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Nowhere twice.

Twice.

“Oh, you absolute menace,” I say out loud.

“Clara?”

“It goes nowhere at both ends. That's the twice. He's not telling us it's a road to nowhere, he's telling us to count the nowheres.” I'm already up. “Selka, if you built a four-kilometer marker to be seen from orbit, where would you put the entrance?”

Selka's spines go up.

“Not at the middle,” she says. “The middle is where anyone looks. At one of the ends. And you'd make the two ends identical so that a person who checked one would assume the other matched.”

They aren't identical. It takes us forty minutes of hard rowing to reach the southern terminus and eleven seconds to see it once we're there, because the southern end has a shallow dish worn into the top surface, exactly like the empty dome at the eighth cache, and the northern end does not.

The dish holds a hand's depth of rainwater. Under the rainwater is a ring of nine notched circles.

I set the eight artifacts into eight of them, in the order the projection gave us, and the ninth socket stays empty and my uncle's single sheet is suddenly the only thing standing between us and four kilometers of pointless rock.

“It's a sequence, not an object,” I tell them. “The artifact would press the sequence for you. We're going to have to press it by hand.”

“How many presses?” Draeven asks.

“From the jars? Forty-one.”

“And if you're wrong on any of them?”

“Then I'd rather everyone was in the boats.”

Nobody moves. Seventeen villagers stay exactly where they are, which is an argument I'm evidently not going to win, and Joren says something to Tilda about it being his causeway too, and Draeven crouches beside me over the dish and doesn't tell me to be careful.

That's what I notice. He's been closer than usual all day, and he has been over my harness twice, and he has put himself on the northeastern side of every boat we've stood in since Tilda spotted the wakes. But he hasn't once told me to step away, or offered to press the sequence, or suggested that a schoolteacher with two hundred jars of coloured water might be the wrong person for this.

“Go on,” he says.

So I go on.

Forty-one presses take nine minutes. On the twenty-eighth I lose the count and have to start the current band again from the top, and nobody says a word, and my hands are not steady and it turns out that doesn't matter as much as I'd feared.

On the forty-first, the dish drains.

Not away. Down. The whole southern terminus of the causeway lowers itself into the marsh, four meters, six, ten, with a sound like a held breath, and where the road used to finish there is now a shaft of white stone going straight down into perfectly clear water, lit from somewhere far below by a light that is thousands of years old and has never once gone out.

Behind us, seven wakes are close enough to see without glasses.

Draeven checks my regulator, and then his own.

“Two-sixty,” he says.

“Two-sixty.”

We go down together, and my uncle's swamp closes over the top of us, and I think: he did this alone. In the dark, for thirty years, and never told a living soul.

I'm going to fix that today.

CHAPTER 18

DRAEVEN