The deliverer stopped at the proper distance from the wall, gave the seventeenth summary in nine sentences, and waited to be released.
Nessar the Hinn took it the way he had taken the first sixteen: a handful of figures, a handful of places, a handful of notes in the agreed form. He fitted them into the running total he kept in his head and lowered his chin a fraction, which meant received, go, bring the next. The deliverer went. The ceiling of the sanctuary was low enough that taller jinn ducked under it, the walls were close where the room he had been held in was wide, and there was one way in with no door in it, where that room had had a door bolted from outside. He had built it as the negative of a cell, and he no longer noticed.
The figures sat where the model said they would. Seventy percent of the targets active, inside the margin. The pools in the cities drawn down at the rate the cells were trained to. The length of the possessions fell into two humps, as designed: a crowd of short cases from the disciplined cells working the light protocols, and a smaller crowd of long ones from the heavy cells. It was the curve he had drawn eighty years ago on no paper at all.
He felt no pleasure in it, only the low hum of a machine running inside its tolerances, and he let it hum.
Then the notes. There had been anomalies in each of the first sixteen summaries, every one inside the tolerance, and he had let them pass. In the seventeenth they had begun to gather, the way grit gathers at a bend in a pipe.
The first came from a cell in the south. Three of its cases that week fitted none of the protocols. They ran long. The behaviour in the occupied bodies matched nothing on the list. One of the three targets was below the minimum age. The reader who compiled the note had added a line: "Operator judged to be acting on his own initiative beyond trained limits."
The second came from another region, another cell. Two of its cases had ended in death. The bodies had been strong enough for the occupation; the deaths came from what the operators did inside them once they were in. The reader's line: "Operator conduct in both cases departs from trained discipline."
The third came from a third cell. A target had been taken who was outside the valid pool by any reading. A child. Nessar had written the age floor himself, in the first year, and had never once thought it would need defending. One operator had chosen her, without his leader. The reader's line: "Operator pressure appears to be rising against the protocols."
Three cells that did not know each other, on the same day.
He did not write the lines down. He read them as he would read a gauge needle sitting past the red. The operations were succeeding. The strain was inside the cells: single jinn carrying their own rage and their own old wounds into the work, and after weeks at peak, pushing through the training like roots through a wall. He had foreseen it. In the first models he had written in a rate of drift that would climb as operators learned what they could do. He had set a tolerance for it.
The seventeenth summary had gone past the tolerance by a little. Carried over the weeks of peak still to come, a little would become a lot.
He could correct it, at a price.
The signal that began the operation had been the simplest thing he ever sent. He had moved through his public life in a certain order, on a certain evening, and observers trained to read that order had read one word: begin. A correction would have to travel the same way, and its content was harder. The cells would have to read, from a more complicated arrangement of where he went and when, a specific change to limits they were already working under. He had built the protocol for that. He had never used it.
A second signal would show more than the first. Anyone who had half noticed the first would see the second clearly and learn that someone was sending. A sender seen was a sender who could be traced. Even a partial trace, in the hands of a reader like Soren the Marid, would narrow the shape of the network more than Nessar could afford.
He set that against the drift. Do nothing, and there would be more deaths the protocols forbade, more children outside the pool. Over the weeks ahead the surge would come to look like a faction without discipline. He did not want that shape. When the future looked back he wanted it to see a correction measured to its purpose, and the difference between those two things might be the last one he still let himself care about.
There was a second sum. A correction would take days to be seen and read, more days to reach the operators at the edges, more again to change what they did. By then the peak would be nearly over. Most of the drift would have burned out as the excited ones tired. The signal would come too late to help and in good time to be read.
He decided against it.
He knew what he had done. He had not wanted to send it, for reasons that lived next door to his judgment, and the sum had found a reason that agreed with the want. He saw it plainly. He did not use the seeing to undo the decision.
The doubt sat at the edge of his attention, where it had sat for eighty years. He had admitted at the start that an operation of this kind would produce results of this kind, and gone ahead. The admission had never shrunk. It was small and heavy, and long ago he had decided not to look straight at it. He kept that decision the way he kept the others.
The word for the work was still correction. He tried it in his mouth, silently, and it still fitted.
He let himself think about Soren.
His observers had brought him the end of the purge. Three hundred and fifteen lines closed. Nine left open, six of them stopped by something the law would not touch. No civilians, no apprentices, no reach into human institutions. Soren had drawn a narrow scope and held it under pressure, and Nessar knew what that cost. He was impressed for the length of a breath and put the feeling away. Measuring his discipline against Soren's would mean accepting a standard he had no intention of being judged by.
There had been a later report. Soren had set his own map aside and had his readers build another: the heat of the surge laid over the territories of the human world, city by city. He had stood before it. He had said nothing in any forum. He had neither claimed it nor condemned it. The observers could not say what he thought, only that he had looked for a long time, and that afterward the readers had been sent out of the chamber.
Soren was still reading. The reading would end in a position, and Nessar did not know what it would be.
What he felt about it had no clean word. Gratitude came near and missed. Guilt he had shut off long ago, in the chamber under a dying man's house. The nearest he could come was debt. Soren had lost a young one, Kael, and his grief had made the verdict and the purge, and the purge was the cover the cells moved under. Nessar had not asked. Soren had not agreed.
Nessar had lost forty years, once, a day at a time. He did not set that against a dead boy. He had spent Soren's grief like coin, and he knew it.
He regretted, a little, that he had never spoken to Soren before he began. It was a useless regret. Soren's law had no room for the operation, and the operation had no room for Soren's law, and any talk, eighty years ago or eight weeks ago, would have ended in the same launch under the same cover. But Soren would have had the chance to say something, and Nessar had not given it to him.
He was fitting the seventeenth summary into the total for the last time when he heard feet at the entrance. The eighteenth was not due for hours.
The deliverer did not stop at the proper distance. He came two steps closer than he had ever come, close enough that Nessar could smell the human city on him, diesel and cooking oil, and he spoke before he was asked.
"Five more below the age," he said. "Five cells. They've stopped hiding it from their leaders."