Kezra turned the leaf of Nym Correl’s fourth volume to the page dated the twenty-fifth day of the siege. Forty-eight hours after the macro-exchange had dropped sixty thousand cubic paces of mountain across the raised stone road.
The ink on this page was thin and watery, applied with a trembling quill that had scratched deeply into the stringy rag paper. Across the top of the folio, written in jagged, uneven block capitals, was a heading that struck Kezra’s heart like a fist of ice:
GLOBAL LOCK: DAY TWO. ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY HOURS Leftover.
“Fixed Mechanic Eight,” Kezra said. Her voice dropped into a harsh, hollow whisper that filled the vaulted archive. “The cooldown laws. For Step and Plot, the cooldown is twenty-four hours. For Reach, it’s seventy-two hours. But for a Quarter exchange—two hundred and fifty-six paces on a side, one hundred and twenty-eight paces deep—the global lock is seven full days.”
“One hundred and sixty-eight hours,” Fellis said softly. His right hand gripped his pencil until his knuckles turned pale. “Seven days where every scale in the book is dead. Not a Step, not a Plot, not a single pebble can be moved.”
“And no potion, no spirit-extract, and no prayer can shorten it by a single second,” Paxa added, her dark eyes scanning Nym’s cold and exact notes with deep empathy. “Look at what Nym was enduring somatically. Severe bilateral sound trauma. Nausea so intense she couldn’t keep down goat’s milk or very thirsty meal. Hand tremors…
