The southern airfield was a strip of poured concrete and pre-fab hangars used for cargo Defense Force did not want logged at the main port.

Soma’s transport landed at twenty-three-fourteen.

Caleb was waiting with Iris in a black sedan two hundred meters from the runway. He had spent the day after Tali’s procedure sleeping on the safe-house couch. His silver marks had not warmed once. His bypass was sitting at eighty-four percent and stable. The override harness was looser under his shirt than it had been since Day One.

Soma had left in a small extraction vehicle. He came back in a sixty-meter cargo lifter.

Iris said: "He didn’t come back alone."

"No."

"Stay in the car for the first sixty seconds. Let him see me first."

She got out.

Soma came down the lifter’s rear ramp with a sealed transport case in his left hand and a man Caleb had never seen walking behind him.

The other man was thin. Mid-fifties. Long charcoal coat, no insignia. He had a slim metal tube clipped to his belt that Caleb’s visor did not register as a weapon, which meant it was a weapon Caleb’s visor did not know how to register.

Soma walked to Iris.

He set the case down at her feet.

He said: "She’s in there. Most of her. The piece is in the smaller compartment. The body went to her family this morning."

Iris nodded and kept her eyes off the case.

"Who came back with you?"

The other man stepped forward.

He bowed to Iris with a brief, formal nod, not a full bow. He said: "Iseul."

"Captain."

"Sergeant."

Iseul glanced past her at the sedan.

"Tell your man to come out," he said. "I have been on a transport for six hours and I want to see him standing on his own ground."

Caleb got out of the sedan.

He walked across the apron to where the three of them stood beside the transport case. His silver marks did not warm at Iseul’s approach. They did not warm at the case at his feet, either, which Caleb noticed.

Iseul studied him in silence.

He said something in Korean.

Caleb did not understand it. The Hacker did not translate it.

Iseul did not translate it himself. He turned to Soma.

"He doesn’t know."

"He doesn’t need to know yet."

"He should know before Day Sixteen."

"He will." Iseul turned back to Caleb with his decision made.

"I’m sorry," he said in English. "I will tell you what I said on Day Fifteen. Your father has asked me not to tell you sooner. He has reasons. I do not fully agree with the reasons. I will hold them anyway."

Caleb said: "Okay."

Caleb let it sit there.

Iseul accepted that and stepped back.

Soma opened the smaller compartment of the transport case.

Inside, in a steel-lined cavity packed with thermal gel, was a coiled red shape the size and color of the sample in Sector Nine.

It was Margaux’s piece.

Soma had extracted it from her body in a hospital room in Paris twenty hours after the cardiac arrest. He had done the extraction himself with a scalpel he had been carrying for nineteen years.

He closed the compartment.

He gave the case to Iris.

"Take it to the safe house. Marcus knows it is coming. He will be there to receive it at oh-one-thirty. Do not open the larger compartment until he tells you to."

Iris took the case. She walked back to the sedan. Iseul watched her go. He turned to Soma.

"You said there would be three of us at the meeting."

"There will be. The third is on her way. She landed an hour ago at the eastern port. She is moving slowly. She does not trust this city."

"Who?"

"The one in Jakarta." Iseul’s shoulders tightened hard.

"You brought Jakarta."

"She brought herself. She told me on Day Five she was coming. I did not stop her."

"You did not stop her."

"I did not. The executives have eyes at the western airports. The eastern port has fewer eyes. She came in low. She will be at the safe house tomorrow night."

Iseul’s attention moved from the runway to the ground.

He said: "Then we are four of seven."

"Five. The Lagos operator will be on a secure channel from her station tomorrow. She has not left Lagos. She has the rail in her bay and she is keeping it there."

"Five of seven."

"Five who know. The other two have not been told. One of them will not be told. The other will be told on Day Fifteen if we get to Day Fifteen."

The airfield’s exterior lights flickered.

It was a flicker every operator in the conversation recognized.

Soma’s blade came out of his right hand in a fold of blue light before the lights came back on.

Iseul unclipped the metal tube from his belt.

The third statue came around the corner of the nearest hangar at a controlled walk, the marks on its torso lit at five of twelve. The spine and neck were still dark from Olamide’s work, and the left arm hung loose where Femi’s rifle team had cracked the shoulder in Lagos.

Caleb recognized it as the Paris statue a breath before his mind finished rejecting the possibility.

It had followed the case across the ocean.

Iseul lifted the tube to his mouth. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

A low, deliberate hum came out of it, a resonance that registered in a person’s teeth before their ears.

The statue stopped walking.

Iseul held the note.

He held the note for ten seconds.

The statue’s left knee gave. The marks on its torso dimmed from five to two. The arm hanging off the shoulder dropped to the concrete with a sound that shook through Caleb’s boots.

Iseul stopped the note.

The statue did not get up.

Soma stepped forward and put his blade through the head cavity at the chin.

The marks went dark. All of them.

The statue did not kneel like the Saint Halvard’s one had knelt. It fell forward onto the concrete and stayed there.

Soma let the blade fold back into nothing.

He turned to Iseul.

"I had not seen that yet."

"It is new. I built the tube on the flight in. It will work three more times before the resonance pattern is decoded and the next statue compensates. We have three more before we are back to blades."

"Then we use them well."

Tali’s containment team came in at oh-one-oh-six. They took the Paris statue and left the case with Iris.

Caleb sat in the back of the sedan with the case on the seat beside him and his hand on the lid of the larger compartment. He did not open it. Soma had told him not to open it.

But Soma had not told him not to put his palm flat on the lid.

He put his palm flat on the lid.

His silver marks warmed.

It was the first time they had warmed since the rebuild.

The warmth matched neither Soma’s second-line resonance nor the cold-kin pulse of the statues.

It was a third warmth he had never known before, and it was coming through the lid of a sealed case from a piece of a woman who had died four days ago on the eighth floor of a Paris hotel.

He took his hand off the lid.

The warmth stayed in his ribs for a long time.

Iris drove him home.