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Which leaves the core, and the core leaves us.

"There's a way in," I say.

Darius looks at me.

"The load-shed." I pull up the commissioning plate I have stared at since 05:00. "When they lit that plant, somebody had to get down to the core and commission it. Before six gates. Before an annulus. The gates came afterward, around a facility that already worked, and nobody builds six gates without leaving a way to service them."

"A commissioning route."

"A commissioning route, on the plate. Outside the annulus entirely, down the outer face of the core shell, ending at a paired plate on the apron." I look up. "Never used. Sealed the day this place was signed off. It opens to a commissioning authority, and the archive holds exactly one of those."

CREW, the Custodian says quietly. IT OPENS TO CREW.

"How long?" Darius asks.

"Nine hours down. Maybe eleven — it's ladder most of the way and nobody has inspected it since it was built."

"And the controller reverts at 10:04."

"With or without us, and we'll still be on the ladder when it goes. That's the problem." I hold his eyes. "The second that thing drops out of the port he has nothing, and he'll know it, and then one option remains and it's the advisory. We have to be there for what he does after ten-oh-four, not before it."

Darius takes the reader, reads the plate, and hands it back.

"Nine hours," he says. "We will need water and we will need to leave now."

Helena comes down the link, thinned by all that rock.

"Architect. Engineer. I've just been handed his terms."

"Don't tell us," I say. "Stall as long as you can, agree to nothing, and if he wants proof of faith give him a district and make him hand one back."

A silence.

"Go and get my city," Helena says.

We go.

CHAPTER 32

DARIUS

The commissioning route was not built for us, and forty minutes is enough to see how thoroughly.

It opens at 07:40 to two hands on a plate set in the core shell's outer face, and behind it lies a passage one meter across and four high, holding that shape the whole way.

Nothing else here is shaped so. Every corridor since day twelve was built for people roughly our size. This is a vertical slot with rungs at ninety centimeters, too far apart to climb comfortably and too close for anything taller than Claire, set in pairs at thirty degrees off vertical.

"They didn't climb it," Claire says at the first rest. "The wear's on the outer edge of each rung, both sides, and nothing on the top face."

"Then how?"

"They braced. Whatever built this put a limb on each side and went up the slot like a chimney. The rungs are for bracing, not standing."

We have never had a Precursor body, image, or description. Ninety centuries of archive and not one drawing of the people who wrote it, because maintenance logs hold no portraits. And here, in a slot untouched since sign-off day, the shape of them sits in a wear pattern, and we have no time to look properly, which is the great tragedy of this expedition.

Nine kilometers, six hours, on rungs made for something with a different number of arms.

The Custodian comes with us and is useless. After the load-shed it has memory and voice and no power for anything else. No lights, no doors, no panels running ahead. It talks us down a passage it has never seen from inside, working off a commissioning plate it read once, ninety centuries ago, and filed.