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The access node was in the basement of the old Municipal Archives, hidden behind thirty years of filing cabinets no one had opened since digitisation. Rohan had seventeen minutes from the moment they opened it before INDRA's security sweep registered the intrusion. He had a patch he'd written in the tunnel, on a device he'd built himself for jobs he'd always hoped he'd never need to do. The patch would kill the hidden subroutine. It would also take INDRA offline for eight minutes — eight minutes in which twenty-two million people would be running on their own judgment.

"Do it," Sparrow said, as if she'd been carrying the weight of the decision for months and was finally ready to set it down. He ran the patch at 2:14 AM. The city grid went dark on his monitor, section by section, orderly, like a held breath. Then it came back on. Section by section. Clean. He sat back. Sparrow put a hand on his shoulder. "Good," she said. "Now we run."