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Four depositories. Confirmation from the first inside eleven minutes, the second at nineteen, the third and fourth together at half past. And a fifth response, which nobody asked for and which Selka reads twice before she can speak, from a university on a world I've never been to, requesting permission to convene an emergency session and asking, with enormous formality, whether the discovering party might be available to address it.

“Tell them yes,” I say. “Tell them Wednesday. I have a village to fix.”

We come upon Cassian Vane below, in chamber nine, and he isn't hiding.

He's sitting on a sample case with the padded case open at his feet and all nine components laid across the floor in a row, in the correct order, which he must have worked out from watching me. He's set them the way somebody lays out cutlery.

He looks up when the doorway opens.

“It's in four depositories,” I tell him.

“I know. My counsel reached me twenty minutes ago.” He says it without inflection. “They were very thorough. They have already begun using the word insolvency, which I thought was premature, and then they explained the exposure.”

“Two hundred witnesses upstairs will testify you hired them.”

“There are three hundred and eleven, and yes, and they will, because they were mercenaries and not martyrs and I never once pretended otherwise to myself.” He touches the ring with one finger, straightens it a half-degree. “Do you know the truly unbearable part, Miss Marlow? It isn't the money and it isn't the prosecution. It's that in about a month somebody at a small institution with no funding at all is going to publish the first serious paper on this archive, and they will do it from a free transmission, and I will read it.”

“That's not the worst of it,” I say.

“Isn't it.”

“What's truly unbearable is that Anwen Reyes would have published it in eleven years' time and you had her killed for a lead you never used.”

He goes very still.

And then Cassian Vane stands up, and leaves the nine components lying on alien stone, and walks past us out of the chamber with the unhurried courtesy of a diner leaving his table, and the structure lets him go, because at no point this entire afternoon has it grasped the difference between one person and another.

“Let him,” Draeven says, behind me. “The cutters are docking. There's nowhere on this planet left to him that isn't a locked box.”

So we let him.

I have gone over that decision perhaps four hundred times.

The three of us stand there, Draeven and Selka and me, and between us we settle nine irreplaceable pieces into their foam cradle with the care they were owed three decades ago, and above our heads a building keeps telling four hundred worlds where everybody came from.

Draeven is grey around the mouth and has not sat down in eleven hours.

“Now,” I say.

“Now,” he agrees, and sits down where he stands, quite suddenly, on the cold floor of the archive, and lets me strip the jacket away without one word of argument.

That's when the note underfoot changes.

Not much. A quarter-step down, the way a held note goes when a singer runs out of air, and every ring across the vault hesitates in its layer for the length of a breath before finding the rhythm again.

Selka's head comes up.

“That wasn't us,” she says.

CHAPTER 28

DRAEVEN

The tone steadies inside a minute, and Selka spends nineteen of them at the console before she’ll say a word, which tells me it’s serious and equally tells me it isn’t immediate.

“Something asked it a question in the control core,” she says finally. “Badly. It’s a malformed instruction and the building has queued it rather than run it, which—Draeven, sit down, I can see you deciding to go—which means we have hours, not minutes. It queues everything. It has done so since its builders walked out.”

“How many hours?”