Page 11 of Kavan

"You should be asleep," he says.

"So should you."

"I've had four hours in two days. That's well within my design tolerance."

"That is a horrifying way to describe your own body."

He takes the water. In the low light his eyes catch what little there is and throw it back, and I've stopped finding that strange, which happened faster than I would have predicted.

"Rask had a sister on Corvane," he says.

I didn't expect that.

"I read the file when he was assigned to me. Everyone's file. It isn't sentiment, it's so that when I write to them I don't get the name wrong." He turns the flask in his hand without drinking. "Her name is Ines."

"Kavan."

"You have thanked me three times since the arch," he says. "Twice out loud and once by putting your hand on my shoulder in the flooded gallery when you thought nobody could see. So I'll say this while we're both too tired to be careful about it, and then I'll go back to watching the corridor."

"All right."

"You didn't kill him. Neither did I, although I'll carry him, because that's the arrangement I have with myself." He finally looks at me. "But fourteen civilians walked out of that fork because you read a wall. When the accounting is done, Doctor, do the whole sum. Not the part that hurts."

There's a version of me that says something clever here. She doesn't arrive.

"Sophie," I say instead. "If you're going to say things like that, it's Sophie."

His mouth changes, barely. It isn't a smile. It's smaller and slower and it costs him more, and I would like to see it again.

"Sophie," he says.

Behind me, Zuri says, "Uh."

She's at the far wall with a scanner in one hand and an expression I recognize from every dig I have ever run, and when we get there she doesn't explain. She just puts her palm on the wall between two columns and pushes, and the section moves.

It isn't a door. There's no mechanism, no disc, no glyphs. It's a slab set into a channel, balanced so finely that a woman who weighs fifty-five kilos can move it with one arm, and behind it is a stair going down.

"It was open a centimeter," she says. "The air was moving. I felt it on my ankle four hours ago and I've been talking myself out of it ever since."

Kavan has his lamp down the shaft. It goes a long way.

"Up is sealed," I say. "Every route back to the northeast district runs through their patrol. We aren't leaving by the route we entered, are we."

"No."

"Then we go down." I look at the stair, and at the ceiling behind me with all its rings, and at the man beside me who has decided that keeping me alive is a load-bearing part of his personality. "Whatever shut this place down is at the center. So is whatever the smugglers came for. We're going to reach one of them first, and I'd very much like it to be us."

CHAPTER 8

KAVAN

The stair drops four hundred meters and the last sixty are cut through volcanic glass, so we descend through our own reflections, nineteen lamps sliding down a black wall beside us like a second column of people going the same way.

Then the wall ends and nothing stands beside us at all, and Marchant makes a sound I have only heard from men who have been shot.

I have served on nine worlds. I have stood inside the drydock at Verrin Anchorage, which is the largest enclosed volume in League space and which people travel for a year to see.

This is bigger.