Chapter 255 Stretch

I didn't know how fast I was going.

There were no windows. I didn't need them. The grey round me was as clear to my sight as glass, and I watched the city fall away through it. The roofs. The square. Father's house, with two small figures on the porch. The garden wall, and our queen at her full height. All of it shrinking under me, while I held the fold, the way the egg sat in the world, asked to lean the other way.

So it leaned.

And it kept leaning. Every second, a little further. The way a stone falls faster the longer it falls, except up. I felt the shield go past, a faint shiver in the grey. I felt the sky thin. I felt Avalon fall away under me, the city, the canyon, the deep, the courts, the garden wall where our queen stood at her full height singing.

I felt the song.

That was how I steered, once Avalon was too far below to see and the station still too far above. Not by sight. By the song. Twenty-three queens singing five notes up into the sky, and Toby's note under them, carrying, steady, not changing. A long bright rope of sound from the ground to the station.

I followed it up.

Hand over hand. The way I'd followed the hello, the morning Toby held my wrist.

And at the top of it, waiting—

Her.

She'd heard.

I felt it before I reached the station. Before it was close enough to see. The spine-queen, in her chamber, in her housings, with her silver drawn down through seven narrow channels.

She was singing louder.

Not much. She couldn't. The voice was still going through her, move north together, pushed down through the seventh channel toward the broods on the far side of the world. And the six other channels were still drawing on her, every second, the way they had for eight years. Air. Water. Power. Gravity. Jump.

But under all of it, she was singing louder.

Because for the first time in eight years, someone was singing back.

The station came at me out of the dark.

A spark first. Then a shape. Then, as it came within reach of my sight, all of it at once, through the grey of the egg and the ordinary metal of the hull: six hundred and four people, in their cabins and corridors, and the decks round them, and the great pale curled shape at the centre that was keeping all of them alive.

And on the far side, facing away from Avalon, toward the sky, the Sorn ring.

Open.

I could feel the tender docked there. Long and grey, the grey I could read now. A warden coming down from the Hand. A warden going up. The ring's inner door sealed and its outer door wide, the way Ruan's map had shown, while the two shells passed each other in the dark.

Eleven minutes.

Nine, now.

I leaned the egg toward the open door.

It was easier than I'd thought.

That frightened me, afterward. How easy. The tender was docked to one side of the ring, its hatch connected to the station's inner door. The other side of the ring was empty. A grey mouth, open to the stars. Nobody watching it. Why would they? Nothing could come up from Avalon without a burn the station's instruments would see.

Nothing except a grey egg with no engine, leaning.

I slid in.

Through the open door. Into the ring. Into the dark beside the tender's hull.

And stopped.

And waited.

The inner door opened eleven seconds later.

I felt it. Felt the air move. Felt two shapes in the passage between the tender and the station, passing each other. One going up into the tender. One coming down out of it.

Both grey. Both shelled. Both with something small and soft curled inside, very still.

The one going up was older. I could feel its shell. Worn. Thin in places, the weave loose, the way the Overseer's had been loose low on the left side. Tired.

The one coming down was younger.

Much younger. Its shell tight and smooth and new, the weave so dense I could barely read it. And inside, the small soft shape wasn't still at all.

It was hungry.

I felt that. I don't know how. Not words, not thoughts. Just a shape. The way Dory's silver had a shape when she wanted feeding. Reaching. Pulling. Toward the centre of the station. Toward the spine chamber.

Toward her.

The younger one went through the inner door.

The older one went into the tender.

The tender's hatch sealed.

And the inner door of the Sorn ring, the door into the station, began to close.

I asked the egg to lean.

Not up. Forward. Toward the closing door. Through the gap. I felt the edge of it scrape the grey of the hull, the grey against the ordinary metal of the station, and the metal give a little, the way soft things give to hard ones.

Then I was through.

Inside the Meridian.

And the door closed behind me.

The corridor was dark.

Ruan's map said it would be. Sorn passage. Not lit. Crew don't come here. A narrow tube of ordinary metal running from the Sorn ring inward, toward the cargo spine, toward the centre.

I opened the egg.

Not the door. Risa had sealed the door with her lightning, and it would only open from outside, or with her. I asked the hull to fold. Just a little. Just a gap, the size of a person, in the side of the egg. The way the old one had been showing me, every night, in my sleep.

It folded.

I climbed out into the dark.

The air was thin and cold and smelled of nothing at all. The station's air. Coming from the spine. From the first channel. From her.

I put my hand on the corridor wall.

And felt her. All round me. Through the metal. Through the whole station. Vast and tired and held.

Singing.

Here. I'm here.

Here, I told her. I'm here.

Ruan was at the chamber door.

I hadn't known she would be. Nobody had told her. Luna had written to her father, and her father knew people, and someone must have told someone. Or Ruan had felt the song. Or she'd just come, the way she'd come before, with a code that still worked, to stand at the door and listen.

She was standing in the corridor outside the spine chamber in an ordinary station uniform with a major's tabs on the collar, very straight, with her hand on the lock panel.

She turned when she heard me.

She was older than I'd thought. Fifty, maybe. Grey hair cut very short. A face like a closed fist.

She looked at me. At my eyes.

She didn't say who are you. She didn't say how did you get here.

She said, "Five notes."

"Yes."

"I've been listening to her for months. Every pass." Her voice was very low. "Today she's louder."

"Twenty-three queens are singing it back," I said. "From the ground."

Ruan's fist of a face didn't change.

But her hand, on the lock panel, pressed.

The door opened.

I'd seen the chamber on Ruan's map.

Thirty meters across. Round. Domed. Seven housings round a central column.

The map hadn't shown her.

She filled it.

She was curled round the column the way a cat curls round a stove, the way the map had made me think. But that wasn't right. A cat is small. A cat curls round a stove because the stove is bigger.

She was bigger than the column. Bigger than the chamber. Her body went round the column and up the curve of the dome and back down and round again, coil on coil, pressed against the walls, folded in on herself because there wasn't room to be anything else.

Her plates were pale. Almost white. Not the dark of our queen, or the cracked grey of the Bowl Queen. White. The way bone goes white when it's been kept from the light too long.

And into her, at seven places, the housings.

Grey. Seamless. Sunk into her plates the way the disc had been sunk into Jessa's skull. And from each one, a channel. Running out into the walls. Into the station.

Air. Water. Power. Power. Gravity. Jump.

Voice.

I stood in the doorway and looked at her.

And she looked at me.

I don't know where her eyes were. I couldn't see them. Somewhere in the coils, buried, pressed against the dome.

But she looked.

I felt it. The way you feel someone look at you across a room. Her whole attention, vast and tired and very old, turning toward the small warm thing in the doorway with silver round its eyes.

She stopped singing.

For one moment, the whole chamber went silent.

Then she spoke.

Not in the brood-speech. Not in anything I knew. She'd been alone for so long, held for so long, that whatever language she'd had was gone. Or folded so far down inside her that she couldn't find it.

So she did what Dory did.

She showed me a shape.

Small. Warm. Bright. Coming up a rope of song from very far below. Reaching for her. Saying, every dawn for months, in a voice she'd never heard before: there you are.

The small one, she said. The small one who sends the hello. Who counted me. You are hers.

I'm her father, I said.

The spine-queen was silent for a long time.

She said someone would come, she said.

Six minutes.

Ruan, in the doorway behind me, said very quietly, "The new warden's in the quarters. Two doors down. It'll come in here to feed. They always come in to feed, the first hour after a rotation."

"How long?"

"Ten minutes. Maybe less."

I put my hands on the first housing.

Air.

I'd built air plants for a whole city. I knew what air was. Nitrogen and oxygen and a little of everything else, in the right proportions, kept moving, kept clean. The station's air plant was big and old and crude, the Project's design from thirty years ago. And under it, doing the actual work, drawing on her, a channel of her silver.

I looked at the housing. At the grey. At the fold.

I didn't unfold it. Not yet.

First I made the air.

I put one hand on the wall beside the housing, on ordinary metal, and I reached into the station's air plant and changed it. Not much. Just enough. A bed of something that would do what her silver had been doing: take the bad air in and give the good air out, steady, without anyone pushing it. Copper and iron and a little of the grey, folded the way the old one had shown me, so it would hold.

It took a minute.

When it was done, I felt the air plant take the load. Felt it hold.

Then I put my other hand on the housing.

And unfolded it.

The grey came apart under my palm.

Not violently. The way a knot comes apart when you find the right end to pull. The weave loosened. Unravelled. Fell away from her plate in fine grey threads, like spider silk, drifting.

And the channel went slack.

Her silver, which had been running out of her through that housing for eight years, stopped.

And came back.

I felt it. Felt her feel it. A small place on her vast pale body, where something had been pulling for eight years, suddenly not pulling.

She made a sound.

Not a word. Not a song. A breath. A very long one. The way you breathe out when you've been holding something heavy and someone takes it from you.

The air in the station didn't change at all.

Water.

Faster. I knew how now. Make the replacement, put it in, feel it take the load. Then unfold.

Power, main ring.

Power, cargo spine.

That one was hard. The cargo spine ran along her body, through the middle of the station, and the power channel went the whole length of it. I had to make a conduit as long as the station. Copper. Thick. Folded into the walls. I felt it go in, meter by meter, a long bright line of metal threading through the ordinary steel.

Three minutes.

Then gravity.

I'd never done anything like it.

Matter, I could change without limit. I had since the ice. But weight isn't matter. Weight is where a thing sits in the world. The old one had been showing me. Every night for fourteen nights. How the spine-queen didn't make the station's weight; she folded its place in the world so it leaned toward its own floor. How the egg could lean toward the sky because I'd learned to ask it to.

But the egg was the size of a cart.

The station was a mile long.

I put my hands on the gravity housing. On the grey. On the channel running out of it into every deck of the Meridian, holding six hundred and four people to their floors.

And I closed my eyes.

And found the fold.

Not the egg's. The station's. The whole of it. Every deck and corridor and cabin, leaning, very slightly, the way she'd taught it to lean, toward its own floors.

I could have held it. I didn't get tired any more; I hadn't since the ice. But I couldn't stay here holding a station's floors for the rest of my life.

I didn't have to hold it.

I only had to remember it.

The way the old one had remembered the shape of our queen's growing and shown it to me, and I'd remembered it and shown it to the egg. I looked at the way the station leaned, the way she'd been holding it for eight years, every second, and I learned it.

And then I put it into the metal.

Not into me. Into the steel of the station's own frame. Every beam. Every deck plate. I folded the memory of the lean into the metal itself, the way you'd teach a branch to grow toward the light by tying it there long enough that it forgets it was ever tied.

It was the biggest thing I'd ever done. It didn't hurt. Nothing had hurt since the ice. But it took all of my attention, every corner of it, for longer than anything I'd ever made, and when I opened my eyes I didn't know for a moment where I was.

The station was still leaning toward its floors.

On its own.

I unfolded the gravity housing.

Six hundred and four people didn't float off their decks.

Ruan was beside me.

I hadn't heard her come in. She had her hand on my shoulder, the way you'd touch someone to bring them back from a long way off.

"Two minutes," she said. "Maybe less. It's moving. In the quarters. I can hear it."

I looked at the last two housings.

Jump.

I didn't touch it. I'd told Luna. I didn't understand jump. I'd leave it. The station would stay where it was, in orbit round Avalon, until someone understood it better than I did.

But the channel was still pulling.

I looked at it. At the housing sunk into her pale plates. At the silver running out of her, through it, into the walls, into whatever machine the Sorn had built that folded eleven light-years into four seconds.

I couldn't replace it.

But I could stop it pulling.

I didn't unfold the housing. I closed the channel. The way I'd closed the filament in Jessa's spine. Every place where it touched her, I sealed, gently, one by one, and turned her silver back toward her own heart.

The jump machine went dark.

The station didn't notice. It wasn't jumping anywhere.

And then the voice.

The seventh housing.

The one Luna said the station didn't need. The one only the Sorn needed. The one that had been pushing move north together down through her, into the broods on the far side of the world, every pass, for eight years.

I put both hands on it.

And I didn't make a replacement.

And I didn't close it gently.

I unfolded it. All at once. The grey came apart under my hands in a single long tearing breath, and the channel went slack, and the voice—

Stopped.

I felt it stop.

Everywhere.

Not just in the chamber. Not just in the station. All the way down. Through the sky and the shield and the rock. Across the whole of Avalon. Every quiet stone in every hollow, which had been catching the voice and flattening it every pass for weeks, suddenly had nothing to catch.

Silence.

And in the silence, from below, twenty-three queens.

Still singing.

Here. I'm here.

And the spine-queen, in her chamber, with all seven channels gone slack and her silver coming back to her from seven places at once, after eight years—

Sang back.

Not under anything. Not through anything. Not round the edges of a voice that wasn't hers.

Out loud.

It filled the station.

I don't know how else to say it. The five notes, from her, from the whole vast pale coiled length of her, went out through the walls and the decks and the corridors of the Meridian, through the metal, through the six hundred and four people, so loud that Ruan's hand on my shoulder clenched and her breath went out of her all at once.

Here. I'm here.

And from every cabin in the crew ring, I felt it. Six hundred and four people, who'd lived for eight years round a queen they didn't know was there, stopping. Whatever they were doing. Eating. Sleeping. Working. Stopping. Lifting their heads.

Hearing her.

For the first time.

The new warden came through the chamber door.

Fast. Faster than the Overseer had ever moved. Its young tight shell gleaming, its arms up, the seams at the ends of them open. And inside it, the small soft shape, hungry, reaching, the way it had reached in the Sorn ring.

It stopped in the doorway.

It looked at the housings. Seven of them. Six unfolded into drifting grey threads. One closed and dark.

It looked at the queen.

Singing.

It looked at me.

And it came at me.

I read its shell. Young and tight and hungry. I could see every fold of it, and the small soft thing inside it reaching, and the seams at the ends of its arms open, and I knew what was in them, what the Overseer had used to show us the feed.

I could have unfolded it in the doorway. Left the small hungry thing lying on the chamber floor in the open air.

I was lifting my hand to do it.

I didn't need to.

The queen moved.

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

You stretch.

She stretched.

Not much. The chamber wasn't big enough for much. One coil. One long pale length of her, lifting off the column, sliding up the curve of the dome, and coming down.

Between me and the warden.

Not fast. Not violent. She didn't strike it. She didn't crush it. She just put herself there. A wall of pale plates, curving, as tall as the chamber, between the small hungry thing in its shell and the small warm thing with silver round its eyes.

The warden stopped.

It stood in the doorway looking at the wall of her.

And the queen, who had fed it and the three before it and the Overseer before them, every day, for eight years, a little at a time, through a housing it had sunk into her plates—

Looked back.

She didn't say anything to it.

She didn't need to.

The warden backed out of the chamber.

Slowly. The way the Overseer had backed away from me in the forge, when I told it I could read its shell.

The door closed.

"Lucas."

Ruan. Very urgent.

"The ring. It's closed. The tender's gone. You can't—"

I knew.

I'd known since the gravity. I'd known I wasn't going to make it back to the egg in time. The ring had been open eleven minutes, and it was closed, and the egg was in a sealed corridor on the wrong side of a door that only opened for the Sorn.

I was on the Meridian.

Four hundred miles up.

And Hana was reading the first horse book.

The queen spoke.

The small one's father, she said.

Yes.

You were told to come back before something ended.

I didn't know how she knew. Maybe Dory had told her, along the rope of song. Maybe she'd heard it in me. Maybe queens just knew.

Before the first horse book, I said. It's very short.

The queen was quiet.

Then she moved again.

One coil. Up the dome. To the wall of the chamber, on the side facing Avalon. Facing the ground. Facing the twenty-three queens still singing below.

She put the end of herself against the wall.

And folded it.

I felt it happen.

Not a hole. Not a breach. The air didn't rush out. The station didn't lurch. She did what the old one had been showing me how to do, every night for fourteen nights, except she'd been doing it for longer than humans had had cities.

She folded the wall of the chamber into a door.

A small one. Round. The size of a person. Through the metal and the hull and the shielding and everything, a passage that opened at one end into the chamber and at the other end into the dark between the station and the sky. And the air stayed where it was, because she asked it to.

And on the far side of the passage, in the dark, hanging, waiting—

The egg.

She'd reached through the station to the sealed corridor by the Sorn ring and folded the egg out of it, through the walls, round the outside of the hull, to the other end of the door she'd made.

I stared at it.

Go, said the queen. Before the horse book ends.

Ruan walked me to the door. She kept her hand on my arm the whole way, as if she thought I might not believe it was over unless someone held on. At the passage, I stopped and looked back.

At the spine-queen. Pale and vast and coiled, but not as tight now. Already, in the few minutes since the last housing came away, she'd begun to loosen. To shift. To take up a little more of the chamber than she had before. To breathe.

Still singing.

"What happens to her?" I said to Ruan.

Ruan looked at the queen for a long time.

"I don't know," she said. "She's keeping six hundred people alive and she doesn't have to any more. You've done that." She looked at the copper and iron in the walls, the air plant I'd changed, the conduits I'd threaded. "I think she'll stay. For a while. Until she decides." Her fist of a face did something. "I think we should ask her."

"Ask her what?"

"If she minds," said Ruan, "having six hundred people living in her house."

I climbed through the door.

Into the egg. Through the gap I'd folded in its side. I folded it closed behind me. Dark. Grey. Cool under my palms.

The queen's door closed behind me.

I was outside the Meridian. Hanging in the dark. Four hundred miles above Avalon.

And under me, the song.

Twenty-three queens. And now a twenty-fourth, above me, louder than any of them, singing down.

I didn't need to steer.

I let go of the fold. Let the egg lean the way everything leans. Down. Toward the ground. Toward the shield and the city and the courts and the garden wall.

Toward a house with a cracked kitchen window.

I fell.

I came down through the shed roof at twenty-six minutes past noon.

Keir was there. And Aster. And Risa, with her hand already on the seam, running her lightning along it, before the egg had even settled. The door unsealed.

She pulled me out.

She held onto me as if I might lean back up into the sky. She looked at my face, at my eyes, and her own went very wide.

"You're back."

"I said."

"Twenty-six past noon, Lucas. You were gone fourteen minutes." Her voice cracked. "The voice stopped. Everywhere. We all felt it. Every queen in the ring. Juno fell off the schoolroom roof. Toby's still playing; he won't stop." She was holding me so hard it hurt. "And then she started. The one in the station. Out loud. We can hear her, Lucas, from the ground—"

"I know."

"You did it."

"She did it," I said. "I just took the housings off."

Risa laughed. It came out like a sob.

Then she put her arm round me and walked me out of the shed. Past the scarecrow with its arms out and its neck bare. Toward Father's house.

They were on the porch.

Genny sitting on the bench, very straight, with her hands folded. Miss Pell beside her.

Garnet standing at the top of the steps, with her hands on her hips.

And Hana. On the porch boards. With her back against the wall of the house and a book open on her knees. A thin book, with a horse on the cover. And Garnet's head, until a moment ago, must have been on her shoulder, listening.

Hana looked up.

She looked at me. At Risa holding on to me. At my eyes, still bright from the chamber.

Then she looked down at the book.

And turned the last page.

And closed it.

"The end," she said. Carefully. Getting every word right.

Garnet came down the steps.

She stood in front of me with her hands on her hips and her chin up and her face screwed up, the way it went when she was about to cry and had decided not to.

"You're late," she said.

"I'm not. Hana just finished."

"She was on the last page. For ages." Garnet's lip wobbled. "She was reading it really slowly. On purpose. So you wouldn't be late."

I looked at Hana.

Hana didn't look up from the closed book. But the side of her mouth that worked was smiling.

Garnet hit me.

In the stomach. Not hard. Then she put her arms round me, and her face in my coat, and held on.

"You promised," she said.

"I kept it."

"Barely."

Above us, through the shield, from four hundred miles up, so faint you could only hear it if you held your breath, a voice was singing.

Five notes.

Here. I'm here.

Day 759. Stretch.

No windows in the egg; I saw through the grey. Where Avalon was too far below and the station too far above, I steered by the song: twenty-three queens and Toby's note, a long rope from the ground to the station. I followed it up hand over hand. She'd heard. She was singing louder, because for the first time someone was singing back.

The Sorn ring was open, the tender docked on one side, the other side an empty grey mouth that nobody watched, because nothing comes up from Avalon without a burn. Nothing except a grey egg with no engine, leaning. Two shells passed in the passage. The old one going up, worn thin. The new one coming down, tight and smooth, and inside it something hungry, reaching toward the spine. I slid through as the inner door closed. I folded a gap in the egg's side and climbed out. The air was hers.

Ruan was at the chamber door. Fifty, grey hair cut short, a face like a closed fist. "Five notes. Today she's louder." Twenty-three queens singing it back. Her hand pressed the lock.

The spine-queen filled the chamber, coil on coil, folded in on herself because there wasn't room to be anything else. Plates white, like bone kept from the light. Seven housings sunk in. She stopped singing, looked at me, and showed me a shape: the small one who sends the hello every dawn, who counted her. "You are hers." I'm her father. "She said someone would come."

Ruan: the new warden comes to feed in the first hour after rotation. Ten minutes, maybe less.

Air: I made the replacement first, a bed of copper, iron and a little folded grey in the air plant, felt it take the load, then unfolded the housing like a knot found at the right end. The channel went slack. Her silver came back. She breathed out, the way you do when someone takes something heavy from you. The air didn't change.

Water. Power for the main ring. Power for the cargo spine, a copper conduit the length of the station.

Gravity. The station is a mile long. I could have held the lean; I don't tire any more. But I can't stay up there holding its floors forever. I didn't have to. I only had to remember it, learn how she'd held it for eight years, and fold the memory into the steel of the frame itself, like tying a branch toward the light until it forgets it was tied. The biggest thing I've ever done. It didn't hurt; nothing has since the ice. It took all of my attention, and when I opened my eyes I didn't know for a moment where I was. Six hundred and four people didn't float off their decks.

Jump: I don't understand it, so I didn't replace it. I closed the channel, sealing every place it touched her, the way I did Jessa's filament. The station isn't going anywhere.

The voice I didn't close gently. I unfolded it all at once. It stopped everywhere, all the way down, every quiet stone with nothing left to catch. In the silence, twenty-three queens still singing. And she sang back. Out loud. It filled the station. Six hundred and four people stopped what they were doing and lifted their heads and heard her for the first time.

The new warden came in fast, the seams in its arms open. I read its shell and was lifting my hand to unfold it. I didn't need to. The queen stretched. One pale coil up the dome and down, a wall between the hungry thing and me. She didn't strike it. She looked at it. It backed out the way the Overseer backed away in the forge.

The ring was closed. The egg was on the wrong side of a Sorn door. Hana was reading the first horse book. The queen: you were told to come back before something ended. Before the first horse book. Very short.

She folded the chamber wall into a round door the size of a person, and the air stayed because she asked it to. She'd reached through the station and folded the egg out of the sealed corridor, round the hull, to the other end. "Go. Before the horse book ends."

Ruan walked me to the door. Will she stay? Ruan: she's keeping six hundred people alive and doesn't have to any more. "I think we should ask her if she minds having six hundred people living in her house."

I let go of the fold and fell. Twenty-four queens singing now, one of them above me.

Twenty-six past noon. Fourteen minutes gone. Risa pulled me out. Juno fell off the schoolroom roof. Toby won't stop playing. "You did it." She did it. I just took the housings off.

On Father's porch, Hana turned the last page of a thin book with a horse on the cover. "The end." Garnet: you're late. She was on the last page for ages, reading really slowly, on purpose, so you wouldn't be. Hana didn't look up. The side of her mouth that works was smiling. Garnet hit me in the stomach, then held on. "You promised." I kept it. "Barely."

From four hundred miles up, so faint you hold your breath to hear it: here. I'm here.