Chapter 471 Corvan

Ilka found it on the Meridian in the middle of the night.

She says it came in on no band she’d ever heard. Not the Collective’s. Not the old ones the small worlds use. Not the Aldri’s. Something very thin and very quiet, like a thread pulled through a needle, very far, and at the end of it, a packet.

Small. Sealed. With no sender on it.

And one word on the outside, in the Collective’s script, in a very neat hand.

Dory.

Ilka didn’t open it. She tried. She said afterward she tried for an hour, with every Aldri ear on the Meridian and everything Asha ever taught her. Then she woke Asha, who came up through the arch in her command coat with her instruments floating round her, talking very fast, and tried for another hour. Then Eve came and told Asha to stop.

It wouldn’t open. It was locked a way none of them had ever seen. Not with numbers. With shape.

“It’s not a lock,” said Asha. In the end. Very fast. “It’s a question. It’s waiting for someone to ask it the right way. I don’t know the way. Nobody on Hearth does.”

She brought it down through the arch at dawn. Before the count. And put it on the long table in front of Okafor.

“It’s for Dory,” said Ilka. “It won’t open for anyone else.”

Okafor looked at it for a long time.

“Who knows how to lock a thing so only Dory can open it?” said Okafor.

Nobody answered.

Dory came down for the count with Sorrel on her hip.

She saw the packet on the long table and stopped in the doorway. Sorrel’s ears went flat.

“That’s mine,” said Dory.

“How do you know?”

Dory put Sorrel down. And came to the table. And looked at it. Not with her eyes. With her black ones. Down. Into it.

“Because it’s asking me,” said Dory. “It’s made so it asks. The way I ask. The way Dad asks.” She frowned. “Nobody else could hear it. You’d have to know how we do it.”

She put her hand on it.

It opened.

I’ll write what was in it. Exactly. Okafor asked me to. Senna Thale asked me to. Imre Oshan has every word in her second book, but I want them in mine.

There were three things.

The first was a letter. From the Assize. The voice; the middle seat; the woman with no hair and very pale eyes. To the Prime. In the Collective’s script, with the Assize’s mark at the bottom, very old, very plain.

Dot turned it for us. Slowly. At the long table. With Senna Thale and Mara Quell and Iolo Venn through the arch from Ister, standing behind Okafor’s chair.

Prime Vael.

The examination of your conduct concerning the Avalon matter will proceed as announced. It is necessary. The recording was played before the whole of the far hall. The Assize must be seen to act under its own law, or the far hall will cease to believe in the law at all.

You need not be concerned.

The examination is a gesture of good faith toward the law. It has no instrument by which to compel you. It will make no finding until a finding is convenient, and the finding will be that the matter was misunderstood.

In the meantime, the Assize has postponed the charges against Avalon, as it had to. It has not dismissed them. It will not.

We remain, as ever, the Collective’s court.

Nobody at the long table said anything for a long time.

Then Senna Thale said, very dryly, very quietly: “Well. I’ll take that back about the closest anyone’s ever come.”

The second was a letter from the Prime.

To someone. Not the Assize. Somebody very high in the Collective; Mara Quell said from the marks it was the head of whatever the Refined answer to. The ones who give them the seal.

Has there been any progress on the houses?

I am told they are not dead. The Sorn traitor said so before the whole hall: under a world called Root, inside a queen. I want them found. I want them brought out.

Not for themselves. They are old men in a room. I want what they made.

They made the Marrah child. The one who breaks worlds by telling them to. The first of their attempts to make what Dask is, from stock, in a line, in two hundred days. They nearly succeeded. Dask himself undid it.

Their research is in them. All of it. Every attempt, every failure, every child. Two thousand eight hundred worlds of stock.

I want it.

Lio was in the doorway.

I didn’t see her come. Nobody did. She’d come up from the courtyard where she makes the warm rain every morning with Kesh and Oona. She was standing very still in the kitchen doorway with her own knot in her hair and her hands at her sides.

She’d heard.

The Marrah child.

Sefa was behind her. Very small, very bent, with her loose grey hair. She put her hand on Lio’s shoulder.

Lio didn’t move.

“That’s me,” said Lio. Very quietly. “Isn’t it. The Marrah child.”

Nobody said anything.

“He wants what made me,” said Lio. “So he can make more.”

Dory got up from the long table. And went to the doorway. And knelt down in front of Lio, so their eyes were level. Black and brown.

“He can’t have it,” said Dory.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” said Dory. “It’s in the houses. And the houses are in the eldest. And the eldest is the oldest thing there is, and she’s said she’ll keep them until they learn.” She put her hands on Lio’s shoulders. “And Dad told her no. On the plateau. He said they’re hers forever if they don’t. I was there.”

Lio looked at her for a long time.

“Then what does he want me for?” said Lio.

Dory didn’t answer straight away.

That was the third thing in the packet.

I’ll write it last. Because it’s the one that matters. And because Dory read it out herself, at the long table, with Lio on her knee and Sefa’s hand on both of them.

It was in the Prime’s hand too. A different letter. Older; the marks were older. To nobody. Notes. The way Father wrote his notebooks. To himself.

Dask is not the end of something. He is the beginning.

Every report says the same. His body takes from every people it meets and keeps what is better. It builds itself again every day. It will not stop. The queens believe he will not die.

He is becoming what they are. A man becoming a queen.

Imagine an army of them.

Not one. Not his children, who are his. Mine. Made. Each one able to stand in a doorway and be beside every ship at once. Each one able to ask a sun to be iron. Each one answerable to the Collective.

Nothing in the Reach could stand against them. Nothing outside it. Not the Hungry. Not the six. Not whatever the six are reaching for.

The Collective would be inevitable in fact, not only in word.

The houses tried to make it and failed. They had the method but not the source. I have the method if I have the houses.

And I have seen the source.

Twice.

Dory stopped reading.

“Twice,” she said.

Nobody said anything.

“Me,” said Dory. “On the white ship. And at the Assize. He looked at me the whole time.” She put the paper down. “That’s what he wanted me for. For his son. It was never his son.”

She looked at the last line for a long time.

There was one more line. Under everything. In a different hand. Very neat. The same hand as the Dory on the outside of the packet.

You said I don’t even like you. You were right.

I don’t like him either.

C.

The kitchen was very quiet.

Dory sat at the long table with Lio on her knee and the three letters in front of her and didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she said:

“I don’t understand.”

Everyone looked at her.

“Why would he send it?” said Dory. “Corvan. He’s the Prime’s son. He stood behind his chair in the white room. He stood behind it at the Assize, every day, for nineteen days. He looked at me the way the Prime told him to.” She turned the last letter over. “I looked all the way down him. On the white ship. I said he didn’t like me. I said he wanted me because his father told him to, so his father would look at him the way he looks at me.”

“You were right,” said Okafor.

“I know I was right,” said Dory. “I could see it. That’s what frightens me.” She put the letter down. “I looked all the way down him and I didn’t see this.”

Senna Thale looked at the letters for a long time.

“It’s genuine,” she said. In the end. Very dry. “All three. The Assize’s mark is the Assize’s mark. The Prime’s hand is the Prime’s hand. I’ve seen both on every document in the archive for three hundred years.”

“Can we use it?”

“In the Assize?” said Senna Thale. “No. The Assize wrote one of them.” She folded her long hands. “In front of the far hall?” She paused. “That’s a different question.”

“If we play it on the old bands,” said Iolo Venn. Not smiling, for once. “To the small worlds. The ones who whisper. And the big ones who are asking where the family is.” He looked at the letters. “They’d know the examination is a show. They’d know the Prime wants the houses. They’d know what he means to do with them.”

“And they’d know someone close to the Prime sent it,” said Mara Quell. Very quietly. “There aren’t many people that close.”

Nobody said anything.

“They’d know it was his son,” said Dory.

So we didn’t. Not yet.

That was Dory’s choice. Okafor asked her. It was addressed to her.

“Not yet,” said Dory. “Not till I know what he wants.” She looked at the last line. I don’t like him either. “If he sent it so we’d use it, he’ll send more. If he sent it so we’d know, then we know.” She folded the letters up. “And if we play it now, his father finds out who sent it. And I don’t know what his father does to people he doesn’t like.”

She stopped.

“Yes I do,” said Dory. “He puts them on frames.”

The Overseer came up the hill that afternoon. He’d heard. Everyone on the hill had heard by noon; things don’t stay in the kitchen.

He stood in the doorway in Holt’s cap and asked to see the second letter. Dory gave it to him.

He read it for a long time. Then he gave it back.

“He’s right,” said the Overseer. Very quietly. “About the research. It’s in them.”

“In the houses?”

“In their memory,” said the Overseer. “They never wrote anything down. They never needed to. They remember. Every attempt. Every line. Every child they put through the making to see if this one would come out the way Lucas did.” He turned Holt’s cap round in his hands. “I heard them talk about it. In the rooms. For years. The Marrah child was the closest they ever came. They were very proud of her.”

Lio, at the long table, didn’t look up.

“If he got them,” said the Overseer, “they’d tell him everything. Gladly. They’d have someone to talk to again. Someone who wanted what they knew.” He put the cap back on. “That’s what they’ve always wanted most. Not power. To be listened to by someone who’d act on it.”

Okafor sent the Standing to Root that evening.

Not all of it. A ring. Round the eldest’s plateau, on the plains below, where Varra’s Kasrai stood on the first day of the body. Varra went herself. With her rope. And Aurelius, with his shield. And three of Halvane’s stations moved in their orbits so they could see Root’s sky without anything in between.

“He can’t get them,” I said. At the long table. “They’re in her. Under the range. He’d have to come through the eldest.”

“I know,” said Okafor. “I’ve read the letter. He knows that too.” She looked at the slate. “He’s never once in that letter said how he’d get them. Only that he wants them.” She picked up the chalk. “People who don’t say how have usually already decided.”

She wrote on the slate. Under War?

Root.

Andraste took Holdfast off its hook that night.

Not to go anywhere. She sat on the bench by the kitchen door with it across her knees and the whetstone in her hand and didn’t sharpen it. Just held it.

“An army,” she said. When I came out. “Of you.”

“Yes.”

“Made,” said Andraste. “In lines. From children.” Her thumb moved on the edge. “He looked at our daughter for nineteen days and thought about it.”

“I know.”

“I could find him,” said Andraste. Very quietly. “Dory could take me. One breath. The white room. The window.” She looked at the blade. “Holdfast goes through anything. The door in it goes anywhere. He’d be on the other side of it before he finished standing up.”

I didn’t say anything.

Hana came out. She’d heard. She sat down on Andraste’s other side and put her hand flat on Andraste’s middle, where the girl for the ridge is.

“No,” said Hana.

Andraste didn’t look at her.

“Not because he doesn’t deserve it,” said Hana. “Because then the Collective has the recording it wants. A Dask wife, through a door, in the Prime’s own room.” She breathed. Slowly. For both of them. “And because Mara says there are a thousand others who’d sit in his chair by morning, and one of them would want the same thing, and not be stupid enough to write it down.”

Andraste held the blade for a long time.

Then she put it back on its hook.

“I hate it when you’re right,” said Andraste.

“I know,” said Hana. “You married me anyway.”

Halvane came up the hill at dusk. He’d read the letters in the deepest city; Senna Thale had brought them.

He stood at the bottom of the porch steps for a long time.

“We saw something like it,” he said. In the end. “Once. Eleven thousand years ago. Before the Sorn. A people who decided the best way to be safe from everything was to make something that nothing could be safe from.” He folded his long hands. “They made it.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t know,” said Halvane. “We moved Ister away from them. The first jump. That’s why the engine was built.” He looked out at the sky. “When we came back, years later, to look, there was nothing there. Not them. Not what they’d made. Not their world.”

He turned to go.

“Ister will never help him,” said Halvane. “Not with an engine. Not with a station. Not with a single listener the size of a seed.” He looked back at me. “I’d like that written down too. In your notebook. In case anyone ever asks.”

Mother was at the glass that night. Father’s wall, in the window over the sink, with the moonlight coming through and the oatmeal across the noble gases.

Fingertips on carbon. The way she does.

“An army of you,” said Mother. Not turning round.

“Yes.”

“He’d have to make a lot of things,” said Mother. “To make one of you.”

“The houses tried for a long time.”

“Not that,” said Mother. “The other things.” She took her fingers off the glass. “A father who paints a wall at night so a boy of four knows what he’s doing. A field in the middle of the poison. A scarecrow with a scarf on.” She turned round. “A mother who pours.”

I didn’t say anything.

“They can make the silver do whatever they like,” said Mother. “They can’t make that. Nobody ever made it. It just happened, in a house at the edge of a field, because two people who’d been thrown out of a city didn’t want their children to be frightened.” She picked up the pot. “He’ll get an army of something. He won’t get an army of you.”

Lio didn’t sleep that night.

Sefa told me. She came up to the porch very late, very slowly, very bent, and sat down on the top step beside me without asking, the way the grandmothers do now.

“She’s doing her knot,” said Sefa. “Over and over. In the dark. Tying it and untying it.”

“Is she frightened?”

Sefa didn’t answer straight away. She twisted a knot in her own loose grey hair. The one for worry, Lio says.

“She’s frightened of herself,” said Sefa. “Not of him. She’s been frightened of herself since the birthing world. Since she told a world to break and it did.” She tied the knot. “Now she knows someone else wants what she is. Wants more of it. Wants a line of children like her, in collars, telling.”

I didn’t say anything.

“She asked me,” said Sefa, “if it would have been better if she’d never been made.”

I went in.

Lio was in the hall under the house. In the heap, the way the children still sleep sometimes, with the queens on their ledges and the red stone warm. Kesh on one side of her, Oona on the other. Both asleep. Lio wasn’t. She was sitting up in the middle of them with her knot half tied, very small, very still.

I sat down on the edge of the heap.

“Sefa said,” said Lio. Before I could say anything.

“Yes.”

“Would it?” said Lio. “Have been better?”

I didn’t answer straight away. I thought about it. I owed her that.

“No,” I said.

“He wants to make more of me.”

“He wants to make more of what the houses did to you,” I said. “That’s not you. That’s the collar. I took most of it off on the birthing world. The rest is in your silver, and you’re learning to ask instead of tell, every day, with Dory.” I looked at her. “That’s you. The asking. Not the telling.”

Lio looked at her hands.

“The houses couldn’t make you ask,” I said. “They only knew how to make you tell. You learned the asking on your own. On our kitchen wall. With Dory.” I put my hand on her head. On her knot. “He can’t make that. Nobody can. It’s yours.”

Lio didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she finished her knot. Very carefully. In the dark. And lay down between Kesh and Oona.

“Dory says I’m not allowed to be frightened of myself,” said Lio. Very quietly. “She says that’s her job.”

“She’s right,” I said. “It’s mine too.”

The eldest heard. Of course she did.

Dory took the letters up the thread to Root the next morning, after the count. And stood on the plateau with them in her hands and read them out. All three. To the eldest. To the ground.

The ground went very still under her feet.

He wants my children’s children’s tormentors, said the eldest. In the end. Very quietly. He wants to bring them up out of me so he can learn from them.

“Yes.”

He will not have them, said the eldest.

And then, after a long time:

They heard.

Dory came back very white.

“The houses,” she said. At the long table. “They heard me read it. They’re in her; they hear what she hears.” She put her hands flat on the table. “They stopped talking.”

“Stopped?”

“For the first time,” said Dory. “Since they went in. The eldest says they’ve never once stopped. Not for a moment. And when I read the Prime’s notes, they went quiet. All of them. At once.”

“Why?”

Dory didn’t answer straight away.

“I think,” she said, “they’re listening.”

Bell came up the hill at the end of the week.

With her stick and her paper. The sum she hadn’t done.

She put it down on the long table in front of me without saying anything. Then she sat down. And looked at me over her glasses for a long time.

“You can get out,” said Bell.

I looked at the paper. At her small hand, all the way down it. At the bottom, underlined twice.

“Just,” said Bell. “If you’re very fast. Faster than you’ve ever been.” She tapped the paper. “From the moment you ask the hydrogen to be iron to the moment it falls in, you have about as long as it takes your mother to pour a cup. Then it goes off.”

“And if I’m not out?”

Bell looked at me for a long time.

“Then you’ll find out whether a man becoming a queen can stand in the middle of a supernova,” said Bell. “And so will everyone else. And I’ll have been wrong about the sum.” She folded her hands on her stick. “I’m very rarely wrong about the sum.”

“He won’t be alone,” said Dory.

From the end of the table. With Dusk in her hands.

Bell looked at her.

“I’ll be at the edge,” said Dory. “Outside it. Holding the thread. The moment he’s asked the iron, I pull.” She put Dusk on. “I’m faster than him at pulling. I’ve always been. It’s the only thing I’m faster at than everything.”

Bell didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she picked up her pen. And did a new sum. At the bottom of the paper. Very fast. In her small hand.

She looked at it.

“Twice as long,” said Bell. “With her pulling. As long as it takes your mother to pour two cups.”

“Is that enough?”

“It’s never enough,” said Bell. “Your mother says so.” She put the pen down. “It’s what you’ve got.”

She got up. Slowly. With her stick. And stopped at the door.

“Don’t try it yet,” said Bell. “Not till I’ve done it again. Twice. And had Mara Quell do it, and Tiamat, and that very rude young man from the Assize who thinks he’s clever.” She looked at me over her glasses. “I’ve been right about every sum on this hill for forty years. I’d like it to stay that way.”

Dory answered Corvan on the sixth day.

She didn’t tell anyone she was going to. She told me afterward. On the roof. She said she’d thought about it for five nights, the way Hana thinks about a thing before she says it, and on the sixth she went up to the Meridian on her own and asked Ilka for the thin quiet band the packet had come in on.

Ilka found it. Just. A thread through a needle, very far.

Dory locked her answer the same way he’d locked his. With shape. So that only someone who’d made a lock like that could open it.

She wrote one line.

Thank you. Are you safe?

“Was that stupid?” said Dory. On the roof. To me. With her knees up.

“I don’t know.”

“Mum said it was,” said Dory. “Gran said it was the right question.” She looked at the sky. At the place, very far, where the web is. “I don’t know why I asked it. I don’t even like him.”

“No.”

“He looked at me the way his father told him to,” said Dory. “For nineteen days.” She was quiet. “And the whole time, he didn’t like his father either. And I didn’t see.” She put Dusk on. “If someone looked all the way down me and missed that much, I’d want them to ask.”

No answer came.

Not that week. Ilka listened every night. The thin quiet band was just quiet.

Dory went up to the Meridian every evening anyway. At the turn. After Mother had lifted the porch and Oona the step. She sat in Ilka’s room with the ears on and her black eyes shut and listened to nothing for an hour.

Ilka didn’t ask why. She brought her a cup instead, every evening, and put it down beside her, and went back to her map.

“Your gran does that,” said Ilka, on the fourth evening. “Sits with people. Even when they’re not there.”

Dory didn’t open her eyes. “I know,” she said. “I learned it from her.”

Corin asked about it. At breakfast. With his spoon in the air, the way he does.

“Why did he send it to Dory?” said Corin. “Not to Dad. Dad’s the one his father wants.”

Everyone looked at him.

“Because Dory looked at him,” said Tiri. Before anyone else could answer. Very quietly. “All the way down. In the white room. And said what she saw.” She turned her bird over in her hands. “Nobody’s ever done that to him. I bet. Not once.”

Corin thought about it.

“So he wanted her to look again,” said Corin. “And see something else.”

Dory put her cup down. Very carefully.

Corin went back to his porridge.

Mara Quell came back from Lantern on the twelfth day with a sheet. The engine. Its place under the lake was dug. The Aldri had started laying the heart of it. The heavy queen was holding the ground up from underneath so it didn’t fall in on them.

“On time,” said Mara Quell. “Just. Eight months left. The star in ten.”

“And the hundred and seven?”

“Watching,” said Mara Quell. “Every day. From their steps. With their lamps.” She almost smiled. “The old woman who poured for Ilas brings the engineers lunch now. She says they’re too thin.”

Enna had the twins on the ninth night.

I’ll write it here, because it was the best thing that happened that week, and because Mother says I always leave the good bits for last and then forget them.

In the long ward. With Halloway, and Abena, who breathed for her the whole time, the way Hana taught her. And Keir on the floor by the bed with his head on the blanket and Enna’s hand in his hair, the way Callum was for Genny. His legs went too.

A boy and a girl. The way Halloway said. Very small. Very loud. The boy with Keir’s hair, which stands up. The girl with Enna’s silver, already, a little, in a thread along her wrist, the way Hearth silver comes.

“Don’t make a fuss,” said Enna.

Everyone made a fuss.

Garnet drew them. Aster held them, one in each hand, with her lights all the way up, the new silver colour running through all the old ones, very bright.

“This unit,” said Aster, “has never held anything this small.” Her lights went higher. “This unit would like to do it again.”

They named them on the third day. Keir and Enna. At the long table. Very matter-of-fact, the way Enna says everything.

The boy is Bram.

After nobody. Enna said every good name on the hill already belonged to someone, and she’d like one of hers to get to be the first. Keir said that was the most Hearth thing he’d ever heard. Enna said it was the most engineer thing; you don’t reuse a part when you can make a new one that fits better.

Wren wrote it down. She said it was a good name. She said she’d never once counted it before. She said that was the best kind; she’d had to share her own Rafe’s name with the stones on the far plain, and she’d always been glad to, but it’s nice for someone to have one all to themselves.

The girl is Aster.

Enna asked her too. In the map room. Aster stood very still under Tiamat’s wall for a long time with her lights going up and down through every colour.

“This unit,” said Aster. In the end. “Would be very honoured.”

Then: “This unit would like it noted that it has never once been honoured before. It is very strange. It is very good.”

Dory read Corvan’s last line again that night. On the porch. At the turn. With Mother lifting it a finger’s width and Oona lifting the step.

I don’t like him either.

“I said he didn’t even like me,” said Dory. “On the white ship. I looked all the way down him and that’s what I saw. A man who wanted me because his father told him to.”

“Maybe that was true,” I said.

“It was true,” said Dory. “I could see it.” She turned the paper over in her hands. “But I didn’t see this. I didn’t see that he didn’t like his father either. I didn’t see that he’d lock a thing so only I could open it. I didn’t see that he’d know how.”

She folded the paper.

“Maybe I underestimated him,” said Dory.

Mother, beside us, put the porch down.

“People are like that,” said Mother. “You can see all the way down someone and still not see which way they’re going to turn.” She looked at Dory. “That’s the bit you have to wait for.”

Days 9119–9142. Corvan.

Ilka found a packet on no band she knew, locked by shape, addressed Dory; Asha: it’s not a lock, it’s a question; it asked the way we ask. The Assize to the Prime: the examination is a gesture of good faith to the law; it has no instrument to compel you; the finding will be that it was misunderstood; we remain the Collective’s court. Senna: I’ll take that back. The Prime: progress on the houses? They made the Marrah child; the first attempt to make what Dask is; I want their research. Lio in the doorway: that’s me. Dory: he can’t have it; Dad told the eldest no. The Prime’s notes to himself: Dask is the beginning; a man becoming a queen; imagine an army of them, mine, made, answerable; the Collective inevitable in fact; I have the method if I have the houses, and I have seen the source, twice. It was never his son. C.: You said I don’t even like you. You were right. I don’t like him either. Dory: I looked all the way down him and didn’t see this. Senna: genuine, all three. Dory: not yet; if we play it, his father finds out who; he puts them on frames. The Overseer: it’s in their memory; they’d tell him gladly; they’ve always wanted most to be listened to by someone who’d act on it. Okafor sent a ring of the Standing to Root with Varra and Aurelius; people who don’t say how have usually already decided; slate: Root. Andraste held Holdfast: I could find him; Hana: no, then the Collective has its recording, and a thousand others would sit in his chair; I hate it when you’re right; you married me anyway. Halvane: we saw it once, eleven thousand years ago; when we came back there was nothing there; Ister will never help him. Mother at the glass: they can’t make a father who paints a wall at night, a field in the poison, a scarf, a mother who pours; he’ll get an army of something; he won’t get an army of you. Sefa: she’s frightened of herself; would it have been better if she’d never been made? No; that’s the collar; the asking is you; he can’t make that. Lio: Dory says that’s her job. The eldest: he will not have them; and the houses heard, and for the first time since they went in, stopped talking; they’re listening. Bell: you can get out, just, in the time it takes your mother to pour a cup; Dory: I’ll pull; twice as long; it’s never enough; it’s what you’ve got. Dory answered on the sixth day, locked the same way: thank you; are you safe? No answer came. Corin: so he wanted her to look again and see something else. Lantern’s engine on time, just; the old woman brings the engineers lunch. Enna’s twins: Bram, a name nobody’s had yet; and Aster: this unit has never once been honoured before; it is very good. Dory: maybe I underestimated him. Mother: you can see all the way down someone and still not see which way they’ll turn.