“It neededbeings.It needed a male who wouldn’t stop investigating for eight rotations no matter what it cost him. It needed a door to let a bought human walk through so there’d be a thread to pull. It needed a grid failure dramatic enough that somebody would eventually be brought in to look at the old network.” I stop. “It needed an engineer.”
“It brought you here,” Rook says.
“Andrew brought me here.”
“Andrew found a contract,” Chief says. “On a rock that runs entirely on a crystal that decides things.”
Cayzor puts the crystal back in his pocket. “It wants Margol. It’s always wanted us. It doesn’t want to bemanaged, it doesn’t want Royal Pigment in the deep levels, it doesn’t want the big drills, and it will go dull and grey and give nothing at all before it will let itself be taken by beings who think it’s only a commodity and doesn’t treat it well. And a House on Chronos spent eleven rotations trying to take it anyway. So it did what it could. It couldn’t name them. It couldn’t testify. It couldn’t stop them from killing our parents.” A pause. “So it kept a light on in a corridor until somebody walked down.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Mara
Something’s wrong with Cayzor this morning.
He’s been off since yesterday, quiet in a different way than his usual quiet, wound so tight I can see it in his shoulders. He did Lucas’s bottle without a word. He’s checked the door twice.
I’ve decided it’s the union. He’s been the head of the Miners’ Union for eleven diurnals and he’s got eleven thousand beings looking at him and he doesn’t sleep anyway, so of course he’s like this.
“You can say no to the tunnel-safety thing,” I tell him, hunting for my other boot. “You’re allowed to say no.”
“Mara.”
“Mm?”
I turn around.
And Cayzor of Eighteen is on one knee in the middle of our front room.
My first thought is that he’s hurt.
I’m serious. That’s genuinely where my brain goes, because a seven-foot Margol Xylan does notkneel, it’s not a thing they do, and the sight of him folded down onto the floor of our apartment with one knee under him makes something in my chest lurch. I’m already moving toward him.
“What happened, is it your back?”
“I’m not injured.”
“Then why are you on the floor?
“Leah told me this is how humans propose.”
And I stop dead in the middle of my own front room with one boot on.
“Mara Wilson.” His voice is absolutely level and his hands are not. “I’m asking you to perform the hand-clasping ceremony with me.”
The apartment goes very quiet. And what comes up in me isn’t joy. It’s something hot and awful and I don’t even see it coming. “Don’tdothat.” My eyes are stinging. “That’s not funny, and I know you don’t do funny, so it isn’t a joke, which means it’spity, and I would honestly rather you’d hit me.”
He doesn’t move.
“You scented me.” My voice cracks straight down the middle of it. “In that kitchen. Nine months ago, you stood right there and you told me, and Ibelievedyou, and do you have any idea what it has cost me to make my peace with that? Every day lying next to you, desperately wishing we could kiss and have hot sex and yet knowing it’s never going to happen. But at the same time we love each other, so I stay. And now you want to put me through a ceremony we both know comes back negative so I can be humiliated in front of your entire family?”
“Your scent changed.”
“What?”
“Yesterday.” He’s still on one knee. “In the kitchen. You went past me for the plates.”
I did. I remember it. I brushed his arm reaching for the top shelf and thought nothing at all about it, because I’ve done it four hundred times.
