“No,” said Creed. “We haven’t come to be Kept.”
The woman in the ferns tilted her head. The movement was slow and smooth, like a plant turning toward a lamp.
“Then you are lost,” she said. “Many are lost, on the stair. The stair is long.” She didn’t blink. “The Gardener will guide you. The Gardener guides everyone who is lost.”
“Who’s the Gardener?”
“The Gardener is the one who keeps the Kept.” She said it the way someone in the Belly would say the horn is the horn. “The Gardener lives above. The Gardener sends the light.” Her pale eyes moved, at last, from his face to the company behind him — the Lancers, the blasting bars, the Discarded in their scavenged canvas, Dorne’s striped arms, Brann’s red-gold — and back. Not alarmed. Not curious. Just moving. “You have blood on you,” she observed. “Many of you. The Kept do not bleed. Bleeding is not kept.”
Wick made a small noise behind him.
“What’s your name,” said Creed.
The woman considered this. It seemed to take her a long time.
“Sefa,” she said. “Sefa Orne. Of the Fern Rows. Third terrace, eastern curve.” She inclined her head. “I tend the ferns. I have tended the ferns for a long time.”
“How long?”
She thought about that, too. The pause went on and on. On the terraces above, the other Kept went on kneeling, lifting leaves, pouring water, as if no one had come up the stair at all. Water trickled in the channels with its small clean endless sound.
“A long time,” said Sefa Orne. “The ferns do not count. I do not count.” She lifted one smooth hand and touched the white cloth that bound her hair. “When my hair goes white, I will go up. Then I will not tend the ferns. Then I will be Kept above.”
“Up where?”
“Up,” said Sefa. And looked — not at the light. At the stair. At the next vertebra, a hundred meters above, its old pale band of bone. “To the Palate. To the Gardener. To be Kept above, which is better than to be Kept below.” She smiled. Her smile was perfect. It didn’t reach anything. “Everyone goes up when their hair goes white. It is a great kindness.”
Behind him, Ilka Dorne said something under her breath that he didn’t catch, and Brann put a hand on her arm.
“Creed,” said Snake. In the black arm. Very low. “You know what up is.”
He knew what up was.
Integration. Physical remainder: facial preservation for the Gallery. Remainder of body: consumed.
He looked at Sefa Orne’s smooth, calm, unlined face. At her pale eyes that didn’t blink. And he thought about the Gallery. Rows of faces. Smiling.
“Sefa,” he said. “Can I show you something?”
She took him to the water first. He hadn’t asked. She simply turned and walked along the edge of the terrace among the ferns, slowly, and he followed, because she seemed to expect him to, and she stopped at the channel where it ran down the terrace wall from the tier above.
“The water comes from the Gardener,” she said. “From above. It feeds the gardens. It feeds the Kept.” She knelt and cupped her smooth hands under the trickle and drank. Slowly. Carefully. Then she held her cupped hands up to him. Water in them. Clear. “You have climbed a long way. You are tired. Drink.”
He looked at the water in her hands.
“Lamp,” he thought.
“I can taste it from here,” said Lamp. Very quietly. “Through your skin. Through the air. It is the Drip. Dissolved. The whole channel. Every drop of water on every terrace.” A pause. And under the words, something new. Something that hadn’t been there before the stair-dogs. A pull. A lean. “It is very strong.”
He didn’t drink.
He crouched beside the channel and put his left hand in it. The black one. Flat. In the trickling water.
The water hissed.
Not boiled. Hissed. A thin steam came up off the surface around his fingers. And the script on his forearm flickered — red, then a thread of white, then red — and he felt the Lamp reach. Down his arm. Into his palm. Into the water. Eating. The frost dissolved in it, the Somnoline, the Drip. Drawing it out of the water into his skin, through the script, up into his blood, where it lived.
He felt it eat. He felt it want.
He took his hand out.
“Lamp.”
“I am sorry.” Fast. Shaken. “I am sorry. I did not — that was not choosing. I did not take your hand. I only — when you put it in, I —” A pause. “I am telling you. I wanted it. I wanted it very much.”
“I know. I felt it.”
He looked at the water below his hand. Where his fingers had been. For a few seconds, the channel ran different there. Clearer. Cleaner. Then the water from above caught up with it, and it was the same again.
Sefa Orne was looking at his hand. At the black arm. At the steam coming off it.
“You are not Kept,” she said. The same soft even voice. But something had moved behind it. Very far back. Like a fish turning in deep water.
“No.”
“You are not lost.”
“No.”
She looked at him with her pale unblinking eyes for a long time.
“Then what are you,” said Sefa Orne.
They held a council in a room in the bone.
There were rooms. Behind the terraces. The Wright buildings were there under the gardens, the same as on the Seventh Stair — old pale walls grown out of the bone of the vertebra, with doorways going back into the dark — and behind the doorways, rooms. Empty ones. Cool. Dry. The Kept didn’t go into them; the Kept tended the gardens and slept in long low dormitories of white cloth on the upper terraces, Sefa said, and the rooms in the bone were not kept. She said it the way she’d said bleeding is not kept.
Ferrin chose a room three doors back from the first terrace, deep enough in the bone that no sound would carry out of it to the stair. They put two Lancers on the doorway and went in.
“How many,” said Ferrin. Low. The rule held even here.
“Sefa says a thousand,” said Creed. “On this vertebra. She doesn’t count, but she knows the rows. Three hundred rows. Three or four to a row.” He looked at the doorway. “She says there are Gardens on the Fifth too. And the Fourth. Every vertebra up to the Atlas.”
“A thousand,” said Wick. “On every —” He stopped.
“Seven thousand,” said Ferrin. “Six. If the Seventh’s empty. Maybe more.”
“And they all go up,” said Dorne. Flat. “When their hair goes white.”
Nobody said anything.
“She said it’s a kindness,” said Dorne. Her square face didn’t move. But her striped arms were folded tight across her chest, and Creed could feel her blood, the drops of him in her — quiet, asleep, Liss’s song still holding them — and under the quiet, something. Something hot. “She said it the way the Prior said it would pass.”
Brann, beside her, didn’t say anything. He was looking at the floor.
“They’re dosed,” said Creed. “More than anybody. More than the deep sumps. It’s in the water. Every drop. It’s not tabs — it’s the water they drink and the water the plants drink and the fruit they eat. All of it. Their whole lives.” He looked at his left hand. “Their blood’s white. Nearly. There’s hardly any red left in it.”
“Can you wake them,” said Ollo.
Silence.
Creed looked at his hand. At the script. He thought about the Belly. About the galleries. The first months after Kon. Thousands of people coming down off the Drip, shaking, thrashing, boiling — and the guiding, his hand on the back of a neck, his blood beside theirs, teaching it to wake slowly. He’d done it a thousand times. Mirelle had done it. Sabine. The guiders.
But the Belly had been one tab a shift. Three at hour sixteen. Twenty years of it, thirty, at the worst.
This was generations.
“I don’t know,” he said. “If I put my blood in her, the way I used to — if I go beside — her blood’s so deep in the frost, it might not be able to wake slow. It might just —” He stopped.
“Boil,” said Mirelle. In her thread of a voice.
“Yes.”
“Like the couriers,” said Mirelle. “Like the fourteen.” She looked at him. “Sere’s notes said — sleeping blood meets waking blood, and the body tears itself apart. That’s what the Drip does. That’s what it’s for. It’s not that the Catalyst is poison. It’s that the frost makes the blood fight itself.” A cough. “The deeper the frost, the worse the fight.”
“Then you can’t,” said Wick.
“I can,” said Lamp.
It said it out loud. Not out loud. Into him. But so clearly, so suddenly, that Creed’s head came up and the others saw it.
“What,” said Wick.
Creed held up a hand. Listened.
“I can,” said Lamp again. Quieter. “Creed. I am telling you. Not choosing. Telling. The frost is what makes the blood fight. If the frost were not there, her blood would only wake. Slowly. Like the Belly did. Like you guided them. The frost is the problem.” A pause. “And I can eat the frost. I found that on the stair. And at the channel. I can eat it. All of it. As fast as it comes.”
“From inside me.”
“From inside her,” said Lamp.
The room was very quiet. The others were watching his face.
“Explain,” he said. Out loud. So they could hear his half.
“Your blood goes into her,” said Lamp. “A drop. To wake her. And I go with it. A thread of me. Into her blood. Beside your drop. And as your drop wakes her blood, I eat the frost around it. So it does not fight. So there is nothing for it to fight.” The cold in his veins trembled. “I have never done it. I do not know if I can leave you. I came out on the dock, but only because you were dying, and I came back. I do not know if I can send a part of me into someone else and still be — here. I do not know what it costs.” A pause. “I am afraid of it. I am telling you that too.”
“And you want to.”
A long silence.
“Yes,” said Lamp. “I want to. I want it very much.” Smaller. “I am afraid of how much.”
Creed looked around the room.
At Ollo, flat, waiting. At Wick, white, watching his face. At Dorne with her arms folded and Brann with his eyes on the floor. At Mirelle, who’d sung the couriers down. At Ferrin, with his pinned sleeve. At Tobin Rell in the doorway with his ruined hand.
“The Lamp says it can eat her frost,” he said. “From inside her. If I put my blood in, it can go in too, and eat the frost, so her blood wakes without fighting.” He paused. “It’s never done it. It doesn’t know what it costs. It’s afraid. And it wants to. A lot.”
Nobody spoke for a while.
“Wants to,” said Snake. In his arm. Low. Thoughtful. Not mocking. “Huh. That’s new.”
“Ask her,” said Ollo.
Everyone looked at him.
“Ask her,” said Ollo again. “The fern one. Sefa. Before you put anything in her. Ask.” He shrugged with his one shoulder. “Nobody asked us. On the line. Nobody asked anybody. They just put the tab in your hand and the horn in your ears. Ask her.”
Creed looked at him.
“She doesn’t know what she’d be saying yes to,” said Dorne.
“Then tell her,” said Ollo. “All of it. Then ask.”
Sefa Orne was still kneeling in the ferns on the first terrace where he’d left her. She hadn’t moved. The long-spouted can sat in the soil beside her. She was looking at the place where he’d put his hand in the channel.
He crouched beside her.
“Sefa,” he said.
She turned her smooth face to him. Didn’t blink.
He told her.
He told her slowly, quietly, crouched in the ferns with the water trickling past. What the water was. What the Drip did. What white blood meant. What up meant. The Gallery. The faces. Integration. Consumed. He told her about Arral walking into the light smiling and the thing with legs rooting into his heart. He told her about Marchetti holding the pendulum and screaming. He told her about the stair-dogs and the needle of light and Haddon and Orla Teague going up the neck. He told her about the Belly, the tab, the horn. About the couriers. About what it felt like to wake.
“It’ll hurt,” he said. “I won’t lie. It’ll hurt worse than anything. In the Belly, people coming off one tab a shift screamed for days. You’ve had more than anybody. Your whole life. It’ll be bad.”
She looked at him.
“And after,” he said. “After, you’ll be awake. You’ll feel things. Everything. All the things the water’s been keeping off you. You’ll be scared. You’ll be angry. You might hate me.” He paused. “And you won’t go up when your hair goes white. You’ll be — you. Whatever that is. Nobody knows. Not even you.”
Sefa Orne was silent for a very long time.
The water trickled. On the terraces above, the Kept knelt and lifted leaves and poured.
“You are asking me,” she said at last.
“Yes.”
“No one asks the Kept.” Her voice was soft and even. But the thing behind it — the fish in the deep water — turned again. Closer. “The Gardener does not ask. The water does not ask. The light does not ask. When my hair goes white, no one will ask.” She looked down at her own smooth hands in her lap. “I do not know how to be asked.”
“I know,” said Creed. “Neither did I. Not until this year.”
She looked at his black arm. At the script. At the spurs on his knuckles. At his ember eyes. For a long, long time. Not blinking.
“Will you be there,” she said. “When it hurts.”
“Yes.”
“Will you stay.”
“Yes.”
Another long silence.
“I have tended the ferns for a long time,” said Sefa Orne. “I do not know how long. I do not count.” She lifted one hand and touched a curled frond, very gently, the way you’d touch a sleeping face. “They uncurl. Every day. A little. I have watched them uncurl every day for a long time and I have never once wondered what it feels like.”
She took her hand away from the fern.
“Yes,” she said.
They did it in the room three doors back, where no sound would reach the stair.
She lay on a blanket on the bone floor in her pale robe with the white cloth still binding her hair. Calm. Waiting. Not blinking. Ollo sat at her head. Wick at her feet, white as she was. Dorne and Brann by the door. Mirelle against the wall with her slate. The others outside.
Creed knelt beside her and cut his right palm with the edge of the sword.
The blood came out dark. Furnace-red. Steaming. He held his hand over her mouth.
“Ready?”
She looked up at him.
“I do not know what ready is,” said Sefa Orne. “Yes.”
He let one drop fall onto her tongue.
And put his left hand — the black one — flat against the side of her neck.
“Lamp,” he said. “Go.”
He felt it go.
He’d never felt anything like it. The cold in his blood — the thin silver threads that ran through every vessel in him, everywhere, since the dock — drew in. All of it. From his feet, his legs, his chest, his right arm. Drawing in, toward the left. Down the left arm. Into the black forearm, into the script, where Snake lived. And he felt Snake move aside. Felt the heat in the forearm coil back, tighten, make room. And the cold went through the script and into his palm —
— and out.
Not all of it. A thread. A fine silver thread of cold, going out of his palm, through his skin, into her skin. Into her neck. Into her blood. Beside his drop.
He felt himself go warm.
Everywhere the Lamp had been, there was nothing now. Just heat. Snake’s heat, banked in the bones, and nothing in the veins to cool it. He felt it start to rise. Slowly. Like water heating in a pot.
And under his hand, Sefa Orne’s eyes went wide.
She didn’t blink. She had never blinked. But her eyes went wide, the pale irises suddenly ringed with white, and her mouth opened, and her back arched up off the blanket —
— and she screamed.
It was the worst thing he’d ever heard.
Worse than the couriers in the reliquary. Worse than Ilka on the dock with her blood being drawn out in threads. Worse than Marchetti in the light. It went on and on, a high raw tearing sound, and it filled the little room in the bone and bounced off the walls and came back, and Wick put his hands over his ears and then took them away again and grabbed her ankles, because she was thrashing, and somebody had to hold on.
He felt it. Through his palm. Through the thread.
His drop, waking her blood. Spreading. The god’s blood, the waking blood, the thing that had boiled fourteen couriers — spreading out from her tongue into the white, white blood of a woman who had drunk the Drip with every mouthful of water for her whole life. And everywhere it touched, the white fought. Rose up. Like it had in the couriers. Like a crowd rising against a door.
And the Lamp was there.
In her blood. A silver thread. Moving ahead of the waking. Every place his drop touched, the Lamp had been there a half-second before. Eating. He felt it eat. The frost in her blood, the Drip, the white — the Lamp devoured it. Ahead of the wave. Clearing a path. So that when his blood arrived, there was less to fight. Not nothing. Less.
It was enough. Barely.
Her blood didn’t boil. It burned. It hurt. Every vessel in her body hurt as the white was torn out of it and the waking came in behind. She screamed. She thrashed. Ollo held her shoulders. Wick held her ankles. Her back arched so far he thought her spine would break, and her hands clawed at the bone floor and the nails split, and the white cloth came off her hair —
— and her hair was dark.
Dark brown. Thick. Spilling out across the blanket. Not a single white thread in it.
He felt the Lamp growing.
That was the other thing. Under the screaming. Under the heat rising in him with nothing to cool it. He felt the thread of the Lamp in Sefa’s blood grow. Thicken. As it ate. As it devoured her frost, a lifetime of it, it got bigger. Fatter. Stronger. He could feel it the way you feel a rope thicken in your hand when it’s under load. And under the growing, the want. Enormous. Rising. More. More. More.
“Lamp,” he said. Through his teeth. The heat in him was climbing. His face was hot. His vision was going red at the edges. “Lamp.”
“— more —” said Lamp. Very far away. In her blood. Not to him. To itself. “— there is so much — so much of it — I did not know there could be so much — more —”
“LAMP.”
A jolt. Through the thread. Like somebody waking up with a start.
“— Creed. Creed. Yes. I am — I am here. I am — I am telling you. I am — it is very —” A pause. Something like a gasp. “I am telling you. I want to eat all of it. I want to eat all of it in her and then go into the next one and eat all of theirs. I want to go into the water. I want to go up the channel to wherever the water comes from and eat it at the source. I want —” It stopped. “I am telling you what I want. I am not doing it. I am telling you.”
“How much longer.”
“Not long. Her blood is almost — the waking is almost through. Hold her. Hold on.”
He held on.
The screaming went on. The heat went up. He could feel his own blood starting to cook, the way it had on the terminus — Snake in the bones with nothing to cool what it made. The grey on his arms — he couldn’t look — he could feel it spreading. Up past the elbows. Toward the shoulders.
“Mule,” said Snake. Tight. “Mule, I’m too hot. Without the white thing. I can’t bank it. I’m trying. You need it back.”
“Not yet.”
“Creed —”
“Not YET.”
He held on. He didn’t know how long. Ollo said, after, that it was an hour. He’d counted. Wick said it was a lot longer than an hour. Wick said it was the longest anything had ever been.
And then, all at once, the screaming stopped.
Sefa Orne lay on the blanket on the bone floor, gasping.
Her hair spread out around her head. Dark. Sweat-soaked. Her pale robe torn at the shoulder where she’d clawed it. Her split fingernails bleeding onto the bone. Bleeding. Red. Ordinary, plain, red blood, beading up at the ends of her fingers.
Her chest was heaving. Her heart —
He felt it. Under his palm. Through the thread.
Fast. Fast. Racing. Like a bird. Like Wick’s. A heart that had beat like a clock running down for her whole life, and now it was going like it was trying to catch up on everything it had missed.
Her eyes were open. Staring up at the ceiling of the room in the bone.
She blinked.
Once. Hard. Like it hurt.
Then again.
Then she blinked and blinked and blinked, fast, her eyelids fluttering, and tears ran out of the corners of her eyes and down her temples into her dark hair, and she made a sound — not a scream — a small, cracked, high sound, like something breaking open.
“Lamp,” said Creed. “Come back.”
A pause.
He felt it hesitate. In her blood. Fat with what it had eaten. The want in it. More. He felt it look — not at Sefa — out. Out of her. Toward the door of the room in the bone. Toward the gardens beyond. Toward a thousand Kept with white blood kneeling among the ferns.
“Lamp.”
“…Yes,” said Lamp. “Yes. I am coming. I am — I am coming.”
The thread came back.
Up out of her neck. Into his palm. Through the script. Snake making room again. And into his blood. And the cold spread out through him, through every vein, fast, faster than before — more than before. Thicker. The silver threads that had been so fine since the dock were heavier now. Stronger. Like wires where there’d been hair. They spread through him and met the heat Snake had been building and cooled it, all at once, a great rush of cold through everything, and he gasped, and his vision cleared, and the grey on his arms —
He looked down.
The grey was back to the elbows. And holding.
“I am back,” said Lamp. Quietly. “I am here.” A pause. “I am bigger.”
“I can feel it.”
“I am telling you,” said Lamp, “that I liked it. Very much. I am telling you that I want to do it again. Now. To all of them.” A tremor. “I am telling you that I am afraid of how much I want it. I have never wanted anything. I was made to hold. Not to want.”
“Okay.”
“Is it? Is it okay?”
He didn’t know. He didn’t say anything.
“Huh,” said Snake. In the black arm. Very quietly. Watching. “Huh.”
On the blanket, Sefa Orne turned her head.
She looked at him. Blinking. Tears running. Her pale eyes — not as pale as they’d been. Something had come into them. A color. Grey-green. Like the fronds.
“It hurts,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“Everything.” She blinked. “Everything hurts. My hands. My — my chest. The light hurts. The air. I can feel the air on my face.” Her voice cracked. Rose. “I can feel — I am — I am so — what is this, what is this, I don’t —”
“You’re scared,” said Wick.
She looked at him. At the thin white man holding her ankles.
“That’s scared,” said Wick. Very gently. His voice shaking. “What you’re feeling. In your chest. Going fast. That’s scared. It’s okay. I’ve got it all the time. You get used to it.”
Sefa Orne stared at him.
“Scared,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I have never been scared.”
“I know,” said Wick. “You are now. It’s okay. Everybody here’s scared. Even him.” He tipped his head at Creed. “Even if he says he isn’t.”
She looked at Creed. At his ember eyes.
Then she began to cry.
Not the tears that had been running already. Crying. Properly. Her whole body. Sobbing, great tearing sobs, curled on her side on the blanket with her dark hair across her face and her bleeding fingers pressed against her mouth. Ollo let go of her shoulders. Wick let go of her ankles. Nobody stopped her.
Creed sat back on his heels and watched her cry.
He thought about the ferns. They uncurl. Every day. A little. I have never once wondered what it feels like.
She cried for a long time. Then she slept. Then she woke, and drank water — from Wick’s water-skin, not the channels, Creed made sure of it — and ate dried grey-cap, and made a face at the taste, the first face he’d seen her make, and then laughed at herself for making it, and then cried again.
Then she sat up against the wall of the room in the bone with her knees drawn up and her dark hair loose and looked at all of them.
“There is a steward,” she said.
Her voice was different. Not soft and even. Rough. Uneven. Up and down, like Wick’s. Like anybody’s.
“Taavi Lusk. He does not tend. He watches the rows. He counts.” She swallowed. “He is not like us. Not like — like I was. He drinks less. I have seen him pour his cup out into the soil when he thinks no one is looking. He blinks.” She shivered. “He has a bell. A small one. On a cord. If anything is not kept — if anyone is lost on the stair, or sick, or if a row fails — he rings the bell. And the light comes down. Into the gardens. And takes what is not kept.”
The room went quiet.
“Has he seen us,” said Ferrin.
Sefa looked at him. Blinked.
“He sees everything,” she said. “That is what he is for.” She looked at the doorway. Toward the gardens. “He will have seen you come up the stair. He will have seen you speak to me. He will have seen me go into the bone, where the Kept do not go.” Her voice shook. “And he will have heard me. Screaming. For an hour. The bone does not carry sound to the stair. But the gardens are not the stair.”
“Where is he,” said Dorne.
“On the top terrace,” said Sefa. “Always. At the rail. Where he can see all the rows.” She looked at Creed. Her new grey-green eyes wide. “If he has rung the bell — the light comes in a long time, or a short time, I do not know. I never counted.”
Creed was already on his feet.
He went out of the room in the bone, through the doorway, onto the first terrace, among the ferns. The others behind him. He looked up.
The gardens rose above him. Terrace on terrace. Green. Lamps burning yellow-white among the rows. Water trickling. A thousand Kept kneeling in the soil in their pale robes, tending, not looking up.
And at the very top, a hundred meters up, on the highest terrace, at an iron rail — a man. Standing. In a robe of grey, not white. Looking down. At them.
Even from here, Creed could see that he was holding something in his right hand. Something small. On a cord.
And that he had already rung it.
Because in the center of the vertebra — out past the edge of the terraces, in the open hollow of the neck, where the soft grey-gold shaft of light came down from the teeth — the light was changing.
Going flat. Going white.
A needle forming inside it. Not narrow, this time. Wide. Wider than the Clock Hall’s circle. Wide enough to take in a terrace. Bending — bending, he saw it bend, the way the light had bent around the bone strut in Lund’s account — out of the open hollow, toward the gardens. Toward the rows. Toward the edge of the first terrace, where the bone of the shelf ended and the soil began.
Soil wasn’t bone.
“Creed,” said Lamp. Fat and cold and strong in his blood. “I am telling you. The gardens are not bone. The soil, the plants, the water. It can see the gardens.” A pause. “It can see the Kept.”
The white came down.
GARDENS OF THE SIXTH
ROW STATUS: DISTURBED
STEWARD SIGNAL: RECEIVED
COLLECTION: —