“— not yours to —”
“— mine, actually, I was here first, I’ve been here since before your kind had —”
“— the balance is not a matter of who arrived —”
“— oh, the balance, here it comes, it’s always the balance with you —”
They were talking over each other. That was the first thing Creed understood, floating in the endless quiet dark with no body and no breath and no heartbeat. The two lights hung on either side of him, the white sphere and the coiling fire, and they were talking at the same time, fast, overlapping, the way two foremen talked when they both thought the same crew was theirs. And they weren’t talking to him. They were talking across him.
He’d been talked across his whole life. It turned out he could still be annoyed about it when he was dead.
“Stop,” he said.
He didn’t have a mouth. It came out anyway, into the dark, flat and hoarse, a gallery voice.
The two lights stopped.
The white sphere hung perfectly still. The fire went on moving — it never stopped moving, he’d learn; it looped and slid around itself endlessly like a coil of cable on a spool, like something that couldn’t bear to be still — but its voice went quiet.
“One at a time,” said Creed. “And talk to me. Not over me. I’m the one who’s dead.”
There was a pause.
“Oh,” said the fire. Its voice was warm, low, amused. It came from everywhere, the way the horn came from everywhere in the stack, up through the floor and the walls and the bones, except there were no walls and no floor and no bones. It came from inside him. “Oh, I like him.”
“You are not dead,” said the white sphere.
Its voice was nothing like the fire’s. It was clear, and cool, and very precise, every word placed exactly, like a sample measured into a vial. It didn’t come from everywhere. It came from one place — from the sphere, from the dead center of it — and it went into him in a single straight line, like light through a hole.
“Not yet,” it added. “Your heart has stopped. Your blood is boiling. Your body is failing in eleven different ways, and in perhaps another ninety seconds of the world’s time, it will fail in all of them, and then you will be dead. But not yet.”
“Ninety seconds out there,” said the fire. “In here, we’ve got as long as we like. Time’s slow, at the edge. Thick. Like marrow. You’d know all about marrow.”
“What are you?” said Creed.
The two lights looked at each other. He couldn’t have said how he knew that, with neither of them having eyes. But he knew it, the way you knew when two foremen on a gantry were deciding which of them would deal with you.
The white sphere spoke first.
“I am what holds the scales level,” it said. “What keeps one thing from becoming everything. When something new comes into the world that should not be, I am what comes to meet it.” A pause, measured. “You are something new.”
“And I,” said the fire, coiling closer, so that Creed felt its heat on the side of whatever he was now, “am what was in the blood before your people ever cracked a bone. I’m the god’s hunger. The bit that wanted. The bit that ate. It died with the rest of him, a long time ago, and your marrow-men have been pumping what was left of me up the cable in tanks for a thousand years without ever once asking what they were pumping. And then your nice Prior put the raw stuff into your veins, and your blood —” it laughed, low, delighted, “your blood woke me up. I’ve been asleep for a very long time, mule. You have no idea how good it is to be hungry again.”
Creed thought about that.
“You’re the Catalyst,” he said, to the fire.
“I’m what’s in it. What was in it. A piece. A little piece.” The coils tightened, loosened. “Enough.”
“And you.” To the sphere. “You’re what? A foreman?”
The sphere was silent for a moment. Something about the quality of its light changed — not dimmer, not brighter, but sharper, as if it had narrowed.
“That,” it said, “is not an inaccurate comparison.”
The fire laughed so hard its coils shook.
“Here is the situation,” said the sphere, when the fire had stopped laughing. “Your blood and the god’s blood went to war, and neither won. Your blood was too awake to simply die, as the others died, and the god’s blood was too strong to simply be absorbed. So they are destroying each other. And you are the battlefield.”
“Your body,” the fire put in, “is a house on fire with the doors nailed shut.”
“Neither of us,” said the sphere, ignoring it, “can hold you together alone. I can cool the fire. I can purify the blood, slowly, and drive the god’s blood out of you, given time — but there is too much of it, and it is too strong, and if I try to do it all at once, the cooling will stop your heart as surely as the heat did.”
“And I can feed the fire,” said the fire. “Make it hotter. Turn your house into a forge. Burn your blood and the god’s together, melt them, make one new thing out of two — but you’re a mule, not a god, and if I do it all at once, you’ll burn to ash before you’re done forging.”
“So,” said the sphere.
“So,” said the fire.
“We hold you together,” said the sphere. “Both of us. From opposite sides.”
Creed was quiet for a moment.
“Like a city,” he said. “Hanging between two ribs. Cables pulling both ways.”
Neither of them answered at once. He had the strangest feeling that he’d surprised them.
“Yes,” said the fire, finally, softly. “That’s exactly it.”
“And the price,” said Creed.
“He knows there’s a price,” the fire said to the sphere. “I told you I liked him.”
“There is no price,” said the sphere. “Not as you mean it. We do not want your service. We do not want your gratitude. We each want only one thing, and it is the same thing.” It paused. “We want you to live. And we want you to succeed.”
“Succeed at what?”
Again, that pause. That sense of two things looking at each other across him.
“That,” said the sphere slowly, “is what we would like you to tell us.”
He thought about lying.
It was a reflex. Nine years in the galleries taught you that when someone above you asked what you wanted, the right answer was nothing. You wanted nothing. You were grateful. You were fine. Your band was green and your quota was met and you didn’t look up.
But he was dead, or nearly. And he was tired, more tired than he’d ever been, tired down into places that had nothing to do with muscle or bone. And there was nobody here to write him up.
“I want to not die,” he said, “on a slab, in a hole, because a Verbous wanted a lamp for his shelf.”
“Good start,” said the fire. “Keep going.”
He thought about Hesk. Her fingers pried off the pump bar one at a time. Her eyes, open, looking down at the work. The little hollow clack of her band in the bin. The bin, half full.
He thought about Ollo, and the dead red mushroom of the e-stop under his palm, and the requisition everybody had seen.
He thought about Jory Thane in the tank, his blue eyes moving, his mouth shaping two syllables over and over, his band left out in the basin for the greylings to drag around until it stopped transmitting, so that a man in a black-lacquer carriage would log him lost and send another. And another. Fourteen.
He thought about the fern.
He thought about the light at the top of the world. The pale smear of it on the backs of his eyes, every morning, for one second. The Head is above. The Head is apart. The Head is not for your eyes. The cameras in the walls. The ledgers. The drums of tempering agent coming down the cable, sealed, that nobody may open. The Drip, free, every four hours, stamped with a closed eye.
“I want to go up,” he said.
The dark was very quiet.
“Up,” said the sphere. Carefully. “To the Ribs? To live as a Mid? Or a Verbous?”
“No.” He didn’t know he knew the answer until he heard himself say it. “All the way up. To the top. To the thing at the top. I want to see it. And whatever it is, whatever’s up there, keeping everyone asleep — I want to break it.” He heard his own voice in the dark, flat and hoarse and certain. “All of it. Every cable. Every ledger. Every band. I want to break it so nobody can ever put it back.”
The fire made a sound.
He didn’t have a word for it. It was the sound a furnace makes when the door is opened and the air rushes in. It was joy. Pure, roaring, ravenous joy. The coils of flame flared up and out, bright, brighter, filling half the dark, and the heat of it washed over him, and it was laughing, and it said, “Oh, yes. Oh, mule. Oh, yes. I’ve waited so long for somebody to say that.”
And the sphere was silent.
It didn’t move. It never moved. But Creed felt something happen inside its silence — a tightening, a drawing-in, the way a man’s whole body tightens when he hears a sound in the dark that he doesn’t want to have heard. Its light didn’t dim. If anything it burned whiter, and colder, and more perfectly still.
“I see,” it said, at last.
That was all. Two words, measured, placed exactly.
But Creed had worked under foremen for nine years, and he knew the sound of a man deciding not to say something. He knew it the way he knew the eleven seconds of the recycler and the nine seconds of the press. And the sphere’s I see had that sound in it — that small careful silence underneath, like a door being quietly closed on a room.
“What,” he said.
“Nothing,” said the sphere. “I understand you.”
“No, you don’t,” the fire said happily. “You never do. That’s the fun of you.”
The sphere ignored it.
“Very well,” it said. “You wish to live, and you wish to break the world. We can give you the first. The second will be yours to attempt.” A pause. “We will take hold now. It will hurt.”
“Everything hurts,” said Creed.
“Ha,” said the fire.
They took hold.
The white sphere came in from his right and the fire came in from his left, at the same moment, and they took hold of him, and it was like being grabbed by two hands — enormous hands, bigger than the god, closing around the whole of him from opposite sides. The white hand was cold. Not cold like the basin or the blade — cold like clean water, like the first breath of air in the pump-house after seventeen hours in a mask. The red hand was hot. Hot like the press, like the saw, like the hottest moment of the injection, except it didn’t burn him. It held.
And then they pulled.
In opposite directions. With everything they had.
He screamed. He’d thought there was nothing left in him to scream with. There was. It felt like being torn in half, slowly, down the middle, from the crown of his skull to the soles of his feet, the cold half going one way and the hot half going the other — and just when it felt like he must split, like there was nothing that could hold under a pull like that, the pull stopped growing.
It didn’t stop. It never stopped. It would never stop again, for as long as he lived. But it stopped growing. It reached some point, some exact balance, where the cold pulled exactly as hard as the hot, and the two forces met in the middle of him and locked. And held.
And he was held. Between them. Hanging in the dark, pulled taut from both sides, every part of him strung tight like a cable under load.
Like a city between two ribs.
He hung there and felt it. It wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t anything like comfortable. It felt like standing at the very top of a lift-shaft with your heels over the edge, forever. But it was solid. He could feel the shape of himself, for the first time since the needle went in. He could feel where he ended. And where, very far off, at the edges of himself, the war in his blood was still raging — but smaller now. Contained. Held in, by the two hands, the way the walls of a furnace hold a fire.
“There,” said the sphere, quietly.
“There,” said the fire.
And then something else happened. Something neither of them said anything about.
Deep in the middle of him, at the exact point where the cold and the heat met and locked — the dead center, where the two pulls cancelled out and nothing pulled at all — a light came on.
It was very small. Smaller than either of them. A thread, no more. A thin, fine thread of gold.
It wasn’t white. It wasn’t red. It wasn’t cold, and it wasn’t hot. It was just there, in the still place between them, glowing faintly, the way the thread had glowed in his arm on the slab for three seconds before it went out. Except this time it didn’t go out. It stayed.
He felt both of them notice it. He felt the white hand go very, very still, and the red hand pause, mid-coil, for the first and only time he’d ever know it to stop moving.
And then, at exactly the same moment, they both looked away from it.
Neither of them said a word. Not then. Not for a long time after.
“What’s that?” said Creed.
“What’s what?” said the fire, easily. Too easily.
The sphere said nothing at all.
He let it go. He was too tired to chase it. He’d learn, later, that this was the only time in his life the two of them ever agreed on anything without saying so: that the thread of gold in the middle of him was something best not talked about.
He hung between them, in the dark, and felt the gold thread glowing faintly in the place where nothing pulled.
“Right,” he said. “Names.”
“Names?” said the fire.
“I’m not calling you the fire and the sphere for the rest of my life. However long that is.” He considered the white light. Smooth, perfect, cold, still. Watching. Measuring. Hanging over him like the work-lamp over the slab, like the lamp over a foreman’s slate, like the Lantern in the chapel window, burning patient and steady to lure fools home. “You’re Lamp.”
The sphere said nothing. Its light went, for a moment, very slightly sharper.
“And you,” he said, to the coiling flame, sliding and looping and never still. “You’re Snake.”
The fire laughed so hard he felt it in the roots of his teeth — teeth he didn’t have yet, out here, but would again soon.
“Snake,” it said. “Snake! A thousand years I’ve been asleep in the blood of a god, and a mule from Sump-Nine calls me Snake.” It laughed again. “I love it. I love it. Keep it.”
Lamp said nothing at all. Which Creed took, after nine years of foremen, as meaning it hated the name and would never, ever admit it.
“Good,” he said. “Now how do I get back?”
“Oh,” said Snake, and the laughter went out of its voice, and something else came into it. Something with an edge. “You’re not going to like it.”
His heart started.
It didn’t start the way a heart starts in a stitch-bay, with a jolt from the paddles and a clean hard beat. It started the way the press started after a jam — grinding, stuttering, a shudder and a lurch and a horrible wet clunk in the middle of him, and then another, and then another, faster, ragged, uneven, until it caught a rhythm and held it. Every beat hurt. Every beat was a fist punching the inside of his ribs.
He breathed in.
That was a mistake.
The air was thick and hot and wet, and it was full of a smell so total and so foul that his body tried to throw up before his mind had even understood what the smell was. He rolled onto his side, retching, and there was nothing in him to bring up but a thin sour string of bile, and he retched it up anyway onto something soft that gave under his hand.
He opened his eyes.
It was dark, but not the endless dark. A dark with walls. Above him, far up — four meters, five — there was a square of dim light, crossed by the black bars of a grate, and through the grate came a faint blue glow, and a faint sound. The hiss of refinery equipment. Someone moving. Someone humming, softly, under their breath. Not Hesk’s tune. Something else. Something educated.
He was at the bottom of a pit.
And the pit was full of the dead.
He lay on top of them. He lay on a slope of them, a heap, where they’d been thrown down from the grate one after another, landing however they landed and staying there. In the blue light from above he could see them, all around him, all under him. A face. A hand. A long, long fall of hair. Bodies with their skin split along every vein, the veins burned black, like the man in the vat. Bodies split so far their skin had come off in strips. Bodies that weren’t bodies anymore, that had rotted down into something soft, the shape of them only a suggestion. Some of them were very old, nothing left but bone and a stain. Some of them were not old at all.
And all over all of them, everywhere, moving, there were the mites.
Pale. Flat. Palm-sized. Too many legs. They crawled over the heap in a slow, constant, shifting crust, thousands of them, the same as on the dead thing in the pipe-forest. The whole pit was moving. Rippling. Like the skin of something breathing.
And they were on him.
He felt them, then. On his arms. On his neck. On his face. Small, cold, many-legged, crawling. Tasting.
He came up off the heap with a sound he’d never made before in his life, flailing, tearing them off himself in handfuls and flinging them away, and they came off with a soft wet pluck, and some of them took little pieces of him with them, and he didn’t care, he tore at them until there were none on him and then he kept tearing at himself anyway, at his arms and his neck and his scalp, until his hands were wet and his skin was raw, and then he stood there knee-deep in the dead with his chest heaving and his heart punching and his whole body shaking so hard his teeth rattled.
The mites didn’t come back.
He realized it slowly. He stood there, shaking, waiting for them to swarm him again, and they didn’t. They crawled over the dead all around him, over the heap, over the rotting faces and the black-veined arms — but they went around him. In a ring. A meter clear, on every side. As if there were a wall there they couldn’t cross.
One of them came close, near his foot. It reared up the front half of its flat body, the way the one in the pipe-forest had, tasting the air.
It tasted him.
Then it dropped down and turned and went away from him, very fast.
“Smart little things,” said Snake.
The voice came from inside him. Not from inside his head, quite. From inside his chest, from somewhere around the place where his heart was punching. Warm and low and amused. And so close, so intimate, so much in him, that for a second he couldn’t breathe again.
“They know what you are now,” Snake went on. “Better than you do. They eat dead things. They’ve been eating dead Vessels down here for nine years, and every one of those dead Vessels had a little bit of me in them, too, at the end, before they burned out. And the mites have learned. They know the taste.” A pause, pleased. “And they know you’re not dead. And they know you’re hungry.”
“Do not,” said Lamp, from somewhere behind his eyes, cool and precise and very clear, “listen to it.”
Creed stood in the pit, knee-deep in the dead, with two voices inside him, and he understood that he had not, in fact, been dreaming.
He looked down at himself.
His shirt was gone. They’d taken it off him at some point — to cut it off him, maybe, the way you cut clothes off the injured in the stitch-bay, or maybe to see the splits better. His trousers were black and stiff with blood. His boots were still on. His feet were the only part of him that felt like his.
The rest of him was covered in scars.
Long, fine, straight lines. Dozens of them. Hundreds. On his arms, his chest, his ribs, his stomach. On the backs of his hands. Everywhere a vein had split his skin on the slab, there was a scar now, sealed, healed — impossibly healed, healed in hours, or in no time at all — into a thin raised line. And the scars weren’t pale. They were dark, nearly black, like old burns. And down in the bottom of each one, when he tilted his arm in the blue light from the grate, there was the faintest glint. Not blue. Not red.
A deep, dull, ember-glow, like a coal at the very bottom of a dead fire. In every line. All over him. A map of glowing scars, laid out across his whole body, like the veins of Jory Thane in his tank. Like a city at night.
He looked at his left forearm. The bite was gone. Not healed — gone. There was no wound, no scar of teeth. Just smooth skin, and over it, the same fine dark lines as everywhere else.
“Hungry,” said Snake again, softly. “Aren’t you?”
He was.
He hadn’t noticed it until it said so. And then he noticed nothing else. The hunger came up through him from his gut like the heat had come up through him on the slab — total, everywhere at once. Not the hunger of a missed ration brick. Not the hunger of hour nineteen. This was hunger like a hole. Like his whole body had been burned down to the frame and needed to be built again, out of something, out of anything, now.
His eyes went, on their own, to the heap.
To the newest bodies, near the top. The ones the mites hadn’t gotten to yet. The ones whose skin was still whole.
“They’re not using it,” said Snake. Reasonable. Warm. “Any of it. And there’s a little of me still in them. Just a little. You’d feel so much better.”
“No,” said Lamp. Very cold. Very clear. “Creed. No.”
Creed stood in the pit and shook.
He thought about the greyling’s very human mouth, opening wider than a human mouth should. He thought about the mites, taking little pieces of him away. He thought about Ollo’s arm, too light. About every rule there had ever been in the Belly, the old ones that were older than he was. You look, in case it’s someone you know. You don’t look in the cabs.
He thought: There are fourteen couriers down here. Fourteen of mine. And whatever’s been put in me, I’m still one of them.
“No,” he said, out loud. His voice cracked on it.
“Suit yourself,” said Snake, not at all offended, as if it had suggested a different route through the pipe-forest and been turned down. “There’s always upstairs.”
Creed looked up.
At the square of blue light, five meters above him. At the bars of the grate. At the shadow that moved across the light, as somebody in the laboratory walked past it, humming softly under their breath.
Upstairs, there was a laboratory full of refinery equipment and specimen vats. Upstairs, there was a man in a fine grey robe who wrote things down on paper and was sorry for what he did and did it anyway. Upstairs, there were nine bleeders who could harden their own blood into knives. Upstairs, there was Jory Thane, in his tank, with his glowing blue eyes, mouthing two syllables, over and over.
And upstairs, on a white cloth, in front of a candle, there was his sword.
He looked at his hands. At the fine dark lines across the backs of them, with their ember-glow deep down in the bottoms. He closed them into fists. They felt strong. Stronger than they had any right to, after everything. They felt like somebody else’s hands. Like hands he’d been waiting his whole life to grow into.
The heap of the dead shifted under his boots.
“How long was I down here?” he said quietly.
“Six hours,” said Lamp. “Perhaps a little more. They believe you are dead. They have not come to check.”
“They never come to check,” said Snake. “Why would they? Nothing ever comes back up out of this hole.”
Creed reached out and put his hand on the wall of the pit.
Bone-stone. Pale and old and rough, cut straight down through the floor of the crypt into the bone of the basin. Five meters of it, sheer, to the grate. No handholds that he could see. No rope. No ladder.
He dug his fingers into it.
The stone was hard. Harder than marrow. Hard enough to have dulled a hundred picks in the galleries. And under his fingertips — under his split, scarred, glowing fingertips — it crumbled. Not much. Just enough. Just a little, like stale bread. His fingers went into the wall a knuckle deep, and stopped, and held.
He stood there, with his fingers buried in the bone, and felt the two hands inside him pulling, cold and hot, and the thin gold thread glowing in the still place between them.
He began to climb.