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I have no speech for him. I have the truth, which is smaller.

"Six centuries back the machine you broke was told to cut the air in nine districts. It refused, and has spent six centuries in the dark for it." I move his hands off the manifold before he burns them. "I won't be worse than the machine."

Claire has the hub back within the hour.

Not clean work — four lenses pulled, a manifold forced, a feed leg needing a fortnight — but by 09:00 the Custodian has Ten back, and by noon four western districts have stable air.

What happens on the surface afterward I did not predict.

We surface at Founders' Fourth to two hundred people waiting. Not protesting — queuing. Somebody has raised a hand-lettered board reading CREW SIGN-ON, and Helena's office stopped keeping up with volunteers two days ago.

Pipefitters. Two retired atmospheric engineers in their seventies. A tram mechanic. Nineteen students from the technical institute, self-organized into shifts. A woman who runs a laundry and sterilizes forty breather masks a night in an inherited copper, and has for a week, and told nobody.

By day fifty-four: four thousand volunteers, still climbing.

And the city recovers faster than our work explains. I check twice. Atmospheric index rising where we haven't been. Water losses falling in mains nobody repaired.

Then I understand, and it isn't engineering.

Ration discipline. Leak reporting. Four centuries of learning there was no point mentioning a dripping riser, reversed in eleven days, because people now believe that if they report a fault somebody comes.

Paragon isn't recovering because we repair it. It recovers because ninety million people stopped behaving like the dying.

I stand at that access with the board beside me and the queue ahead and have to look at the wall a moment, and Claire arrives at my shoulder without comment, which is the second kindest thing anybody has done for me.

CHAPTER 25

CLAIRE

Icall in the debt on day fifty-five.

"The platform," I tell Helena. "Sublevel Fifteen. Eighteen hours, both of us, no link, no tasking, and if the city falls over meanwhile put it on my file."

Helena looks at me over a desk carrying nine days of unread correspondence.

"You've been awake since Tuesday."

"That's the argument."

"Take twenty-four," she says, and goes back to the correspondence.

The platform sits at the eastern end of a capillary that dead-ends against nothing, which is what made me look twice. Precursor engineers didn't build corridors to nowhere. They built this one to a gallery cut into the rock face, forty meters long, with a lip and no rail, and past the lip there is nothing for two kilometers.

You look out over the whole under-city.

Not just the spine, though the spine is there, a lit thread below and to the left. Everything. Light bands running out along nine major reaches until distance closes them. The Lung breathing away to the southwest with a slow tidal shine that changes the color of the whole cavern every forty seconds. Capillary mouths in the far wall like windows in a cliff. Somewhere in a dark patch I can just pick out, the habitation block with its basin.

It's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and I've been on nine worlds.

We bring a stove, two bedrolls, a bottle Tomas pressed on us with a very straight face, and no work at all. Darius sits on the lip with his bad leg out straight, I sit against his shoulder, and for two hours we say nothing, which is the entire point.

Then we start talking about after.

First time we've done this properly. In the habitation block I was sketching a city. This is smaller and much harder — a lease, a job title, whether my mother ever comes to visit.

"I'm not going back." I want that out loud somewhere other than a bunk at four in the morning. Not going back."

"You canceled the berth on day thirty-four."