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“Still here.”

“That was longer than eleven seconds.”

“It was exactly eleven seconds.”

“I'm going to check that later.”

“You're going to be extremely tiresome about it,” he agrees, “and I'm looking forward to that as well.”

At the fifth hour the building moves the command platform.

It lifts the whole floor we're standing on, console and trough and everyone on it, clear of the antechamber and out into the vault's open air, and sets it on a stem of white material in the open air a hundred meters above the rings, with no approach from anywhere at all.

Selka laughs until her legs give and she sits.

“It's put us in a safe,” she says. “Clara. It has decided we're records.”

From this height the whole thing is laid out and working. Nineteen chambers alight in sequence. The rings running in their layers, each at a speed of its own. And below, in the corridors, the slow patient rearrangement going on and on, shepherding all those armed men into rooms that connect to nothing, without harming a soul.

Draeven crosses to the platform edge and stands at my shoulder, bleeding in three places, having refused a seat twice.

“It's done,” I say.

“Not yet.”

He's looking down. I follow his eye, past the rings, to a gallery on the far wall where two figures are moving along a ledge the building has not yet chosen to remove, and one of the two has the padded case tucked against his side, and the other carries nothing at all because he has just drawn a very long blade.

CHAPTER 26

DRAEVEN

Rekk waits for me on a sliding platform ninety meters above the machinery, which is the correct choice, and I'll grant him that before I say another word.

He chose the ground. He chose a place where camouflage is useless, because the footing glows from beneath with all that turning machinery and I've nothing behind me to take colour from but open air. He selected a spot with no cover, no ceiling, and no way out except the route I came in by. He has been planning this for six hours while doing other work.

I have fought perhaps forty people who mattered. Two of them planned.

“You came,” he says.

“You waited.”

“I've been paid until dark.” He rolls the blade once, testing the air on it. “After that I'd have gone home and turned you over in my head for a decade, and my wife would have tired of hearing it.”

“You're married.”

“Two daughters. Don't do that.”

“Wasn't going to.”

“Good,” says Rekk, and comes.

Here is what I have, and it isn't much. Stored charge for perhaps three bursts, because the light in here is bright and constant and my spines have been drinking it for hours, which is the single piece of luck in the whole afternoon. A left shoulder with a hole punched clean through it that will hold for about four minutes of real work. Two blades. A platform eleven meters wide that keeps sliding under both of us because the structure has not stopped rearranging and cares nothing for the fact that we're on it.

He has forty kilos on me, a blade with twice my reach, and no appetite whatsoever for a long fight.

The first exchange lasts under two seconds and costs me a strip off the forearm.

The second costs him nothing.