Elara got Caleb into the First Division engineering bay at oh-three-forty in the morning.

She drove him in the trunk of a maintenance van for the last twelve minutes of the trip. The van was registered to a contractor the division had used for fourteen years and which no one had bothered to audit. The driver was a man named Ridley who had not asked questions about a body in his trunk on three previous occasions.

The bay was four levels below the surface of First Division headquarters.

Elara unlocked the access hatch with a magnetic key she should not have had. She held the hatch open. Caleb climbed out of the trunk.

She locked the hatch behind them.

The bay smelled like ozone, engine oil, and high-end armor warming in storage racks.

Aris was at his workbench.

He had been waiting.

He lifted his head when they came in.

He was a thin man in his fifties with steel-rimmed glasses and a bandage on his left hand. The bandage was three days old. The hand was bleeding through it.

He registered Caleb first, then Elara behind him. "Captain."

"Aris," Elara said. "I assume you know."

"I know."

"You know the compliance review was a feed."

"I know," Elara said. "You don’t know the rest of it."

"That’s why I brought him." 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

Aris took off his glasses and set them on the workbench, then pressed the heels of both hands into his eyes.

When he took his hands down he had bled through the bandage a little more.

"Sit down," he said. "Both of you. The bay is not bugged. I check it three times a shift. I have eight minutes before the next sweep. We use them."

Caleb sat on a tool crate. Elara stayed standing.

"I have known your father since I was thirty-one," Aris said. "He recruited me out of a corporate engineering position I should not have taken in the first place. I owed nothing to anyone when I took the position. I owed your father everything by the time I left it. He has not asked me for very much in twenty years. He asked me for one thing six months ago. He asked me to file the compliance review on you when the executives moved on Margaux. I filed the review three days ago because that was when I judged the timing was right. The review was meant to draw the executives’ hunters to me. They have been hunting for the operator inside First Division who has been moving resources for your father. The hunters were getting closer to the captain. I gave them me instead."

Elara did not move.

"You gave yourself up for me," she said.

"I gave myself up for your father. You are a beneficiary. It is the same outcome."

"Aris."

"Don’t, Elara. There is no time for it. The executives will move on me within ninety-six hours. I have three things to give you before they do."

He turned to the workbench.

He pulled a small drawer open.

He took out a flat metal disc the size of a coin and placed it on the bench in front of Caleb.

"First. The frequency key for the inhibitor your grandfather built into the original sealing chamber under Saint Halvard’s. It has been dormant for forty-six years. Your father has the activator. He does not have the key. The key was held by Henry, then by your grandfather, then by my father, then by me. I am the last of the chain. I am giving it to you because your father can no longer carry both control pieces safely. If they take me, the executives will look for the key on my body. They will not find it."

He pulled a folded paper from the same drawer.

"Second. A floor plan of the sub-basement under Saint Halvard’s that your father does not have. He worked from the original blueprints. The blueprints are wrong. The actual structure was altered in nineteen-eighty-three. I built the altered structure as my first job at this division. The chamber has three exits. Your father only knows two. The third one comes up into a sewer access on a street he has not walked in nineteen years. Use the third one if Day Sixteen goes wrong."

He set the floor plan on top of the coin.

He pulled one more thing from the drawer.

It was a photograph.

A young woman in a lab coat. Twenty-three years old. Dark hair pulled back. Standing next to a man Caleb had only seen in a single childhood photograph. His grandfather.

"Third. This is my mother. She was the research assistant at the lab in nineteen seventy-nine. She heard the shot. She wrote a statement and never delivered it. The statement is in a safety deposit box at the Continental Bank. The box is in my name. The key is taped to the back of the photograph. If your father is taken before Day Sixteen, the statement is the only document in existence that proves what happened in nineteen seventy-nine was not an accident. Elara, you can get it released to the magistrate court inside of three hours. It will not save your father. It will save your father’s name. There is a difference."

Caleb took the photograph.

He turned it over.

A small key was taped to the cardboard backing.

He left it in place.

Aris closed the drawer.

He put his glasses back on.

His hand was bleeding through the bandage faster now. He took a fresh wrap from a kit on the bench and changed the dressing without looking at it. The wound underneath was a clean cut, deep, three days old, not healing.

"Aris," Elara said. "What did you do to your hand?"

"I cut it three days ago when I drafted the compliance review. I dripped a sample of my blood onto the file before I submitted it. The executives’ hunters will run the file for genetic markers. They will confirm I drafted it under stress. They will conclude I knew I was being watched. They will conclude I am the operator. The wound is not healing because I have not let it. I open it every six hours. I will keep opening it until they take me. The wound is part of the cover."

"Aris."

"Don’t, Elara."

She studied him for a long moment, then turned to Caleb. "We’re leaving."

Caleb stood. "Thank you, Aris."

"Don’t thank me. I have wanted to do something for your father for twenty years. I have spent the last six months designing this. Tell him I executed it cleanly. Tell him I will see him on the other side of Day Sixteen if there is one."

Elara opened the hatch.

Caleb climbed back into the trunk of the maintenance van.

He held the photograph in his coat pocket against the dampener and the third folder and the medical gown from his brother.

The trunk lid closed.

The van pulled away from the bay.

Ridley did not ask questions.

In the back of the trunk Caleb thought, for the first time since Day One, about how many people had spent decades of their lives building toward a sixteen-day window he had not known existed.

He did not let himself count them.

He did not think he could count them yet.