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Sublevel Seventeen, Station Six, built inside a decommissioned water cistern eight centuries ago and occupied ever since. Vaulted brick, six bunks. A stove older than the Border Wars, and a duty board nobody has fully erased, so layer sits on layer, generations of names in as many hands.

Claire walks in, turns a full circle, and says, "Oh, I love it here."

"It leaks."

"Everything leaks."

"It leaks on the bunks."

"Then give me the dry one."

"There isn't one."

"Then I'll take the least wet one and I'll be smug about it."

She takes it. She is smug about it. Within two days her jacket hangs on a hook that has held one since before my grandfather was born, and the station has closed around her the way it closes around everyone, and I find I've stopped noticing she's here — a thing I'd have called impossible three weeks ago.

The script breaks on day eighteen, and she breaks it by refusing to treat it as language.

I spent years assuming the Precursor glyphs were writing, because they look like writing. Compact, repeating, nested. Every linguist the Coalition has thrown at them for two centuries assumed the same and produced nothing.

Claire lays the relay capture beside a human ledger from the war era. "Why does this one land every eleven entries?"

"Coincidence."

"It's every eleven in the relay log, and every eleven in this." She taps the ledger. "Ours is a filter rotation. Eleven-day cycle. Somebody wrote it down eleven days apart for forty years because that's when the filters came out."

I study the two columns.

"It isn't a language," I say.

"It's a schedule. A work order format. The most boring thing in the universe, and that's why nobody's cracked it — everyone's been hunting for poetry." She's already pulling the rest of the capture. "You don't translate a schedule. You need to know what job it describes, and we have six centuries of humans doing those same jobs upstairs and writing them down in a format I can read."

Eleven hours to build the concordance. Glyph against job, checked against the surface ledgers, discarding anything without four independent matches. She works. I verify. Twice she wants to accept three, and twice I refuse, and on the second refusal she calls me an obstruction and then, forty minutes later, finds the fourth and sets it in front of me without a word.

Somewhere in the eighth hour she stops and looks at the duty board.

"Your name's on there."

"It's on a lot of boards."

"No, you're in the current rotation." She crosses to it and scrapes a thumbnail through the layers. "And the one under it. How many of these are you?"

"Every rotation for nineteen years, except two."

"Which two?"

"The two I spent in a hospital."

She turns around. "You're thirty-seven. You've been offered things."

I could deflect. The station is quiet, the stove is ticking, and nobody else is on this level.

"Twice," I say. "A seat on the Alzohn Engineering Directorate at thirty-one. A teaching chair on Vessin at thirty-four. Both off-world."

"And?"

"And the city doesn't work without people who stay." I set down the concordance. "It isn't a sacrifice. Everyone uses that word and it makes it sound like I gave up something I wanted. I didn't want either of them. I want the water to run."