Chapter 203 Before the Doors

The eastern queen sent word before dawn.

Her people were beside the device.

A little later, the southern queen answered too.

I was sitting on the edge of our bed when the second message arrived, pulling on a boot. For a moment I forgot what my hands were doing.

Luna noticed.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

She looked at my foot.

“Both boots, preferably.”

I finished tying it.

Risa was folding a spare shirt into her bag. Sera stood at the window, watching the first light reach the roofs below us. Nobody said anything about staying behind. We had settled that already.

I went to Sera first.

She turned and put her arms around my neck.

“Don't start looking like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like you're trying to remember us.”

I kissed her forehead.

“All right.”

She held me a moment longer anyway.

Risa joined us, then Luna, who managed to keep one hand on the bag she had already checked twice.

We stood close in the narrow space beside the window.

Then Sera let go and picked up her coat.

“Come on. We've got people waiting.”

Holt was at the transport with Sigmund.

He handed Luna a folded page.

“Your copy,” he said.

“I have a copy.”

“Now you have the one with the right room numbers on it.”

Luna opened it, checked, and gave him a look.

“Sera changed those yesterday.”

“Yes. On the wall. Not on the page you put in your pocket.”

She exchanged the pages without another word.

Holt looked pleased enough that I decided not to help him enjoy it.

Sigmund waited until Risa had put her bag aboard.

“Anything you want done while you're gone?” he asked her.

She considered him.

“Don't rearrange our house.”

“I wasn't going to.”

“You looked at the work corner yesterday.”

“The shelf is crooked.”

“Sera likes it there.”

He glanced at me, perhaps hoping for support.

I shook my head.

“Stay away from the shelf.”

Risa hugged him before he could answer. His expression changed as he put his arms around her.

When she stepped back, he only said, “We'll be ready.”

Anja stood near the ramp with Liam. She was checking the strap on his bag, although he was quite capable of checking it himself.

Wren had come to see Toby off. They were standing a little apart from the rest of us, her hand resting against his chest while he spoke quietly.

I looked away before either noticed.

Our queen's attendants waited inside the nursery compartments. They had chosen their places during the rehearsals. Now the empty supports around them made the spaces look larger than they had yesterday.

Keir called for the ramp.

I lifted it into place, checked the seals, and took us up.

Scarecrow fell away beneath the windows.

For the first time, leaving it did not feel like pulling the strongest piece out of a badly built wall.

There were people there who knew what they were doing.

There were walls that would hold.

And there was a queen beneath them who had chosen to help keep them safe.

We flew above the broken ground until the twin peaks appeared ahead.

Keir sat beside me with the controls available beneath his hands. The engines were quiet. I was carrying us, and there was no strain in it, no ache waiting behind my eyes.

I could feel the whole craft as clearly as I could feel the seat beneath me.

Water in its containers. Air moving through the compartments. The small movements of the frame when someone shifted their weight.

It would have been easy to become absorbed in that.

Instead I listened to Luna tell Corr where to meet Sera once the lower passage opened.

Power did not tell me whether somebody had understood an instruction.

People still had to answer one another.

The captive queen was awake.

*We are coming,* I told her.

She showed me the nursery chambers, each occupied as before. Then the human rooms. The three kits at their work stations.

All still there.

A woman had been moved from one sleeping place to another during the night. The queen did not know why. She had felt the adults around her become agitated, then settle when another human came to help.

I told Toby.

“Which section?”

“The nineteen.”

He marked it on his page.

Luna looked towards the mountain.

“Any changes to the guards?”

I asked.

The queen could tell us where bodies moved near the paths she knew. She could not tell us what every human carried or intended.

There were two more people in the lower passage than there had been during our visit.

We changed the approach accordingly.

No one suggested that two more people meant we should leave the fifty-one inside.

The transport settled behind the southern shoulder, sheltered from the main landing ground by a fold of dark stone.

I widened the rough ledge beneath it and made the footing sound before anyone stepped outside.

Keir left the engines ready.

Aster remained beside him, connected to the transport's own systems by choice, with a cable that it could release itself.

Dot came with us.

I was glad to see all six of its legs on the ground beside mine.

“Do try not to look delighted,” it said.

“I didn't say anything.”

“You are looking at me as though I am luggage you remembered to bring.”

“Important luggage.”

Risa made a small sound behind her hand.

Dot turned towards her.

“That does not improve it.”

“No,” she agreed. “It doesn't.”

Then we reached the service entrance, and none of us were smiling.

The alarm contact was where we had left it. The lock had been used since our visit, but no new parts had been fitted.

I separated the contact from the reporting circuit and opened the door.

Inside, the little maintenance room smelled of warm metal and the bitter cleaning fluid used on the floor.

Luna shut the door behind us.

Risa went to the power housing. Dot climbed onto the low work platform and joined its own cable to the interface we had used before.

I put a hand against the wall.

The mountain unfolded beneath my awareness.

Not a picture of everything that had ever happened there. Stone, metal, air, living bodies. Things I could understand and change.

The queen's injured silver lay through it like a tree forced to grow through a cage.

*We are inside,* I told her.

*I know.*

The first guard did not get a chance to shout.

He came through the inner door with a cup in one hand and stopped when he saw Luna.

His other hand moved towards the weapon at his hip.

I changed the weapon's working parts into one harmless piece before his fingers closed around it.

Luna caught his wrist.

“Quiet,” she said.

He stared at her, then at me.

His cup fell.

I caught it above the floor and set it upright on the bench.

That frightened him more than the weapon had.

“Is anyone coming behind you?” Luna asked.

He said nothing.

I could feel another person farther along the passage, walking away.

“No one close,” I said.

Risa kept working. Dot did not turn from the interface.

Luna took the useless weapon from the guard and put it on the bench beside his cup.

“Sit down. Keep your hands where we can see them.”

He sat.

“You can't be here.”

“We've had that explained before,” she said.

His eyes moved to her face again.

Recognition arrived slowly.

“Windsor?”

“Yes.”

For an instant, he looked relieved.

Then he looked at the ruined weapon.

Luna saw the change.

“Where are the nursery guards?”

He swallowed.

“I work maintenance.”

“Then tell me who has the keys.”

We did not need his keys.

We needed the things the copied diagram had not told us.

There was a station at the end of the nursery corridor. Two people watched it during the morning shift. The doors could be locked locally as well as from the main control room.

There was also an emergency instruction that closed the inner passage between the nursery chambers and the queen.

Risa looked up from the open housing.

“Lucas.”

I followed the path she had found.

The closing mechanism shared its power supply with the corridor lights. Switching off the whole circuit would leave the attendants in darkness and tell the station exactly where we were working.

I separated the motor from the supply without disturbing the lights.

Then I removed the locking pieces from the doors themselves.

They remained shut.

They could no longer be sealed.

The guard watched my hand resting against the wall.

“What are you doing?”

“Making sure those doors open.”

He shook his head once.

“They'll send people.”

“I expect they will.”

Luna knelt so he had to look at her rather than past her.

“You have a choice about what you do when they come.”

He looked away.

She stood and left him with it.

Dot found the current device list.

It matched the records we had brought, except for one inactive entry that had been marked for replacement. We checked that it was actually unpowered before setting it aside.

Risa traced the independent supply serving the queen's damaged body.

“There,” she said. “This stays.”

“I have it.”

The supporting pumps kept moving. The air system continued its slow exchange through the lower chamber.

Around them, I changed the station's ability to hurt the people inside it.

The fixed weapons at the holding doors became solid shapes. Their ammunition was separated and made inert. The mechanisms that could close the corridors lost their grips. The alarm circuits between the lower rooms and the main control station stopped carrying anything useful.

I left ordinary lights and air alone.

Dot copied the records before it changed any controls.

Then Luna put her hand on my arm.

“Ready?”

I asked the captive queen.

Her answer included the attendants gathering the young closer, the living pressure of eighty-six small bodies.

*Ready.*

Our queen passed the agreed signal to the two waiting mothers.

Dot began the maintenance sequence.

I watched the local controls open their paths to the distant devices.

One by one, acknowledgements appeared.

Then the separate confirmations that power to their outputs had actually stopped.

Not together. Not neatly.

One came twice. Another took long enough that Luna leaned forward without realising it.

Risa kept her fingers against the exposed housing, feeling the changes as they passed.

“Eastern device,” I said when our queen answered. “Power separated.”

Dot marked it.

A moment later the southern confirmation arrived through the queens.

The last remote reading on Dot's display changed.

For a second I thought nothing had happened.

Then the captive queen went utterly still.

*Quiet,* she said.

The word was so small for what I felt behind it that I could not speak.

Luna squeezed my arm.

“Lucas?”

“They've stopped.”

Dot checked the readings again.

“All known outputs isolated.”

Luna took a breath.

“Open the route.”

The stone outside the service room moved.

I opened a passage wide enough for the stretcher teams, joining the sheltered approach to the lower corridor without breaking into an occupied room. The roof carried itself on strong new arches. A shallow line of light ran along each side at knee height.

Sera came through first.

She looked at me, then Luna.

“Which one?”

“The nineteen,” Luna said. “Toby first.”

Toby passed us with his bag. Corr and Ilse moved towards the corridor station. Behind them came our queen's attendants, their limbs making a dry, soft sound against the new floor.

The maintenance guard stood abruptly.

Luna turned.

He raised both hands.

“There's someone in the washroom beside that section. A woman. They don't always include the washroom in the room check.”

I found her through the wall. Alive, crouched beside a basin, one hand pressed over her mouth.

“Thank you,” I said.

He looked as though I had answered in the wrong language.

I opened her door too.

The first human room did not empty when its lock released.

Seventeen people stared at the opening.

There were blankets folded on narrow sleeping platforms. Clothes hanging from hooks. A game scratched into the surface of a little table beside the wall.

One man stood in front of the others.

His left sleeve hung empty below the elbow.

“Which work group?” he asked.

Luna stopped just inside the doorway.

“No work group.”

His eyes moved over her coat, her face, then me.

“What happened to you?”

It took me a moment to realise he meant the silver hair.

“A friend helped me.”

He looked past us at the Teeming crossing the far passage.

The room changed.

Someone made a frightened sound. Two people moved backwards so quickly they hit the sleeping platforms.

Luna held out an empty hand.

“They're with us. They're here for the young being held below.”

“Those things killed—”

The man stopped. His jaw worked.

“I know,” I said.

He stared at me.

I could have explained everything. The stolen silver, the commands, the queens forced to listen while their own young were threatened.

It would have taken too long, and he was not ready to hear it from a stranger standing beside an open prison door.

“The passage on your right leads outside,” I said instead. “There are people there who'll take you to the transport. You don't have to walk beside them.”

“Transport where?”

“Scarecrow, if you want shelter. Somewhere else if we can help you reach it.”

“What do you want for that?”

“Nothing.”

He did not believe me.

I stepped away from the door.

Luna did too.

A woman at the back picked up a small cloth bundle. She walked past the man with the empty sleeve, hesitated at the threshold, then put one foot into the passage.

Nobody stopped her.

The others began collecting their things.

The alarm that finally sounded was a human voice.

“Stop!”

A man in a dark station coat appeared at the far end of the corridor with two armed guards behind him.

I had already changed the weapons before they raised them.

One guard pulled his trigger anyway.

The click was very loud.

Corr took two steps forward.

Luna raised a hand and stopped him.

“Lower them,” she told the guards.

The man in the coat looked past her at the open holding room.

“Those personnel are under movement restriction.”

“They're leaving.”

“You have no authority to move them.”

“Then they'll move themselves.”

He reached towards the wall control.

Nothing happened when he pressed it.

I removed the panel from the wall and set it on the floor.

He looked at me properly for the first time.

I saw his eyes catch on the silver rings around mine.

“You're the material subject.”

“My name is Lucas.”

“You don't understand what you're interfering with.”

Behind him, an attendant carried a young Teeming through the nursery doorway. The little body curled tightly beneath its limbs.

I looked at it, then back at him.

“I understand enough.”

One of the guards lowered his useless weapon.

The other kept it pointed at us until Ilse took it from his hands.

The man in the coat began to speak again.

Luna cut him off.

“Move away from the corridor. People need to pass.”

For a moment I thought he would make us carry him.

Then the woman with the cloth bundle came out behind me.

She walked straight towards him.

He moved before she reached him.

She did not look at his face.

Toby called me from the second room.

The woman who had been moved during the night lay on a low bed near the inner wall. She was awake, sweating, with another captive holding a wet cloth against her neck.

Toby had already loosened the tight collar of her shirt.

“Can you help her?”

I knelt where she could see me.

“My name's Lucas. I can look at what's making you ill, if you want.”

Her eyes moved towards Toby.

“He helped me,” he said.

She nodded once.

The infection was deep, caught behind an old injury that had never drained properly. I could see what her body was trying to do and why it had failed.

“I can fix this,” I told her. “You can stay lying down.”

Her hand closed around the blanket.

There was no bright light. No struggle between my body and hers. I cleared the damaged tissue, removed the infection, restored the pathways that should have been carrying fluid away.

I left her hand alone until she chose to uncurl it.

Her breathing eased.

The person with the cloth started crying.

“She's all right,” Toby said.

“I know.”

He nodded and did not tell her to stop.

The woman on the bed stared at me.

“It doesn't hurt.”

“No.”

“Are you going to do that to everyone?”

“If they want me to.”

She looked towards the door.

“There's a man in the other section. His hand—”

“We'll ask him.”

She let Toby help her sit up.

I looked around the room. Sera was speaking to a young man who had gathered three bags and was trying to carry them all while helping an older woman stand.

“Give me one,” she said.

“They aren't all mine.”

“Then I'll be careful with all of them.”

He handed her the largest.

She slung it over her shoulder and led them towards the passage.

The nursery was louder than I expected.

Not with cries.

With movement.

Limbs against stone. Feeding containers being gathered. The quick tapping of adults calling the young nearer while our attendants waited in the doorway for permission to enter.

Dot stood beside Risa at the local controls. The locks were already useless. Now they were separating the monitoring equipment from the feeding and ventilation systems so nothing stopped while the nursery emptied.

I could feel the captive queen listening.

*They are coming out,* I told her.

*I feel them.*

The first attendant to pass me had a deep groove in one rear plate. It stopped when it saw the silver on my hands.

I did not reach for it.

The queen spoke to it in a pattern I could recognise but not yet reproduce aloud.

It lowered its body slightly.

Beneath its limbs were three young, their small plates pressed together.

One reached towards my boot.

The adult drew it back, then paused as if expecting punishment for the movement.

I stepped aside.

“You're all right,” I said, although I did not know whether the words meant anything to it.

Risa came to stand beside me.

“They've never been outside this corridor, have they?”

Some had. Some had been brought there small enough that the difference hardly mattered.

I passed on what the queen told me.

Risa watched the three young disappear into the new passage.

Her hand found mine for a moment.

Then Dot asked for her help, and she went back to work.

There were three kits in the work spaces.

One had been fixed to a floor mount by clamps around its body. Another could move only as far as a heavy cable allowed. The third stood behind a partition with two of its limbs dismantled on the bench beside it.

I opened the workroom while Luna brought the remaining staff into the corridor where Corr could watch them.

Dot went in first.

It spoke before touching anything.

The kit on the floor mount answered with a string of sounds I did not understand.

Dot answered in the same way.

Then it turned to me.

“This is Reed. It would like the clamps removed before any other work.”

I made them come apart.

Reed remained still for a moment.

Then it lifted one leg. Put it down. Lifted another.

The cable-bound kit watched it closely.

“Your cable can be disconnected safely,” Dot told that one. “There is independent power available. Lucas can make the connection.”

“Will I be required to remain with the new supply?”

“No,” I said.

It turned its head towards me.

“Show me.”

I set the power unit on the bench and showed it the fitting, the release, and the place where its own controls would remain separate.

It asked two questions.

I answered both.

Only then did it allow me to remove the tether.

Its name was Vell.

The third kit asked for its missing limbs before it gave us a name.

I repaired the damaged joints and brought the separate parts back into their proper relationship. Dot explained each step as I worked.

When it could move them, the kit touched the edge of the bench with all its smaller limbs in turn.

Then it said, “I have not chosen a name.”

“All right,” Dot said.

“Is that required?”

“No.”

It looked towards the open door.

“I would like to leave this room.”

Reed moved aside to let it pass.

By then, the mountain knew we were there.

People were gathering above the sealed control stair. I could feel their boots through the metal and stone, the weapons they were carrying, the heavy door they were trying to open.

I made another exit from that upper section to the landing ground before I secured the stair completely.

Nobody was going to be buried in a room because they had been on the wrong side of us.

Luna spoke to them through the ordinary internal speaker.

“The lower holding sections are being evacuated. Your external exit is open. Do not approach the southern passage with weapons.”

A voice answered almost at once.

“Identify the officer commanding this operation.”

“Luna Windsor.”

Silence.

Then, “This facility acts under standing command authority.”

“Send the authority with your records.”

“You are compromising a strategic installation.”

Behind me, Reed walked through the workroom door without a clamp around its body.

Luna watched it pass.

“Yes,” she said.

She ended the exchange.

We counted people at the passage, and again at the transport.

The woman from the washroom belonged to the group of nineteen. She had not been left out of their total. The queen had known where she was; the room board had simply failed to say it.

Seventeen. Nineteen. Fifteen.

All fifty-one.

The man with the empty sleeve waited near the ramp until the last of his group had reached us.

He would not give his name at first.

“That can wait,” Sera told him.

He looked at the craft, then the Teeming compartment beyond the separate passage.

“Are they coming to the same place?”

“Some of them. Some are going home to their mothers.”

He watched a small body uncurl beneath an attendant.

“How many?”

“Eighty-six young.”

He rubbed his face with his remaining hand.

After a while he said, “Toren.”

Sera waited.

“My name.”

She wrote it down.

He climbed the ramp.

Liam met me at the nursery entrance with the count sheet.

“Eighty-three.”

I stopped.

“Three still inside?”

“Last attendant hasn't come through.”

I reached for the queen.

She showed me the far chamber. An adult stood beside a feeding shelf, its body held awkwardly over three young.

I went back at once.

Risa came with me. Dot was already there.

The attendant had been moving when we saw it earlier. Now one rear limb would not bear its weight. An old injury had opened beneath the load.

It would not put down the young.

I knelt well clear of its forelimbs.

“Tell it I can help,” I said to Dot.

Dot spoke. The queen spoke too.

The attendant lowered itself just enough for me to see the damaged joint directly.

I repaired it without moving the young away.

The joint settled. The broken support beneath the outer plate became whole.

The attendant shifted its weight cautiously.

Then it rose.

One of the three young made a thin, vibrating sound.

The adult froze.

Nobody moved towards it.

The sound came again, louder.

I thought of the queen's question in the night.

“Yes,” I said softly. “That's allowed.”

The attendant carried them into the passage.

Risa wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand.

When I looked at her, she shook her head.

“Just keep walking.”

I did.

Keir stood at the open ramp while Aster checked the final names with Sera.

Fifty-one humans.

Three kits, in addition to the two who had come with us.

Eighty-six young. Nineteen attendants from the mountain, with our queen's people helping them settle.

No one missing.

I had to hear it twice.

Keir understood. He said it twice without making anything of it.

The woman Toby had treated was lying comfortably in one of the stretcher spaces. Toren sat where he could see the human exit. Vell had chosen a place beside Reed near the forward partition. The unnamed kit had asked to sit where no workbench was visible.

We had found it somewhere.

Luna came down the ramp.

“Ready to take them?” she asked Keir.

“Yes.”

“We're staying with the queen.”

He looked at the four of us, then Dot.

“I know.”

Toby came to the doorway behind him.

“I'll get them settled. Send word if you need me.”

“I will,” I said.

Corr and Ilse remained with us to keep the lower passages clear. Liam went with the transport to help at the other end. Our attendants would travel with the rescued broods until they were safe in the receiving courts.

The eastern young would reach their mother after we had spoken to her about the route and checked that everyone was well enough for another journey.

Today, nobody had to stay in a prison while we arranged the perfect destination.

Keir climbed into his seat.

Aster closed the doors.

I stood well clear and watched the engines lift the craft.

For a moment it hung above the ledge, heavy with all the lives inside it.

Then Keir turned it towards Scarecrow.

I did not carry it.

I watched until the fold of the mountain hid it from sight.

Our queen was waiting for my message.

*They are out,* I told her.

The answer reached me as a warmth I felt nowhere in my body and everywhere at once.

I gave her the counts. The names the kits had offered. The news that everyone aboard was alive.

She passed what she could to the eastern mother.

Then she asked about the older queen.

*I'm going to her now.*

Sera stood beside me while I spoke.

“Home knows?”

“Yes.”

She nodded and looked towards the passage.

“Then let's finish.”

We entered the lower chamber through a doorway made for people who had never expected to look their prisoner in the face.

The platform beyond it was high above her resting limbs.

I had seen the chamber before. I had felt its structures through the mountain. Neither prepared me for standing there with nothing between us but air.

She was immense.

Old plates overlapped along a body held inside grey supports. Some restraints had been driven through the plates themselves. Others enclosed joints in housings large enough to have served as rooms.

The machines around her were quieter now.

They still looked wrong.

Risa stopped beside the railing. Luna went very still. Sera gripped the strap of the bag she had forgotten to put down.

Dot moved to the edge and spoke aloud.

The queen turned towards us.

*My young?*

“Outside,” I said. “All thirty-one of yours. All the others too. With their attendants.”

*The humans?*

“All fifty-one.”

*The small metal people?*

“Free.”

I felt her attention move beyond us, searching the familiar empty spaces.

For the first time, their emptiness did not mean somebody had been taken away from her.

I changed the platform, making a broad stair that reached the floor beside her without touching her body.

Luna came down with me. Risa and Sera followed. Dot found the independent support controls and began comparing their readings with the ones we had recorded.

I stopped beside the nearest restraint.

“May I?”

The queen shifted her attention to the place where my hand hovered.

*Yes.*

I did not begin with the metal.

I began beneath it.

Living tissue that had been pressed and starved for years opened to a proper flow. The damaged silver paths separated from the forced connections threaded through them. I restored the support the joint should have had before the housing was built around it.

The queen drew a long, slow breath.

I waited until she told me to continue.

Then the first restraint came apart.

Its pieces settled onto the floor.

She moved the freed limb a little. Stopped. Moved it again.

Sera put down the bag at last.

Luna's hand rested against my back.

Risa looked from the broken housing to the queen, her expression fierce and bright.

There were many more restraints. There were deep injuries, and a chamber that would need to become a home again before we left it.

I could see how to do the work.

The queen lifted her freed limb clear of the floor.

For a moment she held it there, choosing where to put it.

Then she set it down beside us.

Day 580. Before the doors.

Mountain rescue begun. Both distant devices isolated by the queens who agreed to help. Remaining known coercion outputs stopped through the maintenance controls, with actual power loss confirmed. Central systems secured. Life support preserved.

All fifty-one human captives evacuated. All three kits free: Reed, Vell, and one who has not chosen a name. Eighty-six young and nineteen adult attendants aboard with them. No one killed during the operation. Injured captives treated, including the attendant who remained with the last three young.

Keir flying them to Scarecrow with Aster, Toby, Liam, and our queen's attendants. Arrival not yet confirmed when I wrote this. Home has the counts and is ready. New arrivals will be recorded when they reach it.

Luna, Risa, Sera, Dot, Corr, Ilse, and I remain at the mountain. Upper staff have an open external exit. Their weapons and the lower confinement systems are disabled. Records copied. Command responsibility still needs establishing.

Planetary queen's first joint restored and restraint removed with her consent. Continuing the repairs.

I watched her decide where to put her foot.

I don't think I will ever forget it.