Page 4 of Kavan

"Marshal—"

"Twenty minutes. Vesk sweeps it, then the drone maps it, then you." I meet her eyes and hold them. "You made me a promise on the cliff."

"I made you no promise. I ran out of things to say."

"I'll take it."

She goes in behind me. That's the only part that matters.

The passage runs level for a dozen meters and then begins to descend, and the walls change from dressed basalt to something smoother that my lamp doesn't reflect off correctly. The air coming up out of it is warm, and it's moving, and it carries the mineral flatness of deep water.

Air only moves if there's somewhere for it to go.

Whatever is under this island isn't a chamber, and it isn't a complex. It's breathing.

CHAPTER 3

SOPHIE

The corridor opens out at the bottom of the descent and I stop walking, because I have to.

Precursor sites are ruins. That's the deal you make with the discipline. You spend a career on foundation lines and collapsed vaults, reconstructing a civilization from the negative space where its architecture stood. Nobody in my field has stood in a Precursor room with the walls still on it.

I'm standing in one now.

The passage runs forty meters past my lamp and doesn't end. The walls are that same seamless dark material, warm to the touch, and every six meters they carry a band of relief carving at chest height, running into the dark like a sentence nobody finished. The floor is dry. Twenty thousand years under a volcanic island in a monsoon belt, and there isn't one puddle.

"Tell me the lattice is getting this." Zuri's voice is tight with the effort of sounding professional.

"It's getting it, and it doesn't like it. Depth returns are garbage past thirty meters."

I put my light on the nearest band and forget them both.

The carving is figural, which is extraordinary on its own, because the standard model says the Precursors didn't depict themselves. Two rows of tall narrow forms face a sphere with lines radiating out at even intervals. Above them runs a repeating glyph cluster I have seen exactly twice, on a broken lintel on Threshold and in a photograph from a dig on Perrin that nobody can reach anymore.

Both times, it sat above a doorway.

Here it runs unbroken for forty meters, which means either it doesn't mean doorway, or this whole corridor is one.

I follow it with my hand on the wall, and the material stays exactly as warm as my palm, so I can't tell where I end and it starts. I'm so far inside the problem that I miss the change in the carving until I'm three steps past it.

I go back.

The band drops to waist height here and the cluster changes. Same first two elements, different third. Below it, flush with the wall, sits a disc of paler material the width of my two hands, cut with three concentric rings.

"I've got a mechanism," I say.

Orrek is beside me before I finish the sentence, and he doesn't ask me to move. He occupies the space between me and the corridor ahead and puts his lamp where I need it without being told, a small thing that saves me forty seconds, and I notice it anyway.

The rings turn, all three independently, with a weighted resistance that means counterbalance rather than gearing. Every ring carries eleven notches.

Eleven is wrong. Precursor mathematics is base twelve. Eleven notches means one is missing, a missing notch means an alignment, and an alignment means I must know what this thing counts.

So I stop touching it and read the wall.

It takes twenty minutes. The frieze above the disc shows the two rows again, but the sphere has moved, tracked across three panels, and in each panel a different number of radiating lines is filled solid. Four, then seven, then two.

This isn't a picture. It's an instruction.