The first clean frame came through at the ninth hour.
Eshel had been fighting for it since dawn. The data link from the well to the central lattice ran along the route’s oldest lines, the command lines, and when the directors took the hall they had cut the operations office’s feed to it. They had done it blind, without knowing what it was. They had shut down every console in the office to stop the public feed, and the lattice link had gone with them.
Eshel had rebuilt it from Cinder. Through the bridge. Through Lorn’s outlet, which had a direct line to the route. Through the well’s service bus, where Sen’s crew had taped Ysol’s tea tin. A long way round.
At the ninth hour it held.
Mara was back in the lowest chamber, at the well’s screen. She had come down the cold stair with Breda at the eighth hour, once the directors’ guards had stood down and the hall was the Board’s again. Sen was at the pumps. Caldris had stayed above, with the observers, at the hall’s long bench.
On the screen, the frame.
The central lattice, drawn from the route’s own sensors instead of the chorus’s model: the lattice’s actual shape, behind the command well, deep in the folded region’s cage. A drawing in pale lines, like the one on Hearth’s wall the night the chorus first spoke. The crushed lantern. The struts. The violet region inside.
