Creed woke the way every Animatid woke: already tired.
There was no surfacing to it. One moment he was nowhere, and the next he was lying on his back in the dark with his heart going like a rivet gun and the taste of marrow-dust glued to the roof of his mouth, and the only proof he’d slept at all was the ache, which had moved. Last shift it had lived in his shoulders. Now it had settled lower, into the hinge of his spine, like a tenant who’d found a better room.
The bunk was a drawer. Not a figure of speech. Sump-Nine stacked its sleepers forty high in steel trays that slid into the dormitory wall on greased runners, each one long enough for a body and tall enough to turn over in if you didn’t mind your shoulder scraping the ceiling. Somewhere down the row the air recycler coughed. It coughed every eleven seconds. Creed knew because he’d counted, his first year in the stack, back when sleep still had to be coaxed instead of clubbed.
Four hours. That was what Kon Reclamation’s labor contract granted between shifts, printed in a font so small you needed a Mid’s eyes to read it. The walk from the Works to the stack ate forty minutes each way. That left two hours and forty minutes of something the contract called rest, and Creed had spent the last thirty of them the same way he’d spent every stolen half-hour for eight months.
He reached down past his own feet and thumbed the false panel at the end of the drawer. It came away with a click he’d filed down to almost nothing. Behind it, wrapped in oilcloth and two layers of conveyor-belt rubber, was the reason he was going to die tired.
He unwrapped it on his chest by feel first, the way you’d check a wound. Then he cracked a glow-strip between his teeth and let the weak green light crawl down the length of it.
A sword. Mostly.
The blade had come up through the scrap sort the spring before, buried in a crate of salvage hauled in from Outside — from the dead world beyond the bones, where nothing had lived for longer than anyone bothered to remember. Kon’s sorters ran every piece under the scanner arch. Copper went left. Rare earths went right. Anything that pinged as a relic went up the cable in a padded case to Nate Kon’s private vaults in the Higher Ribs, where, the rumor went, it sat behind glass and was looked at by people who had never once been hungry.
The blade hadn’t pinged as anything.
Creed had been standing at the arch when it went through. He’d watched the readout. Not steel. Not alloy. Not even unknown. The scanner had looked straight at three feet of curved metal and returned a blank line — the same blank line it gave when the tray was empty. As far as the machine was concerned, there had been nothing there at all.
So nobody noticed when nothing walked out of the sort under Creed’s coat.
It was single-edged, with the long shallow curve of the old blades painted on the dormitory walls, the ones carried by warriors whose names nobody had kept. The steel was dark, darker than any steel he’d ever handled, the color of slate in the rain — except along the edge itself, where it brightened into a line so clean and so thin it seemed to cut the light trying to land on it. He had never sharpened it. He’d tried, once, on the best whetstone in the Works. The stone had come away grooved.
And down the flat of the blade, from the guard nearly to the tip, someone had carved symbols.
Not etched. Not stamped. Carved, deep enough to lay the tip of his smallest finger in, each groove crisp-walled and smooth-bottomed, as if the metal had been soft as clay when the tool went in, or as if whatever held the tool simply hadn’t cared how hard the metal was. Curls and hooks. Lines that branched like veins. Shapes that looked like they wanted to be letters and refused. He had no idea what they meant. Nobody in Sump-Nine read anything older than a ration chit.
Everything else — everything that made it more than a stolen relic — he’d built.
The hilt was wrapped in strips of conveyor rubber cut on the bias so they’d bite into his palm when it sweated. Packed inside it was the breech assembly from a decommissioned rivet driver, rebored by hand over six weeks of half-hours. It fed a short rotating cylinder that held four rounds: slugs he pressed himself from scavenged bearing steel and propellant cake shaved off the blasting crews’ charges, a pinch at a time, so the weight logs never caught it. The barrel ran down the back of the blade along its spine, a length of bored rail-steel clamped tight with three steel bands, because his torch wouldn’t so much as discolor the relic metal and he’d long since given up trying to weld anything to it. The trigger sat inside the guard, under the index finger, right where a hand already wanted to be.
And in the tang, wired through a channel he’d spent a month cutting, was the heart he’d pulled out of a dead marrow saw: a high-frequency emitter. When it worked, the edge sang. When the edge sang, it went through bone like bone was a rumor.
It worked for about three seconds. Then the cell ran dry and needed twenty minutes to come back.
Four shots and three seconds. That was what eight months had bought him.
Wick called it the Problem. As in: How’s the Problem coming? Is the Problem going to get us both reassigned to the Void? Creed, I can hear the Problem through the slats, please, some of us have to haul marrow in three hours.
Tonight he was seating the emitter’s feed wire into the last stretch of channel, working it in with the tip of a bent pin, and he was too tired, and his hands were too tired, and the pin slipped.
His thumb went down the edge.
He didn’t feel the cut. That was how sharp it was. He felt only a strange coolness, then the warm run of blood into his palm, and when he looked, a fat bead of it had rolled off his knuckle onto the flat of the blade, right into one of the carved grooves.
It should have pooled. It should have sat in the bottom of the channel, red and stupid, the way blood sat everywhere.
It didn’t. It ran. It ran along the groove, following the curve faster than it had any right to on a level blade — around a hook, down a branching line — and then it was gone. Not smeared. Not wiped. Gone, as if the metal had drunk it.
Under his fingers, for the space of one breath, the steel was warm.
Not warm like metal left near a lamp. Warm the way skin was warm.
Creed lay very still.
Then the warmth was gone, and it was just a cold blade on his chest, and he was just an exhausted mule in a drawer, staring at a tool he’d built out of stolen garbage. The sensible part of him — the part that had kept him alive for twenty-four years in the belly of a dead god — explained the whole thing in a calm, reasonable voice. Emitter residue. Static. You’re tired, you’re bleeding in the dark, and you can’t see where it went. Wrap it up.
He wrapped it up.
He was pressing the panel back into place when the horn went.
It wasn’t a sound so much as weather. It came up through the floor and the wall and the drawer and the bones of his face, one long brass-throated bellow the whole stack felt at once, and above him, below him, on every side, forty-high rows of steel drawers began to grind open on their runners like the mouths of something waking up hungry.
Something banged twice on the bottom of the drawer above his.
“Tell me you slept,” said Wick’s voice through the slats.
“I slept.”
“Liar. Liar, liar. I heard you. You were doing the little scraping thing. You do the little scraping thing and then you breathe through your nose like a bellows when it won’t go in right.”
“It went in.”
A pause. “Did it?”
“Mostly.”
“Mostly,” Wick said, with feeling. His drawer shrieked out on dry runners, and a pair of bony ankles in patched wrap-socks swung down past Creed’s face. “That’s going on your marker. Here lies Creed. It mostly worked.”
Creed almost smiled. He didn’t have the energy to finish it.
Wickliffe Moraine was built like a cable strut someone had forgotten to finish: all length, no width, joints that stuck out at angles. He kept his hair shaved to grey stubble against the lice and kept his left thumbnail chewed down to the quick against everything else. He was twenty-six, two years older than Creed, and for as long as Creed had known him he had been afraid of nearly everything — heights, drops, the dark, foremen, the Void, the noise the recycler made at the end of the row, the possibility that the noise the recycler made meant something.
And every single shift, he got up and went down into the dark anyway.
Creed had never told him that was the bravest thing he knew. Wick would have died of embarrassment on the spot, and neither of them could afford the sponsorship penalty for a death on company property.
They joined the column on the catwalk. A thousand Animatids, then two thousand, pouring out of the stack in a slow grey river, nobody talking, every face the same color under the sodium lamps. Chit-bands blinked green on a thousand wrists — the steel cuffs Kon Reclamation bolted on you the day you signed, which tracked your hours, your rations and your air allotment, and which no tool in Sump-Nine could open short of taking off the hand. Green meant sponsored. Green meant fed and breathing. Nobody ever looked at their own band. Everybody looked at everyone else’s.
The catwalk ran along the outer wall of the god’s spine, and from up here, if you looked up — which you did not do — you could see the whole of the world.
The vertebrae climbed above them in a column of pale stacked mountains, each one the size of a district, disappearing upward into haze. Out from the spine swept the ribs, curved white bridges miles long, and between the ribs, strung on carbon cables thicker than the dormitory stack, hung the Suspension Cities. From down here they were lanterns. Clusters of light suspended in the dark, swaying very slightly — so slightly you could only see it if you held up your thumb and waited. The Mid Ribs hung lower, their light warm and orange and crowded together. The Higher Ribs hung above them, white-gold and sparse, cities spaced far apart, as if wealth needed room to breathe.
And above all of it, at the top of everything, so far up that the haze turned it into a rumor of light: the Skull.
Painted on the stack wall at the end of the catwalk, in letters taller than a man, faded and repainted so many times the paint had built up into a crust you could peel with a fingernail:
EYES DOWN.
THE HEAD SEES.
Every Animatid learned the catechism before they learned to count. The Head is above. The Head is apart. The Head is not for your eyes. You learned that looking up was a kind of theft — that you were taking something that didn’t belong to you — and that the Heads would know, because the Heads knew everything. The cameras in the walls, the chit-bands on the wrists, the ledgers in the foremen’s slates: all of it flowed upward eventually, into that cold pale glow at the top of the world.
Creed looked up anyway. Just for a second. He always did.
Not because he was brave. He’d thought about it a lot, in the drawer, in the dark, and he didn’t think it was bravery. It was just the only thing in his day that nobody had scheduled.
A bony elbow caught him in the ribs. “Eyes.”
“I know.”
“Then do it.” Wick was staring so hard at the grating under his own feet he was practically counting the holes. “Ferrin’s got cameras in his teeth, I swear to you. I swear on my air card. One day you’re going to look up, and something’s going to look back.”
Creed lowered his eyes. The light stayed on the backs of them for a while, a pale smear, the way it always did.
The cage lift dropped them three hundred meters into the bone.
The inside of the god’s fourth lumbar vertebra was not solid. Nothing about the god was solid, once you got into it. The bone was a honeycomb of chambers — galleries, the crews called them — each cell big as a ration hall, their walls curving and porous and pale as old teeth. And packed into those cells, in layers laid down over however many thousand years the god had been alive, was the marrow.
Near the walls it was hard as poured stone. Toward the center of a gallery it turned soft and grey-blue, the consistency of cold grease. Line C’s crews cracked it out with pneumatic picks, shoveled it into hoppers, and fed the hoppers into the press, a hydraulic monster the size of a cargo cage that squeezed the marrow down into sludge. The pumps pushed the sludge up through pipes as thick as a man’s waist into holding tanks, and the tanks rode the cables up, up, up, out of the Belly and into the light.
Somewhere up there, in refineries no Animatid had ever seen, the sludge became Catalyst.
Creed had seen Catalyst exactly as often as anyone in the Belly had: in other people. It was the color of the inside of a lightning strike, a blue so bright and so clean it looked like it would ring if you tapped it, and it ran in the channels of cyberware, in the arms and spines and eyes of the people who could afford to have it run in them. It lit the Suspension Cities from the inside. It powered the cable lifts and the Verbous carriages and the foremen’s lashes. It was, so the catechism said, the god’s gift to the worthy.
Down here it was just marrow. It stank like old pennies and burnt hair, and it got into everything — your lungs, the creases of your knuckles, the pores of your face — until the long-timers took on a grey-blue cast you could pick out across a ration hall. Marrow-skin, people called it. You didn’t get marrow-skin in under ten years. Creed was nine years in. Some mornings, under the sodium lamps, he thought he could see it starting along the backs of his hands.
“Line C!”
Foreman Dask Ferrin stood on the gantry above the line with his slate in his left hand and his right hand resting on the rail, and his right hand was the only beautiful thing in the gallery.
He was a Mid. You could tell from forty meters off, not from his clothes — he wore the same filth-grey coveralls as the crews, though his were clean — but from the arm. It was a Catalyst rig from the shoulder down: chrome bones under a sheath of translucent synth-skin, and beneath the skin, threading through the cyberware like veins, ran channels of living blue light. When Ferrin flexed his fingers, the light pulsed down them like a heartbeat.
With that arm he could do things. The old word was magic. Nobody above the ribs called it that anymore; they called it channeling, as if giving it a duller name made it less frightening. Creed had seen Ferrin heat a frozen pick-head cherry-red with two fingers. He had seen him throw a lash of blue force across thirty meters of gallery and pick a man up off his feet and put him down on his back. Mids got one rig, if they saved for ten years. The Verbous, it was said, had bodies that were more channel than meat. Animatids got none. It wasn’t allowed, and even if it had been, a single vial of refined Catalyst cost more than an Animatid’s whole contract was worth. That figure was public. Kon Reclamation posted it in the ration hall. Creed had always assumed that was on purpose.
“Quota’s up four percent this shift,” Ferrin called down, reading off the slate. His voice was flat. Not cruel. Ferrin wasn’t cruel for fun. He was cruel on quota. “Higher Ribs are running a gala cycle. Somebody up top wants more light. Picks on the wall in two minutes.”
Nobody groaned. Groaning was a write-up.
By hour four Creed’s arms had gone past aching into the place beyond aching, where they felt like they belonged to somebody else and he was just steering them.
The pick was a pneumatic beast as long as his leg, and the trick with it — the trick everyone learned or broke their wrists failing to learn — was to stop swinging it.
“Don’t fight it,” Hesk had told him, his first week on the line, nine years ago. “Let it fall. Your arms are for aiming, mule, not for hitting. Bone does the hitting. Bone’s cheaper.”
Hesk worked the number-two pump, ten meters down the line. She had worked it for thirty-one years. She was fifty-three, which in the Belly was not old so much as mythological, and she had marrow-skin so deep that under the lamps she looked carved out of the same grey-blue stone as the gallery walls. Her hands on the pump bar were all knuckle and scar. She hummed while she worked. Always the same tune, low and wandering, something with no words that nobody else seemed to know. It rose and fell in time with the pump stroke. Creed had been hearing it for nine years. It had become a kind of clock.
The Drip cart came along the line at hour four, pushed by a Mid clerk in a filter mask who didn’t look at anybody.
The tabs were small and blue-white and soft as wet paper, and each one was stamped with the same mark: a skull in outline, and inside it, a closed eye. The Heads’ mark. You put a tab under your tongue and it dissolved into something that tasted faintly of metal, and ten minutes later your arms stopped belonging to you entirely and the minutes stopped counting, and you could work. That was all it did. It didn’t make you happy. It didn’t make you anything. It just took you out of the room your body was in, and left the body working.
It was free. It came down from the Head, free, on every line in every sector of the Belly, every four hours.
Creed had never in his life trusted anything free.
Most of the line took one at hour four. By hour twelve they were taking two. By hour sixteen some of them were taking three, and their eyes had gone glassy and flat, and their gums had started to recede from their teeth, and in a few years their teeth would go, and a few years after that, so would they. Creed had watched it happen to people he knew. He’d done the arithmetic. The ones who started early ended early. So he took one tab per shift, at hour twelve, when his body would stop on him without it — never before, never more.
Wick took his at hour four with shaking hands and a look of apology, as if the tab might mind.
“Don’t,” Wick said, before Creed could open his mouth. “I know. I know. Some of us aren’t built out of the same stuff as you.”
“Nobody’s built out of anything,” Creed said. “I just haven’t had one yet.”
“That,” said Wick, “is exactly what someone built out of different stuff would say.”
Swing. Fall. Crack. Shovel. Hopper.
Swing. Fall. Crack. Shovel. Hopper.
The gallery was hot, the kind of heat that didn’t come from anywhere, that just existed, wet and heavy, pressing on your chest like a hand. The ventilation pushed the air around without making it any thinner. Sweat ran into Creed’s eyes and the marrow dust in the sweat stung, so that by hour nine he was working half-blind, by feel, the way he’d worked on the sword in the drawer.
He thought about the sword. He thought about the warm groove, and the blood running the wrong way, and then he made himself stop thinking about it, because there were things you could afford to think about down here and things you couldn’t.
He thought instead about the angle of the barrel bands. The third band had been creeping. The barrel had to sit dead true along the spine or the first shot would go wherever it pleased, and the recoil off those slugs was vicious — he’d fired it exactly once, into a slag heap in a dead gallery, and the kick had nearly put the back of the blade into his own forehead. He would need to brace it. Two hands on the hilt. Or one hand on the hilt and the flat of the other against the spine, if the spine wasn’t singing at the time and about to take his palm off.
He thought, for no reason at all, about whether you could load the cylinder faster if you notched the rims.
Down the line, Hesk hummed.
“Hesk,” he said, around hour ten, because the humming was there and he needed to hear a voice that wasn’t in his own head. “What happens if Catalyst gets in your blood?”
The humming stopped. The pump didn’t.
“Who’s been telling you stories?”
“Nobody. Just wondering why they need the metal. Ferrin’s arm. Why not just —” He made a vague gesture with the pick, a jab at the inside of his own elbow.
Hesk worked the pump for three full strokes before she answered.
“Because it cooks you,” she said. “Catalyst touches bare blood — no channel, no metal between — it boils you from the vein out. I saw it once, when I was young enough to be stupid and they still sent Animatids up to scrub the refinery decks. Man slipped. Opened his arm on a tank flange and went into the spill up to his shoulder.” Another stroke. “They said it took him four minutes. I don’t know. I wasn’t counting. He screamed for all of it. That’s why the metal, mule. The metal is the only thing standing between the gift of the god and you turning into soup.”
Creed swung the pick. Let it fall. Crack.
“There’s folk who say otherwise,” Hesk added, after a while, more quietly. “Out past the Breach. Folk who do it the other way. No channels, no metal. Just blood.”
“Bleeders.” Everybody in the Belly knew the word. It was what you said to frighten someone at the end of a long shift. “That’s a ghost story.”
“Course it is.” Hesk’s face, under the lamps, gave away nothing at all. “That’s why the Heads pay so many people to keep saying so.”
And she went back to humming.
The press jammed a little after hour fourteen.
It jammed four or five times a shift. There were knots in the marrow — hard nodules, some as big as a head, that didn’t crack under the picks and didn’t crush under the ram — and when one went into the feed throat sideways, the whole machine locked with a shriek of hydraulics and the hoppers backed up and the pumps ran dry and the quota board on Ferrin’s gantry ticked from amber toward red.
Ollo was on the feed. Ollo was always on the feed. He was a slab of a man from the next drawer-row over, quiet, with forearms like cable spools, who could wrestle a full hopper by himself and never complained about anything, possibly because he never said anything at all.
The procedure for a jam was lockout. Kill the press power, wait for the hydraulic bleed, then clear the throat. Lockout took eight minutes.
Ferrin looked at the quota board. Line C was three percent under.
“Clear it hot,” he called down.
Ollo looked up at the gantry. For a second Creed thought he might actually say something. Then he picked up the pry bar, set it against the knot in the throat, and leaned.
The knot shifted. The bar slipped off it. Ollo, off balance, reached in with his free hand to catch the knot before it settled back — quick, automatic, the kind of thing you did ten times a shift and got away with nine — and the knot dropped into the throat, clear, and the press’s auto-cycle felt the throat open, and the ram came down.
The worst of it was the sound.
Not the scream; the scream came after. First there was the sound of the press finishing its stroke, the same deep hydraulic chunk it had made ten thousand times that shift, except with something wet and splintering at the middle of it.
Then Ollo screamed.
Creed was moving before he’d decided to. Three meters. He hit the emergency stop with the heel of his hand so hard he felt it in his shoulder.
Nothing. The red mushroom button sank under his palm and nothing happened, because it had been dead for eleven weeks. There was a requisition in for it. Creed had seen the requisition. Everyone had.
The ram was down, pinning Ollo’s right arm in the throat to a few inches above the elbow. Below that there was no arm anymore, just the press plate and what was coming out from under it — dark and thick, running down the feed lip in a sheet. Ollo was jammed against the machine, his whole weight hanging off the trapped arm, his mouth open, his face gone a color Creed had never seen on a living person.
And the cycle light on the press housing was blinking amber. Counting down. The auto-cycle would lift the ram, feel the throat still full, and bring it down again. Nine seconds. Creed knew those nine seconds the way he knew the recycler’s eleven. Every Animatid on Line C did.
Next stroke, it would take the shoulder. Next one after that, the rest.
Eight.
The marrow saws hung on the rack beside the press. Creed tore one off its hook and thumbed it live. It was the same make as the emitter in the sword — he’d pulled one apart, he knew every part of it, he knew that its edge would go through calcified bone like a hot wire through wax — and the blade woke up in his hands with a thin, rising whine he felt in his teeth.
Seven.
“Wick! Hold him!”
He didn’t look to see if Wick was there. Wick was there. Wick had his arms around Ollo’s chest from behind and was hauling back on him with his whole stick-thin weight, his face bloodless, his eyes enormous, saying okay okay okay okay over and over in a voice like a cracked pipe.
Six.
Creed set the saw just above the place where the ram’s edge bit, and cut.
It took less than a second. That was the thing he would remember later, in the drawer, in the dark — how little time it took. The saw went in with a sound like tearing canvas, hit the bone, sang higher, and was through, and the spray came up hot across his chest and his throat and his mouth, and Ollo came free all at once and went over backwards on top of Wick, and they both hit the floor in a heap.
Three seconds later, the ram lifted. Felt the throat. Came down again on what was left in it.
Creed had his belt off before it finished the stroke. He dropped to his knees in the spreading dark puddle and cinched the belt around what remained of Ollo’s upper arm, high, right up into the armpit, and hauled it tight, and kept hauling, leaning back with his heels braced on the floor, until the pumping slowed to a weak, sullen pulse and then to an ooze.
Ollo had stopped screaming. That was bad or it was good. His eyes were open, rolling. His lips were moving.
“Talk to him,” Creed said.
“What?” Wick was pinned half underneath Ollo, soaked red from the collarbones down. “What do I — I don’t —”
“Anything. Keep him here.”
So Wick talked. He talked about the recycler and how it coughed every eleven seconds and did Ollo know that, Creed had counted, Creed counted everything, it was deeply unsettling to live under, and the ration hall had been out of the brown bars for two weeks and only had the green ones and the green ones tasted like a boot, and did Ollo remember when the cage lift stuck for six hours and everybody sang, and Wick’s voice was shaking so hard the words came out in pieces, but he did not stop. He did not stop once.
The light on the gallery floor turned blue.
Ferrin came down off the gantry with his rig lit from shoulder to fingertip, the Catalyst channels glowing so bright through the synth-skin that they threw sharp shadows of Creed and Wick and Ollo across the floor. He looked at Ollo for about as long as it took to blink. Then he looked at his slate.
“Log him,” he said. Not to anyone in particular. To the slate. “Asset depreciation, thirty-eight percent. Send him to the stitch-bay. His sponsorship rating’s under review pending reassessment.” He tapped twice. “Somebody clear the press. It’s got arm in it.”
Nobody moved.
Ferrin’s eyes came up from the slate and landed on the saw. It was still in Creed’s hand. It was still live, still whining, still red to the grip.
“You cut him.”
“Press would’ve had his shoulder on the next stroke.” Creed’s voice came out very level. He was listening to it from a distance. “Then his chest.”
“That saw is rated for marrow. You’ll be docked for blade wear.”
Something happened inside Creed then.
It wasn’t loud. It didn’t feel like anger, not the way anger was supposed to feel, hot and fast. It felt cold. It felt like something very old and very patient turning over in deep water. He was aware of the weight of the saw. He was aware that it was a high-frequency cutter, and that he was a meter and a half from the foreman, and that Ferrin’s Catalyst arm was chrome bone, and that the saw had just gone through human bone in less than a second and would not care very much about the difference.
Ferrin saw it. Ferrin was not stupid. The blue in his arm climbed, the channels brightening one after another from his fingertips to his shoulder, and a thin crackle of light began to crawl between his fingers like static over a cable.
“Put it on the rack, mule,” he said softly.
Nine years. Nine years without a missed shift, without a write-up, without a single mark on his band.
Creed stood very still with Ollo’s blood drying on his teeth.
“Creed.” Hesk’s voice, from ten meters down the line. Not loud. She hadn’t stopped pumping. “Rack.”
He thumbed the saw dead. He racked it.
Then, because nobody else on Line C could bring themselves to look at the feed throat, he locked out the press — eight minutes, and Ferrin said nothing about it — and cleared it himself.
He did not let himself think while he did it. He only let his hands work. Afterwards he could remember almost nothing, except that the weight of what he lifted out was wrong — too light — and that it was still warm.
At hour fifteen, he took his Drip tab. Three hours late. His hands didn’t stop shaking until hour sixteen.
He didn’t notice the humming had stopped.
That was what stayed with him afterwards. Not the rest of it. That. He had been hearing Hesk hum for nine years, every shift, low and wandering and wordless, rising and falling with the pump stroke. And somewhere in the long blurred grind of the late hours, it had stopped, and he hadn’t noticed, and he would never know when.
What he noticed was the pump.
The number-two pump’s pressure gauge had dropped into the red, and the pump bar wasn’t moving. Hesk was standing at it with both hands on the bar and her head bowed, the way the long-timers rested — standing up, leaning their weight on the work, because sitting down was a write-up and standing still, if you did it right, looked almost like working.
“Hesk,” Creed said. “Your gauge.”
She didn’t answer.
He set down the pick. He walked the ten meters. He put a hand on her shoulder.
Her shoulder was still warm. Her eyes were open. They were looking down, at the marrow, at the floor, at the work — exactly where she had been told to look at everything, her whole life.
Her chit-band had gone grey.
The bands always knew first. Before the foreman, before the crew, before the body itself had finished falling, the steel cuff on the wrist had already registered that the asset had stopped producing, and logged it, and sent the log upward, toward the ribs and beyond.
“Ferrin,” Creed said. He didn’t shout. He didn’t have to. The whole line had stopped.
Ferrin looked down from the gantry. Looked at the slate.
“Log her,” he said.
Two carriers came with a hook-cart. They didn’t say anything either. They had to pry Hesk’s fingers off the pump bar one at a time. One of them had a pair of bolt-snips, and he cut the chit-band off her wrist — it was faster than unbolting it, and she didn’t need the wrist anymore — and dropped the band into the reissue bin at the end of the line. It landed on the others with a hollow little clack.
The bin was half full. Creed had never noticed that before either. He wondered how long it had been half full.
“Pump two is dry,” Ferrin said. “Somebody take it.”
Creed took it.
He worked Hesk’s pump for the last hour of the shift, his hands on the bar where her hands had been, the steel still faintly warm from them for the first few strokes. He tried to hum her tune. He didn’t know it well enough. He’d been hearing it for nine years and he’d never once learned it, because there was always going to be another shift, and she was always going to be there to hum it.
He got about four notes in, and lost it, and didn’t try again.
When the horn went, people sat down where they stood.
That was always the first thing. Before talking, before eating, before anything, two hundred bodies simply folded onto the gallery floor, onto the marrow, onto each other, and stayed there, breathing. Wick dropped next to Creed with his back against the press housing, still crusted rust-brown to the collar with Ollo’s blood. He’d been crusted with it for six hours. No one had told him to wash. No one had told him he could.
“He’ll live,” Wick said, to the floor. “Ollo. The stitch-bay sent word. He’ll live.”
“Good.”
“Thirty-eight percent.” Wick laughed, a horrible little sound. “They’ll put him on sort. One-armed men can sort. He’ll be fine. He’ll be —” His voice broke cleanly in half. He put his face in his hands.
Creed’s chit-band buzzed against his wrist.
He looked at it. He had never looked at it in his life, not once in nine years, because looking at it meant you thought something might be wrong. The band was flashing red. Across its little scratched display, in letters that crawled:
SPONSOR AUDIENCE
GANTRY 3
IMMEDIATE
Beside him, Wick had gone absolutely rigid.
“No.” Wick grabbed his wrist and stared at the band as if staring might change the letters. “No, no. Sponsor audiences mean two things. They mean reassignment or they mean the Void. Creed — what did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“You cut a man’s arm off with company property and then stared at a foreman like you were deciding which piece of him to cut off next!”
“That’s not why.”
“How do you know that’s not why?”
He didn’t. He stood up anyway. You didn’t keep a sponsor waiting. You didn’t keep a sponsor anything.
· · ·
Gantry Three was a cable terminus, a platform of riveted steel jutting out over a drop so deep that the bottom of it was only an idea. Freight lines came down here from the Mid Ribs: dead-eyed cargo cages, ore buckets, sludge tanks going up. Creed had stood on Gantry Three a hundred times, hauling, and never once looked at what came down the cable.
He looked now.
It came down out of the dark like a seed falling from a very high tree. Black lacquer, polished so deep it held the gantry lamps as stars. Trim in gold — real gold, he thought, though he’d never seen any to compare. The shape of a teardrop, or a pod. It settled onto the terminus cradle with barely a sound, and its side panel slid back, and there was glass behind it, and behind the glass was a different world.
The air inside the carriage was clear. Not clean — clear, so free of dust and haze that the inside of the carriage looked sharper than the outside, as if it was in focus and everything else in the Belly was not. There was a deep chair upholstered in something pale. There was a low table. And on the table, in a white ceramic pot, there was a plant.
A living plant. Leaves. Green.
Creed had seen pictures. He’d seen the painted ones on the dormitory walls, gone brown and grey with age. He had never seen the real color. It was so vivid it almost hurt. He found he could not stop looking at it, and he knew the man in the chair could see him looking, and he still couldn’t stop.
“Ah,” said Nate Kon. “Everyone looks at the fern.”
His voice came through a speaker grille set into the carriage frame: warm, cultured, a little bored, the voice of a man who had never once had to raise it. Kon sat in the deep chair with one leg crossed over the other, a pale fruit in one hand and a small silver knife in the other, and he was cutting the fruit into thin slices and eating them off the blade.
He was tall, and lean, and had the kind of face that had been expensive for a very long time — smooth in a way that had nothing to do with youth. His hair was silver-white, swept straight back. His eyes were not eyes anymore; they were something faintly gold, with irises that ticked and refocused like camera apertures when they moved. And along his jaw and his temples, just under the skin, ran fine branching traceries of Catalyst blue, delicate as frost on glass. Jewelry, Creed realized. Worn on the inside.
Kon did not look at him for some time. He finished a slice of fruit. He wiped the knife on a white cloth.
“Creed,” he said at last. “Single name. Sump-Nine, drawer thirty-one C. Nine years on my books without a single missed shift.” He set down the knife. “Do you have any idea how rare that is?”
Creed said nothing. Silence was safest. Silence had always been safest.
“Most of my assets break around year six,” Kon went on, pleasantly. “It’s practically a law of nature. Backs, lungs, nerves, the Drip — something gives. You haven’t. And you take exactly one tab per shift, at hour twelve. Never earlier. Never more.” The gold eyes ticked, refocused, and settled on Creed’s face for the first time. “Which tells me you are either very disciplined or planning something. Both are useful to me. Don’t look so worried. If I thought you were dangerous, I’d have had you reassigned to the Void from my desk and spared myself the trip. The air down here is dreadful.”
He selected another slice of fruit.
“Have you ever been to a gala, Creed? No. Of course you haven’t. Forgive me. Nine days ago, Ilsa Marchetti — I’m sure the name means nothing to you, and I envy you for it — unveiled a clock. A dead-world clock. Brass and glass, from Outside, from before. And Creed —” for the first time, something like real feeling came into the warm voice, and it was something small and sour, “—it ticks. Two hundred of the finest people in the Higher Ribs stood in a ring and listened to it tick as if it were a symphony. I have been in a foul mood ever since.”
He pressed something on the arm of his chair. A projection unfolded on the glass between them, pale blue: a map, a sector schematic Creed half-recognized. The spine. The pelvic basin. A crack in the bone on the western ilium, marked in red.
“Vesper Hollow,” said Kon. “A village in the pelvic basin, past the Breach. Abandoned twelve years ago, after the Bloom came through. Sealed since. Toxic, unpleasant, of no value to anyone.” The projection zoomed. A cluster of small shapes — buildings — around something that might have been a chapel. “Except. A fence of mine, who deals in this sort of thing, tells me that before the village emptied, the chapel held a relic. The Lantern of Saint Aurel. Glass and silver, dead-world make, said to hold a flame that has not gone out since the world outside the bones died.”
He ate the slice of fruit.
“It is almost certainly a fake. I don’t care. It is trivial, and it is beautiful, and I want it on a plinth under good lighting before the end of the gala cycle. You are going to go and get it for me.”
Creed found his voice. It came out rough, scraped raw by twenty hours of marrow dust. “Why me?”
“Because you are cheap, and you don’t break.” Kon said it as simply as he might have said the time. “Those are the two qualities I value most in a tool. You were selected by an algorithm, Creed. Don’t take it personally. Nothing down here is personal.”
“What’s in Vesper Hollow,” Creed said, “besides the lantern?”
Kon smiled. It was a good smile. It had been made by experts.
“If I knew that, I would send someone expensive.” He wiped his fingers on the white cloth. “There are stories. Squatters. Scavengers. Some nonsense about bleeders — I’m sure you’ve heard. Fairy tales for mules.” A small gesture with the knife. “Take a weapon.”
“Animatids aren’t permitted —”
“Oh, please, don’t.” Kon sounded genuinely pained. “We know about the drawer.”
The gantry did not move under Creed’s feet. It only felt as if it had.
“Eight point two kilos of unaccounted scrap left my sort last spring under your coat,” Kon said. “My people flagged it within the hour. I let it go.” He examined the fruit, chose a slice. “I find it instructive to see what mules make when they believe no one is watching. Most make knives. A few make stills. One, memorably, made a rather good violin. You, I’m told, have been building some kind of … gun? Sword? Both?” He laughed, a light, pleasant sound. “How charming. Take it with you. I’d hate to lose my lantern because the courier had nothing to swing.”
Eight point two kilos of scrap. Creed held his face perfectly still. Kon’s people had flagged the weight. The scanner had flagged nothing. Nate Kon, collector of relics, owner of private vaults full of the dead world’s treasures, thought the blade wrapped in rubber in Creed’s drawer was a piece of junk.
He did not know why that felt important. It did.
“Terms,” said Kon, and the map on the glass was replaced by lines of text that Creed did not try to read. “Seventy-two hours. You’ll be issued a filter mask, a seventy-two-hour air card, field rations and a relic case. Bring the lantern back intact inside the window, and your sponsorship rating goes up two grades. Double rations. A drawer on a higher row, if that sort of thing matters to you.” He shrugged. “Fail to come back inside the window and your band goes grey remotely. If you’re still past the Breach when it does, your air card goes with it. So I’d hurry.”
“And if I refuse?”
Kon looked at him with something like fondness.
“Then you’ll be reassigned. As will Mr. Wickliffe Moraine of drawer thirty-one D, who I’m told is your friend.” He paused. “And the gentleman with one arm, I suppose. I believe his reassessment is still pending. It would be a shame if it went poorly.”
There it was.
Creed thought of Ollo on the gallery floor, the belt cinched tight into his armpit. He thought of the reissue bin, half full, and the hollow little clack. He thought about the saw in his hands, and Ferrin’s arm going blue, and the cold old thing turning over in deep water inside him — and he thought about how thick the glass of the carriage window was, and how far it was to the Higher Ribs, and how there was no saw in the world that could cut that.
“I’ll go,” he said.
“Of course you will. That’s the other thing I like about you, Creed.” Kon tapped the arm of his chair, and the side panel began to slide closed over the glass. “You can do arithmetic.”
The carriage lifted off its cradle. The cable hummed. Just before it rose out of the reach of the gantry lamps, Kon’s voice came once more through the speaker, light and amused.
“Eyes down on your way out. The Head sees.”
Then it was gone, a black seed rising into the dark, and Creed stood alone on Gantry Three with marrow dust in his lungs and another man’s blood dried black under his fingernails, and the only thing he could think about — the only thing, of everything that had just happened — was the green of that fern.
“I’m coming with you.”
“No.”
“I am. I’ve decided. I’m terrified, and I’ve decided.” Wick was hanging upside down out of his drawer, his face going slowly purple. “You can’t stop me. I’ll follow you. I’ll be very quiet. You’ll hardly know I’m there until I scream at something.”
Creed didn’t look up from the satchel. Filter mask. Air card, still warm from the dispenser. Ration bricks. The relic case, padded, with Kon Reclamation’s seal on the lid. And the long bundle in oilcloth and rubber, laid out on the drawer’s thin mattress, waiting.
“Kon wants you here,” he said. “That’s the whole point of you. Leverage only works if it’s in reach.”
Wick’s face did something complicated. “Don’t say it like that.”
“It’s true.”
“A lot of things are true. You don’t have to say them all.” Wick swung himself upright again, disappeared, and there was a scraping and rummaging from the drawer above, and then his hand came back down through the gap, closed around something. “Here.”
Creed held out his palm.
Four slugs dropped into it. Hand-pressed bearing steel, propellant packed behind, crimped tight. Not as neat as his own. Close, though. Closer than he would have thought.
He looked up.
“You said four wasn’t enough,” Wick said, very fast. “Back in, I don’t know, the spring. You said it to the ceiling, but I live on the ceiling, so. And I’m not saying I’ve been stealing propellant off the blasting crews, because that’s a reassignment offense and I’m much too frightened to do anything that stupid. I’m saying some propellant cake fell into my pockets. Lots of times. Over several months. It’s a mystery, honestly. Somebody should look into it.”
Eight rounds. Two full loads of the cylinder.
Creed closed his hand around them.
“Thanks, Wick.”
“Don’t.” Wick’s voice had gone thin. “Just — come back. I mean it. I’m not good on my own, Creed. I’m only any good at being scared next to somebody.”
Creed didn’t answer that. He didn’t know how. Instead he unwrapped the sword.
In the light of the stack’s sodium lamps it looked rougher than it did in the dark. Rubber grip. Mismatched bands. A rivet-driver breech that still had the old Kon Reclamation part number stamped on the side. Junk, Kon had called it, without ever having seen it. And it was junk. Everything except the blade.
He swung the cylinder out, thumbed his own four rounds into the chambers one by one, and snapped it closed. He put Wick’s four into the inside pocket of his coat, over his heart, where he’d be able to find them in the dark. He checked the emitter. The cell read full. Three seconds.
He ran his thumb, very carefully this time, down the flat of the blade, across the carved grooves.
Cold. Just cold.
He wrapped it, slung it across his back with a strap of conveyor belt, and climbed out of the drawer.
The Breach was a wound in the god.
Somewhere, long ago, something had struck the western blade of the pelvis hard enough to crack it through, and the crack had never closed. It ran up the bone wall for a kilometer, a jagged black fissure wide enough at its base for a cargo crawler, and someone, at some point, had bolted a gate across the bottom of it. The gate was steel, scabbed with rust, plastered with warnings in letters so old they’d gone the color of dried blood. Past it, through the bars, there was nothing to see but a slow, faintly luminous haze, drifting the way smoke drifted underwater. That was the Bloom. Or what was left of it. Twelve years on and the air out there still glowed.
The warden was an Animatid, older than Hesk had been, with a filter mask that had been patched so many times it was more patch than mask. He scanned Creed’s band. He looked at the relic case with Kon’s seal on it.
“Kon’s courier,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“Last one went through about a year back.”
Creed waited.
The warden didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to. He just reached over, slow and heavy, and hauled the lever, and the gate shuddered and screamed and began to grind open on its track.
Creed fitted the filter mask over his face. It smelled of rubber and somebody else’s breath. He pulled the strap tight.
Then — because he was about to walk out of the world, and nobody had scheduled it — he turned around and looked up.
From here, at the bottom of everything, the whole skeleton was laid out above him. The spine climbing into haze. The ribs, white bridges in the dark. The Suspension Cities hanging off their cables like strings of lights left up after a celebration nobody below the ribs had been invited to. And at the very top, so far away that it was barely more than a smudge of pale light: the Skull. The Head. The place you didn’t look at. The place that, according to everything he had ever been taught, he was not even permitted to want to see.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he turned his back on it and walked toward the haze.
Behind him, far up the spine, the horn of Sump-Nine sounded the start of the next twenty hours. He felt it through the soles of his boots. Two thousand drawers grinding open. Two thousand Animatids climbing out, already tired, to go down into the bone.
For the first time in nine years, it wasn’t calling him.
Creed stepped through the Breach. The gate screamed shut at his back.
Against his spine, wrapped in rubber and oilcloth, the blade lay cold.
He was almost sure it was cold.