"Then skip checksum on the image copies. Raw push only. Faster." He coughed into his sleeve, tasted soot and iron, and kept typing. "And stamp every packet with multiple route headers. Waste control, pump service, route tone maintenance, whatever still wakes a relay. Make it look like trash until it lands."

"That," Mara said, "is the first useful thing you've said in five minutes."

They worked with almost no speech after that. Elias fought dooring code and lockouts from one cabinet while Mara ran the relay spine by feel, sending broken truths out in splinters: a page here, twenty names there, policy phrases wrapped inside old maintenance traffic. Each file they pulled triggered another erase attempt. Shutters snapped down across side aisles. A ceiling speaker crackled to life with a soft recorded voice asking all authorized persons to remain calm during memory maintenance. Mara smashed it with the butt of a wrench without even looking up.

Time thinned. Somewhere behind them, deeper in the core, the first chamber door finally gave with a long shriek of torn metal.

"How many levels?" Mara asked.

Elias checked the wall map. Red blocks had entered the platform room and split. Two teams. One through the direct access. One circling wide through service.

"Too many," he said. "And they know the layout."