Chapter 444 Better

I want to write a chapter where nothing goes wrong.

I don't think I've ever managed it. Mother says that's because I only write in the notebook when something's happened, and the days when nothing's happened go by without anyone writing them down, which is how it should be.

But this year was different. Things happened. Most of them were good.

So I'm going to write those first.

The Aldri started with the trains.

Halvane asked. He always asks. He came to the long table one morning in the spring with three of his engineers, very tall, in their robes, standing because they don't sit for important things, and asked Enna if they might look at her rail.

Enna said no.

Then she said yes, because Keir kicked her under the table.

Then she took them out on the red-glass line herself, to the canyon curve, the one she made me redo five times, and stood beside them with her arms folded while they looked at it with their little silver boxes.

"It's very good," said the oldest of them, at the end. "The curve is perfect."

"I know," said Enna.

"We would like to make the train go three times as fast round it," said the Aldri engineer.

Enna looked at her.

"Show me," said Enna.

It takes three hours now. From the forest city in the far east to the red glass. It used to take nine.

The rail is the same. Kiln iron, Odra's stone, the grey, a skin of Hearth's silver. Enna wouldn't let them change any of it. But the Aldri put something under the skin, very thin, that does what their fighters do: the train doesn't so much run along the rail as decide where it's going to be next and go there. Crane says his board's had to learn to count faster. He says the board doesn't mind. He says he does a bit.

The canyon curve is still perfect. Enna checks it every week. She says the Aldri respect it. She says that's the only reason she's let them near anything.

Then the cities.

Not the bones. They didn't touch the bones. Halvane said the first week that the bones were the best part, that a city that came up out of the ground because someone asked it to was a thing his people had never had and would never have, and they weren't going to put a single machine in a wall I'd made.

They put them everywhere else.

Light, first. In every street, in every city, the Aldri strung something very fine between the roofs, so fine you can't see it unless the sun catches it, and at dusk it glows. Not bright. Warm. The colour of the sky over Ister. Nobody on Avalon walks home in the dark any more unless they want to.

Water, next. Voss's sheds had been fixing pipes in every city since the cities were built. The Aldri gave them something that finds a leak before it happens. Voss looked at it for a long time, Ilka says, and then painted TEODOR'S on the side of it, very small, and took it to the first shed on the long road.

Then the end rooms. The machines Kwame wouldn't take for floors, they took for everything else. Old ones on the end-room steps who can't manage the steps can have a chair that carries them up and down, if they want one. Most don't. Abbe has one. She says she doesn't use it for the steps; she uses it to go down to the planks over the first channel faster than Wend can, in the mornings, so she gets to pour first.

And the long ward.

Halloway and the Aldri doctor still argue every morning. Over tea. But the long ward's half empty now. Not because people have stopped being ill; because the Aldri doctor's little silver box, and Halloway's hands, and the queens singing, between them mend almost everything that comes in through the door. Most people who come onto the long ward walk off it again within a week.

Halloway says she's never been so bored in her life.

Then she says it's the best thing that's ever happened to her, and goes to argue some more.

I've left something out. Again.

Saska's baby came in the summer of the Tallis. The week Mother was holding Fell up. I was on a floating town over a shallow sea, and I came home and wrote about Oona, and never once wrote that Brock and Saska had a daughter.

Brock says he doesn't mind. Saska says she does, a bit, and that I'd better put it in now.

So.

She came the ordinary way, in the long ward, with Teshka in the corner and Halloway at the foot of the bed and Brock in the doorway, too big for it, iron to the elbows the whole time and not noticing. Halloway says it was quick. She says the baby moved out of the way of everything a heartbeat before it got there, the whole time, and made it very easy for everyone.

She went iron about a minute after she was born. Very small. All over. Halloway put her on Saska's chest and she went iron and stayed iron, very cross about it, until Saska put a hand on her back. Then she went soft again and fell asleep.

Saska looked at Brock in the doorway.

"She's yours," said Saska.

"She's ours," said Brock.

They called her Tesh. For Teshka. Teshka didn't say anything when they told her. Kyria says she went out onto the porch and stood at the rail for an hour with her back to everyone.

Tesh is very difficult to hold. Not because she's heavy; because you go to pick her up and she's already moved, a little, to where your hands are going to be, so you end up holding her before you meant to. Mother says it's like picking up a cat that's decided to be picked up.

She goes iron when she's startled. And when she's cross. And once, very memorably, when Kesh rained on her. Then she went soft and laughed.

Varra came up the hill when she was a week old and looked at her in Saska's arms for a long time. Then she tied a very small knot in a very short piece of grey cord and gave it to Saska.

"She says," said Dot, "for being born. On a wall. Between two people who stand on it."

Life's better.

I want to just write that down. Plainly. Without anything after it.

Life on Avalon is better than it's ever been.

Mother said something about that. On the porch. I'll put it down because she'd be cross if I didn't.

"Better," said Mother. She had Oona asleep against her, and Corin in the chair with his legs over the arm, and Tiri on the floor with her bird, and the light the Aldri strung between the roofs glowing very softly down the hill. "It is. Isn't it."

"Yes."

"Your father would have liked the lights," said Mother. "He always said it was a waste, a street in the dark." She looked at them. "He'd have liked the trains. He'd have liked the long ward half empty." She was quiet. "He'd have said: good. Now don't get used to it."

I looked at her.

"Better isn't the same as safe, love," said Mother. "It's just better. You enjoy it. Every bit. You don't stop enjoying it because it might end." She put her hand on Oona's hair. "But you keep the hollows dug."

Kwame Osei, on the bottom step, where he'd come up to sit, said: "I always do."

Then the Standing.

Okafor asked Halvane for it straight out. At the long table, the week after the arm. With the thirteen markers still out on Crane's board.

"Your fighters held the sky," she said. "I want the ground held the same way."

Halvane looked at her.

"We had soldiers," he said. "Once. On Ister. A long time ago. Before we built the stations and stopped needing them." He was quiet. "We kept the plans. We kept everything. We don't throw things away."

"Can you build them?"

"Yes," said Halvane. "For your people. Not for ours. Ours forgot how to stand on the ground a long time ago."

The suits came in the autumn.

I don't know what else to call them. The Aldri have a word that Dot says means second skin, but nobody uses it. They're suits. Grey-silver, jointed, very light, that close round you from the neck down like water, and when you move in one you're three times as strong as you were and twice as fast and very hard to hurt.

The first one went to Varra.

Of course it did.

She didn't want it. She said so, on the north field, in front of the whole Standing, with the Aldri engineer holding it out to her. She said the Kasrai stand on the ground in their own skin and their own iron, and she'd held a wall for eleven years in nothing more than that, and she didn't need a machine.

The Aldri engineer didn't argue. She just held it out.

Varra looked at it.

Then she looked at the line. Six hundred thousand of the Standing, now. Kasrai and Kett and Aun and Earth and Hearth and the tithe worlds and the Marrah and the Tallis. Every one of them with someone at home.

Then at Crane's thirteen markers, which Holt had told her about.

She took the suit.

Andraste told me what happened next. She said Varra put it on in front of everyone, very slowly, the way the Kasrai put on armour before a wall. And when it closed round her, she stood very still for a long time.

Then she drew her blade.

And did her forms. All of them. The whole Kasrai wall-set, the one she's done every morning of her life. In the suit.

Andraste says she's seen Varra's forms every morning for a year. She says she's never seen them like that. She says it looked like watching someone who'd been carrying a wall on her back for two hundred years put it down.

When Varra finished, she stood in the middle of the north field and didn't say anything.

Then she said one word.

"She says," said Dot. "More."

The weapons came with them.

I'm not going to describe them all. Keir has a notebook. Some of them are rifles, and some of them are things that aren't rifles, and one of them is a thing the Kasrai call the wall that you plant in the ground and it makes a line nothing gets across, the way Aurelius's dome does but long and low. Andraste says they'll kill almost anything. Holdfast hums near some of them, very softly, the way it hums near grey ones.

Andraste says she doesn't know what that means. She says she isn't sure she wants to.

And the tanks.

The Aldri had kept plans for those too. Low and wide and silver, that move the way their fighters move: not rolling, deciding. There are forty of them on the north field now, beside the interceptors, very still, a hand's width off the grass.

And the walking engines.

Odra wouldn't let them touch the walking engines.

She said so in the forge under the ridge on Hyrran, with her scarred arms folded and her hammer on the anvil. The walking engines are Hyrran's. Odra's people built them. Her grandmother's people. They've walked against the Sorn on every ridge on Hyrran for a thousand years, and some of them have Sorn wrecks under their feet that are older than the Accord.

The Aldri engineer stood in the forge doorway and didn't come in.

"We wouldn't touch them," she said. Through Dot. Very carefully. "We'd like to ask if you'd like to touch them. With us. With some of ours."

Odra looked at her. Then at the engine behind her, half built, very old.

Then she looked at Ossel, at the second anvil, with her first tongs in his hand. And at Teel, at the third, with her family's hammer.

"Three short," said Odra. "One long."

The Aldri engineer didn't understand.

"You strike it like that," said Odra. "Every piece. Before you put it in. So the engine knows somebody was thinking about it." She picked up her hammer. "If you'll do that, you can come in."

They did that.

All of them. Every piece of Aldri work that went into the walking engines, every strip of the thin stuff under the skin, the Aldri engineers struck three short and one long on Odra's anvil before they put it in. Teel taught them. They weren't very good at it at first. Teel says the oldest one got the rhythm right on the ninth day and cried.

The walking engines are faster now. They hit harder. They walk on Hyrran's ridges the way they always have, very heavy, very slow, until they need not to be, and then they're very fast.

Odra says they're the best they've ever been.

She says it's the hammering.

The Meridian got the most.

She's old. The oldest ship we have. The long human-built station with the spine-queen laid along the middle of her like a pale root, and Major Ruan on her bridge, and six hundred crew who chose to stay with the queen in their walls. She's carried everyone. Every crossing from Earth. The ring. Ostry's call. Every broken grey ship the old went out to.

The Aldri didn't ask Okafor. They asked Ruan. And then Ruan took Halvane down to the spine chamber and he asked the queen. Halvane said a ship with a queen in her walls should be asked by the queen, and by whoever stands on her bridge.

The queen said yes. Ruan said yes.

She's not the same ship now. She's the same ship. That's the only way I can put it. The Aldri didn't change anything that was the queen's: the heart of her, where the spine-queen lies along the floor, they didn't go near. But everything round it. The ears. The engines, so the rope's easier to sing. The decks. The light.

And the ears most of all.

Ruan says the rope sings itself, now, half the time. She says the queen's very pleased about it.

Ilka's in her room on the Meridian every day now with the map and the Aldri listening gear, and she says she can hear four times as far as she could. Further than Tiamat's stations used to. Further than the Watch.

And Tiamat's stations, too. All nine of Hearth's, in their ring high in Avalon's sky. Tiamat and Halvane spent most of the winter together going over them. I'd never seen Tiamat work with anyone. She works with Dinraal, and Isolde, and her own people, and nobody else. She worked with Halvane. Isolde says they'd stand in the heart of the ninth station for a whole day without saying anything, the two of them, very tall, very old, looking at the same thing.

Then one would say a word. And the other would nod.

Isolde says she's never seen her grandmother so happy.

So now we hear further.

And now there are more calls.

That's the thing about better. You can hear more. And when you can hear more, there's more to hear.

Ilka hears two thousand calls a week now. Then three. People on worlds the Hungry are eating; people on worlds the Sorn have emptied of everyone under fifty; people on ships that have been running for years with nowhere to run to. People who've heard the number. People who've heard someone else say the number.

And with the Aldri ships, we can reach most of them. Fast. Before.

Not all. We're still late for some. I'm always going to have to write that.

But most.

I'll write one. So it's clear what better means.

A world of red cliffs and narrow valleys, two hundred thousand people in the valleys, and a swarm of the Hungry coming over the cliffs at dawn. Ilka heard them at midnight. By the second hour of the morning there were three Aldri ships over the valleys and Kyria's cutters had the arches open and Dory was holding them from the red glass.

And the Standing went through in the suits.

Four thousand of them. Kasrai first, with Varra. They came out of the arches into the valleys and went up the cliffs. Up. Not climbing. The suits don't climb; they decide where they're going to be and go there. And they stood on the tops of the cliffs in a line, in the dawn, with the wall planted in front of them, and the swarm came over the edge and met it.

Nothing got across.

Not one. Holt went through first, as always, and stood at the bottom of the valley with his cap off watching them come down, the old and the children and everyone between, out of the valleys and through the arches, all morning, while four thousand of the Standing held the cliffs over his head in suits that made them three times what they were.

Two hundred and four thousand, Wren said. Of two hundred and four thousand.

Varra lost nobody.

She stood on the cliff top at noon, Andraste says, when the last of them were through, in the suit, with the swarm in pieces at her feet. And looked at her rope. And didn't tie anything.

Andraste says she stood there a long time, not tying anything. Andraste says she didn't know what to do with her hands.

Wren said the number this morning.

"One billion, one hundred and seventy-two million," said Wren. "Give or take."

A pause.

"Every one of them has a door," said Wren. "And there are three thousand more calling."

And so I build.

With Dory. With the Aldri behind us, with their little silver boxes, taking down everything. New cities in the south, past the Tallis coast, where the land's wide and flat and nobody's lived. Dory asks the ground with me now every day. It answers twice as fast. My nose hasn't bled in a year.

And then the moons.

Avalon has two. One big, very pale, with old grey plains on it you can see from the porch on a clear night. And one very small, that comes up red, and that Garnet's said since she was a child has fires on it, because it looked like it did. It doesn't. It's just red.

The Aldri have machines that make worlds.

Not like I do. Slower. Much slower. Halvane says I could probably do in a year what their machines do in a hundred, but that it would kill me, and he'd rather have me than the moons. He says his machines don't get nosebleeds.

They've started on the big one.

I went up. With Dory and Halvane, on an Aldri ship, to the pale plains.

It was very cold and very quiet and there was no air at all. The Aldri machines were already there, very big, very slow, in a row across the plain, breathing. Halvane said that's what they're doing. Breathing. Out, very slowly, for a very long time, until there's something to breathe in.

"How long?" said Dory.

"Without you," said Halvane, "sixty years. Perhaps eighty."

Dory put her hand on the grey ground of the moon.

And asked.

Not much. Just asked. The way she asks the ground on Avalon. Would you like to?

The moon didn't answer for a long time. Moons are slow. Then something very deep in it, very old, turned over. Like a dog that's been asleep for a very long time lifting its head.

Halvane's little silver box made a sound. He looked at it. Then at Dory.

"Forty," he said. "Perhaps thirty."

He didn't say anything else on the way down. But on the red glass, before he went home through the arch to Ister, he took Dory's hand. The very tall old man and the girl who looks seventeen and is fourteen. And held it for a moment.

"Thank you," said Halvane.

"I only asked," said Dory.

"I know," said Halvane. "That's what I'm thanking you for."

The queens are going to sing to it. Our queen said so, at the garden wall. Every queen on Avalon, and the eldest from Root. She says a moon that's been asked, and has said it would like to, should be sung to while it gets ready.

She says one day there'll be a queen on it.

Genny's already asking the queens which of them has a seed to spare. She says it'll have to be one that likes the cold and doesn't mind being a long way from everyone. She says she has a list.

The children like the lights best.

Corin and Tiri sit on the porch rail at dusk, most evenings, to watch them come on. All the way down the hill, street by street, the fine glowing lines between the roofs lighting up one after another until the whole town's the colour of Ister's sky. Tiri says it's the first time she's watched lights come on from the outside. She says on Ister you're always inside them.

Corin says he can feel them. Every one. All the way to the end of the town. He says they hum, very faintly, and they all hum the same note.

"Only one," Corin said, one evening, frowning. "They only know one note."

Tiri looked at him.

The next evening, the lights on our street hummed two.

Halvane came up the hill the next morning and stood at the bottom of the porch and looked up at the line between our roof and the next, glowing very softly in the daylight, and didn't say anything for a long time. Then he took out his little silver box and held it up to the line and listened.

"That's not a thing they can do," said Halvane.

Corin, on the rail, looked very solemn and said nothing at all.

Tiri, beside him, hummed. Two notes.

Oona, on her step, said, "There you are, love," to the light.

Halvane went home and wrote for a week.

That's the better part.

I've written it. Now I'll write the rest.

Dory stopped reaching in.

She told me on the porch. Late. In the autumn. After the names, after Oona had fallen asleep with her teapot and Corin had gone in, and Tiri had gone home through the arch walking backward.

"I'm not going to do it any more," said Dory.

I knew what she meant. She'd been doing it since Sedge. Every few nights, with me on the floor beside the heap. Pushing the net in, very gently, toward the middle. Toward the hand. Not trying to get through. Just touching it. To see if it was still there.

It was always there.

"It looked at me," said Dory.

I didn't say anything.

"Not like a person looks," said Dory. "It doesn't have eyes. It doesn't have anything." She had her hand flat on the step. "It's like when Halloway looks at a chart. Before she says anything. When she's reading it all, every line, very carefully, and you know she's going to know everything about you by the end."

She swallowed.

"It did that," said Dory. "To me. Last night. For a long time. Every line."

"It didn't push," said Dory. "It didn't hurt. It didn't do anything." She looked at her hand. "It just read me. All of me. And then it went back to holding."

She was quiet for a long time.

"I think it wanted to know what I was," said Dory. "I think it's been wanting to know for a while. Every time I touched it. And last night it decided to look." She looked at me. "I don't want it to look again. I don't know what it does after it's finished looking."

"Then don't," I said.

"I won't."

"Dory."

"I won't," said Dory. "I promise. I haven't since last night. I won't."

She put her head on my shoulder. She does that now, when it's late. She hasn't done it since she was small, and then she started again, after Caddoc.

Mother found her on the step in the morning. Before the dawn count. Dory doesn't usually sit on the porch steps; that's Mother's place, and Oona's, and now Tiri's and Kesh's, a ladder of them. Dory was on Mother's step, at the left end, with her back against the post.

Mother stopped in the doorway with the teapot.

She didn't tell Dory to move. She sat down on the step below her. Which she's never done. And poured. And held the cup up.

Dory took it.

"It looked at you," said Mother.

"Yes."

"Well," said Mother. "Lots of things have looked at you, love. Me, the first morning I came to Avalon and you ran across the red glass at me. A queen. The eldest. A billion people every morning while you check them." She poured herself one. "It's looked. Now it knows. That's all."

"What if it comes?"

Mother drank her tea.

"Then it comes," said Mother. "And it'll find you on my step, with my tea, and everyone in this house between it and you." She put the cup down. "It's been there since before the eldest woke. It's had a very long time to come. It hasn't." She looked up at Dory. "Don't go knocking. That's all. Your father told you. Okafor told you. I'm telling you."

"I won't."

"Good," said Mother. "Now get off my step."

Dory laughed. The first time since the night before. She got off the step.

"Dad," she said. "It was so old."

Okafor wrote it on the slate the next morning. She'd heard. Everyone hears everything.

Under IN. Under the place where WHERE? had been.

One word. Not in capitals. Very small. In Okafor's hand.

Don't.

She looked at Dory across the kitchen. Dory looked back. Dory nodded.

That was all.

Halvane came to the long table at the end of the winter.

He'd been listening. All the Aldri listen. With their new ears on the Meridian and Tiamat's stations and Ister's own, further than anyone has ever been able to hear. And he'd heard something.

He stood at the end of the long table, very tall, in his robe. Not sitting.

"The Sorn," said Halvane. "I know what they're doing."

Nobody said anything.

"Not the stock," said Halvane. "We know that. They take everyone in, they make grey ones, they send them at the Hungry. That's the war." He folded his long hands. "This is something else. Smaller. Quieter. On worlds near the middle, where they've never let anyone see."

"What?" said Okafor.

Halvane looked at me.

Then at Dory, beside me.

Then at Corin, at the other end of the table, in Mother's lap, too big for it, with Tiri on the floor beside the chair.

"Experiments," said Halvane.

He'd heard them on the far ears. Not the people. The machines. Sorn machines, on worlds near the middle, running the same thing over and over. Different species. Hundreds. One after another. Into a room, and something done to them, and out, and the machine writing down what happened.

"Silver," said Halvane. "They're putting silver into them. Different kinds. Different amounts. Finishing it, the way you finish it. Or trying to." He looked at me. "And then they write down what each one can do."

Okafor put the chalk down.

I knew what she was going to say before she said it. She'd said it before. Years ago. After the sealed arch on Hyrran, at this same table.

"They want a world-breaker," said Okafor.

"Yes," said Halvane.

He looked round the table. At me. At Dory, and Corin, and Thessaly, and the four. At Kesh in her basket by the door with her cloud.

"They tried to have you," he said to me. "Your Project. On your Earth. They tried to make you theirs, and then they tried to take you. They tried to take the children who make doors. They failed." He folded his hands. "So they're trying to make their own."

He was quiet.

"Out of whatever's left," said Halvane. "Species by species. Child by child. Until they find one that does what you do."

The Overseer was there. In the doorway, with the dog, the way he always is.

Okafor looked at him.

He didn't say anything for a long time. Then he came in. He doesn't come in. He came into the kitchen and stood at the end of the long table beside Halvane, and looked down at the dog.

"When I was young," said the Overseer. "On my first front. Before the Accord. There was a word the officers used. For the thing the houses wanted most." He scratched the dog's ear. "I never knew what it meant. I thought it was a weapon. A ship. A place." He looked at me. "It was the word the voice called you at the forge gate on Hyrran. World-breaker."

Nobody said anything.

"They have wanted one for longer than I have been alive," said the Overseer. "Long before you. Long before your Project. You were only the first one they ever found." He looked at Halvane. "If they've stopped writing, it's because they have stopped needing to."

Ithel was in the doorway of the map room. In his nightshirt. He'd heard.

He came in. Very slowly. And stood at the end of the long table beside Halvane, who's four times his height, and looked up at him.

"The rooms," said Ithel. "In the building on One. Before the making. Where they took us first." His voice was very small. "They put things in our arms. And watched. And wrote it down. And if nothing happened, we went to the box, or the making."

He looked at me.

"They were looking for you," said Ithel. "Even then. I didn't know."

Mother put her arms round Corin, in her lap. Tighter.

Nobody else moved.

"Have they found one?" said Okafor.

Halvane didn't answer straight away.

"I don't know," he said. "The machines stopped writing three weeks ago." He looked at the slate. At IN. At Don't. "On every world near the middle. All at once."

"Stopped why?"

Halvane looked at Dory.

"I think," he said, very carefully, "they've stopped looking."

Days 6072–6340. Better.

I left out Saska's daughter: Tesh, for Teshka, born in the summer of the Tallis; she moved out of everyone's way and went iron a minute after. The trains take three hours now; Enna let the Aldri near the canyon curve because they respected it. Light strung between the roofs, the colour of Ister's sky. Voss painted TEODOR'S on the leak-finder. Abbe uses her chair to beat Wend to the planks. The long ward half empty; Halloway's never been so bored. Life is better. The suits: Varra refused, then looked at the line and Crane's thirteen, and took it, and did her forms like someone putting down a wall: more. Weapons that kill almost anything. Four thousand in suits held the red cliffs; Varra lost nobody and didn't know what to do with her hands. Mother: better isn't the same as safe; keep the hollows dug. Tanks a hand's width off the grass. Odra let the Aldri touch the walking engines if they struck every piece three short and one long. The Meridian, asked through Ruan; Ilka hears four times as far; Tiamat and Halvane in the heart of the ninth station all day, one word at a time. Three thousand calling a week. One billion, one hundred and seventy-two million. Dory asked the big moon if it would like to; sixty years became thirty. Dory stopped reaching in: it looked at me like Halloway reads a chart, every line; it was so old. Okafor: Don't. Halvane: experiments near the middle, species by species, silver in their arms, writing down what each can do. Okafor: they want a world-breaker. Ithel: they were looking for you even then. The machines stopped writing three weeks ago. The Overseer: you were only the first one they ever found. I think they've stopped looking.