Chapter 161 After Supper

Holt wanted a chair.

Not the chair he already had. That one was apparently a disgrace, although he'd been sitting in it for weeks without telling anybody.

“A proper back,” he said. “Something to lean against. And somewhere to put a cup that isn't my knee.”

I looked at the plank across the two stones outside his shelter.

“That isn't a chair.”

“Exactly.”

It was the morning of Day 460. Sera had had her treatment, Toby had written down what needed writing down, and nobody was bleeding or missing from a bed they were supposed to be in.

I should have suspected something.

Holt put a piece of paper in my hand.

He'd drawn the chair.

Badly, but with conviction.

“You want this bit here?” I asked.

“That's the arm.”

“It looks like another leg.”

“I'm a soldier, Dask. If I could draw furniture I'd have had a considerably better life.”

We went through it together.

A high enough seat that his knee wouldn't punish him for standing. A back at an angle that allowed a person to rest without sliding off. A flat place for the cup. Shade in the afternoon.

He'd thought about the shade.

That pleased me more than the drawing.

“How many?” I asked.

“One for now. If it's any good, we'll talk about the others.”

“Others?”

“People come to talk to me. They have to stand there while I sit. Makes me feel like an officer.”

“You could stand up.”

“I could also have a second chair.”

I made him the first one.

He sat in it, put his cup on the arm, and spent several minutes finding fault with an angle he'd chosen himself.

Then he closed his eyes.

I left him to the morning.

Toby was washing a shirt when I found him.

That wasn't unusual. We washed things. Sometimes before other people complained about them.

What was unusual was that the shirt was already clean.

He had it in a basin and was rubbing at a place beneath the collar with the concentration he usually gave a difficult page in Halloway's notes.

“Stain?” I asked.

He looked up too quickly.

“No.”

I waited.

“Maybe.”

I looked at the shirt.

There wasn't a stain.

“You'll wear through it.”

“I know how to wash a shirt, Lucas.”

He went back to the collar.

I left before he decided I needed washing as well.

Wren was at the signal slate with Ellis.

They had the morning's replies copied between them, and the silence from the old ridge marked as silence, without turning it into news.

She was trying to make a line through a patch where the slate had chipped.

It kept catching the chalk.

I smoothed the edge when she asked, then stayed long enough to hear the report.

No new name.

No answer from the water cache, although it wasn't somewhere a person could signal from easily in the first place.

The near stations had passed on our warning about the new pods. Wren wanted another copy made for anyone approaching from the western ridge.

We had reached the end of useful things to say when she asked, with elaborate indifference, whether Toby was busy that evening.

“I don't know.”

“Does he have a watch?”

“Not that I know of.”

She scraped the remaining chalk along the edge of her thumb.

“All right.”

I went three steps before remembering the shirt.

Then, because I occasionally learned things, I kept going.

Anja had her old pot on the cooking shelf.

The one we'd nearly left behind on her ridge because there had been water to carry and a seat to arrange and we'd thought that meant we'd counted everything important.

It had a new handle now. Liam was making it worse.

At least, that was Anja's opinion.

“If you bend it there, the lid won't sit.”

“It will.”

“It did before you touched it.”

“It was loose.”

“It was a loose handle on a pot with a lid that fitted.”

Liam held the handle in both hands and studied the arrangement as though the pot had betrayed an agreement.

I stopped beside them.

“Do you want—”

“No,” they said together.

Anja looked at him.

He looked at her.

Then she laughed, and he smiled in a way that had nothing to do with winning an argument.

I went to find my own lunch.

Sera was outside with a blanket over her knees and the small tool roll beside her.

She wasn't working at the forge. She was checking which tools had been put away by people who believed that the place a tool fitted was the place it belonged.

Some of those people were me.

She held up a narrow pair of tongs.

“Where did you find these?”

“In the roll.”

“Yes. I know. I found them there too. Where before that?”

“Beside the workbench.”

“Which workbench?”

I thought about lying.

She watched the thought cross my face.

“The medical table,” I admitted.

She closed her eyes.

“They were clean.”

“They're for the forge.”

“They still worked.”

“Lucas.”

I took the tongs and went to get the proper ones.

When I came back, she moved the roll aside so I could sit.

“How's Toby?” she asked.

“Washing a shirt.”

“Good.”

I looked at her.

She looked straight ahead.

“How long have you known?”

“Known what?”

“That he and Wren—”

“He and Wren haven't told me there's a he and Wren.”

That stopped me.

She put one hand over mine.

“They're allowed to get there without a commentary.”

We sat until she grew tired.

The treatment was helping. That didn't mean the days before it had left nothing behind. Her strength came back in small, irritating pieces, never quite the piece she'd planned to use next.

She could fasten a sleeve.

She couldn't stand at the bench all morning.

She could tell Kellan what he was doing wrong with a flame.

She still wasn't making one to show him.

When she asked for help getting back inside, I gave her my arm without asking whether she was sure.

At the bed, she turned before sitting down.

“Will you come back after supper?”

“Yes.”

“Without the notebook?”

“If there's nothing—”

“Lucas.”

I smiled.

“Without the notebook.”

She kissed me, then sat down and looked pleased with the arrangement.

That afternoon, Toby came to the worktable.

He had the shirt on.

I made a serious effort not to look at the collar.

“Can you check the small lamp?” he asked.

I checked it. Nothing was wrong with it except a contact that had begun to loosen. I tightened the visible part and handed it back.

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere far.”

“All right.”

He remained beside the table.

I waited.

“Do you think it would be strange?”

“What?”

“If I asked somebody to sit with me.”

“People sit with you.”

“Lucas.”

I put down the tool.

“Oh.”

He looked as though he regretted choosing me already.

Which was reasonable.

“What do you want to ask her?” I said.

He stared at the lamp.

“To sit with me.”

“Then ask that.”

“It sounds like something you ask when there's something wrong.”

“There doesn't have to be.”

“What if she thinks I want help with the records?”

“Tell her you don't.”

He looked at me.

“You make this sound very easy.”

“I was dreadful at it.”

“Were?”

I considered that.

“Am.”

Toby smiled a little.

Then his face changed again.

“I don't want her to think she has to.”

“Why would she?”

“Because of everything.”

He didn't mean one thing. I knew that without asking. The cave. The months of looking at damaged hands. The wall. All the times somebody had kept somebody else alive and then had to work out how to speak to them afterward.

“You can make it a question,” I said. “And leave room for the answer.”

He nodded slowly.

“That part I might manage.”

I saw Wren ask him first.

Not because I'd followed him. I was returning a bowl, and they were beside the water jars in the middle of a camp that didn't have many places to be private.

She had finished with the slate.

He had the lamp.

“Are you doing anything after supper?” she asked.

He opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Looked at the lamp as though he might have written instructions on it.

“No.”

“Good. I was going to sit where I can't see a mirror. You could come.”

“I'd like that.”

She nodded once.

Then, after a moment, added, “I wasn't going to bring the records.”

“Neither was I.”

I looked very hard at my bowl.

Holt had acquired a visitor by late afternoon.

Dov sat on a low stool beside the new chair, carving with his hands held over a cloth to catch the shavings. Holt was telling him that the arm was slightly too narrow.

“It was precisely that width on your drawing,” I said.

Holt opened one eye.

“Then you should have noticed.”

Dov made a quiet sound.

Not quite a laugh. Close enough to be disloyal.

I widened the arm.

Holt set his cup down again and approved by not speaking.

Dov held up what he'd been carving.

A bird. Small, with its head turned as though something had called from behind it.

“Who's that for?” I asked.

“Priya.”

“Does she know?”

“Not if you don't tell her.”

I looked between the two of them.

Holt was smiling into his cup.

I began to suspect the entire camp had arranged to have lives while I'd been studying.

Liam found me before supper.

He didn't have a lamp.

He had changed his shirt as well.

I looked at the sky for assistance. It provided none.

“Is Sera asleep?” he asked.

“She was when I left.”

“Right.”

He stood beside me.

We watched Kellan and Tom argue about how much water a pot needed when half its contents seemed determined to climb out.

After a while, Liam said, “Anja's twenty-one.”

I looked at him.

“She told me. We were talking about birthdays.”

“All right.”

“She's had three out here.”

That made me look back toward the cooking shelf.

There were ways to measure being young that didn't involve birthdays. Anja had been alone for enough of hers that I'd begun thinking of her loneliness before I thought of anything else about her.

Liam was looking at a young woman who had laughed at his pot handle.

I preferred his way of seeing her.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“That mine aren't much of a celebration either.”

“Romantic.”

“Shut up.”

I smiled.

He rubbed his palms on his trousers.

“She said we should do a better job of the next ones.”

“That sounds sensible.”

“Then she asked if I knew when hers was.”

“Do you?”

“I do now.”

He looked pleased with himself for a moment. Then worried again.

“I wasn't asking her to thank me for coming to get her.”

“Did she think you were?”

“No. She said I'd already been thanked and I should stop trying to make the handle an extension of the rescue.”

I laughed.

Liam did too, reluctantly.

“She says things like that.”

“You seem to like it.”

He looked across the camp.

“Yes,” he said.

The word came out without a joke attached.

At supper, Anja saved him a place.

She did it by putting the pot beside her, then lifting it when he arrived. An ordinary movement that became rather less ordinary because Liam stopped halfway through sitting down.

“Is that—”

“Yes,” she said. “Unless you're planning to eat standing up.”

He sat.

I took my bowl elsewhere before either of them could discover me smiling.

Risa caught me doing it anyway.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

She followed my glance.

“Oh.”

“Don't.”

“I haven't said anything.”

“You've got the expression.”

She laughed and shifted so I could sit beside her.

A few paces away, Liam was listening while Anja spoke. Really listening. His spoon had stopped halfway to his mouth.

He'd spent so much of the last fortnight waiting for somebody to tell him how his sister was that seeing him wait for the end of a different story made something in me loosen.

Toby and Wren left after the bowls were washed.

He carried the lamp. She carried two cups.

Nobody called after them.

Liam opened his mouth, noticed Sera watching him from the shelter, and closed it again.

That was one of the more impressive things she'd done without fire.

I went to sit with her as promised.

No notebook.

She checked my hands before allowing me onto the edge of the bed.

“You don't trust me?”

“I know you.”

I put my empty hands in hers.

She looked down at them for a moment, then leaned into me.

Outside, the camp gradually became quieter.

Not silent. A pot being moved. Someone laughing. Holt telling someone that his cup was empty in a tone that suggested a constitutional failure.

Sera smiled against my shoulder.

“He likes that chair.”

“He says he doesn't.”

“That means he loves it.”

We talked about the forge.

Not about going back tomorrow. About a shelf she'd wanted before any of this happened, and a hinge that annoyed her, and the way I'd made three useful things too heavy because I'd been thinking about strength and forgotten she would have to lift them.

Then we talked about the dome.

The drainage tunnel. Her kitchen. The ridiculous amount of time I'd spent believing that wanting to stay near her was something nobody would notice.

“I noticed,” she said.

“I know that now.”

“You weren't subtle.”

“I thought I was.”

“You used to find reasons to carry things that didn't need carrying.”

I looked toward the tool roll.

She followed my eyes and laughed.

“Yes. Like that.”

When I kissed her, she put both hands against my face.

There was still a faint tremor.

I felt it. Let myself feel it. Then went on kissing her instead of turning the moment into another examination.

The next morning, Toby was late to breakfast.

Not late to Sera's check. He had done that, written the results, cleaned what needed cleaning, and gone away again.

Late to breakfast because Wren had caught him on the path after the dawn signals and they'd begun talking.

When they arrived, she had his little lamp.

I didn't ask why.

Toby sat beside me with a bowl and a look of such determined normality that I had to concentrate on my own food.

After a while he said, “It was nice.”

I nodded.

“We didn't do anything.”

“You don't have to tell me.”

“I know. I wanted to.”

I put my spoon down.

He looked toward Wren, who was talking to Ellis with the lamp still in her hand.

“She told me about a place she used to go in the dome. A room with bad chairs where they played recordings on the last day of the week.”

“What recordings?”

“Music.”

He smiled a little.

“She said most of it was awful.”

“Was it?”

“I don't know. She tried singing some.”

That was the first time I'd ever imagined Wren singing.

Toby looked delighted that he had actually heard it.

He grew more serious as he turned the spoon between his fingers.

“I told her about the wall.”

“She knows about the wall.”

“What it means if I'm tired. Why I can't just go anywhere because I want to.”

“What did she say?”

“That she'd spent years choosing places to sit by whether she could signal from them. She could learn another sort of choosing.”

I looked down at my bowl.

He went on quietly.

“She asked me to show her where it was comfortable. Not where it was possible if I tried hard.”

“And did you?”

“Yes.”

For a moment, he looked younger than the boy who'd read Halloway's book eleven times in a cave and decided everyone else's pain ought to belong to him.

Then Wren called him over to explain something on the lamp, and he went with his breakfast still in his hand.

Liam and Anja worked on the pot again that afternoon.

The lid fitted now.

Apparently the handle was too hot.

“It's a pot,” Liam said when I passed. “It gets hot.”

“You're a Calder. You don't get to be the judge.”

He considered that.

Then wrapped the handle properly.

No flame. No performance. Just a strip of cloth, tucked where it wouldn't trail into the fire.

Anja tried it, approved, and asked whether he wanted to walk down to the field after supper.

Her ankle still limited how far she went. She named the nearest level stretch, not the far end of the wheat.

Liam looked at her face instead of her foot.

“Yes.”

“Good. You can tell me the rest of the story.”

“Which story?”

“The one you stopped telling when you decided the ending made you look foolish.”

“That doesn't narrow it down.”

She laughed.

He looked as though he'd happily provide another ending if it kept her doing it.

Before evening, Corr brought back the water marks.

Both channels were running. The trough had caught a little sediment at the bend, and he and Teo had cleared it without changing the part that fed below.

The guide had waited on the other side while they worked.

“Then it moved the lamp,” Corr said.

“Out of the water?”

“No. Closer to Teo's hands. He was trying to see under the lip.”

I looked at him.

He nodded.

“Put it down where we could see. Left it there.”

It was such a small thing to bring back in a report.

A lamp moved a little way.

I remembered how long we'd spent standing on opposite sides of a chamber, frightened to put our hands anywhere at all.

“Did you leave it?” I asked.

“The spare. Dot said we could.”

He put the measurements beside the drawings and went to wash the mud from his sleeves.

Liam had heard the last part.

He stood by the table, looking at the water diagram.

“Do you think they do this?” he asked.

“Clear mud?”

He gave me a look.

“Care about somebody more than everybody else.”

I thought about the queen touching the freed piece. The pale fiber in the hollow. A Teeming lifting a young one away before we laid the trough.

“I don't know how it feels to them.”

He nodded.

“But they keep making room for each other,” I said. “We've seen that.”

Liam ran one finger along the edge of the table.

“I used to think about coming here and doing something enormous.”

“You have.”

“I know. I mean something that would make everything afterward easy.”

He glanced toward Anja's pot.

“Apparently you still have to learn how to put a handle on.”

“I keep making shelves too high.”

He smiled.

Then he went to find her, and I put Corr's measurements where we could compare them with tomorrow's.

Holt had visitors in both chairs by evening.

I'd made the second after he explained, at length, that one successful chair did not constitute a place where people could sit together.

He was in the first. Dov was in the second. Priya stood between them holding the carved bird.

It had acquired a small base so it would stand on a shelf.

She turned it in her hands, studying the backward tilt of its head.

Then sat on the broad stone beside Dov and asked what sort of bird he thought it was.

“One that survived my carving,” he said.

She laughed softly.

Holt lifted his cup toward me.

“Third chair,” he said.

“You're getting ambitious.”

“I intend to be comfortable for a long time.”

I looked at the two of them on either side of him, at the bird in Priya's hands, at the stretch of level ground that could take another seat without narrowing the path.

“I can do a third.”

“Tomorrow,” Holt said. “Sit down tonight.”

I did, eventually.

Luna found me on the ground beside the new chairs and asked whether that had been the intended result of all the furniture.

Then she sat beside me.

Risa brought Sera out for a little while. We had the bench close enough that she could join us without using all her strength to get there.

Across the camp, Wren handed Toby his lamp.

He said something I couldn't hear.

She smiled and stayed beside him.

Liam and Anja came back from the field slowly, matching each other's pace. Neither was carrying anything that needed rescuing. At the turn in the path, she touched his sleeve to keep him there while she finished speaking.

He stayed.

We hadn't become safe in every way. There were still unanswered signals and children waiting for news and things below the ground we didn't understand.

But after supper had begun to mean something besides the work we hadn't finished.

I put my hand beside Sera's on the bench.

She took it.

Holt asked whether anyone knew a card game that Dov couldn't cheat at.

Dov said he hadn't found one yet.

And we stayed outside until the lamps were needed.

Days 460–461. After supper.

Sera's treatment continues. Improving. Still rests. Asked for an evening without the notebook. Managed it.

Holt wanted a chair. Then two. Third tomorrow. Planning a place to sit for a long time.

Toby and Wren went out with a lamp and two cups. No records. She sang. He told her where the wall was comfortable.

Liam fixed Anja's pot badly, then better. They walked to the near field. Her next birthday is something he knows now.

Dov carved Priya a bird. She stayed to talk.

No names for any of it until the people concerned choose them.

There is time after supper.