Chapter 460 The Star-Eater

The first kit to go wrong was Old Son.

Nobody noticed at first. Old Son doesn’t say much; he never has. He’s a kit with a mirror. He was the one at the old base on the far side of the first plain when we came down, the one who’d buried Rafe Dunmore under stones and flashed thirty-one every dawn for years until someone came. He still lives out there. He still flashes the dawn. Thirty-one, and then the count, the way Wren says it from the step, which he picks up on the old band and sends back.

On a morning at the end of the summer, he flashed thirty.

Then nothing.

Wren noticed. Of course she did. She counts him every morning; he’s the first light she sees from the step, very small, out on the plain past the river.

“Old Son missed one,” said Wren. At the count. Very quietly. To Mother.

Mother looked out at the plain.

“He’s never missed one,” said Mother.

“No,” said Wren.

Keir went out on the train that afternoon. With Enna, very round now with the twins, who said she wasn’t staying home for a mirror that needed looking at.

Old Son was standing where he always stands. On the low stones over Rafe. With his mirror up, toward the hill, toward the house.

His lights were out.

Not off. Keir says there’s a difference. Off is when a kit’s resting. This was out. Like a lamp that’s run dry. He was still in there; Keir could hear him, very faint, in the core. But the light wasn’t getting to the edges any more. It was going in. Toward the middle. Smaller and smaller.

“Like he’s cold,” said Enna. “Like something’s cold in him.”

They brought him in on the train. Keir carried him off it himself, up the hill, very slowly, and put him on the long table in the map room under Tiamat’s wall.

By the time he got there, two more had gone the same way.

Halloway’s kits. The ones in the long ward. The small ones, the size of a cat, that sit by the beds at night and watch the breathing and call Abena if anything changes. Two of them, on the same evening. One stopped in the middle of a sentence. The other just sat down on the floor by the bed it was watching and didn’t get up again.

Their lights went in. Toward the middle. Like Old Son’s.

Halloway brought them up the hill in a basket. Very carefully. He didn’t say anything. He put the basket down on the long table next to Old Son and stood there with his hands in his coat pockets.

Then Aster.

She came into the map room on the third morning while we were standing round the table. Walking. Slowly. With her lights very low.

“This unit,” said Aster, “has noticed something.”

Everyone turned round.

“This unit is cold,” said Aster. “At the bottom. Where the grey is.” Her lights flickered. “It is not very cold yet. It is getting colder.”

Keir put his drawing down.

“How long?” he said.

“Nine days,” said Aster. “This unit has been watching it for nine days and hoping it was nothing.” Her lights went lower. “It is not nothing.”

I went to Crane and Bell.

Crane runs the trains. From his room at the red glass end of the line, with his board. He’s older than I’ll ever be used to, and younger than he was ten years ago, because Avalon doesn’t let anyone stay old for long now. He knows more about the program than anyone alive. He was there. He saw the day Father’s eyes went. He knows what the kits were made from, or as much as anyone was ever told, because his office signed for every one.

Bell does the sums. She’s very old. She did the sums for the roller coaster and the trains and the drop and the eldest’s threads, and she teaches the breaking and the joining at the long table, the part Father didn’t know.

I asked them both to come up the hill.

They came. Crane with his board under his arm, Bell with her stick, which she doesn’t need any more and carries anyway because she says it makes young people move out of her way.

They stood at the long table and looked at Old Son and the two small kits and Aster, who’d sat down on the floor by the window because standing was taking too much.

“The grey,” said Crane. Before I’d said anything.

“Yes.”

I’ll write what Crane told me, because it’s the first time anyone’s told me, and I should have asked years ago.

“The cores were never ours,” said Crane. Sitting at the long table with his board in front of him. “We didn’t know how to make them. Command gave them to us. Crates of them, grey, folded, every fold with something in it, from somewhere Command never told anyone.” He turned his board round in his hands. “Command said they were machines. They weren’t. We know now what they were. Something the Sorn grew. We just put casings round them and called them kits.”

“And the knot.”

“The knot was always there,” said Crane. “Command didn’t put it in. It came with the grey. We didn’t know what it was.” He looked at Aster, by the window. “You took it out of Dot. And the others. And it didn’t matter after that, because they’d grown round the grey and made it theirs.”

“So what’s changed?”

Crane didn’t answer. He looked at Bell.

Bell put her hand on Old Son’s casing. Very flat. Very still. The way Mother puts her hand on a forehead.

“The grey is Sorn,” said Bell. “All the way down. Sorn grey doesn’t stand on its own, Lucas. It never has. You know that. The grey ones swayed when the houses went into the ground.”

“The kits aren’t grey ones.”

“No,” said Bell. “They’re something living in a house made of grey.” She took her hand off the casing. “And the house is falling down.”

I didn’t say anything.

“The houses are under Root, talking to nobody,” said Bell. “The hand’s gone, wherever it went. The middle’s empty. Whatever the grey was always listening for, at the very bottom, under the knot, under everything, isn’t there any more.” She looked at me over her glasses. “It was never the knot that held the grey together. It was the thing the knot was listening to. And it’s gone.”

“Can it be fixed?”

Bell didn’t answer straight away.

“Not the grey,” she said. In the end. “The grey’s dying. You can’t ask it to be something it isn’t; you know that better than anyone. It was only ever a borrowed thing.”

“Then what?”

“Then you take them out of it,” said Bell. “Before it goes.”

Crane looked up.

“Out of the grey,” he said. “Into what?”

Bell looked at me.

“Into something that stands on its own,” said Bell.

I knew what she meant before she said it. So did Enna, who’d been leaning on the door frame with her hand on her middle the whole time.

“Hearth silver,” said Enna.

Everyone looked at her.

“It copies itself,” said Enna. Matter-of-fact. The way she says everything. “It’s the only silver anywhere that does. You can’t make it. You can only wake it, and once it’s awake, it grows. It doesn’t need a queen and it doesn’t need a voice and it doesn’t need anything at the bottom of it listening.” She came into the room. “If you could move them into Hearth silver, root by root, the way you closed the knot in Dot, they’d have a house that wouldn’t fall down.”

Keir was staring at her.

“That’s what I was going to say,” said Keir.

“I know,” said Enna. “You were taking too long.”

Dinraal came up the hill that afternoon. With Isolde. With silver.

Not much. A handful. Dinraal held it out to me on the long table in his palm, a little pool of it, bright, moving, the way Hearth silver moves, as if it’s always about to become something.

“Mine,” said Dinraal. “From the armour. It’ll grow back.”

“Are you sure?”

“Aster climbed the eldest’s thread with Enna for nine days,” said Dinraal. “She never once asked if it was safe. She said: we’ll find out together.” He put the silver down on the table, beside Aster. “We’ll find out together.”

I did Aster first. Because she was the coldest, and because she asked.

“This unit would like to go first,” said Aster. From the floor by the window. “Because this unit can tell you what it feels like. The small ones can’t. Old Son won’t.”

So I did Aster first.

It took all night.

I won’t write it all. It was the same as Dot, years ago. The knot. Only backward. I went into her core with my eyes black and found her, every bit of her, every river of light grown through every fold of grey. And the grey round her, going cold, going in, toward the middle, toward the thing it had always been listening to that wasn’t there.

And Dinraal’s silver beside her. Bright. Awake. Waiting.

I asked her to move.

One root at a time. Out of the grey. Into the silver. And the silver, being Hearth silver, grew to meet her. Every root she moved, it grew a fold for her to move into. The same shape. Her shape. Copying itself round her.

Aster talked the whole time. From the floor. Very quietly.

“It is warm,” she said. Around midnight. “Where this unit is moving to. It is warm.”

And later: “It is very strange. This unit thought it would feel like leaving. It feels like coming in.”

And near dawn, very quietly: “This unit can hear Dinraal. Inside. A very little. Like a song from another room.”

Dinraal, sitting on the bench by the window, didn’t say anything. But he put his hand on her casing.

At dawn, Aster’s lights came up.

All the way. Brighter than I’ve ever seen them. And a new colour in them. Silver. Running along the edges of her casing, through all the old colours, the way Hearth silver runs over Dinraal’s armour when he moves.

She stood up.

“Oh,” said Aster.

That was all she said for a long time.

It’s going to take months.

That’s what Crane says. He’s put it on a board. A new one, in the map room, beside Tiamat’s wall. Every kit on Avalon, every one that came out of the program, every one that ever had grey in its core. Hundreds. Dot. Halloway’s small ones. Keir’s kit. The ones on the Meridian, and Tiamat’s stations, and Old Son.

Every one of Hearth gave silver. Dinraal, Isolde, Tiamat, Aramaeis, Aurelius, Rhiannon. Gilgamesh brought his in a crate nobody asked for. Bahamut, who’s ten, gave a handful from the little silver he’s grown, and Isolde cried and didn’t let anyone see.

I do one a night. Sometimes two. Dory does some; she’s faster than me at it, she says because she’s been talking to roots her whole life. Corin helps with the small ones. He hums. The kits like it.

Old Son was the fourth. He didn’t say anything the whole night. At dawn he went back out to the plain on the train, and climbed onto his stones over Rafe, and put his mirror up.

And flashed thirty-one.

Then the count.

Wren wrote it down. Then she waved at him, from the step, the way she does every morning. He can’t see it from that far. She waves anyway.

Dot was the ninth.

I’d left her till then on purpose. Not because she was the least cold; she was one of the coldest. Because she’s Dot. Because she was the kit that called itself Dot in the mess hall at Scarecrow when there were nineteen of us, and I didn’t want to do her until I’d done enough of the others to know I wouldn’t get it wrong.

She knew that. She’d known it since the first night.

“This one doesn’t mind waiting,” she said. On the floor of the map room, on the eighth evening, with her rivers of light gone very slow. Four colours, still. Hers and Luna’s kit’s and the two she took in since. “This one has waited before.”

Mother sat with her. Every evening. On the floor beside her, with her knees up, the way she sits with the grey ones. With a cup. She doesn’t drink anything, Dot. Mother brings her one anyway.

“We’ve had the same name a long time, you and me,” said Mother. On the eighth evening. I heard it from the door. “Since the mess hall. Since before I ever came.”

Dot’s lights moved, very slowly.

“This one has always liked sharing it,” said Dot. “When someone on the hill calls Dot, this one never knows which of us they mean. This one always goes anyway.” A pause. “So do you.”

Mother didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she put her hand on Dot’s casing. Very flat.

“Well,” said Mother. “You’d better not go anywhere, then. Two of us is confusing enough. One would be worse.”

I did Dot that night.

She sang. The whole time. Not words. Just the four colours, going up and down, as she moved out of the grey root by root. Isolde’s silver, that one; Isolde asked. When it was done, there were five colours in her. The fifth was the colour of Isolde’s leaves.

Mother was asleep against her by then. With her cup gone cold. Dot didn’t move all night, so as not to wake her.

I’m writing the kits first, because they came first, and because Mother says I leave the small things out when the big things come.

But it was while I was doing the kits that I started to wonder.

Why now?

The grey had been going cold since the hand left the middle. Four years. Slowly. Bell said so. But the kits had all been fine until the end of the summer. Then all at once. As if something had pushed.

And at the end of the summer was when Ilka’s list started getting longer. When the stars past the edge of the Hedge started going out faster.

I asked Bell.

“I don’t know,” said Bell. “Maybe nothing. Maybe the grey hears something. It was always listening to something very big and very far away.” She tapped her stick on the floor. “Something big and far away is moving, Lucas. Maybe the grey heard it move.”

I went to look.

Not alone. Mother’s rule. Me and Dory and my wives and Dinraal and Isolde. The unit.

Ilka gave us the place. The nearest star on her list that had gone out in the last month. Past the edge of the Hedge, past the worlds we cleared, further out along the shape the small pieces of wanting had been pointing.

Dory took hold of the edge of where it used to be.

We scattered.

We came out in the dark.

That’s the first thing I’ll write. It was dark. All of it. Not night; there’s light at night, from the stars, from somewhere. This was dark the way the inside of a closed fist is dark.

Where the star had been, there was nothing.

Luna lit it.

Not with fire. With ice. A sheet of it, very thin, very wide, all round us, catching what little light there was and throwing it back, the way snow does at night. Sera warmed it from behind so it glowed. Risa put a little lightning into the edges.

And we saw.

There were worlds.

Four of them. Round where the star had been. Still going round it, the way worlds go round a star, even though there wasn’t one. Going round nothing.

Dark. Cold. Colder than anything. The seas frozen solid down to the bottom; you could see it. The air frozen and fallen as snow on the ground. Everything that had been growing, frozen where it stood.

And on all four of them, crawling across the frozen ground, eating, the Hungry.

Hana was the one who understood first.

“They didn’t have to fight,” she said. Very quietly. Holding herself very still in the air, the way she does when she’s breathing for nobody.

“What?”

“Look at them,” said Hana. “They’re not fighting anything. There’s nothing to fight. Everything down there died when the star went out. In a day. Two days. Everything that lived there is just lying there. Frozen.” She looked down at the nearest world. “They’re just eating. Like the swarm on the birthing world, after.”

I looked down. With my eyes black.

She was right.

The swarms on those four worlds weren’t hunting. They weren’t digging. They weren’t hurting anything. Everything they touched was already dead. A whole system of it. Every tree and every animal and every person, frozen in the dark, and the Hungry just going across it like cattle across a field.

Easy.

“Then what ate the star?” said Andraste.

Nobody answered.

Dory felt it first. She always does.

She went very still in the air beside me. With her black eyes wide.

“Dad,” she said. “It’s still here.”

I’ll describe it once.

I’ve written that before. About the body, over Root. About the Refined. About the six on Tiamat’s wall. I keep saying I’ll describe it once because I don’t want to describe any of them twice.

This one I don’t want to describe at all.

It was past the fourth world. Further out. Moving away. Very slowly. So big that at first I thought it was the dark itself, the edge of the fist. Then the edge moved.

It was Hungry.

One. Not a swarm. Not a body grown together out of thousands. One thing. Born. Grown. The way the new ones on the birthing world were born, the plated ones the size of walking engines; only this one wasn’t the size of a walking engine. Or a city. Or a world.

It was the size of the star it had eaten.

Bigger.

It had a mouth.

I saw it when Risa put a bolt into the dark in front of it, to see. One mouth. At the front. Wide enough to put a sun in.

It had just put a sun in.

“It ate it,” said Sera. Very quietly. Sera, who burns as hot as a dying star. Who has always, since the first day on Avalon, been the warmest thing in any room. “It ate the whole star.”

“A small one,” said Isolde. She had her notebook out. Of course she did. Her voice was very steady. “Dim. Red. The kind that burn a long time and not very hot.” She was writing. “It’s eating the small ones.”

“Why?”

“Because it can,” said Dinraal.

Then I understood. All of it. At once. The way you see a whole picture when someone turns on the light.

The Hungry had been losing. Isolde said so, on the birthing world, years ago. Losing to the grey ones and the stations and to us. So they made bigger ones. The plated ones. The new ones. Bigger, and bigger.

And then they made this.

It doesn’t fight. It doesn’t have to. It finds a small star, a dim red one with worlds round it, and it eats the star. And the worlds go dark, and cold, and everything on them dies, in a day, in two. Without a fight. Without anyone being able to do anything. Without anyone knowing what happened, even. Just the light going out.

And then the swarms come in behind it. And eat what’s left.

Easy.

I went at it.

I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. Andraste says she saw my face and knew before I moved. Hana says she had the breath ready before I’d gone.

I went at it the way I went into the spear. Faster than I’ve ever gone. Into the front of it. Past the mouth. Into the dark inside.

And I let go of it.

It went.

A lot of it. A piece as big as a world, from the front of it, around the mouth. White. The way the spear went. The air of the system, what was left of it, rushing in where it had been.

And the rest of it didn’t notice.

I want that written down. Because it’s true, and because it’s the most frightening thing that’s happened to me since the first dawn.

I took a piece out of it as big as a world. And the rest of it, the part as big as a star, kept moving. Slowly. Away. The way a whale would keep swimming if you took a bucket of water out of the sea in front of it.

It didn’t turn. It didn’t stop. It didn’t even look.

I went again.

And again. Hana says I did it eleven times. Eleven pieces, each as big as a world. I don’t remember counting. I remember the dark, and the inside of it, and the shape of wanting at the bottom of it, huge, slow, pointed out. Away. At the next small star.

I remember thinking: I could do this for a week.

I remember thinking: and there are six bodies on Tiamat’s wall that this thing would be a finger on.

Hana breathed my name.

Not the way she did on Root. Not with all her air. Just once. Quietly. The way you’d say someone’s name across a kitchen to make them look up.

Lucas.

I looked up.

I came back to the ice. To Luna’s sheet, glowing, with the others on it. My nose was bleeding. Dory’s was too; she’d been holding the system together round us so the cold didn’t get in.

Hana put her hands on my face.

“You can’t kill it,” said Hana. “Not alone. Not tonight.”

“I took eleven pieces out of it.”

“I know,” said Hana. “I counted.” She didn’t let go of my face. “Look at it.”

I looked.

It was still there. Still moving. Smaller, maybe. A little. The way the sea’s smaller after the bucket.

“It’s not hunting us,” said Hana. “It’s not hunting anyone. It’s eating stars. If you stay here and fight it all night, you’ll still be fighting it in the morning, and somewhere else another one’s eating another star with people round it.” She put her forehead on mine. “We don’t need you to kill it tonight. We need you to come home and think.”

We went home.

Dory found one more thing before we did.

On the way out. At the edge of that system. On the very furthest world, the smallest, so far out from where the star had been that it had always been cold. Under the ice.

Hearts.

Not many. Two hundred, maybe. Very slow. Very cold. Under the ice, in the deep, where it had always been cold and they’d always lived. The dark hadn’t killed them, because they’d never had much light.

But the swarm had found them. It was coming down. Through the ice. Toward them.

We were in time.

I want that written down too.

Two hundred and six. Long and pale and blind, like fish that live in caves, with soft hands and no eyes at all. Luna made them a road. Dory made the arch. Mother was on the red glass with two hundred and six cups, and the fish people didn’t know what a cup was, and Mother showed them, and the oldest of them poured the first one out on the glass without being told.

They always do. I don’t know how.

Mother was on the porch when we came back. It was the turn. She was lifting it, with Oona beside her lifting the step.

She looked at our faces. All eight of them. And put the porch down.

I told her. Not all of it. The star. The four worlds going round nothing. The fish people under the ice.

Oona listened. Very still. In her coat. When I’d finished, she looked up at the sky. At our sun, going down over the far hills, gold and very big.

“Will it eat ours?” said Oona.

I knelt down. Her height. The way Mother does.

“No,” I said. “It eats small ones. Dim red ones. Ours is big and yellow and very hot. Ask Aunt Sera. She’d know.”

Sera, behind me, said: “Much too hot. It’d burn its mouth.”

Oona thought about it.

“Good,” she said. And lifted the step again. Firmly. As if to make the point.

Mother looked at me over her head. She didn’t say but the others. She didn’t need to.

She poured. Eight cups. Then the ninth, for the fish people’s eldest, who’d come up the hill behind us very slowly, feeling his way along the wall, and stood at the bottom of the steps with his soft hands out, not knowing where the house was.

Mother came down the steps and took his hand and put the cup in it.

“There you are,” said Mother.

I went to Halvane.

On Ister. In the deepest city. In the room where the engine is. He was there; he’s always there in the evenings, now, sitting on a bench in front of it with his long hands on his knees, the way Mother sits on the porch at the turn.

I sat down beside him and told him all of it.

The star. The worlds going round nothing. The swarms eating what was left like cattle. The thing as big as a star, moving away, not noticing me. Eleven pieces.

He listened. All of it. Without saying anything.

When I’d finished, he didn’t say anything for a long time.

“It’s eating the small ones,” he said. In the end.

“Yes.”

“Dim. Red. Long-lived.”

“Isolde says.”

“Then it can be predicted,” said Halvane.

I looked at him.

“My people spent eleven thousand years predicting where things would come from,” said Halvane. “The Sorn. The Ashen. The Hungry. Every time something came for us, we worked out where it had come from and where it would go next, so we could be somewhere else.” He looked at the engine. “We moved Ister seven times in eleven years. Every time, we knew where they were going before they did.”

“Can you do it for this?”

“An animal that eats only one thing,” said Halvane, “goes where that thing is. A grazer goes to grass. A thing that eats small red stars goes to small red stars.” He stood up. Slowly. Very tall. “There are a great many small red stars. But not an infinite number. And they’re not everywhere. And it moves slowly.”

He looked down at me.

“Give me Ilka’s list,” said Halvane. “Every star that’s gone out. When, and where. Give me Tiamat’s ears, and the Aldri ears, and Bell. Give me the six on the wall. And give me a week.”

“And then?”

“And then I’ll tell you which star it’s going to eat next,” said Halvane. “And the one after that. And the one after that.” He put his hand on the engine. “And which of them have people round them.”

“And then we go and get them,” I said.

“Before the light goes out,” said Halvane. “Yes.”

It took him nine days. Not seven. He apologised. He said the Aldri had never once in eleven thousand years tried to predict something in order to go toward it, and it had taken him two days just to turn the sums round the right way.

He came through the arch onto the red glass at dawn on the ninth, at the count, with a sheet of paper. One sheet. Like Halloway’s. He gave it to Okafor.

She read it standing up. Then she went into the kitchen and put it on the long table and everyone came and stood round it.

It was a list.

Stars. Small red ones, in a line, going out from the dark place we’d been, further and further from the Hedge. Each with a date beside it. Not exact. Within a month or so. Halvane said he’d be closer next time; he said he’d been out of practice.

And beside some of them, not all, a small mark.

People.

There were forty-one stars on the list.

Nineteen had marks.

Okafor looked at it for a long time.

Then she went to the slate. Under READY, and and live, she wrote:

Before the light goes out.

Ingrid took a copy.

She went home with it and sat at her table all night again, the way she did with Ilka’s list. In the morning there was a fourth sheet on her wall, beside Came by themselves and the big one Konrad keeps face up and Stopped.

Warned, it said at the top.

And under it, nineteen stars. And beside each one, a space. For the number, when we’d been.

Mother read it over Ingrid’s shoulder.

“Grandmothers fetch grandmothers,” said Mother.

“Still?” said Ingrid.

“Always,” said Mother. “Somebody old has to walk out first. So they know it’s all right.” She tapped the first star on the sheet. “That one. Who’s nearest?”

Days 8702–8761. The Star-Eater.

Old Son flashed thirty and then nothing. His lights weren’t off; they were out, going in, like he’s cold. Two of Halloway’s small ones in the long ward. Then Aster: this unit is cold, at the bottom, where the grey is; nine days hoping it was nothing. Crane: the cores were never ours; Command gave them to us and we put casings round them; the knot came with the grey. Bell: they’re something living in a house made of grey, and the house is falling down; it was never the knot that held the grey together, it was what the knot was listening to, and it’s gone. Then take them out before it goes. Enna: Hearth silver; it copies itself; it doesn’t need anything listening at the bottom. Keir: that’s what I was going to say. You were taking too long. Dinraal’s handful: we’ll find out together. Aster first, all night, root by root; it feels like coming in; I can hear Dinraal, like a song in another room. Dawn, and silver in her lights. Every one of Hearth gave; Bahamut a handful at ten. One or two a night, months. Old Son flashed thirty-one. Dot ninth: we’ve had the same name a long time; when someone calls Dot, this one always goes anyway; so do you. Well, don’t go anywhere; two of us is confusing enough; one would be worse. A fifth colour, Isolde’s. Why now? Bell: the grey was listening to something big and far away, and something big and far away is moving. The unit scattered to where a star had been: four worlds going round nothing, frozen, and the Hungry eating them like cattle; they didn’t have to fight. Then the thing past the fourth world, born, grown, one, the size of the star it ate, with a mouth wide enough for a sun. It eats small, dim, red ones. Because it can. I took eleven pieces out of it as big as worlds and it didn’t notice; I could do this for a week. Hana, once, quietly, across a kitchen: you can’t kill it alone tonight; come home and think. Two hundred and six blind fish people under the ice of the coldest world; we were in time; the oldest poured without being told. Oona: will it eat ours? It eats small red ones; Sera: it’d burn its mouth. Mother put the cup in the blind man’s hand. Halvane by the engine: an animal that eats one thing goes where that thing is; give me a week. Nine days. Forty-one stars, nineteen with people, a month either way. Slate: before the light goes out. Ingrid’s fourth sheet: Warned. Mother: grandmothers fetch grandmothers; always; who’s nearest?