Chapter 52 The Number

We moved the lockers after lights-out.

It was Liam's idea. Of course it was. He'd lain in the dark for an hour after the lecture, not snoring, which for Liam was the same as shouting, and then he'd sat up and said, "Behind the lockers. He said their names are behind the lockers," in a whisper that probably woke Squad Six.

"It's after lights-out," said Toby.

"It's our lockers."

"It's after lights-out and they're bolted to the wall."

Liam looked at me.

So that was how it went. Liam held the lighter, very low, cupped in his hand, so it only lit a small circle of floor. Toby stood at the door to the corridor and listened for the duty corporal, with his big ears practically turned round to face it. And I knelt in front of the row of gray steel lockers at our end of the barracks, and looked at the bolts.

Four bolts to each locker. Steel. Threaded into rawl plugs in the rock.

I didn't unscrew them. That would have been loud. I just looked at the threads, and made them a little softer, and a little smoother, and a little less sure of what they were holding on to. And then I took hold of my locker by its sides, and lifted, and it came away from the wall with no more noise than a book coming off a shelf.

My rib told me about it. I put the locker down on the floor.

Liam brought the light closer.

The wall behind was rock. The same pale brown rock as everywhere in the cave, cut smooth by machines a long time ago. But the strip that had been behind my locker was paler than the rest, the way a floor is paler where a rug has been. And it was covered in writing.

Not much. Scratched, not written. With the point of something. A knife, or a nail, or the end of a belt buckle.

A name. A callsign. A number.

MARA VOSS. WREN. 11/34.

And under it, smaller, in a different hand, as if somebody else had come back and added to it:

Wren flies first.

And under that, in the first hand again, very small, almost too small to see:

Back for the wheat.

I sat back on my heels.

"What does that mean?" Liam whispered. "The wheat?"

"I don't know."

But I thought about it. I thought about a girl my age, or a little older, lying in this bed, in the dark, with the same lamp on the same chain over her, scratching her name into the rock behind her locker so that somebody would know she'd been here. And then writing back for the wheat, very small, as if it was a promise she was making to somebody. Or to herself.

Maybe she'd grown up on a farm too.

Maybe she'd had a field.

There were names behind all of them.

We didn't move them all. Just ours. Liam's, then Toby's, once Toby had decided the duty corporal was asleep, which he did by listening very hard at the wall for snoring. Sound was Toby's thing. He could hear a man snore through two walls of rock and tell you which way he was lying.

Behind Liam's locker: DEV AMARI. SPARK. 4/34. And a drawing of a very bad dog.

Liam looked at the dog for a long time.

"I like him," he said finally. "I'd have liked him. Anybody who draws a dog that badly on purpose." He touched the scratches with one finger. "Spark."

Behind Toby's: JUNO PELL. 26/34. No callsign. Just a name, and the number, and four short lines and a crossbar through them, over and over, in neat rows. Counting days. Toby counted them, slowly, with his finger, moving his lips.

"Ninety-one," he said.

"Pell," said Liam. "Like Miss Pell?"

Toby didn't answer. He was looking at the last row of lines. The last one wasn't crossed.

"She stopped counting," he said, very quietly. "On ninety-one. She didn't finish the week."

None of us said anything.

Then Liam's lighter went out, and the door at the end of the barracks opened, and the lamp in the corridor threw a long yellow square across the floor, and in the middle of the square was the shape of somebody standing very straight with her hands behind her back.

"Dask," said Sergeant Okafor. "Calder. Marsh." She didn't raise her voice. "Put them back. Then my office. All three."

We put them back.

I made the bolts remember what they were for, and the lockers went back on the wall as if they'd never been off, and we walked down the long dark corridor in our sleeping clothes, in a line, with Okafor in front and none of us speaking. Liam's ears were bright red. Toby looked like he was walking to his own execution, which, given what Liam had told him on the first night, he might have thought he was.

Okafor opened her office door, and switched on the lamp, and sat down behind her desk.

"Calder," she said. "Marsh. The beam. Five o'clock. Every morning for a week."

"Yes, Sergeant."

"Yes, Sergeant."

"Go to bed."

They went. Liam looked back at me from the door. Toby didn't. Toby had gone so white you could see his freckles from across the room, and I think he was just trying to get as far away from Okafor as possible before his legs stopped working.

The door closed.

Okafor looked at me.

"Not you," she said. "Sit."

I sat.

She didn't say anything for a long time.

She sat behind her desk with her hands folded, the way she always did, and looked at me. Over her shoulder, on the wall, the photograph. Field Unit Seven. The tall young man with black eyes and his hand on the shoulder of a girl, and the girl looking up at him with her mouth open in the middle of a laugh.

I'd stopped needing to ask who they were.

"You took the bolts out without a sound," said Sergeant Okafor.

"I didn't take them out. I just asked them to let go."

"Your father used to do that with doors." She almost smiled. Almost. "Locked ones. In the war. We'd come to a door and he'd put his hand on the lock and look at it and it would just sort of... give up." She looked at the slate on her desk without seeing it. "Whose was behind yours?"

"Mara Voss," I said. "Wren. Eleven."

Something went across Okafor's face.

It was so quick I'd have missed it if I hadn't been watching. If I hadn't been learning, for three months, at a cold table, how to watch. The muscles round her eyes. The small hard place at the corner of her jaw. Her hands, on the desk, the right one tightening very slightly round the left.

"Wren," she said.

"Did you know her?"

"I knew all of them, forty-one," said Okafor. "I trained them." She was quiet. "Wren was fast. Not like Friese. Not fast at running. Fast at deciding. You'd give her a problem and she'd have an answer before you'd finished explaining it. Usually the right one. Not always." A pause. "She was from the flats. North of you. Her people grew wheat, before the war."

Back for the wheat.

I didn't say anything.

"You didn't come out of bed to look at names," said Sergeant Okafor. "You came out of bed because the Director wouldn't give you a number." She looked at me. "So ask."

"How many are alive?"

Okafor didn't answer straight away.

She got up. She went to the shelf beside the photograph, where the old books were, the ones with their spines cracked white, and she took down a slate that had been lying flat on top of them. Not a training slate. An old one, heavy, with a scratch across the corner of its glass. She sat back down with it and didn't turn it on.

"There's a comms room," she said, "at the top of the cave. Under the dish. Every nine days, when the ship's in the right place over AV-7, the bases call in. One at a time. Each one sends its callsign. Then its numbers. Air, power, water, material. How big the plant's grown. Then it closes." She put her hand flat on the dead slate. "Somebody has to sit in the room and log them. It's a dull job. Nine hours, at night, in a cold room, waiting. Nobody wants it."

"You do it."

"Every cycle," said Sergeant Okafor. "Since the first one. I asked for it." A pause. "Nobody argued."

She turned the slate on.

It lit up slowly, the way old slates do, gray first and then pale green. And on it, in rows, a list. Thirty-four lines. A callsign on each. And beside each callsign, a long row of small marks. Ticks, mostly, at first. And then gaps. And then, on most of the lines, nothing at all.

She turned it round on the desk so I could see.

I didn't count. I didn't need to. I could see the last column. The one on the right. The last call-in.

There were ticks in it beside nine names.

"Nine," said Sergeant Okafor.

I sat very still.

Nine.

Thirty-four went down. Eighteen months ago. In pods, each with a seed, to a green world with no intelligent life detected. Many of them, Crane had said. Many of them are still there.

Nine.

"The others," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. "Gone quiet."

"Gone quiet," said Okafor. "That's the phrase." She looked at the slate, not at me. "Six in the first month. That was expected. Landings are hard. Pods come down wrong. People land in water, or on rock, or in the wrong weather. We'd planned for six." She was quiet. "Eleven more in the next four months. That wasn't expected. Eight in the year since. One at a time. A base calls in perfectly for twenty cycles, and its numbers are good, and its plant's growing, and then one cycle it doesn't call." A pause. "And it doesn't call the next one either."

"Crane said some of them come back."

"One came back."

I looked up.

"One," said Okafor. "Once. Seven months ago. A base that had been quiet for three cycles came on, at the right time, on the right frequency." She looked at the scratch across the corner of the slate's glass. "It sent its callsign. Then it sent eleven seconds of nothing. Open channel. Just the air. Then it closed."

"Nothing?"

"I listened to those eleven seconds a hundred times, forty-one," said Sergeant Okafor. "There was something in it. At the edge. Under the hiss. I couldn't tell you what it was. I've never been able to tell anyone what it was. The technicians cleaned it up and said it was weather." She turned the slate face-down on the desk. "It wasn't weather."

The lamp over her desk hummed.

"That's the one that came back," she said. "That's some of them."

I asked about the names.

I didn't want to. I wanted to and I didn't, the way you want to look at a cut and don't. But I asked.

"Spark," I said. "Dev Amari."

"Quiet in the second month."

"Juno Pell."

Okafor was silent for a long time.

"Quiet in the fourth," she said. She looked at me. "You're going to ask. Yes. Her mother works for the Director now. In the city. Looking after families." A pause. "She took the job the week Juno went quiet. She asked for it. Nobody argued with her either."

I thought about Miss Pell. Her neat gray coat and her notebook and her pencil, sitting in our kitchen. Writing everything down. Uneventful.

I thought about four short lines and a crossbar, over and over, on the wall behind Toby's bed. Ninety-one of them. The last one not crossed.

"The lines," I said. "Behind Toby's locker. She was counting."

"To families' day," said Okafor. "It was going to be day ninety-two. Her mother was coming." She looked down at her hands. "They moved the launch up. The ship's window changed. We had one night's notice. Juno went on day ninety-one."

I didn't say anything for a long time.

"And Wren?"

Sergeant Okafor turned the slate back over. She put one finger on the glass, on the third line down, beside the callsign WREN, and slid it all the way along the row. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Every cycle. Sixty-odd of them. No gaps at all. Not one.

"Wren calls in," she said. "Every cycle. Early. Her numbers are the best of all nine. Her plant is the biggest thing anyone's built on AV-7." She took her finger away. "She hasn't missed once."

Something in my chest let go that I hadn't known was holding on.

"Back for the wheat," I said.

"Yes," said Okafor quietly. "I know. I've read it."

"Why are you telling me?"

She didn't answer at first. She put the old slate back on the shelf, flat, on top of the books, exactly where it had been. Then she stood there with her back to me for a moment, in front of the photograph.

"Before every operation," said Sergeant Okafor, "in the war, your father asked the same question. Every time. He'd stand in the briefing and wait until the officer had finished explaining the route and the target and the timings, and then he'd put his hand up. And he'd say, how many are we expecting to bring back?" She turned round. "Nobody ever answered him. Not once. Not in four years. They'd say that'll depend, or the aim is all of you, or that'll do, Dask." She almost smiled. "And he'd go anyway. Every time. But he always asked. He said a man had a right to know the number before he went. He said it didn't change whether you went. It changed how you went."

She came back and sat down.

"You asked," she said. "In front of the Director, and the General, and thirty-nine cadets. The same question. In the same voice." She looked at me with her dark still eyes. "I've waited half my life for somebody to give that man an answer, forty-one. He's not here. So you're getting it."

I didn't know what to say.

"Nine," said Sergeant Okafor. "Of thirty-four. That's the number. You don't tell the cave. You don't tell the Director you know. You tell your squad, because they're going down with you and they've a right to it too. You tell Windsor, because you're going to anyway." A pause. "And you go and train harder tomorrow than you did today. Because the thirty-four went down with less than you'll have. And nine of them are still calling in."

I almost left it there.

I had my hand on the door. And then I turned round, because there were two more things, and I didn't know when I'd sit in this room at night again with her willing to answer.

"In the lecture," I said. "The picture strip. In the machine behind the wall. There was a cut. Between the forest and the faces. Somebody took something out and glued it back."

Okafor went very still.

"You saw that."

"I see through walls, Sergeant."

"I know you do." She was quiet for a long moment. "Don't tell anyone else you saw it. Not the Director. Not your squad. Windsor, if you have to." She looked at me. "And don't go looking for what was on it. Not yet."

"Do you know what it was?"

"No," said Okafor. And I believed her. And I think she wished she could have said yes.

"One more."

"It's after midnight, forty-one."

"His eyes," I said. "My father's. They went black at the end of the program. Halloway saw the ring. Mother told me about the color." I swallowed. "What came after?"

Sergeant Okafor looked at me for a very long time.

Then she looked over her shoulder, at the photograph. At the tall young man with the black eyes and his hand on a laughing girl's shoulder.

"One number a night," she said. "That's the rule. I just made it." She turned back. "Ask me again when you've got a reason that isn't fear. Go to bed."

I went.

Liam and Toby were awake.

Of course they were. They were sitting up in the dark, side by side on the end of Liam's bed, and Liam had the lighter lit very low between his hands again, and they both looked up when I came in, the way people look up in a hospital corridor.

I sat down on my own bed, across from them.

"She told you," said Toby. Not a question.

"Yes."

"How many?"

I looked at them. At Liam, with his red hair and his ears still pink and the little flame going in his hands. At Toby, with his big ears and his white freckled face and his tuning fork in his fist.

Squad Eight. Going down with me.

"Nine," I said.

The lighter went out.

Nobody said anything for a long time. In the dark, I heard Toby breathing. Very carefully, the way Mother had breathed in the first week, as if each one had to be thought about.

"Spark?" said Liam finally. Very small.

"No."

"Juno?"

"No."

"Wren?"

"Yes," I said. "Wren calls in every time. Early. The best numbers of all of them."

Liam let his breath out. And then, after a moment, in the dark, I heard Toby let his out too.

"Good," said Toby. "Good. That's good." He was quiet. "Back for the wheat."

Day 83. Behind the lockers.

MARA VOSS. WREN. 11/34. Back for the wheat.

Nine of thirty-four still calling in. Six in the first month. Eleven in the next four. Eight in the year since. One at a time.

One came back. Eleven seconds of open channel. Something under the hiss. "It wasn't weather."

Juno Pell went quiet in the fourth month. Her mother asked to work for Crane the same week.

Father always asked how many were coming back. Nobody ever told him.

Somebody told me.

I stopped. Looked at it. Then, under it, I added a new list. Short. The shortest one in the notebook.

To learn:

1. How signals travel. How far. What stops them.

2. What eleven seconds of air sounds like when something's in it.

3. Wren's numbers. All of them. Why hers are the best.

I put the notebook back on the shelf, beside Mother's photograph and Father's anatomy book and the yellow socks. And then I lay in the dark, and looked at the wall beside my bed, through the steel of the locker, at the pale strip of rock behind it.

Wren flies first.

Eleven light-years up, every nine days, early, a girl from the flats was still answering.

Somebody had to be the second.