Page 20 of Kavan

"Don't."

"That's not a request I can promise you."

"I know," he says. "Do it anyway."

Then Vesk is at the alcove mouth shouting for a head count, and Kavan is up and gone and being a marshal again, and I lie there for two more seconds with my hands shaking so badly I can't hold the case.

We lost Aldani. Ferreira has a fragment through the thigh and Mirek's arm is broken in two places. The smugglers took the east concourse and pulled back with nothing, because the four cases were behind me the whole time, and the ceiling that would have told them how to reach the center is now gravel.

They can't read their way in either.

Nobody can, except the woman with the rubbings.

CHAPTER 14

KAVAN

We travel inside the walls for two days and the city fights itself without us.

The gutters make it possible. A meter wide, forty centimeters of dust underfoot, and inspection ports every hundred fifty meters that give a slot of the world outside no wider than my hand. Through those slots I watch a war I didn't start and can't influence, and I learn more about both my enemies than four years of intelligence ever gave me.

The constructs don't pursue into the gutters on the regular. It doesn’t do to be part of their route, but I see evidence that they have gone into gutters in the past. Just not as routine.

They hold junctions and they wait, and when a smuggler element tries a plaza they take it apart from three sides with a coordination entirely free of rage. Twice I watch Rourke's people break contact and withdraw in good order under fire, dragging their casualties, and the professional part of me that I would prefer to keep quiet is impressed.

And they're going where we're going. Every contact I observe is further west and further down than the last. On the second morning I put my eye to a port above the ninth terrace, watching two men set a bridging plank across a gap on a route that leads exactly one place.

"They've reached the same conclusion," Sophie tells me when I brief her. "They don't have the map anymore, but they don't need it. Everything down here drains toward the spire."

"Then it becomes a footrace."

"It became a footrace when the ceiling came down." She's walking with the drone hardcase strapped across her back and Ferreira's weight on her shoulder, and she has been carrying him in rotation with Marchant for six hours and has refused twice to hand him to a security officer with fresh legs.

That's the third thing worth recording about these two days.

Ferreira can't walk. Mirek can't use his right arm and can't get through the low sections without help, and the low sections come every few hundred meters. A version of this movement exists that goes twice as fast, and every officer under my command knows what it is, and not one of them has said it out loud, because on the first morning Sophie put her pack down at a crawl-section and got under Ferreira herself without discussion, and the argument ended before anyone made it.

I have led soldiers for nineteen years. I know precisely what it costs a person to carry someone through two hundred meters of meter-high tunnel on their forearms. She does it, and then she does the glyph work at the other end with her hands shaking, and she's accurate.

On the second night Vesk comes to find me at an inspection port.

"Say it," I tell him.

"She'd have made a decent sergeant."

"She'd have been a terrible one. She argues."

"So do the good ones." He settles against the wall. "You've stopped putting yourself between her and things."

"I have not."

"You have. Now you put her behind things and you go and deal with the thing." He looks at me sideways. "That isn't caution, sir. Caution keeps everybody equally alive."

I let that stand, because the alternative is answering it.

We find the core on the third day, in a signal vault the gutter runs straight through, and it ends any belief I had in coincidence.

It's a rack of forty cells like the archive emitters, and thirty-eight are empty, and two are not. Sophie gets both out and one crumbles in her hands and she makes a small ruined noise I haven't heard from her before. The other is intact, black, as long as a forearm, hairline-cracked down one face.