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We are halfway down the spiral when the sound starts—the low, patient tone of a building that has noticed something and is deciding. Every ring in the chamber slows. Then, over ninety seconds, the small ones stop.

Selka’s voice comes up the spiral.

“Draeven. The airlock has cycled.”

Clara’s hand tightens in mine once, and lets go, and she goes down the last forty steps ahead of me at a dead run for the relay. I permit it, because that’s the arrangement now and I gave my word about six minutes ago.

CHAPTER 21

CLARA

Cassian Vane comes into the relay chamber like a man arriving at a dinner he's slightly late for.

That's the thing nobody prepares you for. I had built a picture over five weeks, and the picture was wrong in every particular. He isn't armed. He isn't shouting. He's a trim man in his fifties in clothing designed for a climate that isn't this one, silver-haired, unhurried, and when he sees the eight artifacts laid out along the console he stops walking and puts one hand flat over his mouth like somebody at a graveside.

He stands there for eleven seconds.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, well done. Well done indeed.”

Behind him comes the reason none of us move. Rekk is enormous, ash-grey, with implants along the line of his jaw and a scanner rig across his shoulder, and eleven men fan out through the doorway around him with a discipline that makes Joren's fishermen look exactly like what they are.

Selka's hand is under the console. She's been transmitting for twenty-three minutes and needs seventeen more, and everything I say from this point is calculated to buy her one of them.

“You're Cassian Vane,” I say.

“And you are Garrick's Claire.” He turns from the artifacts with an expression of real warmth. “He wrote about you, you know. Not often. Four mentions across three decades, which for a man that private is a devotion.”

“You've read his journals.”

“I've read everything of his I could obtain, which for a long while was very little.” He walks the length of the console without touching anything, and stops at the ring. “I've been at this since you were in primary school. Twenty-nine years. Do you know how I found him?”

“I'd rather you told me about the eleven days.”

He pauses.

“I beg your pardon?”

“A freight record at Rell Crossing. Two passengers, empty hold, logged eleven days before my uncle drowned in a channel he'd swum since boyhood.” My voice is doing something I don't recognize and I let it. “Say it out loud in this room. There's a functioning archive on this console with an open channel, and it needs saying aloud.”

Cassian Vane studies me a while, and then he does something I will still be turning over when I'm eighty.

He looks relieved.

“You cannot imagine,” he says quietly, “how tiresome it is to be the only person who knows.”

“Say it.”

“I sent two men to Mountmend in the spring. They were instructed to make him an offer, and if he declined it, to make certain he was not in a position to publish.” He straightens a cuff. “He declined. He was extraordinarily rude about it, which I understood. And so, yes. I had your uncle killed, and let me be precise about this: I regret the necessity and not the decision. They are different things and I've yet to muddle them.”

Somewhere behind me, Joren says something under his breath.

“Why?”

“Because he was going to lose it.”

“He kept it for thirty-one years.”

“He managed that by being alone, which isn't a plan, it's a personality.” Cassian gestures, and it takes in the whole chamber, the rings beyond the doorway, the whole stopped sky. “Miss Marlow. Look at what he was doing. One man, unfunded, unsupported, with no institution behind him and no successor, protecting the most significant find anyone has made in the settled galaxy by writing in a private code and lying to fishermen. That is not custody. That is a hobby with a very high ceiling.”