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“You have a hole in your shoulder.”

“I'm aware of it. It's the least interesting thing in this building.”

She holds my gaze a moment, and then does the one thing I don't expect, which is stop arguing.

“Okay,” she says. “Then tell me what you need and I'll do it, and the second those cutters dock you are sitting down and I'm getting that jacket off you even if it needs scissors, and you will not enjoy the conversation.”

“Agreed.”

“Suspiciously fast, that.”

“It was,” I say, and take up a position where I can see both approaches.

And I catch her, in the reflection off the trough, watching me do it, wearing something I will spend years failing to describe.

CHAPTER 27

CLARA

There are two ways to publish something, and the difference between them is the whole reason my uncle waited nine years.

Since the afternoon, what the building has been doing is shouting. Omnidirectional, unencrypted, no addressee — the raw record, going out on forty-one bands to anybody with a receiver and the patience to sort it. It cannot be halted now, nor recalled, and a century from now it'll still be arriving somewhere.

It is also, legally, worth almost nothing.

Selka explains this to me at the seventh hour, sitting cross-legged on a platform in mid-air with her boots off, in the tone of a specialist who has waited a whole career to say it.

“An unauthenticated broadcast is a rumour,” she says. “A very loud, very detailed rumour with no provenance attached. Vane's people will argue in six jurisdictions that it's fabricated, and they'll lose eventually, and eventually is nine years and four appeals.”

“And the other way?”

“A deposit. Signed record, chain of custody, survey conditions, named witnesses, lodged straight into an accessioning repository with a legal duty to keep it and no power to sell it.” She spins the slate toward me. “The Authority has four. Two of them are outside his reach. If we file properly, then in about ninety minutes this becomes the best-documented find the field has on record, and after that nobody can ever claim it was faked, because the primary source will be sitting in a legal depository with my name and yours on the front of it.”

“What do you need from me?”

“Your uncle,” Selka says. “All of him. Thirty-one years of survey, in order, with the cipher key.”

So that's the last thing.

It takes near enough three hours, most of it from memory, because the journals sit in a house on the far eastern boardwalk with a smashed door and the only copy I have down here is the one I wrote into the archive itself with my thumb on a console rim while a man explained why he'd had my uncle killed.

Which turns out to be the point. The archive gives it back. Every value, every press, every reconstruction — exactly as I entered it, in the identical format the makers used, with a timestamp the building generated itself.

No better provenance exists anywhere than a Precursor machine confirming the hour at which you told it something.

Selka builds the deposit around that. I supply the survey. She supplies the credentials and the chain and the professional language that turns a schoolteacher's five weeks into an admissible record, and somewhere near the ninth hour she stops and lifts her eyes to me across the trough.

“Whose name goes first?”

“Garrick Marlow's.”

“Clara, he never filed anything. Not one paper in thirty-one years. There'll be an argument.”

“Then have it. He found it, he understood it, he protected it for three decades and he died holding the door shut.” I don't look up. “I came for a house. Put his name first and mine underneath, and put yours next to mine, and put the village in the acknowledgment, all seventeen of them, by name, spelled the way they spell it.”

Selka does something with her face and gets on with the filing.

We send it at nine hours and forty minutes.