The data from Thorne arrived at noon, encrypted with a key that changed every minute. I sat in the office with Ezra, running the decryption algorithm on a isolated server. The progress bar crawled across the screen. Green. Slow. Steady.
"It is larger than I expected," Ezra said. He stood behind me, watching the code scroll. "Terabytes."
"The vault logs go back centuries," I said. "Every adjustment. Every anchor placement. Every seismic event."
"Will it show the shell?"
"No," I said. "The shell is pre-Court. It won't be in their records."
"Then what are we looking for?"
"The pattern," I said. "Thorne said the anchors were failing. I need to know why."
The bar hit one hundred percent. The file opened. It was a three-dimensional map of the continent's ley lines. Red threads pulsed bene
