Chapter 178 What Holt Kept

The first thing I wanted to do with my improved leg was too much.

Toby pointed that out before I reached the door.

“The chair is here.”

“I can see it.”

“Then try walking toward it.”

I'd meant to go outside. Only to the water shelf, which had become a remarkably important destination since someone had told me not to walk there.

Instead, I turned and sat.

The back of my thigh ached. Not the old sharp pull, exactly. A wider soreness around the place we'd worked on, with the rest of the leg joining in because it had apparently decided to be thorough.

Toby checked it before asking me to move.

The vessel was sound. The small change we'd made was still there. Nothing had undone itself while I slept.

I let out a breath.

He looked up.

“Were you expecting it to?”

“Yes.”

“Next time, say that before you test it by walking away.”

Day 494.

We began with less movement than I wanted and more care than I thought I needed.

Then I tried the small exercise Toby showed me and discovered how little I understood about the difference between moving a leg and asking one particular part of it to work.

I tightened everything.

My thigh. My hip. Most of my face.

“Not your teeth,” he said.

Risa, sitting by the window with a broken switch in her lap, laughed.

I looked at her.

“I'm helping,” she said.

“By laughing?”

“You looked very determined to bite your knee better.”

Toby waited until I stopped laughing too.

Then we tried again.

Smaller.

Slower.

The muscle trembled beneath my hand.

There was no sudden strength waiting to be uncovered. No perfect leg on the other side of one clever repair.

But when I stopped, the movement we'd gained was still there.

We wrote that down and left it alone.

Sera brought breakfast after her treatment.

She set the bowl where I could reach it without twisting, then moved the work pages out from beneath my elbow.

“You can read after you eat.”

“Everybody has become very interested in my schedule.”

“You keep trying to escape it.”

Luna came in behind her carrying the search map.

She looked at my leg, then my face.

“How is it?”

“Sore. Still better than before.”

“Good.”

She kissed me and put the map on the table.

Not on my lap.

I'd begun to appreciate the difference.

Outside, someone tested the new washing screen and discovered that the curtain caught on a screw.

There was a brief argument about whether the screw or the curtain was in the wrong place.

Sera listened.

“The screw,” she said.

She didn't get up.

A moment later, Edda said the same thing outside, with considerably more certainty.

Sera smiled into her cup.

The washing place opened that morning.

There was no announcement. Neri asked whether the shelf was dry, Priya said yes, and that seemed to settle it.

Edda had finished the last curtain hem while sitting with her feet on a box. She'd worked for a little while, stopped when her hands began to ache, and started again later without anyone taking the needle away or asking why she'd slowed.

Now she stood beside the entrance, watching the cloth move in the breeze.

“It'll hold,” she said.

Bram carried the first clean water in.

Ellis went through the entrance with his support and came out some time later with wet hair and an expression I hadn't seen on him before.

Not joy, exactly.

Relief without embarrassment attached to it.

He sat beside me while his hair dried.

“Didn't have to ask anyone to hold the bowl.”

I looked at the broad entrance.

“Good.”

He nodded.

After a while, he added, “Need a peg inside for a towel.”

I called that to Bram.

He brought a peg instead of a new plan.

The path to the latrine was next.

I watched from the chair while Corr and Ade worked at the marked turn. The ground had dried enough to show where it was firm and where the last rain had only left a crust.

They took the wider line we'd agreed on, filled the shallow loose place with ordinary broken stone, and set the handhold where someone could reach it before committing to the corner.

I joined the exposed support at its base when everything was in position.

A short piece of work. Close enough to see from the chair.

No remaking the whole hillside because I disliked being unable to walk across it.

Lena tested the edge first.

Then Nessa.

Then Neri, who stopped at the corner and looked back at us.

“What?” Corr asked.

“Nothing.”

She turned without help and kept going.

Corr watched her for a moment.

Then he picked up the tools.

I knew what he was smiling about.

The rain had found our dry stores too.

Not through the roof. Through the wall, where a row of sacks had been pushed against the stone to make room for a medical bed during the last arrivals.

Priya brought me one of the damaged outer sacks.

“Not lost,” she said before I could ask. “But it will be if we keep leaving things there.”

We had been adding people to a camp laid out around having fewer people.

Food found whatever space remained. Clean cloth lived in three different places. Spare tools disappeared into bedding because there wasn't a shelf near the work they were used for.

Everything could be found.

Eventually.

Usually by asking someone already busy.

I looked at the damp mark.

“We need the stores off the wall and the floor.”

“And somewhere I can reach the sack at the back without moving five others,” Priya said.

Dov, beside her, held up a sketch.

He'd already drawn the shelves.

I took the page.

“I can make the brackets.”

“Good,” he said. “I can make the shelves.”

There was no reason to complicate that arrangement.

Holt watched the brackets take shape from the next chair.

He'd been allowed out after the morning check, wrapped in a blanket he maintained was unnecessary while refusing to let anyone remove it.

The fever hadn't returned overnight.

We still didn't know enough about the changes in his tissue, and Toby had made certain he understood that being outside wasn't the same as being finished with us.

Holt had listened to the whole explanation.

Then asked whether the outside chair was included in his punishment.

Now he looked from my supported leg to his own stick.

“Fine pair.”

“We could supervise.”

“Already am.”

He pointed at a bracket.

“Round that edge. Someone will find it with their forehead.”

I rounded it.

He looked satisfied.

For a little while, we worked without speaking.

Then he put a small bundle on the table between us.

Green binding. Brown binding. One notebook held together with two strips of cloth and a stubborn idea of what a book ought to be.

“The rest,” he said.

I put the bracket down.

“Your logs?”

“Some weather. Some routes. Some things I didn't know where else to put.”

He rested his hand on the top book.

“You wanted copies.”

“I did.”

“Make them while I can tell you which bits are wrong.”

I looked at him.

His mouth tightened.

“Don't give me that face. I mean before you've built another wall and forgotten where I put them.”

I smiled.

He took his hand away.

The first page held a list of supplies.

The second had six names and a note about a damaged boot.

I turned carefully.

A place where the rock gave way under a dry surface. A stream that disappeared after three days without rain. The depth of water in a hollow at morning and evening.

Not a soldier's grand account of arriving on another world.

The work of keeping people alive when nobody was coming to explain how.

Wren came to help copy.

She brought clean paper and asked Holt whether he'd rather keep the original books beside him.

“Yes.”

“Then we'll bring each one back before taking the next.”

He nodded.

Dot offered to make an image record of every page. That was useful for preserving them, though it wouldn't make a cramped word easier to understand than Holt could.

She took the images while Wren read the headings aloud and I copied the places that matched our present search area.

At one point, Wren stopped.

“Is this three days or eight?”

Holt looked at the mark.

“Three.”

“It looks like eight.”

“Then it's a badly written three.”

She wrote the correction beside her copy, leaving the original alone.

We found two shelters that might still stand and one water source Holt told us to cross out before anyone trusted it.

“Bitter after the rains,” he said. “We stopped using it.”

I put the warning on the map.

That was a more useful inheritance than a secret.

At least, I thought so until we reached the folded page.

It was tucked into the second book.

Thin paper, rubbed almost through at the crease, with a drawing on one side and words on the other.

The drawing was of a ship.

Long and smooth, with the lower edge curved around a dark shape beneath it. No exhaust plume. No ladder. A cluster of marks near one end, copied larger in the margin.

I stopped with the pencil in my hand.

Holt saw where I was looking.

“Aye,” he said.

Wren leaned closer.

“What was that?”

“What came over our base before it fell.”

The noise of the camp seemed to move farther away.

I turned the page over.

A date. A direction. A length of time, underlined twice.

Signal sent. No answer.

Below that, in the same small handwriting:

No descent. No supplies. Departed north.

“When?” I asked.

“Before the attack. Not while it was happening.”

“How long before?”

He tapped the book.

“Read the dates. Memory makes neighbours of things that happened weeks apart.”

We laid the pages side by side.

There were entries between the ship and the day the base was overrun. Water shortages. A broken tool. A person unable to sleep. Ordinary troubles continuing beneath the fact that something had found them and left.

“You asked for help?” Wren said.

“We signalled we had injured people. Asked whether they could receive us.”

“By radio?”

“Radio first. Then mirror. Then a cloth on the open ground big enough that anyone looking down could have seen it.”

“What did it do?”

“Stayed there.”

He looked at the drawing.

“Long enough for us to think it was deciding.”

I remembered the lander on the red glass.

The folded legs opening. The sealed middle. The thing inside it that should never have been clamped there.

I remembered the salvage story Holt had already told me, the long gray spine pulled from the river on Earth and carried north to the mountain.

This wasn't the first strange ship in his life.

It wasn't the first one in mine.

But it was another visit to Avalon that nobody had put into the account we were given.

“Did it look like the lander?” I asked.

“Same sort of wrong surface. No proper reflection. Light moved over it, but not the way it should.”

“Same metal?”

“I thought so.”

He looked at me sharply.

“Write thought. I didn't knock on it and ask.”

I wrote it.

His hand shook a little when he reached for the cup.

Wren passed it to him without comment.

We stopped until he'd finished drinking.

“Did Command answer your report?”

“Receipt came back. Nothing useful.”

“You kept that?”

“In there.”

He pointed at the back of the book.

A copied acknowledgement, with the time he'd received it and the words he'd been sent. Logged for review. Maintain position.

I looked at those last two words for a long time.

They hadn't ordered an evacuation.

That didn't prove they knew an attack was coming.

It proved Holt had told them about the ship.

It proved their answer had not helped the people standing beneath it.

“Why didn't you show me this earlier?” I asked.

It came out more sharply than I meant.

Holt's face closed a little.

Then he looked toward the busy path.

“I reported it when it happened. Afterward, keeping the book dry mattered more than showing it to people who couldn't do anything with it.”

He touched the worn cover.

“And I didn't know which part of it you'd need.”

I put the pencil down.

“I'm sorry.”

He shrugged, but not as though the apology was unnecessary.

“You've had a few things to do.”

“So have you.”

Wren sat quietly beside us.

The page remained between my hands.

I could see how easily it might have become another thing I asked Holt about and then left for later. Another conversation interrupted by someone falling or a message arriving.

He had brought the books out while he was well enough to argue about the writing.

That mattered more than wishing he'd done it on a day I'd invented after the fact.

I turned back to the drawing.

“These marks. Did you copy them while it was there?”

“Started then. Finished as soon as it left.”

“All of them?”

“No. Those were the ones I could make out.”

I put that beside the copy too.

No filling the gaps because a complete answer would look better.

We told Luna and Risa that afternoon.

Sera came with the finished shelf brackets and stayed when she saw the page.

Holt described the visit again, slowly enough that we could stop where one person had understood something different from another.

No visible crew.

No people coming down.

No help given.

A departure toward the north.

The attack came later.

We didn't join those last two facts with a line we couldn't justify.

But Luna marked both dates.

“And the acknowledgement?” she asked.

I showed her.

Her expression changed very little.

I had learned that meant very little too.

“We keep the originals safe,” she said. “We compare what we already have before sending questions to anyone.”

Risa studied the marks in the margin.

“Not tonight,” she added, looking at Holt.

He had begun rubbing his thumb over the same place on the blanket without noticing.

Toby took him back inside before the light went.

The books went with him.

I slept badly.

Not the whole night. Enough of it that I knew I would pay for the missing parts in the morning.

At some point, Sera found my hand beneath the blanket.

“The ship?”

“Yes.”

She moved closer without making me turn the leg.

“Tell me the part you keep going over.”

“The cloth on the ground.”

She was quiet.

I could imagine people carrying it out. Looking up. Trying to make the letters larger. Believing that if the right person understood, the next thing would be help.

Sera pressed her forehead against my shoulder.

“They came home with him in the pages,” she said at last.

I looked toward her in the dark.

“The people he wrote about. We can keep their names.”

I held her hand more tightly.

It wasn't an answer to the ship.

It was something we could do that didn't require the ship's permission.

Eventually, I slept.

Day 495 began with the same small leg movements.

I resented them less.

The soreness was easing. The improvement hadn't vanished. Toby let me take a short, supported walk between the shelter and the level patch beside the new washing place.

Not the whole route.

There and back, with a seat at the turn.

I reached it without the old pull stopping the last part of the step.

Then the weak muscle began to shake.

I sat down.

For once, before anyone told me to.

Matthias was outside his shelter when I returned.

He watched me lower myself into the chair.

“Far?” he asked.

“Not very.”

“Farther than yesterday?”

“Yes.”

He nodded toward his own slow work.

“Then you can complain to me tomorrow.”

I laughed.

He smiled, very slightly, and went back to the movement he'd been practising.

I stayed beside him for a while.

Neither of us had to pretend patience was a pleasant skill to learn.

The dry shelves went up before midday.

Dov's measurements were better than mine would have been. He'd left room between the shelves for hands to get around a full sack, not just enough room for the sack itself.

Priya sorted the food while Bram moved it.

Edda marked the cloth ties so we could tell which sacks had already been opened without untying every one.

Jonas, with his foot supported, watched the water containers being shifted to the other end of the shelter.

“Put the empty ones where you can see them,” he said.

Bram looked at him.

“Why?”

“So somebody doesn't walk away thinking another person filled them.”

There was a short silence.

Then Bram moved the empty row to the front.

Jonas leaned back, as though he expected somebody to object.

Nobody did.

By the end of the morning, he was explaining the little routine he and Edda had used when one of them was too tired to remember whether the water had been fetched.

We borrowed that too.

Luna took the new map to Edda after lunch.

I went with her as far as the nearest bench, then remained there while they brought the table to us.

It was easier than moving my leg again.

The old smoke sighting lay beyond a ridge where Holt's book showed a narrow shelf and a possible shelter beneath it.

Possible because the drawing was old.

Possible because Edda had seen smoke, not a house.

But the two accounts gave Ilse something better than walking toward a patch of sky and hoping.

She and Corr would go again, with Bram this time. Ade stayed to finish the store roof edge and rest after the last journey.

The party would use the northern shelter, then check the shelf in daylight. They carried water for more than themselves and enough food to leave a supply if they found an empty place people were still using.

Wren wrote the times for the mirror watches.

Luna made certain there was a time after which not hearing from them meant sending someone to the last known place, rather than waiting until worry became a plan.

Then they packed.

I asked Corr to come over before they left.

He waited beside my chair.

“Don't take the upper cut on Holt's old sketch. The note beneath it says the outer edge had cracked.”

“We saw.”

“Good.”

He looked at the drawing in my hand.

“Anything else?”

I wanted there to be.

One more useful thing to justify why I was still keeping him standing there while everybody else was ready.

“No.”

He nodded.

“We'll call.”

“I know.”

He didn't ask whether I believed it yet.

They left while the light was still good, taking the path past the water shelf and the field.

Risa stood beside me until they disappeared around the western bend.

Then she passed me the little switch she'd been repairing.

“Hold that. I need both hands.”

I held it.

There were worse ways to be brought back to where I was.

The switch belonged to a lamp.

One of the ordinary lamps we'd been moving from room to room whenever someone needed light more urgently than the person currently holding it.

Risa had cleaned the contacts. A damaged spring was the remaining problem.

I made the small replacement while she watched the shape, then she fitted it and tried the switch.

Light.

Off.

Light again.

“That one stays at the washing place,” she said.

“So people can use it after dark.”

“Exactly.”

She set it aside and put a second lamp on the table.

“How many have you got?”

“Three. Then I'm done for today.”

We worked through them without turning it into a race.

Her ankle was propped on another chair. My leg occupied most of the space beneath the table. Anyone trying to pass would have had a reasonable complaint.

Sera looked in, took in the arrangement, and put a little sign beside the doorway.

GO ROUND.

Luna added PLEASE when she came past.

Risa said that weakened the message.

We finished with one lamp repaired, one working after a loose connection was secured, and one still waiting for a part we didn't have.

Risa put the unfinished one on a marked shelf instead of taking it to bed.

I noticed.

She saw me notice.

“Don't.”

“I wasn't going to say anything.”

“Then we both have promising futures.”

She leaned down and kissed me before carrying the repaired lamp outside.

I watched her hand it to Edda, who was checking the curtain fastening.

The light caught the new shelf and the dry floor.

It wasn't much light.

It was enough that somebody wouldn't have to choose between asking for help and finding the entrance in the dark.

I looked at the broken lamp still on the shelf.

Tomorrow's work could stay there.

For once, I believed it would.

Holt asked for the books after supper.

Not because he was afraid we would lose them.

He wanted to show me where the names continued after the first base fell.

We sat inside with the lamp low and the pages supported on a board so he didn't have to hold their weight.

Some names appeared once.

Some appeared for weeks.

Beside a few were notes in another hand. A ration count. A direction. Someone had corrected Holt's spelling with enough force to nearly go through the paper.

He smiled when he saw it.

“Always did that.”

“Who?”

He told me.

I wrote the name carefully on the new page.

We didn't make every name a memorial. Some had been separated from him. Some he'd never seen again. Not knowing wasn't the same as knowing they were dead.

Wren made three headings and left room beneath each.

Known alive when last seen.

Death witnessed.

Uncertain.

Holt approved that more quietly than he approved most things.

The logs needed a better home than the corner of a medical bed.

So did Father's notebooks. Halloway's copied pages. The signal records, the search bearings, and the little accounts people brought when they arrived carrying their history in a piece of cloth.

We had cupboards.

We needed one that stayed dry, with copies somewhere else.

I drew the box while Holt watched.

Plain material. Raised off the floor. A lid that closed against a lip, so water running down the outside didn't immediately find the paper inside. Shallow trays instead of a deep hole where the bottom book became somebody's problem next year.

“Not too heavy,” he said.

“So we can move it.”

“So you don't decide paper requires a fortress.”

I reduced the thickness.

He nodded.

The first box would stay near the records table. The copies would go in a separate dry shelter.

Dot had her images too.

Three ways for a page to survive a bad day.

That seemed enough to begin with.

We didn't solve Holt's illness that evening.

Toby checked him again. I compared the ordinary tissue I could understand with the drawings from the fever's worst hours.

Less strain.

No sudden return to the way he'd looked before.

He could sit up longer. He ate better. When he grew tired, he said so before his hands began shaking around the cup.

That last change was his own work.

“We still need to understand the earlier modification,” I told him.

“Then keep reading.”

“I intend to.”

“Without staring at me like I'm about to become an empty chair.”

I looked at him.

He held my gaze.

“All right,” I said.

He settled back.

“Good. Bring the map tomorrow. That shelf has a lower approach if the upper one's gone.”

I wrote myself a reminder while he could see me doing it.

Then I left him to sleep.

The lower approach mattered.

On Day 496, the first message from the northern watch came while I was finishing my short walk.

Wren brought it to the chair at the turn so I didn't try to follow her back uphill.

Upper shelf blocked. Following lower route. Old fire remains found.

I read it.

The phrase old fire remains could mean almost anything about who was still there.

It meant people had once used the place.

We added that much and waited for more.

Holt looked at the message after breakfast.

Took the map.

Marked a fold in the ground below the lower route.

“Tell them to look here before they climb. You can't see the overhang from the top.”

Wren sent the addition during the next clear interval.

I watched the mirror turn.

Then went back to the chair before the leg began to shake.

Learning one good habit apparently required using it more than once.

The next message came near midday.

Four people.

Alive.

One unable to walk.

Water low. Need carrying help.

Luna read the whole message before speaking.

“Do they have the water Corr took?”

“Now they do,” Wren said. “Bram's with them. Ilse is checking the approach back to the shelter.”

“Any immediate danger?”

“None reported. They asked for water and transport.”

I felt the old movement begin inside me. Distance turning into a hull, a route, a calculation of how long I could hold it.

Then I looked at my leg on the support.

I could sit in a hull.

That didn't answer how I would get it into a narrow place, help load someone who couldn't stand, or get myself out if anything went wrong.

Luna crouched beside the chair.

“We make the plan with the leg you have today.”

I nodded.

It took a little longer than saying it should have.

We sent water first.

Ade and Teo took the checked route toward the northern shelter while there was still plenty of daylight, carrying supplies to meet the returning part of the search party. They weren't going into the unknown gully alone. Corr would meet them at the agreed point and carry the load onward with the people already there.

The four survivors had what Bram brought for the immediate hours.

By evening, they would have more.

That gave us room to solve the carrying problem properly.

Ilse's next message described the narrow section. A chair wouldn't pass. A stretcher would, if carried lengthwise, but there wasn't room for people on both sides along the whole ledge.

I drew the passage as she described it.

Then stopped drawing a wider passage I couldn't see.

“We need the measurements,” I said.

Wren sent the question.

We put the light stretcher on two trestles and looked at the frame.

There were other ways to support a load than holding every corner in a hand.

Jonas asked to see the sketch.

He sat with his foot up while Dov turned the page toward him.

“Is there sound ground above it?” he asked.

“Ilse is checking.”

“If there is, you could take some of the weight from above. Keep the stretcher from tipping while they move it through.”

I looked at the drawing.

“A guided line.”

He nodded.

“We moved water barrels like that once. Not people. But the narrow part sounds the same.”

We didn't turn a barrel trick into a rescue plan without testing it.

We took the idea seriously enough to build a small frame and load it with stone.

Dov watched the attachment points. Bram wasn't there to test the carrying end, so Aven and Liam helped, with Liam taking the heavier work.

I stayed seated and changed the ordinary fittings where I could see them.

The first arrangement twisted.

We lowered it, moved the support, and tried again.

The second held level.

That didn't mean the ledge would allow it.

It meant we had something worth measuring against the real place.

At the evening watch, the reply came.

There was a firm upper approach. Ilse had reached it. Not enough light left to prepare and test the whole crossing safely that day.

The four survivors would stay where they were with Bram and the supplies. Corr and Ilse would keep the route linked to the shelter.

Names followed, slowly enough that Wren asked for two of them again rather than guess at letters.

Dara Vale. Olin Beck. Seth Ader. Vera Noll.

Olin was the one who couldn't walk. All four were adults from the second wave.

We wrote them in the contact record.

Not on the board of people home.

Not yet.

Luna set the next departure for first light, with the carrying frame and enough people to exchange places before their arms failed.

I looked at the hull sketch beside the stretcher plan.

We kept it as an option if the terrain made the carrying route worse than Ilse believed.

But we no longer had only that option.

I sat back.

My leg ached.

For once, it hadn't made the whole camp helpless.

Holt saw the stretcher frame before supper.

They carried it past his open screen, and he called them back long enough to look at the fittings.

“Which approach?”

I showed him.

He studied it, then nodded toward the old map on his table.

“That's the one.”

Four people were waiting below a shelter he'd marked years before.

A ship had once found him and left.

Tomorrow, people from his camp would go to strangers carrying water, a bed, and a way home.

I looked at him for too long.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Your nothing usually wants something.”

I smiled.

“The books helped.”

He looked away toward the path.

“Good.”

Then he asked whether anyone had finished the records box, because apparently gratitude did not excuse poor storage.

Dov brought it over after supper. The trays slid out without catching, and Holt tried the lid twice before letting us put the first copied pages inside.

“That'll do,” he said.

Dov looked at me.

“Means he likes it,” I explained.

“I know,” Dov said.

That night, Luna sat beside me with the route folded closed.

Sera was brushing her hair. Risa had already put the lamp parts away.

I told them I was disappointed I wouldn't be carrying the frame out in the morning.

Nobody tried to persuade me I wasn't.

Luna took my hand.

“You helped make it.”

“I wanted to go.”

“I know.”

Sera put down the brush and sat on my other side.

“You will go places again.”

Risa rested her chin on my shoulder.

“And when you do, I'd prefer you came back with a leg that still works better.”

I laughed softly.

There was no great cure hidden in the sound.

Only a room with people in it who knew what I wanted and could bear to let me be unhappy about waiting.

I leaned into them.

Outside, someone checked the water containers for the morning.

I could hear the full ones being set down together.

Day 496. What Holt kept.

Washing place in use. Light fitted. Latrine turn widened. Dry stores raised, sacks marked, empty water containers kept visible. Records box built; copies to a second dry place.

Leg: short supported walks. Less pulling. Weakness still there. Stop before shaking becomes falling.

Holt improving. Fever has not returned. Earlier modification still under study. Copied logs with him. Names kept as known, not guessed.

Ship over his first base before the attack. Signals unanswered. Report acknowledged. No help. Marks copied at the time. Keep dates separate from conclusions.

Old map helped find four living people. Water delivered. One needs carrying. Frame tested here; route preparation at first light. Forty-seven home. Four in contact.

He gave us the books while he could still tell us how to read them.

Tomorrow we're using them to bring people back.