The scavengers called it the drop: a flat shelf of bone just inside the jammed gate of the Breach, where things got left now. They’d started appearing a month after the refinery fell. Nobody saw who left them. A crate of filter masks, one morning. A sack of ration tins, labels steamed off, frosted — Sabine’s heat-hands cleaned them. A coil of good carbon rope. Once, a pair of boots, new, Mid-made, with a scrap of paper in the left one that said only for whoever.
Ferrin’s packets came there too.
This one came on the hundred and eleventh day. Oilcloth, wire-tied, like the first. But there were no maps in it this time. No schedules. Just a single sheet of paper, folded once, in the same fast hand.
AUDIT. EVERY FOREMAN WHO SIGNED A LINE C REASSIGNMENT IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS. THEY KNOW THE ALLOCATION LIST WENT TO A MID ON SPINDLE ROW. THEY KNOW IT WAS ROUTED.
THEY’LL HAVE MY NAME IN TWO DAYS. MAYBE ONE.
DA CANT WALK FAR.
TRAM 4 TERMINUS. ROOT OF THE RIB. 0300 DAY 113.
IF YOU DONT COME I UNDERSTAND. — D.F.
Creed read it standing in the gap of the gate, in the drifting violet haze, with Wick reading over his shoulder.
“The allocation list,” said Wick slowly. “The one that went to Teo’s terminal. With my name on it.”
“Yes.”
“They traced it to Teo.”
“To a Mid on Spindle Row,” said Creed. He folded the sheet. “They traced the routing. Not the man. Not yet.”
“Not yet,” said Snake, from his chest. Quiet.
Wick looked at him. His thin face was grey in the Bloom-light.
“He sent you that,” Wick said. “Ferrin. The day they put me out. With no priority, so nobody’d flag it. He knew they’d find it eventually.”
“Yes.”
“He signed my reassignment. And then he sent you a message to come and stop it. And now they’re going to —“ Wick stopped. He chewed his thumbnail. “I hate him, Creed. I want you to know that. I lie in my pallet some nights and I hate him so much I can’t breathe. He wrote me up for not taking my Drip when you were gone. He said log her about Hesk. He said clear it hot.”
“I know.”
“But he sent it.” Wick took the thumbnail out of his mouth. “He sent it anyway.”
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to. He went back through the gate toward the caverns to get his comm guts.
Eight of them, this time. Creed. Wick. Sabine, because she wouldn’t hear otherwise, with a pack of cutting charges and a coil of the good carbon rope from the drop. Five of her fighters, the best of them, with lances.
And Ilka Dorne’s name, on Wick’s net, every hour of the climb.
He’d been hearing it for a week. The Concord’s traffic had changed since the cable. More Lancers on the lower ribs. More Gilt, and they weren’t patrol Gilt anymore — they were hired, bought out of Kon’s old company with Marchetti’s channel-grade pay, and they moved in squads of twelve, not fours. And in among the squad codes and the schedules and the patrol reports, a new call-sign. Not a Lancer. Not a Gilt.
Dorne.
“Rib Eight,” Wick said, through the crawlway, three rungs below him, with one plug in his ear. “Dorne, sector four, clear. Dorne, sector seven, clear. Dorne, cable bridge to Nine, clear.” He was quiet a moment, listening. “They talk to her different from the others. Everybody goes quiet when she checks in, like with the Prior. And she checks in everywhere. Every sector on the Eighth. Like she’s walking the whole rib, every night, by herself.”
“What is she?”
“I don’t know. Nobody says on the open net.” Wick climbed a rung. “But the Gilt call her something. When she’s not on the channel. They call her the Prior’s girl.”
Creed climbed and didn’t say anything.
Make me four, he thought, though he didn’t know where the thought had come from. And then go and get me more of him.
They came out of the crawlway at the hatch level with the root of Rib Seven a little after midnight, Concord time, and went up the old maintenance ladders on the bare spine to the anchorage, the way Tamsin had shown them on the Tenth. Three hundred meters. In the dark. With the twelve great claws of the anchorage humming above them, and the twelve cables singing out over the gulf toward Halden.
Halden was dark.
Not all of it. But most. He’d seen the Mid Ribs dim from the sheave-house, brown instead of orange. From here, at the root of the rib, close, he could see what forty percent meant. Whole terraces of windows black. Streets with one lamp in five lit. The trams not running — he could see a row of them at the terminus near the root of the rib, parked, dark, their windows empty. A city on its cables in the dark, like a hanging lantern somebody had forgotten to fill.
He felt the hearts in it. Forty thousand of them. Warm, frosted. Sleeping, most of them. Hungry, some.
The Root Gallery was dark too. The door he’d broken off its hinges and sent over the railing into the gulf hadn’t been replaced. There was just a gap, and a sheet of canvas strung across it, flapping.
And on the walkway outside the gallery, by the tram terminus, in the dark, there were two hearts he knew.
One was steady, Mid-frosted, with a bright web of channels running down the right arm from shoulder to fingertips, flaring a little, nervous.
The other was very slow, very faint, and its frost was — thinner. Much thinner than it had been in the market on Rib Seven three months ago. Not gone. But the crust had cracked, and the warm thing under it was moving.
Ferrin was standing beside a parked tram with his back against its dark side, in his plain grey coat, with his Catalyst arm hidden in the sleeve and its glow showing faintly blue at the cuff. In front of him, in the wheeled chair, wrapped in two blankets, Matthis Ferrin sat with his huge cable-man’s hands folded on his knees and his head tipped back against the chair’s high back, looking up.
At the cables. At the anchorages. At the twelve primaries singing out over the gulf.
Ferrin saw Creed come up off the spine onto the walkway, and his face did something complicated in the dark. Then it went flat. The gantry face.
“You came,” he said.
“You asked.”
“I said I’d understand if you didn’t.”
“I know what you said.”
They looked at each other. Three meters of dark walkway. Ferrin’s arm glowing faintly through his sleeve. Creed’s scars glowing faintly through his father’s jacket.
Behind Creed, Wick came up off the ladder onto the walkway, and saw Ferrin, and stopped dead.
Ferrin looked at him. Something went across his face. Fast.
“Moraine,” he said.
Wick didn’t say anything. He stood on the walkway with his pack of comm guts on his back and his thumbnail at his mouth and looked at the foreman who’d written his name on the list, and his whole thin body was rigid.
Then he looked at the old man in the chair. Wrapped in two blankets. Looking up at the cables.
He took his thumbnail out of his mouth.
“He can’t walk far,” Wick said. To Creed. Not to Ferrin. “The note said. So somebody’s going to have to carry him down the ladder.” He swallowed. “It should be you. You’re the strong one. I’ll take the chair.”
He walked past Ferrin without looking at him, and took hold of the handles of the wheeled chair.
The old man in it turned his head, slowly, and looked up at Wick with his pale wet eyes.
“Cable?” said Matthis Ferrin.
“No,” said Wick. His voice was shaking a little. “Marrow. Line C.”
“Ah.” The old man nodded. “Hard work.” He reached up with one huge knuckled hand and patted Wick’s hand on the chair-handle. “Hard work. Good boy.”
Wick’s face crumpled for a second. Then he got hold of it.
“Come on,” he said roughly. To nobody. “Come on. Let’s get you home.”
“Twenty minutes,” said Creed.
Ferrin looked at him. “What?”
“I need twenty minutes.” He looked down the long curve of the street from the terminus, rising up into the dark, the way he’d looked at it the first day he came to Halden. “Before we go down. There’s somebody I need to see.”
“No,” said Ferrin. Fast. Low. “No. Are you mad? Your face is on every board in the city. There are Gilt on the main road every two hundred meters. The audit’s running — they could come for me any minute, they could be at my flat right now —“
“Then wait at the Root Gallery. Sabine’ll rig the line.”
“Creed —“
“Twenty minutes.”
He was already going.
“Teo,” said Snake, as he went up the dark street, fast, keeping to the shadows of the terraced houses. Not a question.
“They traced the message to a Mid on Spindle Row,” said Creed. Under his breath. “Not to Teo. Not yet.”
“And you’re going to tell him to run.”
“I’m going to ask him to come.”
“He won’t,” said Snake. Quiet. Not mocking. “You know he won’t.”
He knew. He went anyway.
Halden in the dark was a different city. He remembered it loud — the voices, the trams, the music from an open window. Now it was quiet. The few lamps that were lit hummed and flickered. The window boxes, where people had been trying to grow things, were dark, and when he passed close he could see that some of them had been cleared out, the dry brown plants gone, and something else put in. Something small and pale. Something that glowed, very faintly, green.
Grey-caps. On a windowsill in Halden.
He stopped and looked at them.
“Ferrin,” said Snake. “Remember? Growing them for his da. Bought the spores off a scavenger.”
Not just Ferrin. He passed another, three doors on. And another. Window boxes on Spindle Row, glowing faintly green in the dark.
Block Nine. Four flights. He went up them without a sound. The hallway on the fourth floor was dark. Flat fourteen’s door was shut. He wondered who lived there now. Another provisional, maybe. Somebody else lucky for seven days.
He knocked on flat thirteen. Three soft taps.
Nothing.
He knocked again.
And from behind the door, very faint, a whirring. A small mechanical sound, focusing.
The lock went. The door opened a crack. And through the crack, low down, at the height of a short round man, a single glowing blue lens.
It looked at him for a long time.
Then the door opened all the way, and Teodor Brask stood in it in his house-slippers and a long brown coat over his nightclothes, with his bald head bare and his fringe of white hair sticking up at the back, and his real eye — brown, watery — very wide.
“Son,” he said.
He’d forgotten how small the flat was. Two rooms. The table, the two chairs, the window that faced the wrong way, onto the bone of the rib above. The lamp was off. There was a candle on the table instead. A real one, stubby, burning low.
Teo stood with his back to the door after he’d shut it and his hands pressed flat against it and looked at him.
“They’ve got your face on the boards,” the old man said. His voice shook. “On every board in Halden. On the Lumen. Murderer, it says. Bleeder.” He swallowed. “They say you killed a Senior. They say you brought the refinery down.”
“I did.”
Teo closed his eyes.
“I know,” he said. “I know. I knew the day the lights went brown.” He opened them again. “I didn’t tell anyone. That you were here. That you sat at my table. They came round asking, the first week — did anyone see the provisional in fourteen, did anyone talk to him — and I said no. I said I never spoke to him. I said he kept to himself.” His real eye was wet. “I lied to a warden. Thirty-eight years on Spindle Row, I never lied to a warden in my life.”
“Teo,” said Creed. “They’re coming.”
The old man went still.
“Not tonight. Maybe not this week. But there’s an audit. Of the message that came to your terminal for me. The night I left. They’ve traced it to Spindle Row.” He kept his voice level. “They’ll trace it to this door.”
Teo didn’t say anything for a long moment. He stood with his back against his own door, in the candlelight, with his glass eye whirring faintly, focusing and refocusing on nothing.
“Come with me,” said Creed. “Down. Tonight. There’s a place. Thousands of people. We’ve got food, of a kind. We’ve got water. Nobody bows. Nobody’s band goes grey. Nobody —“
“I’m sixty-eight,” said Teo.
“Ferrin’s father’s eighty-something. He’s coming.”
“Matthis Ferrin’s coming because his son’s carrying him.” Teo smiled, a little. Shaky. “I haven’t got a son. Not one who’d carry me down a marrow line in the dark, anyway.” He looked at Creed. “No offense, son. But you’ve got other things to carry.”
“Teo —“
“No.” The old man came away from the door. He went to the table, slowly, and sat down at it, in his chair, in the candlelight. He folded his old hide-colored hands on the wood. “Listen to me. I’m too old to learn new walls. I’ve had these two for thirty-eight years. Dela’s in them. Her chair’s in them. The window faces the wrong way, and I hate it, and it’s mine.” He looked up. “And somebody’s got to watch the primaries.”
“There are drones for that.”
“Drones can’t smell a bad weld,” said Teo, and his voice cracked on the old line, and he laughed at himself, and wiped his eye. “I go up to the roof every night. Dela’s chair. Dela’s blanket. I watch them. You know why?” He leaned forward. “Because the Concord’s rationing the light. The anchorage crews are on half-shifts. Nobody’s maintaining anything. And forty thousand people are hanging on twelve cables over the dark, and nobody’s watching. Except me.” He sat back. “So I’m staying. And watching. And if anybody comes for me about some message on my wall, I’ll tell them I’m an old fool who doesn’t know how to work his own terminal, and they’ll believe me, because I am.”
Creed looked at him.
He thought about arguing. He thought about picking the old man up out of his chair and carrying him down the stairs and down the spine and into the caverns, whether he wanted to go or not.
He thought about Hesk. Who’d chosen. Every shift.
He sat down across the table. In Dela’s chair.
“Stop eating from the counters,” he said.
“I know,” said Teo. Quietly. “I stopped the day you left. You said something, that last week. About the food. I didn’t understand it. But after you’d gone, I could —“ He hesitated. “I could taste it. In the bread. Something cold. I’d never noticed. Thirty-eight years, I’d never noticed, and then one morning it was there, in my mouth, like rust.” He nodded at the window. Creed looked. On the sill, in a cracked bowl, a cluster of small pale shapes, glowing very faintly green. “There’s a market. In the old tram depot on Line 2. Since the lights went brown. Arlo Venn started it, they say. Before they took him. Somebody in the Belly grows those — they come up through the scavengers, the spores, in little jars — and people trade for them. Grow them in cupboards. Under beds. In window boxes, now, with the lights down, nobody can see.” His glass eye whirred. “The Green Market, they call it. It’s not much. But half of Spindle Row eats a bowl of those a day now instead of counter bread. And the Bell —“ He stopped.
“What about the Bell?”
Teo looked at the candle for a long time.
“I don’t bow as low as I used to,” he said. Very quietly. “At the Bell. I still bow. I’m not a fool. But I don’t go all the way down anymore.” He looked up. “And I’m not the only one. I see them. On the street, at the noon Bell. Heads down, but not down. Chins not quite on their chests. Eyes not quite closed.” He swallowed. “Since the Green Market. Since the counters went thin.”
Creed sat at the table and felt something go through him. Warm. Not Snake’s heat. Not Lamp’s cold. The gold. In the middle of him. Steady.
Waking, he thought. Up here too. Slowly. Because they stopped eating the frost.
“Teo,” he said. “I need to go. Ferrin’s waiting.”
“I know.” The old man got up. Slowly. He went to the cupboard over the basin, and reached up, and took something down. A pot. Dented, metal, with a lid. He held it out. “It’s empty. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were coming. But take it. I’ve got four.”
Creed took the pot. He held it.
“Thank you,” he said. “For the soup.”
“You said that last time.” Teo’s real eye was very bright. “Say something else this time.”
Creed looked at him. At the short round bald old man in his house-slippers, with his glass eye and his hide-colored face, who’d brought soup to a stranger because the stranger was across the hall and hungry. Who’d lied to a warden for him. Who was going to sit on a roof every night in a dead woman’s chair, watching twelve cables nobody else would watch.
“Look up,” said Creed. “At the Bell. Next time. Just for a second.”
Teo stared at him.
“My father told me that,” said Creed. “I found out who he was. Last week. He left me a message. That’s what it said.” He held the empty pot against his chest. “Look up. Whatever they tell you. Whatever it costs.”
The old man’s face did something. His real eye filled and ran. His glass eye whirred, focusing, focusing, on Creed’s face.
“Your father,” said Teo Brask. Very softly. “You found your father.”
“And my mother. They’re dead. Twenty-four years. But I found them.”
Teo came across the little room and put his old arms around him.
Creed stood there holding the empty pot, and let him.
He felt them on the stairs.
Six hearts. Coming up. Fast. Gilt — the channels bright, crude, military. And one that wasn’t Gilt. Finer. Denser. Every line laid exactly. A Lancer.
Teo felt him go still.
“What —“
“They’re here,” said Creed.
The old man’s face went white.
“Not for me,” said Creed. “Not yet. For Ferrin. They’ve been to his flat. They’re following the trail.” He looked at the door. “Or they followed me up the street.”
“Both,” said Snake. “Does it matter?”
Footsteps on the fourth-floor landing. A fist on a door — not thirteen. Fourteen. Across the hall. And a voice, amplified, through a Gilt grille: “Concord audit. Open.”
Creed set the pot down on the table.
“Stay here,” he said to Teo. “Lock the door. Don’t open it for anything. If they ask, you heard nothing. You’re an old fool who sleeps heavy.”
“Son —“
“Lock it.”
He went out into the hall.
Six Gilt on the landing. Gold armor, in the dim light of the single flickering lamp. Twelve-man squad split in two, he thought; the others would be on the stairs below, or the street. And behind them, at the top of the stairs, a Lancer — silver scale, flower-staff, smooth helm. Not Quill. Taller. Broader.
They’d broken in the door of flat fourteen. It hung off one hinge. Inside, a frightened Mid in nightclothes — the new provisional, a young man — was backed against the wall under the window with his hands up.
The Gilt turned when Creed came out of thirteen.
They knew him. He saw it. The faceplates turning. The lances coming up. He felt their hearts jump, every one, and their channels flare — and then, under the flare, something else. The thing he’d felt in the Gilt on the catwalk at Sump-Nine, in the honor guard in the vault, in Quill on the capsule. Not anger. Fear.
“Anomaly,” said the Lancer at the top of the stairs. “Sighted. Block Nine, Spindle Row, Halden.” Calm. Talking to her helm. “Engaging —”
“Don’t,” said Creed.
The Lancer stopped. Her staff was leveled, its petals opening.
“Your bolts,” said Creed. “You know what they do. You’ve heard. Quill told you.” He took one step forward. Not fast. “Every one you fire, I eat. Every Gilt that touches me, I empty. You know that. Your Concord knows that. That’s why there’s a woman on Rib Eight with my blood in her veins.”
The landing was very quiet. The single lamp flickered.
“There’s an old man behind that door,” said Creed, “who’s never done anything in his life but watch cables. And there’s a man in that flat with his hands up who’s been a Mid for six days. Neither of them knows anything. Neither of them’s done anything.” He took another step. “I’m going to walk down those stairs. Past you. And out into the street. And down to the root of the rib. And you’re going to let me. And then you’re going to go back to whoever sent you and tell them the Anomaly was here, and left, and you couldn’t stop him, and that’s the truth.”
“And if we don’t?” said the Lancer. Her voice was very calm. Not quite steady.
Creed looked at her.
He let the scars light.
All of them. At once. Under his father’s jacket, under his coat, along the backs of his hands, up the sides of his neck. Not red. Not the pressing-floor red. Red-gold, steady, bright — the color of a city’s windows at night, the color he’d been since the half-tank on the cable. It lit the landing. It lit the gold armor. It lit the Lancer’s silver scales and threw his shadow huge up the stairwell wall.
And in the middle of his chest, under the open collar, a smaller light. Gold. Pure. The mark.
“Then I’ll empty all of you,” he said quietly. “And go anyway. And there’ll be seven more names for somebody to carve.”
Nobody moved.
He felt the Lancer’s heart. Hammering. He felt her channels, dense and precise, running down to her staff, full. Ready. And he felt her decide.
She lowered the staff.
The petals closed.
“Stand down,” she said. To the Gilt. Quietly. Then, to her helm: “Anomaly sighted. Block Nine. Departed. Unable to engage.” A pause. “No casualties.”
The Gilt lowered their lances.
He walked between them. Down the stairs. Past the other six on the landing below, who’d heard everything through their helms and pressed back against the wall as he went by. Out into the street. Into the dark.
He didn’t look back at flat thirteen.
He didn’t have to. He felt it. A heart, behind the locked door. Old. Warm. The frost on it thin, and cracking. And hammering, hammering, so hard and fast that for a moment Creed was afraid for it.
And then — slowly — steadying.
The others were at the Root Gallery when he came down the street at a run. Sabine had rigged the line — the good carbon rope from the drop, anchored to a girder inside the gallery and run out across the thirty-meter gap to the marrow-pipe column on the spine, where one of her fighters had climbed out on the bare bone and lashed it round a steel band. A slope down. A zipline. The others were already going across it, one at a time, on harness, hand over hand, with the gulf under them.
Ferrin was standing by the canvas over the broken doorway with his father’s chair.
“There are Gilt in the street,” he said, fast, when Creed came. “Behind you. Twelve. More.”
“I know. They’re not coming.”
Ferrin stared at him.
“They’re not coming,” said Creed again. “Not tonight.” He looked at the chair. At the old man in it, wrapped in two blankets, his pale wet eyes turned up to the cables. “How do we get him across?”
“I’ll carry him,” said Ferrin.
“Your arm —“
“My arm,” said Ferrin, “is a forty-thousand-chit Catalyst rig that can lift a gallery hopper one-handed.” He flexed the fingers. The blue climbed. “I can carry my father across a rope.”
He bent and lifted Matthis out of the chair, blankets and all, the way you’d lift something very light and very precious, and settled him against his chest, his Catalyst arm locked around him. The old man didn’t protest. He laid his head on his son’s shoulder and looked up past it at the cables. At the twelve black claws in the pale bone of the rib, humming.
And then he turned his head, slowly, and looked at Creed.
His pale wet eyes focused. Focused more. The way Teo’s glass eye focused, whirring. Something came up in them from very far down, like a light in deep water.
“I know you,” said Matthis Ferrin.
Creed went still.
“I know you,” said the old man again. Clearer. His voice was a dry rattle, but it was clear. “You’ve got his jaw. Aurel’s. Aurel Vess. Rib Six. My apprentice. On the primaries.” He was smiling. Vague and sweet, but not empty. Not empty at all. “Two years he worked under me, before he went to engineering. Best hands on a splice I ever saw. Hummed. Always humming. Drove the crew mad.” He lifted one huge knuckled hand off his son’s shoulder, slowly, and pointed at Creed’s face. “That jaw. Like a stubborn hopper-lid. That’s Aurel’s jaw.” The hand wavered. “Is he well? Aurel? Haven’t seen him in — in —“
“He’s dead, Da,” said Ferrin quietly. “A long time.”
“Ah.” The old man’s face went sad. Then cleared. He looked back at Creed. “Shame. Good man. Best splicer on the Seventh.” He patted his son’s shoulder. “You tell his boy. You tell him his da had the best hands on the Seventh.”
“I’m his boy,” said Creed.
Matthis Ferrin looked at him for a long, long moment.
“Well,” he said at last, softly. “Well, then. I just told you.”
And laid his head back down on his son’s shoulder, and closed his eyes.
Ferrin stood very still with his father in his arms. He looked at Creed over the old man’s white head. His gantry face was gone. Completely. Underneath it was something Creed had never seen on it. Raw. Lost.
“Two years ago,” Ferrin said, “he didn’t know my name.”
He went to the rope.
They came down the rope into the first cavern at the end of the next day. Ferrin first, with his father on his back now in a sling Sabine had made from a crawler tarp, the old man asleep, his huge hands hanging loose. Then the others.
The cavern stopped when they saw him.
Ferrin’s arm. The Catalyst rig, blue, glowing through the sleeve of his grey coat. Six thousand people in the caverns, and every one of them had spent their life looking up at a gantry with a man on it with an arm like that. They knew what it meant. Foreman. Mid. Clear it hot. Log her.
The noise of the cavern died, ring by ring, outward from the bottom of the rope, until it was silent.
Ferrin stood at the bottom of the rope with his father asleep on his back and looked at them all. Grey faces. Thin. Bandless. Hundreds of them, in the green fungus light, all looking at his arm.
He didn’t say anything.
And then, through the crowd, from the direction of the fifth cavern and the Press, somebody came.
Ollo.
Big. Slow. Grey with marrow-skin. One arm. He came through the crowd, and the crowd moved for him, and he walked across the first cavern and stopped in front of Dask Ferrin, a meter away, and looked at him.
Ferrin looked back. His face had gone white.
Creed didn’t move. Nobody moved.
Ollo looked at Ferrin’s face. At his glowing arm. At the old man asleep on his back.
“You logged me,” Ollo said. His deep slow rough voice. “Thirty-eight percent.”
“Yes,” said Ferrin.
“Asset depreciation.” Ollo’s face didn’t change. “On the slate. While I was on the floor.”
“Yes.”
Ollo was silent for a long moment. His one hand hung at his side. Big. Scarred. He looked down at it. He flexed the fingers. Then he looked back up at Ferrin.
“I make four thousand rounds a month,” he said. “With this.”
Ferrin didn’t say anything.
“Four thousand,” said Ollo. “One hand.” He looked at the old man on Ferrin’s back. At the huge cable-man’s hands hanging loose. At the sleeping face. He was quiet a long time. “I’m a hundred percent now.”
He turned around and walked back through the crowd, toward the fifth cavern, toward the Press, and didn’t look back.
The crowd let out its breath.
Ferrin stood at the bottom of the rope with his father on his back and his face white and his eyes wet, and didn’t move for a long time. Then, slowly, he went down on one knee on the floor of the cavern, carefully, so as not to wake the old man. And stayed there.
Nobody said anything. Nobody helped him up. Nobody spat. They just looked at him, the foreman on his knee in the first cavern with his father asleep on his back.
Then Sabine Kettle walked over, and held out her two-fingered hand.
“Up,” she said. Gravel. “You’re blocking the rope.”
Ferrin looked at her hand. At her burned face. He took it.
She hauled him up.
“There’s a pallet in the third cave,” she said. “By the Wall. For your da. It’s warm there.” She jerked her chin. “Then come and find me. You’ve got maps in your head. I want them on a slate.”
He found Ferrin in the third cave an hour later, sitting on the floor against the Wall of Names beside the pallet where Matthis was sleeping, with a slate on his knees and a stylus in his Catalyst hand, drawing.
Not maps. Not yet. A list.
Creed sat down beside him.
Ferrin didn’t look up. He kept writing. Small, fast, the hand from the messages, with the same mistakes. Names. Lines. Dates.
VOSS, PELL. LINE C. REASSIGNED 419.
HARROW, JENNET. LINE C. DIED ON SHIFT 421. LOGGED.
OLLO. LINE C. 38 PERCENT. 426.
HESK. LINE C. DIED ON SHIFT 426. LOGGED.
“Every one,” said Ferrin. Not looking up. “Every one I logged. Every one I signed. Seven years on the gantry. I remember them all.” The stylus kept moving. “I thought I didn’t. I thought I’d stopped seeing them. I hadn’t. They’re all in here.” He tapped his temple with a glowing finger. “Sabine said there’s a wall.”
“There’s a wall.”
Ferrin looked up at it. At the thousands of names. At HESK MARROW-VANE. At IONE. At AUREL VESS.
His eyes stopped on the last one.
“Vess,” he said. “That’s the one Da —“
“My father.”
Ferrin looked at him for a long time.
“I’m going to carve them,” he said. “My list. On the wall. All of them. In my hand. With my name beside every one.” He looked back down at the slate. “That’s not — it doesn’t fix anything. I know that. I just want them to know who did it. If anybody ever reads it.”
“They’ll know,” said Snake. Quiet.
Creed didn’t say anything. He sat beside Ferrin against the Wall of Names and watched him write.
After a while, Ferrin put the stylus down.
“Maps,” he said. Roughly. Wiping his face with his ordinary hand. “Sabine wants maps. I’ll give her maps.” He turned the slate over to a clean side. “Rib Nine. That’s where you want to go next. The Concord’s turned the old freight depot on the Ninth into the Catalyst hub for every rib below the Seventh. Everything from the Tenth Works goes through it. Every tank. Every capsule. The depot’s got its own sheave, its own tanks, its own garrison — forty Gilt, ten Lancers. And it’s on the Ninth.” He looked at Creed. “Rib Nine’s the poorest of the Mid Ribs. Most of the workers on the depot are Rib Nine Mids on half-rations. They’ve been dark nine days, some districts. They hate the Concord more than you do.”
“Dela’s rib,” said Creed.
Ferrin looked at him. “What?”
“Teo’s wife. She was from the Ninth.” He looked at the old man sleeping on the pallet. At the Wall. At the names. “Draw me the depot.”
Ferrin drew.