Page 38 of Kavan

"There are people standing on⁠—"

"Blow it."

He blows it. Two hundred grams, placed by someone who has hauled nine kilos across a dead city for a fortnight waiting to be useful, and it takes the socket assembly and the woman kneeling over it and half the platform's outer ring, and it doesn't stop the count, because the count stopped needing the crystal the moment the crystal turned.

It does clear the platform.

I go across the bridge into the survivors of Rourke's close element, and I'm giving no account of the next ninety seconds. It isn't modesty. It's that I don't have one. There's a stretch in which I know Sophie is behind me on my right and the console ahead of me and men between us, and then no men are between us, and my forearm has opened again and I'm unclear on when.

Rourke is gone.

There's an aperture on the underside of the platform where a maintenance spine drops toward the emitter throat, and he has taken it, along with the index crystal out of the wreckage of the socket, and he's nine minutes ahead of me going down toward the part of this machine that is presently trying to open this island.

"Kavan." Sophie is at the console with both hands on it. The whole surface has woken beneath her hands in white, not amber. "Kavan, go."

"Say the number."

"Nine minutes. But it doesn't start until I have the last element and the last element is—" She stops. She looks up, and I have known her nineteen days and never once seen her afraid of a wall. "It isn't here. It isn't stored. Kavan, the fourteenth element isn't a record."

"Then what is it?"

Below us, through the aperture, the sphere fills with the noise of a mountain clearing its throat.

"Go," she says. "I'll have it by the time you're back."

"Sophie."

"I will have it. Go and get him before he reaches the throat, because if he seats that crystal in a housing control I don't get nine minutes, I get none."

Vesk can't climb. He tells me so himself, one-armed and ashen, and the saying costs him worse than the shoulder did. Then he puts Ansel and two others on the platform rail facing the aperture and says, "Nothing comes up past me, sir," and I believe him, because I have watched him mean that sentence before.

I stop at the aperture lip for one second and look back across the bridge.

She's bent over the console with white light coming up through her hands and her hair falling out of its braid, alone in all that empty air, working. She doesn't look up. She has already put me out of her mind, which is exactly correct and which I'll carry for whatever life I have left.

I go down.

The maintenance spine is four hundred meters of vertical ladder inside a shaft that's now carrying live plant, and the walls are warm, and every twelve meters there's a housing junction with a status band on it, and the bands are white all the way down.

The heat builds as I descend. By the fifteenth junction my hands are slipping on the rungs and the bound forearm has stopped being a problem I can feel, which is a warning of a different sort.

At the ninth junction I found blood on a rung. At the fourteenth I find the man who was carrying the crystal for him, dead, with his hands empty, because Cassian Rourke doesn't slow down for his own people either.

At the twentieth the shaft opens into the throat gallery, and I come off the ladder into an enormous curved space with the caldera on the other side of forty meters of Precursor structure, and nowhere I have ever stood has been hotter, and the whole gallery is ringed with control housings coming up white in sequence.

And a man in a long coat is standing at the third one with an index crystal in his prosthetic hand, trying to make an emergency stop out of the only thing he has left to trade.

He has worked it out. That's the awful part. Hours too late, four hundred meters down, with his crew dead behind him, Cassian Rourke has finally read the room, and he's trying to shut it off, and he doesn't know that forcing a crystal into a housing control will do the exact opposite.

"Rourke."

He turns.

Above us, up the full height of that shaft, I hear the seat.

And above that, at the top of the rock, on an island where it has rained for ten days, the forty-one are finishing their deployment cycle and beginning to track.

CHAPTER 25