They had two days. They used them.
Sabine Kettle’s cave of stolen explosives was exactly what she’d said it was: a cave. A side-chamber deep in the sacrum, its entrance hidden behind a slab of bone she rolled aside with her shoulder, and inside, stacked to the roof in neat, careful, blasting-crew rows — six years of theft. Charges in waxed paper. Coils of fuse-cord, white and orange and black. Boxes of copper det-caps, packed in sawdust. A whole wall of shaped breaching charges, the kind the crews used to blow a gallery face, with Kon Reclamation’s seal still stamped on half of them.
Wick stood in the entrance and looked at it all for a long time.
“I think,” he said finally, very carefully, “that I’m going to go and stand somewhere else.”
“Good idea,” said Sabine, and handed him a coil of fuse-cord to carry.
There were forty-one of them, in the end. Forty-one of the Discarded who came to Sabine in the first cavern and said, quietly, without fuss, I’m in. She didn’t ask them why. She looked at them the way she’d looked at Creed when he first came down the rope — head to boots, looking for the leak — and she nodded, or she didn’t. She turned away eleven. Too old, too sick, too new to the Void and still too frosted to keep up. One of them, a young man who’d only been down there three months, argued with her. She let him argue. Then she said, “No,” and he went away.
The forty-one she kept, she split.
Eight to her: blasting crew. Old hands, every one of them, who’d been put out the gate for the same reasons she had — a charge set wrong, a gallery come down, a foreman who needed someone to blame. They knew how to carry charges up a ladder in the dark without dropping one, and how to set a breaching charge in under a minute, and how to wire a whole sequence of them to go off one after another like a heartbeat. They spent the first day in the explosives cave, sorting, packing, crimping caps, and nobody went near them.
Six to Tamsin Rook. Cable crew, sort crew, people who knew the inside of a crate and the code on its lid. They spent the first day with Ollo, at a table of bone in the second cavern, while Ollo — in his slow, deep, rough voice, a few words at a time — taught them everything he knew about the stamps. Which code meant refinery stores, lower dock. Which meant tempering supplies, do not open. Which crates the Gilt on the dock never checked because they came from the Belly and nothing from the Belly was worth checking.
And the rest — twenty-seven of them — to Creed.
He didn’t know what to do with them.
They stood in front of him in the green light of the first cavern, twenty-seven grey thin bandless people, holding the things they’d brought to fight with. Blasting bars. Pick-hafts, the heads knocked off. Lengths of pipe. A few knives. One woman had a marrow saw, a real one, its cell long dead, its edge dull, that she’d carried out the gate with her eight months ago and never let go of. And they looked at him. All of them. The way the crowd on the catwalk had looked at him. But not quite the same. Not afraid. Or not only afraid.
Waiting.
“Say something,” said Snake. “They want you to say something.”
He’d never given an order in his life. He’d taken ten thousand.
“I don’t know how to fight,” he said.
Twenty-seven faces looked at him.
“Not properly,” he said. “Not like the Gilt. Nobody ever taught me. I just — do it.” He looked at the woman with the marrow saw. At the blasting bars. “So I can’t teach you. But I can tell you what I know about them. The gold ones. Their channels run their bodies. Cut a channel, and the arm goes dead. Cut enough, and they fall over. The lances are Catalyst at the tip — don’t let the tip touch you, it’ll stop your heart.” He thought. “They’re fast. Faster than you. So don’t be where they are. Be behind them. Be under them. Be on the other side of a pipe from them. And if one comes at you and you can’t get away —“ He stopped.
“What?” said the woman with the saw.
“Shout for me,” said Creed.
Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything at all. They just looked at him, all twenty-seven of them, for a long moment. Then the woman with the saw nodded, once, and went off to find something to sharpen it with. And one by one, the others went too.
“That,” said Snake, “was the worst speech I’ve ever heard.”
“It was honest,” said Lamp.
“It was terrible.”
Creed went to the Breach.
He went alone, at what would have been the night cycle, and climbed the rope up out of the sacrum and went along the inside of the ilium in the drifting violet haze to the gate. It was shut. The two Gilt he’d left lying on the bone were gone — thawed, and got up, and gone, the way he’d thought. But their lances were still there. They’d dropped them when they fell and hadn’t come back for them, and nobody else had.
He brought them down into the sacrum. Two long black lances with crackling blue tips. He gave them to the woman with the marrow saw and to Garrow Fisk, who’d asked, in his rasp, to be given something better than a pick-haft.
“Don’t touch the blue,” Creed told them.
“Why,” said Wick, from across the cavern, “is it always the blue?”
They went in through Line D.
It was Tamsin’s idea. Line C was watched — Ferrin had said so — and Creed knew it; he’d felt it, the one time he’d come close, the Gilt hearts posted at the gallery mouth, waiting. But Line D was the next gallery over, in the same vertebra, and its pumps fed the same column of marrow lines. And at night cycle, Line D ran a skeleton crew. A dozen mules on the pumps and a single foreman on the gantry who’d be asleep in his chair by hour three.
They came up from the Void through the old drainage cuts under the pelvic basin, forty-two of them in a long silent line in the dark, carrying charges and fuse and lances and blasting bars, and came out through a rusted grate into the bottom of the Line D pump gallery, behind the great iron housings of the pumps.
The pumps were working. He’d known they would be. Thud, hiss. Thud, hiss. The rhythm of the line. Hesk’s rhythm. The marrow sludge going up through the pipes, grey-blue, stinking of pennies and burnt hair, up and up out of the Belly toward the light.
The night crew saw them.
He’d known that, too. You couldn’t bring forty-two people through a pump gallery and not be seen. The twelve mules on the pumps turned, one after another, as the line of grey bandless shapes came out from behind the housings, and their faces went slack, and their hands stopped on the bars. Twelve frosted hearts, jumping.
Creed walked out in front of them, into the light of the gallery lamps.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. He saw them see his bare wrist. He saw them see the sword. He saw them see his face.
And he saw them know him.
The one who came down the pipe. He could see it go through them, face to face, the way it had gone through the Belly in an hour. The one who stuck his band in the sign.
Nobody moved for a long moment.
Then an old man on the number-four pump — older than Hesk, older than Fisk, so marrow-skinned he was nearly blue — took his hands off the bar. He looked up at the gantry, where the night foreman was a dark slumped shape in his chair. He looked back at Creed.
And then, very slowly, he lifted his left hand, and held his wrist out into the lamplight. His band. Steel, scuffed, green.
He didn’t say anything. He just held it there.
Creed went to him. He took the old man’s wrist in his hand — gently, the way Ferrin had tucked the paper sack into his father’s blanket — and closed his other hand around the band. And squeezed.
The steel crumpled. The display cracked and died. He drew it off over the old man’s hand and let it fall to the floor of the gallery with a little hollow clack.
The old man looked at his bare wrist for a long time. Then he looked up at Creed and said, in a voice like a rusted hinge, “Where you going?”
“Up,” said Creed.
The old man nodded slowly. He looked at the line of Discarded behind the pump housings. At Sabine, with her charges. At Wick, with his coil of fuse.
“Too old,” he said. “I’d slow you. But —“ He turned to the others. The eleven mules on the night crew, staring. “You heard him. Up. Any of you got legs.”
Four of them came.
Four, out of eleven. Creed held out his hand and each of them, one at a time, laid their wrist in it, and he crushed their bands and took them off and let them fall, clack, clack, clack, clack, on the gallery floor beside the old man’s. And the others watched. And didn’t come. And didn’t call the foreman. And when the Discarded had gone past them and climbed up to the base of the marrow lines where the first inspection hatch was, the seven who’d stayed went back to their pumps, and put their hands on the bars, and worked.
But they kept their heads up while they did it. Every one of them. Looking after the line of grey shapes climbing into the dark.
Forty-six, now.
The inspection hatch was a round steel door in the side of the pipe jacket, a meter across, with a wheel lock that hadn’t been turned by a human hand in years. Creed turned it. It screamed. They all froze, listening for the foreman on the gantry. He didn’t wake.
Beyond the hatch was the crawlway.
Big enough for a man, Teo had said, if he doesn’t mind it hot.
It was a curved gap between the pipe and the jacket, a little more than shoulder-wide, a little less than a man’s height, running straight up into the dark. On one side, the jacket: thin metal, rough on the inside, beaded with condensation. On the other side, the pipe: thick steel, curved, and so hot that the air near it shimmered, and you could hear the sludge going up inside it, a deep, slow, grinding rush, like blood going through a vein. Every few meters, a rung had been welded to the jacket, a little bar of steel to put your hand or your foot on. Rust-scabbed. Some of them missing.
And the heat came out of it like a breath.
Creed went in first. He’d known he would. The heat closed over him the moment he was through the hatch — wet, total, the heat of the press plate at hour nineteen, the heat of the gallery at its worst, except it didn’t stop. It pressed in from every side. Sweat came out of him all at once, everywhere, and ran.
He felt his scars warm in answer. Not to fight it. To take it.
His blood met the heat the way it had met the spores, and the Catalyst, and the food. It didn’t burn it. It drank it. Slowly. Steadily. Like a man drinking water on a hot shift. He felt the heat of the pipe go into him through his skin, and his scars glowed a little brighter in the dark, and he wasn’t hot anymore. Not the way the others would be.
He started to climb.
Behind him, one at a time, they came in through the hatch. He heard each of them hit the heat. A gasp. A curse. Wick’s voice saying, very faintly, “oh, no, oh, no, no, no.” And then the sound of hands on rungs. Forty-five people, climbing up the inside of a marrow line in the dark, a meter apart, toward the refinery.
They didn’t talk. Talking cost air, and there wasn’t much air. They climbed.
By the third hour, three of them had gone back.
Sabine sent them. She was ten people below Creed in the line, and he heard her voice come up the crawlway, gravel-flat, low: “You. And you. And you. Down. Now. Back to the hatch. That’s an order.” And a protest, weak, cracked. And Sabine: “You’re no good to me cooked.” And then the sounds of three people going back down the rungs in the dark, slowly.
He’d felt them going. Their hearts. Hammering, then stuttering, then hammering again, too fast, too hard. The heat getting into their blood. Cooking them, slowly, from the inside, the way the Bloom cooked lungs.
He felt for all of them now, as he climbed. Forty-two hearts below him in the crawlway, strung out in a line in the dark. He could feel every one. He could feel the heat in each of them — rising, rising.
And he could feel Wick’s.
Wick was right behind him. Two rungs down. Creed had told him to stay close and he had, the whole way, so close that sometimes his hand touched Creed’s boot. And his heart was going like the emitter on the old sword. High and thin and fast. Too fast.
“Wick.”
No answer. Just breathing. Ragged. Fast.
“Wick.”
“… m’fine.”
He wasn’t. Creed could feel it. The heat had gotten into him. His blood was too hot, his heart was too fast, and it was getting faster.
“He’ll drop,” said Snake. Flat. “Ten minutes. Maybe less. And he’ll take the next three below him off the rungs with him when he goes.”
Creed stopped climbing. He hung on the rungs in the dark, with the pipe roaring beside him and the heat pressing in, and reached down with one hand, and found Wick’s wrist, bare, slick with sweat.
He didn’t cut himself. There wasn’t room, and he didn’t need to. He held Wick’s wrist, skin to skin, and reached in.
Not with the heat. With the cold.
He’d never done it on purpose. He’d felt it — every time Lamp spoke, every time he stopped himself, every time the wall came down behind his eyes. Clean cold. Water-cold. He’d never once tried to use it. Never thought it was his to use.
He reached for it now. For the cold behind his eyes.
“Lamp,” he said. Under his breath. “Help me.”
A pause. The pipe roaring.
And then, quietly, the cold came. Not a wall. Not a push. A thread of it. A thin clean line of cool, running down from behind his eyes, down through his chest, past the heat coiled around his heart, down his arm, into his hand.
Into Wick.
He felt Wick’s blood meet it. Flinch. And then — the way it had learned to turn the spores — take it. Let it in. The cool went into Wick’s wrist and up his arm and into his chest, and spread, and his heart, hammering, racing, stuttering — slowed. Slowed. Found a rhythm. Held it.
Wick drew a long, shaky breath.
“What,” he said, faintly. “What — did you just —“
“Keep climbing,” said Creed.
He did it for the others. All the way up the line. Not all at once — he couldn’t reach them all at once — but one at a time, as the crawlway went on and on and the heat rose and rose. He’d feel a heart start to go, below him, and he’d stop and wait, and Sabine would pass the word up the line, and whoever it was would climb up to him, rung by rung, and he’d take their wrist, and cool them. And they’d go on.
It cost him. Not the hunger. The other way. Behind his eyes, every time, a little less of the cold. Like a reservoir slowly draining.
“You’re using it,” said Snake, around the fourth or fifth time. Strangely. “Lamp’s. You’re using Lamp the way you use me.”
“He asked,” said Lamp. Quietly. “And it is not harmful.”
“Isn’t it?” said Snake. And for once Creed couldn’t tell, from its voice, what it meant.
The drone came down the crawlway at them in the fifth hour.
Creed heard it first. Over the roar of the pipe. A skittering. A clicking. Fast, metallic, coming down from above. He stopped. Behind him, Wick bumped into his boot and stopped too, and the stop went down the line, rung by rung, person by person, until all forty-two of them were hanging still in the dark.
A light came down the crawlway toward them. A single white beam, swinging, sweeping the walls. And behind it, scuttling down the rungs headfirst, a shape.
It was the size of a dog. Like the pictures of dogs. Low and flat and many-legged — eight legs, jointed, steel, clicking on the rungs. A body like a beetle’s shell. And on the front of it, two arms folded under, ending in something that glowed bright blue at the tip, and above them, the lamp, and a cluster of small dark lenses, like eyes.
A maintenance drone. Little crawling things, Teo had said. Miss half of what’s there.
It didn’t miss them.
The lamp swung down and found Creed’s face, and stopped. The cluster of lenses whirred. Focused. The blue tips on its folded arms crackled. And from somewhere in its shell, a voice — flat, recorded, tinny — said:
“Unauthorized presence. Maintenance crawlway seven. Reporting.”
And Wick screamed.
Not a word. Just a scream. High and raw and total, the scream of a man who had been terrified for five hours in the dark in a crawlway too hot to breathe in and had finally been shown something to be terrified of. It went up the crawlway and down it and filled the whole jacket.
And then, still screaming, Wick reached up past Creed’s leg with his free hand — the hand that wasn’t holding a rung — and grabbed the coil of fuse-cord off his own shoulder, and threw it.
It wasn’t a good throw. It wasn’t aimed. It just went up, flailing, a loose coil of orange cord, and hit the drone in the face. Hit the cluster of lenses. And tangled there, round the lenses and the lamp and the folded arms, and the drone jerked back, and its legs scrabbled on the rungs, and its blue-tipped arms snapped out and slashed at the cord and caught it and the Catalyst in the tips touched the fuse-cord —
The cord lit.
Not exploded. Fuse-cord didn’t explode. It burned, fast and bright and spitting, a line of white fire running along it, all over the drone’s face, the lenses and the lamp and the arms, and the drone shrieked — a high electric whine — and let go of the rungs with three of its legs and swung out over the gap toward the pipe —
Creed drew the sword in the space of the crawlway, which was too small to draw a sword in, and did it anyway, and put the point through the drone’s shell between the lenses.
It stopped shrieking.
It hung on the rungs above him for a moment, sparking. Then it let go and fell past him, past Wick, down the crawlway — forty people flattening themselves against the jacket as it went by — and down, and down, clattering, sparking, the burning fuse-cord trailing behind it like a tail, until the clattering stopped somewhere far below.
Silence. Except for the pipe.
“Reporting,” said Snake, thoughtfully. “It said reporting.”
Creed looked down at Wick.
Wick was hanging on the rungs with both hands now, white to the lips in the glow of Creed’s scars, shaking so hard the rungs rattled. His shoulder was bare. His fuse-cord was gone.
“I screamed,” he said.
“I heard.”
“I said I would. I said you’d hardly know I was there until —“
“You saved us,” said Creed.
Wick stared up at him.
“It was going to cut,” said Creed. “Its arms. The blue. It was going for my face, and I couldn’t draw in here, not fast enough. You blinded it.” He held Wick’s eyes. “You saved us.”
Wick opened his mouth. Shut it. Opened it again.
“I threw fuse-cord,” he said. “At a drone. In a crawlway. That’s — Creed, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life, and I’ve lived next to you for nine years —“
“I know,” said Creed. “Keep climbing.”
From ten people below, very faintly, up the crawlway, came the sound of Sabine Kettle laughing.
The drone had reported. They knew it. So at the next hatch, Creed stopped.
Tamsin came up the line to him, rung by rung, and hung beside him in the heat with her thin precise face running with sweat, and listened to the sounds through the wall of the jacket. Then she nodded.
“Twelfth Rib anchorage,” she said. “We’re level with it. There’s an inspection platform outside this hatch. It runs along the spine to the anchorage claws.” She closed her eyes, thinking. “If the drone reported, they’ll send a patrol to the crawlway hatches above us. They’ll come down from the refinery. They’ll be on the platform.”
“How many?”
“Four. Usually. Gilt patrols on the anchorage platforms run in fours.”
Creed felt. Through the jacket, through the hatch. And there they were. Four hearts. Above. Coming down. And channels, bright, cold, full. Moving fast.
“Four,” said Snake. Very softly. “Four more. All that blue.”
He was hungry again. He’d been hungry since the third hour — since the second person he’d cooled, since the cold behind his eyes started to drain and the heat in his chest started to pull harder against it to keep the balance. He was hollow. He could feel the gold thread in the middle of him straining. He had another ten hours of climbing and a refinery full of Gilt and Nate Kon at the end of it.
He needed fuel.
“Lamp,” he said. Very quietly.
The cold behind his eyes was thin now. Faint. But it was there.
“I know,” said Lamp. And it sounded — tired. Tired the way Creed was tired. “I know what you need.”
“If I take it. Just the blue. Not the rest.”
A long pause.
“Then take only the blue,” said Lamp. “And I will be there. At the edge of it. And when it is enough, I will tell you.” A pause. “You must listen.”
“I’ll listen.”
He turned the wheel lock on the hatch.
The platform was a narrow steel walkway bolted to the outside of the spine, running out from the pipe column toward the root of the Twelfth Rib — the lowest, the shortest, a stubby floating rib — where its anchorage claws bit into the bone. Lamps on poles every twenty meters. A railing on the gulf side. Below the railing, the dark, and the faint embers of the Belly.
The four Gilt were coming along it from the refinery end, fast, lances leveled, gold armor catching the lamps.
Creed came out of the hatch and went at them.
He didn’t use the sword. Not at first. He went in under the first lance and put his hand on the Gilt’s breastplate, the way he had at the gate, and stopped — and the Gilt froze and fell. One. And while the second was swinging at him he caught the haft of the lance — caught it with his bare hand, just behind the crackling tip — and pulled.
The Catalyst came up the haft into his palm. Cold. Bright. Tame. His blood took it, woke it, swallowed it. And pulled for more. Up the lance. Into the gauntlet. Into the channels.
He felt it come. He felt himself fill. The hollow in the middle of him, the hunger, the strain on the gold thread — filling, filling, like a tank under the press, like the marrow line beside him filling with sludge. The Gilt holding the lance went rigid. His channels went dark from the hands up. Elbow. Shoulder. Chest.
And there was the other thing, under the channels. Warm. Red. Beating.
“Yes,” breathed Snake.
“Enough.”
Lamp. Not a wall. Just a word. Thin and tired and clear.
He let go.
The Gilt fell. Channels dark. Heart beating. Alive.
Creed stood on the platform with the Catalyst roaring through him, full, full, his scars blazing red-gold through the crew-jacket, and turned to the last two.
They were already running.
Not at him. Away. Back along the platform toward the refinery, the way the Gilt on the catwalk had run. He let them go. Then he remembered. Reporting. If they reached the refinery —
Fisk got one of them.
The old warden came out of the hatch behind Creed with one of the lances from the Breach, holding it the way you’d hold a pick-haft, and he couldn’t run, his old legs wouldn’t let him, but he didn’t need to. He planted his feet on the platform and threw the lance, overhand, like a man throwing a bar across a gallery to a mate. It went end over end, badly, wobbling — and caught the running Gilt between the shoulders, tip-first, and the blue crackled, and the Gilt went down in a heap on the walkway and didn’t move.
The other one reached the end of the platform. The steps up toward the refinery. He was on the first step —
And the woman with the marrow saw stepped out of the shadow of a lamp-pole in front of him. Where she’d come from, Creed never knew — she must have gone up the crawlway past him in the dark, past the hatch, and come out at the one above — and she swung the dead saw, two-handed, with eight months of rage in it, into the back of the Gilt’s knee where the plate didn’t cover.
The dull blade bit. The Gilt fell. She swung again. And again.
Creed got there before the fourth swing. He caught her arm. She turned on him, her face wild, the saw dripping.
“He’s down,” Creed said. “He’s down.”
She stared at him. Then at the Gilt, who was crawling, slowly, on the steel, leaving a smear, his leg bent wrong.
She lowered the saw.
Behind them, coming out of the hatch one at a time, the Discarded stepped out onto the platform. Into the air. Into the lamplight. Blinking. Black from head to foot with sweat and rust and pipe-soot, their hands raw from the rungs. Forty-one of them, out of the forty-six who’d started. Three sent back in the heat. Two gone — he’d felt them go, in the sixth hour, a man and a woman who’d slipped on missing rungs where the crawlway ran slick, and fallen, and he hadn’t been able to reach them in time.
He didn’t know their names. He’d ask. He’d ask Sabine. Somebody should know.
They stood on the platform at the root of the Twelfth Rib and looked around them. At the gulf. At the stubby bone of the floating rib, and its anchorage claws, humming. At the Gilt lying on the walkway — one frozen, one drained, one with a lance in his back, one bleeding from the knee.
And then, one by one, they looked up.
Above them, a hundred meters up the spine, was the Costal Refinery.
From here, so close, it wasn’t a cluster of lights. It was a wall. A cliff of steel and glass and pipe, bolted to the spine and built out along the root of the Eleventh Rib above them, going up and up — tanks like towers, towers like stacks, catwalks and gantries strung between them in layers, a thousand lamps, and through it all, everywhere, the pipes. The marrow lines they’d climbed, branching off the column into the refinery in great looping arcs. And the clean lines coming back out, thin, and blue, glowing, running up the spine into the dark toward the Mid Ribs and the Higher Ribs and the light.
And the noise of it. Like a thousand presses running at once. A deep, grinding, hissing roar, under everything, that came down through the spine into the soles of their feet.
And Creed felt the key.
So close now. So strong. The slow enormous beat — a single great pulse, then the long, long pause — coming down to him through the steel and the pipes and the bone, so strong it was almost like hearing it. Somewhere in there. Deep. Low. Under the tempering floor, Tamsin had said. In the vault where the drums came down from the Head.
“There,” he said. He pointed. “It’s there.”
Sabine came up beside him on the platform. Black with soot, her burned face streaked with sweat. She looked up at the refinery for a long time, the way she must have looked at a gallery face before she drilled it.
“Two hundred Gilt,” she said. “In that.”
“Yes.”
“And Kon.”
“Yes.”
“And a thing from the Head.” She looked at him. “An envoy. That nobody’s ever seen.”
“Yes.”
She was quiet a moment. Then she reached into her blasting vest and took out a det-cap, and turned it over in her two-fingered hand, the way she had by the fire.
“Ollo’s crates went up the cable this morning,” she said. “Tamsin’s people sent word down the line before we went in. Fourteen of them. Stamped refinery stores, lower dock. Nobody checks the lower dock. Nothing from the Belly’s worth checking.” The burned half of her mouth pulled up. “Fourteen crates of Kon Reclamation’s own breaching charges, sitting on Kon Reclamation’s own loading dock, waiting for somebody to come and wire them.”
“How long to wire them?”
“Give me two hours inside and I can bring down the bottom half of that refinery into the Belly.” She put the cap back in her vest. “Give me three and I can bring down all of it.”
Creed looked up at the refinery. At the wall of light. At the clean lines climbing up out of it, glowing blue, toward the Ribs. Toward Halden. Toward Teo’s wrong-facing window, and Matthis Ferrin’s chair, and the young woman who’d mouthed down at him in the street.
All of their Catalyst came from here. All of their light. And all of their frost.
“Not all of it,” he said. “Not the clean lines. Not the ones going up. Just —“ He thought about what Ferrin had said. The only place below the Skull with the right kind of vault. “Just the bottom. The tempering floor. The vault. Whatever comes down from above, into this place — I want it gone. I want them to have nowhere to bring it.”
Sabine looked at him for a long time. Then she nodded, once. The way she’d nodded at the forty-one.
“The bottom, then,” she said.
And above them, at the top of the refinery, on its highest platform, a light came down.
They all saw it. It came down out of the dark above the Ribcage, out of the white-gold glow so far above — a shaft of light. Straight down. White. Brighter than anything. Brighter than the shaft in Lumen Square. So bright it turned the whole face of the refinery white for a moment, every pipe and tank and catwalk standing out sharp and black against it, and the Discarded on the platform threw up their hands and turned away.
Creed didn’t turn away.
He watched it fall onto the highest platform of the Costal Refinery and stay there, a column of white light from the sky to the steel, humming. He could hear it. Under the roar of the refinery. A thin, high, pure tone, like a struck glass.
Like a halo.
“It’s early,” said Snake. Very quietly. “Mule. It’s early. Ferrin said three days. It’s only been two.”
“They knew,” said Lamp. “The drone reported. Or the Gilt at the gate. Or the catwalk. They knew he was coming. So they came early.”
Creed stood on the platform at the root of the Twelfth Rib with forty-one black-faced, raw-handed, bandless Discarded behind him, and the sword on his back, and the Catalyst roaring in his blood, and looked up at the column of white light on top of the refinery, and felt the key beating, slow and huge, somewhere below it.
It’s been heard, Kon had said, in his glass house. Looking up.
“Sabine,” said Creed. “You’ve got two hours.”
“And you?”
He looked up at the light.
“I’ve got less,” he said.