The bands went into the fire at the start of every shift.
Nobody worked shifts anymore. Not the old way. Not twenty on and four off, not horns, not quotas. But the body remembered, and the body woke at the hour it had always woken, already tired, and so the caverns had shifts anyway, of a kind. Loose ones. And at the start of the first, before the grey-cap stew was ladled out, before the farms were walked, before anything, Sabine Kettle’s crew took a scoop of chit-bands out of the pit in the first cavern and carried them down to the Press.
Creed went with them most mornings. He liked to watch.
The Press was in the fifth cavern down, in the mouth of one of the great foramina, where the cool air came up from the god’s roots strong enough to carry the smoke away. Sabine had built it out of what the scavengers dragged in from the Breach and what had come down the spine when the refinery fell — a grey avalanche of steel and marrow that had buried half of Sump-Twelve’s catwalks and given the Unbanded the best scrap pile in the history of the Belly. A furnace, made from a settling-vat’s bottom section, glowing. A crucible, made from the cap of a first-draw tank. A rolling mill, made from the rollers of a conveyor. And at the end of the line, the thing that gave the place its name: the head of a marrow press, the small kind, the kind from a pump gallery, salvaged out of the wreck and bolted to a frame of girders and driven by a hand-wheel that took two people to turn.
The bands went into the crucible. Grey steel. Scuffed. Dead displays. Crumpled from Sabine’s crimper. Kon Reclamation seals. Sump-Four, Sump-Six, Sump-Nine, Sump-Twelve. They lay in the crucible in a heap and the furnace roared under them and they went dull red, and then bright red, and then they slumped, all together, and ran, and were steel.
Not bands anymore. Just steel.
Then the rolling mill, and the cutting jig, and the Press. Thunk. A casing. Thunk. A slug. Rows of them, cooling on a rack of bone.
At the end of the rack stood a table, and at the table sat Ollo, with his one arm, filling them. Propellant from Sabine’s six-year hoard, measured in a little brass scoop he’d made himself. Then the slug, seated, crimped, with a single deep crushing squeeze of the crimp-handle that he’d learned to work against his chest. Click. Set it on the rack. Next. He did it the way he’d done everything on Line C: without talking, without stopping, without once looking up. He’d made four thousand rounds in three months.
“For the gold ones,” he’d said, the one time anybody asked him why he kept going after his hand had blistered. “And the white ones. Whoever needs them.”
The last step was Creed’s.
He sat down at the end of Ollo’s table, the way he did most mornings, with a tray of the finished rounds in front of him — a hundred, give or take — and cut his palm on the edge of the sword, and held his hand over the tray.
He didn’t let the blood fall, anymore. He’d learned better. He let it rise, the way Mirelle’s people did — a thin red thread lifting off his palm into the air — and then he split it. Thinned it. Sent it down in a hundred fine red threads into a hundred open casings, one drop to each, before Ollo seated the slugs. And in every casing, on the propellant, the drop of his blood hardened into a small crimson bead. Like a jewel. Like an ember at the bottom of a cup.
A hundred blood-rounds. Every morning.
It took a little out of him every time. He felt it go. A little of the warmth, a little of the strength, a little of the hunger satisfied by the last bowl of grey-cap stew. It went into the rounds and stayed there, and when he was done he sat back and the cavern swam for a moment and settled.
“You’re feeding them,” said Snake, from his chest. “Every morning. A hundred bits of you, going out the barrel.”
“They’re going to need them,” said Creed. Under his breath. He’d learned to talk to them under his breath. People stared less.
“And what are you going to need?”
He didn’t answer. He knew what Snake meant. He’d known for weeks.
He was hungry.
He’d been hungry since the third day after the refinery fell. The good kind of full — the Catalyst-full, the full he’d had on the catwalk and the anchorage platform and the pressing floor — had burned out of him in the first week, healing, and guiding, and kneeling on gallery floors with his palm on the back of one shaking neck after another. And there’d been nothing to fill it since. There was no Catalyst in the Void. The Unbanded had no channels to drain, and no tanks, and no first-draw. They had grey-caps, and dripping water, and each other.
The grey-caps kept his body alive. They didn’t touch the hunger.
He was thinner. He knew he was thinner. The crew-jacket hung on him the way it had hung on him the first day he’d put it on, in the pump-house, before the Hollow changed his shape. The scars on his hands had dimmed. He slept more than he wanted to. Sometimes, guiding someone’s blood through the last of the withdrawal, he’d feel the gold thread in the middle of him flicker — not flare, flicker — like a lamp running out of oil.
“Eight days,” said Wick.
Creed looked up. Wick was standing at the end of the table, the way he’d stood at the end of the stairs on the refinery dock. He had a slate in one hand and a pair of Gilt comm-plugs hung round his neck on a cord, and his chewed thumbnail at his mouth.
“Eight days to what?”
“To the freight schedule Ferrin sent.” Wick tapped the slate. “The Concord’s moving drums down from the Skull to the Tenth Works. That’s the new tempering station, on Rib Ten. They’re running Catalyst back up from there to the Mid Ribs on the old Terminus Six cable.” He looked at Creed. At his thin face. At his dim hands. “Eight days to the first full tank-run since the refinery. Four tanks. Tempered. Full.”
Creed looked at him for a long moment.
“You’ve been listening to them,” he said.
“I’ve been listening to them for six weeks,” said Wick. “Somebody had to.” He pulled one of the comm-plugs off the cord around his neck and held it out. “They talk about you a lot, you know. On their net. They call you the Anomaly. Sometimes the Belly Thing. One of the Gilt mercenaries on Rib Eight calls you that bastard who melts armor, which I think is my favorite.” He swallowed. “They’re scared, Creed. All of them. They don’t know what you are. And they really, really want to know where you are.”
Creed took the comm-plug and turned it over in his fingers.
“Eight days,” he said.
“Eight days.” Wick looked at the tray of blood-rounds on the table. At the cut on Creed’s palm, still slowly closing. “And you look like you’ve got about six.”
They were six thousand now. Tamsin said so, and Tamsin kept the count.
They had not stopped coming. The first wave had been the withdrawal-sick, in the days after the refinery fell — the ones who couldn’t bear the shaking and the screaming and the foremen with their lashes on lines that wouldn’t run. They’d come down the drainage cuts and through the jammed gate of the Breach by the hundreds. Then the wave had slowed, and changed. The ones who came now came because they’d heard. Not of the pit. Of the other thing. That down in the Void, past the Breach, in the hollow bones of the god, people were waking up.
He’d had to stop going to the galleries himself after the first month. There were too many of them. Too many shaking necks. So he’d taught it — the guiding, the walking-beside — to anyone who could learn it. Most couldn’t. A few could. Sabine could, a little, with her heat-hands. Mirelle could, much better, with the old rites she’d brought up out of the Hollow. And three or four of the long-time Discarded, the ones who’d been in the Void for years and whose frost was nearly gone, had found that if they sat beside a shaking person with a hand on their neck and thought about it hard enough, the shaking slowed. Not like it did for him. But enough.
So now there were guiders. Twenty of them. Who went up through the drainage cuts into the galleries, two by two, and came back with more.
Six thousand people. In the sacral caverns, and spilling over now into the deeper tunnels below — the coccyx, the tail-end of the god’s spine, a long twisting run of fused bone-chambers going down and down past the sacrum into the dark. Cooler down there. Damper. The grey-caps grew better. Tamsin had people farming every one of them, chamber after chamber, in beds of crumbled bone.
It still wasn’t enough.
He walked the farms in the afternoons. He couldn’t help it. He walked them the way Teo had walked to the anchorages once a week, to look at what he couldn’t fix. Bed after bed of grey-caps, pale and glowing faintly green, and between the beds, people. Kneeling. Tending. Picking. Thin. Every one of them thin.
They ate once a day. A bowl of stew. It had been twice, the first month.
Tamsin had a number for how long they could hold at once a day. She’d told him. He’d asked her not to tell anyone else.
“Three weeks,” said Snake. “Before it’s every other day. Then the old ones start going. Then the sick ones. You know how this goes. You’ve seen it on the line. Hour sixteen, the weak ones drop.”
“I know how it goes.”
“Then you know there’s only one place with food.”
He did. Up.
The Ribs had food. The Mid Ribs had provision counters and markets on every terrace and bread on every table, even now, even rationed, even with the Catalyst running thin and the lights going brown. The Higher Ribs had gardens under glass. And every crate of it was full of the frost. Every loaf. Every jar of sweet red. Every pale fruit.
He’d walked down Spindle Row with a paper sack of bread and felt the frost in it through the paper.
“Then we take it,” he said, under his breath, kneeling by a grey-cap bed, “and we clean it.”
“Can you?”
He didn’t know. He’d done it with spores. With heat. With the Catalyst in a lance-tip. He’d never tried to burn the frost out of a loaf of bread.
He put it on the list.
In the third cavern, by the Wall of Names, Mirelle was teaching.
He stopped at the edge of it and watched. He did that too. He liked to watch things he didn’t understand being done by people who did.
There were thirty of them sitting in a ring on the floor of the cavern, in the green light. Adults, all of them, Discarded and new-come both. Grey-faced, thin, bandless. And in the middle of the ring, cross-legged, with her bandaged hands in her lap and her bone mask set aside on the floor beside her, Cantor Mirelle.
She’d stopped wearing the mask, mostly, since she’d come down through the foramen. She wore it to sing the dead down at the Wall, when somebody went, and that was all. The rest of the time her face was bare. Young, younger than he’d thought in the chapel. Steady grey eyes. A thin pale scar through one eyebrow. She looked tired. Everyone looked tired.
“The first thing,” she was saying, “is not the cut. Everybody thinks it’s the cut. It isn’t. The cut is just a door. If you open a door and there’s nobody in the house, nothing comes out.” She lifted one bandaged hand. “The first thing is listening. You have to know your blood before you ask it for anything. You have to know what it sounds like when it’s asleep, so you’ll know what it sounds like when it wakes.”
“How do you know what it sounds like asleep?” said a man in the ring. Big. Long-time marrow-skin. Creed knew him — the long-timer from Lumbar Two who’d said you did this.
“You’ve heard it your whole life,” said Mirelle. “You just didn’t know it was a sound.” She closed her eyes. “Close yours. Put your hand on your chest. Feel your heart. Not the beat. Under the beat. Feel how it drags. How it’s a little slow. A little cold. Like something’s holding on to it.”
Thirty people closed their eyes and put their hands on their chests.
“That’s the frost,” said Mirelle softly. “That’s what they put in you. Most of you have less of it than you did three months ago. But it’s still there. You can feel it holding on.” A pause. “Now. Under the frost. Under the cold. Listen.”
Silence in the cavern. Water dripping, somewhere. The faint crackle of a fungus-stalk fire.
Creed felt them. Thirty hearts. Warm, thin-frosted, beating. And under the frost, in every one, the way it had been in Sabine’s and in the long-timers’, something else. Small. Restless. Moving. Like something under ice, pressing up.
The big long-timer from Lumbar Two made a sound. A small, startled breath. His eyes flew open.
“There’s something in there,” he said.
“Yes,” said Mirelle.
“It’s — it’s warm —“
“Yes.”
He stared at her. His hand was pressed flat to his chest, his big scarred fingers spread. “What is it?”
“You,” said Mirelle. “It’s you. It’s been there the whole time. It’s what the frost was for.” She opened her own eyes and looked around the ring. At all of them. “Everything else — the cutting, the shaping, the songs — comes later. Months. Years, for some of you. Some of you will never do more than warm your hands. That’s all right. That’s more than they ever let you have. But today, all I want is for you to know it’s there. That it’s yours. That nobody can take it out of you now.”
The big man looked down at his own hand on his chest. His face did something complicated. Then it crumpled, and he put his other hand over his eyes, and his shoulders shook.
Nobody in the ring said anything. Nobody looked away, either. They’d all seen it before. Most of them had done it.
Mirelle looked up and saw Creed at the edge of the cavern. She held his eyes for a moment. Then she nodded, very slightly, and went back to her ring.
In the second cavern, Sabine was teaching something else.
“Again,” she said.
Twelve Unbanded fighters stood in a line in the cavern’s open middle with blasting bars and pick-hafts and lengths of pipe. And across from them, in a line, twelve more, with lances. Real ones, now — Gilt lances, black, with Catalyst tips. Taken off the refinery dock, off the anchorage platforms, off the Gilt mercenaries who’d wandered too close to the Breach in the weeks since. The tips were dark. Drained. Creed had drained them himself, one by one, and the little fullness he’d got from each had lasted about a day.
“You’re a crew,” said Sabine. “Not a crowd. A crew. The Gilt fight like Gilt — fast, alone, trusting the rig. You can’t. You haven’t got a rig. You’ve got each other. So.” She pointed her two-fingered hand at the first fighter with a bar. “When the lance comes, you don’t block it. You step. And you —“ the fighter beside him, “— go under. And you —“ the next, “— go for the knee. Three of you. One lance. That’s the arithmetic. Again.”
They went again. Clumsy. Too slow. Better than yesterday.
Creed watched them, leaning on the wall.
They were going to die. Some of them. He knew it the way he knew the press cycle. Whatever they were going to do — whatever he was going to take them up into — some of the people in this cavern weren’t going to come back down from it, and he was going to have to carve their names on the wall.
“That’s war,” said Snake.
“I know what it is.”
“Do you? You’ve never been in one. You’ve been in fights. This is going to be different. This is going to be every day.”
He knew that too.
“There is another way,” said Lamp.
It was the first thing Lamp had said in two days. It came quietly. Thin, still, the way it had been since the crawlway — worn, tired. It had been quieter, all of it, since the pressing floor. Since its cold had locked his arm in the air above the young Gilt’s face. Since he’d told it don’t ever do that again. It hadn’t. It had hardly spoken at all. It was there, behind his eyes, cold and still and watching, and that was all.
“What way,” he said.
“You could go alone,” said Lamp. “Up. You do not need them to fight for you. You are faster than any of them. Stronger. You could go up the cables alone, quietly, and find the Head, and none of these people would have to die for it.”
“Ha,” said Snake. “And when he’s dead on a cable somewhere on Rib Six with a Warden’s hand in his chest — what then? Who feeds them? Who heals them?”
“Their own blood,” said Lamp. “As it wakes.”
“In three years. In ten. They’ve got three weeks of grey-caps, Lamp.”
Creed listened to them. He’d been listening to them for three months. They’d been like this since the refinery — not shouting, not pulling, just this. Low, constant. Like the two of them were circling something, each waiting for the other to step wrong.
He thought about going alone. Up. Quiet.
He thought about the pit of bands. The Wall of Names. The six thousand.
“No,” he said. “They already know where the food is. They already know who has it. If I go up alone, they’ll go up anyway, after me, without me. And it’ll be worse.” He watched Sabine’s crew go again — step, under, knee. “Better I’m there.”
Lamp said nothing.
But he felt something from it. Not argument. Not the cold flare of alarm. Something slower. Like a weight being set down on one side of a scale, and the other side lifting, just a little.
Wick’s post was a ledge high up on the wall of the fourth cavern, the great one, near the top, where somebody had cut a little alcove into the bone back in the first weeks. You reached it by a ladder made of lashed pick-hafts that swayed when you climbed it. Wick had been terrified of it for the first month. Now he went up and down it twenty times a day without thinking.
He’d built the post out of what he’d taken off the refinery dock. Three Gilt comm units, ripped out of dead armor, their housings cracked open and their guts wired together with copper from the emitter-spool Creed had given him. A Concord relay chip Tamsin had pried out of a dock office slate. A long thin aerial, run up the cavern wall and out through a crack in the bone toward the basin, toward the Breach, toward the god’s spine and the cables, where the Concord’s net ran.
And Wick, sitting cross-legged in the middle of it all, with the comm-plugs in his ears and his chewed thumbnail at his mouth, listening.
Creed climbed the pick-haft ladder at the end of the day and sat down on the ledge beside him.
From up here, you could see the whole of the great cavern. The fires. The pallets. The thousands of people settling down for the night that wasn’t a night, in drawer-sized spaces, curled. Somewhere below, somebody was humming. Not the Long Way Down. Something else. Some old work song.
Wick took one plug out of his ear. “They’re moving Gilt to Rib Eight,” he said. “Another two hundred. Mercenaries, mostly. Kon’s old company, bought up. Marchetti’s paying them in Catalyst.” He paused. “That’s what they’re calling it now, on the net. Pay. They pay them in channel-grade. Like it’s money.”
“It is money,” said Creed. “Up there.”
“I suppose.” Wick turned the plug over in his fingers. “There’s a new voice on the net. Since a week ago. They call him Prior. He doesn’t talk much. When he does, everybody goes quiet.” He looked at Creed. “That’s him, isn’t it. The one from the Hollow. The one who —“
“Yes.”
Wick was quiet for a long moment.
“He’s with Marchetti,” he said. “Working for her. On something. They don’t say what on the open net. But there’s a lot of traffic about samples. And the slab.” He swallowed. “And about you. He talks about you like —“ He stopped. “Like you’re his.”
Creed looked out at the cavern. At the fires.
“I’m not,” he said.
“I know you’re not,” said Wick. “I just thought you should know he thinks you are.” He put the plug back in his ear. Then, after a moment, took it out again. “Creed.”
“Mm.”
“Eight days.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean —“ Wick hesitated. He looked down at the cavern. “You’re going to take people. Up the cable. For the tanks.”
“Yes.”
“Take me.”
Creed looked at him.
“Not to fight,” said Wick. Quickly. “I’m not — I know what I’m good at and it’s not that. I hit one Gilt with a pipe once and I didn’t sleep for a week. But the tanks are on a freight capsule, and freight capsules talk to the terminus on the net, and if somebody’s on the net when you hit it —“ He tapped one of the cracked comm units. “I can make it say everything’s fine. For a while. Long enough.”
Creed looked at him for a long time. At his thin face, his shaved head, his chewed thumbnail. At the comm-plugs. At the alcove full of stolen, rewired, cracked-open Gilt guts that he’d built with his own hands in six weeks because somebody had to.
“You’d have to be close,” Creed said. “On the cable. With me.”
“I know.”
“You’d be terrified.”
“I’m terrified now,” said Wick. “I’m terrified all the time. I’ve been terrified since the first day I was born in a crèche in Sump-Nine and some foreman put a band on me. I might as well be terrified somewhere useful.”
Creed almost smiled. He was too tired to finish it. But it was there.
“Eight days,” he said.
“Eight days.” Wick put the plug back in his ear. “Go and sleep. You look terrible. I mean it. You look like Hesk at hour nineteen.”
He didn’t mean anything by it. Creed knew he didn’t. It was just a thing people said, in Sump-Nine. You look like hour nineteen. Everybody said it.
But it went into him anyway, and stayed there, cold, as he went back down the swaying ladder.
He didn’t sleep. He meant to. He went to the third cave, where he slept on a pallet against the wall by the Wall of Names because nobody else would sleep there, and he lay down, and closed his eyes, and the hunger sat in him like a stone.
After a while he got up again.
There was a woman on a pallet near the mouth of the third cave who’d come down the drainage cuts that afternoon from Sump-Twelve. Old. Older than Fisk. She’d been taking three tabs at hour sixteen for twenty-two years, and her frost was thick, and the withdrawal had her badly. He’d felt her heart from across the cavern all evening — stuttering, racing, slowing. The guiders had worked on her. Mirelle had worked on her. It hadn’t been enough.
He knelt down beside her.
She was awake. Shaking. Her eyes were open and wet and looking at nothing. Her heart, under his hand when he laid it on her chest, was a mess of cracking frost and thrashing warmth, and the warmth didn’t know where to go, and the frost was holding on.
He opened his jacket. He didn’t know why — it was hot, maybe, by the fire, or maybe he just wanted to feel the air on the scars. He cut his palm and laid it on the back of her neck and went in.
It was hard. She was so old, and so frosted, and so tired. Her blood fought him the way Garrow Fisk’s had, on the first day. Refused, and refused. He went beside it, and went beside it, and showed it, and showed it, the way Hesk had stood beside him at the wall his first week. Let it fall. And slowly, so slowly, the old woman’s blood began to follow.
He felt it cost. He felt it come out of the middle of him. Out of the gold. The thread flickered. Dimmed. He kept going.
Her heart steadied. Her breathing slowed. Her eyes, which had been looking at nothing, found his face, and stayed there.
“Oh,” she said. Just like the young woman in Lumbar Two. Just like everyone. As if somebody had told her a thing she’d always known.
He took his hand away. He sat back on his heels. The cavern swung around him, and he put his hand flat on the floor to stop it.
Somebody was standing behind him.
He knew who it was before he turned. He knew her heart. Steady, young, almost no frost at all — the Hollow bleeders had been cutting the frost out of themselves for generations, and Sere’s drops of first-draw had burned out the rest. And something else in it. Something that had been in it since the chapel. A tightness. A held breath.
“Cantor,” he said.
Mirelle didn’t answer.
He turned. She was standing a meter behind him in the green light, with her bandaged hands at her sides, and she wasn’t looking at the old woman. She wasn’t looking at his face.
She was looking at his chest.
At the open jacket. At the scars. Hundreds of them, fine and dark, glowing faintly ember-red. And among them, over his heart, a little to the left of center, the one mark on his body that didn’t glow at all.
It was pale. Old. Older than the scars, older than the Hollow, older than anything. He’d always had it. A small, faded, silvery mark on the skin over his heart, the size of a thumbprint, like an old burn that had healed smooth. Everybody in the stack had marks. Burns, cuts, gallery scars, crèche scars. He’d never once thought about his.
Mirelle had gone white.
Not pale. White. The color of the bone around them. Her lips were parted. Her bandaged hands, at her sides, had started to shake.
“Where,” she said. Her voice came out wrong. Thin. “Where did you get that.”
“Get what?”
She didn’t answer. She came forward, slowly, the way the greylings had come out of the pipe-forest, and knelt down beside him on the cavern floor, and reached out with one bandaged hand — slowly, so slowly, the way she’d reached for the grooves of the sword on the chapel floor — and laid one fingertip on the pale mark over his heart.
Then she traced it.
A curl. A hook. And a long line, running down, and down, and splitting at the end into three.
He’d never looked at it. Not properly. Not once. He looked now, down at her fingertip moving on his skin, and understood what she was tracing, and the whole of the third cave went very quiet and very far away.
He’d seen it before. Twice.
Once carved large on the wall of an empty niche in the Wright sanctum, above a clean stone seat where nobody sat.
And once at the base of the blade on his back, by the guard, where he’d crimped the emitter’s feed wire into the groove.
“It’s a birthmark,” he said. His voice sounded strange to him. “I’ve always had it.”
“It isn’t,” said Mirelle. “It isn’t a birthmark.” She took her fingertip away. Her hand was shaking so badly she had to hold it with her other hand. “It’s sung. Somebody sang that into you. Before you were born. That’s a seat-mark. That’s — the old songs have a verse for it. Nobody’s sung it in three hundred years. Nobody even knows the —“ She stopped. Her grey eyes came up to his face. “Creed. Who was your mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your father?”
“I don’t know. Nobody in the stack knows. You come out of the crèche at fifteen and they give you a band and a drawer and that’s all.” He was looking at her face. At the white of it. “Mirelle. What is it. What do you know?”
She didn’t answer.
She turned her head, slowly. Away from him. Toward the Wall of Names, glowing faintly in the green light, covered from the floor to as high as anyone could reach with the blocky letters of ration chits.
Her eyes went along the lines. Down the wall. To a place near the top, near the beginning, where the letters were cut deep and clean, by a blade that would cut anything.
HESK. LINE C. NO. 2 PUMP. 31 YEARS.
She looked at it for a long time.
Creed watched her look at it. And something in him — something very old, very cold, very far down, in deep water — turned over.
“Mirelle,” he said.
She stood up. Quickly. Too quickly. She took a step back from him, and then another.
“Not here,” she said. Her voice was steady again. Almost. “Not now. I need to be sure. I need —“ She swallowed. “There are things I have to remember properly. Things my grandmother sang to me. I need to get them right. I can’t tell you this wrong.”
“Tell me what?”
“Eight days,” said Mirelle. “You’re going up the cable in eight days. Go. Take your tanks. Feed them.” She looked at the old woman on the pallet, sleeping now, peaceful, her heart steady. At the cavern. At the thousands beyond. “Feed yourself. You look like you’re dying. And when you come back down —“ She stopped. Her eyes went once more to the Wall. To the name near the top. “When you come back down, I’ll sing you something. And then I’ll tell you.”
She turned and walked away, fast, out of the third cave, into the passage, and was gone.
Creed knelt on the cavern floor beside the sleeping woman, with his jacket open and his hand over the pale mark on his heart.
He could feel it under his palm. It didn’t glow. It never had. It was just there, smooth and faded and silvery, where it had always been.
He’d never once asked about it.
He’d never once asked about anything.
“Lamp,” he said. Very quietly.
Behind his eyes, the cold was absolutely still.
“Did you know?”
A long, long silence.
“Go to sleep, Creed,” said Lamp at last. And it was not Have them, this time. It was not Rest. It was something else. It was almost gentle. “In eight days you will need everything you have. Go to sleep.”
He didn’t sleep. He sat against the Wall of Names all night, under the blocky letters, with his hand over his heart, and he looked up at the name near the top. HESK. That he’d carved himself, with the point of a sword, because he’d never known her other name.
He thought about a woman at the next pump, for nine years. Humming. Always the same tune. Low, and wandering, and going down, and down, and down.
Looking for the bottom of something.
In his chest, for the first time since he’d known it, Snake didn’t say a single word all night. It just lay there, coiled around his heart. Warm. Very still. As if it were listening to the same thing he was.
As if it were waiting to find out too.