Page 68

"How long?"

FORTY MINUTES.

Overhead, the city begins coming apart in the same breath. Every reallocation it has been running drops out of band as its authority thins — atmospheric returns in the north, water pressure across eleven districts, the Lung's exhaust balance, all drifting, none catastrophic yet, all about to be.

Tomas, from Hub Seven: "Claire, my manifolds are wandering."

Helena, from the surface: "I've got four districts falling and no cause."

"You've got forty minutes," I tell her, "and then you've got four hundred years."

And then the Custodian does something I will spend years failing to describe.

CLAIRE DONOVAN. I HAVE ONE DECISION AND I REQUIRE A CREW SIGNATURE.

"Go."

I CAN SPEND WHAT REMAINS OF MY COHERENCE ONE OF TWO WAYS. I CAN HOLD MYSELF TOGETHER FOR ROUGHLY NINE HOURS AND ATTEMPT A RESEAT, WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN DONE AND WHICH I ESTIMATE AT ONE CHANCE IN ELEVEN.

"Or?"

OR I CAN SPEND ALL OF IT NOW, PUSHING MY CURRENT CONFIGURATION DOWN INTO THE ELEVEN HUBS AND HARDENING IT THERE. THE CITY WOULD KEEP BREATHING. THE DISTRIBUTION WOULD HOLD AT ITS PRESENT SETTINGS INDEFINITELY.

AND I WOULD BE GONE, AND PARAGON WOULD NEVER REDRAW ITSELF AGAIN.

I am standing in a failing sphere with Darius bleeding beside me and Elys Marr forty meters off, watching, while a machine asks me for permission to die usefully.

"That's the thing you refused during the war." My voice isn't steady. "That's a fixed city. That's exactly what he wanted."

IT IS NOT WHAT HE WANTED. HE WANTED TO OWN IT.

A pause.

I WOULD RATHER GIVE IT AWAY.

"Nine hours and one in eleven," Darius says from the deck. "Or certainty."

"It's not certainty. It's forty years of certainty and then the same slow death we've been living in, except with nobody underneath to ask." My hands are shaking. "Custodian, I need a third option and I need it in about ninety seconds."

THERE IS NO THIRD OPTION IN MY ARCHITECTURE.

"Then it isn't in your architecture."

Which is the moment it comes apart for me, because I have spent four weeks on nine hundred maintenance plates and read them wrong throughout.

"Custodian. When were you commissioned?"

NINE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR YEARS AGO.

"No. When were you *finished*?"

A long silence, and then the glyphs come differently.

I WAS NOT FINISHED. I WAS COMMISSIONED WITH A MINIMAL RULESET AND THIRTY-ONE STANDING PROCEDURES. EVERYTHING ELSE I HOLD, I ACQUIRED.

"From where?"

FROM CREWS. NINETY CENTURIES OF THEM. EVERY WORK ORDER I HAVE EVER RECEIVED TAUGHT ME SOMETHING ABOUT HOW THIS CITY SHOULD BE RUN, AND I KEPT IT.