Page 23

He is quiet a while.

"In the vestibule," he says, "six days ago, I told you Paragon had no future in it."

"I remember."

"I would like to revise it."

I turn my head. He's looking straight down the corridor at two hundred bands of light running away beneath Paragon, and the markings along his throat are faintly warm, and he keeps his eyes down the corridor because he can't say this and face me at once.

"Revise it how?"

"I think we can save it." He offers it quietly, like a finding, like the seventeen reports he signed and got wrong. "I have no evidence adequate to that statement. I want it in the log regardless."

I put my hand over his.

"Logged," I say.

CHAPTER 12

DARIUS

Our escort arrives on day thirty, nine meters of it.

Three units, nothing like the cutting drones on the horizontal bore. Heavy handlers, low and broad, on a suspension I can neither see nor hear, the lead one carrying eleven tools I don't know. They come up from the west, halt four meters short, and wait.

Tomas reaches for my arm. I shake my head.

"They're not hunting," Claire says. "Look at the spacing. That's a formation for walking behind someone."

She's right, and once I've seen it I can't unsee it. The roster says two crew are on shift. Crew on shift get an escort. Whatever wrote that entry has been making arrangements ever since.

We walk. They follow.

What follows is the most humiliating four hours of my career, and I mean that gratefully.

Nineteen years of working around obstacles I believed permanent. Bulkheads with no external release. A transit section under Founders' Fourth, flooded since the war years, written off twice. An inspection gallery I condemned myself.

The handlers open the bulkheads. They drain the flood — not pump it, drain it, into a sump network that runs beneath everything and has waited six centuries for somebody to ask. At the condemned gallery the lead unit clears my collapse in twenty minutes while I stand there holding a light.

"You look like a man at his own funeral," Tomas says.

"I filed nine pages on that gallery."

"Was it good?"

"Excellent. Also a man cataloging a wound he had no idea was survivable."

Around the third hour I work out what the facility is keyed to, and it isn't us.

Inside the envelope, doing nothing: no response. Apart, working: no response. Inside the envelope and solving something together — a coupling, a torque figure argued out loud — and the handlers reposition, the panels run, a branch lights.

It isn't reading our bodies or our names. It reads the shape of two people thinking against one problem, and it has listened for that shape a long while.

I tell Claire, and she gives me a sentence I intend to keep.

"So it's not a lock. It's a hiring test."

We reach the Lung at 13:00.