Page 27 of Kavan

"No idea."

"Are they lit?"

"Definitely not."

"Is the rail live?"

"Convergence woke when we stood on the platform, so possibly, and if it wakes while we're in the trench we'll be the most interesting stain in the history of archaeology." She looks up. "It's a bad plan."

"It's the only plan that doesn't cross open ground. We take it."

"You didn't even⁠—"

"Sophie." I crouch so we're level. "I stopped auditing you somewhere around the flooded gallery. If you tell me the trench goes to the spire, we're going into the trench."

Her mouth opens slightly and then closes on whatever she was going to say, and what stays on her face instead is something I want more time to look at.

We go at 0300 in three elements. Vesk takes four and puts a demonstration onto the northern causeway with everything we can spare in noise and nothing in ammunition, and the north and northwest positions reorient, exactly as I hoped and exactly as Rourke's people will also notice. Marchant blows the trench cover on the southwestern line with a charge cut down to two kilos and shaped by a man who spent nineteen hours reading about it.

Then twenty people descend through the floor of a dead metropolis and walk toward a gun.

The trench is four meters wide, roofed by the causeway, and the track bed is intact for the first kilometer and after that it isn't.

A two-hundred-meter stretch of roof has come down and turned the trench into a slope of broken causeway with gaps in it, and we go over the top of that slope with no lamps because the plaza above us is watched. It takes an hour. Ferreira goes over on the litter with four people on the lines and doesn't make a sound the entire time, which I'll remember about him.

Sophie is second to last. I'm last.

She's three meters below the crest with her hands on a slab as wide as a table when the slab decides it has held long enough.

I hear it start. There's a grinding, and a shift, and I'm already going down the slope on my heels with my hand out, and the whole face of it lets go at once.

I get her wrist. Just the wrist, and then her forearm, and the slope is running under both of us and I set my back against the causeway pier and take the load on my shoulder and hold.

Rock goes past us for six long seconds. Some of it is man-sized.

When it ends she's hanging against my chest with my arm locked over her back and both her hands closed in the front of my jacket, and the dust is settling, and above us somebody is whispering my name down the line and I can't answer yet.

"I've got you," I say.

"I know." Her voice has lost its footing. "You always do."

"Yes."

"Kavan." Her forehead comes down against my sternum and stays there, and I let it, and I lay my hand flat between her shoulder blades and hold her against me in a collapsed trench under a plaza full of machines that want us dead. "I can't do this part. The part where you catch me and we both act like it was reflex."

"It wasn't reflex."

"I know that too."

"Then say the rest of it somewhere that isn't here."

She laughs, one breath of it, unsteady. "That's a promise."

"That is a promise."

We come over the crest at 0520, and at the trench's far end there's a door, and past it a chamber with a shaft going up eight hundred meters to the surface of the island.

And down the shaft, faint and impossible and thirteen days late, comes the sound of rain.