The broken brass spacer was three inches long, sharp on one end where the gear-teeth had sheared off, and it smelled of old machine-oil.
Xander kept his thumb pressed against the flat side of it until the skin went white. He didn't have his thumb-grip anymore. He didn't have the silicone sleeve that used to keep the stylus from slipping when his palms got slick with sweat. He just had the metal.
Fourteen, he thought. Fourteen steps between the lime-pit turnstile and the salt-barrels.
He scratched a small, vertical tick into the soft lime-wash of the cellar wall, right under the copper water pipe. It was the forty-second tick in the row.
Then he waited.
His ears were ringing—not with the clean, high-frequency data chime of his old multi-scanner, but with the wet, heavy thrum of the laundry-vats two levels above. Without the filters to separate the noise, everything came at him in a single, greasy lump. The boots of the proctors on the timber floorboards. The scrape of the coal-shovels in the scullery. The low, rhythmic click of the primary gate turnstile.
He reached his right hand toward his left hip, his fingers twitching as they curled into empty air.
He did it three times before he caught himself. His hand was looking for the leather holster. It was looking for the heavy, ribbed casing of the Lexicon pad—the one with the triple-node array that could map a room's resonance footprint in seven seconds. The pad was sitting in a heap of slagged glass and melted copper behind the administrative block, but his forearm still expected the weight of it.
His fingers stayed open. Empty.
"Stupid," he whispered to the dark. His voice sounded thin, dry from the flour-dust that drifted down through the floor-joins.
He was losing the count.
He closed his eyes and tried to force the layout of the Western wing into his head. In the old days, the holographic wire-frame would have hovered six inches from his nose, crisp and green, updating every time a guard changed their route. Now, he had to build the halls out of charcoal and memory, and the lines kept blurring at the corners.
Did the secondary corridor turn at twelve yards or fifteen? Was the lintel over the forge cells iron-reinforced or simple granite?
If he got it wrong, James would step into a dead zone. If he got it wrong, Drake's brace would catch on the turnstile frame before the guard shifted his weight.
A thick, hot drop of blood leaked out of his left nostril. It ran down the groove of his lip, tasting of copper and salt. He didn't wipe it with his sleeve; he couldn't afford to lose the position of his fingers on the wall. He just let it drop into the dust between his boots.
I'm missing the variable, he thought, his jaw tightening until his ears popped. I'm missing the whole bottom half of the ledger.
He wasn't trying to be a genius. He was terrified that if he stopped counting, if he let his mind go soft for even ten minutes, the last link between the rooms would simply snap. They'd just be five separate kids sitting in five separate locked boxes until the Board finished the paperwork.
The cellar door groaned.
Xander didn't move his head. He didn't drop the brass spacer. He leaned his shoulder against the lime-wash, pretending to check the alignment of the flour-sacks as the junior clerk—the one with the squint and the ink-stained cuffs—slid a crate of salt-balk across the threshold.
"The Auditor wants the Ward 4 tool manifest by noon," the clerk muttered, not looking at him. "They're clearing the secondary roster. Don't touch the purple stamps."
The clerk left the tin clipboard on the grain-bin and slid the door shut.
Xander waited until the latch dropped. Then he crawled across the floorboards, his knees dragging through the chaff, and pulled the tin into the light of the tallow candle.
He didn't look at the lists of blankets or the iron spoons. He looked at the back of the ledger page, where the heavy purple ink of the Auditor's seal had bled through the wood-pulp. The ink was fresh—still tacky enough to leave a grey smudge on the ball of his thumb.
The name at the top of the reclassification block wasn't a number. It was Kara-092.
But below it, where the routing destination should have said Training Hall Base, someone had used a heavy, blunt pencil to cross out the entry and write three words in the margin: Forge Extraction: 2400.
The handwriting belonged to Calder. Short, square, and heavy on the down-stroke.
Xander's chest felt hollow, like an empty stove-pipe. He wasn't happy he'd found it. He didn't feel the sharp, clean satisfaction of a solved proof. He just felt the cold, greasy weight of the deadline hitting him in the ribs.
Midnight, he thought. They aren't waiting for the tribunal.
He looked at his hands. They were covered in charcoal and lime-dust, the nails broken back to the pink from scratching at the masonry. He didn't have a transmitter. He didn't have a secure line.
He picked up the brass spacer, his hand shaking so hard the metal clicked against the tin frame of the clipboard. He didn't try to write a letter. He didn't have room for a letter. He just drove the sharp, sheared point of the gear-tooth through the edge of the tin, using his memory of the old turnstile schematics to punch three tiny, ragged holes through the solder.
One for the drift.
One for the interval.
One to tell them she's out of time.
He didn't know if James would see them. He didn't know if James's grey eye could still find the gaps in the floorboards. He was just a spotter working without instruments, throwing stones into the dark and praying someone heard them hit the bottom.
He wiped the blood from his chin with the back of his bare wrist, gathered the tin clipboard against his ribs, and waited for the clerk to come back for the manifest.