The voice asked nothing more. It waited, crackling, and when neither of them answered, the speaker in the ceiling gave a small dry click and fell silent, and at the far end of the bay a door opened onto a lift.
“It’s letting us in,” Sera said. “Without the code.”
“It’s letting us go down.” Mara looked at the lift. “That’s not the same.”
They went anyway. There was nowhere else to go; the ring behind them was dark and sealed.
The lift was an open platform, a square of grated steel with a waist-high rail on three sides, hanging in a shaft so tall that when Mara looked up she could not see its top, and when she looked down she could not see its bottom. A cage of old girders surrounded the shaft, and running up one girder was a set of rails along which the platform would slide. There was a control post at the rail’s front corner with three buttons, worn smooth, unmarked.
Mara left the buttons alone; her gloved fingers were too thick to trust on them anyway. She took notebook I out of the suit’s thigh pocket instead and opened it with her gloved fingers to a page she had marked on the flight from the dock.
“Wait,” she said.
Sera waited.
“She wrote about this,” Mara said. “Or something like this. Listen.” She read aloud, carefully, the way she had read the first page in Tavin’s back room. “The suits draw cooling from the frame. Keep contact. Off the marked paths, the suits become ovens: the cooling has nowhere to come from and the heat has nowhere to go. Stay on the marks.” She looked up. “There’s a drawing. Paths. Lines on a floor.”
“What color?” Sera said.
Mara looked at the page. The drawing was small, in ink, but her mother had gone over the paths afterward with something else, a red pencil, so that they stood out from the rest: thin red lines on a plan of floors and corridors.
“Red,” she said. “She drew the paths in red.”
Sera looked down at the lift platform. Mara looked with her. Under the grime on the grated steel, faint, worn almost away by the boots of people who had stood here once and were gone, there was paint. A strip of it, down the middle of the platform. Red.
“Then we walk on the paint,” Sera said.
“It’s her red. On the page and on the floor. The same.”
“Then we walk on her red,” Sera said.
She took the rescue line in her gloved fist again, the two meters of it that ran between their belts, and ran its slack through her grip so that it lay taut between them, and she put her other hand on the lift rail.
“Keep your hands on the rail,” she said. “Both of them. The suits draw cooling from the frame. You heard your mother.”
Mara put her hands on the rail.
She felt it at once: a coolness, coming up through the gloves into her palms, spreading along her arms under the suit. The suit drew it in. Somewhere in the lift’s frame, cold was running, and the suits knew how to borrow it.
“Before it moves,” Mara said, “I want to check.”
“Check what?”
“Everything. Out loud.” She could not have said why. She knew only that her mother had written keep contact and stay on the marks, and set the limit before you go in and let someone else hold it, and that the notebook was full of lists, and that every list had been a list of things to check. “Suit seal rings.”
She ran her hand over her collar ring, her wrist rings, her waist ring. Each one seated. “Mine are seated.”
“Good,” Sera said, running her own.
“Coolant gauge.” The small dial on Mara’s left forearm. The needle sat in the green, near the middle. “Mine’s in the green. Middle.”
“Good.”
“Lift brake.” She looked at the control post. Beside the three buttons there was a lever, iron, with a red handle, and it was set in the upper position. Locked. “Brake’s on.”
“Good.”
That was all Sera said. Good. After each check. Nothing more. Mara heard it each time and found it steadying, the way Sera’s count on the jacks in the yard had been steadying: a voice outside her own head saying the same word in the same tone, so that she need not carry the whole check herself.
“I’m going to release the brake,” Mara said.
“Good.”
She pulled the red lever down. The lift dropped a hand’s width, caught, and began to descend.
They went down through the dark.
It was a long way. The shaft’s girders slid past the rail, close enough to touch, rust-streaked, and between the girders there was darkness, and then, every so often, a window.
The windows were set into the shaft’s walls at intervals: thick round ports of some clear heavy material, the size of a cartwheel, each one framed in pale metal. Through the first one, Mara saw only black. Through the second, a dim glow. Through the third, she saw what lay beyond the walls, and her hands tightened on the rail.
It was metal. Vapor. Streams of it, glowing faintly gold and orange and a deep sullen red, moving along tracks: great curved rails that ran through the darkness beyond the port, mile after mile, in long sweeping bands. The streams flowed along them like rivers along their banks, held to the rails by something Mara could not see, a pull, a field. None of it spilled. They curved where the rails curved and rose where the rails rose and vanished into the dark in every direction. There were hundreds of them. Thousands. Layer behind layer, as far as the port would let her see, a whole lattice of glowing rivers suspended in the black.
She had imagined a lamp as a furnace. A big one, the biggest furnace in the world, but a furnace: a box with a fire in it. The primer drew it that way. Even the Founder plate, with all its layers and arrows, had made it look like a vessel with something burning inside.
It was a city. A city of rails and rivers built around something at its center, every wall and girder and stream of light bent toward holding that something in place. It was like looking at the scaffolding of a building so large that you could not see the building, only the scaffold, and understanding from the scaffold alone that what it held up was enormous and could not stand on its own.
A city built around a wound, she thought. Every wall helping to hold something impossible in place.
“I didn’t know,” she said. Her voice was small inside the suit.
Sera was looking through the port too.
“Neither did I.”
They went down. The windows passed. The rivers of light went on outside them, layer after layer, dimmer as they descended, the gold fading to orange, the orange to red. The cold from the rail ran up Mara’s arms.
“It’s a city,” Mara said, after a while. “The lamp. It’s like a city that needs a witness. Somebody to watch it. Somebody standing there.”
Sera was slow to answer. The rescue line lay taut between them, through her fist.
“Cities don’t need rescue lines,” she said at last. “People do.” She glanced at Mara, then back at the port. “And the city I came for is the one under this lamp, with my sister in it. Don’t forget that. Whatever’s at the bottom of this shaft.”
“I won’t.”
“You will,” Sera said. “That’s why I’m saying it now.”
Mara found that she was counting the windows. Eleven. Twelve. She did not know why. Then she knew: she was counting them so that she would know how far down they had come, so that if they had to climb out, if the lift failed, if something happened to Sera, she would know how many windows lay between this place and the ring. Thirteen. She said the number under her breath each time. Sera heard and let her go on.
The lift began to slow.
The girders passed more slowly, and more slowly, and then the platform stopped, with a soft jolt and a hiss, at a landing: a short grated deck that ran from the shaft to a closed door. The air that came in around Mara’s suit seals tasted of ozone and dust, sharp and dry, the smell of a machine that has been running a long time in a closed room.
In the wall beside the closed door, at head height, there was a speaker grille: a small round mesh, dark, set in a frame of the same pale metal as the windows.
It clicked.
“Inspection code, please,” it said. The same thin crackling voice as in the bay above. And then, after a pause, in a different tone, uncertain, almost apologetic: “I’m sorry. I asked that already, didn’t I.”