The seam in the storm was a golden thread in Ira's mind.
He saw it with a clarity that made the physical world feel like a smudged, inferior copy. The Map unfurled behind his eyes, a living tapestry of pressure gradients, temporal eddies, and the deep, structural fault lines of the reality storm. The next convergence band wasn't just "denser." It was a braid of seven different environmental memories, twisting around a core of navigable, if turbulent, space. It was a sublime, terrifying knot, and the Map was patiently showing him how to pick it apart. It would take precision. It would take nerve. It would take a ship pushed to its absolute limit.
He knew the Greywater's limit. The Map showed him that, too. It overlaid the ship's schematics—every stress point, every fatigue crack from the mountain flight, the heat-warped port plating, the shudder in the starboard lift-array. It calculated the probabilities of failure for each component under the predicted stresses of the braid. The numbers were amber, edging into red. High risk. But not certain failure. The path existed. The math was clean.
It was the human variable that was fuzzing the equation.
Rust's fear was a palpable, sour note in the cabin, a tremor in his hands that wasn't just from fighting the wheel. The memory of the puppet was a ghost in the machine of his body, making him flinch at his own agency. Ira had accounted for it. The commands had to be absolute, leaving no room for doubt. It was working, but it was costing Rust, and the cost was a subtle degradation in response time—a variable the Map could not quantify, only hint at with shifting probability percentages.
And Zadie.
Zadie was a storm of her own. The Map couldn't plot emotions, but it could extrapolate behavior from patterns. It showed him not images of her, but vectors of probability blooming from her last known state: frustration, fear, a deep-seated distrust of the new certainty that had replaced the man she'd begun to soften toward. The Map, in its cold, logical way, was analyzing her as a system under stress.
Subject: Zadie Merrin. Primary Drives: Survival, Protection of Unit (Rust/Ira dynamic - shifting), Autonomy. Observed Stress Response: Contrarian action, assertion of control via sabotage of perceived unstable systems.
The words weren't whispered in his ear; they were simply known, a conclusion drawn from a million data points of her past behavior, her words on the mountain, the way she'd looked at him after the chapel—not with hatred, but with the horror of something beloved becoming alien.
As he gave the order to prepare for the inertial shear, a new branch of probability sprouted from her vector. It wasn't related to the storm' mechanics. It was related to the ship's internal systems. The probability of manual intervention on the secondary dampeners spiked. Then, the probability of a misaligned intervention. The Map cross-referenced this with the ship's stress tolerances, the false resonance it would create, the cascade of sensor errors it would trigger.
A cold, hollow understanding settled in Ira's gut, separate from the Map's data. This wasn't a mechanical failure it was predicting. It was predicting her.
She was going to force their hand. She was going to make the ship scream so loud he'd have no choice but to hear its pain over the Map's perfect, silent geometry.
For a fleeting second, a hot spike of betrayal—the old, human kind, not the Map's kind—pierced his concentration. He could stop it. He could get on the intercom and say, "Zadie, don't touch the secondary couplings. I know what you're planning." He could lay bare her distrust, confront the saboteur in their midst.
But another vector bloomed, this one from his own internal data. Primary Drive (Historical): Protection of Zadie Merrin. Secondary Drive (Emergent): Preservation of Unit Cohesion (Fragile).
Confronting her now, in the teeth of the storm, would shatter the unit irrevocably. It would confirm every fear she had—that he was a monitor, a spy in their midst, that his connection severed him from them. It might make her do something truly catastrophic. Or it might break something in her he couldn't bear to see broken.
The man who had loved her on the mountainside, whose love was now a quiet, desperate ache beneath the layers of cartographic certainty, made a choice. He let the betrayal pass through him like a ghost. He accepted the new data. The probability of her sabotage was now 94%. He factored it in.
The Map's golden thread through the braid winked out, recalculating. New paths appeared—shorter, dead-end paths leading to forced landings. One path led here, to this spliced city graveyard. Probability: 87%, and climbing as he delayed.
He gave the mark. The ship shuddered. The false alarms she'd engineered flared to life on the board, exactly as predicted. Rust's panic was real. The buckling sound from the corridor was real stress, amplified by her tampering into a crisis.
When her voice, laced with manufactured panic, came over the intercom claiming core failure, it was merely an audio confirmation of a plot point he'd already charted. The lie was a dot on a graph he'd already drawn.
He let the performance play out. He let Rust believe it. He let himself seem defeated, his shoulders sagging not from the weight of failure, but from the weight of this terrible, silent knowledge. He gave the order to land, choosing her fabricated crisis over the Map's true path.