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CHAPTER 8

DRAEVEN

She spreads five artifacts across the floor of a ruin and tells me to stand back, which is the first sensible instruction anyone has given me in a month.

We're in the upper gallery of Sedge End, on the one platform that has kept a roof, because it's dry and defensible and nine minutes from open water in three directions. Rain comes through in two places. Joren has taken his boat out to the reed line to watch the approaches, on the grounds that he'd rather be bored than curious.

Clara has been awake for most of two days. I've said nothing about it, because when I raised the subject yesterday she informed me that I have slept four hours since we met and am therefore in no position to hold a seminar.

“Right,” she says. “The ring goes in the middle. It has to. It's the only one with an inside.”

“You said that about the spindle.”

“I was wrong about the spindle, and I'd like you to notice how gracefully I'm handling it.”

She sets the ring down. She works the crystal into the ring, base first, until the nine faces sit against the nine notches, and it goes in the way a key goes into a lock that has been maintained.

Nothing happens.

“Fine,” she says.

She turns it a quarter and the ruin fills with stars.

I have been in orbit above six worlds. I have seen a Kaleidian war fleet come out of transit over Kalei with the sun behind it. I put that on record so that what follows is understood as a considered judgment.

I have never seen anything like this.

It comes out of the ring in a column and then opens, and the gallery is gone, and we are standing inside a section of the galaxy roughly four meters across. Stars in their thousands, hanging in the dark, so dense in places that they run together into a haze. They are not decorative. They have depth. When Clara walks forward the near ones slide past her shoulder with the geometry of real distance, and she halts inside it with her hands over her mouth and stands there while a spiral arm turns very slowly through her.

“Draeven,” she says, from inside a galaxy.

“I see it.”

“Draeven, it's moving. It's not a picture, it's running. Those are proper motions.”

“Which means?”

“It means it's a clock.” She turns a full circle, and stars go through her. “If you know where the stars were when this was made, and you can see where they are now, you can read the date off it. This thing is telling us how long it's been alone.”

I take stock, because one of us has to.

The projection is incomplete. Whole regions are absent, not dark but simply not rendered, and the edges of the missing volumes are clean, geometric, and interlocking. There are gaps shaped for four more pieces.

And through the center of the whole thing, from one edge to the other, runs a line.

Not a star. A path. It has a start and it has an end, and both of them are inside the volumes we don't have.

“It's not an archive,” I say.

“It's not a treasure map either.” She's tracking the line with her finger and not touching it. “It's navigation. Somebody plotted a course and then built the chart to carry it.”

Nine artifacts. Five on this floor. One in a vault I will never be invited to. Three still in the ground, in a marsh, on a frontier world with no government worth the word, and a man with a decade's patience and unlimited money assembling the same puzzle from the other end.

My contract says recover one crystalline artifact and deliver it to a bonded agent at Halvic Station.

I look at four meters of turning sky in a dead village and understand, with total clarity, that I am not going to do that.

“Shut it down,” I say.