The back room of the Salt & Vice had become a war room in the twenty-four hours since the council meeting. The table was covered with maps and schematics and the scattered components of Axel's salvaged equipment. The walls, once lined with shelves of canned goods, were now papered with printouts—floor plans of the Spire, personnel rotations, the chemical formula for Raina's aerosol sedative. The single bulb overhead had burned out and been replaced twice. No one had slept.
Caleb sat at the table with Raina's leather-bound notebook open in front of him, the optical discs stacked beside it like a tower of obsolete secrets. He had been reading for six hours, his coffee cold and forgotten, his eyes moving across the pages with the focused intensity of a man who was memorizing the architecture
