Wick had a notebook.
It was a Kon tally-book, the kind the foremen used to carry, with KON RECLAMATION stamped in faded gold on the cover and the pages ruled in columns for hours and cycles and quota. Wick had found a box of them in the ruins of the Kon depot on the Ninth and brought one down, and crossed out the column headings, and for four days he’d been going round.
Round Hesk’s Rest. Round the caverns. Up the switchback road to the Breach, where Alis Fisk had rung her bell at him and counted him in, one, and then down again. Round the Belly, gallery by gallery, sump by sump, drawer-row by drawer-row, on Line C and Line D and the dead lines nobody worked anymore. With his notebook open and a stub of pencil and his mask round his neck, stopping people.
Asking.
He’d been bad at it the first day. He’d come back to the Car at the end of it grey in the face and sat down on the step and said, “They don’t know what I’m asking. I don’t know what I’m asking. I say, what do you need, and they look at me like I’ve got a foreman’s slate. I say, what do you want, and they look at me like I’ve gone mad. Nobody’s ever —” And stopped. And put his face in his hands.
“Nobody’s ever asked them,” said Sabine.
“Nobody’s ever asked them.”
“Then ask them something smaller,” Sabine said. “Ask them what’s wrong.”
The second day he’d come back with eleven pages.
He came into the Car now with the whole book full, and three more pages folded inside the back cover, and sat down at the end of the long seat by the door, where he’d sat at the first council, and looked at it, and didn’t open it.
The Car was full. It was always full now. People came in and stood at the back to listen, and nobody told them not to, because nobody was in charge. Tamsin, in her carried chair, up from the Collar on a crawler. Hanne Dray and Ebbe Sallis for the Ninth. Senna Kade for Halden — she’d driven the last tram off the Seventh with four hundred people hanging off it, and hadn’t driven anything since. Fenn Arrowby for the Lancers, with Varro behind him. Haddon Rusk for Line C, and Orsa Pell beside him. Sefa Orne’s voice on the relay from the Sixth, a long way up and very clear. Cassia Lund’s from the Second. Sabine at the near end with her feet on a crate.
Creed sat against the wall by the window, under the old route-map of the Halden trams with its lines all running to a city that wasn’t there anymore. Ollo beside him.
“Speaker,” said Sabine.
Wick winced.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t call me that.”
“It’s what you are.”
“It’s a word. It’s a stupid — fine.” He opened the book. His hand was shaking. He held the book down flat on his knee with his other hand so nobody would see, and everybody saw. “Fine. I asked. I asked eleven hundred and something people. I stopped counting. Creed would know.”
“I wasn’t there,” said Creed.
“You’d know anyway.” Wick turned a page. “I asked them what’s wrong. And they told me. So I’m going to — I’m just going to read it. Is that all right? Is that how this works?”
“Nobody knows how this works,” said Sabine. “Read it.”
He read it.
“Water,” read Wick. “That’s the first one. That’s the first one on every page. The Belly’s lines ran on Kon’s pumps and Kon’s pumps ran on Kon’s people and Kon’s people are — some of them are still there, still turning up, because they don’t know what else to do. But the big pumps on the Fourth sump went dry eight days ago and nobody knows why. Ollo —”
“Looked,” said Ollo. “Belt.”
“He fixed it,” Wick told the Car. “It was a belt. He fixed it. So that one’s — I’m going to put a line through it.” He put a line through it. It was the first line he’d put through anything, and he looked at it for a moment as if he didn’t trust it.
“Food. Grey-caps are fine, they grow in the sumps, they always did. But the ration tins came down the cables from the Ribs and the cables are — some of them are working and nobody knows who’s supposed to send them. People are hungry on the Twelfth sump. Not starving. Hungry.”
“The Sixth has more fruit than we can eat,” said Sefa, on the relay. Very clear. Very calm. “The vines are pulling down the walls. Come and get it. And bring people who want to learn how to grow it. We don’t need anything back. We’d like to be asked how we are, sometimes.”
Wick wrote that down. “How are you?”
A pause on the relay. Then something that might have been a laugh. Sefa didn’t laugh much. She was learning.
“Tired,” said Sefa. “Good. Forty of my people didn’t wake. I say their names in the mornings. The ferns are coming up through the stair. Thank you for asking.”
Wick wrote that down too.
“The Drip,” he read. “People who were on it. Long-timers. Thirty years, forty. They’re coming off it hard. Some of them shake so bad they can’t hold a cup. Some of them can’t sleep. Some of them —” He stopped. “Some of them went back to the sumps where the Drip-vats were and sat by the empty vats. Just sat. I asked one of them what was wrong and she said, the horn hasn’t gone. I said the horn goes at hour ten now. She said, not that horn.”
Nobody said anything.
“I’ll go,” said Creed. “I can show their blood how to wake without —”
“I put that,” said Wick. “I put, Creed will go. And then I crossed it out.” He showed them. A line through it. “Because there’s forty thousand of them. In the Belly alone. You can’t put your hand on forty thousand necks. You’d be doing it till you died.”
“Then I’ll do it till I die.”
“No,” said Wick. “No, because —” He looked down at the book. “Because I asked them. And a man on Line D said, can’t he teach somebody. And a woman on the Ninth said, can’t he show us how. And an old man in the caverns said — he said, my hands glow too, don’t they. Why can’t I do it.” Wick looked up. “So that’s what I wrote. Teach it.”
Creed looked at him for a long moment.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Teach it.”
“Brann can sing them to sleep, too,” said Wick. “Liss’s song. Mirelle can’t sing it anymore but you can, and Brann can, and the Choir can, and — people can learn songs. People learn songs easier than they learn anything.”
He turned the page.
“Names,” he read. “People want to know who’s dead. Everybody on every page wants to know who’s dead. Six thousand two hundred and twelve on the beat, and nobody’s got the list in one place, and people don’t know if their — people don’t know. The Register’s got some. Ossian’s got some. Quill’s got the Second’s. I’ve got —” He held up the three loose folded pages. “I’ve got the ones people told me. People who said, can you find out about.”
Sabine took her feet off the crate.
“The Wall,” she said.
“The Wall,” said Wick. “That’s what they said. Put them on the Wall. All of them. Everybody who died on the beat. And everybody who died before it, in the war. And everybody the Head took. Everybody.”
“That’s a lot of carving,” said Haddon Rusk.
“Yeah,” said Wick. “I asked about that too. A lot of people said they’d do it.”
He turned to the last page in the book. The writing on it was smaller. He’d pressed harder.
“This one’s different,” he said.
“Go on,” said Sabine.
“The Fourth Rib.” Wick swallowed. “There’s a man up there called Maddox Reave. He was a Gilt captain. He had channels — old ones, bought ones, all up both arms and his neck, like a Verbous, nearly. And on the beat his blood woke up like everybody’s, and now he’s got the old channels and the new, and they don’t fight in him, they — add. He can lift a tram-car. Somebody saw him do it.
“And the Fourth’s lamps went out on the beat. Like everywhere. The Concord’s Catalyst lines all went dead. And then the bone lit up and everybody’s hands lit up and you could light a lamp by putting your hand on the pipe. Anybody could. That’s — that’s the point, isn’t it. Anybody.
“Except on the Fourth. On the Fourth, Reave’s people have got the pipe-junctions. Where the lamp-lines meet the bone. They’re standing on them. Gilt, mostly. Old Gilt. And some — some Unbanded. Ours. People who came up the neck with us.” He stopped. “People who fought.
“And they say the light’s free. They say Reave says so. They just ask for something to keep the junctions safe. Grey-caps. Tins. A shift’s work on the Fourth’s walls. Just to keep it safe. In case someone breaks them.”
The Car was very quiet.
“Nobody’s breaking them,” said Orsa Pell.
“No.”
“Then safe from what?”
Wick didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Everybody in the Car had grown up with a band on their wrist.
“I asked a woman on the Fourth what was wrong,” said Wick. “And she said, nothing. Nothing’s wrong. Lord Reave keeps the lights on.” He closed the book. “She was joking. The Lord part. I think she was joking. I think it started as a joke.”
Fenn Arrowby swore, softly, and looked at the floor.
Cassia Lund’s voice came over the relay from the Second, dry and thin and very old.
“It always does,” she said.
Everybody in the Car looked at Creed.
He felt them do it. The way he’d felt the Collar do it, the well and the clavicles, a hundred thousand faces turning up toward one man on a landing. He knew what they were thinking. He could go. He could go up to the Fourth on a crawler and walk into the pipe-junction where Maddox Reave stood with his old channels and his new blood, and put out his hand, and Reave’s blood would know whose it was in the presence of. The way the god’s had. The way the tree’s had. He could end it in an afternoon.
“No,” he said.
Sabine didn’t say anything. She waited.
“If I go up there and make him stop,” said Creed, “then I’m the thing that makes people stop. And the next one — there’ll be a next one, there’s always a next one, Lund’s right — the next one waits till I’m asleep. Or dead. Or somewhere else. And then there’s nobody, because everybody waited for me.” He looked round the Car. “I’m not the Head with a nicer face.”
“So what, then,” said Haddon Rusk. Not angry. Just asking.
Creed looked at Wick.
“Everybody on the Fourth’s got hands that glow,” he said. “Same as Reave. Same as me. Every single one. They can light their own lamps. They just have to know they can.” He shrugged. “Ask them.”
“Ask them what?”
“If they need him.”
Wick stared at him.
“You want me to go up to the Fourth,” said Wick slowly, “where a man who can lift a tram-car is calling himself a lord, with a notebook —”
“Not me,” said Creed. “You asked who wanted to. You’re the Speaker. Ask who wants to.”
Wick looked at the Car.
“Who —” His voice cracked. He started again. “Who wants to go up to the Fourth and ask people if they need a lord?”
Fenn Arrowby put his hand up.
Then Varro. Then Orsa Pell. Then Senna Kade, who’d lost a city to men standing on junctions. Then a woman at the back of the Car whom nobody knew, a Line D woman with her band-stripe still pale on her wrist, who’d just come in to listen. Then the man next to her.
Then Wick.
He looked at his own hand in the air as though somebody else had put it there.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, I didn’t mean — okay. Okay. I’m scared of him. I’m going.”
“Received,” said Sabine.
There was a man sitting on the step of the Car when the council came out.
He’d been there all through it. Creed had seen him through the window. Sitting on the bottom step with his back to the door and his hands between his knees. Fifty, maybe. Big shoulders gone thin. A Mid’s cable-crew jacket with the Seventh Rib’s lineman flash on the shoulder, the stitching picked out so that only the holes showed. His hands were glowing, faintly, the way everyone’s did, and he kept them pressed together as if he could hide it.
Wick stopped on the top step.
The man stood up. He turned round. He looked at Wick, and then past Wick at Creed, and then at the ground.
“They said the Speaker asks people,” he said. “They said if you had something, you came down to the Flats and waited by the Car and the Speaker would ask you. So I came down.”
“What’s your name?” said Wick.
“Joss Merrin.” He kept looking at the ground. “Lineman. Seventh Rib primaries. Twenty-six years.”
Behind Creed, on the step, Senna Kade went very still.
“Primaries four and nine,” said Joss Merrin. “I was on four. The release. On the day.” He swallowed. “We got the order on the S2. Execution on signal. We didn’t know what — no. That’s a lie. We knew. We knew what a primary release does. We’d been told it was a test. We’d been told there’d be an evacuation. We’d been told a lot of things. I knew what it does. I’ve known since I was an apprentice.
“I pulled it.”
Nobody moved.
“I’ve been on the Fourth,” said Joss Merrin. “Since. I went up after. I didn’t — I didn’t go home. There wasn’t a home. Mine was on the Seventh, on the up-rib side, it didn’t fall, but I couldn’t —” He stopped. “On the beat I felt it. Like everyone. I felt the god dreaming. I felt — it was looking at the green world. And I was in it. And I thought, I don’t get to be in this. And then it was over and I was still standing there on the Fourth.
“There’s a man on the Fourth called Reave who’s looking for people who know how the lines run. To keep the junctions. He asked me. I said no. I came here instead.”
“Why,” said Wick. Very quietly. Not a challenge. Just the question.
“Because somebody should ask me,” said Joss Merrin. “What I did. To my face. And I should answer. And I didn’t know where else to go to be asked.”
Wick looked at him for a long time.
Then he looked round. Not at Creed. Past Creed, at Senna Kade, standing in the doorway of the Car. Halden. Tram-driver. Twenty years on the Halden lines, before the Fall. She’d driven the last car off the Seventh with the city tilting under her wheels.
“It’s not mine to ask,” said Wick. “Is it.”
Senna Kade came down the steps.
She stood in front of Joss Merrin. She was a head shorter than him. She looked up into his face until he looked back.
“Twelve thousand,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You know the number.”
“Twelve thousand one hundred and four. They put it on the Concord board on the Fourth. I read it every day.”
Senna Kade looked at him a long time.
“There’s a slab of Lumen-glass at the edge of the Field,” she said. “We carve the names on it. We’ve done about four thousand. We had to stop. The glass is hard and we haven’t got the tools for it and every time somebody picks up the nail they —” She stopped. “It’s slow.”
He didn’t say anything.
“There’s a list,” said Senna Kade. “The whole list. Twelve thousand one hundred and four. We’ve got it. Every name.”
He looked at her.
“I’m not saying you’re forgiven,” said Senna Kade. “I’m not saying I’ll ever say that. I’m not saying anybody on the Flats will. I’m not saying you’re safe here. Some of them will want to put you off the Long Bridge, and some days I’ll want to help.”
“I know.”
“I’m saying there’s a slab of glass,” she said, “and a list. And eight thousand names left. And you’ve got hands.” She turned away from him. “Start with Teo Brask. Flat thirteen, Spindle Row. He watched the primaries. He was watching yours.”
She went back up the steps of the Car and inside and shut the door.
Joss Merrin stood on the Flats in his lineman’s jacket with the flash picked off.
After a while he turned round and walked toward the long slab of fallen Lumen-glass at the edge of the Field, where the lamp on the tram-rail pole burned steady over it. Matthis Ferrin was on his crate under the lamp. He watched the lineman come. He watched him kneel at the end of the glass where the carving stopped.
Matthis was a lineman too. Fifty years on the Seventh’s primaries.
He got up off his crate. Slowly. And went and found him a better nail.
The word came on the net at hour six the next morning.
Orsa Pell’s voice, on the Line C speaker that Wick had wired into the Belly relay. Not calm. Orsa Pell was always calm; she’d been calm on the Line D tab for nineteen years and calm coming off it and calm learning Hesk’s name. She was not calm.
“Creed. Line C. Number-two pump. Come and look. Come now. Something’s — just come and look.”
He came.
Wick and Ollo with him, up the switchback road at a run, through the Breach — three, said Alis Fisk, ringing her bell, in — and up the cavern-stair into the Belly and along the gallery to Line C. And Line C was full.
Not working. Nobody was working. The presses were still. The pumps were thudding on their own, because nobody had turned them off. The whole shift, forty, fifty of them, and the shift before that, who’d come back, and people from Line D next door, and from the drawer-rows, and more coming — standing in a loose wide ring around the number-two pump.
Hesk’s pump.
Nobody was standing close to it. They’d left a space. A circle of bare floor around the pump’s iron footing, two meters wide, and they stood round the edge of the circle and looked in, the way you’d stand round something that might break if you breathed on it.
Orsa Pell was kneeling at the edge of the circle. She looked up when he came through.
She didn’t say anything. She just pointed.
At the base of the pump, where the iron footing met the floor of the gallery, there was a crack in the bone. There had always been a crack there. He knew it. He’d seen it every shift for nine years, a thin dark crack in the floor at the corner of Hesk’s footing, where the vibration of the pump had worked at the bone for longer than anybody had been alive. Dust collected in it. Marrow-dust, the fine grey-blue powder that got into everything on Line C. And water. Hesk had kept a rag on the pump-housing for wiping her hands, and she used to wring it out at the end of every shift, there, into the crack at the foot of her pump. Thirty-one years. He’d seen her do it. He’d never thought about it.
On the beat, the flood had come up through the bone of the gallery floor like it had come up everywhere. Clear and gold and red and white. Into the bone. Into the crack. Into thirty-one years of marrow-dust and wrung-out water.
And something was growing out of it.
It was very small. Smaller than his thumb. A curl. A tight green curl, like a fist, on a stem no thicker than a thread, coming up out of the dark crack at the foot of Hesk’s pump into the light of the sodium lamps and the faint four-colored glow of the bone.
Green.
He stood at the edge of the circle and couldn’t move.
He had seen green once. Before. In the Belly, once in nine years, behind glass. On Gantry Three, at the end of a twenty-hour shift, with another man’s blood under his fingernails. A white ceramic pot on a low table in a black lacquer carriage, behind glass, in air so clear it looked like another world. Everyone looks at the fern. He’d looked. He hadn’t been able to stop. It had been the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life, and it had belonged to a man who owned him, and it had gone up into the dark like a seed rising, and he’d stood on the gantry thinking about nothing else.
This was smaller. It wasn’t in a pot. It wasn’t behind glass.
It was growing out of a crack in the floor of Line C where his aunt used to wring out her rag.
He knelt.
Nobody stopped him. He went into the circle on his knees, slowly, and knelt by the pump, and put his face down near the floor, and looked at it. Close. The tiny tight green curl. The fine hairs on the stem, catching the light. A darker green at the heart of the curl, where it was folded in on itself, waiting.
He didn’t touch it.
He could feel it, though. Without touching. The way he felt blood. Something very small and very quiet, drawing up the glow out of the bone the way the lamps did, the way the hands of everyone on Line C did when they put them on the pipes. Not a person. Not a hand. Just a living thing, with its own small want. Toward the light.
“What is it,” said Wick. Behind him. At the edge of the circle. His voice wasn’t steady.
“A fern,” said Creed.
“How do you know?”
“I’ve seen one.”
“Where?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Everybody on Line C knew about Kon’s carriage, and the glass, and the pot on the low table. Everybody who’d ever stood on Gantry Three with their eyes down when the carriage came. Everyone had looked at the fern.
“Oh,” said Wick. Very quietly.
By the end of the shift there were three hundred people in the gallery.
They came from everywhere. From the other lines, from the drawer-rows, from the caverns, up the switchback road from Hesk’s Rest. They came in silence, mostly, and stood at the edge of the circle, and looked. Some of them cried. Some of them laughed, suddenly, and put their hands over their mouths. An old man from Line A, eighty if he was a day, marrow-skinned to the eyes, stood at the edge of the circle for an hour and then said, to nobody, “I thought they were painted. On the dormitory wall. I thought somebody made them up,” and went away.
Nobody went into the circle. Nobody touched it.
Haddon Rusk wanted to put a guard on it.
He said so at hour nine, standing beside Creed at the edge of the circle, with his arms folded. “Somebody’ll tread on it. Somebody’ll pick it. Somebody’ll take it up to the Ribs and sell it. It’s the only one. There’s three hundred people in here and there’ll be a thousand tomorrow. Put a fence round it. Put somebody on it, every shift.”
“No,” said Orsa Pell.
She was still kneeling at the edge of the circle. She hadn’t moved all day.
“No,” she said again. “If you put a fence round it, it’s somebody’s. It’s whoever’s got the fence.” She looked up at Haddon Rusk. “Kon’s was in a pot behind glass. Nobody could touch it. It was his.” She looked back at the fern. “This isn’t anybody’s.”
“Somebody’ll tread on it.”
“Then somebody’ll tread on it,” said Orsa Pell. “And it’ll grow again, or it won’t. It grew out of a crack nobody looked at for thirty-one years. Nobody planted it. Nobody watered it on purpose. She just wrung her rag out, every shift.” Her voice caught. “I’m not putting a fence round that.”
Haddon Rusk looked at her for a long moment. Then he unfolded his arms.
“Somebody should at least tell people to watch their feet,” he said.
“So tell them,” said Orsa Pell.
He told them. He went round the edge of the circle all evening, telling people, quietly, to watch their feet. That was all. Nobody guarded it. Nobody fenced it. And three hundred people became six hundred, and nobody trod on it.
At hour ten the horn went, and nobody moved, and after a while Orsa Pell began to hum.
Hesk’s tune. The Long Way Down. Low. Under her breath. The way Hesk had hummed it at this pump for thirty-one years, under the noise of the line, so quiet that nobody had heard it but the bone.
The line hummed it with her.
Not loud. Not singing. Just six hundred people standing in a dead gallery round a pump, humming, the way they’d hummed it under the presses on the beat without knowing why. The bone hummed back. Very faint. He felt it under his knees.
The fern didn’t do anything. It was a fern. It stood in its crack in the light, a tight green curl, wanting the light.
Somebody near the back said, “Hesk’s fern,” and somebody else said it, and by the time Creed went back down to the caverns that night that was what it was called, all down the Belly. Hesk’s fern. At the number-two pump. On Line C.
Nobody’s.
The Wall of Names was in the third cavern, where it had always been.
It had been one wall once. The long smooth face of bone at the back of the cavern where Sabine’s people, the Unbanded, the Discarded who’d come up out of the Void, had carved the names of everyone the Belly had thrown away. Jory Thane. Pell Ossary and Marn Tuve, who’d fallen in the crawlways. The eight from the pressing floor. HESK MARROW-VANE. LINE C. NO. 2 PUMP. 31 YEARS. SHE SANG. Ione and Aurel. THEY WALKED OUT TOGETHER. Garrow’s four thousand, released. ALIS FISK. ALIVE.
It had filled up. They’d started on the side walls. Then on the floor, in rows, worn smooth already by people kneeling to read them. Then the fourth cavern.
Now there were people carving everywhere.
He came in from the cavern-stair and stopped.
Fifty people. Sixty. With nails and chisels and sharpened bits of girder from the Halden wreck, carving. On every wall of the third cavern that wasn’t already full, and on into the fourth, and the fifth, by lamp and by the light of the bone, which glowed in the caverns as it glowed everywhere. The names were coming down on the relay. Wick had set a speaker on a pole in the middle of the cavern, wired to the net, and the names came out of it, steady, one after another, in voice after voice. Quill’s, from the Second. Ossian’s, from the Register, dry and careful. Tamsin’s, from the Collar. A woman on the Ninth he didn’t know. Names. And the carvers listened, and when a name came that they’d been given, they carved it.
The six thousand two hundred and twelve.
Somebody had done the arithmetic and chalked it on the cavern wall in big square figures at the entrance, so you’d know how far they’d got. Under it, a tally, in chalk. Four hundred and nine. A line through it. Four hundred and thirty.
He stood under the tally and listened to the names.
“Aldo Vance. Ninth Rib. Clerk.”
“Merry Ansel. Sixth Stair. Kept.”
“Ibbet Crane. Eighth Rib. Lantern Walk. Seventy-one.”
On and on. People he’d never met. People who’d been on the Drip forty years and whose hearts had stopped on the beat when the frost went out of them all at once. People the Gilt had fired on in the last hour, on the Collar, when the white light went out of the sky. People who’d been asleep in the Gallery of Faces when their faces went to ash. Six thousand two hundred and twelve.
He’d done it. Not on his own. But he’d sat in the chair. And they’d died.
“Yes,” said the voice. Gently. It never pretended. “They died. On the beat. Because the god woke. Because you let it. And four million didn’t. Both are true.”
“I know.”
“Then carve one.”
He went to the wall.
A woman at the near end looked up at him from her carving. Old. Belly-born. A long-timer’s grey-blue skin. She looked at him a moment, the way people did now. Then she held out her nail.
“I’ve got a list,” she said. “From the relay. I’ve done twelve. My hand’s gone.”
He took the nail.
She gave him the next name on her list. He carved it. It took him a long time. The bone was hard. He was bad at letters. He did it anyway, slowly, square and badly made, the way he’d written in the logbook.
BENNET HOLM. FIFTH SUMP. LINE F. DRIP 33 YEARS. HE WOKE.
He looked at it. The woman looked at it.
“Did he?” she said. “Wake? Before?”
He didn’t know. He’d never know. Somebody on the relay had said the name.
“Everybody woke,” he said. “On the beat. For a heartbeat. Everybody.”
She looked at the name for a long time.
“Then that’s true,” she said, and took her nail back, and went on.
Afterward he went to the foot of the first wall.
The old wall. Hesk’s wall. Under her name, where the bone of the floor met the bone of the wall, there was a shallow pocket, a hollow worn in the floor by people kneeling there to read. Sabine’s people had been kneeling there for years. It was smooth as the inside of a bowl.
He knelt in it.
He took the disc out of his pocket.
Clear as water. Thin. The size of a coin. It had been in the cylinder in the lab under the pump-house, in a palm-sized niche at heart height in his mother’s wall, with the seat-mark on its end. It had opened to his blood along a gold seam, and inside it a seed had glowed gold and spoken in his mother’s voice, and his father’s, and then gone dark. Spent. He’d carried it ever since. Through Kon’s Glasshouse and the Ninth and the Shelf and the neck and the Skull and the dreaming. In the jacket’s inside pocket, with everything else.
The seed was still in it. Very small. Smaller than a grain of marrow-dust. Dark now. A dark speck, in the exact center of the glass, like a pupil in a clear eye.
He didn’t know what it was.
She’d never said. We put the pattern back into you, she’d said. Nothing about this. He didn’t know if the speck in the glass was part of it. He didn’t know if it was a seed the way the fern had come from a seed, or a seed the way an idea was, or neither, or both. He didn’t know if his mother had made it out of something that grew, or out of glass and blood and four years of reading the god’s handwriting on a wall. She hadn’t had time to tell him. They’re on the road. We can see their light.
“Do you know?” he asked the hands.
“No,” said the voice. “We were never told. She made it after we stopped being the only ones listening. It’s hers.”
He held it up to the light of the bone.
Then he put it on the floor of the hollow and took the pommel of the knife from his belt and struck it, once, not hard. The way you’d crack a grey-cap shell.
The glass broke clean in two.
The dark speck lay in the hollow of one half. He tipped it out into his palm. It was so small he could barely see it. Hard. A grain. Lighter than anything he’d ever held.
Wick was at the cavern mouth with a bucket.
He’d gone back up to the Belly for it, without being asked, while Creed was carving. A bucket of marrow-dust. Not from anywhere. From the crack at the foot of the number-two pump on Line C, scraped out carefully round the edges with a spoon, a long way round from where the fern was. Orsa Pell had let him. She’d held the lamp.
“She said take it from the edge,” said Wick. “She said Hesk would want somebody to have some.”
He put the bucket down in the hollow at the foot of the wall.
Ollo came behind him with a can of water. From the Hollow. From the No. 1 pump on the basin dunes. He’d carried it up the switchback road and through the Breach. He didn’t say so. Creed knew anyway.
They filled the hollow with the dust from Hesk’s pump. Creed pressed a little pocket in the middle of it with his black thumb. He put the seed in. He closed the dust over it. Ollo poured the water, very slowly, a little at a time, so it wouldn’t wash the dust away. It soaked in. The dust darkened. Under the darkness, faintly, the bone glowed.
That was all.
They knelt at the foot of the Wall of Names, under Hesk’s name, under Ione’s and Aurel’s, and looked at a little patch of wet grey dust in a hollow in the floor.
“What’s it going to be?” said Wick.
“I don’t know.”
“She didn’t say?”
“No.”
Wick looked at the wet dust.
“How long does it take?”
“I don’t know.”
“The fern took —” Wick worked it out. “A hundred and forty days. Since the beat. If that’s when it started. Or thirty-one years. If it started with the rag.” He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about growing things.”
“Nobody does,” said Ollo. “Down here.”
“Sefa does.”
“Ask her,” said Creed.
Wick looked at him. Then he laughed, very tired, and wrote it down in the Kon tally-book. Ask Sefa about the seed.
It didn’t come up.
He went every day. In the morning, before Wick went round, and at night, after the council. He knelt at the foot of the Wall and looked at the patch of grey dust in the hollow under Hesk’s name. Ollo watered it from a can every morning. Sefa, on the relay, said: keep it damp. Not wet. Damp. And wait. Some things take a season. Some things take a year. Some things come up when they’re ready and not before. You can’t ask a seed to hurry. It doesn’t speak.
It didn’t come up.
The fern at the number-two pump uncurled. On the fourth day. He was there when it happened — not the moment, nobody saw the moment, but the morning it was done. The tight fist had opened into a frond, a single frond, flat and green and as long as his finger, divided down both sides into tiny leaves like the teeth of a comb. A second curl was coming up beside it.
People came from the Ribs to see it. From the Ninth, the Eighth, the Fifth. Down the cables and the spine-stair to the Belly, Mids who’d had ferns in pots in their flats all their lives, standing at the edge of the circle at Line C with their eyes stinging. Hedda Dorne came down from Lantern Walk on a cable-car with her kettle in a bag, because she said she wasn’t going anywhere without a kettle, and stood at the edge of the circle in her good coat and said, “Well, I never,” and stayed three days.
Nobody fenced it. Nobody guarded it. Haddon Rusk told people to watch their feet.
Nobody trod on it.
The seed at the Wall of Names didn’t come up.
“Maybe it’s not that sort of seed,” said Wick. On the ninth day, kneeling beside him. “Maybe it’s — I don’t know. Maybe it’s the other sort. The sort that’s in you.”
“Maybe.”
“Does that bother you?”
He thought about it.
“No,” he said. And found it was true.
He put his hand flat on the wet grey dust. He felt for it. The way he’d felt the fern without touching it. Something small. Something quiet. Wanting.
He couldn’t tell. It might have been there. It might have been the bone. It might have been his own blood, which glowed, and wanted, and was kind, and was enough.
“Not yet,” said the voice. Glass and ember. Very quiet. Almost amused. “That’s all. Not yet.”
He took his hand off the dust.
“Not yet,” he agreed.
Wick came back from the Fourth on the hundred and fifty-second day.
He came in on a crawler from the spine-stair foot with Fenn Arrowby and Varro and Orsa Pell and Senna Kade and the Line D woman, whose name was Tolly Calder, and eleven others who’d gone up, and he got down off the crawler at the edge of the Fall-Field and walked across to the Car and sat down on the step, where Joss Merrin had sat, and put his face in his hands.
Creed sat down beside him.
After a while Wick took his hands away from his face.
“I asked them,” he said.
“What did they say?”
Wick laughed. It wasn’t a good laugh, but it wasn’t a bad one either. “Mostly they said, what? Like I was mad. Like the first day. Then they said, Lord Reave keeps the lights on. Then I said, put your hand on the pipe. And they looked at me. And I said, go on, put your hand on the pipe. Not the junction. Just the pipe. Anywhere. Your own pipe, in your own flat.”
“And?”
“And the lamp came on,” said Wick.
He was quiet a moment.
“It’s not like they didn’t know,” he said. “They knew. Everybody’s hands glow. Everybody felt the beat. They knew they could. They just — nobody had asked them if they needed him. Everybody’d just — gone along. Because he was there. Because he was strong. Because he said safe and they’d been hearing safe from the Concord their whole lives and it sounded like the right word. Nobody’d asked.
“So I asked. Street by street. Seven days. And Orsa asked, and Fenn, and Tolly, and everybody. We just went round asking. Do you need him. And some people said yes. They did. Some people said, he keeps the Fourth quiet, there’s been no fighting, I like it quiet. And I wrote that down. I wrote all of it down.
“And most people said no.”
“And Reave?”
Wick looked at his hands.
“I asked him too,” he said. “At the end. I went to the big junction on the Fourth’s spine, where he stands. With the notebook. He’s — he’s very big. He’s got old channels all up his neck like a collar and the new blood under them and they glow both colors, blue and gold, and he could have put me through a wall. I was so scared I couldn’t feel my legs. And I asked him what was wrong.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, nothing’s wrong. He said, I’m keeping order. I said, the Fourth says it doesn’t need keeping. He said, it will. He said, you’ll see. He said, give it a year. When the grey-caps run short and somebody takes somebody’s water and there’s nobody to stop it. You’ll come back up here and ask me to keep it. Everybody will.”
Wick was quiet.
“And I didn’t know what to say,” he said. “Because he might be right. Lund said it always does. He might be right.”
Creed didn’t say anything.
“So I wrote it down,” said Wick. “I wrote down what he said. And I said thank you. And I came back down. And he’s still standing on the junction. Nobody’s paying him. Most of them. Some of them are. He’s still there.” He shook his head. “It’s not finished, is it. It’s not — it doesn’t finish.”
“No,” said Creed.
“You knew that.”
“I sat in a chair in the top of the world and a god told me,” said Creed. “It doesn’t finish. It just goes. Down, probably.”
Wick looked at him.
Then he laughed. Properly this time. Wet and cracked and helpless, the way he’d laughed into Teo’s book. “It’s a long way down,” he said.
“It’s a long way down.”
They sat on the step of the Car in the dusk. Over the Field, Teo’s lamp burned steady on its pole. Under it, Matthis Ferrin sat on his crate, and at the end of the long slab of Lumen-glass, Joss Merrin knelt with a lineman’s nail and carved, by the light of the lamp, one name and then the next. He’d done six hundred. He did them every night. Senna Kade came out and checked them every morning and didn’t say anything, and some mornings she brought him tea.
The Kept woman who’d named herself Asa came down the god on the hundred and fifty-third day.
She came on Fenn Arrowby’s crawler with her drawing-board strapped on her back, a long flat case under her arm, and her eyes gone almost wholly brown now, warm and dark, the last pale fleck at the very center of each iris like the last ice on a pond. She’d walked down from the Palate with the Kept who were taking the Gallery faces home, and come off the Seventh Stair at the Sixth and gone on alone, down the neck and the Collar and the ribs, drawing. Everything. She’d filled the case.
She found him at the foot of the Wall of Names, kneeling by the patch of dust that hadn’t come up.
She sat down beside him on the floor and opened the case and took out a drawing and gave it to him.
It was the crown.
The top of the god. The broken Skull, drawn from the Seventh Stair looking up, in soft black charcoal on Register paper — the long jagged suture-line where it had sundered, and the yellow light coming in through it. And beyond the yellow, at the very top of the drawing, where the charcoal stopped, she’d left the paper bare.
“What’s that?” he said. The bare part.
“I don’t know,” said Asa. Her voice was still strange. Flat and careful and new, like somebody walking on a floor they didn’t trust yet. But it moved. “I couldn’t see it. From the stair. You can only see the light. You can’t see what’s past it.” She looked at the drawing. “Fenn says the Lancers have flown up to the edge. Where it broke. He says from the edge you can see out. Past the god. All the way out.”
He looked at the bare white paper at the top of the drawing.
“He won’t tell me what it looks like,” said Asa. “He says he can’t. He says he tried to tell the Lancers who didn’t go and he couldn’t find the words and he went and sat down. Fenn Arrowby. He went and sat down.” She turned and looked at him with her almost-brown eyes. “I want to draw it. I want to see things and draw them. I told you that. In the Gallery.”
“You did.”
“Will you come?”
He looked at the patch of dust under Hesk’s name. Not yet. He looked at the drawing. The bare paper where the charcoal stopped.
“I’ll ask,” he said.
He asked.
He stood up in the Car at the end of the council on the hundred and fifty-fifth day, which he’d never done — he sat against the wall by the window, always, and didn’t speak unless someone asked him — and the Car went quiet.
“I want to go up,” he said. “To the crown. To the edge, where it broke. I want to see out.” He looked round. “I don’t want to go on my own. I’m asking who wants to come.”
Wick put his hand up first. He didn’t even look scared. He looked tired and grey and very much like a man who’d known for a hundred and fifty-five days that this was coming and had stopped arguing with it somewhere around the Seventh Stair.
“Obviously,” said Wick.
Ollo put his hand up. He didn’t say anything. He never did.
Sabine took her feet off the crate. She looked at him a long time.
“I’ve spent my whole life under bone,” she said. “In the Belly, and the Void, and the caverns. Telling people there was a sky, when I’d never seen it. And there is. And I haven’t looked at it yet. Not properly.” She put her hand up. “I’d like to look at it properly.”
On the relay from the Axis, very faint, a deep flat voice: Ilka Dorne. “Brann and I’ll meet you at the Collar. The Wheel-Kept are walking. Most of them. They don’t need carrying anymore.” A pause. “I told my mother I saw the sun. I’d like to actually look at it. Once. Without a Bell.”
And Brann’s voice behind hers, lighter, younger: “Tell Mirelle.”
“I already did,” said Wick, and held up the tally-book. “Relay to the pump-house. She’s coming up. She says she’s finished copying the wall. She says Ossian can have it. She says, wait for me at the Collar, I walk slow.”
Creed looked round the Car.
At Sabine, and Tamsin in her chair, and Hanne Dray and Ebbe Sallis and Senna Kade, Haddon Rusk and Orsa Pell, Fenn Arrowby and Varro. At Asa with her drawing-case on her knees. At the people standing at the back, who’d come in to listen, because nobody told them not to. At Wick, with his notebook. At Ollo.
“The rest of you,” he said. “Don’t wait. If we’re not back — we’ll be back. But don’t wait. Keep asking.”
“Received,” said Sabine.
He went to the Wall of Names one more time before they left.
The patch of dust under Hesk’s name was damp. Ollo had watered it that morning. Grey. Still. The bone faintly glowing under it.
Nothing.
He knelt by it anyway. He put his hand flat on it, gently, the way you’d put your hand on someone’s back while they slept.
“Not yet,” he told it.
Then he got up and went out of the cavern, and up the cavern-stair into the Belly, past Line C, where Hesk’s fern stood at the foot of the number-two pump in its crack in the bone, with three fronds now, green, open, nobody’s, and a thousand people had walked round it that day watching their feet. Orsa Pell was humming. He stopped a moment at the edge of the circle and listened.
Then he went on. Up. Toward the spine-stair, and the ribs, and the neck, and the light.
HESK’S REST
SPEAKER: MORAINE, W.
ASKED: 1,100+ (BELLY); 4,000+ (FOURTH)
MISSING LIST: 2,214
WALL OF NAMES: 1,906 OF 6,212
HALDEN GLASS: 4,611 OF 12,104 (MERRIN, J., CARVING)
LORD REAVE: STILL STANDING
HESK’S FERN: 3 FRONDS (UNGUARDED)
SEED: NOT YET
—