Page 28 of Kavan

CHAPTER 19

SOPHIE

It's an observatory.

That isn't my word for it, it's theirs. The glyph over the door is a compound of eye and sky and duty, and I have stood under it for a solid minute failing to translate the third element into anything that isn't watch.

The chamber is a bowl thirty meters across, terraced down to a floor of dark glass, and above it the shaft climbs eight hundred meters of volcanic rock, and at the top hangs a disc of pale gray.

That is sky up there. Storm-light. The actual sky.

It has been raining on Osiris for thirteen days without me, and I can hear it coming down that shaft in a soft continuous hush. Wet air, cool and green and mineral, and under it the smell of a coast in autumn. My legs put me down hard on the second terrace, and I place my head between my knees.

Kavan posts the watch. Vesk takes the trench door. Auclair gets the wounded onto the warm floor. Twenty people who haven't seen weather in a fortnight stretch out on the terraces of a Precursor observatory and stare up a hole at a gray disc of rain. Nobody says anything for a good while. Then Bee Halloran starts crying, and Zuri holds onto her, and it's fine. We're all doing some version of it.

Six hours. That's what Kavan gives them. Six hours of rest before we go up the spire, and he takes the third watch himself.

At 0200 I climb up to the rim terrace and sit down beside him because I'm done being patient.

"You said somewhere that isn't there," I say.

"I did."

"Well. This isn't there."

He doesn't answer straight away. He watches the disc of sky, and the storm-light moves across his face. I let him have the silence because I've learned he needs a run-up.

"On Hesper," he says, "after the inquiry, I put in for the furthest posting on the list. Osiris wasn't the furthest. It was the one where the work was protecting people, so I took it, and I've been here four years, and in four years I haven't had a conversation I'd describe as personal." He tips the flask and doesn't drink. "I'm telling you that so you understand the scale of what I'm about to say. I have no reference for this. I have no idea how to do it well."

"Do it badly."

"Sophie." He says my name like it's load-bearing. "There's a thing that happens to Vakutan. It's called ashari. The one your blood chooses. It's no decision, it isn't desire, and nothing about it is built over time. It arrives whole." He keeps his eyes on the shaft. "It arrived on the fourth morning, when you had your whole arm jammed down between two boulders and you laughed at me for saying your observation was exceptional. I've known since then."

"Since—" My voice stops working. "Kavan, that was the fourth day."

"Yes."

"You've known for ten days."

"I have, and I decided not to tell you, and I'll be honest about why." Now he does look at me. "Not to protect you. To protect me. Because if I told you and you felt obligated, I would pass the rest of my life not knowing whether you chose me or whether you were being kind. I would rather have had nothing."

"And now?"

"Now the spire is at eight-twelfths and the odds are fair that we don't see that sky again, and I find I'm not willing to die having never once said it aloud."

The rain comes down the shaft, hushing.

"Can I talk now?"

"Please."

"I have a speech, and it isn't as good as yours." I turn to face him properly, cross-legged, knees touching. "I have spent nine years leaving. Threshold, Perrin, Kessic, eleven worlds, and not once have I been sad on a departure day. Not once. I've been proud of that. I said it in interviews."

"I know."

"On the eleventh day under the rock, in the gutters, carrying Ferreira, I caught myself thinking about after. Not the next dig. After. Whether the preserve office up on the headland has a window. What the storm season is like when you aren't trapped under it. Whether you'd hate having someone in your house or whether you'd just make tea."

"I would make tea."