Page 24 of Kavan

"Six hours. Maybe five."

Sophie has the rubbings out before I ask.

"Then we don't take the spine," she says. "We take the maintenance ring beneath it. It runs four kilometers short of the spine, and they can't use it because it's unmarked and unmapped and you need the waymark counts to navigate it, and the only complete set of waymark counts in this city is in my head and in this bag."

"How much does four kilometers buy us?"

"If they stop to fight the constructs, and they will, because the spine is a marked route and it's crawling—" She works it. "We come out level with them. Maybe ahead."

"Then we move at eleven hundred."

The redoubt empties. I find her at the approach afterward, packing the rubbings in oilcloth with a care she doesn't spend on herself.

"You told twenty people I'm irreplaceable," she says, not looking up.

"You are."

"You also told them it wasn't sentiment."

"I told them to ask you what geometry means."

She ties the bundle off and finally turns around, and she has that look she gets before she takes a corner apart with her thumbnail.

"Kavan. What happens to you when this is over?"

I have an answer prepared. I've had it prepared since Convergence. It's professional and it's complete and it's a lie in every part, and I stand in a doorway under a thousand square kilometers of tomb and discover I can't make my mouth produce it.

"Ask me again at the spire," I say.

"That isn't an answer."

"No," I agree. "It isn't."

She shoulders the bag and goes past me down the terrace, and she doesn't push, and somehow that's worse than if she had.

CHAPTER 17

SOPHIE

The maintenance ring under the transit spine is nine kilometers of the most frightening beauty I have ever moved through, and the smugglers aren't why it frightens me.

It runs between the machine districts. Not past them. Between, with inspection ports on both sides at shoulder height, and through them I see the plant of a civilization that brought down two hundred sixteen invasions.

Reactor galleries as big as stadiums. Coolant runs a meter across, ranked in their hundreds, vanishing into manifolds I have no vocabulary for. Racks of something that is neither machinery nor architecture, ordered in a lattice that repeats at intervals of eleven, which is my number now, my missing notch, the grammar of this place.

And all of it is waking up.

Not fast. Over three kilometers I watch a coolant run go from cold to skin-warm. Over the fourth, housings on the northern wall come up in sequence, one every ninety seconds, an amber ripple moving off into the dark, something being tuned.

"It's charging," Eli says with one palm against the channel wall, his face gray. "This is a plant coming online. This is what a station looks like eight hours before it goes hot."

"Four-twelfths," I say. "It's still four-twelfths."

"Is it?"

The other thing is worse, and I'm not certain of it until the fifth kilometer.

At the twenty-second waymark, on a lintel I passed under, there's a hooked glyph.