Page 25 of Kavan

It wasn't there this morning.

I know it wasn't, because I copied this lintel from the archive index four days ago and my copy has no hook. I stand under it with my lamp up and the rubbing in my hand and the two don't match. The cut is clean. There's no dust in it.

"Kavan."

He arrives at my shoulder before the word is out.

"It's marking new routes." My voice comes out flat and too fast. "It's extending the patrol grid. Every unmarked corridor I promised you is safe only until it decides otherwise, and it's deciding while we walk."

He studies the lintel a moment.

"How much of your map is still true?"

"Most of it. Today."

"Then we go faster."

That's all. No reassurance, no argument, no asking me to be certain when certainty has left the building. Just a decision, and the column moving, and his hand briefly at the small of my back as I turn, which isn't a thing he has done before and which he declines to explain.

He checks on me four times in two hours. He does it badly. He has a repertoire of transparent excuses, water and lamp charge and the litter rotation, and each ends with him at my left shoulder for ninety seconds asking nothing in particular.

The fourth time, I say, "You could just come and stand here."

"That would be conspicuous."

"Kavan, everyone knows."

"Everyone suspects."

"Zuri has a wager."

He absorbs this. "With whom?"

"Bee. And I think Auclair is holding the stakes, which is a serious breach of medical ethics."

"What are the terms?"

"I refuse to tell you."

"Doctor Larkin, my remit covers site safety."

"And I have authority over Precursor systems, and this is a human system, so it's outside your remit." I hear him make the small sound that is his laugh, and I would walk another nine hundred meters for it.

The security construct reaches us at the seventh kilometer, and it's none of the ones we know.

It fills the channel mouth. Not four meters but nine, folded, unfolding, plates like doors and a light along its spine that is white instead of blue. It enters the maintenance ring, which nothing has ever done, because the channel now carries a hook above its entry that was absent this morning.

"Back," Kavan says. "Back, back, into the gallery port, move⁠—"

The gallery port is welded shut by thermal creep, Marchant can't shift it, Ferreira is on a litter, and we're in a meter-wide corridor with a wall of white light coming down it.

I turn around.

That isn't bravery. In a corridor the answer is always behind you, and four meters back there's a bypass panel I cataloged and dismissed on the way in, because it's an inspection hatch for a coolant run and those go nowhere.

Except it has eleven notches under it. Eleven is the district count, the district count is the challenge answer, and this is no inspection hatch. It's an emergency egress, and has been since the day it was cut, waiting for somebody desperate enough to read the small print.

"HERE. Four notches down from the seam, everybody, HERE⁠—"