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"What are you doing?"

"Finishing what they started." I have a shim scriber out of my kit, which is a poor tool for slate and the only sharp thing I own. "Four hundred people came down here and signed off. Nobody's signed this wall in nine thousand years. It's a commissioning route and we're the commissioning crew and I'm not walking through that door without filing."

Eleven minutes. Slate is unkind to a shim scriber and my hands are poor tonight, so my name comes out crooked and shallow and stays that way, because four hundred people managed worse using proper tools and none went back to tidy up.

I hand him the scriber. He cuts his beneath mine, in Alzohn characters, taking longer than I did and getting a better result, which is entirely in character. Then underneath both, in concordance glyphs, he cuts the crew mark and a count.

Two.

He steps back and studies it, and the studying goes on for some time, and I let him have it.

"If we do not come out," he says, "somebody will read that."

"They will." I put the scriber away. "And whoever it is will know we filed."

He takes my hand.

We go to the door.

CHAPTER 34

DARIUS

The nexus chamber is a sphere.

Forty meters across. We come in through the outer face onto a walkway running its equator, and the whole lower hemisphere is one unbroken surface of slate holding a light with no source. At the center, on nothing, floating the way thirty meters of gate floats, sits the socket.

The Custodian's geometry is inside it, and nothing about it resembles the Speak chamber. It is enormous, and it is turning slowly, and one whole quadrant of it has gone dark.

Elys Marr is on the walkway with eight people and a cutting rig.

Eleven hours at it. Coat off, sleeves burned at the cuff, a rack beside him holding the substitution controller, and beneath the socket, on a platform his people have bolted into a face that has never carried a fixing in its life, three of four retainers are cut through.

He looks up when the door opens, unsurprised, and I understand he has expected us since ten-oh-four.

"Architect. Engineer." He straightens. "I'd assumed the annulus. You came down the commissioning route. I looked for that plate for nine years."

"Stop cutting," Claire says.

"In forty minutes." Entirely reasonable. "Then we can talk properly, and I'll have something to trade with and you'll have a reason to listen, and the city gets its air back permanently instead of at my discretion. I'd have preferred the procedural route. You closed it."

"I closed it with paperwork."

"You did, and it was beautiful, and it cost me eleven hours and four men, and I am done being beaten by a filing system." He nods to his people. Two of them move toward us along the walkway. "Take them off the door."

Then several things happen and I am responsible for most of them.

The walkway is Precursor, which means ribs, which means I know where facing is and where it isn't, and I have had four minutes here to count seams. I don't have to fight eight people on a catwalk. I just have to delete eleven meters of catwalk.

I take the facing out between two ribs with a cutting charge from Tomas's kit and the near span drops into the lower hemisphere with four of them on it, and the two coming at us go with it, and Marr does not.

Then it is Marr's remaining two, me, and a catwalk with a gap in it. I keep them off her for eleven minutes. One of them puts something through my left arm at some point and I don't notice until later.

Claire spends those eleven minutes doing something else entirely.

She goes flat with her reader wedged against a stanchion and she opens the roster.

I do not understand it while it is happening. I understand it afterward, and it stands as the single most elegant thing I have watched anybody do.