“Orison,” Mara said. “The network maps. All of them. Everything you have of the lattice. The lines from the reservoir to every lamp.”
“I will send what I have,” Orison said.
It came on the Tern’s roll printer, which Sera had left connected to the console. It came slowly, sheet after sheet, curling off the roll onto the lowest chamber’s bench: the lattice, drawn in fine green lines on black, the reservoir at the center, the conduits radiating out from it to the lamps like the channels from a heart’s open center.
Except that it was not whole.
Whole sections were missing. Mara laid the sheets out on the bench edge to edge, matching them, and saw it at once. Here, where a conduit should have run from the reservoir toward Tal, the line stopped dead, with no fading at its end. The sheet beyond it was black. And there, where the lattice’s lines should have converged on the command well beneath Meridian, a whole region of the map was gone, a rough square of black where every line ran to its edge and ended.
The gaps were not blank. Blank would have been white: no information. These were black, the map’s background, as though the lines had been there once and had been lifted out. And their edges were clean. Straight. Every line that ran into a gap was cut off at the same place, square, like the edge of the split in the old heart.
