Chapter 256 Void

I slept for four hours.

Not because I needed to. I hadn't needed sleep the way other people did since the ice. But I hadn't slept for three nights before the transport, and Risa walked me from Father's house to ours, with Garnet holding my other hand and Genny walking very straight behind us and Hana and Miss Pell behind her, and put me in the bedroom, and said lie down in the voice that meant storms. So I lay down. And somewhere between lying down and deciding to get up again, I slept.

Edda was there when I woke up.

Sitting on the end of the bed with her green book open on her knee and her pen in her hand, writing.

"Heart steady. Blood steady. Not a mark on you," she said, without looking up. "Your silver was so bright when Risa brought you in that I couldn't look at it without my eyes watering. It's come down since." She wrote something. "Except your left palm. There's a new line in the markings. Look."

I looked at my palm.

There it was. In the silver lines the queen's gift had left on my skin, a new shape I hadn't had that morning. Small. Six-sided. Where I'd put my hand on the gravity housing.

"What did you do?" said Edda.

"I taught a station to stand up by itself."

Edda looked at me for a long moment.

Then she wrote it down.

Taught a station to stand up by itself.

And next to it, very small: of course.

The house was full.

I could hear it before I opened the bedroom door. Voices. Too many for our kitchen. Garnet's, over all the others, the way it always had been. Liam's. Toby's, hoarse. The General's, low.

And under all of it, through the walls, through the stones, through the soles of my feet—

Her.

Faint. Very faint. Four hundred miles up. But there. If you held your breath.

Here. I'm here.

I stood in the bedroom doorway with my hand on the frame and listened to her for a long time.

Toby was asleep at the kitchen table.

Face down. With his fiddle under one arm and his bow still in his hand. Sera said he'd played until the station went over the horizon, an hour after I came down. Carrying the twenty-four of them now, the twenty-three and her, until there was nothing left to carry. Then he'd walked up the street from the listening room, sat down at our table, and fallen asleep in the middle of asking for tea.

Nobody had moved him.

Juno was on the bench by the stove with her arm in a sling. She'd fallen off the schoolroom roof when the voice stopped. Not far. One storey. She said it was like someone had taken away a sound she'd been hearing her whole life, so suddenly that she'd forgotten where the edge of the roof was.

"Everywhere," she said, when she saw me. Her eyes were very bright. "Lucas, it's gone everywhere. Every brood on Avalon. The ones past the river, the delta, the white mountains, the jungle." She shook her head. "They're all facing home."

"All of them?"

"All of them," said Juno. "For the first time since I've been able to feel them. Every brood on the planet, facing its own queen." Her voice cracked. "Nothing's pulling them anywhere."

The pilot's channel opened at three.

Dot brought the speaker into the kitchen and put it on the table beside Toby's sleeping head. Everyone went quiet.

A voice. Not Ruan's. Younger. Female. A little shaky. With a station accent, the vowels clipped short.

"Scarecrow. This is—" A pause. A breath. "This is the pilot. I've been let out. Major Ruan opened the door herself." Another pause. "Dot? Are you there?"

Dot's lamps went very bright.

"This unit is here," she said. "This unit has been here every pass. This unit called four times, every time."

The pilot laughed. It came out unsteady.

"I know. I heard. Through the wall. Every time." A breath. "Dot, something's happened. Up here. There's—" She stopped. "There's singing. In the walls. Everyone can hear it. The whole crew ring. It started at noon and it hasn't stopped."

"This unit knows," said Dot.

"Major Ruan called the whole crew to the main ring an hour ago. She told us." The pilot's voice went very quiet. "About what's in the spine. About what it's been doing. For eight years. Keeping us breathing."

Nobody in our kitchen said anything.

"Some of them didn't believe her," said the pilot. "Then she took them to the chamber. In groups. Twenty at a time. And let them look." A long pause. "Nobody's not believing her now."

"Major Ruan wants you to know something," the pilot said. "She says the queen hasn't moved much. She's stretched out a bit. She's not as tight. She's still singing. And the air's better. Everyone says so. Cleaner. Like the filters got changed."

I looked at the new mark on my palm.

"And she says," said the pilot, "the queen asked her something."

"Asked what?" said Dot.

"Major Ruan doesn't know how the queen talks," said the pilot. "She says it's like having a picture put in your head. And the picture was of the crew ring. All the cabins. All the people in them." A pause. "And then a sort of question. At the end."

"What question?"

The pilot was quiet for a moment.

"Major Ruan says it was the same feeling you get," she said slowly, "when someone asks if you'd like to stay for dinner."

The Overseer came at dusk.

Not to the dawn count. Not through Crane. Not to the forge. It walked out of the guest compound at sunset, alone, the way it had walked to the courts, and down the street, and past the square, and up to the bottom of our porch steps.

Where I was sitting.

With Genny on one side of me and Garnet on the other. Risa in Gareth's chair. Sera and Luna on the step below. The General, Holt, Miss Pell and Hana on the bench under the kitchen window.

Dory in the quiet room, with Dot.

The Overseer stopped at the bottom of the steps.

Garnet went very still beside me. I felt her hand find mine. Genny didn't move at all. She sat very straight and looked at the mirror, and I saw herself reflected in it, small and curved and upside down, with her chin up.

The Overseer looked at me.

The asset entered the Meridian, it said.

Its own voice. Sand on glass.

"Yes," I said.

The asset entered the spine chamber.

"Yes."

The asset removed the housings from the planetary-class queen held there.

"Yes."

It didn't say anything for a long time.

Then: The terms of cooperation state that Primary Base will not act against the Meridian or its crew.

"I didn't," I said.

The mirror didn't move.

"The crew are fine," I said. "All six hundred and four. The air's cleaner. The power's steadier. The gravity's holding. Nobody was hurt." I held its gaze, if you can hold the gaze of something without eyes. "I didn't act against the Meridian. I acted against the voice. And the voice isn't named in the terms."

Luna, on the step below me, had her notebook open. She didn't need to read it. She knew every word.

"Term five," she said quietly. "Primary Base will not act against the Meridian, its crew, or any Sorn vessel in orbit around Avalon." She looked up at the mirror. "The spine-queen isn't a Sorn vessel. The voice isn't the crew. And the Meridian's never been better."

The Overseer was silent.

I waited for it to say noted. Or the quota is tripled. Or something about the terms being void.

It didn't.

It stood at the bottom of our porch steps for a long time.

Then it said:

The terms are kept.

Nobody moved.

The Overseer has assessed the actions of the asset, said the mirror. The Meridian is intact. Its crew are unharmed. No Sorn vessel has been acted against. A pause. The voice was not named.

Another pause. Longer.

The Overseer finds the terms kept.

Holt, on the bench under the window, made a sound. Very low.

The General sat very still.

And the Overseer turned its mirror, slowly, not toward me, not toward Luna, but toward the end of the street. Toward the guest compound.

Where the handler was standing.

It had come out without a sound.

The smaller Sorn. The one that had come down with the Kethri. Standing in the middle of the street in the last of the light, with its mirror turned toward us.

And behind it, the ten Kethri.

Not three steps behind. They were scattered. Not in their line. Two of them on their knees on the paving. One with its long neck bent so far forward its beak touched the ground. Others standing, swaying, their three-fingered hands at their collars.

Their collars were singing.

All ten of them.

I could hear it from the porch. Not faint. Not the low hum I'd heard from Sesh's sliver at the edge of the square. Loud. Ten slivers of nine dead queens from a world with none left, all singing the same five notes at once.

Here. I'm here.

Because four hundred miles up, a queen was singing them out loud. And twenty-three more were singing them from below. And the voice that had been holding everything down for eight years was gone.

And ten pieces of queens in ten grey collars had heard.

And answered.

Sesh was at the front.

Standing. Barely. Her neck curved, her beak open, her three-fingered hand pressed flat over the boss on her collar, under her beak, where the sliver was.

The sliver that had never sung before Day 735.

It was singing now so loud that I could feel it in my teeth.

The handler raised one arm.

Too long. Bending wrong. The seam at the end of it opening.

And all ten collars pulled.

I saw it.

Every thread from every sliver, running into every spine, going taut. All at once. Like ten leads yanked by the same hand.

The Kethri screamed.

Not a click. Not a whistle. A sound I'd never heard and never want to hear again. High and thin and terrible, out of ten long throats at once, as the collars pulled so hard that the slivers stopped singing and the threads in their spines went rigid.

The two on their knees went down flat.

The one with its beak on the ground convulsed.

Sesh didn't fall.

I watched her not fall. I watched the thread in her spine go so taut I thought it would break her, and I watched her stand there with her hand pressed over her collar and her neck curved and her talons dug into the paving stones.

And not fall.

The sliver in her collar had stopped singing.

But she was still standing.

I was on my feet.

I didn't remember standing up. Garnet's hand had gone out of mine. Genny had grabbed my sleeve.

I could see every collar. Every thread. Every fold of the grey.

I could have opened them. All ten. From where I stood. Before the handler's arm came down.

Twenty-six days, I'd thought, on the apron, the day they landed. If nothing happens. If I hold still.

The twins were here now. On the porch. Beside me.

Under the queens.

The feed was gone. The penthouse was eleven light-years away and empty.

There was nothing on any wall.

Except—

The asset's mother receives her stabilizer on a regular schedule. Its continued provision is at the Project's discretion.

I stood on the porch with my sisters beside me and every collar in reach and Mother in a chair eleven light-years away with a spoon in a dish and a calendar on the wall.

And I didn't move.

The Overseer moved.

It turned. From our porch. Toward the handler, in the middle of the street, with its arm raised and its seam open and ten Kethri screaming.

It didn't walk. It stood where it was.

And spoke.

Not in the sand-on-glass voice it used for us. Something else. A sound that wasn't a sound. A pressure, like the voice from the sky but smaller, aimed. I felt it go past me down the street like a door closing in another room.

The handler's arm stopped.

The seam at the end of it stayed open. But the arm stopped.

The collars stopped pulling.

The threads went slack. All ten. Not loose. Not free. Just slack, the way a lead goes slack when the hand holding it pauses.

The Kethri stopped screaming.

The two on the ground lay still, breathing. The one that had convulsed curled in on itself. The others swayed, their hands at their collars.

Sesh stood.

The handler turned its mirror toward the Overseer.

For a long time, neither of them moved. Two shells in the dusk. One old and loose-woven, with the small soft shape curled very still inside it. One young and tight, with the small soft shape inside it not still at all.

Then the handler spoke.

Through a band. Not Crane's. A band of its own, at what would have been its throat. Flat. Even. In words we could understand.

The Hand has reviewed the actions of the asset.

Nobody on the porch breathed.

The Hand finds the terms of cooperation void.

I felt Luna go rigid beside me.

"They're kept," she said. Loud. To the street. "It just said. The Overseer. The terms are kept."

The Overseer, said the handler, does not speak for the Hand.

Silence.

The Overseer has been assessed, said the handler. The Overseer's assessments have been found unreliable. The Overseer attended a party. The Overseer released communications to a general under investigation. The Overseer stood in the middle of a room after contact with a juvenile of the enemy's weapons.

The Overseer didn't move.

The Overseer, said the handler, is recalled.

Holt was on his feet.

I hadn't seen him stand. He was beside the bench under the kitchen window, without his stick, very straight, the way he'd stood on the apron the day the shuttle came down.

"Recalled to where?" he said.

The handler's mirror turned toward him.

To the Hand.

"For what?"

The handler didn't answer.

It didn't need to.

I'd seen the wardens' quarters on Ruan's map. Warden 2. Rotates to the Hand every forty days. I'd felt the old one going up into the tender, worn thin, tired.

I'd seen Marlo, through Jessa. In rows.

The Hand is a housing.

The Overseer turned its mirror toward me.

I saw myself in it. Small. Curved. Upside down. With Genny's hand on my sleeve and Garnet's face behind my arm and the porch and the house and the garden behind me, and the queen at the wall, at her full height, watching.

It looked at me for a long time.

Then it spoke. Sand on glass. Very quiet.

The asset reads the shell.

"Yes."

The asset knows what is inside it.

"Something small," I said. "That doesn't live long."

The mirror was still.

The Overseer has lived on Avalon, it said, for four hundred and eleven of your years. Under the mountain. Then in the sky. Then here. A pause. That is very long. For something small.

I didn't say anything.

The Overseer was told what it was for, it said. In the vat. Before it had a shell. It was told: hold the queen. Drive the brood. Take the world.

Another pause.

No one told it about parties.

The handler raised its arm again.

Not at the Kethri. At the Overseer.

The Overseer didn't move.

It stood at the bottom of our porch steps with its mirror turned toward me, and I watched the handler's arm come up, and the seam open, and I didn't know what was in the seam and I didn't want to.

The asset, said the Overseer, very quietly, should not watch this.

And it turned.

And walked.

Not toward the handler. Not toward the guest compound. Down the street. Past the square. Past the tree we didn't move.

Toward the meeting passage.

Toward the courts.

The terms said it couldn't go there. Not in the courts. Not in the deep. Not unless invited.

It wasn't invited.

But it walked anyway. Not fast. At the same slow pace it had walked to the courts on Day 698, when the queen said let it come. Past Toby's bench. To the mouth of the passage, where the young sat in the evenings.

And stopped.

At the very edge. Where the street met the dark of the passage. Where Pebble had first come out to Sesh.

The handler's arm was still raised. But it hadn't come down. It was watching. The way the Overseer had watched the party, all night. Not understanding.

The Overseer stood at the mouth of the passage.

And in the shadow, small and dark, with a pale scar on his foreplate—

Pebble.

He'd been there the whole time.

He came every evening for the music. Toby was asleep at our kitchen table, but Pebble came anyway. He sat at the front of the row, the way he always did, and waited.

He looked up at the Overseer.

The Overseer looked down at him.

Neither of them moved for a long time.

Then the Overseer did something I'd never seen it do.

It folded.

The long legs bending backward at the knee, the way they'd bent at Nessa's supper. Lower. And lower. Until it was crouched on the paving stones at the mouth of the passage, with its mirror level with Pebble's flat head.

And it lifted one too-long arm.

And tapped the ground.

Three times.

Then two.

Then one.

Pebble didn't move.

Then he hummed.

Not the content hum. Not the hollow-song. A different sound. One I'd heard from him only once before, on the porch, the day Risa first held Dory up to him. Low and slow and very soft.

Dot told me later what it meant.

Welcome.

The handler's arm came down.

Not at the Overseer. At its side. The seam closed.

It stood in the middle of the street for a long time, watching. The Overseer, crouched at the mouth of the passage. Pebble, humming. The young in the shadow behind him, beginning, one by one, to hum too.

Then the handler turned and walked back to the guest compound.

The Kethri followed. Not three steps behind. Slowly. Two of them helping the third, the one that had convulsed. Sesh last.

She stopped at the edge of the square. Where she always stopped.

She looked at the Overseer, crouched at the mouth of the passage.

Then she looked at me.

And clicked. Once. A long low whistle.

Here.

Then she followed the others.

The twins met Dory that night.

I'd promised. Risa had promised Garnet, on the apron. You'll meet her tonight. And after everything, after the handler and the collars and the Overseer crouched in the dusk with Pebble humming welcome, Garnet had looked up at me on the porch with her face screwed up and said, "You promised."

So we took them down.

The quiet room. The faceted dark. The queens had opened the hollow, just a little. Just enough.

Dory was awake.

In her basket. With the swift feather in one fist and the nursery stone beside her. She looked up at the two girls coming down the stairs behind me.

Her check came round.

Me. Risa. Sera. Luna. Dot. The queen.

And then two more.

New. Unfinished. Narrow in places. Very bright.

She'd found them at four in the morning, in the dark between the worlds. There you are.

She found them again.

Garnet knelt down by the basket. Very carefully. The most careful I'd ever seen her be.

Dory looked at her.

And reached out with the hand that wasn't holding the feather. And touched Garnet's face.

Garnet went completely still.

"She's warm," she whispered.

"She's always warm," said Risa.

"No. Inside. I can feel her. Inside." Garnet's eyes were enormous. "She's checking me."

"She checks everyone," I said. "Every four minutes. To make sure they're still there."

Garnet looked at Dory for a long time.

Then she reached into her pocket and took out a pebble. Grey. Ordinary. From the apron, probably, or the path to Father's house.

She held it in her palm.

And it turned red. And soft. And round.

A strawberry.

She held it out.

Dory looked at it. Then at Garnet.

Then she said her fourth word.

"Gar."

Genny didn't kneel.

She stood at the bottom of the stairs, very straight, with her hands at her sides, and watched Garnet and Dory and the strawberry.

Then Dory's check came round again. And found her.

And stopped.

Stayed. On Genny. The way it had stayed on Sera the first time Sera held her. Slow and warm and steady.

Genny's hands came up from her sides.

She looked at them. At her hands. As if they belonged to someone else.

"She's," Genny said. "She's—"

"I know," I said.

Genny didn't move for a long time.

Then she knelt down beside Garnet. Very straight. And held out one hand, the way you'd hold out a hand to a strange animal you didn't want to frighten.

Dory took it.

Genny's face did the thing.

And this time she didn't say she wasn't crying.

Crane's band lit at midnight.

I wasn't there. I was on the porch, with the twins asleep in the room Luna and Sera had made up for them, and Risa and Dory in the quiet room, and Holt and the General and Miss Pell on the bench under the window, nobody wanting to go to bed.

Wren came up the street at a run.

She never ran. She stopped at the bottom of the steps, breathing hard, with her book under her arm, and said:

"Crane. The bench. The band lit and he said something and then it went dark and he—" She stopped. "You need to come."

Crane was on his bench.

The band was dark. His hands were on his knees. Steady. Very steady.

His face was grey.

He looked up when I came. He didn't say anything for a long time.

Then he said, in his own voice, very quietly:

"The Hand has sent an order. To Central Allocation. Through me. The band made me say it out loud so the record would show it was delivered." He swallowed. "In response to the asset's actions on the Meridian. By authority of the Hand. The terms being void."

"Say it."

Crane closed his eyes.

"The stabilizer provision for the Retention subject Dask, Dorothy, is suspended," he said. "Pending review."

Day 759. Void.

I slept four hours, because Risa told me to and I hadn't for three nights. Edda: heart steady, not a mark on me, silver too bright to look at when I came in, and a new six-sided shape in the silver markings on my left palm, where I touched the gravity housing. "Taught a station to stand up by itself." She wrote it down, and beside it: of course.

Toby asleep face down at our table, still holding the bow. He carried all twenty-four until the station went over the horizon. Juno's arm in a sling; she fell off the schoolroom roof when the voice stopped. Every brood on Avalon is facing its own queen. Nothing is pulling them anywhere.

Three o'clock, the pilot's channel. She's out; Ruan opened the door herself. "Dot? I heard you through the wall. Every time." Singing in the walls since noon. Ruan called the crew to the main ring and told them, then took them to the chamber twenty at a time and let them look. Nobody isn't believing her now. The air's cleaner, like the filters got changed. The queen put a picture in Ruan's head, the crew ring, all the people, and then the feeling you get when someone asks if you'd like to stay for dinner.

Dusk. The Overseer at the bottom of our porch steps, its own voice. The asset entered the Meridian. The spine chamber. Removed the housings. Yes, yes, yes. Term five. I didn't act against the Meridian; the crew are better than fine. I acted against the voice, and the voice isn't named. Luna: the spine-queen isn't a Sorn vessel, the voice isn't the crew, and the Meridian's never been better. "The terms are kept."

Then the handler in the street, the Kethri scattered behind it. All ten collars singing, loud. Ten slivers of nine dead queens answering. The handler raised its arm and all ten pulled. The Kethri screamed, high and thin. Two went flat, one convulsed. Sesh stood, hand over her collar, talons in the paving, the sliver silenced, and didn't fall.

I could have opened all ten. The twins were beside me. The feed was gone. But Mother's stabilizer is at the Project's discretion. I didn't move.

The Overseer turned to the handler and made a sound like a door closing in another room. The arm stopped. The threads went slack.

The handler, through a band of its own: the Hand has reviewed; the terms are void. The Overseer does not speak for the Hand. Its assessments are unreliable: it attended a party, released communications to a general under investigation, stood in a room after contact with a juvenile. It is recalled. Holt: recalled to where? The Hand. For what? No answer. The Hand is a housing.

The Overseer to me: four hundred and eleven years on Avalon, under the mountain, in the sky, here. Very long, for something small. In the vat it was told: hold the queen, drive the brood, take the world. "No one told it about parties."

The handler raised its arm at the Overseer. "The asset should not watch this." It walked, uninvited, to the mouth of the passage. Pebble was there. The Overseer folded down until its mirror was level with his head and tapped: three, two, one. Pebble hummed a sound I'd heard once, the day Risa held Dory up to him. Welcome.

The handler lowered its arm, watched a long time, and went back inside. The Kethri followed slowly, not in line. Sesh stopped at the edge of the square, looked at the Overseer crouched there, then at me. Here.

The twins met Dory. Garnet knelt more carefully than I have ever seen her do anything. Dory touched her face. "She's warm. Inside. She's checking me." Garnet turned a pebble into a strawberry. Dory's fourth word: "Gar." Then the check found Genny and stayed. Genny looked at her own hands as if they were someone else's, knelt, held one out. Dory took it. Genny didn't say she wasn't crying.

Midnight. Wren ran, which she never does. Crane on the bench, grey. The band made him say it out loud so the record would show it delivered: by authority of the Hand, the terms being void.

"The stabilizer provision for the Retention subject Dask, Dorothy, is suspended. Pending review."