Page 52

“Six. Perhaps eight. And the Authority team is coming down that shaft with an engineer and two linguists, and I would rather hand them a queued instruction than a building I’ve made worse by guessing before dawn on no sleep.” She closes the slate with a snap. “So. Everyone stops. That’s a professional recommendation and I’ll put it in writing.”

“Vane.”

“Is in a corridor somewhere with no exit and no components. Let the cutters have him.” Selka picks up her boots. “I intend to sleep four hours in a chamber full of the earliest known record of my species, which I will be telling people about until I die. Do not wake me for less than the ceiling.”

So the archive gives us a room.

It does it the way it has done everything since the afternoon, without ceremony and without asking: we walk into the eleventh chamber looking for somewhere quiet, and part of the wall withdraws where there was no opening an hour ago, and behind it is a space perhaps six meters square with a floor that is faintly, unmistakably warm.

Clara stops in the entrance.

“It made us a room.”

“It reconfigured a volume.”

“Draeven. It gave us one.”

“I’m aware of what it did.”

She’s laughing, and then she isn’t, and then both her hands come up to cover her mouth and she’s standing in that alien doorway, crying at last after eleven hours, and I get the door shut behind us before anybody else has to see it.

It runs on a while. I don’t try to stop it.

“Sorry,” she says eventually, into my chest.

“No.”

“I’ve been fine all day.”

“You were exceptional all day, which is a different thing and considerably more expensive.”

“That’s a horrible way to put it.”

“It’s accurate. You’ll be paying for today in instalments for about a year.” I get her sitting down, on a warm floor, in a room that did not exist before we needed it. “I can give you the timetable if it helps. It usually does.”

“Go on then.”

“Three days of sleeping badly. Two weeks where loud noises are unreasonable. Somewhere around a month you’ll be doing something entirely unrelated—washing something, probably—and you’ll find you’ve stopped, and you won’t know why, and that’ll be the man on the platform.”

“The one you⁠—”

“That one.”

“I wasn’t about to ask.”

“You can ask. Today, tomorrow, in nine years.” I mean it and I want her to hear that I mean it. “There is nothing I have done that you are not entitled to the whole of, and there’ll be no version of me that gets kept in a separate room. I’ve watched men do that to their wives for twenty years and it never once made anybody safer.”

Clara dries her face against her wrist, a gesture she picked up from a sixteen-year-old on a boat, and looks at me.

“Say the wives part again.”

“No,” I say. “Not on a floor, filthy, with a hole in my shoulder, on the day we did this. You get that properly or you don’t get it, and I’m aware you’ll make me suffer for the delay.”

“I absolutely will.”

“I’m counting on it.”

The rest of that night is ours.