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"Or a man who inherited a habit."

"Kovic filed a dissent."

"Kovic did," he agrees. "And a block went out of the Nineteen index, and a pin was turned on a lathe, and hangers were cut by three separate hands in three separate decades." He crouches so we're level. "You believe this is organized."

"I believe it's a business."

He is silent a beat, and then he gives me the thing I did not know I needed until it was in the room.

"Then we take it apart. Not you. We." His hand comes over mine on the desk. "I have signed seventeen wrong reports for these people. I am going to enjoy the rest of this a great deal."

CHAPTER 14

DARIUS

The bond doesn't grow steadily. It grows the way water finds a level — nothing for days, then a step, and no returning to the previous depth.

Day thirty-four takes a step.

I am eighty meters from her, past a junction, arguing torque figures with an Alzohn specialist, and I stop mid-sentence because Claire is frightened.

Not startled. Frightened, and beneath the fear a hard bright layer of anger she is choosing not to spend. Eighty meters. Two walls. No sound. I don't decide to walk; I'm already walking, and I come round the corner to find her squared up to a wall recess, both hands flat at her sides.

"There's something in there," she says.

"I know."

"How do you—" She stops. "Right. Yes."

It's an inspection void, and six meters up inside it a bracket has been welded on. Not Precursor work. Modern steel, modern rod, a weld any surface tradesman would know, holding nothing — whatever it carried is gone, and the weld has maybe fifteen years of oxide on it.

Somebody has been inside this facility before us. Past a gate that requires two hands and an envelope.

Claire's anger stops being unspent. "Fifteen years they've been in here, and Founders' First has been losing atmosphere the whole time."

"We don't know they got far."

"They got far enough to weld."

Day thirty-five brings the security node, which is the reason I now understand what this facility is for.

It sits at the western terminus, the first thing down here that is unambiguously a barrier. No panel lights as we approach. No roster acknowledgment. A slate face with two receiving plates and, above them, a glyph sequence that changes every four seconds.

Six hours before Claire sees the sequence is a challenge and I see it isn't a lock at all.

"It wants an answer in two parts," she says. "Same structure as a work order, but with a hole in it. It's handing us an incomplete job and asking us to finish it."

"There are two holes."

"Two holes." She raises her eyes to me slowly. "One of them wants a number."

The hole that wants a number wants a torque tolerance for a bearing class obsolete nine thousand years, derivable from the archive if you are patient, methodical, and willing to reconcile eleven plates for two hours. That one is mine.

The other hole is not a question with an answer. It is a fault condition — a described failure with no procedure written for it, something the Precursors evidently never solved — and it wants a method. Not a correct one. Any method that works.

Claire stares at it four minutes, then improvises something from a bypass and a deliberate imbalance I would never have permitted in a maintenance log, and which undeniably works.

We enter both at once, one hand each. The node opens.