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“Then we build it.”

So we build a verb.

Twenty-nine of the forty minutes go to it. Nothing I have ever done was harder than this, not the causeway, not the well, and this time there is no cipher to lean on. Garrick never reached this console. He reasoned that a rebuild had to be possible from the logic of the machine, and he set the instruction down in plain human words, trusting that whoever reached this point would have learned enough of the makers' grammar to translate it. He is, in other words, still setting me homework from the far side of a drowning, and the assignment is this: render a human sentence into an alien one, correctly, at the first try, while the building comes apart around you.

Selka does the grammar. I do the thing I'm actually for, which is reading intent — not the words, the person behind the words, the way you read a child's answer and see the question they thought you asked.

Restore off the earliest copy. Not the most recent sealed state. The very first. From before the makers ever ran it. The blank index, the factory map, the thing the building was before it was anything.

We enter it at thirty-eight minutes.

The trough dims to nothing.

It stays dark for six seconds, which is four seconds longer than it has ever gone dark before, and across those six seconds the sound underfoot climbs to a pitch that reaches my teeth, and the rings across the vault all halt in the air together, hundreds of them, an entire galaxy frozen mid-turn.

Then it acknowledges.

And Draeven, who has said nothing this entire time, who has been standing at the approach with a blade in each hand watching a corridor for the man we all know is coming, says, very quietly, without turning round:

“Clara. He's here.”

CHAPTER 30

DRAEVEN

Cassian Vane climbs the approach to the raised floor alone, with no case, no weapon in view, and the particular calm of one who has run out of things left to lose.

That calm is the dangerous thing. Nineteen years in rooms with people who wanted something has taught me that anyone who wants something can be read, redirected, and outlasted. Vane doesn't want anything now. He has watched an open transmission pour out over four hundred worlds, he has watched a schoolteacher refuse to sell him the meaning of his own life, and somewhere in the last hour the wanting has burned off him and left only the wish to be the last thing that touches this.

“It's rebuilding,” he says, looking past me at the frozen rings. “I can see it. You've told it to forget.”

“To forget the ten millennia of itself it’s learned,” Clara says, from the console. “Not the records. It keeps those.”

“Of course it does.” He sounds almost fond. “You'd have found the one instruction that saves the part nobody can sell. He'd have been proud of you, incidentally. Your uncle. He talked about you the way people talk about a will they haven't written yet — the person who'll deserve the thing when I'm gone.”

“Leave it,” I say.

“I'm not manipulating her, tracker. I'm past it. I'm making conversation with the last people I'll speak to who understand what this is.” He halts at the platform's rim, ten feet from Clara, and I move to put myself in the line and he watches me do it without interest. “You think I came up here to stop the rebuild. I can't stop the rebuild. Nobody can, that's rather the point of what she's done. I came up because there is one thing left that is still mine to decide, and I'd like a witness who'll set the account down accurately.”

His hand travels to his coat, and I'm already moving before it lands, and what he draws is not a weapon.

It's a data core. Small, matte, the kind of thing that holds a very great deal.

“This is the only complete record of my network,” he says. “Twenty-nine years. Every buyer, every broker, every official across four hundred worlds who took my money to look the other way while people like your uncle were removed. Names, dates, transfers. The Authority will need a decade to reconstruct a tenth of what sits on this core, piecing it out of rumour, while half the guilty die comfortable.”

Clara has turned from the console. “Why are you telling us this.”

“Because I'm going to give it to you.”

The silence that follows has weight.

“I've thought about it for the whole descent,” Vane says, and the manners crack at last and something old and tired shows through. “Prison awaits, which I can survive, or a bullet from one of the people on this core before I ever reach a courtroom, which I find considerably more likely and which I would prefer to disappoint. So. I can go to trial as the man who trafficked the Precursor archive and murdered Garrick Marlow. Or I go as the figure who handed the frontier its largest corruption case in a generation, from inside, and took four hundred people down with me.” He turns the core in his fingers. “One of those is a footnote. The other is a legacy. You'll understand I've always cared a great deal about legacy.”

“That's not remorse,” Clara says.

“No,” Vane agrees. “I told you as much weeks ago. The necessity I regret; the decision I don't. I haven't changed. I've simply run out of decisions that go my way, and I'm taking the exit that irritates the greatest number of people I hate.” He holds the core out. “It is the truth, and it's the cruelest thing I can do to the people who assumed they'd outlast me, and those two facts have finally arrived at the same address. Take it.”

I take it, because Clara can't reach it and because I trust his self-interest more than I would ever trust his conscience.