Chapter 230 Forty Pods

Bryn Tolley had kept a name strip.

She gave it to me on the second morning, in the medical building, while Priya was cleaning a two-year-old burn on her forearm that had healed badly and Edda was frowning at her teeth. She'd been carrying it in the lining of her boot. She took the boot off, worked her fingers into a slit along the seam, and drew it out, and put it in my hand without a word.

It was a strip of grey fabric, about the length of my finger. Stiff with old dirt. The kind that was stitched over the breast pocket of every flight suit in the dome.

Black letters, stencilled.

ARDEN, P. — SQ 5.

I stood there with it in my hand and didn't say anything for a long time.

"You know him," Bryn said.

"I knew him."

"We found his pod," Bryn said. "On the walk. After we went the wrong way at the river. Two days south of the crossing, in a gully full of red thorn. It was the only human thing we saw for a month." She looked at the strip in my hand. "It was empty. We thought he'd walked out. We looked for tracks. There weren't any. So we thought maybe something took him. One of the Teeming." Her mouth tightened. "But there weren't any Teeming tracks either."

"What was there?"

Bryn looked at me for a long moment.

"Burn marks," she said. "On the ground. In a ring. Like something big had landed and taken off again." She paused. "And the hatch was open from the outside. Somebody'd cut the seal. Clean. The way you'd do it with a tool. Not the way you'd do it if you were inside and scared."

Pim Arden.

I'd known him the way you know everyone in a cohort of forty. Not well. He was Squad Five's leader. Okafor had named him in the same breath as Luna, the day the squad leaders were announced, and he'd nodded at us across the briefing hall as if to say well, here we are. He'd been tall and serious and very good at knots. Liam had called him the Scoutmaster, and Pim had laughed, which was more than most people did when Liam named them.

He'd sat four pods down from mine on the ring.

I hadn't thought about him in months.

That was the thing that sat in my chest like a stone, standing in the medical building with his name strip in my hand. Not that he'd gone. People had gone. The north wall was covered in people who'd gone. It was that I hadn't thought about him in months. That somewhere in the long blur of the canyon and the Teeming and the city and the station and Dory, I'd stopped counting.

Forty pods.

How many of them had I stopped counting?

Wren had a list.

Of course she did. She'd had it since the first month, when Dot logged the names of everyone I could remember and Wren copied them out by hand because she said a machine's memory wasn't the same as a person's. She'd kept it ever since. In the back of the same book she used for the north wall. Forty names in a column, in her square careful hand, with a line after each one for what had happened.

She brought it to the map room that evening and laid it on Holt's table.

Squad Eight was at the bottom. Dask. Windsor. Calder, L. Calder, S. And Toby. All five of us, with Scarecrow written after each name, and the day we'd arrived.

Squad Two, above us. Friese, S. Friese, R. Scarecrow. Haddon, B., and beside it a small cross and the word jungle.

And above that, the rest.

I read down the column.

Some of them had Scarecrow after them. Corr. Tamsin Hale. Ilse Brandt. Ade. Others who'd come in with Sigmund, or walked in over the first year, or been found by the search parties. Some had a cross. The ones we'd buried, or found, or seen. The ones whose names were on the wall.

And some had nothing.

Just a line. Blank. Waiting.

I counted.

Fourteen of us were in Scarecrow.

Eleven had a cross.

Fifteen had nothing.

"Fifteen," I said.

"Fifteen," Wren said. "Never found. Never confirmed. I've kept the lines open." She put her finger on the first blank one. "I didn't know what else to do."

They came, one by one, as the word went round.

Not because anybody sent for them. Because that's how Scarecrow was. Someone said a thing in the kitchen, and by supper everyone knew. Liam came first, with Sera behind him. Then Luna, from the house, leaving Risa asleep with Dory. Then Sigmund, who stood at the end of the table and read his own squad's names without expression, and stopped at Haddon and stayed there.

Then Corr, and Tamsin, and Ilse.

Then, last, the person I'd been half-expecting and half-dreading.

Harrow Dane.

He stopped in the doorway. He'd been back in Scarecrow for weeks now, since the relay basin, since the transfer camp and the long flight home. He helped with the count boards. He worked in the yard with Gareth. He didn't talk much, and he didn't come to the map room, ever, because Keir was usually there.

Keir was there now.

He was standing by the window with his arms folded. He looked at Dane. Dane looked at the floor.

"I heard," Dane said. "About Arden. The name strip." He swallowed. "I might know something."

The room went very quiet.

"Come in," said Holt.

Dane didn't sit down.

He stood at the end of the table, by Wren's list, with his hands at his sides. He was thinner than he'd been at his gate. Quieter. The proud, well-supplied cadet who'd asked about processing capacity and refined stock had gone somewhere, and I didn't know if he was coming back.

"When I was running my base," he said, "before. When I had the carrier and the supplies and the deliveries. You remember."

"We remember," said Keir.

Dane flinched.

"The deliveries came with paperwork," he said. "Route sheets. Manifests. Station procurement, it always said. No names. Just codes." He looked at the list. "There was a code on the sheets for where things went. Destination code. The same one that was on the containers. The one Luna found at my gate."

"The receiving code," said Luna.

"Yes." Dane's jaw was tight. "There was another code. On some of the sheets. Not many. I only saw it three or four times. It was a different kind of line. Not cargo. It had a person-mark on it. The little figure, like on the evacuation boards." He drew it in the air with one finger. A circle. A line. "Person. Then a number. Then the receiving code."

Nobody moved.

"I asked about it once," Dane said. "On the channel. Station procurement. I asked what the person lines were." He looked at Keir. Then away. "They said it was recovery. Pod recovery. That some cadets had landed in bad terrain and been picked up by the station's search shuttles and taken somewhere safe." He swallowed. "They said I should be glad. That it meant Command was looking after us. And I was. I was glad." His voice cracked. "I thought it meant someone was coming for me, if I needed it."

"How many person lines?" said Luna.

"I don't know. Three or four sheets. Some of them had two lines. One had three."

"Names?"

"No names. Numbers." Dane closed his eyes. "Pod numbers. I think they were pod numbers. Two digits. I remember one. Because it was the same as my birthday." He opened his eyes. "Fourteen."

Wren's finger moved down the list.

Stopped.

Wren had written the pod numbers in, too, beside each name. The ones Dot had been able to log on Drop Day.

Arden, P. SQ 5. Pod 14.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Keir said, from the window, very quietly, "You never told me."

Dane didn't look at him.

"I didn't think it mattered," he said. "Not until the relay basin. Not until I saw what receiving meant." He was still looking at the floor. "And then I didn't know how."

Keir stood there.

I'd seen Keir angry. I'd seen him cold and silent and gone. I'd seen him fly eight hours with his face grey and his hands steady. I'd never seen him look the way he looked now, standing by the window in Holt's map room, looking at the boy he'd shared a base with for a year.

"You were in the same room as me," Keir said. "At the relay basin. They locked me in with Aster. They took you on with the eleven. And you knew. You'd seen the code. You knew what a person line was."

"I didn't know," Dane said. "I didn't know until I was standing in it."

Keir's jaw moved.

Then he turned and walked out.

Dane stood very still at the end of the table.

After a moment Sera got up and went after Keir. Nobody stopped her. Nobody stopped Dane either, when he sat down, very suddenly, on the bench by the wall, and put his face in his hands.

Holt let him sit.

Then he said, quite gently for Holt, "That's one."

Dot was the second.

She'd been at the door the whole time, listening. She rolled in when Holt called her, scraping her lamps on the frame, and stopped beside the table.

"This unit has the Drop Day logs," she said. "This unit has always had them. No one has asked for them in a long time."

"Show us," said Luna.

Dot projected them on the wall.

It was the first night on Avalon. Day 297. The pod ring had opened over the planet nine hours after we arrived, and the pods had gone down one by one, and each one had carried a beacon. A small automatic signal, so Command could find us. So Dot, waking up in the red glass under a green sky, could find me.

Forty dots on a map.

They scattered across the whole of Avalon, wider than the briefing had said. North into the white mountains. South past the river. East into the jungle. West to the ice. Forty small lights, blinking, all at once.

"Every pod beacon transmits until the pod is opened from inside," Dot said. "Then the cadet switches it off, or it switches itself off after seventy-two hours to save power. This unit logged every one."

She ran the log forward.

The lights began to go out. One. Two. Five. A slow scatter of dark, across the first three days. My own, in the canyon, early on Day 298. Luna's in the ice. Liam's, Sera's, Toby's.

"Thirty-one beacons stopped in the normal way," Dot said. "Opened from inside, or timed out. The pattern is irregular. As you would expect."

"And the other nine?" said Luna.

Dot's lamps went very low.

"The other nine did not stop in the normal way," she said.

She ran it again. Slower. And this time she marked them. Nine lights, scattered across the south and the far east. Pod 14, in the thorn gully two days south of the river. Pod 22, in the forest past Lantern. Pod 31, in the deep east, past the jungle where Sigmund had held his wall. Others.

They went out on Days 300 and 301.

Not all at once. One at a time. Each one about four hours after the last.

In a line.

"This unit noticed at the time," Dot said quietly. "This unit flagged it to Command. Command replied that the pods in question had been recovered by orbital search and rescue, and that this unit was not to concern itself with them." A pause. "This unit did not concern itself with them. This unit was a new unit. This unit did what it was told."

Nobody said anything.

"This unit is sorry," said Dot.

"You were three days old," I said.

"This unit was three days old," Dot agreed. "This unit is not three days old now."

Nine.

Nine pods, on a line across the south and east, switched off one after another, four hours apart, on the third and fourth days. Recovered by orbital search and rescue.

Wren went through the list with Dot. Matching pod numbers to names. Matching names to the fifteen blank lines.

All nine were blank.

Arden. Pod 14. Squad Five.

Kemi Ade's brother, Tobias Ade, who'd been in Squad Six and whose pod had come down past the forest, and whom Kemi had never once stopped looking for. She'd been in the map room the whole time. She sat down very slowly on the floor when Wren said his name.

Lise Varga, Squad Three, who'd shared Hana's dormitory and had cried at the assembly when Crane said acceptable attrition.

Marlo and Jessa Quint, twins, Squad Four, who'd asked to be put in pods side by side and been refused.

Four more. Names I knew. Faces I'd half forgotten.

"That leaves six," said Luna, looking at the list. "Six blank lines that aren't on the line."

"Six we know nothing about," Wren said.

"No," said Luna. "Six that died, or are still out there on their own, or that Dot couldn't see. But nine that someone took." She looked up. "Those aren't the same thing. They were never the same thing. We've been carrying fifteen as lost. Nine of them were collected."

"Collected," Sera said, from the doorway. She'd come back. Her face was set. "Like Dane's eleven."

"Like Dane's eleven," Luna said. "And Arden's pod had its seal cut from outside, and there was a ring of burn marks in the gully. And Dane saw person lines on route sheets with the receiving code." She put her hand flat on the list. "They didn't land in bad terrain. They landed where somebody wanted them to land."

"Why?" said Liam.

It was the first thing he'd said all evening. He'd been sitting on the bench by the wall with his elbows on his knees, very quiet. Liam was never quiet.

"Why those nine?" he said. "Why not me? I landed in a bog with half a kit and a broken leg. I'd have been very easy to collect." He looked at the list. "Why Pim? Why the Quints? What's special about them?"

Nobody answered.

Then Risa spoke from the doorway.

I hadn't heard her come. She was standing there in her coat with Dory asleep against her chest in the sling Sera had made, one hand under her, and her face was very pale.

"Their silver," she said.

We all turned.

"Holt told me once," Risa said. "About the first wave. The modification. How it was different in different people. How some of them burned out and some of them didn't." She looked at the list. "I knew Lise Varga. A little. In the dome. She did something with water, like Hana, but not the same. And the Quints were the ones Halloway kept taking blood from. Do you remember? They were always in the medical wing. Twice a week. Nobody knew why." She looked at me. "What if they were the ones whose silver was closest? To finishing. To being whole. On its own."

Nobody said anything.

"Article Fourteen," Luna said very quietly. "Complete integration, whether arising naturally."

"Naturally," Risa said. "Yes."

"So they were picked." Sera's voice was flat. "Before we even landed. Somebody looked at the blood work and said, those nine. And dropped their pods where nobody would see the shuttle come down."

"Before Lucas," said Holt.

We all looked at him.

"Before Lucas finished anyone," Holt said. "Before he finished himself. Before the queen told him how." He looked at the list for a long time. "They weren't waiting to see what Dask could do. They already had a plan. They were already collecting. Dask was just the one they couldn't drop where they wanted, because they needed his kit to build something first." His mouth twisted. "Priority one. That's what it said on the pod ring. I saw the photographs. Priority One, Dask L. We all thought it meant important." He shook his head. "It meant last."

Luna stayed after the others had gone.

I found her still at Holt's table at midnight, with the page of numbers in front of her and her pen in her hand, writing columns.

"There's no case to send it in," I said.

"Not tonight." She didn't look up. "There will be. Or there won't, and I'll find another way. But when there is, I want it ready."

I sat down across from her.

She was encoding the nine names. One at a time. Pod number, name, squad, the day the beacon went out. Then Dane's person lines. Then the receiving code. Then three words at the bottom that she'd underlined twice before she turned them into numbers.

I could read it upside down. I'd learned that from her.

Who signed these?

"He'll know where to look," Luna said. "If anyone in his office stamped a recovery order on Day 300, there's a record. There's always a record. Command never does anything without a form." Her pen moved steadily. "And if it was his seal on it, he'll want to know that too."

"Will he?"

Luna stopped writing.

"Yes," she said. "He'll hate it. But he'll want to know." She looked up at me. "That's the difference, now. Six weeks ago he wouldn't have."

She went back to the numbers.

Sera came in a little after one. Alone. She sat down beside Luna and put her head on the table.

"Keir?" I said.

"On the apron," Sera said into the wood. "In the transport. Sitting in the pilot's seat with the engines off." She turned her head. "He said Dane used to sit in the second seat. On the old carrier. Before. He said they used to fly the perimeter at dusk just to see the light on the ridges." A long breath. "He said he's not angry that Dane didn't know. He's angry that he didn't ask."

"Is that fair?"

"No," said Sera. "But it's true. Those aren't the same thing either."

Luna wrote the last number and folded the page.

I didn't sleep.

I went home after the map room and sat on the top step of the garden stairs, the way I'd sat the night before Dory was born, and looked at the dark.

Nine of us.

Taken on the third day. Before any of us had found each other. Before I'd built the tower or the city. Before the Teeming came over the canyon rim. While I was still sitting in the red glass with Dot, feeding her a cliff and being ashamed of being happy.

Somewhere, all this time.

Two years.

I'd built a city and found a family and finished thirty-four people and stood under a voice from orbit and had a daughter. And Pim Arden had been somewhere. Lise. The Quints. Tobias Ade.

Somewhere.

Doing what?

Juno found me there an hour before dawn.

She didn't sit down. She stood at the bottom of the steps with her arms wrapped round herself and her head turned east. Not quite east. North of east. The way a compass needle sits when it's found something and doesn't want to lose it.

"I've been trying," she said. "All night. Since Wren read the names."

"Trying what?"

"To feel them." Her voice was very quiet. "I can feel every person on Avalon with silver in them. Since you finished me. All of them. Every one in Scarecrow. The old first-wave pattern in Holt. The third wave. The thirty-four from the sinkhole. Bryn's six." She swallowed. "I know what cadet silver feels like. Our cohort's. The second modification. I've got fourteen of you round me every day."

"And?"

"And I went looking," Juno said, "for more."

I stood up.

"I didn't find nine," Juno said quickly. "I want to say that first. I didn't find nine." She closed her eyes. "But there's something. A long way. East. Past the jungle. Past where Sigmund held his wall. Past anywhere the queens have ever been. There's a place where there's no brood. None. A dead space, a big one, where nothing lives. And in the middle of it."

She stopped.

"What, Juno?"

"Three," she said.

Her eyes opened. They were wet.

"Three cadet silvers," she said. "In the middle of nothing. Very faint. Like they're behind a wall. Like the quiet room. Like someone built something round them to keep the noise out." Her voice shook. "Or keep them in."

"Alive?"

"Alive," Juno said. "I think. They're not moving. They're not facing anywhere. They're just" She searched for the word. "Held."

Below the garden, in the quiet room, Dory woke.

I felt her come up. Bright and quick, the way she always did. Her check went round. Me, on the step. Juno, at the bottom of it. Risa, beside her. Sera and Luna in the house. The queen at the wall. Pebble.

And then she did what she'd done for the old queen past the river.

She followed the thing I was thinking about.

East. Past the jungle. Past where Sigmund had held his wall. Further than the old queen. Further than anything.

To a dead space where nothing lived.

To three faint lights behind a wall.

I felt her reach it. I felt her touch the wall, gently, the way she'd touched the old queen through the noise. There you are.

And I felt the wall touch her back.

Cold. Patient. The same cold I'd felt at the end of the hello, in the spine chamber, beside the sleeping queen. The same thing that had taken hold of the rope and looked down along it at the city.

Dory pulled back.

She didn't scream, this time. She didn't thrash. She came back very fast, and very quiet, and curled up small and tight against Risa's chest. And her silver went round on its check again, fast, faster than it had ever gone. Me. Risa. Sera. Luna. Juno. Everyone. Everyone. Everyone.

Everyone home?

Everyone home, I told her.

But I was looking east.

At the dawn count, Wren brought her book to the red glass.

She didn't usually. The count was Dot's. But this morning she stood beside Dot with the book open at the back, at the column of forty names, and when Dot finished the hello and the thirty-one and said All names, Wren said, "Not yet."

Everyone turned.

Wren read them out.

Nine names. Arden, Pim. Ade, Tobias. Varga, Lise. Quint, Marlo. Quint, Jessa. And four more. Slowly. Clearly. In her flat careful voice that carried all the way to the north wall.

Then she said, "Taken. Not lost."

And wrote it in the book beside each one.

Then she read the other six, the six we knew nothing about. And wrote beside them: Still looking.

Then she closed the book.

Nobody said All names.

Not that morning.

But Kemi Ade, standing at the edge of the red glass with her brother's name in her mouth, said quietly, "Not yet," the way Wren had said it.

And then somebody else said it.

And then the whole city.

Not yet.

At the very back, by the north wall, Harrow Dane said it too. Quietly. With his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground.

Keir, on the far side of the red glass, heard him. I saw his head turn, very slightly.

He didn't look round.

But he didn't walk away, either.

Days 635–637. Forty pods.

Bryn kept a name strip in her boot lining: ARDEN, P. — SQ 5. They found his pod two days south of the river, empty. No tracks, human or Teeming. A ring of burn marks. The seal cut clean from outside. Pim was four pods down from mine on the ring. I hadn't thought about him in months.

Wren's list of the forty, kept since the first month. Fourteen of us in Scarecrow. Eleven with a cross. Fifteen blank. She kept the lines open because she didn't know what else to do.

Dane came to the map room for the first time. His old route sheets from "station procurement" had person lines: a figure, a number, the receiving code. They told him it was pod recovery and he should be glad. He remembers one number, because it's his birthday: fourteen. Arden's pod. Keir: "You never told me." He walked out. Sera went after him. Holt: "That's one."

Dot has the Drop Day logs: forty beacons. Thirty-one stopped normally. Nine went out on Days 300 and 301, one at a time, about four hours apart, in a line across the south and east. Dot flagged it then. Command said they had been recovered by orbital search and rescue and she wasn't to concern herself. She was three days old. She says she is not three days old now.

All nine were blank lines. Arden. Tobias Ade (Kemi sat down on the floor). Lise Varga. Marlo and Jessa Quint, who asked to be put in pods side by side and were refused. Four more.

Luna: we've been carrying fifteen as lost. Nine were collected. They didn't land in bad terrain. They landed where somebody wanted them to.

Liam: why those nine? Risa: their silver. The Quints were always in the medical wing. What if they were closest to whole on their own? Luna: Article Fourteen, "arising naturally." Holt: they were collecting before I finished anyone. Priority One, Dask L. We thought it meant important. It meant last.

Luna encoded all of it for her father, though no case is coming: nine names, Dane's person lines, the receiving code, and "Who signed these?" Sera found Keir in the transport's pilot seat. He isn't angry that Dane didn't know. He's angry he didn't ask.

Juno, an hour before dawn: she went looking for cadet silver. Not nine. But east, past the jungle and past anywhere the queens have been, there's a dead space with no brood. In the middle of it, three cadet silvers. Faint. Behind a wall. Not moving. Held.

Dory followed my thinking there and touched the wall. It touched her back. The same cold as the spine chamber. She came home fast and quiet and checked everyone, again and again.

At the dawn count, Wren read the nine aloud: "Taken. Not lost." And the six: "Still looking." Nobody said "All names." Kemi said "Not yet." Then the whole city did.

Three, held, in the east.

Not yet.