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Behind me the world gets loud.

Metal on metal. A shoring bar off the stack and swung. Darius doesn't shout. He puts himself in the gap between me and the lead unit and stays in it, and the bar shears, and something opens the back of his left hand from knuckle to wrist, and he changes grip and keeps standing there.

Priority tasking. Containment class. Not a command — a work order, in their own protocol, from an authority they were built to obey. The beauty of it is that I needn't be that authority. I only have to sound like the relay, and I have four days of the relay talking in my pocket.

I hit send.

The lead unit stops mid-stroke, forty centimeters from his chest.

All three fold their arms away in unison. They pivot. They drift past us without any acknowledgment at all, down the bore toward the collapse we shored coming in, and they begin, with enormous patience, to clear it.

Nobody speaks for about twenty seconds.

"You gave them a job," Tomas says.

"I gave them a better job."

"That thing was going to open you like a tin can."

"It was aiming at him. I was crouching."

Darius has his hand wrapped in a pressure bandage he applied himself, one-handed, without mentioning it, and he's watching the units work with an expression I'm starting to read at about forty percent accuracy.

"You didn't destroy them," he says.

"They're six centuries old and they still hold a charge. You don't smash the only working example of something."

"No." He looks up. "You don't."

So I decide to embarrass him, because he's earned it and because I have watched him do this three separate times now and nobody has said it out loud.

"Tomas. Do you know what he did?"

"I was there, Claire."

"He put himself in front of a cutting arm with a shoring bar. Not a weapon. A bar. For ninety seconds, on the assumption that I'd deliver, which he had no evidence for, because I've never done it before in my life." I turn to him. "You had no reason to believe I could."

"You said ninety seconds."

"That's not a reason, that's a number."

"You had not yet been wrong about a number."

He says it flatly, like a maintenance finding, then turns away and starts coiling the safety line, and I watch the tips of his ears go a shade darker than the rest of him and decide, generously, not to mention it.

Tomas mentions it. Tomas has no discipline whatsoever.

We come up at 22:40. In the lift I catch myself running the numbers on what would have happened if the emulator had needed one more pass, and I make myself quit, and then I notice I've been standing closer to him than the lift required for the last four floors.

Sixteen days ago I thought he was an obstacle with a very good safety record.

I don't think that anymore, and I'd like the record to show I resisted for at least nine of them.

CHAPTER 6

DARIUS

We move to the Cistern on day seventeen. The commute is eating four hours a day, and I want her where I can control the exits.