BEFORE DAWN
The mapping came in at the second bell.
Not visually. Not the way a survey team delivered corridor readings — sketched on paper, argued over, revised, filed in triplicate with the classification authority's standardized notation. It arrived the way the Log had said it would: as spatial awareness. As if the dungeon above the convergence point had always been inside the Null Field and Kai had simply not known where to look.
He was awake when it happened. He had not slept.
The three constructs had been moving through the upper formation for eleven hours when the first of them completed its circuit and returned below. He felt it rejoin the deep chamber — a pressure releasing, like a breath held too long. Then the second. Then the third, within minutes of each other, all three signatures settling back to stationary at the chamber's edge.
And then the knowledge was simply there.
