Page 49 of Kavan

"Tell me what it says."

"Command belongs to whoever spends themselves last."

Everything in him goes quiet.

"It's a demonstration," I say. "The Precursors built a gun able to sterilize a system, then decided that the only being permitted to stand it down would be someone who had proven, in front of the fortress, that they valued their people above the objective. Not stated. Proven. And that's why I couldn't tell you, Kavan, because the moment you know the machine is watching, it isn't a demonstration anymore, it's a performance, and it would not have counted and you would have done it anyway and it would have killed you for nothing."

He's silent a long moment.

"You've had this since this morning."

"Yes."

"You carried it alone all day."

"Yes."

"Sophie." His voice catches on the word. "Was it heavy?"

Which is why I love him, and that's all the explanation anybody gets.

"Very," I say.

The wall changes again.

Not glyphs this time. The amber runs down the inner surface in a long spiral, gathering, until it resolves at the equator of the sphere into a single vertical line of light about a person's height, eleven meters from where I'm standing, and I know with complete and undramatic certainty that I'm being addressed.

"Kavan. It's looking at me."

"Can you answer it?"

"I don't know. Nobody has ever⁠—"

The line speaks.

It doesn't use sound. It writes, one cluster at a time, at a rate I realize after the second word is deliberately slow, and it's slow because I'm reading it, and it has measured how fast I read.

You are no fleet of ours.

"No," I say aloud, and write it, hands moving on the console. "We're not. We came from a different star. We opened your door by accident."

Two hundred sixteen returned. Four hundred did not. I held.

"I know. I read the wall."

I was not permitted to decide. I was permitted to hold.

There it is, entire.

I have spent my whole career reconstructing the interior lives of dead civilizations from postholes and pottery, and I'm standing inside one, being spoken to by the only member of it still functioning, and what it wants me to know before anything else is that it was obedient.

It isn't proud and it isn't victorious. Two hundred sixteen enemy fleets killed, and it has named none of them as an achievement. It has named the four hundred that never returned, and then it has explained, to a stranger, in the third sentence of the first conversation it has had in two hundred centuries, that the decision was never its to make.

"Warden," I say, and my voice cracks halfway through the word. "Nobody is coming. I'm sorry. I have read every record in eleven districts and I tell you as an archaeologist and I wouldn't lie to you about this. The four hundred aren't late. They're gone, and so is everyone who could have relieved you, and you have been holding a gate for a civilization that ended before anyone on my world learned to write."

The line doesn't change.

I calculated this. I did not conclude it.