The canister came to a halt beside her. She stared down at the rejected gift. If it had travelled all the way into the expanse of the chamber, it was very unlikely to have entered the shaft again.

There had to be a grille or baffle of some kind at the bottom of the shaft – below the piston’s lowest point, or the canister would have been crushed into powder. Some of the disruptor would surely have ended up inside the chamber, but the grit blown back at her must have been the rest.

Agata touched the clock on her belt; she needed to start moving immediately, or she’d be so late for her end of shift that Celia would send in a search party. She gathered up her tools and the lidless canister and forced them back into their hiding place.

She had four days left, and a barrier at the bottom of a giant, pounding piston that would reject most of what she threw into the shaft.

But as she retreated along the tunnel, she finally understood where the plan was leading her. She could dive under the piston, survive the landing on the barrier, and – if the low point of the piston’s motion was high enough – remain there unharmed long enough to deliver the disruptor into the chamber by hand. That much was possible.

But once she was down there, there would be no way out.

31

‘Have you checked the horizon lately?’ Tarquinia asked Ramiro, following him into the apartment.

‘I think it’s still about a bell away,’ he said. There was no official cut-off point, but there was a public site where people had posted the times of origin of all the messages they’d received from the last few days before the disruption. Ramiro harnessed himself to the desk beside his console and brought up the file.

‘No change,’ he reported. ‘Do you want to try out the system while you still have a chance?’

Tarquinia hummed with mock regret. ‘Too late. Let the messagers who want the bandwidth have it; I’m not going to steal it from them for a cheap thrill.’

‘Then why do you care about the timing?’

‘This is the start of freedom,’ she said. ‘The Councillors might know everything they’re going to do for the next three days, but most people will have nothing proscribing their actions.’

Ramiro wasn’t expecting an uprising. ‘It’s going to take more than three days for the effects of the last three years to fade. And if there was going to be public unrest, I think the Council’s own bulletins would have mentioned it.’ Censoring bad news wouldn’t change anything, and once the omission came to light it would only undermine the government’s credibility.

He took the link from its hiding place under the desk and plugged it into the console.