He had never flown.
Nobody from the Belly ever had. Nobody from anywhere, really, except the Lancers, and the Wardens descending in their columns of light. He hung under Oriel Haske’s kite in a harness of blasting-crew webbing, clipped to her by two carbon lines, with the gulf opening under his boots — four kilometers of dark, the faint embers of the Belly at the bottom — and the silver fabric of the kite stretched above them both, singing in the air.
It didn’t feel like flying. It felt like falling slowly, and sideways.
“Catalyst lift,” Haske had said, on the depot roof, clipping him on. “There’s a rig in the frame. It pushes the air. Not much. Enough to stretch a glide.” She’d looked at him. “With two, it won’t stretch far. We’ll go down as much as across. We’ll come in low on the Seventh. Below the city. At the root.”
“How long?”
“Three hours. If the air’s kind.”
The air wasn’t kind. It came up out of the gulf in long slow surges, warm from the Belly, and the kite rode them and dropped between them, and every drop his stomach went with it. Below them and behind, five more silver kites, Haske’s Lancers, two of them carrying Unbanded fighters, spread out in a line across the dark between the Ninth and the Seventh.
Ahead, across the gulf, Halden.
He could see it. Hung in its web of cables on the Seventh Rib, dim, brown-lit, forty percent. The terraces climbing the curve of the bone. The little bridges. The dark streets. A lantern somebody had forgotten to fill.
And he could feel it. Even from here, even across the gulf. Forty thousand hearts. Warm, frosted, most of them sleeping. Some of them not. Some of them — here, there, scattered, more every minute — awake. Moving. Fast.
The runners.
“They’re getting the word in,” said Snake. Low. “The Green Market. Listen to them go.”
He listened. He couldn’t hear them. But he could feel the hearts waking, spreading out from the bridges and the hoists like ripples from a dropped stone. Somebody on a street. Somebody at a door. Somebody shaking somebody awake.
Teo Brask says the bites are cut.
He looked for one heart. On the far side of the city, near the top of the long curve of Spindle Row. He knew it. He’d sat across a table from it.
He couldn’t find it. Not from here. Too many. Too far.
“Faster,” he said.
“It doesn’t go faster,” said Haske, above him. Calm. “It goes as fast as the air.”
They came in low, the way Haske had said. Below the city, under the long dark belly of Halden’s lowest terraces, in the shadow of the rib, toward the root, where the twelve great black claws bit into the bone.
There were lights on the anchorage.
Not the dim brown of the city. Bright. White. Work-lamps, on stands, the kind the crews used on the galleries. Dozens of them, ranged along the anchorage platform where Teo had taken him once on the tram, where Creed had stood at the railing and looked at the bites and said like a hook in a fish.
And under the lamps, people. Working.
He felt them as the kite swung in over the edge of the platform. Forty hearts. Gilt — the channels crude and bright. And others, not Gilt — men in heavy silver heat-suits like the ones on the refinery cooking floor, with long black lances that weren’t lances, that ended not in Catalyst tips but in something that roared. Torches. Cutting-torches. Catalyst-fed. He could feel the Catalyst pouring through them, tame and bright, into the flame.
They were at the bites.
All twelve. A crew at every claw. And at every claw, where the great black blades of the anchorage went into the pale bone of the rib — fifteen meters into the bone, you can’t cut them, you can’t unscrew them — the bone was black. Burned. Gouged. The silver-suited men had been working at the swelling, the places where the god’s bone had grown up around the blades over a hundred years, and they had cut it back. Burned it away. Down and down, around each blade, until the bites weren’t fifteen meters deep anymore.
He didn’t know how deep they were now. He didn’t need to. He could feel the cables. The twelve primaries, running out from the claws over the gulf to the city. Singing under the load.
The note was wrong.
He’d heard them at the Root Gallery with Teo. A deep, constant, enormous hum, below the edge of hearing, steady as a heartbeat. This wasn’t steady. It wavered. It rose and fell. And under it, every few seconds, a sound he’d heard once before, in a gallery on Line C, a long time ago, when a pit-prop was about to go. A creak. Deep. In the bone.
And on every claw, in the burned-out hollow where the bone had been cut back, packed in tight against the black blades — charges. Not Sabine’s. Concord-made. Grey. Shaped. Wired together, claw to claw, all twelve, with a single thick cable running from the last of them to a junction box on a pole at the end of the platform.
Waiting for a signal.
Haske cut him loose six meters above the platform. He dropped.
He came down among them before they knew he was there. Gilt and silver suits both. He landed at the foot of the number one claw, where a crew of four silver-suited men were working at the bone with a roaring torch, and he took the torch away from the first of them — reached into the Catalyst pouring through it and stopped it, and the flame went out like a lamp — and the man in the silver suit fell back against the claw with his faceplate turned toward Creed, and through the dark glass, Creed saw his eyes go wide.
“Anomaly —”
The Gilt came. Forty of them. From along the platform, from the junction box, from the crews at the other claws. Lances leveled.
He didn’t have time for them.
He went through them the way he’d gone through the wedge on the Long Bridge. Stop and pull. Stop and pull. Fast. Faster than he’d ever done it. Hand on a breastplate — stop — down. Lance behind the tip — pull, burn the frost, enough — down. He didn’t feel the cost. He didn’t feel the hunger. He felt the cables, wavering, and the bone creaking, and he went through the Gilt like a man going through a collapsing gallery to get to the tapping on the other side.
Above him, the kites came in. Haske’s Lancers, swinging down off the dark onto the platform, flower-staves blazing, bolts cracking into the Gilt from behind. The two Unbanded fighters dropping off their harnesses with lances.
And the silver-suited men ran.
They dropped their torches and ran, along the platform, toward the steps that went up to the tram terminus, to Halden, and Creed let them go, because they didn’t matter, because the torches didn’t matter anymore. The cutting was done.
He went to the junction box.
It was a steel box on a pole, grey, Concord-stamped, with a single thick cable going into its bottom from the charges and a smaller one going into its top, up the pole, and away along the platform toward a relay mast. And on its face, behind a little window of dark glass, a light. Red. Steady.
And under the light, a slate-screen. Numbers on it. Counting down.
10:58:12
Not on signal. On a clock.
He stared at it.
Execution on signal, the order had said. And the signal was this. Not a voice on a channel. Not a hand on a switch. A clock, in a box on a pole, set thirty-one hours ago in a round chamber on the Second Rib by a woman who’d spent four years making a dead-world clock tick by hand.
Tick, he thought. Tick. Tick.
“Cut the cable,” said Snake. “The one from the charges. Cut it at the box.”
He drew the sword.
“Creed.” Lamp. Fast. Sharp. “Wait. Look at the box.”
He looked.
There was a second cable. He hadn’t seen it. Thinner. Coming out of the side of the box, near the bottom, and running not toward the charges but down. Down the pole. Into the platform. Into the bone.
And on the face of the box, below the countdown, small, stenciled: TAMPER — IMMEDIATE.
He stood with the sword raised.
“If you cut it,” said Lamp, “it fires. Now. Not in eleven hours. Now.”
“Then I take the charges off the claws.”
“Twelve. Packed into burned bone, wired claw to claw. You don’t know how they’re set. You aren’t Sabine.”
“Then Sabine.” He hit the comm at his collar. “Sabine. Sabine. Where are you.”
Crackling. Far away. Gravel. “— crawlway. Fourth hatch. Seven hours out. Maybe six if nobody cooks.”
Seven hours. The clock said ten fifty-seven.
“There are charges on all twelve bites,” he said. “Concord. Grey. Shaped. Wired to a box with a clock and a tamper line. Ten hours fifty-seven.”
A silence on the comm. Long.
“Don’t touch the box,” said Sabine. Very flat. “Don’t touch the charges. Don’t touch anything. I’m coming.” A pause. “Seven hours, Creed. Then I’ve got three. That’s tight. That’s very tight. But don’t touch anything.”
“And if they’ve got a second box? Somewhere else? A signal they can send early?”
Nothing on the comm for a long moment.
“Then get people off that rib,” said Sabine Kettle.
He went up into Halden.
He didn’t know what else to do. He left Haske at the anchorage with her Lancers and the Unbanded fighters and the stopped Gilt and the clock in its box, with orders not to touch anything, and he went up the steps to the tram terminus at the root of the rib and into the city.
It was waking.
Not the way the Ninth had woken, under the gold. This was different. This was the stack at the horn. People in the streets in their nightclothes, in their coats, carrying things. Bags. Bundles. Old people. Families — adults, holding each other’s hands. Coming out of doors, down stairs, onto the dark streets, and standing there. Confused. Frightened. Looking at each other.
Not moving.
Because nobody knew where to go.
He felt them. Forty thousand hearts, more awake every minute, hammering. And from the bridges — he could feel that too — the bridges at the ends of the city, the little ones to the Sixth and the big one to the Eighth — hearts. Clumped. Bunched up at the bridge-heads.
Not crossing.
He ran to the nearest. The footbridge at the top of the Bell Terrace, a narrow suspension span to a district of the Sixth, one tram-width wide. There was a crowd at the bridge-head. Hundreds. And across the bridge-head, blocking it, a line of Gilt. Lances leveled. Faceplates down.
“BY ORDER OF THE CONCORD,” one of them was saying, through his grille, over and over, “HALDEN IS UNDER QUARANTINE FOR BLEEDER-TAINT. NO CITIZEN OF THE SEVENTH MAY CROSS. RETURN TO YOUR HOMES. BY ORDER OF THE CONCORD —”
Quarantine.
They weren’t just going to drop the city. They were going to drop it full.
“Mule,” said Snake. Very quiet. “Mule, look at them.”
He didn’t need to look. He felt them. The crowd at the bridge-head, hammering, terrified, pressed up against the line of lances. And the Gilt in the line. Eight of them. Their hearts hammering too. Their channels flaring. Afraid.
He walked into the space between the crowd and the line.
The Gilt saw him. They knew him. Every Gilt in the Ribs knew him now. He saw the faceplates turn. He felt the hearts jump.
“Do you know,” he said, “what’s on the anchorage?”
The line didn’t answer.
“Charges,” said Creed. “On all twelve bites. With a clock. Ten hours.” He looked at them, one faceplate after another. “Your Concord’s going to drop this city into the Belly. With these people on it. With you on it, if you’re still standing here.”
Nothing. Then one of them — at the end of the line, younger, he thought, from the way he held his lance — said, through his grille, uncertain: “That’s — they told us it was quarantine. They told us the bleeders on the Ninth —”
“Go to the root of the rib,” said Creed. “Look at the claws. Look at the bone. Look at the box on the pole. Then come back and tell me it’s quarantine.”
The young Gilt stared at him.
Then he lowered his lance. Turned. And ran, past the crowd, down the Bell Terrace, toward the root of the rib.
The others didn’t move.
“Let them across,” said Creed. To the seven.
“Our orders —”
“Your orders are going to kill you in ten hours,” said Creed. “Along with forty thousand people. Including your sergeant.” He looked at the one with the white band on his faceplate. “Let them across. Or I’ll stop you, and they’ll go across anyway, and you’ll lie on this bridge-head unable to move until the clock runs out.”
The sergeant looked at him for a long time.
Then he stepped aside.
He did it at every bridge.
There were seven. The Bell Terrace footbridge to the Sixth. The Lantern Street span. Two freight hoists at the root. A tram-bridge to the Sixth that had been shut for years. The big bridge to the Eighth, at the top of the city, where the Gilt line was forty strong and dug in behind a barricade. And the old cable-crew walkway along the underside of the rib, back toward the spine, that only engineers knew.
At five of them, the Gilt stood aside when he told them what was on the anchorage. At one, they didn’t, and he stopped them, eight at once, hand on breastplate after hand on breastplate, until they lay in a heap of locked gold armor on the bridge-head and the crowd went over them. At the big bridge to the Eighth, they fired at him, and he caught the bolts on the sword and ate them, and when he walked through the barricade with his scars blazing red-gold, they broke and ran — across their own bridge, toward the Eighth, ahead of the crowd.
And the crowds went.
Not fast. Not enough. Forty thousand people on seven bridges, in the dark, with bags, with the old and the sick, with families holding hands. Pushing. Shoving. Some of them fell. He felt their hearts stop, at the bridge-heads, crushed. He couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t be at every bridge at once.
And some of them didn’t go at all.
He felt them. Thousands. In their flats. In their doorways. Still. Not moving. Hearts frosted so thick they barely woke at all, even now, even with runners hammering on their doors. Old people who’d eaten from the counters for sixty years. People who’d bowed at the Bell three times a day their whole lives, chin to chest, eyes closed, and had never once in their lives done anything else when frightened but put their heads down and wait for it to pass.
The Head watches, so that you need not.
They were waiting for it to pass.
The Bell rang at the end of the night cycle, the way it always had.
He was on the main street, near Lumen Square, half-way between the Lantern Street span and the big bridge, with the crowd streaming past him toward the bridges. And the disc on the roof of the Lumen shivered in the white-gold light from above, and the note rolled out, deep and slow, over the whole of Halden.
And the street stopped.
He felt it. Thousands of hearts, all around him, all at once. Going still. Heads going down. On the street, in the crowd, people stopping where they stood — with bags on their backs and old parents on their arms, on their way to a bridge that would get them off a rib that was going to fall — stopping. Bowing. Chin to chest. Eyes closed.
When the Bell rings, you stop.
He felt something in the air. Under the Bell. The same thing he’d felt in Lumen Square the day they took Arlo Venn. Cold. Fine. Settling. Like the frost in the darts. Falling, with the note, out of the disc on the roof, over the whole square, the whole street, the whole city. Faint. So faint. But there.
He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t have time to know.
He drew breath and shouted. His gallery voice. Over the Bell.
“WALK!”
Nobody moved.
“Don’t stop! Don’t bow! WALK! The bridges! GO!”
A few heads came up. A few. Wide eyes. Faces white. And then went back down, because the Bell was still ringing, and the Bell had always rung, and when it rang you stopped.
“Creed,” said Lamp. Fast. “The disc. On the roof. The Bell.”
He looked up at it. At the Lumen. At the polished disc on the point of the colored-glass dome, shivering, throwing its light and its note out over the square.
He didn’t think. He brought the gun-sword up and fired.
The blood-round went up through the white-gold light and hit the disc dead center and bloomed.
The disc didn’t explode. It cracked. A long jagged line across its polished face, from edge to edge, and the note it was making — the deep slow rolling Bell — broke. Shattered. Turned, in an instant, from a single clean tone into a jangling, rattling, discordant clang, like a cracked pot struck with a spoon.
And stopped.
The square was silent.
All around him, heads came up. Slowly. One after another. Confused. Blinking. Like people waking up in a drawer with no horn.
“WALK,” said Creed.
They walked.
He went to Spindle Row.
He’d been going there the whole time. He’d known he was going there since the kite. Since the depot. Since cut marks. Every bridge, every crowd, every Gilt line, he’d been going toward it, the way the sword had pulled toward the sanctum. He’d just had to go through everything else first.
The street was empty. Almost. A few doors open, dark rooms behind them. A few hearts, in flats, frosted thick, not moving. He knocked on their doors as he went. He shouted. Some came out. Some didn’t.
Block Nine. Four flights.
He felt it before he reached the top. A heart. Old. Warm. The frost on it thin, and cracking. Hammering.
Not on the fourth floor.
Above it.
On the roof.
The hatch was open. The brass key was in it, on its cord, hanging.
He came up through it onto the flat square of roof, into the white-gold light and the singing of the cables, and stopped.
Teodor Brask was sitting in his chair at the edge of the roof. Dela’s chair. Wrapped in Dela’s blanket. With his house-slippers on and his long brown coat over his nightclothes and his bald head bare in the light. Beside him, on the rusted tripod, the cracked lens on its swivel was turned toward the root of the rib. Toward the anchorage. And beside the lens, bolted to the tripod’s leg, something Creed hadn’t seen there before.
A lamp. Old. Heavy. Brass, with a shutter on the front, like the eye of the Breach warden’s scanner. And a lever on the side. The old man’s hand was on the lever.
Click. Click-click. Click.
The shutter opened and closed. Light, dark, light-light, dark, light. Out over Halden. Over the dark streets and the terraces and the little bridges.
“Teo,” said Creed.
The old man didn’t turn round. His hand kept working the lever.
“Cable-watch signal,” he said. His voice was hoarse. Steady. “Every block used to have one. Before the drones. You’d see a bad sway, you’d signal. Every cable-man in Halden knew the code. Every engineer. Every crew-boss. Every old fool who ever worked the primaries.” Click. Click-click. “EVACUATE. PRIMARIES COMPROMISED. ALL CREWS OFF.” Click. “Over and over. Since the runners came. Six hours.” He coughed. “They know it. The old ones. The ones who won’t listen to a runner from the Ninth. They know the cable-watch light. They grew up with it. They see it, and they go.” His glass eye whirred. “I’ve watched them go. Thousands. From up here. Down the streets. To the bridges.”
“Teo,” said Creed again. “Come down.”
“I can’t, son.” Click. Click-click. “Who’d work the lamp?”
“I will. Somebody else will. Come down. There’s five hours. I’ll carry you. I’ll carry you down the stairs and to the bridge and over it, I’ll —“
“There’s five hours on the clock in the box,” said Teo. “I know. I saw it. Through the lens.” He tapped the cracked lens on its swivel. “Number four’s going to go before the clock does.”
Creed stopped.
“I’ve been watching it,” said Teo. Quietly. His hand still on the lever. Click. Click. “Number four and number nine. The ones I reported. They cut those first. Deepest. Before the charges. They’re carrying the whole load now, the bites on the others are cut so far back. Four’s been creaking for an hour. I can hear it from here. Can’t you?”
He could. Under the singing of the cables. The creak. Deep. In the bone. Getting longer. Closer together.
“An hour,” said Teo. “Maybe less. Then four goes. Then nine. And then the others can’t hold it, not cut like that, not with the charges in them. The clock doesn’t matter. The clock was for show.” He coughed again. “So the Ninth would see. On the hour. Neat. Marchetti’s a clockmaker, they say.” His hand worked the lever. Click. Click-click. “But bone doesn’t care about clocks.”
“Then come DOWN —”
“Son.” The old man turned his head, finally. His real eye was wet and brown and steady. His glass eye glowed, whirring, focusing on Creed’s face. “There are still eleven thousand people on this rib who haven’t moved. I’ve counted. Through the lens. In their doors, in their flats, in the street, waiting. Bowing. And every time I flash the code, a few more of them look up and remember what it means. A few more of them go.” Click. Click-click. “If I stop, they stop. If I go down the stairs with you, they stay in their doors and wait for it to pass.”
Creed stood on the roof and couldn’t say anything.
“You go,” said Teo. “You go to the anchorage. You do what you can for number four. You’re strong. Stronger than anybody. Maybe you can give them another hour. Another hour’s another thousand people.” His hand didn’t stop. “I’ll stay here. I’ll work the lamp.” He looked back out over Halden. “Somebody’s got to watch the primaries.”
He couldn’t make his legs move.
He stood on the roof of Block Nine in the white-gold light and the singing of the wavering cables and the creak of the bone, and looked at the old man in the chair, and couldn’t make himself go.
“Creed,” said Snake. Very quiet. Not hungry. Not hot. Something else. “He’s right. You know he’s right.”
“Go,” said Lamp. Quieter. “Go, Creed. Give him his hour.”
He went to the chair. He knelt down beside it, on the roof, on the rusted deck, the way he’d knelt beside Jory Thane on the floor of the lab. He put his hand on the old man’s arm. On the long brown coat. Over the hide-colored skin.
Teo didn’t stop working the lever. Click. Click-click.
“You came and found me,” said the old man. “Twice. Nobody ever came and found me. In thirty-eight years. Not since Dela.” Click. “You know what that’s worth? To an old man in a flat with a window facing the wrong way?” He coughed. “Everything, son. It’s worth everything.”
“I’m sorry,” said Creed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, the gold, the Ninth, if I hadn’t —“
“Stop that.” Teo’s voice went sharp. The engineer’s voice. “Stop it. You didn’t cut the bites. They did. You didn’t sign the order. They did. You lit the Ninth, and the Ninth is gold, I’ve seen it, from this roof, every night for a week, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Dela would have cried.” His voice cracked. “Don’t you dare be sorry for that. They’re dropping this city because they’re afraid of a lamp. That’s on them. Every one. Not you.”
Click. Click-click.
Below, in the streets, Creed felt hearts moving. Out of doors. Down stairs. Toward the bridges. A few. A few more. Following the light.
The creak in the bone. Longer now.
“Go,” said Teo. “Please. Go and give them an hour.”
Creed stood up.
He looked at the old man in the chair. In Dela’s blanket. In his house-slippers. With his hand on the lever and his glass eye whirring and his real eye wet.
He didn’t say thank you for the soup. He didn’t say goodbye.
“Look up,” he said.
And Teodor Brask, sixty-eight, thirty-eight years on Spindle Row, retired cable engineer, tipped his bald head back in Dela’s chair, with his hand still working the lamp, and looked up. Past the cables. Past the cities. At the Skull, pouring its light down out of the god’s eyes.
“Huh,” he said softly. “It’s big.”
Creed went down the hatch.
He held it for three hours.
He’d remember that, afterward, when he remembered anything. He went down from the roof and through the empty streets and down the steps to the anchorage and past Haske and her Lancers and the stopped Gilt and the box on its pole with its clock — 04:12:40 — and went to the number four claw.
He could see it now. The bite. The great black blade of the anchorage, going into the pale bone of the rib. And around it, where the bone had grown up over a hundred years, the silver-suited crews had cut it back with their torches. Burned it away. Down and down. The blade was standing in a black, burned pit, its swelling gone, and the bone at the bottom of the pit, where the blade went in, was cracked. A spiderweb of cracks, spreading out from the blade into the rib, every one of them groaning.
The charges were packed into the pit around it. Grey. Shaped.
Don’t touch the charges.
He didn’t touch the charges.
He put his hands on the bone.
On the rib itself. At the edge of the burned pit, below the charges, where the cracks spread out from the blade into the pale bone. He put both palms flat on it, and cut them first, on the sword, deep, so that his blood ran down onto the god’s bone.
And he went in.
Not into a heart. Not into blood. Into bone. He’d never done it. He didn’t know if he could. He’d crumbled bone with his fingers in the pit under the Hollow, climbing. He’d felt the spine shudder under him on the marrow line. He’d never once tried to reach into it.
He reached.
And the bone answered.
He felt it. The way the sword had answered in the reliquary, the way the door had answered in the sanctum, the way the hatch had answered under the pump-house. The rib of the god felt his blood on it — his woken blood, with the pattern in its marrow — and it knew him. Not like a person knowing a person. Like a body knowing its own.
And the cracks around the bite were a wound.
He held it.
He didn’t know how. He just held. The way the scar on his own arm had held when a spike went through it. The way his ribs had held, knitting, on the Long Bridge. He reached into the cracked bone around the number four bite and he showed it — the way he’d shown Wick’s blood how to burn spores, the way he’d shown the old woman from Sump-Twelve how to wake — he showed the god’s bone how to knit.
It was slow. It was so slow. The bone was dead — a thousand years dead — and it didn’t remember how. He had to go beside it and go beside it and go beside it. And it cost. It cost the way waking the tanks had cost, the gold coming up out of the middle of him and going out through his palms into the rib. Every crack he closed, a little of the gold. And the weight on the bite, on the cracks, never stopped. The whole of Halden, hanging from it, from four and nine, pulling.
The creaking stopped.
Not forever. He knew that. He could feel the weight on the bite, the whole city, pulling. He could feel the cracks wanting to open. He could feel the bone, dead and tired and cut, wanting to let go.
He didn’t let it.
Another hour, Teo had said. Another hour’s another thousand people.
He held it for three.
It was nine that went.
Not four. He was holding four. He’d held it for three hours with his palms on the bone and the gold pouring out of him and his scars dimming and dimming, and Haske had come and knelt beside him at some point and said something he didn’t hear, and Sabine’s voice had come over the comm at some point — two hours out, two hours, hold on — and he’d held. He’d held four.
Nobody was holding nine.
He felt it go. Through the bone. Through his palms. A crack — not a creak, a crack, deep and enormous, like the vault of the crypt coming down on him in the Hollow — from the number nine claw, eighty meters along the anchorage. He felt the bone around the bite let go. He felt the blade come out of it. He felt the weight that had been on nine come across the city’s web of cables all at once, the whole load shifting, slamming onto four, onto the cracks he was holding, onto him —
And the charges went.
Not on the clock. On the shock. Somebody had set them to fire if the load moved too far. He’d never know who. He’d never know if it had been meant to happen like this or if it was an accident or if it was the clockmaker’s idea of neatness.
The grey charges packed into the burned pits of all twelve bites went off at once.
He was thrown. He didn’t know how far. He was on the platform and then he wasn’t, he was in the air, and then he was on the platform again, on his back, with the sword gone from his hand and his ears ringing and his palms burned to the bone and the gold in him gone, gone, emptied, and the bone of the rib under him shuddering —
And the cables sang.
All twelve. One last time. A sound he would hear in the dark for the rest of his life. Not a hum. A scream. Twelve carbon cables as thick as dormitory stacks, suddenly free at one end, whipping. Out over the gulf. Away from the rib.
And Halden fell.
It went slowly. That was what he’d remember. The way the refinery had gone slowly. He was on his back on the anchorage platform with his burned palms and his ringing ears, and he turned his head, and he watched it go.
The city tilted. The near end, the end by the root, by the anchorage, dropping first. The terraces sliding. The little bridges between them snapping, one after another, like the fuse-cord burning on the drone. The streets. Spindle Row, rising up the curve of the bone. Lumen Square, its colored glass, its cracked disc. The windows — the dim brown windows — tilting, turning, going sideways in the dark.
And the far end of the city, the end by the top of Spindle Row, rising for a moment as the near end fell. Lifting. Up into the white-gold light. As if, for one moment, the whole of Halden was trying to climb.
And on the top of Block Nine, at the very top of the long curve of Spindle Row, at the highest point of the rising end of the city, for one moment — one, as long as a heartbeat, as long as the first look up from the catwalk in the morning — a light.
Click. Click-click. Click.
EVACUATE.
Then the city went over the edge of the dark and fell, turning slowly, into the gulf, toward the Belly. The windows going out, one after another, from the near end to the far. Like the lights of a Suspension City going dark. Like Jory Thane’s veins. Like Kon’s face.
He watched until he couldn’t see it anymore.
He didn’t hear it land. Nobody on the Seventh did.
They heard it on the Ninth, Hanne Dray told him later. They felt it. In the soles of their feet. In the bone of their rib. A shudder, through the whole skeleton, from the Belly to the Skull, like the god turning over in his sleep.
And then, on the Ninth, under the gold lamps, in the square, she said — she said she’d never forget it — the Bell rang. On the hour. Neat.
Nobody bowed.
Sabine found him at the anchorage two hours later. She came up out of the crawlway hatch on the spine and up the ladders onto the platform with her blasters behind her and her pack of charges on her back, too late, two hours too late, and stopped.
There was nothing at the end of the anchorage. Twelve black claws, torn out of the bone, hanging off the rib. Twelve stumps of cable. And beyond them, over the gulf, where Halden had hung in its web for a hundred years — nothing. Air. Dark. The Eighth, across the gap, blue-brown and far away.
And Creed, on his knees at the edge of the platform, where the number four claw had been. His palms on the bone. Burned. His scars dark. His face turned out over the gulf.
He wasn’t moving.
Sabine came and stood beside him. She didn’t say anything for a long time.
“How many,” she said finally.
“Twenty-eight thousand got off,” said Haske, quietly, behind her. Her helm under her arm. Her gauge-face grey. “We counted. At the bridges. The runners and the cable-watch lamp. Twenty-eight thousand, maybe a little more.” A pause. “Twelve didn’t.”
Twelve thousand.
Sabine knelt down on the platform beside Creed. Slowly. The way she’d knelt by the fire in the deep cave. She put her two-fingered hand on his back. Between his shoulder blades. Over his father’s jacket.
“There was a light,” said Creed. Hoarse. Not looking at her. “On the roof of Block Nine. At the end. When it fell. He was still working the lamp.”
Sabine didn’t say anything.
“Twenty-eight thousand,” said Creed. “Because of an old man in a chair.” He looked down at his burned palms on the bone. “And twelve thousand because of a clock.”
Behind his eyes, Lamp was silent.
In his chest, Snake was silent too.
He knelt at the edge of the anchorage with Sabine’s hand on his back and looked out at the place where Halden had been, and for a long time nobody said anything at all.
Then, very quietly, so quietly that Sabine had to lean close to hear it, Creed began to sing.
The Long Way Down.
For Teo. For twelve thousand. For a city that had tried, for one moment, to climb.
Sabine didn’t know the words. She hummed it with him anyway. So did Haske, after a while, and her Lancers. And the Gilt — the ones he’d stopped on the platform, thawed now, sitting against the wall with their faceplates off, who’d been sent to guard the clock and had watched the city go — one by one, not knowing the tune, not knowing what it was, they hummed it too.
Going down, and down, and down.
Looking for the bottom of something.