In Verdant Reach, everyone knows the rule: dark surfaces drink the sun.
Robi recites it as they cross the old harbor road, where black asphalt shimmers like a griddle. "Urban heat island," he says. "Pale surfaces reflect sunlight. Dark ones absorb it and release heat all night. This block is eleven degrees hotter than the Windward Terraces."
"Twelve," says Carmen, fanning herself with a scavenged circuit board. "My sneakers are voting twelve."
Ahead stands the abandoned weather lighthouse, a crooked gray tower crusted with salt. Two nights ago, Robi's pollinator drones pointed here. Two nights ago, a teal light blinked a message across his panel: *STOP GUIDING. START LISTENING.*
Professor Vale studies the tower over her amber glasses, the silver curl on her forehead damp with heat. "You've stopped chasing faults, then."
"I have," Robi says. His chest leaf glows steadily. "I have been reactive. Today I choose the destination."
The lighthouse door is welded shut by rust. Carmen produces a pry bar from her tool pouch, plants her boot, and heaves. Nothing.
"Robi," she grunts, "calculate the optimal grunt."
"Grunting contributes negligibly."
"Then negligibly move." She heaves again. The door shrieks open onto a stairwell like the inside of an oven.
Inside, the air is thick enough to lean on. Sixty steps up, they find the first obstacle: the Cure relay chamber, sealed behind a heat-locked hatch. Robi reads the wall temperature, and his eyes dim a shade.
"Fifty-one degrees Celsius. The relay has throttled itself to avoid damage. This tower is a heat trap—black tar roof, sealed windows, no vegetation. If we cannot cool it, we cannot read what it knows."
"So we cool it," says Carmen.
