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“Clara.” Draeven's voice, from a doorway that was empty a second ago. “Now.”

I go, and behind me the relay chamber comes apart, and the last thing I hear before the corridor swallows it is Cassian Vane saying, in a tone of enormous and genuine disappointment, that he would have given me anything I asked for.

CHAPTER 22

DRAEVEN

Eleven men around that console and perhaps ten times as many above them in the shaft, and the only advantage I have is that they want the building undamaged.

It isn't a small advantage. It is, in fact, the whole battle.

A crew that can shoot at walls beats me in ninety seconds. A crew that has been told, on pain of losing a very generous contract, that the walls are worth more than they are, has to think about every round it fires, and thinking is slow, and I'm not.

I take Clara three chambers deep and hand her to Selka.

“Central control,” I say. “Far side of the great chamber, up two levels. Selka, you know the route better than she does.”

“And you?” Clara says.

“I'm going to make it very difficult for anyone to work out where you've gone.”

“That's not the arrangement. You said I'd hear the plan.”

“That is the plan, entire. There'll be nothing heroic and I won't vanish — I walk them the wrong way for as long as it holds, then I come to you. If I'm not there in twenty minutes it's because I took a longer route and not because something went wrong.”

“Is that true?”

“It's probable.”

“Draeven.”

“It's the honest version, and that's what you asked for.”

She takes my face in both hands, which requires her to reach considerably, and then she's gone up the corridor after Selka and I stop thinking about her with an effort that costs more than I will admit here.

Then I go to work.

The observatory is built for people who were never in a hurry. Every corridor curves. Nothing runs straight for more than forty meters, and every chamber has three exits set at unequal intervals, and the walls are that same pale material that takes and holds whatever colour is put against it.

Nineteen years have taught me to be difficult to see in swamps. This building is a gift.

The first two go down in the eighth corridor without ever locating me. The third gets a shot off, into the ceiling, and I hear the shouting that follows and understand that somebody senior has just reminded them about the walls.

After that they group. Four-man elements, back to back, sweeping by the numbers.

Good. Four men who are watching each other are four men not watching a wall.

I take the next pair at a corridor junction using nothing but stored charge and the fact that the human eye tracks motion at a certain speed and gives up above it. I take the one after that from directly overhead, from a ledge he walked under twice.

By the fourth engagement they have stopped calling it a sweep. I can hear it in the radio discipline; the transmissions get shorter and more frequent, and a crew that transmits every eleven seconds is a crew that is checking whether its friends are still alive.

Rekk finds me at the twenty-minute mark.

He doesn't come at me. That's the first intelligent thing anyone has done since the airlock. He walks into the middle of a junction chamber, alone, sets his weapon on the floor, and waits, and when I don't oblige him he speaks to the room in a voice like gravel going down a chute.

“Kaleidian. You've got eleven fishermen stacked behind sample cases downstairs and a woman going up the west spiral.”

So they've found the barricade, and somebody saw Selka's route.