He went back down into the Hollow first, because the Lantern was there, and because he’d promised Kon a Lantern, and because he had learned, in the last day and a half, that the things you leave behind in the dark have a way of following you out of it.
The chapel was a shell. The roof had come in and the spire had come down across the square, and the blue fire still burned low in the wreck of the crypt beneath, so that the whole broken building glowed from inside like a cracked lamp. But the nave still stood, most of it. The carved doors with their climbing people still hung on their oiled hinges. He pushed one open and went in among the overturned benches and the fallen beams.
He found his satchel by the altar rail, where the Choir must have thrown it when they stripped him. The relic case was still inside, Kon’s seal on the lid, the padding dusty and untouched. His water flask. His last ration brick. He ate the ration brick in four bites without tasting it.
The Lantern was on the altar.
He’d smashed it — he remembered that clearly, swinging it by its ring into a bleeder’s face, the glass going, the phosphor spraying. He’d expected to find it in pieces on the floor. But somebody had picked it up. Somebody had straightened the bent silver vines of its cage as best they could with their hands, and picked the last shards of broken glass out of its frame, and set it back on the white stone of the altar, upright, empty, in the very center.
And in front of it, burning, a single candle.
Not a phosphor vial. A real candle, tall and white, its flame standing straight up in the still air. The kind of candle that had stood before his sword on a white cloth in Sere’s reliquary.
Mirelle.
He stood at the altar for a while. Then he reached out and lifted the Lantern off the stone. It was light without its glass, a cage of tarnished silver leaves around nothing. He put it in the relic case, in the dusty padding, and shut the lid.
He left the candle burning.
Thirteen hours, and thirty-four hours of basin between him and the Breach.
He did the arithmetic standing on the rim, the way Kon had said he could. He’d come in at a walk, a hard walk, with a filter clogging and his legs quitting. Going back at a walk, he’d come through the Breach to a grey band and a dead air card twenty hours after the window closed. Kon would have logged him lost. Wick would be reassigned. Ollo’s reassessment would come back however Kon wanted it to come back.
So he didn’t walk.
He started at a jog, down off the rim and into the bone-dunes, testing it, the way you test a new pick-head on soft marrow before you put it to the wall. His legs, healed from breaking, felt strange — loose, light, springy — and the dunes that had sucked at his ankles on the way in seemed to let go of him now, as if he weighed less. He jogged faster. It didn’t hurt. He ran.
He had never run in his life. Not really. There was nowhere to run in Sump-Nine — the catwalks were too crowded, the galleries too low, the drawers too close. You walked. You shuffled, at hour nineteen. Running was a thing you saw in the pictures on the dormitory walls, warriors with old curved swords racing across painted grass.
He ran across the bone-dunes in the glowing dark with the god’s dust flying up behind him in long pale plumes, and the spores whipping past his bare face, and the key beating slow and huge against his ribs under his arm, and the sword across his back, and he didn’t stop.
It was the strangest feeling he’d ever had. Stranger than the endless dark. Stranger than the key. His body did what he asked it to do and then it did more, and when he asked it for more again, there was more. His lungs pulled in the Bloom and breathed it out clean. His heart beat hard and steady and never stuttered. The scars across his chest and arms warmed under his coat as he ran, and he could feel the ember-glow in them brighten with every stride, and when he looked down at the backs of his hands they were glowing faintly, a web of dull red lines in the dark.
The hunger came with it. Of course it did. He’d felt it begin before he was off the rim, and by the twelfth dune it was gnawing, and by the pipe-forest it was a hole. He ran anyway. He had nothing to eat. He ran on the hunger like the line crews worked on the Drip, letting it take him out of the room his body was in, and leaving the body running.
“You’ll burn out,” said Snake. Not worried. Interested. “You’re burning through yourself like a cheap cell. There’s nothing left in you to burn but you.”
“I’ll eat at the Breach.”
“There’s no food at the Breach.”
“Then I’ll eat in Sump-Nine.”
“And between here and Sump-Nine?”
Creed didn’t answer. He ran.
The greylings were waiting at the edge of the pipe-forest.
He felt them before he saw them. Their hearts, dozens of them, spread out among the first rows of the groaning pipes. Not warm glows like the bleeders’ hearts or the Choir’s. Something stranger: dim and grey and fuzzy at the edges, like the spores, like a light seen through mold. They were all very still.
He slowed. Stopped, at the edge of the dunes. His hand went back over his shoulder to the hilt of the sword.
They came out from among the pipes. Not fast. Not low on all fours, the way they’d come at him on the dunes. Upright, mostly, the way people stood. Twenty of them. Thirty. More, behind. Long-limbed and grey-furred and eyeless, their very human mouths closed, their faces turned toward him.
He drew the sword.
He didn’t light it. He held it, bare, dark steel in the violet glow of the Bloom, and waited.
The nearest greyling tilted its head. That small motion. The others did the same, all at once, a whole field of eyeless faces tilting.
Then the nearest one went down.
Not fell. Went down — onto its knees, in the bone-dust, its long-fingered hands flat on the ground in front of it, its forehead lowering until it touched the dust between its hands.
And behind it, one after another, in a slow wave, the others did the same. Down onto their knees, their foreheads to the ground. Thirty, forty grey shapes, kneeling at the edge of the pipe-forest in the drifting spores, while the pipes groaned above them.
Creed stood with the sword in his hand and didn’t understand.
“They know what you are,” said Snake softly. “What’s in you. They’ve got a little of me in them too, remember. From the Prior. Gone bad, gone wrong. But enough to know.” A pause. “They know the steel, too. Some old bleeder blood in them, from before. Enough to remember.”
“They’re bowing.”
“They’re begging,” said Snake. “You could take them. Any of them. All of them. They wouldn’t fight. They’d let you. And you’re so hungry, mule.”
He was. He was so hungry he was shaking. His hands on the hilt of the sword were shaking. He could feel the dim grey glows of their hearts, all of them, kneeling in the dust, so close, so easy.
“No,” said Lamp. Quietly. Not sharp, this time. Just certain.
Creed looked at the nearest greyling. At the old white scars across its palms where it pressed them flat to the dust. At the crude, smeared mark painted on its chest, reaching for something it had never seen.
They were people once, he thought. Hollow people. Bleeders. Folk who did it the other way. And Sere put the god’s blood in them too fast, and they turned into this, and he let them out to graze.
He sheathed the sword. He walked forward, slowly, into the edge of the pipe-forest, into the middle of the kneeling grey shapes. They didn’t move as he passed. They knelt with their foreheads to the dust, and the pipes groaned over them, and he walked between them, and he didn’t touch any of them, and none of them touched him.
On the far side, he looked back.
They were still kneeling. Every one of them. Their eyeless faces turned toward him over their shoulders as he went.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He didn’t know if they could hear. He didn’t know if they understood words anymore. “I can’t help you. I don’t know how.”
The greylings didn’t move.
He turned and ran on into the pipe-forest.
“Soft,” said Snake.
“Merciful,” said Lamp.
“Shut up,” said Creed. “Both of you. I’m learning you.”
He was. Learning them. He had been for hours, and he’d started to see it, the way you started to see the rhythm of a new crew after a few shifts on the line.
Snake answered when he bled.
It was there all the time — that warmth in his chest, around his heart, the low coiling heat that never stopped moving — but it was quiet, mostly, a background hum like the press three galleries over. When he cut himself, though, when his blood ran, it came up. Every time. Louder, closer, hotter. When he’d lit the sword in the reliquary it had roared. When he’d pulled the bleeder’s blood in the lab it had sung. When he’d been bleeding from the stub of a spike in his thigh it had been right there, in his ear, urging. More. More. Blood was its door. When his blood was open, Snake came through it.
And Lamp answered when he stopped.
Not when he was still — when he stopped himself. When he pulled back. When the edge was at the guard’s throat and he turned it to hit with the hilt instead. When he let go of the red thread pouring out of the bleeder’s hand. When he lowered the sword in front of Mirelle on the stair. That was when the cold behind his eyes came clear and sharp and close, and spoke. Restraint was its door. When he held back, Lamp came through.
Which meant, he thought, running across the bone-dunes with the hunger gnawing a hole through his middle, that every time he did anything at all, one of them was getting stronger.
He thought about that for a long time.
“Can you hear what I’m thinking?” he said out loud, eventually, to both of them.
A pause.
“Not exactly,” said Snake. “More like smelling it. I know when you’re hungry. I know when you’re angry. I know when you want something. Wanting’s loud.”
“I perceive your intentions,” said Lamp, “not your words. Usually.”
“Usually,” said Snake, amused. “He means when you’re very clear. You’re not very clear, mostly. You’re a mule. You think in pick-strokes.”
“So you didn’t know I’d spare the guard. Before I did it.”
Another pause. Longer.
“No,” said Lamp.
“Nobody knew,” said Snake. “Least of all you.”
He ran on in silence for a while. The dunes gave way to the long slope up toward the western blade of the ilium, toward the old switchback road and the Breach.
“In the dark,” he said. “When I told you what I wanted. You said I see.”
Lamp said nothing.
“What did you see?”
“I saw,” said Lamp, slowly, “that you wish to break the world.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Yes.”
“So why did it sound like you were hiding something?”
Silence. Long, and cold, and perfectly still.
“Ha,” said Snake softly, delighted. “Oh, he’s got you. Go on. Tell him.”
“There is nothing to tell,” said Lamp. Each word placed exactly. “I was concerned. I remain concerned. What you wish to do is very large and very dangerous, and the power in your blood is very large and very dangerous, and the two together —“ It stopped. Started again. “I am what holds the scales level. Your wish is not level. That is all.”
It was true, Creed thought. All of it. Every word was true.
And it still wasn’t the whole thing. He could feel the shape of the thing behind it, the way you feel the shape of a marrow-knot through the haft of a pick before it cracks. Something big, and hard, and kept.
He didn’t push. Not yet. He’d learned in the galleries that you don’t crack a knot by swinging harder. You find the seam.
He’d find the seam.
He stopped at the pump-house because his legs stopped.
Not quit, like the first time. Just — stopped. Abruptly, mid-stride, on the long flat stretch of dunes, as if somebody had thrown a switch. He went down on his knees in the dust and stayed there, his whole body shaking, his scars glowing so bright through his coat that he could see the web of them through the cloth. The hunger had stopped being a hole. It was everything. It was all of him.
“I told you,” said Snake. Quietly, for once. “Nothing left in you to burn but you.”
The pump-house was forty meters off, half-buried on its windward side. He crawled to it. He got the door open and fell inside and lay on the concrete floor in the dark, the way he had two nights and a lifetime ago.
When he could, he sat up, and looked around.
The cot. The desk with its swollen logbook. The chair.
The crew-jacket, folded on the bed.
He sat on the floor and looked at it for a long time.
Then he got up, and went to the cot, and picked it up, and unfolded it. It was heavy canvas, pump-crew issue, the kind the Hollow’s workers must have worn back when the basin was still worked. Old, but whole. Dusty, but clean. Someone had folded it very carefully, the sleeves tucked in, the collar squared.
There was a name stitched inside the collar, in faded thread. VESS. A.
“Somebody should use it,” he said, to nobody. To the empty room. To whoever Vess, A. had been, who’d sealed this place up with gasket tape and rag, and folded their jacket neatly on the bed, and gone out into the Bloom, and not come back. “Somebody should.”
He took off his coat. He put on the crew-jacket over his scarred bare chest. It was a little big in the shoulders — or it would have been, two days ago. Now it fit. He buttoned it to the collar. Then he put his own coat back on over it, the key in its lining against his ribs, beating.
The scars didn’t show anymore. Not unless you looked at his hands.
Then he did the thing he’d been not-doing for four hours.
He sat on the floor of the pump-house and cut the inside of his own forearm with the edge of the sword, a long shallow cut, and watched his blood well up out of it, red, with that ember-glow deep down inside. Snake surged up in his chest at once, hot and close and eager.
“Yes,” it breathed.
“Not for that,” said Creed.
He laid the flat of the blade along the cut. Let the grooves drink. And then — carefully, the way he’d learned on the stair, in the lab, with the bleeders’ whips — he reached into the blood that was running into the steel, and instead of pulling, instead of stopping, he did something in between. He turned it. Back. Out of the steel, back up the grooves, back into himself.
The heat came with it.
Not the heat of the fire — the heat of the sword. The heat the sigils made when they burned. It came back up out of the steel and into the cut and into his arm and through him, all through him, the way the food had gone into him in the reliquary, the way the bleeder’s blood had started to come in before Lamp stopped him. It filled the hole. Not all the way. But enough. Enough that the shaking stopped. Enough that he could stand.
He sat back against the cot, breathing hard. The cut on his arm closed while he watched.
“Clever,” said Snake, after a moment. Grudging. “Very clever. Burning yourself to feed yourself. Like eating your own tail.” A pause. “It won’t last. You can’t live on your own blood forever.”
“I don’t need forever,” said Creed. “I need four hours.”
Behind his eyes, Lamp said nothing. But the cold there was — not warmer. It would never be warm. But softer. The way clean water is soft.
The gate was shut.
He came up the last switchback of the old road at a dead run, past the crawler with its cab full of breathing spores that he still didn’t look into, and into the crack of the Breach, and there it was ahead of him in the haze: steel bars, scabbed with rust, plastered with warnings the color of dried blood. Shut.
He’d taken the two halves of his band out an hour ago, while he ran, and wired them back together around his left wrist with a strand of the emitter wire he’d stripped off in Sere’s workshop. The join was ugly. The steel didn’t sit flush. But when he’d pressed the halves together, the little display had flickered, and stuttered, and come back on.
SIGNAL RESTORED
STATUS: LOST — BLOOM (AUTO)
WINDOW: 00:41:16
Lost. Kon’s system had logged him lost the moment the band was cut. Courier fifteen, logged for basin disposal.
He came out of the crack into the little space in front of the gate, and stopped, and stood there in the haze with his chest heaving.
The warden was in his hut beside the gate, behind a scratched plexi window. Asleep, or nearly, slumped on a stool with his patched mask pushed up on his forehead. Creed felt his heart. Slow, tired, old. Like Hesk’s must have been, at the end.
He hammered on the bars.
The warden came awake with a jerk. He stared through the plexi. He stared for a long time.
Then he got up off his stool, slowly, and came out of the hut, and came to the gate, and looked at Creed through the bars. He didn’t pull his mask down. He just looked.
“Kon’s courier,” he said at last. His voice was a rasp.
“Yes.”
The warden’s eyes went to Creed’s bare face. No mask. Spores drifting past it.
“Where’s your mask?”
“Lost it.”
The warden looked at him a while longer. At the wired-together band on his wrist. At the relic case on his back, beside the long wrapped shape of the sword.
He took the scanner off his belt and held it up to the band through the bars. It beeped. He looked at the readout.
He looked at it for a very long time.
“Says you’re lost,” he said.
“I’m not lost.”
“Says you’re lost. Says your band got cut thirty-eight hours ago in the basin.” The warden lowered the scanner. “Last one’s band said the same.”
“I know,” said Creed. “I found it. He’s dead. His name was Jory Thane. Sump-Four, twenty-two H.” He held the warden’s eyes through the bars. “There were thirteen more before him. I’ll tell you their names when I find them out. I’m the fifteenth. I’m not lost.”
The warden’s old eyes went to the face of the scanner. To Creed’s face. To the scanner again.
Then he reached up and pulled down his mask, so that it hung around his neck, and Creed saw his face for the first time. It was very old, and very grey with marrow-skin, and it was crying. Silently. Tears running down through the grey and dripping off his chin.
“Nine years I’ve been on this gate,” the warden said. “Nine years I’ve been letting them out. You know how many I’ve let back in?”
Creed didn’t answer.
The warden hauled the lever.
The gate shuddered, and screamed, and began to grind open on its track. And while it was opening the warden held his scanner up to Creed’s band again, and his thumb moved on its face, slow and deliberate, and the band on Creed’s wrist buzzed, once.
STATUS: RETURNED
WINDOW: 00:38:02
“There,” the old man said. “Now you’re not.”
The horn was sounding when he came up the spine to the stack. The end of a shift and the start of the next one, all at once, the way it always was. He came up the last stair onto the catwalk and stood at the edge of it, out of the way, and watched two thousand Animatids pour past him in a slow grey river, one tide going down to the cage lifts and the other coming up from them, and nobody talking, and nobody looking up.
And he saw them.
Not their faces. Not their grey coats or their bent shoulders or their chit-bands blinking green. He saw them, the way he’d seen the hearts of the bleeders through the vault, the way he’d felt the greylings kneeling in the dust. Two thousand warm beating glows, all around him, so close and so many that for a second it was like walking into a wall of heat.
And every single one of them was cold.
Not cold-dead. Cold inside. In every glow, in every heart, threaded all through the warmth, he could feel something else. Something blue-white, and fine, and crystalline. Like frost. Like frost growing on the inside of a window in a cold room, spreading in fine branching ferns across the glass. In every one. In every heart that went past him. Some of them only a little — a rime, a dusting. Some of them so thick he could barely feel the warmth underneath at all, just the cold, just the frost, a heart beating slow and dull under a skin of ice.
Little blue-white flecks, Sere had said, peering at his blood under a lens. Like frost on everything.
The Drip.
It was the Drip. In all of them. Every one. Settled into their blood, into the warmth of them, and grown there like frost, like a crust over a pump-gauge, until they were slow, and cold, and quiet. Until they didn’t look up.
He stood on the catwalk and felt it go past him, two thousand cold hearts, and his own heart was hammering, and the scars all across his body were burning under the crew-jacket, and the key against his ribs gave one of its slow enormous beats, and he understood something he’d been taught never to wonder about.
It wasn’t for the pain. The Drip. It had never been for the pain.
It was for this.
“Asleep,” said Snake, in his chest. Very quietly. Without any amusement at all. “All of them. Every one. Asleep on their feet.”
Lamp said nothing.
Lamp said nothing for so long that Creed, standing there with the river of frost going past him, finally turned his attention inward, to the cold behind his eyes, and looked at it, as hard as he’d ever looked at anything.
And found it — not looking away. Looking at the hearts. At the frost. Steadily. Coldly. Without surprise.
As if it had always known.
Wick was in his drawer, because it was the end of Wick’s shift, and Wick always went straight to his drawer at the end of a shift because the drawer was the only place in the world where Wick was not afraid of anything.
Creed climbed the ladder to row thirty-one and stood beside drawer D and knocked on the side of it. Twice. The way Wick always knocked on the bottom of his.
The drawer shrieked out on its dry runners. Wick’s head came out of it upside down, eyes red-rimmed, face grey with marrow-dust and exhaustion, a Drip-tab wrapper stuck to his cheek.
He saw Creed.
His face did several things very fast. Disbelief. Joy — enormous, total, cracking his whole face open. And then, as his eyes went to Creed’s eyes, something else. Something that came up behind the joy and drained it out, all at once, and left his face white.
“Creed,” he said.
“Wick.”
“Your —“ Wick swallowed. “Your eyes.”
Creed didn’t know what his eyes looked like. He hadn’t seen a mirror. He hadn’t seen anything but stone and bone and blood and the Bloom for three days.
“What about them?”
“They’re —“ Wick stopped. Swallowed again. Upside down, his face was going slowly purple. “In the light. When you turned your head. They went — red. Just for a second. Like the inside of a —“ He stopped. “Like the press plate. When it’s been running all shift.”
Creed didn’t say anything.
Wick looked at him. At his face, his bare face, no mask. At the old crew-jacket buttoned to his collar under his coat. At the band on his wrist, wired together with a twist of copper.
At his hands, on the edge of the drawer. At the fine dark lines across the backs of them, faintly glowing.
Creed felt his heart. He couldn’t help it. The warm glow of it, right there in front of him, hammering now, so fast. And the frost in it. Thinner than most. Wick only took one tab at hour four, and maybe another at twelve if it was a bad shift, and he’d always felt bad about it. But it was there. Fine and white, branching through the warmth.
“Wick,” he said. “Listen to me.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t tell you what happened. Not yet. Not here.”
“Okay.” Wick’s voice was very small.
“But I’m going to. I promise. Everything. When it’s safe.”
Wick was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, carefully, the way you’d step on a gantry grate you didn’t trust: “Are you still — you?”
Creed thought about the question for a long time. Longer than he should have. He thought about the endless dark, and the two hands pulling, and the gold thread in the middle of him that nobody would talk about. He thought about the bleeder’s blood, rushing toward him in a red rope, and how it had felt coming in. He thought about the greylings, kneeling. About Jory Thane’s brown eyes.
“Mostly,” he said.
Wick stared at him.
And then — slowly, upside down, his face purple, his eyes still red and frightened — he started to laugh. A cracked, wet, helpless little laugh, the kind that comes out of you when you’ve been holding something in for three days and it finally breaks.
“Mostly,” he said. “Oh, that’s — that’s going on your — oh, Creed. Oh, you idiot.”
He reached down out of the drawer and grabbed Creed by the front of the coat, upside down, with both hands, and held on. Hard. His fingers shaking. Not pulling. Just holding. Like he was making sure Creed was really there.
Creed let him.
Against his ribs, the key beat, slow and huge.
And on his wrist, the wired band buzzed.
He looked down at it. Wick looked down at it too, still holding on. The little scratched display had gone red. Flashing. The letters crawled.
SPONSOR AUDIENCE
CABLE TERMINUS 3
ASCEND
Not Gantry Three. Not Immediate. Ascend.
Wick’s hands tightened on his coat.
“Creed,” he whispered. “That’s — they don’t — nobody from the Belly ever —“
“I know,” said Creed.
He reached up and took Wick’s hands off his coat, gently, one at a time. Held them for a moment. Then let go.
“Eat something,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
“You said that last time,” said Wick.
“I came back last time.”
Wick looked at him, upside down, his eyes red, his face working.
“Mostly,” he said.
Creed went down the ladder, and along the catwalk, through the grey river of frost, toward the cable terminus and the long way up.