Chapter 14 — The Catch-22

3:14 in the morning.

Amy had been awake since 1:00. She'd stopped arguing with the insomnia around 2:00. She'd opened the secondary screen, built into the kit bag lining on day three. The screens a building gives you are the screens a building can read — at 2:35, after she'd run out of things to think about that didn't require the screen.

3:14. Seven-second burst through a channel that officially didn't exist.

She read the signature analysis. Put the screen away. Lay on her back in the dark and looked at the ceiling.

The ceiling was white and featureless, which was true of every ceiling in this facility, and she'd spent enough time looking at it to know that featurelessness had been chosen rather than arrived at. Absence of detail was a design decision. She'd started applying this principle to everything she encountered here and had found it useful.

Robert Graunos.

The name appeared in the BNCY procurement logs as an external contractor. Specialist: the designation BNCY used for people whose expertise predated the institution and whom the institution had decided it needed without understanding why. No photograph. No current address. No record of any kind except the frequency signature — that arrangement of frequencies she now recognized, that she'd been carrying around since day two like a splinter she'd run her tongue over too many times to stop noticing.

She'd found it first in Siefr's books. A marginal notation in a reference text, small and precise, the handwriting of someone who was used to writing in margins. The boy is ready. She'd photographed it and filed it and not understood it until the procurement logs produced the signature.

Same hand. Same frequency. Same person.

Three contracts. All dated before the facility existed in its current form. Materials she couldn't identify by designation code. Services listed as environmental calibration — which could mean anything, which meant it meant something they didn't want described accurately. Something called asset preparation.

The Graunos who had published his book and vanished the next morning — he'd been working for BNCY decades before BNCY was the shape it was now. Before Fredrick had his commission. Before any of them had been born. The boy is ready. A notation left where Siefr would find it, or where Siefr had already found it, or where Siefr had left it to be found by someone else in the chain of a plan that had been running longer than she'd understood.

She lay very still.

She was thinking about what Siefr had said. The kind of people who design institutions. She'd thought it was self-awareness. Now she thought it might have been a confession.

If she went to Fredrick with what she had — the channel, the screen, six weeks of unauthorized analysis — he'd have what he needed to reclassify her. She'd seen where reclassifications went in this building. She'd been building a map of it since day one. The map wasn't good.

If she said nothing, Siefr's routing orders would keep reaching the plateau. She'd intercepted three. The fourth was due in thirty-six hours. And Chrys was burning reserve.

Both blades. Meeting in the middle. No position that didn't cut her.

She thought about scissors.

She opened the narrow channel, calibrated for the plateau distance, built on day four because she'd known on day three she was going to need it. She sent Rad four sentences. She told him what she had. She told him what it meant. She told him what she was going to do. She told him the timing.

She put the screen away.

She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling.

In the room next door, Eevi was awake. Amy could hear it in the quality of the silence — the breathing of someone lying still and not sleeping, which had a different texture than the breathing of someone asleep. She'd known Eevi's awake-silence for years.

She thought about asset preparation.

She thought about what you prepare an asset for. A test. A crisis. An outcome that requires a specific input at a specific time. You prepare the ground. You introduce the variables. You arrange the circumstances that will cause the asset to move in the direction you need.

The boy is ready.

Ready for what.

She was still thinking about this when she heard the first sound from outside, barely anything, the kind of sound the building made in the early morning when the structure cooled and contracted. She listened to it.

She thought about Siefr's hands. Steady. Dry. At peace with something.

She thought about the kind of person who is at peace with something.

Not a person who has won. Not a person who has gotten what they wanted. A person who has resolved something in themselves. Who has made a calculation they're comfortable with. Who has set something in motion and has accepted that they won't see it finish.

She closed her eyes.

She would talk to Eevi in the morning.

There was still the matter of six minutes and a server room and a route she'd been memorizing since day four, which she'd built on day three, which she'd understood she was going to need on day two.

She'd been ready for a while.

She just hadn't known what she was ready for.