Chapter 250 Ruan's Package

The shard came in a box of bandages.

Edda found it. Of course she did. Edda went through every crate of medical stock the supply drop brought down, item by item, with her green book open beside her, counting and checking and writing. She said the Project's packers couldn't count past ten and she'd stopped trusting their lists the first week.

On Day 744, in the third box of field dressings, under the sterile wrap, between the eighth roll and the ninth, she found something that wasn't a bandage.

A sliver of glass. Grey-blue. The length of her little finger. Flat, with a faint grid of lines etched inside it, so fine you could only see them when you tilted it to the light.

Edda looked at it for a long time.

Then she wrapped it in a clean dressing, put it in her apron pocket, and walked straight up the street to our house without stopping, which Wren said afterward was the fastest she'd ever seen Edda walk.

She put it on the kitchen table in front of Dot.

"That," she said, "is not a bandage."

Dot read it.

It took her an hour. The shard was a Project data format, old, the kind the station's medical office used for records, and Dot had to find the right slot in her casing and then the right way to read it and then the right way to unlock it, because it was locked.

The lock was a phrase.

Dot tried the obvious things first. Ruan's name. The station's name. The pilot's channel key. None of them worked.

Then Luna, at the end of the table, said, "Try hide what you can't afford to lose."

Dot tried it.

The shard opened.

It was a map.

The Meridian. All of it. Not the drawing Holt had made on the map-room table, the night the General first described it, with the crew ring and the cargo spine and the spine chamber at the centre behind three sealed doors. Not the shape Dot had pieced together from months of watching through her lenses.

The real thing.

Every deck. Every corridor. Every door, with its lock code beside it, in a small precise hand that wasn't the Project's printing but someone's own handwriting, scanned in. Every duct and conduit and cable run. The crew ring, with every cabin numbered and a count of how many people slept in each. Six hundred and four, in total, at the last roster.

The cargo spine, running down the centre like a backbone.

And at the heart of it, the spine chamber.

Dot put it on the wall. Big. The way she'd put up the Drop Day logs, and the feed, and the hole in the stars.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

The spine chamber was round.

Thirty meters across. Domed. And in the middle of it, filling most of it, curled round a central column like a cat round a stove—

Her.

Ruan hadn't drawn her. Ruan couldn't have. But she'd drawn the housings. Seven of them, round the queen's great body, like the seven housings round the column in the east. Each one with a channel running out of it. Into the walls. Into the station.

And beside each channel, in Ruan's small precise hand, a label.

Air.

Water.

Power, main ring.

Power, cargo spine.

Gravity.

Jump.

And the seventh.

Voice.

"Seven," said Holt, very quietly. "Seven channels. Seven things the station needs her for."

"Six," said Luna. "The station doesn't need the voice. The Sorn need the voice."

Holt looked at her.

"Six things the station needs to keep six hundred people alive," said Luna. "And one thing the Sorn need to drive broods across a continent." She looked at the map. "If we took the seventh, the station wouldn't notice."

"The Sorn would."

"The Sorn would," Luna agreed.

There was more.

Ruan had marked the wardens' quarters. Four of them, beside the spine chamber, the way the General had said. Each with a small grey square drawn in it, and a note.

Warden 1. Sorn. Shell. Has not left quarters in six years.

Warden 2. Sorn. Shell. Rotates to the Hand every forty days.

Warden 3. Sorn. Shell. Rotated in from the Hand eleven days ago. Younger.

Warden 4.

And beside the fourth, nothing. Just a line. And then, underneath, in the same small hand but pressed harder, as if she'd written it quickly:

Formerly the Overseer's. Empty since it went down to you.

And there were the docking rings.

Three of them, on the outer edge of the crew ring. Two were the ones Dot had seen: the main dock, where the courier shuttles came and went, and the cargo dock at the end of the spine, where the supply drops loaded and the grey tender had burned up toward the Hand.

The third was on the far side. Away from Avalon. Facing the sky.

Ruan had drawn it in red.

Sorn ring. Not on station plans. Not in station roster. Fitted during the eight years. Crew are told it is a maintenance port. It is not.

The Sorn use it to come and go without passing through the main ring. The tender docks here when it does not want to be seen.

The Hand's shuttles dock here.

If they bring anything up from Avalon they do not want the crew to know about, it goes through here.

Jessa, at the end of the table, made a sound.

She'd come with Juno. She'd been sitting very quietly, looking at the map. Now she had her hand pressed flat against her chest, over the path I'd opened, the one that reached up.

"That's where they took him," she said. "Marlo. A year ago. I felt him go up. Not round. Not along. Up. Through the station and out the other side." She touched the red ring on the wall. "There."

At the very bottom of the map, below the spine chamber, Ruan had written one more thing.

Not a label. A note. In the same small hand, but longer. The writing went slightly uphill, the way handwriting does when the person writing it is in a hurry and not sitting straight.

Dask.

The queen in the spine is alive. You know that. I didn't, until the night you touched her. The instruments showed it. Two things touching the core, one of them whole. The Overseer's office told us it was a calibration fault. I didn't believe them.

I've been to the chamber since. I'm not supposed to. I have a code that still works. I stood at the door and listened.

She sings. Under the voice. Every pass. Something with five notes. I don't know what it is.

I can't save her. I can't save the six hundred if anyone tries. I can't do anything except this.

If you go for her, go when the Sorn are looking somewhere else. And go knowing that six of those seven channels keep my people breathing.

Hide what you can't afford to lose.

R.

Luna drafted the plan that night.

She didn't do it alone. She'd learned that from the ring. She did it at the garden wall, with her notebook on her knee and Dot beside her translating and our queen's great head on the stones. And through our queen, the mountain queen. And through the mountain queen, all twenty-three.

It took until dawn.

I sat with her the whole time. So did Toby. So did Holt, for the first half, until Luna sent him to bed. Sera came at midnight with tea and sat down behind Luna and let Luna lean back against her, and stayed there, and every so often Luna would stop writing and tip her head back against Sera's shoulder and close her eyes for a moment, and Sera would put her chin on top of Luna's head and wait.

Risa was in the quiet room with Dory. She sent up a message with Dot at two in the morning, written on the back of one of Hana's envelopes.

Storm map says clear for three weeks. Then a front. Ask me nearer the time. — R.

Luna added it to the page.

By dawn, it was a plan.

Not finished. Luna said nothing was ever finished. But it had a shape.

The day the twins are on the ground.

That was the first line. Underlined twice. Before anything else. Before anyone went anywhere or did anything, Genny and Garnet had to be on the red-glass apron, off the transport, under the queens. Out of reach of the feed and the penthouse and the lens.

Then.

The queens sing.

All of them. All twenty-three. Not the hello. Not the voice. The hollow-song. From below. From every hollow on Avalon, at the same moment, up through the deep and the rock and the sky, to the spine-queen in her chamber. The way Pebble had sung it at the bottom of our porch steps while our queen was growing. The way the young had sung it in the dusk for Sesh's sliver.

Here. I'm here.

So that, for once, when she sang it under the voice, someone would sing it back. Loud enough to be heard over everything.

Toby carries the note.

The counter-note. The one he'd held over the old queen's valley and in the dead plain in the east. But not to cancel. To carry. To take the hollow-song from twenty-three queens and hold it steady, the way the bowl had held his note, so it reached all the way up.

And then:

Lucas goes up.

"How?" I said.

Luna looked at me.

"I don't know yet," she said. "The transport can't reach orbit. We don't have anything that can. But Ruan's ring—" She touched the red mark on the map. "The Sorn ring. The Hand's shuttles dock there. The tender docks there. Things come down to Avalon from there that the crew don't know about." She looked at me. "Things go up."

"You want me to ride a Sorn shuttle into the Meridian."

"I want you to find a way to be in that chamber," said Luna, "when twenty-three queens are singing to her from below, and Toby's carrying it, and the Sorn are looking somewhere else." She closed the notebook. "How you get there is the part I haven't written yet."

"And when I get there?"

Luna was quiet for a moment.

"Seven channels," she said. "Six keep six hundred people alive. One drives broods." She looked at me. "You can make anything, Lucas. Iron, copper, tungsten. The grey, now, Holt says. You told me you could." She held my eyes. "Could you make six things that do what she does? Air. Water. Power. Gravity. Jump. Make them, and put them in, and take her out, one channel at a time?"

I didn't answer.

I thought about it.

Air was easy. Water was easy. I'd built air plants and cisterns for a whole city. Power was harder, but not impossible; I'd built the forge, the tower, the lamps. Gravity, I didn't know. I'd never tried.

Jump, I didn't understand at all.

"Not jump," I said. "Not yet. I don't know how it works."

"Then the station doesn't jump," said Luna. "For a while. It stays in orbit round Avalon. That's fine. That's where it is now." She opened the notebook again and wrote something. "Five channels. Air, water, two kinds of power, gravity. And the voice. Which you don't replace."

"And then she's free."

"And then she's free," said Luna. "And the station keeps breathing. And six hundred people never know how close it came."

The queen spoke then.

Not to Luna. To me.

You will not be able to carry her, she said. Not down. She is too large. Larger than I am now. Larger than the old one.

I hadn't thought of that.

But you will not need to, said the queen. If her channels are closed, if the voice is gone, if she can hear us singing, she will not need to be carried.

What will she do?

The queen was quiet for a moment.

What do you do, she said, when someone has held you still for a very long time, and then lets go?

I didn't answer.

You stretch, said the queen.

Hana's answer came that afternoon.

In a courier case. Not numbers. Pencil, on station paper, the lines going up and down, words rubbed out and rewritten. Shorter than the first letter. Much shorter.

Lucas.

Yes.

I want it. The finishing. I thought about it for six days. I asked my father. He said: you have carried enough for other people. Carry this one for yourself.

So yes.

Miss Pell says the twins are coming to you. On the transport. In fourteen days. She says they will need someone with them who is not a guard and not a teacher. Someone who carries things.

She asked the General. The General asked someone. I do not know who.

I am coming with the twins.

Tell Risa I am bringing the horse books.

Hana.

P.S. I wrote spoon three times in this letter and did not say moon once. I checked.

Risa read it on the porch.

Once. Then she put it down on her knee, and put her hand over her mouth, and looked at the garden for a long time.

Then she picked Dory up out of the basket and held her up so they were face to face.

"Hana's coming," she said. "With your aunts. In fourteen days. She's bringing the horse books."

Dory looked at her.

"Mama," said Dory, helpfully.

Risa laughed. It cracked in the middle.

"Yes," she said. "Mama. And Hana. And Genny, and Garnet. And Miss Pell." She held Dory close. "Everyone's coming."

Sera, on the step, reached up and took Risa's free hand. Luna, in the doorway, had stopped writing and was watching them, with her pen in one hand and her notebook against her chest.

"Fourteen days," Luna said quietly.

"Fourteen days," said Sera.

"And the queens sing," said Luna. "The day they land."

Nobody said anything.

Then Risa looked up at me, over Dory's head.

"And you go up," she said.

"Yes."

Risa looked at me for a long time.

"Then you come back down," she said. "Before Hana finishes the first horse book. That's the rule."

"That's a very short time."

"They're very short books," said Risa.

That night I went to the edge of the square.

Sesh was there. The way she was every dusk. Standing at the edge of the perimeter, her neck bent, her beak pointed at the passage where the young sat in their row.

Toby was playing.

I stood a few yards away, on our side of the line.

Her eye swivelled to me.

And I looked at the sliver in her collar. Still humming. Five notes. In time with the young.

Here. I'm here.

And I thought about the spine-queen, in her chamber, in the sky. Singing the same five notes under the voice, every pass, for eight years. To anyone who could hear.

And about Ruan, standing at the chamber door with a code that still worked, listening, not knowing what it was.

And about twenty-three queens on Avalon. And the old one on the mountain, with a piece of herself back after four hundred years. And the delta queen, with a fragment that was no one's laid among her eggs.

And about ten Kethri soldiers in a compound across the street, with ten pieces of nine queens from a world that had none left.

Fourteen days.

Sesh clicked.

Very soft. Under the music. Dot wasn't there to translate.

But I'd heard it enough times now, from the recordings in the listening room, that I knew it.

A click. A long low whistle.

Here.

I didn't have the clicks. My mouth couldn't make them.

But I said it anyway. Quietly. In my own voice.

"Here," I said.

Sesh's eye stayed on me for a long moment.

Then swivelled back to the young.

But she didn't move away. Not until the last of the young had gone back down into the dark.

Luna took the map to Crane in the morning.

Not the whole thing. One page. The red ring on the far side of the station, with Ruan's note beside it. She held it out to him on his bench, with the band dark, and didn't say anything.

Crane looked at it for a long time.

Then he looked up at the guest house window. Empty. It had been empty a great deal since the garrison came. Wren said the mirror spent most of its time now in the middle of the room, the way it had after the courts. Not at the window. Not watching.

"The warden rotation," Crane said quietly. "Warden two. Every forty days, to the Hand and back." He touched the page, just beside the red ring. "The tender takes it up through there. And brings the new one down."

"When's the next one?" said Luna.

Crane closed his eyes.

I watched him count. His lips moved, the way Luna's did. The way Jessa's had, reading my list of elements on the screen.

"Day 759," he said.

Luna went very still.

"The transport," she said. "The twins. The garrison said twenty-six days, on Day 733."

"Day 759," said Crane.

Nobody said anything.

"The whole of the Hand," Crane said, "will be watching the apron that day. Watching your sisters come down. Watching what the asset does when he sees them. That's what the offer's for." He opened his eyes. "And on the same day, the tender goes up through the Sorn ring with a warden in it. And comes back down with another."

"Empty," said Luna slowly. "Going down. Except for one warden."

"Except for one warden," said Crane.

He looked at me.

The band on his collar was dark. His hands, on his knees, were perfectly steady.

"I didn't tell you that," he said.

"No," said Luna. "You didn't."

She folded the page and put it inside her coat.

I went to the garden wall at noon and asked about gravity.

The queen listened. Then she was quiet for a long time, the way she was when she was talking to the old one on the mountain.

She says you are asking the right question, the queen said at last. And at the wrong time.

I know. She said when the mirror has gone.

The mirror has not gone, said the queen. But she says time has. Fourteen days. A pause. She says gravity is not made. It is folded. Like the grey. Like the shells. Like the elements, which you have changed without climbing since the ice. Another pause. She says the spine-queen does not make the station's weight. She folds the station's place in the world, a little, so that it leans toward its own floor.

I didn't understand that at all. Matter I could read and change without limit; I'd been able to since the queen gave me her silver in the snow. But weight wasn't matter. Weight was where a thing sat in the world.

She says you will not understand it, said the queen, by being told. Only by being shown. Her plates shifted on the stones. She will show you. Tonight. And every night, for fourteen nights. Through me.

On her terrace?

In your sleep, said the queen. The way she taught me to grow. She says matter you already fold as easily as breathing; my silver gave you that. Weight is the same rope, tied a different way. Now she will show you how to tie it.

I sat with my back against the wall for a long time after that.

Not alone, the mountain queen had said, months ago. And not yet.

It wasn't yet.

But it wasn't alone either.

Sera asked me to look that night.

We were in bed. Luna asleep on the far side, curled toward the wall. Risa down in the quiet room with Dory. The lamp out. Sera on her back with my hand on her stomach, the way she put it there most nights now, not saying anything, just holding it there.

"Look," she said. "I'm asking."

I looked.

Eleven weeks. A shape now. A real one. Head and body and the beginnings of arms. A heartbeat, very fast, like a bird's. And the thread of silver in the middle, whole, turning toward my hand.

I see you.

But something else, tonight.

Not the turning. The thread had done that every night for weeks. Something new.

It was humming.

Very faintly. So faintly I almost missed it. Not five notes. Not the hollow-song. Not anything I knew.

One note. Low. Steady.

Over and over.

"What?" said Sera, feeling me go still.

"It's humming."

"It can't hum. It hasn't got a mouth."

"Its silver's humming." I listened. "One note. Low."

Sera was quiet for a moment.

"Toby," she said. "That's Toby's note. The counter-note. He's been playing it every night at the square for Sesh. And in the forge, tuning stones." She put her hand over mine. "It's been listening."

I listened again.

She was right.

Somewhere inside Sera, eleven weeks old and smaller than my thumb, a thread of whole silver was humming the note that cancelled the voice from the sky.

Sera started laughing. Quietly, so as not to wake Luna.

"Of course it is," she said. "Of course it is. Dory got the hollow-song. This one gets the fight."

Luna, on the far side of the bed, said without opening her eyes, "Some of us are trying to sleep."

"Sorry," said Sera, not sounding sorry at all, and reached over me to put her hand on Luna's hip. Luna made a small sound and settled back against it.

I lay in the dark with one hand on Sera's stomach and the other under my head, and listened to my second child hum the note that would carry twenty-three queens' song up to the sky.

And I slept.

And in my sleep, the old one on the mountain began to show me how to tie the rope.

Days 744–745. Ruan's package.

Edda found a grey-blue shard between the eighth and ninth rolls of field dressing and walked to our house faster than Wren has ever seen her walk. "That is not a bandage." Locked. Luna: try "hide what you can't afford to lose." It opened.

Ruan's map of the Meridian, in her own hand. Every deck, corridor, door and lock code. Six hundred and four crew. The spine chamber: round, thirty meters, domed. Seven housings round the queen, each with a channel: air, water, power for the main ring, power for the cargo spine, gravity, jump. And the seventh: voice. Luna: six keep six hundred alive; the seventh only the Sorn need.

Four wardens' quarters. One hasn't left in six years. One rotates to the Hand every forty days. One came in eleven days ago, younger. The fourth: formerly the Overseer's, empty since it came down to us.

Three docking rings. The third, on the far side facing the sky, in red: not on station plans. Crew told it's a maintenance port. The Sorn come and go there unseen; the Hand's shuttles dock there. Jessa, hand on her chest: that's where they took Marlo. Up, through the station and out the other side.

Ruan's note: the instruments showed two things touching the core, one whole, and the Overseer's office called it calibration. She has a code that still works. She stood at the chamber door and listened. She sings, five notes, under the voice. Ruan can't save her or the six hundred if anyone tries. If you go, go when the Sorn are looking somewhere else, knowing six of seven channels keep her people breathing.

Luna drafted the plan at the garden wall with all twenty-three queens until dawn. Sera behind her; Luna tipping her head back on Sera's shoulder to rest. Risa sent up a note on the back of Hana's envelope: storm map clear three weeks, then a front.

The day the twins are on the ground, underlined twice. Then the queens sing the hollow-song from every hollow on Avalon at once, up to the spine-queen, so someone finally sings it back. Toby carries it, not to cancel but to hold it steady all the way up. Lucas goes up. How, she hasn't written yet. The Sorn ring: things go up from there.

Could I make six things that do what she does and take her out one channel at a time? Air, water, power: yes. Gravity: I've never tried. Jump: I don't understand. Then the station doesn't jump for a while. Five channels, and the voice, which I don't replace. The queen: I won't be able to carry her; she's too large. I won't need to. "What do you do when someone has held you still a very long time and then lets go? You stretch."

Hana: yes. She thought six days. Her father: you've carried enough for other people, carry this one for yourself. Miss Pell says the twins need someone who isn't a guard or a teacher. Someone who carries things. The General asked someone. Hana is coming with the twins, in fourteen days. She's bringing the horse books. P.S. Spoon three times, moon not once. She checked.

Risa held Dory up: Hana's coming, with your aunts. Dory: "Mama." Then Risa to me: then you come back down, before Hana finishes the first horse book. That's the rule. "That's a very short time." "They're very short books."

Crane, looking at the red ring: warden two rotates every forty days. The tender takes it up through the Sorn ring and brings the new one down. Next rotation: Day 759. The same day as the transport. The whole of the Hand will be watching the apron. And the tender comes back down empty except for one warden. "I didn't tell you that." "No. You didn't."

The mountain queen, through ours: right question, wrong time, but time has gone. Gravity isn't made, it's folded. The spine-queen folds the station's place in the world so it leans toward its own floor. I won't understand by being told, only by being shown. Tonight and every night for fourteen nights, in my sleep, the way she taught ours to grow. Matter I already fold; weight is the same rope tied a different way, and she'll show me how to tie it. Not yet. But not alone.

Sera, eleven weeks: a shape now, a heartbeat like a bird's. Tonight the thread was humming. One low note, steady. Toby's counter-note; it's been listening. "Dory got the hollow-song. This one gets the fight." Luna: "Some of us are trying to sleep." Sera put her hand on Luna's hip and she settled.

Sesh at the square. She clicked: here. I can't make the clicks. I said it anyway, in my own voice. She didn't move away.

Fourteen days.