Chapter 55 Six Months

I was outside Okafor's door at a quarter to five.

She opened it before I knocked. She was already dressed, the way she always was, as if she slept standing up in her uniform and only took her boots off out of politeness. There was a mug of something in her hand. It was steaming. I'd never seen her drink anything hot before. I'd only ever seen it go cold beside her.

She looked at me. At my eyes, which I knew were red. At my face.

"You didn't sleep," she said.

"No, Sergeant."

"Come in. Shut the door."

I came in. I shut it. She sat down behind her desk, under the photograph, and put the mug down on the slate, and folded her hands, and waited.

"You said to ask again," I said, "when I had a reason that wasn't fear."

"I said that about your father's eyes."

"I know. This is something else." I stood very straight. "I want to hear the eleven seconds. And I want to know whose base it was."

Okafor didn't say anything for a moment.

"And the reason?"

I told her.

Not all of it. Not the letter. Mother had said not anywhere, and I didn't know if Okafor's office counted as anywhere, and I wasn't going to find out. But enough. That Miss Pell was Juno's mother. That Crane had gone to see her at her school, and said Juno is well, and that she'd been writing reports for him for fourteen weeks because of it. That she'd asked whether Juno was still calling in. That she made a lemon cake every families' day, on the Saturday night, and took it to the little ones at the school on the Sunday.

That she'd made eighteen.

Okafor listened to all of it without moving. Her hands stayed folded on the desk. Her face stayed exactly the same, the whole time, the way it did on the field when somebody fell off the beam.

But the steam stopped coming off the mug.

I watched it. It just stopped, partway through, as if somebody had shut a door on it. By the time I'd finished, the drink had gone cold, the way all her drinks did. She hadn't touched it. I don't think she knew.

"Juno is well," said Sergeant Okafor.

"That's what he said."

"Juno is well." She said it again. Quietly. As if she was turning it over to look at the underneath. Then she looked at the cold mug in front of her for a long moment, and pushed it away with one finger, an inch.

"That isn't a reason that isn't fear, forty-one," she said. "That's a reason that's somebody else's fear." A pause. "It'll do."

She took the old slate down off the shelf. The heavy one, with the scratch across the corner. She turned it on, and waited for it to go from gray to green, and turned it round on the desk so I could see the list again. Thirty-four lines.

She put her finger on the twenty-sixth.

"COMPASS," she said.

That was Juno's callsign. I hadn't known. There'd been no callsign scratched behind Toby's locker. Just a name, and a number, and ninety-one small lines.

"She didn't pick it," said Okafor, as if I'd asked. "She wouldn't. She stood on the field on callsign day and said she didn't want one. She said she knew where she was, and that was enough." Her finger stayed on the line. "The engineers gave her COMPASS for the logs. She hated it. She never once used it on comms. She'd call in as Pell. Every cycle. Pell, base twenty-six, reporting. And I'd log it as COMPASS, because that was the form." She was quiet. "Fourteen months ago, she stopped calling in at all."

"Did she say anything? Before?"

Okafor slid her finger along the line. Tick. Tick. Tick. Eleven of them. Then a mark that wasn't a tick. A small square box, with something written in it, too small to read.

She touched it. The slate opened it up.

Base 26. Cycle 12. All numbers nominal. Operator remark (verbatim): "North's wrong here. It moves. Going to look."

And after it, nothing.

I read it three times.

"North moves," I said.

"That's what she said."

"It can't. North doesn't move."

"Not here," said Sergeant Okafor. "And not anywhere she'd ever been. She was never wrong. Not once. Not in a room with no windows, a mile underground." She took her finger off the slate. "She went to look. And she didn't call in again."

"And the one that came back," I said. "The eleven seconds. Was it hers?"

"No."

I breathed out. I didn't know until I did it that I'd been holding it.

"It was twenty-nine," said Okafor. "LARK. A boy called Teodor Venn. From the river floors. Quiet in the tenth month. Back three cycles later, for eleven seconds." She paused. "And then quiet again. For good."

"Can I hear it?"

She looked at me for a long time.

Then she opened the drawer of her desk. The same drawer, I thought, that Brock's father's letter was in. She took out a small black box, no bigger than a matchbox, with a wire coming out of it, and a single earpiece on the end of the wire. She put it on the desk in front of me.

"I'm not supposed to have this," she said. "The technicians took the original. They cleaned it up and filed it as weather. This is what I took off the board, before they got to it." She pushed it toward me. "Once. You hear it once. And you don't tell me what you hear unless you're sure."

I put the earpiece in.

She pressed the side of the box.

Hiss.

That was all, at first. A long soft roar of nothing, like wind across a field, like the rain on the gallery. The sound of eleven light-years of empty space with nobody in it.

Then a voice. Thin. Far away. Cracked down the middle the way voices crack when they come too far.

"Lark."

Just that. A boy's voice. Saying his own name, the name the engineers had given him, the way Juno had said Pell. Then nothing.

Then the hiss again.

I closed my eyes. I don't know why. I couldn't see sound. I'd never been able to. But I closed them anyway, the way I'd closed them in the locker room, and listened as hard as I'd ever listened to anything in my life.

Hiss.

Hiss.

And under it.

At the very edge. So far down I wasn't sure it was there, and then sure, and then not sure again. Not a voice. Not words. Something slower than words. Something that went in, and then out, and then in. Long. Slow. Even. Like a field breathing. Like the red jungle in the sim when I'd held five people's air in my chest and felt it go in and out.

Like a lot of people breathing out at once.

Then the hiss stopped.

Eleven seconds.

I opened my eyes.

Okafor was watching me. She hadn't moved.

I took the earpiece out and put it on the desk, very carefully, next to the black box.

"Well?" she said.

"I'm not sure."

"Then don't tell me."

I didn't.

She put the box back in the drawer, and shut it, and turned the key.

"What do I tell her?" I said.

Okafor sat back in her chair. For the first time since I'd known her, she looked tired. Not the way Crane looked tired, gray and stooped. Just tired. Like someone who'd been sitting in a cold room under a dish every nine nights for eighteen months, waiting for names, and logging the ones that didn't come.

"Nothing," she said.

"Sergeant—"

"You tell her nothing, forty-one. Not on a call the Director's office listens to. Not in a letter the Director's office reads." She looked at me. "That's not yours to carry up sixty floors in your mouth. It's mine."

I didn't understand.

"I've got leave," said Sergeant Okafor. "Thirty-six hours, every two months. I've never taken it. There's been nowhere to go." She picked up the cold mug and looked into it. "I'll take it the Saturday after next. I'll go up. I'll knock on the door of your mother's flat, and I'll ask for Miss Pell, and I'll sit down with her, and I'll tell her what I logged. All of it. Every tick. North's wrong here. Going to look." She put the mug down. "And then I'll tell her about the girl who wouldn't take a callsign. Who stood on my field and said she knew where she was. Because nobody's told her that either."

"Why you?"

"Because I trained her," said Okafor. "Because I sat in the room when she stopped calling. Because I logged it as quiet, and filed it, and went back to the field the next morning and taught forty more children to climb a beam, and never once asked who was waiting for her at the top of the city." She was quiet for a moment. "Your father asked the number before every operation. And afterward, every time, he asked for the names of the ones who didn't come back. And then he went and found their people. Every one. On his own leave. He'd sit in kitchens. He'd tell them." She looked at the photograph. "I used to think it was the bravest thing I'd ever seen anyone do."

"It was."

"No," said Sergeant Okafor. "The bravest thing was that he kept asking for the number. Even knowing he'd have to go and sit in the kitchens after." She stood up. "Go and eat. Laps at six. Don't be late. There's an announcement."

I was at the door when she spoke again.

"Forty-one."

"Sergeant?"

"Tell your mother on Sunday," said Okafor, "that a friend of Trevor's would like to come to tea. The Saturday after. That's all. She'll understand."

The announcement was at breakfast.

Not on the field. In the mess. That was the first strange thing. Okafor didn't make announcements in the mess. The mess was where you ate and the field was where you were told things. That was how the cave worked.

But at seven o'clock, just as the porridge came out, the doors at the end of the long room opened, and Okafor came in, and she wasn't alone. Behind her came Halloway, with her silver case. Two of the engineers, in white. The woman with the slate from the lecture. And the General.

The mess went quiet.

Not the slow quiet, the one that goes down the tables in waves. All at once. Forty spoons stopping. Forty cadets sitting up very straight without being told.

At the end of the Windsors' table, Luna Windsor put her spoon down, and folded her hands, and didn't look at her father at all.

The General didn't speak. He stood just inside the doors with his hands behind his back and his silver hair cut close, and he looked down the long room, table by table, face by face. The way he'd looked at us on field one. Measuring. When his eyes got to me, they stayed there a moment longer than anywhere else.

Then he nodded to Okafor.

Okafor walked to the middle of the room, between the tables, and stopped.

"The Meridian," she said, "has been cleared for launch."

Nobody breathed.

"The window opens in a hundred and eighty-two days," said Sergeant Okafor. "Six months. The ship will be fitted and fuelled in orbit. You'll go up in three lifts, by squad, in the last week. You'll make the crossing in three weeks. And you'll land." A pause. "Everything you have done in this cave so far has been learning to walk. From tomorrow, you learn to run. The safety limits come off the fields on Wednesday. The sim goes to full depth. You'll be fitted for armor next week, and you'll see your kits the week after." She looked down the long room. "Some of you will find it too hard. You'll tell me. Quietly. In my office. And there will be no shame in it, from me or from anybody in this room, and if I hear otherwise I'll put the person I hear it from on the beam until they can recite the Accord backwards." Another pause. "That's all. Eat your breakfast."

She turned and walked out. The General went with her. The engineers. Halloway. The woman with the slate.

The doors closed.

Nobody ate their breakfast.

Six months.

I sat at the end of the Calders' table with my porridge going cold in front of me and tried to make the number into something I could hold.

A hundred and eighty-two days. Twenty-six Sundays. Twenty-six calls. Twenty-six times Garnet's nose filling the screen and Genny pushing her out of it. Six families' days, if they didn't move the window. Six more passes, if Okafor signed them. Six more times on the sixtieth floor, in the big room with the glass walls, with Mother walking to the lift and back.

Six more rain cycles on the gallery.

Twenty call-ins, every nine nights, from Wren, early, with the best numbers of all nine. If she kept calling.

Six months, and then three weeks in the dark, and then a pod, first out of the Meridian, somewhere nobody had been.

Somewhere north moved.

Beside me, Liam hadn't said anything. That was how I knew it was bad. Liam always said something. Liam said something when there was nothing to say. He was sitting with both hands flat on the table on either side of his bowl, looking at the doors Okafor had gone through, and the air round his hands was very slightly shimmering, the way air does over a road in the summer, and he wasn't saying anything at all.

Across the table, Seraphina had her chin up and her jaw set and she was looking at nothing. Toby had his tuning fork out, under the table, in both hands. He wasn't tapping it. Just holding it.

At the end of the Windsors' table, Luna Windsor picked her spoon back up, and ate one mouthful of porridge, very slowly, and put it down again.

The water in the glass by her elbow stayed water.

I looked at it for a long time.

We didn't talk about it all day.

Nobody did. That was the strange thing. The whole cave went quiet in a way I'd never heard it go quiet before. We ran our laps, and climbed the beam, and went through the Town, and Squad Two set the course record again, and Sigmund didn't even look at the board. At lunch, at the fern, Risa sat against the metal stand and didn't say anything about anybody's heart, and when I asked her why, she said because they're all the same this afternoon, and I don't want to tell you what they're all the same as.

At dinner, Liam ate three helpings of everything and still didn't say anything.

And that night, after lights-out, I lay in the dark for an hour. And then I got up, and put on my boots, and went to Liam's bed, and then Toby's, and touched them each on the shoulder. Neither of them was asleep. Neither of them asked where we were going. They just got up.

Seraphina was already in the corridor outside the girls' barracks, with her arms folded, when we got there. She didn't ask either.

And Luna came out of the door behind her a moment later, very straight, with her silver hair tied back, and looked at me.

"The stair?" she said.

"The stair."

Three hundred and eleven steps.

Liam counted them out loud the first time, in a whisper, and got to forty and stopped, because nobody was laughing. After that, nobody said anything. Just five people climbing in the dark, with a thin iron rail on one side and the rock close on the other, and Toby's breathing going ragged near the top, and Seraphina's hand on his back, very lightly, pushing.

At the top, I opened the door.

The gallery was dry tonight. No rain. Just the long narrow walkway round the base of the dome, and the gold glass curving up and away over our heads, and the railing, and the drop, and the city spread out below us in the dark like a field of lamps.

And the little clear window, set into the glass at the height of my face. Old, and scratched, and a little cloudy at the edges.

We sat down under it. In a row. Our backs against the dome. Liam, then Toby, then me. Then Luna. Then Seraphina, at the end, with her knees drawn up.

Nobody said anything.

Through the window, very faint through the old glass, you could see the sky. Black. Clear. More stars than I'd ever seen from the field, because there was no dust up here. And low in the west, going down behind the line of the dead hills, a thin white sliver of moon.

Somewhere past it, eleven light-years up, a green world was turning under two small moons. And on it, tonight or tomorrow or the night after, nine bases were going to call in. And twenty-five weren't.

And in a hundred and eighty-two days, we'd be the first squad down.

I didn't say any of that. Nobody did.

After a long time, Liam's hand found the floor between us in the dark, and stayed there, close to mine. On my other side, I felt Luna's shoulder, very lightly, against my arm. Cold. Not very cold. Just cold enough that I knew it was her.

At the end of the row, Seraphina put her head back against the glass and closed her eyes. The air round her went warm. Not hot. Warm, the way a kitchen is warm. It spread down the row, slowly, past Luna, past me, all the way to Liam.

Toby took his tuning fork out of his pocket.

He tapped it, once, on his knee, and held it up in the dark under the little window. One clear note. The first note of the old song.

He didn't sing the rest. None of us did.

We just sat there, the five of us, under the glass, with the city below and the stars above and the note going on and on and on in the dark between us, getting smaller and smaller, until you couldn't tell anymore whether you were hearing it or just remembering it.

Day 95. A hundred and eighty-two days.

Compass. "North's wrong here. It moves. Going to look."

Lark. Eleven seconds. Something under the hiss. In. Out. Not sure.

Okafor is going up the Saturday after next. "A friend of Trevor's would like to come to tea."

The gallery. Five of us. Nobody said anything.

It was the best thing anyone's said to me since I came here.