Chapter 78 The Choice I Didn't Make

I want to be honest about this part.

I've told the rest of it as straight as I can. The bad parts too. The corridor where I said you burn her before I looked. The night I didn't ask Risa who her roommate was. I've tried not to make myself look better than I was.

This is the part where that's hardest. So I'm going to tell it slowly. The way Father taught me to do things I was frightened of getting wrong.

I didn't tell.

That's the whole of it, really. Everything else in this chapter is just me explaining why. And none of it is good enough. I knew that at the time, a little. I know it all the way now.

But I'm going to explain it anyway. Because if I don't, it'll look like I didn't think about it. And I did. I thought about it every day.

I just thought wrong.

The first thing I thought was: Okafor.

That was easy. That was the rule. Trust the people on the bridge. Nobody above sergeant. Okafor was a sergeant. Okafor was the bridge.

I got as far as her door. The morning after the cistern. Before laps. I stood outside it with my hand up to knock, and I could hear her inside, the scratch of her pencil on a slate, and I thought about what would happen next.

She'd listen. In the dark. With her hands folded. She wouldn't interrupt.

And then she'd get up and walk straight to the infirmary.

Because she'd have to. Because she was a sergeant, and a sergeant counts them, every time, and goes back for the one she didn't count. She'd carried that her whole life. She wouldn't stand in a corridor and let a cadet bleed into her helmet for twelve weeks, not for a stipend, not for meat, not for anything. She'd take Hana to Halloway herself, by the arm, the way she'd taken Liam and Toby to the beam.

And Halloway would see in one second.

And Hana would go home to the forty-fourth floor of the Harbor Block with a card that said unfit.

I put my hand down.

I told myself it was because of Hana. Because it was hers to choose. Because she'd stood on the edge of the cistern with her boots against her chest and said it's mine to choose, it's not yours, and she'd been right.

And Mother had said it too. On the last page of her list. Never choose for them without telling them.

I thought about that line a lot, that week. I turned it over and over. And every time, I came out the same place. Hana had chosen. She'd told me. And if I went to Okafor, I'd be choosing for her. Taking it away. The thing Father did to Mother for eleven years, so she'd never have to carry it.

I didn't want to be that.

It was only a long time afterward that I understood I'd read the line exactly backwards.

Mother never said let them choose anything they like. She said don't choose for them without telling them. She meant: tell them the truth. All of it. And let them have a say.

And I hadn't told Hana the truth. Not all of it.

Because the truth was I don't know. And I'd let her hear I don't know as maybe it's fine.

So I kept an eye on her.

That was what I told myself. Every morning. Every night. I'll keep an eye on her. As if that was a thing. As if eyes did anything on their own.

I had good eyes, though. That was the trouble. The best eyes in the dome. I could see all the way to the bottom of anything.

So I made a system.

Every morning at breakfast, I sat where I could see the Squad Three table. Hana sat at the far end, near the wall, with her back to the room. I didn't have to see her face. I could see through the back of her head.

And I measured the ring.

The angry tissue round the coin. I measured it the way Father measured the wheat, every evening, walking the rows with a stick with marks on it. I didn't have a stick. But I knew how wide my palm was. Nine centimeters, across the knuckles. I'd measured it on a ruler in the reading room.

The first morning, the ring was nine centimeters. A palm.

I wrote it down. In notebook fifteen. A new page. A column of dates down one side, and numbers down the other.

Day 197. 9.

The second morning, it was nine and a half.

Day 198. 9.5.

The third morning, it was nine and a half again. I sat at breakfast with my porridge going cold and looked through the back of Hana Osei's head at the ring of angry tissue round her coin, and it hadn't grown. And I felt something in my chest go loose, like a knot coming undone.

Day 199. 9.5. Same.

Same was good. I underlined it.

That's what I mean about thinking wrong. I had a number, and the number hadn't got worse, and I underlined it, and felt better, and ate my porridge.

I didn't know what the number meant. I didn't know if nine and a half was bad, or very bad, or nothing. I didn't know if the ring was the thing that mattered, or just the thing I could see. I had a column of numbers that looked like Father's wheat book, and that made it feel like I knew what I was doing.

It was a column of numbers about something I didn't understand.

Like Wren's.

I didn't see that either.

I studied.

Every night. In the reading room, under the one lamp, after Squad Eight had gone to bed. Brains. Now. The officers' library had a whole shelf of them. Neurology. Neuroanatomy. Things with long names that took three goes to say. Books with pictures of the brain cut into slices like a loaf, every slice labeled in tiny writing.

I read them the way I'd read the cell biology book. Every word. Slowly. Not skipping.

It was too slow.

I knew it was too slow. Every night, I'd read twenty pages and understand eight of them. And every morning, I'd look at the ring at breakfast and know that twenty pages wasn't going to be enough. Not in twelve weeks. Not in twelve years. There were people who'd spent their whole lives on this, and they still had question marks in the margins.

I took out Father's anatomy book. The one with his notes. I went to the pages about the head.

His notes stopped.

All the way through the book, every page had his writing on it. The bones. The muscles. The heart, which he'd drawn three times, the third time very small and careful. The face, with every nerve, and the line at the bottom: Sorry, Maris. I only knew the front of it.

And then the brain. Eleven pages. And on all eleven, nothing. No drawings. No arrows. No questions.

Only one line. On the first page. In pencil, very small, at the top, as if he'd written it and then thought about rubbing it out and hadn't.

Don't. Not without a teacher.

I sat and looked at that for a long time.

He'd seen it. He must have. With those eyes. All the way to the bottom. The same as me. And he'd looked at it, and understood that he didn't understand it, and written don't.

I didn't have a teacher.

I had eleven blank pages and a column of numbers.

I went to Halloway.

Not to tell her. I want to be clear about that, because it would be easy to make it sound braver than it was. I went to ask her a question. A clever one. A question that would get me the answer without giving her anything back.

She was in the infirmary at night, the way she always was. Writing up. With her silver case open on the desk and a cup of something black beside it and her spectacles pushed up on her forehead.

"Dask." She didn't look up. "Something changed?"

"No, Doctor."

"Then you're not here."

"I wanted to ask you something. About the links."

She looked up then.

"Hypothetically," I said. "If somebody's link coin had a ring of swollen tissue round it. Hot. Dark. About a palm wide. And the little blood vessels behind their eyes were leaking. And they had nosebleeds at night." I kept my face very still. Luna's still. "What would that mean?"

Halloway took her spectacles off her forehead. Very slowly. And folded them. And put them down on the desk next to the cup.

"Hypothetically," she said.

"Yes."

"Hypothetically," said Dr. Halloway, "it would mean the body is fighting the wire. And the wire is winning." Her voice was very level. "It would mean there's inflammation spreading into the tissue round the link. Into the brain. And that the pressure's building, slowly, behind it. And that the blood vessels are starting to give." She didn't look away from me. "And that the person should be on my table tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight."

The infirmary was very quiet.

"Hypothetically," said Halloway, "you should tell me who."

I didn't say anything.

"Dask."

"It's hypothetical."

"Nothing you've ever asked me has been hypothetical," said Halloway. "Not once. You don't have it in you." She leaned forward. "I've been a doctor in this program for twenty-six years. I've lost people to the link before. Not many. Some. And every one of them, every single one, there was somebody who knew. A roommate. A squadmate. Somebody who saw the blood on the pillow and was asked not to say."

I didn't say anything.

"I'm not going to make you," said Halloway. "I can't. I'm not Okafor. I can't run you round the beam until you talk." She picked up her spectacles again. "But my door is open. Every hour. Every night. Until the Meridian. And if you walk through it at three in the morning with a name, I won't ask you why you waited." She put the spectacles on. "Go to bed, Dask."

I didn't go to bed.

I went to the cistern.

She was there. Of course she was. Feet in the black water, spheres turning in the dark. They didn't fall this time when she heard me on the steps. They wobbled. And then held.

"You talked to Halloway," she said. Before I'd got to the bottom.

"How do you know?"

"I was in the corridor. Outside the infirmary. I go past it every night on the way here." She didn't look at me. "I heard her say hypothetically. Four times."

"I didn't tell her your name."

"I know. Or I'd be in there." She let one of the spheres drift down until it touched the surface of the pool, and sank in, without a ripple. "What did she say?"

I told her.

The body fighting the wire. The wire winning. The pressure. The vessels. On my table tonight.

Hana listened. The spheres went on turning. A little slower.

"She's guessing," said Hana. "Like you. She can't see it. She's guessing from what you said."

"She's a doctor."

"She's a doctor who's never seen mine." Hana looked at me. "And you have. And you said yourself you don't know." She turned back to the water. "Is it worse?"

I looked.

"No," I said. "The same. Nine and a half."

"Nine and a half what?"

"Centimeters. Across. I measure it every morning. At breakfast."

Hana went very still.

Then she laughed. Not a big laugh. A small, surprised, tired one, like something falling out of her.

"You measure it," she said. "Every morning. From across the mess."

"Yes."

"With your eyes."

"With my palm. I know how wide my palm is."

She looked at me for a long time. And something in her face changed. Went softer. And then more frightened, in a different way. The way you look at someone who's started carrying a thing for you that you didn't ask them to carry.

"Can you do anything?" she said. "Not to tell. To do. You can change things. Everybody knows. You turned the fuel into dust. You turned the fern's dirt into—whatever it is. Risa says you see the whole of a spark." She swallowed. "Can you change it? The ring?"

I should have said no.

Father had written don't. On eleven blank pages. He'd been better at this than me, and older, and he'd had his eyes for twenty years before he died, and he'd written don't. Not without a teacher.

I said, "I don't know. Let me look."

She sat very still on the edge of the cistern. With her back to me. With her short black hair, and the coin at the base of her skull under it, and the ring of angry tissue round it like a dark sun.

I knelt down behind her.

And I looked.

All the way. All of it. The coin. The wire. The tissue. I made myself not look at the parts I didn't understand, the deep parts, the place where the wires went into the thinking. I held my eyes on the parts I did. On the blood.

Because there was blood. Old blood. Pooled, under the swelling, where the little vessels had leaked and leaked and it had nowhere to go. A dark bruise on the inside, between the skin and the bone, pushing. I could see it. I knew what blood was. Iron and water and salt and a hundred things I'd read about in the immunology book. I knew all of them.

I didn't touch the vessels. I didn't touch the wire. I didn't touch anything I didn't understand.

I just took the old blood apart.

A little at a time. Very slowly. Very carefully. The way Father made Okafor's jaw. Half a millimeter. The iron back into the iron in her, the water into the water, the salt into the salt. Not making anything. Not changing anything. Just tidying. Taking the pooled blood that had nowhere to go, and giving it somewhere.

It took forty minutes.

When I finished, the ring was smaller.

Not much. But I could see it. The swelling had gone down where the blood had been pushing. The dark had gone lighter.

Eight centimeters.

Hana put her hand up to the back of her neck. Slowly. And touched the coin. And then the skin round it.

"Oh," she said.

"Does it hurt?"

"No. It—" She pressed her fingers there. "It doesn't push. It's been pushing for weeks. Like somebody on the other side of a door. And it's—" She stopped. Her voice went small. "It's stopped."

She turned round.

She was crying. Not much. Not loudly. Just her eyes, filling and spilling, the way Mother's had on the screen.

"Thank you," said Hana Osei.

And I felt it. In the middle of my chest, where the knot had been. A warm thing, a big one, going out all through me, like Seraphina's warmth down the row on the gallery.

I felt like I'd fixed it.

That was the worst thing that could have happened.

She slept that night. All night. Without bleeding.

Risa told me at the fern.

"She slept," said Risa. Her tea was going cold in her hands. She wasn't looking at the fern. She was looking at me. "Last night. Right through. First time in weeks. No blood on the pillow." A pause. "She was smiling when she woke up."

I didn't say anything.

"Was that you?"

I didn't say anything.

Risa looked at me for a long time. She didn't hold up her hand. She didn't say watch the spark. She just looked.

"Lucas," she said. Very quietly. "Whatever you're doing. Is it enough?"

"I'm keeping an eye on her," I said.

Risa didn't answer.

She looked at the fern. At the eleventh frond, half uncurled. And she didn't say anything else that morning. And when she got up to go, at half past five, she put her hand on my shoulder. Just for a second. The way Liam had on Sigmund's in the lift.

It wasn't comfort. I didn't understand that till later.

It was the thing you do when somebody's standing on a bridge on their own, and you can't get to them.

Luna noticed the numbers.

Of course she did. She read my notebook upside down every night across the table in the reading room. She'd done it for months. I'd stopped noticing.

"What's nine point five?" she said.

I closed the notebook.

Not fast. I didn't slam it. I just closed it. And put my hand on the cover.

Luna looked at my hand. Then at me.

"You don't have to tell me," she said.

"I know."

"I'm not going to ask again." She went back to her own book. She turned a page. She didn't read it. "You'd tell me. If it was something I needed to know. As your leader."

"Yes."

Luna turned another page.

"That's not the same as telling me," she said.

Okafor told us on the Monday.

At breakfast. Standing at the end of the hall in her patched gray uniform, with her slate, reading the week out the way she always did.

"Wednesday," said Okafor. "Pressure chamber. All squads. Full suits. Full link. AV-7 conditions, as near as the engineers can make them. Thin air. Low pressure. Four hours." She looked down the hall. "It's the last big trial before the Meridian. If your suit's going to fail, it'll fail in there, where Halloway can reach you, and not on a world eleven light-years from the nearest bandage."

She looked at the slate.

"Squad order. One, two, three. Then the rest. Squad Three goes in at ten."

Across the hall, at the far end of the Squad Three table, with her back to the room, Hana Osei put her spoon down.

I looked through the back of her head at the ring.

Eight centimeters. Better. Smaller than it had been in a week.

Full link. Four hours. Low pressure.

I didn't know what low pressure did to swollen tissue round a wire in somebody's brain. I didn't know. It was on page three hundred and something of a book I hadn't got to yet.

I didn't go to Halloway.

I didn't go to Okafor.

I sat at the Squad Eight table and ate my porridge. And I decided that on Wednesday, at ten, I'd find a way to be in the observation gallery of the pressure chamber. And I'd watch. The whole four hours. And if anything happened, I'd be there. I'd see it before anyone. I always did.

I wrote it down that night. The last entry in the column.

Day 203. 8. Better.

Wednesday, 10:00. Pressure chamber. I'll be there.

I'm keeping an eye on her.

That's what I wrote.

I've read it a thousand times since.