Page 12

“It's been lifted,” she says. “And put back. That's what happens to my classroom garden when the kids replant something badly. It lives, but it sulks for a year.”

I get down and put my hand on it, and under the mat the stone gives, very slightly, the way a plate gives when it isn't sitting flush.

A pressure section. Precursor, original, and until eleven days ago covered by a growth that had sealed it harmless since the makers left. Somebody scraped it clean, tested it, and laid the mat back down over an armed trap set in the only road across this water.

They did that for us. There is no other traffic here.

I lever a stone off the broken edge of the segment and drop it on the strip from four meters back.

The road opens.

Not a blast. Something worse and much older: a section of causeway two meters long simply ceases to be structural and drops into the channel, taking the stone with it, and the water goes over the gap and keeps going, and inside eight seconds there is nothing to indicate that a person walking there ever existed.

Clara sits down on the wet stone.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay. I need a minute and then I'll be fine.”

“Take two.”

“I don't need⁠—”

“Take two,” I say. “I'm going to want you thinking clearly in about an hour, and you can't do that while your hands are like that.”

She looks at her hands as though they belong to somebody she's only met socially. Then she laughs, badly, once.

“That was a good catch,” I tell her.

“It was a garden.”

“It was nine hundred years of pattern recognition applied by someone with ninety seconds and no equipment.” I have said more in that sentence than I usually say in a working day, and I find I'm not finished. “I walked this road twice this morning. I read the water, the sight lines, and the anchor points, and I did not look at the moss. You did. That isn't luck, and I'd prefer you stopped calling it that.”

There is a silence of a length I have no way to interpret.

“Well,” she says at last, in a voice slightly off its usual pitch. “Now I want three minutes.”

The cache sits under the sixth segment, in a chamber the causeway was built to carry, and Marlow got into it originally by cutting a hole in the roadbed and then patching it with river clay mixed to match, which took him, by the evidence, several visits.

The third artifact is a flattened ring, wide as my palm, dark where the others are pale.

Clara has all three out on the stone inside a minute, ignoring me entirely, turning the ring against the crystal and then against the cone.

“They're not a set,” she says.

“They're the same material.”

“Same material, different jobs. Look. The crystal has nine faces around the base. The cone has nine facets around the rim. This has nine notches.” She turns the ring so the light catches it. “It isn't nine pieces of one thing. It's nine of something else, and each of these is a copy of the count. He wasn't just splitting up a machine. He was hiding a number.”

Nine.

Eleven sites. Nine of something. And a broker somewhere with enough money to keep four men in a reed blind for a decade.

I get her clear of the causeway before the light goes, and she keeps station off my shoulder exactly as she has all week, and halfway across eight hundred meters of very old stone I stop pretending about one thing.

I have carried civilians before. I have kept them alive because a dead client is a professional failure and because I am not, whatever the frontier says, a man who leaves people in water.

That is not what happened on that road.

When the road opened and she was standing eleven meters from it, I did not calculate. There was no assessment, no ranking of assets, no consideration of the artifacts in her bag. There was only a single flat certainty, arriving from somewhere below thought, that whatever else occurred today, she was not going into that channel.