Chapter 138 Below

The spoon moved first.

It was beside my bowl, on the terrace, where I'd put it down to write. It turned a little. Not far. Just enough that the handle touched the bowl with a small clear tick.

I looked at it.

Then at my hands.

I wasn't doing anything.

Across the table, Risa stopped chewing.

“Get up,” she said.

I stood. My bad leg caught against the bench, and the bowl slid toward me, and then the whole table tipped sideways.

Risa had my arm before I found my stick.

We stumbled backward together. The edge of the terrace dropped six inches with a sound like somebody biting through a crust. A crack went between the table legs, out under the little wall, and down the face of the step below.

My bowl went into it.

So did the spoon.

Then it stopped.

Luna was there almost immediately.

“Away from the edge. Everyone. Dot, lights.”

It was still the evening of Day 420. Above us, Old Son was coming down from the tower after its dusk flash. Wren stood on the north path, holding the telescope against her chest. In the forge, the fire went white, then low again as Sera came out.

Risa didn't let go of my arm.

She was looking at the crack with her head tipped a little to one side, as if somebody had said her name from the bottom of it.

“Under us,” she said.

“What is?” said Luna.

Risa's fingers tightened.

“A lot of them.”

Dot put a lamp over the broken edge.

I looked down. Through the cracked paving. Through the thin red glass below it. Into the soil and the layers of old broken stone that had held up the terrace until a moment ago.

There was a space.

Not large. Not at the top. A little dark pocket where there should have been weight and resistance, widening farther down until I couldn't pick its edges out of the muddle.

Something moved in it.

A leg. Jointed. Black along the edge where the light caught it.

Sera lifted one hand.

“Wait,” I said.

The leg withdrew.

I heard a little scattering sound, like pebbles poured into a cup, and then something pale rose into the lamplight.

My spoon.

It came up in a claw, slowly, and was laid on the unbroken part of the terrace.

The claw went away again.

Nobody moved.

“Well,” said Liam, from behind Sera. “That's confusing.”

We moved the table.

Then the bench. Then everybody on that side of the canyon, until Luna was satisfied that nobody was standing on anything we hadn't checked.

Dot held lamps. I worked from the solid part, making columns through the shallow places I could see, asking loose stone to become something that would hold its neighbors without crushing whatever was below.

I couldn't close the hole. Not safely. I didn't know who was in it.

I made a rail instead.

Behind me, Risa stood with both hands against the wall.

“They're moving away,” she said. “Some of them. More coming underneath.”

“Toward the hole?”

“Past it.” She frowned. “I think.”

“How far down?” said Luna.

Risa shook her head.

“Hearts don't tell you that. Not properly. I can hear a roomful through a wall. I can't tell you how thick the wall is just because I can hear them.”

Luna nodded once. Wrote it down.

“Then we find another way.”

We slept in the dome and the rooms Dot had checked beside it.

Some of us slept.

Matthias had watched the whole move from his bed with his hands folded over his stomach. When Toby came back to check him, he asked whether the roof was going to fall in.

“Not this roof,” said Toby.

“Good. I've had enough of floors.”

Lena laughed from the chair beside him. It sounded tired.

I stood in the doorway, looking at the weight in the walls, and thought about seventy-four rooms built for people who weren't here yet. About all the places I'd made strong because I could see the parts that needed strengthening.

I'd built them on a world I still barely understood.

Holt came up beside me.

“Don't,” he said.

“Don't what?”

“Whatever you're starting.” He leaned on his stick. “You built a roof. People needed a roof. Ground shifts. You fix it.”

I looked at him.

“Can't sit in a field forever waiting to know everything about dirt, boy.”

“I nearly have.”

“Aye,” said Holt. “That's what worries me.”

At dawn, Dot sent three.

We stood on the checked glass in front of the dome, nineteen of us with Toby inside his wall, while the deep breathed and the spine woke overhead.

I watched the ground instead of the sky.

It didn't move.

Dot counted the names. Thirty-one. A gap. One. Then she was quiet, her arms resting among Teo's wheat, and Luna counted the seconds.

Eleven.

“Sent,” said Dot.

“An answer?”

“The one had already spoken.” Her rivers moved. “This unit will listen tomorrow.”

I nodded.

It was strange, how quickly a person could learn to wait a day for something that once would have seemed impossible to wait a minute for.

It didn't get easier. There were just other things to do while you did it.

We went to the eastern gully after breakfast.

Luna, Risa, Sera, and me. Nobody went inside. Luna said that before we left, at the rim, halfway down the slope, and again when we reached the shelf of rock.

“I've heard you,” said Sera.

“I know.”

“You could stop saying it.”

“I could.”

She didn't.

The opening was wider than it had looked through the telescope. A man could have walked into it without bending. Two Teeming could have passed each other if they folded the long legs close.

Cool air came out. Wet. Smelling of stone, and roots, and something sharp that caught at the back of my tongue.

I knelt at the lip.

The first bend was twelve meters in. I could see that far. After it, the other sight became the same crowded confusion I'd found from the terrace. Dirt, water, broken rock, living threads. Too much of too many things together.

I made a little lamp and rolled it down the slope.

It went round the bend.

Light shone on the far wall. The bend stayed a bend.

“Very illuminating,” said Risa.

“Thank you.”

She sat down beside me and put her hand against the damp rock.

Not flat. Two fingers first. Then the side of her palm. Her head turned slightly, listening to something I couldn't hear.

“There are wet seams,” she said. “All the way along.”

I looked where she touched. Water. Salts dissolved in it. Fine metallic grains in the rock, ordinary ones, with the other silver threaded farther back where I couldn't follow it.

“Don't put anything into that,” I said.

“I wasn't going to.” She opened one eye. “I can tell the difference between knocking on a wall and setting the house on fire.”

“Usually,” said Sera.

Risa smiled without looking at her.

Then a tiny spark went between her fingers.

So small I almost missed it.

Her smile stopped.

“Again,” she said.

“What happened?”

“It came back differently.”

She did it again. One little blue thread, gone almost before it existed. Her other hand moved along the stone, and she shut both eyes.

“There. Left. No. Two left.”

“Two what?” said Luna.

“Places it can go.” Risa breathed out. “The water carries it. I give it a little push, and I can feel where it goes easier. Where it stops. Where it divides.”

She took her hand away.

“I don't know if that means a tunnel.”

Luna crouched beside her.

“Then we try it somewhere we already know.”

We spent the morning at a drain.

It wasn't what I'd expected when we'd gone out to investigate a mysterious hole full of Teeming. But it was safer, and it smelled worse, which Liam said was usually how you knew an idea had been approved by Luna.

Dot had built the drain. She knew every bend. I could see most of it, through the clean wall beside the forge, and all of it from the little inspection openings.

Risa couldn't.

We didn't tell her where it divided.

She sat on the paving with her palm on the damp channel and a piece of chalk in the other hand. Sent a spark. Waited. Drew a line.

At first she got it wrong.

She put a branch where there was only a wetter crack. Missed a dry bend entirely. Called something a wall that turned out to be a lump of sediment, which Dot removed with an offended air.

“This unit inspected it yesterday.”

“Things happen,” said Liam.

Dot turned her grille toward him.

He looked away.

We tried again.

Risa learned to ask the same question from two places. I put little iron markers where she told me, so she could compare what reached each one. Luna measured distances along the surface. Dot kept the map hidden until Risa had finished drawing hers.

By noon, she could find the fork.

By afternoon, she could tell the wet crack from the passage, most of the time.

“Most,” said Luna.

“I said most.”

“Write most.”

Risa wrote it in very large letters across the top of the slate.

Luna looked at it.

“Thank you.”

At the broken terrace, Risa found three branches.

One ran east, toward the gully. One went along the canyon wall. The third sloped down until she lost it.

She marked the uncertain parts with dots. The parts she found twice, from different places, she drew solid. We put markers into the ground above them and moved the water jars away from the second branch.

I strengthened what I could reach.

That evening, while I was working on Matthias, the floor under the old place where the water jars had stood gave way.

Nobody was on it.

Nobody lost so much as a cup.

When I came out, Risa was sitting beside the new hole with the slate on her knees, looking at the mark she'd made before it opened.

“There,” she said.

Luna knelt beside her.

“Yes.”

Risa touched the chalk line.

“I got it.”

“You did.”

Under the rail, a Teeming lifted a piece of broken paving and carried it away into the dark.

Carefully. Almost gently.

I didn't know whether that made me feel better.

On Day 422, Crane answered three.

Not one to seven. Not another longer count. Three small marks, alone, after his name.

Dot drew them on the paper Toby held out when he came down from his wall.

I looked at them for a long time.

Then I sat down on the step.

Liam sat beside me.

“He heard.”

“Yes.”

“So we can tell Mum.”

I shut my eyes.

“Not yet.”

He was quiet.

“But we can get there,” I said. “We know something gets through. We know he can send back what he hears. That's a start.”

Liam nodded. Rubbed both hands over his face.

“Right. Good. That's good.”

His voice went on the last word. He stood up very quickly and went to find Sera.

I stayed on the step with three marks in front of me, and thought about all the things people had written with less.

“Different gaps,” said Toby, over breakfast.

He had his notebook beside the plate. Dot was looking over his shoulder, her fine arm curled away from the food.

“Three, then one. Long gap between. If he can copy the groups, we can make letters. Eventually.”

“Which letters?” said Luna.

“We'd have to agree.”

“How?”

He paused with the pencil over the page.

“Yes. That's the part I haven't done.”

Wren reached across and turned the notebook toward herself.

“The dawn line uses groups. He'll know the old signal tables. He trained people who used them.” She looked at Dot. “Can you keep a short gap and a long one different?”

“This unit can try.”

Wren drew two marks. Then left room. Then three.

“Don't start with a letter. Start with that. Let him show us he knows where one bit ends.”

Dot studied the page.

Under the table, my foot felt a faint vibration.

I stopped smiling.

The third opening was beside the lower water channel that night.

The fourth came before dawn, under an empty storage room.

Risa found both before they broke through.

She also marked a place beside the forge that didn't break, and a place under the western steps where nothing happened at all. Luna left those marks where they were.

“We don't rub out the ones that aren't finished,” she said.

Risa didn't answer.

She had stopped making jokes by then.

I found her on the north path at two in the morning, barefoot, with her palm against a marker and the slate tucked under one knee.

“Your shoes,” I said.

“I hear better.”

“You feel better.”

“What?”

“The ground. You feel it through your feet.”

She looked up at me.

“I'm delighted we've agreed what my feet do, Lucas.”

I sat down beside her.

She'd drawn the canyon three times.

The first map was neat. The second had additions along the eastern side. The third had so many branches beneath the terraces that it looked like the fern at the cave, turned upside down.

Under it, a long line curved toward the middle.

Then stopped.

“I lose it there,” she said. “Every time. The wet seams keep going, but the little push doesn't come back the same. Something takes it.”

“The silver?”

“Maybe. I stop when it starts doing that.”

“Good.”

She looked down at the map.

“It's below the foundations.”

I didn't answer.

“All the things you fixed. All the places you can see. It goes underneath them.”

Farther down the path, a lamp moved as one of Dot's hands checked a rail. The rest of the canyon was dark except for the forge and the little light in Toby's clinic.

“When did you last sleep?” I asked.

“Yesterday.”

“When yesterday?”

She moved her hand to the next marker.

I caught the slate before it slid off her knee.

“I'm not telling you to stop caring,” I said.

“Good.”

“I'm telling you you missed the step coming up here. I saw your foot.”

“It's dark.”

“There are lamps.”

She turned toward me. For a moment I thought she'd be angry.

She looked frightened instead.

“You were sitting on it,” she said. “Eating. The table was fine. You were fine. Then there was nothing under you.”

I looked at the slate in my hands.

“I know.”

“I nearly didn't hear it.”

“You did.”

“Nearly.” Her fingers pressed against the stone. “I can't go to sleep and let there be another one.”

Toby had said something like that once. In the Town, by a cracked fountain, with a tuning fork held in both hands.

I wanted to tell her that she couldn't hold the whole ground up by being awake.

I'd have sounded very foolish. Sitting there with my stick and the dried blood I'd missed under my nose.

So I said, “Come and tell Luna which parts you're most worried about. We'll move everyone off them.”

“There won't be anywhere left.”

“Then we'll find somewhere else.”

Luna was awake.

Of course she was.

She looked at Risa, looked at the three maps, and made room on the table without asking why we'd come.

“Show me.”

Risa did.

When she finished, Luna took the chalk and drew a ring round the upper stretch of the north path, above the shallow shelf I'd checked that afternoon.

“Beds here. Food here. Matthias moves in his bed. No one carries him in the chair. Dot can make a windbreak.”

“The dome—” I began.

“Will still be there in the morning if it stays up. If it doesn't, we won't be in it.”

She turned to Risa.

“You sleep at the back. Ilse takes the first watch with Dot. Wren takes the second. Surface movement, noise, cracks. If anything changes, they wake us. All of us.”

“They can't hear what I hear.”

“No,” said Luna. “They can hear you when you tell them what to look for.”

Risa stared at her.

Then she pulled the map closer and began marking places.

We moved at three in the morning.

Nobody enjoyed it.

Priya wrapped bread in a cloth before she wrapped herself in a blanket. Dov insisted on taking the box of carved birds. Benedikt helped clear the path from where he could sit safely, passing bundles hand to hand. Juno stayed beside Lena. Toby supervised Matthias's bed as though we were transporting something made of spun sugar.

“I'm bigger than you,” Matthias told him.

“That's why I don't want to drop you.”

Old Son brought water. Dot built the windbreak in long curved sections, leaving gaps where Luna asked, and put lamps where Lena could find the posts.

Nineteen. Two kits.

All on checked ground.

Risa sat on a folded blanket with her shoes beside her, watching everybody settle.

I put the slate where she could reach it.

“It's here.”

“I know.”

“So am I.”

She looked up.

Then she lay down on her side, facing the canyon, and closed her eyes.

I stayed until she stopped pretending.

At dawn on Day 423, we counted from the north path.

Dot stood below in the wheat. Toby held his wall around himself on the cleared ground, well away from the edge, and Luna watched the seconds.

The thirty-one answered. The one answered.

Dot sent the two groups Wren had written.

Risa slept through all of it.

Nobody woke her to say it had gone well.

Matthias finished his seventh night of bone work that evening.

We'd missed a session while the terraces were giving way. I wasn't going to start taking a man's pelvis apart when somebody might need to move his bed.

Not standing. Not walking. Lying beneath a windbreak with the blanket pulled back, while Toby checked what hurt and where, and I looked at the joins I'd spent a week rebuilding.

They were where they belonged.

That was all I could honestly say. The muscles were still thin. The body still had eighteen months of being afraid to move to learn its way out of.

“Tomorrow,” said Toby, “we try sitting differently. A little. With help.”

Matthias nodded.

Lena reached out, and he took her hand before she found his.

Neither of them said anything.

I went behind the windbreak afterward and sat down for a while where nobody could see me.

Sera found me anyway.

She handed me bread. Sat beside me. Put her shoulder against mine.

Below us, a lamp moved along an empty terrace. All that room, and us sleeping outside it.

“He'll get there,” she said.

“I think so.”

“That's what I meant.”

We ate the bread.

The water channel broke just after midnight.

Ilse saw the flow change and called Dot. Dot called Luna. Luna woke everybody whose name she'd written on the board, in the order she'd written them.

By the time I reached the lower terrace, the channel was pouring into a hole big enough to swallow a bed.

Risa was there with her shoes on.

“Left branch,” she said. “It goes under the store. The water's taking the loose stuff with it.”

I looked.

She was right. I could see the first length of it now because the roof had fallen away. Pale soil slid into dark water, and behind it, underneath the edge of the storage room, a supporting layer was beginning to peel apart.

I stopped the water at the channel mouth.

The hole kept growing.

“It's draining from farther up,” said Risa. Her hand was on the marker. “There's another way in.”

“Where?”

She pointed.

Behind the wall. Out of sight.

Lena opened the eastern shutter from the upper terrace.

Two notches. She found it without anyone pointing.

Sera swung the lamp. Dot lifted a spare mirror into place above the rail, turned it until I saw the pale seam beyond the broken wall, and held it steady.

Two bends.

The other sight went out. Turned. Turned again.

The seam wavered. Came together.

There was water running through it, carrying sand. I could see the small throat where it entered the space beneath the store. I could see enough stone around it to give the water another place to go.

I made a lip. A channel. A way out onto the open glass, away from the foundations.

The weight behind my eyes came down hard.

“Hold the mirror.”

“This unit is holding.”

The water turned.

The sand slowed.

I let go and sat on the step, breathing through my mouth.

Something struck the underside of the remaining paving.

Once. Twice.

Sera's hand lit.

A Teeming came up through the hole.

Then another behind it. Then four more, their jointed backs shining wet in the lamplight, climbing past one another as the mud shifted under their feet.

“Back,” said Luna.

We moved.

They didn't follow.

The first one turned at the lip and reached down. Caught the next by a leg and hauled it up, clumsily, the way somebody hauls a friend out of a river without much caring how dignified either of them looks.

The last came through with a piece of black stone clutched underneath it.

No. Not stone.

Something rounded. Wrapped in fine silver threads. Too muddy to see clearly.

It held that thing away from the ground while the others crowded around it.

Risa took a breath.

“There's another beat.”

“Where?”

“In what it's carrying.”

I didn't move.

I didn't try to look harder into the little dark shape. The Teeming holding it backed away when the lamp came close, and Sera lowered her hand.

Six of them stood between us and whatever it was.

I'd stood like that in front of my sisters. I knew what it looked like from the inside.

“Dot,” I said. “Can you ask?”

Her rivers moved slowly.

“This unit knows hello. Names. And the patterns we are learning.” A pause. “This unit does not know a word for what is in its arms.”

“Then hello.”

She said it. Quietly. Into the ground.

Risa shut her eyes.

After a moment, she nodded.

“Back,” she said. “They said it back.”

The six turned together and went up the eastern slope, carrying the little shape between them, out of the light.

I watched until the last leg disappeared into the green.

We closed the path. Braced the store. Put another rail round the hole.

No one went below.

At dawn, Dot received two groups from Crane. Two marks. A long gap. Three.

Wren put the page beside the one she'd drawn. They matched.

I should have felt something enormous. Perhaps I would later.

I was looking at the mud drying on the lower terrace, where six creatures I'd once turned to salt without asking had climbed out of the ground carrying something small.

Holt came to stand beside me.

“They've got things down there,” he said.

“I saw.”

He shook his head.

“No, boy. More than that.” He looked at the closed path. At the holes, and the empty rooms, and the ground beneath them. “There's something I ought to have told you about a place I found. Before Wren found me.”

I turned toward him.

His hand was tight on his stick.

“Sit down,” he said. “And fetch Luna.”

Day 420–424.

The spoon moved. Risa got me up. The terrace went down.

A Teeming gave the spoon back.

Hello doesn't hold up a foundation.

Day 421. Dot sent three. We looked at the gully from outside. Luna said outside four times.

Risa can feel a small charge follow the wet seams. Not a picture. Not every passage. We tested it on Dot's drain. Most. Written large.

Two places marked before they opened. More holes every night.

Day 422. Crane sent three back.

He hears.

Wren: teach the gaps before the letters. Two, long gap, three.

Risa stopped sleeping. “You were sitting on it. Then there was nothing under you.”

We moved. Nineteen and two. Checked ground. Watches. She slept.

Matthias's bones are where they belong. Seven nights. Sitting next. Walking later.

The channel broke. Risa found the second flow. Lena opened east. Dot held the mirror. Two bends. Turned the water. Braced the store.

Six came up. One carried something with its own beat. They stood in front of it.

Dot said hello. They answered. Took it away.

Day 424. Two. Long gap. Three. The message came back correctly.

We can send something home.

First I have to understand what's under it.