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CHAPTER 20

DRAEVEN

Sixty-eight minutes.

That’s what I have. Selka is transmitting out of the relay chamber and needs forty. Tilda has the airlock charges wired and needs twelve for the secondary. Joren has seventeen fishermen behind a barricade of Precursor sample cases in the entry corridor, and has spent the last quarter of an hour teaching them to fall back in pairs rather than in a crowd.

Everything I can do is done. There is a stretch of about twenty minutes now in which my presence anywhere makes no difference at all, and I’ve spent two decades learning to hate that interval and use it.

I go and find her.

She’s not in the inscription room or the ninth chamber. She’s up the spiral, near the top, where a gallery runs out over the main volume on a bridge of white stone that has no rail because the people who built it did not have our relationship with height.

From up here the instruments are underneath you. All of them. Half a kilometer of turning metal, and at this elevation you can finally see that they aren’t independent—the small fast ones sit inside the slow ones, and the whole assembly is one machine, and the machine is a sky.

Clara is sitting on the edge with her boots hanging over ten thousand years.

“Don’t say anything about the drop,” she says.

“Wasn’t going to.”

“You were absolutely going to.”

“I was going to sit down beside you and say nothing about the drop, at some volume.”

So I do. It takes a moment to arrange myself; the bridge was not built for Kaleidians.

“How long?” she asks.

“Sixty-four minutes.”

“Then I’m going to use twenty of them badly.” She doesn’t look at me. “Tell me all of it.”

“Of what?”

“Of uveth.” Now she does. “You gave me a definition in a kitchen. It was a beautiful definition and you gave it like a man defusing something. But you’ve been carrying this since day one and I got four sentences, and I’d like the whole of it before we go down there, please, because I’d rather not find out the important part from a stranger in a hospital.”

There is no honest way to refuse that.

I tell her everything I left out the first time—the permanence, the asymmetry, the way the recognition sits in the body like a second pulse that never fades. She listens without interrupting, eyes bright and furious and not remotely sad by the end.

“That’s monstrous,” she says.

“It’s biology.”

“It’s monstrous and you’d have let it happen to you rather than put one finger on the scale.” She turns to face me properly. “Draeven, I need you to understand something and I need it to land, because there are sixty minutes left and I won’t go into a firefight with you still doing arithmetic about my motives.”

“Say it.”

“I didn’t know.” She takes hold of my hand with both of hers. “I didn’t know what uveth was on the causeway. I didn’t know at the well, or during the storm, or the night I cancelled the flight. I hadn’t heard the word. Whatever I decided, I decided with nothing on the scale except you.”

“I know that.”

“You don’t. You keep re-deriving it.”

That’s true, and there’s no defense for it, so I don’t offer one.

“Then tell me the other word,” she says. “The one for the person who chooses. You said you’d teach me after we surfaced, and I’ve decided I don’t accept the terms.”