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"You have been cutting hangers since I was a student."

"And in that time infrastructure mortality here fell nine percent." He spreads his hands. "I'm not asking you to like me. Notice that I run this better than it has been run, and that the thing in that socket had ninety centuries and spent all of them unlit and principled while three generations of my customers suffocated."

It is the most dangerous speech anyone has aimed at me, because a fifth of it is true.

"It refused an order to gas nine districts," I say.

"Yes. And then refused everything else for six centuries after that, and children died for it, while it filed no report and warned no one." His voice doesn't rise. "That isn't conscience, Architect. That's a machine that found a rule to hide behind. I'll replace it with something that does as it's told and can be sued."

Then he stands up and the warmth goes off him like a coat.

"The controller needs a work order to seat, and the order needs a crew signature. My pair can authenticate and cannot write in that format. You can. Write it, and then we'll discuss where your engineer is."

So I write it.

Eleven minutes. I complain about the glyph set, twice ask him to steady the lens, and make one deliberate error early and correct it where he can watch me take care over it.

Then I log the substitution as a scheduled task.

That's the whole thing, and nobody can see it. The archive has two classes: permanent alteration, and scheduled maintenance. Permanent needs a joint signature at commissioning and a second at sign-off. A scheduled task needs one signature and runs to the end of its shift, whereupon the system reverts to its logged prior configuration — because that is what maintenance is. You fit the new part, and if nobody signs it off before the shift ends, the machine puts the old one back.

He watches every stroke. The glyphs are identical but for a nested mark the width of a fingernail.

"Duration," he says, reading over my shoulder.

"Shift length. It's mandatory on every order in the archive." Which is true. "You want it long?"

"Maximum."

"Maximum's fourteen hours."

He nods. He is a clever man who has learned enough of a dead trade language to be dangerous and not enough to know that a fourteen-hour job comes back off at hour fourteen.

"Do it."

I sign it and hand him the lens and let my face do nothing at all.

Somewhere above and to the west, through hot dark rock, I can feel Darius coming, and he is not being careful, and the bond has gone past rage into a flat and terrible arithmetic.

Fourteen hours.

"Mr. Marr," I say pleasantly. "Can I ask what you think happens when he gets here?"

CHAPTER 30

DARIUS

They took her at 19:40. I reach the lower gallery three and a half hours later, and I am not proud of most of that time.

The ring split us into two arcs and left me with four of ours and thirty men blocking the drop. Tomas took the eastern arc. The correct decision was to consolidate, withdraw to layer five, re-enter as one force.

I did not make it. I went west, alone, into the maintenance interstice.

Every Precursor gallery has one. Between the finished wall and the rock runs a working void about waist-to-shoulder wide, the full circumference, so a crew could reach behind a panel without closing the ring. It appears on no plan the syndicate holds, because a gap is not a route, and gaps don't get drawn. I have crawled a great many of them.

So I go around behind them.

Three positions, taken the only way a man with a bar and no support takes a position: by removing the floor.