The northern range sat two hours out of Orison behind a chain fence nobody had bothered to electrify. Kana walked them past the outer ring on a technician gate read, since a woman with sixteen logged entries is furniture to a guard post.
The maintenance annexe had its own feed and its own roof, plus a return-air duct running the length of the building above the guard room. Vell went into that duct at the eleventh minute of the lockdown, moving on his forearms with the pack pushed ahead of him.
Wren took the roof rather than the duct, because a cat in a metal tube announces itself to every room underneath. She held the north wall in the contract and fed him the guard positions as smells rather than shapes.
The contract had been carrying a second person inside the building since the fence line, which Vell had read as a technician working late. It was the wrong reading, though it was the only one available to him at that hour.
