Chapter 79 Chapter 79

Chapter 79 Chapter 79

Derek's POV

Four minutes.

I looked at Davina.

She was already reading my face the way she had learned to read it across years of decisions made in rooms where the options were all bad and the cost of choosing wrong was measured in lives.

"Go," she said.

"Davina—"

"Go to her, Derek. I'll find the override."

"The sub-level is below where we fought through. We don't know what's still down there. We don't know who reactivated it or whether they're still in the facility—"

"I know." She said it cleanly. No tremor. "Go to your daughter."

Three minutes forty seconds.

I pulled her in and held her for exactly two seconds. Her hands pressed flat against my back.

Then I let go and ran.

Caden moved with me without being asked. Whatever calculation he ran in the seconds after Davina walked back into the corridor, the result was that he matched my pace and said nothing and I accepted his help because there was no version of the next three minutes that left room for the conversation we still needed to have.

The chair at the center of the room. The consciousness anchor. He had called it that. The hardware that was holding Aria's scattered presence inside the network rather than letting it disperse completely into nothing.

I reached it and stopped and looked at it and understood immediately that I had no idea how to use it.

"Tell me what to do," I said.

Caden moved to the console beside it. His hands were fast. He pulled up an interface and walked me through it in the compressed language of someone who understood that explanation was a luxury we didn't have.

"The anchor creates a tether. A single fixed point in the network that a distributed consciousness can orient toward. Right now the network has no anchor because the failsafe interrupted the calibration when it activated." He typed a sequence. "I'm going to create a manual tether. But it requires a consciousness to bind to. A reference point the system can use to call her back."

"Use mine."

He looked at me.

"If the failsafe completes while you're bound to the network—"

"Use mine," I said again.

He held my gaze for one second. Then he looked back at the screen.

"Sit down," he said.

I sat in the chair. He attached two contact points at my temples and one at the base of my skull. The equipment was cold and precise and I made myself focus on Aria rather than on what it was going to feel like when it connected.

Two minutes twenty seconds.

"When the bind initiates," Caden said, "you'll feel the network. All of it simultaneously. Forty-seven connection points. It will be disorienting. You cannot panic. Panic will scatter your own signal and then you're useless to her."

"I've been inside The Void," I said. "I know how to hold ground."

He looked at me for a moment that was almost something other than what we were to each other.

"Find her," he said. "She'll feel like herself but quieter. Like a voice in a loud room. When you locate her signal, hold it. Don't pull. Just hold. Let her orient toward you."

"And then?"

"Then we hope the anchor is strong enough."

He initiated the bind.

The network hit me all at once.

Forty-seven minds. Not deeply. Not the way The Void had been. More like standing in a vast room where forty-seven conversations were happening simultaneously and the sound of all of them pressed against the inside of my skull without distinguishing itself into individual voices. Human minds and awakened minds and the traces of supernatural consciousness that Aria had woven through each connection.

I didn't try to hear any of it.

I looked for her.

One minute fifty seconds. I couldn't see the counter but I felt Caden's urgency in the quality of the silence behind me.

She wasn't where I expected her to be. I had imagined finding her at the center of the network. The hub. The origin point. Instead she was everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Spread so thin she had become more texture than presence. The particular quality of Aria's consciousness threaded through every connection like a dye dispersed through water. Present in everything. Nowhere in concentration.

I held very still inside the noise.

Aria.

Not out loud. Inward. The way you call for someone in the dark when you're not certain your voice is working.

Nothing.

One minute twenty seconds.

Aria. I'm here. Find me.

The noise of the network shifted slightly. A quality change. Like forty-seven conversations briefly lowering their volume by a fraction.

Something oriented toward me.

Not strongly. Not with the sureness of someone who knew where they were going. More like a compass needle that had been spinning randomly for a long time and had just found north and didn't entirely trust it yet.

I held.

I didn't pull. Caden had said not to pull and I understood why instinctively. She was spread too thin. If I pulled I would get a piece of her instead of all of her and I could not bring her back in pieces.

I held and I let her feel me and I thought about every specific thing I could think of that was only hers and mine and nobody else's.

The sound of her voice at four years old asking me to explain why the moon followed the car.

The particular way she tilted her head when she was deciding whether something was worth saying out loud.

The way she had looked in the Riga facility with her eyes open and still and I had stood at the window of that room and not let myself understand what I was looking at because understanding it would have required feeling it and I couldn't feel it and still function.

I felt it now.

The compass needle moved.

Forty seconds.

She was consolidating. Slowly. Pulling herself inward from the forty-seven points the way a tide pulls back from the shore. It was not fast. It was not clean. There were fragments that didn't want to release from the connections they had settled into over eight days of being part of something larger than themselves.

I held.

All of you, I thought. I need all of you back.

Twenty seconds.

The quality of the network changed completely. From ambient noise to something with a shape. A center. A weight that gathered itself toward the tether with the slow momentum of something enormous that had been drifting and had just found ground.

Ten seconds.

She hit the anchor like a wave hitting a wall.

The impact went through the chair and through the equipment and through every contact point and through me and the network lit up around it and forty-seven minds registered something simultaneously that I would never be able to describe in any language I knew.

And then the failsafe completed.

I heard it in the room before I felt it. A sound that was also a pressure change. Every screen in the facility went dark. The server banks shut down. The pale blue light that had been running everything went out.

The silence lasted exactly two seconds.

Then the facility shook.

The explosion was not in this room. It was below us. Sub-level five where the override was hardwired. Where Davina had gone.

"Aria." I pulled the contact points free and crossed to the chair where her body had been positioned on a support frame. Her eyes were closed now. Her face was her own. She was breathing with a depth and evenness she hadn't had since Riga.

She was back.

"Aria." I took her face in both hands.

Her eyes opened.

They were her eyes. Present. Focused. Finding my face and staying there.

"Dad," she said. Her voice was rough and very small.

"I've got you."

The facility shook again. Deeper this time. Structural.

Caden appeared at my shoulder. "We have to move. The explosion compromised the sub-level supports. This section has maybe four minutes before—"

"Where's Davina?" I said.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

"Where is she, Caden?"

He looked at the ceiling. At the floor. At the screens that were no longer running.

"Sub-level five," he said quietly.

I was already moving.