Chapter 71 Overload

Five weeks of needles.

That's what I wrote in notebook fifteen, on the morning of the exercise. Not because anything was different that morning. Just because it was five weeks, and I'd been counting, and Okafor had said six, and I'd started counting backwards without meaning to, the way you count down to a families' day.

Five weeks of needles. Six weeks, then black.

One to go.

The needles were worse. Not every day. But most. The dusk helped, and the dark helped, and Okafor's office with the lamp off helped. But the falling was worse too. The going-deeper. I'd look at a cup of water at breakfast and be halfway down into it before I knew, past the water and into the little bricks the water was made of, and past those into something smaller still, something I didn't have a word for yet, little bright points held together by nothing, and I'd come up gasping with my spoon on the floor.

Toby picked up my spoon a lot that month.

He didn't say anything. He just picked it up.

The night before the exercise, Luna asked me about the hydrogen.

She'd been waiting to. I knew she had. Genny had told me to ask her, on the call, weeks ago, and I'd told her, and she'd gone very quiet and said let me think, and then she hadn't mentioned it again. For weeks. Which was how I knew she was thinking very hard indeed.

"Nothing comes from nothing," she said, across the table in the reading room, with the lamp turned right down for my eyes. "Your father's rule. Page one."

"Yes."

"So you didn't make the hydrogen. On the moon." She had a pencil, and she was drawing on the margin of the cell biology book, which she never did. Small circles. Points. "You took it from somewhere."

"I didn't take it from anywhere. I was four. I looked at the moon and wanted it to have water."

"You looked," said Luna, "at the moon. And you went down. Into the rock. Into the oxygen in the rock." She drew another point. "And then you went further down. Past the oxygen. Into whatever the oxygen's made of. The little pieces. The smallest ones." She looked up at me. "What if, down there, at the very bottom, the pieces don't care what they are? What if oxygen and hydrogen and iron and gold are all made of the same little bright points, just arranged differently? And you didn't take the hydrogen from anywhere. You just rearranged some of the moon."

I looked at her drawing. At the small circles, the points, held together by nothing.

I'd seen that. At breakfast. Every morning, for five weeks. Falling into my porridge. Into my water. Into the fern.

Little bright points held together by nothing.

"I've been seeing them," I said. "Since the headaches. When I fall. That's what's at the bottom."

Luna put her pencil down very slowly.

"Then that's what's coming," she said. "In a week. Whatever your father saw. That's what's at the bottom of everything." She was quiet for a moment. "And when you can see that, all the time, without falling—"

She didn't finish.

She didn't need to. I'd turned a nail into copper and a slab into glass and a Town into a beach. I'd only ever been able to do that because I could see what things were made of.

If I could see what everything was made of. All the way down. All at once.

"Nothing comes from nothing," said Luna quietly. "But everything comes from the same thing." She looked at me across the cold table. "Be careful, Lucas."

I wrote it down that night. Under the five weeks.

Everything comes from the same thing.

I didn't know I'd need it in the morning.

The exercise was in the training hall.

The big one, at the end of the cave past field four. The one where, four months ago, in another life, I'd put out two hundred and twelve flames one at a time and my hands had shaken for three days. It had been rebuilt since. Bigger. Taller. With a gallery all the way round the top for observers, behind thick glass, and new gray walls, and a floor of bare concrete with drains in it.

And pipes.

That was the new thing. Along the walls, and across the ceiling, and down into the floor, there were pipes. Fuel lines. Thick ones. Painted yellow. They fed the burners, the big steel nozzles set into the walls and floor at intervals all round the hall, that the engineers used now instead of Liam and Seraphina to make the fire for live-fire exercises. Real fire. Fuel fire. Hotter than anything a Calder could make without burning out.

So the cadets can practise against a fire they didn't start, Okafor had said. On AV-7, nobody will light it for you.

That day it was four squads. Two, Six, Seven, and Eight. Twenty cadets, in suits, in the middle of the floor. And round the edges of the hall, and up in the gallery, instructors, engineers, medics, observers. Halloway with her silver case. Odell, in his leather apron, grumbling at a valve. Pryce, with her slate. Okafor on the floor with us.

I counted, because I always counted. Sixty-one people.

And in the gallery, behind the glass, standing very still, with his long hands folded on the handle of his cane, Crane.

I saw it before anyone.

That's the only reason anyone's alive to argue about it.

We'd been in the hall for twenty minutes. The burners had been going in sequence, round the walls, roaring up and dying down, and the squads had been moving through them, practising. Toby's walls. Luna's ice. Risa's lightning, from across the hall in Squad Six, cracking white and clean against the targets. Sigmund's, bigger, from Squad Two. It was going well. It was going the way it was meant to.

And I was looking at the pipes.

Not on purpose. I'd been trying not to look at anything too hard, all day, because of the falling. But the falling did what it wanted now. And my eyes had gone to the big yellow fuel line that ran along the north wall, behind the burners, at head height. And gone into it, without asking. Into the steel. Into the fuel inside, rushing along, under pressure, thick and dark and full of energy, like a river in flood.

And into the coupling.

The place where two lengths of pipe met. A thick steel collar, with bolts round it. Eight bolts.

Seven of them were steel.

The eighth wasn't.

It looked like steel. It was the same color, the same size, the same shape. But inside, it was something else. Something softer. Something that had been stretched, and stretched, under the pressure of the fuel, for twenty minutes, every time the burners fired, and was very nearly at the end of its stretching.

I opened my mouth.

The bolt went.

It wasn't loud. That was the first thing. I'd expected loud. A crack, a bang. It was a small sound. A tink, like a spoon dropped on a plate.

Then the coupling opened.

Not all the way. Just a little. Just enough. A gap a finger wide between the two lengths of yellow pipe. And out of the gap, at head height, under pressure, came the fuel.

Not liquid. Not in the pipe's pressure. It came out as mist. A fine white roaring mist, like steam from a kettle the size of a house, spraying out across the hall from the north wall in a widening fan. Into the air. Over the floor. Toward the burners. Toward the twenty cadets in the middle of the hall, two of whom could set the air on fire by thinking about it, and two of whom were throwing lightning.

Toward sixty-one people.

And the mist was spreading. Fast. Faster than anything. I could see it go. Every droplet. Every bit of it, breaking up as it went, finer and finer, into smaller and smaller drops and then into no drops at all, just fuel, loose in the air, mixed through it, a hundred thousand, a million, a billion little pieces of fuel spreading through the air of the training hall like ink through water.

Toward the burners on the east wall, which were still lit.

Waiting for a spark.

"Squad Eight."

Luna. In my ear. In the comms. Very calm. The calmest I'd ever heard her.

"Ember. Cold. Now. Pull it all in. Don't let a single degree out."

Across the hall, Seraphina's suit went dark. The silver coolant channels flaring white as she pulled every bit of heat she had back into herself and dumped it through the plates.

"Hearth. Out. Everything. Hands down."

Liam's hands, which had been glowing, went dark.

"Arc. Friese. Squad Six. Squad Two. NO LIGHTNING." Louder. On the open channel. To everyone. "No sparks. Nobody sparks. Nobody lights anything."

Across the hall, I saw Risa close her hands into fists. I saw Sigmund do the same, a second later, white-faced behind his visor.

"Fork. Walls round the east burners. Seal them. Keep the mist off them."

Toby's voice, the low bell note, coming up through the comms. And round the four burners on the east wall, still flaring, the air going thick and gray. A wall. Four walls. Holding the mist back from the flames.

For now.

Toby was shaking. I could see it. His wall was flickering. It wasn't meant for this. It was meant for steel and rounds. Not for mist, which got into everything, which came through any gap.

And the mist was still coming. Out of the gap in the coupling. Roaring. Spreading. Filling the hall. Up to the ceiling. Down to the floor. Into the drains. Round the cadets. Round the instructors at the walls, who were moving now, shouting, running for the doors. Round Halloway, and Odell, and Pryce with her slate.

Odell was running toward the north wall. Toward the valve. Toward the coupling. Straight into the mist, with his burned hands out.

He'd never get there in time.

"Keep," I said. "Luna. The burners. Toby can't hold them. Ten seconds. Maybe less."

A silence. Half a second.

"I know," said Luna.

And I knew she knew. And I knew what she was going to say. And I knew why she was waiting, for half a second, before she said it.

"Scarecrow," said Luna Windsor.

Her voice cracked. Just once.

"Everything."

I want to tell this part properly.

Because people have told it since. A lot of people. Some of them were in the hall. Most of them weren't. And they tell it like I raised my hands, and something happened, and it was over. Like a trick. Like the beach. Like the steel ball.

It wasn't like that.

I didn't raise my hands. I stood in the middle of the training hall in my suit, with my visor down and Father's dusk on behind it, and I opened my eyes as wide as they would go.

And I looked at the mist.

All of it.

Not one thing. Not pick one thing. Not slow. Not thorough. Not one at a time, the way I'd done everything since I was four years old, the way Father had taught me, the way I'd told Crane in the white room I'd rather.

There wasn't time for one thing.

So I looked at everything.

It was like mud. At first.

Fog. Everything at once. A billion little pieces of fuel, mixed into the air, mixed into each other, spreading, moving, never still. Too much. Too much. It slid off me. It had always slid off me. I couldn't pick anything out of it. I couldn't see what I couldn't see.

And then I fell.

The falling. The going-deeper. The thing that had been happening at breakfast for five weeks, without asking. The thing that had dropped me on the floor by the fern. The thing that made the needles.

I didn't fight it.

I let it.

I let myself fall, down, into the mist, past the mist, into the little bright pieces it was made of. Down past the droplets. Down past the bricks. Down into the place I'd been glimpsing at breakfast for five weeks, where everything was tiny bright points held together by nothing.

And down there, it wasn't fog.

Down there, every single piece of fuel in the training hall was separate. A billion of them. More. Each one on its own. Each one bright. Each one a small, simple, perfect thing, a few points held together, the way the water on the moon had been, the way Father's notebook one had drawn it.

I could see them all.

At once.

And I could see what they were made of. And I could see what else they could be. And I could see, very clearly, very simply, what to do.

Nothing comes from nothing.

I didn't make anything. I took them apart. Every one. And put them back together. As something that would never burn. Something that would just hang there, in the air, quiet and heavy and inert, and fall slowly to the floor of the training hall, and lie there, and do nothing at all, forever.

A billion of them.

At once.

And something in my head tore.

I don't have a better word for it. I've looked, since. In every book in the reading room. In Father's anatomy book, with his notes in the margins. There isn't one.

It tore.

Behind my eyes. In the middle. At the very back, where the needles had been going for five weeks. Not a pain, at first. A sound. A long, slow, ripping sound, like a sheet being torn down the middle, very carefully, by somebody who wanted to hear every thread go.

And then the pain.

White. All of it. Everything. Not needles. Not like needles. Like the needles had been the knocking on a door, and this was the door coming off.

I heard myself make a noise. I didn't know I could make a noise like that.

And the last thing I saw, before the white came in and took everything, was the mist.

The roaring white fan of fuel spraying out of the gap in the coupling, across the hall, toward the east wall, toward Toby's flickering walls, toward the four burners.

Stopping.

Not stopping coming out. Stopping being fuel. Turning, as it came out of the gap, into something that didn't roar. That didn't spread. That just hung, a faint gray shimmer in the air, and drifted down, slowly, softly, onto the concrete floor, like the snow Luna had made over Eastgate.

The burners on the east wall flared through Toby's walls as his voice gave out.

And nothing happened.

Nothing at all.

The flames licked at the gray shimmer drifting past them and found nothing to eat, and went on burning, small and yellow and harmless, the way they always had.

I didn't see the rest. I was told it after. By Liam, and Toby, and Seraphina, all of them telling it slightly differently, the way people do.

That Odell got to the valve, and shut it, with his burned hands, and stood there shaking.

That the instructors stopped running for the doors.

That nobody in the training hall, sixty-one people, had a single burn.

That I was standing in the middle of the floor the whole time, perfectly straight, perfectly still, with my visor down. And then I wasn't. That I went down all at once, the way a puppet goes when somebody cuts the strings. And didn't move.

That Luna got to me first.

That she didn't run. She walked. Very fast. Across the hall, through the gray shimmer on the floor. And knelt down. And took my helmet off, with her hands shaking, and Father's dusk came off with it, and skittered across the concrete.

That there was blood coming out of my nose. And my ears.

And my eyes.

That she put both her hands on my face, cold, and said my name, and I didn't answer.

That up in the gallery, behind the thick glass, Crane hadn't moved the whole time. Not when the bolt went. Not when the mist came. Not when the instructors ran. He'd stood there, very still, with his long hands folded on the handle of his cane, leaning forward a little. Watching.

And when I went down, Liam said, Crane leaned forward a little further.

Like a man watching milk come up to the boil.

I didn't know any of that then.

All I knew, at the very end, in the white, before the white went out, was something cold on my face. Two cold hands. And a voice, very far away, saying something over and over, very quietly, that I couldn't hear.

And then, under it, very faint, through the ripping sound that still hadn't stopped, a single note.

Low. Clear. Steady.

The first note of the old song.

Toby. On his knees on the concrete beside me, with his voice gone, with nothing left. Tapping his tuning fork on the floor, and holding it up, and tapping it again.

So I wouldn't be on my own in the dark.

And then the white went out.

And it was black.