Page 14

"Sixteen hours."

"I've got half a ration bar and a lot of unspent opinion."

We start with the pin. The pin lasts forty minutes. Then the concordance, then the sabotage timeline, and then we run out of work, and the quiet that follows has a different weight than any quiet I have shared with her.

"Tell me something that isn't the city," she says.

So I tell her about Oren Tannis, who had a laugh you could hear through two bulkheads, and who taught me that the tunnels are not trying to kill you — they are indifferent, and indifference is worse than malice, because you cannot predict it. He went into a shaft on a Tuesday to check a bearing, the shaft closed, and I was the one who found the place where it had closed.

"How old were you?"

"Nineteen."

"And you kept going down."

"Somebody had to check the bearing."

She says nothing kind about that, and I couldn't say how to thank her for it.

Then she tells me about a colony irrigation pump she rebuilt at nine, in a shed, out of a manual and pure stubbornness, and how when it turned over she sat on the floor and wept, because she had put her hands inside a dead thing and the dead thing came back.

"That's the whole job," she says. "Everything since has been the same feeling with a bigger budget."

The wall gives back its heat. Fourteen hours remain, and I am about to say a thing I have never said aloud, and I understand why: there is nobody else in the world down here and no work left to stand behind.

"I don't believe this city can be saved."

She goes very still.

"Paragon." It comes out level, which surprises me. "Nineteen years believing we could delay it. Not save it. Delay it — a district here, a decade there — and hand the problem to somebody younger with better tools and a cleaner conscience. That is what I have been doing. That is the whole of it."

"You turned Nine back on."

"Nine was already alive. We opened a door on it." My eyes go to the floor. "In nineteen years I have never believed this city had a future. What I believed it had was a schedule."

For a long stretch she says nothing. Then she moves — carefully, because of the knee — until she is against the same wall, near enough that the warmth coming off her arrives before she does.

"You know the difference between us?" she says. "It isn't hope. Everybody assumes hope. I'm not more hopeful than you, I'm just less impressed by impossible. Impossible is what engineers say when we've run out of the specific reason. Nine was impossible for six centuries and change, and then it was a clearance code." She turns her head. "You don't have to believe we'll save it. That isn't the job. You only have to be willing to be wrong about it."

"That is a very small thing to ask."

"It's the only thing worth asking."

And she looks up at me.

I have spent three weeks managing what happens when she does that. I have a system for it. The system involves the tunnel mouth, the tap, the light, seven separate items procedure requires of me in a failing space, and the system fails now, entirely, in the pitch dark, her shoulder a handspan from mine and the heated wall behind us both.

Neither of us looks away.

Under the dust and the antiseptic there is something that is only hers, which I have known for eleven days without permitting myself to know it, and in this heat, at this distance, it arrives whole.

"Darius."

"Yes."

"I'm going to move first, because you won't."

She's right. She does, and the first touch of her mouth is careful — a question, offered slowly enough that I could refuse it.