Page 40 of Kavan

Behind me, at the aperture, somebody says Kavan's name.

He hauls himself over the lip on one arm because the other one won't take his weight anymore. His right sleeve is gone. A burn runs up his neck into his hair and his eyebrows are gone and he's moving the way men move when they've decided that stopping is a separate problem for later.

"Rourke," he says.

"You didn't get him."

"A housing vented at the sixteenth junction and I was between it and my own ladder." He gets both feet under himself. "I had him. He was nine meters away and I had him, and then the gallery filled with steam and I climbed."

"Kavan—"

"He's coming back up," he says. "There's nothing down there for him. He has grasped that the only prize left down here is standing at that console, and he's going to come up here and try to take you."

"Then he'll have to come through the walkway."

"No." He indicates the aperture we're both standing beside. "He'll come up the way I did."

CHAPTER 26

KAVAN

That's the arithmetic that governs the next part of my life. Ninety minutes of reconstruction before she can attempt the sequence, and the sphere needs about the same to finish assembling whatever it's assembling, and between those two numbers there's a gap in which nineteen people can do nothing at all except wait.

So I make them rest. I put Ansel and two more on the aperture, Vesk along the walkway with the last ammunition, and I send everybody else off the platform and into the ring of observation blisters set into the sphere wall, and I tell them to sit down and eat something and not to talk to me for an hour.

Then Neris takes the console watch from Sophie and physically removes her hands from it, which no one else on this expedition would have dared, and Sophie comes and finds me in the third blister with her hair in her eyes.

The blister is four meters across and its outer wall is transparent. Below us the buried city goes on to the edge of sight, terrace after terrace, dark now that the Warden has pulled its power inward, and the hanging towers come down out of the vault like roots looking for water.

She sits beside me. She doesn't say anything for a while.

"You aren't going to make it up that ladder again," she says eventually. "Are you."

"No."

"Right." She nods slowly. "Thank you for not lying about it."

"You would have known."

"I'd have known." She pulls her knees up. "Say the rest."

So I do, because nothing is left to protect her from that the room isn't already doing.

"Rourke will come up through the aperture. Vesk can't fight anymore and he'll try. Ansel is twenty-six and has never held a position against a determined assault and she'll hold this one because she believes I think she can, which I do, and it will very likely kill her. My right arm is finished. I have perhaps one good engagement left in me and I mean to spend it in the eleven seconds between that man clearing the lip and reaching you."

"That's the plan."

"That's all of the plan."

"It's a terrible plan."

"It's the single plan in which you're at that console when the count finishes," I say, "so it's a good plan."

She's quiet. Down in the city, nothing moves. Nothing has moved down there since the Precursors went except us.

"Kavan," she says. "Ilun."

Everything in me settles into a kind of stillness I don't like.