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"He co-signed the risk. That man won't co-sign a stationery order." He glances across. "Three weeks ago you couldn't agree on a lift."

"Things move."

"Things move," Tomas agrees, far too pleasantly, and holds the door.

CHAPTER 10

DARIUS

Authorization arrives at 06:00 on day twenty-nine, countersigned, with fourteen pages of annexed conditions I have no intention of meeting.

We take a full party down. Tomas and six safety officers. Two Alzohn structural specialists. A medical unit. Helena, who has not been below Sublevel Nine in four years, who comes anyway and never complains about the ladders. Councilor Rhyss, who complains at length and descends every rung.

Then twenty-two people stand in a rock gallery before thirty meters of Precursor gate, waiting on two engineers to touch it.

"Any last conditions?" Claire says.

"Fourteen pages of them."

"Which are we breaking first?"

"Annex four. Remote actuation only."

"Can't be helped." She flexes her fingers. "It wants us."

We place our palms on the plates in the same moment.

They are warm. That's the first surprise — blood temperature, in a gallery holding at eleven degrees. Then the whole face lights from within, and the light isn't the relay's soft blue-white but something with more iron in it, and a line of glyphs runs out from beneath our hands in both directions and keeps running, past the reach of our lamps, up past the ceiling, along however much of this thing exists above the rock.

It continues for eleven seconds. Behind us, twenty people say nothing.

Then the gate opens, and it opens upward, and it does it without a sound.

Thirty meters of it lifting into the ceiling with no mechanism I can identify — no dust, no shear, no complaint — at the speed of a lift door in a well-kept building. Rhyss makes a small noise. Tomas takes his hat off, which I have not once seen him do.

Beyond it, the corridor.

I have worked underground my entire adult life and I have no vocabulary for this. It runs away from us straight and level and unbroken, walls of that same slate, and every eighty meters a seam in the ceiling holds a band of light. The bands come up in sequence as the gate finishes rising, near to far — a hundred of them, then two hundred, then more than the eye will hold, running away beneath the city until perspective folds them to a point.

The floor is clean. Not swept. Clean the way the relay is clean, because nothing has been permitted to settle here in ten thousand years.

"Atmospheric," Claire says. Her voice has gone flat, which is what real awe does to her. "Darius. Read the tap."

I read it. Then I read it again, because the first figure isn't credible.

"Twenty-one percent oxygen. Pressure nominal. Humidity at thirty-eight." I lower the meter. "This is better air than Tier Three."

"It's better air than the shuttle I flew in on."

Helena has come up on my other side. She looks down the corridor for a long while.

"How far does it run?" she says.

"Nine to fourteen square kilometers of volume," Claire says. "This is the spine. Everything else branches off it."

"Beneath my city."

"Beneath all of it."