Chapter 165 Hundred and sixty five

Chapter 165 Hundred and sixty five
Morning in the Iron Citadel was an abstract concept, since the citadel itself made no distinction between the hours of darkness and the hours of light, the foundry ran equally without preference, and the analogue red battery lighting in the residential corridors neither brightened nor softened with the rotation of the planet above the smog layer.
Elias Vorn, who had apparently not slept, was in the archive when Mia arrived at what her body insisted was early morning, because her body had an opinion about such things even when the environment did not.
He was standing at the central table with a printed map spread across it, weighted at the corners by four identical binders. The map was not a political map. It was a sub-ether propagation map, the kind Mia had been looking at the night before, but this one was more recent, the spread patterns updated in handwriting so precise it looked typeset.
"You sleep less than anyone I have ever met," she told him.
"I sleep in intervals," he said, without looking up. "Four hours is sufficient if the intervals are correctly timed."
"That is either a superpower or a pathology."
"In my experience, most superpowers are pathologies with better press coverage." He looked up then, and she saw in his face the particular quality of a man who had been thinking very hard about something and had arrived somewhere significant. "I have been reviewing the Death Dealer territorial data."
Mia sat across from him. "And?"
"Their primary operational base is not where you would expect it to be." He turned the map. The Death Dealers' territory was marked in a deep, particular shade of red that was not the red of the emergency lighting but a slightly different hue, the red of something that had been on the map long enough to bleed slightly into the surrounding paper. "They moved their centre of operations eighteen months ago, after what I believe was a conflict with my Null-Trooper deployment along the eastern European boundary."
"Where to?"
"Iceland," he said.
Mia looked at the map. At the small island in the upper Atlantic, sitting in the space between Europe's suppressed red and the grey open ocean.
"They're using geothermal power," she said, the mechanic's brain doing its work automatically. "The Null-Zone suppresses sub-ether, but geothermal is thermal energy converted to electricity, no sub-ether component. They'd be fully operational in a geothermal zone even directly adjacent to the suppression field."
Elias Vorn looked at her with an expression she was beginning to recognise as his version of being impressed, which was a slight widening of the eyes and a pause before the next sentence.
"Yes," he said. "Precisely. Their facility runs on geothermal extraction from the Reykjanes Ridge. Their code-born capabilities are fully intact. They have resources, structure, and the active presence of the two immune carriers I have not been able to reach."
"Who are they?" Mia asked. "The two carriers."
Vorn reached for a binder and opened it to a section of photographs and handwritten data summaries. "The first is a man named Dorian Walsh. Former structural engineer, originally from Dublin." He slid a photograph across the table. The man in it was perhaps fifty, with a lean, weathered face and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead in the manner of someone who had put them there temporarily six hours ago and forgotten about them. "He has been with the Death Dealers for approximately two years. My data suggests he joined voluntarily, which means either he does not understand what the immune architecture implies, or he understands and has made a different calculation than I would like."
"And the second?"
Vorn paused. This pause was longer than the previous ones and had a different texture.
He slid a second photograph across the table.
Mia looked at it.
The woman in the photograph was perhaps sixty, with a strong face and dark eyes and high cheekbones that belonged to a specific geography Mia had only ever seen in one other face. A face she knew from the inside rather than from observation.
She turned the photograph over. Vorn had written the name in his precise hand on the reverse.
Li Mei Chen.
"That is your father's sister," Elias Vorn said. "Your aunt. She is the strongest immune carrier I have identified in the northern hemisphere." He looked at her steadily. "She is also, according to my data, one of the Death Dealers' most valued assets." He paused. "She has been with them for three years."
Mia set the photograph down.
She sat with the information for a moment, turning it in the quiet that her father had taught her was necessary before you touched the bolt. Feeling the weight distribution. Finding the balance point.
Li Mei Chen. An aunt she had never met, a name she had heard exactly once, in a conversation she had been too young to fully follow, her father's voice carrying the particular tone of someone discussing a wound that had not healed and was not healing.
"He never spoke about her," Mia said.
"They had a disagreement," Vorn said carefully. "Over the work. Over what the immunity meant and what it obligated them toward. Your father believed it obligated him to the people around him, the small, immediate, daily work of maintaining community. Li Mei believed it obligated them to something larger. She went looking for the larger thing."
"And found the Death Dealers."
"She did not find them," Vorn said. "She built them."
Mia looked up.
"The Death Dealers," Elias Vorn said, "are not, at their foundation, what they were in Coldwater. The club your father knew, the organisation Dutch Steele made his deal with, was a street-level operation, territory and money and the usual motivations of men who want more than they have." He folded his hands on the table. "That organisation was absorbed, approximately eight years ago, into something Li Mei had been building since she separated from your father. An organisation that understands the seeding event, understands the immune architecture, and has drawn entirely different conclusions from that understanding about what should be done."
"What conclusions?" Mia asked, though she was already reading the shape of the answer from the architecture of the information.
"That the seeding event should be completed," Elias Vorn said. "That the convergence it produces should be welcomed rather than resisted. That the entity or entities on the other end of the signal represent an evolutionary step for humanity rather than a threat to it." He looked at Mia with his winter eyes. "Li Mei Chen believes your father was wrong and I am wrong. She believes we are both standing in the way of humanity's next chapter out of small, sentimental attachment to what we already are."
The foundry roared, far below. The analogue light pulsed its steady red.
Mia picked up the photograph.
Her father's sister. The woman her father had lost over a disagreement about what their lives meant.
"She won't give up the carriers willingly," Mia said.
"No," Vorn said. "She will not."
"And going to Iceland means going outside the Null-Zone."
"Yes. Which means the Code resumes its effect on everyone who is not immune." He looked at her. "Except you."
Mia set the photograph down.
She pressed her hand over the pocket that held the detonator.
She thought about her father's voice in the kitchen, singing something tuneless.
"I need to speak with Dax," she said.