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We spend nineteen minutes sealed in that volume, and I use them badly — pacing a perimeter that has no gaps, testing a seam that has no seam, while Clara sits at the console and watches an archive give itself to the galaxy at forty-one wavelengths. Then part of the eastern face simply withdraws, and Cassian Vane steps through it with Rekk behind him and four men behind Rekk, and a padded case under his arm.

He didn't force it. Selka spends the rest of her life arguing about why, and her best answer, which I think is right, is that the building had finished sorting by then. It had put everyone somewhere. And having decided nobody in here could damage it any more, it began putting people back together.

That is not mercy. It's tidying.

“Miss Marlow,” says Cassian Vane.

He is not composed. I want that recorded, because everything else in this account gives him too much credit. His hair is wrong. There's dust down one sleeve of a very expensive coat and he keeps touching it. The man who arrived at that console like a late dinner guest has spent an hour and a half being moved around a building by the building, and something in him has come loose.

“Stop it,” he says.

“I can't.”

“You will stop it. You will reverse it, and now.” He sets the case down and opens it, and there they are, all eight of them, and beneath them in the lower tray, in a foam cradle nine months old, the ninth. “I have the complete set. All nine. Whatever you did with a partial assembly, I can undo with a full one, and you will tell me the sequence.”

“Mr Vane⁠—”

“They are the control system.”

“They're a doorkey,” Clara says.

The room goes very quiet.

“That's the whole of what they are,” she says, and she says it kindly, which lands harder. “Nine components, one function. They open the causeway. That's it. That's the whole job. My uncle spent thirty-one years hiding a set of keys and he was right to, because without them nobody gets in — but they don't do anything else. They don't run this place. They can't stop it. You could melt all nine down this afternoon and that transmitter would still be going in a thousand years.”

“That is not possible.”

“It's a filing system, Mr Vane. It was built by people who couldn't imagine anyone stealing a library, so they put a lock on the front door and nothing on the books.”

I watch twenty-nine years leave a man's face.

He looks down at the case. Eight pale artifacts and one that cost him four surveys, an unknown number of people, and an old explorer in a marsh, and all nine are now, functionally, keys to a door that is standing open.

“The archive,” he says. “The technology. There must be eleven million years' worth of⁠—”

“There's no technology.” Clara stands up. “That's the other thing, and I'd rather you heard it from me than found out in a year. Nothing down here is a weapon. No drive schematics, no power systems, no biology anyone can turn into one. I've had nineteen chambers and six hours and Selka has read more of it than any living person, and every single record in this building is the same category of thing.”

“Which is what.”

“It's a nature journal,” she says. “It's the biggest nature journal ever kept. They found dead worlds, they seeded them, they came back and wrote down what grew. Ten thousand millennia of somebody patiently taking notes on what happened.” She takes in the walls with one arm. “That's the treasure. That's what you had four expeditions killed for. Not a fleet. Not a weapon. A record of how every one of us got here, kept by people who never once tried to charge for it.”

Cassian Vane stands in an alien archive and totals up his own life.

I have seen men take a serious wound and keep talking for a minute before they understand. It looks exactly like this.

“Then it's worth nothing,” he says.

“It's worth everything. It just isn't worth money, and you never learned the difference.”

That's when he rounds on me, and I have been waiting for it since the wall opened.

“Tracker.”

“Vane.”

“You hold a bonded recovery contract. Reference nine-four-one, executed at Halvic Station, for the retrieval and delivery of one crystalline Precursor artifact taken by force from an unregistered site on this world.” His voice steadies as he says it, because paperwork is the last thing he has. “That artifact is in this case. The contract is live, the fee is escrowed, and I am, through three intermediaries you are perfectly capable of identifying, the client. Recover it and deliver it.”

So there it is. The thing Selka warned me about on a boardwalk two weeks ago, in front of witnesses, with the terms read out.