Chapter 264 Up the Stairs

Wren didn't answer her aunt that night.

She stood in the square beside Crane's bench with her book under her arm and the band on his collar glowing pale, almost white, and she listened to the whole thing. I hear my niece's name. Mara. Counted. With the living. And when the band went dark, she turned round and walked back up the steps of the north wall without saying a word, and sat down in her usual place, facing north, and opened her book.

Toby went up after her.

He didn't say anything either. He sat down beside her on the wall with his fiddle across his knees. After a while, she leaned against his shoulder. After a longer while, he started to play. Very quietly. Not the old song. Something else. Something I'd never heard him play before, slow and low, the kind of tune you'd play to someone who couldn't sleep.

I watched them from the porch for a long time.

"Is she going to answer?" said Risa, beside me.

"I don't know."

"Would you?"

I thought about it. About Voss at the garden party in her plain white dress, greeting every cadet by name. About the transfer order with her name on it. About her saying, on the General's letter, the price had to be paid by someone, very kindly, with the door closed.

About Mother, at the kitchen table, saying I'd do it again tomorrow.

"I don't know," I said again.

Risa leaned her head on my shoulder.

"Wren will," she said. "Eventually."

"How do you know?"

"Because she's still sitting on the wall," said Risa. "If she wasn't going to answer, she'd have gone to bed."

She answered at four in the morning.

Not through the band. Crane was asleep on his bench, the way he slept most nights now, sitting up, with his hands on his knees. Wren came down off the north wall and across the square and woke him by putting her hand on his shoulder.

He opened his eyes.

"Can she hear me?" said Wren. "If I talk to it. To the band."

Crane looked at her for a long moment.

"I think so," he said. "I don't know. Nobody's ever tried it the other way."

"Then I'm trying it."

I was on the porch. I hadn't gone to bed either. Neither had Toby; he came down off the wall behind Wren, with his fiddle, and stood a little way off.

Wren knelt down in front of the bench. Level with the band on Crane's collar. Very straight, the way she knelt at the dawn window when she was about to send the numbers.

She put her hand flat on the stone of the bench beside Crane's knee.

"Aunt Renata," she said.

The band didn't light.

Wren waited.

Then, very faint, pale, almost white, it pulsed. Once.

Mara, said a voice.

Wren's hand pressed flat on the stone.

"I'm not going to say much," said Wren. "I'm going to say four things. And then I'm going to stop."

The band pulsed again. Yes.

"One," said Wren. "You signed my transfer. I saw your name on it. On the ship. I thought someone had made you. Nobody made you."

A long pause.

No, said Voss. Nobody made me.

"Two," said Wren. "You cut my hair. In your kitchen. With the big scissors you used for the post. You did it every month until I was twelve, and you used to sing while you did it, and you never sang anywhere else." She swallowed. "I remembered that on the base. When everyone else was dead. I remembered the scissors and the singing. Every night. For eighteen months."

The band didn't pulse for a long time.

When it did, it was very faint.

Yes, said Voss.

"Three," said Wren. "I'm alive. I'm on Avalon. I'm with a man called Toby Marsh who plays the fiddle and holds my heart steady when I'm frightened, and I'm happier than I've ever been in my life." Her voice didn't waver at all. "You're not to tell anyone. Not the Senate. Not the Project. Not anyone."

Who would I tell? said Voss. Very quietly. Everyone I'd tell, I've lied to.

Wren closed her eyes.

"Four," she said.

She stopped.

I don't think she'd known what the fourth thing was going to be. I think she'd counted four because she always counted, and she'd got to three and found she didn't have one.

The band waited.

Toby came forward. Not close. Just a step. And put his hand on the back of Wren's neck, very lightly, the way he did at dawn when the hello went up.

Wren opened her eyes.

"Four," she said. "Go up the stairs."

The hello went up at dawn, and Okafor had already decided.

She says, said Mother, that the Chancellor's coming at the hour of the hello. A pause. She says she arranged it that way on purpose. So you'd be in the room.

Will she know?

Okafor says the Chancellor's wearing a seed that's been listening to the hello every morning for a year, said Mother. Okafor says the Chancellor will know exactly who's in the room. That's the point.

So I worked while we waited.

That was what Okafor wanted. Don't stop the work for her, she'd said, through Mother. She's had twenty years of people stopping the work for her. Let her walk in on it.

Ines Tarrow first.

Fourth on the list. Fragment four. A year of mornings on the hello without a word. I'd opened six of her doors on the long morning and three more since. This morning, with the Hand holding the door open, I finished her the way I'd finished Mother. All at once. Listening first.

She was stone.

That was the only way I could describe it. Her silver didn't run through her the way Mother's did, or Maura's, or Rory's. It settled. Slow and heavy and deep, like water soaking down into the ground after rain. When I'd finished, it didn't run out to the ends of her. It ran down. Through the soles of her feet. Into the floor.

And eleven light-years away, the floor of Okafor's flat shifted.

Not much. A tremor. The kind you'd feel in an old building when a heavy cart goes past in the street. Every cup on every shelf rattled once.

Then stopped.

Oh, said Ines Tarrow.

It was the first word she'd ever said on the hello. Her voice was very low and very rough, like gravel shifting.

Oh. There it is.

There what is? I said.

The ground, said Ines Tarrow. I'd forgotten it was there.

Toby's mother was next.

Sixth on the list, behind Hana's father, because she'd said she'd waited twenty years and could wait a week. She'd waited a week. Toby was on the glass beside me with his fiddle, the way he was every morning, carrying.

Only this morning he wasn't playing.

He was kneeling with the fiddle across his knees and his hands flat on it, and his face very still.

"Toby," said Wren. Behind him. She'd come to the dawn, for once. She'd been up all night.

"I know," said Toby.

"You have to play. Or the hello—"

"I know," said Toby. "I can't."

I understood. I didn't say anything. I looked at Juno, and Juno looked at me, and then Juno closed her eyes, and I felt her reach into the hello beside me and take the end of what Toby had been carrying. Not as well as Toby. Not unchanged. But enough.

Toby put the fiddle down on the glass.

He put his hands flat on the red beside it.

And I went down to his mother.

Her name was Adaeze Marsh. Dot had found it on the list. Fragment twenty-nine. She'd answered the hello every morning since it began, and once, on Day 607, she'd sung Toby's name back up it, the first time she'd said his name since he was fourteen.

Her silver was small.

Toby had said so, the first night I met him, in Okafor's room with the fern. She's a sound-shaper too, only small. She can't make walls. She can just make things a bit quieter, or a bit louder. She'd made a whole ward quiet once, all night, so nobody would wake and hear her son crying.

I opened her.

All of her. Listening first.

And her silver ran out the way Toby's did. Not like water. Not like fire. Like sound. Like the ring that goes out from a bell, through everything, through the walls and the floor and the air, until the whole room is humming with it.

The whole of Okafor's flat hummed.

Eleven light-years away. Every chair. Every cup that had just stopped rattling. Every window. I felt it through Mother. A low, warm, steady note, coming up out of a small woman in a chair, filling the room the way Toby's note filled the canyon at dawn.

Then she sang.

I didn't know the song.

It wasn't the old song. It wasn't anything Toby had ever played. It was very simple. Four notes, over and over, going up and then down again. The kind of thing you'd sing to a baby who wouldn't sleep, in a ward where nobody was allowed to wake.

Toby made a sound.

Not a word. Not a note. Just a sound, out of the bottom of him, like something giving way.

And then he picked up his fiddle.

He didn't stand up. He played it kneeling, on the glass, with his head bent over it and his eyes shut and tears running down his face and dripping off his chin onto the wood.

The four notes.

Going up, and then down.

His mother's song.

And eleven light-years away, I felt her hear it.

Not through silver. Through sound. Through the hello, which had always been sound, Toby's note, carrying everything unchanged. She heard her son playing her song on a fiddle on another world, and she stopped singing.

For a moment.

Then she started again. Louder. With him.

Four notes, up and down. On two worlds. At once. A small woman in a chair in a retired Major's flat and a tall young man on his knees on the red glass, singing and playing the same four notes, eleven light-years apart, with a queen in a housing a mile out over the plain carrying every one of them between.

Nobody on the glass said anything.

Wren knelt down behind Toby and put her arms round him from behind, fiddle and all, and her face in his back.

He kept playing.

"She's on the stairs," said Mother.

Toby's mother had stopped singing. Toby had stopped playing. The hello was still wide, and the Hand was still holding it.

Okafor says she's alone, said Mother. Okafor's been watching from the window. No guards. No car. She walked here. From the Senate Residence. In a coat. A pause. Okafor says it's twenty-three floors and the lift's been broken since the spring, and the Chancellor's sixty-four years old.

Is she coming up?

She's coming up, said Mother. Slowly.

I waited.

We all waited. On the glass, in the grey before the full light, with the Hand a mile out over the plain and every brood on Avalon still facing it. Wren, with her arms round Toby. Luna with her notebook. Sera with her hand on her stomach and Risa with Dory and the General at the end of the row.

Crane, on the glass a little way off, with his eyes shut and the band on his collar faintly pale.

She's at the door, said Mother.

She's knocking.

Okafor's opening it.

I'd never felt Voss's silver. I'd seen her once, at the garden party, and her heart had been the only one in the room that didn't rise when I walked past. I hadn't looked any deeper than that.

I felt her now.

Not through Mother. Through the seed. Through the small grey sliver of a dead queen on the chain round her neck, which had been listening to the hello every morning for a year and was singing now, very faintly, the way all the slivers sang when something reached them.

She had no silver of her own.

None. She was an ordinary woman. Sixty-four. Out of breath from twenty-three floors. With a seed round her neck that she'd thought was jewellery.

She stood in the doorway of Okafor's flat and looked in.

I felt what she saw, through Mother. Thirty-one chairs. Thirty-one people, most of them old, most of them sitting. Maura Calder, with her hands in her lap, warm. Rory, standing behind her chair, holding his fire in. Ines Tarrow, with her feet flat on the floor and the floor very slightly settled under them. Adaeze Marsh, with her face wet. Hana's father, Kwame Osei, with the shake still in his hands, because I'd only opened three of his doors and he was next.

And Mother.

Standing. In the middle of the room. Whole.

Voss looked at her for a long time.

You're Dot Dask, she said.

Yes, said Mother.

They told me you were dying.

I was, said Mother.

Voss didn't say anything.

Then she looked past Mother. Round the room. At every chair.

And she looked at Maura.

I didn't know what Voss would do. I don't think Voss knew either. She'd climbed twenty-three floors with a speech, probably. She was a politician. She'd have had one.

She didn't make it.

She walked across Okafor's flat, past Mother, past Rory, to Maura Calder's chair.

And knelt.

On the floor. In front of Maura. In her coat. The Chancellor of Earth, on her knees on the boards of a retired Major's flat, in front of the woman in the photograph they laughed at in the offices on the upper floors.

The Kneeling Calder.

On the glass, beside me, Sera made a sound I'd never heard her make.

Voss didn't say anything for a long time.

Then she said:

I've seen the photograph.

Maura didn't answer.

Everyone's seen it, said Voss. It's on the wall of the second-floor canteen in the Senate Annex. Somebody wrote something under it. I won't say what. Her voice was very low. I walked past it every day for twenty years. I never once asked who you were.

Liam had pneumonia, said Maura.

I know. I know that now.

He was four months old, said Maura. It was snowing. I didn't have my coat because I'd wrapped him in it. Rory was behind me. He couldn't do anything. They'd taken his fire at the first gate and they said if he raised his hand at the second they'd send all three of us back out into the snow. Maura's voice didn't change at all. So I knelt. In the snow. And begged. And somebody took a photograph.

Voss's head was bowed.

I'd do it again tomorrow, said Maura. I'd do it in the snow without my coat. Let them laugh.

Nobody in Okafor's flat moved.

Then Maura leaned forward in her chair. Her hands, warm, the oven-door warmth of her, came out of her lap. And she put them on either side of the Chancellor's face. Gently. The way she'd held my face at her kitchen table on Hearth Block, with flour on her fingers, the first time I ever went to dinner.

Get up, love, said Maura Calder. The floor's cold.

Okafor did the talking after that.

Mother carried it. Every word. Through the hello, whole, while I sat on the red glass with Sera's hand crushing mine and Liam on her other side with his face in his hands.

Okafor didn't make speeches either.

Chancellor, she said. You came up the stairs. Thank you. Sit down.

Voss sat. In a chair someone gave her. Rory, I think.

You'll want to offer us something, said Okafor. A repeal. A pardon. A signature. Article Fourteen struck out of the Accord with your own pen.

Yes, said Voss.

No, said Okafor.

Voss stopped.

You've signed enough paper, said Okafor. Under your own name and under other people's. Every one of the people in this room is here because of paper you signed. I don't want any more of it. A pause. I want three things. And I want them done, not written.

One. Level 62. Okafor's voice, through Mother, was flat and plain, the way it had been on the first day in the dome, when she read our names off a slate. The pharmaceutical works. I want it opened. Every door. Every store. Every gram of what's in there. Not to us. To the boy.

To Lucas Dask.

Yes. A pause. What's in there was taken out of someone who's alive. He's the only one who can give it back to her.

Voss didn't say anything for a moment.

And two?

Two. The second floor of the Senate Annex. Central Allocation. Every file. Every order. Every route sheet with a person line on it. Opened. To anyone who wants to read them. Starting with the families in this room.

That's— Voss stopped. That's the end of the Project. If those files are read. That's the end of the Senate.

Yes, said Okafor.

Voss was quiet for a long time.

And three?

Three, said Okafor. You stay.

I felt Voss go very still.

You stay Chancellor, said Okafor. You don't resign. You don't run. You don't hand it to someone else and go and sit in a cottage and feel sorry. A pause. I need the dome. The power and the water and the air. The lifts. The ration rolls. The thing that keeps four million people breathing under that glass. I don't know how to run it. You do. So you'll run it. And you'll run it the way I tell you to, until I say otherwise.

And if I refuse?

Then you'll walk back down twenty-three floors, said Okafor, and Dot will hold your buckles in the air all the way to the bottom.

On the glass, Holt laughed. Out loud. Once. He put his hand over his mouth.

In Okafor's flat, I felt Voss think about it.

Not for long.

Yes, said Chancellor Renata Voss. All three.

There was one more thing.

Voss said it as she was standing up to go. She'd stayed for the rest of the hello. She'd watched me open Kwame Osei's fourth and fifth doors, through Mother, through the seed, the way you'd watch a surgeon. She'd watched his hands go still.

She stood up, and put her hand to the seed on its chain round her neck.

Major, she said. There's something else. Something not in the files. Something I've never told anyone. A pause. Not because I was hiding it. Because nobody in this dome would have believed me.

Try me, said Okafor.

Voss's hand closed on the seed.

It's still there, she said.

What is?

The ship, said Voss. From the second bombardment. The one over the northern front. The one that— She looked at Mother. The one you opened.

Mother went very still.

It never left, said Voss. After the Accord. Everyone thought it went home. It didn't. It couldn't. It was damaged. You tore it open, and it couldn't close again. She swallowed. It's behind the moon. It's been behind the moon for twenty-two years. The Project has a station on the far side. That's where the grey comes from. For the collars. For the bands. For the tools on Level 62. They cut it off the ship.

Nobody in the flat moved.

On the glass, nobody moved either.

They've been cutting pieces off it for twenty-two years, said Voss. And sending them out on the transports. I signed for every one.

She let go of the seed.

I didn't know there was anyone in it, she said. Until this morning. Until the boy's queen sang through it and I heard it sing back.

The hello ended a few minutes later.

I sat on the red glass for a long time.

Everyone did. Nobody said anything. The light came up over the canyon rim the way it did every morning, and the Hand hung over the plain with its fingers folded, and somewhere underneath its ten thousand folds, the first queen sang.

And eleven light-years away, behind the moon, a finger of a Hand that had been torn open twenty-two years ago was singing too.

Sera hadn't let go of my hand.

She'd held it through all of it. Through Maura kneeling in the snow, the way she told it. Through get up, love, the floor's cold. Through Okafor's three things. Her grip had got tighter and tighter until I couldn't feel my fingers, and I hadn't said anything, because there wasn't anything to say.

Now she let go.

She looked at her hand. Then at Liam, on her other side. He still had his face in his hands.

"She never told us about the second gate," Sera said. "Never. She told everyone about the kneeling. She told it to anyone who'd listen." Her voice was very flat. "She never once said they'd threatened to send us back out."

"Because Dad made her promise," said Liam, through his fingers.

"Because Dad made her promise," Sera agreed.

She was quiet for a while.

Then she said, "The Chancellor knelt to her."

"Yes," I said.

"On the floor. In her coat." Sera looked up at the sky. "And Mum told her to get up because the floor was cold."

Liam took his hands away from his face. His eyes were red. He was almost smiling.

"Course she did," he said. "That's Mum."

Sera laughed. It came out of her cracked and wet and sideways, and she put her hand over her stomach as if the baby had laughed too, and Luna, kneeling behind her, reached out without a word and put her hand on top of Sera's head and left it there.

Risa leaned over and kissed Sera's temple.

"She'd have done it in the snow," Risa said. "Without her coat."

"She would," said Sera. "She'd do it tomorrow."

Genny was on her knees beside me.

She'd been there for the whole hello. She hadn't said anything. She'd listened to Ines Tarrow find the ground, and Adaeze Marsh sing four notes on two worlds, and the Chancellor of Earth kneel in front of Maura Calder. She'd listened to Okafor's three things.

And she'd listened to the last one.

She turned to me. Her face was very white.

"Lucas," she said. "That's the one."

"I know."

"That's the one Father went into. Dot, there's someone in there." Her voice was shaking. "That's the one he was asking. Why must I climb. For the rest of his life." She grabbed my arm. "She's been there the whole time. Behind the moon. While he was asking. While we were growing up. While Mother was dying." She swallowed. "And they've been cutting her."

I didn't say anything.

I looked up. Past the canyon rim. Past the Hand. Toward the place in the sky where, a very long way off, there was a small blue world under glass, and a moon, and behind the moon, a piece of something torn open and never closed.

"Genny," I said.

"Yes."

"You wanted to tell the queen in the Hand that somebody asked."

Genny's chin came up.

"Yes," she said.

"Then tell her," I said. "And then ask her if she can hear the one behind the moon."

Days 775–776. Up the stairs.

Wren didn't answer that night. She went back up the north wall and opened her book. Toby went up and played something I've never heard, slow and low, a tune for someone who can't sleep. Risa: she'll answer. If she wasn't going to she'd have gone to bed.

Four in the morning. Wren woke Crane: can she hear me the other way? Nobody's tried. Knelt level with the band, hand flat on the stone. "Aunt Renata." Mara. Four things. One: you signed my transfer; nobody made you. "No." Two: the post scissors, every month until twelve, and the singing, the only place she sang; Wren remembered it every night for eighteen months when everyone else was dead. Three: I'm alive, with Toby Marsh, happier than I've ever been; tell no one. "Everyone I'd tell, I've lied to." She didn't have a four. Toby's hand on the back of her neck. "Go up the stairs."

Dawn. Okafor timed it to the hello so I'd be in the room: don't stop the work for her; let her walk in on it. Ines Tarrow, finished all at once. Her silver settles, like rain soaking into ground, and runs down through her feet. Okafor's floor shifted; every cup rattled once. First words ever on the hello: "There it is. The ground. I'd forgotten it was there."

Toby couldn't play. Juno took the carrying, not as well, but enough. Adaeze Marsh, fragment twenty-nine, who sang Toby's name up the hello on Day 607, small silver: she once made a whole ward quiet all night so nobody would hear her son crying. Opened, it ran like the ring from a bell, and the whole flat hummed. Then she sang four notes up and down, a song for a baby in a ward where nobody may wake. Toby played them kneeling, crying onto the wood. She heard him and sang louder, with him. Two worlds at once, the Hand carrying every note. Wren holding him from behind. He kept playing.

Voss alone, no guards, no car, walked from the Senate Residence in a coat. Twenty-three floors, the lift broken since spring, sixty-four years old. No silver of her own; I felt her through the seed. Thirty-one chairs. Mother standing. "You're Dot Dask. They told me you were dying." "I was."

She knelt in front of Maura. The Chancellor on the floor of a retired Major's flat, before the woman in the photograph. It's on the wall of the second-floor canteen; she walked past it twenty years and never asked who. Maura: Liam was four months old, snow, no coat, she'd wrapped him in it. They took Rory's fire at the first gate and said if he raised his hand at the second they'd send all three back into the snow. So she knelt. I'd do it again tomorrow. Let them laugh. Then her warm hands on the Chancellor's face: "Get up, love. The floor's cold." Sera made a sound I've never heard.

Okafor: you'll want to offer paper. No. You've signed enough. Three things, done not written. One: Level 62 opened, every gram, to me, because it was taken out of someone alive and I'm the only one who can give it back. Two: Central Allocation's files open to anyone, families first. "That's the end of the Senate." Yes. Three: you stay. No resigning, no cottage. I need the dome, four million breathing under glass; you know how to run it, so you'll run it my way until I say. If not, Dot holds your buckles in the air all twenty-three floors down. Holt laughed out loud. Voss: yes, all three.

She watched me open Kwame Osei's fourth and fifth doors through the seed and saw his hands go still. Then, standing to go, her hand on the seed: the ship from the second bombardment, the one Mother opened, never left. It couldn't close. It's been behind the moon twenty-two years. The Project has a station on the far side and cuts the grey off it for collars, bands and Level 62's tools, shipped out on the transports. She signed for every one. She didn't know anyone was in it until this morning, when our queen sang through it and she heard it sing back.

Genny, white: that's the one. The one Father went into and asked every day, why must I climb. Behind the moon the whole time, while Mother was dying, and they've been cutting her. You wanted to tell the queen in the Hand that somebody asked. Tell her. Then ask if she can hear the one behind the moon.