The channel began beneath the city courthouse.
We climbed down an old well and crawled along a hot pipe. The archive hummed overhead. Every few minutes, a metal hatch opened and a bundle of discarded contracts dropped into the stream.
Lily fished out the papers with a hook. Even contracts marked for destruction retained the seals of people and beasts. Many bore a note transferring ownership to the Li family after a debt, an arrest or the owner's death.
"They've been collecting bonds for years," she whispered.
"Not bonds," Mira replied. "Access."
A sorting bay stood at the end of the channel. Instead of rubbish, it held glass containers filled with living beasts. Their owners had died or lost their licences, but the external control circuit remained active. The Guild did not release the creatures. It stored them as ready-made nodes for someone else's control.
A red mosquito battered itself against the smallest container.
A swarm captain.
The one Kane had used at the station.
I approached the glass. No System panel appeared, but I felt a faint prick inside my head. Not an order, and not a bond. Recognition.
The captain flung himself at the wall beside my palm.
"He remembers you," Lily said.
"He remembers Styx."
Mira found a line running from the container to the floors above. The captain served as a calibration model for the queen's cage. As long as he remained here, the device compared every impulse from Styx with the behaviour of a subordinate node and suppressed any deviation.
"Freeing him will weaken the cage," she said. "But Kane will be alerted at once."
The plan called for the alarm to sound later.
I looked at the mosquito hurling himself against the glass again and again.
"Open it."
Mira held the consent key to the container, and the plate requested confirmation from the beast. The captain touched the wall from inside.
The container opened.
The mosquito flew out and settled on my finger. He was smaller than Styx, with a scorched carapace and one wing half burnt away. Fragments came through the brief contact: a cage, golden rings, the queen's voice somewhere above.
Styx was alive.
The captain could not restore the System, but he could sense the direction. He rose and flew towards a ventilation grille.
At that moment, the alarm swept through the archive.
Cole looked at his watch.
"We're off schedule."
"But now we know the way."
Noise came from the neighbouring containers. The beasts had sensed one cage open and strained towards us.
Freeing them all would raise the alarm on every level and release creatures that had lived in isolation for years. Leaving them meant walking past the very system we had come to fight.
Mira did not wait for a decision. She inserted the key into the central panel.
"I'm opening only the inner locks. The outer doors will remain closed until the evacuation signal. Otherwise they'll run straight into the security seals."
Lily connected the archive storage device and set a route to the old freight exit. Cole marked the room for his people outside.
We could not save the beasts yet, but we gave them a route that would open during our withdrawal.
The swarm captain disappeared into the ventilation shaft. I followed.
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