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"You already know."

"I want it said."

"Seven hours, and nobody else can be in that room, and the annulus is at eighty degrees and cracking, and Tomas needs two days." She looks up the slot. "There's no arrangement of this that has anybody else in it."

"No."

"Then finish yours."

I hold a rung meant for a limb I was never issued, nine hundred meters beneath a city which has spent nineteen years trying to kill me, and say it.

"I know what is likely waiting at the foot of this passage. I am not turning around, and doing so means choosing a machine over a good many years I might otherwise have had with you." My voice stays steady, which surprises me again. "I understand the choice. I made it deliberately. Courage isn't in it, and neither is the bond."

Claire is quiet for four rungs.

"Good. I made the same one, and I'd have been furious if you'd made it for both of us."

At 16:20 the slot ends.

We come out onto a landing roughly the dimensions of a small room, a bench along one wall, and a door opposite that reads, in concordance glyphs, OUTER FACE, CORE.

We are one door from the nexus, and nobody goes near it.

CHAPTER 33

CLAIRE

The landing is a waiting room.

That's what stops us. Not the door — I can look at the door later. It's that somebody built a room here, nine kilometers down a slot, and they gave it a bench, and a water tap that still runs, and a shelf at the height of a bench, and nothing else, because what else does a crew need while they wait for the last item on a commissioning list?

And then I put my lamp on the left-hand wall.

Names.

Four hundred of them, maybe more, hand-cut into the wall itself using a dozen tools and a dozen different levels of care, filling the wall from the floor to as high as anybody could reach. Some are neat. Some are gouged. One near the bottom is enormous and crooked and I would bet everything I own that whoever cut it was very young and very pleased.

"The commissioning crew," Darius says.

"All of them." My throat has gone tight. "This is the last room before sign-off. They came down here, they finished the job, and on the way out each of them paused and cut a name into the wall, and then they sealed the route behind them and nobody ever came back."

Nine thousand years. Four hundred people. Not one of whom knew what a human being was.

We sit on their bench and drink their water, which is the best water I have ever had, and we don't talk for a while.

Darius reads the wall the whole time. Not scanning it — reading it, left to right, low to high, the way you read a duty board. At one point he stops and puts two fingers under a mark near the middle.

"This one was cut with a broken tool," he says. "The stroke drags where every line finishes. He knew that, and cut it that way regardless."

"Maybe there wasn't another tool."

"There is always another tool. He wanted his own."

Then we talk about the thing.

"Say it," I tell him. "The number."

"There isn't a number."