Page 10 of Kavan

"Marshal, I have been staring at Precursor floor plans for nine years and I finally got a complete one for ninety seconds before the lights went blue." She almost smiles. "Ask me for a district."

So I do. She draws it in the floor dust with a stylus, and it isn't perfect, and it's enough.

We move for six hours on her memory and my sightlines. Twice she stops the column at an unmarked wall and twice she's right. Once she's wrong, and we lose forty minutes backing out of a flooded gallery with the water at our thighs, and she apologizes to the whole team in front of everyone, which costs her nothing and buys her all of them.

At 1030 we come out under a vault I wouldn't have believed if a scan had shown it to me.

A temple. That's Marchant's word and nobody argues. The chamber is round, ringed with columns, and the ceiling is worked into a pattern of interlocking rings that continues past the reach of every lamp we own. There are no hooked glyphs on any of the three approaches, and no plate marks in the dust.

"Off the route," Larkin says.

"You're certain."

"I'm certain enough to sleep here, which is more certainty than anyone else has offered you today."

I post Vesk on the widest approach and take the second myself and put the third under a corporal who has stopped shaking. Then I go around the room and hand out ration bars, one by one, into twenty sets of hands, because it's all I have left to physically give them.

Larkin takes hers and doesn't eat it. She sits with her back against a column, looking at the ceiling, and I know without asking that she's already reading it.

CHAPTER 7

SOPHIE

Idon't sleep. I tell Kavan I'm sleeping, and he lets me lie about it, which I decide to count as a kindness.

The ceiling is the problem. Nine hours in this room and I can't stop looking at it.

The interlocking rings aren't decoration. Decoration repeats. This doesn't repeat, it iterates, each ring carrying a band of glyphs that modifies the ring inside it, and by hour three I've worked out that the innermost ring is a date and everything outside it is a count. By hour six I know what's being counted.

They're arrivals.

Every ring is a fleet. Every fleet is dated. The innermost is the oldest and the outermost is the newest, and there are two hundred sixteen of them, and the outermost ring is unfinished. Somebody was carving it when they stopped.

"You're making a face," Eli says. He has come to sit beside me with his back against the same column, holding his knees, his glasses pushed up into his hair. "You've been making it since 0400."

"How stable is a caldera throat that's been hollowed out and reinforced?"

"That's not an answer to what I said."

"It's the more urgent question."

He sighs. "Stable, if the reinforcement holds. Catastrophic if it doesn't. Why."

"Because they cut straight through it, and nobody tunnels a volcano to store grain." I point up with the stylus. "Eli, this room isn't a temple. It's a tally board. This is where somebody stood and marked down every time something came out of the sky at this planet."

He studies the ceiling for a while without answering.

"Two-sixteen," he says.

"And the last one is half carved."

Neither of us says the obvious thing, which is that people who are carving don't stop in the middle unless something stops them.

Zuri has the lamps down to a third to save power, and in that light the ranks of columns lose their edges, softening until you could believe there were people between them. Seventeen exhausted human beings are asleep on a floor no one has slept on since the Precursors left. A woman from the sediment team is crying quietly and pretending not to. Somebody has arranged everyone's boots in a row, which is such a small, absurd, human thing that it makes my eyes sting.

Kavan is on the eastern approach, where he has been for six hours, standing the way he stands, which I have learned means he isn't remotely relaxed.

I bring him water because it's the only excuse I have.