Rematch

It came over the open net on the fifty-eighth day, in a flat militia voice, on every channel at once, the way Marchetti’s broadcast had.

Not the Concord’s channel. Not the Prior’s. Somebody had walked into a relay station on the Eighth’s upper terraces and put their hand on the master switch and said it into the whole skeleton.

“This is Captain Ilka Dorne. Rib Eight militia.”

Wick was in the cellar under the tram-shed with the plugs in his ears. Creed was in the yard. They both went still.

“Anomaly,” said the voice. “Creed. You know who this is. You know what I am.” A pause. “The great conduit. Top of the Eighth. Tonight. End of the second watch. Come alone. Nobody singing.”

The net crackled.

“If you don’t come, I bring the frost-tubes to the Shelf. All of them. And there won’t be anybody on a barricade to sing them out of you.” Another pause. Longer. “If you come, it’s you and me. Nobody else. I’ve told the Gilt on the upper Eighth to stand off. They’ll stand off. They’re more afraid of me than of you.”

The net went quiet.

Then, very quietly, almost not on the channel at all, as if she’d forgotten to let go of the switch:

“I said I’d be in the street. This is the street.”

The channel went dead.

“No,” said Sabine.

“No,” said Mirelle.

“No,” said Wick, coming up out of the cellar with the plugs still hanging round his neck. “No, no, no, Creed, you can’t, you heard her, she beat you, on the bridge, she broke your arm, she — and now she wants you alone, with no Mirelle, that’s — that’s a trap, that’s obviously a trap —“

“It’s not a trap,” said Creed.

“How do you know?”

He didn’t know. He thought about Ilka Dorne on the Tenth Rib, sitting on the bone with blood all down her face, saying don’t make it more than it is. Holding the knot of cable on the Snag with her bare hands before he got there. Switching off Sere’s voice on the bridge.

“Because if it was a trap,” he said, “she’d have come for the Shelf with the frost-tubes. She wouldn’t have told us.”

Wick stared at him.

“She told us,” said Creed, “because she wants it to be a fight. Not an ambush. Just her and me.” He looked at the dark upper terraces of the Eighth, rising up the curve of the rib above the Shelf. “She wants to know.”

“Know what?”

“What she is,” said Creed. “What I am. Whether it’s the same thing.”

Mirelle came across the yard to him. She put her bandaged hand on his chest, over the mark. She’d done it every night since Fisk. Every night, she sang the verse, and he felt the gold come up — slowly — and melt the frost out of him that had come in on bolts the sword hadn’t eaten.

“Without me,” she said, “if the frost gets in —“

“It won’t,” said Creed.

“How —“

“Because I’m not taking the sword.”

The yard went very quiet.

He laid it on the table in the tram-shed. Bare. The dark slate-colored steel, the impossible edge, the carved grooves down the flat, dark. The three refinery clamps on the spine. The rubber grip, cut on the bias.

He hadn’t trusted it since Fisk. He’d used it. He’d had to. But every time he drew it, he felt the cold behind his eyes, small and squeezed and grieving, watching the grooves — and he never knew. Whether this time, when the fire came up, it would go dark in his hand.

“Take it,” said Snake. “You’re mad. She’s stronger than you without it. She’s faster. She knows how to fight and you don’t.”

“Her blood’s mine,” said Creed. Under his breath. “The sword’s just steel to her. It doesn’t eat anything from her. It doesn’t feed me. It just cuts.” He looked at it. “And I don’t want to cut her.”

“She broke your arm —“

“I know.”

“She’ll break the other one.”

“Maybe.”

He reached for the cold behind his eyes. For Lamp. It was there. Small. Still. It had said almost nothing since yes, I know. Since the Wall.

“You,” he said. “Are you going to stop me? Tonight? If the fire comes up?”

A long silence.

“There will be nothing to stop,” said Lamp quietly. “If you go without the steel. I cannot touch your body. You told me not to. And I have not.” A pause. “I will not.”

“Then I’m going without the steel,” said Creed.

He went to the door of the tram-shed. To the crate where Fisk had sat. He stood there for a moment, looking at it.

Then he went up the rib alone.

The Eighth above the Shelf was dark.

Not the dim brown of thirty percent. Dark. Twenty percent, Wick said, and then the Tenth Works had gone, and whatever was left of the Concord’s channel-grade on the Eighth was going up the rib to the top, to the last districts where the Concord’s people lived, to the relay station, to the conduit. The rest of the Eighth — the streets he walked up, the terraces, the little bridges — had nothing. Windows black. Lamps dead. Grey-caps glowing faintly green on a few windowsills, here and there.

People watched him from the dark.

He felt them. In doorways. At windows. Hearts, frosted, hammering. They’d heard the broadcast. Everybody on the Eighth had heard it. Come alone. And now here he was, walking up their streets in the dark, a man in an old coat over a pump-crew jacket, no sword, his scars glowing faintly red-gold through the canvas, and they watched him go by and didn’t say anything.

Near the top, on the last terrace below the conduit, somebody stepped out of a doorway in front of him.

An old woman. Square. Thick-armed, the way a militia captain was thick-armed. Grey hair cropped short. She stood in the dark street in front of him with her hands folded in front of her and looked at him.

He stopped.

“You’re the one,” she said. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“She’s up there. On the conduit.” The old woman’s voice was flat. A militia voice, gone rough with age. “She’s been up there since the end of the first watch. Waiting.” She looked at his empty hands. “You didn’t bring the sword.”

“No.”

The old woman looked at him for a long time.

“She told me,” she said. “About the Snag. About you holding it. With your hands. Growing bone.” She looked away, down the dark street, toward the Shelf and its single gold lamp. “She said the Concord’s lying. About everything. About Halden. About the gold.” She looked back at him. “I didn’t believe her. I’ve lived on the Eighth seventy years. The Concord’s never lied to me.”

“Did you believe her?” said Creed.

The old woman was silent for a long moment.

“She’s my daughter,” she said finally. “She’s never lied to me either.”

She stepped back into the doorway.

“Don’t kill her,” she said, from the dark.

“I won’t.”

“She might kill you.”

“I know,” said Creed.

He went on up.

The conduit was a cable.

He’d heard about it from Ferrin. Every Mid rib had one: a single great power-cable, thicker than the primaries, that ran from the relay station at the top of the city out over the gulf to an anchorage on the next rib up, carrying the Catalyst current from rib to rib. The Eighth’s ran up to the Seventh. To the Seventh’s anchorage. To where Halden had hung.

The anchorage was empty now. The claws torn out. But the conduit still ran out to it — a cable as thick as a cage-lift shaft, sheathed in black insulation, stretching from the top of the Eighth out over four kilometers of dark toward the broken bone of the Seventh, sagging in a long slow curve. And at its far end, where it had been fastened to Halden’s grid, it was torn. Severed. Hanging. And the current in it — the last of the Concord’s channel-grade on the Eighth, still pumping up from the relay station because nobody had thought to turn it off — was pouring out of the torn end into the empty air.

Sparking.

A storm of it. Blue-white. Bursting out of the frayed end of the conduit two hundred meters out over the gulf, in great crackling arcs, lighting the underside of the empty Seventh and the dark of the gulf and the long black curve of the cable in flashes. Crack. Light. Dark. Crack-crack. Light.

And in the middle of the cable, a hundred meters out, standing on the top of it, on the black insulation, in the flashes of the spark-storm, with the gulf under her —

Ilka Dorne.

He walked out to her.

The top of the cable was a curved black road, two meters wide, slick with condensation, sagging gently out over the dark. No railings. Nothing. He walked out along it the way he’d walked along the spine on the zigzag ladders, not looking down, and the spark-storm lit him in flashes, and he felt her watching him come.

He stopped ten meters from her.

She was in her militia uniform. Grey. No armor. No weapon. Square, thick-armed, her cropped hair dark with sweat. The red-gold threads in the whites of her eyes were lit, steady, glowing. And under the skin of her square hands, the same. She looked at his empty hands, and something moved in her plain face.

“No sword,” she said.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s just steel to you,” said Creed. “And I didn’t want to cut you.”

Ilka Dorne looked at him for a long moment. In the flashes. Crack. Light. Dark.

“You’re mad,” she said.

“Probably.”

“I broke your arm on the bridge.”

“I remember.”

“I’ll break both of them tonight.” She rolled her square shoulders. “I’ve been fighting every night since the bridge. On the upper Eighth. Against everything the Prior could throw at me. Gilt. Lancers. Drones. To get better.” She looked at him. “To get ready for you.”

“I’ve been fighting every day,” said Creed. “On the Shelf. Against everything the Concord could throw at me.”

“Did you get better?”

He thought about it.

“No,” he said. “I got tired.”

Something happened in her face. Not quite a laugh.

“At least you’re honest,” said Ilka Dorne.

She came at him.

She was faster than on the bridge. He’d been afraid of that. She came along the curved black top of the cable in a line, flat, low, the way she’d crossed the gap, and her shoulder came at his chest the way it had on the bridge —

He stepped.

Sideways. The way Sabine taught her crews. The way Dorne herself had stepped on the bridge, to put her knee into his head. He’d watched Sabine’s crews in the second cavern for four months. He’d never practiced it. He just did it.

She went past him. Her shoulder missed his chest by a hand’s width. And he put his hand on her back as she went by — flat, not a blow, just a hand — and pushed, a little, the way you push a hopper that’s already moving.

She went sprawling. On the slick black insulation of the cable. Rolling. Toward the edge.

She caught it. Of course she caught it. She was Ilka Dorne. Her square hand slapped down on the curve of the cable and her fingers dug in through the insulation and she stopped, half off the edge, legs over the gulf, and hauled herself back up in one movement.

She turned and looked at him.

“Where did you learn that,” she said.

“Watching.”

She came again.

She didn’t go past him this time. She came in close and stayed close, too close for him to step, her fists in his ribs, his face, his gut, and every one landed like the press, and he felt her blood go into him through the skin with every blow, his blood, fighting his healing. His ribs went. His nose. He tasted blood.

He didn’t hit back. Not the way she was hitting him. He got his hands on her arms, her wrists, her shoulders — the way Sabine’s crews tied up a Gilt’s lance-arm, three to one — and held. He couldn’t hold her. She was too strong. She tore free every time. But every time he held, for a heartbeat, her next blow came slower.

“Fight back,” said Snake. Desperate. Hot. “Fight BACK, she’s killing you —”

“No,” said Creed. Out loud. Through blood.

Dorne heard it. Her next blow stopped a hand’s width from his face.

“Who are you talking to?” she said.

He didn’t answer.

She looked at him. Bleeding. On his feet. On the top of a cable over the gulf in the flashes of the spark-storm. Not fighting back.

“Why won’t you fight me?” she said. And her flat voice cracked.

“I am fighting you,” said Creed.

“You’re standing there —“

“I’m not hitting you,” he said. “That’s different.” He spat blood onto the black insulation. “On the bridge, you said the only thing in the Ribs I can’t eat is you. You were right. I can’t pull you. I can’t stop you. The sword’s just steel.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “So I can’t win the way I win against Gilt. And I don’t want to win the way you win against me.”

“Then how do you want to win?”

He looked at her. At the red-gold threads in the whites of her eyes. At the web of it under the skin of her square hands. Lit, now. But not steady anymore. Since the fight began, it had started to flicker. Stutter. The way it had on the bridge when Mirelle sang.

“It’s burning you,” he said. “Isn’t it. Right now. Every time you hit me.”

Ilka Dorne went very still.

“Every time you use it,” said Creed. “The strength. The speed. My blood in you. It burns. In the bones. Like you said on the bridge. Every night. And when you fight, it’s worse.” He held her eyes. “You’re not stable. You said so. You’re dying slower. And every fight makes it faster.”

She didn’t say anything. Her face, in the flashes of the spark-storm, had gone grey. Her hands were shaking.

“I’m not going to win by hitting you,” said Creed. “I’m going to win by standing here until you can’t hit me anymore.”

The cable hummed under them. The spark-storm cracked, out at the torn end, two hundred meters away. Light. Dark.

“That’s your plan?” said Ilka Dorne. Barely a whisper. “Outlast me?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll kill you first.”

“Maybe,” said Creed.

She came at him again.

It went on for a long time.

He’d remember it the way he remembered the long climbs in the crawlways. Not in pieces. In one long grinding thing. Her fists. His ribs. The black insulation slick with condensation and blood. The flashes of the spark-storm, light, dark, light. The gulf under them.

He didn’t hit her once.

He stepped, and she went past him. He held her arms, and she tore free. He went down, and got up. Went down, and got up. Every time slower. Every blow she landed went into him with her blood in it and his healing went slow, and slower, and he stopped healing at all, near the end — his left arm hanging broken, his ribs a cage of fire, one eye swollen shut, blood running from his nose and his ear. He was on his knees more than he was on his feet.

And she was slowing too.

He felt it. Not in her blows — in her blood. The red-gold in it, flickering, stuttering, flaring. Burning. Every time she hit him, it burned brighter, and every time it burned brighter, something under it frayed. Her heart, under it all, went from steady to hard to uneven to wrong. Skipping. Racing. Catching.

Near the end, she stopped and stood over him on the cable, gasping, and the blood was coming out of her nose too, and out of the corners of her eyes, the way it had come out of his on the slab. Red. With threads of gold in it.

“Stop,” said Creed. From his knees. “Ilka. Stop. It’s killing you.”

“I know what it’s doing —”

“Then stop.”

“I CAN’T.”

It came out of her in a scream. Raw. Over the gulf. Over the crackle of the spark-storm.

“I can’t stop!” She was standing over him, shaking, her square hands in fists, the red-gold blazing and stuttering under her skin. “It doesn’t stop! It never stops! Every night since the slab, it burns, it BURNS, in my bones, in my teeth, looking for something, WANTING something, and I don’t know what, and the only time it’s quiet is when I’m fighting, when I’m using it, when I’m hitting something —” Her voice broke. “And then after, it’s worse. Every time. Worse.”

She went down on her knees on the cable in front of him.

“The Prior says it’ll pass,” she said. “He says I’m stable. He says with more of your blood he can make it better.” She was crying. Blood and tears, red-gold, down her plain hard face. “It’s not passing. It’s never going to pass. It wants something I haven’t got.”

Creed knelt on the cable in front of her with his broken arm and his swollen eye.

“I know what it wants,” he said.

She looked at him.

He didn’t have Mirelle. He didn’t have the verse. He hadn’t brought the sword.

He had the gold.

It was small. It had been small since the Snag. A filament, in the squeezed place behind his eyes, where Lamp was small and the fire was huge. Mirelle’s singing brought it up, every night, enough to melt the frost out of him. Not more.

He reached for it anyway.

Not with a song. Not with a cut. He just reached. The way he’d reached for Lamp in the crawlway to cool Wick. The way he’d reached for it on the Tenth Works tower to melt the drums. Help me.

It came. A thread. Down his good arm. Into his hand.

He put his hand on Ilka Dorne’s chest. Over her heart. Flat. The way Mirelle put her hand on his.

She flinched. She didn’t pull away.

He felt her blood. His blood, in her. Red-gold. Thrashing. Burning. Wanting. The way it had thrashed on the bridge when Mirelle sang, reaching for an anchor that wasn’t there.

And he didn’t try to pull it. Or stop it. Or command it.

He did what he’d done on the bridge, without meaning to, when her blood had come into him with her blows and the gold had come up and calmed it. He did what he’d done with Wick’s spores, and the old woman from Sump-Twelve, and the waking Animatids in the galleries.

He went beside it.

He let the thread of gold go into her, through his palm, into the blood over her heart. And he didn’t push. He just let it be there. Next to her blood. His blood. The way a hand is laid on the back of a frightened animal. The way Hesk had stood next to him at the pump for nine years, humming.

You’re not alone. It’s here. The thing you’re looking for. It’s here.

Her blood went still.

Not stopped. Not frozen. Still. The thrashing stopping. The burning cooling. The red-gold under her skin going from blazing and stuttering to — steady. Soft. Glowing, the way his scars glowed in the evening, after a meal, red-gold, like a city’s windows at night. Like it had found what it was looking for. Like it had come home.

Ilka Dorne made a sound.

Not a word. Not a scream. A breath. Let out. All the way. The way Lamp had let out its breath in the burned lab under the pump-house. The sound of someone setting down something heavy they’d been carrying for a very long time.

“Oh,” she said.

Like everyone. Like the old woman under the first gold lamp. Like the young woman on the floor of Lumbar Two.

“Oh.”

She knelt on the cable with his hand on her chest and her eyes closed and her plain hard face slack with something he’d never seen on it. Relief. Total. Absolute.

“It stopped,” she whispered. “It stopped. It’s quiet. It’s —” Her eyes opened. Red-gold, steady. Wet. “It’s the first time. Since the slab. It’s the first time it’s been quiet.”

“It won’t last,” said Creed. Hoarse. “Not forever. It’ll come back. It’s my blood, and you haven’t got what I’ve got. My mother built something in me. In the marrow. It’s what the blood’s looking for.” He kept his hand on her chest. “You haven’t got it. Nobody has. But if somebody’s beside you — with the gold — it quiets.”

She stared at him.

“Mirelle,” said Creed. “Can do it too. With the song. Not as well. But enough.” He was so tired. He was swaying. “Come down. To the Shelf. To Hesk’s Rest. We’ll —“

He didn’t finish. The cable tilted. Or he did.

She caught him.

He woke on the top of the cable with his head on something hard, and the spark-storm still crackling far out at the torn end, and the gulf under him, and Ilka Dorne sitting beside him with her knees drawn up and his head on her boot.

Not on her lap. Her boot. He noticed that, even half-conscious. It seemed like the right distance.

“You fainted,” she said. Flat. Militia. Her voice back to normal. “On a cable. Over the gulf. After telling me you’d outlast me.”

“I did outlast you.”

“You fainted.”

“After.” He tried to sit up. His arm. His ribs. He lay back down. “You stopped first.”

She was quiet for a while. Looking out at the spark-storm. At the empty anchorage of the Seventh, beyond it, where Halden had hung.

“I did,” she said finally. “Didn’t I.”

The red-gold under her skin was steady. Soft. Still quiet. He could feel it from here.

“It’s still quiet,” she said. Wondering. “An hour. It’s been an hour. It’s never been quiet for an hour.”

“It’ll come back.”

“I know. You said.” She looked down at him. “You could have hit me. On the cable. Any time. When I was going over the edge, the first time. You had your hand on my back. You could have pushed harder.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He thought about it. He thought about Hesk, at the pump, saying Creed. Rack. About his mother’s voice in the dark. Don’t keep it. About sixty Gilt walking home across the Long Bridge.

“Because you came to the Snag,” he said. “When nobody else did.”

Ilka Dorne looked at him for a long time.

“That’s not a reason to let somebody break your arm,” she said.

“It’s the only one I had.”

She looked away. Out at the spark-storm.

“My mother stopped you in the street,” she said. “Didn’t she. On the way up.”

“Yes.”

“She told me she would.” A pause. “What did she say?”

“Don’t kill her.”

Something happened in Ilka Dorne’s face. She put a square hand over her eyes.

“She doesn’t believe me,” she said. Muffled. “About the Concord. About Halden. She’s lived on the Eighth seventy years. She says the Concord’s never lied to her.”

“She said you’ve never lied to her either,” said Creed.

Ilka took her hand away from her eyes. They were wet. Red-gold. Steady.

She stood up. On the curved black top of the cable, in the flashes of the spark-storm, over the gulf. She looked down at him.

“Can you walk?”

“Give me a minute.”

“You always say that.”

“I always need it.”

She almost smiled. Not quite. Then she bent and got her shoulder under his good arm and hauled him up, the way Sabine hauled people up, and he hung off her, broken, swaying.

“Where are we going?” he said.

“Down,” said Ilka Dorne. “To your Shelf. To your Hesk’s Rest. To this Mirelle with the song.” She started walking. Along the cable. Toward the Eighth. Toward the dark terraces and the single gold lamp on the Shelf far below. “And then you’re going to show me the Fall-Field. Where Halden came down. All of it. Every row.” Her voice was flat. “And then I’m going to go back up to the Eighth, and stand in the street in front of my mother’s door, and tell her what I saw.”

“And then?”

She was quiet for a long time, walking, with him hanging off her shoulder.

“Then I’m going to find the Prior,” said Ilka Dorne. “And ask him why he told me it would pass.”

He showed her.

All of it. The edge of the field, where the rows were. The graves in the marrow-cake, marked with stones and pieces of the wreck and slates with names scratched on them. Twelve thousand. He walked her down every row, slowly, his arm in a sling Sabine had made, his ribs knitting, and she walked beside him and didn’t say anything at all.

At the end of the last row, there was a chair. What was left of one. Wood. And a slate propped against it.

TEODOR BRASK. CABLE ENGINEER. FLAT 13, SPINDLE ROW. HE WATCHED THE PRIMARIES.

She stood in front of it for a long time.

Then she looked up. Past the dome of colored glass at the center of Hesk’s Rest. At the pole at the field’s edge, the tram-rail pole, and the brass lamp on top of it.

Click. Click-click. Click.

Gold light. Up into the dark. Toward the ribs.

“What’s it saying?” said Ilka Dorne.

“Look up,” said Creed.

She looked at the lamp for a long time.

Then — slowly, the way the man at the back of the crowd on the catwalk had done it, the way Wick had done it in the great cavern, like it hurt, like her neck didn’t know how — she tipped her head back.

And looked up.

Behind his eyes, very faint, Lamp said nothing.

In his chest, huge and hot, Snake said nothing either.

But in the middle of him — in the squeezed, narrow place between them, where the gold lived — something flickered.

A little brighter.

A little.