It had come down on the Flats.
That was something. The Flats were the old marrow-waste ground between Sump-Seven and Sump-Eight — a wide stretch of Belly floor where, for a hundred years, the galleries had dumped the dregs from the settling, the grey cake that was too dry to pump and too wet to burn. Nobody lived on the Flats. Nobody worked them. The nearest drawer-stack was Sump-Eight’s, two kilometers off.
Two kilometers was close enough. The outer catwalk of Sump-Eight had come down with the shock. Forty drawers. He didn’t count them. Ollo did, and told him, and he went and carved the names.
But it was the Flats that Halden hit.
He stood at the edge of it on the second morning after the fall, with Ollo beside him and a hand-cart and twenty Unbanded with lamps and ropes behind them, and looked.
It went on for kilometers.
A city doesn’t fall in one piece. He’d known that, watching it go. It had come apart in the air, tilting, the terraces sliding off the curve of their rib, the little bridges snapping. And when it hit the Flats, what was left of it had gone out. Spread. Like a sack of grain dropped from a gantry. A field of it. Stone and steel and glass and wood, in drifts and heaps and long ridges, across the grey cake of the Flats, as far as the lamps would show. Walls standing up out of it with nothing behind them. A tram-car, crushed flat, its rail still bolted to a slab of street. A doorframe. A window box, intact, on its own, sitting on top of a heap of rubble, with something in it that might once have been a grey-cap and was now just a stain.
And under it all, everywhere — he could feel it — nothing.
No hearts.
He’d come down with the first light. He’d stood at the edge of the field and reached into it, with the thing in him that felt the blood, all the way across it, every heap and drift and ridge, the way he’d reached for the greylings in the pipe-forest. Looking for anything. One heart. A flicker.
Nothing.
Four kilometers is a long way to fall.
“Nobody,” said Snake. Quiet. “Nobody, mule.”
He knew. He went in anyway.
They searched for nine days.
Not for the living. Everybody knew. But you looked. The rule was older than he was, older than any of them. You look, in case it’s somebody you know.
The Unbanded came down out of the caverns in their hundreds. Sabine organized them, the way she’d organized blasting crews — teams of ten, a lamp each, a sector of the field each, marked out with chalk on the grey cake. They went through the wreck slowly. Lifting. Clearing. Looking. When they found someone, they stopped, and one of them went for Mirelle, or one of her Choir, and the Choir came and sang, and the team waited until the song was done, and then they carried the someone out of the wreck on a door or a plank or a sheet of steel and laid them in rows at the edge of the field.
The rows got long.
He worked in the wreck every day, from the start of the light until he couldn’t see. He didn’t use the blood-sense after the first morning. There was no point. He used his hands. Lifting. He could lift more than any ten of them, and he did, slabs of terrace and walls and girders, so that the teams could get under them. He didn’t feed. He didn’t let himself. There was nothing to feed on in the field — no Catalyst, no channels, just stone and the dead — and when the hunger came up in him on the third day, the red hunger, the Tenth Works hunger, bigger now than it had ever been, he went on lifting.
“You need to eat,” said Snake. Every day. “The Tenth Works is three ribs up. Ten tanks. You could be there and back in a day.”
He lifted.
“Your eyes are going dim,” said Snake. “The red’s going out of them. You know what happens when it goes out. You go empty. Like after the bite.”
He lifted.
Lamp said nothing. It had said almost nothing since the Snag. It was there, behind his eyes, small and cold and faint. Holding on. But it didn’t speak. And he didn’t ask it to.
He found Lumen Square on the fifth day.
Not the square. The Lumen. What was left of it. The colored glass dome had come down in a single piece, somehow, and lay on its side in the wreck like a dropped bowl, cracked all over but whole, gold and pale yellow and milk-white glass in its frame of dark metal. And beside it, half-buried, the disc from its roof. The Bell. Polished metal, as wide as he was tall, with a long jagged crack across its face from edge to edge where his blood-round had hit it.
He stood and looked at it for a long time.
Then he went on.
He found Teo on the seventh day.
He’d been looking for Block Nine since the first morning. Spindle Row had been at the top of the long curve of the rib, the far end, the end that rose up for a moment as the near end fell. It had come down last. Farthest. At the far edge of the field, near Sump-Eight, where the wreck thinned out into the grey cake.
He knew it by the hatch.
The roof of Block Nine had come down more or less whole. A flat square of rusted deck, the size of a ration hall, tilted, half-buried in rubble. Edged with a low wall. And in the middle of it, the hatch — open — with the brass key still in it, on its cord.
He climbed up onto the tilted roof.
The rusted tripod was there. Bent. The cracked lens on its swivel, smashed now. And bolted to the tripod’s leg, its brass housing dented, its shutter jammed half-open, the cable-watch lamp.
And beside it, the chair.
Dela’s chair. Wood. What was left of it. And in it — in what was left of it — wrapped in a blanket, gone grey with dust —
He knelt down.
He didn’t look for long. He’d learned, in the pit under the Hollow, and on the floor of the pressing floor, and in the rows at the edge of the field, how long to look. Long enough to know. Not so long that you couldn’t stop.
Teodor Brask had been sitting in the chair when the city fell. He was still sitting in it. In Dela’s blanket. In his house-slippers — one of them; the other was gone. His right hand was on the lever of the lamp. His fingers were still curled round it.
His head was tipped back.
Creed knelt beside the chair for a long time.
He didn’t sing. Not yet. He didn’t cry. He’d cried at the anchorage, on his knees, and on the floor of flat fourteen, and in the burned lab under the pump-house. He didn’t think he had anything left to cry with.
He reached out and closed the old man’s eyes. The real one. The brown one.
The glass one wouldn’t close. It was set in the socket, steel and glass, with the faint blue glow gone out of the center of it. Dark. He looked at it for a long moment.
Then, very gently, the way you’d lift a pump-seal out of its housing, he took it out.
It came out easily. It had been made to. A small cylinder of steel and glass, the lens on one end, a fine silver coupling on the other where it had met the channel behind the eye. Cold, now. Dark. He held it in his palm.
You’re across the hall, Teo had said, and you’re hungry, and I’ve got soup. It doesn’t seem to need much more than that.
He put the glass eye in the inside pocket of his father’s jacket. Next to the dark seed-disc from the lab. Next to Ferrin’s note. Next to the Pale Key.
Then he unbolted the cable-watch lamp from the bent tripod, and picked up Teodor Brask in his chair and his blanket, the whole of him, the way Ferrin had picked up his father at the Root Gallery — carefully, as if he weighed nothing, because he did — and carried him down off the roof of Block Nine and across the field to the rows.
They sang them down on the ninth day. All of them.
Mirelle had wanted to do it one by one. The way the Choir did. A song for each. She’d done it for the first hundred, on the first days, standing at the edge of the field as each one was carried out. She’d stopped on the fourth day because her voice had gone. She’d tried again on the fifth and couldn’t.
So they did it together.
Everybody came. Not just the Unbanded. Not just the Choir.
The Halden people came down.
That was the thing nobody had expected. Two thousand of them on the Ninth, from the Snag, sleeping in Hanne Dray’s depot and the dead tram terminus and people’s flats under the gold lamps. Twenty-eight thousand more, scattered across the Sixth and the Eighth and the Fifth, wherever they’d got off a bridge. And the Ribs didn’t want them. Wick heard it on the net. Hanne heard it in the Green Market. The Sixth had shut its bridges to Halden people on the second day. Bleeder-taint. The Eighth had put them in a warehouse at the root and posted Gilt on the door. The Fifth said it had no room.
So they came down.
He didn’t know how the word went. It went the way word always went in the skeleton. Faster than water through a crack. The Belly’s searching the wreck. The Belly’s carrying them out. The Anomaly carried the old cable-man down off his roof in his chair.
They came down the freight hoists and the maintenance ladders and the old cable-crew walkways, in ones and twos and then dozens. Mids. From the Seventh. Who had never in their lives been below the Eighth. Who’d been taught their whole lives that the Belly was dark and poisoned and full of mules who’d cut your throat for a ration chit. They came down the spine into the dark with their bags and their bundles and their faces white, and they came to the edge of the field, to the rows, looking.
Looking for their people.
And the Unbanded helped them look.
By the ninth day there were six thousand people at the edge of the field. Unbanded and Halden, Animatid and Mid, standing together in the dark between Sump-Seven and Sump-Eight, among the rows. More of them than had ever stood together anywhere in the Belly. And the gold lamps — Pell Varrow had brought one down from the Ninth, one of the little crane-rig cylinders, and hung it on a pole at the end of the rows — lit their faces. All of them. The same.
Mirelle stood at the end of the rows with her bone mask on. The first time he’d seen her wear it in weeks. Her voice was a wreck. She sang anyway.
The Long Way Down.
And six thousand people, Animatid and Mid, who’d never in their lives sung anything together, sang with her.
The Animatids knew the shape of it. Somebody’s mother. Somebody’s grandmother. Somebody at the next pump. And the Halden people didn’t know it at all, had never heard it, and they learned it in the first verse from the people standing beside them, the way the Gilt on the anchorage had learned it, humming, without knowing what it was.
Going down, and down, and down.
Creed stood at the end of the last row, beside a chair with a blanket in it, and sang.
When it came to the hidden verse, he sang that too. Alone. He didn’t think about it. It just came.
“Hush now, the lamp is lit —”
The mark on his chest warmed.
He felt it. Under his father’s jacket. Warm. And in the middle of him, in the squeezed, pushed-back place behind his eyes where Lamp was small and the gold had gone down to a hair —
A flicker.
Just a flicker. Not a flare. Not a swell. The filament of gold, in the narrow place between the huge heat and the small cold, glowing. For a breath. Brighter than it had been since the Snag.
Then it went back down.
But it hadn’t gone out.
Nobody left.
That was the strange thing. After the singing, after the rows were laid in the deep marrow-cake at the edge of the Flats and covered and marked — with stones, with pieces of the wreck, with names scratched on slates and propped up — the six thousand people at the edge of the field didn’t go home.
The Unbanded didn’t go back to the caverns. The Halden people didn’t go back up the spine.
They stayed. They sat down, at the edge of the field, under the gold lamp on its pole, in the dark, among the graves. And they talked.
He didn’t hear most of it. He was too tired. He sat against a fallen wall at the edge of the rows with the cable-watch lamp in his lap and listened to the voices, low, all around him. Animatid voices. Mid voices. Mixing.
Where are you from? — Sump-Eight. Line B. You? — Spindle Row. Block Four. — I heard there was a Block Nine. — There was. The old cable-man. — I heard. I heard he worked the lamp till it went. — He did. My mother saw it from the Lantern Street span. She said it was still flashing when —
He sat and listened, and the voices went on, and on, into the night that wasn’t a night.
Sabine found him there. She sat down beside him against the wall, heavily, and looked out at the field. The wreck of Halden. Kilometers of it. Stone and steel and glass and wood, in drifts and heaps and long ridges, across the grey cake of the Flats.
“There’s a lot of it,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Walls. Doors. Roofs. Stairs.” She looked at it the way she looked at a gallery face. “Pipes. Wiring. Glass.” A pause. “Windows.”
He turned his head and looked at her.
“There’s two thousand Halden people on the Ninth with nowhere to go but somebody else’s floor,” said Sabine. “There’s twenty-eight thousand on the Sixth and the Eighth and the Fifth in warehouses with Gilt on the doors. There’s six thousand of ours in the caverns eating one bowl of grey-caps a day and sleeping in holes in the god’s arse.” She jerked her chin at the field. “And there’s a whole city lying here. Broken. In pieces. With nobody in it.”
He looked at the field.
“It’s on the Flats,” said Sabine. “Nobody wants the Flats. The Concord doesn’t patrol the Flats. There’s nothing here. Never has been.” The burned half of her mouth pulled up. “It’s ours, if we want it.”
“It’s a graveyard.”
“So was the Hollow,” said Sabine. “So’s the whole Belly. So’s the whole god, if you think about it.” She looked at him. “Everything we’ve ever had, we built in a dead thing. In the dark. Out of what somebody else threw away.” She looked back out at the field. “That’s the only kind of city the Belly ever got to build.”
He sat there with the lamp in his lap for a long time.
“Ask them,” he said finally.
“Ask who?”
“Them.” He nodded at the people at the edge of the field. Animatid and Mid. Talking. “Not me. Ask them if they want it.”
Sabine looked at him for a long moment.
Then she got up, and walked out into the middle of them, under the gold lamp, and asked.
They built.
Not fast. Not well, at first. Nobody in the Belly had ever built anything that wasn’t a drawer-stack or a gallery prop, and the Halden people had built things only with tools and plans and Catalyst-driven cranes, none of which they had. So they built the way the Belly built everything. Out of what was there. With their hands.
The first thing was the Lumen.
Not to worship in. Nobody said that. But the colored glass dome was lying on its side in the wreck, whole, cracked all over, and somebody — a Halden glazier named Orrin Tace, old, frightened, with a single channel in his right hand that had gone dark since the fall — said it was the biggest piece of unbroken glass in the field, and you could see through it, and if you stood it up it would make a roof.
So they stood it up. Two hundred people, with ropes and levers and Ollo’s hand-carts, and Creed under the heaviest edge, lifting. They stood it up the right way on a ring of rubble at the center of the field, near where Lumen Square must have fallen, and it was a roof. A great dome of gold and pale yellow and milk-white glass, cracked all over.
Under it, Pell Varrow hung the gold lamp.
And the light came through the cracked glass of the dome and fell out across the field. Gold, through gold. Pale yellow through pale yellow. Milk-white through milk-white.
People stood under it and looked up.
Nobody bowed.
After that, they built around it. Walls that were still standing, they roofed. Rooms that were still rooms, they cleared. Stairs that went nowhere, they made go somewhere. Halden people who’d been engineers and plumbers and electricians showed Animatids who’d been pick-hands and pump-hands and blasting crew how to run a pipe or a wire. Animatids who’d lived in the dark their whole lives showed Halden people how to grow grey-caps in it. How to find water dripping from the bone. How to sleep in a space the width of a drawer and be glad of it.
Ferrin came down from the caverns with his father, and Matthis Ferrin, eighty-three, cable-sick, half-lucid, stood at the edge of the field in his blanket and looked at the wreck of the city he’d hung for forty-one years, and cried. And then asked, quite clearly, to be shown where Teo Brask was buried. And sat by the slate with Teo’s name scratched on it for a whole day, talking to it. Telling it, as far as anybody could tell, about a bad splice on number seven in the year three-eighty-eight.
Wick came down and wired the field. Not lights — they had only the one gold cylinder, and it hung in the Lumen. A comm-net. He ran it out from a junction under the dome to every cleared room in the field, cracked Gilt comms and Halden house-terminals dug out of the wreck, so that anybody anywhere in the field could talk to anybody else.
The first message on it, the first day it worked, was from an old woman in a cleared room on the east side of the field to her son, who’d come down from the Eighth’s warehouse that morning and was helping clear the west side. It said: there’s soup, if you want it.
Wick told Creed about it. He was trying not to cry. He failed.
They needed a name for it.
Not Halden. Halden was the city on the Seventh, on its cables, hung from the rib. That city was gone. The Halden people didn’t want its name on a pile of its own wreck in the dark. And not the Flats. The Flats were dregs and grey cake. Nobody wanted to live on the Flats.
They talked about it under the dome, at the end of a shift that nobody worked. Hundreds of them. Animatid and Mid. Arguing. New Halden. No. The Field. No. Teo’s. Some liked that. Some didn’t; Teo hadn’t been the only one. The Fall. Too sad. The Rest. Somebody liked that. Where the city rested. Somebody else said it sounded like a graveyard. Somebody else said it was a graveyard.
Creed sat at the edge of it with his back against a cracked wall and the cable-watch lamp in his lap and didn’t say anything. He didn’t think it was his to name.
Then somebody said, from the back of the crowd, quite quietly: “Who was Hesk?”
The arguing stopped.
It was a Halden man. Young. Thin. An apprentice electrician, he’d said, the day he came down. He’d been helping carve names on the Wall in the caverns — the Halden people had started going up to the caverns, too, to carve their own — and he’d seen it. Near the top. Near the beginning. Cut deeper than the others, with a blade that would cut anything.
HESK MARROW-VANE. LINE C. NO. 2 PUMP. 31 YEARS. SHE SANG.
“I saw it on the Wall,” the young man said. “Up in the caverns. It’s the first name. Near the top. Everybody else’s name, they just carved it. That one —“ He hesitated. “That one says she sang. Nobody else’s says anything like that. Who was she?”
The dome was very quiet.
People turned. Looked at Creed. The Unbanded first — they knew — and then the Halden people, following their eyes.
He didn’t want to answer. He sat against the wall with the lamp in his lap and thought about not answering.
“Tell them,” said Snake. Quietly.
“Tell them,” said Lamp. So faint he barely heard it.
The first time, he thought, in a long time, that the two of them had said the same thing.
“She worked the pump next to mine,” said Creed. “On Line C. For nine years. She hummed a song. Every shift. The one we sang at the rows.” He looked down at the lamp. “I never knew her name. Her whole name. I never asked her anything. And she knew who I was the whole time and never told me, because if I’d known, I’d have gone looking, and they’d have killed me.” He was quiet a moment. “She stood next to me for nine years and kept me alive by not telling me anything. And sang. And then one shift, at hour nineteen, she stopped singing, and died standing up at her pump, and I didn’t notice when.”
Nobody said anything.
“She was my aunt,” said Creed. “I found that out a month ago.”
The young Halden electrician stood very still at the back of the crowd.
“Hesk’s,” said somebody. An Animatid voice. Old. A woman. “Hesk’s.”
“Hesk’s Rest,” said somebody else.
He didn’t know who. It didn’t matter. It went round the dome. Quietly. One voice to the next. Hesk’s Rest. Hesk’s Rest. Like the Long Way Down going round the rows. Animatid voices and Mid voices.
Nobody voted. There wasn’t a kiosk. It was just a name, going round, until it was the name.
He sat against the wall with the lamp in his lap and his eyes closed.
“She’d have hated it,” said Snake, after a while. Almost fond. “Wouldn’t she. Having a city named after her. All these people.”
“Yes,” said Creed. “She’d have said who’s been telling you stories.”
He didn’t know he was smiling until he felt it.
On the twenty-fifth day, they put Teo’s lamp on a pole.
Not in the dome. Outside it. At the edge of Hesk’s Rest, where the field met the Flats, on the side that faced up — toward the spine, toward the ribs, toward the place in the dark far above where Halden had hung. A tall pole, made from a length of tram-rail dug out of the wreck. And on top of it, the brass cable-watch lamp, with its dented housing and its shutter fixed, and a line run up the pole from a second gold cylinder that Hanne Dray had sent down from the Ninth for the purpose.
Matthis Ferrin worked the lever.
He’d asked to. He’d said, quite clearly, that he’d taught Teo Brask the cable-watch code on the Rib Seven primaries in the year three-seventy-four, and he’d be damned if anybody else was going to work Teo’s lamp. Ferrin helped him up the ladder to the little platform at the top of the pole. Then stood at the bottom, looking up, with his Catalyst arm glowing.
The old man put his huge knuckled cable-man’s hand on the lever.
Click.
The shutter opened. Gold light, out over the Flats, up into the dark.
Click-click. Click. Click-click-click.
He wasn’t flashing EVACUATE. Ferrin had asked him what he wanted to send, and Matthis had thought about it for a long time, sitting by Teo’s slate, and then said he didn’t know the code for it. There wasn’t one. The cable-watch code only had words for things going wrong.
So he’d made one up. Out of pieces of the old words. He told Ferrin what it meant, and Ferrin told Creed, and Creed stood at the bottom of the pole and watched the old man send it, over and over, gold, up into the dark toward the ribs, where anybody who’d ever worked the primaries — anybody, on any rib, who’d learned the cable-watch light before the drones came — might look out of a window and see it.
Click. Click-click. Click.
LOOK UP.
“I need to tell you something,” said Wick. “And you’re not going to like it.”
They were under the dome. Late. Wick had come in from the listening post he’d built in a cleared cellar on the north side of the field, a better one than the alcove in the great cavern, with three times the Gilt guts. His face was grey. His thumbnail was bleeding.
“Go on.”
“The Concord,” said Wick. “They’re not taking Halden people anymore. Anywhere. The Sixth, the Eighth, the Fifth. They’re sending them down. Forty, fifty a day, down the freight hoists. Into the Belly. To us.” He swallowed. “They’re saying it on the net. Bleeder-taint. Quarantine. The Belly can have them.”
“Then we’ll take them.”
“I know. I know we will. That’s not —“ Wick stopped. “That’s not the bad part.”
He held out a slate.
CONCORD ALLOCATION ORDER — CYCLE 427
MID RIBS 1-12: CATALYST ALLOCATION REDUCED TO 30%.
HIGHER RIBS 1-6: CATALYST ALLOCATION MAINTAINED AT 100%.
SOURCE: TENTH WORKS (DRUM-TEMPERED). DROP SCHEDULE: DAILY.
NOTE: ANY RIB HARBORING OR TRADING WITH THE NINTH WILL BE REDUCED TO 0%.
Creed read it.
“Thirty percent,” said Wick. “For every Mid rib. And the Higher Ribs keep everything. All of it. From the Tenth Works. From the drums.” He looked at Creed. “They’re starving the Mids. On purpose. So the Mids hate the Ninth. So they hate us. So the next time a city falls, nobody comes down to the rows.”
Creed looked at the slate for a long time.
Source: Tenth Works.
Drop schedule: daily.
He thought about the Tenth Works. The tower bolted to the spine at the root of the Tenth Rib. The capsule dock. The drum-drop platform at the top, where the white drums came down from the Skull every day.
The ten tanks he’d turned his back on.
“There it is,” said Snake. Very softly. Patient. Huge. “I told you. You’ll need to go back.”
He looked up. Through the cracked colored glass of the dome. Up, past the gold light, into the dark. Toward the ribs. Toward the Tenth. Toward the white-gold glow of the Higher Ribs, still at a hundred percent, still bright, still pouring down.
“Every drop,” he said. “Every drop of Catalyst in the Ribs comes through the Tenth Works now.”
“Yes,” said Wick.
“Every drum from the Skull.”
“Yes.”
“And if the Tenth Works stops —“
Wick stared at him.
“The Higher Ribs go dark,” Wick said slowly. “For the first time. Ever.”
Creed stood up.
Behind his eyes — small, cold, faint — Lamp said nothing.
In his chest, around his heart — huge, hot, patient — Snake said nothing too.
It didn’t need to.