Page 17 of Kavan

"You've been standing on my left for six hours. You do it in corridors, you did it on the platform, you did it in the arcade. Always my left."

He's quiet.

"Kavan."

"Your right hand holds the stylus," he says. "Whatever you're reading, you turn toward it. If something comes, you'll turn right, into it, because you'll want to see. So I stand on the left, where you won't be, so that the first thing between you and it is me." He shrugs, barely. "That isn't sentiment. It's geometry."

"That," I say, when I can, "is the least convincing sentence you have ever said to me."

Eli finds the impact marks at 2200.

They're on the fourth terrace, on the arcade wall two hundred meters below the archive, and they're a burst pattern, four rounds, and the scoring is bright at the edges. Kinetic, not Precursor. Nothing down here uses kinetics except us.

Kavan crouches and lays his lamp low across the wall the way he did in the ceremonial chamber, and I watch him become a different man in the space of about two seconds.

"Dust on the lip," he says. "Eight hours. Maybe ten."

"Ours?"

"We've not fired a round since the west arch." He stands. "Vesk. Lamps to a quarter, weapons free, everyone off the open terraces. Sophie, how many routes to the center?"

"Three."

"Then they know that too." He looks down the arcade into the dark, toward a dead city as broad as a country with something living in it besides us. "How long have they been down here?"

"Longer than we have."

"Yes," he says. "That's what frightens me."

CHAPTER 12

KAVAN

Four rounds in the arcade wall isn't a firefight. It's the end of one, and I want the rest.

I find it at dawn, or at what my chrono insists is dawn, three hundred meters east along the fourth terrace. Scoring runs across a plaza in two arcs. There are twenty-two impact sites on the north colonnade and nine on the south, which means two positions firing across each other, which means they were flanking something that stood in the open and didn't care about being flanked.

There's slag on the flagstones where a construct went down. There's also blood.

It has dried black in the low humidity and it runs eight meters toward the arcade, thinning, with a boot scuffing alongside it. Somebody was dragged and somebody did the dragging, and forty meters on there's a discarded pressure dressing and a foil ration wrapper with printing on it that I photograph twice.

Kesteven Provisioning. An Ostmark Chain trading house that lost its League charter six years ago and kept trading.

"So they can be killed," Vesk says.

"They can be hurt. They stopped to dress him." I stand up. "That's worse."

"How is that worse?"

"Because a crew that leaves its wounded moves fast and breaks. A crew that carries them is disciplined and it holds." I look down the arcade. "Twelve shooters minimum. Two elements. They've taken losses and they're still going the same direction we are."

We move the camp before midday.

The sixth terrace has a redoubt built into the terrace wall itself, and I don't know what the Precursors used it for and it doesn't matter, because it has one approach, a covered field of fire two hundred meters long, and a ceiling nobody can come through. Sophie finds the way in from a waymark I would have walked past.

"There's a whole second city," she tells me, spreading the rubbings on a crate. "The gutters. Every gallery has them, every terrace, and they interconnect. They aren't on the transit map because they were never meant for people, they were meant for whoever maintained the people-parts." She taps the sheet. "Nobody hunts you in a corridor they don't know exists."

"How many kilometers?"