Rib Nine

Ferrin drew the depot eleven times.

On slates, at first. Then, when the slates weren’t big enough, on the floor of the second cavern with a stick of charred fungus-stalk, the way Tamsin had drawn the sheave-house. A long, low building, built out along the root of the Ninth Rib on girders over the gulf, where the bone of the rib came out of the spine. A sheave of its own, on the spine above it, where the Terminus Six cable came up from the Tenth Works. Tanks — twenty of them, in two rows, inside. Loading cranes. A capsule dock. A garrison barracks at the city end, where the depot met the first terraces of Rib Nine’s main district. Forty Gilt. Ten Lancers. A wall, three meters high, steel, around the whole of it, with a gate on the city side and lamps every ten meters.

“And the workers,” said Ferrin. On his knees on the cavern floor, his Catalyst arm glowing over the charcoal lines. “Two hundred. Loaders, crane-crews, tank-hands. All Rib Nine Mids. Half-rations since the refinery. Their own districts dark.” He tapped a spot near the city gate. “They come in at the start of shift through here and go out at the end. The Gilt search them both ways.”

“Can we talk to them?” said Creed.

Ferrin looked up at him.

“Not through the Gilt,” said Ferrin. “But you don’t need to go through the Gilt.” He looked across the cavern, to where Mirelle was sitting with a ring of her guiders, teaching them to clean bread. “You’ve got a market.”

The Green Market on Rib Nine wasn’t in a tram depot. Rib Nine didn’t have trams anymore; the line had been shut down years before the refinery fell, when the Concord decided the Ninth wasn’t worth the Catalyst it took to run them. It was in a laundry.

A long low room in the bone of the rib, under a terrace, with great dead washing-tubs in rows and pipes overhead dripping. And on every flat surface — on the lids of the tubs, on shelves, on the floor in trays — grey-caps. Growing. Glowing. Hundreds of them. And people. Rib Nine Mids, thin, in patched clothes, coming and going in ones and twos through a side door with paper sacks, trading things for jars of spores and trays of caps. A coat. A pair of shoes. A cup of channel-grade, in a sealed vial, siphoned out of somebody’s lamp.

Mirelle went up first. Three days before the strike. With four of her guiders, and a pack full of spore-jars, through the Breach and up the marrow lines and out at the Ninth Rib anchorage on the bare spine in the dark, the way Tamsin had taught them. Creed hadn’t wanted her to. She’d looked at him.

“You can’t go into a Green Market,” she’d said. “Your face is on every board in the Ribs. I can. Nobody’s ever seen mine.”

So she went. And on the third night, she sent word back down through the scavengers, and the word was a name.

HANNE DRAY.

Hanne Dray was fifty, broad, red-faced, with forearms like a loader’s and a voice like a loader’s. She had a Rib Nine depot badge on a cord around her neck and a channel in her left hand — a single cheap line, the kind the depot paid for so its loaders could run the cranes. And she was standing in the back of the laundry among the dead tubs, at the end of the night cycle, with her arms folded, looking at Creed.

He’d come up himself, in the end. Mirelle had sent for him.

“So you’re him,” said Hanne Dray.

“I’m him.”

“Thought you’d be taller.” She looked at his hands. At the scars. At his face. “Thought you’d be uglier, from the boards.”

“They used a bad picture.”

She snorted. Then didn’t smile. She looked at him for a long time with her red-rimmed eyes.

“My cousin married a cable-man on the Seventh,” she said. “Long time ago. Dela. Dela Ostrander, she was, before. Went up to Halden with him. Teo something.”

“Brask,” said Creed. “Teodor Brask. Flat thirteen, Spindle Row.”

Hanne Dray’s arms came unfolded.

“He’s alive?”

“Last week. He’s watching the primaries.”

She stared at him. Then she laughed, short and surprised, and put a big red hand over her mouth.

“Watching the primaries,” she said through it. “Course he is. Course he is, the daft old — Dela used to say he’d die on that roof.” Her eyes were wet. She rubbed them roughly. “She came down to the Ninth every rest-day when her mother was alive. Brought him along once. He spent the whole afternoon under the depot looking at the girders and telling us they were rated wrong.” She shook her head. “Teo Brask. Well.”

“Hanne,” said Creed. “The depot.”

She looked at him. The laugh went out of her face.

“The depot,” she said. “Yeah.”

She went to one of the dead tubs and sat down on its rim and folded her loader’s hands between her knees.

“Two hundred of us,” she said. “Twelve-hour shifts, half rations, and the Gilt search us going in and going out like we’re Belly mules. Begging your pardon.” She glanced at him. “My district’s been dark eleven days. My sister’s got a cough that the clinic won’t see because the clinic’s on ration too. And every shift I stand there loading tanks of channel-grade onto capsules for the Higher Ribs. Our light. Going up past our windows in the dark.” Her jaw worked. “The Concord pays its Gilt in it. Did you know that? We load the tanks, and then the Gilt who search us at the gate get paid in what we loaded.”

“I knew.”

“So.” She looked up at him. “What do you want?”

“The gate,” said Creed. “At the start of next shift. When the Gilt are searching. I want it open.”

“And then?”

“And then we take the depot. And the tanks.”

“Take them.” Hanne Dray’s eyes narrowed. “To where? Down your hole in the Belly? So you can light your caves with our —“

“No,” said Creed. “To you.”

She stopped.

“The tanks stay on the Ninth,” he said. “In the depot. Running the Ninth’s lines. Your lamps. Your clinic. Your trams, if you want them back.” He held her eyes. “We don’t need it. We don’t use channels. We’re taking it so the Concord can’t.”

Hanne Dray looked at him for a long, long time.

“Why?” she said finally. “Why would you do that? You could sell it. You could pay half the scavengers in the Belly with one tank. You could —“

“My mother left me a message,” said Creed. “Before she died. She said: don’t keep it. It’s everyone’s.”

The laundry was very quiet. Water dripped from the pipes overhead into the dead tubs.

Hanne Dray stood up.

“Next shift’s in nine hours,” she said. “I’ll talk to the crane-crews. And the tank-hands. Most of them are mine anyway.” She looked at him. “The gate’ll be open.”

It was open.

Not all at once. Not dramatically. At the start of the shift, the two hundred Rib Nine loaders came along the walkway from the city terraces to the depot gate in the dim brown light, the way they did every shift, in their patched coats with their badges on their cords. And the Gilt at the gate — eight of them, the gate squad — began to search them, the way they did every shift, patting coats, checking pockets, waving them through one at a time.

And halfway through the line, a crane-operator named Vell Ostrand, who’d been searched by the same Gilt every shift for three months, reached up while the Gilt’s gauntlets were patting his ribs, and took hold of the lance in the Gilt’s other hand, and held it.

Just held it. Didn’t pull. Didn’t twist. Just closed his crane-operator’s hand around the haft behind the tip and held on, the way he held a crane-lever in a crosswind.

And the loader behind him did the same to the next Gilt. And the one behind her. Eight loaders, eight Gilt, eight hands on eight lances.

The Gilt stared at them.

“Let go,” said one, through his grille. Uncertain.

Vell Ostrand didn’t let go. He looked at the Gilt’s faceplate with his tired brown eyes.

“No,” he said.

And Creed came over the depot wall.

He came from the gulf side. From the bare spine above the depot sheave, where he and Sabine’s crew and forty Unbanded fighters had hung in the dark for six hours on blasting-crew harness waiting for the start of the shift. When the gate squad turned to look at their eight held lances, he let go of the spine and dropped.

Twenty meters. Onto the depot roof. Through it — the roof was thin steel on girders, and he went through it the way he’d gone through the pipe jacket, and landed on the floor of the tank hall in a shower of torn metal and rust.

Twenty tanks. Two rows. Every sight-port glowing blue. He felt them all at once, a wall of tempered Catalyst, bright and cold and full, so much that for a moment he couldn’t breathe.

“Oh,” said Snake. “Oh, look at that, look at all of —”

“No,” said Creed. Out loud.

And the Gilt came.

They’d heard the roof go. They came out of the barracks at the city end of the depot at a run, gold armor, lances, twelve of them, then twelve more. Fast, the way Gilt were fast. And over the depot wall behind him, on their harness, came Sabine’s crew and the Unbanded fighters, dropping onto the roof, onto the yard, onto the cranes. And through the open gate — open now, the eight gate Gilt down on the walkway with eight loaders sitting on them — came Hanne Dray and two hundred Rib Nine Mids with crane-hooks and pry-bars and pieces of girder.

It wasn’t a battle. Not the way the pressing floor had been a battle. It was a riot. Two hundred tired, hungry, furious people who’d been searched at that gate every shift for three months, and forty Unbanded who’d trained three to a lance in the second cavern, and Sabine’s crew with cutting charges — against forty Gilt who’d been told the depot was the safest posting on the lower ribs.

Creed went through the Gilt that came at him. He didn’t drain them. He didn’t burst them. He stopped them. Hand on the breastplate, channels frozen, down. One. Two. Five. He went through the tank hall like that, between the glowing tanks, and the Gilt went down around him like dropped dolls, and behind him the Unbanded went three to a lance and the Rib Nine loaders went ten to a Gilt with crane-hooks. It cost him, every stop — that drawing on the cold behind his eyes, that bar held against a load. He didn’t care. He’d fed on the cable. He had a month in him. He spent it.

“You could just take them,” said Snake. Frustrated. Hungry. “Every one. You’d never run out. Why are you stopping them?”

“Because they’ve got mothers on Rib Nine,” said Creed. Under his breath. Through his teeth.

And then the Lancers came.

Ten of them. He felt them before he saw them — ten hearts, ten dense precise rigs, coming fast along the catwalk that ran above the tank hall from the barracks. Silver scale. Flower-staves. They came out onto the catwalk above him and spread out along it, ten silver shapes in a line, with the white-gold light of the Head coming in through the hole he’d torn in the roof behind them.

He stood in the tank hall below them with the sword in his hand and waited for the bolts.

He wanted them. He knew it. He was spending fast, stopping Gilt after Gilt, and every bolt they fired would go into the sigils and down into him, and fill him. Let them fire. Let them feed him, the way Quill had.

They didn’t fire.

The ten Lancers on the catwalk lowered their flower-staves. All at once. As if they’d been told to.

And from their belts, they drew something else.

Short. Fat. A tube, the length of a forearm, with a grip and a trigger. Not silver. White. And in the end of each tube, loaded, a dart. He could see them catching the light. Long, thin, glass. Full of something.

White.

He felt it before the first one fired. Through the air between them. Cold. Not Lamp’s clean cold. Not the frost in a heart, thin and cracking. Dense. Crystalline. Concentrated. The same cold he’d felt through the lid of a drum on the tempering floor, reaching up through his palm toward his blood.

The frost. Pure. In glass.

“Creed —” said Lamp.

The first dart hit him in the shoulder.

It didn’t hurt.

That was the first thing. A sharp prick, through the coat, through his father’s jacket, into the meat of his left shoulder. Like the needle on the slab. And then — nothing. For a heartbeat.

And then the cold.

It came out of the dart into him the way the first-draw had come into him on the slab: a thin line of it, sliding into his blood. But where the first-draw had been wild, this was still. Heavy. Patient. It didn’t burn. It settled. It found his blood and it lay down in it, and where it lay, his blood went slow. Thick. Quiet. He felt it spread out from his shoulder, down his arm, across his chest, a crust of ice forming on the inside of a window, branching, fern by fern —

And everything got very far away.

The noise of the tank hall. The riot. The Gilt and the loaders and the Unbanded. All of it going quiet, going distant, the way the cavern went quiet at night. His arm was heavy. His sword was heavy. His eyes were heavy. He was so tired. He’d been tired his whole life, every day, every shift, and here, finally, was rest. Here was the thing the Drip had always promised and never quite delivered. Here was sleep. Here was down. All he had to do was let it. Let his eyes close. Let his head drop. Let his chin go to his chest, the way they all did at the Bell. Rest. The Head watches, so that you need not.

The second dart hit him in the thigh.

The third, in the side.

He was on his knees. He didn’t remember going down. The sword was on the floor of the tank hall beside him, its grooves dimming. Ember-red going to dull red going to dark. His scars were going dark. Everywhere the frost spread, the light in them went out.

In his chest, Snake was screaming.

He could hear it, very far away, the way you hear the horn when you’re deep in sleep in the drawer. Screaming and screaming. Wake up. Wake up. WAKE UP, mule, they’re putting you down, they’re putting you down like the rest of them, WAKE —

And behind his eyes, the cold of Lamp — the clean cold, the water cold — was fighting. He could feel it. Pushing against the frost. Trying to hold the balance. But the frost wasn’t heat. Lamp’s cold couldn’t push against it. It was cold against cold, and the frost was winning, because the frost was everywhere and Lamp was only behind his eyes, and the frost was heavy and patient and it had been doing this for a thousand years.

His eyes closed.

The gold thread, in the middle of him, flickered.

And somebody sang.

It came from the catwalk.

Not the Lancers’ catwalk. The one on the other side of the tank hall, over the cranes, where a figure in an ash-grey robe had come up off the depot roof through the hole, with bandaged hands and a bare face and grey eyes, and was standing at the railing with both hands on it, looking down at him.

“Hush now, the lamp is lit,” sang Mirelle.

Not soft. Not a lullaby. She sang it. Loud. The old words, the way she’d sung the Long Way Down in the great cavern, her voice going up into the tank hall and filling it, ringing off the steel of the twenty tanks.

“Hush now, the god is near —”

The frost in him — heard it.

He felt that. Even down in the dark, even with his eyes closed and his chin going to his chest. The pattern in his marrow, the thing his mother had put there, the thing Hesk had sung asleep at the next pump every shift for nine years — it heard the verse. And it turned toward it. The way the candle flame had bent toward the sword in Sere’s reliquary.

“Sleep in the bone till the key is turned —”

And the mark over his heart lit.

Gold. Under the frost. Under the ice-crust spreading across his chest. A small gold light, burning up from beneath it, the way the sun would burn up through frost on a window — if there was a sun — if he’d ever seen one —

“— and WAKE when the blood is HERE.”

The gold thread in the middle of him did not flicker.

It flared.

Brighter than on the roof of Block Nine. Brighter than when he’d picked up the key. It came up out of the center of him, out of the still place where neither of them pulled, in a single blinding swell — and it met the frost.

And the frost melted.

Not burned. Not turned. Not stopped. Melted. The way ice melts in sun. The gold went out along every line of his body, along every scar, the way light goes along a cable — and wherever the gold went, the frost simply wasn’t there anymore. It ran out of him. He felt it go. Out of the dart-holes in his shoulder and his thigh and his side, in thin white wisps, like the steam that had come out of the tank on the cable when the blood-round woke it. Out of his skin. Out of his breath. He breathed out, and the air that came out of him was white, a long white plume of it, like the breath of the people on the Twelfth Rib platform when the tempering floor froze.

And then it was gone.

He opened his eyes.

His scars were lit. Not red. Not red-gold.

Gold.

All of them. Every line. Gold, the way they’d been for one moment on the roof of Block Nine. And they didn’t settle back. They held. He knelt on the floor of the tank hall with the sword beside him and his whole body lit gold, and he could feel it — the pattern, his mother’s pattern, awake, running through his marrow like light through the sanctum walls.

On the catwalk across the tank hall, the ten Lancers had stopped. Their frost-tubes were still leveled at him. Nobody had fired again.

They were staring.

And in his chest — for the first time since he’d known it — Snake wasn’t screaming. Or laughing. Or hungry. It was completely silent. Coiled tight around his heart, not moving.

Afraid.

And behind his eyes, Lamp was silent too. The same silence. The same stillness.

The two of them, together. Looking at the gold. And afraid of it.

He picked up the sword.

He didn’t stop the Lancers. He didn’t need to.

He walked across the tank hall toward the catwalk they stood on, gold, with the sword in his hand — the grooves lit now not red but a deep warm red-gold, the gold coming down from his hand into the steel and mixing with the crimson — and one of them panicked and fired a frost-dart at him.

He caught it.

In his free hand. Out of the air. The glass dart, full of white frost, in his gold-lit palm. He felt the frost in it reach for him, through the glass, the way it had reached through the drum lid on the tempering floor.

And his hand melted it. Through the glass. The white in the dart went clear. Went to nothing. Just water. He opened his hand and let the dart fall to the floor and it broke there and what ran out of it was water, clear, and nothing else.

The Lancers lowered their tubes.

One by one. Slowly. All ten. And the one in the middle — taller, broader, the one from the landing on Spindle Row, he thought, though he couldn’t be sure — lowered hers last, and then reached up and took off her silver helm.

She was older than he’d thought. Forty. Dark-skinned, grey-haired, cropped. A face like a gauge, like Tamsin’s. And she was looking down at him from the catwalk with an expression he didn’t have a word for.

“They told us,” she said, “it would put you down. The Prior told us. One dart, he said. The frost would take you like it takes everyone. You’d sleep, and we’d carry you to the Second.” She looked at the gold. At his hand. At the broken dart on the floor, running clear water. “He said you were just like us with the frost burned off. He said if we put it back —“

“He was wrong,” said Creed.

“Yes.” She looked at him for a long moment more. “What are you?”

He thought about it. About his mother’s voice in the dark. The first one in a thousand years.

“The first,” he said. “Not the last.”

The Lancer captain stood on the catwalk with her helm under her arm. Then she set it down on the steel at her feet. And her flower-staff beside it. And her frost-tube.

“Lancer-captain Oriel Haske,” she said. Not to her helm. To him. “Ninth Rib detachment. Standing down.”

Behind her, nine more helms came off. Nine more staves were set down on the steel.

It was over by the middle of the shift.

The Gilt who were still standing had run — out the far side of the depot, onto the capsule dock, and down the Terminus Six cable on the depot’s own capsules, toward the Tenth Works. Sabine let them go. “Somebody’s got to tell Marchetti,” she said, “and I’d rather it was somebody who saw what they saw.” The ones who were down, stopped or beaten, were sitting in a row along the depot wall with their faceplates off and their hands on their heads, guarded by Rib Nine loaders with crane-hooks. The ten Lancers were sitting with them, apart, in their silver scale, quiet.

Four of the Unbanded were dead. Three Rib Nine loaders. He knew their names before the shift was over. He made Hanne Dray tell him.

And the tanks were theirs. Twenty of them. Two rows. Every sight-port glowing blue.

Creed stood in the middle of the tank hall in the white-gold light from the hole in the roof and looked at them.

The gold was still in him. It had faded a little, since the catwalk. Settled. His scars were red-gold again, mostly — but there was gold in the red now, all the way through, the way there was gold in the grooves of the sword. And in the middle of him, the thread was thicker than it had ever been. Not a thread. A cord.

“What did you do?” said Snake. Quietly. The first thing it had said since the frost. “Down there. With the gold. What was that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You melted it. The frost. The Head’s frost. You didn’t burn it, you didn’t pull it — it just stopped being there. I’ve never —“ It stopped. Coiled. Uncoiled. “I don’t like it. I want you to know I don’t like it.”

“I know.”

Lamp said nothing. But it was there. Very still. Watching. Like something standing at the edge of a drop, looking down, trying to judge how far it went.

Hanne Dray came across the tank hall to him. She had blood on her coat that wasn’t hers and a crane-hook in her hand, and her red face was streaked with tears and soot.

“Twenty tanks,” she said. “What now?”

He looked at them.

Tempered Catalyst. Frost all through it, like ice through water. The Ninth’s light. The Ninth’s clinic. The Ninth’s trams. And every drop of it carrying the sleep.

He put his hand on the nearest tank.

He didn’t pull. He didn’t drink. He did what he’d done on the cable to the fourth tank with the blood-round — but slowly. Gently. Without a bullet. He reached into the tank through the steel with the gold that was in him now, and found the frost laced through the blue, and he melted it. The way he’d melted it in his own blood. The way he’d melted it in the dart in his hand.

The sight-port of the tank changed color.

Not blue. Not the tempered blue, bright and cold and clean. Not the woken blue, wild and dark, either. Something else. Warmer. Deeper. A blue with a gold light in the bottom of it, like the gold in his scars.

He felt it in the tank, under his hand. Calm. Not tame — calm. Awake, and not wild. The god’s blood without the frost and without the war. Just itself.

“What did you do to it?” said Snake.

He didn’t know. He took his hand away.

The steel of the tank didn’t bulge. It didn’t peel. It just sat there, glowing its new warm color.

“Hanne,” said Creed. “Your district. The dark one. Run this one into its lines.”

She stared at him. “That’s not — that’s not channel-grade anymore. I can see it isn’t. I don’t know what that is. It could burn every lamp on the terrace out —“

“Try it,” said Creed. “One lamp.”

They tried it at the end of the shift, on a lamp at the bottom of Hanne Dray’s terrace. One lamp, on a pole at the corner of a dark street, its glass smoked, its filament cold for eleven days.

A tank-hand named Pell Varrow — young, nervous, with a channel in his hand he’d only had a year — ran a line from the tank on a crane-trolley up the walkway to the terrace and into the junction box at the foot of the lamp-pole. Two hundred Rib Nine Mids watched him do it. Hanne Dray. The ten Lancers, in their silver scale, standing at the back, helmless. The Unbanded fighters. Sabine, with her arms folded. Mirelle. All of them, in the dim brown light, in the dark street.

Pell Varrow opened the valve.

The lamp lit.

Not blue-white. Not the light of the Ribs, the cold clean steady light of tempered Catalyst that had lit every street in the Mid Ribs for a thousand years.

Gold.

Soft, warm, gold. Like the light the Higher Ribs got from the Head, except it wasn’t white. Like the light in Kon’s garden, through the glass dome, except it was warmer. Like the light that came off his scars on the roof of Block Nine. It came out of the smoked glass of the lamp on the corner of Hanne Dray’s terrace and fell across the street and the doors and the windows and the upturned faces, warm.

Nobody said anything.

Then a woman at the front of the crowd — old, thin, in a shawl, coughing — lifted her face into it. Closed her eyes. And Creed felt her heart, from across the street, and the frost on it, thin and cracking.

And felt the frost thin. Under the light. Not melt — the light wasn’t strong enough to melt it. But thin. A little. The way frost thins on a window with a lamp held close to the glass.

“Oh,” said the old woman. Very quietly. Like all of them. Like everyone who’d ever felt the warm thing under the frost for the first time. “Oh.”

Hanne Dray turned and looked at Creed. Her face, in the gold light, was wet.

“Do it again,” she said. Hoarse. “The tanks. All of them. Do it to all of them.”

He looked at the lamp. At the light. At the old woman with her face lifted into it.

“Mule,” said Snake. Very low. “If you do that to twenty tanks, you’ll be emptying yourself into them. Everything you got on the cable. Everything the gold gave you.”

“I know.”

“And then you’ll be hungry again.”

“I know.”

“And the Prior will know exactly where to find you.”

He looked at the lamp.

Don’t keep it, his mother had said. Give it back. It’s everyone’s.

He went back to the depot. He put his hand on the second tank.

He did eleven before the gold ran out.

He knew when it ran out. He felt it — the cord in the middle of him thinning back toward a thread, and the thread flickering, and the hunger coming up from under it like water up a dry well. His knees went on the twelfth tank. Sabine caught him.

“Enough,” she said. Gravel. Not unkindly. “Eleven’s enough. Eleven’s half a rib.”

He let her sit him down against the steel of the tank. The sight-port above him glowed warm blue-gold.

Out through the hole in the depot roof, he could see the Ninth Rib. Its terraces, climbing up the curve of the bone in the dark. And on them — here, there, a street, a corner, a whole terrace, as Pell Varrow and the tank-hands and the crane-crews ran lines from the eleven tanks into junction box after junction box — lights. Coming on.

Gold.

Patches of it, spreading up the rib, among the brown and the dark. Gold light, warm, soft, on the Ninth Rib, where it had never been. Where it had never been anywhere in the skeleton, in a thousand years.

He sat against the tank and watched it spread.

“They’ll see it,” said Lamp. Very quietly. The first thing it had said since the catwalk. “From above. The Higher Ribs. The Skull. A gold rib, among the blue. They will see it.”

“Good,” said Creed.

Lamp was silent for a long time.

“Yes,” it said at last. So softly he almost didn’t hear it. “Perhaps it is.”

Somewhere up the rib, very faintly, through the hole in the roof, he heard the Ninth Rib’s Lumen ring the night Bell.

The deep note rolled down the terraces, over the gold patches and the brown and the dark.

He didn’t feel the hearts on the Ninth go still. Not all of them. Some did. Most did. But on the gold streets — under the new lamps — some of them didn’t. He felt them. Here and there. A heart that kept beating at its own pace while the Bell rang. A head that didn’t go all the way down.

A face, in the gold light, tipped back. Looking up.

Wick’s voice came through the comm-plug Sabine had clipped to his collar. Thin, crackling, from the listening post in the great cavern, four kilometers below.

“Creed,” said Wick. “Creed, it’s all over the Concord net. Everybody’s talking. They’re saying the Ninth’s on fire. Gold fire. They’re saying —” He stopped. “Creed. There’s a call-sign moving. Off the Eighth. Toward the cable bridge to the Ninth.”

“Dorne,” said Creed.

“Dorne,” said Wick. “And twelve squads behind her. And the Prior’s on the channel.” A pause, crackling. “He’s laughing, Creed. On the open net. He’s just — laughing.”

Creed sat against the tank with his hunger coming up and the gold lights spreading across the Ninth Rib above him, and closed his eyes.

“How long?”

“Tamsin says six hours. Maybe less.”

He opened his eyes. He looked at Sabine. At Mirelle, in the hole in the roof, silhouetted against the gold. At Hanne Dray, in the depot doorway, with her crane-hook. At the ten Lancers, sitting against the wall, helmless, watching him.

“Then we hold the bridge,” he said.