The maintenance trunk dropped into a long service run under the archive floor. Cold air breathed through it in weak pulses. Cable nests hugged the walls. Water ticked somewhere in the dark. Elias climbed down too fast, boots slipping on the rungs, and hit bottom with a jolt that made his side flare white. He bit down on a sound and kept moving.

Ahead, the trunk opened into the server galleries: a maze of old racks and relay cabinets between narrow walkways, all washed in low algae-green backup light. Fans spun down in uneven stages overhead. Screens flashed file names, warning text, then blanked. The whole place felt less like a room than a mind erasing itself before it died.

Mara stood at an open relay spine halfway down the nearest gallery, one arm buried to the elbow in cables. The audit core sat jammed into an adapter cradle she had built out of stripped wire, a maintenance plate, and pure nerve. On a dead screen beside her, lines of text shivered in and out: POPULATION STABILITY DIRECTIVE. INTAKE SORTING. COMPLIANCE REVIEW.

"You weren't told to come," she said without turning.

"You weren't told to rewire an archive by hand." Elias reached the console and nearly missed the edge because the floor shifted under his eyes. He braced himself, blinked, focused. "Status?"

"Bad." She pulled one cable free with her teeth, spat insulation, and pointed with her chin. "This branch still touches undercity maintenance relay six and maybe eight. The archive keeps cutting my packets, tagging them contaminated, then trying to wipe source blocks after transfer. I can seed fragments. Not whole sets."