They bled the Engine for six days.
Ferrin and Dorne went from drum to drum through the caverns of the god’s face, turning valves. A quarter-turn. Then, when the old hearts took it, a half. Then another quarter. Ferrin lay on his back under every one of the sixty-one separators in turn with his single hand on the chrome rim, and Dorne crouched beside him with her square hands on the rim beside his, and they pushed together, and the wheel groaned, and the white thinned.
Creed sat with his hand on the master separator’s white pipe and felt it thin.
Four million. A breath at a time.
He felt the Belly first. It had been thinnest. A year of guiders, of tabs running out, of drums that never came. The white in the Belly’s blood thinned and thinned and — in places, in some people, in the deepest caverns where the long-time Discarded lived — ran out. He felt it. A thread, and then no thread. A heart that had leaned on the white for thirty years, standing on its own.
And then he felt the waking.
It wasn’t like the Kept. It wasn’t screaming in a bone room for an hour. It was slower. It was a woman in Sump-Six waking up in her drawer between shifts and not wanting to go back to sleep. A man on Line C looking up from his press at hour twelve and seeing the man beside him. A crowd in the third cavern standing in front of the Wall of Names and reading the names out loud, all of them, one after another, for hours, because they suddenly couldn’t stop.
And thrashing. That too. In the galleries. In the flats. Blood going looking for something and not finding it. Fever. Shaking. The old ones, worst.
And under it all, on every speaker, the song.
Around and down. Around and down. A terrible cracked mule’s voice, singing badly, on every Lumen speaker on every rib, on the Line C tannoys, on the comm in every Gilt’s helm, on Matthis Ferrin’s lamp-relay on the Flats. Day and night. On loop.
People started singing along.
He felt that too. Not through the white. Through the bone. The god’s bone carried sound, Wick said, better than air. And on the second day he started to feel it through the floor of the cavern, through the gratings, through the master separator’s chrome flank: voices. Thousands. Then tens of thousands. Humming it. Singing it. Off-key. Wrong. Around, and down. In the Belly. On the Ninth. In the Gardens of the Sixth, where Sefa Orne was teaching it to eight hundred and forty-eight Kept in the bone. On the Second, where a tall narrow Lancer stood beside a high black chair and — Wick said — Quill had started humming it too, under her breath, without seeming to know she was doing it.
On the third day, the reports started coming.
Wick read them off the net. Every hour. Sitting on the grating beside him with the comm-set on his knees, croaking.
“Collar. Lund’s asked to see Tamsin. She says she wants to help with the relay.”
“Sixth. Sefa says the water’s thinner. She can taste it. Forty-one more said yes today. She says a hundred and twenty-three still in the soil.”
“Ninth. Hanne Dray says there’s a fight in the market on the third terrace. Two men. Somebody stopped it by singing at them.” A croak that might have been a laugh. “She says it worked.”
And then, on the fourth day, the other reports.
“Axis,” said Wick. Quietly. “Brann went down. To check. The wheels.” He stopped. “The Wheel-Kept. Two hundred and forty. He says —” He stopped again. “He says ninety-one.”
“Ninety-one what.”
Wick didn’t answer for a long time.
“Ninety-one dead,” he said. “In the wheels. They stopped walking when the wheels stopped. Before. When the cage came down. They just — stood there. In the groove. And now the white’s thinning and they’re —” His croak broke. “Brann says they’re sitting down in the groove. One at a time. And not getting up.”
Creed closed his eyes.
He’d felt them. In the pipe. The thickest white of all. Nothing underneath. Not enough of them left underneath to wake into.
“The Archon said all of them,” he said. “All the Wheel-Kept.”
“Brann’s trying,” said Wick. “He’s singing to them. In the groove. He says some of them are — some of them are listening. He says one of them stood up.” A long pause. “One.”
On the fifth day: “Fifth. Ossian. The Register.” Wick read it slowly. “He says, I have copied the first deaths. In my own words. Two hundred and seven, in the Gardens of the Fifth and the Fourth. Kept. Old. He says —” Wick swallowed. “He says, I have written their names. I did not write nearest. I wrote: they were tired, and someone sang to them.”
On the sixth day, the count was three thousand, four hundred.
Across the whole god. Old hearts. Wheel-Kept. Deep Gardens. The last of the long Belly lungs that had breathed the Drip for seventy years.
Three thousand, four hundred, in six days.
He carried every one. Through the pipe. Through his hand. He felt every heart that stopped — not with the stagger the Archon had promised, not in a flood — one at a time, here and there, across the whole skeleton, like the clocks in Marchetti’s vault. Each at its own pace.
He didn’t take his hand off the pipe.
“You can stop,” said Lamp. On the sixth night. In his blood. Very quietly. “Feeling them. You do not have to feel every one.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
“Because I turned the valves,” said Creed. “Somebody should.”
Ferrin turned the last quarter-turn on the last valve at the end of the third watch on the sixth day, lying on his back under drum sixty-one with Dorne beside him and his arm shaking so badly that she did most of it.
He lay there afterward. Under the drum. Not getting up.
Creed went and crouched by the gap in the grating and looked down at him.
“Halfway,” said Ferrin. From the dark. “Every one of them. Half-bled.” His dented face was grey with exhaustion. “Another six days. Maybe five. Then shut.”
“Okay.”
“Three thousand four hundred,” said Ferrin.
“Yeah.”
“Moraine reads them off. Every hour. I hear him.” Ferrin didn’t move. “It’s not eleven thousand. Not yet. It might not be.” A long pause. “It’s still three thousand four hundred.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to carve them,” said Ferrin. “All of them. When we go down. On the wall at the Collar. Same as the list. I’ll put my name beside every one.” His voice was flat. Very tired. “I turned the valves.”
“We turned the valves.”
“I turned them,” said Dask Ferrin. “With my hand. My name goes beside.”
He lay there under the drum a while longer. Then he started to get up. By stages. Swearing. Dorne helped him.
He’d just got to his feet on the grating when the drums stopped.
Not all at once. One. Then three. Then the whole cavern.
The humming stopped. The great chrome flanks slowed. Slowed. Stood still. And in the silence that came after — so sudden that every sleeping body in the army on the gratings sat up at once — he heard it.
Behind the bone. Behind the walls of the cavern. Up. Toward the back of the face. Toward the mind.
A rustling.
Like dry grass. Like the legs of a thousand stair-dogs on a stair. Like the inside of the folds, when the walls had bulged and split, but bigger. Everywhere.
“The gold,” said Ferrin. Very quietly. He was looking at the pipes. At the gold pipes, the ones that ran from the base of every drum back up into the bone toward the mind. The ones they hadn’t touched.
They were dark.
Not glowing. Not faint. Dark. Empty.
“They’ve cut it,” said Ferrin. “From the other end. They’ve stopped drawing the gold. They’ve stopped the drums.” He looked at Creed. “They’re not feeding from the Engine anymore.”
“Why would they —”
“Because they’re done with it,” said Creed.
He knew. He felt it. The rustling. Behind the bone. Coming closer.
Then we will remember what it was like to want a body.
“They’re coming out,” he said.
Wick’s comm-set started screaming before they reached the bottom of the shaft.
Fenn Arrowby. On the Palate. Her voice — a calm, flat, old Lancer’s voice — not calm at all.
“— out of the Halls, out of the tower, the low door, they’re coming out of the Gallery — hundreds — thousands — they’re on the bridges, they’re going for the Kept — they’re going for the Kept —“
He came down the last rungs of the shaft and out onto the walkway behind the Mother’s chain, and saw it.
The Palate was white with them.
Not the white of the towers. Moving white. Pale. Segmented. Pouring. Out of the Halls of the Gallery — out of the tower of faces, out of every door and window and seam in it — and down the bridges, along the walkways, over the hanging towers, in a vast slow pale rippling tide. Small ones. Big ones, chrome-banded, wearing faces. Hundreds of legs. Ringed mouths. Thousands. Tens of thousands.
And on the bridges, in the windows, in the towers — the Kept.
Twenty thousand. Who had been kneeling six days ago. Who had stood up when a little brass bell ended. Who had been walking back and forth on the walkways for six days with the white in them thinning, slowly, a breath at a time, learning how to say names.
The tide reached them.
He saw it reach the nearest bridge. A woman. Standing on it. In her pale robe. Looking at the white coming toward her. Not kneeling. Not turning away. Looking. Her face doing something — creasing, confused, the way Hollin Esse’s face was creased on its hook.
A big one reached her. Reared. Its legs went around her.
And she screamed.
Not the Kept’s silence. Not the smooth calm unblinking acceptance of the light. She screamed, and she fought. Her hands — smooth Kept hands, beautiful, that had never done anything but carry white cloth — tore at the legs around her. Pulled. Clawed. She fought it.
Because she was waking. Because six days of the white thinning had left her with something underneath. Not much. Enough to scream.
The legs went in.
He saw her go rigid. Saw the ringed mouth press to the back of her neck. Saw her eyes go wide and then — blank. Smooth. Calm. And then she stood up straight on the bridge, with the parasite’s legs wrapped around her and its body coiled down her back like a pale segmented spine, and turned, and walked toward the next Kept on the bridge with her hands out.
Remember what it was like to want a body.
They were taking them.
The Kept. The waking ones. The ones who’d been thinned. Who had just enough of themselves to scream but not enough to stop it. The parasites were rooting into them. Wearing them. The way they’d once worn the pods. The way the tree wore Aurel’s face.
All across the Palate. Bridge by bridge. Tower by tower.
“No,” said Creed. “No —”
Sabine had the army on the walkways before he’d reached the floor.
She didn’t wait for orders. She didn’t need them. She came down the shaft behind him and saw what he saw and her two-fingered hand came up, and three hundred people poured out of the arch onto the bridges behind her with blasting bars and lances and Ollo’s rounds, and met the tide.
He went with them.
He didn’t remember most of it, after. He remembered the bridges swaying under too much weight. He remembered parasites coming up the sides of the bridges from below, pale and rippling, and going for the army’s legs. He remembered the army’s legs — the long-time Discarded, the cavern people, the ones with no white left in them at all — and the parasites sliding off. Not rooting. Not finding anything to hold. The more awake, the less they can take. The way Dorne’s blood had made them slide off in the folds.
And the turned Gilt. The Mids from the Ninth and the Shelf. The ones who’d only been off the white for weeks.
The parasites didn’t slide off them.
He saw a Gilt go down on a bridge near the Mother’s chain. One of the ones from the Second’s square, who’d taken off his gold plate and picked up a blasting bar. A big chrome-banded one came up the side of the bridge and went around him and he fought it — he fought it — and the legs went in, and he went rigid, and stood up, and turned.
And came at the man beside him with his hands out.
Creed killed him.
He had to. He was the nearest. He went across the bridge and put the spurs through the thing coiled down the Gilt’s back and burned it, and the Gilt fell, and he didn’t get up. The thing had gone in too deep. Into the spine. Into the brain. There was nothing left of him underneath to get up.
He didn’t know his name.
He’d find out. He’d ask Sabine. He’d carve it.
He fought.
The Lamp fought with him. Not just the ones that touched him. All of them. Every parasite that came within reach of his hands, the Lamp reached out through his palm and ate — not the frost, there was no frost in them — the wanting. The cold reaching will. The holding hand gone wrong. It ate them and they went dry and dead and fell off the bridges like husks. And every one it ate, he felt it grow. Fatter. Colder. Hungrier. And every one it ate, he felt it shudder with revulsion.
“They taste like me,” it said. Over and over. In his blood. Not to him. To itself. “They taste like me. They taste like me.”
And the Snake burned.
Everything else. Everything the Lamp didn’t eat. The black arm went white-hot and stayed that way and he swept it along the bridges like Ollo swept the rifle and they went up in stinking black flakes.
It wasn’t enough.
There were tens of thousands. And they weren’t trying to win. They were trying to take. Every Kept they rooted into stood up and walked toward the next. Every waking Kept on every bridge was a door. And the doors were opening, one after another, all across the Palate, faster than he could close them.
“Creed!”
Sabine. On the bridge behind him. Her face streaked. Her blasting bar black with pale fluid.
“It’s not going to stop,” she said. “There’s too many. It’s going to take every Kept on the Palate and then it’s going to come at us with twenty thousand of them.” She grabbed his arm. The black one. Her hand hissed on it and she didn’t let go. “You know why it’s doing this.”
He knew.
“To make me choose,” he said.
“To make you go down the slope.” Her flat grey eyes held his. “That’s the only way it stops. You go down. You sit with it. You let it drink you. And it calls them back.”
“I know.”
“And the slope’s covered,” said Sabine. “Arrowby says. The gold slope in the folds, down to the tree. It’s solid with them. You’d never get through on your feet. Not alive. Not yourself.”
“I know.”
“So it’s not giving you a choice,” said Sabine. “It’s giving you a door. And it’s standing in the door.”
He looked at the Palate. At the tide. At the bridges.
“There’s another way up,” said Ferrin.
He was standing on the bridge beside Sabine. One-armed. With the ledger against his chest, inside his jacket, and a blasting bar in his one hand that he’d been swinging like Ollo swung the rifle. His dented face was grey and set.
“The Atlas lift,” he said. “The cable. The cage. It doesn’t go to the folds. It goes up the peg. Up through the bottom of the skull. Into the base.” He looked at Creed. “Where the pillars go in. Where the blood begins. The root.”
“Under the tree.”
“Under the tree,” said Ferrin. “Not down the slope. Up from below. Through the floor.” He shifted the bar. “They won’t be standing there. Not all of them. They’ll be on the slope. Waiting for you to come down it. Like it told you.”
“The cage came down,” said Wick. “With the envoy. From the top. Somebody at the top pays it out.”
“Somebody at the top did, with the wheels stopped,” said Ferrin. “To bring a guide down. They control it from the top. Now.” He looked at Creed. “But I’ve been looking at that drive-house for twelve days. In my head. Every night.” His voice was flat. “The Wrights didn’t need anybody at the top. The Wrights had a counterweight. In the peg. The weight-pit. Water.”
“It’s dry.”
“It’s dry,” said Ferrin. “So we fill it.”
“With what?”
Ferrin looked down. Off the edge of the bridge. Through the swaying web of walkways and towers. Down to the floor of the Palate, far below. To the long white tables, with their upturned cups. To the pool of poured-out water still lying in the grooves of the bone between the tables and the teeth.
And past it. To the throat. To the neck. To the white pipe running down the inside of the neck, bolted to the bone, carrying the bleeding Drip down to the Gardens.
“There’s a pipe,” said Dask Ferrin, “running right past the Axis. Thick as a man’s waist. Full of water. Half-bled. Nobody needs it anymore.” His dented face didn’t change. “I cut it. I turn it into the weight-pit. The pit fills. The counterweight drops. The cage goes up.” He looked at Creed. “On its own. No wheels. Nobody at the top.”
“How long?”
“To fill?” Ferrin thought. “An hour. Maybe less. It’s a big pipe.”
“And the brake?”
Ferrin was quiet for a moment.
“The brake’s on the drum,” he said. “In the drive-house. Iron lever. Big one. A counterweight drop, you’ve got to ride the brake the whole way, or the cage goes up the peg like a bolt out of a staff and hits the top and everybody in it’s jam.” He shifted the bar. “Somebody’s got to hold the brake.”
“Then somebody holds it.”
“Somebody who knows lifts,” said Ferrin.
Nobody said anything.
“Told you,” said Dask Ferrin. “At the Collar. In the sanctum. On the stair.” He looked at Creed. “You need someone who knows lifts.”
They went down through the teeth, and the throat, and onto the Atlas.
Not the army. The army stayed. Sabine held the bridges. Fenn Arrowby held the teeth. Varro held the shaft to the Engine, with the blasters. Three hundred people against tens of thousands on the white bridges of the Palate. And on every bridge, the Kept, fighting — some of them now, more of them, as the hours went on and the white thinned — fighting the things that tried to root into them. Screaming. Clawing. Not kept.
Down the throat came seven.
Creed. Ferrin. Ollo. Wick. Dorne. Brann, up from the Axis, grey and weak, with a coil of fuse-cable over his shoulder he couldn’t carry and carried anyway. Mirelle, with her six tablets wrapped in her robe.
The drive-house on the Atlas was empty. The envoy with Arral’s face was gone. The cage it had come down in was gone — paid back up, sometime, from the top. Only the first cage was there. The big one. Grown bone. On the floor beneath the drum. Hung on its great bone hook from the sinew-cable.
The six shafts from the wheels were still. The drum was still.
Ferrin went to the weight-pit.
The dry round hole in the floor at the base of the peg. Bone-lined. Deep. He crouched at its lip and looked down into it for a long time. Then up. At the peg. The vast pale trunk of bone going up through the roof of the drive-house into the base of the skull.
“Hollow,” he said. “Told you. Look. There.” He pointed. At the side of the pit. A channel. Cut into the bone. Going into the peg. Up. “That’s where the weight runs. Inside the peg. A bucket. A tank. Something. Up at the top. You fill the pit, the water goes up the channel by — by something, the god’s pumps, a siphon, I don’t know — and fills the bucket at the top, and the bucket’s heavier than the cage, and it drops down the inside of the peg, and the cable runs over the drum, and the cage goes up.” He looked at the drum. “And you ride the brake so it doesn’t go up too fast.”
“Where’s the pipe?”
Ferrin pointed. Out of the drive-house. To the outer edge of the Atlas ring. To where the white pipe — thick as a man’s waist, black iron, bolted to the bone — came down out of the bone of the skull above and ran down past the rim of the Atlas into the neck.
“Dorne,” said Ferrin. “Brann. Blasting cable.”
Brann had the cable. Dorne had the charges — Sabine’s last three, from her pack. They went to the pipe.
It took twenty minutes. Two charges on the pipe, one above and one below, to cut it. A length of the Concord’s iron conduit from the drive-house walls, wrenched off its brackets by Dorne’s hands, to bend the flow. Ferrin directing. One-armed. Shouting. Lying on his back under the pipe with his hand on the bolts.
The charges went.
The pipe split. And the water came out.
Not white. Not anymore. Grey. Pale grey. Half-bled. The Drip in it thinned to almost nothing over six days. It came out of the cut end of the pipe in a thick grey rush and hit the conduit Dorne was holding and roared down it, along the Atlas, into the drive-house, across the floor —
— and over the lip of the weight-pit.
Down.
He heard it go. Down into the dry pit. Hitting the bottom. Filling. And then — after a minute — a sound. A deep, slow, wet gulp. Like a throat swallowing. And the water level in the pit dropped. Drawn away. Into the channel. Into the peg. Up.
“There,” said Ferrin. Very quietly. Standing at the lip of the pit, soaked to the knees. “There. It’s working. It’s going up.” He looked at the peg. “The god’s pumping it.”
They waited.
The pit filled. Drained. Filled. The gulp, over and over, slow, like the pulse. The water going up into the peg.
Up at the top — far up, inside the hollow trunk of bone — something was getting heavier.
They came at the end of the hour.
He heard them first. In the bone. In the peg. In the floor of the Atlas. The rustling. Not from the folds above. From below. Up the throat. Up the neck.
“They’re coming up the stair,” said Wick. White. Clutching the comm-set. “Arrowby says — Arrowby says some of them broke off. From the Palate. Down the throat. Hundreds. Coming here.” He swallowed. “She says they know where you are.”
“Of course they know,” said Snake. In the arm. Low. “They always know where you are. They’ve been reading you off a slate since the reliquary.”
“How long,” said Creed.
“Minutes,” said Wick.
Ferrin was at the drum.
He stood beside the great iron brake-lever on the side of the drum — a bar as long as he was tall, black, worn smooth at the grip by a thousand years of Wright hands and Kept hands — and put his one hand on it. He looked up at the cable. Taut now. Humming faintly. Something at the top of the peg, getting heavier, pulling against the drum.
“Get in the cage,” said Ferrin.
Nobody moved.
“Get in the cage,” said Ferrin again. “It’s nearly full. When the bucket tips past the cage weight, the cable goes. I’ve got to be on the brake when it goes. You’ve got to be in the cage.”
“Ferrin —”
“Get in the bloody cage, Creed.”
He looked at Ferrin. At the dented face. The pinned sleeve. The single hand on the brake.
“And you?”
“I hold the brake,” said Ferrin. “Somebody holds the brake.”
“They’re coming. Up the stair. Up the throat. Hundreds. They’ll be here before the cage is halfway.”
“I know.”
“They’ll come for you.”
“I know,” said Ferrin.
He didn’t let go of the brake.
“If I let go,” he said, “the cage goes up like a bolt and hits the top and you’re all jam. If I hold too hard, it stops halfway and they climb the cable and get you in the peg. If I hold it right — if I ride it right — it goes up steady. Fast as it can and no faster.” His dented face didn’t move. “Bleed it. Same as the Engine. Same as a press.” He looked at Creed. “I can do that. I’ve been doing it my whole life. It’s the one thing I’m good at.”
“Brann can —”
“Brann can’t lift a blasting bar,” said Ferrin. “Brann’s got no arms left. You took them out of him. Good. He’s going up with you.” He looked at Dorne. “She’s going up with you. Ollo’s going up with you. Moraine. The cousin.” His voice didn’t change. “You need them. Up there. You don’t need me. You need a lift.”
“Ferrin.”
“Here,” said Dask Ferrin.
He took his hand off the brake. Just for a second. Reached into his jacket. Took out the ledger. Taavi’s ledger, with its cracked spine and its swollen pages and Taavi’s folded face flat inside the cover. He held it out.
Not to Creed. To Ollo.
“You took the face,” said Ferrin. “You keep the book.”
Ollo looked at it for a long time.
Then he took it. In his one hand. Flat. The way he took everything he meant to keep.
Ferrin put his hand back on the brake.
“Tell Matthis,” he said. “Tell my da I made it work. Tell him it was a counterweight drop and I rode the brake the whole way and I didn’t let it jump.” He looked up at the cable. “He’ll want to know that. He’ll want to know it didn’t jump.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“And put me on the list.”
“You’re on the list. At the Collar. You carved it yourself.”
“Put me on again,” said Dask Ferrin. “Under it. Different line.”
Creed looked at him.
Then he got in the cage.
The rustling came over the rim of the Atlas.
Pale. Rippling. Up from the throat. Over the edge of the ring. Hundreds of them. Small ones and big ones. Chrome bands. Faces. Coming across the flat top of the Atlas toward the drive-house in a slow white tide.
He was in the cage. All of them were. Creed. Ollo, with the ledger against his chest. Wick, with the comm-set. Dorne, square, at the open side, fists up. Brann, grey. Mirelle, with the tablets.
The cable was humming. Taut. Higher-pitched every second. Something at the top of the peg, heavy, heavier.
“Ferrin,” said Creed.
Ferrin was at the brake. Both feet planted. His one hand on the black iron bar. His shoulder against it. Leaning. Holding.
“Not yet,” said Ferrin. “Not yet. Nearly. Nearly.”
The tide reached the drive-house door.
“Not yet —”
The first one came through the door. Big. Chrome-banded. Wearing a face. It came across the floor toward the drum. Toward Ferrin.
“Ferrin, it’s —”
“NOW,” said Ferrin.
The cable went.
He felt it. The whole cage. A jerk, upward, so hard his knees buckled. The drum on the wall of the drive-house screamed into motion. The cable ran over it, paying out down — no, up, the other end going down, the weight at the top of the peg dropping, inside the hollow bone — and the cage lifted off the floor of the drive-house —
— and shot —
— and slowed.
Ferrin. On the brake. Leaning. Every muscle in his one arm and his shoulder and his back and his planted legs, leaning. The brake-shoe screaming against the drum. Smoke. The cage slowing. Steadying. Rising. Not like a bolt. Like a lift. Steady. Fast. Up. Through the slot in the drive-house roof. Up into the dark of the hollow peg. Up.
He looked down through the slot as they went.
He saw Ferrin at the brake. Leaning. Holding.
He saw the big chrome-banded parasite reach him.
He saw its legs go around Ferrin. Around his chest. His waist. His one arm. The ringed mouth turning toward the back of his neck.
Ferrin didn’t let go of the brake.
He saw the legs go in.
He saw Ferrin go rigid. Saw his whole body jerk. Saw his face — his dented face, turned up toward the slot, toward the rising cage — go white, and then go still, and then —
— not blank.
Not smooth. Not calm. Not Kept.
Set. The face of a foreman at hour eighteen with a jam on the line. The face of a man on the gantry for seven years. The face of a man with his one hand on a brake-lever.
He didn’t let go.
The parasite was in him. Rooting. Reaching for his brain. Reaching for the part of him that could be worn. And Dask Ferrin stood at the brake of the Atlas lift with the thing’s legs in his spine and held. Rode the brake. Leaned. The brake-shoe screaming. The cage rising steady. Not too fast. Not too slow.
Fast as it can and no faster.
More of them reached him. Two. Three. Small ones. Up his legs. Into his back.
He held.
The cage went up into the dark of the peg. The slot went small below them. A square of grey light. Then smaller. And in it, getting smaller, a man at a brake-lever, leaning, with pale things wrapped around him and pale things going into him, not letting go.
“FERRIN —”
He felt for the heart. He couldn’t help it. The way he’d followed Arral’s and Marchetti’s and Taavi’s. He reached down the peg with his blood-sense. And found it. Heavy. Hard. Steady. A foreman’s heart. Going. Going. With the cold reaching things all around it. Going.
Going.
Then — the cage jerked. Hard. Upward. The brake had slipped. He felt the cable sing. Felt the cage start to go — too fast — like a bolt —
— and catch. Slow. Steady again.
Somebody had leaned on the brake again.
He reached for the heart.
It was still going. Slower. Very slow. But going. And around it — not the cold. Something else. Something flat. Stubborn. The thing that had kept Dask Ferrin at a gantry desk for seven years and then made him send a packet down to the Drop with an audit in it. The thing that had made him carve every name on the Wall with his own name beside it.
The parasites had his body. They didn’t have that.
The cage rose.
The heart went slower. Slower.
The cage rose steady.
Slower.
He couldn’t feel it anymore. Too far. The cage was too high in the peg. He’d lost it. He didn’t know if it had stopped or if he’d just gone out of range.
The cage rose steady. All the way. Not too fast. Not too slow. The brake never slipped again.
Halfway up, they came up the cable.
He should have known. Ferrin had said. If I hold too hard, it stops halfway and they climb the cable. Ferrin hadn’t held too hard. But they’d climbed anyway. Small ones. Fast ones. Up the pale sinew-cable from the drive-house below, rippling up it like ants up a rope, into the dark of the peg after the rising cage.
They came over the edge of the cage floor.
Dorne met them.
She was at the open side, and she didn’t wait. She crushed the first three as they came over the lip, and kicked the fourth off into the dark, and the fifth —
The fifth was big. It came up the cable slower than the others, and when it came over the lip of the cage it was already rearing, chrome bands flashing in the faint light from the top of the peg, its ringed mouth open, its hundreds of legs spread like a net.
Dorne caught it. Square hands around its first segment. And it didn’t try to root. It struck. Its whole front end — the mouth and the hooks and the chrome — driving forward into her chest like a lance.
Into her. Under the collarbone. Deep.
She didn’t scream. She’d never screamed except for Sere. She grunted. Like a woman taking a punch. And her hands closed on the thing’s first segment and crushed, and it burst, and screamed, and she pulled it out of her chest — the front end, the hooks, all of it — and threw it off the cage into the dark.
Then she sat down.
On the floor of the cage. Hard. Her back against the bone bars. Her hand pressed to the hole under her collarbone. Red coming through her fingers. A lot of red.
“Ilka,” said Brann. On his knees beside her. “Ilka —”
“Fine,” said Ilka Dorne. Grey-faced. “Fine. It’s —” She coughed. Red on her lips. “It’s not fine.”
More were coming over the lip.
Creed burned them. Ollo swept them. And Wick —
Wick dropped the comm-set.
He let it go — it fell on its strap against his chest — and he went across the swaying floor of the rising cage on his knees to Dorne, and got his thin arms around her under the shoulders, and pulled. Away from the open side. Away from the lip, where they were coming over. To the back of the cage. Against the far bars. Away. He dragged her. Ilka Dorne, square and heavy and twice his weight. He dragged her across the cage floor leaving a long red smear, and got her against the back bars, and put his own body between her and the open side.
He had nothing in his hands.
He crouched there in front of her with nothing in his hands, shaking so badly his teeth clattered, white as bone, and looked at the open side of the cage where they were coming over, and didn’t move.
“Moraine,” said Dorne. Behind him. Hoarse. “Moraine. What are you doing.”
“Being in the way,” said Wick. His voice cracked into pieces. “It’s what I’m for.”
None of them reached him. Creed made sure. He and Ollo, at the lip. Burning and sweeping. Until the cage rose past the last of them and the cable above the cage was clear and the cable below was full of pale rippling shapes falling away into the dark.
The cage stopped.
Not a jerk. A slowing. Gentle. Steady. The way a press stops when you bleed it down. The cable singing lower and lower and then not singing at all. The cage swaying, very slightly, at the top of the peg.
At the top. In the dark. In a chamber of bone.
Somewhere below them — far below, down the hollow peg, in a drive-house on the Atlas — somebody had ridden the brake the whole way, and not let it jump, and brought the cage to the top as gently as setting down a tray.
And then let go.
Creed stood in the swaying cage at the top of the peg with his hand on the bone bars and reached down. All the way down. With everything he had. Down the peg. Down the cable. Toward the drive-house.
He couldn’t reach it. Too far.
He didn’t need to.
“He did it,” said Ollo. Quietly. Beside him. With the ledger against his chest. “It didn’t jump.”
“No.”
“He’d want Matthis told that.”
“I’ll tell him.”
Ollo nodded. He looked down at the ledger. At the cracked spine.
“He said put him on again,” said Ollo. “Different line.”
“Yes.”
“What line.”
Creed thought about it for a long time. At the top of the peg. In the dark. In the cage, swaying, with Dorne bleeding against the back bars and Wick crouched in front of her with nothing in his hands and Brann holding her hand and Mirelle with her tablets pressed to her chest.
He set the spurs of his right fist against the bone bar of the cage. And carved.
DASK FERRIN. LINE C. HE HELD THE BRAKE. IT DIDN’T JUMP.
ATLAS LIFT
COUNTERWEIGHT DROP: COMPLETE
CAGE: AT HEAD
BRAKE OPERATOR: —
NOTED