Page 14 of Kavan

"You built all of that from a wall," he says.

"That's the job."

"No." He turns. "The job is looking at a wall. You looked at a wall and found the reason a civilization existed. Those aren't the same activity, and you should stop letting people tell you they are."

I don't have anything to say, which is an unfamiliar condition.

He goes back to the platform mouth and I stay where I am, feeling the top of my skull come off.

Zuri finds the security field an hour later, and Kavan's rule is what saves us, because the corporal on point halts when I say stop instead of arguing. Three arches, each with a lintel glyph I have never seen, and a floor that reads as ordinary stone and is not, because Zuri's dropped bolt goes through it and never lands.

It takes an hour to work out that the arches are a challenge sequence, and forty minutes more to find that the answer is the district's own waymark count. We go through the third arch in file. Nothing wakes up, and nobody talks for a while afterward.

We rest at the reservoir on the fifth terrace. It's enormous, black, absolutely flat, and our lamps never find the far side.

Vesk sits down next to me with his rations. We have not exchanged twenty words.

"He said something to you on the platform," he says.

"He did."

"Was it a compliment?"

"I think so. It was structured like one."

Vesk grunts. "Nine years I've served with him." He eats for a while. "Doctor, I've had four. Two of them were about ammunition discipline."

The water doesn't move at all. Somewhere out in it something drips at a slow interval, and the sound comes back to us from a wall we can't see.

Kavan sits on my other side eventually, which he has started doing, and doesn't comment on it, which he also has started doing.

"Can I ask you something that isn't about the ruins?"

"You can ask."

"Vakutan get assigned to a world and stay for life. Four years on Osiris. Do you miss anywhere?"

He's quiet long enough that I think I have lost him.

"There's a coast on Vakuta where the tide goes out three kilometers," he says. "My grandmother took me onto the flats to dig shell-crabs. You have to read the sand. Where it dimples, where it holds water, where the birds won't walk." He rolls the flask between his palms. "I was very bad at it and she was very patient."

"And now you read boot prints in ash."

"Now it's ash, and men who would rather not be read."

"Kavan." I'm watching the black water and not him, which is the single reason I can say it aloud. "You'd have liked her. My mother. She was hopeless at reading people and very patient about it."

"Was."

"Six years."

He doesn't say he's sorry. He puts his hand flat on the stone between us, palm down, close enough that the side of my hand touches his, and leaves it there, and we let them stay that way a long while.

CHAPTER 10

KAVAN

The geothermal gallery is four kilometers wide and the only way across it is a bridge the Precursors never intended to last this long.