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Not because she would refuse, though she would. The reason is that I've watched her for twenty-six days, in a flooded shrine and a counting shaft and a burning village, and I have not once seen the expression she is wearing at that rail.

She looks like somebody who has stopped bracing.

For twenty-six days some part of that woman has been holding a door shut against September. Against an empty flat. Against a class list and a floor-polish smell and a life she is extremely good at and does not want. She cancelled a ticket more than a week before I gave her any cause to, and I believed her, and I still did not fully understand it until I saw her let go of the rail with both hands to point at something.

This is what she was for. Her uncle spent forty years building a puzzle to find a person who would do the work, and the person turned out to be a schoolteacher who reads handwriting like a physician reads a limp, and she has just walked into the room he was protecting.

I would take on Vane's entire complement in a corridor before I would shorten this by an hour.

That is not a professional assessment. I have run out of those.

“Draeven!” she calls down, and her voice comes back off five hundred meters of stone. “Draeven, come up, you have to see what it does when you stand in the middle —”

“Two minutes,” I say, and go to set charges at the airlock instead, because someone has to be the person who does that, and because I intend to give her every minute the arithmetic allows.

Four kilometers above us and thirty minutes behind, a scout on the northern terminus of a causeway that reaches nothing at either end finds a shaft that is no longer sealed, and a set of relays that stopped transmitting in sequence, from the top down, like a man walking a line and switching off lamps.

He reports it exactly that way.

On the lead boat, Cassian Vane listens to the report twice, and then says, to nobody in particular, that after eleven years he is rather looking forward to meeting the tracker.

CHAPTER 19

CLARA

The inscription room takes me forty minutes to break, and I want it recorded that most of the credit isn't mine.

Selka does the linguistics. My contribution is noticing that the wall repeats.

It's four hundred meters long and covered floor to ceiling in continuous Precursor script, and about nine meters in, a cluster of eleven marks appears that I have seen before — not here. On a ceramic plate in the flooded stilt of a dead fishing village, scratched by my uncle before firing, copied faithfully from somewhere.

He'd been in this room.

“That's a section header,” Selka says, when I show her. “It recurs every fourteen meters. Different suffix each time.”

“It's a catalogue.”

“It's a catalogue. And if these are volume markers, then the wall isn't a text, it's an index to a text, which means the actual⁠—”

“The actual thing is somewhere else.”

We find the reader in the ninth chamber. It's a dish, three meters across, set into the floor, and it wakes up when Selka puts her hand into it and does not ask her permission for anything that follows.

The room fills with people.

Not projections of people. Records of them, standing at their own scale, and they are not shaped like anything I've met: tall, thin, four-limbed, with a stillness to them that reads as enormous patience or enormous grief and I've never managed to decide which. They do not speak. They are not addressing us. They are simply what was recorded, going about a task, in a room somewhere that no longer exists.

And behind them, the sky.

What we watch, over the next six hours, in fragments, out of order, with Selka translating a third of it badly and guessing at the rest, is this.

They were not an empire. That's the first thing that goes, and it goes hard, because every story anybody tells about the Precursors assumes an empire. There is no evidence of one here. There are no borders, no fleets, no conquests. What there is, chamber after chamber, is the same activity performed for what the instruments say was eleven million years: they went out, they found worlds that were sterile, and they seeded them.

Not with cities. With bacteria.

They put the beginning of life onto dead worlds, and then they left, and then they came back in a hundred thousand years to see what had happened, and they wrote down what they found. Every single time. Castus is in the catalogue. So is Kalei. So, and Selka has to sit down when we get to it, is Earth.

They didn't build us. Let me be careful about this, because it's the part everybody is going to get wrong and I want the record to be exact from the beginning. They didn't design anybody. They put a starting condition on a rock and walked away and let it do whatever it was going to do, and eleven million years later they had a catalogue of several hundred thousand experiments, most of which failed, some of which produced something they clearly did not anticipate.