Sefa

The white came down into the Fern Rows like a hand into a basin of water.

Creed saw it bend. Out of the open hollow of the neck, where the old soft grey-gold shaft fell from the teeth, a part of the light went flat and white and curved — the way water curves around a stone, the way the light had curved around the bone strut in Lund’s story — toward the inside wall of the vertebra. Toward the terraces. It came across the edge of the shelf where the bone stopped and the soil began, and it touched the first terrace, and spread. Across the soil. Across the ferns. White on green.

It was looking.

He felt it look. The flat cold scanner attention. Moving along the rows. Not at the company — the company was standing on the bone of the shelf, on the old Wright stone at the terrace edges, and to the light they were background. It moved past them the way the stair-dogs’ hearing had moved past the silent ones. It moved along the soil. Along the ferns.

Along the Kept.

They didn’t look up. They never looked up. They knelt in the rows in their pale robes and lifted leaves and poured water, and the white slid along the soil toward them, and they didn’t so much as turn their heads.

It stopped on three of them.

Three Kept in the Fern Rows. Kneeling together, ten meters along the terrace from where Sefa had been kneeling an hour and a half ago. Two women and a man. The light stopped on them and gathered, the way it had gathered over the polished circle in the Clock Hall, and he felt it reach down into them. Into their white blood. Looking for something.

Disturbed, he thought. The readout from somewhere. The word in the light’s flat attention. Row disturbed.

Sefa’s row. The row nearest the place where he’d put his hand in the water. The row nearest the room in the bone, where she’d screamed for an hour. Something had been not kept, here. And the light had come to take what was nearest.

“No,” said Creed. “No —”

He went off the bone.

Two steps. Onto the soil. Into the ferns. Toward the three Kept. And the light turned. All at once. Off the three — onto him. The flat cold reaching into him, finding the heat in his bones and the cold in his blood and the script burning red on his arm, and hesitating, the way it had hesitated over the hollow of the neck —

— and then pulling.

His boots lifted off the soil.

“Creed!” Ollo. From the bone. His one hand caught Creed’s jacket at the back of the collar, and held, and Creed felt himself stop rising, felt the pull and Ollo’s grip fight over him the way the Lamp and Snake had fought over him on the dock —

— and Dorne caught his belt. And Brann caught Dorne. And the three of them hauled him back off the soil onto the bone of the shelf, and he fell on his back on the old Wright stone, and the light let go.

It went back to the three.

He lay on the bone and watched it take them.

They rose. Slowly. Out of the ferns. Kneeling still — their knees still bent, their hands still held out in front of them where they’d been lifting fronds — rising up off the soil into the white, calm, smooth-faced, not blinking. One of the women still had a long-spouted can in her hand. As she rose, it tipped, and water ran out of the spout in a thin clear stream and fell back into the ferns below her.

They didn’t scream. They didn’t struggle. They didn’t even look surprised.

They rose out of the gardens into the open hollow of the neck and went up the shaft of light. Up past the next vertebra. Up past the next. Small. Smaller. Toward the teeth.

Behind him, in the doorway of the room in the bone, Sefa Orne screamed.

Not the waking scream. Something else. Something with a word in it. Two words. Names. He’d never heard them before and he knew he’d never forget them.

“JUNA! MAER! —”

She was in the doorway with her dark hair loose and her split fingernails and her new grey-green eyes, and she was screaming their names, and she started forward out of the bone onto the terrace, onto the soil, toward the place where they’d been —

Wick caught her.

Wick, who couldn’t catch anything. Who’d fallen over on the dock. Who’d sat down hard on the step when Creed came back over the edge. Wick caught Sefa Orne around the waist from behind as she came out of the doorway and held on, and she fought him, and she was stronger than him, and he held on anyway, and they went down together on the bone of the threshold, half in the doorway, half out, and he wrapped both arms around her and put his face against her back and didn’t let go.

“You can’t,” Wick was saying. Into her back. Shaking. “You can’t, you can’t, it’ll take you, it’ll take you too, you’re awake now, it’ll see you —”

She screamed their names at the light. Up the hollow of the neck. Until they were gone.

Then she stopped screaming, and lay in Wick’s arms on the threshold of the room in the bone, and shook.

“They were my row,” she said. Very small. “Juna Fale and Maer Tolland and Ib Coss. My row. Three to a row, and me. Four.” She was staring up at the light. “I tended the ferns with them for a long time. I never once —” She stopped. “I never once thought about them. I never once thought about anyone.”

She turned her face into the bone of the threshold.

“I’m thinking about them now,” said Sefa Orne. “Is this what it is? Is this what it’s like? All the time?”

Wick didn’t let go of her.

“Yeah,” he said. “Pretty much.”

Ilka Dorne went up the terrace walls.

Not the stairs between the terraces. There were stairs — little stone flights, set into the terrace walls, for the Kept to go up and down between the rows. But the stairs had soil on them, and ferns spilling over them, and Dorne didn’t trust them. She went up the walls. The old Wright stone that held each terrace back. Bone, or close enough. She went up them with her fingers in the joints and her boots on the ledges, terrace after terrace, fast, the way she’d crossed the Long Bridge, never once setting foot on the soil.

Brann went up beside her. Then Creed.

At the top, on the highest terrace, a hundred meters above the stair, there was a broad flat walk of pale stone with an iron rail along its edge. And at the rail, in a robe of grey, a man.

He didn’t run.

He stood at the rail with his back to the gardens and watched them come up the last wall. He was perhaps sixty. Thin. Not beautiful, the way Sefa had been — his face was lined. Creased. Worried, around the eyes and mouth, as if he’d spent a long time frowning at small things. His hair was cut short and it was grey, not white. Iron grey. He had a ledger under his left arm — a thick bound book, its spine cracked, its pages swollen with damp — and in his right hand, on a cord looped around his wrist, a small silver bell.

He was blinking. Fast.

“Taavi Lusk,” said Creed.

The man looked at him. At his eyes. His arm. The spurs.

“Yes,” said Taavi Lusk. His voice was dry. Careful. “Steward of the Sixth.” His eyes went to Dorne, coming over the rail, square and red-gold-veined and bloody. To Brann behind her. He didn’t step back. “You have disturbed the rows.”

“You rang the bell,” said Creed.

“I rang the bell.” Taavi’s grip on the cord tightened. “That is what the bell is for. When a row is disturbed, I ring. When I ring, the light comes. When the light comes, it takes what is disturbed, and the rows are kept.” He said it like a recitation. Like the Kon jingle. Like something he’d said ten thousand times. “It is very simple.”

“It took three people.”

“It took Juna Fale, Maer Tolland and Ib Coss, of the Fern Rows, third terrace, eastern curve.” He didn’t look at the ledger. He didn’t need to. “They were nearest to the disturbance. The light takes what is nearest. It is not precise. It is not meant to be precise.” His mouth worked. “I am sorry for it. I did not choose which.”

“You chose to ring.”

Taavi Lusk looked at him for a long time.

“Yes,” he said. “I did.”

Dorne took the bell.

She did it the way she did everything. Without warning. Two steps and her square hand closed around Taavi’s wrist and her other hand closed around the bell and she pulled, and the cord snapped, and she had it. A small silver bell. No bigger than a thumb. She looked at it in her palm. Then she closed her fist.

There was a small, flat, crumpling sound.

She opened her hand. The bell was a lump of silver, folded in on itself, its clapper sticking out of the side like a broken bone.

Taavi Lusk looked at it. Then at his own empty wrist. He didn’t try to take it back.

“There are others,” he said quietly. “On the Fifth. The Fourth. Every Garden has a steward. Every steward has a bell.” He looked up at Dorne. “And the light does not only come for the bell. The bell is only faster.”

“Faster than what,” said Creed.

Taavi looked down. At the gardens below. A thousand Kept, kneeling, tending, not looking up.

“Than noticing,” he said.

He showed them the ledger.

He opened it on the iron rail with careful fingers and turned the pages. Columns. Names. Dates, in a numbering Creed didn’t know — cycle 381, cycle 382 — and against each name, a mark. A small upward stroke. Like a tick. Like an arrow.

“Up,” said Taavi. “When their hair goes white. I write their name, and the row, and the cycle, and I make the mark.” He turned the pages. Forty years of them. Hundreds of pages. Thousands of names. “The Gardener does not require it. The light does not require it. No one has ever asked to see it.” He closed the book. “I keep it anyway.”

“Why?”

Taavi Lusk looked out over the rail at the hollow of the neck. At the light falling through it.

“When I was made steward,” he said, “I drank the water. Like everyone. The steward before me drank it. Her name was Hollin Esse. She drank the water, and she stood at this rail, and she rang the bell, and she never once looked at a face.” He was quiet a moment. “One day the light took her. Her hair was not white. She had made a mistake. Rung the bell on the wrong row. The rows were disturbed, and she was nearest.” He looked down at his hands. “I was in the row. I was a Kept, then. Fern Rows, the same as Sefa Orne. And I watched her go up, and I was so full of the water that I felt nothing at all. Nothing. I watched a woman rise into the light and thought: the rows are kept.”

He turned the ledger over in his hands.

“And the next day, the Gardener’s light came down and touched my head and made me steward. And gave me the bell.” His voice went very dry. “And the first time I rang it, and watched three people rise into the light from the row I had knelt in, I felt nothing. Again. And that night I poured my cup into the soil.”

“Because you felt nothing.”

“Because I wanted to know if I could,” said Taavi Lusk. “Feel something.” He looked at Creed. Blinked. “I poured out half a cup a day for a year. Then a whole cup. Then two. Now I drink only enough that my hands do not shake when I stand at the rail. And I feel —” He stopped. “Some. Not much. Enough to want to write their names down.”

“But you still ring.”

“Yes.”

“Why.”

He was quiet for a very long time.

“Because if I do not ring,” said Taavi Lusk, “the light notices anyway. A disturbed row is a disturbed row. And when the light comes without the bell, it does not take what is nearest. It takes the whole terrace. I have seen it. Once. Cycle 397. The steward of the Fifth was sick and did not ring for three days, and the light came down on its own and took —” He stopped. “Everyone. On the terrace. Ninety people. And the steward.”

The wind moved in the hollow of the neck. The light fell. The ferns stirred below.

“So I ring,” said Taavi, “and the light takes three instead of ninety. And I write their names in a book nobody reads.” He looked at Creed. “Do you understand?”

Creed did understand.

He understood it the way he understood Ferrin on the gantry. Logging people. Signing their reassignments. Cruel on quota. Mid hostage to his own status. I logged them. And then sending a packet down to the Drop with an audit in it, at the risk of his life. And then carving every name on the Wall with his own hand.

“Dask Ferrin used to be a foreman,” he said. “On Line C. He logged people. Sent them to the bin.”

Taavi looked at him.

“He’s down on the stair,” said Creed. “One-armed. He carves their names now. Every one. With his own name beside them.” He paused. “You should meet him.”

Taavi Lusk didn’t say anything. But his fingers, on the cracked spine of the ledger, went very still.

The water came from above.

Taavi showed them. At the back of the top terrace, against the inside wall of the vertebra, there was a cistern. Huge. A tank of black Concord iron bolted onto the old Wright stone, three meters high, ten across, with a lid of riveted plate. Pipes came out of the bottom of it and ran down into the terrace walls, into the channels, branching, so that every trickle on every terrace started here.

And into the top of the cistern, from above — running straight up the inside wall of the neck, bolted to the bone with iron brackets every few meters, going up and up toward the Fifth and beyond — a pipe. Thick as a man’s waist. Black iron.

“From the Gardener,” said Taavi. “From the Palate. It comes down through every Garden. The Fifth’s cistern fills first, and overflows into ours, and ours into the Seventh’s — the Seventh has no Garden now, it has not had one in a long time, but the pipe still runs.” He put his hand on the black iron of the cistern. “Water from above. And in it, what keeps us.”

“Lamp,” thought Creed.

“I can taste it,” said Lamp. Fat and cold and strong in his blood now. Stronger than it had ever been. “Through the iron. It is very strong. Stronger than the channels. Concentrated. Before it is mixed.” A pause. The want rose, under the words. “I am telling you. I could eat it. All of it. If you put your hand on the pipe I could go up the pipe and —”

“No.”

“I know. I am telling you. Not doing.”

There was a hatch in the side of the cistern. Taavi opened it. Inside, the water. Black, in the shadow of the tank. Still. And floating on it, along the inside edge of the iron, a film. Thick. Pale. Like the scum on the surface of a settling-vat at the end of a shift. White.

“The keeping,” said Taavi. “It separates. If the water stands. It rises.” He looked at the white film for a long time. “I skim it off every eighth day. And pour it back in. Because if it is not mixed, the rows nearest the cistern get too much, and the far rows get too little, and the far rows are disturbed.”

Creed looked at the white scum on the black water. At the pipe going up into the dark.

“If we break this,” he said, “what happens?”

Taavi turned and looked at him.

“The water stops,” he said. “The channels go dry. The ferns die. The Kept —” He stopped. “The Kept come off it. All at once. A thousand. I do not know what that looks like. I have only seen one come off. Today. Sefa Orne. You heard her.”

“In the Belly,” said Creed, “when the refinery fell, and Kon was dead, and the Drip stopped coming down — thousands came off it at once. It was bad. Shaking. Thrashing. Weeks of it. Some of them died.” He looked at the white film. “Most of them didn’t. We had guiders. We had Mirelle. We held them.”

“And the light?”

“The light didn’t come to the Belly,” said Creed. “Not then.” He looked across the terrace. Out into the hollow of the neck. At the shaft of grey-gold, falling. “Here, it’ll come. A thousand disturbed rows.”

“It will take the whole Garden,” said Taavi. “Every terrace. Like the Fifth in 397. But all of them.” His voice was very calm. His hands, on the hatch of the cistern, were shaking. “You will kill everyone you are trying to wake.”

Nobody answered him.

Then a voice said, from the stair at the back of the top terrace, rough and uneven and cracking on every other word:

“Not if they’re in the bone.”

Sefa Orne had come up the terrace walls.

Not the stairs. The walls. Like Dorne. Like Brann. With her bleeding fingers in the joints of the old stone and her bare feet on the ledges and her pale robe torn and hitched up at the knee, and Wick behind her, white and gasping and climbing anyway, because she’d gone, and somebody had to go next to her.

She stood at the top of the last wall with her dark hair loose and her new grey-green eyes on Taavi Lusk.

“Steward,” she said.

Taavi looked at her. At her hair. At her eyes. At her blinking. His face did something Creed couldn’t read.

“Sefa Orne,” he said. “Fern Rows. Third terrace. Eastern curve.” A pause. “Your hair is dark.”

“It was always dark,” said Sefa. “Under the cloth.” She came forward along the top terrace walk. Unsteady. Her new heart going fast. “The light can’t see bone. He says.” She tipped her head at Creed. “He came all the way up the stair on the bone and the light never saw him once. And I was in the room. In the bone. For an hour, screaming, and the light didn’t come for me. It came for Juna and Maer and Ib. In the soil. Not me.”

“Because you were in the bone,” said Taavi slowly.

“The rooms,” said Sefa. “Behind the terraces. The ones that are not kept. There are rooms behind every terrace. Hundreds of them. Going back into the bone.” Her voice shook. “Nobody goes in them. Nobody ever goes in them. Because they are not kept.” She looked down at the gardens. “So they’re empty. All of them.”

Creed looked at her.

“Put them in the bone,” said Sefa Orne. “All of them. Every row. Then break the water. Then let the light come. Let it come down and look at the soil and the ferns and find nothing. No one disturbed. No one at all.”

“A thousand people,” said Taavi. “They will not go. They do not go into the bone. They have never —”

“I’ll ask them,” said Sefa.

Taavi stared at her.

“Nobody ever asked them,” said Sefa Orne. “Nobody ever asked anyone. He asked me.” She pointed at Creed without looking at him. “He told me everything and then he asked. And I didn’t know how to be asked. But I said yes.” She swallowed. “So I’ll ask them. Every row. I’ll tell them about the water and the light and up and the faces. I’ll tell them about Juna and Maer and Ib. And I’ll ask.”

“And if they say no?”

Sefa was quiet for a moment.

“Then they’ll say no,” she said. “And it will be the first thing they ever said.”

It took the rest of the day.

He watched her do it. From the bone. From the old Wright stone at the terrace edges, where the light couldn’t see him, with Ollo beside him and Wick beside her and the company spread along the walls in a long line.

She went row by row.

Down the terraces. Along the curves. Kneeling in the soil beside each row of Kept — three, four of them, in their pale robes, lifting leaves — and speaking. Low. The rule held. She didn’t raise her voice. She knelt and spoke, and he couldn’t hear the words, but he could see her hands moving, see her pointing up, at the light, see her touching her own dark hair, her own eyes.

And he could see them listen.

Not all of them. Some of them didn’t look up at all. Some of them went on lifting leaves while she spoke, smooth-faced, unblinking, as if she were the wind. She’d finish, and wait, and they’d go on tending, and she’d stand up and go to the next row with her jaw tight.

But some of them looked up.

Not at the light. At her. At her dark hair. Her blinking. Her face, which did things now — creased, and crumpled, and shook. They looked at her the way you’d look at a fern you’d tended for years that one morning had flowered.

And some of them stood up.

Not many, at first. One, from a row of climbing vines on the fourth terrace. A man, tall, with a long-spouted can. He stood up from his row and set the can down very carefully in the soil and looked at Sefa for a long time. Then he walked along the terrace to the nearest doorway in the bone, and stopped at the threshold, and stood there.

Not kept.

He went in.

Then two more. Then a row of four, from the fruit bushes on the second terrace — all four of them, together, setting down their baskets of small red fruit and walking along the soil and into the bone. Then a woman alone. Then eight. Then twenty.

He counted. He couldn’t help it.

By the end of the second watch, three hundred and twelve.

Three hundred and twelve of a thousand. Walking off the soil, out of the rows, into the rooms in the bone where the Kept never went. Sitting down on the bare pale floors in their robes. Waiting. Not knowing what for.

The other seven hundred knelt in the rows and tended the gardens and didn’t look up.

Sefa came back to him at the end of it. She sat down on the old Wright stone of the first terrace edge beside him, in the place where he’d first seen her, and put her face in her split-nailed hands.

“Seven hundred,” she said. Through her fingers. “Seven hundred said nothing. They didn’t even look at me.”

“Three hundred did.”

“Seven hundred will go up when the water stops.” She lifted her head. Her grey-green eyes were red-rimmed. “Won’t they. If we break the water, the light will come down and the seven hundred will be in the soil and it will take them. Every one.”

He didn’t answer.

“If we don’t break it,” said Taavi Lusk.

He had come down the walls behind Sefa, slowly, carefully, an old man with a ledger under his arm. He stood on the bone at the end of the terrace with the green behind him.

“If you don’t break the water,” said Taavi, “the three hundred can come out of the bone and go back to their rows. And drink. And kneel. And the light will not notice. And the rows will be kept.” His voice was very dry. “And when their hair goes white, they will go up. One at a time. And I will write their names.”

Sefa turned and looked at him.

“Or,” said Taavi, “you break the water. And three hundred live. Awake. In the bone. And seven hundred go up today. All at once. And I write seven hundred names tonight.” He looked down at the ledger. “Those are the choices. I have stood at that rail for forty years. Those have always been the choices.”

Nobody said anything.

“Lamp,” thought Creed.

“I am telling you,” said Lamp. Very carefully. “I could go into them. The seven hundred. A thread into each. Eat the water out of them. Fast. Before the light comes.” The want rose up under the words, enormous. “I could eat all of it.”

“Could you?”

A long pause.

“No,” said Lamp. And he felt how much it cost it to say. “No. Not seven hundred. Not fast. Sefa took an hour. I grew. I do not know how big I can grow. If I tried seven hundred, I would —” It stopped. “I would be so big. And you would be so hot, with nothing in you to cool it. You would burn. On the terminus. On the tarp.” A tremor. “And they did not say yes. Seven hundred did not say yes. Ollo said ask.”

“Yeah,” said Creed. “He did.”

He sat on the bone with his black arm across his knees and looked at the gardens. Green. Lamps burning. Water running. Seven hundred people kneeling in the rows, tending, calm, kept. And three hundred in the bone, waiting.

“Snake,” he thought.

“You know what I’d say, mule.” Low. In the arm. “Break it. Burn it. Wake the three hundred. Let the light have the rest. They’re already gone. They were gone before you got here. They went the day they were born into those rows. You can’t save people who won’t look at you.” A pause. “But you’re not asking me what to do. You’re asking me if I’ll help.”

“Yes.”

“Then yes,” said Snake. “Whatever you pick. I’ll burn what you point me at. That’s not a promise. It’s just true.”

He didn’t break the water.

Not then. He sat on the bone until the end of the third watch, and the Kept in the rows lay down in the soil where they knelt, the way they did every night, Sefa said, and slept. Seven hundred, in the soil, in the dark between the lamps. And three hundred in the bone, awake, sitting on the bare floors in the dark, not sleeping.

He went into the bone.

Room by room. With Sefa. With Mirelle, and her thread of a voice, and her slate. With Wick.

He didn’t wake them. Not the way he’d woken Sefa. Not with a drop and the Lamp and an hour of screaming. There were three hundred of them and one of him and one Lamp, and the Lamp was already so fat with what it had eaten that he could feel it straining against his veins.

He did what he’d done in the Belly. In the galleries. In the first months after Kon.

He sat with them.

He put his right hand — the spurred one, carefully, the spurs turned out — on the back of a neck. And went beside. Not into. Beside. His blood, close to theirs, through the skin. Not waking them. Showing them. This is what it’s like. This is the shape of awake. When the water stops, this is where you’re going. Don’t fight it. Follow it.

The way Hesk had showed him the pick. Your arms are for aiming, not for hitting.

And he sang.

Not out loud. Not in the gardens, where the light could see and the stair-dogs could hear. In the bone, where no sound carried. Low. Barely a breath. Liss’s song. Around and down. Around and down. Like water in a basin. Like someone walking a dark room with something heavy in their arms.

He sang it to every room. And then he sang it to Sefa, alone, in the room three doors back, slowly, over and over, until she had it.

“Around,” she whispered. “And down.”

“That’s it.”

“It’s not — it doesn’t wake. It’s not like the other one.”

“No. The other one wakes. This one — puts to bed. When it’s bad. When they’re coming off it and their blood’s looking for something and it can’t find it and it’s thrashing. This one tells it to lie down. Rest. It’s okay.” He looked at her. “You’ll need it. When the water stops. For the three hundred. I can’t be in every room.”

She looked at him with her new eyes. Blinking.

“I can’t sing,” she said. “The Kept don’t sing. The stair has ears.”

“In the bone, it doesn’t.”

She was quiet a long time. Then she opened her mouth, and sang it. Badly. Cracked. Thin. Her voice going wrong on the second turn, like his had. Around and down.

It was the first song Sefa Orne had ever sung.

At the very end of the third watch, Taavi Lusk came to the room three doors back.

He stood in the doorway with his ledger under his arm. He looked at Sefa, asleep on the blanket against the wall with her dark hair over her face. At Creed, sitting on the bone floor with his black arm across his knees. At Wick asleep in a corner, and Ollo, awake, watching.

“I have been thinking,” said Taavi, “about the choices.”

Creed waited.

“You did not break the water,” said Taavi. “Why?”

“Seven hundred didn’t say yes.”

“Seven hundred did not say anything.”

“That’s not yes.”

Taavi looked at him for a long time.

“In forty years,” he said slowly, “no one has ever not done a thing to the Kept because the Kept did not say yes.” He set the ledger down on the floor of the room. Carefully. “The Gardener does not wait. The light does not wait. I did not wait.” His dry voice cracked, very slightly. “You are the first.”

“I can’t wait forever.”

“No.” Taavi looked down at the ledger. “You are going up. To the Fifth. To the Gardener. You will break the water there, or above. Somewhere. And when you do, it stops here too. The pipe runs down through all of us.” He looked at Creed. “So the choice is not yours. Not really. Only when.”

“Yeah.”

“Then let me do something,” said Taavi Lusk.

Creed looked up.

“Let me ask them,” said Taavi. “Tomorrow. The seven hundred. Not Sefa. Me. The steward. The one who stood at the rail.” His hands were shaking. “They do not look at Sefa because Sefa is one of them, and one of them cannot be anything but kept. But I am the steward. When I speak, they listen. They have always listened. I have rung the bell on them for forty years and they have never once not listened.” He swallowed. “Let me tell them what I have written in the book. All of it. Every name. Every up. And ask.”

Creed looked at him.

“You’ll be disturbed,” he said. “Standing in the soil, telling them. The light will see you.”

“Yes.”

“It’ll take you. You’re nearest.”

“Very likely,” said Taavi Lusk. “I am sixty-one years old. My hair is grey. In a cycle or two it will be white.” He bent and picked up the ledger again. Held it against his chest. “I would like to go up having said something. Once. Instead of ringing.”

He turned to go.

“Taavi,” said Creed.

The steward stopped in the doorway.

“Leave the book,” said Creed. “If you’re going to stand in the soil. Leave the book in the bone. Somebody should have it.”

Taavi Lusk looked down at the ledger in his arms. Forty years. Thousands of names.

He came back into the room and set it down on the floor beside Ollo. Then he stood up, and nodded once, to no one in particular, and went out.

Ollo looked at the book. Then he put his one hand on it, flat, the way he put it on everything he meant to keep.

“Ferrin’ll want this,” he said.

GARDENS OF THE SIXTH
ROWS KEPT: 700
ROWS VACATED: 312
STEWARD: —