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Then she starts to get up.

"Sit down."

"The reader's back there."

"Sit. Down."

She sits, mostly because her legs make the decision before she does. I take her wrist, find the pulse, count. Fast. Nothing worse. There is blood on her sleeve from her own elbow and she has not noticed it yet.

"You were going back," I say.

"For the reader."

"For a reader."

"That reader has four hours of gallery scan on it, and I don't have a backup, so unless you want to do this morning again⁠—"

"It costs nine hundred credits." My voice comes out harder than I had planned, and I do not soften it. "You have one life. There is no procurement office for the second one."

She goes quiet. Then she reaches around, unclips something from the back of her harness, and holds it up between two fingers.

The reader. Casing cracked across the corner, screen intact.

"I clipped it on before we walked out," she says. "I was going back for my thermos."

I look at her. She looks at me, absolutely straight-faced, filthy, bleeding from one elbow, with a cracked survey reader held up like evidence in a trial nobody called.

"It's a good thermos," she adds.

The laugh gets out of me before I can shut the door on it — half a sound, barely anything, and I turn toward the lift so she cannot collect it. It does her no good to be encouraged.

She collects it anyway. I can hear her not saying so all the way up.

I came down this morning certain she would slow me down. I climb out certain of nothing at all, which is a worse position to hold and, I am beginning to suspect, a more honest one.

CHAPTER 3

CLAIRE

The bulkhead on Sublevel Nineteen takes Tomas Halek four hours and eleven minutes to cut, and he complains through every one of them.

"Forty centimeters," he says, for the third time, tipping his visor up. Soot has worked into the creases around his eyes and turned him into a woodcut of himself. "Standard blast door is fifteen. Somebody didn't want this opened, they wanted it forgotten."

"Somebody succeeded," I say.

"Somebody's about to be disappointed."

I like Tomas. He arrived on day one convinced I was a theorist with a good publicist, told me so, and then carried forty kilos of shoring gear down eleven flights without being asked. Skepticism I can work with. It's enthusiasm that gets people killed.

The slab comes free at 14:23 and the air that comes out of the gap behind it is colder than the air on our side, and drier, and it has not moved in a very long time.

Beyond the bulkhead is a maintenance concourse, and it is perfect.

That's the part that stops all three of us in the doorway. Not ruined. Not stripped. A cart still stands loaded with conduit sleeves, the sleeves stacked in size order. A jacket hangs over the back of a chair at the dispatch station, the sleeve turned inside out where somebody shrugged out of it in a hurry. There is a cup on the console. Dust covers all of it evenly enough to look applied.

"Border Wars," Darius says quietly. "They sealed the level mid-shift."

"With people's coats still in it."