Page 13 of Kavan

"Sophie."

"Sophie." I find I haven't moved as far back as I intended. "Ninety percent isn't a number you gamble my life on."

"It's a number I gamble mine on constantly." She ducks under my arm and out into the plaza, and then she stops and turns around. "You went in second. You always go in first, and this time you didn't, because you followed me."

There's no answer to that which doesn't tell her something.

"The rail," I say. "Show me the platform housings."

She lets me have it. That's what stays with me. She sees it, and she leaves it alone, and she walks ahead of me into a city that has been waiting twenty thousand years for someone to read its street signs.

CHAPTER 9

SOPHIE

The transit station is called Fourth Muster. I know that before I know anything else about it, because the name is carved above the entry in glyphs a meter tall, and the first element is a numeral and the second is the word that has been quietly terrifying me since the ceremonial chamber.

It says muster. Not market, not terminus. Muster.

The platform runs two hundred meters, the rail bed empty, and at its far end sits a car, or the corpse of one, canted against the buffer with its underside opened up like something dissected. Zuri gets forty meters from it before she stops.

"That isn't decay," she says. "Sophie, that's been stripped. Someone pulled the induction plates."

"How long ago?"

"Nothing like twenty thousand."

We photograph everything, touch nothing, and I set it aside, because the walls are talking and I only have so much of me to go around.

They're manifests. It takes two hours to accept that, because a manifest is such an ordinary thing to find at the heart of a mystery. Column after column, running the whole platform, each block headed by a date-ring and a district glyph, each entry a rotation. Units in. Units out. The head-counts I can't convert. The dates I can, and the dates are the problem.

Two hundred sixteen blocks, which is the same count as the temple ceiling.

"They rotated a garrison every time a fleet came," I say. Eli is sitting on his pack with his glasses off, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Eli. Two hundred sixteen fleets and two hundred sixteen musters. This wasn't a colony that got attacked. This was a garrison that was never anything else."

"For how long?"

I do the arithmetic three times and still hate it.

"First block to last is eleven thousand years."

He puts his glasses back on very slowly.

Eleven thousand years of standing watch. My discipline has spent a century arguing whether the Precursors were explorers or traders or philosophers, and the answer, carved into a train platform, is that they were sentries for longer than humans have farmed.

Near the midpoint, between two blocks, someone cut a line that isn't a manifest at all. It's smaller, off the register, crooked the way graffiti is crooked, made by a person with a hand tool and no authorization.

It says the sky is not empty.

I'm still standing in front of it when Kavan comes down the platform.

"You've been here forty minutes," he says.

"I know."

"So what is it?"

So I tell him. The manifests, the rotations, the crooked little line somebody carved when they were bored or frightened or both. He listens the way he does, which is completely, without once looking at my face, watching the platform mouth throughout.