The statue would not stop kneeling, and that turned out to be the harder problem. It stayed down at the lip of the turntable pit, head lowered, the unkillable thing the team had spent twenty minutes dying to slow, and now it simply knelt to Caleb and waited, inert as a tool set down between uses.
Kikaru circled it once with her weapon still raised, found nothing to do with the raised weapon, and lowered it. Iharu would not come closer than ten meters and did not pretend otherwise.
"So we're all seeing it kneel," Iharu said. "I want that on the record, that we all saw it, because when I tell people a Class-unknown walked through three of us and got down on the ground in front of Caleb like he's a shrine, nobody's going to believe me, and I want witnesses."
"It's not a shrine. Don't say shrine." Caleb crouched a careful distance from the kneeling thing, studying it. The silver under his ribs leaned toward it, gentle, kin-close, and he held the lean still.
