"The mathematics of rescue are not romantic. They are a sequence of doors and a narrowing window and the brutal simplicity of how many people you can move before the window closes."
The alert propagated through the facility's monitoring infrastructure at the speed of Aether, which is to say: immediately.
Not an alarm — not yet. The monitoring system registered a brand integration disruption as an anomaly rather than an emergency, because the system had been designed around the assumption that brand integrations could not be disrupted from outside the facility's own infrastructure. What it sent to the hub's control node was a query: unusual Aether-event in holding block one, request confirmation.
The query would receive a response in approximately four minutes when the hub operator reviewed the notification.
Four minutes.
Eleven cells in block one. Eleven brand integrations to break. Four minutes before the alert escalates. Move.
He went fast.
The first break had taken ninety seconds because he had been careful, calibrating the absorption against the specific architecture of the first man's brand. Now he understood the construction: all brands from the Order of the Sunken Chain followed the same design, same sixteen integration points, same anchor configuration, same channel frequency. The knowledge transferred. He moved down the corridor, door by door, and the breaks took forty seconds each, then thirty, the Void-core finding the pattern and executing it with increasing precision.
Seris worked the doors. Vael moved people — explaining quietly, efficiently, to each practitioner they freed: the plan, the north exit, the need for speed, the fact that this was real.
Some did not believe it immediately. Three months, five years, fourteen years — the duration of confinement had different effects on the capacity for belief in exits. Vael handled these cases with a directness that was not unkind: she took their hands, she made eye contact, she said: we are leaving now, and her voice carried the absolute certainty of someone who has made the decision so completely that doubt no longer occupies the same conceptual space.
They moved.
Eleven people from block one, moving toward the holding block access junction. Luceo paused at the junction to pulse Extended Resonance.
Hub: the operator had received the query and was now standing, moving toward the monitoring station. Two Guard signatures, previously at the main entrance, were turning inward.
They know something happened. They do not know what. Thirty seconds before they engage the holding block corridor.
"Vael," he said. "Take block one to the north exit corridor. Hold there. Seris — block four with me."
He did not look to see if the instruction was followed. He knew it would be.
Block four was across the hub atrium.
They would have to cross it.
✶
The atrium was sixty feet of open space with a ceiling forty feet above, the Aether processing infrastructure visible in the architecture: channels carved into the walls, the collection reservoir's access shaft at the center of the floor, covered with a reinforced grate through which a dim crimson light pulsed slowly, the breath of the accumulated Aether below.
The two Guards were at the far end when Luceo and Seris entered from the east corridor.
There was a moment — the length of a breath — where all four people processed the same information.
Then the Guards moved.
Both at once, the coordination of trained unit response, their Aether signatures flaring as they released technique: one a directional force projection, the standard opening move of people who have been taught that hitting first and hard is the most efficient path to resolution; the other a containment array, the spreading formation designed to limit the target's movement options.
Luceo saw both forming before they were released.
The force projection he negated completely — the compression structure dissolved, the kinetic energy dispersing harmlessly into the ambient Aether. The containment array he handled differently: he absorbed three of its eight anchor points, which collapsed the formation's coverage radius from room-scale to approximately fifteen feet centered on its caster, which was interesting to the Guard in question but not useful as a containment tool.
Seris moved.
She moved the way she had been moving since the Ashenreach forest: with the particular efficiency of someone who has spent three years in the spaces between things and has learned that the most dangerous kind of movement is the kind that doesn't waste anything. She reached the containment-array Guard before he could release a secondary technique and executed two strikes to his meridian junction points — not cultivation, pure physical technique, the result of her own education in the Unmarked network's survival curriculum — and the man sat down with the look of someone whose Aether flow has been temporarily interrupted.
The force-projection Guard, technique negated, did not waste time on confusion. He was already forming a secondary technique when Luceo closed the distance and pressed two fingers to the Guard's sternum and let the Void absorb, briefly and specifically, the technique's Aether source directly.
The man looked at him with an expression that was, for one clear moment, not a Guard's expression but a person's: confused, suddenly aware of something he had not understood about the world.
"Down," Luceo said, quietly.
The Guard sat down.
Seris was already at the east corridor to block four.
They ran.
✶
Block four was fifteen cells.
He was on the seventh when the facility's main alarm activated.
Not the query anymore — the full Aether-resonance alarm, the kind that rattled the monitoring stones in every corridor and produced a pulse through the collection infrastructure that he could feel in his teeth. The hub operator had finally reviewed enough to understand that the anomaly was not a malfunction.
Somewhere north, the six Guards who had responded to the misdirection were receiving a recall signal.
The ninety-minute window just became shorter. Estimate: forty minutes before external reinforcement arrives. The two interior Guards are neutralized. The Cultivator-General's office is in the hub. She knows the alarm has sounded. She is coming.
He worked faster. The breaks were twenty seconds now, the pattern fully internalized, the Void-core executing the absorption with the precision of something practiced until it was automatic.
The thirteenth cell. The fourteenth.
The fifteenth.
He stopped.
Seris had found her.
He knew it before he turned, from the quality of the silence behind him — the specific silence of a space where something significant is happening and everyone present understands that the significance requires quiet.
Seris stood in the open doorway of the last cell.
The woman inside was perhaps forty-five, with silver hair like Seris's worn long, and the particular quality of someone who has been in a place too long and has made it as much theirs as any captivity can be made one's own. She was standing. She had been standing when the door opened, which meant she had heard the alarm and had stood up, which meant she had decided, in that moment, that this was the thing she had been standing for.
She looked at Seris.
Seris looked at her.
Luceo looked away.
There are things that do not require witnesses.
He gave them forty-five seconds. Then:
"We need to move."
Seris's voice, from the doorway:
"I know."
They moved.