The road from the river landing runs thirty-one kilometers and stops nine short. It ends on a hardstand poured in 2044 and patched every wet season since, and everybody who works it calls the place Nueve. Nine kilometers of jungle the SCA will not cut a road through, because a road is a map, and the entire value of the Selva Legion's ground is that nobody has mapped it.
So the last nine kilometers go on backs.
That is the whole economy here. Everything the Site consumes arrives at Nueve by truck and leaves Nueve on a human being. Diesel in forty-liter cans, two to a frame. Water cartridges. Bearing stock. Reagent crates in cold sleeves that have to make the walk in under five hours or the contents are a write-off and somebody's papers get a note. Six hundred and forty kilos a day in season. I know the number because Odalys Prieto weighs it, and Odalys Prieto has been weighing it for eleven years, and she reads the day's total off the shed book the way a farmer reads rainfall.
There are no civilians at Metropoli Perdida. That is a line in the SCA's own site documentation, and it is true in the sense that matters to a lawyer. Inside the perimeter there are administrative personnel, Legion security, and twelve permitted researchers a year, admitted through a review process no faction analyst has ever found a pattern in. Nueve sits outside the perimeter. Nueve is therefore not the Site. The people at Nueve are not the Site's population. They are a contractor's staffing solution on ninety-day papers, and the ninety days is the point. Nobody at Nueve accrues anything.
I counted four hundred and ten of them.
Ercilia Nunes carries the north approach. She is tapir-lineage, built for weight and wet ground, which in practice means she takes the loads that break the commercial-stock carriers first. Her frame is a Legion pattern twenty years old, rebuilt around a spine bar somebody welded in Sao Paulo. She walks with the pads of her feet turned slightly out. She has done the nine so often she no longer counts it in kilometers. She counts it in the four places where the ground goes soft.
She talks about the step the way other people talk about weather.
Roughly a kilometer out, the tree line thins, the undergrowth changes species, and the air drops three degrees. There is not enough shade to account for it. The SCA's engineers have written this up as an interference radius. The carriers call it the step. Every one of them knows where it is to within a stride, in full dark, and the forged ones meet it earlier than the rest. Ercilia says her jaw registers it before her skin does. She told me that in the same flat tone she used for the spine bar.
The Legion perimeter is grown into the root structure. The monitoring is biological. It does not look like anything. Carriers cross it behind an SCA guide setting a pace that has nothing to do with terrain. Nine kilometers, four hours forty on a good crew. The guides do not talk. The carriers do not ask. What anyone at Nueve knows about the inside of the Site is whatever came back out on somebody's boots.
The food is good. It is the first thing anybody mentions. The SCA's agricultural cooperative sits on the cassava algorithm, the yield stack that triples output in low water, and it feeds its own logistics sites at cost. So the last hardstand before the most classified hole in the hemisphere is the one site in theater where the rice is not the problem. Beto Sarria, who keeps the pumps and the two generators and has never been past the perimeter in nine years, put it plainly. They feed you well because it is cheaper than paying you.
The outbound leg is lighter and worth more. Sealed crates come down the nine in the other direction, three or four a week, carried by a rotating crew paid on a separate line that does not eat in the same shed. The crates move under a seal and a manifest nobody at Nueve signs. They weigh less than a load of cans. Four separate Accord filings describe the logistics behind them as an ongoing compliance question, which is the polite way of saying everybody knows the name. Odalys does not weigh those. Her book has a column for them anyway, ruled in by hand, eleven years and empty the whole way down. She showed me the column. She did not explain it.
Two crews will not work the north approach after last light.
That took three days to get, and not from a carrier. I got it from the shed book, because the contractor pays a differential on the north approach after dark and has done since spring. A differential is what a rumor looks like once it reaches accounting. Ask a carrier and you get a shrug and a change of subject. Ask a foreman and you get the rate. Ask what the rate is for and you get a patrol contact, an operational AI that logged one thing, a sergeant who wrote down another in the paper log, and a paper log that lives in a filing cabinet in the command post. The sergeant recorded a question and an answer. The question is in the log. The answer is not.
I do not know what is down there, and the people who do have arranged their lives so that being asked is not something that happens to them.
Here is what I do know, and none of it is classified. Seven civilizations came to this exact spot across two thousand years without knowing about each other. Every one of them had to get material to it. Every one of them solved that problem the same way the SCA solves it now, which is the only way it has ever been solved. Somebody walked it in.
Ercilia is forty-one, with eleven seasons on the nine. She is not in any registry that lists her as living at Metropoli Perdida, because nobody lives at Metropoli Perdida. Her papers run out in six weeks. She will sign the next ninety days, because the alternative is the river landing. I asked what she thought was in the outbound crates. She laughed at me. Then she said the thing I have not been able to put down since.
She said, I have carried it. That is more than the researchers can say.