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“Don't come down,” I call up.

“I'm already down.”

She is. Of course she is. She's on the line two meters above me with the lamp between her teeth, and I decide that this argument is one I will have later, in a place where losing it is cheaper.

“Twenty-two seals on the shaft,” she says, once she's on the floor. “Nine on the plinth. Give me a minute.”

She takes eleven.

I spend them standing between her and the grooves, which accomplishes nothing whatsoever, and doing it anyway is the most instructive part of my week.

“Got it,” she says. “The shaft seals aren't a lock. They're a counter. You press them on the way down, one per descent, and it logs how many people are in the chamber. The plinth won't release unless the count is right.”

“Right being what?”

“One.” She turns. “It's built for one person. Two is a robbery.”

“And we pressed nothing coming down.”

“Which means it currently thinks the chamber is empty, and an empty chamber is either fine or extremely not fine, and my uncle's warning was about counting, which suggests he found out which.”

So we climb, and press, and I stay above with a hand on the line while a schoolteacher goes down a Precursor murder shaft alone, and those are the worst four minutes I have experienced in a decade of professional risk.

The plinth opens for her. The grooves stay grooves.

The seventh artifact is a rod, waist-length, the darkest of the nine.

We eat on the mudbank afterward because she's shaking too much to be useful and I'd never say so.

“You were going to tell me something,” she says. “Before I went down. You started a sentence.”

I had. I had opened my mouth with a word already loaded, in my own language, which does not survive translation and which every Kaleidian child learns before they learn to hold a blade.

Uveth. Recognition is the nearest human term and it isn't close. What the word actually carries is a prohibition: you hold your tongue until the other one is free to leave without cost, because afterward they can never again be certain of their own answer.

She has known me nineteen days. She has a life on another world, a school year starting, a return ticket.

“It keeps,” I tell her.

“Does it.”

“It keeps.”

She studies me for a while over a ration tin, and whatever she sees, she lets it go, and that restraint costs her something I can see and can't repay.

“Fine,” she says. “But you should know I'm extremely good at waiting people out. I get thirty children a year who think they're better at silence than I am.”

Here is what has actually changed, and I record it because I would like there to be a record.

Nineteen days ago I put a civilian on a bank and went to read the ground alone, because civilians are cargo with opinions and the job is to deliver them intact.

Today I stood at the top of a shaft and let her go down into it, because she was right and I was wrong and the count had to be one.

That is not protection. Protection is what you give something that cannot act. What I did today is what you offer somebody who can, and I have no framework for it, and I notice I am not looking for one.

CHAPTER 11

CLARA