Page 18 of Deep Alien Obsession

"Very okay."

I lie awake a while. A human engineer's hair across my chest, a bad knee braced over my leg, and I run the arithmetic I have avoided for three weeks and find it comes out the same however I turn it.

Then I sleep too.

I wake before she does.

The light sits where we left it. The vestibule is dark enough that the far wall doesn't exist. And I know, without looking, without moving, precisely where she is.

Not her weight. Not her breathing. Her. A bearing held steady in me the way a compass holds north, and beneath it something with texture — she is dreaming, the dream is not a bad one, and I could tell you its temperature.

I raise my hand and look at it. The markings across my wrist are still faintly warm, and I can see them, which means they are still lit eight hours later. That does not happen. Nothing in Alzohn medicine or Alzohn poetry says it happens.

Claire shifts against me and says, eyes shut, voice thick with sleep, "You're awake. You're — " a pause while she reaches for it — "you're up near the ceiling somewhere. Thinking."

She is not touching my face. Her eyes are closed. She is entirely correct.

"Yes," I say.

"Don't," she says, and puts her arm across me, and goes back under.

Tomas breaks through at 09:40, over the last of the rubble with a cutting rig and considerable momentum, and finds us on that bench, fully dressed, entirely composed, a meter and a half apart.

He stops.

"Right," he says. "Well."

Neither of us offers him anything. He knows regardless. So does the wall.

CHAPTER 9

CLAIRE

The bond changes the work first, and the work gets frighteningly good.

Day twenty-five, Sublevel Fifteen. A live purification feed at four-fifths pressure with a hairline in the coupling housing. Routine repair: two engineers, one clamp, one hydraulic set, and maybe eleven seconds between isolating the feed and the housing giving up.

We do it in seven, without speaking.

I know where his hands are going. Not a guess — I set the clamp into a space he hasn't cleared yet, because he's about to clear it, and he does, and the clamp is waiting. He alters his grip and my elbow leaves the arc before the movement starts. When the housing shudders I'm bracing half a second early, because he heard it, and it reached me like a shove.

Tomas watches from the walk, hand over his mouth.

"Do it again," he says when we're clear.

"No."

"I want to film it."

"Never."

It changes the map too.

Four days of concordance against relay triangulation, and late on day twenty-six it resolves. The under-volume has a spine — one enormous corridor running its whole length, everything branching off that, and exactly one entrance on our side of the rock.

It lies beneath the foundation raft of Founders' First, sixty-one meters under the layer the schematic calls bedrock.

We go down and look on day twenty-seven, and it takes me a while to make my mouth work.