Silvia delivered the report the way a clerk delivers the minutes of a meeting.

She did it on purpose. Lloyd realized this within the first thirty seconds, and the realization landed in his chest with a small, strange, unwilling warmth. She had pulled a stool up to the end of the counter. She had taken out of one of her innumerable pockets a small sheaf of cards, no bigger than playing cards, covered in tiny handwriting, and she had laid them face down on the wood and squared them with the edge of her palm. She had even, he noticed, cleared her throat.

"I thought," she said, "that you'd prefer it in a format you could use."

"How do you know what I prefer?"

"I've watched you for four days. You write lists in your sleep." She turned over the first card. "Three headings. Personnel, finance, and the Core. I'll go in order. Stop me if you have questions. You will."

Elena had come in from the yard and stood by the door with her arms folded. She did not sit. Lloyd had put the kettle on, and it was sending up a thin white thread of steam into the quiet room, and the lamp on the counter made a warm yellow ring on the wood. It was past ten. The other guests were asleep. It was, he thought, a remarkably cozy setting in which to receive bad news.

"Go on," he said.

"Item one," said Silvia. "Personnel."

---

"Pandemonium has lost thirty-one percent of its operations staff since the first of the month."

She said it flatly, reading from the card.

"Not to dismissal. To attrition. Two hundred and six imps, forty-eight gargoyles, nine of the senior cooks. Resignation letters, in most cases. A few simply didn't come back from leave. A dozen were found asleep at their stations, and have been placed on medical rest." She turned the card. "The three replacement operators, whom you trained, are still in post. Fenwick has applied for transfer four times. Grist has not applied for anything, because it's a golem and cannot write. Ossa has been promoted to Acting Deputy, and is, by all reports, very good and very unhappy."

Lloyd stood quite still.

"And the Commander?" he said.

"I'm coming to the Commander."

She turned the second card. Her mouth, he saw, had tightened very slightly. It was not a large change. A person who had not spent six years reading faces would have missed it entirely.

"Item two. Finance."

"The Demon King convened a Quarterly Review on the eighth. The Legion's yield for the month was down thirty-eight percent from projection. The Dashboard has been in a state of red alert for forty-three days. His Majesty described this, in open assembly, as 'a failure of command.'" Silvia raised her eyes. "I have it from three independent witnesses. They agree on the wording."

"In open assembly."

"In front of the whole court. About four hundred officers. His Majesty called the Commander forward, by name, and read out the figures." She paused. "Then he reduced her salary by forty percent. Effective immediately. Backdated to the start of the quarter."

The kettle began to whistle.

Nobody moved to take it off.

"What did she say?" said Lloyd.

His own voice sounded very far away. It was not loud. It was level, and cool, the voice of a man asking a question about a column of figures. But something had gone tight in his throat, a hard small knot, like a fist closing around a stone.

"Nothing," said Silvia.

"Nothing."

"She stood at attention. She said, 'Understood, Your Majesty.' She saluted. She walked back to her place." The paper in Silvia's hand had stopped moving. "I'm told that the whole room went quiet. It was a very quiet room. Nobody could remember a Commander of her rank being treated like that in public. The Demon King is not a cruel man, as a rule, but he is a tired one, and he has a great many things he cannot say to the right people." She lowered her voice. "She took it. She didn't argue. She didn't explain. She didn't say that it was not her fault."

"It wasn't her fault."

"No."

"It was mine," said Lloyd.

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to."

He put out a hand, and took the kettle off the hob. It was a small, mechanical gesture, a thing his hands did without him. The steam rolled up past his face. He set it down on the board, carefully, with the spout turned away.

His hand, he noticed, was not quite steady.

He felt something rise in him, slowly, from a long way down. It had no shape that he recognized. It was not guilt, though it had a streak of that in it. It was not grief. It was hotter than either, and much more precise, and it had a direction, though he could not have said where. It pointed at a high chamber with a black window. It pointed at a figure in a coat, standing at attention, while four hundred people looked at her and said nothing.

He was angry.

He had not been angry in a very long time. He had not, as far as he could remember, been angry at all, in the whole of his adult life; it was not an emotion that fit comfortably into the work. But it was here now, hot and sharp and without a name, like a coal dropped into a cold room.

"Lloyd," said Elena, gently.

"I'm fine."

"Your hand is bleeding."

He looked down. He had been gripping the edge of the counter, and a splinter had gone into the heel of his palm. A thin bright line of red ran down his wrist. He regarded it with mild surprise, and took out his handkerchief, and wrapped it.

"Continue," he said.

---

"Item three," said Silvia. "The Core."

She turned over the last card. It was the one she had been saving. He could tell by the way she held it, with both hands, as if it might be heavier than it looked.

"A new officer has been appointed to the Abyss. Sent down by the Demon King's own office, with the title of Director of Output. Name of Vex." She said it carefully. "Short for Vexillarius, I believe, though nobody uses the long form. He's an old Marcher. Very senior. Very cold. He came up through the Mines and the Foundries, never the Dungeons, which tells you what you need to know. In eleven years of service, I can find no record of him ever having failed to meet a target."

"A hard man," said Lloyd.

"A very hard man. I met him once, at a banquet. He wore gloves at the table. He never took them off." She turned the card. "He took charge on the nineteenth. He has been in the Operations Wing for twenty-four days. And in that time, he has been doing something that, as I understand it, you did not recommend."

She did not say what.

She did not have to.

"He's raised the circulation," said Lloyd.

"Yes."

"By how much?"

"I'm not an Operator," said Silvia. "I only know numbers when I'm given them. I have them here, in three readings, from a man in the Dashboard room who owes me a favor." She laid the card on the counter. "Ninety-four on the nineteenth. Ninety-six on the twenty-fourth. As of Friday, ninety-eight."

She did not read them aloud. She laid them down side by side, in a neat row, and let him see.

94. 96. 98.

Lloyd looked at the numbers.

He looked at them for a very long time. They did not change. They sat on the cards in Silvia's small crabbed hand, in black ink, three plain figures, with nothing around them. They did not look like anything at all.

His right hand had begun, without any decision on his part, to count. His thumb touched his forefinger. His middle finger. His ring finger. His little finger. One. Two. Three. Four. Again. One. Two.

"That is not," he said.

His voice cracked, and he stopped, and cleared his throat, and began again, perfectly level.

"That is not within tolerance."

"I'm told it isn't."

"The recommended ceiling is seventy. The hard limit is eighty-two. Beyond that, the lattice begins to..." He stopped again. His mouth had gone dry. "It's not a theoretical risk. It's a documented failure mode. There's a section about it in the manual. Section Fourteen, Subsection Three."

"Yes," said Silvia, very softly. "I know. I read it."

He looked up.

"You've read the manual."

"I read everything." She met his eyes without flinching. "I stole it from the Dashboard room on the twenty-sixth. I thought it might be worth something." She paused. "It's the best technical document I've ever seen."

Lloyd did not say anything.

Behind him, the kettle ticked as it cooled.

"I underlined the number," he said.

"I saw."

"I underlined it twice."

"I saw that, too."

"He's ignoring it," said Lloyd.

"As far as I can tell," said Silvia, "he's never read it."

---

It was a quiet minute.

There were sounds in it. A log settled in the grate. A mouse ran along a beam. Far off, in the black fields, a dog barked twice and stopped. Lloyd stood with his hands on the counter and his handkerchief red at the palm, and let the numbers sit in front of him, 94, 96, 98, until they stopped being numbers and became a kind of weather.

He was not going to speak of it.

He was quite determined about that. He had walked a long way from the Abyss, and he had left a great deal behind, and he had trained himself over six weeks to look at certain things only from the side, the way you learn to look at the sun. He would not say the number. He would not name the floor. He would stand here, in the warm yellow lamplight, and discuss the matter as an Operator, calmly, as a technical problem.

It was a good plan.

It lasted until Elena spoke.

"Is it the same as before?" she said.

She had not moved from the door. She stood with her arms still folded and her broad face turned toward him, grave and open and quite unguarded. She was not looking at the cards. She was not looking at Silvia. She was looking at him, with the steady, patient, sorrowful attention of a soldier looking at a wall she knows has a crack.

"Before what?" said Lloyd.

She did not answer.

She only looked at him. She did not say it again. She did not press. It was the quietest kind of question, the sort that is asked without being asked, and then simply left in the air between two people like a cup set down on a table.

Lloyd's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

He was aware of the room, all at once, with the very sharp clarity of a man at the edge of a fall. He was aware of the lamp and the steam and the three small cards on the counter. He was aware of Silvia, who had gone quite still on her stool. He was aware of a drawer in the back of his mind, which was locked, and which had, in the last several seconds, begun very faintly to rattle.

Sixty-six.

It rose in him like a note on a pipe organ, low and cold and enormous. It filled his chest. He felt the whole weight of it, the sound of a Core screaming and screaming in the dark, and a page with his name on it, and a long silence in a room with a black window.

"Nothing," said Lloyd. "I don't know what you mean."

Elena did not move.

"I see," she said, very gently.

She did not say anything more. But she did not look away. And Silvia, on her stool, lowered her eyes to her cards, and moved one of them a quarter of an inch, with the air of a woman making a note she would not be writing down.

---

"There's one more thing," said Silvia.

"I don't want it."

"I know."

"I've heard enough."

"I know that, too." She slid the last card across the counter, so that it lay in front of him, face down. "I wouldn't give it to you if I thought you could do without it. It's not very much. It isn't about numbers."

She did not turn it over. She left it where it was, and put her hands in her lap.

"The Commander," said Silvia, "has been resisting him."

Lloyd's hand stopped on the counter.

"Openly. From the first day. She refused to countersign the new output schedule. She refused to release the Legion's reserve crews to run the extra shifts. She filed a formal objection with the Demon King's office, in writing, on the twenty-first, and she copied it to the Dashboard room. It's a nine-page document. I'm told it's a masterpiece." Silvia's voice was very quiet. "It cites a number of technical papers that I'm quite sure she didn't have in her library."

"She wouldn't have," said Lloyd. "They were mine."

"Yes. I thought so."

"I left them in the annex."

"She took them." Silvia paused. "She read every one."

He did not say anything.

"The objection was overruled," said Silvia. "She appealed. It was overruled again. She appealed a third time, and was told that further appeals would be treated as insubordination. She said," and here a faint, strange smile touched her mouth, "she said that she would treat it as an honor."

"That sounds like her."

"Does it? I've never met her." Silvia's eyes were on his face. "But I've been told by several people who have, that she has stopped sleeping. That's the other thing. The Legion has noticed. There's a night sergeant who patrols the east wing at four. He says that for six weeks, there's been a light under the door of the Command Chamber. Every night. All night. And he says," she hesitated, "he says, if you press your ear to the wood, you can hear something."

"What?"

"Paper."

Lloyd stared at her.

"A pen on paper," said Silvia. "A scratching, and then a stop. And then the sound of a page being torn. And then the scratching again." She tilted her head. "He's heard it for six weeks. He's started to count. He says that on a good night, it's eleven pages. On a bad night, thirty."

The room had gone entirely silent.

It was not the silence of a thing that has stopped. It was the silence of a long tense breath, held, and held, and held. He heard the fire. He heard his own pulse. He heard, with the dreadful clarity of an echo, a sentence in black ink, struck through with a single line.

I haven't slept since you left.

"She writes them," said Silvia, "and she tears them up. And she writes them again."

"Stop," said Lloyd.

"I thought you ought to know."

"Please stop."

She stopped.

He stood at the counter with his hand pressed flat on the wood, and the lamp lit his face from below, and for a moment, none of the three of them moved. The face of the Operator, the face of the broker, and the face of the soldier, all quite still. A clock ticked on the shelf. Outside, the wind rose a little, and fell.

He was not angry now.

He was something else. It was a thing that had no name in any of the lists that he had written. It was a deep, strange, helpless, tilted feeling, as of a man who has been walking on a long flat road for a very long time and has just now looked down and seen that it was, all the while, climbing.

"Excuse me," said Lloyd.

---

He went down to the cellar.

He did not remember deciding to. He found himself on the stone steps, in the dark, with the lamp in his hand and his feet moving of their own accord, going down and down into the cool, damp, earthy dark. The air changed as he descended. It grew colder, and clearer, and smelled of stone and wet and iron.

He reached the bottom. He set the lamp on the floor. He went to the far corner, where the north-east wall met the foundation, and he knelt, in the dust, and laid his palm flat against the rock.

It was cold. It was wet. It ran, faintly, under his hand, in a long slow tremor, steady and endless. He felt it in his bones.

Water.

It had been running here before the cabin was built. It had been running before the village, and before the forest, and before any of them. It would go on running, he thought, after all of them were gone. It had no opinion about the Demon King or the Church or the cost of a Core. It simply flowed. It went where the ground sloped. It took no orders, and it made no apologies, and it did not wait for anyone to say that it was needed.

He put his forehead against the stone.

He wished, with a sudden, terrible, uncomplicated wish, that he were a spring.

It was a stupid thing to think. He knew that. He stayed there anyway, on his knees in the lamplit dark, with the cold seeping through his shirt and the blood drying in his palm, and he tried to put the pieces in a row.

One: the Core was being driven to ninety-eight percent, and it would fail. It was not a prediction. It was arithmetic. It would fail in a week, or a month, and when it did, it would fail the way it had before. It would fail like Floor Sixty-Six, but on a larger scale, and in a worse way, because this time there would be no warning, and no Operator to ignore.

Two: that was not his problem.

He tried it again, slowly. That was not his problem. He had resigned. He had given proper notice. He had completed a handover of three hundred and four pages, and a diagram, and every detail he knew. If someone chose to disregard a clearly marked limit, the fault was theirs. It was a clean argument. It was a sound argument. He had said it to himself, over and over, in a hundred different forms, in the long cold hours of the night.

And it did not seem to be doing anything at all.

Three.

He stopped.

He did not have a three. He had searched for it, a dozen times, in the dark. It was the thing he could not put in a list, because it did not fit into a column. It was not a fact. It had no figure attached. It was only a picture: a tall figure in a black coat, sitting alone at a desk at four in the morning, in a red light, writing a page. Tearing it up. Writing it again.

He had not asked to see it. He did not want to. It sat in his mind with a terrible, quiet, steady weight, like a stone at the bottom of a pool.

Why can't I stop thinking about her?

It was a very simple question. He turned it over, and over, and could not find the bottom.

He had told himself it was loyalty. He had told himself it was professional concern. A colleague, a superior, the commander of a unit that depended on his work. A person with whom he had spent six years. It was reasonable that he should wonder how she was. It was natural. It was what anyone would do.

He knew, kneeling in the cold with his forehead against the wet stone, that it was not what anyone would do.

He did not finish the thought. He did not let it go on. It stood at the very edge of a word, trembling, like a man on a high ledge, and he took one long breath and stepped back.

"No," said Lloyd, aloud, to the dark.

The spring ran on.

---

He did not hear her on the stair.

She was just there, when he lifted his head: a large still shape at the foot of the steps, holding a lamp in one hand and a steaming mug in the other, with her shadow thrown huge and gentle across the stones. She had taken off her boots. She was standing in her stockinged feet, in the cold, and her face in the lamplight was very quiet.

"I did not want to disturb you," said Elena.

"You're not."

"You have been down here for forty minutes."

"Have I?"

"I was counting." She crossed the floor, and set the mug on a barrel beside him, and sat down on an upturned crate with the air of a person who intends to stay. "It is chamomile. I have improved. It is only three minutes."

He took it. It was hot against his hands, and slightly bitter, and he found that it was the best thing he had ever tasted.

She did not say anything. She sat with her elbows on her knees and her big hands loosely clasped, and looked at the wall of wet stone, and let the silence sit.

After a long while, she spoke.

"You do not have to decide tonight."

"I'm not deciding anything," said Lloyd.

"No?"

"I have no decision to make. There's no decision involved. It's an administrative matter. The Core is outside my jurisdiction, and I've resigned, and there's nothing I can do." He heard his own voice, level and tight and a little too fast. "It's all quite settled."

"Yes," said Elena.

"It's not as if I've been asked."

"No."

"She's never asked."

"I know."

"She'd never ask." He set the mug down. His fingers were trembling very slightly. "She'd rather tear up thirty pages."

Elena did not say anything.

She sat for a moment longer, with her hands between her knees. Then she lifted her head, and looked at him, quite plainly, with her wide gray eyes in the lamplight, and he saw that there was nothing in them but a deep and settled kindness.

"That is also a decision," she said.

He closed his eyes.

"I know," said Lloyd. It came out very low. "I know it is."

The spring ran on, under the stones, in the dark. Above them, in the warm room, a woman who had never in her life told anyone where she slept sat alone at a counter beside three small cards, and did not touch them, and waited.