He did ordinary things for two days, because Teo had asked him to, and because he didn’t yet know what else to do.
He ate. Slowly. A little at a time. Bread from the market on the lower terrace, and soup from Teo’s dented pots, and once, sitting at the little table in flat fourteen with the window open, one of the pale fruits, cut into thin slices with the edge of his sword, which he ate one at a time off the blade. He did it on purpose. He wanted to know what it felt like. It felt like nothing. It tasted sweet. He didn’t do it again.
He slept in the bed. Not every night — the second night, after the dream, he couldn’t, and lay on the floor in the drawer-gap until the light changed. But the third night he lay down in the middle of it and let it be soft, and his heart hammered, and slowed, and he slept.
He kept his head down at the Bell. Every time. Three times a day. He stood in the street, or sat at the window, or paused on the stair, and put his chin on his chest, and felt the note roll through him, and felt the frosted hearts all around him go still and quiet and frightened. And every time, under his bowed head, his eyes were open. And every time, the scars on his body burned so hot under the crew-jacket that he could smell the canvas scorching.
He didn’t go back to Lumen Square.
He went to the archive once more. He typed ARLO VENN, and the screen said NO RECORD. As if he’d never been born.
He sat with Teo.
That was most of it, those two days. He’d knock on flat thirteen in the late afternoon, three soft taps, and the old man would open the door with his glass eye whirring, and they’d sit at Teo’s table — the window faced the wrong way, Teo was right, you looked out at the bone of the rib above instead of the gulf — and drink the bitter brown stuff from the square, which was called char, and Teo would talk.
About cables. About Dela. About a festival in year 402 when the whole of Spindle Row had been strung with ochre lanterns and Dela had danced with a warden on the tram platform and been written up for it and laughed. About Hollis, who could hear a crack. About the cable-sickness, and old Matthis Ferrin, who’d been his foreman for six years on the Rib Seven primaries before Teo moved to engineering. “Best cable-man I ever saw,” Teo said. “Never took a channel. Didn’t need one. Could feel a load shift through his boots.” He was quiet a moment. “Shame. What happened to him. The hum gets in, eventually. That’s what they say.”
Creed thought about Matthis Ferrin’s heart, buried under frost so thick it was barely beating.
He didn’t say anything.
And on the second day, the old man asked him a question. The first one he’d ever asked.
“What was it like?” said Teo. “Down there. In the Belly.” He was turning his cup on the table, around and around. “I’ve lived here all my life. Born on Rib Nine, moved to Seven. Never been below Eight. Dela’s mother used to talk about it, sometimes, but she was so old by then, and she cried when she talked, so Dela made her stop.” He looked up. His real eye was soft. “You don’t have to say. I just thought — you might want to tell someone. Before you go back.”
Creed looked at his own hands on the table. The fine dark lines across the backs of them.
He told Teo about the drawers.
Not the Hollow. Not the sword, or the needle, or the pit, or the two voices. Just the drawers. Forty high. The recycler, coughing every eleven seconds. The horn. The walk down, forty minutes. The catwalk, and the sign, and the one second every morning. The cage lift. Line C. The pick, and how you let it fall. The Drip cart, every four hours. Hour twelve. Hour nineteen.
He told Teo about Hesk. Thirty-one years at the number-two pump. The tune she hummed. Her hands on the bar. Her eyes, open, looking down. The little hollow clack.
He told him about the bin, half full.
He talked for a long time. Longer than he’d ever talked in his life. Teo didn’t interrupt him once. When he stopped, his voice was raw, and the char in his cup had gone cold, and the light outside the wrong-facing window had shifted.
Teo didn’t say anything for a while.
Then he reached across the table, slowly, and put his old hide-colored hand over Creed’s scarred one. Just for a moment. The way Wick had grabbed his coat out of the drawer. Not pulling. Just holding.
“If Kon offers,” the old man said quietly. “To let you stay. Stay.” His glass eye whirred. “Please. I’m too old to lose anybody else down there.”
Creed didn’t answer.
Teo took his hand back. He didn’t ask again.
He didn’t go back to flat fourteen that night.
He meant to. He stood up from the table, and Teo stood up too, slowly, one hand on the table’s edge, and Creed thought that was the end of it. But the old man didn’t go to the door. He went to the shelf over the cot instead — a single board on two brackets, with a cracked cup on it, and a tin of something, and a coil of old cable-wire wound neat as a sleeping snake — and reached up behind the tin and took down a book.
He brought it back to the table in both hands, the way you’d carry a full pot.
It was big. Bigger than the logbooks in the Kon offices, and heavier, and much older. Cloth covers, faded to no color at all, gone soft at the corners from being handled. The spine had been mended with cable-tape, and then mended again over the first mending. There was no title on it anywhere that Creed could see. Teo set it down on the table between the two cold cups of char and sat down in front of it, and for a moment he just sat there with his old spotted hands flat on the cover. As if it were warm.
“My grandmother’s,” said Teo. “And her mother’s before her. And before that, I don’t know. A long way back.” His glass eye whirred, refocusing on nothing. “Nobody’s supposed to have these. The Lumen collected them, back in my grandmother’s day. Went round the flats with a cart. Old books, old pictures, anything printed before the count. Said they were unhelpful.” He almost smiled. “That was the word. Unhelpful. My grandmother hid this one in the flour bin under a sack of meal for two years, and every time a Warden came up the stair she baked.”
He opened it.
The pages were thick. Stiff. Yellowed at the edges, and spotted with brown. And on every other one, laid into the paper under a thin sheet of something like oiled tissue, there was a picture.
Not a picture like the ones on the dormitory walls in the Belly. Those had been painted by somebody who’d never seen anything, copying something somebody else had painted, a long time ago, and they’d gone brown and grey and flaked away until you couldn’t tell what they’d been. These were colored. Printed. Fine as hair. Colors he’d never seen and didn’t have names for.
Teo turned the tissue back on the first one, carefully, with one finger.
Trees.
He knew it was trees. He didn’t know how. He’d never seen one. But they stood up out of the ground in the picture the way the Ribs stood up out of the spine, tall and close and dark, hundreds of them, more, going away into a kind of blue haze at the back of the picture, and every one of them was covered in green. The green of Kon’s fern. Except there wasn’t one fern. There were thousands. Millions. A whole picture full of green, so much green that it went dark with itself, and between the trees there were bars of light coming down slantwise, gold, the way the light came down through the gaps in the Ribs if you were standing in the right place at the right hour.
He stared at it.
“A forest,” said Teo softly. “That’s the word for it. Lots of trees together.”
“Where is it?”
“Nowhere now.” Teo turned the page.
A city. But not like Halden. Not like any of the Ribs. It stood on flat ground. In the open. With nothing above it. Towers of glass and white stone, very tall, very thin, standing straight up out of the ground with no cables and no anchorages and nothing holding them, and around them, between them, roads, and on the roads tiny shapes that might have been carriages or might have been people, and none of them were looking down.
“Strange,” said Creed.
“Isn’t it,” said Teo. “No ribs. My grandmother said they built them on the ground. On the actual ground. Can you imagine? Building on the ground.”
He turned the page.
A field.
Grass, tall and yellow-green, going away flat to the edge of the picture, moving — he could see it moving, somehow, the way the printer had laid it down, as if something were pushing at it, bending it all one way. And above the field, high up in the top corner of the picture, there was something round.
Round and yellow. Bright. Brighter than anything else on the page, so bright the printer had left the paper bare in its middle and colored only the edges. And coming off it, in every direction, painted lines. Long, thin, straight, gold. Like light coming off a lamp, if the lamp were the size of the world.
“What’s that?” said Creed.
His voice came out strange.
“The sun,” said Teo.
“What’s a sun?”
Teo thought about it. He took a long time.
“A lamp,” he said finally. “A big one. Up high. That nobody owned.” He touched the edge of the plate, very lightly. “That’s what my grandmother said. Everybody got the light off it. Nobody had to pay. It was just there, in the morning, and it went down at night, and in the morning it came back.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I believe that last part. Comes back every morning. Who’d fill it?”
“Was it real?”
“It was real once,” said Teo. “A long time ago.”
And he turned the last plate.
It was blue.
That was all. Just blue. The whole of the page, edge to edge, a pale clean blue, paler at the bottom and deeper at the top. And drifting across it, here and there, soft white shapes, like steam off a press-bed, like breath on a cold morning, but bigger, and slower, and not coming from anywhere.
There was nothing else on it. No trees. No towers. No ground. Just the blue.
Creed looked at it for a long time.
“What is it?” he said.
“The sky,” said Teo.
“The —“ He didn’t have the word. They had the word in the Belly. Sky. It was in the old songs, the ones nobody sang anymore. It meant up. It meant the Higher Ribs. It meant the Skull, the dim far glow you saw for one second a day if you were careless. That was the sky. “Where’s the top?”
“There isn’t one,” said Teo.
Creed looked at him.
“That’s what my grandmother said,” said Teo. “Her grandmother told her. No roof. No bone. No Skull. You look up and it’s blue, and it just keeps going. Back and back. It doesn’t stop.” He was looking at the blue page now, not at Creed, and his real eye was wet. “It goes back forever.”
Creed tried to think about it.
He couldn’t. He tried to picture a place with no top, a place where you looked up and there was nothing there to look up at, and it was like the drawer-gap in the dark when you woke and didn’t know which way the ceiling was. His stomach turned over. His hands closed on the edge of the table.
Forever. A thing that didn’t stop.
He’d never seen anything that didn’t stop. Everything stopped. Shifts. Hearts. The horn. Hesk’s humming.
“Lies,” said Snake. Lazily. Somewhere in his left arm. “Pretty ones. They put pictures on the walls down there too, didn’t they. To keep you quiet.”
He didn’t answer it.
Something else stirred. In his chest, where the cold thread ran. Lamp. It had been very quiet since the square. He felt it now, the way you’d feel somebody lean forward in the dark beside you, to see better.
“Blue,” it said.
Very faint. Thin and clear and very far away, like a glass rung with a fingertip in another room.
“It was,” said Lamp. “Once. Before.”
“Before what?” he thought at it.
It didn’t answer. He felt it draw back into the cold, the way it did, folding itself small. But it had leaned forward. He’d felt it. For one moment, at a picture of the sky in an old man’s book, the thing that held the scales level had leaned forward to look.
Teo closed the book. Gently. He sat with his hands on the cover again.
“I used to show it to Dela,” he said. “On bad nights. When the Bell had gone hard on her, or there’d been a fall on the cables. She’d sit where you’re sitting and I’d turn the plates, and when we got to the blue one she’d always say the same thing.” He smiled. It was a very old smile. “She’d say, Teo, if it goes back forever, then somewhere up there it’s still going. And I’d say, I suppose it is, love. And she’d say, Well, then. And go to bed.”
He pushed the book across the table. A few centimeters. Toward Creed.
“You can look at it,” he said. “When you like. You don’t have to knock. I’m asleep in the chair most evenings anyway.”
Creed looked at the faded cover.
“Why?” he said.
Teo’s glass eye whirred.
“Because of how you looked at the trees,” said the old man. “The first plate. I’ve seen that look once before. Dela’s mother had it, the one time I showed her. She’d seen one green thing in her life, down there, behind glass, and she never stopped thinking about it. Never told anybody, either. What would be the point.” He stood up, slowly, hand on the table. “That’s what it’s for. That book. For people who’ve seen one green thing and can’t stop.”
He went to his chair by the wrong-facing window and sat down in it, and closed his real eye, and after a while his breathing slowed.
Creed sat at the table under the lamp and opened the book again.
He turned the plates. The forest. The city. The field, and the round yellow lamp that nobody owned. He stopped at the blue page and looked at it for a long time, until the old man in the chair was snoring softly, and the Bell had gone for the night and come and gone again in his head, and the lamp on the table had burned down low.
It didn’t stop. That was what he kept thinking. Somewhere up there, it was still going.
He came back to the table every evening after that, while the old man dozed in his chair. He never asked. Teo never said anything. The book was just there, on the table, when he knocked.
That first night, when he finally closed it and got up to go, his eyes were stinging, and he was looking up.
“There’s a roof,” said Teo, on the sixth evening.
Creed looked at him.
“Block Nine. Up the back stair, past the top floor. There’s a hatch.” Teo shrugged, a little sheepishly. “In the old days, before the drones, every block had a cable-watch. Somebody on the roof all night, watching the primaries for sway. I did it for years. Nights. Dela used to come up and sit with me.” He turned his cup. “They don’t use them anymore. Nobody goes up. But the hatch is still there. And I’ve still got the key.” He touched the brass key on the cord around his neck. “It’s the best view in Halden. You can see four ribs from up there. And the anchorages. And —“ he stopped.
“And?”
“And up,” said Teo. Very quietly. “You can see up. If you were going to. Which you shouldn’t.” He looked at Creed for a long moment. Then he took the cord off over his head and held out the brass key. “Tomorrow’s your last night. Somebody should see it. Once.” He pressed the key into Creed’s palm and closed Creed’s fingers over it with his own. “Bring it back.”
The hatch opened onto a flat square of roof the size of a ration hall, edged with a low wall, scattered with old equipment — a rusted tripod, a cracked lens on a swivel, a wooden chair with a blanket folded on it. Teo’s chair. Dela’s blanket. The old man had come up with him, puffing on the stairs, and had settled into the chair with the blanket over his knees and a flask of char, and had talked for an hour about the primaries — that one there, see the sway? Nothing. Four centimeters. Wind off the rib above — and then had fallen asleep, mid-sentence, with his chin on his chest and his glass eye still whirring faintly, focusing on nothing.
Creed tucked the blanket up around him. Then he went to the edge of the roof.
Teo was right. It was the best view in Halden.
He could see the whole curve of the rib, the city clinging to it, the thousands of warm orange windows going away along the bone and bending up into the dark. He could see the gulf below, and the faint embers of the Belly at the very bottom. He could see the anchorages at the root of the rib, twelve black claws in the pale bone, and the twelve cables running out from them over the dark, humming. He could see the column of the marrow pipes, climbing the spine past the root of the rib, from the Belly to the Eleventh Rib where the refinery sat, a dim cluster of lights in the dark, and on up past it.
He could see the city across the gulf. The windows. The little bridges.
And up.
He could see up.
He stood at the low wall at the edge of the roof of Block Nine on Spindle Row in the Halden district of the Seventh Rib, and he looked up.
Not for one second. Not sideways through his lashes. Not with his eyes streaming in a capsule window.
He looked up the way you look at a gallery wall before you put the first pick to it. Steadily. All of it.
The ribs climbed above him into the dark, one after another, white bridges curving out from the spine, each one hung with its city in its web of cables. The Mid Ribs, crowded and orange, getting smaller as they went up. Then the light changed. Orange to gold. The Higher Ribs. Sparse, white-gold, cities spaced wide apart. Gildmark, on the Third, somewhere among them. Kon’s glass house. And above them, the last ribs, the highest, so bright they were hard to look at. And above them —
The neck of the god. The column of the spine, going up, narrowing, knuckled, seven great vertebrae, one above another, up and up into a haze of light. And at the top of the neck, where it met the curve of the skull, something he’d never noticed before, because he’d never looked long enough to notice anything. A line. A dark curved line across the base of the skull, from one side of the neck to the other. Like a wall. Like a dam.
And above that, filling a whole quarter of the sky, the Skull.
Pale bone. A dome over the world. And in it, the two great eye sockets, pouring down white-gold light. And between them and above them, inside the curve of the bone, through the gaps and the sutures and the holes, a glow. A fortress-glow. White, and cold, and steady, and absolutely still. Like the light in the Lumen. Like the halo on a Warden’s head. Like the white sphere in the endless dark.
He stood and looked at it, and he didn’t lower his eyes, and nothing came down.
“You knew,” he said.
He said it quietly, out loud, to the dark. Teo didn’t stir.
Behind his eyes, the cold was very still.
“The frost,” Creed said. “On the catwalk. You looked at it and you weren’t surprised. You knew it was there. You knew what it was.” He kept his eyes on the Skull. “And the things in his head. In the square, when Snake started to say it, you shut it up so hard you nearly stopped my heart. You knew about those too.” He breathed in. “And the key. You knew what it was. In the sanctum. You told me you didn’t, and you knew.”
Lamp said nothing.
“I’m not angry,” said Creed. He was surprised to find that it was true. “I just want to know why.”
The silence went on for a long time. So long he thought it wouldn’t answer at all.
Then: “I knew,” said Lamp, “that there was a sleep laid over this world.” Each word placed exactly. Quieter than he’d ever heard it. “I felt it the moment I came into being in you. In your blood, a little. In the blood of everyone you have touched, more. A sleep, laid over all of them, like frost. I did not know its shape. I did not know who laid it. I suspected. I did not know.” A pause. “I still do not know all of it.”
“But you knew enough.”
“I knew enough.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
Another silence.
“Because I knew what you would do,” said Lamp. “If you knew. I have watched you since the dark. I have watched you kill, and pull, and feed. I have felt how close the fire is to the surface of you. I have heard you say break it so nobody can ever put it back.” Its voice was very steady. “If I had told you, on the catwalk, that every heart around you had been put to sleep — if I had told you, in the square, what lives in the god’s head — you would not have come to this roof. You would have gone up the cables that same hour, with the sword burning in your hand, and you would have killed every living thing between you and the Skull. And the fire in your chest would have grown with every one. And by the time you reached the top, you would not have been Creed anymore.” A pause. “I wanted you to have the week first. The bread. The bed. The old man. I wanted you to see what you would be destroying. I hoped —“ It stopped.
“You hoped I’d stay.”
“I hoped,” said Lamp, very quietly, “that you would find something you loved enough not to burn.”
Creed stood at the edge of the roof and looked up at the Skull.
He thought about it. He gave it that. He thought about the bread, and the bed, and the soup, and the window, and Teo’s hand over his, and Teo calling him son. He thought about the young woman in the street mouthing down, get your head down, trying to save him. He thought about Matthis Ferrin waving from his chair. He thought about the man and woman on the platform who’d bumped into each other and said sorry and laughed.
He’d found things he loved. More than he’d ever had in his life. In seven days.
“I did,” he said. “That’s the problem.”
Lamp was silent.
“You think I want to burn it,” Creed said. “All of it. The ribs, the cities, everyone. You think that’s what break it means.” He shook his head slowly. “It’s not. It never was. I told Snake, at the ballot. I’ll tell you. The ribs are the line. Halden’s the line. Teo’s the line. The Mids are on the line, same as us, just higher up, with a nicer view. Ferrin told me that, and he was right.” He lifted one scarred hand and pointed, straight up, at the Skull. At the cold white glow inside it. “That’s what I want to break. Not the line. The thing at the end of it. The thing that put the frost in Teo’s blood and the Drip in Wick’s mouth and Matthis Ferrin in a chair. The things in the god’s head, drinking. That’s all. That’s all I ever meant.”
Lamp didn’t answer.
And Creed felt it — felt it the way he’d learned to feel everything Lamp didn’t say. The cold behind his eyes didn’t ease. It didn’t soften. It went tighter. Like something hearing a thing it had been afraid to hear, and finding it worse than it had feared.
He didn’t understand why. Not then.
He looked up at the Skull for a long time.
And then he spoke to it.
He didn’t plan it. He didn’t know he was going to until he heard his own voice, low and flat and hoarse, a gallery voice, going up off the roof of Block Nine into the dark. He didn’t shout. There was no need to. He had a feeling, standing there, that it could hear him no matter how quietly he said it.
“I see you,” he said.
The white glow inside the Skull didn’t change. It didn’t flicker. It never did.
“Twenty-four years,” he said. “Twenty-four years I’ve been told not to look at you. Before I could count. Eyes down. The Head is above. The Head is apart. The Head is not for your eyes.” He breathed in. “I looked anyway. One second a day. Every day. It was the only thing in my life nobody scheduled.”
The cables hummed in the dark below him.
“I’ve seen what you do,” he said. “I’ve seen it all the way down. I’ve seen the frost in every heart in the god. In Wick. In Teo. In Kon, even. I’ve seen your Wardens come down and take a man for looking at you, and I felt the thing you put in their heads. I’ve seen what’s in your head. In his. I’ve seen you drinking him.” His voice didn’t rise. It got lower. Colder. The cold of something very old and very patient, turning over in deep water. “I know what the Drip’s called. I know what it’s for. I know why you give it away.”
The light poured down out of the god’s eyes, white-gold, onto the bowed cities of the ribs.
“So I’m coming up,” Creed said.
“Not for a bed. Not for a window. Not to be invited. Not to Ascend.” He said the word like spitting. “I’m coming up through every rib and every gate and every Warden you’ve got. I’m going to find you. Every one of you. In every fold. And I’m going to pull you out of his head the way you pull mites off a corpse. I’m going to break your Bell, and your bands, and your Drip, and your light. I’m going to give him back his blood. I’m going to give them back theirs.”
He lowered his hand. He was shaking. Not from fear.
“And when I’m done,” he said, “nobody in this god will ever lower their eyes again.”
He stood there at the edge of the roof with his face turned up into the white-gold light, and he waited for it to come down. For the shaft of light, and the two tall white shapes, and the long hands on his shoulders.
Nothing came.
The light poured down out of the Skull the way it always had. Steady. Silent. Indifferent.
But in the middle of him — in the still place between the cold and the heat, where nothing pulled — the thin gold thread flared.
The way it had when he’d picked up the key. Brighter. Brighter. Brighter than it had ever been, so bright he gasped, so bright he could feel it in every scar on his body at once, a warmth that wasn’t heat and a clarity that wasn’t cold, running out from the center of him along every line like light along a cable. For one long moment he stood on the roof of Block Nine and every scar on him glowed not red, but gold.
Then it settled. Back down. Back to a thread.
But a thicker thread than before. A brighter one. And it didn’t settle all the way.
In his chest, Snake roared.
Not words. Joy. That furnace-door rush, wild and ravenous and huge, flaring up through him so hot that the canvas of the crew-jacket over his chest began, very faintly, to smoke. “YES,” it said, when it could say anything. “Yes, yes, yes, oh, mule, oh, Creed, yes —”
It was the first time it had ever called him by his name.
And behind his eyes, Lamp said nothing at all.
It watched.
It had watched since the dark. Since the needle. Since the first moment it had come into being, flaring white in the endless black beside a dying man, to hold him. It had watched him in the pit, and in the lab, and on the dunes, and in the glass house, and in the square. It had watched every choice. It had weighed every one.
It was what held the scales level. That was all it had ever been. A balance, given a shape. When something came into the world that should not be — something that would tip the scales so far they could not be righted — it came to meet that thing. To hold it. To keep it from becoming everything.
It had held many things, in the long dark of its existence. Fires, and floods, and hungers, and gods.
It had never held anything like him.
It watched the gold flare in the still place at his center, where its pull and the serpent’s pull cancelled out. It watched it run along his scars like light along a cable. And it was afraid.
Not of the Heads. It knew what the Heads were, or most of it. It had known since the dark, in the way it knew things — not as words, but as weights, as imbalances, as a long, slow, terrible tipping of the scales that had been going on in this dead god’s skull for a thousand years. It hated them, in the way a balance can hate. They were wrong. They had always been wrong.
But they were a wrongness it understood. Parasites, drinking a dead god dry. The scales knew how to hold parasites. They had held such things before. Given time, given enough time, every parasite outlives its host and dies.
It did not understand him.
He was not light. He was not fire. He was not the god’s blood, and he was not his own. He was all of them, braided together in the dark by a careless chemist and a dead man’s hunger and a sword that had been waiting a thousand years. And at the center of all of it, in the place where neither of its own two forces could reach, something was growing that was none of them.
Gold.
It had seen that gold before. Once. On a wall. In the veins of carved people, a thousand years ago, before the parasites came. And it remembered — in the way it remembered things, not as words but as weights — that when those people had stood at the top of the god with their gold in their veins and a key in their hands, the scales had tipped so far, so fast, that it had taken the coming of the parasites to tip them back.
It did not know what he would become if the gold kept growing. Neither light nor fire. Something new. Something that could stand at the top of the world with a key in its hand and pour a god’s blood down over everything, and wake every sleeper in the skeleton at once.
Something the scales could not hold.
It listened to his vow. It heard: break. It heard: pull you out. It heard the cold in his voice, and the serpent’s roar of joy, and the canvas smoking over his heart. And it thought: he does not know what he is saying. He thinks he will only break the Heads. But a man who pulls a god’s parasites out with his bare hands, burning his own blood to do it, will not stop at the parasites. The fire will not let him. The serpent will not let him. He will burn and burn, and the gold will grow and grow, and by the time he reaches the top he will not be a man who wants to free the world. He will be a thing that wants to remake it.
And the world would not survive being remade.
So it would not tell him.
Not what the Heads truly were. Not what the gold at his center meant. Not what the key truly opened, or what would pour out when it did. If he knew — if he understood that he was not only fighting the Heads but becoming something that could replace them — he might choose it. On purpose. With his eyes open. And the serpent would be there to help him.
It could not let him choose that.
It would hold him. As long as it could. As carefully as it could. It would slow him, and cool him, and keep the gold small, and keep the truth from him, and steer him, a little at a time, away from the top. Toward a life. Toward bread, and a bed, and old men with soup. Toward something it could understand.
It would hold the scales level.
Even if he hated it for it.
It watched him stand on the roof, with his face turned up and the gold settling back into a thread at his center — a thicker thread, a brighter one — and it was very afraid. And it said nothing.
He woke Teo, gently, near what would have been the end of the night cycle if Halden had one. The old man came awake slowly, blinking his real eye, his glass eye whirring as it found focus.
“Did you see it?” Teo said.
“I saw it.”
Teo looked at him for a long moment. At his face. At his eyes, which — Creed didn’t know this, then — still had a little gold in them, deep down, under the red, like the last light at the bottom of a cup.
The old man didn’t ask anything. He just nodded, slowly, and let Creed help him up out of the chair, and fold Dela’s blanket, and get him down the hatch and down the back stair to flat thirteen.
Creed gave him back his key at the door. Teo put the cord over his head.
“Your terminal,” Teo said, as he opened his door. “It’s been chiming. Since before we went up. I heard it through the wall.” He frowned. “Provisionals don’t get a terminal, so anything that comes for fourteen gets routed through mine. Nobody ever sends anything.” He went in and Creed followed him, and there it was: a small screen on Teo’s wall by the door, an old one, its edge cracked, blinking a slow amber.
ROUTED — PROVISIONAL, FLAT 14
1 MESSAGE
SENDER: FERRIN, D. — RIB SEVEN
PRIORITY: NONE
Priority: none. Ferrin had sent it with no priority, so it wouldn’t be flagged. So nobody would look.
Creed touched the screen.
The message was short. It had been typed fast. There were mistakes in it that hadn’t been fixed.
MORAINE REASSIGNED. VOID. 0600 TODAY. ORDER CAME FROM KON PERSONALLY. ALSO THE ONE ARMED ONE FROM SORT. ALSO YOUR BAND — YOUR PASS ENDS AT THE CABLE. THEY WILL BE WAITING AT THE BOTTOM. DONT COME BACK TO LINE C. — D.F.
Creed read it twice.
Then he stood in Teo’s small warm flat with the window that faced the wrong way, very still, and felt the scars on his body begin to burn.
“What is it?” said Teo, behind him. Frightened. “Son? What is it?”
0600 today. Creed looked at his band. The display. The time.
It was 0547.
Thirteen minutes ago, he’d been standing on a roof, telling the Skull he was coming.
And thirteen minutes from now, four kilometers straight down, in the dark, they were going to put Wick out through the gate of the Breach into the Bloom with no mask and no air card and no band, the way they did with everyone who was reassigned, and shut the gate behind him, and log him.
Lost.
“Kon,” said Snake. Very low. Its voice had gone utterly cold for the first time since he’d known it. Cold like Lamp. Colder. “Kon did this.”
“Creed,” said Lamp. Quick. Sharp. “Wait. Think. If you go now —“
He didn’t wait.
He turned and went out of Teo’s door and across the hall and into flat fourteen, and got the sword from where it leaned against the wall behind the door, and tore the wrapping off it, and slung it bare across his back. He took nothing else. Not the empty relic case. Not the food in the cupboard. He took the sword, and his coat with the old rounds in the left pocket and the last of the blood-rounds in the right, and he came back out into the hallway.
Teo was standing in his doorway in his house-slippers with his hands over his mouth.
“Son,” he said. “Son, please —“
Creed stopped. Just for a second.
“Thank you,” he said. “For the soup.”
Then he went down the stairs, four flights, three at a time, and out into Spindle Row, into the warm orange light, and ran — the way he’d run across the bone-dunes, faster than any Mid on Rib Seven had ever seen anything run — toward the public terminus, and the cable, and the long way down.