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CHAPTER 16

DARIUS

We are back below the gate by 22:00, eight hours after the ambush, because leaving nine hundred plates in a room eleven men know the way into is not something I am prepared to do.

Tomas takes the archives out through the capillaries with fourteen people and a cargo sled, up into a Civil Authority store on Founders' Second that has one door, no windows, and a lock I fitted myself in my sixth year. Helena has Rhyss in surgery for a shoulder that will mend. Kovic has requested an emergency session, which tells me plenty about who briefs him.

Claire and I stay below. Horizon knows where the Cistern is and which bunk is hers, and I would rather sleep two kilometers under a rock than discover how thorough they are.

So we go west, past the security node, into the capillaries, and eleven hundred meters along the fourth branch we find the habitation block.

Nobody built it for us and nobody has used it in ninety centuries and it is the kindest room I have ever walked into.

Six chambers off a common hall. Sleeping alcoves cut into the slate with a lip at the edge so a person doesn't roll out. A long low basin along one wall that fills with clean warm water when Claire puts her hand near it and stops when she takes it away. Recessed shelves worn smooth at the front edges by hands. Whoever crewed this place lived here a long while, and somebody thought about them while drawing it.

"They had families down here," Claire says.

"Possibly."

"No — look at the alcoves. Four are that size and two are that size." She points. "Somebody's children slept here."

We sit on the floor of the common hall with our backs to the warm wall, eating the worst meal of my life out of emergency packets, and Claire starts talking about what she wants.

Not the mission. What she wants afterward.

"The tunnels," she says. "Not as archaeology. As districts. Do you have any idea what's down here? Ten-odd square kilometers of dry, lit, breathable, structurally perfect volume, with a transit network reaching every district on the planet, and Paragon has a housing shortage in six tiers." She is using her hands. "You put engineering schools down here. Workshops, real ones, with the archive next door, and you let Alzohn and human crews train together on Precursor systems until nobody remembers which species worked out what. Two generations of that and this city doesn't merely survive — it becomes the only place in explored space where anybody actually understands this technology."

"The Council will call it a heritage site."

"They will, and I'll tell them it's a working building that has been continuously occupied for ninety centuries, and I refuse to be the generation that turns it into a museum." She glances over. "Also I want the observation platform on Fifteen. Non-negotiable. That one's mine."

I let her run for an hour. It costs me nothing, and she is, I think, building something she needs to be able to see.

Then she stops. "You've got something you haven't said."

I do — eleven days of having it.

"I am thirty-seven years old," I say, "and I have not had this before, and I don't know how to put the next part without it sounding like an accusation."

"Try it badly."

"Jalshagar chose. Not you." The words are worse out loud. "You are the most extraordinary person I have encountered in my life, and I cannot be certain you would have looked at me twice if a machine under this city had not decided in advance that we fit. That is the thing I have not said. Every good day since the relay has had that underneath it."

Claire sets her packet down. She takes a long time, and when she speaks she is not gentle, which is what I needed and had no means of requesting.

"That's a stupid theory and I can disprove it."

"Please."

"Sublevel Twelve. Day two." She turns to face me properly. "Ceiling comes down, you get me into the junction, then you check my pulse and shout at me about a nine-hundred-credit reader. And I made a joke about a thermos, and you laughed — one syllable, and you turned away so I wouldn't get it, and you thought I didn't." She taps my chest. "I got it. Day two. Before the relay, before the gate, before your arms lit up. I went up that lift thinking about a man who was angry at me for being replaceable, and I've thought about him ever since. Your machine didn't do that. I did that, on a Tuesday, with a cracked reader, over nine hundred credits' worth of principle."

I have no argument. Eleven days of constructing one, and she has taken it apart in ninety seconds with a thermos.

"Also," she says, "Jalshagar doesn't choose. You told me so yourself, in the vestibule. It arrives. It's a diagnostic, not a decision — it noticed something already true and lit up about it. You're an engineer. Stop blaming the instrument for the reading."

Something in me lets go. Nineteen years of holding one particular thing at one particular angle, and it simply lets go.

"Come here," I say, my voice sounding foreign to my own ears, thick with a hunger I can no longer categorize as a mere biological urge.