Crane was removed from the academy by midmorning.

  Raka did not see it happen. He was in the dormitory, asleep, having finally crossed the threshold from functional exhaustion into the kind of sleep that arrives without negotiation. He slept through breakfast and most of the morning and woke at noon to the sound of Lenne's voice in the common room, speaking at a volume that suggested she was not aware he was still in his alcove.

  '— and they escorted her out through the east administrative exit, apparently. Nobody in the main corridors saw it. Hale told me.'

  'Did she resist?' Tobas's voice, quieter.

  'No,' Lenne said. 'That's the part that bothers me. She just went. Like she expected it. Like she'd already decided that part was over.'

  Raka lay still for a moment, listening.

  'Because for her, it is over,' Mira's voice. 'Not the larger plan — she said as much to Raka. But the thirty-one years of positioning. The access. The infrastructure. That part is done. She's already thinking about what comes next.'

  He got up.

  The common room had the specific quality of a space where people have been talking for hours and have processed through the immediate tension into something more complicated and quieter. Damar was at the table with what appeared to be a new map — not of the academy's corridors but of something else, a schematic that Raka couldn't immediately identify. Sena was in her corner chair. Kai was present, which Raka confirmed by the quality of the air near the window.

  'The junior faculty member,' Raka said, taking his usual seat. 'The Terra instructor. What happened to him?'

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  'Also removed,' Damar said. 'His role was primarily logistical — he maintained the infrastructure access points that Crane used to reach the barrier's outer architecture. He wasn't doing the modifications himself.'

  'So the fraksi had two people,' Lenne said. 'That we know of.'

  'That Hale identified,' Mira said. 'The qualifier matters.'

  It did. Raka noted it and kept it.

  'The academy is going to want answers,' Tobas said. 'From us. Formally. Beyond what we told the Headmaster.'

  'They'll get them,' Raka said. 'We tell the truth. All of it. The archive, the barrier points, the Heart, the sustaining mechanism. All of it goes into the official record.'

  'Including the multi-thread resonance,' Mira said. Not as a question.

  Raka looked at her.

  'Including that,' he said. 'If we start deciding what parts of the truth to share with the academy, we become the same kind of thing Crane was.'

  Nobody argued with this. Lenne knocked her knuckles on the table once — her version of yes — and Damar nodded and went back to his schematic.

  'What are you drawing?' Raka asked him.

  Damar turned the paper.

  It was the archive chamber. The Heart at the center. The Aether-script on the walls, rendered as functional diagrams — not the script itself, which none of them could read, but Tobas's analysis of what it was doing, translated by Damar into the precise visual language of a map. Around the Heart, seven positions were marked.

  'Where we should be,' Damar said, 'when we go down to sustain it. The original Seven's records described optimal positioning for the sustaining mechanism. Seven specific angles relative to the Heart. If we stand there, our Aether signatures interact with the conversion mechanism at maximum efficiency.'

  'You're planning the maintenance schedule,' Raka said.

  'Someone has to,' Damar said.

  Raka looked at the diagram. At the seven positions. At the Heart drawn in the center with the careful accuracy of someone who had memorized it in two hours of underground observation.

  This is what we are now.

  Not just students. Not just a team. The maintenance crew for a three-hundred-year-old mechanism that is the only thing standing between this world and something that has been waiting longer than any of us have been alive.

  He thought about that for a moment.

  Then he picked up a pencil and started marking questions on Damar's diagram, and they spent the afternoon planning.