How could she get an answer out of Prone that she could understand? She shared one common unit of time with him, and that was this artificial world.

HOW LONG? she asked again. IN ONYX DAYS. WE CALL THIS PLACE ONYX.

The years had been longer here, but the days were very close in length to Earth’s, one of the factors that got the colonists’ interest. Earth-bred crop varieties could grow in their natural cycles without much modification.

Does Prone know there was a planet outside here, though? Come on, he’s an Engineer running a Forerunner bunker. Of course he knows.

She wasn’t sure what the length of the day was inside the sphere, but she knew it wasn’t ten hours or anything that would give her an answer that was too far off the mark. Prone paused, then scribbled some symbols on the glass.

37000000 She counted the zeroes. That couldn’t be right. IN WORDS, she responded. ONE, TWO, THREE?

Prone got it right away. THIRTY SEVEN MILLION.

Lucy had to stop and reread it. Was he real y saying 37 mil ion days? That was … she shut her eyes to move the decimal place and get a rough idea of the years.

She made that a hundred thousand.

Oh God. Oh God, no. We’ve been in here that long?

It hadn’t been much of a world, and her life had been miserable, but she wasn’t ready to turn her back on al that it had been. Now she definitely had to make sure Halsey got this information.

I HAVE TO GET OUT, Lucy wrote. NOW.

She could feel her throat tightening and an awful pressure building up at the roof of her mouth. Her eyes brimmed. She was going to burst into tears. She’d always managed to hold it together in combat, but being ripped out of time wasn’t something she was prepared for at al .

Prone seemed to notice. He fussed over her with his cilia. He might just have been trying to take samples of her tears because he didn’t know what they were, but she preferred to think that he was being kind.

I MUST RESTORE YOU, he wrote.

They were communicating in English, but that didn’t necessarily mean that they were using words the same way. Maybe it was her: maybe she real y wasn’t making sense, however sane she sounded to herself.

RESTORE WHAT? she asked.

RECLAIMER, he said.

Prone drifted away to gaze at his own screen for a while. Then he flashed up some diagrams. She thought he was bored and that his attention had drifted back to machines, but every few minutes he would float across and put the flat paddlelike end of one tentacle on her cheek. She felt a tickling sensation every time the cilia touched her skin. Now that he thought the Flood hadn’t overrun the galaxy and the Halo hadn’t fired, he seemed to believe the crisis was over— one hundred thousand years over.

Wel , hers wasn’t. She had to make him understand that. She walked up behind him, intending to grab him if she had to, but she found herself looking at the schematic on the screen that was occupying him. It looked like a complex wiring loom, a closed system with dense networks in a couple of places and long, much thicker routing connecting them.

No, that wasn’t right. Some of the routing looked vaguely familiar.

Lucy took a few steps back so that the detail blurred and she could get a sense of the overal shape. Then it struck her. She had to cast her mind back to the earliest period of her training on Onyx. She was seven or eight years old, grappling with subjects she’d never had to worry about at school, and she was trying to copy a diagram from a biology text.

Human circulation. It’s the human circulatory system.

It was now obvious, an outline almost like an elongated figure of eight or an infinity symbol, the classic stylized diagram that had appeared in anatomy references for centuries.

She tugged at one of Prone’s free arms and tried to get his attention back on the writing screen.

WHY CIRCULATION? she wrote.

TO HELP ME REPAIR YOU.

Lucy now knew where this was going. Prone reached out to one side of the workshop, a flurry of tentacles and cilia, and whipped out a smal spatula and a gray cylinder exactly like the ones that had been stalking the squad outside. She was ready to trust him with anything now.

HOLD OUT YOUR HAND, he wrote.

She had nothing to lose. The more he knew about her, the more chance she stood of explaining her situation. She thrust her hand out, palm up, and he drew the spatula across the skin. The gray cylinder drifted free and hung in front of her for a few seconds. Then it moved off and merged into what she’d thought was just a wal . Prone turned away and studied the circulation diagram again. More symbols were appearing on it, one at time.

He spent a few moments prodding the screen and watching the display change, then turned to her, making little burbling noises like a stream. His head tilted back and forth as if he was working out what to say.

YOU ARE WELL. WHY ARE YOU SILENT?

He reached out and put a tentacle on the top of her head. Lucy took it as a comforting gesture at first, like patting a dog, but then she had another thought: Is he analyzing me? The cilia on Engineers’ tentacles obviously provided more than just a sense of touch at what seemed to be a molecular level. Maybe they could detect electrical activity through them, too, and perhaps Prone was just doing an EEG, not being kind to her.

He withdrew and wrote on the screen again. NOT BALANCED, BUT SPEECH CENTER IS UNDAMAGED. WHY CAN I NOT REPAIR YOU?

It was a very good question. Lucy chewed over the not balanced bit before responding. I’M NOT BROKEN.

YOU ARE VERY BROKEN LUCY-B902. RECLAIMERS SPEAK.

It was one thing trying to explain things she understood. Al she had to do was find the words, and that was coming back to her faster than she’d expected. But her inability to talk was something else entirely. Al the rationalizations she gave herself didn’t explain why she couldn’t snap out of this when she absolutely needed to.

NOT BALANCED? she asked.

MORE SCARED AND ANGRY THAN YOU NEED TO BE. BUT WHY DO YOU NOT TALK?

That summed up her existence. Prone was a pretty good psychiatrist. Maybe that was al part of his duties. The Engineers here looked more like an emergency team than ever, maintaining the bunker and repairing everyone and everything that came to shelter here.

BECAUSE IT’S IN MY HEAD, she wrote. This was suddenly getting very uncomfortable. FEELINGS.

EXPLAIN TO ME. WHY?

Sometimes just thinking it was the hardest thing of al . Lucy put her finger on the glass screen and paused, watching the letters fading in and out uncertainly while she struggled to pin down the awful thing that lurked in her mind, the monster under the bed that she didn’t dare look at in case it saw her and turned to scream the awful truth at her.

She found herself pressing her finger against the glass so hard that her forefinger turned yel ow and bloodless.

Say it. Write it. Admit it. Face it.

Prone wasn’t human. She knew he wouldn’t judge her. He didn’t even seem capable of being hostile to her for kil ing his friend. If there was anyone she could lean on to face this moment, it was him.

She paused and realized her eyes were brimming with hot tears, blinding her to what was on the screen. She wiped them with the heel of her free hand, scared that if she took her finger off that keyboard that she would never touch it again, just as she had given up speaking, and then she would sink inside herself forever.

BECAUSE I’M ALIVE AND MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD. I SHOULD BE DEAD TOO. Lucy looked at the words, stark and accusing with a life of their own. It was very different to having them hidden in her head. MY FAMILY IS DEAD. MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD. I COULDN’T SAVE ANYONE AND I DON’T DESERVE TO BE HERE WHEN THEY’RE NOT.

The effort almost stopped her breathing. But the words were out now and she stared at them, letting the reality sink in. Prone made odd little cooing sounds like a very distant pigeon.

BUT THEY ARE NOT ALL DEAD. THEY ARE IN THE CITADEL.

Lucy eyes were fixed on the lines of text, her own miserable failure and guilt now public for al to see. Just as she couldn’t force herself to jump off the ledge and speak, she now couldn’t look away from the black letters floating in front of her. Prone slid his tentacle under her chin and forced her to face him. He was a lot stronger than she imagined. She couldn’t actual y pul back from him, even though he wasn’t hurting her.

YOU ARE THE FIRST THING I CANNOT REPAIR. His bioluminescence suddenly seemed a lot brighter. PERHAPS YOUR FRIENDS CAN.

Lucy now realized why he was forcing her to look away. He wasn’t trying to stop her from wal owing in her own misery. He was trying to get her to look at something else. Spread across the far wal was a composite image of a city, al towers and deserted roads, and one fragment of the image seemed to be the viewpoint of a floating camera drifting down a street. It was looking head-on at Chief Mendez and Fred, flanked by the rest of her squad and Blue Team, walking in silence with a resigned set to their shoulders.

But then Mendez spoke, as if he’d been arguing with himself and couldn’t keep it in any longer. “Goddamn it, we will find her. She’s only been gone four days. She’s a survivor. She knows we won’t stop looking for her.”

Four days? Four days? Lucy was certain she’d only been in here for hours. This place had to be another slipspace pocket. How many dimensional layers were there in this sphere?

She pul ed away from Prone and tapped frantical y in the text screen. PLEASE. TAKE ME TO THEM.

WILL THEY HURT US? he asked.

Lucy grabbed his tentacle. He almost jerked away, but he seemed to be getting used to her now. She reached back to the screen with her free hand.

I WON’T LET ANYONE HURT YOU. It didn’t seem enough. She tried to underline ANYONE with emphatic strokes but the marks didn’t appear.

Prone cocked his head to one side as if he was weighing up the odds.

I KNOW, he said, and led her through the workshop.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I WANT A COMPLETE EM CORDON AROUND THAT ANOMALY. I DON’T WANT ANYONE ELSE TO KNOW IT’S THERE, AND I DON’T WANT ANY SIGNALS IN OR OUT. YOU KEEP THAT DAMN THING UNDER SIGNAL LOCKDOWN, AND IF YOU HEAR SO MUCH AS A SNEEZE FROM IT, THEN YOU ABSOLUTELY DO NOT RESPOND TO IT OR INDICATE YOUR PRESENCE IN ANY WAY. COMMUNICATION WILL BE CONDUCTED ENTIRELY THROUGH ME.

(ADMIRAL MARGARET O. PARANGOSKY, CINCONI, TO THE CO OF UNSC GLAMORGAN, ON THE DISCOVERY OF THE TRANSDIMENSIONAL OBJECT NEAR THE ONYX COORDINATES)

UNSC PORT STANLEY: FEBRUARY 2553.

“I stil think we should pay Venezia a visit.” Vaz leaned out of the compartment to check if the door to Osman’s day cabin was stil shut. “Although one Shiva wouldn’t be enough to glass them, would it?”

“Maybe ‘Telcam can oblige,” Mal said. He was stirring something in a bowl, a brown paste that looked like baby food. “Now that he’s got a warship and everything. No point having dodgy hinge-head friends if you can’t use them.”

Vaz peered into the bowl. “What’s that?”

“BB’s special recipe.” Mal stuck his finger in the sludge and tasted it, but he didn’t pul a face so Vaz took that as approval. “Actual y, it tastes like yeast extract with sugar in it. Sort of salty and malty.” He held out the container in Adj’s direction. “Come on, Adj. Nom nom. Nummy yeast stuff.”

Adj seemed tempted and floated across to take the container. He looked into it, cocking his head.

“You need a spoon or something?” Mal pul ed one out of his pocket. “Go on. Dig in.”

Adj took the spoon and the container and drifted into a corner behind one of the duct runs, enchantingly harmless. Vaz was starting to worry what would happen to him when he was handed over to ONI. A ferociously disloyal and undisciplined thought crossed his mind, but he pushed it away.

Mal was right. If UNSC had grabbed a few more Engineers early in the war, things would have been very different. It was clear now that the Covenant wouldn’t have been half so powerful without them. They were al struggling to change their own lightbulbs now.

Osman’s door clicked, a warning that it was going to open. She emerged with an odd expression on her face that Vaz interpreted as a sort of wistful satisfaction, like some good news had arrived a little too late.

She caught him watching. “Why don’t you al grab a coffee and close up on the bridge in five minutes?” she said, more of a friendly invitation than an order. “I’ve got some interesting information from Sydney.”

Mal raised his eyebrows discreetly at Vaz and turned to whisper. “Phil ips reckons that Admiral Hood’s planning to visit the hinge-heads, judging by the chatter he’s picking up. Maybe we’l have to provide close protection for him. I do love a bit of irony in my life.”

BB must have been doing a discreet roundup. Naomi, Devereaux, and Phil ips joined them on the bridge, looking as if they were expecting what Mal referred to as a serious bol ocking. Vaz found it hard to imagine Osman bol ocking anybody. Vaz suspected that her style was much more like Parangosky’s: either a look of quiet disapproval for the smal mistakes, or a single round that you never saw coming for the real y big misjudgments.

Shouting didn’t seem to be the ONI style.

BB settled on the comms console and didn’t say a word.

“Do you want me to give you a long explanatory preamble to this, or would you rather I just plunged straight in?” Osman asked. “You’re free to stop me and ask questions.”

“We’re real y good with plunging in, ma’am,” Mal said. “As long as there’s no complicated physics in it.”

Osman almost smiled. “I’l add clairvoyance to your list of adquals, Staff. Yes, there’s a little bit of physics. It’s a mixed bag, so I’l deal with the bad news first.” She looked at Naomi. “There’s a memorial dedication at Voi next month, and you’l know some of the names on it. I’m afraid the Master Chief’s one of them.”

Vaz didn’t know much about Spartan politics apart from the rapid acquaint of the last few weeks, but he did know who the Master Chief was. He could only imagine how hard that news hit Naomi. He tried not to stare at her, but it seemed cowardly not to look the woman in the eye and remind her she was among friends. She didn’t move a muscle. It was hard to tel if any blood had drained from that porcelain-white face, but she glanced down for a second and clasped her hands in her lap.