The clock on the Jazz Showcase bar read 6:04 when Isadora stopped pretending she was asleep.

  Forty hours since the tunnel. She had counted them. The burst capillaries in her palms had begun to close, the skin red and tender under the bandage linen Brielle had wrapped around both hands with excessive care and audible worry. The ringing in her left ear had not changed. She had classified it as background information rather than a symptom. This felt more defensible at two in the morning than it did at six.

  Four blocks of perimeter sense. Down from twelve. Rainer had finished the junction disconnections during the first night, working through his folded diagram until the last ward-threaded junction released and her awareness collapsed to the building's walls and a thin shell beyond, the city past that shell opaque and indifferent. She could feel the copper wiring in the Showcase's own walls, the CTA line two hundred meters north, the aggregate mass of steel and glass in the buildings facing Michigan Avenue. Nothing past that. If Holt's people moved on the building right now, she would hear it at the front door.

  This was not a useful condition. She noted it and went downstairs.

  ---

  The knock came at 6:14.

  Three raps on the service entrance door. A cadence she had catalogued: Sal, Pete Romano, or someone Pete Romano had briefed. She was through the service corridor and pulling back the deadbolt before the echo died, coat over her sleeping clothes, bandaged hands still stiff with morning cold.

  Sal was already there.

  He was in his rumpled grey suit, which meant he had not slept either, and his right hand was doing nothing, which told her before she saw his face what kind of morning this was. The coin was in his pocket. He opened the door two inches and looked through the gap, then pulled it wider.

  Detective O'Malley stood in the alley. He held his badge at waist height, face-in toward his thigh, the metal not catching the sodium light overhead. Dark circles under both eyes that had not been there at their last meeting. He had a takeaway coffee cup in one hand and held up his phone with the other, no preamble.

  Three words on the screen. An address on South Michigan.

  Sal let her see and closed the door.

  The Harold Washington Library. The Winter Garden atrium. Public. Neither side had tactical advantage in a room with a hundred reading tables and forty-foot sightlines in every direction.

  She was already heading back toward the stairs. Behind her, Sal moved into the doorway.

  "Before you say anything."

  ---

  The back room smelled of old coffee and last night's food. She sat in the piano-side chair and looked at her bandaged hands and waited for his sequence to begin.

  He had catalogued it over weeks. The historical precedents came first, delivered as though the next one would be the one she could not argue with. Then the conspiracy infrastructure — names, dates, none of which she could verify, none of which he had ever questioned. And then the personal anecdote. Always a name. Always Joliet.

  The coin came out and started spinning.

  "Guy named Ferretti." He paced the narrow route between bar and stage lip, coin spinning, voice pitched low and rapid. "Sal Ferretti, no relation, good man, ran numbers out of Wicker Park, never hurt anybody in his life. Federal agent comes to him, says it's a conversation, says neutral ground, says bring your own lawyer if you want. Ferretti goes. You know where Ferretti is now?"

  She did not know where Ferretti was now.

  "Ferretti is in Joliet. Eighteen months in, twelve more to go. Because he trusted the word 'neutral.'"

  Isadora turned her bandaged left hand over and examined the seam where the linen wrapped her knuckles. The skin at the edge was still pink, the abraded layer from the copper housing not quite healed.

  "Holt has had Carmine's file for forty hours and done nothing with it." She set both hands flat on the table. The pressure pulled at the abraded skin beneath the bandage. "That is a woman who needs something she does not yet have."

  "Or a woman who's taking her time."

  "O'Malley came here at six in the morning with his badge turned against his leg and no backup." The pressure in her palms was less unpleasant than keeping her hands in her lap. "He is protecting us. The meeting request is not a pretense."

  Sal's pacing slowed. He was looking at her with the coin tilted between two fingers, assessing. She recognized the shift, from the performance of argument to the actual calculation underneath.

  "Iz." He dropped his voice to the low pitch that meant he was past the performance. "You've got four blocks of range left and both hands wrapped up. Half capacity. You walk in there and she sees it."

  "I know what I am walking in as." She turned to the corridor. "Rainer."

  Rainer appeared from the back staircase in three seconds. He was carrying the indigo robe over one arm, the geometric embroidery along the collar and cuffs already arranged facing outward, as though he had selected it before she came downstairs. He draped it across the back of the nearest chair and stepped back without comment.

  The coin went still.

  Sal looked at the robe, then at her. He did not resume pacing. He stood with the coin between two fingers and no further angles to deploy.

  "That robe lights up near mana concentrations." He pressed the coin flat between his fingers. "You know that."

  "Yes."

  "Federal agent. Public building. A hundred witnesses."

  "I am aware of the conditions." She pulled the robe from the chair back and shook it open. "I am not going to meet Diana Holt in borrowed clothes pretending to be something she already knows I am not. She verified the South Loop blackout connection. She knows what the anomaly is. The robe does not change her position." She paused. "It changes mine."

  Sal pressed his lips together and put the coin back in his pocket.

  ---

  At the corridor mirror, she worked the copper clasps into her braids with her bandaged hands. Slow. The left index finger protested at the angle, the blistered skin pulling against the linen wrap where the clasps required pressure. She set each one anyway. One at the crown, two above the ear on the right, two at the nape.

  Five instead of six. The sixth was in her coat pocket, blackened and warped, and it was staying there.

  She had worn this robe the morning she presented her third dissertation to the Academy council, the Air ley line conductivity research, the work that had made her reputation. She had worn it the last time her title carried weight in a room full of people who understood what it meant.

  The embroidery caught the low corridor light, the copper threads in the geometric patterns at the collar just barely luminous.

  ---

  The Harold Washington Library's Winter Garden occupied the ninth floor, a glass-and-steel atrium running the building's full width, the ceiling four stories of tempered panels through which morning light fell in long rectangles across the reading tables and the marble floor. A schoolchildren's group was setting up near the eastern wall. Two researchers had laptops out. An older man slept behind a newspaper at a far corner table.

  Isadora came through the entrance and stopped.

  The reach was involuntary, two months old, so grooved into muscle memory she performed it before deciding to: outward through the copper clasps, through the city's electrical infrastructure, the spread of awareness across the ward network. Four blocks of range.

  The Winter Garden gave her nothing. No copper cables close enough. No exposed wiring. The building's structural bones were too far above, the atrium floor was marble and stone, and the air between the reading tables was just air. She stood in the entrance of the most consequential room she had been in since the transfer, navigating by sight alone.

  Holt was already at the reading table.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  She was standing. That was the first thing. Not reviewing notes, not managing the performance of controlled waiting. She had seen Isadora come through the entrance and had risen, and standing for a petitioner was a tell she probably knew she was making. Isadora crossed the atrium floor without hurrying. Holt sat.

  Sal peeled off two tables to the left and settled with a folded newspaper across his knee.

  "Ms. Fairbrook."

  "Special Agent." Isadora set her bandaged hands on the table. The marble was cool through the linen. "You have had Carmine Vitale's file for forty hours."

  "I have."

  "You are here with a request."

  Holt's eyes moved to the bandages for less than a second, then back up. "I need your expertise. You need my resources. Better to establish that now than in six weeks when we're both dealing with something worse."

  She put a tablet on the table and turned it face-up toward Isadora.

  The data ran four columns. Waveform readouts and frequency overlays with geographic headers. Tokyo. S?o Paulo. Lagos. Chicago. The waveform signatures were not identical but they shared an architecture, the same Earth-frequency harmonic propagating through each city's structural steel, carrying the same coherent signal she had first mapped against her grid chart in the tunnels beneath Jackson Street. The second signal. Running through rebar and load-bearing columns rather than copper cable, the bell-ringer building something into the bones of every city that sat near a transfer bubble.

  Four cities. The same bell.

  She studied the S?o Paulo overlay. The propagation curve was lower than Chicago's, attenuating with distance as the signal crossed the dimensional corridor's bandwidth. Tokyo was higher. She had not known about Tokyo. The weight of that landed differently than the others—she had categorized Tokyo as someone else's problem, which had been naive, and the naivety was now on a federal tablet in front of her.

  Holt spoke with her hands flat on the table, no notes, no prompts. "Your instruments in Chicago detected the suppression event three days ago." Not an accusation. A briefing. "I confirmed the South Loop blackout correlation within two hours of our last conversation. I've known for weeks you're not the source. You're the only person with any understanding of what the source actually is."

  "Your superiors." Isadora looked up from the Tokyo waveform. "Current position."

  Holt's right hand moved from the table to her jacket pocket and stayed there.

  "Active countermeasures. If the resonance can't be neutralized within seventy-two hours from this morning, I've been authorized to recommend a controlled demolition of the Chicago transfer site. The estate and the primary mana nodes."

  The morning light from the glass ceiling fell across the table in a long rectangle. Isadora held Holt's gaze and placed the words demolition and mana nodes next to each other and examined what they produced.

  "That will not stop the resonance." She kept her voice at the same cadence Holt had used, even, informational. "My nodes are how I observe and partially suppress the signal. Destroying them removes my ability to manage the local effect while doing nothing to the origin point. The resonance will continue in every other city with a transfer bubble, unchecked."

  "I know."

  "Then your superiors are willing to protect one city at the cost of every other."

  "My superiors care about Chicago." Holt's voice stayed level. "They care about the liability of a glass-fracture event on a populated lakefront, and they care about the optics of a task force that's been watching an uncontrolled anomaly for three months without result. They are not thinking about Lagos."

  Isadora sat back.

  Above her, the glass ceiling ran the atrium's full width, four stories up, the morning light falling through the tempered panels in long rectangles.

  She put her eyes back on Holt.

  "Three conditions."

  Holt waited.

  "Legal protection for my household. Formal documentation designating them as protected persons. Binding, not pending review." One condition, stated. "Second, the estate perimeter reclassified from active quarantine to protected cultural site. Full access restoration for my staff." Two. Same cadence, same weight. "Third, Carmine Vitale's intelligence filing withdrawn from the system."

  Holt nodded at the first two, quick and definitive, no pause for theater. She had decided those before she sat down.

  On the third, her right hand was already in her jacket pocket.

  "That one I can't do. It's in the system. My discretion stops at the field level."

  Isadora had assigned this outcome a forty percent probability before she sat down, the Carmine file specifically, because what entered the federal system did not come cleanly back out, and Holt would not pretend otherwise.

  "Then delay action on it."

  Holt's jaw tightened. "Six months, maybe eight. After that it's part of the formal case file and I lose discretion over the timeline."

  Six months. Enough time for the resonance problem to resolve in one direction or another. She was betting on a timeline rather than a permanent fix, making that bet from a position of damaged hands, diminished range, and no other available options. Refusing meant walking out and waiting for the next meeting, which would have a warrant instead of a tablet.

  She extended her right hand across the table. The bandage wrapping her knuckles was clean but visible, the linen tight over abraded skin.

  "Agreed."

  Holt shook it. Firm, brief. She did not look at the bandages.

  ---

  Isadora rose. Sal was already on his feet two tables over, the newspaper folded under one arm. She turned toward the exit, and the copper clasps pulsed.

  One flicker, warm, in the clasps — the detection enchantment reading a mana concentration within range. Not from below. From above.

  She stopped walking.

  The Winter Garden's glass ceiling stretched across ninety feet of atrium. Four stories up, nine rows of tempered panels in steel frames, the morning light running through them in long white sheets. She tilted her head back.

  Three panels on the north face of the ceiling had changed.

  The fractures were hairline-width, each line no thicker than a printed circuit trace, propagating outward from central stress points in the same geometric formation she had first recorded two months ago in the South Loop. The crystalline lattice fracture pattern. She had documented it in the Loop, along the lakefront corridor, in the window glass of four commercial buildings and one residential tower on Lake Shore Drive, always the same geometry, the Stasis resonance locking the molecular lattice and the lattice beginning to slip. The bell-ringer's signal, accumulated in the steel frame of every building that carried a ley line through its bones.

  The three fractured panels were directly above the table where they had been sitting.

  "Fairbrook."

  Holt had come up beside her.

  Isadora kept her eyes on the ceiling. "The resonance is in the steel frames. Those panels have been accumulating stress since before we arrived." The fractures extended in the second panel, lines reaching for the frame's edge, following the geometry she had documented in dozens of windows across this city. "The building is not shaking."

  The fractures reached the frame. Held. Then the third panel began to vibrate at the lower boundary of perception, the crystalline structure resonating with a frequency that had crossed the dimensional corridor from a forge she had never seen, a signal that had received no instruction to stop and had not slowed.

  The bell-ringer had not stopped. The city's bones were singing. Whatever she had agreed to at the table below these panels, the physics had already moved past it.

  She pulled her coat closed over the indigo robe and turned from the ceiling.