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“Tomorrow,” he says finally. “The marked site.”

“Tomorrow,” I agree.

And I go on sitting there with my hand in his, thinking about a word my uncle scratched into fired clay forty years ago, which was, roughly translated, careful.

CHAPTER 6

DRAEVEN

The fifth site is a causeway, and I don't like it before we get there.

Marlow's warning is one reason. The other is the shape of the approach. A raised stone road runs eight hundred meters across open water, Precursor work, half-sunk and broken into segments, and there is no way onto it and no way off it except at either end. Whoever laid it out was not thinking about ambush. Whoever wants to use it against us doesn't have to think very hard either.

I put Clara on a mud bank with the plate and the two artifacts and instructions I have low confidence in, and I go and read the ground first.

What I find occupies most of the morning and rearranges the entire contract.

There's a blind on the eastern shore. It's good work. Cut reed over a frame, low profile, sited for the prevailing wind, with a drainage trench so the floor doesn't turn to soup. Nobody builds that for one job. I strip it and count.

Eleven ration wrappers, five different manufacturers, and the oldest is a Kellan-issue dry pack that stopped being produced nine years ago. There's a firepit under a slab with ash compacted in layers. There are four separate boot patterns pressed into the clay under the frame, and one belongs to a size and gait I already know, because I found it on the island where this started.

Somebody has been sitting on this marsh, in shifts, for the better part of a decade.

That is not theft. Theft is opportunistic. This is a siege, conducted patiently, against a single old man who kept refusing to die usefully, and the only reason it took a decade is that Marlow was better at hiding things than they were at finding them.

Until four months ago, when he stopped being a problem, and then a schoolteacher landed at Rell Crossing with his key in her pocket.

I go back for her at midday and don't tell her yet.

“You found something,” she says immediately.

“Why.”

“Because you've come back the quiet way instead of the annoyed way.” She's already packing the plate. “You have two silences. This is the other one.”

Nineteen years of professional stillness, catalogued in eleven days by a woman who teaches multiplication.

“Later,” I tell her.

“That's fine. I'll be insufferable about it later, then.”

The causeway is worse up close.

Six segments still stand clear of the water. Between them the road is under anything from a hand's depth to a meter, and the stone is slick with the same growth that covers everything here, and nothing resembling a rail, because ten thousand years ago whoever walked this didn't need one.

I take the front. Clara stays two paces back and to my left, which she worked out for herself on the third day and has done since without being asked.

At the fourth segment she stops.

“Draeven.”

“Keep moving.”

“No, look at the growth.”

I study the growth. It covers the stone in a continuous mat, dull green, ankle-deep, across the full span of the segment.

Except for a strip about a meter wide, running the full width of the road, where it grows thinner and paler.