The ship rose off the crater rim and turned north. Melvin lay on the litter with his eyes open, listening to the hull creak, and the hum of the engines dropped to a steady note after the first twenty minutes.Lu sat on the deck plates against the far bulkhead, since nobody had offered him a bench. Wei sat across from him with a plate on his knee and a brush in his hand, and for the first hour neither of them wrote anything.“Ask him about the chamber, Wei. I need the depth, the ring order, and the date of the last repair,” Melvin said.Wei wrote the question in the old form, and Lu answered in the modern one, which made Wei look up in surprise. He read the plate slowly.“He says two hundred and sixty feet down, cut into dry rock, with the same eighty-one sockets as the other chambers. He says no repair has ever been made, because nobody has ever been let in,” Wei read.“Two hundred and sixty feet is inside my sight from the shaft head. I can read the vault before anyone goes down it,”

Melvin closed his fingers over the needle and waited until the ache in his wrist settled. The network of fourteen thousand had existed for twelve days, and the only people who knew its full shape were standing at the top of this shaft or sitting on the crater rim."Ask Gao Ren what the man wanted to know, Lin. Have him write every question in the order it was asked," he said.Lin carried the request to the crystal, and the answer came in pieces over the next quarter hour. Gao Ren wrote with one finger in the dust, slowly and with long rests between the lines, and Wei's conversions reached the vault in the same unhurried rhythm."First question, how many positions the network holds and where the regulator sits. Second question, who can hold that regulator and for how long at a stretch," Lin read."He came for the holders," Melvin said."Third question, which of the holders is weakest. Gao Ren says the man asked about the doctor's hands twice and the girl's Dantian three times," Lin went

The voice that came from the crater changed.It was Evelyn Cross, speaking from the stretcher in the tone she used in boardrooms, level and unhurried. "Stranger, you stand on the property of the Cross Consortium and on federal ground. State your business or leave it."The figure on the disc turned its head toward her by exactly the angle needed to look at the stretcher. A dry, familiar voice spoke from its mouth, the voice of the man standing on the deck of the stone ship, and every listener on both ends of the line stiffened."I have come for the regulator, Miss Cross. The man holding it is old enough to know that a cap should not rest on a single will," the proxy said."Sun Wen is holding it of his own free will, and you will not touch him," Evelyn answered.Melvin pictured the disc from the sounds that reached him, the old carrier kneeling at the regulator with both hands flat on the stone and Chloe beside him with the frame on her lap. Evelyn lay on her stretcher with her face gre

The stone ship dropped through the last of the cloud and came down on the crater rim a minute later, and the ramp hit the scree before the engines had spun down. The wind off the crater smelled of hot stone and spilled ink, and every enforcer on the rim turned at once to watch the litter go by.Four marshals ran Melvin across the scree on the litter with Kaelen limping behind and Lin sprinting ahead with the frame, and Beatrix's enforcers parted around them as they reached the disc.Before he took the regulator, Melvin opened his sight on the figure in the grey robe. The face and hands were lacquered clay over a frame of eighty-one hair-fine needles, and the whole structure hung from the thread with no organ inside it and no blood.Chloe's hands were still on the regulator when Melvin reached her, and a line of blood ran from her left nostril down her chin. He laid his palms over hers, felt her fingers let go one at a time, and took the whole of the flow into his own hands."Doss, get

"Then whoever is pulling it has run out of patience," Melvin said.He drew the velvet case from his belt and took out three more needles. He leaned forward until his chest nearly touched the stone and drove the first needle into the disc beside the proxy's left foot, then the second beside its right, and then the third a hand's width behind its heels. Each one cost him a breath and a measured turn of the wrist, since the pull in the stone resisted every needle that went in.The three needles formed a triangle that braced the original nine against the drag. Melvin read the stone around them and found the hairline cracks he had feared at the edge of the black disc, opened by the strain and halted at the line where the new needles held. The groaning in the regulator eased, though only a little, and Melvin sat back on his heels with sweat running into his collar."The brace will hold for an hour if nothing else pulls on it. Lin, tell me what you're seeing at the warehouse," he said into t