Chapter 166 Hundred and sixty six

Chapter 166 Hundred and sixty six

Dax had found the Citadel's equivalent of a garage.

It was on the third sublevel, a maintenance workshop serving the guardian unit repair programme, and it was empty in the current hour except for the general low-grade roar of the foundry through the walls and the smell of machine oil that no amount of industrial exhaust had managed to fully displace. He was standing at a central workbench, his dead gauntlet on the surface beside him, working on it with a set of manual tools he had evidently located in the workshop's storage cabinets with the practised efficiency of someone who knew where garage tools lived the same way people know where the kitchen light switch is in a house they grew up in.

Mia stood in the doorway for a moment before he heard her.

This was, she had come to understand, the most honest version of Dax Steele that existed. Not the VP commanding a rooftop, not the man whose authority reorganised the room when he entered it, not even the person who had sat in her room in the dark and said when this is over with the weight of everything they had not said yet. This version, the one with his sleeves rolled and a torque wrench in his hand and his full attention given over to a mechanical problem, was the version she had recognised first, in the early days of the Iron Wolves clubhouse when she had been cataloguing reasons not to trust him and had found this particular piece of evidence impossible to file under the appropriate heading.

You could not entirely distrust a man who respected a machine enough to repair it properly.

She came into the workshop and sat on the edge of the opposite bench.

"Vorn has data on the Death Dealers," she said.

He kept working. "Iceland."

"You knew?"

"I went to the archive at four in the morning. He was already there. We talked." His hands moved methodically over the gauntlet's inner housing, resetting the analogue components that the Null-Zone had disabled. "He told me about your aunt."

Mia looked at the workbench surface, at the engineering diagrams Dax had spread beside the gauntlet, at the tools arranged in the order they would be used, which was exactly the order she would have arranged them.

"She built the Death Dealers," Mia said.

"Yes."

"She believes the seeding event should complete."

"Yes."

"She's wrong," Mia said.

It was a short sentence and it cost something to say it, the way truth costs something when it takes a form you had not chosen and cannot negotiate with. Her aunt was a woman she had never met, a woman whose face carried the bones of her father's face, and that woman had built the organisation that had paid for her father's destruction. Had, through the chain of events that Vorn had documented, been the indirect architect of Chen Wei's death.

Whether Li Mei had known that specific consequence or intended it was a question Mia could not yet answer. Whether it would change what had to be done was not a question at all.

"She's wrong," Mia said again, more quietly.

Dax set the torque wrench down. He looked at her across the workbench with those steady amber eyes.

"We'll need Vorn's transport," he said. "Outside the Null-Zone, the Code resumes on anyone who isn't immune. That means Jax, Tank, Reyes, all of them are operating with a clock running."

"How fast does the restructuring work in someone with full Code-Born expression?"

"Vorn estimates months before measurable changes in autonomous decision-making. The acute phase takes longer." He picked up the torque wrench again, considered it, set it back down. "But months is not a comfortable margin for a mission with no defined timeline."

"We go in, we retrieve the carriers, we come out," Mia said.

"We go in against an organisation that has been preparing for this confrontation for eight years, led by a woman who knows what the immune architecture is and has had three years to strategise around your specific existence." He looked at her. "I'm not saying we don't go. I'm saying we go correctly."

"Which means what?"

"Which means we don't go with five people and a detonator that can't function outside the Null-Zone anyway." He turned the dead gauntlet over, checking the work with his hands rather than his eyes, the way experienced mechanics verified quality. "We go with Vorn's full transport capability, the six carriers as a resonance network, and a plan that accounts for the possibility that your aunt is going to try to use your existence to complete the convergence rather than prevent it."

"She can't use me," Mia said. "Immune carriers disrupt the restructuring. They don't accelerate it."

"Vorn said your expression radius was theoretically several kilometres and expanding." He looked at her steadily. "Mia. If someone who wanted the convergence to complete could invert that radius, turn a disruption field into an amplification field, a fully expressed immune carrier would be the most powerful tool the seeding programme has ever had access to."

The workshop was very quiet for a moment.

Mia turned this over with the slow, careful attention of a mechanic approaching a problem that had just revealed a feature she had not previously known was there.

"Is that possible?" she asked. "Inversion."

"I asked Vorn the same question at four in the morning," Dax said. "He was quiet for thirty-seven seconds before he answered."

"What did he say?"

"He said he didn't know." Dax looked at her. "Which is the most frightening thing I've heard him say yet, because that man knows everything he has had eleven years to think about. The things he doesn't know are the things none of us have had time to think about." He paused. "I think Li Mei has had time to think about it."

Outside the workshop, through the iron walls, the foundry roared its indifferent mechanical roar, and the world waited with the patience of something that was not in a hurry, because the thing it was waiting for was already in motion and had been for forty-one years, and a few more days or weeks or months were simply the last small distance between the beginning of something and its conclusion.

Mia reached into her vest pocket.

She placed the detonator on the workbench between them.

"When we leave the Null-Zone," she said, "this becomes irrelevant. We need something else."

"We need the carriers," Dax said. "All nine of them. Broadcasting together."

"Yes."

"And we need to do it before Li Mei Chen finds a way to turn the most powerful counter-frequency on the planet into the thing she's been building toward for eight years."

Mia looked at the detonator. At her own hands, which had planted three charges in an iron spire on a rooftop at the end of a sixty-story climb in a dead factory on a suppressed continent, and had been steadier in that moment than she had expected.

She thought about her father.

She thought about what he had been building without knowing it.

She thought about the network of small, quiet gestures, the bikes fixed and the debts refused and the hands on a teenager's shoulder in a hospital photograph, and she understood, with the full weight of the understanding settling into her bones, that this was simply the next version of the same work.

The bolt in front of her was enormous.

She picked up the detonator, tucked it back in her pocket, and looked at Dax.

"Then let's go get them," she said.