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“Say the word,” she says after a long silence.

“No.”

“Draeven.”

“Not tonight.” I turn my head so I can look at her properly. “Tonight you’d say something back, and you’d mean it, and neither of us would ever be certain whether you meant it because it was true or because I was warm and the storm was loud. Ask me when you’re dry, and rested, and standing somewhere safe, and I’ll say it in front of anyone you like.”

She’s quiet for a while.

“That is,” she says finally, “the single most infuriating act of integrity I have ever been subjected to.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to ask you again.”

“I’m counting on it.”

We talk until the rain thins—about the last site, the leak at Rell Crossing, the two artifacts still in the ground. She tells me she isn’t leaving before it’s finished. I tell her I already knew. At some point she falls asleep mid-sentence, still halfway through a theory about the ninth artifact. I lie awake in the dark of a building that hasn’t held anyone in twenty years and, for the first time since I was nineteen, I make a plan that has no end date in it.

CHAPTER 13

CLARA

The eighth site is a bell.

That's the only word for it. We find it four days after the storm, in a bend of the deep marsh where the trees give out and the water runs shallow over a shelf of white stone, and rising out of that shelf is a dome eleven meters across with a doorway in the side and absolutely nothing in it.

No plinth. No cradle. No seal. Just a smooth interior, curved, and a floor worn into a shallow dish at the centre by something that stood there once and doesn't now.

“It's been emptied,” Draeven says.

“By who?”

“By your uncle. Look at the doorframe.”

He's right. There's clay packed into a seam near the hinge, the same river clay he mixed to patch the causeway roadbed, and it has Garrick's thumbprint set into it like a signature on a bad forgery.

“So where did he put it?”

“Somewhere he thought was safer than a Precursor vault,” Draeven says, and neither one of us finds that reassuring.

It takes me the whole run home to work it out, and the answer is so like him that I nearly throw the journal in the water.

He put it beneath the floor of his own house. In the same hinged compartment as the maps. It's been lying eleven centimeters from my knee every night I've spent bent over that table, wrapped in oilcloth, and I never opened the second bundle because the first held maps and I am, on the evidence, a woman who stops looking when she finds what she came for.

“Don't,” Draeven says, watching my face.

“I'm going to.”

“It cost you nothing. You had the maps. Without the maps the artifact is a paperweight.”

“I'm still going to.”

The eighth artifact is a lens. Or something that behaves like one, a disc of that pale material, two hands wide, and it's the only piece of the nine that isn't solid. Light goes into it and doesn't come out anywhere I can find.

We set all eight on Garrick's table at nine in the evening. Edda is there because she refused to leave. Joren is there because Edda is. Tilda came because she wanted to see it and said so, and Pip is asleep under the window because he refused to go home and then betrayed himself entirely.

“If this breaks the house,” Edda says, “you're rebuilding it.”