Chapter 482 Good Standing

The Collective tried.

I’ll say that first, because they’ll want it said. They’ll want it in the long record and in Imre Oshan’s book and on every band there is. The Collective tried to save one of its own.

I’ll also say how hard.

Ilka heard it on the bands at dusk. The grave voice. The sorrowful man. On every band at once, the way it always comes, so that the Meridian’s ears rang with it and Ilka had to turn them down.

The Collective is a family, it said. And a family protects its own.

A pause.

The world of Thole, a member in good standing for four thousand years, lies in the path of a phenomenon that has already taken three suns in Collective space. The Collective will not abandon Thole. A fleet of the Collective’s finest has been dispatched to destroy the phenomenon before it reaches Thole’s star.

Another pause.

Let no one say the Collective does not care for its family.

Ilka put it on the slate at the long table. Okafor read it twice. Halvane read it three times, the slow Aldri way, sitting on the bench between Kesh and Teo.

“Thole,” said Halvane. “It’s on Mara Quell’s list.”

“How high?” said Okafor.

“Near the top,” said Halvane. “A small red star past the centre of their web. Two and a half million people. Miners. When Mara gave us the list, I made it five months.” He looked at the slate. “It’s three months now. The eater’s faster than I thought.”

“And the fleet?”

Halvane didn’t say anything.

Bell, at the end of the table, said it for him.

“It won’t work,” said Bell. Very quietly. “Nothing they’ve got will work. I’ve seen what it is. You can’t shoot it. There’s nothing there to shoot.”

We watched it.

Not from there. From the Meridian. Through Ilka’s ears, turned as far as they go, past the Watch and the Hedge and into the Collective’s dark, to the place where Thole’s thin red sun hangs on its own at the edge of nothing. Asha found the angle. Bell sat in Ilka’s chair with her instruments open on her knees.

The fleet came out of the dark in a long white line. Forty ships. Narrow and fast-looking, with silver on them. The Refined.

And ahead of them, between them and the red sun: nothing.

That’s what the eater looks like, from far off. Nothing. A place where the stars behind it aren’t. Very large. Much larger than the sun it was going towards. A shape you only see because of what’s missing.

The Refined fired.

I’ll describe it fairly. They fired everything they had. Forty ships, at once, white light and silver light and something dark that I didn’t know, all of it going out across the empty space and into the place where the stars weren’t.

And going through it.

Not hitting it. Not bouncing off it. Through it. As if they’d fired into the dark between stars. Which, Bell says, is exactly what they’d done.

“It’s not there,” said Bell. Watching her instruments. “Not the way a ship’s there. Not the way a star’s there. It’s more like a fold. A place where the dark is heavier. You can’t hit a fold. You can only fall into it.”

The Refined fired again. And again. Nine volleys, Ilka counted. Each one a little shorter than the last.

Then they stopped.

They didn’t go closer. They didn’t try anything else. They didn’t send a ship to see what the dark did if you touched it, or call for engineers, or try to move the world, or ask anybody anything. They fired nine volleys at a place where nothing was, and then the long white line turned round, very neatly, all forty at once, and went back the way it had come.

The whole thing took less time than Mother takes to pour for the long table.

“Nine,” said Ilka. Very quietly. “Nine volleys. And then home.”

“They weren’t trying,” said Asha.

“They were trying to have tried,” said Bell. She closed her instruments. “That’s different.”

The voice came on the bands an hour later.

The Collective has done everything in its power, it said. Its finest warriors have engaged the phenomenon with the full strength of the family. The phenomenon has proved beyond any force in existence.

A pause.

The Collective grieves for Thole.

That was all.

They didn’t say what Thole should do. They didn’t say where its people should go. They didn’t send ships to carry anyone anywhere. They grieved for Thole, on every band, and then went back to considering their response to us.

Okafor wrote one word on her slate. Then rubbed it out. Then wrote it again, harder.

Left.

The call came that night.

Dory was asleep. In the heap, with Sorrel. She sat up in the dark all at once, the way she did the night of Ysse, and Sorrel woke up and started to cry, and Dory didn’t hear her.

She was listening.

“Gran,” said Dory. Mother was there; Mother’s always there, at the turn. “Gran. Another one.”

“Another what, love?”

“Another queen,” said Dory. “Calling. Holding a thread out. To the eldest. Very far.” She put her hands on the floor of the heap. “She’s frightened. She’s not on a frame. She’s not hurt. She’s just very frightened.”

Dory looked up.

“It’s Thole,” said Dory.

I went with her. I always go with her.

We sat on the red glass in the dark with our hands flat, and listened, and the thread came. Very thin. Very far. Past the Watch and the Hedge and the Collective’s whole web, past its centre, to the very edge, where its web goes thin. To a small red star with nothing round it. And a world under it.

And the queen under the world. Holding the thread out. Shaking.

Please, said the queen of Thole. To the eldest. Through Dory. Please. It is coming. I can feel it. My sun is afraid. My people are afraid. The ones who were meant to help came and made light at it and went away.

The eldest answered. Low, and very bright, from the east.

I know, said the eldest. I saw. I am sending you the two who come.

Dory looked at me.

I looked at Dory.

“Bell said don’t get between it and the star,” said Dory.

“I know.”

“Bell said she doesn’t know what it would do to us. Because we’re nearly the same as stars now. In some ways. She said it might want us.”

“I know.”

Dory looked at the thread. At the long thin line of it going out into the dark.

“Gran,” said Dory.

Mother was standing at the edge of the red glass with her shawl round her and Sorrel on her hip, still crying a bit.

“Go on, then,” said Mother. “Both of you. And come back. That’s all I’m asking.”

“We’ll come back.”

“I know you will,” said Mother. “I’m still asking.”

We went up the thread.

I’ll say what Thole was like when we got there. In the dark. At the edge of everything.

Cold, first. The cold of a world under a sun that’s never been very warm. Thole’s star is small and red and very old, and it gives about as much heat as a banked fire through a door. The ground was blue. Not painted blue. Blue all the way down, in the rock, in veins as wide as rivers. That’s why people live there. That’s why they’ve lived there four thousand years, in the cold, under a thin red sun, in cities built into the walls of enormous pits.

The blue is lumen. I didn’t know the word. The miner who met us told it to me.

Lumen is what the Collective’s arches run on. Its drives. Its long-band ears. Everything that goes fast or far in the Collective has lumen at the heart of it. And a fifth of all the lumen in the Collective, the miner said, comes out of Thole.

“A fifth,” I said.

“A fifth,” said the miner. “For four thousand years.”

The miner was the leader of Thole.

Her name is Mira Tannock. She’s Thole’s First of the Seam, which is what they call whoever speaks for the pits. She’s short and broad, the way the Thole are, with blue in the creases of her hands that never washes out, and grey hair cut very short, and a face like someone who’s been down a very deep hole and come up again many times.

She met us at the lip of the biggest pit. She’d known we were coming. She said the queen told her. She said she’d never once heard the queen say anything in her whole life, and then that night, in her sleep, she’d heard her say they’re coming, and woken up, and come.

She looked at me for a long time. Then at Dory.

“You’re them,” said Mira Tannock. “The man in the doorway. The girl with the net.”

“Yes,” I said.

She nodded. Slowly. And then she said a thing I didn’t expect.

“My grandson has you,” said Mira Tannock. “Both of you. Soft. Down in the seventh shaft, where the lamps are always out. He hid you there when the ban came. He thought nobody’d ever go that deep to find them.” A pause. “Nobody did.”

So we started.

I’ll put it down the way it went, because I want to remember what it takes. Not the scattering. Not the asking. The rest.

Dory cut the first arch at the lip of the biggest pit, at dawn, Thole’s dawn, which is a red smear on a cold sky. To the eastern plain on Avalon. Next to the Lenn-woven houses. Where Lantern’s people were.

Lantern’s people were waiting.

They’d heard. Everyone on Avalon had heard by morning; Wren made sure of it. And the ninety thousand of Lantern, who’d come through an arch themselves once, onto red glass, with nothing, came down to the eastern plain with lamps and blankets and tea, and stood at the arch the way Mother stood at theirs. Ebb at the front. Leaning on his granddaughter.

And the first of Thole came through.

Miners. Families. Children with blue on their hands. Old people carried by young. Some of them had bags. Most of them didn’t. Mira Tannock had told them to bring only what they could carry and what they couldn’t bear to leave, and most of them had decided that meant each other.

They came out onto the plain under Avalon’s sun, which must have looked to them like a fire with the door wide open. And stopped. And put their hands over their eyes.

And Ebb poured a cup of tea out on the ground.

The way he did on Lantern’s square when Mother came. The way he did on the plain when Lantern moved. The first of Thole watched him do it and didn’t understand, and then the woman at the front, very old, with a child on each hand, saw the tea go into the ground and the steam come up off it into the sun.

And sat down on the grass and cried.

The Standing came. Varra brought them herself. And the asking groups, every six that wasn’t out on the Hedge, with their grandmothers and their slates. And the long ward, with Halloway at the front, and Abena. And Taveth, of course, with the great iron pot. Nobody needed to tell him.

The first day, eleven thousand.

The second, forty thousand. Dory cut four more arches. Two to Avalon, one to Root, one to the plains of Hyrran below the ridge, where Kyria’s people came down from the forges with furs.

The third day, a hundred thousand. Dory cut nine more.

She cut them standing at the lip of the biggest pit with her glasses off and her black eyes open, one after the other, the way she cut them on the day the Lenn came. She didn’t sleep. I made her. On the fourth night I sat her down at the edge of the pit and put my coat over her and told her if she cut one more arch before she’d slept I’d tell Mother, and she went to sleep sitting up.

I held the arches while she slept. All fourteen. I’d never held so many. I didn’t know I could.

I could.

The children of Thole came up out of the mines with soft ones.

That’s what I want written down from those days, more than anything. More than the arches or the numbers.

They came up out of the deep shafts with soft ones they’d hidden. From the ban. From the burning. Down in the seventh shaft and the twelfth and the ones too deep for any lamp, where they’d tucked them into cracks in the blue rock and left them in the dark. Soft ones of me. Of Dory. Of Mother with her pot. Of the queens, cat-sized, carried up in two arms. Of the three. Of Taveth, which surprised everyone, because Taveth’s had only been out since the spring, and Mira Tannock said a trader had come through Thole in the summer in a brown patched ship and sold a dozen before anyone could stop him.

Mattick. He’s been everywhere.

The soft ones had blue on them. Lumen dust, in the hems. Ground in. The way the Caddi ones have salt.

Wren says you’ll be able to tell a Thole child by the hem of their doll for the rest of their lives.

Mira Tannock’s grandson came up on the fifth day.

He’s nine. Very small and broad and serious, with blue in the creases of his fingers already, the way the miners get it. He came up out of the seventh shaft with his two soft ones under his arm, the ones he’d hidden where the lamps are always out. A soft me. A soft Dory. Both of them blue all down the front from being held against the rock.

He walked straight across the lip of the pit to where Dory was cutting an arch. And stood in front of her. And held up the soft Dory.

“You’re real,” he said.

Dory finished the arch. Then she knelt down.

“I’m real,” said Dory.

He looked at her face. Then at the soft one’s face. Then at her face again.

“Your nose is bigger,” he said.

Dory laughed so hard she had to sit down on the blue rock.

On the fifth night, I felt it.

I want this written down, because Bell asked me to write down everything, and because I’d like Mother to know I was careful.

I was holding the arches. All fourteen, while Dory slept against my arm with Brom’s soft one in her hand. Sitting on the lip of the biggest pit with my hands flat on the blue. And Thole’s queen under me, very deep, shaking, the way she’d been shaking since the night she called.

And past her, past the thin red sun, out in the dark where the stars weren’t: something turned towards me.

Not much. Not the way a person turns. The way a field of barley leans when the wind changes. Very slow. Very large. A long way off, but not as long as I’d have liked.

It wasn’t looking at me. It doesn’t have anything to look with. But it noticed. The way a fire notices a draught under a door.

I held very still.

I don’t know how long. Long enough that the arches started to hum in my hands, all fourteen, the way Holdfast hums. Long enough that Thole’s queen stopped shaking, under me, and went completely silent, the way you’d go silent in a house if you heard something on the stairs.

Then it turned back. To the sun. To what it wanted.

And Thole’s queen said, very small, through the blue, not through Dory, because Dory was asleep, but to me, straight to me, the first time any queen but the eldest ever has:

It felt you.

“I know,” I said.

It wanted you.

“I know.”

Why didn’t it come?

I thought about that. I still think about it.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’m not a star yet. Not enough of one.” I looked at the dark. “Maybe it’s like Bell says. It only wants the one it’s going to. It goes where that thing is.”

The queen was quiet for a long time.

You stayed, she said. When it turned. You didn’t let go of the doors.

“There were people in them,” I said.

I told Bell, when I came home. Everything. She wrote it all down, very fast, the way she does. Then she put her pencil down and looked at me for a long time.

“Don’t do that again,” said Bell.

“I’ll try not to.”

“Don’t try not to,” said Bell. “Don’t.” She picked the pencil up again. “And next time it happens, tell me exactly how long it looked.”

On the sixth day, the Refined came.

Not the forty. Six ships. A regiment, Aune called it afterwards; she’d come through Dory’s first arch on the third day in her Ceren, with four more, to sit over the pits and watch the sky, and she saw them first.

White. Narrow. Fast-looking. With silver on them, tarnished at the edges.

They came in very slowly. Very carefully. Nowhere near me. They stopped a long way out over the pits, in a line, the way the twelve stopped over Lantern’s lake. And they didn’t come any closer.

They’d heard about Lantern. Everyone has.

A voice came off the lead ship. Not the grave one. Another. A man’s voice, very calm, very cold, very sure of itself, the way the Refined always are.

World of Thole, he said. On every band. So that every miner on the lip of every pit could hear. You are in the presence of the criminal Lucas Dask and his daughter, who are wanted by the Assize for murder and for the erasure of the Sorn.

A pause.

By the decree of the Collective, any world that receives aid from Avalon, Ister or the so-called Hedge renounces the protection of the Collective, and will be banished. And then eliminated. Another pause. You have been warned once before. This is the second time. There will not be a third.

Mira Tannock answered him.

She didn’t ask me. She didn’t look at me. She walked out to the very lip of the biggest pit, where the drop goes down three miles into the blue, and stood there, short and broad with her grey hair and her blue hands, and looked up at the six white ships. And somebody gave her a voice-piece, one of the old mine ones they use to call down the shafts, and she held it up.

And spoke. On every band. The way he had.

“Four thousand years,” said Mira Tannock.

The six ships didn’t move.

“Four thousand years we’ve dug for you,” said Mira Tannock. “A fifth of everything that makes your ships go. Your arches. Your ears. The lumen in the ship you’re sitting in now, commander, came out of a hole on this world, and some miner’s grandmother dug it.”

She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. It went out on every band.

“Four thousand years we’ve called you family. We paid every tithe. We sent every shipment. When you asked, we gave. When you didn’t ask, we gave anyway, because that’s what you do for family.” She stopped. “And when the dark came for our sun, you sent forty ships. And they made light at it nine times. And then they went home. And then your voice came on the bands and said you grieved for us.”

Her hand on the voice-piece was very steady.

“You didn’t send one ship to carry anyone. Not one. Not a child. Not a grandmother. You grieved for us and you left us to die. That’s what your family did.”

She turned round.

And pointed. At me. At Dory, on the blue rock, with the miner’s grandson on her knee and his soft Dory in her hand.

“That man,” said Mira Tannock, “and his daughter. Who you call criminals. Came up a thread to the edge of everything. To a star with the dark coming for it. Not knowing if the dark would take them too. Their own scientist told them not to come. They came anyway.” Her voice went odd for the first time. “They’ve been on this rock six days. She hasn’t slept but once, and he made her. They’ve taken half a million of my people through holes in the air to somewhere warm. To somewhere a stranger poured tea out on the ground for them.”

She turned back to the ships.

“He risked his life,” said Mira Tannock. “And his daughter’s. To come here and try. Just try. To save as many as he can.”

A pause.

“You didn’t even try that,” said Mira Tannock. “You tried to have tried.”

Nobody on the lip of the pit made a sound.

Then, very far down, from somewhere in the third shaft, a miner started to bang on the rock. With a pick handle. Slowly. Clang. And another one, in the fifth. Clang. And then all of them. All the shafts. All the pits. Every miner on Thole who was still on Thole, banging on the blue rock with whatever was in their hands, very slowly, all together, so that it came up out of the ground like a heartbeat.

Mira Tannock says it’s what they do in the mines when someone’s been brought up alive.

The six ships didn’t fire.

I was ready if they did. I’d been ready since they came. I was standing on the lip of the pit, and I was also, if I needed to be, beside every one of them. They knew it. I could feel them knowing it, in the way their silver sat in them, very still, very careful.

They didn’t fire.

The voice came again. Colder.

World of Thole. You are banished from the Collective. You will be eliminated.

A pause. As if he wanted to say something else. As if he’d been told what to say and had come to the end of it.

Then the six ships turned round. Very neatly. All at once.

And went.

Mira Tannock put the voice-piece down.

She stood at the lip of the pit for a long time with her back to me. Looking at the place where the six white ships had been. The banging in the shafts went on, slow, like a heartbeat, and then slower, and then stopped.

Then she turned round. And came across the blue rock. And stood in front of me.

“They’ll come back,” she said.

“Probably.”

“Not to fight you. They’re frightened of you. I saw it.” She looked up at me. “They’ll come back when you’re gone. To eliminate. Whatever’s left.”

“There won’t be anything left,” I said. “We’ll have everyone out.”

“You’ll have everyone out,” said Mira Tannock. “I know. I believe you.” She looked down. At the blue under her boots. “But there’ll be the world.”

She told me then. About the world.

She told me Thole isn’t just blue at the top. She said the lumen goes down further than anyone’s ever dug. She said in four thousand years they’ve mined a fifth of everything the Collective needs, and they’ve barely scratched the skin of it. She said there’s more blue under Thole than in the rest of the known sky put together, and the Collective has always known that, and that’s why Thole was always a member in good standing, and why they never once, in four thousand years, asked the people of Thole what they needed.

“They’ll miss it,” said Mira Tannock. “Not us. They’ll never miss us. But they’ll miss the blue.”

She was quiet for a while.

“Your Hedge,” she said. “The trains. The arches. The Aldri engines. That fighter on our sky. Everything you’ve got that goes fast or far.” She looked at me. “What does it run on?”

I didn’t know. I said so.

“Lumen,” said Mira Tannock. “Some of it. Asha told me. The Aldri one. On the third day. She said the Hedge has always had to buy it through the Collective, at three times the price, or go without.”

Then she asked.

She asked the way the Caddi grandmother asked at the salt pool, and the way Ebb asked on Lantern’s square. Very plainly. Like someone who’s been told no so many times that she’s stopped expecting anything else, and is asking anyway, because asking is the only thing left that’s hers.

“Can we join the Hedge?” said Mira Tannock. “Instead.”

I’ll say what I said. I want it right.

“It’s not mine to say,” I said. “The Hedge isn’t mine. It’s everyone’s. It’s the small worlds, all of them, together. They’ll want to be asked.”

Mira Tannock nodded. As if she’d expected that.

“Then ask them,” she said.

“I will.”

“Today?”

“Today.”

She nodded again. Then she said, very quietly, looking at the blue rock under her boots, the thing I think she’d actually come across the lip of the pit to say.

“And the world. If they say yes. Can it come too?”

I didn’t answer that one. I didn’t know the answer.

I looked at Thole’s thin red sun. At the empty place out past it, very large, where the stars weren’t. Three months, Halvane had said. Less now. Lantern’s engine took eight and a half.

I looked at Dory. Who was looking at the sun too. With the miner’s grandson asleep against her arm.

“I’ll ask about that too,” I said.

I asked the Hedge that night.

Not me. Okafor. Through every arch and every station and the listening ring and Wren’s slate and every asking group on every world. She put it to them the way the Hedge does everything, which is slowly and all at once: Thole has asked to join us. Thole was in good standing. Thole was left. Do we say yes?

The answers came back by the dawn count.

Caddoc’s was first. Two words, the way the Caddi say everything.

Yes. Obviously.

Then Tiel. Then Lantern, from its new place near Tiel, in a very long message mostly about tea. Then Sedge. Then Ostry. Then Kiln, then Hyrran, then the walkers’ world, very slowly, all at once, in a sound like a mountain clearing its throat. Then Ithre, where Ysse is. Then all of them.

Every one.

Wren wrote it at the top of the slate. Under the stars. Under the ring.

Thole: yes.

Then Halvane stood up. At the long table. Off the bench. For the second time since he started sitting on it.

“The world,” said Halvane. “She asked if the world could come.”

“Can it?” said Okafor.

Halvane looked at Bell. Bell looked at her instruments. Crane looked at Asha. Asha looked at the ceiling, the way she does when she’s doing a sum too big for paper.

“Lantern took eight and a half months,” said Halvane. “We had every engineer on Ister and every smith who could be spared. And the queens.”

“Thole has less than three,” said Bell.

“Yes,” said Halvane. “And it has two and a half million miners who’ve been digging holes in rock for four thousand years. And it has a queen who’s frightened. And it has more lumen under it than the rest of the sky put together, which is what Aldri engines run on.” He put his long hands flat on the long table. “And it has us.”

Nobody said anything.

“I don’t know if it can be done,” said Halvane. “I’ve never tried to build an engine in less than three months. Nobody has. Nobody ever needed to.” He looked round the table. “I’d like to find out.”

Mother poured him a cup. And turned the handle round for Oona.

“You’ll want to sit down for that,” said Mother.

Halvane sat down.

The other things. Quickly.

Six hundred and eighty thousand of Thole are on Avalon and Root and Hyrran now. The rest are still on Thole. Mira Tannock says most of them will stay until the end, either way, to dig. She says if the world’s going to go somewhere, it’ll need its miners. And if it isn’t, they’d like to be on it when the sun goes down. Mother says she’ll go and sit with them, if it comes to that. Halloway says absolutely not. Mother says she’ll go anyway.

Mira Tannock’s grandson is called Brom. He lives in the Lenn-woven houses on the eastern plain now, with Ebb’s granddaughter’s family, until his mother comes through. He sleeps with both his blue soft ones. He’s asked Dory to sign the soft Dory’s nose. She did. She wrote bigger on it.

The toymakers have heard about Thole. Imre Oshan says they want to make a miner. A soft one. With blue on its hands. She says they’ve asked Mira Tannock’s permission. Mira Tannock said yes, if they’d make it short and broad, and put a pick handle in its hand, and give all the money to the pits.

The long record has opened another new book. Halvane says it’s for the Thole. He says the first name in it, a girl born on the eastern plain on the second night, is Ebb.

Bell says she watched the recording of the forty ships forty times. She says the eater didn’t hesitate once, all nine volleys. She says it didn’t even notice. She says it only hesitates at the end. When it closes. She says she still doesn’t know why.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Two hundred and eighty-two. And one more, a very small, very frightened red one, very far away, that I asked for the first time.

Not yet, said Thole’s sun. Please. Not yet.

Wren wrote it at the top of the slate. Two hundred and eighty-three.

Days 9641–9668. Good Standing.

The voice: the Collective is a family and protects its own; a fleet for Thole, in good standing four thousand years. Halvane: near the top of Mara Quell’s list; two and a half million miners; three months now. Bell: you can’t shoot it; there’s nothing there to shoot. Through Ilka’s ears: forty white ships, and ahead of them a place where the stars weren’t. Nine volleys, through it, like firing into the dark between stars; you can’t hit a fold, you can only fall into it. Then all forty turned round and went home. They were trying to have tried. The Collective grieves for Thole. Okafor’s slate: Left. Dory sat up in the heap: another queen, not hurt, just frightened; it’s Thole. The eldest: I am sending you the two who come. Bell said don’t get between it and the star; it might want us. Mother: go on, then; come back; I’m still asking. Thole: cold, a banked fire through a door, blue rock in veins as wide as rivers; lumen, which every fast or far thing in the Collective runs on; a fifth of it from Thole. Mira Tannock, First of the Seam: the queen said they’re coming; my grandson hid you in the seventh shaft where the lamps are always out. Dory’s first arch to the eastern plain, beside the Lenn-woven houses; Lantern’s people waiting; Ebb poured a cup on the ground, and an old woman with a child on each hand sat down and cried. The Standing, the asking groups, the long ward, Taveth’s pot. Eleven thousand, forty thousand, a hundred thousand; fourteen arches; I made her sleep and held all fourteen. The children came up from the deep shafts with the hidden soft ones, blue in the hems; Mattick had sold Taveths there in the summer. Brom, nine: you’re real; your nose is bigger; Dory laughed on the blue rock. The fifth night the dark turned towards me like barley in a changing wind, and noticed, and turned back; Thole’s queen, straight to me: it felt you; why didn’t it come? Bell: don’t do that again; and next time tell me exactly how long it looked. The sixth day, six Refined ships, nowhere near me. Banished, then eliminated; there won’t be a third. Mira Tannock at the lip of the three-mile pit, on every band: four thousand years we dug for you; you sent forty ships and they made light at it nine times and went home; you didn’t send one ship to carry anyone; that man and his daughter came up a thread not knowing if the dark would take them too; you tried to have tried. Every shaft on Thole banged on the rock like a heartbeat, which is what they do when someone’s been brought up alive. They didn’t fire. Banished; eliminated; and they went. They’ll come back when you’re gone; there’ll be the world. More lumen under Thole than in the rest of the sky; the Hedge pays three times through the Collective. Can we join the Hedge, instead? Not mine to say; then ask them; today. And the world, can it come too? The Hedge answered by the count: Caddoc first, yes, obviously; every one. Thole: yes. Halvane: less than three months; two and a half million miners; more lumen under it than anything; and us; I’d like to find out. Mother: you’ll want to sit down for that. Six hundred and eighty thousand out; the rest staying to dig, or to be there when the sun goes down. Brom’s soft Dory’s nose: signed, bigger. A soft miner, short and broad, with a pick handle, all the money to the pits. The Thole book’s first name: Ebb. The eater didn’t notice the nine volleys; it only hesitates at the end. Thole’s sun: not yet, please, not yet. Two hundred and eighty-three.