"Lalu," I said into the dark. "Your chair is humming."

"I know it's humming." His voice came out of the black from the centre of the deck, higher than usual and rough with smoke. "That pulse took out the flat's main breaker and Maddy's relay with it. The rig's dropped onto my uncle's backup cell."

"Then why are we still in here?"

"Because the tape isn't finished. It had eight seconds left to run when the lights went. The cell's holding us in here until it can play them, and it hasn't got the juice. The moment the mains comes back, it'll grab it and finish."

I couldn't see my own knuckles. The console, the blue bars, the red digits in the corner: everything had gone out at once. The artificial gravity had gone with it, and I hung an inch above the navigator's seat in a darkness so thick it felt like wool pressed against my eyes.

Two things told me where my body was in the room outside. One was the cold cast-iron radiator pipe under my right hand, bleeding through the edge of the virtual armrest with its small hard blister of paint. The other was the smoke. Not the ship's, this time. This smoke had a sharp, coppery vinegar bite I had smelled once before, at a Riot and Compliance drill in Sub-Basement Two, and it was reaching me from a room I couldn't see. Somewhere far below the deck I had heard a soft metal clatter and a long hiss: a canister, rolled in through the gap under Lalu's door.

They're here.

"How long does the cell last?" Sethu asked. His voice was very calm, the way a man's voice goes calm when he is holding something in with both hands.

"Twenty minutes if nobody touches it," Lalu said. "Two, if they fire another pulse charge at that door."

Somewhere far below the deck, through the floor of a flat I couldn't see, something heavy hit iron. Then again. A ram, finding its rhythm against Lalu's bars.

"Are we going to die in your uncle's armchair?" I asked.

"That's a possibility."

"Don't give me possibilities, Lalu."

"What do you want me to do, pray?"

"Don't you dare. If you start praying now, the roof really will come in."

Out of the dark came a short, wheezing sound, and after a second I realized he was laughing. Across the deck, Sethu let out a breath that sounded suspiciously like the same thing.

"Is this your first solar storm, Sarkowski?"

"Yes."

"Mine too."

"I can hear you smiling, you idiot."

"Have to do something with my face," Lalu said. "Can't see yours. For all I know you've both turned into beetles."

That one didn't get a laugh. The ram hit the bars again.

It is a strange thing to hang in the dark with your eyes open and see nothing at all. My eyes couldn't tell me whether I was floating off a dead rock in the belt or sitting on a stool in a flat full of smoke. But the inside of my head had never been brighter. I saw the brass paperweight on my kitchen shelf. I saw the hollowed stone step at Gate Four. And, because a frightened mind will show you what you're afraid of whether you ask or not, I saw my own funeral.

It was a very small chapel on Tier 82, the one Staff Benefits booked in thirty-minute slots between quarterly reviews, with an LED stained-glass window that switched from oak trees to alpine snow on the half-hour so the next department didn't get the same view. Pemberton stood at the back in his good charcoal suit, checking his tie in the polished polycarbonate lid of the coffin. Wheatley had sent flowers from the corporate wellness catalogue, with a card saying they had been chosen to support the bereaved and charged to my closing balance. Vane had sent an auditor to make sure the crematorium credited my heat to the right floor.

I looked along the pews for my father. Of course I did. Some part of me always looked. The pews were empty, and I couldn't have told you what face I was looking for anyway. Forty years, and he still hadn't come back for anything.

"Funny," I said into the dark, and my voice came out wrong. "I've just watched my own funeral. Pemberton came. He checked his tie in the lid."

"Pemberton would," Lalu said. "Who else came?"

"Nobody I was looking for."

He didn't make a joke. That was how I knew he had heard what I meant.

For a while there was only the ram, and the hum of the cell under the deck.

"He told me he was fixing lifts," Lalu said at last. "Sector Two. A month. I was five. He came back so thin I didn't know him at the door, and he sat at that workbench and laughed at my drawings, and he never said a word." The leather creaked. "Forty years he had that tape. I used to bring him tea while he soldered. He'd ruffle my hair and say, What would I do without you, Lalu? And all that time it was sitting in a drawer at the bottom of the pylon."

"He was keeping you safe," Sethu said.

"He was keeping me out." Then, more quietly: "Same thing, probably. That's what makes it so annoying."

"Why my desk?" Sethu asked. "He had a key to every cage in this pylon. He could have hidden it under his own floorboards. Why carry it all the way down to the curator's desk?"

"Because nobody looks for anything in a museum," Lalu said. It was a joke, but only just.

"Eleven years I sat at that desk," Sethu murmured, almost to himself. "I thought the lock had rusted."

"My mother lived in one of those Inception worlds, you know," Sethu said. It came out of the dark plainly, the way a man sets down something heavy he has carried up a long stair. "She went in when I was nine and only came out for meals."

He didn't say anything else. Neither of us asked. After a while I heard him take off his spectacles and put them on again, the way he did when he had finished with a page.

"Sethu," Lalu said, very gently, and stopped.

"I know," Sethu said. "Not now."

The ram struck the bars a fourth time, and the whole deck shivered.

"All right," Lalu said, and his voice put its jacket back on. "Lovely chat. Here's the cheerful version. For all you know, Sarkowski, there's no flat, no ram and no pipe. Just a little demon in my uncle's processor, tickling the ends of your nerves. I could reach across this aisle right now and..."

Before he could finish, somewhere far below the deck, a relay clicked.

Under my boots the hum of the cell changed key. It deepened and filled out, the way a lift motor sounds when the main power comes back after a cut.

"That's the mains," Lalu said. "That's the mains, boys. It's going to finish. It's going to..."

The cabin exploded with white light.

It wasn't the warm golden glow of Lalu's first knob, or the blue of the charging coils. It was flat and surgical, the glare of a hundred security strobes going off in an interrogation room. I threw my left arm across my eyes.

When I could see again, the viewport was still black, but every screen on the console was awake and scrolling hard white type:

EXTERNAL LINE-TAP DETECTED // CONDUIT 64-B SLAVING INCEPTION BUS TO STATUTE 4 RECOVERY PROTOCOL

The ram on the door had stopped.

"They're not coming through the door," I said, and heard how calm I sounded, the way you sound when you have read the breach manual before you have felt it. "Blow the room while the core's running and the crash wipes the tape before they can read a word of it. So they switched the power back on. Your chair's been sitting in the dark starving for eight seconds of current, and they fed it from the hall. It let them in with the meal."

"They've back-fed the conduit from the pylon riser," Lalu said, his voice tight, "and clamped a bailiff tap on the live line. They're coming into our heads for the tape, and they'll scrub the three of us while we sit on our stools."

I tried to lift my left hand in the real room to tear the brass halo off my temples. Nothing moved. Their recovery protocol had my real muscles pinned to the wooden stool on Tier 64. Only my right hand, which had already been resting against the cold cast-iron radiator pipe before the lock came down, could still feel the room outside.

Inside the starship cabin, a heavy magnetic bar snapped shut across my chest. Across the aisle, a matching bar locked Sethu into the observer's seat. Beneath Lalu, the recliner gave a violent lurch. Its gimbal whined, swung him half round toward the dead viewport, tipped him back until his boots pointed at the ceiling, and snapped two padded steel cuffs down over his forearms.

"Lalu, what is it doing?"

"How do I know! It's their recovery protocol. It's got hold of the chair!" The recliner swung him left and right like a crane hook in a high wind.

Sethu's seat tipped sideways. His satchel slid off his knees and, with the gravity half dead, drifted across the aisle, turning slowly, until it bumped Lalu on the nose.

"Pull the plug on the chair, Lalu!" I shouted, bracing my boot against the console frame while my real knuckles pressed hard against the cold iron pipe in the flat.

"Can't!" He twisted his wrists in the cuffs. "Wait. The chair takes voice commands from the registered owner."

"You're the owner, speak to it!"

"Right." He took a breath of smoke and shouted at the headrest. "Chair! Power down!"

A chime sounded behind his ear. The voice that answered wasn't the freight announcer, and it certainly wasn't Maddy. It was a rich, unhurried contralto, as smooth as a receptionist at a very expensive clinic on Tier 90.

"Error," the chair purred. "My name is not Chair."

The gimbal dropped forty degrees in one sickening plunge. My stomach hit my ribs.

"Lalu!"

"Wait, wait, he had a phrase for it." Lalu's sunglasses had slid up onto his forehead. For once I could see his eyes, and they were frightened. "Covenant Chair," he shouted. "Break the covenant!"

A soft golden light blinked on the rim of the headrest.

"Suspending active covenant," the voice said. "Goodbye, my dear Lalu."

The servos cut out. The recliner glided back to level and set its footrest down with a polite little click. Across Sethu's chest and mine, the bars slackened by two inches, though the recovery protocol on our real bodies in the flat didn't let go. On every screen the white type froze in the middle of a line:

VOICE BUS INTERRUPTED // BLACK-BOX TAPE READOUT PAUSED AT 99% // 00:08 REMAINING

For three seconds there was only the sound of the three of us breathing, and the dull metallic groan of a hydraulic jack being wedged against the door frame out in the real corridor.

"Covenant Chair?" I asked.

"It's what my uncle called his line." Lalu didn't look at me. He was already working his thumb under the edge of his right cuff, which had dropped to half-latch when the voice bus paused. "No time for chit-chat, Sarkowski. Linguafranca® will be in our starship any moment."

I nodded at the wire-guarded lever on his bolster. "Pull the red handle under your elbow. Before they come."

"Look at the board, Sarkowski!" Lalu snapped, straining his fingers toward a manual release pin under the armrest. "The tape's stuck at 99 per cent! That red handle isn't a polite off-switch. If I pull it before the cylinder finishes its last eight seconds, we lose everything we came for!"

"What's the point, Lalu?" Sethu said, watching the frozen text. "Whatever we do, Linguafranca® takes the tape and our heads with it."

"If I can pop this cuff and reach the console socket, I can switch the cylinder's last eight seconds onto local cache." Lalu's fingers strained toward the brass pin under the bolster. "Come on, come on..."

"They want the tape," I said.

"They're not having it." Something in his voice made me look at him properly. "He kept it forty years, Sarkowski. Forty years of lying to me about lifts. If I hand it to a squad in the corridor now, what was any of it for?"

The pin wouldn't come. His fingertips were raw on the brass.

"Hold still," Sethu said. With his chest bar slackened, he was able to slide one arm out under the rail and reach across the narrow aisle. He closed his hand round Lalu's wrist to steady it, the way you steady a child's hand on a pen. "Now. Gently."

The pin slid out. Lalu's right cuff sprang open. He lunged forward against his left strap and slapped the auxiliary cache toggle beside the spinning black cylinder. On the console, the paused readout counter was replaced with LOADING...

"Thanks," Lalu said, without looking up.

"Don't mention it," Sethu said. "I'm still angry with your uncle."

"So am I," Lalu said. "Join the queue."

The viewport didn't go black this time. It turned the colour of grease.

A seam of violet light tore open from ceiling to deck between our seats and the helm, and out of it stepped three figures nearly seven feet tall, in segmented olive-green carapace, with cold blue visors where their faces should have been and four jointed arms apiece, every arm holding an arc-lance.

For a second I thought the caviar had finally caught up with me. Then I read the code stencilled across the leader's breastplate: MARS GARRISON ENFORCEMENT SPRITE // REPURPOSED BY LINGUAFRANCA® BAILIFF DAEMON 4.2.

"What are they?" Sethu whispered.

"Borrowed," Lalu said. "Their rig doesn't send its own pictures down a power line. It grabs whatever enforcement it finds on the host drive, and on a Mars core that's the garrison troopers from the old Tharsis training reels." He swallowed. "They were made to frighten miners."

"It's working," I said.

The leader took one step onto the deck plates, and the chair's bass shakers rattled our teeth. Four arc-lances came round to point at Lalu's chest, and Lalu, who had never in his life been able to leave a silence alone, smiled up at it.

"Afternoon, gentlemen. Welcome aboard. Can I offer anyone synthetic tea? You didn't file an entry request, and you're tracking red dust on my uncle's carpet, but let's not stand on ceremony."

The visor narrowed on his forehead. When it spoke, its voice was the ship's subwoofer wearing the manners of a municipal court clerk.

"Subject Lalu. Sector Seven, Pylon 64. You are in possession of unindexed property recovered from a curatorial archive. Unregistered script caches and unlicensed memory cores are forfeit under Statute 4. Stand by for cortical scrub."

Two of its arms flicked. Braided magnetic bands shot from the console and pinned all three of us back against our seats at the shoulders, wrists and knees, much tighter than the chair's own bars had done.

Behind it, a second trooper stepped to the console and clipped a siphon lead onto the black cylinder in its socket. A third came between our seats, narrower than the others, with a yellow lens that spun like a camera iris. Stencilled on its collar: SEMANTIC AUDITOR // PRE-SCRUB CLASSIFICATION.

"That one's the parser," Lalu whispered out of the corner of his mouth. "They can't scrub a subject until it files a definition on the warrant. It has to say what it's wiping. Keep it talking until our tape finishes those last eight seconds!"

The Auditor's lens turned to Lalu. A red recording light blinked on its collar.

"Prior to neural erasure, the subject will state the classification of the unindexed sign tru," it said. "The subject will then state his nature."

Lalu looked up at it, and I watched him reach, the way he always did, for the joke.

"What am I?" he said. "Officer, I'm whatever you'd like me to be. Repairman, philosopher, cargo. I'm very flexible."

The yellow lens clicked twice.

SUBJECT DECLARES NO FIXED NATURE. CLASSIFICATION: UNFORMED MATERIAL // LEGAL PERSONHOOD: NULL CLEAR FOR IMMEDIATE WIPE

A red stamp flashed in the air above Lalu's head. The Auditor lowered a slim probe toward his brow, and a blue spark crawled out to its tip.

"No," Lalu said. The smile had gone. "No, wait, that was a joke, that was just a..."

"Jokes are not indexed," the Auditor said.

I pulled at the band across my right arm. In the cabin it was a braided magnetic tether pinning my wrist to the navigator's armrest. In the smoky room on Tier 64 that I couldn't see, my real right hand was still wedged against the cold cast-iron radiator pipe, and the chair's processor couldn't make the two agree. You cannot lock a hand in space when the nerve keeps reporting iron in Sector Seven. The virtual band over my right forearm flickered like a bad strip light.

"He's not unformed," I shouted. "Log this."

The yellow lens swung to me.

"He's the man who came down to a museum in the rain this morning for a friend he hadn't spoken to in two years," I said, driving my real knuckles harder into the paint blister on the pipe until the tether over my wrist thinned to a ghost. "Nobody asked him to. He's the man who hauled me up sixty tiers of pylon this afternoon. He's the man who laughs when he's frightened, so the rest of us won't be. Put that on your warrant."

UNINDEXED INPUT, the Auditor said. Its lens spun. RESTATE IN CLASSIFIABLE TERMS.

"He used to take his uncle tea at that workbench," Sethu said from the far seat, and his voice wasn't calm any more. "He cried at a cello concert once and said it was hay fever. He pocketed the brass seal off my drying tray this afternoon." Lalu's head came round. "Don't look at me like that, I saw you do it. Put that on the warrant too."

UNINDEXED INPUT. UNINDEXED INPUT. The lens spun faster, and the Auditor's cooling fan rose to a thin whine, the same sound Optimus had made at Gate Three in front of a sentence it couldn't put down. Every watt the parser burned trying to square the warrant drained power from the tether bus.

The leader lost patience. Its two lower gauntlets clamped over Lalu's shoulders, forcing his head back against the headrest so the probe could find his temple.

"Enough!" it thundered. "Statute 4 exists because men like your uncle broke the dictionary. What are you?"

Lalu stared up past the blue spark at the ceiling. He looked at me. Then he looked at Sethu.

"Theirs," he said, and tipped his chin toward us. "I'm theirs. File that."

The Auditor's lens stopped dead.

CLASSIFICATION: RELATIONAL, it said slowly, as if the word tasted wrong. NOT PERMITTED UNDER CLAUSE TWO. RE-INDEXING WARRANT...

The tether over my right wrist dissolved into white static as the warrant buffer overflowed, and the band across my shoulders went slack.

"Is that what my uncle did?" Lalu shouted at Sethu over the whine of the fan. "Broke the dictionary?"

"He melted the locks," Sethu shouted back. "And Linguafranca® bought the doors."

I tore my right hand free of the stuttering band, leaned across the narrow aisle between our chairs, and slammed my palm into the shaft of the Auditor's scrub-probe.

The blue arc missed Lalu's eyebrow by an inch and discharged straight into the green carapace breastplate of the lead garrison trooper.

For half a second the giant sprite stood rigid, forty thousand volts skittering across its collar stencil.

A Mars garrison sprite didn't have a legal parser. It had a 2170s riot-control reflex: anything in the cabin that fired an arc at its chest was a mutineer. Its blue visor flashed red, it let go of Lalu's shoulders, spun on the Auditor and the siphon-trooper at the console, and opened fire with all four arc-lances at point-blank range.

The cabin was six paces wide, and the war happened in all of it.

The first lance-bolt took the Auditor squarely through its chest grille. It came apart in a shower of white numbers. The second sheared through the tether-bus conduit on the console, and the remaining magnetic bands pinning our shoulders and knees snapped out like cut elastic.

White pulse-bolts and green lance-arcs crossed over our heads and chewed holes in the bulkheads, and through every hole I caught a flash of something that didn't belong on a spaceship: the curve of Lalu's porcelain sink, a strip of cracked plaster ceiling, the leg of my own wooden stool. The chair's processor was buckling under the firefight, folding the flat on Tier 64 and the ship in the belt into each other like two old slides jammed in the same projector.

At that same instant, in the real room on Tier 64, the hydraulic jack outside tore the top iron bar out of the door frame.

I didn't see it with my eyes, which were still inside the chair. I felt it through the soles of my real shoes as the floorboards jumped, and a gust of cold hallway air, thick with tear-smoke and the bark of a squad leader's megaphone, hit my real face.

On the ship's console, beside the smoking siphon-lead, the cylinder's readout bar flashed green:

BLACK-BOX READOUT 100% // KEY RECOVERED EXTERNAL SIPHON RE-ROUTING // UPLOAD TO CONDUIT 64-B IN 00:08

"The tape's done!" I shouted, tearing the dead tether-clip off Lalu's left shoulder while Sethu kicked free of his ankle band. "Cut the halos! Let's go!"

"The manual disconnect won't answer while their tap is on the power line!" Lalu yelled, clawing at the dead helm as the blinded lead trooper grappled with the siphon-sprite three feet from our boots and pinned Lalu's right leg against the footrest.

"Then ask the lady!"

He looked at me as if I had just balanced the quarterly figures. He cupped his hands round the torn headrest. "Covenant Chair! Power up!"

The golden light came back on the rim.

"Good day, Lalu dear," the contralto purred, as calm as a Sunday afternoon in a hothouse. "What world would you choose today?"

"None of them! Dump the recovery protocol! Eject us to the room!"

"Standard voice release is unavailable during an active tariff dispute," the chair said pleasantly. "Would you care to browse our autumn catalogue?"

Lalu swore. Then he looked down at his right armrest, at the wire-guarded red handle I had reached for when the ship first caught fire, and something went still in his face.

"That one isn't wired to the software bus," he said. The grappling trooper's knee had his right arm wedged against the side of the recliner. "It's a physical breaker bolted straight to the transformer in my flat. When you pull it in here, the servo trips the real latch in the room. Under my elbow, Sarkowski. The red one. Pull it."

"You told me not to touch that."

"I told you it wasn't the way out you wanted." He met my eyes. "The tape's finished. It's the one we've got."

I hooked my fingers into the copper guard wire. "What happens to the chair?"

He looked down at the cracked leather under his hands, at the worn patches at the elbows where his uncle's arms had rested for forty years.

"We don't get it back, Sarkowski." He looked up. "Pull it anyway."

I snapped the wire and hauled the handle back to its stop.

A small brass door popped open in the top of the bolster, and up out of it rose a heavy, spring-loaded plunger with a single word engraved across its crown in gold:

NIRVANA

"He had a sense of humour," Lalu said. "Hit it."

I hit it.

Thoom.

In the flat on Tier 64, a heavy mechanical latch dropped inside the transformer box. Inside the cabin, every clamp, every pin and every tether vanished, what was left of the virtual gravity went with them, and the three of us were thrown up out of our seats like corks out of three bottles, floating free under the smoking ceiling as the two remaining sprites went pinwheeling across the deck.

Lalu got his shoulders against a ceiling rib, drew his knees up, and drove both boots down into the back of his uncle's chair. It tore free of its mounts and spun away into the chest of the lead trooper.

"Ego-dissolution sequence initiated," the contralto said serenely from somewhere inside the tumbling leather. "Returning subject and vessel to the void in five. Four."

"Lalu! The chair!"

He wasn't looking at it. "Thermite core. He built the off switch into the furniture. Three!"

Behind the smoking console, where the projection was tearing apart, a seam of plain white light had opened, no colour in it at all, just the raw daylight of our own waking eyes coming back through the failing halos above the cast-iron pipe.

"Two!"

Lalu shoved Sethu toward the white, and then me, and came after us with one hand still reaching back.

"One," said the chair.

The floor of Tier 64 hit me in the knees.

I pitched forward off the wooden stool onto the real floorboards beside the real pipe, coughing up a lungful of real tear-smoke, and dragged the dead brass halo off my head with two hands that finally belonged to me again. Across the rug, Lalu was already out of the recliner. He tore the temple pads away from his head, lunged to the transformer box, took the black cylinder by its base ring, the way the little paper tag in Sethu's drawer had told us to, and wrenched it out of its socket before the heat could reach it. He dropped it into Sethu's open satchel.

At the hall door six paces away, the second iron bar tore out of the frame with a shriek of splitting wood and plaster. Red helmet-lamps cut through the fog as two custody troopers in black polycarbonate stepped over the threshold with their portable Bailiff tap-rig still wired by a thick copper cable to the wall conduit between them.

They never took a second step.

Behind us in the corner, inside the liquid-cooled box of the chair, the thermite fired.

There was no blast. Lalu's uncle had built it to melt silicon, not walls. There was only a white, silent flash, a heat on the backs of our necks, and the smell of the chair's core turning to slag in half a second. Then the capacitor bank dumped its last charge the only way it could go: straight back out along the copper line-tap, forty thousand volts of it.

The tap-rig in the second trooper's hands blew apart in blue sparks. The arc jumped across both men's chest-rigs, locked every servo in their suits, and laid them out flat across the threshold like two dropped shop dummies.

"Up," Lalu said. "Up, up, up."

He didn't look at the corner. I watched him not look at it.

Then he saw the workbench, and stopped. He picked up the scarred aluminium case in both hands and held it against his chest the way you hold something that might still be breathing. Its amber light was dark. "Maddy," he said. Nothing. The pulse had fused her voice relay. He thumbed the latch, saw the green tell-tale of the shielded drive still blinking inside, and let out a breath I hadn't known he was holding.

"She's in there," he said. "She's just not talking."

He tucked the case under his arm, kicked the galvanized bucket out from under the sink, threw back the iron lever of the vapour-vent hatch behind it, and a warm, wet, electrostatic wind roared into the room from the outer rim.

Sethu went first, the satchel clutched against his waistcoat, the cylinder inside it still warm against my ribs as I boosted him over the coaming. I went after him onto a narrow steel catwalk bolted to the outside of the pylon. Lalu came last. He passed the case out to Sethu before anything else, then stopped in the hatchway for half a second with his back to us. Then he slammed it, dropped the outside pin into its slot, and the shouting on the stairs went small behind three inches of iron.

For a while the three of us just crouched on the wet grating and breathed.

To the east, two tiers below our boots, the lid rolled away toward the heart of the city, a bruised orange sea of vapour held down by six hundred rings of humming ionizers. Rising out of that thick soup were the upper towers of Sector One, their lit windows stacked in neat, tariffed rows, with the white beads of the pod lanes stringing them together through the dusk. Every breath of air in those towers had been scrubbed, warmed, priced and logged before it reached a lung.

Out here, at the last pylon of the outer rim, the ionizer brackets ended at a rusted flange on the smooth titanium curve beside my knee. Beyond that flange, to the west, the lid simply stopped in a ragged curtain of mist that drifted out over nothing and came apart in the wind. And far below the mist, sixty tiers down under a sky rinsed clean by the evening rain, lay the dark backs of hills: wild forest, wet black stone, a pale thread of water falling down a cleft in the rock. No pylons, no lanes, no lights, and no ledger to say who owned the rain. The wind rising off those trees smelled of wet pine and cold mud, and I didn't even have names for half of it. I had lived my whole life in this city and never once seen where it ended.

Sethu sat with Lalu's aluminium case across his knees and his satchel against his chest. He took off his spectacles, wiped the soot from them on the hem of his shirt, and didn't put them back on.

"Did the cylinder make it?" I asked.

He opened the satchel and turned the black cylinder in his hands until I could see the thin e-ink band round its steel collar, the kind flight recorders carry so a salvage crew can read them with the power gone. It needed no current to hold its letters.

STARSHIP-09 // READOUT 100% // KEY RECOVERED

"Key? To what?"

"No idea," Lalu said. "My uncle never built anything without a lock on it."

It was the first thing he had said since the hatch. He was sitting with his back against the pylon wall and his knees drawn up, looking at nothing. His hands were shaking, and he had tucked them under his arms so that we wouldn't see.

I didn't ask him anything. I sat down beside him on the wet steel, close enough that our shoulders touched, and looked at the hills.

After a while, Sethu came and sat down on his other side.

Above us, a Linguafranca® patrol siren began to wail across the roof of the tier.

Lalu let out a long breath. He looked back once at the bolted hatch. Then he turned to me.

"All right, vice-president. What's the plan?"

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.

For twelve years I had had a plan for everything: a deadline, a ticket, a protocol, a compliance form with a box marked Other. I had never once been anywhere a plan couldn't reach. Now I was sitting on a wet grating on the outside of a pylon with no phone, no clearance and no name in the register, and I could not think of a single next step.

"I don't have one," I said. It was the first time in my life I had said it out loud.

Sethu put his spectacles back on.

"Then we go back down. To the museum."

"The museum," Lalu said. "We left a seven-foot tin man in its basement."

"He isn't in the basement," Sethu said. "He went down the sump after a phone, and he'll be wading through the storm tunnels half the night. Nobody searches the same room twice." He patted the satchel against his chest. "Your uncle hid that tape in my desk, under solder, for forty years. And now we've got a key. Whatever it opens, he didn't leave it up here."

Lalu looked down through the grating at the maintenance rail that spiralled round the outside of the pylon and dropped away into the orange vapour, toward the bottom of the city, where we had started the day.

"End of the line for the sky, boys," he said softly. "Come on. Let's go see if the ground is still where we left it."