Page 19

The gateway runs thirty meters across.

Not a door. A door is a thing a person walks through. This is a plate of the same seamless wet-slate as the relay, set into rock with no frame, no hinge line, no mechanism, no wear, and it rises out of the gallery floor and into the ceiling and keeps going. Thirty meters is only what we can see.

Set into the face at collarbone height, forty centimeters apart: two contact plates.

Two.

"They knew," I say.

Darius holds his light on them. "They designed for it."

The Restoration Council convenes on day twenty-eight and it goes badly from the second slide.

I have Helena. I have Councilor Mina Rhyss, the Alzohn representative, who reads my brief twice and asks the three sharpest questions anyone has put to me here. And I have Undersecretary Anselm Kovic, who has a very reasonable voice and will kill this if I let him.

"Two collapses in eight days," he says. "One nearly took both joint leads. Architect Donovan proposes we authorize breaching a structure of unknown mass directly beneath the load raft of the oldest district on Paragon. Let the record reflect that I asked what happens if it fails."

"Nothing happens. It's been down there ten thousand years."

"Closed for ten thousand years."

"With respect — the second collapse happened because somebody has cut hangers under Founders' for forty years and nobody looked, because looking was never authorized." I put the tool marks up. "Every one of these sits on a line with a failure report against it. All seventeen say fatigue. None of it is fatigue. The risk isn't down there. The risk is that we keep filing paperwork about a city somebody is quietly taking apart."

"That is a serious allegation."

"They're serious tool marks."

Kovic folds his hands. "And if you're wrong, forty thousand people in Founders' First are standing on the answer."

Which is the good argument, and he knows it, and the room knows it. So I use the truth.

"District Nine had eight hours of reserve when I landed. Eight. Argue about authorization for one more shift and forty thousand people suffocate on bottled air while we protect them from a risk assessment." I'm louder than I meant to be, and I don't correct it. "This city has been dying four centuries, and every person who might have stopped it was busy being careful. Careful is how we got here. I'm not asking anyone to gamble. I'm asking you to notice that doing nothing is also a gamble, and we have been losing it since before anybody in this chamber was born."

Quiet. Helena studies the table with the stillness of a director who won't help me and doesn't need to.

Then Darius stands.

He hasn't spoken once. He has sat the whole session with his hands flat on the table, and I know — the way I know things now — what this costs him.

"Councilors." He waits for the room. "I have opposed this architect nine times in twenty-eight days. Twice in writing. It is a matter of record, and I would like it weighed against what follows."

Kovic sits back.

"I have maintained the Founders' sublevels nineteen years. I wrote the seventeen reports. I signed all of them, all of them are wrong, and they are wrong because my schematic had been edited." His voice never rises. It doesn't need to. "I do not believe the gate is safe. I believe it is less dangerous than the forty years we have already permitted. Architect Donovan has been on Paragon four weeks and found what I failed to find in two decades. I support her application without reservation and I will co-sign the risk."

Rhyss looks between us a long moment. Something crosses her face that I can't read, and I don't enjoy being unable to read it.

"Well," she says. "That is the first occasion in eleven years I have heard Engineer Darius call another person's work superior to his own."

"It is superior."

"Yes," she says. "I heard."

It carries five to two. Kovic files a dissent, which is his right, and I make a private note to learn who briefs him and who pays him.

In the corridor afterward, Tomas falls into step. "You know what carried that," he says. "It wasn't the tool marks."

"I know."