Thirty-eight kilometers beneath the surface of Titan, Merc Cimbrianus is the best deep-shaft miner in Niðholm — a Pulse laborer at the bottom of the Lattice, digging out the crystal that makes his rulers more than human. He files his safety reports. He sets his bolts right. And when the ice fails anyway and takes his brother, the colony’s ledger records the death in one word: geological.
But something has been waiting in the köld for sixty-three years. Something that was a mind before the Architects cut it apart to build their own. It has watched the harvest, the lies, and the twenty-three names marked resolved — and out of every mind in the solar system, it has chosen the one man who kept believing the report was the right call.
What Merc carries out of Shaft Seven cannot be unmade. The Allting will learn that a number can be suppressed, a document discredited — but not a proof that walks.
