The ceremonial shovel was somebody's idea of a joke — a nine-year-old, now twelve, breaking ground on a rail line that wouldn't finish for a decade — but I understood the value of a good photograph better than most of the adults standing around the podium pretending to be delighted by it. Ohio's governor gave a speech about jobs. Hitachi's project lead gave a shorter one about tolerances measured in millimeters over four hundred miles of track. I said almost nothing, on purpose, and let the shovel do the talking.
The engineering underneath the photo-op was the part that actually mattered. Plasma-channel guideway heating to keep the Maglev corridors clear through Midwest winters. A signaling backbone Skye had quietly rewritten twice already, once for redundancy and once because she'd found a synchronization fault three separate outside audits had missed. Real money, real steel, moving at a pace no purely private infrastructure project in this country had moved at before, because the private money behind it didn't answer to shareholders who needed a return inside a fiscal quarter.
Halloran was there too, unofficially, standing at the edge of the press pool with his arms crossed. "Ridership numbers from the pilot corridor came in yesterday," he said, once the cameras had moved on. "Thirty percent ahead of your own projection."
"I'd rather be conservative and beaten than confident and wrong," I said.
"Noted." He almost smiled. "Congress votes on the second-phase funding next month. You've got the numbers. Don't get comfortable — numbers convince budget offices. They don't convince everyone in that building."
I was still turning that over when Skye's voice dropped into my earpiece, flat in the specific way she got when something had crossed a threshold she'd been quietly monitoring for over a year without telling me how close it was.
Sam. NBE-1's core just registered a fluctuation. Not random noise — a response.
"A response to what?"
I don't know yet. But the timing isn't a coincidence. It happened the same second you broke ground on a project running under half this country's power grid.
I kept smiling for the cameras. Nobody in that crowd had any reason to notice that the boy holding the shovel had just gone very, very still underneath it.