Four days before the consolidation event, he sat with Seraphine at the pond in the dark.They had fallen into a rhythm over the past week of finding each other at the end of the day, sometimes with conversation and sometimes without, in the way of two people who had established that the other's company was a reliable form of rest. He did not analyze the rhythm. He simply showed up and found her there, or she found him, and the facility made its sounds behind them and the pond was what it had been since they built the filtration system: clean and still and remarkably indifferent to what was happening in the world."Tomorrow," she said."Tomorrow Prenn transmits the packet," he said."Are you confident in it?"He thought about the honest answer. "I am confident in the technical execution. Prenn has built something that is as close to right as it can be built without direct access to the target system. Whether it passes the coordination center's verification is a question that has a prob