The Void Camouflage engaged with a sound like a held breath. The Midnight Express’s exterior dissolved into the surrounding darkness, the train becoming a shape defined only by the absence of void-light where its hull displaced the ambient radiation.

  David watched the countdown: sixty minutes of invisibility.

  The gateway’s security perimeter was denser than the sensor data had suggested from a distance. Up close—and David was now very close, the Express threading through the patrol routes at minimum speed, the navigation console displaying each entity’s position in real time—the coverage was a three-dimensional lattice of overlapping sensory fields. The patrol entities moved in formations that left gaps only where two routes diverged at the extremes of their arcs.

  The fourteen-minute gap. David had timed it from the Warden’s sensor data. Thirteen minutes and forty seconds. Thirteen fifty. Fourteen.

  The gap opened: two patrol routes pulling apart, creating a corridor of unmonitored space that would last approximately ninety seconds before the next pair of routes converged.

  David pushed the throttle. The Express surged through the gap in near-total silence, its spectral tracks bending to accommodate the dimensional geometry of the gateway’s approach zone. The patrol entities continued their arcs, oblivious. The Void Camouflage held.

  They were inside the perimeter.

  The gateway itself was visible now through the forward viewport, and the sight of it stopped conversation in the Engine Room.

  It was enormous. The incomplete ring of crystallized energy arced across the void like the ribcage of something that had been alive and impossibly large. The completed sections glowed with a deep, pulsing amber—the color of compressed consciousness, David realized, seeing the energy signature through his Warden permissions. Each photon of that light represented a fraction of a harvested human mind, processed and integrated into the bridge’s structure.

  The construction gap—the 115-degree section where the ring was unfinished—was a wound of raw energy and scaffolding. Consortium construction entities swarmed the gap like ants on a broken branch, assembling the bridge’s crystalline matrix one segment at a time. The control interface was visible as a platform at the gap’s edge: a cluster of terminals and holographic displays, connected to the ring by conduits that pulsed with the same amber light.

  And standing on the platform, motionless, facing outward: Cleaner Unit 7.

  David’s True Sight attempted to resolve the entity’s data and returned a partial read—the system was willing to show him the tag but not the full specifications, as if even Warden-level permissions weren’t sufficient for complete access to a Cleaner’s profile.

  What he could see: humanoid. Male. Tall. Dressed in a Consortium uniform that was somehow both military and corporate—tactical gear with the golden-eye insignia embroidered on the chest. The face was partially obscured by a visor that David suspected served as both a heads-up display and a suppression interface for the 15% residual human consciousness.

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  The Cleaner stood the way a powered-down machine stands: no fidgeting, no shifting weight, no micro-movements of restlessness. It was conserving energy, all of its processing capacity dedicated to monitoring the surrounding space for threats. It was, in a very real sense, sleeping with its eyes open.

  "Razor." David’s voice was low. "Your drop point is two hundred meters south of the platform, behind the construction scaffolding. When I give the signal, make noise. Draw patrols. Run west, away from the platform."

  Razor was at the side door, his gear checked, his scarred face set in the expression David had first seen in the sleeper cabin of the Ghost Train: ready, resigned, alive.

  "How long do you need?"

  "As long as you can give me."

  "I’ll give you everything I’ve got." Razor met David’s eyes. "Don’t waste it."

  The train slowed. The side door opened silently. Razor dropped into the void’s half-gravity, landed in a crouch on the scaffolding, and vanished into the construction maze.

  David moved the Express to its own position: one hundred meters north of the platform, concealed behind a section of completed ring. The Void Camouflage had forty-one minutes remaining.

  "Michael. Monitor the patrol network. Call every movement."

  Michael’s hands were steady on the sensor console. His coin was in his pocket. This wasn’t a coin-flip situation.

  "I’m ready."

  David looked at the Shadow Bear Spirit. The creature was already manifesting, its dark form coalescing beside him, denser and more solid than he’d ever seen it—as if the Bear understood what was coming and was gathering itself.

  David placed both hands on the Bear’s head. The fur was warm. The purring was deep, almost sub-audible, felt more than heard.

  "When the Cleaner comes, you buy me time. That’s all. Don’t try to win. Don’t try to be brave. Just be between me and it for as long as you can."

  The Bear pressed its massive head against David’s chest. The purring intensified. A sound that, if David had allowed himself to interpret it as communication rather than physiological process, might have said: I know.

  David let go. He drew his knife—not because it would be useful against an S-plus entity, but because the weight in his hand was a comfort, and comfort was a resource that didn’t appear in any system interface.

  "Razor," David spoke into the relay. "Go."

  Three seconds of silence. Then: an explosion of sound from the south side of the construction zone. Not a weapon discharge—Razor was smarter than that. He’d triggered a chain reaction in the construction scaffolding, collapsing a section of framework that produced a cascading roar of metal and energy discharge. It sounded like a structural failure, not an attack—which meant the patrols would investigate rather than immediately converge on a combat footing.

  Michael’s voice: "Eight patrols breaking formation. Moving south. Twelve holding position. Cleaner—" A pause. "Cleaner is not responding. Still stationary at the platform."

  As predicted. The Cleaner’s targeting was focused on the control interface, not the perimeter. It wouldn’t move until its primary objective was threatened.

  David opened the side door, dropped to the ring’s surface, and began running.