Page 75 of Deep Alien Obsession

"They've been there the whole time," I say.

"They have been there forty minutes and Tomas has been extremely difficult about it."

I put my name to it.

He signs beneath me, and then, because he is who he is, he transmits it, and four hundred meters below us a very old maintenance intelligence logs a task with no scheduled end against two names on its roster and returns, without comment, an acknowledgment.

FILED.

Tomas starts the noise and everybody else joins in, and somebody has brought a stove onto a Precursor observation gallery, which is against about nine regulations I helped write, and the party runs until dawn, deep beneath a city that is not dying anymore.

Late on, I sit at the edge with my legs over the drop and Darius's shoulder against mine, and I do the arithmetic.

Ninety days. Nine worlds behind me, and none held on to me. A city I was sent to triage. A man I met in a room with no windows and disliked for approximately four hours.

"What are you thinking?" he says.

"That they sent me here to write down which parts to give up on."

"And?"

"And I'm going to be here so long they'll have to put my name on the wall downstairs," I say. "Crooked. Under yours."

He puts his arm around me, and the markings light, and overhead the city goes on breathing.

CHAPTER 40

DARIUS

Two years on, the thing I notice is the noise.

The spine at shift change sounds like a street. Boots on slate, a tram on the eastern reach, four hundred people talking in two languages and a third happening between them — a pidgin of Alzohn nouns and human verbs that would appall my mother and does the job in half the words.

This corridor spent six hundred years hearing only its own lights.

I still write reports. So: atmospheric index holds at nominal in every district and has for six hundred days. Emergency reserve draw, zero. Unplanned outages last year, nine, all closed inside a shift. Two districts marked for staged abandonment in the brief Claire arrived with are now the fastest-growing tiers on the planet, which she mentions about once a fortnight and will mention forever.

The figure that matters is different: eleven hundred people work underground who had no work three years ago.

The schools opened in spring. The first at the Cistern, where the duty board now carries so many names that a second has gone up on the opposite wall. The second among the sleeping alcoves, which took the Council eleven months to approve and Claire four minutes to argue for.

Sixty-one apprentices in the first cohort — thirty-four human, twenty-seven Alzohn, and one volunteer supervisor of fifty-three who sterilized masks during the bad month and decided, at an age when most people stop deciding, to retrain.

Ottoline runs the registry and is terrifying about rosters. Tomas took the safety directorate and swears at councilors instead of engineers, which he says pays better. Ovel runs training and is still surprised when people listen. Helena sits in the Assembly, which is no longer advisory. Rhyss chairs it.

Elys Marr was convicted on nineteen counts and is serving twenty-two years. I sat through every hour, as promised. He made his argument. It was answered by four hundred pages of filed records and one laundry keeper who took him apart without raising her voice.

The archive is published. All of it, to anyone who asks.

That caused more argument than anything else we have done. Serious people wanted Paragon holding the only working knowledge of Precursor systems in explored space, because leverage is safety. The Custodian settled it by declining to discuss it.

I WILL ANSWER ANY CREW THAT FILES CORRECTLY. I HAVE NEVER DONE OTHERWISE. THE INSTRUCTION PREDATES THIS CITY AND WAS NOT WRITTEN BY IT.

Four Coalition delegations sit under us at any given moment, a joint survey team works the eastern branches, and a young woman from a mining world who arrived with no credentials and considerable nerve now runs her own section.

Claire still files her entries. Every evening, eleven minutes, after the queue. Two years of them. She has told it about the vestibule, and the Lung, and the day District Nine got its air back, and the thermos, and my face when the handlers cleared a gallery I had condemned in writing.

Six weeks ago it did something new.