They met in the south reading room on seven consecutive evenings between 1700 and 1730.
The structure of the sessions was implicit — he spoke, she responded, they refined. He brought the operational elements: facility layout, personnel schedules, the delivery window's specific parameters, the security staffing notations from the locked cabinet. She brought the geography: the specific terrain, the routes, the distances, the seasonal considerations that a topographic read could not give and that she had built up from the texts with the patience of someone who had decided the texts were survival manuals before she had a specific survival to plan for.
First session: the exit sequence. Delivery window, Friday, begins at 1800. West exit propped by surface-side receiving staff from approximately 1755 to 1840, based on the log pattern. Floor Zero has zero security during this window. The service elevator to Floor Zero operates during the delivery, which means the elevator shaft is occupied — they would not use it. The secondary stairwell from the observation deck corridor connected through to Floor One and then, via a maintenance access he had confirmed in the structural records, to Floor Zero. The access required a key. He did not have the key.
"There's a second access," Tessaly said, in the first session. "Maintenance conduit, east side of Floor One. I found it mentioned in a facilities maintenance log in the Floor Four reading room — the approved texts include two years of facility maintenance records, I think by accident. The conduit runs from Floor One to the surface building's subfloor. It's rated for equipment transit, not personnel, but the dimensions are sufficient."
He filed this and adjusted the exit sequence.
Second session: personnel. The two surface-side receiving staff were not security — facilities workers, regular rotation, no bloodline or Remnant notation in the personnel files he had accessed. Their concern during the delivery window was the delivery, not the building. The overnight security staff did not begin until 2200. The window was large.
"What about the researchers working late," she said.
"Two, on average, on Floor Three. Not on Floors One or Zero during delivery windows." He paused. "Pollwen sometimes works late on Fridays. Her office is on Floor Three. The path doesn't cross Floor Three."
Third session: what to carry. Weather-appropriate clothing, water, caloric density for approximately four days, and the bloodline suppression compound he had identified in the medical supply invoices, which dampened the ambient Gaze expression and would make them less detectable to anyone sensitive enough to read bloodline signatures.
"Four days of supplies," she said. "To reach Vareth."
"If the route is clear and the pace is sustainable. Six days with a conservative margin."
"I can sustain the pace," she said, without emphasis, in the flat tone of someone stating a parameter.
He looked at her. "I know," he said.
Fourth session: what happens when they are missed. The morning check at 0600 would find their rooms empty. At that point: full facility alert, search protocol, Compact notification. He had read the alert protocol in the administrative documents on Floor Two — three phases, the first being internal search, approximately two hours, before external notification. They needed to be beyond the facility's search radius before 0800. With a 1800 departure, that was a fourteen-hour window. With a conservative pace through the Ash Valley route, they could cover approximately fifty kilometers.
"The search will prioritize roads and clear terrain," Tessaly said. "The Ash Valley route is neither." She spread her hands on the reading room table as though the map were there. "There's a section between thirty and sixty kilometers that's dense enough to make tracking difficult. If we reach it before dawn we can rest during daylight and move again at dusk."
He looked at her hands on the table and the absent map. "You've been routing this in your head."
"Yes," she said.
"How long."
She looked at him. There was a pause — shorter than he might have expected, like she had already decided whether to answer this. "Since I was twelve," she said. "Since I understood what this place was."
He absorbed this. Two years of routing in her head, waiting for the conditions that would make it executable. He thought about what the Gaze had shown him when she said the fear had nearly sent her through a wall — the specific architecture of someone who had taken the worst thing in their situation and built the one thing that might save them from it.
He thought about the calculation and what it produced when he introduced the variable of someone who had been running a parallel calculation for two years. The probability continued to improve.
Fifth session: contingencies.
Sixth session: the night before. He ran the full sequence once, verbally, from the blind spot to the reading room to the conduit to Floor Zero to the west exit to the surface. She listened and corrected one detail — the west exit opened inward, not outward, which changed the approach angle by forty degrees.
He corrected the sequence.
"One more thing," she said, at the end of the sixth session.
He looked at her.
"Preet," she said. "He's running out of time."
He had been thinking about Preet. The full panel assessment was the only entry in Preet's schedule that week with restricted notation. Preet had been absent from three common room evenings.
"I know," he said.
"If we could—"
"It changes every variable," he said. Not harshly. Accurately. "Another person changes the supply calculation, the pace calculation, the detection probability."
She was quiet.
"But I've been thinking about it," he said.
She looked up.
"I need to know his answer first," Ren said. "Before the window. I'll ask him."
She nodded, once. He noted that she had not looked surprised. He went to dinner and ate and looked at Preet across the room and thought about what to say and how to say it.