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I pause on the gantry, my gaze drawn to a glass-walled enclosure jutting over the fabrication floor. Inside, under a bank of harsh white work lights, sits a human and an Alzohn. They aren't welding or packing crates. The human—an improviser, by the look of his loose, restless posture—is gesturing at a terminal screen displaying a rotating, complex Precursor security node. Beside him, an Alzohn calculator stares at the math, his fingers flying across an input board.

They are running simulated trade examinations, utilizing a stolen copy of my concordance to systematically crack the security sequences.

A chill goes through the bond, and Darius feels it before I can even shape the thought. Elys Marr isn't trying to force the Precursor locks with brute strength anymore. He has hired specialized teams to mimic the precise, complementary pairing the system demands—faking the bond to bypass the core's security layers.

Then, at the four-hour mark, on a gantry above a bottling floor, a supervisor asks me what I am doing.

No time to think. So I don't.

I straighten with the slate held to my chest and use the flat bored voice of somebody eleven hours into a shift. "Differential survey on the recirculation legs. Your ninth-bay compressor is eleven percent over rated draw and has been about four months, which is why your discharge temperature trips the interlock on hot days, which I assume is why nobody's replaced the interlock." I turn the slate around. "Bad bearing race. It'll seize inside six weeks. Report it, or fix it quietly?"

The supervisor looks at the numbers. Then at the compressor. Then at me.

"Quietly," he says.

"Smart." I close the slate. "Get a torque wrench on the mounting bolts too. Somebody's been eyeballing them."

He thanks me. He walks us to the lift.

Every word was true, which is the only reason it worked. I read that compressor walking in, because I can't pass a machine that's complaining.

We are in the lift and eleven floors up before I let myself shake.

Then, crossing the loading apron in borrowed clothes, I see him.

Fourth level walkway, above the bonded store. Lean, immaculate, a coat worth more than my annual salary in a building where everybody else is filthy, laughing at something the man beside him said. He has the easy stillness of somebody who has never had to hurry. He doesn't look down. No reason he would.

I have seen four photographs of Elys Marr. None of them prepared me for how ordinary he is.

Darius doesn't turn his head. His hand finds the small of my back and moves me along at exactly the pace we were already walking, and the bond goes so flat and so cold that briefly I can't feel him at all.

We clear the perimeter at 15:40.

Four streets away, in a transit shelter, with the cells in my jacket and my hands finally steady, he says the thing.

"On the gantry." He is looking at the wall. "I had nothing. Four hours of preparation and I had no answer for that man, and I was working out how to get you out through the bottling floor."

"I know. I felt it."

"And then you read a compressor." He turns. "I have trusted people with my life. That's easy — you trust a rope, a shoring calculation, that Tomas will come. The gantry was different. I stopped having a plan and I was not afraid, because you were still talking."

He stops. Starts again.

"I have never trusted anybody the way I trust you. Not my instructors. Not Oren Tannis. Nobody. And I'm aware that a transit shelter and a stolen coverall is not the setting this deserves."

I take his hand in front of eleven strangers waiting for a tram.

"It's the perfect setting," I say. "Let's go put him in a hearing."

CHAPTER 24

DARIUS

Hub Ten frightens me, because they have already blundered inside it.

By day fifty-two the mobile units have retaken six of the nine. Three through Six came easily once we stopped fighting for chambers and started making corridors expensive. Eight cost us four injured. Seven cost me a bore and a hole in my leg that still argues with stairs. What remains is One beneath the Exchange, Two on the northern return, and Ten, deep on the spiral's western reach.

The Custodian has been describing Ten for two days.