They went up the last hundred meters on the outside of the spine, on the maintenance ladders bolted to the bone between the pipe column and the anchorage platforms, and they came over the edge of the refinery’s lowest level onto the lower dock, forty-one of them, black-faced, in a silent rush.
The dock was a wide steel apron jutting out over the gulf, where the freight cable from the Belly came up and the cargo capsules unloaded. Crates everywhere. Stacked in rows. Kon Reclamation seals, sort codes, stencils. A pair of cranes on rails. A dock office with a lit window and a Mid clerk in it, asleep over his slate.
Four Gilt.
Creed was among them before they’d turned around. He stopped two — hand on the breastplate, channels frozen, down. The third he cut through the lance-arm, and the channels burst, and the blue fire went up through the plate, and there was nothing left in the armor but smoke. The fourth got his lance up, and the woman with the marrow saw put her stolen Gilt lance through the gap under his arm from behind, and the Catalyst tip met the Catalyst in his channels, and he went rigid and screamed and fell.
The clerk in the dock office woke up, saw them through the window, and very sensibly put his head down on his slate again and stayed there.
“Fourteen crates,” said Tamsin, already moving down the rows, reading stencils. “Refinery stores, lower dock — here. Here. And here —“
Sabine’s eight were already pulling the lids. Inside, nested in straw, the breaching charges. Kon Reclamation’s own seal on every one.
Sabine knelt beside the first crate and looked up at Creed.
“Go,” she said. “Two hours. I’ll be on the dock. Wired, and waiting.” Her burned face, in the dock lamps, was utterly calm. The calm of a woman who’d set a thousand charges in a thousand gallery faces and knew exactly what this one would do. “You’ll hear it when it goes.”
“Don’t set it off with us inside.”
“I’ll give you a count.” The burned half of her mouth pulled up. “Somebody has to know when to run.”
He took twenty-two of the fighters, and Tamsin to guide him, and Wick, and Fisk with his lance. The rest stayed on the dock with Sabine. And he went up the steel stairs at the back of the dock, into the refinery.
The first thing he saw was his own marrow.
He knew it. He knew it the way he knew the rubber grip cut on the bias. Grey-blue sludge, thick, stinking of old pennies and burnt hair, filling vats so big they had their own catwalks around the rims. Twenty of them. Thirty. In rows, across a floor the size of the whole of Line C, under a roof of steel girders hung with lamps. The sludge sat in them, still, heavy, slowly separating — a dark grey sediment sinking to the bottom, a thinner blue fluid rising to the top.
Settled, Sere had said, in his lab. We cook it, we press it, we settle it.
The marrow lines came in through the floor beneath the vats. He could hear them. The deep slow grinding rush of the sludge coming up from the Belly, up from Line C and Line D and every line in every gallery, up through the pipes they’d climbed, into here. Nine years of his life were in these vats. Hesk’s thirty-one. Ollo’s arm.
The settling floor was worked by Mids. A dozen of them, in long grey coats and filter masks, on the catwalks around the rims of the vats, with long-handled skimmers and gauges and slates. They saw the Discarded come up the stairs. One of them screamed. The others dropped their skimmers and ran — not at them, away, along the catwalks, toward the far end of the floor.
“Let them go,” said Creed.
“They’ll raise the alarm,” said Tamsin.
“The alarm’s raised,” said Creed. “There’s a Warden on the roof.”
They went across the settling floor between the vats. Through the stink. Under the lamps.
He felt for the key. Still below. Still beating. Slow, huge. Somewhere under everything. Under the floor below this one, and the floor below that.
“Down,” he said. “Not up. The vault’s under the tempering floor.”
“Tempering’s two levels up,” said Tamsin. “The vault’s under it, but the only way down to the vault is through it. Through the tempering floor. There’s a shaft.” She was moving fast, reading signs on the girders, the stencils on the vats. “Cooking floor. Then pressing. Then first-draw. Then tempering.” She glanced back at him. “We go up to go down.”
Of course they did. Everything in the god was upside down.
The cooking floor was heat. Even after the crawlway. Furnaces in rows, great iron bellies with grated mouths full of blue-white Catalyst flame, and the sludge piped through them in coils that glowed red, and the air above them so hot it rippled like the surface of water. The Mids on the cooking floor wore suits — full suits, silver, hooded, with dark glass faceplates — and they didn’t run when they saw the Discarded come up the stairs. They just stood there, at their furnaces, in their silver suits, and watched them go past. As if it didn’t matter. As if nothing that came up those stairs could possibly matter.
The Discarded crossed the cooking floor in a line, black-faced, raw-handed, sweating, carrying blasting bars and lances and pipe, and the silver suits watched them, and didn’t move.
The pressing floor was noise. Presses. Bigger than the press on Line C, ten times bigger, a whole row of them, the rams coming down on the cooked sludge with a sound like the end of the world, chunk, chunk, chunk, squeezing it, the first-draw running out of it in streams of dark wild blue into channels in the floor. Creed stopped at the edge of the pressing floor and watched them for a long moment.
The e-stops on these presses were lit. Green. Working. Every one.
He didn’t say anything. Behind him, Wick did.
“They work,” Wick said, staring at the nearest e-stop. His voice was very strange. “Up here. The stops. They work.”
Nobody answered him.
And on the pressing floor, the Gilt came.
There were twenty of them. Coming down the steel stairs from the floor above, and in through the doors at the far end of the pressing floor, and along the high catwalk over the presses. Gold armor. Lances leveled. Their channels blazing bright and cold in his blood-sense, so bright and so many that for a moment it was like looking into the Halo-glass. And they were not running away. These were not patrol Gilt. These were the ones who’d been posted here for three days, the best Kon had, waiting for exactly this.
They’d seen what had happened on the catwalk at Sump-Nine. And the gate. And the anchorage platform. They knew what he was.
They came anyway.
“Twenty,” said Snake. Its voice was low and hot and very, very calm. “Twenty. All that blue.”
The Discarded behind him had stopped. Twenty-two grey, raw-handed, frightened people, holding blasting bars and pick-hafts and pipe. He felt their hearts go, all at once, hammering.
Be behind them, he’d said. Be under them. Be on the other side of a pipe.
“Spread out,” he said. “Use the presses. Don’t stand where they can reach you. And if one gets close —“
“Shout for you,” said the woman with the marrow saw. She had her lance leveled. She was shaking. She was grinning. “We know.”
Creed drew the sword.
He didn’t cut his hand. He didn’t need to. The Catalyst from the anchorage platform was still in him, roaring, full, and his scars were already burning red-gold through the crew-jacket. He closed his hand on the hilt and the grooves lit on their own, all at once, from the guard to the tip — not ember-red, but bright, blazing, the red of the Lantern’s false flame made real. The edge went cherry. The steel sang.
He went at them.
He’d remember it in pieces. Later. Like the lab. Like the catwalk. Pieces, out of order, that came back to him in the dark for years.
A lance-tip, coming at his face. Turning his head. The blue crackle of it past his ear, so close it burned. The sword going up and through the haft and the hand and the arm, and the channels bursting, blue fire pouring out of the joints of the gold armor, and the Gilt coming apart in light and sound.
A Discarded man — he didn’t know his name — swinging a blasting bar into the back of a Gilt’s knee, and the Gilt going down, and two more Discarded on him with pick-hafts. And another Gilt turning and putting a lance through the man with the blasting bar, and the man’s heart stopping, and Creed feeling it stop, and crossing the floor in the time it took to feel it, and putting the sword through the Gilt who’d done it from shoulder to hip.
The press. A Gilt backing a Discarded woman toward the feed throat of the nearest press, the ram rising, falling, chunk, rising — and Creed coming across the floor and hitting the e-stop with the heel of his hand, and it working, the ram stopping dead at the top of its stroke, and the woman diving clear under it, and the Gilt following her into the throat, and Creed hitting the e-stop again to restart it. He didn’t remember deciding to do that. He remembered the sound.
The blood-rounds. He fired four. Each one bloomed inside a gold breastplate, red light shining out through the plate and the man inside it, the shadows of the ribs like the bars of a grate. Red smoke curling out of the faceplate slits.
Fisk, the old warden, on his knees against the housing of a press, his lance broken, holding off a Gilt with the stump of the haft, and Wick — Wick — coming up behind the Gilt with a length of pipe and swinging it two-handed into the back of the gold helmet, and the helmet ringing like a bell, and the Gilt turning, and Wick screaming and swinging again, and again, and the Gilt going down, and Wick standing over him with the pipe, white, shaking, staring at what he’d done.
The woman with the marrow saw, on the high catwalk over the presses — she’d climbed up there somehow — fighting two Gilt at once with her stolen lance, and holding them, and holding them, and then not holding them. Creed felt her heart go high and hard and then stop. He saw her fall. She fell into the channels of first-draw in the floor, the dark wild blue, and the first-draw took her, and she boiled — in forty seconds, the way Sere said — and she didn’t scream, because she was already dead when she hit it.
He didn’t know her name. He’d never asked. He’d been going to.
After that he stopped remembering pieces.
After that there was only the red.
It started with the hunger.
He’d been full. Full since the anchorage platform. But he’d been fighting for eight minutes at a pace no living thing could hold, burning, and the sword had been drinking — not his blood, not this time, but the Catalyst in him, pulling it out through his hand and into the grooves to keep them blazing — and somewhere in those eight minutes he’d gone from full to half to empty.
And he was surrounded by blue.
Twelve Gilt left. Twelve gold shapes on the pressing floor, and every one of them laced through with bright cold channels, full, so full, right there. And the Discarded falling around him. Six down now. Seven. He could feel their hearts going out. And the hunger came up through him like the heat on the slab, total, everywhere, and he couldn’t think around it, and in his chest Snake rose up to meet it, and for the first time Snake didn’t say anything at all.
It didn’t need to.
He took the next Gilt by the faceplate with his bare hand, the way he had on the catwalk, and pulled.
Not just the blue. He pulled the blue, and it came, tame and cold, and woke in him, and roared — and then he kept pulling, and the red came after it, warm and beating, up out of the cracks in the gold armor in a rope, and he took that too. And it filled him. It filled the hunger. And he dropped the empty armor and took the next one.
And the next.
He could feel his scars blazing. He could feel the light coming off him. Not red-gold. Red. Pure red, the red of the press plate, the red of the inside of a furnace, pouring off every line on his body through the crew-jacket, through his coat, so bright it threw his shadow across the whole pressing floor. He could feel his eyes burning. He could feel the heat in his chest rising, rising, coiling up and up through him, Snake’s heat, the god’s hunger, filling every part of him, and the cold behind his eyes —
He couldn’t feel the cold.
He reached for it — some small part of him reached for it — the way he’d reached for it in the crawlway. Lamp. Help me. And there was nothing there. Or almost nothing. A thread. A thin, tired thread of cold, far away, behind a wall of red. He’d used it up. All the way up the crawlway, cooling forty people, one at a time. He’d drained Lamp’s side of him like a reservoir, and now he was empty of it, and the heat was everything, and there was nothing on the other side of the scale to hold it.
He took the next Gilt. And the next. He didn’t count. He’d stopped counting.
Somewhere far away, somebody was screaming his name.
The last Gilt on the pressing floor threw down his lance.
Creed was coming at him across the floor, over the bodies, burning, with the sword up and the red pouring off him, and the Gilt — standing with his back against the housing of the last press — threw his lance away. It clattered across the steel. And then he reached up with both shaking gauntleted hands and took off his faceplate.
He was young. That was the first thing. Twenty, maybe, no older than the guard on the stair in the Hollow. A Mid face. Clean, soft, terrified, the face of somebody who’d joined the Gilt because the pay was good and the armor was gold and nobody had ever told him there was anything in the Belly that could do this. His eyes were huge. Tears were running down his face.
“Please,” he said. “Please. I’ve got — my mother’s on Rib Nine, she’s — please, I’ll go, I’ll go, I won’t —“
Creed brought the sword down.
He didn’t decide to. He didn’t decide anything. He was the red, and the red was coming down, and the young Gilt’s face was in front of it, and the edge was cherry-hot and singing —
And his hand stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped. His arm, at the top of the stroke, just — locked. Froze. The way the bleeder’s whip had frozen in the lab. The way the Gilt at the gate had frozen under his palm. Every muscle in his sword-arm, from the shoulder to the fingers, went rigid and still, and the sword hung in the air above the young Gilt’s face, burning, singing, a hand’s width from his skin — and didn’t move.
Creed stood there.
He pulled. He pulled, with everything in him, with all the red, with all the hunger — and his arm didn’t move. It wasn’t his. It was like trying to lift the press ram with his hand. Like the dead e-stop on Line C, pressed and pressed, and nothing.
The young Gilt stared up at the burning blade a hand’s width from his eyes. Then at Creed’s face. Whatever he saw there made him make a small, thin, broken sound. The sound of a frightened young man with a mother on Rib Nine.
And then he ran.
He scrambled sideways along the press housing and away, across the floor, over the bodies, through the far doors, gone.
Creed’s arm unlocked.
All at once. The sword came down the rest of the way, through the air where the young Gilt’s face had been, and into the steel of the press housing, and through it, and stuck there, sizzling.
He stood with his hand on the hilt and the sword buried in the press and stared at his own arm.
I didn’t do that, he thought. Clearly. Through the red. That wasn’t me. I didn’t stop. Something stopped me.
The red was fading. Slowly. Draining down out of his scars, out of his eyes, back down to red-gold. The heat in his chest was pulling back. Coiling in. And far away, behind the wall of red, the thread of cold behind his eyes was still there. Thin. Tired. Very still.
Very still.
“Lamp,” he said. Out loud. Hoarse.
Nothing.
“Lamp. Did you —“
“You would have killed him,” said Lamp. Very quietly. Its voice was thin, worn almost to nothing. “He had surrendered. He was unarmed. You would have killed him, and taken his blood, and you would not have stopped.”
“I asked if you —“
“I could not reach you,” said Lamp. “With words. There was too much fire. You could not hear me.” A pause. “So I did not use words.”
Creed stood very still.
He thought about the endless dark. Two hands, enormous, closing around him from opposite sides. Pulling. Holding. Like a city between two ribs. He’d thought of it, all this time, as the two of them holding him together. Holding him up.
He’d never once thought about what else a pair of hands like that could do. If one of them decided to.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t ever do that again.”
Lamp didn’t answer.
“Oh,” said Snake, very softly, from the coiled heat in his chest. Not to him. To the cold. “Oh, Lamp. Oh, you shouldn’t have done that. He’ll never forget that now.”
He wouldn’t.
He wrenched the sword out of the press housing. It came free with a scream of torn steel. He turned around.
The pressing floor was full of the dead.
Gold armor, mostly. Empty, or drained, or burst open and smoking blue. He didn’t count them. He made himself look at each one, though. In case it’s somebody you know. None of them were. All of them were.
And grey. Seven of the Discarded. Eight. The man with the blasting bar. The woman with the marrow saw, somewhere in the first-draw channels, gone. Others. He made himself look at them too.
Fourteen were still standing. Fourteen of the twenty-two. And Fisk, sitting against the press housing with blood running down his face from a cut on his scalp, his broken lance across his knees. And Tamsin, crouched by the stairs, unhurt, her thin face blank with shock. And Wick.
Wick was standing in the middle of the pressing floor, holding a length of pipe that was bent and dark at one end, and staring at him.
Not at the bodies. At him.
At his face. At his eyes. At the red still draining slowly out of his scars. At his hands, which were — he looked down — red. To the elbows. Not glowing. Red. Wet.
Wick’s face was white. His eyes were enormous. His heart, which Creed could feel from across the floor, was hammering so hard it shook his whole thin body.
And it was the same look. The same look as the crowd on the catwalk. The same look as the gold faceplates, when his scars lit.
Wick was afraid of him.
“Wick,” Creed said.
Wick flinched.
It was small. Just a little jerk of the shoulders, a half-step back. He caught it. He stopped himself. He stood his ground, white, shaking, holding the bent pipe. But he’d done it. And they both knew he’d done it.
“I’m sorry,” said Wick. His voice cracked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t — I’m not — it’s just — your face, Creed. Your face, when you were —“ He stopped. Swallowed. “I’ve known you nine years. I didn’t know your face could do that.”
Creed didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say.
He looked down at his red hands.
“He’ll learn,” said Snake, softly. “They all will. Give them time.”
Lamp said nothing.
And Creed thought: No. I don’t want them to learn that. I don’t want anybody to learn that.
He went to the nearest channel of first-draw in the floor and knelt and put his hands into it. Up to the wrists. The wild dark blue. It should have boiled him. It didn’t. It went into him, cold, waking, burning — filling him, a little, the way the Catalyst from the Gilt had filled him — and it washed the red off his hands. Not all of it. Enough.
When he stood up, his hands were clean. And blue-lit, faintly, under the skin, along the lines of the scars. And full.
“Up,” he said. To all of them. Hoarse. “The tempering floor. Then down. To the vault.”
Nobody moved for a moment.
Then Tamsin got up from the stairs. And Fisk, slowly, with his broken lance. And the fourteen. And Wick, last, still holding his bent pipe, not quite looking at Creed’s face.
They went up.
The first-draw floor was quiet. Empty. Its workers fled. Long open channels of wild dark blue running across the floor from the presses below, into great sealed tanks along the walls, glowing. Pumping. He’d seen this before. In the crypt under the Hollow, in miniature, stolen and patched. This was where Sere had filled his flask, nine years ago, from the supply line under his kitchen. This was where the man had slipped and gone in up to the shoulder and lit up gold for one second.
They crossed it without stopping.
The tempering floor was white.
That was the first thing. Every other floor of the refinery was steel and rust and grime and blue. The tempering floor was white. White walls. White floor, smooth, seamless, like the inside of the Lumen. White tanks — huge, sealed, rounded, twelve of them in a ring around the edge of the floor — connected by white pipes to a great white machine in the center, a column of white steel rising up through the floor above and down through the floor below. And everywhere, soft white light, from nowhere, from the walls themselves.
It was clean. Perfectly clean. And it was cold. Cold the way the inside of the Glasshouse had been. Cold like the air that came through the vent of the capsule. Empty.
And it was full of drums.
Stacked along the walls between the tanks. Rows and rows of them, in neat pyramids, hundreds. White. Sealed. Each the size of a man’s chest. And on the lid of each one, stamped in the center, the same mark he’d seen on every Drip tab of his life: a skull, in outline. And inside it, a closed eye.
Comes down the cable from above, Sere had said. From the Head. In sealed drums. And nobody on the tempering floor is permitted to know what it is.
Creed walked to the nearest pyramid of drums. He put his hand flat on the lid of the top one.
And felt.
Through the white steel. Into what was inside.
Cold.
Not the cold of Lamp. Not the clean cold of water, or of the first breath in the pump-house. A different cold. A cold he knew. He’d felt it in two thousand hearts on the catwalk at Sump-Nine. He’d felt it in Wick, and in Teo, and in Matthis Ferrin in his chair, and in Kon, even Kon. He’d felt it in his own blood, a little, all his life, without knowing what it was.
Frost.
Not a rime. Not a crust. All of it. The drum was full of it. Packed solid, dense, crystalline, a pure white freezing sleep, so concentrated that his hand on the lid went numb and the scars on his palm dimmed, and for a moment, for just a moment, he felt it reach up through his skin toward his blood. Reaching. Wanting to get in. Wanting to settle. Wanting to grow.
He took his hand away. Fast.
“That,” said Snake. Thick. “That’s it. That’s what they put in me. In all of it. In the god’s blood.”
Creed stood looking at the drums.
The tempering agent. Poured into the first-draw in these white tanks, to make it tame. To make it run in channels. To make it biddable. To make it safe.
To put it to sleep.
Every drop of Catalyst in the god went through this floor. Every channel in every Mid’s arm. Every light in every Suspension City. Kon’s jaw. Ferrin’s arm. Teo’s eye. The lamps on the streets of Halden. All of it — every bit of the god’s blood that ran in the skeleton — had been poured into these white tanks and had this frost poured into it, and come out asleep.
And then gone up the cable. To the Higher Ribs first. Then the Mids. Then back down to the Belly.
And everybody who touched it — everybody who ran it in their channels, everybody who lived under its light, everybody who ate food grown under it and drank water pumped by it — got a little of the frost. A rime. A crust. A sleep.
Not just the Animatids. Everyone.
“There’s more,” said Tamsin.
Her voice was strange. She was standing at the far side of the tempering floor, beside a door. A white door, half open. Through it, Creed could hear a sound. A steady, rhythmic sound. Thunk — hiss. Thunk — hiss. Like a press. Small.
He went to the door.
Beyond it was a long white room. And in the room, in a row, there were machines. Twelve of them. Small presses, the size of a pump housing, fed from above by white pipes. Each one, with every thunk, stamped out a tray of small, soft, blue-white tabs. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Each one stamped, as it came out of the press, with a skull. And a closed eye.
The trays slid off the presses onto a belt, and the belt carried them to the end of the room, where they fell into crates. Kon Reclamation crates. Stenciled. LINE ALLOCATION — SUMP-NINE. LINE ALLOCATION — SUMP-FOUR. LINE ALLOCATION — SUMP-SIX.
The Drip.
They made it here. In the same room. From the same drums. The tempering agent, pressed into tabs, and sent down to the Belly. Free. Every four hours. By benevolence of the Head.
Creed stood in the white doorway and watched the presses stamp. Thunk — hiss. A tray of tabs. Thunk — hiss. Another.
He thought about the Drip cart on Line C, pushed by the Mid clerk in the filter mask, every four hours. The tabs under the tongue, tasting faintly of metal. Arms that stopped belonging to you. Minutes that stopped counting. Hour twelve. Hour sixteen, and the glassy eyes. Hesk, standing at her pump with her eyes on the work.
It wasn’t for the pain, he’d thought, on the catwalk. It had never been for the pain.
It was the same stuff. The same frost. In the Belly they gave it to you straight, in tabs, so you’d work twenty hours and never look up. In the Ribs they hid it in the light, so you’d bow at the Bell and call it rest. In the Higher Ribs they ran it through your jaw like jewelry, so you’d want nothing in the world but to be invited higher.
It was all one sleep. All the way up.
“Safe,” said Snake, in a voice like ash. “Effective. Free.”
Behind his eyes, the thread of Lamp’s cold was very still. Not surprised. It had never been surprised. Not once.
“You knew this too,” Creed said. Quietly.
“I knew there was a sleep,” said Lamp. So faint. “I told you that.”
“You didn’t tell me it was this.” He looked at the presses. “In everything. In everyone. You let me sit in a flat on Rib Seven and eat bread full of it and tell me to stay.”
Lamp said nothing.
Creed turned away from the door.
He looked at the drums. Hundreds of them. White. Stacked. The frost of a whole skeleton, waiting to be poured. He looked at the twelve white tanks in their ring, and the white column in the center, rising up through the floor and down through it.
Down. Toward the vault. Toward the key, beating, below.
“Wick,” he said. “Fuse-cord.”
Wick stared at him. “I — I threw mine. At the drone. Remember?”
“Fisk.”
The old warden, leaning on his broken lance, reached into his coat and came out with a coil. Orange. Sabine had given every one of them a coil, at the bottom of the crawlway. In case.
Creed took it.
“Tamsin. How do I get down to the vault from here?”
“The column.” She pointed at the white machine in the center of the floor. “It’s a shaft. The drums come down it from above, through the roof, from the landing platform. Then down, below, into the vault, for storage. There’s a lift inside it. And a ladder.” She looked at him. “That’s where the light came down. The envoy. On the landing platform. It’ll come down the shaft.”
“Then that’s where I’m going.”
He walked to the nearest pyramid of drums and began to unspool the fuse-cord around its base. And then the next. And the next. Around every pyramid, along the walls, between the tanks. He didn’t know how to set a charge. He didn’t need to. He’d seen what Catalyst did when the edge of the sword touched it. He’d seen what first-draw did when a blood-round went into it. He’d find out what tempering agent did.
When the coil was gone, he stood in the middle of the white floor, by the base of the column, and looked at the fourteen.
“Go back down,” he said. “To Sabine. To the dock. Tell her the tempering floor’s laced. Tell her when she lights the bottom, this’ll go with it.” He looked at Tamsin. “Take them.”
“And you?” said Tamsin.
“I’m going down the shaft.”
“Alone?”
“Kon’s down there,” said Creed. “And the key. And whatever came down that light.” He looked at Wick. At Wick’s white face, and his bent pipe, and his eyes that couldn’t quite meet his. “I don’t want anybody else to see what I’m going to do.”
Wick’s head came up.
For a moment, Creed thought he would argue. Wick always argued. I’m terrified and I’ve decided. He watched Wick’s face work, watched him open his mouth —
And close it.
And nod. Once. Small. And look away.
It hurt more than the lance had.
“Go,” said Creed.
They went. Down the white stairs, back toward the first-draw floor, toward the dock. Fourteen grey shapes and an old man with a broken lance and Tamsin Rook. And Wick, last. At the top of the stairs, Wick stopped, and looked back, for a long moment, at Creed standing alone in the middle of the white floor beside the column.
Then he went down after the others.
Creed turned to the column.
There was a door in it. White. Seamless. With a ring around its edge, a thin band of white light. Humming. A halo, laid flat.
He reached out to open it.
And it opened by itself. From inside.
Beyond it, the shaft. White, going down. A lift-cage, empty, waiting. And from below — from the bottom of the shaft, from the vault, faint, rising — a voice.
Warm. Cultured. A little bored. The voice of a man who had never once had to raise it.
“Ah,” said Nate Kon. “Courier fifteen. You’re early too. Do come down.” A pause, pleasant. “We’ve been expecting you.”
Below him, the key beat. Slow. Huge.
And under it — under the key, under the voice, at the very bottom of the shaft — he heard another sound. A thin, high, pure tone, like a struck glass.
Humming.
Waiting.