Peter didn't go for a walk.
He meant to. He left the Sanctum with every intention of wandering through the Village, maybe cutting through Washington Square, maybe ending up at that falafel place on MacDougal that stayed open until midnight and didn't judge you for ordering three sandwiches. A farewell tour. A greatest-hits reel of the city he might never see again.
Instead he went back to the chamber.
He wasn't sure why. He'd been halfway down Bleecker, hands in his pockets, the sleet needling his face, when something pulled at him. Not spider-sense. Not the device's resonance. He was too far away for that. Or thought he was. Just a feeling. A thread attached somewhere behind his ribs, tugging south and down and through sixty meters of Manhattan bedrock toward a machine that knew his heartbeat better than he did.
He turned around.
Strange had gone upstairs. Peter could hear him moving on the third floor, the particular creak of the floorboards near the meditation room, the faint hum of a containment spell being prepped. Working on the tether, probably. The mystical bungee cord. Peter still wasn't sure he believed it would work, but Strange had that look. The one where his jaw set and his eyes went somewhere internal, running calculations against possibilities, and you either trusted the process or got out of the way.
Peter went to the sub-basement alone.
The door opened for him. No resistance, no shifting geometry. The stairwell beyond was, and this was new, *lit.* Faintly. The mineral flecks in the stone walls glowed with their own soft luminescence, a blue-white light that was barely enough to see by but enough to navigate without stumbling.
Like someone had left the porch light on.
The descent took four minutes. Fifty-eight meters. He counted, because he always counted. The temperature rose in its steady gradient. The ozone smell thickened. By the time he reached the chamber entrance, his spider-sense had engaged, but gently. Not the alarm. Not even the tuning fork. More like a cat pressing against his shins. Present. Familiar. Not demanding attention, just there.
He stepped into the chamber.
The device pulsed. Found his heartbeat. Two seconds.
The walls cycled. Slow, steady. The diagnostic readout he'd spent six hours mapping. Two thousand seven hundred and forty-one nodes, ninety-seven percent dark. The math of a collapsing multiverse rendered in symbols he was starting to recognize, if not read.
Peter sat on the floor. Cross-legged. Six feet from the device, where Strange had been sitting that morning.
The stone was warm.
He sat there for a while. Not thinking, exactly. Letting his brain do whatever it wanted while his body settled into the resonance. The heartbeat-pulse synchronization was so natural now it felt like his own circulatory system had expanded to include a two-foot sphere of ancient technology. Weird thought. True thought.
"Okay," he said to the room. To the device. To whatever was listening. "Let's talk about what I'm walking into."
Nothing happened. The device pulsed. The walls cycled.
"I know you can't actually talk. Or maybe you can and I just can't hear it yet. Either way." He rubbed the back of his neck. Talking to a machine in an underground chamber at eight o'clock at night. If Ned could see him. If *MJ* could see him.
He stopped that thought.
"Here's what I know," Peter said. "You're sending me to a world called Planetos. One of your nodes there is dying. Twelve percent output, and dropping. If it fails, the cascade takes out enough of the network to collapse dimensional barriers across thousands of realities. Including mine."
The walls cycled. A cluster near his left shoulder brightened slightly. One of the sixty-one active nodes, pulsing its dim status report.
"I know the world is pre-industrial. No electricity. No synthetic materials. Seasonal cycles governed by your network instead of orbital mechanics, which means winters that last years and summers that are, I'm guessing, the only reason anyone's still alive there."
He pulled his notebook from his jacket. Flipped to the survival protocol page. Still mostly blank. The few items he'd written were practical. Water purification, antibiotics, web fluid. But they felt thin. Insufficient. Like bringing a first-aid kit to an earthquake.
"What I don't know," Peter said, "is what I'm supposed to *do* when I get there. You showed me the Wall. The darkness behind it. The cold. But you didn't show me the node. You didn't show me where it is, what it looks like, how to fix it. You gave me the *why* but not the *how.*"
He looked at the device.
"I need the how."
The amber pulse continued. Steady. Patient.
Nothing.
Peter sighed. Leaned back on his hands. The stone was warm against his palms, almost body temperature, and the vibration beneath the surface was constant. The heartbeat of the chamber itself, slower and deeper than the device's pulse.
"You know what," he said, "this is exactly like talking to Strange. I ask a direct question, I get silence, and then three days later the answer shows up sideways in the middle of something else."
He stared at the ceiling. The darkness that went up forever.
"Fine. I'll figure it out myself. It's what I do."
He opened the notebook to a clean page. Started writing.
Not the survival protocol. Something else.
A list of questions. The things he needed answers to before the countdown hit zero, arranged not by importance but by the order they'd occurred to him, because that's how his brain worked. Associative, tangential, spiraling inward toward the center.
*1. Where is the node physically located? Underground? In a structure? In the open?*
*2. What does a node look like from the outside? Is it like the device, spherical, mechanical? Or something else?*
*3. The node is at 12%. What does "repair" mean? Restoring it to 100%? Stabilizing at current levels? Replacing it entirely?*
*4. The weirwood network. Strange said ley lines, natural magical channels. Are the weirwoods growing along the ley lines? Are they part of the node's interface? Like biological antennae?*
*5. The Wall. Seven hundred feet of ice. Is the Wall a node? A node's effect? A containment structure built around a node?*
*6. The darkness in the north. The thing moving south. Is it a symptom of node failure? Something that exists because the node is weakening? Or something independent, a separate threat that the node was keeping in check?*
*7. If it's the latter, if the darkness is something the node was containing, then repairing the node doesn't just stabilize the seasons. It re-establishes containment. Which means the repair and the threat are connected. Which means I can't do one without confronting the other.*
Peter stared at question seven.
Read it again.
His hand tightened on the pen.
That was the shape of it, wasn't it. Not a repair job. Not just find-the-broken-thing-and-fix-it. The broken thing was connected to the dangerous thing, and the dangerous thing was alive and moving and ancient and...
*This must not reach them.*
The thought from the vision. The imperative that had risen from somewhere deeper than consciousness. Not his thought and his thought simultaneously. The device's urgency mapped onto his own moral architecture.
*This must not reach them.*
Them. The people on the other side of the Wall. The people with the torches. The people in the world of impossible seasons, living their lives, fighting their wars, ignorant of the infrastructure crumbling beneath their feet.
Peter Parker. Professional superhero. Chronic responsibility addict. Being sent to save people who didn't know they needed saving, from a threat they couldn't see, using a system they didn't know existed.
Yeah. That tracked.
He wrote an eighth question.
*8. Is there anyone there who knows? About the network. About the nodes. About any of this. Or am I completely alone?*
He underlined *completely alone* twice.
---
Footsteps on the stairs. Peter's spider-sense flagged them before the sound reached his ears. Not a threat, just awareness. Strange's particular gait, slightly uneven, the Cloak's fabric brushing stone walls.
Strange appeared at the chamber entrance. He'd changed again. Different robes, darker, more practical-looking. His hair was wet. Shower, not rain. His eyes were bloodshot, but focused. Sharply focused. The focus of a man who'd found something and wasn't sure yet if it was good news or bad.
"I thought you left," Strange said.
"Came back."
Strange looked at him. At the notebook. At the six feet of distance between Peter and the device. At the way Peter sat, cross-legged, settled in, comfortable. Like he belonged there.
Something flickered across Strange's face. Gone before Peter could name it.
"I've been working on the tether," Strange said. He walked into the chamber, stopped at the edge. His usual distance. Further from the device than Peter sat. "The theory is sound. An emotional anchor tied to a specific object from your origin reality, reinforced with a dimensional threading spell that maintains a connection across the barrier."
"The photo."
"The photo. It's... potent. The emotional charge is substantial." Strange paused in a way that suggested he was choosing between clinical language and something more honest. "Your uncle. He's..."
"Dead. Yeah."
"The grief is part of what makes it effective. Grief is one of the most dimensionally stable emotions. It persists. It doesn't fade or fluctuate the way other bonds do. Love changes shape. Romantic love especially. Happiness is ephemeral. But grief..." Strange trailed off. Recalibrated. "Grief is a permanent scar in the emotional field. It makes an excellent anchor point."
Peter looked at his hands. The pen. The notebook.
"You're telling me the reason you can build a way to bring me home is because my uncle is dead and I'll never stop missing him."
"I'm telling you that the bond you carry, the specific quality of it, creates a fixed point that dimensional shifting can't erase. Yes."
Peter was quiet for a long beat.
"Ben would have hated that," he said. "Being useful because he died."
"Most people would."
"No. I mean he'd have hated being reduced to a function. He wasn't a fixed point. He was a person." Peter closed the notebook. Set the pen down. "He taught me to change a tire. He made terrible pancakes and pretended they were good. He sang in the shower, badly, like impressively badly, and he always left the toilet seat up, which drove May insane."
His voice was steady. His eyes were dry.
"He was a person. Not a scar. Not an anchor. A person."
Strange said nothing. Which was, Peter had learned, his version of respect.
The chamber hummed around them. The device pulsed amber. The walls cycled their endless diagnostic. The health report of a dying multiverse, scrolling in a language that was older than grief.
"Will it work?" Peter asked. "The tether."
"In theory."
"I need better than theory."
"Then you need to accept that certainty doesn't exist in dimensional mechanics." Strange crossed his arms. The tremor in his hands was hidden by the posture. Intentional, Peter suspected. "I can build the tether. I can anchor it to the photo and thread it through the dimensional barrier. But maintaining the connection across an unknown distance, through unknown interference, for an unknown duration..."
"That's a lot of unknowns."
"Welcome to my entire discipline."
Peter almost smiled.
"There's another problem," Strange said. His voice dropped half a register. The tell. The one that meant the next part was the part he didn't want to say. "The tether requires a sustained energy input on this end. Someone has to maintain it. Actively. For the entire duration of your displacement."
"Someone being you."
"Someone being me."
"For how long?"
"However long it takes you to repair the node."
"Which could be..."
"Weeks. Months. I don't know." Strange uncrossed his arms. Let the tremor show. A deliberate vulnerability, or an involuntary one. Peter couldn't tell. "I am telling you that I will sit in this building and hold a spell for as long as it takes to bring you back. That is what I am committing to."
The words landed in the chamber's warm air and stayed there.
Peter studied Strange's face. The bloodshot eyes. The set jaw. The expression that wasn't warmth, because Strange didn't do warmth, but was something adjacent. Determination, maybe. Or obligation. Or the specific kind of caring that a man like Strange could only express through action, never through words.
"You don't have to do that," Peter said.
"No. I don't."
"So why..."
"Because I called you." Strange's voice was flat. Final. "I brought you into this. I showed you the chamber. I watched you touch the device. I could have sealed this room the day I found it and spent the rest of my life pretending it didn't exist."
"And the network would have collapsed."
"And the network would have collapsed. And I wouldn't have known. And neither would you. And we'd both be ignorant and alive and the multiverse would end and we'd never even feel it." He paused. "Instead, I called you. At ten-thirty on a Tuesday. Because I needed help and you were the only person I could think of who might understand what I was looking at."
The admission cost him. Peter could see it in the tendons of his neck, the way his shoulders drew up a fraction of an inch. A man confessing to a vulnerability he'd spent decades learning to hide.
"So yes," Strange said. "I will hold the tether. For as long as it takes."
Peter looked at him for a long time.
"Thank you, Stephen."
Strange blinked. The surprise was micro, barely visible. But Peter caught it. A man who had expected gratitude to come in the form of a joke, a deflection, a quip. Not two words, delivered simply.
"You're welcome," Strange said.
It sounded like it might have been the first time he'd said it in years.
---
They worked for another three hours.
Not on the tether. Not on survival protocols. On the device itself, its interface, its logic, its operating language. The thing Peter had come down here to do in the first place. Get answers.
He told Strange about the questions in his notebook. Strange listened, actually listened. Not the performative patience of a man waiting for his turn to speak, but genuine attention. His eyes tracked Peter's logic. He nodded at questions four and five. He paused, visibly, at question seven.
"The containment theory," Strange said. "You think the node isn't just stabilizing the seasons. You think it's holding something back."
"I think the vision supports that interpretation. The Wall. The darkness. The thing moving south." Peter tapped the notebook. "If the node is just a climate regulator, why show me a threat? Why transmit urgency? The device didn't show me weather patterns. It showed me something *alive* behind a wall of ice. That's not a status report. That's a warning."
Strange was quiet.
"There's a concept in older mystical texts," he said eventually. "Containment nodes. Purpose-built anchor points that don't just stabilize a reality's structure. They actively suppress specific phenomena. Entities. Forces. Things that existed before the Atlas network and were sealed away as part of the original construction."
"Sealed away by the Atlas builders."
"Or by whoever came before them. The texts are unclear." Strange pulled one of his diagnostic displays from the air, the one tracking the destination node's output. Twelve percent. The number hadn't changed, but the waveform beneath it was less stable than it had been two days ago. Micro-fluctuations. Noise in the signal. "If the destination node is a containment anchor, then its failure doesn't just destabilize the seasons. It releases whatever it's containing."
"The darkness."
"Whatever the darkness is. An entity. A force. A phenomenon that predates recorded history in that reality." Strange looked at Peter. "And you, the repair agent, wouldn't just need to fix the node. You'd need to do it while the thing it's containing is actively trying to break free."
Peter stared at the waveform. The micro-fluctuations looked worse up close. Not the steady decline of a machine running down. Something more erratic. Like the node was under pressure. External pressure. Something pushing against it from the other side.
"Can we see more?" Peter said. "The device showed me a vision when I touched it. A specific image of the destination. Can I ask it for more specific information?"
"You want to touch it again."
"I want to *communicate* with it. Last time was accidental. It pushed a vision into me and I wasn't prepared. This time I want to go in with specific questions."
"That's not how the device works. It's not a search engine."
"How do you know? You couldn't get it to show you anything." Peter held up a hand before Strange could respond. "I'm not being a dick. I'm being factual. You touched it for thirty seconds and got nothing. I touched it for five and got a full sensory vision. It *wants* to talk to me. I just need to learn how to listen."
Strange's jaw tightened. Not anger. The effort of not saying something. Peter waited.
"The last time you touched it," Strange said, measured, controlled, "your heart rate hit two-ten. Your pupils were nonresponsive for eleven seconds. You were functionally unconscious for fourteen seconds, during which I had no way to assess your neurological state or intervene if something went wrong."
"I know."
"If something *had* gone wrong. A seizure, a cardiac event, a neurological overload. I would have been standing six feet away watching you die on a stone floor in my own basement."
"I know, Stephen."
"So when I express reservations about you voluntarily repeating that experience, I am not being obstructive. I am being..."
"A doctor." Peter said it quietly. "You're being a doctor."
Strange stopped. The word landed somewhere inside him that the title of Sorcerer Supreme didn't reach. Older. Deeper.
"Yeah," Strange said. Rough. Barely audible. "I'm being a doctor."
"I appreciate that. I do. But I have seven days, and the only source of information about where I'm going is that sphere, and it responds to me. Not to you, not to the spells, not to the books. To *me.*"
He stood up.
"So I'm going to touch it again. And this time, I'm going to ask it specific questions. And I need you to monitor me. Vitals, neural activity, whatever you can read. And pull me out if something goes wrong."
"Define 'goes wrong.'"
"Heart rate above two-twenty. Loss of motor function. Seizure activity. If I stop breathing." Peter paused. "If I start saying things that aren't me."
That last one hung in the air.
"You're concerned about cognitive influence," Strange said.
"I'm concerned about an intelligence that's older than human civilization interfacing directly with my nervous system. Yeah. A little." Peter rolled his shoulders. Shook out his hands. The kind of pre-action ritual that had become second nature. Patrol prep, fight prep, now apparently interdimensional-communication prep. "If I come out of it and I'm not me, if I'm saying things I wouldn't say, wanting things I wouldn't want, you shut it down. Hard. Whatever it takes."
Strange nodded. No argument. No negotiation.
He raised his hands. Diagnostic spells materialized, a web of amber light that settled around Peter like a net. Heart rate monitor. Neural activity scan. Respiratory function. Pupil response. Five separate readouts floating in Strange's peripheral vision.
"Baseline established," Strange said. "Heart rate ninety-two. Elevated but within acceptable range."
"I'm about to stick my hand in an alien machine. Ninety-two is pretty calm, all things considered."
"Your definition of calm is clinically fascinating."
Peter walked to the device.
Five feet. The amber pulse intensified. The walls accelerated their cycling, symbols rearranging, clusters reorganizing around his approach. The chamber's acoustics shifted, the ambient hum rising in pitch.
Three feet.
His spider-sense was wide open. The singing, the full-body resonance that happened when he was close, filled him from the soles of his feet to the crown of his skull. Not unpleasant. Not comfortable either. Like standing in a current. Like being tuned.
Two feet.
He could see the individual pathways of light between the plates now. The branching, converging, splitting patterns. Last time, they'd been beautiful and alien. Now they looked almost logical. Almost like something he could follow if he tried hard enough.
Peter raised his hand.
"Specific questions," he murmured. More to himself than to Strange. "Location of the node. Nature of the threat. What 'repair' means. How to do it."
He reached out.
His fingertips touched the nearest plate.
---
This time, the cold lasted longer.
Three heartbeats of absolute, cosmic cold. The temperature of the void between galaxies, the cold of spaces where light hadn't reached yet. Peter's breath stopped. His vision whited out. His muscles locked.
Then warmth. Not gentle warmth. A flood. Like stepping from a freezer into sunlight. His body unlocked all at once, every joint releasing, every muscle going slack.
He was somewhere else.
Not the ice field. Not the Wall. Somewhere new.
He was underground.
A cavern. Vast, but not infinite. He could see the walls, the ceiling. Stone. Old stone, older than anything he'd ever touched. The kind of stone that had been formed when the planet was young and hadn't moved since.
And embedded in the stone...
Roots.
Enormous roots. White as bone, thick as tree trunks, threading through the rock in every direction. They formed a network, a web, his brain supplied, because of course it was a web, that covered the cavern walls and ceiling in an intricate, organic lattice.
Peter's breath caught.
He knew what these were. Not from experience. From the description Strange had given him. Ley lines. Natural magical channels. But not abstract energy. *These.* Physical. Biological. Roots of trees so old they'd grown through solid rock.
Weirwood roots. The word surfaced from somewhere. Not his vocabulary, not his memory. The device, feeding him context. Weirwood. White bark. Red leaves. Carved faces. An ancient network of trees connected by their root systems, stretching across an entire continent.
And at the center of the cavern, where the roots converged, where every strand of the organic web met and merged, something glowed.
Peter moved closer. Floated closer. He still had no body in these visions, no physical presence. Just perspective. A camera in a dream.
The glow came from deep within the root mass. A steady, faint, amber light. So similar to the device's pulse that Peter's heart lurched with recognition. He could see it through the gaps in the tangled roots, pulsing slowly. Weakly.
The node.
Not a sphere. Not a machine. Not anything technological at all.
A *seed.*
It looked like a seed. Roughly ovoid, maybe three feet long. Dark, dense, its surface covered in patterns that Peter recognized instantly. The same shifting symbols that covered the chamber walls in the Sanctum. Atlas language. Atlas technology. But encased in something organic. Something alive. The roots had grown *around* it, embraced it, integrated it, made it part of their network.
The seed was the node. The weirwood roots were the interface.
And the seed was dying.
Peter could see it. Not with his eyes, because he didn't have eyes here, but with whatever sense the device was giving him. The amber glow was dimmer than it should have been. Irregular. The symbols on the seed's surface were moving sluggishly, like a clock running down. Some sections had gone dark entirely. Dead patches where the language had stopped, where the connection had failed.
Twelve percent.
He could *feel* the number now. Feel what it meant. The seed was supposed to be a beacon, a powerful, steady signal that regulated the reality around it. Maintained the seasons. Kept the barriers stable. Held back the things that pressed against the edges.
At twelve percent, it was a candle in a hurricane.
Peter tried to move closer. The vision obliged, his perspective sliding forward until he was inches from the seed's surface. Up close, the dead patches were worse than they'd looked from a distance. Not just inactive. *Corroded.* Something had eaten into the seed's surface. Dark marks, like burns, spreading from the dead patches into the living tissue.
Not natural decay.
Damage.
Something was *attacking* the node.
Peter pulled back. Looked up.
The cavern ceiling was high. Fifty, sixty feet. The roots covered it entirely. But in the far corner, where the stone met the deepest concentration of roots, something was wrong.
The roots were black.
Not dark. Not shadowed. *Black.* The bone-white wood had been corrupted, turned to something that absorbed light instead of reflecting it. The blackness spread from a crack in the stone, a fissure that went up and up and up into darkness, into the earth above, into...
Into the north.
Peter knew it with a certainty that bypassed logic. The crack led north. Whatever was coming through it, whatever was corrupting the roots and attacking the seed, was coming from the same direction as the darkness he'd seen in the first vision.
The same darkness that was moving south.
It wasn't just a threat beyond the Wall. It was *here.* Underground. In the root network. Eating the node from the inside. A slow, patient corruption that had been working for centuries, maybe millennia, while the world above went about its wars and politics and petty human business, oblivious to the rot beneath their feet.
Peter's spider-sense screamed.
Not the chamber's spider-sense. The vision's spider-sense. A warning so fundamental, so total, that it transcended the barrier between real and projected.
*GET OUT.*
The blackness in the corner moved.
Not the roots. The darkness *itself.* It shifted, contracted, and for one terrible moment Peter felt it *notice him.* A vast, cold attention swiveling toward his point of perspective like a searchlight made of nothing.
It saw him.
It *knew* him.
And in the fraction of a second before the vision shattered...
It smiled.
---
Peter hit the chamber floor on his back.
He was gasping. Choking. His hands were clenched so hard his fingernails had broken the skin of his palms. Four crescent moons of blood on each hand, bright red against white knuckles.
Strange was beside him. Hands on his shoulders. Diagnostic spells blazing.
"Rate two-thirty-five, pupil dilation maximal, cortisol spike beyond readable levels..."
"I'm here." Peter's voice was a wreck. "I'm here, I'm here, I'm..."
He rolled onto his side. Dry-heaved. Nothing came up. He hadn't eaten since the coffee. But his body tried anyway, his diaphragm spasming, his stomach clenching around nothing.
The chamber was too bright. Too warm. The device's pulse was rapid, frantic, matching his racing heart. The walls were cycling fast, the symbols cascading in patterns that looked almost panicked. As though the chamber itself was alarmed.
"What happened?" Strange's voice. Professional. Controlled. The doctor, not the sorcerer. "Peter. What did you see?"
Peter lay on the stone floor. Stared at the ceiling that went up forever.
His hands were bleeding. His heart was trying to exit through his ribs.
And behind his eyes, burned into his retinas like an afterimage, the shape of something vast and dark and patient.
Something that had smiled.
"I know where the node is," Peter said. His voice was flat. Distant. The voice of a man processing information too large for the container. "It's underground. Deep underground. A cavern. It's built into a root system. Trees, white trees, a whole network of them. The node itself is like a seed. Organic. Living. And it's being attacked."
"Attacked by what?"
Peter closed his eyes.
"I don't know what to call it. A corruption. A darkness. It's in the roots. It's spreading through the same network the node uses. Coming from the north. Eating the node from the inside."
He opened his eyes. Looked at Strange.
"And it knows I'm coming."
Strange went very still.
"The darkness. The thing in the north. Whatever it is. It *saw me,* Stephen. Through the vision. Through the device. It looked at me and it..."
He stopped. Because how do you tell someone that an ancient evil smiled at you? How do you describe the specific quality of that smile? Not amusement, not cruelty, not malice, but *recognition.* The way you smile when a piece you've been waiting for finally appears on the board.
"It knows," Peter said. "It knows about the device. It knows about the repair protocol. And it's not afraid."
The chamber was quiet. The device had slowed its pulse, settling, calming, returning to baseline as Peter's heart rate gradually dropped. The walls resumed their steady cycling. The diagnostic readout, endlessly scrolling its report of decay.
Strange sat back on his heels. His diagnostic spells dimmed but didn't vanish.
"You're bleeding," he said.
Peter looked at his palms. The crescent wounds. His own fingernails.
"Yeah," he said.
Strange reached into his robes and produced a handkerchief. White, monogrammed, because of course it was, with the initials S.S. in silver thread.
Peter took it. Pressed it against his left palm. The fabric turned red in small, spreading blooms.
"Seven days," Peter said.
Strange nodded.
"It's not just a repair job."
"No."
"It's a war."
Strange didn't answer. He looked at the device, pulsing amber, steady, patient. A machine that had been built to save worlds, sending a twenty-year-old from Queens into a fight that had been waiting for him since before humans existed.
Peter sat up. His head swam. He waited for the vertigo to pass.
Then he opened his notebook. Turned to a new page. The pen was hard to hold, his palms slick with blood, but he managed.
He crossed out question eight.
*~~8. Is there anyone there who knows? About the network. About the nodes. About any of this. Or am I completely alone?~~*
Replaced it with something worse.
*8. Something there already knows I'm coming. It's inside the root network. It's killing the node. And it smiled when it saw me.*
He stared at what he'd written.
Then, below it:
*9. How do you fix a machine when the thing breaking it is alive, intelligent, and expecting you?*
He didn't have an answer.
The device pulsed.
The walls cycled.
Seven days.
[END OF CHAPTER SEVEN]