Page 15 of Kavan

Marchant surveys it for an hour and comes back with a face I don't like.

"Structurally it's fine," he says. "The span is fine. The anchors are fine. What's not fine is the rock the anchors are in. There's a vent system under the east abutment that's been cooking that stone for twenty millennia. It's competent until it isn't."

"Give me a number."

"I can't."

"Give me the number you don't want to say."

He takes his glasses off. "Four at a time. Spaced. No stopping in the middle. And if you hear anything, you don't look, you run."

So we cross in fours, and it takes three hours, and I stand at the west anchor and count every person off the span personally because nothing else I could do would be useful. Below us the gallery drops into red. Vents along the floor throw up columns of heat that make the far wall swim, and the air tastes of iron and old matches, and the whole time I can feel Sophie twenty meters behind me on the safe rock, not saying a word, because she knows what I'm doing and has decided to let me do it.

Group five is nine meters from the east anchor when the abutment lets go.

It isn't dramatic. That's the detail I want to record. There's a sound like a door closing somewhere far away, and then forty meters of the eastern approach path simply isn't attached to the wall anymore, and it goes down in a single piece, and the dust comes up afterward.

Four people are on the wrong side. Auclair, Ferreira, Corporal Mirek, and a sediment technician named Halloran whose first name I have to reach for and find. Bee. She asked us to call her Bee.

The bridge itself holds. The approach to it doesn't exist.

"Voice check," I call, and I get four voices back, and Vesk's hand closes on my shoulder for exactly one second, which is his entire vocabulary for this.

Then I run the arithmetic. The span is intact but the far end lands on nothing. We have ninety meters of line among us and we need three hundred. There's no route down the gallery wall that doesn't cross open vent floor. I run it four ways and every one of them ends with people on that ledge until the heat takes them, and I'm reaching for the fifth way when Sophie says my name.

She's on her knees with the waymark rubbing spread out on the rock and her stylus in her teeth.

"There's a maintenance ring," she says. "Every gallery on the map had one. It isn't a route, it's a service gutter, cut inside the wall for inspection access, and it's about a meter wide and it will be full of nothing but dust." She looks up. "It comes out on their side. I'm almost certain."

"How certain."

"Kavan, ask me the real question."

"Would you send someone you loved into it?"

"I'd go into it," she says. "That's not the same and I'm aware it isn't, so here's the honest answer. Seventy percent it connects. Ninety-five percent it's structurally sound, because it runs inside the wall, and that wall isn't what failed. And a hundred percent that I can't do the entry glyph from this side without someone tall enough to reach the lintel."

I look at her for four seconds.

"Vesk. Line, lamps, and the small pack. Neris, you're on comms relay at the mouth."

"You're going," Vesk says.

"We're going."

The gutter is exactly as she described it, which by that point doesn't surprise me. It runs for two hundred and forty meters inside the wall with the heat of the vents coming through the stone against my left shoulder the entire way, and there's one section where the ceiling drops and I have to go through on my forearms, and Sophie goes back and takes my pack off my shoulders without being asked and carries it in front of her so I can fit.

It connects.

We come out on the ledge behind four people who have spent ninety minutes deciding they're going to die, and Bee Halloran hits me somewhere around the sternum and holds on, and I let her, and Mirek is trying to salute and shake all at once and managing neither.

Getting them back through takes two hours. Sophie goes last with me because she refuses to go first, and at the mouth of the gutter the lip is smooth and high and I turn and put my hand down for her.

She takes it. I bring her up through the gap in one motion because she weighs nothing and because I've stopped being careful about how much strength I show her, and she comes up faster than she expects and ends braced against my chest, and my grip hasn't opened.

Neither of us lets go.

Her hair is white with rock dust. There's a smear of it across her cheekbone and along her jaw, and her eyes are enormous in the lamp glare, and I'm aware of every place we're touching in an order that starts at my palm and doesn't stop there.