Lysander's reply came not as data, but as a person. A new janitor was assigned to the research annex—a grizzled woman with a limp and calm, assessing eyes. While emptying a waste bin next to Sage's terminal, she slid a small, cool object into his hand.
It was a stone. Smooth, worn, and slightly resonant. When Sage held it up in the lab's light, he saw it: a tiny, perfect, natural spiral formation in the rock's heart. A fossilized echo of the Stillpoint Spin.
With it was a note, in decisive handwriting: "The seed holds the pattern. The pattern seeks the source. Be ready at the waste hatch. The river remembers its bed."
They were moving. Lysander wasn't just providing information; he was providing an instrument. The stone was a natural resonator, a sliver of the living world that remembered the true song.
That evening, Sage input the waste-conduit hatch code. The hatch, labeled Non-Vitae Bio-Waste Conveyance, led not to a pipe, but to a vertical service ladder plunging down the Spire's inner skin, parallel to the great shaft containing the Core. The air here was warm, vibrating with the deep hum. It was a blind spot, a place for the un-precious, the ignored.
It was their first thread to the outside.