Book 1 of Rebirth of the Technomage Saga: Earth's Awakening

Chapter 478: Chapter 477: What We Carry

Date/Time:TC1855.11.25 (Night)

Raven walked through the settlement at midnight.

The residential terraces were dark — formation lights dimmed to their nighttime amber, the living architecture breathing slow. Eighty-three thousand people sleeping in buildings that hadn’t existed two years ago, on a mountain that had been claimed ground before it was home. She passed the construction site where Greer’s crew had left their scaffolding neat and their tools covered. She passed the communal kitchen, closed, the scent of the evening’s stew still hanging in the cold air. She passed the school, empty, the children’s formation slates stacked on shelves that Bess Cade’s compound held together.

The cold corridor at the main gate glowed faintly — formation crystals maintaining their five-degree differential through the November night, waiting for the dawn traffic that would carry the day’s arrivals through the chill. An observer sat at the corridor’s exit, wrapped in a heavy cloak, watching nothing because nothing moved at this hour. He nodded at Raven as she passed. She nodded back.

The command center was empty at midnight.

Raven sat at her desk with the formation lights at their lowest. The progress board glowed on the wall. The numbers hadn’t changed since the evening update, but she read them again anyway, because the numbers were the skeleton of everything she’d built, and sometimes she needed to feel the shape of the bones.

"7T9."

"Present." The voice from her shoulder. Small. Familiar. The voice that had been with her since before the sect, before Seven Peaks, before any of this. The Autonomous Overseer who lived in a boy’s root network and spoke through formation crystals and had opinions about everything, and shared approximately half of them.

"Run the inventory."

"Which inventory?"

"All of it."