Page 12 of Kavan

The vault above us isn't rock. It's the pale material, worked smooth, arching away in every direction until my lamp gives up, and hanging from it are towers. Not standing. Hanging, root-first, tapering down toward a floor that lies three hundred meters beneath our boots, and between them and under them the city terraces down in rings, and every ring carries streets, and every street runs to a plaza, and the plazas are laid out on a grid I can read as a soldier before Larkin reads it as a scientist.

Those are fire lanes down there. Those are fallback lines. It's a garrison town built for a million people, buried under a tourist coast.

"Kavan." She has come up beside me at the rail without my noticing, which doesn't happen. "Look at the pillars."

At every intersection below us there's a marker, waist high, and each one carries a district glyph and a row of small hooked notches beneath it.

"Waymarks," she says. "That's a numbering scheme. Those aren't decorative, they're distances, and if I'm right about the unit, the notch count drops as you approach the center." She grips the rail with both hands. "Marshal, this city is signposted. We don't have to guess. We can read our way in."

"And the transit?"

"Maybe." She points to a terrace two rings down where a low arcade runs into the dark. "Those are platform housings. If any of the rail is live, we walk in days instead of weeks."

Days instead of weeks. We have twelve days of rations if I cut the allowance again, which I have already decided to do tonight and haven't yet told anyone.

I gather them in a plaza on the first terrace, under a hanging tower, and I do a thing I haven't done in nineteen years of service.

"Doctor Larkin has operational authority over every Precursor system we encounter," I say. "Her call on a wall, a door, or a machine is my call. You will treat it that way. If she says left, you go left, and you go left fast, and you can ask her why afterward."

Nobody argues. Neris says, "Finally," under her breath, and Vesk's mouth does something at the corner.

Afterward he finds me back at the rail.

"Nineteen years," he says.

"I'm aware."

"I'm only observing." He looks out at the towers. "You've never given a civilian authority in your life. You wrote a paper about why."

"I wrote a memorandum. It was six pages and it was wrong."

"It was four pages."

"Then it was wrong faster."

He laughs, quietly, which from Rhoran Vesk is the equivalent of another man weeping.

We scout the second terrace together, Larkin and I, because she has to see the waymarks up close and because I won't send her with anyone else and I've stopped pretending that's a tactical decision.

The patrol finds us at the third plaza.

We hear it before we see it, plates on stone, coming up the arcade, and there's no cover on the plaza worth the name. She's halfway to the arcade mouth and I catch her wrist to pull her back and she turns her hand over and pulls me instead, hard, into a service alcove that I had dismissed because it looked too shallow to hold me.

It holds me. Barely. It holds both of us with her spine to the wall and my forearm braced above her shoulder and no room at all between us, and above the alcove entrance, cut into the lintel, is a glyph with no hook.

The construct passes two meters away. Blue light washes the alcove floor and stops at the threshold like it has met glass.

She doesn't move, and neither do I. Her breathing is quick and shallow, and I make myself count the plates going past instead of anything else, and I get to thirty-one before the sound thins out down the arcade.

When I step back her face is tilted to mine, wearing an expression I have no file for.

"They can't come in," she says. "Not anywhere that isn't marked."

"You knew that before you pulled me."

"I was ninety percent sure."

"Doctor."