The second time was worse.
He’d thought it would be easier. He knew the crawlways now. He knew the heat, and the rungs, and the missing rungs, and the places near the third hatch where the jacket had corroded through and you could see out into the gulf through a hole the size of a fist. He knew the sound of the sludge in the pipe — thinner now, slower, a fraction of what it had been, since the refinery fell and half the galleries in the Belly had stopped pumping. He knew how to cool a person who was cooking, with the thread of cold behind his eyes.
But the thread of cold was thinner too. And he was hungry. And there were nineteen people climbing behind him instead of forty-one, and every one of them was someone he’d watched train in the second cavern, every one of them someone whose name he knew.
He climbed. He cooled them when they needed it. Every time, it cost.
Behind him, two rungs down, Wick climbed with a pack on his back full of rewired Gilt comm guts, and talked. Not loudly. Under his breath. Constantly. About the heat, and the rungs, and the drones, and how he was absolutely not going to scream this time, he’d decided, he’d practiced not screaming in the fourth cavern for a week, Sabine had thrown things at him from behind to test it.
“Did it work?” said Creed, around the second hatch.
“No,” said Wick. “But she ran out of things to throw.”
Below them, Sabine laughed. A gravel-slide, echoing up the crawlway.
They came out at the hatch level with the Tenth Rib, nine hours up, in what passed for night. Not the platform at the anchorage; Tamsin had said no. The Concord had put Gilt on every anchorage platform below the Mid Ribs since the refinery, she said, and lamps, and drones that didn’t crawl but flew — little things like the crawlway drones, with rotors, that hung in the air near the cables and watched.
So they came out on the spine itself.
On the bare bone. On the outside of the god’s backbone, between the pipe column and nothing, where the old maintenance ladders ran up the vertebrae in rusting zigzags that nobody had climbed in thirty years. Tamsin found them. She’d climbed them, she said, in her eleven years on the cable crews — not these ones, but ones like them, on the Eleventh — and she went out of the hatch first, onto the first rung, with the gulf opening under her, and didn’t look down, and didn’t hesitate, and the rest of them followed.
Creed went last. He watched every one of them go out of the hatch onto the bare spine. Every one of them looked down. Every one of them went anyway.
The ladders went up. Three hundred meters, in zigzags, past the root of the Tenth Rib and its anchorage claws — lit, guarded, he could feel the Gilt hearts on the platform, eight of them, bored, frosted, channel-bright — and up, in the dark, between the pools of lamplight, to a place on the spine where something was bolted to the bone.
The sheave-house.
Tamsin had drawn it for them in the dust of the fourth cavern a dozen times. Now he saw it. A box of black steel the size of a dock office, bolted to the outside of a vertebra with clamps as thick as his body. Out of the bottom of it, and out of the top, ran a cable. Not a primary — thinner, a freight cable, the kind the capsules rode. It came up out of the dark below from the Tenth Works, and went into the bottom of the sheave-house, and came out the top, and went on up into the dark toward the Mid Ribs. Inside the box, Tamsin said, the cable ran over a wheel. A great grooved wheel, three meters across, that changed the cable’s angle as it went up the curve of the spine. Every capsule on the Terminus Six line passed through it. Every one slowed, going over the wheel.
And on the side of the sheave-house, a little door. And beside the door, a junction box, grey, with a thick bundle of wires running out of it along the cable and up toward the Mid Ribs and down toward the Tenth Works.
“Comms,” said Tamsin. “Every sheave-house is a relay. Every capsule that goes through talks to the terminus through the box.”
Wick looked at the junction box for a long time.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, I can do that.”
They waited eleven hours.
The capsule was due at the start of what Concord schedules called the second watch. Ferrin’s freight timetable said so. Wick’s six weeks on the net said so. Tamsin, with a slate full of numbers and her thin precise face blank with concentration, said so. Four tanks, tempered, full, out of the Tenth Works, up the Terminus Six cable, through the sheave-house, to the Mid Ribs.
So they waited, hanging off the spine. Some of them inside the sheave-house, wedged in among the wheel housing and the brake-gear, in the dark, in the hum of the cable. Some of them outside, on the ladders, clipped on with blasting-crew harness. Sabine’s four blasters on the brake. Wick on the junction box, with its grey cover off and his Gilt guts spread out on a ledge of bone beside him, plugs in his ears, listening.
Creed sat on the top of the sheave-house, on the black steel roof, with his legs hanging over the edge and the sword across his knees, and looked up.
From here, so much higher than the Belly, he could see the Mid Ribs. The cities on their cables. Their windows.
They were dimmer.
Not dark. Not like the night the refinery fell, when whole districts had gone out and come back slowly. But dimmer. The warm orange he remembered from Halden was brown now, more brown than orange, the windows like coals instead of lamps. Here and there, a whole section of a city was dark. Not flickering. Just dark.
The Concord was rationing.
Somewhere up there, in Halden, on Spindle Row, in Block Nine, an old man with a glass eye was sitting at a table by a window that faced the wrong way, with less light than he’d had three months ago. Because of him.
“Because of them,” said Snake. “They’re the ones rationing. You just broke the tap.”
“Teo doesn’t know that,” said Creed.
“Teo doesn’t need to.”
He looked up past the Mid Ribs. The Higher Ribs were still bright — white-gold, sparse, the cities spaced far apart. The Concord had taken the light from the bottom first. Of course they had.
And above them, the Skull. Unchanged. Pouring its light down out of the god’s eyes, the way it always had.
He looked at it for a long time. He’d stopped counting the seconds. He just looked.
“Creed.” Wick’s voice. From below, at the junction box. Low. Fast. “Creed. It’s coming. They just called it.”
He heard it before he felt it. The cable began to hum.
Not the steady hum it had made all through the eleven hours. A deeper sound. A load sound. The sound of something heavy coming up the line from below, pulling the cable taut, making it sing. The whole sheave-house shivered with it under him, and the great wheel inside began, slowly, to turn.
Wick had the plugs pressed into his ears with both hands. His face, in the light of the junction box’s little status lamp, was grey. His lips were moving. Creed slid down off the roof onto the ladder beside him.
“— six-four, Tenth Works terminus, confirm departure and load,” said a voice, tinny, faint, from one of the cracked comm units on the ledge. Wick had rigged a speaker so they could all hear. “Six-four, confirm.”
A pause. Then another voice, closer, from the cable below — the capsule. Rough. Bored. Gilt. “Terminus, six-four. Departed on schedule. Four tanks, channel-grade, sealed. Six escort. One Lancer observer. Twelve crates provisions, Rib Eight allocation. Two crates Somnoline, Rib Nine line allocation. Ascending.”
“Copy, six-four. Next check at Sheave Three.”
Wick looked up at Creed. His eyes were enormous.
“Sheave Three,” he whispered. “That’s us. They check in here.”
“You knew that.”
“I knew it, I didn’t know it —“
The cable sang. The wheel turned. Below them, in the dark, a light was coming up the spine. Swinging slightly. Getting bigger.
“Sabine,” said Creed.
“Ready.” From inside the sheave-house, by the brake-gear. Calm. “On your word.”
“Tamsin.”
“Ready.”
The light came up out of the dark.
It was a capsule like the one that had taken him up to Gildmark, but bigger. Longer. A steel cylinder slung under a trolley that rode the cable, with a cage of girders welded around it. And slung under the cylinder, in a cradle of steel straps, four tanks. Great round sealed tanks, each as tall as a man, each with a single glass sight-port in its side, and through every sight-port, a light.
Blue. Tempered. Bright. Clean. Steady.
He felt it before the capsule was fifty meters below him. Four tanks of tempered Catalyst, coming up the cable toward him in the dark. He felt it the way he felt hearts — but bigger. So much bigger. Like four suns. Like four of Kon’s gardens. Like the first bite of the pale fruit in Halden, so sweet it hurt. The hunger in him, which had been sitting in his middle like a stone for three months, woke. All at once. It came up through him so hard his hands shook on the ladder.
“Oh,” said Snake. Low. Shaking too. “Oh, mule. Oh, look at that.”
On top of the capsule’s girder-cage, on a little railed platform, there were people. Six of them in gold. Gilt. And one in silver.
“Six-four, Sheave Three check,” said the terminus voice, from the speaker on the ledge.
The capsule was thirty meters below. Slowing, as the cable began to curve over the wheel.
Wick pressed the button on the side of a cracked Gilt comm unit with a trembling thumb and spoke into it.
“Sheave Three, six-four, check,” he said. His voice was — not his voice. Rougher. Lower. Bored. The Gilt voice from the capsule, near enough that Creed had to look twice at Wick to be sure it was him. “All nominal. Proceeding.”
A pause. The cable sang.
“Copy, six-four.”
Wick let go of the button. He looked at Creed. He looked like he was going to be sick.
“Now,” said Creed.
Sabine’s crew threw the brake.
Not the sheave-house’s brake. A brake of their own, that they’d spent four hours of the eleven building inside the sheave-house in the dark, out of girders and blasting-cable and a pair of shaped charges set precisely, by a woman who’d set ten thousand. The charges went off with two flat cracks inside the steel box, and something in the wheel housing jammed — a girder driven into the spokes of the great grooved wheel, at an angle, wedged — and the wheel stopped.
The cable didn’t.
Not at once. The cable kept moving up from below for a meter, two meters, three, pulled by the winding-gear at the top of the line — and then, at the wheel, it caught. Locked. Shrieked. The sound of it was like the press jamming, ten times over, and the whole sheave-house shuddered on its clamps, and the vertebra under it shuddered with it, and for an instant Creed thought they’d brought the whole thing down off the spine.
And the capsule, twenty meters below, slammed to a stop.
The tanks swung forward in their cradle. The girder-cage rang like a bell. On the railed platform on top, the six Gilt and the silver figure were thrown off their feet, sprawling, grabbing at the rails.
Creed went down the cable.
He didn’t climb. He jumped off the ladder onto the cable itself, where it came out of the bottom of the sheave-house, and caught it in both hands, and slid. The way he’d slid down the marrow line. Down the taut singing carbon cable, twenty meters, in the dark, with the gulf under him, his palms smoking. He hit the top of the trolley and let go and dropped onto the railed platform among the sprawling Gilt with the sword already in his hand.
The Gilt were getting up. Fast. They were good — they’d been thrown, and they were already rolling, coming up onto their knees, grabbing for their lances. Their channels flared in his blood-sense, bright and cold and full.
He didn’t have time to do it gently.
He went through the first one with the sword, and the channels burst, and the blue fire went up through the plate. He put his hand on the breastplate of the second and stopped him, and he fell. The third got a lance up, and the fourth, together — the way Sabine had taught her crews, two at once — and the platform was narrow, and swaying, the capsule rocking under them on the locked cable, and he couldn’t step, there was nowhere to step to.
So he went over.
He went up onto the railing and over the lances, the way he’d gone over the gap at the Root Gallery — and he came down on the other side of them and put the sword through the fourth from behind, and the burst lit the whole platform blue, and the third turned, and Creed caught his lance just behind the tip with his bare hand.
And pulled.
The Catalyst came. He’d forgotten. Three months. He’d forgotten what it was like. It came up the haft into his palm, cold and tame and bright, and his blood took it — took it — like a drowning man taking air, and woke it, and swallowed it, and the hunger in his middle that had been a stone for three months cracked open and drank.
He didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. It was like the first bite of the fruit. It was like the fullness on the catwalk at Sump-Nine. He pulled the Gilt’s channels dark from the hands up and kept pulling, and there was nothing left in the channels, and there was the warm thing under them, the red thing —
“Enough.”
Lamp. Thin. Tired. Clear.
He let go.
The Gilt fell, limp, channels black, heart beating.
Creed stood on the swaying platform, breathing hard, with the Catalyst roaring in him. Not full. Not nearly. One Gilt’s worth. A sip. But after three months, a sip was the whole world. His scars were lit. His hands were steady. The gold thread in the middle of him had stopped flickering.
Two Gilt left. And the silver one.
The two Gilt were already going over the railing. Down. Onto the girder-cage around the tanks, climbing, scrambling, getting away from him — he let them go. They wouldn’t go far. The capsule was locked on the cable, twenty meters below the sheave-house, three hundred meters above the Tenth Rib, with nothing below it but the gulf.
The silver one didn’t run.
It was a woman, or he thought so from her height. Tall, narrow, in armor that wasn’t plate. It was scale. Hundreds of small overlapping silver scales, like a fish in a picture, each one polished so bright it threw back the blue of the tanks’ sight-ports below. A helm, silver, smooth, with a narrow eye-slit like the Gilt’s but finer. And no lance. In her right hand she held something shorter — a staff, as long as his arm, silver, with a head like an open flower made of metal petals, and in the center of the flower, a light. Blue. Hot. Pulsing.
She’d gotten up off the platform when the others had. She’d watched him. She’d watched him go through the Gilt. She’d watched him pull the third one dry with his bare hand. And she hadn’t run.
She stood at the far end of the platform with her flower-staff leveled at him and said, through a grille, in a voice that was very calm and very cold: “Lancer-observer Quill, Second Rib. Anomaly sighted. Sheave Three, Terminus Six. Engaging.”
She wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to something in her helm.
He felt it then. The channels in her. Not crude, like the Gilt’s. Not expensive and fine, like Kon’s. Something in between — dense, hard, efficient, every line laid exactly, built for one thing. And all of them running toward her right arm. Toward the staff. Toward the flower.
She fired.
The petals of the flower snapped open wide and the light in the center of it came out in a bolt — not a ball, like the Gilt captain’s roaring throw, but a bolt, narrow and fast and blinding, white-blue, straight at his chest. He barely got the sword up. The bolt hit the flat of the blade — not the edge, the flat — and the sigils ate it, the light running down the grooves and turning crimson and pouring into the hilt, into his hand, into him, and he staggered back against the railing with the impact of it, so hard the railing bent.
She fired again. And again. Fast. One bolt after another, crack, crack, crack, and he caught them on the blade, the edge, the flat, and every one went into the grooves and down into him, and every one hit like a pick-swing to the chest, and he was being driven back along the platform toward the edge — full, getting fuller, the Catalyst from her bolts pouring into him faster than he could burn it —
“Take it,” said Snake. Breathless. Laughing. “She’s feeding you! She’s feeding you, the fool, take it, take it —”
He took it. He couldn’t not. Every bolt she fired, the sword ate, and he drank. His scars were blazing now. Red-gold, through the crew-jacket, through his coat. He could feel the light coming off him. He could see it reflected in her silver scales.
She saw it too. He felt her heart stutter.
She stopped firing.
They stood at opposite ends of the swaying platform, the capsule rocking under them, the cable singing, the four tanks glowing blue below. Her flower-staff was smoking. Its petals were half-closed, its center dim. She’d emptied herself into him. He could feel her channels, through the air between them — low now, depleted, cold.
He took a step toward her.
And Lancer-observer Quill, Second Rib, did something he didn’t expect.
She saluted.
A small motion. The flower-staff raised, the head of it touched once to the brow of her silver helm. The way Mirelle had bowed over the slab. The way Kon’s captain had dropped his lance.
Then she went over the railing.
Not down onto the girder-cage, like the Gilt. Out. Into the gulf. He lunged for her and missed, and she fell, a flash of silver in the dark — and twenty meters down, something on her back snapped open. Wings. Not wings — a frame, a kite, silver fabric on silver rods, spreading wide, catching the air. And she swung. Out from the capsule in a long falling arc, across the gulf, toward the anchorage platform on the Tenth Rib, where the eight bored Gilt hearts he’d felt on the way up were no longer bored at all.
She landed on it. Rolling. Up.
Gone.
“Ha,” said Snake, after a long moment. Almost admiring. “I like her.”
“She has seen you,” said Lamp. Very quietly. “She has seen what you do to their weapons. She will tell them.”
“I know,” said Creed.
He looked down at the tanks.
They had perhaps fifteen minutes. Tamsin said so, through the comm on Wick’s ledge, her voice tinny and precise. Fifteen minutes before the winding-gear at the top of the line overheated against the locked wheel and somebody up there thought to send a crew down to look, and fifteen minutes, now, before Lancer-observer Quill’s eight Gilt on the Tenth Rib anchorage got their own lances and their own kites and came up the spine.
Sabine’s crew came down the cable. Two of them, on harness, with blasting-cable and cutting charges. And four of the fighters, with lances, onto the girder-cage, where the two Gilt who’d climbed down onto it were clinging, terrified, and threw down their lances as soon as they saw them coming.
Creed went down onto the girder-cage too. Down among the tanks.
They hung in their cradle of steel straps below the capsule, four of them, side by side. He put his hand flat on the side of the nearest, by the sight-port, on the cold steel.
And felt.
So much. So much. Tempered Catalyst, sealed in steel, packed tight, bright, cold, tame. More than in a hundred Gilt. More than in Kon. He could feel the frost in it, too — the tempering, the sleep, laced all through it like threads of ice through water. But under the frost, the blue. The god’s blood. The thing that had come into him on the slab and nearly killed him and then made him.
“All of it,” said Snake. Barely a whisper. “You could take all of it. Right now. Through your hand. And you’d never be hungry again.”
He believed it. He could feel how it would go. He’d pull it out of the tank through the steel, the way he’d pulled it out of a lance-haft, and it would come, all of it, and it would fill him, and keep filling him, and he would be —
What would he be?
He didn’t know. That was the thing. He’d been full, on the catwalk at Sump-Nine, and he’d knelt on the grating with his hands in a man’s face. He’d been full on the pressing floor, and his arm had locked in the air above a terrified young man with a mother on Rib Nine. He knew what one Gilt’s worth did to him. He didn’t know what a whole tank would do.
“Lamp,” he said.
“I am here,” said Lamp. Faint.
“How much.”
A long pause.
“Half a tank,” said Lamp at last. “Perhaps. If you take it slowly. If you burn the frost out as it comes, and do not let it settle in you. Half a tank, and you will be well for a month. More, and —“ It stopped. “More, and I do not know.”
“Ha,” said Snake. “He doesn’t know. Did you hear that? He doesn’t know. First honest thing he’s said in three months.”
Creed closed his eyes. He kept his hand on the tank. And he pulled.
Slowly.
He pulled the Catalyst through the steel of the tank and into his palm in a thin, steady stream. Not the rush he’d taken off the Gilt. A thread. And as it came into him, before it could settle, before it could reach his blood and touch the frost there and spread, he did what Lamp had said. He burned the frost out of it. Turned it. The way he turned spores. The way he’d turned the heat back out of the sword in the pump-house. The tempering came out of the Catalyst as it entered him, and burned away into nothing, and what was left was blue. Woken. Wild. Clean.
The god’s blood. Awake.
It was the best thing he had ever felt.
He felt the sight-port on the tank dim, slowly, as the level dropped. A quarter. A third. He felt himself fill, slowly, steadily, the way the pump-house had filled with air when he took off the mask, the way the cup of grey-cap stew had filled him in the third cave. Not the drowning rush of the Gilt. Something deeper. Steadier. The scars on his body glowed, not blazing, just lit, all of them, evenly, red-gold, the way a city’s windows are lit at night. The hunger that had been a stone in him for three months went quiet. Not filled. Fed.
And the gold thread in the middle of him burned steady and bright.
“Enough,” said Lamp. Softly.
The sight-port was at half. He let go.
He stood on the girder-cage under the capsule, with his hand flat on the half-empty tank, and opened his eyes, and the world was very sharp. He could feel every heart on the cable. Every Gilt on the Tenth Rib platform, three hundred meters below. Every one of the Unbanded on the ladders and in the sheave-house above. Wick, at the junction box, his heart going like an emitter. He could feel the cable humming. He could feel the spine.
“Better,” said Snake. Grudging. “Not what you could have had. But better.”
He didn’t answer. He felt better than better. He felt awake.
They couldn’t take the tanks. Not all of them. Not up the crawlways, not down the spine, not with fifteen minutes and a Lancer on the anchorage. Tamsin had known that from the start. So had Sabine.
So they took what they could carry, and they dropped the rest.
Sabine’s crew cut two of the tanks loose from their cradle with shaped charges, one at a time. Before the cuts, they rigged each tank with a frame of blasting-cable and a canvas drogue Sabine had sewn in the fourth cavern out of crawler tarps. The tanks fell. Into the gulf, into the dark, the drogues snapping open above them, slowing them — not much, but enough — and they went down and down toward the Belly, toward the grey slope of wreckage at the foot of the spine where the refinery had fallen, where a crew of Unbanded under Ollo had been waiting for two days with lamps and ropes and a hand-cart.
Whether they’d land in one piece, nobody knew. Sabine thought maybe one would. Tamsin thought maybe one would. That was enough. One tank of Catalyst in the Belly was worth more than all the grey-caps in the caverns. Ferrin’s packet had said so. Wick’s net had said so. The Concord paid its mercenaries in it. Scavengers would trade for it. People in the Ribs would trade for it.
The third tank, Creed had half-emptied.
The fourth, they blew.
He did that. He went up onto the girder-cage when the others were clear and the two terrified Gilt had been sent up the cable to the sheave-house with their hands tied, and he put a blood-round into the fourth tank’s sight-port from three meters away.
He’d seen a blood-round go into first-draw. He’d never seen one go into tempered Catalyst.
It didn’t explode. Not the way first-draw did, all at once, white-blue and roaring. The red bloom of the blood-bead went off inside the tank, and the tempered Catalyst around it — woke. In a ring, spreading out from the bloom, the tame bright blue going wild and dark and roiling, the frost in it burning off in a hiss of white steam that came out of the sight-port in a jet. The whole tank shuddered in its straps. Its steel bulged. Glowed. And the woken Catalyst inside it, too wild now for the steel that had been made to hold it tame, simply — went through. Through the walls of the tank, the way the blade went through bone. The steel peeled open like the skin of a fruit, the way Sere’s vat had, and the blue came out, dark and wild, and fell into the gulf in a long glowing rope, down and down into the dark.
Burning as it went. Lighting the spine. Lighting the underside of the Tenth Rib. Lighting the faces of the Gilt on the anchorage platform, looking up.
“Oh,” said Snake. Very quietly. “Oh, it woke. You woke it. With a bullet.”
“Creed.” Tamsin, on the comm. “Eight minutes.”
The provisions were the last thing.
Twelve crates of them in the capsule’s hold, stamped RIB EIGHT ALLOCATION. Sabine pried the first one open with a blasting bar. Bread. Loaves of it, brown, round, packed in straw. The Mid kind. The kind he’d carried home in a paper sack along Spindle Row.
He could feel the frost in it from where he stood.
He knelt beside the crate. He cut his palm on the sword. And he laid his bleeding hand flat on the top loaf, and pressed down, and turned.
It wasn’t like spores. Or Catalyst. The frost in the bread wasn’t a living thing he could teach to burn, or a power he could drink. It was just in it — in every crumb, the way salt was in it, baked in. He reached for it, and found it, a fine cold crystalline web through the whole loaf, and he burned it.
The loaf smoked. The crust blackened under his palm. The smell of scorched bread came up sharp and sudden.
He lifted his hand. He broke the loaf open. Inside, it was — clean. He could feel it. No frost. None. Just bread. Hot, now, scorched at the edges, but bread.
One loaf. And he felt it cost him. Not much. A little. More than he’d have thought, for one loaf.
There were twelve crates. Three hundred loaves, maybe. More.
“You can’t,” said Snake. “Not loaf by loaf. Not for six thousand. You’ll burn yourself down to nothing doing it, and they’ll still be hungry.”
“Not me,” said Creed. He was looking at the scorched loaf in his hands. “Not just me.”
He thought about Mirelle’s ring. Thirty people, hands on their chests, feeling the warm thing under the frost. He thought about Sabine, holding out her two-fingered hand, the air above it shimmering with heat. He thought about the guiders, going up through the drainage cuts two by two.
“They can learn,” he said. “Not all of them. Some. Enough.” He stood up. “We take it all. Every crate. We take it down and we clean it.”
Sabine looked at him. At the scorched loaf. At the twelve crates.
“Down the crawlway,” she said. “Twelve crates. In seven minutes.”
“No,” said Creed. He looked up the cable. At the sheave-house. At the jammed wheel. At the two terrified Gilt with their hands tied, sitting on the ladder above it. “Down the cable.”
The winding-gear at the top of the line had been fighting the jammed wheel for eleven minutes, and losing, and the cable was shrieking with it. Creed went up into the sheave-house and put his hand on the girder Sabine’s charges had driven into the spokes of the great grooved wheel.
“When I pull this,” he said, to everyone, “the capsule goes. Fast. Back down the cable. To the Tenth Works.”
“That’s where they are,” said Wick. From the junction box. White. “That’s where the Gilt are, Creed, that’s the whole Tenth Works, that’s —“
“It won’t reach the Tenth Works.”
Tamsin understood first. She always understood first. She looked at the cable below the sheave-house, running down into the dark, and at the line of it, and her lips moved, doing arithmetic.
“Sabine,” she said. “Charge on the cable. Below us. Forty meters down. Right above the anchorage platform.”
Sabine looked at her. Then at the cable. Then, slowly, the burned half of her mouth pulled up.
They were all on the ladders when he pulled the girder. All of them, Unbanded and the two bound Gilt both, clipped on, clinging to the spine above the sheave-house. Twenty-one people, holding on to the bone of a god.
The great wheel jerked free. The cable, released, whipped — and the capsule, with its two remaining tanks gone and its third half-empty and its hold full of twelve crates of frosted bread, shot back down the cable into the dark like a stone off a sling.
Forty meters down, Sabine’s charge went off.
Not to cut the cable. To kink it. A shaped charge, set by a woman who’d set ten thousand, that bent the carbon cable sideways off its line by half a meter, right above the Tenth Rib anchorage. And the capsule, screaming down the cable toward it, hit the kink, and jumped — trolley and all — off the line.
And fell.
Not far. Three meters. Onto the anchorage platform at the root of the Tenth Rib. Where the eight Gilt and Lancer-observer Quill were standing, looking up, with their lances and their kites, waiting for something to come down at them from the dark.
It came down at them.
He didn’t see what happened. He heard it. Through the bone of the spine. The crash. The steel. The screaming.
And then, a long moment after: Sabine’s crew going down the spine on their harnesses, fast, toward the platform. The fighters going after them. Lances leveled. A short, sharp fight he felt rather than saw — a few hearts on the platform hammering, then fleeing, along the anchorage platform toward the Tenth Works; a silver flash, swinging out over the gulf on a kite, gone again. And then Sabine’s voice on the comm, gravel-flat:
“Platform’s ours. Capsule’s on its side. Crates are fine. Bread’s fine.” A pause. “There’s a freight hoist on the anchorage. Goes down to the Twelfth. And from the Twelfth there’s the old service hoist to the Belly floor.” Another pause, and something that might have been a laugh. “We’re taking the bread home the easy way.”
Creed let go of the ladder with one hand and leaned his forehead against the bone of the spine and closed his eyes.
Beside him, Wick was shaking so hard the ladder rattled.
“I didn’t scream,” Wick said. Faintly. “Did you notice? The whole time. I didn’t scream once.”
“I noticed.”
“I lied to the terminus. On the Concord net. In a Gilt voice.” Wick’s voice cracked, high, and he laughed, a small helpless sound. “They said copy. They said copy, six-four. Like I was — like I was a person. Like I was one of them.” He swallowed. “Creed. I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Not on the spine.”
“Not on the — right. Right. Not on the spine.”
He didn’t. He held on. After a while, the shaking eased.
And then, from the junction box below them, the speaker on Wick’s ledge crackled. And a voice came out of it. Not the terminus. Not the Gilt. Soft. Educated. Reasonable. An upper-cable Mid accent, all its edges smoothed off.
The kindest voice Creed had ever heard. And the one he hated more than any sound in the world.
“— all channels, all channels,” it said, mild, almost pleasant. “This is the Prior. Sheave Three, Terminus Six. Confirmed. It’s him.” A pause. A small breath, like a man smiling. “Do tell the Senior that I was right. Do tell her he’s eating again.”
The channel went dead.
Wick stared at the speaker. Then at Creed.
Creed looked down the spine, past the Tenth Rib, past the dim brown lights of the Mid Ribs, into the dark. He couldn’t feel Sere’s heart. Sere wasn’t anywhere close. But he felt him anyway, the way he’d felt the envoy’s eyes at the end of a thread.
Somewhere up there. Watching. Waiting.
Courier fifteen.
“He knows,” said Snake. Low. “He knows you’re hungry. He knows you have to come up. He knows you have to eat.”
“Then he knows where I’ll be,” said Creed.
He looked at the cable. At the dark. At the bright cold blue of the Higher Ribs above.
“So will I,” he said.
They climbed down to the platform, and took the bread home.
He came down the rope into the first cavern at the end of the second day, with nineteen people behind him and twelve crates of bread on a hand-cart and a half-empty tank of Catalyst in his blood, and his scars lit red-gold, and the gold thread steady and bright.
Ollo was waiting at the bottom. He’d got one of the dropped tanks. The drogue had held. It had landed on the grey slope of the refinery wreck and rolled and come to rest against a fallen girder with a dent in its side the size of a cart, and not a drop spilled. Ollo told him this in nine words, which was a speech, for Ollo.
Sabine took the bread to the third cavern, to Mirelle’s ring, and the guiders. Creed showed them. A loaf. A cut palm. Turn. Most of them couldn’t. Four could, a little, slowly, scorching the crust, with sweat running down their faces. Mirelle could. Sabine could, with her heat-hands, almost easily — the frost in bread was a cold thing, and her blood had woken hot.
It would be enough. Not for everyone. Not every day. But enough, with the grey-caps, to go back to twice.
He went to the Wall of Names, at the end of it all, when the bread was being broken and passed and the cavern was louder than it had been in weeks. He went to tell Mirelle it had worked.
She was already there.
She was sitting on the floor of the third cave with her back against the Wall, under the blocky carved letters, in her ash-grey robe. Her bone mask was on the floor beside her. Her bandaged hands were in her lap. And she was looking up at the name near the top. HESK.
She turned her head when he came. Her grey eyes found his. Steady. Red-rimmed.
“You came back,” she said.
“I came back.”
“You’re fed.” She looked at his scars. At his hands, lit. At his face. “You look like you again.”
“Mirelle,” he said.
She stood up. She brushed off her robe. She picked up her bone mask, and looked at it for a long moment, and set it down again, on the floor, by the Wall.
“Not here,” she said. “There’s a place I need to take you. It’s a long walk. Out through the Breach. Out across the basin.” She looked at him. “There’s a pump-house on the dunes. With a cot. I think you’ve been there.”
Something went cold in him. Very cold. Very far down.
“How do you know about the pump-house?”
Mirelle didn’t answer. She looked past him, at the Wall. At the name.
“Bring the jacket,” she said quietly. “The one you’re wearing. With the name in the collar.”