The morning started with the schematic.
Aiden had been at the table since before the others came down, the server architecture spread in front of him, Rian's page beside it, the plain notebook open to a clean page. He had been looking at the residual node for forty minutes with the same attention he gave to any system he was learning from scratch: methodically, without conclusions yet, letting the shape of it build before he decided what it meant.
The node was there.
He could see it in the architecture the way you saw a structural irregularity in a wall once you knew what to look for, invisible until it wasn't, obvious after.
What he couldn't see was what surrounded it.
The schematic showed him the skeleton. The codes showed him the pathways. But between the skeleton and the pathways there was a layer of information the schematic hadn't been built to represent, the living texture of the system, the way it actually moved and breathed and held its own weight.
