I woke in the basement of a dye works.
First I tried to summon the System panel, but nothing appeared before my eyes. Then I reached for the bond and found only emptiness again.
Styx was gone.
Cole was asleep in a chair beside me. His uniform was scorched from the station, and his left arm had been bandaged. Lily sat by the stove, copying the salvaged part of the archive onto several storage devices. Mira was examining the consent key.
They had reached the slums ahead of the Guild patrols. The residents of the dyeing quarter had hidden us in an old boiler room once used to store banned dyes. A heap of coal concealed the entrance, and the ventilation shaft fed into a network of abandoned pipes.
I got up.
"Where is the Li family tower?"
Cole opened his eyes.
"Sit down."
"Kane took Styx."
"And you can't take three steps without a wall to hold you up."
I headed for the door anyway. Everything lurched before my eyes. Cole did not try to restrain me. He simply stood between me and the exit.
Before, I would have ordered the swarm to remove the obstacle. Now I had to speak.
"Move."
"No."
The word struck harder because it reminded me of Styx.
Lily laid a map on the table. The Li tower, the laboratory levels and the guards' routes were already marked on it.
"While you were unconscious, we were working."
"Who gave you the plans?"
Leon answered from a dark corner.
"I did."
He sat on a crate, concealed by a cloak, with a fresh dressing over the burns on his neck. The Void Dragon was not with him.
I stepped towards him.
"Your father took Styx."
"And the same collar is holding my beast. Do you think you're the only one with someone to bring back?"
Leon had brought the internal plans of his family tower and an old access ring. After his testimony in the arena, Kane had declared his son temporarily incapacitated and locked the Void Dragon in the lower laboratory. Leon was to be taken there in the morning to restore the external control circuit.
He had escaped through a service tunnel he once used for secret excursions.
"I'm not helping you," Leon said. "I'll take the dragon and leave."
"Then why give us the map of the queens' laboratory?"
He did not answer.
A brass whistle sounded outside. The girl we had rescued from the fire was giving the agreed signal. A Guild patrol was entering the yard.
No one in the basement asked me what to do.
The dyers overturned carts and blocked the street. The women led the children out through the laundries. The old men opened the furnace dampers, releasing thick blue smoke above the roofs. The girl whistled from different alleys, drawing the patrol away.
The people acted because they knew the district and wanted to protect one another. They had no queen, no System and no control circuit.
I looked at the map and saw people around me who had already divided up every task without me.
"All right," I said. "We won't enter the tower through the main entrance."
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