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"I'd like you to explain it."

Water drips somewhere out in the dark, keeping poor time. When he speaks, he's chosen the words first, the way he always does.

"On my world we don't have a clean translation for what a machine like this is. The nearest word means host. You are a guest inside something you did not build and cannot replace, and the whole of engineering is learning to be a good guest — quiet, careful, leaving the house better than you found it." He turns his hand over. "A guest does not let the house fall on someone standing next to him."

"That's very courteous for a species famous for bridges."

"The bridges stay up."

I tape the dressing down and sit back on my heels. "For what it's worth, I don't think the machine is a host. I think it's a conversation. Everything that's ever been built was built by somebody who was trying to say something, and if you ask it the right question it will finish the sentence."

"And when it's the wrong question?"

"Then it corrects me. That's the good part."

He looks at me then, properly, for longer than he has looked at me in nine days. Whatever he finds, he doesn't say. He picks his jacket up, checks the tear across the shoulder, and folds it over his arm rather than putting it back on over the dressing.

Then he holds out his other hand for my palm, where the ladder rung opened it, and turns it over, and starts cleaning the cut without being asked.

I cataloged this man on day one as immovable. Nine days in, I'm learning that immovable and unfeeling are not remotely the same material, and that I was lazy to confuse them.

Somebody carved a hole in the record and then squared the arithmetic behind themselves.

Whoever they were, they're going to be so annoyed with me.

CHAPTER 4

DARIUS

There are eleven shafts under Paragon that appear on no schematic. I know all of them. Until this morning I had never taken a surface engineer down one.

The knowledge isn't classified. It has simply never been written, because the men who held it distrusted paper and trusted whoever stood in front of them, so it passes hand to hand the way a tool does. An engineer named Oren Tannis taught me four of the shafts in my first year and died in a fifth.

Claire is on the ladder below me and she has been narrating for six minutes.

"Stop talking."

"I'm processing."

"Process with your mouth shut. If you fall, I'd rather hear the rungs than you."

She stops. Twenty meters of silence, and then, in a completely different tone, "These rungs are handmade."

They are. I say nothing, because she is right and I want to see how far she takes it.

"Four smiths, minimum. That set's forged, those are cast, and the ones under my left hand have been peened flat by about nine hundred thousand boots." A pause. "Somebody kept coming down here for centuries. Long after the map forgot."

"Yes."

"You could have led with that."

"You'd have talked more."

We come off the ladder into a gallery below the Nineteen concourse, then along a route that requires crossing a collapsed sump on a beam I placed myself eleven years ago. She crosses it without comment and without slowing down, which I have decided to stop finding surprising.

Then the relay.

It fills the end wall, four meters across, the color of wet slate. No seams. No fasteners, no housing, no access panel, no maker's mark. Dust doesn't hold on the surface — it slides off, always has, and the floor at its base carries a gray drift of everything that has tried to settle on it across six centuries.