Page 51 of Kavan

I won't dignify what follows with the word combat. Four of them, one of me, and Vesk with one arm at the rail and Marchant behind him with a detonator and nothing to detonate. What we have instead is a stub of bridge forty centimeters below the walkway, and it's two meters wide, and only one person can cross it at a time.

So I take it.

The first man I put into the drop. The second gets past my guard and opens my shoulder and Vesk shoots him off the stub one-handed at nine meters, which he will be insufferable about forever and has earned. The third stops, looks at the arithmetic, and puts his weapon on the deck.

Rourke is last.

He was never a fighter; he buys fighters. But he has a blade and forty kilos less than me to carry and a strip of decking where my reach is no advantage, and briefly it's genuinely close, and then he does the thing that ends it. He tries to go past me.

He doesn't come through me, he goes past me, toward the console, toward her, because I was never the objective.

I get my left hand into the front of his coat as he goes.

And I hold on, and my leg gives, and we go down together onto the stub with two hundred kilos of Vakutan on top of a forty-seven-year-old man, and I place my forearm across his throat and keep it there until he stops.

He isn't dead, and I want that written down too. There's an earlier version of me, eleven years back, who would have kept the weight on for another minute and told the inquiry the truth about it afterward, and that man isn't on this bridge.

"Vesk. Line."

"On it, sir."

We tie Cassian Rourke's hands with a length of drone tether, and he lies on his side on a stub of Precursor material with his cheek against a floor his people cut a crystal out of, and he laughs. It goes on for some time. Nobody stops him.

At minute nine the relay comes up.

Enwright hears it first and makes a sound like an animal. It's Helena Ostrand's voice, eight hundred meters and fifteen days away, saying League Security element four, we are through at Cove Three, we have your beacon, hold your positions — and behind her voice there's another sound, thin and impossible, which is weather.

At minute eleven the wall goes dark.

All of it. The whole sphere, top to bottom, every strip and band, gone between one breath and the following one, and then the amber comes back at one-tenth brightness in a single line around the equator, low and steady, the way a room looks when somebody has turned off the working lights and left one on.

Sophie's hands come off the console.

"It's down," she says. "It isn't destroyed and it isn't off. It's standing down. The housings are cold, the arrays are stowed, and the caldera is holding, and it will keep holding, because something has decided to keep maintaining it."

"And the Warden?"

"Relieved." Her voice goes. "It said thank you, Kavan. All that time, four hundred ships that never came back, and it thanked me, and then it went quiet."

I cross the stub and she meets me halfway and I keep her upright with the arm that still works while the League descends the shaft behind us, and high over our heads, over an island that has been under weather since the day she found a corner in a cliff, the autumn storm finally begins to break apart.

CHAPTER 31

SOPHIE

The surface is unbearable.

Nobody warned me. Fifteen days under a mountain, and the first thing that happens when they walk me out of the lava tube on the third headland is that the light goes into my eyes like a hand, and I go down into the wet volcanic grit and sob in front of forty League personnel and a medical team and Helena Ostrand, who kneels in it beside me in a clean uniform and doesn't say one word for four minutes.

Then she says, "Twenty-two went down."

"Nineteen came up. Plus three of yours."

"Three of mine," she says, and closes her eyes, and that's how I learn she has known those names for fifteen days too.

The storm has broken. That's the other thing. The clouds are shredding out over the eastern water in long copper strips and the forests on the headland have gone past their color, dropping, and the whole coast smells of wet ash and salt and the wrung-out end of a season.

The next eleven days are paperwork and hospitals.