Page 48 of Kavan

Rourke stands three meters off with the aperture behind him and his blade down and his breath tearing, and he's finished, and one more engagement ends him. I know it as surely as I know my own hands. It would take nine seconds, perhaps six.

I don't decide anything.

That's the bit I want set down on the record, because afterward people will want to make it a moral event, and it wasn't. There was no deliberation. There was a bridge carrying people and a man I could kill, and my body had already turned toward the bridge before the thought arrived, and the thought, when it did arrive, wasn't about Ilun at all.

I get to the span as the far anchor lets go.

The span swings. Four people go off their feet and Enwright loses the wounded man and Halloran catches him by the harness, and I hook my one arm through the rail stanchion and lay my body across the low side and become, for about eleven seconds, a fixed object.

They go over me. All four of them, hand over hand, along the length of a marshal wedged into a collapsing bridge, onto the walkway.

Obuya keeps the shards.

When the last of them is clear I let go of the stanchion and Vesk and Marchant haul me the final two meters by the collar, and the bridge goes into the dark below us and takes a long time to stop being audible.

Cassian Rourke is at the aperture.

He regards me across nine meters of deck, and there's something on his ruined face that I'll spend a long time failing to name, and then he goes down the shaft.

I don't follow. I couldn't have followed. But the honest account is that I have no wish to, and I notice the absence, and it's like setting down a pack I've been wearing so long that the absence reads as falling.

"Kavan."

Sophie is on the console platform, alone now, forty centimeters lower than she was and out of reach of anybody.

She isn't watching the bridge, and not the aperture either.

She's looking at me, and she has both hands over her mouth, and she's crying as I haven't seen her cry at any point in fifteen days, not at Convergence, not on the ledge, not in the observatory.

"Sophie. Are you hit?"

She shakes her head.

"Then what?"

"Kavan." She takes her hands down. "Look at the wall."

Every surface inside the seat has changed.

Every glyph strip. Every band. The full hundred forty meters, top to bottom, and it's white no longer.

It has gone amber.

CHAPTER 29

SOPHIE

Ihave known what element fourteen was since the tenth hour of the march and I haven't been able to say it to anyone, and now I don't have to, because it stands written across the curve of a sphere in letters four meters tall.

Authority is demonstrated.

"Sophie." Kavan is out on the walkway with his leg opened up and Vesk working a tourniquet onto it. "Talk to me."

"It's you."

"That explains nothing."

"It's the answer to everything." My hands shake so badly I have to brace them on the console. "Element fourteen isn't a code. It isn't a key or a phrase or a sequence. I found it this morning, buried in a requisition for lamp stock at the back of a shard, and I went through it three times and then said nothing at all, and you must understand why before I tell you what it says."