Chapter 139 The Queen

Holt waited until Luna sat down.

Then he waited until she put the slate on her knee and looked at him properly, which was how I knew it wasn't going to be a short story.

We were behind the windbreak. Morning light lay across Matthias's blanket, and somewhere out of sight Priya was telling Liam that breakfast wasn't improved by asking about it every thirty seconds.

Holt held his stick between his knees.

“I called it a queen,” he said.

Luna picked up her pencil.

“After my kit fell,” he said. “On the way south. Before the ridge. Before Wren.”

He glanced at me.

“I told you I stayed up on the rock. Mostly, I did. But there are gaps between the high places, and some days the weather doesn't care what you've decided. I went down into a cut one evening. Narrow. Black walls. Water at the bottom, not much. I wanted somewhere the wind couldn't get its teeth in.”

He rubbed one thumb along the handle of his stick.

“There was a shelf. Looked dry. I climbed onto it. Found a crack behind it wide enough to get my shoulders through. Warm air coming out.”

“You went in,” said Luna.

“Aye.”

“How far?”

“Far enough to regret it.”

She didn't smile. Neither did he.

The crack opened into a passage, he told us. The passage went down. He'd had a lamp then, one he'd kept alive with parts from his kit, and he followed the dry strip beside the water because the air grew warmer as he went.

He thought it might be a spring. Somewhere he could sit with his boots off and get the cold out of his feet.

“You start wanting small things,” he said. “After a while. A warm place to put your feet. A drink that doesn't make you ill. You stop thinking very far past them.”

Luna's pencil rested against the slate.

“I know,” she said.

Holt nodded, once.

“There was a ledge at the end. I didn't see the end until I was on it. The passage just stopped, and the floor went away, and the lamp didn't reach the bottom.”

He looked down between his boots.

“But there was light down there already.”

“Silver,” I said.

“Aye. In the walls. In the floor. Enough to see shapes by once I put the lamp behind my coat.”

His hands were very still.

“Hundreds of them. The little ones. What we call little, anyway. Coming and going through holes in the sides. Carrying things. Taking things out of the water. Bringing other things back to it. There were shelves all the way round, like your terraces.”

He nodded toward the empty canyon.

“And in the middle, something big enough that I thought it was part of the floor.”

Luna stopped writing.

“How big?”

“I couldn't see both ends together. Longer than that dome of yours. Wider than a wagon. Pale plates along its back, not black like theirs. Legs folded under it. More than I could count from where I was.”

He swallowed.

“And things coming out of it.”

I thought of the dark bundle in the Teeming's arms.

“The same things?”

“I didn't get that good a look last night. But the shape. The way they held it.” Holt nodded slowly. “There were rows of them down there. Rounded. Wrapped in the fine stuff. Some on shelves. Some being carried. One opened while I watched.”

“Opened how?”

“Split. Along one side. Something pushed through it. Small legs. Folded up, then coming out.”

Neither of us said anything.

“One of the big ones picked it up,” said Holt. “Held it while it unfolded. Like you'd hold a wet shirt you didn't want touching the floor.”

He looked at his hands.

“I remember thinking that was a stupid thing to think about it. A shirt.”

“Why queen?” asked Luna.

Holt looked up.

“Because everything went to it. The big pale one. Touched it. Stopped beside it. Went away again. And every so often the light in the walls would change, and they'd all turn. Together. Like somebody had shouted an order I couldn't hear.”

“Did you see it give an order?”

“No.”

“Did you see it make the little ones?”

“I saw something being taken from beneath it. More than once. Didn't see where it came from exactly.”

She wrote that down.

Holt watched her pencil.

“I know what you're doing, girl.”

“Good.”

“And you're right to.”

He'd stayed on the ledge until his feet went numb.

He didn't know how long. He hadn't wanted to turn the lamp on again. The light below made it hard to judge time, and the warm air that had felt so good in the passage had begun to feel like somebody breathing against his face.

Then the pale thing moved.

“Not much. One end lifted. There was a patch under it, dark, where the threads went into the rock. Hundreds of them. Thick as ropes, some. Thin as hair, others.”

He closed his eyes briefly.

“It turned toward the ledge.”

“Toward you?”

“I thought so.”

Luna waited.

“I still think so. But I can't prove it.”

“What did you do?”

“Went back the way I'd come. Quietly at first. Then not quietly at all.”

For a while I could hear only the camp behind us. A pot being set down. Matthias asking Toby a question. Old Son's feet on the path as it carried something up from the checked part of the store.

“Did anything follow?” I asked.

Holt shook his head.

“Not that I saw. I didn't stop to ask.”

“And you never went back.”

“No.”

He said it very firmly.

I thought about a man on his own, with a dying lamp, walking through a world that had eaten the middle of the only machine that could keep him alive.

I wasn't going to ask why he hadn't gone back.

There was something else I did have to ask.

“Why didn't you tell us?”

He looked at me for a long time.

“Because you turn things into salt.”

Luna's pencil stopped.

I sat very still.

“You did,” said Holt. “When I first knew you. When you went after the Calder girl. It was what kept us alive. I'm not sitting here saying it wasn't.” He tightened his grip on the stick. “But I thought if I told you where something like that lived, you'd go and kill it. And maybe that would stop them. Maybe it wouldn't. Either way, I'd be sending you down there on a guess.”

“You could have told me it was a guess.”

“Aye.”

He didn't look away.

“Could have. Should have. Then the world started saying hello, and I told myself it didn't matter anymore. It was a long way off. It was old. There were other things to tell.”

The bone in the river. Father standing beside it. A thin boy with shaking hands who became the Director.

There had been other things.

“Last night,” said Holt, “I saw what they were carrying. And I ran out of excuses.”

I wanted to be angry.

I was angry. A little. There was a shape to it I knew too well to enjoy. I'd kept Hana's headaches in a notebook. I'd kept the thing on Luna's nerve to myself until someone who knew more told me what it actually did.

I'd been very sure both times that I was helping.

“Next time,” I said, “tell me what you saw. And tell me what you think. Separately. I'll try to do the same.”

Holt nodded.

“Fair.”

Luna drew a line under the last thing she'd written.

“This chamber wasn't here.”

“No. Farther north. On the way down from F-four.”

“Then we don't know whether there's another one under this canyon.”

“No.”

She looked at me.

“We start there.”

Dot didn't know either.

We asked her with everyone listening, after breakfast, beside the long table we'd put behind the windbreak.

She stood below us on the path, tall enough that her grille was level with the tabletop. Old Son had stopped beside her. It held a water jar in two arms and its mirror in a third.

“The deep is still here,” said Dot. “Beneath the canyon. This unit can hear it.”

“Is it what Holt saw?” I asked.

“This unit cannot compare a description of a shape with a name.”

Juno rested her elbows on the table.

“The thing I followed moved,” she said. “A long way. Under mountains. Under rivers. A room full of shelves didn't do that.”

“Perhaps it carries them,” said Liam.

Juno looked at him.

“I don't know,” he said. “It was a thought.”

“It was,” said Luna. She wrote a small question mark instead of a line.

Toby asked Holt to describe the little one unfolding.

Not the queen. Not the walls. The legs. How many he'd seen. Whether it moved by itself. Whether the thing holding it had taken any of the wrapping away.

Holt answered what he could. Mostly he couldn't.

“I was frightened,” he said at last. “I wasn't taking notes.”

“I know,” said Toby quickly. “I'm not—sorry. I'm trying to see what you saw.”

“Aye. So am I.”

Toby put the pencil down.

“It sounds like a nursery.”

The word stayed over the table.

Behind it, the canyon lay in the morning light, with holes in the floor and rails round the places where our supper had been.

“A nursery can still bring the roof down,” said Tamsin.

“Yes,” said Luna.

“On us.”

“Yes.”

Toby looked at the map.

“And on them.”

That was the part I hadn't let myself think about properly.

I'd made columns. Braces. Strong patches underneath the rooms. I'd turned loose stone into solid stone wherever I could see enough of it to know where to put the weight.

The weight still went somewhere.

If a roof was failing below my floor, making my floor harder didn't make the things underneath stop needing somewhere to stand.

“I need to see the lower supports,” I said.

Sera's arms folded.

“Of course you do.”

“Not go charging down. See them. First.”

Dot's rivers brightened.

“This unit has eyes that are not the operator's.”

I looked at her.

The wings.

We used one that afternoon.

Dot took the blades off. Folded the little legs close, then unfolded them again when the camera head wouldn't fit under the brace. Sera made a guard for the lens, and I made a smooth guide for the wire we ran down after it.

“A leash,” said Liam.

“A way to bring it back,” said Dot.

He considered that.

“Better.”

The wing climbed into the hole beside the water channel, under its own little motors, carrying a lamp in front and drawing the wire behind. Dot's screen showed wet stone, then a black leg so close it filled the whole picture.

I stopped breathing.

The leg moved aside.

The wing went on.

There was no grand chamber immediately below us.

Just a passage. Low. Uneven. Roots dangling from its roof, with loose pieces of paving caught among them. One of my columns came down on the left, smooth and gray, ending on what looked like solid rock.

On the screen, the rock beneath it had a crack.

“Stop,” said Luna.

Dot stopped the wing.

The camera turned.

I leaned closer, although there was nothing leaning closer could do. It was a picture. Light caught in one place and made again in another. I could see the little bright parts of the screen if I tried. I couldn't reach through them and close the crack.

It was very difficult not to try anyway.

“Draw it,” said Luna.

So I did.

The passage widened after the first bend.

There were three ways out. One led back toward the gully. One had water in it. The third went down under a shelf of black rock, where the roots grew thicker and the walls began to shine.

Risa compared it with her slate.

“The fork's right. The depth wasn't.”

“How far wrong?”

“I had it shallower.” She rubbed out a mark. “A lot shallower.”

She didn't apologize. I was glad of that.

Dot sent the wing down the third passage until the wire caught against the bend. Then she backed it up a little and turned the camera toward the ceiling.

A pale strand hung across the passage.

Water gathered on it. Dropped. Gathered again.

The strand moved sideways, very slowly.

Something was pulling on the other end.

“No farther,” said Luna.

Dot stopped.

We sat watching the strand for almost a minute. Then it drew tight and lifted out of the picture, and a Teeming came under it carrying a rounded bundle against the underside of its body.

Another followed.

Then three more.

They went up. Toward the gully. Past the wing without touching it, their legs setting down carefully on either side of the wire.

The last one stopped.

It lowered its head toward the lens.

“Hello,” said Liam, very softly, beside me.

It couldn't hear him. There was no speaker on the wing.

For a moment its face filled the screen. Black plates. Small joints. Water moving over something I'd never looked at for this long without wanting it dead.

Then it lifted one foot over the wire and went after the others.

Dot brought the wing back.

It came out with mud all over its camera guard and a scrap of pale wrapping caught round one leg.

Toby bent to look. Didn't touch.

“Can we keep that?”

“This unit does not know whose it is.”

He looked at her.

Then he laughed once. Quietly. Almost in surprise.

“Neither do I.”

We put it in a shallow dish beside the hole, with the part that had caught on the leg carefully unwound. Nothing came to take it while we were there.

I still didn't pick it up.

We had a second council before supper.

This one had a drawing of the cracked support in the middle of the table, so it was shorter.

“We could leave,” said Corr.

Nobody answered at once.

He looked around at us.

“We can. There's a skiff. There's high ground. There's the valley where Wren grew wheat. We don't have to die trying to keep rooms nobody's sleeping in.”

I opened my mouth.

Closed it.

“He's right,” I said.

Luna looked at me, then back at Corr.

“The people go before the buildings. That's already decided. The question is whether we can learn what's happening without putting them under it.”

“Not everyone,” said Sera.

“No,” said Luna. “A small party. If we go.”

The last three words mattered.

We made the other plan first.

Not the interesting one. The one with blankets and water and how many people could travel in Maris without me falling over. The one where the first flight carried the people who couldn't climb a ridge on their own, and where Dot would walk with those who could.

Priya asked about food. Teo asked about seed. Dov held his box of birds against his chest and didn't ask, because he had already decided.

Old Son asked about the tower.

“If this unit goes elsewhere,” it said, “will the number still be seen?”

Wren leaned down toward it.

“We'll take the mirrors. Find a high place. I'll show you where to stand.”

“At dawn, noon, and dusk?”

“Every one.”

Its rivers began to move again.

I hadn't known they'd stopped.

Then we talked about going below.

Risa would have to come if we wanted to compare the wet seams with the actual passages. Sera could light what the lamps missed and keep us warm. Luna would lead. I could mend only what I could see and understand, which meant the mirrors came too.

“And me,” said Holt.

“You don't know this chamber,” Luna said.

“No. But if we find something like the other one, I can tell you which parts are the same.”

She considered him. His stick. His repaired knee.

“We'll decide after we test the slope.”

He didn't argue.

Toby was very quiet at the end of the table.

I noticed that. I also noticed the bag beside his foot, already packed.

I decided I didn't want to have that conversation over supper.

He noticed that too.

“Why not ask it to stop?” said Lena.

We all turned toward her.

She sat beside Matthias, with one hand resting on the bed frame so she knew exactly where it was.

“The thing below. You asked it to say hello to your mother. Couldn't you ask it not to pull the house down?”

It was such a sensible question that for a moment I felt foolish.

Then I thought about putting my hands on the glass. About being only myself. About holding Mother out into the dark, and something recognizing her without ever having seen our kitchen.

“I don't know how to show it a foundation,” I said.

“You know what one is.”

“I know what ours is. I don't know what theirs is.”

Lena was quiet.

“You might show it the wrong thing.”

“Yes.”

Dot lowered her grille.

“This unit can ask who. This unit cannot yet ask which wall is falling.”

Lena nodded slowly.

“Then learn the wall,” she said.

Before dusk, Wren went up the tower.

Old Son went with her. I watched them from the path while Luna checked the rescue map beside me.

Twenty-two. Twenty. Eight.

People still out there. Waiting while we tried to stop our own floor falling through.

“We haven't forgotten,” I said.

“I know.”

“They don't.”

Luna turned the map so I could read what she'd written underneath it.

BASE DAMAGED. ALL SAFE. STILL COMING. REPORT WATER. REPORT FOOD.

“Wren's sending it tonight. We can't promise a day until we have one.”

I nodded.

Up on the tower, the mirror turned. Caught the sun. Flashed.

I stood there until my leg ached, watching a promise travel away from us without a date attached.

Matthias sat up before the light went.

Not all the way. Not on his own. Toby had arranged cushions, and Lena sat where Matthias could hold her shoulder without pulling her off balance. I watched the repaired bone while he moved, and he watched my face as if I'd put the answer there on purpose.

“Slowly,” said Toby.

“I'm moving slowly.”

“Slower than that.”

Matthias made a sound through his teeth.

Then he was there. Propped up. Both feet still on the bed. Looking out over the windbreak at the top of the tower.

His hands gripped the blanket.

“Different,” he said.

“Bad different?” asked Toby.

He shook his head.

Lena's hand found his cheek. She waited.

“Straight,” said Matthias Roe. Very quietly. “Feels straight.”

We let him have that for a while.

Nobody turned it into walking. Nobody promised stairs or a journey or a sword back in his hand. He sat in the evening and watched a little kit flashing a dead man's number from the top of a tower.

When Toby said enough, Matthias let us lower him again without arguing.

That was how I knew it had taken everything.

Later, Toby caught me outside the windbreak.

“You can't do that with bone unless you can see it,” he said.

“I know.”

“You can't do everything else just because you can.”

I looked at the bag over his shoulder.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“Yes,” said Toby. “We can argue tomorrow. I wanted you to think about it tonight.”

He went back to his patient.

It was very inconvenient, how much better he'd become at being right.

Risa slept before midnight.

I knew because I passed her blanket on the way to the watch post and her hand lay open beside the slate, instead of holding it.

Ilse sat by the lamp with the movement marks in front of her. Little threads stretched across cracks. Cups set beneath places where water dripped. Things any of us could watch, once somebody had shown us what mattered.

“Quiet?” I asked.

“So far.”

Below us, one of Dot's hands moved past the broken terrace.

“She needs the sleep,” Ilse said.

“I know.”

“So do you.”

“I'm going.”

She looked at my notebook.

“Eventually,” I admitted.

I sat where I could see the eastern slope and wrote down what Holt had actually seen.

Not a queen. A pale body. Plates. Folded legs. Threads into rock. Little things opening on shelves.

Then, separately, what we thought it might mean.

I'd written three lines when Sera sat beside me.

“You're leaving the queen out.”

“We don't know it's a queen.”

“I know. I'm glad.”

She watched the dark below us.

“A queen sounds like somebody you can kill and be finished.”

I put the pencil down.

“Would you have?” she asked.

“Before?”

She nodded.

I thought about her ridge. Her hands burned open. The fire going out as I reached her. All those things in a ring waiting for it to stop.

“Yes,” I said.

She didn't flinch.

“So would I.”

The wind came up the canyon. Cold enough that she moved closer, although cold had never been the reason Sera moved closer to anything.

“They still hurt people,” she said.

“I know.”

“Benedikt. Dov. My hands.”

I looked at her fingers, resting on her knees.

“I know.”

“I don't want you to start thinking we imagined that because one of them picked up a baby.”

“We don't know it was a baby.”

She turned toward me.

“Dask.”

I let out a breath.

“No. I won't forget.”

She looked back at the canyon.

“Good. Neither will I.”

After a while, she put her hand over mine on the notebook.

“But I don't want to burn it either.”

We sat until the lamp at the watch post changed hands.

At dawn on Day 425, we sent the first letter.

Or tried to.

Wren had chosen the old table's signal for A, and Dot had practiced its short and long spaces in pencil until Wren stopped finding anything to correct. We sent only that, after Dot's name, with room before and after it.

“He may think it's another test,” said Toby, when he came out of his wall.

“It is another test,” said Wren.

He smiled.

Thirty-one names. A gap. One.

Still there. Still answering.

I carried that with me down to the gully.

We tested the entrance in daylight.

Only the first stretch. The bit before the bend. Luna stood at the lip while Holt walked down and back, once, with Sera beside him and a rope along the wall where his hand could find it.

He came up breathing hard.

“Again?” he said.

“No,” said Luna. “Rest. Then tell me which part hurt.”

Dot lowered the wing behind them. This time we fed the wire from a spool and kept it off the jagged corner.

The picture moved past yesterday's fork. Down to the black shelf. Beyond it, farther than we'd seen before.

The walls shone more brightly here.

Then the passage opened, and the little lamp found nothing close enough to light.

Dot stopped the wing at the edge.

“There is a drop,” she said.

We watched the screen.

For a long time there was only darkness, with pale threads descending into it like roots seen from underneath.

Then something moved below.

Slowly. Across the bottom of the picture. A curve of pale plates, too large for the little lamp to hold all at once.

Holt put one hand on the back of my chair.

Nobody asked him anything.

The camera turned a little. Found a ledge farther down. Small rounded shapes rested along it, silver-wrapped, with Teeming moving between them.

Above the ledge, a crack ran through the roof.

Water came out of it in a thin brown stream.

“That's the lower line,” whispered Risa. “Where I lost it.”

Something below lifted. The pale plates shifted, and one of the thick strands tightened against the wall.

A stone fell out of the crack.

The Teeming on the ledge moved at once.

They lifted the bundles. Passed them along. One stood beneath the falling dirt with its back arched, while the others went under it carrying what they could.

I leaned toward the screen.

Nothing I could touch.

Nothing I could hold from here.

Beside me, Luna took out her slate.

“Bring the wing back,” she said. “We have enough.”

Dot turned the camera away.

The last thing I saw was the pale body moving again, very slowly, trying to draw itself away from the place where the roof was coming down.

The threads held.

I couldn't tell whether they were keeping it alive or keeping it there.

Day 424–425.

Holt saw a chamber on his walk south, before Wren found him. A large pale body. Little ones opening on shelves. Threads into rock.

He called it a queen. He never heard it give an order.

He didn't tell me because I turned things into salt. Then because he thought it didn't matter anymore.

Next time: what we saw. What we think. Separately.

The deep is here. We don't know whether the pale thing is part of it, or something else that listens.

Dot's wing went below. A cracked support under my new column. A picture isn't a way through.

Corr: we can leave. We made that plan first.

Wren told the dawn line: BASE DAMAGED. ALL SAFE. STILL COMING. Asked for food and water counts.

Matthias sat up. With help. “Feels straight.”

Risa slept. Ilse watched the marks.

Sera: we didn't imagine what happened. She doesn't want to burn the little one either.

Day 425. Sent A. Perhaps the first letter. Perhaps another test.

The wing reached a drop beneath the eastern gully.

Pale plates. Threads. Shelves. The roof is breaking.

They stood under the falling dirt while the others carried the small ones out.

I know that part.