There were two Gilt on the gate, the way Ferrin had said.
They stood in front of the rust-scabbed bars in their gold plate with their lances grounded, and they’d heard. He could feel it in them from fifty meters back down the crack — two hearts hammering, the channels in their bodies already flaring, bright, cold, full, ready. They’d heard about the catwalk. They’d heard about the armor lying empty on the grating, smoking blue.
He came out of the crack into the little space before the gate and stopped.
They leveled their lances.
“Look at them,” said Snake. Soft. Fond, almost. “All that blue. Two more. Just two. You liked it, Creed. You know you did.”
He did know.
He could feel it from here: the Catalyst in their channels, bright and cold and tame, running through their crude military rigs like water through a pipe. He could feel how it would feel, coming into him. Waking. Burning. Filling. He’d been full for an hour now — full for the first time in his life — and already, at the edges, he could feel it starting to burn down. The hunger starting to come back. Faint. Patient.
He remembered the man on the grating under the sign. The rope of red. How he hadn’t wanted to stop.
“No,” he said.
The Gilt came at him.
He didn’t draw the sword.
He went between their lances, low and fast, the way he’d turned past the first lance on the catwalk, and he put one hand flat on the gold breastplate of each of them as he went through. Not hard. Just a hand. Just a touch, the way the Warden had touched Arlo Venn.
And he reached into their channels, and he didn’t pull.
He stopped.
The way he’d stopped the bleeder’s whip in the lab. The way Lamp had stopped him on the grating. He reached for the bright cold Catalyst running through the lines in their bodies, and he didn’t drink it, and he didn’t burst it. He just made it still. Froze it in the channels, the way a pump freezes when the power’s cut. Every line in their bodies, from the fingertips to the spine. Still.
The two Gilt went down like their strings had been cut.
They lay on the bone in front of the gate in their gold armor, their lances clattering away across the ground, and they couldn’t move. Not an arm. Not a finger. Their channels were full and frozen, and the rigs that drove their bodies were locked solid, and they lay there like statues knocked off their plinths, and through the grilles of their faceplates he could hear them breathing, fast and terrified.
Alive.
Creed stood over them, breathing hard.
It had cost him. He felt it. Not in the hunger — in the other place, behind his eyes, where the cold lived. Holding the stop was like holding a bar against a load. He let go. Their channels would thaw, he thought. Slowly. In an hour, maybe. Maybe less.
“Wasteful,” said Snake. Sulky. “All that blue, just lying there.”
Lamp said nothing. But the cold behind his eyes — for the first time since the grating — eased. Just a little. The way a held breath eases.
He went to the hut by the gate. The warden’s hut, with its scratched plexi window and its stool. Empty. The old man’s mask was on a hook on the wall, patched so many times it was more patch than mask.
He hauled the lever.
The gate shuddered, and screamed, and began to grind open.
He’d thought he would have to search.
He’d thought, coming down the stack stairs at a run, through the Belly, through the long dark galleries toward the pelvic basin, that he’d come through the Breach into the Bloom and have to cast about in the haze for Wick’s heart, faint and frightened somewhere out on the dunes, the way you’d search a collapsed gallery for the sound of tapping.
He came through the gate, and stopped, and reached out with whatever it was in him that felt the blood.
And Wick’s heart wasn’t on the dunes.
It was below him.
He stood in the crack just past the gate, in the drifting violet haze, and felt for it. He’d know it anywhere. He’d felt it every night for nine years, through the slats of the drawer above, without knowing he was feeling it. Quick, light, frightened. A little frost on it, thin. He felt it now, faint, far — but not out across the basin. Down. Somewhere under his feet. Under the bone.
And not alone.
He felt for the others, and they were there. Eleven hearts — no, ten, one of them very faint, struggling. Ollo’s, slow and heavy, like a big man’s should be. And an old one, tired, that he thought might be the warden. Ten of them, together, below him.
And around them —
He stood very still in the haze.
Around them, below the bone, under the floor of the basin, there were more. Dozens. Hundreds. A great faint scatter of warm glows, spread out underground like the stack seen from above, like the lights of the Belly from the capsule window. All beating. All alive. And their frost —
Their frost was thin. Thinner than the Mids’. Some of them so thin it was barely there at all, like Arlo Venn’s, like the last patch on a window when the sun’s been on it.
“Oh,” said Snake. Very quietly. “Oh, look at that.”
“What is it?” Creed said. “What are they?”
“The reassigned,” said Snake. “All the ones that went out through the gate. Years of them.” A slow, wondering coil of heat. “Not dead. Not all of them. Some of them went down instead of out.”
He found the way down a hundred meters along the inside of the ilium, below the old switchback road. A crack in the bone, narrow, half-hidden behind a slump of bone-dust, that he’d never have seen if he hadn’t been following the hearts. And at the mouth of the crack, in the dust, footprints. Lots of them. Bare feet and boots and drag marks. And a rope. A real rope, knotted, old, tied off around a spur of bone and running down into the dark.
He went down it.
The god’s sacrum was a hollow mountain.
He hadn’t known that. He’d never thought about it. The sacrum was the bone at the base of the spine, where the vertebrae fused together into a single great wedge and joined the pelvis on either side, and he’d thought, if he’d thought anything, that it would be solid. Like the lumbar bone where Line C worked. Marrow, packed hard.
It wasn’t. Whatever marrow had been in it was long gone — dried out, crumbled away, a thousand years ago, maybe more. What was left was a shell. A vast, hollow, branching shell of bone, full of chambers and passages and great vaulted caverns, one opening into the next, going down and down. And through the walls of the caverns, at intervals, there were holes. Huge holes, round, as big as the mouths of the cage-lift shafts, where the nerves of the god had once passed out of the spine to the rest of the body. The foramina. Air came through them. Not the Bloom. Cool air, damp air, moving slowly up from somewhere far below, from the deepest roots of the god, and it smelled of stone, and water, and nothing else.
And in the caverns, there were people.
He came down the rope into the first of them and stood at the bottom and looked, and for a long moment he couldn’t move.
It was lit. Not by sodium lamps or glow-strips or Catalyst. By fungus. Pale grey-green mushrooms, growing on the walls in great shelving clusters, and on the floor in neat rows in beds of crumbled bone, and glowing — softly, faintly, a cool watery light, like the shell-light in the Wright sanctum but greener. Hundreds of them. Thousands. The whole cavern was lit by them, the way the basin was lit by the Bloom. But this wasn’t the Bloom. This was something else. Something that grew in the dark and didn’t kill you.
And among the fungus beds, there were shelters. Made of everything. Scrap metal, bone slabs, old cloth, the rusted doors of crawlers, crates with Kon Reclamation’s seal half-scraped off them. Built against the walls and in the alcoves and on ledges cut into the bone, the way the stack was built on the spine. Dozens of them. Smoke from small fires going up into the dark of the vault. And water — he heard it before he saw it — water dripping, steadily, from the roof of the cavern, from a hundred places, into a hundred containers set out to catch it. Pots. Tins. Helmets. Cupped bone.
People moving among it all. Grey people. Thin. Marrow-skinned, Bloom-scarred, ragged. Carrying water. Tending the fungus. Sitting by the fires. Not many, in this cavern — fifty, sixty. But he could feel the others, beyond, in the caverns past this one. Hundreds.
None of them wore a band.
He looked at their wrists. Every one he could see. Bare. Some with the pale ring of skin where a band had been, and the thin cut across it. Some so long bare that the pale ring had darkened to match the rest.
They’d seen him.
The nearest of them — a woman carrying two tins of water — had stopped, and was staring at him. At the sword on his back. At his face. At his scars, which were glowing, still, faintly, through the canvas of the crew-jacket.
At his bare wrist.
She set the tins down, very slowly, on the floor of the cavern. Then she turned and ran, deeper into the caves, shouting something he couldn’t make out.
He waited.
The woman who came to meet him was the hardest-looking person he had ever seen.
She was short and broad and bald, her scalp shaved clean and shining faintly green in the fungus-light. She was somewhere past fifty. Her face was burned — old burns, the whole left side of it, the skin shiny and puckered and pulled tight from the jaw to the ear, so that the corner of her left eye drooped and the corner of her mouth was pulled up into a permanent half-sneer. Her left hand was missing two fingers, the smallest two, and the stumps were neat and old. Her arms were huge. She wore a blasting-crew vest, the old kind, padded and pocketed, faded from orange to the color of rust, and in the pockets of it there were things he recognized. Fuse-cord. Det-caps. A crimping tool.
She came out of the passage from the next cavern with a dozen people behind her, and she stopped three meters off, and looked at him, and her eyes went over him from the top of his head to his boots, the way Hesk’s used to go over a pump-seal looking for the leak.
“You’re the one came down the pipe,” she said. Her voice was a gravel-slide. “Off Rib Seven. Whole Belly’s talking.”
He didn’t ask how she knew. He’d learned, in the stack, that news went through the Belly faster than water through a crack. If it was on the catwalk at six, it was in the Void by seven.
“I’m looking for Wick Moraine,” he said. “And Ollo. And the others from this morning.”
“I know who you’re looking for.” She didn’t move. “Sabine Kettle. I ran blasting crew on Lumbar Two for nineteen years. Then I blew a charge wrong and took off a quarter of a gallery and two of my fingers and my sponsorship, and they put me out the gate. That was six years ago.” She jerked her chin at the cavern behind her. “I’ve been down here since. So’ve most of them. Some longer.” Her eyes narrowed. “We keep watch on the Breach. Every allocation. When they put someone out, we go and get them before the Bloom does. We got your eleven at zero-six-ten. Brought them down.”
“Are they alive?”
“Ten of them.” She didn’t soften it. “One’s going. Spores. Old man, had a bad chest already. The rest’ll cough a while. Some of them’ll get the grey lung. Some won’t.” She looked at his wrist. “Your boy Moraine’s been asking for you. Nonstop. Hasn’t shut up since we pulled him in off the dunes. Says you’d come.” The burned half of her mouth moved. It might have been a smile. “I said nobody comes.”
“I came.”
“So I see.” She looked at the sword. At the grooves, dark. At his hands. “And you came through two Gilt at the gate, they’re saying, and left them lying on the bone like dropped dolls. And four more on the catwalk at Sump-Nine before that. Empty armor. Blue fire.” She was quiet a moment. “What are you?”
He thought about it.
“Mostly,” he said, “I’m still Creed.”
Sabine Kettle looked at him for a long time.
Then she turned. “This way,” she said, over her shoulder. “Your boy’s in the third cave. Try not to bleed on anything. Water’s scarce.”
Wick was sitting on a pallet of old cloth against the wall of the third cavern with a blanket around his shoulders and a tin of water in his hands, coughing.
He looked smaller. Greyer. His shaved head had a fine dusting of violet spores across it, glowing faintly. His eyes were red. He was coughing the way men coughed on Line C at hour nineteen, deep and wet and from the bottom of the chest, and every time he coughed, the water in the tin slopped, and he didn’t seem to notice.
He looked up.
He saw Creed.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t move. He just stared, with the tin in his hands and the water slopping, for so long that Creed thought something was wrong with him, that the spores had gotten into his head.
Then his face crumpled.
“You came down the pipe,” he said. His voice cracked in half on it. “Sabine’s people said — somebody on Rib Nine saw — I said, no, no, that’s not — and then I thought — oh, of course he did. Of course he came down the outside of the marrow line. Of course he did.” He was laughing, or crying, or both, and coughing on top of it. “You idiot. You absolute — you had a bed, Creed. They gave you a bed.”
Creed knelt down on the cavern floor in front of him.
“I know,” he said. “I slept in it.”
“Did you?” Wick wiped his face with the back of his hand, smearing the spores. “Was it good?”
“It was soft. It took three nights.”
Wick laughed again. Then coughed. Then couldn’t stop coughing. Bent over the tin, his whole thin body shaking with it, the water slopping out over his hands.
Creed put his hand flat on Wick’s back. Between the shoulder blades. Through the blanket.
And felt.
He felt Wick’s heart. Quick, light, hammering. The frost on it, thin. And he felt Wick’s lungs. Not the way you felt a heart. Differently. Like feeling the inside of a pipe by the sound of the flow, the way Teo said Hollis could. He felt the air going in and out, rough and ragged. And he felt, all through the lungs, deep in them, coating the insides of them like rust inside a pipe, the spores. Thousands of them. Millions. Small and cold and grey, rooting into the soft wet walls of the lungs, the way the things in the god’s head rooted into the folds. Growing.
Takes days, Snake had said. The spores. Not minutes.
Days. Then grey lung. Then nothing.
He’d breathed the Bloom for days now. On the stair, in the sanctum, across the dunes. And every spore that had gone into him, his blood had met, and taken, and broken down, like coal in a furnace.
“You can’t,” said Snake. Fast. “Not in him. It’s his blood, not yours. His blood doesn’t know how.”
“Then I’ll show it.”
“Creed —”
He cut his palm on the edge of the sword. Quick, shallow. He pressed the bleeding palm flat to the back of Wick’s neck, under the blanket, against the skin, where the big veins ran up into the head.
“Wick,” he said. “This is going to feel strange.”
“Everything about you feels strange,” said Wick, between coughs. “Since you came back. You know that?”
Creed closed his eyes.
He reached into Wick, through his own blood, through the cut in his palm pressed against Wick’s skin. He didn’t pull. He didn’t stop. He’d learned, in the pump-house, that there was a third thing — the thing he’d done with the sword, turning the heat back out of the steel into himself. Turning. He reached into Wick’s blood with his own, through the place where their skins met, and found the spores in the lungs, and he turned them. The way his own blood turned them. He showed Wick’s blood how. Not by pushing it. By being there, next to it, doing it. The way Hesk had showed him the pick, standing beside him at the wall, letting it fall. Your arms are for aiming. Bone does the hitting.
He felt Wick’s blood flinch. Then hesitate. Then — slowly, clumsily, the way a new crew finds the rhythm of the line — start to do it too.
The spores began to burn.
Not fire. Not heat you could feel from outside. Inside. In the lungs. One by one, then ten by ten, then a hundred by a hundred, the grey cold things rooted in Wick’s lungs met his woken blood and broke down into nothing. Into air. Into breath.
Wick gasped.
He sat bolt upright on the pallet, his eyes huge, and dragged in a breath — a long, deep, ragged breath, all the way down — and it didn’t catch. It didn’t rattle. It went all the way to the bottom of his chest and stayed there. He let it out. He dragged in another.
“What,” he said. “What — what did you —“
Creed took his hand away. He was dizzy. It had cost him — more than the Gilt at the gate. Much more. He felt hollowed. The fullness he’d had since the catwalk was gone, just like that, burned down to the frame, and the hunger was back, gnawing.
“Told you,” said Snake. But it said it quietly.
Wick was staring at his own hands. Then at Creed. Then at the back of Creed’s hand, at the fine dark lines across it, glowing faintly in the green fungus light.
“Creed,” he said, slowly. “What did they do to you?”
“Later,” said Creed. “I promised. Later.”
Behind him, somebody made a sound.
He turned. Sabine Kettle was standing in the mouth of the passage with her arms folded across her blasting vest. And behind her, crowding into the passage, filling it, spilling out into the third cave — people. Grey people. Thin. Twenty of them. Fifty. More. They’d followed. They’d been watching. They’d seen.
They were very quiet.
At the front of them, an old man was being held up between two others. Very old, very grey, his chest heaving, every breath a wet, rattling drag. Creed knew him. He’d last seen him behind the bars of a gate, crying, with his patched mask pulled down around his neck.
The warden.
“Garrow Fisk,” said Sabine Kettle. Very quietly. “Nine years on the gate. They put him out at zero-five-forty with the rest. He’s the one who’s going.” She looked at Creed. Her burned face gave away nothing at all. “Can you do that again?”
He did it eleven times.
The warden first. Garrow Fisk. Whose lungs were so full of spores and so scarred from thirty years of Belly air before the spores ever got there that it was like reaching into a pipe packed solid with marrow-cake. Creed knelt beside him on the cavern floor with his bleeding palm against the back of the old man’s neck, and turned, and turned, and felt the old man’s blood refuse, and refuse, and refuse — too old, too tired, too frosted, after nine years of Drip at the gate — and then, finally, slowly, learn. The spores burned. The old man breathed. He opened his eyes and looked up at Creed and said, in his rasp, “Now you’re not.” And laughed, and coughed, and lived.
Then the others from the morning allocation. A young man with spores in his eyes. A woman whose lungs were half-grey already. Ollo, last — the big man sitting against the wall with his one arm wrapped around his knees and his slow heavy heart beating, coughing so hard the stump of his right arm jerked with every one, and looking at Creed when he came, and saying nothing, the way Ollo always said nothing. But when it was done, and he could breathe, he reached out with his one hand and put it on Creed’s shoulder. And left it there for a moment. And took it away.
Then others. Not from the morning. From before. From months ago, years. Discarded with the grey lung in them already, too far in, coughing in the back caves on pallets, waiting. Sabine brought them one at a time. He did what he could. With some of them he could. With two of them, he couldn’t. The grey had gone too deep, into the blood itself, and when he reached in to turn it, there was nothing left of their own blood to show. He felt them go, under his hand. He didn’t count them. He counted them.
By the eleventh, he couldn’t stand.
He sat against the wall of the third cave with his back to the bone and his hands in his lap, palms up, both of them cut and cut again until the cuts had stopped healing as fast as he made them, and the blood was running slowly down his wrists, and the sword lay across his knees drinking it, its grooves glowing a faint, tired red. He was shaking. The hunger was so big he couldn’t think around it. His scars had dimmed to nearly nothing.
“You’re burning yourself down,” said Snake. Not angry. Not mocking. Something almost like worry, if Snake could worry. “For them. Down to the frame. There’s nothing left in you. You know there’s only one place to get more.”
He knew. He’d felt it. On the catwalk. The Gilt’s channels. All that blue.
He didn’t answer.
Somebody crouched down in front of him.
It was the woman who’d run from him in the first cave. The one with the two tins of water. She had a bowl in her hands now. Bone. Cupped. And in it, something steaming. Grey-green. Thick.
“Grey-caps,” she said. “The mushrooms. We boil them.” She held the bowl out. “It’s not much. But it’s not theirs.”
He took the bowl. His hands were shaking so badly he nearly dropped it. She put her own hands around his, around the bowl, steadying it. Her hands were rough and grey and bare at the wrist.
He drank.
It tasted of dirt, and stone, and water. Nothing else. Nothing sweet, nothing sharp, nothing like the pale fruit or the bread. It went down into him warm and plain and it was the best thing he had ever eaten in his life.
And it was clean.
He felt it go into him, and he felt for the frost in it — the way he’d felt it in the hearts on the catwalk, in Matthis Ferrin, in every Mid on Rib Seven — and there wasn’t any. None. The grey-caps grew in the dark on the god’s bone, watered by drips from the god’s roots, and nobody had ever put anything in them. Nobody from above had ever touched them.
He looked up at the woman. At her heart. Warm. Beating. The frost on it so thin he could barely find it.
“How long have you been down here?” he said.
“Four years.” She shrugged. “Since my band went grey. Kon’s lines, Sump-Six.”
“You don’t eat their food.”
“Nothing to eat down here but what we grow. And what we steal off the Breach scavengers, sometimes.” She tilted her head. “Why?”
He looked past her. At the people in the mouth of the passage. At the dozens, the hundreds, he could feel in the caverns beyond. At all those hearts.
And at the frost on them. Thin. So thin. On the ones who’d been down here longest, so thin it was almost gone.
Stopped eating at the counters, Teo had said, about Arlo Venn. Bringing his own food from somewhere.
“Sabine,” he said.
She was still standing in the passage mouth. She came over and crouched beside the woman with the bowl.
“The people who’ve been down here longest,” he said. “Years. Do they — feel things? Strange things? Warm hands, when they’re angry? Cuts healing fast? Knowing when somebody’s behind them, without looking?”
Sabine Kettle’s face didn’t change. But her eyes did. Something went still in them. Very still. The way the Breach warden’s had gone still, looking at his scanner.
She looked at her own left hand. At the two neat stumps.
Then she held it out, palm up, between them, in the green light. And as Creed watched, very faintly — so faintly he’d have missed it, if he hadn’t been looking with more than his eyes — the air above her palm shimmered. The way air shimmered over the press plate. The way it had shimmered over the edge of the sword in the reliquary.
Heat.
She closed her hand. The shimmer was gone.
“Started about three years in,” she said. Quietly. Very quietly. “Thought I was going mad. Thought it was the spores. Then Fisk’s predecessor at the gate, old Dunmore, got it too, and some of the other long-timers. Little things. Warm hands. Cuts that close overnight. Hearing hearts.” She looked at Creed. “We don’t talk about it. Not even down here. You know what they call people who can do things with their blood.”
“Bleeders,” said Creed.
“Bleeders.” She nodded. “Thought we were turning into what they scare you with at the end of a shift.” She looked at him for a long time. At his scars. At the sword drinking from his hands. “But you’re not scared of it.”
“No.”
“What is it?”
He thought about Hesk’s voice, at the pump. There’s folk who say otherwise. About Sere, in his lab, with his bright terrible eyes. What if it’s something in the blood? Something that’s been put there? About Lamp, on the roof: a sleep laid over this world.
“It’s you,” he said. “It’s what you are. What everybody is. It’s been in you the whole time. They’ve just been keeping it asleep.”
He told them.
Not all of them. Not yet. Sabine, and Wick, and Ollo, and Garrow Fisk, and a thin quiet woman named Tamsin Rook who’d worked Kon’s cable crews for eleven years before her band went grey. They sat in a small cave deep in the sacrum, off the main caverns, around a fire of fungus-stalks, and he told them.
The Hollow. The Choir. Sere. The needle. The dark. The two voices — he didn’t tell them much about the voices; he didn’t know how. The sanctum. The sixty-two dead people sitting looking up. The murals. The key.
The frost. The Drip, and what it was called. Somnoline. What it was for.
The things in the god’s head. Drinking.
When he stopped, nobody said anything for a long time.
Wick was the first. He was sitting with his knees drawn up and his arms around them, the blanket still on his shoulders, staring into the fire. “So the key,” he said slowly. “The thing you found. It opens — what? That wall? At the top?”
“I think so.”
“And Kon’s giving it to them.”
“In three days. At the Costal Refinery. To an envoy.”
“To buy his way up,” said Tamsin Rook. Her voice was soft and very precise, like someone used to reading gauges. “Ascension. He’s been a candidate for seventeen years. Everybody on the cable crews knew. Used to joke about it. Kon’s ticket’s in the post.” She looked at the fire. “I worked the Eleventh Rib anchorages for three of my years. Right on the refinery. I know how it sits. I know where the vaults are. There’s one at the bottom, under the tempering floor, where the drums come in from above. Sealed. The only door in the refinery that Kon’s people don’t control. If there’s a handover, it’ll be there.”
“Can we get in?”
Tamsin looked at him. “The marrow lines run straight into the refinery’s intake. From the Belly. From right under Sump-Nine.” She paused. “The jackets have crawlways. Hatches every two hundred meters. The drones go up them, now. Nobody else.”
“I know,” said Creed. “A cable engineer told me.”
Sabine Kettle had been silent the whole time. Arms folded across her blasting vest. Her burned face in shadow. Now she leaned forward into the firelight.
“Say we get in,” she said. “Say we get up the pipes and into the refinery and down to the vault and through every Gilt in Kon’s company, which is two hundred, by the way, at the last count. Say we do all that.” Her voice was gravel. “Then what? You take back your key? And then what?”
“Then I kill Kon,” said Creed.
The fire crackled.
“That’s it?” said Sabine. “That’s the plan? Kill a Verbous?”
“He put you out the gate,” said Creed. “He put Wick out the gate. And Ollo. And Fisk. He sent fourteen couriers to the Hollow and never asked why none of them came back. He sat in his glass house and told me a man in a tank for a year was depreciation.” He looked at the fire. “And in three days he’s going to hand the only thing in this god that might open that wall to the things that put the frost in you. To buy himself a seat at their table.” He looked up at Sabine. “So yes. I kill him. And I take the key back. And then they’ll know who I am, up there. They probably already do. And then they’ll come for me. And for anybody near me.”
“Then what,” said Sabine.
He was quiet for a long moment.
“Then I keep going,” he said. “Up.”
Nobody said anything.
Behind his eyes, the cold was very still. “Creed,” said Lamp, quietly. “If you kill him at the handover, in front of an envoy of the Head, there will be no going back. Not to Halden. Not to Teodor Brask. Not to anything. You will be the enemy of everything above the Belly for the rest of your life.”
“I already am,” said Creed. Out loud. The others looked at him, and at each other, and said nothing; they’d seen enough in the last hours not to ask who he was talking to. “I was from the moment I was born in a drawer. I just didn’t know it.”
In his chest, Snake didn’t say anything at all. It didn’t need to. He could feel it. Coiled. Warm. Patient. Satisfied.
Sabine Kettle looked at him across the fire for a long, long time. Then she reached into one of the pockets of her rust-colored blasting vest and took out a det-cap. Small. Copper. A fuse-tail dangling from it. She turned it over in her two-fingered hand.
“I’ve been stealing these,” she said, “for six years. A few at a time, off the Breach scavengers, out of crates that fall off cage lifts. I’ve got a cave full of them. Charges. Cord. Caps. Six years.” She looked up. “Never knew what for. Just knew I wanted them. Just knew one day I’d want to blow something up that wasn’t a marrow wall.” The burned half of her mouth pulled up. “Never thought it’d be a refinery.”
“You’re in?”
“I’m in.” She put the det-cap back in her pocket. “So’s anyone down here who wants to be. That’s their choice, not mine. But I’ll ask.”
“I know the shipment codes,” said Ollo.
Everybody turned. Ollo almost never spoke. He was sitting against the wall of the cave with his one arm around his knees, and he looked at the fire, not at them.
“From sort,” he said. His voice was deep and slow and rough from disuse. “Every crate that goes up the cable gets a code. I’ve been stamping them for two weeks. I know which ones go to the refinery. I know which ones they don’t open.” He looked up at Creed. “You get me a stamp, I can get you a crate.”
Creed looked at him. At the stump of his arm, where the belt had been cinched tight in the gallery, a lifetime ago.
“Thank you, Ollo.”
Ollo nodded once. Looked back at the fire. That was all.
“And me,” said Wick.
Creed turned.
Wick was still sitting with his knees drawn up. His face was white. His hands, wrapped around his knees, were shaking. He was breathing fast — clean, deep, all the way down, but fast.
“No,” said Creed.
“Yes.”
“Wick —“
“No. No. Listen to me.” Wick’s voice cracked, and he pushed through it. “Last time you went somewhere, you said I had to stay. You said Kon wanted me where he could reach me. And I stayed. And he reached me. And they put me out a gate.” He was shaking all over now. “I’m not staying anywhere anymore. Not without you. I’m terrified. I’m so terrified I could be sick, I’ve been terrified since zero-five-thirty this morning, I’ve been terrified my whole life, Creed. And I’ve decided.” He swallowed. “I’m terrified, and I’ve decided. You can’t stop me. I’ll follow you. I’ll be very quiet. You’ll hardly know I’m there until I scream at something.”
Creed looked at him for a long time.
He thought about telling him no again. He thought about how it would go. How Wick would follow anyway, the way he’d said, and be alone in the pipes when he did it, instead of next to someone.
I’m only any good at being scared next to somebody.
“Stay close,” Creed said. “Do what I say. Don’t touch anything blue.”
Wick let out a breath that was half a sob. “Blue? Why would I touch anything blue? Why is blue the thing? What happens with blue?”
“Later,” said Creed.
“Everything’s later with you now —“
Across the fire, Garrow Fisk, the old warden of the Pelvic Breach, started to laugh. A rasping, wheezing, clean-lunged laugh. And after a moment, Sabine Kettle joined him, a short gravel bark. And Tamsin Rook smiled into the fire. And Ollo, very slightly, at one corner of his mouth.
And Wick, still white, still shaking, put his face in his hands and laughed too.
Creed sat with them in the fungus-light, in the hollow bone at the bottom of the god, with the sword across his knees and his hands still bleeding into it, and felt their hearts. Five of them. Warm. Thin-frosted. Beating.
And beyond them, in the caverns, hundreds more.
Three days, he thought.
He looked up. Through the roof of the little cave. Through the sacrum. Through the basin, and the Belly, and the Ribs.
He couldn’t see the Skull from here.
He didn’t need to.