Chapter 417 - 416: The Number
Location:Seven Peaks — Command Center
Date/Time:TC1854.12.24 (Late Evening)
The command center was empty except for Raven and 7T9.
Not by accident. Raven had sent the evening staff to Midwinter preparations — the festival began tomorrow, and the command center’s skeleton crew could be spared for lantern-stringing and kitchen support without compromising operational coverage. The formation displays ran themselves. The scanner ran itself. The intelligence feeds would alert her if anything changed.
She sat at the map table. The eastern display glowing. The crescent. The dots. The organic growth perimeter. The same picture she’d been looking at for weeks, familiar now in the way that terrible things became familiar when you looked at them long enough — not less terrible, just less surprising.
7T9 activated a secondary display without being asked. He did this sometimes — presented analysis that he’d been preparing in the background, triggered by a calculation completing or a data threshold being crossed or, occasionally, by the particular quality of silence that Raven produced when she was ready to hear something she didn’t want to hear.
"I have completed the Sanctum population analysis," he said.
Raven didn’t look surprised. She’d known this analysis was running. She’d known approximately when it would complete. She’d known what it would show because the pieces had been assembling for weeks, and the picture they formed had only one possible shape.
"Show me."
The display materialized. Not the crescent — the Sanctum itself. The pre-growth city, reconstructed from census data, merchant registries, Imperial administrative records, and Naida’s archived intelligence.
"The Sanctum complex prior to the organic growth event comprised the following population elements." 7T9’s voice was measured. Not clinical — careful. The voice of an entity delivering numbers that were also people and knew it.
"Sanctum Council and administrative staff: 1,200. Security and enforcement personnel: 800. Research and academic faculty: 2,400. Support staff — maintenance, kitchen, cleaning, groundskeeping: 3,100. Resident scholars and students: 4,500. Civilian service population — merchants, craftsmen, service workers living within the Sanctum township: 6,800. Families of the above: 4,200."