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He doesn't argue. That frightens me more than the ceiling did.

It takes Tomas six hours to reach us. We spend them in a junction chamber with a working atmospheric tap and one light between us set to its lowest setting, because nobody knows how long six hours is until they're rationing a cell against it.

I sit with my back to the wall and inventory the damage. Reader intact. Concordance backed up twice. Left knee opening like a flower under the fabric, but it'll keep. Around hour four I realize I've stopped hearing him move, and I look up to check on him.

He isn't watching the fall. Not the tunnel mouth either, or the tap, or the light, or any of the seven things a safety-rated engineer is supposed to watch in a compromised space.

He's watching me.

And he doesn't stop when I catch him. That's what I can't get around. He holds it, in the dark, across two meters of a chamber that hasn't held anyone in six centuries, and it lands like a hand between my shoulder blades, and I feel it all the way down.

Then he looks away, back to the tunnel mouth, and says, "Your knee is bleeding."

"I know."

"You should have said."

"I know."

He crosses over and starts working on it, and his hands are careful, and neither of us raises the other thing.

I'd like to file it under stress response. Adrenaline. Twenty-one days of very little sleep in a city that keeps trying to fall on me.

I'm not going to, because I don't lie in my own notes.

CHAPTER 8

DARIUS

Asabotaged tunnel stays sabotaged after it comes down.

We go back under Founders' First on the twenty-third to trace the signature upstream, because that bypass pin was machined on a lathe by somebody with a supplier, and a supplier is a name. Nine hundred meters in, the load that shifted two days ago finishes deciding where it wants to sit.

It takes four minutes. Three sections, unhurried, and when the dust settles the bore is closed at both ends and a great weight of rock occupies the place our route used to be.

Tomas comes up on the relay link ninety seconds later, already pulling gear.

"Status."

"Two of us. Uninjured. Sealed in."

"Air?"

"A live Precursor tap eleven meters east, heated conduit in the same vestibule. Water from the tap."

A pause while he works something out. "Sixteen hours. I'm not cutting faster with a crew of four and I'm not bringing a bigger crew down a compromised bore."

"Sixteen is acceptable."

"Sit tight and don't get clever." A crackle. "Claire, that was for you."

So. We are in no danger whatsoever. That is the entire problem.

The vestibule is Precursor-built, four by six, dry, and warm the way a good wall is warm — heat stored in the fabric of it rather than pushed at you. A low bench runs along one side. Somebody in the war years dragged a crate in and never dragged it out.

Claire sets her light on the bench, dials it down to almost nothing, and sits against the wall with her bad knee straight out.

"Sixteen hours," she says.