Page 2

"Then you already know about the missing draw," I say.

"I know about it."

"And?"

"And it has been there my entire career, and it will still be there next week."

Which is exactly the kind of answer I came here to break. "Then let's go look at it. Graduated diagnostic pulse down the Cradle Line — low current, stepped, forty-minute cycle. Whatever's down there has to be drawing through something. We pulse the line, we watch what answers, and we get a volumetric map of the dead space without cutting a single bulkhead."

"No."

I wait. He doesn't elaborate, which is somehow more irritating than if he had.

"You want to hear the parameters."

"I heard them. You put current into the Cradle Line and you take water purification off-line for Districts Four through Seven."

"At a tenth of rated load."

"The line has no rating." He crosses to the telemetry wall and taps a junction I hadn't looked at twice. "Nothing below Fourteen has a rating. The last engineer qualified to write one for that conduit has been dead six hundred years, and everything since is a guess we've all agreed to repeat."

"So we keep patching."

"We keep people breathing."

"Those are the same sentence and you know it. You're just saying it slower." Heat rises into my voice and I let it. "Nine went dark this morning. Forty thousand people are sucking bottled air out of emergency reserves because the third repair on the same seal finally quit. At some point being careful becomes the fastest way to lose."

Something in his face moves. Not offense. He turns the idea over the way you'd turn a component you weren't expecting to find in a housing.

"You are not wrong," he says. "You are early."

Helena watches this the way a woman watches two reagents she deliberately combined. "You'll both be pleased to hear the pairing is not optional. Six weeks, joint authority, full expedition support. Halek runs your safety envelope." She stands. "Descent at six."

"I don't need a chaperone," I tell her.

"I'm not offering to be one," Darius says.

He leaves the way he came, without filling the doorway with any last remark, and that is the detail I keep chewing on afterward. Everyone I have ever worked with talks to occupy space. This one waits before every sentence as though each has a cost he has already calculated and decided to pay.

Six weeks. Fine.

I want very badly to hear what he sounds like when he's wrong.

CHAPTER 2

DARIUS

Iread her personnel file three times, which is two more than it warrants.

Nineteen restorations of systems formally condemned. A colony reactor brought back on parts cannibalized from a mining rig, in violation of nine regulations, six of which were later amended because of her. Two censures. One commendation issued four months after one of the censures, by the same board. She is thirty-one years old and she has never in her career been wrong in a manner that survived review.

None of which tells me whether she will get someone killed under my city.

The Authority has handed me a partner the way you hand a man a tool he did not request and cannot decline. I file the objection I know will be denied, because the record should show it. Then I go to work.

She reaches the Tier Two access ahead of me. Six in the morning, gear checked, harness already inspected, hair tied back and out of the way. Early irritates me more than late would have. Late I know how to correct.

"Morning," she says.