He knew before he reached the end of Spindle Row that the cable was too slow.
The capsule from Terminus Three had taken the better part of an hour to climb from the Belly to Gildmark. Coming down to the Belly from Rib Seven would take half that, if there was a capsule waiting at the public terminus, which there wouldn’t be at this hour, and if nobody at the bottom was holding the cable for him, which Ferrin said somebody was.
They will be waiting at the bottom.
Twelve minutes.
He ran past the end of Spindle Row and didn’t turn toward the terminus. He turned the other way. Toward the root of the rib.
“Where are you going?” said Snake. Sharp, hot, close. “The terminus is —”
“Too slow.”
“Then how —“
He didn’t answer. He ran. Along the curve of Halden’s main street, past the shuttered stalls and the sleeping trams and the few early Mids on their way to somewhere, who turned and stared and flattened themselves against the walls as something went past them faster than anything they’d ever seen move. Past Lumen Square, its colored glass dark, its disc catching the first of the white-gold light. Down the long ramp of the street toward the root of the rib, where the tram line ended, where the walkway ran to the heavy door marked MAINTENANCE — AUTHORIZED.
He didn’t have Teo’s key.
He hit the door with his shoulder. It was steel, and old, and bolted, and it came off its hinges and went across the Root Gallery floor in a long screaming skid and over the railing into the gulf. He heard it go. He didn’t hear it land.
Then he was at the railing himself, and looking down.
The anchorages. The twelve black claws in the pale bone, humming. And past them, thirty meters across the gap, the spine of the god — and climbing the spine, out of the dark below, up past the root of the rib, into the dark above: the marrow lines. The braided column of great pipes, each one as wide as a cage lift, bound together every few dozen meters by a thick steel band.
Running straight down. All the way down. To the Belly.
“Oh,” said Snake. “Oh, no. Oh, you mad —”
“Creed,” said Lamp. Very fast. “That is four kilometers. If you fall —“
“Then don’t let me fall.”
He climbed up onto the railing.
He’d never jumped across anything in his life. There’d been nothing to jump across. In the galleries you crawled and you squeezed and you went down ladders. He stood on the railing of the Root Gallery, one hand on a stanchion, with the gulf opening under him, the long drop down to the faint embers at the bottom, and the anchorage cables humming so deep he could feel them in his teeth, and he looked across thirty meters of empty air at the pipe column on the spine.
He thought about Wick, upside down in his drawer, purple-faced, saying mostly.
He jumped.
He didn’t make it.
Not quite. He’d known he wouldn’t, somewhere in the part of him that did arithmetic — thirty meters was too far, even for what he was now. He went out over the gulf in a long flat arc with the wind of it tearing at his coat and the sword on his back and his arms reaching, and the pipe column came at him, fast, enormous, and he was going to fall short. He was going to hit the outside of the nearest pipe two meters below the band he’d been aiming for and slide off it into the dark.
He hit the pipe.
He drove his hands into it.
Not the pipe. The jacket. The thin metal sleeve around it, that kept the heat in — a shell, Teo had said. His fingers went through it like through wet paper, punched through it up to the knuckles, and caught on the pipe beneath, and the heat of the pipe came up through the jacket and through his fingers like the inside of the press, searing, and he held.
He hung there on the outside of the marrow line, three hundred meters above the next rib down and four kilometers above the Belly, with his fingers buried in the jacket and his palms burning and his boots scrabbling against the slick curved metal, and screamed through his teeth.
“Hold,” said Snake. “Hold, hold, hold —”
He held.
The burning in his hands peaked, and broke, and became the slow crawling waking of the healing, and the skin of his fingers knit itself back together around the jagged edges of the holes he’d punched, and it hurt worse than the burning had, and he held.
His band buzzed. He didn’t look at it. He knew what it said. 05:50.
Ten minutes.
He looked down the column of pipes. The steel bands, every forty meters or so, ringing the whole bundle. The pipes themselves, slick and curved and hot, running straight down the spine into the dark, past the Mid Ribs below, past the Eighth and the Ninth and the Tenth, past a cluster of lights at the root of the Eleventh, past the stubby floating ribs, and down, and down.
He couldn’t climb down four kilometers in ten minutes.
He let go.
He didn’t fall free. He’d thought about it, in the instant before he let go — about the arithmetic of falling, how fast a body went, how long four kilometers would take — and he knew he’d hit the Belly floor like a slug from the gun-sword and come apart the way the whip-wielder had. So he didn’t fall free. He fell along the pipe.
He let go and slid, his back to the gulf and his front to the pipe, his arms spread wide around the curve of it, his palms flat against the jacket, and the jacket was hot and slick, and he went down it fast. Faster. Faster than the cage lift. Faster than anything. The wind roared up past him and his coat flapped up around his ears and the sword on his back hammered against his spine. His palms smoked against the metal. He felt the skin go. He felt it come back. He felt it go again.
The first steel band came up at him out of the dark.
He hit it with his boots. It was a ring of steel a hand’s width thick, standing out from the pipe, and he hit it with both heels and his knees took it and he felt something in his left knee break, and heal, and he was crouched on the band, on the outside of the column, gasping. He’d fallen forty meters in about two seconds.
“Again,” said Snake. It wasn’t urging, now. It was something else. It was with him. “Again. Before the knee locks.”
He went again.
He slid. He hit the next band. He felt his ankle go, and heal. He slid. He hit the next. He stopped feeling the breaks. He stopped feeling the healing. He just slid, and hit, and slid, and hit, and the bands came up at him out of the dark one after another like the rungs of the longest ladder in the god, and he went down them two seconds at a time, and the lights of the Mid Ribs went past him on his right, close, a whole city’s warm windows streaming upward like sparks from a grinder.
Somebody in a window saw him. He felt the heart jump. He was gone before it finished jumping.
Rib Eight. Rib Nine. The light going from orange to dimmer orange to brown. The air getting thicker. Warmer. Starting to smell — just faintly, just at the edges — of old pennies and burnt hair.
His band buzzed. 05:53.
Rib Ten.
And then the column of pipes went past a cluster of lights so bright and so close that he nearly lost his grip — a whole wall of light, on his right, at the root of the Eleventh Rib, where the stubby bone came out of the spine. Tanks. Towers. Pipes that branched off the column he was sliding down and ran away into the cluster in great looping arcs, and pipes that came back out of it, thinner, glowing blue — the clean lines, Teo’s clean lines, carrying tempered Catalyst up. Catwalks. Gantries. Armored figures on the gantries in gold-lacquered plate, standing very still, holding long thin lances with tips that crackled faintly blue.
The Costal Refinery. Where his marrow went. Where Sere had worked. Where the drums of tempering agent came down from the Head that nobody could open.
And as he slid past it, so close he could have reached out and touched a gantry rail, something in the middle of him lurched.
The key.
He felt it. Not faint. Not far. Here. Close. Somewhere in that wall of light, somewhere deep inside the tanks and towers, the slow enormous beat — a single pulse, then the long, long pause. Strong. Stronger than it had been since Gildmark.
Somebody was carrying it somewhere, he’d thought in the dream.
They’d carried it here.
“Mule,” said Snake, fast. “The key — the key’s there —”
He was already past. The refinery’s light streamed upward away from him. The beat of the key faded behind him, above him, not gone, never gone, but receding.
He didn’t stop. He couldn’t. Wick.
He hit the next band, and slid, and hit the next, and filed it away. The way he’d filed everything away, for nine years, in the cold place where he kept the anger. The Costal Refinery. Root of the Eleventh. Gold armor on the gantries. The key.
The stubby floating ribs went by. And then there were no ribs at all, just the spine, and the dark, and the smell — full now, thick and close — of marrow. Of the Belly.
He could feel the hearts. Below him, rushing up at him. Thousands of them. Faint, warm, frosted. Home.
05:56.
The bands got farther apart. The pipes got hotter. He slid the last two hundred meters in one long screaming smoking rush with his palms burned to the meat and his boots on fire and the column of pipes swinging past him into the mouth of the gallery shafts in the lumbar bone, and he let go of the pipe and dropped the last five meters onto the catwalk outside the cage lifts of Lumbar Four and landed on his feet.
His knees buckled. He went down on one hand. The catwalk grating rang under him like a bell.
He was in the Belly.
Four minutes.
The Breach was two hours’ walk from Sump-Nine. Forty minutes, if you ran the way he could run now. He had four.
He stood up on the catwalk outside the cage lifts with his hands smoking and the healing crawling up his arms and knew it.
He couldn’t make it.
He’d known it in Teo’s flat, looking at the band. He’d known it on the railing of the Root Gallery. He’d known it every band of the way down. He’d come anyway. Because there was nothing else to do. Because Wick was going out through the gate into the Bloom with no mask and no band, and you didn’t stand in a Mid’s flat with a pot of soup while that happened. You came.
Even if you were too late.
“The Bloom won’t kill him,” said Snake. Fast. Low. “Not quick. Not without a mask. Takes days, the spores. Not minutes. They put them out and they wander. You’ve got time. Not to stop it. To follow.”
He stood very still.
“You can find him,” said Snake. “You know his heart. You’ve felt it a thousand times. You’ll feel it through the haze like a lamp in a window.”
Like a lamp in a window.
He breathed in. Marrow. Old pennies, burnt hair. Home.
He breathed out.
“Then I need to get to the Breach,” he said. “Without stopping.”
“Creed.” Lamp. Quiet. Urgent. “There are people on the catwalk.”
He turned.
There were six of them, at the far end of the catwalk, where it met the stack. Where the sign was. EYES DOWN. THE HEAD SEES. Standing under it in a loose line, the way soldiers stand when they’ve been told to wait for something.
Gold armor. Lacquered plate, gold, the color of the trim on Kon’s carriage, polished so deep it held the sodium lamps of the catwalk as stars. Faceplates, smooth, gold, with a single narrow slit of dark glass across the eyes. On each left shoulder, Kon Reclamation’s seal: a pair of hands holding a cog. And in each right hand, a lance. Long. Thin. Black. With a tip that crackled faintly, steadily, blue.
And channels. He felt them. Not one channel each, like a Mid. Webs. Bright cold lines of tempered Catalyst running all through their bodies, arms, legs, spines, like Kon’s — but harder, rougher, cruder. Military rigs. Built for one thing.
Behind them, pressed back against the wall of the stack, the shift-change crowd. Two thousand Animatids, the river of frost, coming up from the cage lifts and going down to them, and stopped — stopped dead on the catwalk, packed together, staring at the gold soldiers. Afraid to move. Afraid to go past.
The Gilt had seen him.
The one in the middle — taller than the others, with a band of white lacquer across the gold of his faceplate, a rank-mark — lifted his lance and pointed it down the catwalk at Creed.
“Courier fifteen,” he said. His voice came out of a grille in the faceplate, flat and amplified. “By order of Nathaniel Kon, Senior of the Third Rib, your provisional status is revoked and your sponsorship is terminated. You will submit for reassignment.”
“Where’s Wick Moraine?” said Creed.
The faceplate didn’t move. “Reassigned.”
“When?”
A pause. The faceplate tilted, very slightly, as if consulting something inside the helm. “Zero-five-forty. Released at the Breach with the morning allocation. Eleven units.”
Zero-five-forty. Not six. Twenty minutes ago. Before Ferrin’s message even reached Teo’s wall.
He’d never had thirteen minutes. He’d never had any.
Creed stood on the catwalk and felt the scars on his body light up.
All of them. At once. Every fine dark line, from his scalp to his heels, under the crew-jacket, under his coat, along the backs of his smoking hands. Not ember-red, this time. Brighter. Hotter. The red of the press plate at hour nineteen. He saw it reflected in the gold faceplates. He saw the Gilt see it. He saw the one in the middle take a step back.
He reached over his shoulder and drew the sword.
The grooves were already burning.
“Yes,” said Snake. It wasn’t a hiss. It wasn’t a roar. It was a single word, cold and quiet and absolutely certain. “Yes.”
Lamp said nothing at all.
The Gilt were good. He’d give them that, later. They were Kon’s best, the private soldiers of a Senior of the Third Rib, and they were rigged and armored and trained, and they’d never once in their lives been afraid of anything that came out of the Belly.
They came at him in a wedge, the six of them, lances leveled, the blue tips crackling, and the channels in their bodies flared bright as they came — he felt it, the tempered Catalyst surging through the crude military rigs, pouring into their legs, their arms — and they were fast. Faster than bleeders. Faster than anything human. They crossed the catwalk at him in a gold blur.
He went to meet them.
The first lance came at his chest. He didn’t block it. He turned his body and let it go past him, close, so close the blue tip crackled against the canvas of the crew-jacket and burned a line across it, and he brought the sword around and through.
Through the lance. Through the gold gauntlet holding it. Through the forearm in the gauntlet. Through the lacquered plate of the chest behind the forearm, and the channels under the plate, and the man under the channels.
The Wright-steel sang. The edge glowed cherry. And where it cut the channels — the bright cold lines of tempered Catalyst running through the Gilt’s body — something happened that had never happened before.
The channels burst.
Tempered Catalyst met the burning edge of a sword fed on woken blood, and lit, the way the first-draw had lit in Sere’s vat when the blood-round hit it. Blue-white, from inside. It ran back up the severed channels into the Gilt’s body like fire up a fuse, and every channel in him lit at once, blazing through the gaps in the gold armor, out of the eye-slit of the faceplate — and he didn’t scream. He didn’t have time to. He went. Blue fire poured out of every joint of the armor, and the gold lacquer blistered and peeled, and the man inside it came apart in a burst of white-blue light and sound like a cable snapping under load.
The armor fell onto the catwalk in pieces. Empty. Smoking blue.
The other five stopped.
Not because they were afraid. Not yet. Because they didn’t understand. They stood on the catwalk with their lances leveled, staring at the smoking pieces of gold on the grating, at the faint blue fire still licking along the edges of them, and the channels in their own bodies flickered, uncertain.
Creed didn’t wait for them to understand.
He went through the second one the same way. Lance, gauntlet, arm, chest. The channels burst. Blue fire. Pieces.
The third got a lance into him. Through the coat and the crew-jacket and the side of his belly below the ribs, and the blue tip crackled inside him, and the Catalyst in it hit his blood —
And his blood took it.
He felt it. He felt the tempered Catalyst pour into him through the lance-tip, cold and tame and biddable, the stuff that ran in channels like water in a pipe — and felt his blood meet it the way it had met the first-draw on the slab. Not war, this time. Something faster. His blood took the Catalyst and woke it — tore the tameness out of it, the tempering, the sleep — and swallowed it, and burned it, all in an instant, like coal into a furnace.
And then pulled for more.
Up the lance. Up the haft. Into the gauntlet. Into the channels of the Gilt holding it, and up them, into his arm, his chest, his spine, every bright cold line in his body —
The Gilt screamed. Through the grille of his faceplate, amplified, a sound like metal tearing. His channels went dark. One after another. From the hands up. Drained. Every drop of Catalyst in his body pulled out through the lance and into Creed. And when the last channel went dark the Gilt fell, limp, and lay on the catwalk inside his gold armor with nothing moving in him at all, his heart beating, faint, his channels black and empty.
Creed pulled the lance out of his own side. The wound closed.
He was burning.
Not his scars. Him. All of him. The Catalyst he’d pulled out of the Gilt was in him, woken, roaring, and it was like the food in the reliquary and the bleeder’s blood in the lab and the heat out of the sword in the pump-house all at once, all of it, more. The hunger he’d carried since the pit — since the dark — since the needle — was gone. Not drawn back. Gone. Filled. He’d never felt like this. Never. He felt like he could tear the stack down with his hands. He felt like he could run to the Breach in a minute. He felt like he could fly.
“More,” said Snake. And it wasn’t urging. It was simply true. “There’s more. Three more. Look at them. Look at all that blue.”
He looked at them.
The three Gilt left standing had stopped. They’d seen what happened. Now they understood. Now they were afraid. He could feel it. Three hearts, hammering, under the gold, the fear coming off them like heat off a pipe. And the channels, bright, cold, full. Full of tempered Catalyst. Full of more.
He took a step toward them.
They broke. All three. They turned and ran, back along the catwalk toward the stack, toward the crowd — and the crowd, the river of frozen Animatids packed against the wall, scattered out of their way, pressing back, falling over each other —
And one of the Gilt, running, panicking, swung his lance to clear the path.
The blue tip went into the crowd. Into a woman. An Animatid, grey-coated, grey-faced, marrow-skinned, who’d been standing at the edge of the catwalk. It caught her across the chest and the Catalyst in it discharged with a crack and she went over the railing.
Creed heard her heart go out as she fell. He heard it stop before she hit anything.
He didn’t remember crossing the catwalk.
He remembered, after, being on the Gilt. On top of him, on the grating, under the EYES DOWN sign. He remembered his hands — not the sword, his hands — on the gold faceplate, and the faceplate crumpling under his fingers like the jacket of the pipe, like wet paper. He remembered the channels. Pulling. Pulling the Catalyst out of every one of them, through his hands, into him, the gold armor going dull, the blue light draining out of the joints. He remembered the Gilt screaming, and then not screaming. He remembered that he didn’t stop when the channels were empty. He remembered that there was something else to pull, after the Catalyst, red and warm, and that he was pulling it, and that it was coming, up out of the man in a rope —
“STOP.”
Lamp.
Not a voice. A wall. A wall of cold, so total and so absolute that it was like being dropped into the gulf between the ribs. It came down from behind his eyes through all of him at once and met the heat and the roaring and the pulling and the hunger — and stopped them. All of them. Dead. The way he’d stopped the bleeder’s whip. The way the e-stop should have stopped the press.
He froze.
He was kneeling on the grating, under the sign, astride the Gilt. His hands were inside the man’s crumpled faceplate. There was blood on them. Up to the wrists. Up to the elbows. In a long red rope, the blood had been coming up out of the man, through the cracks in the armor, toward him, and it had stopped in the air, frozen, the way the lash had frozen. A rope of red glass, between the Gilt’s body and Creed’s hands.
It fell. Shattered on the grating. Became blood.
The Gilt under him wasn’t breathing. His heart wasn’t beating. There was nothing in him at all. Not Catalyst. Not blood. Not anything.
Creed knelt there and looked at his hands.
The other two Gilt were gone. Run. Down the cage lifts, or up the stack, or into the galleries; he didn’t know and didn’t feel for them.
The catwalk was silent. Two thousand Animatids pressed against the wall of the stack, staring at him. Not moving. Not making a sound. The frosted hearts all around him, hammering.
He stood up, slowly.
He looked at them. At their grey faces. At their eyes. And he saw it in their eyes, every one, the thing he’d seen in the gold faceplates when his scars lit: fear.
They were afraid of him.
He’d wanted — he didn’t know what he’d wanted. He’d come down four kilometers of pipe for Wick. He’d come down for every one of them, if he was honest. For the frost in them. He’d stood on a roof eight minutes ago and told the Skull he was going to give them back their blood.
And they were pressed against the wall of the stack, looking at him like he was the press.
“They’ll learn,” said Snake. Quiet. Satisfied. Full. “They’ll learn what you are. Give them time.”
Lamp said nothing. But the wall of cold behind his eyes didn’t lift. It stayed there. Holding.
He looked down at himself. At the blood on his arms. At the scars, still burning, red-gold, through the canvas of the jacket. He didn’t feel hungry. He’d never in his life not felt hungry. He felt full. Full of Catalyst and blood and something that wasn’t him.
He’d liked it.
That was the thing. That was the thing he’d carry. Not the Gilt’s empty armor. Not even the woman going over the rail. The thing he’d carry for the rest of his life was that he had knelt on the grating with his hands in a man’s face, pulling the life out of him, and he had liked it, and if Lamp hadn’t stopped him he wouldn’t have stopped.
He looked down at his left wrist.
The band was still there. The ugly wired-together band, the two halves he’d carried out of Sere’s reliquary, held on with copper wire from the emitter. Its little display was flashing red.
STATUS: SPONSORSHIP TERMINATED
REASSIGNMENT PENDING
REPORT TO NEAREST WARDEN
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he took hold of it with his right hand, and squeezed.
The steel crumpled in his fingers like the Gilt’s faceplate had. The copper wire snapped. The display cracked, and flickered, and went out. He pulled it off his wrist. The pale band of skin underneath, with its thin cut across it. Bare.
Nine years. Nine years that steel had told the world where he was and what he’d eaten and whether he was breathing. It had been cut off him once, on a slab, while he was dying, by somebody else. He’d put it back on himself, to get through a gate.
He’d never heard of anybody taking off their own.
He turned to the wall of the stack, to the sign. EYES DOWN. THE HEAD SEES. 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. He reached up and drove the crumpled band into the crust between EYES and DOWN, hard, with the heel of his hand, so that the steel punched through the paint and into the stack wall behind it, and stuck there. A twisted lump of grey metal, its dead display staring out at the catwalk, wedged into the middle of the catechism.
He turned back to the crowd.
Two thousand frosted faces, staring at him. At his bare wrist.
“I’m going into the Void,” he said. His voice was hoarse. It carried anyway. On the catwalk it always had. “Kon put eleven of us out through the Breach this morning. Wick Moraine. Ollo from sort. Nine more. I’m going to get them.” He looked at the faces. He didn’t know any of them. He knew all of them. “If anybody knows the names of the other nine, tell somebody. Write them down. Somebody should know.”
Nobody moved. Nobody said anything.
He turned to go.
And a voice, at the back of the crowd, said, “Creed.”
Ferrin came through the crowd. Pushing. In his coveralls, not his grey coat, his Catalyst arm bare and glowing, his face white. The crowd let him through — he was a foreman; they always let a foreman through — and he came out onto the open stretch of catwalk and stopped, three meters off, and stared at the empty gold armor, and the drained one, and the blood, and Creed.
He’d come down on the shift lift. Creed could see it in him. He’d sent the message and then he’d come down himself, as fast as a Mid could come down, to — what? Creed didn’t know. To see. To be there.
“You came down the pipes,” Ferrin said. His voice was strange. “They’re saying on the lift — somebody on Rib Nine saw a man come down the outside of the marrow line —“
“Wick’s gone,” said Creed. “Zero-five-forty. Before your message.”
Ferrin’s face did something. He closed his eyes for a second.
“I sent it as soon as I knew,” he said. “I swear. They didn’t post the allocation till zero-five-thirty. I didn’t —“ He stopped. “I’m sorry.”
Creed looked at him. At the foreman’s coveralls. At the glowing arm. At his tired furious grey face.
He thought about the gold Gilt’s channels, bright, cold, full.
He thought about pulling.
He felt the heat in his chest stir — look at all that blue — and he felt the wall of cold behind his eyes, still there, still holding.
He didn’t move.
“Why,” he said. “Why’s Kon doing this.”
Ferrin glanced at the crowd. At the faces pressed against the wall. He stepped closer, and lowered his voice.
“He’s cleaning house,” Ferrin said. “Whatever you brought him — it’s big. Bigger than anything. The whole Third Rib’s talking. There’s an envoy coming down. From above. Not a Warden. An envoy. To look at it.” He swallowed. “Kon’s got it at the Costal Refinery. Moved it there two days ago. Every Gilt in his company’s been posted there. He’s meeting the envoy there in three days. Something about the refinery being neutral ground. Something about it being the only place below the Skull with the right kind of vault.”
The key, Creed thought. Beating, in the wall of light. Here. Close.
“And whatever it is,” said Ferrin, “it came out of bleeder ground. The basin. That’s — you don’t know what that means, up there. That’s a death sentence. Bleeder-taint. If the envoy finds out where his gift came from, Kon doesn’t Ascend. Kon goes into the Gallery a different way.” He shook his head. “So nobody who knows where it came from gets to stay above the Belly. Moraine knew you’d gone to the basin. The one-armed one knew. The warden at the Breach — they took him off the gate this morning, put him out with the rest.” He looked at Creed. “And you. They were supposed to take you at the terminus. Bring you down here. Put you out with the next allocation.” His mouth twisted. “Nobody thought you’d come down the outside of the pipe.”
Creed stood very still.
The old warden, he thought. Who cried. Who said: now you’re not.
“Why are you telling me this,” he said.
Ferrin looked at him for a long time.
“My da,” he said at last. Very low. “He was cable. Forty-one years. And he was Animatid first. Born here. In that stack.” He nodded at the wall. At the drawers. “And I put Moraine on the list this morning. My signature. Because Kon’s office sent it down, and if I hadn’t signed it, my standing goes to review, and Da goes to the —“
He stopped. He looked at the bin at the end of the catwalk. The reissue bin, half full.
“I signed it,” he said. “And then I sat in my flat and I looked at Da in his chair, and I thought about you at the ballot box. Laughing.” He laughed himself, a horrible short sound. “Somebody on Spindle Row told me. The provisional who laughed at the ballot. I thought — that’s the one. That’s the one who’ll go down there and get them.” He looked at Creed’s bare wrist, and then at the sign, at the crumpled band driven into the middle of the catechism. “I didn’t think you’d do that.”
“Neither did I.”
They looked at each other across three meters of catwalk.
“Go,” said Ferrin. “The Breach. There’s two Gilt on the gate since they took the old man off it. Kon’s posted them. They’ll have heard by now, about this.” He jerked his chin at the empty armor. “You’ll have to go through them.”
“I know.”
“And Creed.” Ferrin’s voice dropped even further. “Don’t come back to Line C. Not ever. Not for anything. They’ll be watching it now. They’ll be watching everything.”
Creed nodded.
He turned toward the stack stairs, toward the long way down through the Belly to the pelvic basin and the Breach. Then he stopped, and looked back.
“Ferrin.”
The foreman looked at him.
“The frost in your da,” said Creed. “In his heart. It’s not the cables. It’s not the hum.” He held Ferrin’s eyes. “It’s what’s in the food. In the water. What’s in all of us. It’s thickest in him because he’s been eating it longest.”
Ferrin stared at him.
“Stop feeding him from the counters,” said Creed. “See what happens.”
He went down the stairs, three at a time, into the Belly, toward the Breach, and the Bloom, and the Void. Behind him, on the catwalk, two thousand frosted faces watched him go.
And one of them — he felt it, as he went, a heart somewhere at the back of the crowd — one of them, very slowly, lifted its head.
Just for a second.
Just to look up.