Chapter 181 Not Possible

We had enough material for two more sleeping bays.

Not a house. Not a row of stone rooms with doors and windows and somewhere for every person to put a chair. The seventy-four rooms I made were above the collapses and rendered unusable.

Two dry spaces beneath an extension of the existing roof, with a broad passage between them and curtains we could finish before the next rain.

Sera put the drawing on the table.

“Those,” she said.

I looked at the larger plan beneath it.

“Not that?”

“Not this week.”

Teo nodded from the other side of the table.

“We need to know where the next planting goes before you put a building over it.”

“I wasn't going to build over the field.”

“No. You were going to build where the field needs to go next.”

I moved the drawing away from the green patch he'd marked.

He looked satisfied.

Day 501 began with things I could understand.

I was grateful for that.

The water vessel had passed its first checks.

The cover fitted. The joins held. Nothing had settled unevenly beneath the base after the rain filled it partway.

Bram and Jonas had cleaned it and put it through the same routine we used for the existing water containers. Priya checked the marks before letting anyone begin drawing from the new supply.

It didn't make rain more frequent.

It did mean yesterday's rain was still here this morning.

Nessa filled a cup, drank, and looked at the little shelf of cups beside the tap.

“Better.”

I waited.

She looked at me.

“What?”

“I've learned to wait for the rest.”

“There isn't any rest.”

She went away with the cup.

I stood beside the vessel for a moment, enjoying an improvement that hadn't immediately asked to become another one.

Then Bram asked where we wanted the empty carrying jars.

I pointed toward Jonas's marked shelf.

Some answers were getting easier.

The new sleeping spaces would stand on ground we'd already been using for storage.

Corr and Ilse checked the exposed stone while Ade lifted the old platforms. I sat where I could see the joins and the shallow cracks instead of trying to inspect them while leaning on the stick.

No buried miracle foundation.

No claim that being high above the broken terraces meant the ground could never fail.

We had sound places for the uprights and a route for the runoff that wouldn't cut beneath them.

That was enough to begin.

Benedikt and Liam moved the beams. Sera marked the position of each fitting, then handed the page to Tamsin when her fingers needed a rest.

She didn't leave.

She sat with the drawing in her lap and answered questions while other people did the lifting.

I liked seeing that.

She caught me watching.

“Make your bracket.”

“Yes.”

“And make the holes agree with the marks this time.”

“That happened once.”

“And was memorable.”

Liam laughed without looking around.

I made the bracket.

By midday, the first upright was in place.

I had stopped twice, walked the short covered stretch once, and eaten something before I was too tired to notice being hungry.

It was an irritatingly effective way to get through a morning.

Toby found me at the map table afterward.

“Olin's ready to talk about tomorrow.”

I put the building drawing aside.

“How is he?”

“Slept. Ate. Still wants the work done. Has more questions.”

“Good.”

“He asked whether you've been sleeping.”

I looked up.

Toby's mouth moved slightly.

“I told him he could ask you himself.”

Olin was waiting with Dara beside him and the leg drawings laid on the blanket.

The support we'd changed was keeping the worst pressure off the old injury. His face looked less drawn than when he'd arrived.

He still watched the doorway as though leaving might become necessary without warning.

I sat where he could see me properly.

“Yes,” I said before he asked. “I slept.”

He nodded.

“That seems important.”

We went through the plan in ordinary words.

The old break had joined badly. Both bones were involved. If I changed only the obvious angle, I could leave the other one pulling against the correction.

I would work with the leg supported, seeing the ordinary structures as clearly as I could, and stop if the strain moved somewhere I didn't understand.

The result would still need protection afterward.

He wouldn't stand up at the end and walk to the water shelf because I wanted the day to have a satisfying finish.

Olin listened.

Then asked, “Will I be able to sleep on my side again?”

I looked at the drawing.

“I hope so. It may not be the first night.”

He nodded as if that mattered more than the shelf.

Dara wrote it down.

“Anything else?” Toby asked.

Olin considered.

“Don't tell me it's going well just because you don't want me frightened.”

I met his eyes.

“I won't.”

That was the promise he wanted.

Luna was waiting outside when we finished.

She didn't ask about the leg immediately.

She looked at my face, then at Toby carrying the notes away.

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes. After Sera's treatment. Toby's keeping the morning clear.”

She nodded.

Then held out a folded sheet.

Not one of the ship drawings.

A list of what we'd actually learned.

Meridian panel. Holt's sighting. Fragment. Structure beneath the queen's plate. Salvage memory.

Beside each, a date or an explanation of why we didn't have one precise enough to use.

“I keep trying to make this say less,” she said.

I read it.

“Does it?”

“No.”

We sat beneath the common roof, far enough from the building work to hear each other.

For a while, the hammering filled the spaces where neither of us had a useful word.

“They were destroyed,” Luna said at last.

I knew who she meant.

“That was what we were told.”

“That wasn't how it was told.”

She looked at the page.

“It wasn't one account among others. It was the end of the war. The Sorn came, we changed people who could fight them, and the Sorn were destroyed. Everything afterward was rebuilding.”

I thought of Mother at home. Her hands. The vial. Father in the field, careful about which questions he answered.

Rebuilding had been a word used by people who didn't have to mend the same door for the fourth winter.

Luna rubbed the edge of the paper between her fingers.

“If the ships were theirs, and the same things are here—”

She stopped.

“Then the account is missing something,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Not necessarily the thing we're most afraid of.”

“No.”

But neither of us looked relieved.

We'd learned too much about what a missing part could contain.

“My father's name is on the victory reports,” she said.

I looked at her.

“Not a story somebody told me at school. The reports. He kept copies. There were citations in the study, photographs, letters from people whose names everyone knew.”

She looked toward the unfinished roof.

“He wasn't a general when the first ships came. But he was there. He watched what happened. Later, he sat in rooms where they decided what the rest of us would be told.”

I remembered her in the Meridian's corridor, telling me how her father had looked at the window and said humanity couldn't land a ship that size on its tail.

She remembered too.

“He knew what we couldn't build,” she said. “He knew what had gone into the Meridian. More than he ever told me.”

“Knowing about salvaged machinery isn't the same as knowing who flew over Holt.”

“I know.”

She folded the list carefully.

“I need to keep knowing that while I find out the rest.”

We took the question to Holt after lunch.

Not the question of whether Luna's father was a bad man.

The question of what victory had looked like from where Holt had stood.

He listened without interrupting.

Then looked past us toward the field.

“The shooting stopped,” he said. “Orders changed. People who'd spent months expecting to die were told they could go somewhere else.”

“Did you see the last of their ships destroyed?” Luna asked.

“No.”

“Did anyone you knew?”

He took his time.

“People said things. Usually things they'd heard from someone farther up. I can tell you what I saw at the river. I can tell you what we pulled out afterward. I can't make the whole war visible because you need an honest witness.”

Luna nodded.

“That is an honest answer.”

He looked at her for a moment.

Then reached for his cup.

“Harder to use, though.”

“Yes,” she said.

Holt had been told the salvage mattered because it would keep humanity safe.

Studying what had nearly killed them. Taking apart things nobody understood. Learning enough that the next generation wouldn't have to stand under the same shadow.

That part sounded sensible even now.

Then I thought of the needles in Mother's arm.

Holt saw my face.

“A thing can start with an answer people will accept,” he said. “Doesn't tell you what they'll do with it afterward.”

Luna looked down at her folded list.

“Could the ship over your base have been ours?”

“Could have.”

“Could the crew have been human?”

“Never saw them.”

He didn't soften either answer.

Then he tapped the table with one finger.

“Whoever was inside, they saw our signal. Or had every chance to. They stayed long enough.”

That was the part none of the explanations improved.

A human crew using an old enemy's ship would still have left injured people on the ground.

We didn't need to know the faces inside it to know help hadn't come.

We kept the comparison meeting small.

Liam came when the lifting work stopped. Risa brought the notes from the queen's chamber. Toby joined us after checking Holt and Olin. Wren had the signal records, and Ilse knew which routes we'd actually been able to examine.

Nobody had another hidden page that made the answer simple.

Liam listened to the whole account, then looked at the little copied marks.

“I don't understand how we can have this much and still not know.”

“Because the writing doesn't tell us who's holding the object,” Risa said.

“Unless we can read it.”

“Even then. You could write your name on my cup.”

“You'd complain.”

“Yes.”

A little of the tension moved out of the room.

Then Toby asked what we were changing because of it.

That was a better question than whether everyone felt sufficiently frightened.

Luna turned the route map toward us.

“We keep looking for people. We record unfamiliar aircraft properly. And we don't assume something is safe because the message attached to it comes from Command.”

None of that required a declaration of war.

It required paying attention.

Wren added a page to the sighting records.

Time. Direction. What was actually visible. Whether anyone had tried to answer or signal. Who had seen it.

No demand that every distant shape become a threat.

No instruction to follow something into the green just because we'd become curious about it.

Holt read the page and removed a question that would have required people to guess at distance from an unfamiliar sky.

“Let them draw where it was against the ridge,” he said. “You can argue about height afterward.”

Wren changed it.

Ilse took a copy for the northern shelter.

The next short search would check the old cut branches Edda had described. It was already planned for after the rescue party had rested. There was no reason the ship drawings should cancel it.

People who needed water would still need water if we spent the next week arguing about who had won a war before I was born.

I put the search page above the sighting page in my notebook.

Both mattered.

One had people waiting beneath it.

That evening, I found Luna standing beside the new roof frame.

Sera was sitting nearby, marking cloth. Risa had brought a lamp out while there was still enough daylight to see whether its fastening would catch on the curtain.

I sat on the low bench and rested the leg.

The four of us stayed there while the others put the tools away.

Luna looked up at the bare beams.

“It's a very poor time to be making people comfortable.”

Sera stopped marking.

“Is it?”

Luna looked at her.

Sera glanced toward the shelters, where Vera was helping Dara fold a blanket without disturbing Olin.

“They've had enough poor times.”

For a moment, Luna didn't answer.

Then she let out a breath.

“Yes.”

Risa leaned against my shoulder.

“Besides, being dry won't stop them noticing a ship.”

I laughed.

Luna smiled, reluctantly at first.

The unfinished roof looked like a sensible thing again.

We went inside before the air grew cold.

Olin's correction began on Day 502.

Sera's treatment was finished first. I'd eaten and rested. My own leg was supported so I wouldn't spend the morning bracing against pain while trying to look inside somebody else's.

Toby had everything arranged before Olin arrived at the part of the shelter with the best light.

Dara stayed near his head. He'd asked her to.

Dot held the lamp steady.

I looked again before touching anything with the part of me that could change it.

The old bone. The distorted healing. The softer structures that had spent too long accommodating the wrong shape.

Seeing them clearly didn't make them simple.

Olin watched my face.

“Still the same plan?”

“Yes.”

“Then go on.”

I checked with Toby.

He nodded.

Outside, somebody began hammering, then stopped when Luna asked them to move the noisy work to the far end of camp.

The quiet that followed felt deliberate.

I was glad of it.

I worked on the old repair a little at a time.

Not a new leg. Not even all the damage in the one he had.

The place where the bones had settled badly, and the strain that made straightening one part pull another in the wrong direction.

Toby kept the limb supported. I changed only what I could follow, easing the old distorted join while keeping the surrounding structures in view.

At the first pause, Olin asked whether we'd stopped because something was wrong.

“No,” I said. “Because this part is ready to check.”

He nodded.

I checked it.

There was a difference between making a shape I liked and leaving living tissue able to bear what came next.

We went slowly enough to keep asking which of those I was doing.

The second part was harder.

A pull I hadn't fully understood in the drawing became visible when the alignment changed.

I stopped.

Olin's hand tightened around Dara's.

I told him why.

Then I looked until I understood where the strain was going.

Only then did I continue.

By the time I sat back, my shirt was damp and the light had moved across the far wall.

The leg lay straighter in its support.

That was visible without my eyes.

The important part was inside.

The two bones no longer opposed each other in the same damaging way. The repair I'd made held the corrected alignment, with the surrounding tissue left room to settle instead of being forced into an answer it couldn't sustain.

It wasn't ready for weight.

It was ready to begin healing from a better place.

Toby checked what he could. I checked the things only I could see.

Then we fitted the prepared support to the leg as it was now, not the shape it had been that morning.

Olin had tears running into his hair.

Dara wiped them away.

“Bad?” I asked.

“It hurts.”

“I know.”

He swallowed.

“But it isn't pulling sideways.”

I looked at the straight line beneath the blanket.

“No.”

For a while, none of us needed to say anything else.

I didn't do more work that afternoon.

That was harder than doing the work had been.

The new roof needed its last fittings. The water measure had to be marked more clearly. Someone had found a poor join in a carrying jar.

All ordinary things I could fix.

All things that would still exist after I'd slept.

Luna brought me to our room, made certain the leg was comfortable, and put the notebook where I couldn't accidentally begin working in it without noticing.

“Sleep.”

“I will.”

She sat beside me.

“You're waiting for news from Toby.”

“Yes.”

“He said he'd send word if anything changed.”

“I know.”

She took my hand.

For a little while, she watched the window while I watched her.

Then I closed my eyes.

When I woke, Sera was drawing at the table and the light was lower.

Olin was resting.

The roof had not fallen because I hadn't finished its fittings.

I was beginning to collect useful evidence about that sort of thing.

The next morning, Olin asked about sleeping on his side again.

Not before Toby had examined him.

Not before I'd checked the repair.

Afterward, when we knew the alignment had held and the swelling hadn't introduced anything unexpected, we helped him find a supported position that didn't drag at the leg.

He lay there very quietly.

Dara sat beside the bed.

“Better?” she asked.

He nodded into the pillow.

Then nodded again, as though the first one hadn't been enough.

I left them alone.

Outside, Seth was helping Priya count the clean bowls before breakfast. Vera had put a small folded cloth on the shelf beside Olin's bed so he could reach it himself.

There were no great new abilities in either act.

They were the things that happened when people stopped spending every hour wondering how to survive the next one.

I leaned on the stick and watched the camp for a moment.

Then went to do my own small, undramatic work at the walking rail.

Toby changed the exercise that morning.

Not by much.

Enough that I noticed.

He asked me to put a little more of the movement through the muscles that had learned to let the stick and the other leg do everything.

I had to concentrate.

The first attempt was mostly determination and very little useful movement.

The second was better.

At the turning chair, he watched me stand with one hand on the rail.

“Wait there.”

I waited.

He moved the stick to the other side of the chair, still within reach.

Then stood close enough to catch me without making that the whole point of the exercise.

“Just between these marks. Keep your hand there if you need it.”

It wasn't far.

Less than the distance from our bed to the door.

I looked at the marks.

Then put my foot down.

Six steps.

I counted them because I couldn't help it.

One hand close to the rail. Toby beside me. The stick waiting at the other end instead of carrying part of me through every movement.

My leg trembled on the fifth.

I reached the chair on the sixth and sat before the trembling became anything else.

For a moment, I couldn't speak.

It wasn't walking normally.

It wasn't the end of the injury.

But I'd moved from one place to another without putting my weight through the stick.

Toby was smiling.

Only a little, which was how he smiled when he didn't want me to turn an improvement into a reason to do something foolish.

“That's enough for now.”

I nodded.

Then nodded again.

Olin would have understood.

Across the path, Neri lifted her cup toward me.

She'd seen.

I laughed, and had to wipe my eyes before standing with the stick again.

Risa found out before I reached our room.

Nessa had told her.

Nessa apparently regarded distance as no obstacle to an important report.

“Six?” Risa asked.

“With Toby and a rail.”

“Six,” she repeated.

I smiled.

She kissed me, then stepped aside so I could sit down properly.

Sera looked up from the drawing table.

“What happened?”

Risa told her.

Luna came in halfway through the telling and made Risa start again because she wanted the beginning.

I sat while all three looked at me.

“It's not fixed,” I said.

“We heard,” Luna answered.

Sera took my hand.

“That doesn't stop it being good.”

No one asked for a demonstration.

No one made me cross the room to prove the morning had happened.

Risa put the stick beside my chair and began talking about lunch.

I loved her for that almost as much as for the kiss.

The sleeping bays had a roof by the afternoon of Day 503.

The outer sides still needed their weather coverings. Edda and Vera were working on the inner curtains, with Sera's markings spread between them.

I finished the last fittings from a chair while Ade brought each one close enough for me to see properly.

No reaching through walls.

No doing the whole structure at once because it was frustrating to have to keep asking someone to turn a piece over.

The finished roof changed the shape of the camp.

There was space beneath it that wasn't already assigned to someone's injury or someone's stores.

Bram carried a bench in and sat down to test the shade.

Then two of the younger survivors joined him with a book.

Within a few minutes, the empty space had become a place people used.

Luna stood beside me and watched.

“We'll need those beds eventually.”

“Yes.”

“But not this afternoon.”

“No.”

She went to fetch another bench.

I stayed where I was and let other people carry it.

Teo's new planting plan took us outside the roof.

Only on paper for me at first.

He'd marked the existing crop, the seed we needed to keep, and the next patch we could prepare without cutting into the living growth around the field.

I had an instinctive dislike of leaving any grain uneaten when people were hungry.

He had an equally sensible dislike of discovering we'd eaten next season.

We looked at the numbers with Priya.

Then I stopped trying to solve them by imagining a bigger pot.

Two narrow extensions. Prepared in stages. The current water arrangement kept intact until we could see what the extra ground actually required.

Seth asked whether he could help with the soil work.

Teo asked him what he'd done before.

“Mostly carried things.”

“That'll remain useful.”

Seth smiled.

They went to look at the ground together.

I watched them leave and thought about the ship that had brought all of us here.

Whatever it had been built for, it hadn't taught us how to plant wheat.

We were doing that part ourselves.

Ilse came back from the short search before dusk.

Corr had gone with her. They'd checked the old cut branches from Edda's account and returned along the marked route, without finding anyone to bring home.

The cuts were real.

Old enough that the exposed surfaces had changed colour. No fresh smoke. No clear recent footprints on the hard ground.

They'd found the cloth beneath the overhang too, brittle where the weather had reached it.

A place people had used.

Not proof of where those people had gone.

Ilse put a sketch on Holt's table.

“We left water and directions to the northern shelter. Marked the date.”

Holt nodded.

“Good.”

It wasn't the sort of return that made everyone hurry out to the path.

It was still a return worth recording.

We had one less place being treated as an answer simply because nobody had checked it, and one more place where someone lost might find water.

Wren added the note to the next outward signal.

Searching wasn't only the days it ended with new names.

The Sorn question returned while we were putting the maps away.

Liam leaned against the end of the table and looked at the separate tray where we'd kept the ship records.

“Not possible,” he said.

I looked up.

“That keeps being the first thing I think.”

“Mine too.”

“And then I remember the ship we came in.”

He rubbed a hand over his face.

“We already knew they used things they didn't make.”

“Yes.”

“So why does this feel worse?”

Luna answered from beside the records box.

“Because they told us where the danger ended.”

Liam looked at her.

“Back there,” she said. “Thirty years ago. A finished war. We could be afraid of Avalon, of failing, of the Teeming, of whatever the training told us came next. But not of the people whose machines made the journey possible.”

Nobody spoke for a moment.

Then Holt closed his notebook.

“Someone decided what you were allowed to prepare for.”

I looked at the new roof outside.

We were preparing differently now.

That didn't mean declaring every person on the station an enemy.

Iona had told us about supplies arriving at Dane's base. Dane had let us use a carrier to bring her people home. Ruan had brought medical things we needed.

Help could be real even when the account around it was incomplete.

So could harm.

I wanted an answer that separated everyone into groups I knew what to do with.

The evidence refused to give me one.

“We need someone who was there,” Luna said.

Holt lifted an eyebrow.

“Someone who was in the rooms afterward,” she added.

His expression changed.

He understood before I did, though I'd been standing beside the question for two days.

Luna put her hand on the closed box.

“My father.”

Liam looked at her.

“You think he'll tell you?”

“I don't know.”

“Can you get a message to him?”

“I don't know that either.”

She met my eyes.

“But I know what I want to ask.”

We didn't write it at the table with everyone listening.

Luna took the blank page to our room and left it there while we ate.

That was her decision.

I didn't make a point of noticing it aloud.

Olin had managed another supported turn in bed. Holt had spent a useful hour with the maps and stopped before his hands began shaking. The new sleeping roof had kept a brief shower off three people reading beneath it.

There were ordinary things to talk about over supper.

We talked about them.

Dara told Olin he would have to decide where he wanted his shelf before someone else made the choice.

He said he wanted it where he could reach the cup.

Vera said that was an unnecessarily ambitious request.

He laughed.

I hadn't heard him laugh that freely before.

Luna heard it too.

She looked across the cooking shelter, then returned to her meal.

The blank page could wait another hour.

After supper, Sera asked whether I wanted to walk to the water shelf.

“Again?” I asked.

“With the stick,” she said immediately.

“I wasn't going to—”

She looked at me.

I smiled.

“With the stick.”

Risa came with us. Luna stayed to finish a conversation with Wren, then caught up at the bench.

We sat with the new roof behind us and the field ahead.

There wasn't room for all four on the seat. Sera sat close beside me, Risa on the other side, and Luna stood until Risa shifted enough to make space on the end.

It was a poor arrangement for anyone trying to draw a neat plan.

It worked.

Sera slipped her hand into mine.

“Six steps,” she said softly.

I looked at her.

“Still thinking about it?”

“Yes.”

“So am I.”

She rested her head against my shoulder.

For a little while, we watched the water move through the place we'd made for it.

Luna spoke after the light began to change.

“If he tells me something I can't bear, I don't want you deciding I shouldn't have asked.”

I turned toward her.

“I won't.”

Risa's hand settled over Luna's wrist.

“And if he doesn't answer,” Sera said, “we won't pretend that tells us everything either.”

Luna looked down at their hands.

Then at me.

She seemed tired in a way the day's work didn't explain.

“I used to know how a conversation with him would go,” she said. “Even when I hated it.”

I thought about Father, about all the questions I'd learned to carry around his silences.

“I don't think knowing the words always means knowing the answer.”

“No.”

She let out a slow breath.

Then leaned against Risa for a moment.

We stayed until I needed to stretch the leg and the evening began to cool.

No one tried to solve her father on the way home.

At the doorway, Luna stopped beside the shelf where I'd kept my letter to Mother.

She didn't touch it.

“Do you ever think about changing what you've written?”

“Yes.”

“Do you?”

“Sometimes. Mostly I add things.”

She nodded.

I looked at the folded letter.

“I want her to know what happened. I also want her to know I'm happy. Those keep refusing to fit into separate letters.”

A small smile moved across Luna's face.

“That sounds like you.”

She went to the table and set the blank page where the morning light would reach it.

Then she came to bed.

Risa put the lamp out after Sera had found the edge of the blanket.

I lay with the ache in my leg and the memory of six steps.

For once, the ache wasn't the only part of the leg I remembered.

Day 503. Not possible.

Olin's old break corrected on Day 502. Both bones aligned together. Supported, no weight. Repair holding at morning check. Managed a comfortable turn in bed.

My leg: six short steps without loading the stick, beside the rail with Toby. Still weak. Use the stick outside practice. Improvement holding.

Two sleeping bays roofed. Outer coverings and curtains still being finished. Water vessel in use. Next planting marked; seed reserve kept.

Old cut branches and cloth checked. No people found. Water and dated directions left. Continue other bearings.

Holt helped separate what he witnessed from what he was told. Shooting stopped. Salvage continued. No witness here to the destruction of every Sorn ship.

Luna's father's name is on the victory reports. She wants to ask him what happened. No message sent yet.

Fifty-one people.

A dry roof, a straighter leg, a question we can no longer leave alone.