Chapter 123 The Mountain Colony

It was warm behind the ice.

That was the first thing. I'd braced for the cold, the way you brace for a step that isn't there, and it didn't come. We went round the edge of the frozen waterfall in a line, Toby first, then Liam, then the rest of us, and the moment I was through the gap where the wall of sound had been, the air changed. Soft. Damp. Warm as a kitchen.

"Hot spring," said Sera, behind me. She said it the way another person would say thank God. "Somewhere under the floor. I can feel it."

"Forty meters down," said Toby, without turning round. "Ilse found it. That's why they came here."

The cave went back a long way.

I looked into it before my eyes had got used to the dark. I couldn't help it. A long throat of black rock, sloping gently up, wider than the Scarecrow dome and three times as deep. Water running somewhere under the floor, hot, in a crack that went down further than I could follow. Rooms cut into the sides with somebody's hands, the edges too square to be the mountain's work. A garden, at the back, under a lamp. And stones. In the walls, all down both sides, every few meters, at the height of a man's head. Stones like the ones on the cairns. Humming.

"You put the wall in the stones," I said.

Toby looked back at me over his shoulder. For the first time since the ice, he nearly smiled.

"I had to sleep sometime," he said.

There was a fire at the end of the cave, in a ring of black plates.

And round it, four people.

They stood up when we came in. All of them. Not quickly. The way you stand up when you've been sitting a long time and you don't trust what's coming through the door. I saw their hearts before I saw their faces. Risa did too. I heard her breathe in, behind me.

Four hearts. Going very fast.

The tall one first. A woman of fifty or so, broad across the shoulders, with gray-yellow hair cropped short with a knife and a burn scar down one forearm, standing a little in front of the others with her hands loose at her sides. She was the one who'd stood up first. She'd put herself between the fire and the door without thinking about it.

Beside her, a man with gray in his beard, sitting down again almost at once, on a block of stone carved into a stool, because he didn't have any feet. Not below the ankle. The ends of his legs were wrapped in gray cloth, neatly, the wraps tied off with care. There was a knife on his knee and a half-carved bird in his other hand.

Behind them, a small brown woman with a long gray plait and her hands tucked into her sleeves. She was shaking. Not with fear. I could see the difference. Fine and fast and steady. In the hands.

And at the back, by the garden, a thin boy about my age with dark hair and a face I'd never seen, holding a trowel. He didn't say anything. He just looked at us, one at a time, and his heart was going like a bird's.

"Ilse Brandt," said Toby. He pointed at the tall one. "F-five. It was her base. It's down in the foothills, two days' walk. She dragged the mirror up here on a sledge after the kit fell." His hand moved. "Dov Asher. F-fourteen. Lost his feet in the first winter. Carves. Priya Lal. F-nineteen. Cooks. Better than Mum." The hand moved to the back. "And that's Teo."

I knew the name before he said the rest of it.

I hadn't known I knew it. But I'd sat across a table from a woman with half a jaw made of a bridge rail, and watched her run her finger down a slate, and stop.

It was twenty-nine. LARK. A boy called Teodor Venn. From the river floors. Quiet in the tenth month. Back three cycles later, for eleven seconds.

And then quiet again. For good.

"Teodor Venn," I said.

The boy at the back put the trowel down.

"Nobody calls me that," he said. His voice was very rough. Like a voice that had been broken in half and mended badly. "Not since the river floors."

"Sergeant Okafor does," I said. "She's got you on a slate. You called in for eleven seconds after three cycles of nothing. She's been counting you every night since."

Teo Venn stared at me.

"She thinks I'm dead," he said.

"She doesn't know," I said. "She counts the ones she doesn't know as well. That's her rule."

He sat down on the edge of the garden, very suddenly, in the dirt, the way I'd sat down in the snow beside Toby's pod.

"Eleven seconds," he said, to the floor. "That's all the kit had left. I crawled forty kilometers on my hands to get back to it, and it had eleven seconds." He put his hands over his face. "I said my name. I didn't know what else to say."

"She heard it," I said. "She's still got it."

Then the fifth one stood up.

I hadn't counted her. That's the truth. I'd counted four hearts round the fire, and there were four people round the fire, and I'd stopped. But there was another heart in the cave, and it wasn't Toby's.

It was in the shadow beside the cave wall, behind the fire, where the light didn't reach. Very steady. Very slow. A heart that had decided a long time ago not to hurry for anybody.

She stepped forward into the light.

She was small. Not much taller than Genny. Dark hair cut straight across at the jaw. A thin, sharp, ordinary face, a little too pale, the face of somebody who'd been indoors under a mountain for a year. A gray coat with the sleeves turned back twice. And her eyes moved. Even standing still. Even looking right at me. Every few seconds they went away, very slightly, to one side, the way your eyes go to a clock on a wall, and came back.

As if there were something in the room she always needed to know the position of.

"Pell," she said.

Just that. The way she'd said it on comms, Okafor told me, every cycle for four months, instead of the callsign the engineers had given her.

"Juno," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment.

"You're the Dask," said Juno Pell. "You're the one on the radio. Every hour. For fourteen days. This is Scarecrow." Her voice was very level. Very matron. I'd heard that voice before, in a kitchen, over a pot of tea, telling me to eat two pieces of toast. "And then you stopped."

"The Teeming were coming to it," I said. "The radio. They hear it. I had to stop."

"I know. I worked that out." She didn't look away. "I climbed the peak every morning after. I flashed where is he. Every morning since." A pause. "You took your time."

"Yes," I said. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry." Her eyes went away to the side. Came back. "Be here. You're here." She looked round at the others. At Luna, very straight. At Liam, with his hands lit. At Holt in the doorway. "How many did you bring?"

"Six," said Luna. "And the skiff takes six. We'll make it take twelve."

I should have waited.

I know that. Luna said so afterward. There was water to be got from the skiff, and Liam's leg to see to, and Holt was grey from the cold, and the five of them hadn't spoken to anyone from outside the cave in two years and were standing round their fire like people at the edge of a cliff. It wasn't the time.

But I'd been carrying it since the kitchen. Since before the Meridian. And I didn't want to carry it one more minute.

"Your mother's well," I said.

Juno Pell went completely still.

Not the way Luna went still. Luna went still like ice. Juno went still like a needle that's found where it's pointing, and stopped, and won't be moved.

"You don't know my mother," she said.

"I do," I said. "Miss Pell. She's in the city, with my mother. She looks after my sisters when Mother can't. She made me toast the morning I left. Two pieces. She told me to eat both." I swallowed. "She makes a lemon cake every families' day. A small one. She's made eighteen. She takes them to the school and gives them to the little ones."

Juno didn't move.

"She asked me to tell you something," I said. "She sent it through my mother. Months before I came. I thought it was for me. I thought it was a riddle. I wrote it down and I didn't understand it." I looked at her. "It wasn't for me. It was for you. She was just hoping."

"Say it."

"North was never wrong," I said. "Not once."

For a long moment nothing happened.

Then Juno Pell's eyes went away to the side, the way they did. To wherever it was. And this time they didn't come back.

She stood there by the fire, with her hands at her sides and her face turned toward something none of us could see, and she cried without making any sound at all. Not her face. Her face didn't move. Just the water, coming out of her eyes and running down and dripping off her chin onto the gray coat.

Nobody said anything.

Ilse Brandt put a big burned hand on Juno's shoulder, and left it there.

"She used to say that," said Juno at last. Very quietly. To the side. "When I got lost. When I was small. I always got lost, before. Before the program. Before I knew where north was. I'd come home at dark and she'd be on the steps, and I'd say I went the wrong way, and she'd say no, love. North was never wrong. You just weren't facing it yet."

She wiped her face with the turned-back sleeve.

"I'm facing it now," she said. "That's the trouble."

We ate at the fire that night. All twelve of us.

Priya's stew, out of a pot that had been a kit's shell plate, hammered into a bowl. Something from the garden in it, pale and soft, and something from the green below that Ilse had brought up two days before, dark and stringy and very good. Liam's flask went round. Dov Asher sniffed it, and drank, and sat for a long moment with his eyes watering, and then said, "Who made this?" in the voice of a man meeting God.

"I did," said Liam, enormously pleased.

"It is not a beverage," I said, in Dot's voice. Nobody but Squad Eight got it. Squad Eight laughed until Sera had to put her stew down.

Toby didn't eat much. He sat beside me with his medic's bag on his knees, and after a while he opened it, and took out a notebook.

Not one of mine. Not one of Father's. A thick one, made of kit-plate shavings pressed flat and stitched together with wire, every page covered in Toby's small round handwriting. He'd ruled the columns himself.

"I need you to look at something," he said. "I've been waiting for you to look at it for seventy-four days."

It was hands.

Page after page of hands. Ilse's. Priya's. Dov's, for a while, at the start, and then not, because Dov's had stopped. Every day, a line. The date, the time, how long Toby had counted. Ilse, right hand, at rest, 31 movements in ten seconds. Priya, both, 44. And next to each line, in a separate column, one word.

Up. Or Down.

"Up's here," said Toby. "In the cave. Above the line where the green stops." He turned a page. "Down's when they go down to hunt. To the valleys. Where the green is. Where it's silver at the tops." He put his finger on the columns. "Look."

I looked.

I didn't need my eyes for it. Up: thirty, forty, forty-four. Down, four days later: twelve. Eight. Six. Up again: thirty, thirty-eight, forty-one. Forty times. Fifty. Page after page. The same shape every time. Like breathing.

"They were in the program," said Toby. "Before they came. Ilse and Priya and Dov. Second intake, the same as Holt. They took the stabilizer for years. They stopped when the supplies ran out." He looked at me. "Their hands stop shaking when they go down into the green. And start again when they come up. And I don't know why. I've read the immunology book eleven times and it isn't in there."

Holt, across the fire, had put his stew down.

"Boy," he said. To Toby. "Come here."

Toby went. Holt held out his hands, over the fire, flat. Big, scarred, square hands. Perfectly still.

"Twenty-eight years," said Holt. "Twenty-eight years they shook. And then I lived two years in the green, and they stopped." He turned them over. "His Lordship here looked inside them. Found the silver in my nerves. Same as the stuff in the plants. Asleep, at home. Awake, here."

Toby looked at the hands. Then at me.

"You found it?"

"I found what it is," I said. "Holt's woke up. The silver in his nerves. Living next to the plants. They say something to it, the plants, all the time, very quietly. I call it hello. And his answers." I looked at Ilse Brandt, at the burned hand on her knee, going very fine and very fast in the firelight. "Up here, there aren't any plants. Nothing to say hello. So it goes back to sleep."

"And down there it wakes up again," said Toby slowly.

"Every time. Forty times. You proved it." I put my hand on his notebook. "Toby. I had one man. You've got three people and seventy-four days. This is the best thing anybody's written down on this planet."

Toby went red to the ears. Exactly the way he used to, at the end of the Calders' table, with his armband slipping down.

Then he said, very quietly, "Does that mean your mum?"

"It means my mum," I said. "And Liam's. If we can work out how to get the hello home."

On the other side of the fire, Liam had stopped laughing.

Luna counted us that night.

She did it at the mouth of the cave, standing in the warm air with the frozen waterfall behind her going faintly blue in the starlight. The way she'd done it every night since Scarecrow. Out loud. Each name. Then the number.

When she'd done the twelve, she didn't stop.

"Lucas Dask," said Luna. "Nineteen."

I looked up from where I was sitting.

"What?"

"You're nineteen," said Luna. She didn't look at me. She looked at her slate. "You turned eighteen in the seed. On the way down. On the eighteenth day. Three days before we landed. I worked it out from your file before we launched. I wasn't going to say anything in a seed." She turned the slate over. "And you turned nineteen on Day 362. In the workshop. With your arms black to the elbow and Calder shouting at you about heat." A pause. "I didn't say anything then either. You were busy."

"You've been counting my birthdays?"

"I count everything," said Luna. "That's what I'm for."

Liam was sitting very still.

"Eighteen months for the circles to meet," he said slowly. "I said. On the roof. I said I'd be eighteen and Lucas'd be nineteen and Luna'd be twenty and she could buy it." He looked down at the flask in his hands. There was about a third left in it. "There's nowhere to buy it."

"No," said Luna.

"Then it's a good thing Lucas can make anything," said Liam. "He made the moon wet." His voice had gone thick. "I made the drink, though. He only made the still."

He stood up. On his good leg and his healing one. Holding the flask.

"Squad Eight," he said.

Nobody argued.

That was the thing I'll remember. Nobody said we're on a mountain, or there are six strangers watching, or it's not a beverage. Sera got up from the fire. Toby put his notebook down. Luna put away her slate. And the five of us went and sat on the warm rock at the mouth of the cave, in a row, the way we'd lain on the warm stones on the roof with the moon going over, a long time ago, when Liam made us promise.

Liam drank, and passed it to Sera. Sera drank, and passed it to Luna. Luna to Toby. Toby to me.

I held it for a moment.

When we get there. When we've found each other. When everybody's breathing.

Five. All five. Breathing.

I drank.

We didn't get very, very stupid. There wasn't enough. But Liam started laughing, and couldn't stop, and then Toby did, the cracked wet laugh from the snow, and then Sera, and then, very quietly, at the end of the row, so that you'd only know if you were sitting next to her, Luna. And it went bouncing off the frozen waterfall the way Toby's sounds did, and came back from every side of the valley at once.

"Happy birthday," said Toby, when he could. "Twice."

Juno woke me before dawn.

She didn't say anything. She stood over me where I slept by the fire until I opened my eyes, and then she jerked her head toward the cave mouth, and went.

I followed her. On my stick. Out round the edge of the ice, into a cold that took the breath out of me, and up. There was a path. Narrow, steep, cut into the rock beside the waterfall, with handholds where there needed to be handholds. She went up it like she'd gone up it every morning for a year, which she had. I went up it like a man of nineteen with a stick, which was slower.

At the top there was a flat shelf of black rock under the peak, swept bare by the wind, with the whole of the white mountains below it and the whole of the green beyond those, going south and away into the dark. And in the middle of the shelf, set into a frame of kit-plate, the mirror from F-five.

Juno put her hand on the frame. Turned it to the south. Waited.

When the first edge of the sun came over the eastern range, she caught it, and flashed. Fast. Practiced. Without looking.

F5. FOUND. FIVE PLUS ONE. ALL ALIVE. HE IS HERE.

Then she let go of the mirror and turned round to me.

"I want to show you something," said Juno Pell. "I've never shown it to anyone. Toby's seen me do it. He didn't understand. Nobody understands." Her eyes went away to the side. Came back. "You might."

"All right."

"Before the first wave," she said, "they put me in the infirmary, and they put the needles in, and I woke up and I knew where north was. Always. Like knowing where your own hand is. I could shut my eyes in the middle of the city and point." She did. Shut her eyes, and lifted her arm. "That's what it was for. On a new world. No maps. Someone who couldn't get lost."

"And here?"

"Here," said Juno, "I landed at twenty-six, and I shut my eyes on the first morning, and I pointed." Her arm swung, slowly, with her eyes still shut, to the right. To the northeast. To the far end of the white range, where the peaks went down into cloud. "There. True north. The pole. Where it should be."

She stood like that for a moment.

"And by the twelfth cycle," she said, "it wasn't there anymore."

"It moves," I said.

"It moves. North's wrong here. It moves. Going to look." She said it the way you'd say a line from a song you were sick of. "So I went to look. I walked after it. It went west, first, and then north, and then up. Into the mountains. And I followed it for a year. Through all of it. Teo found me. Ilse found me. Priya found Dov, and we carried him. And it came here." She put her foot down flat on the rock. "Under here. Under the mountain. Down where the hot water comes from, and further. And it stopped. For two months, nearly. It just sat there. Under us. Like something asleep."

The wind went across the shelf. I could feel my ears going.

"And then it started moving again," said Juno.

"When?"

She opened her eyes and looked at me.

"I wrote it down," she said. "The morning it moved. I'd been sitting on top of it for two months and I woke up and it wasn't under me anymore. It was a little way off. Going south. Slowly. A little every day." A pause. "It was the day your seeds came down. Day one. The second wave."

I didn't say anything.

"I didn't know what it was following," said Juno. "Not then. Then I heard you on the radio. This is Scarecrow. And I took a bearing on the signal, the way they taught us. And I drew a line on Ilse's map from here to where your voice was coming from."

She shut her eyes again.

And pointed.

Not northeast. Not toward the pole at the far end of the range. Her arm came round, slowly, with her eyes shut, past the east, past the rising sun, all the way round, until it was pointing south. South and a little west. Down the whole length of the white mountains, and out over the green, and on, three hundred miles, to where a red canyon would be, and a tower, and a dome, and a robot with eight arms standing in the doorway counting the dawns.

"North," said Juno Pell, "is pointing at you, Dask. It's been pointing at you for a year."

Far below us, at the mouth of the cave, I heard someone come out onto the rock. Risa. I knew her heart.

She stood there for a moment, in the cold, with her eyes shut and her hand out flat. Then she called up the cliff to us, very clearly, the way you'd call to someone across a field.

"Lucas. The beat. It's doing the catch again. Louder than it's ever been." A pause. "And it's not coming from everywhere anymore. It's coming from one place."

She turned, slowly, with her eyes still shut, and pointed.

South. And a little west.

Exactly where Juno's arm was pointing.

Day 373–374.

Warm behind the ice. A hot spring forty meters down. Toby put his wall in the stones so he could sleep.

Five. Ilse Brandt, F-5, dragged her mirror up on a sledge. Dov Asher, F-14, no feet, carves birds. Priya Lal, F-19, cooks better than Toby's mum. Teodor Venn, F-29, LARK. Eleven seconds. "I said my name. I didn't know what else to say." Okafor still counts him.

Juno Pell. "Pell." That voice. Told her: your mother's well. Eighteen lemon cakes. "North was never wrong. Not once." It was hers. She cried without her face moving. "You just weren't facing it yet."

Toby's notebook. Hands. Up: thirty, forty, forty-four. Down in the green: twelve, eight, six. Fifty times. He proved it. Holt's silver isn't luck. The plants say hello and the sleeping silver answers. Toby went red to the ears.

Toby: "Does that mean your mum?" Yes. And Liam's. If we can get the hello home.

Luna: "Lucas Dask. Nineteen." Eighteen in the seed, three days before landing. Nineteen on Day 362, in the forge. She counted. She didn't say. "That's what I'm for."

The rule. Something to drink. All five of us. Breathing. We drank it. Toby: "Happy birthday. Twice."

Dawn on the peak. F5. FOUND. FIVE PLUS ONE. ALL ALIVE. HE IS HERE.

Juno: north moves. She followed it a year. It stopped under this mountain, asleep, two months. It started moving again on our Day 1. South.

She shut her eyes and pointed. At Scarecrow. At me.

Risa, from the cave mouth, eyes shut: the catch, louder than ever. Not everywhere now. One place. She pointed the same way as Juno.

Underlined twice.