The Mirror gave him three fragments in the first week after the Trench. No labels. No context. The first was short. His own hands working on something metal, no collar on his throat. The second was a room he didn't recognize. Someone sitting across a table from him, face cut off by the angle. A document between them. He couldn't read it. The third was just a voice saying his name. He couldn't tell if it was a threat or something else.
He wrote all three down on scraps of packing material. Not coded. Just incomplete enough that only he could read them.
He spent most of those forty-one days thinking about Ferrath.
The problem with getting off Mol Sareth was that it kept coming back circular. He needed the collar off to leave. He needed a foundry floor on Ferrath to get what he needed to take the collar off. He needed to leave Mol Sareth to reach Ferrath.
He sat with it for two days.
Then he found the gap.
Voss had written the frequency down because he didn't trust his memory. But Voss had known it before he wrote it down. The Archive didn't care about paper. It cared about what people knew. The frequency existed in Voss's echo the moment he first worked it out.
He just had to ask for it the right way.
On the thirty-eighth day, during rest period, he lay down and reached for the Archive.
Voss arrived faster than the first time.
He asked for the frequency. Voss gave it. He also asked about the drain mechanism this time. Voss told him. Any dense material with natural Rimforce affinity, held against the weakened housing, would slowly pull the kill switch cell's charge down below the discharge threshold. The ore from Level Eight qualified. Four to eight hours of contact. Charge drained. Safe to remove.
He thanked Voss. The session ended.
Then the cost hit.
He lay still on his bunk and felt it come through. Not pain. Heavier than the previous sessions. Something taken from deep down, from a level he had no word for. He did not move for several minutes. He just felt the size of it and let himself understand it clearly.
Eight years.
He didn't know exactly how he knew the number. The system gave him nothing that said it directly. But the sense of it was precise. The way you know the size of a room in the dark. Eight years. Gone. Traded for thirty minutes with a dead man and a frequency he needed.
He looked at the ceiling.
He had been sixty-three when he died the first time. He had a full second lifespan ahead of him. Plus the ten years the system had added. He was spending from that now and the spending was not small.
He filed it and got up.
The ore fragment came next. He had been pocketing pieces from Level Eight during shifts, testing sizes. He settled on one about the width of two fingers pressed together. Heavy for its size. The right composition.
He went to Cal.
They spoke in the dark passage, the one that went past the guard sightline. He kept it simple. The frequency. The housing. What Cal needed to do. He left out the Archive, left out Voss, left out everything Cal didn't need.
Cal listened without interrupting. When he finished Cal said: "If this works. You leave."
"Yes."
"And everyone else stays."
"Yes."
Cal was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded once. The nod of a man who already knew the answer and had asked anyway, just to see what kind of person he was dealing with.
They agreed on a night four days out.
Those four days were tense in a way the Trench hadn't been. The Trench had been physical. This was different. Every guard rotation felt closer than usual. Every scan felt like it lingered. He went to Level Eight and worked his quota and kept his face the same and thought about nothing except the sequence. Fragment. Frequency. Housing. Drain. Release point. The order mattered. Any mistake in the order and the kill switch fired.
He had calculated it correctly. He was almost sure.
On the fourth night he lay on his bunk with the ore fragment in his hand and waited for the block to settle.
The rest period came down over the room slowly. The guards moved to the entrance the way they always did. The two less attentive ones. He had counted on that.
Cal appeared from the dark between the sections and crouched beside the bunk without a word.
He turned slightly and exposed the back of the collar.
Cal's hands came up near the housing. He felt the warmth of Rimforce projection building. Slow and precise. Cal was better at this than he had expected, which was useful.
He pressed the ore fragment against the back panel.
He held it there.
One hour. The block breathed around him. Someone turned over in a bunk. One of the guards by the entrance said something and the other one made a short sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
Two hours. His arm ached from the position.
Four hours. He felt something change in the collar's hum. The three-second tracking pulse was still running. But something under it had gone quieter.
Six hours. The quiet was real now. Unmistakable.
He held it another thirty minutes.
Then he reached up with both hands and found the seam and pressed the release point the way Voss had described it.
The collar opened.
He took it off.
He held it and looked at it in the dark for a moment. The weight of it. He set it down on the floor beside the bunk without any drama and looked at Cal.
Cal looked back at him.
He gave a short nod. Cal slipped back into the dark between the sections without a sound.
He picked the collar back up and held it closed around his throat with one hand. He was not leaving tonight. Morning count would notice. The search would start too fast. He needed two more days. He needed the Assembly Yard contractor window he had been watching for three weeks.
He lay there holding his own collar closed around his neck until the rest period ended and the block started waking up.
Then he got up and went to Level Eight and worked his quota and thought about Ferrath.
---