He told Kaspar first. Then Marcus. Then Mira. Then, in a group session in the operations center, everyone else who needed to know.
The strategic response took three days to build and involved every senior officer in the citadel. General Yuen brought in analysts from the other two Fortress Citadels via secure feed. The question was not whether to fight there was never a question about that but how to fight when the opposing force was eleven beings for whom 'engaging' was not the same thing as 'defeating.'
Theo had been running material science models since the breach for the past three weeks. He emerged from the Forge lab on day four with the haunted, electric look of someone who had been in the middle of an idea for seventy-two hours without sleeping and had just resolved it.
His finding: the Genesis Suit's resonance field, at full activation, produced an Aphelion counter-frequency. Not strong enough to damage a Stage 12. But theoretically strong enough if sustained and amplified to prevent an Apotheosis from completing. The procedure required physical proximity and sustained contact with the subject. If Ray could maintain the counter-frequency for long enough, the Apotheosis window would close.
The problem was 'long enough.' Theo's model suggested twelve minutes. Twelve minutes of full resonance activation against the direct effort of a Stage 12 entity, while the other ten were doing whatever they planned to do to the citadel.
Marcus said: 'The other ten are our problem. You hold the field for twelve minutes.'
Ray said: 'Okay.'
Mira said: 'I'm staying with you through the twelve minutes.'
Everyone else said some version of that, and none of them needed to it wasn't a discussion, wasn't a plan requiring consent but it mattered that they said it, and Ray let it matter.
On day nine of the seventeen, he went to see Dayo.
He didn't tell him about the Apotheosis threat. He told him about the paintings in Ha-Jin's storage room and about the cities Dayo designed and about the fishing village on the Spanish coast that Ha-Jin had painted from memory and how it looked exactly like a place you'd want to live if the world was still the kind of place where you could.
Dayo listened. Then he showed Ray the latest design a city built on a plateau, with water collection systems and vertical gardens and a school at the center instead of the perimeter.
"The school is at the center because if you put the school at the center, everything else grows outward from learning. Kids grow up knowing they're surrounded by the thing that makes sense of everything else."
Ray looked at the school at the center of Dayo's city.
"That's a good idea."
"I know."
They sat together for a while. The particular version of doing nothing that is not nothing at all.
"You're going to be okay."
"I know."
"You don't actually know."
"No. But I know I'm going to try."
Dayo nodded. That had always been enough between them.