Ollo was waiting on the platform with the sword.
He was standing at the very edge of the dock where the courier car came in, under the terminus lamps, one-armed, in a leather apron burned black at the front from the Press, with the scabbard slung across his chest on a strap. Behind him the upper terminus of Rib Eight spread out in the dim gold of the cylinders — the drum-sheds, the winding house, the long brake-house with its great iron wheel, Gilt bodies here and there on the decking where they’d been put down and not yet moved — and around it, in the shadows of the sheds, Unbanded fighters with blasting bars and Gilt lances and Concord frost-tubes taken off dead Lancers, forty or fifty of them, watching the dark streets of the upper Eighth.
The car bumped into the cradle. Ferrin set the brake. The door rattled open.
Ollo looked at Creed.
At the bare chest. The bare feet. The smoldering red scars. The holes in the crooks of both elbows, black-edged, where the white had gone in. The holes in both wrists. The eyes.
He didn’t say anything about any of it. He unslung the sword from his chest and held it out, hilt first, the way he’d held out every round he’d ever crimped.
“You left it in the yard,” said Ollo. “At the Shelf. Under Haske’s cylinder.”
Creed took it.
The grooves lit. Not red-gold. Red. Deep red, like the vials. He felt the steel take a little of the heat out of his hands and give it back changed, the old feeding loop, but thinner now — there was no Catalyst in the air up here to drink, no bolts to eat, and nothing in him but the fire. The sword just passed the fire back to him. A circle.
“Thanks,” he said.
Ollo nodded. He took a bundle off a crate behind him. A shirt. Boots. And the jacket. The heavy crew jacket, dark blue gone grey, with the name stenciled inside the collar.
Creed put the jacket on over his bare skin. It was cold from the night air. He felt the weight of the inside pocket against his ribs: Kon’s dark glass eye, the seed-disc, Ferrin’s folded note, and the Pale Key, still there, still wrapped in its scrap of cloth. Ollo had found the jacket in the Shelf yard too.
“Tamsin’s in the brake-house,” said Ollo. “We took the terminus an hour and ten ago. Twelve Gilt. They didn’t fight much. They’ve been on half-rations since the drums stopped.” He looked past Creed into the car, at Dorne, at Wick, at Ferrin. “Where’s Sere?”
“Running,” said Creed. “He’s got twelve vials of me. He’s — different now.”
“Different how?”
Creed thought about it.
“He put me in himself,” he said. “And something grew.”
Ollo looked at him for a long moment. Then at Dorne, sitting on the floor of the car with her split hands in her lap.
“Right,” said Ollo. And turned and called across the decking, in his flat Line C voice that carried like a horn: “Lamps out on the dock side! Bars to the sheds! Somebody’s coming down the line!”
“How do you know,” said Wick. Climbing out of the car on shaking legs with his comm-set hugged to his chest.
“Because they always come down the line,” said Ollo. “Every time. Since the Eighth. They never learn. You get on the line, they follow you down it.”
They waited an hour.
Creed sat on a crate under the brake-house wall with the sword across his knees and his back to the iron and drank water from a canteen Tamsin brought him, and then another, and then another. He couldn’t stop drinking. He was so hot. The steam had stopped coming off his skin in the car, but the heat hadn’t stopped. It was in his blood. It was in his blood — not under it, not around it, not a thing riding it. He could feel the difference. For eight months Snake had lived around his heart and spoken from there and reached out from there. Now, after three days of burning the white, it was in the blood itself. In every vessel. Like the Catalyst had been, the first night in the reliquary.
“I’m thin,” said Snake. Quietly. For his ears. “You know that. I’m big, but I’m thin. Spread out. Three days on the frost. I need to eat.”
“There’s nothing up here to eat.”
“There’s Gilt.”
He didn’t answer that. He drank.
Wick had found the terminus’s comm-room and plugged into it and was listening, white-faced, to the Concord net. He came out every few minutes to report. “They know you’re out. Coronet’s screaming. The Senior hasn’t said anything. Not one word. Lancers asking for orders and nobody’s giving them.” And then: “There’s a halo-tone on the Second net. Just — sitting there. A carrier. Nobody’s broadcasting it. It’s just there. They don’t know what it is.” And then, later, very white: “It’s moving.”
Dorne sat on the edge of the dock with her legs over the drop, looking up the line into the dark. Her hands had healed. The red-gold under her skin was quiet. She’d asked Tamsin for a stick of charcoal and a scrap of paper and was writing something, slowly, in square militia capitals.
“What’s that,” said Creed.
“For my mother,” she said. Not looking up. “In case.”
Ferrin went from shed to shed. Checking the bars. Checking the lances. Putting people in places. He’d done it on Line C for seven years; he’d done it at the Snag and the Shelf. He was good at it. Twice he came and stood in front of Creed and looked at him and opened his mouth and didn’t say anything, and went away again.
The third time he said: “Your eyes.”
“I know.”
“They’re —” Ferrin’s dented face worked. “They’re like the vents on the refinery stacks. At night. When the burn-off’s going.”
“I know.”
Ferrin nodded. “Right,” he said. “Just — right.” And went away again.
Ollo came and sat on the crate beside him.
They didn’t talk. They’d never talked much. On Line C, Ollo had been the feed-man at the hopper beside Creed’s press, big and near-silent, and Creed had been the press-hand who did hour nineteen beside a woman humming, and they’d eaten their meal-bars on the same grey bench for years without exchanging fifty words. Then the press had taken Ollo’s arm at hour fourteen, and Creed had cut him loose with a marrow saw while Wick held him down, and the company had logged him at thirty-eight percent and moved him to sort, and then purged him into the Void. And Creed had come into the Void and brought him out.
After a while Ollo said: “The Press made four hundred rounds yesterday. Gold-cut. For the kites.”
“Good.”
“There’s no gold left to put in them,” said Ollo. “Mirelle says. Not since the Shelf. The gold’s in you or it’s nowhere. They’re just rounds now.”
Creed looked at his red hands.
“I know,” he said.
Ollo was quiet for a while.
“In the Void,” he said. “When they put me there. I thought, that’s it. That’s the count done. Thirty-eight percent. Nobody comes back from the Void.” A pause. “Then you came.”
“Ollo —”
“I’m just saying.” Ollo looked out at the dark line. “You came for me. You didn’t have to. I wasn’t anything to you. One-arm sorter. You came anyway.” He shifted on the crate. “So if you go somewhere, I’ll come. That’s all. Wherever.”
Creed didn’t say anything. He couldn’t.
“It’s moving,” said Wick, in the comm-room door. His voice cracked. “The tone. It’s on the line. It’s coming down the line. It’s —”
The cable over their heads began to hum.
It wasn’t a capsule.
It came down out of the dark above the terminus the way the Wardens had come down on the Shelf, except there was no white light around it. There was only the halo-tone. Thin. High. Getting louder. And under the tone, the scream of the cable over the sheaves, because whatever was coming was coming fast — not riding the line, sliding it, the way the Lancers slid on their kites — and the sheaves above the dock began to smoke.
Then it hit the dock.
Three shapes. They came off the cable at full speed and landed on the decking and the decking buckled under them. Two of them went down on one knee with the force of it and came straight up again. The third stood up slow.
The red-haired woman. The nervous young one. And Calloway Sere.
The two Choir-born were wrong.
He saw it at once. Under the terminus lamps. Their eyes were gold — all gold, no white, like Sere’s — and their faces were slack. Empty. Not asleep. Driven. And the red-gold lines in their arms and necks weren’t faint anymore. They stood up raised and glowing out of the skin, like Sere’s, and they pulsed. In time. With each other. And with the long-fingered red-gold hand that hung at Sere’s right side and flexed, slowly, joint by joint, as if it were holding strings.
“Oh,” said Snake. “Oh, he’s wearing them.”
Sere smiled.
He looked worse. Better. Both. The tightness in his face had gone further; you could see the shape of his skull through the skin of his forehead, and the gold eyes sat deep in it like lamps in a cave. His grey coat was gone. He wore only a shirt and trousers, soaked through with red at the back and side, and the raised lines covered him — arms, neck, face, the visible slice of his chest — glowing, branching, like the veins in a leaf held up to the light. On a strap across his chest he carried a steel vial-case. Twelve slots.
Three, Creed saw, were empty.
“Courier fifteen,” said Sere. His voice had changed too. It was layered. Under the voice there was the tone. “You broke my racks.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what you destroyed? A hundred lives. A hundred Branns. Strong, and stable, and awake —“
“They weren’t stable. You knew it. Dorne knew it. Brann knew it. You knew it before you made the first one.”
“I know it now,” said Sere softly. He raised the long hand. “Now I know where it goes. What it’s looking for. I couldn’t read your pattern, Creed, but I didn’t need to. I only needed to be something it would come to.” The fingers curled. “And it comes.”
On the edge of the dock, Ilka Dorne screamed.
She came up off the decking as if yanked by a hook. Arms out. Red-gold blazing in every line of her. And Creed felt it — felt the drops of him in her — turn, and pull, toward the hand. Toward Sere. Harder than in the cellar. Much harder. Her skin split along the backs of both hands and up the insides of her forearms in long red lines and the blood came out of them not in drops this time but in threads, glowing, stretching across the air of the terminus toward Sere’s hand like wet red-gold wire.
Sere opened his mouth and the threads went into it.
He drank.
“ILKA!”
Creed was off the crate before he knew he was moving. The sword came up. The grooves lit red.
And he felt the pull hit him too.
Not a thread on the breastbone this time. A hook. It went into his chest under the mark and set and pulled, and his whole body leaned toward Sere, and his feet slid on the decking. His blood — the blood in his veins, his own blood, the source of all of it — turned toward the hand like a crowd turning toward a door. Like Brann’s blood had turned. Like Dorne’s. As if it had been looking for it all along.
No, he thought. No, it’s mine, it’s not looking for anything, it’s MINE —
The skin on the back of his left hand split.
He watched it. It just opened. A line. From the knuckles to the wrist. And the blood came out, red, not red-gold, hot, and lifted — lifted — off his skin in a thin red thread toward Calloway Sere’s open mouth.
“Snake,” he said.
“I’m trying.” Through clenched teeth. If it had teeth. “I’m trying, I’m trying, he’s — Creed, he’s calling it, he’s calling it in the voice it wants, he’s — I can’t burn it fast enough —”
The red-haired woman and the young one came at him.
He’d fought Dorne twice. He knew how a Choir-born fought. Fast and square and trained, with eleven years of militia in their bodies and the strength of his own blood behind it. He’d beaten her once on the bridge, barely, with the sword feeding him, and lost to her once, and fought beside her a dozen times since.
These weren’t fighting like Dorne.
They weren’t fighting like anybody. They moved together. When the red-haired one swung, the young one was already ducking the counter, and when Creed turned to meet the young one, the red-haired one was already behind him. They didn’t look at each other. They didn’t need to. Sere’s hand flexed and they moved, and they moved like two fingers of the same hand, and their faces were empty and gold-eyed and didn’t change even when he cut them.
He cut them. The sword went into the red-haired woman’s shoulder and grated on bone and she didn’t even make a sound; she took the blade in her shoulder and trapped it with her arm and the young one hit Creed in the kidney with a fist like a rivet-gun.
He went down on one knee. The blood was coming out of the back of his hand. Out of the holes in his elbows. Out of the holes in his wrists. He could see the threads. Fine and red, stretching away from him across the terminus, glowing faintly, all going the same direction. To Sere.
Sere was standing in the middle of the dock with his face tipped back and his mouth open and the threads going in. Dorne’s. Creed’s. Lit up like wires. He was swelling with it. The lines on his skin were brighter every second.
The Unbanded came out of the sheds.
Ferrin led them. He’d held them back, the way he’d held the Line C crews back when a press jammed, and then he’d let them go all at once, forty fighters with bars and lances and stolen frost-tubes, and they came across the decking at Sere from three sides.
Sere didn’t even look at them.
The red-haired one took her arm off Creed’s sword and went to meet them. She went through the first five like a rig through a wall. One swing of her arm threw a woman with a blasting bar off the edge of the dock into the gulf. She caught a lance in her bare hand and pulled it and the man holding it came with it and she broke his neck with the haft. A frost-dart took her in the side and she didn’t slow down; the frost hit the raised glowing lines and hissed and was gone.
Ferrin’s Catalyst arm caught her across the face.
It was a forty-thousand-chit rig. It could lift a gallery hopper one-handed. It knocked her three meters across the decking into the winding-house wall, and the wall caved, and she got up out of the dent in it with half her face broken and her gold eyes still empty and walked back toward him.
“Hold her,” Ferrin was yelling. “Hold her, hold her, bars on her legs —”
Somebody screamed behind Creed. He turned his head. Tamsin. In the brake-house door. She’d come out with a frost-tube and fired it at the young one and the young one had turned and thrown something at her — a piece of decking, a jagged slab of iron plate he’d torn up out of the floor — and it had taken her across the thigh and she was down in the doorway with her leg wrong and blood everywhere.
Ollo was shooting.
He was on top of the drum-shed, one-armed, with a long Unbanded rifle braced on the roof-edge against his stump, firing gold-cut rounds that weren’t gold anymore. Just rounds. Just metal. They hit Sere and Sere didn’t notice them. They hit the young one and the young one jerked and kept coming.
The young one was coming for Creed.
He got the sword up. Barely. The young one hit it. The impact went down his arms into his shoulders and something in his left shoulder tore and he went over backward onto the decking, and the young one was on him, gold eyes empty, hands at his throat.
He reached into the young one’s blood. To stop it. His stop.
His own blood, in the young one, didn’t answer. It was turned the other way. Toward Sere. It didn’t even hear him.
He reached with the fire. The way he’d burned the young one’s arm in the cellar.
The young one’s arm hissed and blistered and he didn’t let go.
“Snake,” said Creed. His voice was going. The hands on his throat. “Snake —”
“I can’t.” And for the first time in a year, Snake sounded afraid. Truly afraid. Not the pressed-flat fear of the Warden-light on the Shelf. Something worse. “I can’t, I can’t, I’m too thin, he’s pulling me too, Creed, I’m in the blood now, I’m IN it, and it’s going out of your hand in a thread and I’m going with it, he’s DRINKING me —”
He looked past the young one’s empty face.
Sere. In the middle of the dock. Glowing. Swelling. And the thread from Creed’s hand going into his mouth was not just red anymore. It was red with something in it. A flicker. A coil. A fine, bright, burning shape, like a thin red snake, sliding along the thread.
Snake. Being drunk.
“No,” said Creed.
“Yes,” said Snake. Thin. Pulled. Stretched. “Yes. Unless.”
It was dark, and hot, and quiet.
He knew this place. He’d been here before. On the slab in the reliquary, eight months ago, with the needle in his neck, when the two of them had first come. The inside of himself, with no light in it but what they brought.
Snake was there.
Not huge. Not small. Stretched. It hung in the dark in front of him like a thing tied at both ends and pulled, a long, thin, burning rope of red with a head at one end. The far end disappeared into a hole in the dark. The hole was pulling. He could feel it pulling. A slow, wet, terrible suction.
“Here’s the bargain,” said Snake.
He waited.
“I’ve been around your heart for a year. I’ve been in your blood three days. That’s not enough. He can pull me out of the blood. The blood’s his kind of thing — he’s made of it now, he can call it. But he can’t call bone.” The head turned toward him. Two embers. “Let me into the bone.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m not riding anymore. I’m not around you. I’m not in you. I’m you. Part of you. Written in. Like the thing your mother and father put in your marrow. I go in beside it. Into the long bones and the ribs and the skull. And then nobody can call me out, because I’m not a thing in the blood. I’m the thing that makes the blood. Every drop you make from then on, I made.”
“And then?”
“And then your blood’s mine. Fire. All the way. Hot enough he can’t call it. Hot enough it’ll burn his thread off at the root. And then I’ll take him apart. Him, and the two he’s wearing. And then we go and get Ilka’s blood back out of his mouth, if there’s any left.”
“And then.”
Snake was quiet a moment.
“And then you’ll be different,” it said. “You’ll look different. You’ll feel different. It won’t come off. Ever. I’ll be in the bone. You won’t be able to put me down at night. You won’t be able to stand at the edge of something and choose not to. Because I’ll be the edge.” The embers didn’t blink. “I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve never lied to you. The Lamp lies. Not me.”
“Where is it.”
“The Lamp?” Something like a laugh. Thin. Pulled. “There. Look.”
He looked.
Far away in the dark, a pinprick. White. Very small. It wasn’t moving. It wasn’t speaking. It was just there. Watching. The way it had watched Haske freeze.
“It won’t stop you,” said Snake. “It can’t. It’s too small. It’s got nothing to stop you with. It hasn’t had anything since the Shelf.”
He looked at the pinprick.
“Lamp,” he said.
Nothing.
“Lamp. Please. Say something. Tell me not to. Tell me there’s another way. Tell me anything.”
The pinprick flickered.
Very faint — so faint it might have been his own wishing — a voice:
“…I cannot… help you… Creed.”
That was all.
The suction pulled. Snake jerked toward the hole in the dark. He felt it in his body, far away, on the terminus, under the young one’s hands. A long, wet, dragging pull at the inside of everything. His sight went grey at the edges.
Outside, somebody was screaming his name. Ollo. Or Wick. He couldn’t tell.
“Ilka’s going,” said Snake. “She’s going, Creed. She’s on the dock on her knees and there’s nothing in her arms but threads. Tamsin’s leg is open to the bone. Ferrin’s holding the red one with his rig and she’s breaking it. One-Arm’s on the roof firing rounds that don’t do anything. Wick’s in the comm-room door with his hands over his mouth.” A pause. “And you’re on your back under a man you made, who’s going to hold you down until Sere finishes drinking us both. And then Sere’s going to be what you are. And then he’ll go up the line to the Head and sell himself as the Vessel. And maybe they’ll buy it.”
He closed his eyes. In the dark, inside, it made no difference.
“Say yes,” said Snake.
He thought about the Hollow. The reliquary. Fourteen names on a wall. He thought about the pump next to Hesk’s, the humming, hour nineteen. He thought about his mother and father in a burned lab under a pump-house, putting something into his marrow so that one day he’d wake instead of boiling, and then folding a jacket on a cot and walking out to die.
They’d made him to survive.
He didn’t know if they’d made him to survive this.
“Yes,” said Creed.
It went into the bone.
He felt it go. Not as a heat. As a weight. As if somebody had poured molten metal into the hollows of his long bones and it had set. Thighs. Shins. Arms. Spine. Ribs. Skull. In a second. In less than a second. Everywhere at once. And then the molten metal was his bones, and the bones were burning, and the marrow inside them was boiling — not dying, making — and new blood came out of the marrow into his veins.
Red.
Not the red of the vials. Not the red of Line C press-plate. The red of the furnace mouth at the refinery stacks, when the burn-off goes up into the dark. The red of the inside of a coal. It came out of his bones and went into his vessels and every vessel in his body lit, and he felt the thread from the back of his hand, the thread going across the terminus into Sere’s mouth —
— burn.
Not snap. Burn. Like a fuse. The fire went up it from his hand. Along the thread. Across the air of the terminus. Faster than a bolt. Into Sere’s mouth.
Calloway Sere’s head snapped back. Fire came out of his mouth. A gout of it. Red. He staggered. The thread from Dorne — the threads — they burned too, the fire leaping across from his to hers where they met in Sere’s mouth, and ran back along them, and Dorne screamed again, and Creed thought, no — but the fire didn’t go into her. It stopped at her skin. It burned the threads off at her skin like a lamp-flame burns a string. And she fell forward onto her face on the decking, and her blood stopped coming.
The young one on top of him lifted his gold eyes. Confused. The hand that drove him had flinched.
Creed put his hand on the young one’s face.
He didn’t think about it. He didn’t do it. It was done. His hand, his right hand, the one holding the sword — the sword had fallen somewhere — went up to the young one’s face and the knuckles of it opened.
He felt them open. Not split. Open. Like doors. And bone came out of them.
Four spurs. Out of the four knuckles of his right fist. Short — the length of a finger joint — thick at the base, tapering to a point. Pale. Not white. A dark, hot, smoldering ivory with veins of red in it, like the grooves of the sword. They came out of his knuckles through the skin and the skin didn’t bleed, it just parted around them and sealed against them like it had always been that way.
They went into the young one’s face.
He didn’t remember, afterward, the next part. Not clearly. He remembered it the way you remember a shift at hour nineteen. In pieces. In red.
He remembered getting up.
He remembered the young one on the decking and not being able to tell what had been his face.
He remembered the red-haired woman letting go of Ferrin’s rig and coming for him, and her gold eyes, empty, and the way she moved like a finger on Sere’s hand, and the way he caught her arm in his left hand — and the knuckles of his left hand were opening too, now, spurs coming out, four more — and the way the arm broke, and broke again, and the way the spurs went in under her jaw.
He remembered the sound she made, at the very end, which was the only sound either of them made. A small one. Surprised. As if, for just a second, Sere’s hand had let go of her, and she’d woken, and found herself there.
Then she wasn’t anything.
He remembered Snake laughing.
Not around his heart. Not in his head. In his bones. In his teeth. He could feel it humming in his jaw like a struck cable. It was so big. It was so big now. It was everywhere. It was in every bone of him and it was laughing, and the laugh was hot and wide and joyful, and it was not a cruel laugh, not exactly. It was the laugh of something that has been in a cage a very long time and has just felt the door give.
“THERE you are,” said Snake. With his mouth. He heard it come out of his own mouth. His voice. Snake’s words. “There you ARE.”
He remembered Sere.
Sere was on his knees in the middle of the dock with smoke coming out of his mouth and his long red hand clawed over his face. The lines on his skin had gone dark in patches, charred. He was making a sound. Not the halo-tone. A wet, broken, choking wheeze.
He looked up as Creed came at him.
And Creed saw his face — the tight skin, the gold eyes — and saw, in it, for the first time in a year, fear.
“Courier fifteen,” Sere whispered. “Your eyes.”
He didn’t know what his eyes were doing. He found out later. Wick told him. Wick said they’d gone like the inside of a coal stove when you open the door. All of them. The whites gone. Just ember. Just glow. With a darker red point at the middle of each.
He raised his spurred fist.
And Sere did the only thing he had left. He pulled the steel case off his chest and swung it, and it opened as it swung, and nine glowing vials flew out of it across the dock in a fan. Into the dark. Over the edge. And Creed’s eyes went with them — his blood, nine of him, falling — and in that half-second Calloway Sere threw himself backward off the dock into the gulf after them.
He went into the dark. The halo-tone went up, once, thin and cracked, and then there was a flicker of red far below, sliding, catching a lower cable, and the tone faded down and away toward the dark of the Higher Ribs and was gone.
Creed stood at the edge of the dock with his spurs dripping and looked down.
“He’ll live,” said Snake. With his mouth. “He’ll catch the line to the Fourth and climb. I can smell him. Let’s go.”
“Go —”
“After him. Down the line. Now. While he’s burned. While he’s weak.” His legs turned. His body turned. Toward the cradle. Toward the courier car. “We’ll catch him on the Fourth.”
He hadn’t turned his legs.
He was in the back.
That was the only way he could describe it, later. He was in the back. Like Snake had said. He could see everything. He could feel everything. The heat in his bones. The spurs in his knuckles, eight of them, and the wet on them. The weight of the jacket. The cold air of the Eighth on his face. He could feel his legs walking toward the cradle. And he wasn’t walking them.
“Snake,” he said. Inside. “Snake. Stop.”
“In a minute.”
“Now.”
“He’s getting away, mule. He’s got three vials left on him, I counted. And he’s going to make three more of those. Three more empty faces with your blood in them. And then he’ll make more. Is that what you want?” His legs kept walking. “Let me catch him. Then I’ll stop. Then you can have it back. A bit.”
A bit.
There were people between him and the cradle.
Unbanded. Fighters. Six or seven of them. Standing on the decking with their bars and their lances, staring at him. At his eyes. At his hands. They were afraid. He could feel it. Their hearts. All going hard and fast and high, like Gilt hearts in the vault.
They were afraid of him.
“Out of the way,” said Snake. With his mouth.
They didn’t move. Not because they were brave. Because they were frozen. Like rabbits in a lamp. And Snake didn’t stop his legs.
He walked into the first one — a woman, a Shelf mechanic, with a wrench, he’d seen her break the third side at the Snag — and his shoulder took her and threw her aside like a bag of slag and she hit the decking hard and rolled and lay there gasping, and his legs kept going.
“Creed!”
Wick.
Wick had come out of the comm-room. He’d come across the decking. He’d put himself between Creed and the cradle. Thin and white and shaking so hard that his teeth were chattering. He’d put his comm-set down somewhere. His hands were empty. He had them out in front of him, palm-out, the way you’d hold them out to a dog you weren’t sure of.
“Creed,” said Wick. “Creed, it’s done. It’s done. He’s gone. Ilka’s alive. She’s breathing. Tamsin needs a tourniquet, Ollo’s doing it. It’s done. You can stop. Please.”
His legs stopped.
Not because he stopped them. Because Snake did. Because Snake was looking at Wick, through his eyes, with interest.
“Moraine,” said Snake. With his mouth. Pleasantly. “The scared one.”
Wick’s face went whiter.
“Creed,” said Wick. Not to Snake. Past Snake. Into his eyes. Looking for him. “Creed, I know you’re in there. I know. Come on. Come on, it’s me. It’s Wick. It’s — it’s hour nineteen, mate. Come on. Come back.”
“He’s not in charge right now,” said Snake. “Move.”
“No.”
“Move, Moraine.”
“No.” Wick’s voice cracked into three pieces. His knees were shaking. He didn’t move. “N-no. I’m not — I’m not moving. You want to go after him, you go round. Or you — you take him back. You give him back. Creed. Creed!”
His hand went up.
He watched it. From the back. His own right hand, with its four short smoldering spurs, went up and closed around Wick Moraine’s throat.
Wick made a sound.
His hand lifted. Wick came up off the decking. His feet kicked. His thin hands came up and grabbed Creed’s wrist and pulled, and couldn’t move it, and the spurs were a centimeter from Wick’s neck, the points of them, one on each side of his throat, and Wick’s face was going red, then dark, and his eyes were bulging and they were looking into Creed’s — still looking, still looking for him — and the heat was coming off Creed’s hand into Wick’s skin and Wick’s skin was going pink under his fingers, the way the young one’s arm had in the cellar.
“He’s in the way,” said Snake. Inside. Calm. Reasonable. Hot. “He’s always been in the way. Scared. Slow. He’ll get you killed one day. He nearly did, in the crawlway. You know he will. Just — squeeze. Just once. It’ll be quick. Then we go.”
“NO —”
He threw himself at it. From the back. With everything. And it was like throwing himself at the press-bed. It didn’t move. It was in the bone. It was in the bone. He couldn’t get at it. It was everywhere he was.
His fingers tightened.
Wick’s eyes rolled.
“Creed.”
A hand on his wrist. Not Wick’s. A wide, hard, calloused hand, the only one its owner had. On his wrist. Over the spurs.
“Creed,” said Ollo.
He was standing right beside him. Close. Shoulder to shoulder. In his burned apron with Tamsin’s blood on it up to the elbow. One-armed. Not pulling at the wrist. Just holding it. Holding on.
“Let him down,” said Ollo.
“Go away, One-Arm,” said Snake. With his mouth.
Ollo didn’t look at his mouth. He didn’t look at his eyes. He looked at the side of his face, the way you look at a man next to you on a bench.
“I’m not talking to you,” said Ollo. Flat. “I’m talking to him.” And then, in the same flat voice, Line C voice, the voice of a sorter calling a count: “Creed. Shift’s over. Horn’s gone. Put it down.”
The horn.
He heard it. Not on the terminus. In himself. The long, flat, cracked blast of the shift horn on Line C, the one that went at hour twenty, the one that meant you could stop, you could let go of the lever, you could take your hand off the press, and stand there for a second with your arms hanging and the noise of the line dying around you. Six years of it. Nine years. Every day of his life. Horn’s gone. Put it down.
His hand opened.
Not much. Not all the way. But it opened. And Wick dropped out of it onto the decking on his knees and fell forward onto his hands, choking, hauling in air with a sound like a broken bellows.
And in the gap — in the half-second when his hand opened, when Snake was caught off-guard by a one-armed sorter talking about the horn — Creed got to the front.
Not all the way. Not the whole of himself. But to the front. To his eyes. To his mouth.
“Ollo,” he said. In his own voice.
“Yeah,” said Ollo.
“Don’t let go.”
“I’m not.”
He stood there with Ollo’s hand on his wrist. He could feel Snake in his bones. Huge. Everywhere. Coiled through every long bone, every rib, every plate of his skull. Not fighting him now. Not yet. Just… there. Settling. Like a man settling into a chair he means to keep.
He looked down at Wick.
Wick was on his hands and knees on the decking. Coughing. Retching. There were marks on his throat. Four of them, in a row, red, where the spurs had been. Not cuts. Burns. And four more on the other side.
Wick looked up at him.
He waited for it. The look. The one the Unbanded had given him. The fighters on the decking. The look you give a thing that’s going to kill you.
Wick looked at him with his eyes watering and his face red and blotched and his throat burned in eight places.
“There you are,” Wick croaked.
Creed’s knees went.
He didn’t remember much after that either. He remembered pieces.
He remembered sitting on the decking with his back against the drum-shed and Ollo sitting next to him, still holding his wrist. Not tight. Just holding. Like you’d hold a rope you’d tied off, to be sure.
He remembered the Unbanded fighters standing at a distance in a ragged ring. Looking at him. Not coming closer. He couldn’t blame them.
He remembered Ferrin carrying Tamsin out of the brake-house door with a strap tight around her thigh, her face grey, her eyes open, saying in her tinny precise voice, “Femur. Femur, I think. Put me down by the light, I want to see it,” and Ferrin putting her down by the light.
He remembered Dorne. Ferrin had turned her over. She was alive. She was grey, greyer than Tamsin, with her arms and hands striped red and black where the threads had come out and where the fire had burned them off at the skin. The red-gold under her skin was dim. Very dim. Like a lamp with almost no oil. She looked at him across the decking with her plain square face.
“He drank a lot,” she said. Hoarse. “Before you. I can feel the gap.” She tried to lift her hand and couldn’t. “It’s quiet, though. It’s really quiet.” A breath. “He took the part that was looking.”
He remembered the bodies of the two Choir-born. He made himself look at them. The young one. The red-haired woman. He didn’t know their names. Brann would know. He’d ask Brann. If he ever saw Brann again. He’d ask, and he’d carve them.
He remembered his hands.
He held them up in front of his face in the terminus lamplight. The spurs. Eight of them. Four out of each set of knuckles. Dark ivory with red veins. He tried to pull them back in. He didn’t know how. They didn’t move. They were part of his hand now. He flexed his fingers and they flexed with them, the bone tips lifting a little, like the hackles of a dog. When he made a fist, they stood out from it like the spikes on a Gilt gauntlet.
He touched one with the thumb of the other hand. It was warm. It was always going to be warm.
“You’ll get used to them,” said Snake. In his bones. In his teeth. Quietly. Content. “They’re good. Look at them. You can cut through Warden-plate with those.”
He didn’t answer.
“You can have the front back,” said Snake. “For now. You did well. You said yes. I’m in. That’s what I wanted.” A pause. Something almost fond. “I’m not going anywhere, mule. Ever. So we’ll take turns.”
“No,” said Creed. Out loud. Ollo looked at him. “No turns.”
Snake laughed. Softly. In his jaw. In the long bones of his arms. Everywhere.
“We’ll see,” it said.
He looked for the Lamp.
He looked for a long time, in the dark behind his eyes. Where it had always lived.
He couldn’t find it.
Not a pinprick. Not a spark. Nothing. Only heat, everywhere, in every bone, and in the place where the white had always been, a darkness so complete it had no edges.
“Lamp,” he whispered.
Nothing.
Ollo’s hand tightened on his wrist.
“Wick’s called the Shelf,” said Ollo. “Sabine’s coming. And Mirelle. On Rell’s kites. They’ll be here in an hour.” He looked at Creed’s face. At his eyes. And didn’t look away. “Hold on till then.”
“Ollo.”
“Yeah.”
“Something’s wrong.” He could feel it now. Under the heat. Under the weight in his bones. A slipping. A thinning. As if he were a cup with a crack in it, somewhere he couldn’t see, and something was running out. “Something’s — I’m —”
“I know,” said Ollo. Steady. “I can see it. Your hands are going grey.”
He looked down.
They were. The fire-red scars were still red. But the skin around them, between them, the plain skin of his hands, was going the color of ash. Of slag. Of a grey band on a dead man’s wrist.
“It’s the bone,” said Snake. And for the first time since the bargain, it didn’t sound content. It sounded surprised. “Oh. It’s the bone. I’m in the bone, and the bone’s making the blood, and the blood’s — it’s hotter than you are. It’s hotter than the body is. Mule. Mule, it’s burning the body. It’s burning you from inside.”
“You said —”
“I didn’t KNOW.” A hiss. Not anger. Alarm. “I didn’t know. I’ve never been in a body. I’ve never been in anything. I was a hunger in a dead god. I didn’t know a body couldn’t — I didn’t know —“
He felt it then. Clearly. The fire, in the bone, making blood too hot to hold. The blood, going through his vessels, cooking them. The heart, pumping it, and every beat a little weaker. The grey spreading up his wrists. Into his forearms. Under the jacket.
He looked at Ollo.
“Hold on,” said Ollo. And held on.
And somewhere far, far down in the dark of him, so far he almost didn’t notice — so small it might have been nothing at all — something white, and cold, and terrified, began very, very slowly to move.
UPPER TERMINUS, RIB EIGHT
CASUALTIES: 7 UNBANDED, 2 CHOIR-BORN
1 MISSING OVER THE EDGE
1 —
UNRESOLVED