Chapter 124 Second Hull

Juno checked north again the next morning.

She didn't wake me this time. She didn't have to. I was already up, sitting in the mouth of the cave with the notebook on my knee, not writing anything, looking south at the place where the white mountains went down into the green. I'd been there since the middle of the night. I hadn't slept much.

She came out and stood beside me in the cold. Shut her eyes. Lifted her arm.

It didn't swing south.

It swung down. Not far. A few degrees. Toward the floor of the valley, and the frozen waterfall, and the cave mouth.

Toward me.

She opened her eyes and looked at her own arm for a long time.

"It's turned," she said.

"Which way?"

"Back." Her voice was very level. "Yesterday it was pointing at your canyon. Three hundred miles south. This morning it's pointing at the bottom of this valley." She lowered the arm. "It isn't going to your canyon, Dask. It never was. It was going to where you were. And you aren't there anymore."

I didn't say anything.

"It's following you," said Juno Pell.

Luna called the meeting at the fire an hour later.

All twelve of us. Toby and Squad Eight on one side. Holt and Risa. The five on the other, close together, the way people sit when they've only ever had each other. Juno told it. Short and flat, the way she said everything, with her eyes going away to the side every few seconds and coming back.

Then Risa told her part. The beat. The catch in it. One place, now, not everywhere.

Then I told mine. Dot, at Scarecrow, hearing the pattern through the silver. The shape of a question.

When we'd finished, nobody said anything for a while.

"So what is it?" said Liam at last.

"I don't know," I said.

"Is it the Teeming?"

"I don't know."

"Is it going to eat us?"

"Liam," said Sera.

"I'm only asking what everybody's thinking."

"It's been under this mountain before," said Ilse Brandt. Her voice was deep and slow and very calm. She had her burned hand flat on her knee to stop it shaking. "For two months. With us sitting on top of it. And it didn't eat anybody." She looked at Juno. "It slept."

"It slept until he landed," said Juno.

Luna let them go on for a few minutes. Then she stood up.

"We don't know what it is," she said. "We don't know what it wants. We do know it's slow. Juno says a few kilometers a day, at most. It took it a year to get from here to halfway to Scarecrow." She looked at me. "We fly. It walks, or crawls, or whatever it does. If it's following Lucas, then Lucas is the fastest thing on this planet, and he's going to be at Scarecrow with Dot and Wren and the tower long before it is."

"And then?" said Holt.

"And then we'll have time to think," said Luna. "Which we don't, sitting in a cave three hundred miles from anything, with twelve people and a boat for six."

That was the real problem. It always is. Not the thing under the mountain. The boat.

Maris was twelve meters long and had six seats and a floor I could see all at once. Twelve people would fit in her, if they sat on each other's knees, and if nobody minded Dov Asher's legs across their lap for three days. But twelve people weighed twice what six did, and I didn't know if I could hold that. And even if I could, the water and the food and Toby's notebook and Priya's pot and Ilse's mirror wouldn't fit.

"Make her bigger," said Liam.

"I can't make her bigger here. There's nothing to make her out of."

"There's my base," said Ilse.

Everybody looked at her.

"F-five," she said. "Two days' walk. Down in the foothills. Under the snow line." She turned her shaking hand over on her knee. "The kit's dead. The pod's still there. And the kit fell in pieces, when it fell. Twenty arms. A shell. All of it the same gray plate." She looked at Sera, and then at me. "Is that enough?"

I looked at Sera.

Sera was already standing up.

It took two trips to get everyone down. Six and six. An hour each way, very low over the snow, with Ilse in the bow beside Luna, pointing.

The base was on a shelf of rock above a narrow valley, at the very top of where the green came up the mountain, so that from the edge of the shelf you could look down and see the silver at the tops of the fronds, and look up and see nothing but white. There was a dome, half fallen in. A garden, long dead. A filter, silent. And in the middle of it all, lying on its side in the rubble like an animal that had lain down to sleep and never got up, the kit.

Twenty arms. Twenty legs. A shell as long as Maris, cracked down the middle.

Ilse walked up to it and put her burned hand on the shell, and stood there.

"Hello, old girl," she said.

I looked into it.

All the way. The shell, gray and smooth and strong, the same metal as Dot. The arms, jointed, hollow, light. And the core.

There wasn't a core. Not anymore. Just a hollow place in the middle of the shell where the core had been, scraped clean, the way the cores at F-eleven and F-nine had been scraped clean. Something had eaten it.

"They took the middle out," I said. "After it fell."

"The first night," said Ilse. "I watched them do it. From up there." She pointed at the snow. "There were hundreds. I thought they'd come for me after. They didn't. They took the middle and they went away, and they never came back." She took her hand off the shell. "I never understood why they wanted it."

I didn't either.

But I was starting to think I knew who'd have the answer. And that it was three hundred miles away, following me.

We built for three days.

The same as at Scarecrow. Sera's bare pink palms over a fire she made out of nothing, on a bed of rock, holding the gray plate at exactly the heat it wanted. Me beside her, asking it, grain by grain, to be the shape we'd drawn in the snow with a stick. Liam fetching and carrying, because Liam couldn't sit still, and because Sera let him. Toby holding a wall of sound across the open side of the dome to keep the wind off us, sitting cross-legged on the rock with his eyes shut for hours at a time.

Not a new boat. A second hull.

The same length as Maris. The same shape. Lying beside her on the rock, a meter apart, and joined to her by seven long thin spars of the same gray plate, bow to stern, so that from above they looked like two leaves with their stems tied together.

"It's two boats," said Liam, on the first evening.

"It's one boat," I said. "With two floors."

"It looks like two boats."

"It can't be two boats," said Sera, without looking up from the fire. "He can't hold two boats. He can hold one. So it's one." She moved her hand, and the end of a spar went soft and white and sank into the rim of the new hull as if it had grown there. "No seams."

"No seams," I said.

That was the hard part again. The spars. Where they met the hulls.

Every place one thing touched another, my eyes wanted to stop. To see two. A spar, and a hull. A hull, and a spar. And the second I saw two, I'd have to hold two, and the bucket would split.

So we didn't join them. Not the way you'd join two pieces of metal, with a weld or a rivet. Sera made the plate soft at both ends at once, all the way through, and I asked the grains on either side of the line to forget there'd ever been a line. To lie down together. The way they'd lie in one piece of plate that had always been one piece.

Seven spars. Fourteen joins.

It took me most of a day to do one.

At night, after, I sat by the fire at the edge of the shelf with my hands in my lap, too tired to lift a spoon, and looked down at the green.

Priya came and sat beside me.

She didn't say anything for a while. Then she held out her hands. Small, brown, square-nailed, with flour, or something like flour, ground into the creases of the knuckles. Shaking. Fine and fast.

"Toby says you can see it," she said. "The thing in my nerves."

"I can see it," I said.

"Can you change it?"

I'd been afraid she'd ask that.

I took her hands. Very carefully, the way Mother used to take a cup she wasn't sure of. And I looked.

Nerve. Long and pale, branching, the way it had been in Holt's knee, in Mother's wrist on a screen eleven light-years away. And all along it, threaded through it, so fine you'd miss it if you didn't know it was there, the silver.

Asleep. Like a seam of metal in a rock, that nobody had ever struck.

I tried. I knew I would. I took hold of it, the way I'd take hold of anything, and asked it to wake.

And it slid away from me. The way the core of a kit slid away. The way the dark outside the Meridian slid away. Not a page. Not anything I could hold.

"No," I said. "I'm sorry. Not like that."

Priya nodded. She didn't take her hands back.

"How do the plants do it?" she said.

"They say something," I said. "All the time. Very quietly. I can feel it, when I'm near them. Like a hum. Like a voice in another room." I looked down at the green below the shelf, where the silver tips of the fronds had turned up toward me, the way they always did. "I call it hello. I don't know what it really is."

"Can you say it?"

"I don't know how."

From the other side of the fire, where I'd thought he was asleep with his head on his bag, Toby said, without opening his eyes:

"What does it sound like?"

"It doesn't sound like anything," I said. "It isn't a sound."

"Everything's a sound," said Toby, "if you go slow enough." He opened his eyes and looked at me across the fire. "Or fast enough. I put a note in a stone, Lucas. A stone's just a sound that's very, very slow." He sat up. "If the plants are saying something, they're doing it with something. And if it moves, it's a sound. And if it's a sound, I can hear it. I just haven't been listening to the right thing."

He got up. Walked to the edge of the shelf. Stood there, looking down at the green, at the long silver ripple of the fronds turning up toward us in the starlight. And shut his eyes.

He stood there for an hour.

When he came back to the fire he didn't say anything. He just sat down, and took out his notebook, and wrote for a long time.

We finished on the evening of Day 377.

Two hulls, side by side on the rock above the green, and seven spars between them, and fourteen places where one thing met another that weren't places anymore. I walked round it three times on my stick with my eyes half shut, looking, and every time my sight went along a spar and into a hull it didn't stop. It didn't catch. It just went on, the way your hand goes on along the edge of a table you've known all your life.

One thing.

"It's still two boats," said Liam.

"It's not," said Sera. She was sitting on the rock with her hands in her lap, gray to the elbows with ash, too tired to stand. "Look at him. He's not reading it."

Dov Asher asked for the knife.

He'd been sitting on his stone stool at the edge of the shelf for three days, carving, watching us work. A lot of birds. Small ones, the size of a thumb, out of a pale soft wood from the green that Ilse brought up. He'd left them in a row along the rim of the dead dome, all facing south.

Now he held out his hand, and Ilse gave him the knife, and he looked at Sera.

"Make the front of the new one soft," he said. "Just a little. Just the top."

Sera looked at me. I nodded.

She put her palm on the bow of the second hull until the plate under it went pale and willing, and Dov leaned out from Ilse's arms with his knife, and carved. Fast. Sure. Not a word. A bird. Small, with its wings half open and its head up and its beak open, the way a bird looks when it's going up and singing at the same time.

When he'd finished, Sera took her hand away, and the plate went hard, and the bird stayed.

Teo Venn, at the back, made a sound.

"That's a lark," he said.

"That's a lark," said Dov.

We left at dawn on Day 378.

Fourteen people's worth of room and twelve people in it. The five in the new hull, with Toby, and Priya's pot, and Ilse's mirror wrapped in her coat. Squad Eight and Holt and Risa in Maris. And me in the middle seat of Maris, on the side nearest the spars, where I could see all of it at once.

Juno came across to sit in the bow beside Luna. Nobody told her to. She just climbed over the spars like she'd been climbing over things all her life, and sat down, and put her hand on the rim, and looked south.

I closed my eyes. The ordinary ones.

Let the other sight go out. Round me. Both hulls. The spars. Twelve people. Water. A pot. A mirror. Fourteen places that weren't places anymore.

One thing.

I opened my eyes and held it.

It was heavy.

I'm not going to pretend it wasn't. Six people had been a full bucket. Twelve was a bucket filled to the brim and then a little more, so the surface stood up over the rim and trembled, the way water does when it's just about to go over. I lifted, and the whole long double shape of it came up off the rock, level, smooth, and I felt my nose go warm before we'd cleared the dome.

"Lucas," said Luna, without turning round.

"I'm all right."

"Your nose."

"I know about my nose."

"Four hours," said Luna. "Not six. Four. And then we land, and you sleep, and nobody argues." She marked the slate. "Two degrees east."

Four hours a day. Three days.

I don't remember a lot of it. I remember holding. That was all it was. Not flying, the way it had been with six, when I'd had room left over to look down at the green and listen to Liam and laugh. Just holding. Every minute. The bucket full to the trembling edge, and my eyes open, and the whole double shape of us hanging in the green sky over the green world, and Luna's voice every hour, very quiet, two degrees west, hold this heading, Lucas, drink.

And every morning, before we lifted, Juno at the bow with her eyes shut and her arm out.

Not pointing south. Not anymore.

Pointing back. North. Behind us. At the mountains. Following.

"Closer?" said Luna, the second morning.

Juno shook her head. "Same. It turned when we left. It's coming south again." Her arm came down. "It's slow, Windsor. It's always been slow. We'll be at the canyon days before it."

"Weeks?"

Juno's eyes went away to the side, and came back.

"Days," she said.

And every night, on the tors, Risa with her hand out in the dark.

"Thum, thum. Thum—" A pause. "—thum." She didn't open her eyes. "Behind us. Still asking."

And every night, at the far end of the row, where he'd put himself so as not to keep anyone awake, Toby. Not asleep. Sitting up with his knees drawn up and his notebook on them, looking down off the edge of the tor at the green.

Humming.

So quietly I could barely hear it. So low it was almost nothing. Not a song. Not a tune. A long slow hum, rising and falling, like somebody breathing in their sleep.

I didn't ask him what it was.

I should have.

We came over the ridge at F-thirty on the afternoon of Day 380.

Two days early. Luna made a mark on the slate when she saw it, a small hard one, the way Okafor used to tick a name.

They were outside. Both of them. They'd been outside every afternoon, I found out later, since the bundle came down out of the sky. Standing on the flat rock at the top of the ridge, outside the shelter of stacked black plates, looking north.

A tall dark man with one leg, on a crutch. A small fair woman beside him with her hand on his arm.

I set us down on the rock beside them as gently as I've ever set anything down. And let the bucket go. And sat there, with my nose running into my mouth and my hands shaking like Priya's, and couldn't move.

The woman came to the side of Maris and looked in at us. At me.

"You're the Dask," she said.

"Yes."

"I'm Ade." She held up the strip of titanium, with Luna's message scratched into it. COMING BACK FOR YOU. 10 DAYS. HOLD. "Short for Adelheid. Which I hate, so don't." She looked at Luna. "You said ten days."

"It's been eight," said Luna.

"I know," said Ade. "I counted." And then her face crumpled, and she reached over the rim of the skiff and put both arms round Luna Windsor's neck, and held on.

Luna went stiff as a board.

Then, slowly, very slowly, she put one hand on Ade's back.

Benedikt came over on his crutch. He was very big, up close. Bigger than Holt. He looked down into the two hulls, at all twelve of us, at the five from the mountain, at Teo, at Juno in the bow. He knew her. I watched him know her. His heart went.

"Pell," he said. "You went to look."

"I went to look," said Juno.

"Did you find it?"

Juno's eyes went away to the side. Came back.

"It found him," she said.

We stayed that night at F-thirty.

Benedikt's leg had come off below the knee in the first summer, in the green, when they'd tried to walk south. Ade had taken it off herself, with a kit's blade, in a hollow under a rock, with Benedikt holding the blade steady because her hands wouldn't. She told it in about four sentences, while she cooked. Toby sat beside Benedikt for an hour with his bag open on his knee, and looked at the stump, and wrote things down.

It was after we'd eaten that Ade said it.

"They went past us," she said.

Everybody looked up.

"Four nights ago." She was looking at the fire. "In the green. Down there. Under the ridge." She pointed. "We heard them first. That clicking. And we thought, this is it, after two years, this is the night. Benny got the blade. I got the fire up." She swallowed. "And they went past."

"How many?" said Luna.

"I don't know. You couldn't count them. It was like a river. All night. Going north." Ade looked at Benedikt. "They didn't even look up. Not one of them."

"North," I said.

"North. Toward the mountains." Ade turned a stick in the fire. "And then, last night, they came back."

Nobody spoke.

"Same river," said Benedikt. His voice was very deep and very slow. "Same click. All night. Going south." He shifted on the rock, easing the stump. "Like a river that changed its mind."

"Were they hunting?" said Liam. Very quietly, for Liam.

"No," said Benedikt. "I've seen them hunt. Hunting's different. Hunting spreads out." He looked at me across the fire. "These weren't spreading. They were going somewhere. Together. In a line." A pause. "Like they were being called."

I thought about four nights ago.

Four nights ago, I'd been at F-five, at the top of the green, with my hands on Priya's.

And last night, I'd been coming south.

Juno didn't say anything. She didn't need to. She shut her eyes, and lifted her arm, and pointed north. Back toward the mountains. Toward the thing under them, that was coming south again, slowly, following.

And then she moved her arm, very slightly. A few degrees. Down. Toward the green under the ridge, where the river of the Teeming had gone back south in the night.

"Same way," she said.

The dawn line came at sunrise.

Wren's mirror, from the top of the tower at Scarecrow, far to the south, passed ridge to ridge, high place to high place, F-eleven and F-twenty-two and the empty ridge at F-three. Ade read it off the far horizon, standing on the rock in her coat with her lips moving.

Then she turned round and read it again, out loud, for me.

"Scarecrow to F-thirty. For Dask. Dot says." She frowned at the horizon. "All green fifty kilometers round the canyon turned in the night. Every frond. Same way. North. Toward you." A pause. "Dot says it started three nights ago. Dot says it is not the hello. Dot says it is an answer."

The flash stopped. Then one more word.

"Query," read Ade. "What did you do."

"I didn't do anything," I said.

Nobody said anything.

Then, at the far end of the rock, where he'd been sitting since before dawn with his knees drawn up and his notebook on them, Toby Marsh lifted his head.

His face was very white.

"I did," he said.

Day 374–381.

Juno, at dawn: north has turned. Back. Toward this valley. "It isn't going to your canyon, Dask. It never was. It's following you."

Ilse's base, F-5. The kit on its side like an animal asleep. Core scraped out, the first night. Hundreds. They took the middle and never came back.

A second hull. Seven spars. Fourteen joins. Not welded. Asked to forget there was ever a line. One thing.

Priya's hands. I can see the silver. I can't take hold of it. It slides away, like a core. Not like that.

Toby: "Everything's a sound, if you go slow enough." He listened to the green for an hour.

Dov carved a lark on the new bow. Teo: "That's a lark."

Twelve aboard. Full to the trembling edge. Four hours a day. Nose every day. Luna: "Nobody argues."

Every morning Juno points behind us. Every night Risa: still asking. Every night Toby, at the end of the row, humming.

F-30, Day 380. Two days early. Ade (Adelheid, "so don't") hugged Luna. Luna let her. Benedikt: "Pell. You went to look." "It found him."

Four nights ago: a river of Teeming going north under the ridge. Last night: back south. Not hunting. "Like they were being called."

Dawn line. Dot: all the green round the canyon turned north in the night, toward me. "It is not the hello. It is an answer." "What did you do."

I didn't do anything.

Toby: "I did."