The formation board showed the administrative anchor climbing in steady increments. Eight percent. Nine. The estimated time to secondary critical ticked downward with each small rise. Forty-six minutes. Forty-five.
No one in the pavilion spoke for the first span of that countdown. Lydia kept both hands on the formation controls, ready to convert the entire privacy lattice into the sequenced release that would give us our extraction window. Seraphina tracked the temporal pressure in the administrative wing with her eyes half-closed, reading the faint signatures that reached us through the listening layer. Vale held the primary spatial anchor active and updated the patrol positions every few breaths. Elizabeth stood behind the board and watched the numbers with the same cold focus she once used to decide the fate of clan branches that had outlived their usefulness.
