He ate half a tank the morning after the bridge.
He didn’t want to. He sat on the floor of the depot’s tank hall with his back against one of the nine tanks he hadn’t touched — still tempered, still blue, still cold and bright and full of the frost — and looked at it for a long time with his knitting ribs aching and the hunger sitting in him like the stone it had been for three months in the caverns.
“Take it,” said Snake. Not urging. Tired, almost. “You can’t light anything if you’re dead on a bridge.”
“It’s theirs. The Ninth’s.”
“And you’re the only one who can make it gold for them. You think about that? You’re the tap. Tap runs dry, nobody gets water.” A slow coil of heat. “Feed the tap, mule.”
He looked at Lamp. Not with his eyes. With the part of him that had learned, over four months, to turn inward and look.
“Half,” said Lamp. Quietly. “As before. Burn the frost as it comes. Then rest. Then you will have enough to wake three of the others.” A pause. “And tomorrow, half of another. And three more. The Ninth feeds you, and you light the Ninth.”
He thought about that. A loop. Like the pumps on Line C. The marrow going up, the Drip coming down. Except this one went round, and nobody was asleep at the end of it.
He put his hand on the tank.
Hanne Dray found him there an hour later, sitting against the half-empty tank with his scars lit evenly red-gold and his eyes closed, breathing slow and deep the way he’d breathed in the pump-house after seventeen hours in a mask. She stood and looked at him for a while, with her crane-hook over her shoulder and her red face blank.
“You took some,” she said finally.
“Half.” He opened his eyes. “I’ll put it back. Gold. Three tanks’ worth, by tonight.”
“I’m not complaining.” She leaned on the crane-hook. “I’m just looking at you. Last night you looked like a man who’d been through a press. This morning you look like the depot when the gold came on.” She was quiet a moment. “Is that what it’s like? For you? Every time?”
“No,” he said. “Usually it’s worse.”
She didn’t ask what he meant. She just nodded, slowly, the way the long-timers nodded at hour nineteen when somebody said something true.
“There are people outside,” she said. “Want to see you. Have done since last night.”
“How many?”
“Most of the Ninth,” said Hanne Dray.
The Ninth had a square, like Halden did. Smaller. Poorer. Three streets meeting at the bottom of the main terrace, a well that hadn’t run in years, a Lumen — a little one, its colored glass cracked, its disc dull. And a crowd.
He came up the walkway from the depot into the square with Hanne Dray beside him and Sabine behind, and stopped, because he couldn’t go any farther. They filled it. The square and the three streets running into it and the terraces above, people on the stairs, people at the windows, people on the roofs. Rib Nine Mids. Thin. In patched coats. Their faces lit — half of them — by the gold lamps Pell Varrow and the tank-hands had strung along the square’s edge in the night. The other half in the brown dark, where the gold hadn’t reached yet.
They were very quiet.
Not the silence of the Bell. Not chins on chests. The other kind. The kind he’d felt in the great cavern, when two thousand people looked up.
He didn’t know what to do. He’d never known what to do, in front of a crowd. He stood at the edge of the square with his father’s jacket open over his scars and the sword on his back and his hands at his sides.
And somebody at the front of the crowd — an old man, thin, in a shawl that might have belonged to his wife — stepped forward, and held out his wrist.
There was no band on it. Mids didn’t wear bands. Creed looked at the bare wrist, confused.
“Do the thing,” said the old man. Hoarse. “Whatever it is. The thing you did to Sallow Fenn’s mother. Under the lamp. On Hanne’s terrace.” His eyes were wet. “She said she felt it. Under her ribs. She said it was like being woken up after sixty years asleep.” He kept his wrist out. “Do it to me.”
Behind him, another wrist. And another. A woman. A young man. A loader from the depot with his badge on a cord. Wrists held out, bare, in the gold light and the brown dark.
“Mule,” said Snake. Very quiet. “There are thousands of them.”
He knew. He could feel them. Every heart in the square, warm, frosted — more frost than the Belly had now, the Mids had been eating counter-bread and living under tempered light their whole lives — and every one of them, under the frost, the warm thing. Pressing up. Waiting.
He couldn’t wake them all. Not one by one. Not with a cut palm on the back of every neck. He’d burn himself to nothing before he got through the first street.
He looked at Hanne Dray. At Sabine. At the gold lamps along the edge of the square.
At the old man’s wrist.
“I can’t,” he said. “Not all of you. Not like that.”
The old man’s face fell.
“But you don’t need me to,” said Creed.
He walked across the square. The crowd parted for him. He went to the little cracked Lumen in the middle, to the dull disc on its roof, to the steps. He didn’t go in. He turned around on the steps and looked out at them.
“Eat the grey-caps,” he said. His gallery voice. It carried. “From the market. Not the counters. Every day. Stand under the gold lamps, not the blue. Every night.” He looked at them. “It’ll take months. Maybe years, for some of you. But you’ll feel it. Under your ribs. The way her mother did. Not because of me. Because it was always there. They just kept it asleep.”
The square was silent.
“And when the Bell rings,” said Creed, “don’t go all the way down.”
He felt it go through them. Like a pressure wave through a pipe.
Somewhere in the crowd, somebody laughed. Shaky. Then somebody else. Not happy. The way Wick laughed when something broke.
The old man with the bare wrist lowered it. He was crying. He was smiling.
“Not all the way down,” he said. “Right.” He wiped his face with the end of the shawl. “Right.”
The Ninth had a Lumen Warden. Of course it did. Every rib did.
She came down to the depot on the second day after the bridge. A woman in white robes with gold at the hems, gone grey and frayed at the edges — the Ninth was poor, even its Lumen was poor — her head shaved, a ring-channel glowing at her crown like a halo laid flat. She was old. Older than Hanne Dray. Her face was gentle and lined and very, very frightened.
She stood at the depot gate, where the eight loaders had held the eight lances, and asked to speak to the Anomaly.
He went out to her.
“My name is Warden Ebbe Sallis,” she said. Her voice shook. “I have kept the Ninth’s Lumen for thirty-one years.” She looked at him. At his face. At his scars. At the gold lamps behind him in the depot yard. “I have come to ask you to stop.”
“Stop what?”
“The lamps.” She lifted a hand toward them. It was trembling. “The gold. The words in the square. Don’t go all the way down.” She swallowed. “You don’t understand what you’re doing. The Head is above. The Head is apart. The Head carries the weight of seeing so that we may rest. If the people stop bowing —“ She stopped. “If they stop bowing, the Head will see them. The way it saw Arlo Venn on the Seventh. The way it’s seen every one who ever lifted their eyes. It will send its Wardens. And it won’t be one, this time. It’ll be the whole rib.”
Creed looked at her.
“You believe that,” he said.
“I’ve seen it.” Her eyes were wet. “Three times, in thirty-one years. Three people on the Ninth who wouldn’t bow. And the light came down, and they went up, and they never came back.” Her hands twisted together. “I loved those people. I prayed for them. I begged them to bow. And they wouldn’t, and I watched them taken.” She looked at him. “I don’t want to watch a whole rib taken. Please.”
He thought about Teo, in his hallway, in his house-slippers, turning his cap. It’s the only mercy there is.
“Warden,” he said. “Do you eat from the counters?”
She blinked. “I — of course. The Lumen has an allocation —“
“And you sleep under blue light.”
“Every Lumen is lit by the —“
“And you ring the Bell. Three times a day. From the disc on the roof.” He held her eyes. “Have you ever stood under it? When it rings? Close?”
“I — I ring it from the vestry. There’s a cord. The disc is —“ She stopped. Her face changed. “Why?”
He didn’t know why. Not yet. It was something about the disc. The way the Bell’s light shivered across Lumen Square in Halden when it rang. The way everybody under it went still at once — not like people deciding, like people falling. He didn’t know. But he’d felt something, in Lumen Square, under the noon Bell, the day they took Arlo Venn. Something in the air. Cold. Fine. Like the frost in the drums.
He hadn’t known what it was. He still didn’t.
“Don’t ring it for a few days,” he said. “Just a few. See what happens.”
Ebbe Sallis stared at him.
“I can’t do that,” she whispered. “The Bell is — the Bell has rung on the Ninth three times a day for a thousand years. If it stops —“
“Then it stops,” said Creed. “And you see.”
She looked at him for a long time. Then she turned and walked back up the walkway toward the square and the cracked Lumen, slowly, her frayed white robes trailing.
The noon Bell rang on the Ninth that day, the way it always had.
So did the evening one.
He wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t expected anything else.
That night, the Ninth gathered in the square again, and Hanne Dray stood on the Lumen steps where Creed had stood, and somebody shouted her name, and somebody else, and then a lot of people, and when it stopped she was the Speaker of the Ninth. Nobody voted. There wasn’t a kiosk. There was just a square full of people shouting Hanne until she put her red face in her big loader’s hands and said all right, all right, shut up, and that was that.
Creed watched from the depot gate. He didn’t go up.
“Ha,” said Snake. “They made her a foreman.”
“No,” said Creed. “They made her theirs.”
Wick came up on the fourth day.
He came up the marrow lines with the fourth supply run from the caverns — grey-cap spores, bread-cleaning guiders, two of Sabine’s blasters, a crate of Ollo’s blood-rounds — and Creed felt him coming the whole way up, his heart going high and light and fast in the crawlway, the way it always did. He came out at the Ninth Rib anchorage hatch onto the bare spine, and up the old ladders, and onto the walkway at the root of the rib, and stopped.
Creed was waiting for him at the depot gate.
Wick didn’t see him. Wick was looking past him. Up. At the Ninth.
At the gold.
It had spread, in four days. Creed had woken nine tanks now, three a day, half a tank of tempered fuel each morning to do it. Pell Varrow and the tank-hands had run lines from all of them, up the terraces, junction box by junction box. Not the whole rib — not yet — but most of the lower terraces now, and the square, and the main street climbing the curve of the bone. Gold lamps on poles. Gold light in windows. Gold falling soft across the doorways and the stairs and the little bridges between the terraces.
Wick stood on the walkway with his pack of comm guts on his back and his thumbnail at his mouth and looked at it.
“Creed,” he said. Very small.
“I know.”
“It’s gold.”
“I know.”
“It’s like —“ Wick took his thumbnail out. His face was doing something complicated. “It’s like the light up top. The Higher Ribs. From the Belly, you’d look up and see the Higher Ribs all white and gold and think — that’s the sky, that’s what the sky is, that’s what you’re not allowed. And it’s here. It’s on the Ninth. On a Mid rib. It’s —“ He stopped. “Can I see a window?”
Creed looked at him.
“A window,” said Wick. “A real one. In a house. I’ve never — I’ve seen them from the catwalk, from the Belly, but I’ve never stood at one. I’ve never looked out of one.” He was blinking very fast. “Is that stupid? It’s stupid. You lived in a flat for a week, you had a window, I know, you told me. I just —“
“It’s not stupid,” said Creed.
Hanne Dray’s flat was on the third terrace, under the gold. Two rooms. Smaller than Teo’s. The window faced the gulf. She let them in without asking why.
Wick went to the window.
He stood there for a long time. Hands on the sill. Looking out. At the gulf, the dark falling away. At the faint embers of the Belly, four kilometers down. At the Eighth across the gap, its terraces blue-brown in the Concord’s rationed light. At the Long Bridge, between them, with its two holes in the deck. At the cities above, getting brighter as they went up, gold, white. At the Skull.
Then he looked down. At the street below the window. At the gold lamps along it. At the people walking under them. At a woman sitting on her doorstep with her face tipped up into the light.
He opened the window. The way Creed had, in flat fourteen. Found the latch, pushed, and the window swung out, and the air of the Ninth came in. Warm. Smelling of grey-caps and cooking and the faint clean smell of the gold Catalyst in the lamps.
Wick leaned out of it, both hands on the sill, and breathed.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.
After a while, Creed realized Wick was crying. Silently. The way Creed had cried on the floor of flat fourteen, the first morning, not knowing why.
He didn’t say anything either. He sat down at Hanne Dray’s little table and waited.
“I’m sorry,” said Wick eventually, still leaning out. Thick-voiced. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m —“
“It’s the first time you’ve been not tired,” said Creed.
Wick turned around. His face was wet.
“How did you know that?”
“Same thing happened to me.”
Wick looked at him for a long moment. Then he laughed, wet and helpless, and wiped his face with the heel of his hand, and turned back to the window.
“It’s so big,” he said. “Everything. Out there. I never knew it was so big.”
Mirelle found him on the depot roof, on the fifth night, sitting by the hole he’d torn in it, with his legs hanging down into the tank hall and the gold light coming up from below.
She sat down beside him. Not close. A meter off. Her bandaged hands in her lap, her bone mask left behind in the caverns. She’d stopped bringing it up the cable.
They sat there for a while.
“My mother’s name was Liss,” she said eventually. Without looking at him. “Liss Marrow-Vane. The youngest. She wasn’t like Hesk, or Ione. She wasn’t angry and she wasn’t clever. She just sang.” A small breath. “She was the best singer in the Hollow. My grandmother said. She sang the Long Way Down at every death in the crypt for fifteen years. She knew every verse. Even the ones nobody else remembered.” Mirelle’s voice didn’t change. “She died in the Bloom. In the square. She went out to sing the people in from the streets, to the crypt, where the air was sealed. She got thirty of them in. Then she breathed too much of it.”
Creed didn’t say anything.
“I was ten,” said Mirelle. “I was in the crypt. I heard her singing, outside. Getting further away. Then I didn’t.” She was quiet. “My grandmother raised me after that. In the crypt. With the others who’d made it. Six families, and then four, and then two. Ysolde taught me everything she knew. Every song. Every rite. And she told me about Ione. And Hesk. And the child.” She looked at her hands. “She made me promise. If I ever found you. To tell you. And to look after you, the way Hesk did.”
“Is that why you came down? Through the foramen. To the caverns.”
“No.” Mirelle almost smiled. “I didn’t know it was you. I didn’t know until I saw the mark. I came down because you let us go. In the lab. When you could have killed all of us.” She looked at the gold light coming up through the hole. “And because Sere had gone, and I didn’t know what we were anymore without him. And because I heard there were people in the Belly waking up, and I thought — somebody should teach them the songs. Before they make up their own, wrong.”
“Like the doors in the Hollow,” said Creed. “The blood-marks. Reaching.”
“Like the doors.” She nodded. “Everything we had was reaching. For three hundred years. Copies of copies. And then my grandmother died, two years after the Bloom, and Sere came, and he gave us the god’s blood, drop by drop, and suddenly the copies worked. Blades. Fire. Whips.” Her voice dropped. “And I thought he was the answer. I thought he was what the songs had been waiting for. I made him our Prior. I lit the Lantern every week for him. I took the bands off the couriers. I took their hands.” She stopped. Her bandaged hands were shaking in her lap. “Fourteen of them.”
“I know.”
“I sang them down. Every one. When they died in the tanks. I stood in the lab and I sang the Long Way Down for every courier I’d helped put there.” She looked at him finally. Her grey eyes were dry and very dark. “I don’t know what that makes me. Somebody who sang them down after she helped kill them.”
Creed looked at her.
He thought about Ferrin, on the floor of the third cave, writing his list. I just want them to know who did it.
“It makes you somebody who knows their names,” he said.
Mirelle stared at him.
“Do you?” he said. “Know their names? The fourteen?”
“Yes.” Barely a whisper. “Every one.”
“Then carve them,” said Creed. “On the Wall. Next to Jory Thane. Next to Ferrin’s. In your hand.” He looked back down at the gold light. “Somebody should know.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time.
Then she shifted. A little. Not much. Half the meter between them, closed.
“Hesk would have liked you,” she said. “My grandmother said Hesk never liked anybody. But she’d have liked you.”
“She stood next to me for nine years,” said Creed. “I never heard her say one kind thing.”
“No,” said Mirelle. “That’s how you’d know.”
“— ALL RIBS. ALL RIBS. THIS IS THE CONCORD OF THE HIGHER RIBS.”
The voice came out of every comm-plug on the Ninth at once. And out of every screen — the few that still had power, on the Lumen and the depot office and the old tram terminus. And, Wick said afterward, out of every screen and every comm and every Lumen speaker on every rib from the First to the Twelfth. All at once.
Not Sere’s voice. Not a Gilt’s. A woman’s. Older. Clear. Precise. Each word set down like a part on a bench.
“— THIS IS ILSA MARCHETTI, SENIOR OF THE SECOND RIB, SPEAKING FOR THE CONCORD.”
Creed was in the depot office with Wick, at the slate Wick had wired into the depot’s comm junction. They both went still.
“FIVE DAYS AGO,” said the voice, “THE BELLY TERRORIST KNOWN AS THE ANOMALY SEIZED THE CATALYST DEPOT ON THE NINTH RIB. HE HAS SINCE CONTAMINATED THE NINTH’S SUPPLY WITH AN UNKNOWN AGENT. THE GOLDEN LIGHT NOW VISIBLE ON THE NINTH IS NOT CATALYST. IT IS POISON.”
Wick’s face went white.
“CITIZENS OF THE NINTH REPORT SYMPTOMS,” said Ilsa Marchetti’s precise voice. “AGITATION. INSOMNIA. FAILURE TO OBSERVE THE BELL. THESE ARE THE FIRST SIGNS OF BLEEDER-TAINT. THE SAME TAINT THAT DESTROYED VESPER HOLLOW IN THE YEAR 414.”
“That’s a lie,” said Wick. “That’s a lie, the Hollow was the Bloom, the Hollow was —“
“THE CONCORD WILL NOT ABANDON THE NINTH,” said the voice. “BUT THE CONCORD CANNOT PERMIT THIS TAINT TO SPREAD UP THE CABLES. EVERY CITIZEN OF THE RIBS IS ADVISED: DO NOT CROSS TO THE NINTH. DO NOT ACCEPT GOODS FROM THE NINTH. DO NOT LOOK AT THE GOLDEN LIGHT.” A pause. “EYES DOWN. THE HEAD SEES.”
The channel went dead.
The depot office was very quiet.
“Do not look at the golden light,” said Snake. Thoughtful. “Hm. That’s new. They’ve never had to tell anybody not to look at a light before.”
“They are afraid,” said Lamp. Quietly. “Very afraid. They have told every rib in the skeleton, in the Senior’s own voice. They have never done that. Not once, in the archive.”
Creed sat at the slate and looked at the dead channel.
“The same taint that destroyed Vesper Hollow,” he said. “She said that.”
“It’s a lie,” said Wick again. Shaking.
“Yes,” said Creed. “But she said it. On every rib.” He looked at Wick. “Why would she say that? Why bring up the Hollow? Nobody on the Ribs even remembers the Hollow. It’s sealed in the archive.”
Wick stared at him.
“Unless,” said Creed slowly, “she knows. Unless the Concord knows what really happened to the Hollow. And it’s not the Bloom.”
He thought about Mirelle’s mother, singing the people in from the streets. About the crawler in the switchback road, its cab full of breathing spores. About a Head that had sent Wardens to the basin in 402 to find a spike in a child’s marrow.
About twelve years later.
Not an accident, he thought. The Bloom wasn’t an accident.
He didn’t say it. Not yet. He didn’t know. But he filed it away, in the cold place, with everything else.
The note came up through the Green Market on the sixth day.
The Ninth’s Green Market runners had linked up with the Seventh’s in the week since the bridge — scavengers, mostly, and a few brave Mids, going back and forth across the gulf on the old freight hoists and the maintenance ladders on the spine at night, carrying spore-jars and trays of caps and news. This one was carried by a young woman from Spindle Row with soot on her face, who came to the depot gate at the end of the night cycle and asked for the one in the jacket.
She gave Creed a folded paper. Then she went to sleep on the floor of the depot office for nine hours.
He unfolded it under the gold lamp in the yard.
The handwriting was small and neat and a little shaky. An engineer’s hand. An old one.
SON.
SAW GOLD ON THE NINTH FROM THE ROOF. FIRST NIGHT. DELA WOULD HAVE CRIED. I DID, A BIT.
I LOOKED UP. AT THE BELL. LIKE YOU SAID. JUST FOR A SECOND. NOTHING CAME DOWN.
THEY PULLED THE ANCHORAGE CREWS OFF THE SEVENTH ENTIRELY THREE DAYS AGO. NOBODY ON THE PRIMARIES NOW. NOT EVEN DRONES. NOBODY BUT ME AND THE CHAIR.
SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH THE NUMBER FOUR AND NUMBER NINE BITES. NEW MARKS ON THE BLADES. CUT MARKS. LIKE SOMEBODY’S BEEN AT THEM WITH A TORCH. I REPORTED IT. NOBODY ANSWERED.
I’M WATCHING THEM.
EAT SOMETHING. — T.B.
Creed read it three times.
He read I looked up three times, and something in his chest was warm and tight and aching.
He read cut marks three times, and something in his chest went cold.
Nobody on the primaries now. Not even drones.
New marks on the blades. Cut marks.
“Wick,” he said.
Wick was beside him. Reading over his shoulder. Wick was always reading over his shoulder.
“The bites,” said Wick. Slowly. “The anchorage claws. Teo told you about them. Fifteen meters into the bone. You can’t cut them.”
“You can’t,” said Creed. “With a torch. Not in a day.” He was looking at the note. “In three days. With a crew. Working at night. With nobody watching.” He looked up. “With nobody on the primaries but an old man in a chair.”
Wick went white.
“Listen to the net,” said Creed. “Everything. Every channel you’ve got. Anything about the Seventh. Halden. The anchorages.”
Wick ran.
He found it on the seventh day. In the dark, in the depot office, at the slate, after eighteen hours on the comm with his eyes red and his thumbnail chewed bloody. He came out into the yard where Creed was sitting against a tank, and his face was a color Creed had only ever seen on Ollo, the day the press came down.
“It’s encrypted,” Wick said. “Not the open net. A Senior channel. Marchetti’s. I’ve been trying for six hours. I only got pieces.” He held out the slate. His hand was shaking.
— AUTHORIZED. S2.
— DEMONSTRATION. RIB SEVEN. HALDEN.
— PRIMARIES 4, 9 PREPARED. 1, 2, 3, 5-8, 10-12 PREPARED.
— EXECUTION ON SIGNAL.
— THE NINTH WILL SEE IT.
— THE MIDS WILL KNOW WHAT THE GOLD COSTS.
— 48 HOURS.
Creed read it.
He read it again.
Primaries prepared. All twelve.
Execution on signal.
The Ninth will see it.
Halden.
Forty thousand people. On twelve cables. Over four kilometers of dark.
And an old man on a roof in a dead woman’s chair, watching the bites, who’d reported the cut marks, and nobody had answered.
“When was it sent,” said Creed. His voice was very calm. Very far away.
“Thirty-one hours ago.” Wick’s voice cracked. “I was too slow, Creed. I was too slow, I couldn’t break it, I —“
“Seventeen hours,” said Creed.
He stood up.
“Mule,” said Snake. Quiet. Hot. Very fast. “Mule. Seventeen hours. The crawlways take nine. The ladders on the spine take three. You’d get there with five hours. Against whatever they’ve got on the anchorage. Alone, if you go now.”
“Then I go now.”
“Creed.” Lamp. Cold. Clear. “Think. If they have cut all twelve bites, you cannot hold them. Not twelve. Not alone. Not with every drop of the god’s blood in the Ninth’s tanks.”
“Then I get Teo off the roof.”
“And the other forty thousand?”
He didn’t answer.
He went to the depot yard gate. Sabine was there. She’d heard. Everybody had heard. They were standing in the yard in the gold light — Sabine, Mirelle, Haske with her six Lancers, Hanne Dray, the Unbanded fighters, the loaders — and they were all looking at him.
“Halden,” he said. “They’re going to drop it.”
Nobody spoke.
“Seventeen hours,” he said. “I’m going up the spine. Now. Anybody who can climb that fast, come. Anybody who can’t —“ He looked at Hanne Dray. “Get word up the Green Market. Every runner you’ve got. Across the gulf, tonight. Into Halden. Tell them to get off the rib. Any way they can. The trams, the bridges, the freight hoists. Tell them get off the Seventh.”
“They won’t believe it,” said Hanne Dray. Hoarse. “The Concord’s told them we’re poison. They won’t believe a runner from the Ninth.”
“Then tell them it’s from Teo Brask,” said Creed. “Flat thirteen, Spindle Row. Tell them the old cable-man on the roof says the bites are cut.” He looked at her. “Some of them will know his name.”
Hanne Dray stared at him. Then she turned and ran, up the walkway, toward the square, toward the Green Market laundry, shouting names.
Haske stepped forward. Her six Lancers behind her. Helms on, now. Kites on their backs.
“We fly,” she said. “Faster than the ladders. We can carry two.”
Creed looked at the kites. At Haske’s gauge-face.
“Carry me,” he said.
He didn’t look back at the Ninth as they went off the depot roof into the dark. At the gold. He didn’t need to. He knew it was there.
He knew who’d be watching it.
The Ninth will see it.
The Mids will know what the gold costs.