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“I'm not paid to care about either,” Rekk says. “I'm paid to hold this building for six hours. You can spend that time killing my people one at a time in the dark, and you'll get maybe thirty of them, and then you'll get tired, because everybody does.” He picks the weapon back up. “Or we can do it properly at some point, you and me, and whoever's left walks out.”

It is, professionally speaking, a courteous offer.

“Not yet,” I tell the room.

“No,” he agrees. “Not yet.”

I break west, which is wrong, and that's precisely the point. I make enough noise doing it that four elements converge on the west spiral, and I am halfway up it when the building does something.

The corridor I'm in narrows.

Not collapses. Narrows. Both walls close by roughly two paces over ninety seconds, smoothly, with no sound at all, and the ceiling follows, and I clear the gap into the chamber beyond with perhaps four seconds to spare, and behind me stands a slab of white material where an eight-meter corridor used to run.

I lay a palm against it. There's no seam. There has never been a seam.

I find Selka in the antechamber below central control, and she has already worked it out, because she has been watching walls all day while I have been watching men.

“It started nineteen minutes ago,” she says. “Four corridors so far, all of them off the eastern approach.”

“It's herding.”

“It's sorting. Draeven, there's no mechanism in this building that could kill anyone — I've been through nineteen chambers and found not even a pressure plate. But it can move its own mass. Which means the only defense a structure like this has ever needed is to stop being the shape you memorized.”

“Who's driving it?”

“Nobody. It woke when Clara pressed the final position and it has been thinking about us ever since.”

Clara is up the last flight, on her knees in front of a console shaped for people three meters tall, with her one page flattened against the floor by her elbow and Selka's slate propped in her lap.

She doesn't look up. “I need forty minutes and I don't have the artifacts.”

“Rekk has them.”

“I know. It matters less than I feared.” She turns the slate. “Look. Every one of the nine is a door key. That's all they ever were. Uncle Garrick assumed they were the control system because he never got this far. Four visits, and not once did he climb the west spiral, because he was alone and he was sixty-eight and it's two hundred steps.”

“And the actual control system?”

“Is the building. It's had a console this whole time. It doesn't need a key, it needs an instruction, and the instruction is in the last four lines of his cipher, which I have been reading as a bearing for five weeks because that is what all the others were.” She finally looks up, and her face is filthy and her fingers won't hold still and she has never looked more like a person doing exactly what she is for. “It's not a bearing at all. It's a verb.”

“Saying what?”

“Publish,” Clara says. “He worked out that it could publish itself, and he wrote the instruction down, and then he sat on it for nine years because the moment he used it he'd have had every government in the sector on this marsh.”

Below us, four levels down and a long way off, something very large begins to move.

“How long to enter it?”

“Forty minutes. Thirty-five if nobody talks to me.”

I look at Selka. Selka looks at the antechamber, which has one approach, a ceiling I can reach, and no cover whatsoever.

“Joren's people?” she asks.

“Falling back in twos and doing it properly. Tilda has the secondary charges on the airlock and will not fire them while anyone is below her, which is a problem for later.” I set myself where the approach opens and let the colour come off me entirely. “Thirty-five minutes.”

“Draeven,” Clara says, without turning round. “Twenty minutes ago you told me you'd come to me.”

“I came to you.”