Page 41 of Kavan

"You've been carrying that township for eleven years," she says, "and I need it set down before you go and stand at that aperture. Not because you deserve to. Because I need the man at that rail to be the one who's here, and he isn't, he's still four meters from a burning cordon waiting for permission."

"That isn't how it works."

"It's exactly how it works. That's the only way anything ever works." She turns to face me, cross-legged, filthy, absolutely certain. "You asked command for confirmation because you were twenty-five years old and you wanted somebody to carry it with you. And nobody did. And you decided that meant you had to carry every single thing alone for the rest of your life, and that was eleven years ago, Kavan, and it has not helped one person in Ilun. Not one."

"I know that."

"You know it. You have never once believed it." She takes my ruined hand, carefully, in both of hers. "So believe it here. Look up and take it, because eighteen people in this sphere are alive right now, specifically and entirely, on decisions you made without consulting a soul, and if you can't count that as evidence then you aren't being rigorous, and I don't love a man who isn't rigorous."

And it goes.

I should be precise here, because I have had years to build a description of this and it turns out to be nothing like what I expected. It isn't absolution. Nobody says it wasn't my fault, and I'd have refused it. What happens is smaller and much stranger: I look at a woman with rock dust caught in her lashes telling me my own file back to me, and I understand, not decide, understand, that I held that cordon from twenty-five onward, and that I can stand down, and that the standing down is mine to do and always was.

Two hundred fourteen people are still dead. That doesn't change and I'll carry them until I stop.

But I have been standing at that line for eleven years waiting for somebody to confirm that I may leave it, and there's nobody left to ask, and there never was.

"All right," I say.

She looks up. "All right?"

"All right." My voice isn't doing what I want. "It's down."

Sophie makes a small wrecked sound and puts her forehead against my collarbone and I get my good arm around her and hold on.

We stay like that. The city goes on being dark below us. Somewhere above, a machine builds a firing solution and we give it no thought at all for six minutes, which is the longest I haven't thought about it since the crystal turned.

"I have something to say," she says into my chest, "and I've been rehearsing it and it isn't going to survive contact, so I'm going to say it badly."

"Do it badly."

"That's my line."

"It's a good line."

She lifts her head. Her eyes are red and her mouth is doing something that's trying to be a smile.

"If we shut this thing down and walk out of here," she says, "you're going to try to give me an exit. You'll be noble about it. You'll say something about the multi-world program and how I've earned it and how you'd never ask me to stay on a rock this far out, and you'll mean every word, and it'll be the single stupidest thing you have ever done."

"I had drafted something."

"I know you had. I could see you drafting it in the trench." She takes hold of my collar with both hands. "So I'm getting in first. Kavan, I've spent nine years digging up the most important artifacts in League history and never once wanted to keep any of them. Not one. I give them all to museums. And then I met a security marshal on a cliff who told me to keep clear of new edges, and I have thought about nothing else since, and he is the finding of my career. That's it. Two hundred sixteen dead fleets, a buried city and a working Precursor fortress, and the thing I want to keep is you."

Nothing available to me is an answer to that.

So I take her face in my working hand and I kiss her, and she rises into it hard, and briefly the sphere and the count and the aperture all stop existing.

When I break the kiss, she's breathing like she has run a kilometer.

"I want you," she says against my mouth. "Kavan. Right now."

"You have me." I don't let go of her face. "You have always had me."

My body answers the words before my mind catches up. The discipline I have worn like a second skin for nineteen years is still there, still trying to do its job, but she's looking at me with those hazel eyes and her hands are knotted in my collar and she smells of rock dust and clean sweat and the warm particular scent of her own skin.

"Sophie." My voice is rough. "If we do this⁠—"

"We are doing this."