Chapter 109 Liam's Hole

The first thing I did was give him the water.

Not the flask. The water. I got the straps undone with my hands shaking and dragged a two-liter bottle out of the rack under the spoon and crawled over the embers to him on my good knee and put it in his hands.

He looked at it like he'd forgotten what it was.

"Slowly," I said. "Halloway says slowly. Or it comes straight back up."

"Halloway's not here," said Liam, and drank half of it in one go, and then sat very still with his eyes shut while his stomach decided, and kept it.

I watched him do it. All of him. All the way in.

It wasn't good. I'll write that down plainly, because it's true, and because I'm trying to write things down plainly now. He was dry all through, the way a leaf is dry, his blood thick and slow, his kidneys working too hard. His heart going fast to make up for it. The skin of his face tight over the bones. Fourteen days of cave and three days of fire and not enough of anything.

But nothing that wouldn't mend. Not if he drank. Not if he slept.

Not if we lived through the morning.

"Twelve on the rocks," I said. "Six on each side of the ravine."

"I know. I can count."

"Nine more coming. From the south. Following me."

He lowered the bottle.

"You brought more?"

"I didn't mean to."

"Twenty-one," said Liam. "You flew eighty kilometers to bring me twenty-one murder beetles and a flask." He looked at the flask, still lying against his foot. "What's in it?"

"Something to drink."

"That's not an answer, that's a category."

"Dot made it," I said. "From the plants. It smells like a compost bin."

Liam looked at the flask for a long moment.

"I've never loved anybody as much as I love Dot," he said, "and I've never met her."

I turned round to look at them.

I had to. I'd had my back to them since I crashed. Sitting in the mouth of a cave with my back to the Teeming, which I'd sworn, in the notebook, in capital letters, after the forge, I would never do again.

But they hadn't come. Twelve dark shapes on the rocks, six on each lip of the ravine, fourteen meters apart, very still. Watching the spoon. Watching the place in the fronds where it had come down through the smoke.

Measuring the operator.

I looked at the nearest one. Into it. Three hearts, fourteen legs, the silver threaded through it like wires through a wall. Awake, and humming, and passing something along the line, body to body to body, too fast for me to read.

I could salt it. I felt for the other thing, behind my eyes, and it was there. Tired. But there. A different well from the one I'd emptied flying. Further forward. I'd learned that on the tor at two in the morning, when the bucket was empty and I'd still been able to see.

I could salt it. And the next one. And maybe the next.

Not twenty-one. Not like this.

"Liam," I said. "How long can you keep the fire up?"

"Without sleeping?" He thought about it. "I've been doing it three days. I can do it another hour. Then I'm going to fall over and you'll have to step on me."

"Can you give me forty minutes?"

"What happens in forty minutes?"

"I get some of it back," I said. "And the nine get here."

He gave me forty minutes.

I lay on my back on the floor of the cave, just inside the mouth, with my head on the scarf and a bottle of water on my chest and Dot's salty paste in my mouth, and shut my eyes, both kinds, and let it fill.

It filled slowly. Like a cistern after rain. Like the one at Scarecrow, a long way south, that Dot would be checking every hour.

Behind me, Liam talked.

I think he did it to stay awake. I think he'd been doing it for three days, to the half-kit, to the cave, to the twelve on the rocks. He told me about the trees. About the egg-split pod and the half-kit forty meters up, glinting. About how the paste the half-kit made tasted of the Meridian. About the night he'd woken up and one of them had its head and two front legs into the cave, over the embers, close enough to touch, and he'd set fire to its face, and it hadn't screamed, it had just backed out, very slowly, with its plates smoking, and sat down again on the rocks in its place in the line.

"That's the worst bit," said Liam. "Not that they come. That they go back and sit down. Like they're waiting in a queue."

"They're one thing," I said, with my eyes shut. "All of them. The silver joins them up. When you burn one, they all learn it."

Liam didn't say anything for a while.

"That's horrible," he said.

"Yes."

"That's the most horrible thing you've ever told me, and you once told me what's in the paste."

At thirty minutes, I sat up.

Not because I was full. Because I'd been looking down.

Into the floor. Lying there with my eyes shut, the ordinary ones, I'd let the other sight go down, slowly, the way it does when I'm tired and not watching it. Into the granite under the cave. Down. Ten meters. Twenty. Forty.

Granite. All the way.

Not sandstone, soft and layered and full of old water channels, like the town at Scarecrow. Not red glass. Granite, very hard, very old, the crystals locked together so tightly that I couldn't see a single crack worth calling a crack. No tunnels. No channels. Nothing hollow, anywhere, in all that rock, under us or round us.

They couldn't dig this. Not fast. Not in a morning.

I sat up and looked at the cave.

Ten meters deep. One mouth. Granite on both sides, granite overhead, granite underneath. One way in.

"Liam," I said slowly. "Do you know what you've done?"

"Broken my leg, mostly."

"You found the only place on this planet," I said, "where everything has to come from in front of me."

He didn't understand. So I told him. About the wedge. About the ring of three hundred and eighty, and how they'd learned in forty-one minutes that I could only look one way. About the forge, and the floor coming up under me, and the eleven, and the seam I'd put in my own leg.

The enemy goes where my eyes don't.

"And in here," I said, "my eyes go everywhere they can go. There isn't a behind. There isn't an under. There's just the mouth."

Liam looked at the mouth of the cave. Five meters wide. The embers in their ring. The ravine beyond it, full of green. The rocks on both lips, with the twelve on them.

"So you just," he said, "sit here. And look out. And they all have to come in through there."

"Yes."

"And you look at them."

"Yes."

"And they turn into salt."

"Yes."

He was quiet.

"I'd like that very much," said Liam Calder. "I'd like to watch that. I've been setting fire to them for three days and they just sit down again."

The nine got there at fifty minutes.

I saw them come over the southern lip of the ravine, one after the other, and stop, and fit themselves into the line beside the six already there, without a sound. Fourteen point two meters. Fifteen on the south side now. Six on the north.

Twenty-one.

They sat for a long time. I sat in the cave mouth, cross-legged, with my bad leg out straight and the embers in front of me, and watched them. All of them. Both lips of the ravine. They were all in front of me. Every one. I could see them all at once, the way I'd never been able to see the ring, and I could feel the line between them humming, the silver passing something along, body to body.

I think they knew. I think that's why they sat so long.

Then they came.

All at once. Twenty-one. Down both walls of the ravine, fourteen legs each, fast, head first, the way water comes down a rock face after a storm. Through the green. Across the floor. Straight at the mouth of the cave, from both sides, in two lines that met in the middle.

I looked at the first one.

Salt.

And the second.

Salt.

It costs. It always costs. One, a little. Five, more. By the eighth my nose was going and my eyes were stinging and I couldn't feel my hands. But I didn't have to turn my head. Not once. They were all in front of me. In my wedge. Every one of them, coming out of the green into the open floor of the ravine in front of the cave, into the light, where I could see them, and I looked, and they went white, and stopped, and fell, and the next one came over the top of them.

Eleven. Twelve.

Liam was beside me. I don't know when he'd moved. He'd dragged himself up to the mouth on his elbows with his leg behind him, and he was sitting against the wall with his hands up, and his hands were on fire. Not throwing it. Holding it. Ready.

Fourteen. Fifteen.

"Lucas," said Liam. "Up."

I hadn't looked up.

That was the thing. I'd been so sure. Granite on both sides, granite overhead, granite underneath. One way in. I'd looked down into the floor and into the walls and out of the mouth.

I hadn't looked at the top of the mouth. At the lip of rock above the opening, outside, where the cliff went up from the cave to the rim of the ravine. Where you could come down the face, very quietly, while your friends came running across the floor making all the noise in the world.

It dropped off the lip above the cave mouth, straight down, legs spread, blade arms out, at my head.

And Liam set it on fire.

Not a little. Not the way he'd been doing it for three days, a wall of flame across the mouth to make them back off and sit down. All of it. All he had. A column of white fire from both his hands, straight up, into the thing as it fell, so hot I felt my eyebrows go and the scarf start to smoke.

It hit the embers a meter in front of me, burning, its plates gone black and cracking, its fourteen legs curling up.

I looked at it.

Salt.

And then I looked back out at the ravine, where three more were coming over the top of the white heap, and did them too.

Twenty.

The last one stopped.

Twenty meters out. On the floor of the ravine. At the edge of the green. It stood very still and looked at the mouth of the cave, at the white heap of salt in front of it, at me.

Then it turned and went back.

Up the wall. Over the lip. Gone.

I didn't salt it. I could have. It was in my wedge the whole way up the wall. I watched it go and I let it.

"Why?" said Liam, beside me. Very hoarse. His hands had gone dark. He was shaking all over.

"Because the silver in it is joined up," I said. "To all the others. Wherever they are. Hundreds of them. Thousands." I watched the lip of the ravine where it had gone. "I want it to tell them."

"Tell them what?"

"Not to come in here."

Liam was quiet.

Then he laughed. Hoarse and cracked and very tired. And he leaned his head back against the granite wall of his hole, and shut his eyes.

"You missed one," he said. "Up. You missed it."

"I know."

"So I've got up," said Liam. "From now on. You do in front. I'll do up."

"Deal," I said.

He was asleep before I'd finished saying it.

He slept for seven hours.

I let him. I sat in the mouth of the cave with the white heap in front of me and the ravine empty and the green very still, and kept the in front, and every few minutes, because I'd promised, I looked up, at the lip of rock over the opening. Nothing came. Nothing moved on either rim. Even the fronds had stopped turning toward me, after a while, as if they'd said hello enough.

I ate. I drank. I let the wells fill, both of them, the one in front and the one further back.

And I looked at his leg.

I'd been putting it off. I'll admit that. I'd seen it, the moment I crashed. You can't not see a thing like that, with eyes like mine. But I hadn't looked. Not properly. Not the way Halloway would have, in order, from the outside in.

I did it now. While he slept.

The splint first. Half a kit. A strip of the gray shell, bent round his shin, tied on with a strap from his suit. He'd done it well. Better than well. Okafor would have nodded.

Then the skin. Shiny, tight, swollen. Purple going yellow at the edges, which was good. No break in it anywhere, which was better. Nothing had come through. Nothing had got in.

Then the bones.

There are two, in the shin. A thick one at the front, the one you bark on the edge of a table. A thin one behind it, on the outside, like a splint the body made for itself. Father's anatomy book had a whole page on them, with the bones drawn twice, once from the front and once from the side, and his notes in pencil down the margin. Tibia takes the weight. Fibula keeps it honest.

Both of Liam's were broken. About a hand's width below the knee. Clean, more or less. Not shattered.

But they'd moved.

When he'd gone off the edge of the ravine and landed on the rocks, the lower half of his leg had gone one way and the upper half had gone the other. And then he'd crawled. And then he'd splinted it, lying on his back in a cave, as straight as he could get it, which wasn't straight. And then for seventeen days, his body had done what bodies do, which is mend whatever's in front of them, the way it's lying.

So it had.

I could see it. Soft new bone, gray and spongy, built up round both breaks like mortar round bricks that somebody had laid crooked. The ends overlapping, the bottom piece of each bone sitting a finger's width behind the top piece. The whole lower leg turned out, a little, at the ankle. Twenty degrees, maybe. Knitting together. Setting.

In another two weeks, it would be bone. Hard. Crooked. For the rest of his life.

It's the wrong shape, he'd said, on the radio. I can see it's the wrong shape.

He'd been right.

I took out Halloway's notes.

Three hundred and seventy-four grams. I'd carried them eleven light-years and eighty kilometers. I turned to the section on fractures, which I'd read on the Meridian so many times the corners were soft.

Set early if you can. If you can't, and it's begun to knit wrong, the old way was to break it again and set it properly. It is a terrible thing to do to someone. It is less terrible than a leg that's wrong for fifty years. You'll know which. Don't be a coward about it. Don't be a butcher about it either.

And then, underneath, in a different pen, added later:

You, Lucas, will not need to break anything. You will be able to see the callus. Ask it to let go.

I sat in the mouth of the cave and read that line ten times.

She'd known. Sitting in the white rooms, before launch, writing three hundred and seventy-four grams of notes for a boy she'd never get to check on again, she'd thought about this. About a leg, on a world she'd never see, that had knit wrong. And she'd written down what to do.

Bring me back a brain I've never seen.

I'd bring her back a leg she'd have been proud of.

Liam woke at four in the afternoon.

He woke the way people wake after three days without sleeping, all at once, with his hands coming up and starting to glow, and then he saw me, and the white heap, and the empty ravine, and the glow went out.

"Oh," he said. "It wasn't a dream."

"No."

"You actually flew here in a spoon."

"Yes."

"Right." He lay back. "Right. Good. I've decided I'm going to stop being surprised by you. It's too tiring."

I gave him water. And paste. And then I told him about his leg.

He listened all the way through without saying anything. He'd gone very pale.

"So I'll limp," he said, at the end. "If you don't."

"Yes. And it'll hurt. And your knee will go, by the time you're thirty, because it's taking the weight wrong. And your hip after that."

"And if you do?"

"Then it'll hurt a great deal more," I said. "Tonight. For about an hour. And then it'll heal straight."

Liam looked at his leg. Then at the flask, which was still lying where it had stopped, against his good foot.

He picked it up.

"Rule," he said. "Something to drink. All five of us. Together." He unscrewed the top. "There's two of us. That's not five. But Toby's still in the snow and Sera's still sulking in a forest and Luna's walking north to kill you personally, so I'm taking a head start. I said I would. On the radio. It's binding."

"It smells like a compost bin."

"I know," said Liam. "I can smell it from here." He held it up to me. "To Dot."

"To Dot," I said.

He drank.

He made a face I'll remember for the rest of my life.

Then he drank again.

"That," said Liam Calder, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, "is the worst thing I've ever put in my body, including the paste, including the time Sigmund dared me to eat soap. It tastes like a pear died in a sock." He drank a third time. "I love it. Tell her I love it. Tell her it's perfect."

"She'll want to know why your face looked like that."

"Tell her that's how humans look when something's perfect."

I did it at dusk, with the fire built up across the mouth of the cave so I wouldn't have to watch the ravine, and Liam watching up, with his back against the wall and his hands ready, because he'd said he would.

First the nerve.

Father's book had it. The long one that goes down the back of the knee and splits in two and runs all the way to the foot. I looked into it, behind his knee, the long gray cable, full of signal. And I didn't change it. I didn't dare. I just asked it to be quieter. The way Halloway's notes said the drugs did, in the hospital. Not to stop. To slow down. To pass on less.

It did. A little.

"Can you feel that?" I said, and pressed his shin.

"Yes," said Liam. "But it's like it's happening in the next room."

"That's as far as I can go."

"That's fine," said Liam, and his voice was very steady and his face was white. "Next room's fine. Do it."

I looked into the callus.

All of it. The soft gray mortar built up round both breaks, seventeen days of it, the body's best guess. I didn't ask it to be anything else. I asked it to let go.

It did it slowly. Cell by cell. The way you'd take apart a wall you'd built yourself, brick by brick, so you could lay it again properly. It had taken his body seventeen days to build. It took me forty minutes to undo. By the end of it my nose was running into my mouth and I couldn't feel my fingers and the bones of his shin were loose again, in his leg, broken, the way they'd been on the first day.

Liam didn't scream. I want that on the record too. He bit through the strap I'd given him. He made a sound I'd never heard a person make. His hands lit up the whole cave, white, and the granite overhead started to crackle. But he didn't scream, and he didn't move his leg, and at one point, with his eyes squeezed shut, he said "up," through his teeth, very hoarse, and I looked up, and there was nothing there, and he said "just checking," and I nearly laughed, and didn't.

Then I set it.

I couldn't pull it with my hands. Not hard enough. Not with my own leg strapped straight, sitting on the floor. Okafor would have put her boot on his hip and pulled his foot with both hands, the old way, the way you see in films.

I looked at his foot instead.

Just looked. The ordinary way. The way Mother looked at a spoon.

And held it.

And pulled.

Slowly. The bucket weight came back in behind my eyes, further back, and I drew his foot down, away from his knee, a centimeter, two, until the overlapping ends of both bones came apart and slid past each other and met, end to end, the way they were supposed to. And I turned it. Twenty degrees. Back. Until the ankle was straight under the knee.

And then I looked inside, the other way, all the way down, and made sure.

The broken ends lined up. Edge to edge. Like the two halves of a plate.

"Done," I said.

Liam opened his eyes.

His hands went dark. The cave went dark with them, except for the fire.

"Done?" he said.

"Done. Don't move it."

"I wasn't going to move it, Lucas, I'm not mad."

I put the titanium splints on. Dot's. Light and pale, one on each side of his shin, from above the knee to below the ankle, padded with the clean wrappings, strapped tight. And then I looked inside one more time, and the bones were still where I'd put them.

And then I lay down on the floor of the cave beside him and didn't get up for a long time.

The half-kit woke us in the night.

It sat at the back of the cave, against the wall, where Liam had dragged it on its strap. A lump of gray shell with the core in it and one arm and the fabricator, making its slow paste. I'd barely looked at it. I'd been looking at everything else.

At two in the morning, it spoke.

"Liam, love," it said. "You need to drink something."

I sat up so fast I hit my head on the granite.

It wasn't Dot's voice. Dot's voice was clear and level and not quite anybody's. This was somebody's. A woman's. Low and warm, with a burr in it, the vowels a little flat, the way the Retention families say them. Tired. Kind.

I'd heard it a hundred times. Across the Calders' table, on families' day. The evening I'd looked into a pair of shaking hands and seen fifteen years of silver packed into the sheaths of every nerve.

Maura Calder.

"It picked it," said Liam, in the dark. Very quietly. "The first morning. In the tree. Before I'd even got the straps off. I didn't ask it to. It just looked at me and talked like that." A pause. "I think it got it out of my head. I think it looked for whatever would make me get up, and that was it."

"Liam, love," said the half-kit. "Drink something. Please."

He reached out in the dark and found the water bottle and drank.

"Thank you, love."

"She says please," said Liam. "Dot doesn't say please, does she."

"No."

"Mum always says please. Even when she's telling you off."

We lay there for a long time, in the dark, with the fire low in the mouth of the cave.

"Lucas," said Liam. "Her hands."

I knew which hands.

"Rory says they're worse. In his letters. Before launch. He said evenings were bad. He said he had to hold them for her, to help her eat." His voice was very flat. "Is it the stuff? The spoon on the first of the month?"

"Yes."

"Can you do anything? When we get back?"

I thought about the plants. The silver in them, turning toward me the whole way across the green, awake, saying hello. I thought about the silver in my own optic nerves, not fighting. I thought about the silver in Maura's, asleep, packed in, and her body fighting it every day, every hour, so that her hands shook too hard to hold a spoon.

I thought about the line in the notebook. Underlined twice.

"Not yet," I said.

Liam was quiet.

"Not can't?" he said.

"Not can't," I said. "Not yet."

He breathed out. Long and slow.

"Right," said Liam Calder. "Not yet. I can work with not yet." He shifted, carefully, with his straight leg in its pale splints. "Write it down. In your notebook. Underline it."

"I already have."

"Underline it again."

"Liam, love," said the half-kit, very softly, from the back of the cave. "You should sleep now."

"Yeah, Mum," said Liam. "Yeah. I will."

And he did.

Day 325.

21 came. Granite cave, one mouth. Everything in front. 20 salted. One let go, to tell the others.

Missed one. Up. Liam burned it. "You do in front. I'll do up."

Liam's leg: tibia and fibula, overlapped, turned out 20°, knitting wrong. 17 days.

Halloway: "You, Lucas, will not need to break anything. Ask it to let go."

She knew.

Callus: let go. 40 minutes. Foot: held and pulled, the way Mother lifts a spoon. Edge to edge, like a plate.

Liam didn't scream. He said "up" through his teeth. Just checking.

The flask. "A pear died in a sock. Tell her it's perfect."

Liam's half-kit speaks in Maura's voice. "Liam, love." It says please.

Maura's hands. Not can't. Not yet.

Underlined again.