Page 14

Draeven finds the cache in the fourth alcove. I find the second stair.

It goes down again, from the corner of the shrine floor, into a chamber the humans clearly never used, because the doorway is Precursor and it is sealed with the same notched circle, and it opens for me the way the first one did.

The fourth artifact is a spindle, palm-length, dark as the ring.

And the fifth is beside it.

We are both inside that chamber, with two artifacts and no free hands, when something above us goes off with a sound the water turns into a fist.

The shrine roof comes down in three places.

I don't get a chance to be frightened, which I gather is common, and which I resent. There is an enormous amount of noise and then none at all, and my light has died, and so has his, and there is a slab of a stranger's temple across my legs, and the water in the chamber is going down.

That last part takes me too long to understand. Going down. The chamber is airtight, was airtight, and something has opened it, and as the water leaves, the roof above us stops floating and starts weighing.

Then his hands find me in the dark.

He doesn't ask whether I'm hurt. He says nothing at all. He works down my body to the slab, sets his shoulder against it, and lifts a piece of masonry I could not have moved with a machine, and holds it, and keeps holding it, while I drag myself clear by handfuls of somebody's floor.

He lets it down. The sound it makes is the sound of the space I was in ceasing to exist.

“Artifacts,” I manage.

“I have them.”

“Both?”

“I have them, Clara.”

He carries me up the second stair and across the shrine floor and up the first stair, and the water drops from over my head to my chest to my waist, and we surface into rain and grey daylight and the most obscene relief I have ever felt.

There's a boat leaving fast on the far side. Two men in it. Draeven doesn't even look.

“They didn't come for the cache,” I say, once I can. “They came to bring the roof down.”

“Yes.”

“They'd rather nobody had it than risk us getting it.”

“Yes.” He sets me on the stone with a gentleness that has no relationship to what he just did with his shoulder, and then he stays crouched in front of me, going over me for damage with an efficiency that is, I notice from a considerable distance, not remotely efficient. He has checked my left ankle three times.

“I'm all right,” I tell him.

“You were under a temple.”

“I'm all right.”

He stops. He's kneeling in the rain in a ruined basin holding my ankle in one hand like it's a bird, and he looks up, and I look down, and neither of us does anything about it at all.

That's the moment I stop lying to myself.

Not in the water. Not under the slab. Here, afterward, in the rain, with my hair full of four-hundred-year-old silt and a man who cannot say a single true thing about his own feelings saying all of them with his hands.

“We should go,” he says.

“We should,” I agree.

Neither of us moves for another four seconds, and I count every one of them.