Chapter 311 Cinder

Dot counted one more.

I didn't see it. I was still on the ramp, with Dory wrapped round my legs and Pebble leaning on my knee and Risa's hand on the back of my neck, very warm, crackling slightly. But Garnet told me afterward. She said Dot had been at the foot of the steps of Scarecrow every evening while we were gone, the way the Major had asked. Every evening, counting everyone up, one at a time. Getting to the end. Stopping. Waiting a moment, as if there might be one more.

And that evening, when we'd come down out of the dark over the plain and the whole of Scarecrow had come running, and the crowd had finally thinned, and the lamps had come on along the steps, Dot stood at the bottom and counted everyone up.

And at the end, she counted me.

"This unit counted one more," she said. To nobody. To the steps. Very quietly. And her grille went bright. And stayed bright.

Garnet said it was the brightest she'd ever seen it.

Risa was enormous.

I'd been gone less than two weeks. It didn't matter. Edda had said every one would be quicker than the one before, and this one was, and Risa stood at the foot of the ramp with one hand on the small of her back and the other on my neck and a very small storm cloud sitting directly over her head, about the size of a hat, raining gently on nobody.

"Don't say anything," she said.

"I wasn't going to."

"You were going to say I've got bigger."

"You have got bigger."

"I told you not to say anything." But she was laughing. The cloud rained a little harder. "Edda says weeks. Not many. Ruth says fewer. They've been arguing about it in the records room every evening. Dory goes and sits on the floor between them and checks." She pressed my hand flat on her stomach. "Go on. You're the only one who hasn't."

I looked.

Small. Curled. Silver all through in a fine net, like Dory's, but tighter. Storm in every thread. And at every crossing, something that was mine. Asleep. Very calm. With its thumb very nearly in its mouth.

"A boy," I said.

"I know," said Risa. "Dory told me. She told everyone. She's been telling the Teeming. Pebble knows."

Hana was behind her. Not enormous yet. Not quite. But there was a curve to her now under her coat, and she stood very straight and held my hand and didn't say anything for a long time, and then said, "Good evening," very carefully, and I said it back, and it was exactly right again.

I looked there too. I couldn't help it.

Two. Facing each other. Curled. With their foreheads almost touching. Water and something else in one. Water and something else in the other. Different somethings. And between them, very faint, a thread of silver going from one to the other and back.

"They talk," said Hana. "Dory says. All the time." She pressed my hand harder. "Your mother says that's normal. She says they'll stop when they're about forty."

Tally walked down the ramp last.

Holding Wren's hand. With Genny's notebook against her chest, and the pile of tally marks in a bag over her shoulder, squared at the edges, every sheet. The ramp lights came on as she reached the bottom, one after another, and she stopped and looked at them.

Voss was at the foot of the ramp.

She'd been there, Garnet said, since noon. Since Juno sent word we were coming. Standing very straight in her plain coat with her hands at her sides. Not reading names. Not writing anything. Just standing. For six hours. With people passing her and crossing the plain to get away from her and coming back because the ship was coming and the best place to see it was where she stood.

Tally stopped in front of her.

Voss looked down at her. At the short silver hair, grown out a little, sticking up at the back. At the notebook. At the bag.

"I counted them," said Tally.

"I know," said Voss. "Juno told us."

"Fifty-eight thousand three hundred and twelve." Tally held up the bag. "I made a mark for every one. Wren said the numbers and I made the marks. And one more. On a new page." She opened the notebook. To the page that said THEM. To the one mark under it. "That one is her. The one who sat next to me."

Voss looked at the mark for a long time.

Then she did a thing I'd never seen her do. Not in the Senate. Not on the grass at the garden wall. Not in the room at the end of the arrivals hall with the door open.

She knelt down. And put her arms round Tally. And held her.

Tally stood very still. She didn't know what to do. Nobody had ever told her. She stood with the notebook pressed between them and her arms at her sides and her dark eyes very wide.

Then, slowly, she put one hand up. And rested one finger, very lightly, on Voss's shoulder.

Okafor was waiting in the map room.

Not with everyone. Just Okafor. And the General. And Holt, and Luna, and Crane on his bench by the wall with the grey band dark on his collar, the way he always sat now. Okafor had a slate in front of her. She'd written the number on it already, from Juno's word. 58,312. And under it, 1.

She didn't ask me anything for a long time. She just looked at me. Then at Wren. Then at Tally, who'd come in behind us without anyone saying she could, and sat by the door, where Voss always sat.

"Tell me," said Okafor. "All of it. In order. Slowly."

So I told her.

It took two hours. Wren told the parts I couldn't. Tally told the parts neither of us could, about the benches and the voice and what it felt like when it came down. Okafor didn't interrupt once. She wrote. Every word, on her slate, very small. When the slate was full she took another from the stack beside her and kept going.

When we were done she put her stylus down.

"The keeper at the top," she said. "You looked at it."

"For a day."

"Could you fold it?"

I thought about it. I'd thought about it every hour since.

"Yes," I said. "Not fast. Not like the small polite one. It's old. It's grown in. It's—" I looked for the word. "It's not in the grey, the way the keeper in the box was. It is the grey. The whole top of that world. If I folded it, I'd be folding the top of the world." I swallowed. "And the children are in the world. In the halls. All the way down."

Okafor looked at me for a long time.

"Then we don't fold it," she said. "We take them out from under it first. All of them. And then it's standing on nothing." She wrote that down. "That's the shape of it. I don't know how yet. But that's the shape."

The transmission came at midnight.

I was asleep. For the first time in two weeks. In my own bed, with Risa's back against mine, very warm, crackling faintly every time the baby kicked, and Sera on the other side, and somewhere through the wall the sound of Hana talking in her sleep, very carefully, every word right.

Then Dot's hand on the shutter.

Very lightly. One knock. Then a second.

"Operator," said Dot. Through the wood. "The Major is in the map room. The Meridian has received a transmission. From the human world. The Major would like the operator to come."

The Meridian had never stopped listening to Earth.

I'd forgotten that. Everyone had. She hung over Avalon on her track, the long human-built station with the spine-queen laid along the middle of her like a pale root, and six hundred and four crew aboard under Major Ruan who'd chosen to stay with the queen in their walls. She came over the plain every night. You could see her if you knew where to look, a slow bright star.

And she still had her relay. The one Earth had built into her, a long time ago, when she was Earth's. Pointed back at the human world. Listening. Nobody had ever turned it off. There'd never been any reason to. Nothing had come down it since Crane stopped using it.

Until midnight.

Ruan's face was on the big screen in the map room when I came in. Grey with tiredness, the way it always was at night. Behind her the main ring of the Meridian, mostly dark, with a few crew sitting along the walls, very still, listening to something.

Okafor was at the head of the table. The General beside her. Holt, in a coat over his nightshirt. Luna, with her hair down. Crane on his bench. And Voss, by the door, fully dressed. I don't think Voss ever slept properly.

"It came in forty minutes ago," said Ruan. "On the old Council band. Unencrypted. Just—sent. Straight up the relay, the way it used to come when Crane wanted to talk to us." She glanced at Crane on the screen. Crane didn't move. "It's a man's voice. He says he built the relay. He says his name is Odell."

I sat down very suddenly.

Odell.

Old. Burned hands. Chief engineer in the suit bay, on Day 102, when I was a cadet who'd never seen a forge since Father's. I'm not a soldier, he'd said. He'd taught me metallurgy every evening. He'd built Luna's grandfather's war suit. He'd built seventy-four housings over eleven years and never once seen inside one. He'd held the bolt, secretly, the day the needles came out. He'd known Father's eyes.

He'd welded the Meridian together round the spine, three hundred meters of human steel. Every seam.

"Play it," said Okafor.

The screen went grey. Then a face.

Older than I remembered. Much older. The hair gone completely white. Sitting in what looked like a workshop, very dark, with one lamp, and a great deal of equipment behind him that I recognized, because I'd learned on it. The suit bay. Or what was left of it.

He looked into the camera with his pale tired eyes.

"Dask," said Odell. "If this gets to you. I don't know if it will. I built the relay end of this and I've never been sure the station end's still listening. If it isn't, I'm talking to a dead box, and that's all right, I've done that before."

He held up one hand. Burned. The same burns.

"It's Odell. From the suit bay. You'll remember the holes in suit three. You left them alone. I never told anyone you could have closed them."

Luna put her hand over her mouth.

"I'll be quick," said Odell. "I don't know how long I've got on this before somebody notices. I'm sending it from the old bay because nobody comes down here any more. They've forgotten it's here."

He leaned closer to the camera.

"They've started Cinder again."

Nobody in the map room moved.

"Not Program," said Odell. "Project. They've changed the name. They think that makes it different. Project Cinder." His mouth twisted. "After the Chancellor's broadcast. After everyone saw. Everyone heard what she said about Article Fourteen. What the Sorn wanted. The children. Born whole."

He stopped. Looked down at his burned hands.

"The new Council heard it too," he said. "And they didn't hear what she meant. They heard something else. They heard: the Sorn want children born whole. And we don't have any. Because everyone who could have had them either went to Avalon or was cut so they couldn't." He looked up. "So they're making more."

"They opened the stores on Level Sixty-two," said Odell. "All of them. The silver. All the silver the Sorn ever gave us in the tithe, for thirty years. Everything they used for the vials and the program and the kits. They've got more than anyone knew. They're putting it in people."

"Thousands. Not dozens. Not a careful intake of forty with doctors sitting up nights. Thousands a week. Volunteers, they say. Some are. Most are people from the lower floors who were promised a ration card and a room on a higher level. They line them up in the old Program halls and inject them in rows."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Some of them don't wake up. Like the first time. More than the first time. Because they're going faster." He looked straight into the camera. "Halloway would know the number. She sat with the ones who didn't, the first time. Tell her it's worse."

At the end of the table, I heard a sound. Very small.

Ruth Halloway was standing in the door. I hadn't seen her come in. Nobody had. She must have heard Dot at the shutters, or seen the map room lamps from the records room across the square, where she'd been sitting up as she always did. She had her coat on over her nightdress. Buttoned wrong.

She didn't say anything. She stood in the door and listened. Her face had gone perfectly still.

"That's not all," said Odell.

"They're trying to finish them. They know he can do it. Everyone knows. The Chancellor said it, in front of four million. A man on Avalon who can open the narrow places and finish the silver and then you're whole and your children are born whole." He shook his head. "They can't do what he does. So they're trying to do it the other way. The Sorn way."

"Pieces of queens. From the tithe stores. The little slivers the Sorn gave the Council as tokens. They're putting them in. In people. Next to the silver. Trying to make it finish itself. The way the Sorn make their—" He stopped. "I don't know what the Sorn make with them. But they're trying."

The General had gone very still. I'd heard him go still once before, on the forest floor, when the new Hand's fire came down. He was as still as that now.

"Most of them die," said Odell. "The ones with the slivers. Most of them. A few don't. A few—" He looked away from the camera. "I've seen one. They brought him down here to have a housing fitted, because I'm the only one left who knows how. He wasn't screaming. He was very quiet. He did what he was told. Every single thing. I asked him his name and he didn't answer. I don't think he knew it was a thing he was allowed to have."

By the door, very quietly, Tally made a sound.

"And there's the rest," said Odell.

"The registry. Everyone who's been injected and lived goes on a list. The ones who look like they might finish. They're paired. By the Council. Matched. Like stock." His face was grey. "So there'll be children. Born whole. They think. Enough of them that when the Sorn come back and ask why the small polite one in the Chancellor's chair went quiet—"

He didn't finish.

He didn't have to.

"They're going to pay the tithe," said Voss. From the door. Very quietly. "With children. They're going to make children and pay the tithe with them. So the Sorn don't come for everyone else."

Nobody answered her.

Nobody had to.

"Here's why I'm calling," said Odell.

He sat back. He looked very old, in the light of the one lamp.

"It's not only New Halcyon any more. The Chancellor's broadcast went everywhere. Every dome. The outer domes picked it up. The ones nobody in the central dome ever thought about. Carver. Stillwater. Ashby. The old mining domes on the north rim. Six of them. Seven, if you count what's left round Halden." He spread his burned hands. "They heard. All of them. They heard there's a world with a sky. And they heard what the Council's doing now. And they've been talking. On the old band. The one nobody uses. The one I built thirty years ago for the war."

"They want to go. Not a few. Not Pell's people, a family at a time through the locks. All of them. Whole domes. They've counted."

He held up a sheet of paper to the camera. Old paper. Handwritten. A list of names. Not people. Domes. With numbers beside them.

"Three million, one hundred thousand," said Odell. "Give or take. From the outer domes. And more every day from New Halcyon, who've seen the rows on the Program floors and want out before their name goes on a list."

He put the paper down.

"They asked me to ask you. Because I built the relay. Because I knew you, once. Because I told them you left the holes in suit three alone, and that's the kind of man you are." He looked straight into the camera. "Will Avalon help?"

A pause.

"I'll be on this band at midnight. Every night. For as long as they don't find me. If you can answer, answer."

He reached forward. The screen went grey.

Nobody said anything for a very long time.

Ruan's face came back on the screen. She looked at all of us. She didn't say anything either.

Then Crane stood up.

I'd hardly heard Crane speak since the Accord broke. He sat on his bench by the wall with the grey band on his collar and his hands in his lap and listened, and sometimes he said something at the dawn count, very quietly, and mostly he didn't. He'd run Project AVALON. He'd sent the forty. He'd wanted me in the ring. He'd told me about Halden at night, on his bench, in a voice like someone reading out a list of things he could never put down.

He stood up now. Slowly. With one hand on the wall.

"I signed the original Cinder protocol," he said.

Nobody moved.

"Me and five others. All dead now but me." He didn't look at Ruth in the door. "We went slowly. Forty at a time. A doctor for every three. Ruth sat up with the ones who didn't wake up. She was twenty-three." He was quiet. "We lost one in nine. And I thought that was a terrible number. I thought about it every night for thirty years." He looked at the dark screen. "Thousands a week. In rows. With slivers."

He sat back down. Very heavily.

"It's worse than anything I ever did," said Crane. "And I did a great deal." He looked at his hands. "They learned it from me."

Ruth came in from the door.

She walked down the side of the map room, past Voss, past Tally, to the table. She put both hands flat on it. She looked at Okafor.

"I was the youngest doctor in Program Cinder," she said. "I took blood. I wrote numbers on charts. I sat with the ones who didn't wake up." Her voice was perfectly steady. "I was in the room when Dorothy Dask woke up. I wrote it down." She looked round the table. "I've never told anyone how many didn't. I'm going to tell you now. Forty-one. In the whole of the program. I knew every name."

Nobody said anything.

"He says it's worse," said Ruth. "I believe him."

She straightened up.

"I can't stop it from here," she said. "I can't go there. They'd put me in a chair. But I can tell you what's going to happen to the ones who live. The ones with the slivers. The ones who do what they're told and don't know they're allowed a name." She looked at Tally, by the door. "I've got one of those in my hospital already. I know what it takes. Eleven days. A fold a morning. And someone who'll sit with them every evening and answer forty-one questions." She looked at me. "If there are hundreds, I'll need a ward. If there are thousands—"

She stopped.

"Then I'll need the twins," she said. "Both of them. Every day. And I'll need Voss."

By the door, Voss looked up.

Okafor stood up.

Slowly. The way she did when she was about to say something that would go on the slate and stay there. She looked round the table. At all of us. At the dark screen where Odell's face had been.

"Fifty-eight thousand three hundred and twelve," she said. "Under a ring. With a keeper grown into the top of the world." She put her hand flat on the slate. "And three million one hundred thousand. On the human world. Under a Council that's opened the stores and is making children to pay with."

She looked at me.

"Dask. A season ago we couldn't keep the water out of the drains for two hundred thousand."

"Yes."

"Now there are three million who want to come."

"Yes."

"Can Avalon hold three million?"

I didn't know.

I thought about the plain. The red glass going out to the horizon in every direction. The ranges in the east where the Hesk lived. The seventh lake and the eighth and the ninth, going away north. The canyon, and the old grey-black rock under everything, that didn't mind holding things. The cold hill. The salt terrace. The dark grove. The forest the Kethri had brought, growing out from the park in every direction a little more every day.

Avalon was very big. Bigger than Earth, Genny had said once. With a sky.

"Avalon can," I said. "I don't know if we can."

Okafor nodded slowly.

"That's the right answer," she said. "Write it down, Windsor."

Luna wrote it down.

It didn't get decided that night.

It couldn't. It was too big. Okafor didn't decide things that size at midnight in a map room with half the people in their nightclothes. She sent everyone home. She told Ruan to record everything that came down the relay and send it to the map room. She told Juno, through Dot, to tell every queen on Avalon in the morning, after the count, and ask them what they thought.

And she told me to answer Odell.

"Not yes," she said. "Not no. We don't know yet. Don't promise him anything." She looked at me. "But answer. He's sitting in a dark bay on a dead band that he built thirty years ago, talking to a box he isn't sure is listening. Tell him it's listening."

So the next night, at midnight, I sat in the map room in front of the big screen with Ruan's relay open. And Luna beside me. And Ruth, who said she wasn't leaving, and Voss, who didn't say anything and didn't leave either. And Crane, on his bench.

The screen went grey. Then the workshop. Then Odell.

He looked at the camera for a long time. As if he didn't believe it.

"Dask," he said.

"Odell."

He sat back very slowly in his chair. And put one burned hand over his face. And kept it there. For a long time.

"Well," he said at last, through his fingers. "Well. I'll be damned. The box is listening."

I didn't promise him anything.

I told him what Okafor said. That we didn't know yet. That it was big. That we'd need to talk to the queens and the broods and two hundred thousand people who'd only just got their water working. That we'd need ships. More ships than we had. That we'd need to know what the Council would do when three million people walked out of their domes.

He listened to all of it. He nodded.

"That's fair," he said. "That's more than fair. I was ready for nothing."

Then I asked him something.

"The one they brought down to you. For the housing. The one who didn't know his name."

Odell's face changed.

"Yes."

"Did you fit it?"

Odell didn't answer for a long time.

"I fitted it," he said. "I had to. They were standing behind me. But I left a hole in it. Like suit three. A small one. In the back. Where nobody'd look." He held up his burned hands. "I don't know what it's for. I just thought—if anyone ever found him who could close it, or open it, or whatever you do—there ought to be somewhere to start."

I didn't say anything.

"I've been leaving holes," said Odell. "In all of them. Every housing they've sent down here. Thirty-one, so far. All in the same place." He looked at the camera. "I don't know if that matters. I don't know if anything I do matters. But I remembered you didn't close the holes in suit three when you could have. And I thought, if he left a hole, I'll leave one."

Ruth made a small sound beside me.

I turned. She had her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were very bright.

"Thirty-one," she said. Very quietly. Not to me. To herself. "There were thirty-one in the chairs. With their spoons. Before he came." She looked at the screen. At Odell, old and white-haired in the one lamp. "Ask him their names. If he knows them. The ones with the housings. Ask him if he knows any of their names."

I asked.

Odell looked at his hands.

"No," he said. "They don't know their names. I told you." He was quiet. "But I gave them numbers. On the housings. On the inside. Where they'd find them, if anyone ever took them off. One to thirty-one." He almost smiled. "It's not a name. But it's not nothing. It's somewhere to start."

By the door, Tally had stood up.

She came to the table. Very small. Very straight. With Genny's notebook. And she opened it to a new page. A clean one. And held out her hand for my pen.

I gave it to her.

At the top of the page, very carefully, in Genny's square letters, she wrote: EARTH.

And under it, thirty-one marks. Four lines down. One across. Six times. And one more.

"I will count them," said Tally. "When they come. One at a time." She looked at Odell on the screen. "Will you tell them? That someone is counting?"

Odell looked at the small silver-haired child on his screen for a long time. Then he looked at me.

"Who's that, Dask?"

"Her name's Tally," I said. "She was one of them. The ones the Sorn take. She sat in a chair once and didn't know she was allowed to have a name."

Odell didn't say anything for a while.

"Then yes," he said at last. To Tally. "I'll tell them. All thirty-one. I'll tell them someone's counting." He reached forward to the controls. Then stopped. "Tally."

"Yes."

"That's a good name," said Odell. "Midnight tomorrow."

The screen went grey.

Days 2081–2084. Cinder.

Dot at the foot of the steps every evening while we were gone, counting everyone up, stopping at the end, waiting a moment as if there might be one more. That evening, after the crowd, she counted me. This unit counted one more. Her grille went bright and stayed bright; Garnet says the brightest it's ever been.

Risa enormous after less than two weeks, a storm cloud the size of a hat raining gently over her head. Don't say you've got bigger. Weeks, Edda says; fewer, Ruth says; Dory sits between them in the records room and checks. Go on, you're the only one who hasn't. A net like Dory's but tighter, storm in every thread, mine at every crossing, thumb nearly in his mouth. A boy. Dory told everyone, even the Teeming; Pebble knows. Hana with a curve under her coat: good evening. Two facing each other, foreheads almost touching, water and something different in each, a thread of silver going between and back. They talk, Dory says. Mother says they'll stop at about forty.

Voss at the foot of the ramp since noon, six hours, people crossing the plain to avoid her and coming back for the view. Tally with the bag of marks: I counted them; and one more on a new page; that one is her. Voss knelt and held her. Tally stood very still, not knowing what to do; then one finger, lightly, on Voss's shoulder.

Okafor alone with the General, Holt, Luna, Crane on his bench: 58,312 on her slate, and 1. Two hours, in order, slowly; Wren and Tally telling what I couldn't; two slates full. Could you fold the keeper at the top? Not fast; it isn't in the grey, it is the grey, the whole top of that world, and the children are in the world all the way down. Then we take them out from under it first, and then it's standing on nothing. That's the shape. I don't know how yet.

Midnight, Dot's knock on the shutter: the Meridian has received a transmission from the human world. She still has Earth's relay, pointed home; nobody ever turned it off; nothing came since Crane stopped using it. Ruan: on the old Council band, unencrypted; a man who says he built the relay; Odell. Old, burned hands, the suit bay on Day 102, I'm not a soldier, metallurgy every evening, Luna's grandfather's suit, seventy-four housings never seen inside, the bolt he held the day the needles came out, Father's eyes; every seam of the Meridian.

White-haired in the dead suit bay with one lamp. If the station end's not listening I'm talking to a dead box; I've done that before. You'll remember the holes in suit three; you left them alone; I never told anyone you could have closed them. They've started Cinder again. Not Program; Project; they think that makes it different. After the broadcast the new Council heard: the Sorn want children born whole and we have none; so they're making more. Every store on Level Sixty-two opened, thirty years of tithe silver; thousands a week, in rows, in the old Program halls; volunteers, some; mostly lower floors promised a ration card and a higher room. More don't wake than the first time, because they're going faster. Tell Halloway it's worse. Ruth in the door in her coat over her nightdress, buttoned wrong.

They're trying to finish them the Sorn way: slivers of queens from the tithe tokens, put in beside the silver. Most die. A few don't. One brought down for a housing because Odell's the only one left who knows how: very quiet, did every single thing he was told; I asked his name; I don't think he knew it was a thing he was allowed. Tally made a sound by the door. And a registry: the injected who might finish, paired by the Council like stock, so there'll be children born whole. Voss: they're going to pay the tithe with children so the Sorn don't come for everyone else.

Why I'm calling: the broadcast went to every dome; Carver, Stillwater, Ashby, the old mining domes on the north rim, what's left round Halden. They heard there's a world with a sky, and what the Council's doing. Talking on the old war band he built thirty years ago. Whole domes. A handwritten list: three million one hundred thousand, give or take, and more from New Halcyon every day who've seen the rows. They asked me because I built the relay and knew you and told them about suit three. Will Avalon help? Midnight, every night, as long as they don't find me.

Crane stood, one hand on the wall: I signed the original Cinder protocol, me and five others, all dead but me. Forty at a time, a doctor for every three; one in nine; I thought that terrible every night for thirty years. Thousands a week in rows with slivers. Worse than anything I did, and I did a great deal. They learned it from me. Ruth, hands flat on the table: the youngest doctor in Program Cinder; I was in the room when Dorothy Dask woke; forty-one didn't, in the whole program; I knew every name. I believe him. I can't go there. But the ones with slivers who don't know they're allowed a name: I've got one already; eleven days, a fold a morning, someone to answer forty-one questions every evening. If thousands, I'll need the twins every day. And Voss.

Okafor: fifty-eight thousand under a ring, and three million on the human world under a Council making children to pay with. A season ago we couldn't keep the water out of the drains for two hundred thousand. Can Avalon hold three million? The plain to every horizon, the eastern ranges, lakes going north, the grey-black rock under everything, the Kethri forest growing out from the park. Avalon can. I don't know if we can. That's the right answer. Write it down, Windsor. Not decided at midnight in nightclothes: Ruan records everything; Juno asks every queen after the count. Answer him; not yes, not no; he's talking to a box he isn't sure is listening; tell him it's listening.

Next midnight, Luna, Ruth, Voss, Crane on his bench. Dask. Odell. A burned hand over his face a long time: I'll be damned; the box is listening. No promises; it's big; ships, the broods, two hundred thousand who've only just got water; what the Council will do. That's more than fair; I was ready for nothing. The one with the housing: did you fit it? I had to; they stood behind me; but I left a hole, like suit three, small, in the back where nobody'd look; somewhere to start. Thirty-one housings so far, every one with a hole in the same place. You left the holes, so I leave one.

Ruth: thirty-one, like the chairs with their spoons; ask if he knows their names. They don't; but I numbered the housings inside, one to thirty-one, where they'd find them; not a name, not nothing. Tally took my pen and a clean page: EARTH, and thirty-one marks, six fives and one. I'll count them when they come, one at a time; will you tell them someone is counting? Who's that, Dask? Tally; she was one of the ones the Sorn take, in a chair once, not knowing she was allowed a name. Then yes; I'll tell all thirty-one someone's counting. Tally. That's a good name. Midnight tomorrow.