They arrived at dawn.
Ethiopian dawn was different from Lagos dawn — not better or worse, just different in the specific way that places with their own ancient relationship with light are different.
The sky over Addis Ababa going from deep blue to gold without the Lagos orange-pink intermediate, the light arriving with a directness that felt almost intentional.
Like the sun rising specifically for the highlands rather than for the world generally.
Rex landed them on the Entoto Hills' eastern slope.
The crack sealed behind them before Rhea had fully registered that the jump was complete. One moment the sub-level.
The next — this. Eucalyptus forest, dense and fragrant, the specific green of Ethiopian highlands in the early morning. The ground beneath their feet ancient and red-earthed and —
Rhea felt it immediately.
Not through temporal sense — she didn't have one, not the way Alex did, not the Heartstone's perception.
But through the glyph knowledge. Through years of studying Void-adjacent frequency architecture and its interaction with natural lattice fields.
The specific pressure of extraordinarily concentrated temporal energy moving through the earth beneath her boots.
She stopped walking.
Rex looked at her.
"You feel it," he said.
"The lattice threads," she said. "They're — enormous. The pressure is—" She looked at the ground.
"I've read about high-concentration lattice fields in academic literature. Theoretical models. Mathematical descriptions."
She paused. "Nothing prepared me for what it actually feels like to stand in one."
Rex looked at the forest around them.
He wasn't reading the lattice — his quantum perception worked differently, parallel rather than temporal. But he could feel the way the local field affected his jump calculations.
Every adjacent reality position in this location was more defined than normal — sharper, more distinct, the quantum variations between parallel positions amplified by the lattice concentration the way sound is amplified in a space with perfect acoustics.
"The threads run deep here," he said.
"Deeper than anywhere on the planet," Rhea confirmed. She looked at the detection device Mira had given her — a compact scanner calibrated to the Void-adjacent frequency signatures they were looking for.
"The broadcast point is two hundred and thirty meters northwest." She looked at Rex. "The natural lattice density is going to make reading it difficult. The signal will be masked almost completely by the background field."
"Almost," Rex said.
"Almost," Rhea confirmed.
"Which is why we needed to be on site rather than remote." She looked at the forest ahead. "Two hundred meters. Then we read it."
Rex was already calculating jump positions.
They moved through the eucalyptus forest in stages.
Rex jumping ahead — short hops, reading the terrain, finding positions — then bringing Rhea forward to each new point. Not the fluid rapid sequence of his solo jumps.
Slower. More careful. The specific adjustment of someone who had been operating alone and was learning in real time what it meant to move with someone else's pace and safety as a variable.
He didn't rush her.
Rhea noticed this without commenting on it.
At one hundred and fifty meters she stopped him.
"Something's wrong," she said quietly.
Rex went still immediately. "Define wrong."
"The broadcast point's signal."
She was looking at the scanner. "It's not following the Delta Node network's architecture." She showed him the reading.
"The Delta Node collected and stored — the energy built up over time, accumulating toward a threshold."
She paused. "This isn't accumulating. It's cycling. The energy is moving through the broadcast point rather than being stored in it." She looked at Rex. "It's a relay. Not a hub."
Rex looked at her. "The hub is somewhere else."
"The hub is somewhere else," Rhea confirmed.
"This is one node in a distribution network rather than the central collection point." She looked at the scanner. "Which means the Entoto Hills aren't where the network is building. They're where it's being distributed FROM."
Rex absorbed this.
"The eight broadcast points we detected," he said slowly. "Across the continent. They're not feeding INTO Addis Ababa."
"They're being fed FROM it," Rhea said.
"The Entoto Hills aren't the hub receiving broadcasts from eight locations." She met his eyes. "They're the source broadcasting OUT to eight receivers." She paused. "The network architecture is inverted from what we assumed."
Rex looked at the forest.
At the ancient red earth. At the eucalyptus trees. At the dawn light coming through the canopy.
"Then where is the actual source," he said.
Rhea looked at the scanner.
She adjusted the frequency parameters — widening the detection range, looking for the signal's origin rather than its relay point. The scanner worked for forty seconds. Sixty. Ninety.
Then it flagged something.
Rhea looked at the reading.
She looked at it for a long time.
"Rex," she said quietly.
"Yes," he said.
"The source signal," she said. "It's not coming from beneath the hills."
She showed him the scanner. "It's coming from above them."
Rex looked at the sky.
They called it in at five forty seven in the morning.
Alex answered immediately — he hadn't slept, had been sitting on Chronicle Hall's front step watching New Lagos turn from grey to gold and feeling the Heartstone's pull and waiting.
Rhea spoke. Quickly. Precisely. Everything they'd found in the order Alex needed to hear it.
The relay not the hub. The inverted architecture. The eight broadcast points receiving rather than sending. The source signal coming from above the Entoto Hills.
"Above," Alex said.
"Above," Rhea confirmed.
"The scanner is reading a Void-adjacent frequency source at altitude. High altitude." She paused. "Alex — whatever is generating the source signal is not on the ground."
Alex pressed his palm to his sternum.
The Heartstone beat — warm, deep, and underneath both of those something that was colder and more significant than either.
"How high," he said.
"The scanner's altitude resolution isn't precise enough for an exact reading," Rhea said. "But the signal strength and the atmospheric attenuation factor suggest—" She paused. "Orbital."
The word landed in the pre-dawn street outside Chronicle Hall like a stone.
Alex looked at the sky above New Lagos — still dark at the zenith, stars visible, the specific deep blue of pre-dawn that was giving way to gold at the horizon.
"He has something in orbit," Alex said.
"A satellite," Rhea said.
"Or something that reads like one. Broadcasting a Void-adjacent frequency source signal down to the Entoto Hills relay point which distributes it outward to eight ground-based receivers across the continent."
She paused. "Alex the orbital position gives it line of sight to the entire African continent simultaneously. And with the right orbital parameters—"
"Line of sight to the entire planet," Alex said.
"Rotational coverage," Rhea said. "Yes. If the orbital period is synchronized with the ground-based receiver network—" She paused. "This isn't targeting the African lattice. This is targeting the global lattice. From above."
Alex looked at the stars.
At the deep blue sky above New Lagos giving way to gold.
At the space above the atmosphere where something was orbiting — patient, ancient, entirely invisible — broadcasting a signal downward through the planetary field toward eight ground receivers that had been built to catch it and distribute it into the oldest lattice threads on Earth.
What I'm building — when it completes, no Anchor and no team of allies can stop it.
Not the mesh. Not individual Anchor connections.
The global lattice from orbit.
The source unreachable by any ground-based operation.
Completely protected.
"Come back," Alex said. "Now. Both of you."
"Alex—"
"Now Rhea," he said. "We need to replan everything."
A pause.
"Understood," she said.
He heard her say Rex's name. Heard the specific sound of a crack opening in Ethiopian dawn.
Then the line was quiet.
Alex stood on the street outside Chronicle Hall and looked at the sky and felt the Heartstone beat its deep ancient pulse and felt the threads pulling from the Entoto Hills and felt the specific cold weight of understanding arriving all at once.
The network couldn't be dismantled from the ground.
Because the source wasn't on the ground.
The sub-level assembled at six fifteen.
Full team. Rex and Rhea back — Rhea slightly pale from three rapid jumps in succession but present and focused, the scanner data already uploading to Mira's systems. Rex entirely composed, reading the room the way he always read rooms, filing everything.
Alex stood at the center.
He told them.
The relay architecture. The inverted network. The orbital source.
The sub-level received it in the specific silence of people whose operational framework has just been fundamentally restructured.
Mira spoke first.
She was already pulling satellite tracking data — cross-referencing the scanner's altitude and signal strength readings against known orbital objects. Her fingers moving across two keyboards simultaneously. The focused energy of someone running a complex analysis at maximum speed.
"There are approximately four thousand active satellites in low to medium Earth orbit," she said without looking up. "Of those — objects in a position to maintain rotational coverage of the African continent while also having line of sight access to the Entoto Hills relay point—"
She paused. "Narrowing by orbital period, inclination, and signal frequency compatibility—" Another pause. Longer.
"Alex."
"Yes," he said.
She turned her primary screen to face the room.
A satellite tracking display. Global orbital map. Hundreds of objects plotted in their trajectories.
One of them highlighted.
"This object," she said. "Registered in the international satellite database as a decommissioned weather monitoring platform. Launched 2019. Officially taken offline 2022." She paused.
"It's not offline. Its signal output has been masked by a frequency overlay that makes it read as inactive to standard monitoring."
She held the room's attention. "The overlay is — Void-adjacent. The same technology used to mask the Delta Node network's ground-based signals. Applied to an orbital object." She paused. "It's been up there for three years. Operational the entire time. Hidden in plain sight."
Three years.
While the ground-based network was being built. While Okafor was being positioned in the Federal Ministry. While the prototype was being constructed and tested and dismantled.
The orbital source had been operational for three years.
"Can we bring it down," Jace said.
"Shooting down a satellite requires either another satellite, a ground-based missile system, or a directed energy weapon," Mira said. "None of which we have access to."
She paused. "And even if we did — the debris field from a low orbit deorbit event over Africa would be catastrophic."
"We don't bring it down," Rex said.
Everyone looked at him.
He was looking at the orbital display. At the highlighted satellite tracking its slow arc across the global map. His eyes doing the specific calculation they did when he was reading jump positions — the sideways Nexaran perception tracking movement and position and the quantum variables that defined a path between locations.
"I jump to it," he said.
The sub-level was completely silent.
Rex looked at Alex.
"I've jumped between adjacent realities at high velocity before," he said. "In Nexara's quantum storms — the storm fields exist at altitudes significantly above standard atmospheric pressure. I've jumped in vacuum-adjacent conditions."
He held Alex's gaze. "An orbital jump is at the extreme edge of what's possible with my current device calibration. But it's possible."
"The vacuum," Alex said. "The temperature. The radiation exposure—"
"Manageable with the right preparation," Rex said. "I don't stay. I jump up, I disable the source signal, I jump back." He held Alex's eyes. "Three minutes maximum on site. Less if possible."
"Rex," Soren said carefully. "An orbital jump of this nature—"
"Is something I've been calculating since Rhea said orbital," Rex said. He looked at Soren with the specific directness of someone who had made a decision and was presenting it as a completed calculation rather than a proposal.
"The quantum position variables in low Earth orbit are actually more stable than in a Nexaran quantum storm. Fewer interference patterns. Cleaner jump geometry."
He paused. "I can do this."
The sub-level was quiet.
Alex looked at Rex.
At the battle-scarred Pathfinder from a world of shattered timelines who had walked into a room eleven minutes late and stolen Mira's stylus and sat on Jace's crate and learned what it meant to call something in before acting alone.
Who had just done the calculation no one else in the room could do and arrived at the answer no one else in the room could execute.
"What do you need," Alex said.
Rex looked at Mira. "Precise orbital coordinates updated in real time. Jump window timing — the satellite's position relative to the Entoto Hills relay point during its operational broadcast cycle."
He paused. "And a modified device calibration for vacuum and microgravity conditions."
Mira was already typing. "Give me four hours."
"You said that about the disruptor," Rex said. "It took three."
"The disruptor was simpler," Mira said. Without looking up. "Four hours."
Rex looked at Rhea.
Rhea was looking at the orbital display. At the highlighted satellite. At the thing that had been hiding in plain sight for three years while everything on the ground was built around its signal.
"The source signal," she said. "On site — what am I looking for in terms of the broadcast mechanism."
Rex looked at her. "You're not coming."
"I know the architecture," she said. "I know what the broadcast mechanism looks like. I know how to disable it in under ninety seconds."
She met his eyes. "You know how to get there and back. I know what to do when you arrive." She paused. "Together it's three minutes. Alone—"
"Longer," Rex admitted.
"Longer," she confirmed. "And longer in orbit is—"
"More dangerous," Rex said. He looked at her. At the Chrono-Lock on her wrists. At the cracked tablet under her arm. At the midnight blue hair and the intense eyes that didn't flinch from anything.
"Can you handle a vacuum jump," he said.
"I handled a temporal shockwave in an enclosed building at twenty years old," she said. "I think I can handle a jump."
Rex looked at her for a long moment.
Then he looked at Alex.
Alex looked at Rhea.
She held his gaze steadily. The calculating eyes. The something younger underneath. The person who had chosen differently and was choosing again now with the specific certainty of someone who understood exactly what they were offering and had decided it was worth offering.
"Your call," Alex said to Rex.
Rex looked at Rhea.
"Four hours," he said. "Mira calibrates the device. We go over the broadcast mechanism until you can disable it in your sleep."
He held her gaze. "And when we're up there — you do exactly what I say exactly when I say it."
"Understood," Rhea said.
Rex looked at the orbital display.
At the satellite tracking its slow arc. Patient. Hidden. Three years operational above the atmosphere.
"Four hours," he said to Mira.
"Four hours," Mira confirmed.
Alex stood at the orbital display after the team dispersed into preparation.
Soren beside him.
They looked at the highlighted satellite together — the decommissioned weather platform that wasn't decommissioned, broadcasting its masked Void-adjacent signal downward through the atmosphere toward the oldest lattice threads on Earth.
"He planned this before the Delta Node network," Alex said quietly. "The satellite was launched in 2019. Operational since then." He paused. "The ground network was built after. Around the satellite's signal."
"Yes," Soren said.
"The ground network was always the expendable part," Alex said. "He expected us to find it eventually. Expected us to dismantle it."
He pressed his palm to his sternum.
"Because the satellite was always the real infrastructure. The ground network was—"
"Another demonstration," Soren said.
"Teaching you to look down while the real threat was above."
Alex looked at the sky through the sub-level's ceiling — through the building above, through New Lagos's morning air, through the atmosphere to the orbital position where something patient and hidden had been waiting for three years.
"He's patient," Alex said.
"Yes," Soren said.
"More patient than I've been giving him credit for," Alex said. "Even knowing he's patient." He held the orbital display. "A three year setup. A ground network as misdirection. An orbital source as the real weapon." He paused. "And he knows we've found it now. Rhea and Rex's reconnaissance — he'll have detected it."
"Yes," Soren said.
"Which means the six week timeline just changed," Alex said.
"Yes," Soren said. "It did."
Alex looked at the tracking display.
At the satellite's arc.
At the four hours Mira needed.
"How much time do we have," he said. Not to Soren. To the room. To the Heartstone beating in his chest. To the twelve thousand year old threads pulling from the Ethiopian highlands.
The Heartstone beat back.
Warm. Deep. Urgent now in a way it hadn't been before.
Not six weeks.
Less.
Much less.
Mira confirmed it at seven thirty.
She'd been running the satellite's signal analysis alongside the device calibration — two tasks simultaneously because Mira was Mira — and she looked up from her screens with the expression that meant the information was significantly worse than anticipated.
"The satellite's broadcast cycle," she said. "I've been analyzing its operational pattern — when it broadcasts, at what intensity, toward which ground receivers." She paused.
"Alex the cycle isn't building toward a threshold the way the Delta Node network was. It's already at threshold." She held the room's attention.
"The six week timeline was based on the ground network's collection rate. But the ground network wasn't the primary collection mechanism."
She looked at the orbital display. "The satellite has been at threshold for approximately two weeks. The ground network was distributing collected energy into the lattice threads in preparation for—"
"Immediate deployment," Rhea said. She'd been listening from her workspace. "The satellite isn't building toward a strike. It's ready to execute one."
She met Alex's eyes. "The ground network was priming the lattice threads — saturating them with distributed Void-adjacent energy so that when the satellite's full signal is deployed the lattice has no resistance capacity left."
"How long before it deploys," Alex said.
Mira looked at her calculations.
"Based on the ground network's current priming rate," she said carefully. "And assuming Kronos accelerates the timeline now that he knows we've found the satellite—" She paused. "Forty eight hours. Maybe less."
The sub-level absorbed this.
Not six weeks.
Forty eight hours.
Alex looked at Rex.
Rex looked at the device calibration Mira had been building. At the four hours remaining.
"Three hours," Rex said to Mira. "Can you do it in three."
Mira looked at her work.
"Two and a half," she said. "If Rhea helps with the frequency calibration."
Rhea was already moving toward the workbench.
Alex looked at his team — Mira and Rhea calibrating, Rex preparing, Jace coordinating Warden deployment across eight ground locations, K'rath reinforcing Chronicle Hall's temporal defenses, Lyra building her eight frequency harmonic to full operational readiness, Soren watching everything with four centuries of experience.
He pressed his palm to his sternum.
The Heartstone beat — warm, deep, urgent.
Forty eight hours.
Two and a half to finish the device.
One jump to orbit.
One chance.
"Everyone," he said.
The sub-level looked at him.
"This is what we've been building toward," he said. "Not the Delta Node. Not the waterfront. This." He held their eyes. "Rex and Rhea go up in three hours. While they're in orbit — every ground receiver needs to be offline. All eight simultaneously. If even one remains operational during the orbital disruption the distributed lattice priming will compensate and the strike goes ahead anyway."
He looked at Jace. "The Wardens."
"Ready," Jace said.
"All eight locations. Simultaneously. The moment Rex deploys the disruptor on the satellite."
He looked at Lyra. "You coordinate."
"Already building the signal," Lyra said.
He looked at K'rath. "Chronicle Hall. If Kronos responds to the orbital operation the way he responded to the network dismantling—"
"He will find the defenses significantly improved," K'rath said. Simply. Certainly.
Alex looked at Mira. At Rhea. At the device taking shape on the workbench.
"Build it right," he said. "We only get one window."
"We know," Mira said. Without looking up.
He looked at Rex.
Rex met his gaze with the battle-worn eyes of a Pathfinder from a world of shattered timelines who had been calculating this jump since the moment Rhea said orbital and had arrived at the answer with the specific certainty of someone who understood exactly what they were capable of.
"Bring her back," Alex said quietly.
Rex looked at him.
"Both of you," Alex said.
Rex held his gaze.
"We jump," he said. "We land. We win." He paused.
"That's what I do."
Alex looked at him for a moment.
Then he pressed his palm to his sternum.
The Heartstone beat back.
Warm. Deep. Urgent.
Two and a half hours.
Then orbit.