“There’s a piece,” said Haske.
Creed didn’t move. He was still on his knees at the edge of the anchorage, with his burned palms on the bone and the song finished and Sabine’s hand still on his back. He’d stopped singing. He’d stopped doing anything.
“Creed.” Haske crouched beside him. Her helm was on again. Her voice came through the grille, calm, gauge-flat. “Listen to me. There’s a piece of it. Caught.”
He turned his head.
She was pointing down. Over the edge of the platform. Into the gulf. Where Halden had fallen.
He looked.
Below them — far below, two ribs down, three — the ribs of the god came out of the spine one under another, the way they always had. The Eighth, the Ninth with its gold patches, the Tenth, the Eleventh with the broken stump of the refinery hanging off it, frost-white. And between the Tenth and the Eleventh, wedged in the gap where the two ribs curved out from the spine close together, there was something that hadn’t been there before.
A tangle. Steel and stone and cable, jammed between the two ribs like a stone between two fingers. Terraces, broken off and tilted. Pieces of street. A tram-car, hanging by its rail. A web of snapped tertiary cables, wrapped around the bone of the Tenth Rib where the falling city had caught on it and torn and caught again.
And windows.
Some of them lit. Brown. Flickering.
He reached for it. With the thing in him that felt the blood. Down, through the dark, through the gulf, through two ribs of distance.
Hearts.
Hundreds of them. More. Two thousand, maybe. Hammering. Terrified. Hanging in a broken wedge of city between the Tenth Rib and the Eleventh over four kilometers of dark, held up by nothing but a snag of torn cable and a lip of bone.
He felt the snag.
It was slipping.
He stood up. He didn’t remember deciding to.
His palms were burned to the bone. He could see it — white, under the black, where the gold had poured out of them into the number four bite for three hours. They weren’t healing. Not properly. Slowly. As slow as Dorne’s blows. Slower. Because there was nothing in him to heal them with.
He was empty.
Not hungry. Hungry was what he’d been on the Long Bridge, in the caverns for three months. This was something else. The gold was gone. The thread in the middle of him, the cord, the thing he’d felt grow on the roof of Block Nine and in the burned lab under the pump-house and on the depot catwalk — it wasn’t flickering. It was barely there. A hair. A filament. The last glow at the bottom of a fire that somebody’s kicked apart.
His scars were dark. All of them. For the first time since the pit.
“Creed,” said Snake. And its voice was strange. Thin. “Creed. You can’t. There’s nothing in you. You gave it all to the bone. If you go down there like this —”
“I’m going down there.”
“You’ll die.”
“Then I’ll die holding it.”
“No,” said Lamp. Very quietly. Behind his eyes. “You will die before you touch it. You will reach for the bone and there will be nothing to reach with. You will fall into the gulf with them.”
He stood at the edge of the anchorage and looked down at the snag between the ribs. At the flickering brown windows. At the two thousand hearts.
“Then give me something,” he said.
Silence.
“Both of you,” said Creed. “You hold me together. You’ve been holding me together since the dark. Pulling. Both ways. All the time.” He looked down at his burned hands. “So pull harder. Both of you. Give me something to hold with.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” said Snake.
“Make it.”
Neither of them answered.
“There’s a way,” said Haske, behind him.
He turned.
She’d taken her helm off again. She was standing on the platform in her silver scale with her flower-staff in one hand, and her gauge-face was very calm.
“The Tenth Works,” she said. “On the Tenth Rib. The emergency tempering station. It’s there.” She pointed down. At the Tenth. At the cluster of lights near its root, by the spine, a few hundred meters along the bone from where the snag had caught. “Twelve tanks of channel-grade, tempered, waiting to go up the Terminus Six cable. Forty Gilt. And the drums from the Skull.” She looked at him. “You need to eat.”
He looked at the Tenth Works.
“Half a tank,” said Lamp. Fast. “Half a tank will not hold two thousand people on a snag. You know it will not.”
“Then more.”
“Creed —”
“More,” said Creed.
Lamp was silent.
“Oh,” said Snake. Very low. And the thinness was gone from its voice. Something else was in it. “Oh, yes.”
Haske carried him down. Her kite and two more, her Lancers, carrying Sabine and the last two Unbanded fighters. Down off the anchorage of the Seventh into the gulf in a long falling spiral, past the Eighth, past the Ninth — he saw the gold on the Ninth go past, patches of it on the terraces, lit, the people on the Ninth must have watched Halden fall past them, past their gold, into the dark — and down toward the Tenth.
The Tenth Works was a refinery in miniature. A cluster of tanks and sheds and a single tall tower bolted to the spine at the root of the Tenth Rib, lit white, with a capsule dock and a drum-drop platform at the top where the white drums came down from the Skull. And it was in chaos.
He felt it as they came in. Gilt — forty of them — running. Not toward the snag. Away from it. Along the Tenth Rib’s root, toward the spine, toward the ladders, toward anywhere that wasn’t the broken wedge of city two hundred meters along the bone from them, groaning and slipping. Technicians in white coats, running with them. Nobody was going toward the snag. Everybody was going away.
Except one.
He felt it before the kite touched down. A heart. Steady. Strong. No channels. Almost no frost. Red-gold, threading all through the blood.
Going toward the snag.
He didn’t think about her. Not then. Haske cut him loose over the Tenth Works’ tank yard and he dropped onto the steel among twelve tanks of tempered Catalyst, glowing blue, and the Gilt who were still in the yard saw him and ran.
He put both burned hands flat on the side of the nearest tank.
It hurt. It hurt more than anything had hurt since the slab. His palms were open to the bone and the steel of the tank was cold and the Catalyst in it was cold, and he pressed the raw bone of his palms against the steel and pulled.
It came. Through the steel. Into the wounds. Into him.
He burned the frost as it came. He tried to. He’d done it on the cable, slowly, a thread at a time, Lamp at his shoulder saying slowly, slowly. There was no time for slowly. He pulled the Catalyst out of the tank in a flood, the sight-port dimming as he watched — a quarter, a half — and the frost came in with it, faster than he could burn it, and he felt it reach his blood and start to settle —
And the gold wasn’t there to melt it.
“Creed,” said Lamp. Sharp. “The frost. You’re taking the frost —”
He kept pulling.
Three quarters. The frost was in him. Thin. Spreading. Like the dart on the depot floor. And the Catalyst was in him too, roaring, tame, bright — and he felt it start to do what it had done on the catwalk at Sump-Nine. Fill him. Fill him. The hunger and the emptiness and the dark scars, all of it, filling, the way the pressing floor had filled him, the way the Gilt on the grating had filled him —
The sight-port went dark. The tank was empty.
He moved to the next one.
“Half,” said Lamp. “Creed. You have had one. One is already —”
He put his hands on the second tank.
“More,” said Snake. And it wasn’t urging. It was with him. The way it had been with him on the marrow line, coming down from Rib Seven. “More. Take it. Take it all. You need it. They need it. Take it, take it, take —”
He took it.
He took it all.
He felt it go into him, the second tank, and the frost with it, and the frost was settling now, in his arms, in his chest — and under the frost, the Catalyst, so much of it, more than he’d ever had in him at once. More than the pressing floor. More than the catwalk. It came up through him in a wave, roaring, tame, cold, bright, filling every scar, and his scars lit —
Not red-gold.
Not gold.
Red.
Bright. Hard. The red of the press plate at hour nineteen. The red of the pressing floor. The red of the grating at Sump-Nine with his hands in a man’s face. Every line on his body, blazing red through the frost, through his father’s jacket, through his coat, so bright it threw his shadow across the whole tank yard and up the side of the Works tower.
The burns on his palms closed.
All at once. The way his wounds had closed in the lab, in the fight with the Choir — fast, gripping, sealing. Bone, then meat, then skin. In seconds.
He stood in the tank yard of the Tenth Works with two empty tanks behind him and the red pouring off him and the frost settled thin and cold under it, and he felt strong. Stronger than he’d ever felt. Stronger than on the Long Bridge, than on the catwalk, than in the vault with Kon.
He felt like he could hold a city.
“Yes,” said Snake. Low. Satisfied. Huge. It was bigger. He could feel it. In his chest, around his heart, the coils of it — thicker, hotter, more. “Yes. Now you can.”
Behind his eyes, Lamp said nothing.
He didn’t wait for it to.
The broken piece of Halden was wedged between the Tenth Rib and the Eleventh like a fist between two fingers.
He saw it close, running along the root of the Tenth from the Works. A tilted wedge of city — three terraces, four, broken off from the rest and turned half on their side, so that the streets ran up instead of along, and the buildings stood out sideways from them like teeth from a jaw. A tangle of snapped cables wrapped round the bone of the Tenth Rib where the wedge had caught — dozens of them, tertiaries, secondaries, wound round and round the rib in a great knot. And under the wedge, holding it up on the other side, a lip of the Eleventh Rib’s bone, curving up.
The knot of cables was slipping. He could hear it. Steel grinding on bone. A long shrieking creak, every few seconds, and the whole wedge would drop a hand’s width, shudder, catch.
And on the wedge — in the tilted streets, in the sideways buildings, clinging to doorframes and railings and each other — people.
He felt them. Two thousand hearts. Hammering.
And among them, already there, climbing up the tilted wedge from the Tenth Rib side, hand over hand, toward the knot of cables —
Ilka Dorne.
She was in her plain grey militia uniform. No armor. No weapon. Climbing the side of a sideways building like a ladder, fast, her square hands finding holds in the stone, her red-gold eyes fixed on the knot of cables at the top of the wedge where it was wrapped round the bone.
He felt her heart. Steady. Strong. And the red-gold in her blood, lit.
She reached the knot.
He watched her get her hands into it. Into the tangle of snapped cable, where it wound round the Tenth Rib’s bone. And brace her feet on the wedge. And pull. Against the slip. Against the weight of the city.
The creak stopped.
Not for long. A few seconds. He felt her heart hammer — not steady anymore, straining, the red-gold in her blood blazing — and felt the knot hold, and hold, and then begin, slowly, to slip again, dragging her with it, a hand’s width, another.
He was running.
He came up the wedge the way she had. Up the tilted streets, up the side of a sideways building, hand over hand. Past people clinging to doorframes, who saw him come, his scars blazing red, and screamed — he didn’t stop — past a man holding a woman by the wrist over a gap where a terrace had broken, and Creed caught the woman by the other wrist as he went past and swung her up onto the ledge and went on.
He reached the knot.
She was there. Braced against it. Her hands buried in the tangle of cable, her square shoulders locked, her whole body straining. Her face was grey. Blood was coming out of her nose. The red-gold in the whites of her eyes was blazing, flickering, stuttering, the way it had on the bridge when Mirelle sang.
She turned her head and saw him.
Her face didn’t change. Plain. Hard. Bleeding.
“You,” she said. Through her teeth.
“Me.”
“Good. Pull.”
He put his hands in the knot beside hers.
He didn’t pull the cable. He reached through it. Through the steel, into the bone it was wrapped around. The Tenth Rib. The god’s bone. The way he’d reached into the number four bite.
He felt it answer. The way the Seventh’s bone had answered. Knowing him.
But this time he wasn’t empty.
He poured the red into it.
Not gold. He didn’t have gold. He had two tanks of tempered Catalyst roaring in him, red, and the frost thin under it, and Snake’s coils huge around his heart. And he poured it into the bone of the Tenth Rib, through the knot of cable, through his hands — not showing the bone how to knit, there was no time for showing, he just made it. He reached into the god’s bone where the cables were wrapped around it and he grabbed the bone itself and pulled it up. Around the cables. The way the bone had grown up around the anchorage bites over a hundred years. In seconds.
He felt the bone move.
It came up out of the surface of the rib, under his hands, like something rising out of water. Pale. Rough. Swelling. Around the snapped cables. Over them. Closing on them, the way a fist closes. Gripping.
The slip stopped.
He felt the weight of the wedge come onto the bone. Onto the new bone, the swollen grip. Onto him. The whole broken city, through the cables, into the rib, into his hands. Two thousand people and the stone and the steel and the sideways buildings. He felt his arms take it. His shoulders. His spine. His knees went and he held. His palms — healed, ten minutes healed — split open again where they pressed into the cable and the blood ran down into the bone.
The sigils on the sword on his back were burning. He could feel them through his coat. Through his father’s jacket. Red. Hot. Burning. Hot enough to scorch the canvas.
He held.
Beside him, Ilka Dorne let go of the knot.
He felt her stagger. Felt her heart stutter, and catch, and steady. She was on her knees on the tilted wall beside him, gasping, blood running from her nose into her mouth, staring at the bone.
At the bone swelling up around the cables, under his hands. Pale. Rising. Holding.
“What are you doing,” she said. Barely audible.
“Holding it,” said Creed.
“That’s bone. You’re — you’re growing it —“
“Get them off,” said Creed. Through his teeth. “Onto the Tenth. All of them. I can’t hold this forever.”
She stared at him for one more second.
Then she was up. Moving. Down the wedge, the way she’d come up. Shouting. Her militia voice, made for shouting over noise, going out over the tilted streets.
“TENTH RIB! ONTO THE RIB! THIS WAY! MOVE! MOVE!”
He held it for an hour.
He didn’t know that, then. He didn’t know anything, then, except the weight. And the red. And the bone under his hands, swelling, gripping, and the cables in it, and the city on the cables.
He felt them go. The two thousand. One by one, ten by ten. Off the wedge. Onto the Tenth Rib. Up the tilted streets, along ledges, across planks Dorne threw down between the broken terraces and the bone. He felt Haske’s Lancers come in on their kites and pluck people off the far end of the wedge where the terraces hung out over nothing, two at a time, and carry them across the gap to the rib. He felt Sabine at the bottom of the wedge on the Tenth Rib side, with her two fighters, catching people as they came off, hauling them up onto the bone. He felt the Gilt from the Tenth Works — some of them, not all, the ones who’d run and then stopped running and come back — reaching down from the edge of the rib with their lances held out like poles, for people to grab.
He felt Dorne. Everywhere. Up and down the wedge. Her heart like a drum.
And the whole time, the red.
It was in him. Filling him. Pouring through him into the bone, and the more he poured, the more there was. Two tanks of it. More than he’d ever had. And Snake, around his heart, huge, coiling, singing — not the hungry hum of the lab, not the roar on the roof of Block Nine. Something deeper. Like the note of the sword. Like the god’s breath in the pipe-forest.
“You see?” it said. Low. Close. Inside him. “You see what you can do? When you stop holding back? When you stop letting Lamp say enough? You’re holding a city, Creed. With your hands. Out of the god’s own bone. Nobody’s done this. Nobody, ever. Not the Wrights. Not the Heads. Nobody.” A long hot coil. “And all you had to do was eat.”
He held.
“Imagine,” said Snake. “Imagine what you could do with more. Twenty tanks. Fifty. The Tenth Works has drums of it coming down from the Skull every day. Imagine. You could hold every city in the Ribs. You could drop every city in the Ribs. You could walk up the neck of the world with the god’s bone moving under your hands like water —”
“Stop,” said Creed.
“— and when you got to the top —”
“Stop.”
Snake stopped. But it didn’t shrink. It stayed huge. Coiled around his heart, hot, patient.
Waiting.
And behind his eyes — he reached for it, the way he’d reached for it in the crawlway, when he’d needed to cool Wick — behind his eyes, Lamp was —
Small.
He’d never felt it small. It was always there. Cold, clean, still, behind his eyes. Sometimes thin, like after the crawlway. But always there. Always the same size as the heat. The two of them, holding him like a city between two ribs.
It wasn’t the same size. Not now. Snake was huge, and Lamp was small, and the balance between them — the place in the middle where they cancelled, where the gold thread lived — wasn’t in the middle anymore. It had moved. Toward Lamp. Squeezed. Pushed back, behind his eyes, by the size of the heat.
And the gold thread was a filament. A hair. In the squeezed place. Barely glowing.
“Lamp,” he said.
“I am here,” said Lamp. Very faint. “Hold the city, Creed. Hold it. I am here.”
He held it.
“CLEAR!”
Dorne’s voice. From the bottom of the wedge. Hoarse, cracking, still loud enough to carry.
“THAT’S ALL OF THEM! IT’S CLEAR! LET GO!”
He didn’t let go.
He couldn’t. His hands were in the bone. Not on it — in it. He’d been pouring himself into it for an hour, and the bone had swollen up around the cables, and around his hands too, and now it held them both. He was kneeling on the tilted wall of a broken city with his arms buried to the wrists in a knot of god-bone that he’d grown himself, and the whole weight of the empty wedge still on it.
He tried to pull his hands out. The bone held.
“LET GO!” Dorne, closer. Coming up the wedge. “Anomaly — Creed — IT’S CLEAR, LET GO —”
“I can’t.”
The wedge creaked. Not the cables. The wedge itself. Empty now, all its people gone, its weight still hanging off the knot of bone. And the lip of the Eleventh Rib under its other end, where it had caught — that was going. He felt it. Cracking. The bone of the Eleventh, never meant to hold a city, splitting under the edge of the wedge.
When it went, the wedge would swing. Off the Eleventh. Down. Hanging only from the knot. From the bone he’d grown. From his hands.
And then the knot would go, and the wedge would fall, and he’d go with it.
“Pull,” said Snake. “Pull out. Tear it. Tear your hands off if you have to. They’ll grow back. Pull —”
He pulled. The bone held. It was his. It was holding the way he’d told it to.
The Eleventh’s lip cracked.
The wedge swung.
He felt it go out from under him. The tilted wall he was kneeling on, dropping away, swinging out over the gulf on the knot of cables, and the knot shrieking, and his arms in the bone taking the whole weight in a single tearing jerk that pulled at his shoulders, his spine, his everything —
Somebody’s arms went around his chest from behind.
Square. Thick. A grip like a vise.
“When I say,” said Ilka Dorne, in his ear, “stop telling it to hold.”
“What —”
“It’s yours. The bone. It’s doing what you tell it. Tell it to stop.” Her arms tightened. “NOW.”
He stopped.
He reached into the bone around his hands and he didn’t tell it to hold. He told it — nothing. He let go of it. The way he let go of a lance when Lamp said enough. He stopped pouring.
The bone let go of his hands.
The wedge fell.
Dorne pulled.
He came up out of the knot of bone and backward, over the edge of the Tenth Rib, in Ilka Dorne’s arms, and they hit the bone of the rib together and rolled, and behind them, below them, the empty broken wedge of Halden swung down off the knot, tearing the last of the cables, and fell.
Into the gulf. Turning. Toward the Belly. Empty.
He lay on his back on the bone of the Tenth Rib with Dorne half on top of him, both of them gasping, and listened to it fall.
He didn’t hear it land.
When he could, he sat up.
Dorne was sitting a meter away, on the bone, with her back against a stump of torn cable and her knees drawn up and her square hands hanging between them. Blood all down her face from her nose. Her eyes closed. The red-gold under her skin flickering, dim, stuttering. Her heart going hard and uneven.
Around them, on the root of the Tenth Rib, between the snag and the Works — people. Two thousand of them. Sitting on the bone, lying on it, holding each other. Halden people. In nightclothes, in coats, with bags, without. Crying. Silent. Staring out at the gulf where their city had been.
Alive.
He looked at Dorne.
“Why,” he said.
She didn’t open her eyes. “Why what.”
“Why did you come?”
She was quiet for a long time.
“The Eighth saw it fall,” she said at last. Flat. “From every window on the rib. We watched it go past. Forty thousand people’s city, going past our windows into the dark.” She opened her eyes. Red-gold, dim. Looking at nothing. “The Concord told us it was you. On every channel, before it had finished falling. The Anomaly has dropped Halden. My mother heard it. My crew heard it. Everybody on the Eighth heard it.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“I know it wasn’t you.” She turned her head and looked at him. “I was at the Clock Hall when they signed it. On the Second. Standing guard at the door. The Senior was winding her big clock when the order came back confirmed.” Her plain face did something terrible. “She said: good. The Ninth will see. On the hour. And she went back to winding.”
Creed didn’t say anything.
“So I came,” said Ilka Dorne. “That’s all. I came because the Eighth saw it fall. I came because somebody had to come who wasn’t you, so that when they tell the Eighth it was the Anomaly who did it, somebody from the Eighth can say I was there, and he was holding it up.” She looked away again. “Don’t make it more than it is.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. I can see it on your face.” She wiped blood off her lip with the back of a square hand. “I’m still Marchetti’s. I’m still going to be in the street on the Eighth when you come. My mother’s still on the Eighth.” A pause. “But I’m going to tell her what I saw tonight. And she’s going to tell her neighbors. And they’re going to tell theirs.”
“That’s more than it is,” said Creed.
Dorne almost smiled. Almost.
Then her face changed.
She was looking at him. At his scars. At the red still pouring off them — not as bright as on the snag, but still red, hard, the press-plate red. At his eyes.
“Your eyes,” she said slowly. “On the bridge, they were — red-gold. Like mine. Like the threads.” She leaned forward a little. Squinting. “They’re not, now.”
He didn’t know what his eyes looked like. He hadn’t seen a mirror since Kon’s house.
“What are they,” he said.
Ilka Dorne looked at him for a long moment.
“Red,” she said. “Just red. Like the inside of a furnace.” A pause. “Like you’re burning.”
He went back to the Works while Haske and Sabine and the Lancers and the Tenth Works Gilt who’d stayed began the long work of getting two thousand people off the Tenth Rib — up, to the Ninth, by kite and hoist and ladder, where Hanne Dray had already sent word that the Ninth would take every one.
He went back to the tank yard. To the two empty tanks.
He stood in front of them for a long time.
“There are ten more,” said Snake. Quiet. Warm. Patient. “Right there. And the drums. You’re still full, but you won’t be for long. And there’s so much more you could do. So much more you need to do. The Ninth needs light. The Halden people need food. The Concord needs stopping.” A slow coil. “And Lamp says enough. Every time. Lamp always says enough.”
He looked at the ten tanks. Blue. Tempered. Full.
He reached for Lamp.
Behind his eyes. He went looking for it, the way he’d gone looking for it on the roof of Block Nine to find the seam. He found it.
It was small. Still small. Squeezed into a corner of him by the size of the heat. Thin and cold and faint, the way it had been after the crawlway, but worse. Much worse. And the gold thread in the place where they met — a hair. A filament. Almost nothing.
“Lamp,” he said.
“I am here,” said Lamp. So faint.
“Did I do this?”
A long silence.
“You took two tanks,” said Lamp. “With the frost. Without the gold to melt it. You let the fire hold a city.” Each word placed so carefully. As if it hurt. “It held. The city is off the snag. Two thousand people are alive.” A pause. “And the fire is larger now. And I am smaller. And the gold —” It stopped.
“Will it come back? The gold?”
“I do not know.”
He looked at the ten tanks for a long time.
“Take them,” said Snake.
He turned his back on them, and walked out of the Tenth Works, and went to help carry people up the ladders to the Ninth.
“Soft,” said Snake, behind him. Not mocking. Not angry. Thoughtful. Patient. Huge. “You’ll come back. You’ll need to. They’ll keep coming, Creed. Dorne. The Concord. The Wardens. And every time, you’ll need more. And every time, I’ll be here.”
He climbed.
Behind his eyes, very faint, Lamp said nothing. But he felt it. Small, and cold, and holding on.
Holding on to him.