Page 19 of Kavan

It comes in without a sound. That detail is the one I can't get past afterward, that a machine the length of four buses arrives at a platform after two hundred centuries without a sound, just resolves out of the tunnel mouth with a strip of amber running along its flank, and settles, and opens.

Nobody moves. Then Eli says, "Is it inviting us," and Bee Halloran laughs and it comes out wrong and she covers her mouth with one hand.

The amber strip flickers. Along the platform edge, a line of glyphs I last read on the plinth upstairs lights up and begins to repeat.

I read it four times to be sure.

"It's an advisory," I say. "It's a service advisory. The network is at—there's a fractional element here, I think it's twelve parts, and it's saying four. Four of twelve. Partial activation. Kavan, the defense system isn't awake. It's a third awake."

"And the other eight parts?"

"Waiting on the command core. Everything we've run from down here is what a quarter of this place does when it's annoyed."

The car's amber dies. The doors stay open. Whatever woke in it has already gone back to sleep and I could lie down on the platform and cry about it.

We're still cataloging the ceiling map when they hit us.

It starts with the lamps. All of ours die at once, every unit, and in the two seconds of absolute black before Kavan's voice arrives something patters across the concourse steps like rain, and the rain is shell casings.

"Down! Records to the west platform, security on me!"

I don't remember deciding anything. I have four record cases and the drone hardcase and I'm on my stomach behind a stanchion pushing them ahead of me one at a time while the air over the concourse comes apart. Muzzle flash paints the vault in stutters. Somebody is screaming instructions in a language I don't have, and somebody closer is screaming in one I do.

Then a voice comes over the concourse address system, calm and amplified and pleasant.

"Doctor Larkin. My name is Cassian Rourke."

I keep crawling.

"You have four cases of Precursor records that you cannot read at speed and I have eleven specialists on retainer who can. I am also, unlike your marshal, entirely willing to leave this city with everyone in it alive. Set the cases down and step away from them."

"Sophie!" Kavan, from somewhere left. "Don't answer him!"

I wasn't going to. What I do instead is get the fourth case behind the stanchion, and that's when the charge goes off under the east platform.

They were never trying to take the concourse. They were cutting the ceiling.

Twelve hundred square meters of relief map, the only complete survey of this city that exists anywhere, comes down in one piece and then in ten thousand.

I get two cases into the service alcove. I go back for the third with the vault opening up above me in a spreading crack that runs the whole length of the hub, and I close my fingers on the case, and a slab the width of a shuttle hatch lands where I was kneeling four seconds earlier.

"SOPHIE."

He comes through the falling ceiling. There's no other way to describe it and I won't soften it later. He crosses forty meters of collapsing concourse in the time it takes me to stand up, and his arm goes around my ribs and lifts me off the ground entirely, and he turns his back to the vault as he runs, which means every piece of it that was going to hit me hits him instead.

We go into the alcove hard. My shoulder takes the wall. He takes the rest.

The noise goes on for a long time. When it stops there's dust so thick that my lamp makes a solid cone of it, and I lie flat on my back with Kavan braced over me on both forearms and his head down, and we hold there without moving.

"You went back," he says. Not loudly.

"There were three thousand years of⁠—"

"You went back."

"Yes."

He lifts his head. There's blood along his hairline and down the side of his neck, and his eyes in the dust-light are very bright and not remotely calm.