Chapter 391 Hollows

Kwame Osei dug the first hollow himself.

Not Hana's Kwame. Not my son, who's small yet, and watches everything, and holds spoons still for Mother in the kitchen. Hana's father. The one who dug the north cisterns, and turned the seventh lake through three tunnels in the grey-black rock like a dog that knows its name, and went down into the water on Harbor Block Forty-four when Hana was small and came back up with her.

He came to the map room on the second morning of the Hedge with his coat on and his hat in his hand and stood at the end of the table until Okafor looked up.

"The hollows," he said.

"Yes," said Okafor.

"Who's digging them?"

Okafor looked at the slate. She'd written HOLLOWS on it, and under it, nothing.

"I was going to ask Lucas," she said.

"No," said Kwame Osei. He put his hat on the table. "You were going to ask Lucas, and he was going to say yes, and he was going to make one in an afternoon that was perfect, and then you were going to need fifty more on fifty worlds and he'd be on every one of them at once." He looked at me. Down the table. Not unkindly. "Not one person. I heard her say it. I was at the long table."

Okafor looked at him for a long time.

Then she wrote, under HOLLOWS, in small square letters: K. OSEI.

"He's not young," said Hana. That night. In the big chair. With Abena asleep on her chest.

"I know."

"He's got a bad knee. He's had it since the cistern."

"I know."

"He's going to go down a hole in the ground on Avalon and not come out until it's done." She looked at the ceiling. "He did that with the cisterns. He did it with the lake tunnels. Mama used to send food down on a rope." She shut her eyes. "He's going to be so happy."

He was.

He took me with him on the first day. Not to dig. To look.

"You can feel the rock," he said. At the edge of the red glass, past the landing field, where the plain goes down in long steps toward the canyon. "All of it. Every grain. Down as far as you like." He leaned on his stick. "So tell me what's down there. And then go away."

I put my hand flat on the ground.

And told him. Red glass, then red stone, then the grey-black rock the lake tunnels go through. Then something older under that. Harder. Laid down in sheets, very flat, like the pages of a book shut for a long time. And under that, deeper than anything I'd ever reached on Avalon, warm.

"How deep's the old stuff?"

I told him.

He thought about it. With his eyes shut. Leaning on the stick.

"The hard sheets," he said. "That's the roof. Nothing cuts through that in a hurry. Not acid. Not teeth." He opened his eyes. "And under it, where it's warm, that's the floor. So they don't need fires down there. So there's no smoke coming up for anything to feel." He tapped the ground with the stick. "Between the two. That's where you put the children."

"How big?"

"Big enough for everyone," said Kwame Osei. "And then a bit more. Because there's always a bit more." He turned round. "Thank you. Now go away."

I went away.

He had eleven hundred people by the end of the first week.

I don't know how. He didn't ask for anyone. He just went to the edge of the red glass every morning with his stick and his hat and a slate, and stood there, and people came. Bram Okonedo, who kept the forty-first floor waterworks running for thirty-one years with spare parts and swearing, and the four hundred who'd worked water with him. Miners from Carver. Tunnellers from the east locks who'd dug the service ways under the domes for three generations and said this was the first time anyone had asked them to dig down instead of along.

And the Hathri.

Holt brought them. Through the arch from the Hathri world. Two hundred of them, at first, and then more, every day. Low and broad and grey, with their long hands and their hard, wide feet, built for the steppe and the frozen ground under it. The ones who'd lived for years in the winter hollows while the correctors walked over their heads and never knew.

They stood at the edge of the red glass and looked at Kwame Osei.

Kwame Osei looked at them.

Then the oldest of them knelt down and put her long grey hand flat on the ground. The way the Hathri do, every night, singing to the ground to let it know they're still on it. And sang. Very low.

And after a while, she looked up. And said something to Holt in Hathri.

"She says the ground here doesn't know anyone's on it," said Holt. "She says it's very lonely." He listened again. "She says she'll introduce you."

Kwame Osei took his hat off.

"Tell her I'd be honoured," he said.

So the first hollow on Avalon was dug by an old man from Harbor Block Forty-four with a bad knee, and eleven hundred people from the domes, and two hundred Hathri who sang to the rock every evening so it would know they were there.

And it went down faster than anything I could have made.

Because I'd have made it perfect. And they made it right. Crooked in places, where the Hathri said the rock didn't want to go straight. With a step in the floor where Bram said the water would want to run. With a hundred small rooms off the big ones, because the miners from Carver said children in a big dark place need small places to be in, and the tunnellers from the east locks said the same thing about old people.

Kwame Osei went down on the fourth day.

He didn't come up for nine.

His wife sent food down on a rope.

Abena Osei stood at the top of the shaft every evening at dusk with the rope in her hands and old Efua beside her with her stick, shouting at the birds, and didn't say anything at all. And when the rope came back up empty, she nodded, and went home.

"He's always been like this," she said. To Mother. On the porch. On the seventh night. "Since the first cistern. He goes down and he doesn't come back up until it's finished." She drank her tea. "I used to be frightened. Every time. On Earth." She put the cup down. "And then I'd see his face when he came up."

"What's it like?" said Mother.

Abena thought about it.

"Like Lucas's," she said. "When he's made something nobody's ever made before." She looked at me on the step. "And then he sleeps for two days and wants rice."

The hollows weren't only on Avalon.

That was Okafor's whole point. Not one person. Not one world.

So the Hathri went home through the arch and dug their own. Deeper than they'd ever dug, under the old winter hollows, into rock their grandmothers had never touched. The Caddi went down into their salt mines, where they'd hidden eleven thousand children once, and made them bigger, and joined them up, until the whole of the salt plain of Caddoc had a second plain under it, just as wide, full of lamps. The Lir went down into the deep cold water and found caves there that nobody had ever found, under the sea floor, and asked the queen of deep cold water if they could have them, and she said yes.

And on Tiel, Wenna asked the grandmothers who'd stayed with the washing.

And the grandmothers who'd stayed with the washing said they'd been digging since the first Hand came, under the river, with spoons, very slowly, for forty years. They'd never told anyone. In case it was taken away.

They showed Wenna.

It went under the whole of the river valley.

"Spoons," said Okafor. At the long table. When Wenna told her.

"Spoons," said Wenna. With a shirt in her lap. "And their hands. And the soup ladle from the long house, when the spoons broke." She looked down the table. "They said nobody was going to take another child from Tiel while they were alive. So they made somewhere to put them." She folded the shirt. "They're very cross nobody asked before."

Okafor looked at the slate for a long time.

Then she wrote, under HOLLOWS, under K. OSEI: the grandmothers of Tiel.

Hana went down into Kwame's hollow on the tenth day.

With me. And Maura. Because Bell had said the air was the problem. That a hollow big enough for everyone was a hollow where everyone was breathing, all at once, in the dark, with the doors shut, and that the air would go stale in a day and thin in three and kill them in a week.

Hana went down the long shaft on the rope with Abena on her chest, because Abena won't be put down when her mother's going somewhere new, and her grandfather was at the bottom.

He'd been there nine days. He was grey with dust from his hat to his boots. He had a slate in one hand and his stick in the other and his bad knee was very bad and he was smiling so wide that Hana stopped on the last rung of the ladder and looked at him for a long time.

"Papa," she said.

"Breathe for me," said Kwame Osei. "I want to see if it works."

It worked.

Not the way she does it for us. Not breath to each of us, one at a time, quiet, so we don't notice until we stop being tired. That's for a fight. For a run back to an arch with something behind you.

This was different.

She stood in the middle of the big hollow, under the hard sheets, in the warm, with Abena on her chest. And put her hands out. Flat. The way Maura does on a black arm. And felt the air. All of it. Every breath of it, in every room, in every crooked passage the Hathri had sung, in every small room the miners from Carver had made for children to be in.

And taught it.

I don't know a better word.

She found the part of the air that people breathe out, the part that's no use, and she showed it the way to the rock. Down. Into the warm floor. Where there was a kind of stone Doctor Bell had found on the fourth day that drinks it, very slowly, the way a sponge drinks water. And she found the part that people breathe in, the part that's left, and she showed it how to come back. Out of the water in Bram's channels. Out of the rock. Very slowly. A little at a time. All the time.

And then she stepped back. And took her hands away.

And the air kept doing it.

Bell went round every room in the hollow with a little brass instrument on a chain, for three days. When she came up she sat down on the top step of the shaft beside Abena Osei and took both pairs of spectacles off and rubbed her eyes.

"It's going round," she said. "The air. On its own. Out of the water and into the rock and back again." She put her spectacles back on. "It's what a forest does. Or a sea. She's taught a hole in the ground to be a forest."

"How long will it last?" said Abena.

"I don't know," said Bell. "That's the trouble with it. I can't find a reason for it to stop."

Maura did the warm.

That was harder. Bell said the warm was the dangerous part, because the Hungry feel warmth from miles away, and a hollow full of people is the warmest thing on a world.

So Maura went down with her hands bare and sat on the floor in the middle of the big hollow for a whole afternoon, with her eyes shut.

"It's the same as the black," she said, when she came up. "When I warm the black out of an arm. I don't make it hotter. I tell it where to go." She looked at her hands. "So I told the warm to stay down. Not to come up. To go sideways. Into the rock. Along the hard sheets. All the way out to the edge of the plain." She wiped her hands on her apron. "So if anything feels for it, it'll feel a little warm everywhere. Spread out. Like the ground in summer. And not a lot of warm in one place." She sniffed. "Like a person. Or a hundred thousand."

Kwame Osei looked at her for a long time.

"That's very clever, Mrs. Calder," he said.

"It's bread, love," said Maura. "You keep the warm in the middle of the oven and not on the door." She put her hand in one of her eleven pockets and gave him a bun. "Eat that. You've been down a hole for nine days."

He ate it.

Then he went home and slept for two days and woke up and wanted rice.

Abena made it. A very large pot. He ate all of it, standing up, in the kitchen, still in his hat.

The grandfathers had the drills.

Nobody gave them the drills. They took them. The way Mother takes the front of everything.

The General started it.

He came out onto the north field on the third week in his old uniform with every medal, before dawn, and stood in the middle of the grass with his hands behind his back. And when the children came down from the house on the rise for their morning, he said:

"Hollows."

The children looked at each other.

"Where's the nearest one?" said the General.

Dory pointed. Without thinking. Down the plain. Toward the edge of the red glass and the shaft.

"How long to get there?"

Nobody knew.

"Then we'll find out," said the General. And looked at his watch. "Go."

They went.

All of them. Dory first, with Pebble. Trevor on a path of ice that Luna had told him he wasn't allowed to make and that he made anyway. Ash, very fast, making the ground rise under her feet in long slopes so she could run down them. Small Sigmund flying, low, because Ingrid had said low. Efua and Kwame holding hands, very seriously. Elin and Goldie together, in a little weather of their own, warm one side and cold the other. Harriet singing. Rory the second, very hot, leaving footprints in the grass that steamed. Inga with her mother's small fierce face.

Corin and Thessaly, too small to run that far, in the iron basket. Carried by Pip. Who said she'd carried bread to a correctors' war and she wasn't going to be outrun by children.

Abena, on her grandfather Kwame's hip. Because Kwame Osei was at the shaft already, with his stick and his hat and his slate.

He looked at his watch when the last of them came down the ladder.

"Eleven minutes," he said.

The General, coming down the ladder behind them, very slowly, because he's not young either, said: "Too long."

They did it every morning for a month.

Every morning a little faster. The General on the north field with his watch. Kwame Osei at the shaft with his. Konrad in the middle, on a stool, with a slate, writing down every child's time in a column, because Konrad said if there was one thing he knew how to do it was keep a ledger, and he'd like for once to keep one where the numbers got smaller.

By the end of the month it was four minutes.

By the end of the second month it was three.

Rory taught the grandchildren of the town under the garden wall.

Not ours. Everyone else's. Two thousand children from the white rooms and the crooked houses and the domes, who'd never had a drill in their lives, who'd been taken and sorted and greyed and brought home. He stood at the gate of the town every morning with a bell from Meg's bakery, the brass one, on its iron curl, and rang it once, and every child in the town went to their nearest hollow. Holding hands. In twos. The big ones with the small ones.

"Not running," said Rory. "Walking. Fast. Holding on." He rang the bell again. "Running's for when you're frightened. Walking's for when you know where you're going."

The children from the white rooms walked.

Holding on.

Rain at the front, from the window at the top. With her three sisters behind her, who'd come home from the tithe world, holding her hand and each other's.

Rain looked back at Rory, at the gate, with his bell.

"We know where we're going," she said.

And Taveth, who's good at nothing, made soup.

Every day. In the big hollow. On a stove Maura showed him how to keep from smoking. Very bad soup. Everyone said so. He made it anyway, and the children from the drills came down the ladder every morning to find it waiting, steaming, in a great iron pot that Kyria said had been in her family for six hundred years and had never once held anything as bad.

"That's not the point," said Taveth. Stirring. "The point is, when they come down here for real, in the dark, with the sky gone and their mothers up top fighting, it'll smell like this. And they'll know." He tasted it. Made a face. "They'll know it's the place where the bad soup is. And that someone's always here making it." He put the spoon down. "And that means it's home."

Kyria looked at her husband for a long time.

Then she took the spoon off him and put salt in it.

I taught the grey.

That was mine. Okafor gave it to me. Not the fleets. Not the walls. Just this: Odra's black stone, and the young grey on the far side of the seventh lake, and Aster.

Aster had asked. For nine hours. And one patch of grey the size of a hand had gone dark.

The grey wanted to learn. It just didn't know how.

So I went out to the yard every morning, with Aster beside me, very still, her lights low, and Doctor Bell with her notes, and Sera with her hands. And I knelt down by the nearest ridge of young grey and put one hand on it and held Odra's piece of black stone in the other.

And showed it.

Not the way I make things. I didn't change it. I didn't reach in and lay the atoms the way they were laid in the stone, one by one, perfect. I could have. I could have made a ship's hull of it in a day.

But then there'd be one ship's hull. And I'd have made it. And when it was hit, and cracked, and needed mending, someone would have to come and find me.

Not one person.

So I showed it. The pattern. The way the stone was laid, very slowly, very deep, by the mountain, over a very long time. I held the pattern in my hand and let the grey feel it. Over and over. The way you hold a child's hand round a pencil and make the letter with them until they can make it on their own.

The grey felt it.

And tried.

The first week, it got a patch the size of a door.

The second week, a whole ridge. Dark, with the faint blue sheen at the edges, like Ingrid's armour at the seams. Sera put her palm on it and burned as hot as she could, and it didn't mark. Bell poured a jar of something from her bag that hissed when it touched the glass, and it ran off the grey like water off a duck.

The third week, Aster stood in the middle of the yard with her lights very bright.

"They are teaching each other," she said.

I looked up.

"The young grey," said Aster. "The ridge that learned first is showing the ridge beside it. And that one is showing the next." Her lights moved, very slowly, from one end of the yard to the other. "This unit is not needed any more. Nor are you."

She said it as if it was the best news she'd ever had.

I suppose it was.

Keir came out the next morning and stood at the edge of the yard with his drawings under his arm and looked at it for a long time. Ridge after ridge of young grey, going dark from one end of the yard to the other. Without anyone touching it.

"I'm going to have to draw everything again," he said.

"Sorry."

"Don't be," said Keir. "I like drawing." He opened his drawings. Looked at them. Closed them again. "Do you know what they're going to look like? The ships? When they're grown in that?"

"No."

"Nor do I," said Keir. And grinned. "Nobody does."

That was the good part.

I've written it first, because it's most of what happened. Every day for two months. Hollows and drills and soup and grey going dark in the yard. Odra's smiths at the arches with their cold cups of tea. Crane at the table with his spanner. Kwame Osei coming up out of a hole in the ground grey with dust and wanting rice.

But there was the other part, too. And I said I'd write it all.

Tally came down from the long ward on the forty-first day.

Very white. With her notebook.

She didn't sit down on the porch steps. She stood at the bottom of them, very straight, the way she stands when it's the voice.

"A world," she said. "On the list. The sixty-four. Not at the long table." She opened the notebook. Turned the page. "Orrin. Thirty-ninth on Konrad's sheets. A tithe world. Small. Two million people. They paid every two years."

"What happened?"

Tally didn't answer straight away.

"The houses came," she said. "Last night. Not for the tithe. It was not time for the tithe." She looked at the page. "They came with the Hands. Nine of them. And they did not sort. They did not take the ones with silver. They did not take the ones born whole."

Her voice was very level.

"They took all of them," she said. "Every child. Every one. Under sixteen. All at once. In one night. Four hundred thousand."

Nobody on the porch moved.

"Not to the sorting," said Tally. "Not to Seven-three-K. Not to the hollow world." She turned the notebook so I could see. A line she'd drawn. From a small circle, outward. Away from everything. "To the far yard."

Okafor was in the map room.

She'd already heard. Ilka had brought it, ten minutes before Tally. She was standing at the wall, with Garnet's drawing of the ring, and the new map beside it with THE HUNGRY across the top, and HEDGE over all of it.

She had her finger on a small circle near the edge of the ring.

Orrin.

"Two million," she said. When I came in. Without turning round. "Four hundred thousand under sixteen."

"Okafor—"

"I know," said Okafor.

She didn't move her finger.

"I know what you're going to say," she said. "I know you can get there. I know Kyria can cut an arch. I know you can scatter, and I know you can stand in front of nine Hands and make them stop singing." She was very quiet. "I know."

"Then—"

"They left last night," said Okafor. "Nine Hands. Up the thread. Outward. Faster than anything the houses have ever sent anywhere." She took her finger off the map. "Ilka heard them go. They're already past anything we could reach. They're already halfway to wherever the far yard is."

She turned round.

"We're late," she said. "We were late before we knew."

I've been late before.

On the fire world, the first time I killed after the Teeming. Twelve minutes late to the first of the Caddi mines; sixty. Eight worlds late on the thirty-four, and four not at all. The tower that went into the light with seventy-one in it.

I know what late is.

I'd never been late like this. Not with four hundred thousand. Not with nothing to do. Not with nowhere to go and nobody to carry and no arch to cut.

"Why?" said Sera. Very low. In the doorway. She'd come with me. "Why all of them? Why not sort them?" Her hands were very hot. "They always sort. They always take the ones with silver. Why take all of them?"

Okafor didn't answer.

Crane did.

From the table. From the chair between Keir and Bell. With his spanner holding the corner of his slate down.

"Because they're not for the towers," he said.

Everyone looked at him.

"You sort when you want silver," said Crane. "When you want the ones born whole. When you want to make something out of them." He didn't look up from the slate. "You don't sort when you want numbers." He put his pen down. "They're not taking them to make anything. They're taking them to put them between themselves and the thing that's eating them."

Nobody said anything.

"The Overseer told us," said Crane. "Things made at the middle hear. More tithe, faster, for the far yard." He was very pale. "I sent them numbers for thirty years. I know what numbers are for." He looked at me. "Biomass."

Sera went out.

I heard her go down the steps of the map room. Very fast. And then I felt it, through the floor, through the whole of Scarecrow: the forge on the edge of the red glass, the big one, the one she runs, going up. All of it. At once. White.

She didn't burn anything. Bell said afterward she didn't burn a single thing. She just stood in the middle of her own forge and went up, as hot as she could go, until the iron round her glowed and the glass under her feet ran, and stayed there for an hour.

When she came down, she didn't say anything.

She went home and sat in the children's room until morning. In the middle of the heap. With all eleven of them asleep round her and the Scarecrow queen's young in a ring.

I went and stood in the door, once, after midnight.

Ash was awake. Ash is always awake when her mother's hot. She was curled against Sera's side with her hinge face very serious and her branches glowing faintly up both arms, the little glass flames at the tips of them lit.

"Mama's counting," she whispered.

"Counting what?"

Ash thought about it.

"Us," she said. "Over and over. All eleven." She put her hand on Sera's arm, where it was hottest. "She keeps getting to eleven. And then she starts again. In case."

I didn't go in.

Sera didn't look up. But the room got, very slightly, cooler. So the children could sleep.

Okafor wrote it on the wall.

Under HEDGE. Under THEY ARE FIGHTING TOO. In small square letters, the way she writes the names at the dawn count.

ORRIN. 400,000. LATE.

And under that:

Not again.

She didn't change the plan.

I thought she would. I thought she'd stand at the long table the next day and say we go out. Cut arches to every tithe world on Konrad's list. Bring every child home before the Hands came for them.

She didn't.

"We can't reach the far yard," she said. At the long table. With forty-one worlds very quiet. "We don't know where it is. We don't know what's there. Lucas walked into the edge of it once, through Vessa's arch, and it was a world eaten to the rock." She put her hand flat on the slate. "If we go out now, with what we have, we go out thin. And we come back thin. And when the Hungry come past the houses, there's nothing standing here."

She looked down the table.

"So we build faster," she said. "And we make the hollows deeper. And we make the grey learn quicker. And when the Hedge is standing, on every world, and every child on every world has somewhere to go down to in four minutes and somebody making bad soup at the bottom—"

She stopped.

"Then we go and get the rest," said Okafor. "Every tithe world. Every child. Before the houses can take them outward." She looked at Konrad. Down the table. "You have the list."

"Sixty-four," said Konrad. Very quietly.

"Sixty-three," said Okafor. "Now."

Konrad didn't say anything.

He took the sheet out of his coat. The old one. The tithe sheet, with the codes, that he's carried since the long table, since Outbound. He unfolded it. And took his pen. And drew a line, very carefully, under Orrin.

Then he wrote, beside the line, very small, in the same neat hand he used for thirty years: Not again.

Risa found me on the north field that night.

The wheel was back up.

Keir had finished it the week before. In the middle of the north field, where the weddings will be, at dawn, in the spring. All the little painted houses back on the great iron circle. Turning very slowly, with the lamps in them, against the dark.

Risa had a ribbon.

Red. The one from the red house on the grass, where it rained round us and not in it. She'd tied it round my wrist that night, for the ride I owed her. I'd forgotten it was there.

She hadn't.

"I know it's not the night," she said. Standing at the bottom of the wheel. In her flying leathers, worn through at both elbows. With her hair loose. "I know about Orrin. I know Sera's still in the children's room. I know." She looked up at the wheel. "I don't care. I want to go to the top. With you. Now. And I want to look at everything." She held out her hand. "Because there's four hundred thousand children who'll never see a wheel. And I want to look at it for them."

We went up.

In the red house. Slowly. Round and up, past the lamps, past the dark north field, past the house on the rise with all its porches, until the whole of Avalon was under us. The town under the garden wall, with its fifteen thousand windows. The lake. The red glass, and the forge, cool now. The yard on the far side of the seventh lake, where the young grey lies in long dark ridges, teaching itself.

And the edge of the plain, by the canyon, where Kwame Osei's shaft goes down.

Risa didn't say anything at the top. She held my hand. And looked at everything. For a long time.

Then she said: "Not again."

Very quietly. To the whole of Avalon.

And above the wheel, very small, a cloud came over us, the size of a plate. And didn't rain.

Days 4316–4378. Hollows.

Kwame Osei dug the first hollow, with eleven hundred from the domes and two hundred Hathri who introduced him to the rock; nine days down, then rice. Wenna's grandmothers had dug under the whole river valley with spoons. Hana taught the air to go round; Maura told the warm to go sideways. The grandfathers took the drills: eleven minutes, then three. Taveth's bad soup. The grey learned the black stone and started teaching itself. Then Orrin: every child, four hundred thousand, outward to the far yard. Late before we knew. Crane: biomass. Okafor didn't change the plan. Sixty-three. Not again. Risa and I went to the top of the wheel and looked at everything for them.