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“No,” I say.

“That is your licence.”

“It is.”

“Nineteen years and a bond you cannot replace, over an object you were paid to collect.”

“You've misread the contract,” I tell him. “I don't blame you; almost everyone does. A recovery contract obliges me to recover cultural material and return it to lawful custody. It does not oblige me to hand a Precursor artifact back to whoever took it. You are that man, and you established as much yourself, beside an open archive channel, ninety minutes ago, with an Authority archaeologist listening.”

Selka raises a hand. “Transcribed and appended,” she says. “It's in the record with everything else. It's on several hundred worlds by now, which I admit is more than the situation strictly required.”

Rekk makes a sound. It might be a laugh.

“So the licence goes,” I say. “They'll take it inside a month and I'd like to be clear that I understood that before I opened my mouth, because I would rather be somebody who counted first.” I step across and put myself where I have been putting myself since an island four weeks ago, and I stop pretending it is tactical. “I'm not recovering your artifact, Vane. I'm not delivering anything. As of the moment you named her uncle, the only thing I am doing on this world is standing between you and her, and I intend to go on doing it after your money runs out.”

A silence follows, in which a very rich man understands he has nothing left to buy anybody with.

“Rekk,” says Cassian Vane.

“It's over,” Rekk says. “The transmission's away. My people are in eleven separate boxes and the building keeps making more. You're paying me to hold something that can't be held.”

“I am paying you for six hours.”

“You are.” Rekk rolls his shoulders, and the scanner rig comes off and hits the floor, and he draws the long blade off his back with the unhurried competence of a professional who has looked forward to one thing all day. “And there's four of them left.”

Around us, the building keeps rearranging. The note in the floor climbs by a fraction. Somewhere out in that turning sky, an instrument that has held its alignment since before Kalei had cities begins, very slowly, to swing.

“Clara,” I say. “Back to the console. Whatever it does next, be somewhere it has already decided is safe.”

“And you?”

“Told you the plan. All of it.” I let the colour go out of me and take the blades off my back. “Now comes the difficult part.”

CHAPTER 25

CLARA

The building starts closing doors it should not be closing, and I have about six minutes to explain to it that it has misunderstood.

I'm at the trough with Selka's slate propped against my knee when the readout changes. Up until now every line has been the same: chambers reporting, records queued, transmission nominal. Then a column I haven't seen before opens on the left and begins filling from the bottom, and Selka reads it and goes the colour of old paper.

“It's isolating,” she says.

“Isolating what?”

“Chamber nine. And fourteen. And — Clara, it's cutting them loose. It's severing the physical connections and it will seal the interfaces, and once those interfaces are closed I don't know that anything short of the makers can open them.”

“Why would it do that?”

“Because there are armed strangers in the corridors and it has decided the safest configuration is fewer rooms.”

And there it stands. The archive is protecting itself by amputation. It will survive the afternoon, and it will do so by sealing four chambers of irreplaceable record behind a surface with no door and no seam and no history of anybody opening one, and it will remain perfectly content with that outcome forever.

“Tell me how to stop it.”

“I can't. I don't know the vocabulary.” Selka's hands are flat on the console rim. “We have three verbs, Clara. Scope, qualifier, publish. That's the entire grammar either of us can produce reliably.”

“Then we use those.”