Chapter 382 The Cut

We held the arch for six days.

I'm going to write them in order this time. Because they happened in order. Because every hour on the ring was the hour after the last one, and the children came out one at a time, and you couldn't skip any of them.

The first day.

The grandmothers went into the towers.

Sixteen hundred of them. Through the arch from the courtyard of the house on the rise, past Dory and Corin with their hands on the stone, out onto the grey of the ring, with bags. Wenna at the front.

And the Mom Squad beside them. All five. Showing them how.

You kneel in front of the child. You put your hands up, if you can lift, or your hands out, if you can't. You feel for the note. It's in them like a splinter, very thin, very deep, and some of the grandmothers couldn't feel it at all, so Mother and Ingrid and Maura and Kyria and Teshka went down the rows ahead of them, pulling, and the grandmothers came after with the shirts.

That was the thing about the shirts. Wenna had brought them all. Six hundred and eleven from Tiel, and thousands more from the other three, and the grandmothers of the town under the garden wall had brought more again, every spare shirt on Avalon, Nan Vey had ironed them all, and when a child came out of the note and looked up, grey, not knowing where they were, a grandmother put a shirt on them.

It didn't matter whose. It didn't matter if it fitted.

It was something warm. That someone had washed. And folded. For someone who was going to come home.

Eleven thousand on the first day.

Through the arch. Into the courtyard of the house on the rise. Past Dory and Corin. Down the long road, in rows, holding hands, to the town under the garden wall, where Lotte Quint and Abena Osei and the three hundred grandmothers of Avalon who hadn't gone were waiting with bread and blankets and the doors of every house open.

Nan Vey ironed on the red glass.

All day. On a Hyrrani shield. Every shirt that came back through the arch dirty, because a child had been sick on it, or bled on it, or just held it too tight. She ironed it and folded it and gave it to someone going back through.

"There," she said. Every time. "That's one thing right."

Eleven thousand times.

The second day.

I found Bell.

I'd been going tower to tower. The way I did in the second hour. Into the hollow, hand on the wall, hello, and wait. Risa went ahead of me and hushed them, one at a time, as lightning. Andraste went behind me and guarded the door. And I went in and asked each queen in pieces what she'd been, before.

Moss. Then a queen of deep cold water, who remembered ice on the top of a sea and something singing underneath it. Then one who didn't remember anything at all, who'd been in the tower so long there was nothing left but the note; I sat with her for an hour, and she never answered, and I had to leave her.

Then one who remembered a bell.

Not a bell. A sound like a bell. A clear high note, very pure, that she'd sung on her own world over a valley where the air was so still you could hear it for a hundred miles. Her people had built towers of their own, to ring it back to her. Real towers. Of stone. With real bells.

She remembered that the houses had come. And taken her. And broken her. And given most of her away as tokens, in boxes, to the people who signed.

And put the rest of her in the voice. In one of the nine quiet places. Where she'd sung the note slowly, on purpose, until the houses found her and took her out.

And brought her here.

And put her in a tower.

I sat down on the floor of the tower.

I didn't mean to. My legs did it. With my hand still flat on the wall.

"Bell," I said.

She didn't know the name. Genny gave it to her. On the long ward. Over the tray where the rest of her is, the pieces from the tokens, that hum when Brock reads.

But she heard me say it.

And something in her, very far up, at the top of the tower, very small, rang.

Genny came through the arch an hour later.

She'd been on the Harness, with Halloway, with the children who'd come out too grey for the town, the ones who needed more than a shirt and bread. Andraste went and got her. Andraste didn't say anything; she just stood in the doorway of the Harness's medical bay with her blade on her back until Genny looked up, and Genny saw her face, and put down Father's pen.

She came into the tower.

She knelt down beside me on the grey floor. And put her hand flat on the wall beside mine. Not touching. Near. The way she taught everyone.

And waited.

Bell rang for her.

Clear. High. Very pure. All the way down the hollow tower, from the top where the pieces were, to the floor where Genny was kneeling.

The way she used to hum on the long ward when Brock got a long word right.

Genny didn't say anything for a very long time.

Then she said, very quietly: "I kept your tray. The rest of you. On the long ward." She swallowed. "You hum when Brock gets a long word right. Did you know? The rest of you does."

We brought her down.

Not all of her. Not then. Bell was in pieces at the top of a tower on a ring round a star, set into the metal, and there was no way to bring her down whole. But I went up the inside of the tower, the way I go up anything, asking the metal to let me, and found her. And asked the metal round each piece to let it go.

Every piece.

One at a time.

And handed them down. To Genny. Who'd come up after me, halfway, on the wall, the way my sister would, with her coat off and a tray from the Harness strapped to her back.

Every piece.

When the last one was in the tray, Bell rang so loudly that every tower in the cluster went quiet for a moment, listening.

The third day.

The houses answered.

They hadn't, until then. Not really. The correctors kept coming up out of the doors in the grey, and the towers kept turning their singing toward us, and the Vaeli and the Hyrrani and Brock kept standing in front of everything. But that was the ring. That was what the ring did. That was the houses' machine, doing what it was built to do.

The houses themselves hadn't said anything.

On the third day, Tally felt them come.

She was on the Meridian. With Moon. She'd asked to come, and Okafor had said no, and Tally had said that the voice would need someone to talk to at the ring, because the voice was frightened, and nobody else could hear it, and Okafor had looked at her for a long time and then said yes.

On the third day, at noon, she put her hands over her ears.

"They're here," she said. "In the voice. Standing on it." She was very white. "They're not talking to us. They're talking to the ring."

"What are they saying?" said Okafor.

Tally listened.

"Numbers," she said. "Just numbers. Very fast." She swallowed. "The voice says it's the ring's numbers. Where everything is. How much it weighs. What's holding it up."

Okafor went very still.

"Which part of the ring," she said.

Tally didn't need to answer.

I felt it. Every atom. Under my feet, on the grey, where I was standing at the door of a tower with my hand on the wall.

The ring was moving.

Not the whole ring. Our part. The cluster of towers Ilka had chosen, the ones where the newest children were. And the grey round them. And the arch Kyria's people had cut in four hours with their knees bleeding.

All of it. Very slightly. Very slowly.

Toward the star.

They were cutting it off.

The houses. Their own ring. The thing they'd built out of thousands of queens and spent longer than anyone could remember filling with children. They were cutting the piece we were standing on away from the rest of it. And letting it fall.

Into the sun.

Rather than let us have it.

"How long?" said Okafor.

Ruan answered. From the Meridian's heart. Very quietly.

"Days," she said. "It's very big. It's falling very slowly. Three days. Maybe four." A pause. "Then it's too close. The heat. Nothing on it will last."

Okafor looked out of the Meridian's forward window at the cluster of towers. At the arch, very small, on the grey. At the Hyrrani round it and the Vaeli and the tide of correctors and Brock, still iron, still standing.

At the towers.

"How many children are left in that cluster?" she said.

Ilka told her.

Okafor didn't say anything for a very long time.

Then she took out the black slate. And didn't write anything on it.

She just held it.

"Can you stop it?" she said. To me. On the channel. Very quietly.

I was standing on the grey. With my hand on the wall of a tower. Feeling the whole cluster under me go toward the star, very slowly, the way a ship goes when the engines have stopped and the tide's got it.

I thought about it.

I thought about the moon. And the salt plain of Caddoc. And the second sun. And the six Hands over Ammaru. And the hearts of the atoms in every piece of Sorn metal in the cluster, very small, very tight, held.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know what it would take. To push something this big back up. Away from a star." I swallowed. "I'd have to go very small."

The channel was quiet.

Then Andraste, behind me, at the door of the tower, with her blade out, said:

"No."

She didn't say it loudly. She didn't need to.

"No," she said again. In our language. "Not this. Not here." She didn't turn round; she was watching the correctors. "You would go small enough to push a piece of ring the size of a world away from a sun. And you would not come back. I can feel it. I can feel how far down it would be." Her voice didn't change. "I am the fifth door. I am telling you no."

And Okafor said: "She's right."

"Then what?" I said.

Okafor didn't answer for a long time.

"Then we do it the way we always do," she said. "We don't stop it. We get them out before it gets there." She put the black slate away. "Three days. Every child in the cluster. Through the arch." A pause. "Before the heat."

The fourth day.

Okafor made it light.

Not the whole cluster. She couldn't. Nobody could. But the part right round the arch. And the towers nearest it. She stood on the forward deck of the Meridian with both hands up and made it lighter, and lighter, and lighter, so that it fell more slowly than the rest. So that the cluster began, very slowly, to tear. The far towers falling faster. The near towers, the ones round the arch, falling slower.

Buying time.

She stood there for two days.

She didn't sit down.

On the second night Ruth came up from the Harness and stood beside her and said, very quietly, that her heart was doing something Ruth didn't like.

Okafor said: "I know."

And didn't sit down.

And everyone went into the towers.

Everyone. Not just the grandmothers. Not just the Mom Squad. The Hyrrani put down their blades and went in. The Vaeli. The Lir and the Sheln and the Caddi and the terrace people. The Hessan, blind and soft and small, who'd been digging since the first day, who could hear the children under the grey and went down through it in tunnels nobody else could find.

Everyone who could carry, carried.

And the ones who couldn't carry held the paths. Luna held every ice path from the arch to every tower in the cluster, white and blue, criss-crossing the grey like the lines on Garnet's sheet. Sera burned the black back off every one. Risa went from tower to tower, faster than she'd ever gone, hushing every queen so the note would stop and the children could be lifted.

And Hana breathed.

For all of them. For every child coming out of the note grey and not knowing how. For every grandmother carrying two at a time across Luna's paths. For Okafor, on the forward deck, with Ruth's hand on her shoulder.

For everyone.

The fifth day.

The heat started.

Not much. Not at first. The grey of the ring under our feet going warm. Then warmer. The light from the star getting brighter, and whiter, and bigger, until Garnet said she could see it through her eyelids.

The far towers went first. The ones Okafor couldn't hold. Falling faster. Getting closer. And the grey round them starting to glow.

Ilka counted the children left in them.

And then stopped counting.

I went to the far towers.

I shouldn't have. Andraste said so. Okafor said so, very quietly, on the channel. I went anyway. Across the grey, toward the star, toward the glow, with Andraste behind me because she said if I was going to be an idiot she was going to guard the door while I did it.

There were children in the far towers. Not many. The ones the grandmothers couldn't reach, because the grey round them was too hot to walk on. Hundreds.

I went in.

I'm not going to write all of it.

I'll write that I went into the hottest tower I could reach with my hand flat on the wall, the metal so hot under my palm I could feel it trying to be something else, and found the children in the rows at the bottom, in the dark, in the note, very still.

And that I couldn't carry them.

Not all of them. There were too many and the grey outside was too hot and I'm only one person. I can feel every atom of the moon and I can only carry two children at a time.

So I asked the tower.

Not the queen. The tower. The metal. The Sorn grey it was made of, every atom of it, that was going soft in the heat of the star.

I asked it to be something else.

Not sand. Not a door. A boat. A long flat shape, wide at the bottom, with walls, with the children in it, lifting off the floor of the tower and out through the wall and across the grey and back toward the arch. The way the Sheln's flat boats go across the shallow sea.

It didn't want to.

It was made by people who didn't want it to want anything. It had been a tower for longer than anyone could remember. It knew how to be a tower.

But it was very hot. And it was going to stop being anything at all very soon. And I asked it the way I ask everything, patiently, as if there was nothing in the world that couldn't come back if you were patient enough with it.

And it listened.

I took the children out of the far towers in boats.

Eleven of them. Eleven towers. Eleven boats. Across the glowing grey toward the arch, with Andraste walking beside each one with her blade and Luna's path coming out to meet them and the grandmothers at the end of the path.

Four hundred and nineteen children.

On the twelfth tower, the grey under my feet was too hot to stand on and the tower itself was too soft to be anything but what it was falling into, and Andraste took me by the collar and pulled me back.

"No," she said.

I could feel the children in it. In the dark. In the rows. Seventy-one of them.

"No," said Andraste again. And held on.

And the twelfth tower went into the light.

The sixth day.

The cluster was very close to the star by then.

The near towers, round the arch, the ones Okafor held light, were the last. Everything else was gone. Burning, or melted, or falling the last of the way into the white.

And the arch.

Kyria's people had cut it out of stone from the highest mountain on Hyrran. It was the coolest thing on the cluster. Red-grey, with the water pattern in it. Standing on the glowing grey. Open. Onto the courtyard of the house on the rise, three days down the thread, where Dory and Corin had had their hands on it for six days without taking them away.

Six days.

Corin is seven weeks old.

Rory said afterward that the grandfathers took turns sitting beside them. Feeding them. Holding cups to their mouths. Putting blankets round them at night. Dory never took her hand away. Corin never took his away. Thessaly slept against her brother's back the whole time, and every time Corin started to tire, she gave him something, very quietly, and he kept asking.

The old queen, under the house, sang to them.

She didn't sleep either.

The General told me the rest. Afterward. On the porch. Very quietly, the way he tells things he doesn't think he's allowed to feel.

He said the grandfathers took the nights in turns. Two hours each. Rory first, because Rory doesn't sleep much anyway; he said a baker's body gets used to being up at three. Then Kwame. Then Konrad. Then the General himself. Then Taveth, who was good at nothing, and who sat beside Dory and Corin for two hours every night and told them stories in Hyrrani that neither of them understood, very quietly, so they wouldn't feel alone.

"He was the best of us," said the General. "At that." He looked at his hands. "I'd never have thought it."

And in the day, he said, everyone came. Every person on Avalon who wasn't on the ring. They came up the long road past the house on the rise, the way the porch comes down to the red glass when someone leaves. Not to go through the arch. Just to see. Just to stand at the edge of the courtyard for a minute and look at two children with their hands on a stone, holding a door open for a hundred and thirty-nine thousand people they'd never met.

Some of them brought things. Bread. Blankets. A Lir child from the shallow seas brought a shell. A Vaeli boy brought a wooden blade he'd carved himself and put it down beside Corin very carefully and went away without saying anything.

On the fifth night, the General said, Elin and Goldie came down the stairs from the children's room on their own. Holding hands. And sat down on the courtyard stone, one on each side of Dory and Corin, with their other hands flat on the ground.

And made it April.

All night. So the stone wouldn't be cold.

"I didn't ask them to," said the General. "Nobody asked them." He was quiet for a long time. "They just knew."

He looked out at the courtyard. At the arch. Closed now. Just stone, with the water pattern in it, very fine.

"Your mother would say that's what family is," he said. "Knowing. Without being asked."

"She would," I said.

"She'd be right," said the General. And got up, and went inside, and didn't say anything else that night.

The last children came out of the last tower at noon on the sixth day.

Mother carried the last one. Of course she did. Across Luna's last path, which was melting under her feet, with the light of the star so bright behind her that Garnet said she was only a shape. A small shape in a dark coat, carrying a child in a grey shirt.

Through the arch.

Then the queens.

I'd been going tower to tower for six days. I'd asked every queen in the cluster what she'd been, before. Some of them remembered. Some of them didn't. Some of them I'd sat with for an hour and they'd never answered.

I couldn't leave them.

Queens don't die easily. I've always said that. The boy who said hello taught them that, the voice said. But a queen in pieces at the top of a tower that's falling into a star—

I didn't know.

And I couldn't find out.

So the grandmothers carried them.

That's what happened. I didn't plan it. Nobody planned it. On the last afternoon, with the grey glowing white round us and the arch the only cool thing left, Wenna came out of the last tower with a tray. One of Halloway's, from the Harness. With pieces of a queen in it. Grey. Very small. Singing very faintly.

She'd gone up the inside of the tower. On her own. A very old woman with a long grey neck, too old for the tithe, who'd climbed up the hollow inside of a tower falling into a star and asked the metal, the way she'd seen me do it, to let go of the pieces.

It had.

"You said you would go and get them," she said. Through Dot. To Okafor. "Everyone. You didn't say only children."

After that everyone went up.

Every grandmother. Every one of the Mom Squad. The Hyrrani cutters, with their old tools. Genny, with Bell's tray on her back and an empty one under her arm. Up the insides of the towers, in the heat, asking the metal to let the pieces go, and coming down with them in trays and bags and folded shirts.

We didn't get all of them.

I'll write that. We didn't. Some of the towers were too hot by then. Some of the queens didn't let go; they'd been the note so long they didn't know how to be anything else, and the metal held on to them, and we had to leave them.

But we got a great many.

Brock was the last one through the arch.

Of course he was. He'd stood in front of it for six days. Iron. With his black hand, which Maura said would take a while, and his other one. He stood in front of the arch while everyone went through it. The cutters. The Vaeli. The Hyrrani. The grandmothers with their trays. The Mom Squad. Andraste, with her hand on my collar. Me.

And then he turned round.

And looked at the arch.

And went through it.

And Saska, waiting on the other side, in the courtyard of the house on the rise, caught him.

Dory took her hand off the arch.

For the first time in six days.

Corin took his off too. And looked at his hand for a long time, very carefully, as if he was working out how it had been made.

And then he went to sleep. On the courtyard stone. Instantly. In the middle of a breath.

Thessaly lay down beside him.

And the arch on the ring, on the other side, three days up the thread, standing on the white-hot grey of a piece of the houses' ring the size of a world as it went the last of the way into a star, closed.

Okafor sat down.

On the forward deck of the Meridian. Very suddenly. For the first time in six days.

Ruth was there before she hit the deck.

She's all right. I'll write that now, because I didn't know it for two days, and I don't want anyone reading this to not know it for even a line.

She's all right. Her heart did something Ruth didn't like, and Ruth and Halloway and Maura did something about it, in the medical bay of the Harness, for most of a night. And in the morning she woke up and asked for the black slate.

Ruth said no.

Okafor said she'd only add, she wouldn't subtract.

Ruth gave it to her.

I'll write the numbers. Because Okafor wrote them, the morning she woke up, in the medical bay of the Harness, with Ruth watching.

The left column.

One hundred and thirty-nine thousand, four hundred and six children. From the cluster. Through the arch. Into the courtyard of the house on the rise and down the long road to every house on Avalon that had a door, and then every house on every world through every arch that had a door, because Avalon ran out of doors on the fourth day.

Seven hundred and twelve queens, in pieces. In trays and bags and shirts. Bell. And the moss queen. And the queen of deep cold water.

And under that, in Okafor's square hand: Every grandmother came back.

The right column.

I'm not going to write the right column. It's in volume sixteen. Genny wrote it in the medical bay with Father's pen, every name Ilka could give her, and when there weren't names, a number, and when there wasn't a number, a line.

It's very long.

It's shorter than it would have been.

And at the bottom of the slate, under both columns, something that wasn't a number.

Okafor showed it to me. In the medical bay. With Ruth's hand on her shoulder.

They cut off their own ring rather than let us have it.

And under it, smaller:

They're not farming any more. They're burning the field.

Genny took Bell home first.

Before the Harness had finished coming down on the red glass. Before Okafor was carried off it. Before anyone. She went down the ramp with the tray on her back and Father's pen in her coat and walked straight across the red glass and down the long road to the long ward, and didn't stop for anyone.

Brock went with her. With his black hand. Saska went with him.

I went too. I wanted to see.

The long ward was very quiet.

The trays along the walls. All of them. The four hundred and the nine. Humming very faintly, the way they always do. And the young of four broods asleep on the floor between them, because the young sleep on the long ward now, Halloway says, more than anywhere else on Avalon; she says they like the sound.

And at the end of the third row, beside the place where the rain queen's tray used to be, Bell's.

The rest of her. The pieces from the tokens. That Genny found in Sera's sacks a very long time ago and laid out in a tray and named, before anyone knew what she was.

Genny knelt down beside it.

And took the other tray off her back. The one from the ring. And set it down beside the first one. Very carefully. Side by side.

And took her hands away.

Nothing happened for a long time.

Then the pieces from the ring rang. Very faintly. That clear high note, very pure, like a bell over a valley where the air is so still you can hear it for a hundred miles.

And the pieces in the old tray, the ones that had been on the long ward all this time, humming when Brock got a long word right, heard it.

And rang back.

I've heard a great many things on the long ward. The rain queen singing the thank-you song. Callum's hand closing. Tally waking up screaming.

I'd never heard anything like Bell finding the rest of herself.

It wasn't loud. It was two notes. The same note, from two trays, a hand's width apart. Over and over. Like two people in the dark calling each other's names to find out where they are.

And then the two notes came together.

And were one.

Genny didn't say anything.

She sat back on her heels on the stone floor of the long ward with her hands in her lap and looked at the two trays. At the pieces in them. Grey. Very small. Ringing one note between them.

Then she picked up Father's pen.

And wrote. In volume sixteen. On a page of its own.

Bell. Whole. Or more whole than she has been since the houses. Ring pieces and token pieces in two trays, side by side. Rang to each other. Then once together.

And under it, smaller:

I kept your tray.

Brock sat down on the floor across from her. With his back to the wall. Where he always sits.

He took a book out of his coat. One-handed; the black hand wouldn't hold anything yet.

It was the book about Earth's birds. The one with ptarmigan in it.

He opened it.

And read. Badly. Stopping at the long words.

Saska, beside him, said them before he got to them.

And Bell rang.

Every time.

Hearth kept the hour every day.

I didn't know, on the ring. There wasn't time to know anything. But Dot knew. Behind her soft door, in the Meridian's map room, the relay pulsed every day at the hour, exactly when it should have, and Dot sent one back every time, so they'd know we were still there.

On the fourth day, when the cluster was falling and Okafor was holding it light, the pulse came with words.

Dot didn't read them to me until we were home.

We can see your star, they said. Asha found it. In the common reference. It's brighter than it was. A pause. Is that you?

Dot had answered. On her own. While I was in the towers.

Yes, she'd sent. And no. The operator is busy. This unit will explain later.

And then, Dot said, because it seemed right, she'd sent the picture of the house on the rise again. With the arrow. Pointing the way she'd turned it.

Coming home.

I said it that night.

Not on the porch. Not in order. I couldn't. Everyone was everywhere. On every ship and in every house and on every world. I said it on the Meridian, going home, in the dark of the thread. Through the silver. Out. To everyone. All at once.

And then I said it once more, very quietly, down the little branching structure in Dot's side, to a room with a long table and a window over a field.

The answer came at the hour. Exactly when it should have.

One pulse.

And then, after it, slowly, through the old dictionary:

Come home.

Days 4163–4174. The Cut.

Six days holding the arch. The grandmothers went into the towers with shirts; eleven thousand on the first day; Nan Vey ironed on the red glass. On the second day I found Bell, and she rang for Genny, and we brought her down piece by piece. On the third day the houses came into the voice and gave the ring numbers: they cut our piece of their own ring away and let it fall toward the star. Andraste said no to me going small. Okafor held the near towers light for two days and didn't sit down. Everyone carried. I asked eleven towers to be boats; the twelfth went into the light with seventy-one in it. Mother carried the last child. Wenna climbed a tower for a queen; then everyone did. Brock last through. Dory and Corin took their hands off the arch after six days. Okafor sat down. 139,406. 712 queens. They're burning the field.