Page 7 of Kavan

Something shears loose above the ring.

I move before I decide to. I get her under me and take the weight across my shoulders and back, and the noise of it is enormous, and a chip of something opens my scalp above the left ear.

When it stops, she's looking up at me from eight centimeters away with dust in her eyelashes and no fear in her face whatsoever.

"You're bleeding," she says.

"You're pinned."

"Those are both true."

I let her up. Around us, half the research team is flat on the floor and the other half is against the walls, and Marchant is swearing in a low continuous stream that is doing a great deal of good for morale.

"Nobody move," I say. "Rask, count heads."

Larkin doesn't move. She stands in the settling dust with her hand still on the stone, and the amber lines are still spreading, and she starts to laugh.

"Doctor."

"It isn't an altar." She turns to me lit up the way she was at the seam, and I hold my hands at my sides. "Marshal, this isn't an altar and it isn't a shrine. Look at the projection field, look at the way the light indexes. This is a table. It's a map table."

"A map of what?"

"I don't know yet." She's already reaching for it again. "But somebody was standing exactly here three days ago, and they didn't take a single artifact from this room, which means they weren't here to steal."

"Then what were they here for?"

"The same thing I am." Her hand settles back on the plinth. "They wanted to see the map."

CHAPTER 5

SOPHIE

The map takes twelve seconds to build and I stop breathing for most of them.

It rises out of the plinth in amber, layer on layer, and keeps going long after I expect it to stop. First a chamber. Then a district around the chamber. Then a lattice of districts, transit lines threading between them, reservoirs, a spine of vertical shafts descending through all of it like the roots of a tree. It fills the bowl of the floor, climbs past my shoulders, and keeps unfolding until Zuri steps back to stay out of it.

"Sophie." Eli's voice has gone thin. "Sophie, what's the scale bar."

I find it. I read it twice, because the first time my brain refuses the number.

"Eleven hundred square kilometers," I say.

Nobody responds.

Osiris's main island is fourteen hundred. We're looking at a city that runs under nearly all of it, and the ten square kilometers our orbital survey found is one district, in the northeast, at the shallow end.

I walk into the projection because I can't help myself. Amber light goes through my hands and my sleeves and doesn't warm them. Up close the transit lines resolve into stations, each tagged with a glyph cluster. I can read maybe a third of them. One says something very close to granary. Another I've seen only on a Threshold fragment, where the accepted gloss is muster.

Granary and muster, side by side. Farming and soldiers in the same city, under a resort planet.

"There." Eli points into the light at a shaft near the center, wider than the others by a factor of ten. "That's your volcanic vent. That's the caldera throat. Sophie, they built through it."

The sound of the room changes.

It isn't loud. It's the opposite of loud. It's a drop in pitch somewhere far below the floor, the way a building feels different when the ventilation comes on, and the amber projection flickers once and steadies and turns from amber to a cold white-blue.

Across the whole span of it, in a slow wave rolling outward from where I stand, the districts begin lighting up.