Page 8 of Kavan

"What did you do?" Zuri says.

"I didn't⁠—"

The ribs overhead reverse.

Then everything happens in the wrong order. The vault throws itself into motion. A wall of dark material comes down across the north arch fast enough to make wind. Orrek is shouting for the door and I'm running with everyone else, and the nine-meter slab we came through is already sliding out of its cavity, and it's faster now than it was when it opened, and Rask gets three researchers through the gap before it stops being a gap and becomes a wall, and Rask is on this side of it with us.

The noise it makes when it seats is very final.

"Comms," Orrek says.

Vesk has his unit up. "Dead."

"Beacon."

"Dead, sir."

"Relay through the drone lattice," Zuri says, already working. "Give me thirty seconds." She works for closer to ninety, and then she sets the controller down on the plinth very carefully, which is how I know. "There's no carrier. There's no carrier anywhere. It isn't jamming, it's just—gone."

Half a kilometer of rock over our heads at the shallowest reading, and Helena somewhere on the far side of it, and no way to tell her anything at all.

Orrek is already counting. He does it out loud, walking the bowl, touching each person on the shoulder as he passes, and I understand the point of it before he finishes. He's making twenty-two frightened people feel individually located.

"Twenty-two," he says. "Fourteen research, eight security. Everyone is standing. Marchant, injuries."

"Two lacerations, one wrist. Nothing that can't wait."

"Then it waits. Neris, I want every powered device we have inventoried in ten minutes, and I want to know how long the batteries last if we run them at half." He turns. "Vesk, the arches. Find me the one the rock didn't finish sealing."

Everyone moves. That's the piece of him I missed three days ago. He doesn't calm people down. He gives them a job and lets the job do it.

I stand in the middle of a map of a buried world and feel the floor of my life tilt.

Four ring positions. That's all it took. Four, seven, two, and a fourth I found on my own and turned nine notches because the frieze told me to, and I did it fast, without asking anyone, and now twenty-two people are sealed under a mountain.

"Doctor."

He has come back around the plinth. Up close there's dried blood in his hair from the ceiling and he hasn't touched it.

"I did this," I say.

"Yes."

It goes through me like cold water.

"You opened a door in a structure nobody has entered in twenty thousand years," he says. "The structure responded. That's what happened. It isn't the same as what you just said to yourself, and you must be clear about the difference, because in about four hours I'm going to need you thinking."

"You warned me."

"I warn everyone. It's the job." He looks at the projection, at the pale enormous thing turning slowly above us. "I have been on Osiris four years hunting people who wanted this and couldn't find it. Whoever left those prints found it. If you hadn't opened that door, they'd have opened it in a month, with nobody down here to stop them."

"That's a very generous reading."

"It's an accurate one." He doesn't soften, and that's what makes it land. "Blame is a surface activity. We aren't on the surface."

Behind him, far out in the dark past the collapsed arches, something begins to move.

CHAPTER 6