Page 47

"Canceling a berth is a transaction. This is different." I watch the Lung change the light. "Nine worlds. Fourteen years of contracts. A reactor on Cassen, an orbital farm at Deyu, four water systems, a lift network, a fusion plant everybody had written off — and every time I got on a ship afterward and never thought about the place again. That was the job. Go in, fix the machine, don't get attached, the next one's worse."

"And now?"

"Now I can tell you the name of the woman who runs the laundry in District Twelve." I look over. "Her name is Ottoline, her sister has bad lungs, and she boils forty masks a night over a coal stove. Fourteen years without learning one name, eight weeks here and I know hers, and which riser leaks on her street, and I have opinions about the tram timetable." My voice is doing something. "I don't want the next one. I want this one. I want to be here when the students who signed on this week are running crews, and when the tunnels have addresses, and I'd rather be the one woken before dawn because something's wrong where I live."

Darius says nothing for a while.

"Then I should tell you something," he says. "Because you have said the word world to me nine times in eight weeks and I have let it stand."

"Let what stand?"

"I have never been to Alzohn." Flatly. "I was born eleven levels under Founders' Second. My parents came with the fourth engineering corps rotation and stayed, my mother taught me the language, and when I say on my world I repeat a phrase I inherited from two homesick people. It isn't mine. I have never seen it and don't intend to."

I sit up.

"You turned down the Directorate seat."

"I turned down a seat on a council of a planet I have never walked on, to remain in the only city I have any claim to." A faint movement of his shoulder. "It was not modesty and it was not sacrifice. It was accurate."

And then he tells me about growing up down there, and I get what I have wanted since Sublevel Twelve and never asked for.

A childhood in maintenance levels. Corridors for streets. Reading a pressure gauge before he could read a book, because his father hung one at his eye height in the hall and made a game of it. Nine years old and small enough for inspection voids adults couldn't fit, paid in sweets, utterly delighted. The particular sound of the old Founders' mains at night, which he says he still hears if a room goes quiet enough.

"My father sealed shafts during the war," he says. "That was his work. When the military took a level they closed the ways in, and he was on the crew that did the closing, and he came home and did not talk about it. I was four. I remember him sitting on our hall floor with his hands on his knees."

"That's why you stayed."

"That is why I stayed." He looks out at the Lung. "The city took two generations of my family, gave us corridors to live in, and never once admitted it needed us. Somewhere around fifteen I decided to keep it alive anyway. I expected nothing for that and received nothing, and then a woman from off-world arrived and put my name before a camera."

His voice does something on the last part that I have not heard from it.

"You were owed it."

"I was not owed it. I am glad of it. Those differ." He turns. "Ka'sheth was easy. A heated room, after an ambush. This is the harder version. I am asking you to build a life somewhere with no rail on its best balcony, with someone who has never left the planet he was born on and doesn't want to. I have nothing else to offer. No homeworld, no family estate."

"Darius."

"Yes."

"I have spent fourteen years leaving." I lay my palm flat on his chest, where the markings fork. "Ask me properly."

"Stay."

"Yes," I say. "Obviously. Yes."

What happens after that happens slowly, which is becoming our pattern, but there is nothing hesitant about it.

Two kilometers of lit cavern stretch beyond the edge of the platform, no rail between us and the drop, and Darius has just asked me to stay in the only home he has ever known. I have already answered him. There is nothing left to negotiate. When I put my hand against his chest again, directly over the place where the markings divide across his ribs, I can feel the heavy, thudding rhythm of his heart. I am touching the man I chose before either of us understood what the bond meant.

He covers my hand with his, his fingers splaying across mine, pinning me to him.

For a moment he simply looks at me. The Lung turns somewhere below us, and the cavern light shifts from pale gold to a deep, bruising blue across his face. There is exhaustion around his eyes, but the tension that usually seems built directly into his bones has loosened.

I slide my fingers beneath the collar of his coat, feeling the heat of his skin.

He gives me the smallest lift of one eyebrow. "Cold?"

"No."