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I look at my uncle's handwriting on a sheet of paper weighted down by my own elbow, in a room he never reached, at a word he never used.

“Draeven!”

“Go,” he calls back, from somewhere extremely loud.

So I lower a hand into the trough and ask a ten-thousand-year-old building to speak.

For three seconds nothing happens at all, and I have time to think: this is the part where it doesn't work, this is where I find out he was wrong, and forty people came down here trusting a schoolteacher's reading comprehension.

Then the whole world wakes up.

It starts as a change in pressure. Then a sound comes up through the floor, the walls, the bones of my legs, low and enormous, the same tone as before but with intent behind it now, and it goes on rising until it stops being a sound and becomes a condition.

Out past the doorway, the stopped sky begins to turn.

Not the way it was turning before. Faster, in layers, each ring finding its own speed, and the light comes up with it — not lamps, there are no lamps, the material itself brightens until you cannot look at the lower galleries. Nineteen chambers of storage light up in sequence like a street at dusk. Somewhere below, the airlock corridor opens itself to a width that would take a boat.

And the building starts moving its own mass.

This is what I will never manage to describe to anyone who wasn't there. Whole sections of floor take a step sideways. A gallery that ran east now runs north. The west spiral, which is two hundred steps and the only way up to us, folds itself flat against the wall from the bottom, tread by tread, in under a minute, and eleven mercenaries on it go down four levels into a chamber that seals behind them without injuring anybody at all.

It isn't a weapon. I want that on the record too, because it matters. In six hours, in a structure as large as a town, with a hundred and fifty armed intruders loose inside, that archive does not kill one person. It rearranges until they are somewhere that doesn't matter, and then it resumes what it was doing.

What it is doing is talking.

Selka is at the readout with both palms flat to her cheeks.

“It's transmitting,” she says. “Clara. It's transmitting the whole thing. Every chamber, every record, eleven million years — omnidirectional, forty-one bands, no encryption, no key, no addressee.”

“To who?”

“To anyone. It's not aimed. It's just — out.” She turns, and there are tears on her face and she is laughing. “Have you worked out what he built? He didn't hide a treasure. He hid a switch. And the switch makes the thing impossible to own, because in ninety seconds there will be receivers on four hundred worlds with the first packet on them, and you cannot sell what everyone already has.”

Which is precisely when the floor under the antechamber decides to be somewhere else.

Draeven gets a hand around my arm and pulls, and Selka goes flat, and a section of wall eleven meters long slides between us and the approach with the unhurried inevitability of weather. There's a sound beyond it that I decline to think about. Then quiet.

We're in a sealed volume with one console, three people, and no door.

“It's put us somewhere safe,” Selka says, wonderingly.

“It's put us where it can control us,” Draeven says. “Those aren't the same.”

There's blood coming from a line above his eye and his left forearm is open again along the seam I stitched shut three weeks ago, and he is standing between me and a wall that has no door in it, out of pure habit.

“It's still going,” I say, watching the readout. “It'll keep going. It has no further use for us.”

“Then we've done it.”

“We've done the part that matters.” I get up off the floor. “Cassian Vane is loose in this building with nine artifacts, no exit, and a century of conservation practice behind him, and he has just watched the only thing he ever wanted become free.”

Below us, deep in the moving architecture, something other than the building begins to force a door.

CHAPTER 24

DRAEVEN

The wall opens for him. That's what I keep coming back to.