Chapter 84 The Squads Lock

The General told us himself.

Not Crane. Not Okafor reading off a slate at breakfast. The General. In the briefing hall, on the stage, in his black uniform with the three rows of medals, standing very straight in front of the big screen with his hands behind his back.

It was the first time he'd spoken to all of us at once since field one. Since the first day. Since I don't care what you were before you came here.

Forty-five days to the Meridian.

"The squads are locked," said the General.

He said it the way you'd shut a door. Not loud. Just final.

"The eight squads you have trained in for the past seven months are your final squads. There will be no further changes. Your squad is your chain of command on Avalon. Your squad leader is your commanding officer. Your squad is who you report to, and who reports to you." He looked out at us. "Learn their voices. You will be hearing them for a long time."

Beside me, Liam let out a breath. A long one. Relieved. He leaned over to whisper something to Seraphina.

And the General turned to the screen, and touched something, and the map came up.

It was AV-7.

Not the green, empty picture from Crane's briefing four months ago. A real map. Gray and brown and green, with mountains and rivers and the long curve of a coastline. A whole continent, from above, the way the Meridian would see it from orbit. Rivers like veins. Mountain ranges like the folds in the brain drawings in Halloway's book.

And on it, scattered across it, dots.

Forty of them. Small and blue. Spread out all over the continent. Not in clusters. Not in groups of five. Spread. Wide apart. Some on the coast. Some in the river valleys. Some in the hills. Some so far north they were almost off the edge of the map.

"Landing zones," said the General. "Forty cadets. Forty pods. Forty kits. Forty zones."

Forty. There'd been forty-one of us, on field one, on the first day. Hana Osei didn't have a dot.

The hall went very quiet.

"Each of you will land alone," said the General. "In your own pod. In your own zone. You will plant your own kit. You will build your own base. Your zones have been selected to give the widest possible initial coverage of the continent." He touched the screen again, and the blue dots grew faint circles round them, slowly widening. "As each base secures territory, its coverage will expand. In eighteen months, the circles meet. And Avalon is ours."

He turned back to us.

"Your squad will be your chain of command," he said. "Your squad leader will coordinate by link, through the Meridian, during each nine-day comms window. Your squad's zones are grouped by region." He touched the screen. Eight colors. Eight scattered clusters, if you could call them clusters. Five dots each. Forty, eighty, a hundred miles apart. "Squad Eight. Northern region."

Five dots. Green. Up at the top of the map. Spread out across a long band of hills that ran up toward a line of mountains, white at the top.

One of them was right at the foot of the mountains.

One of them was a long way out on its own, to the east, almost in the foothills.

"Assignments will be posted tonight," said the General. "That's all."

"Sir."

Luna. Beside me. On her feet.

The General looked at her. Across the whole hall. His face didn't change.

"Cadet Windsor."

"Why aren't we landing together, sir?" Her voice was perfectly level. Perfectly calm. "As squads. We've trained for seven months as squads. Every drill. Every exercise. The jungle. The training hall. Every one of them was five people within shouting distance of each other." She didn't look away from him. "And now we're landing a hundred miles apart."

"Operational reasons, Cadet."

"Which operational reasons, sir?"

The General looked at his daughter for a long moment.

"The reasons," he said, "that the Director's office has determined maximize the security of the mission. The more land is secured in the first months, the faster the second wave can follow. Dispersal maximizes secured land."

"The more land is secured," said Luna. "Secured against what, sir?"

Somebody in the row behind me drew in their breath.

"Projections of what, sir," said Luna. "You never said. In the lecture. Four months ago. None detected, and then secured. I asked you then. You said that'll do."

The General didn't say anything.

"I'm asking again," said Luna Windsor. "As squad leader of Squad Eight. Because I'm about to land four of my squad a hundred miles from the nearest person who could help them. And I'd like to know what I'm landing them next to."

The hall was absolutely silent.

The General looked at her.

And then, very quietly, so quietly I don't think anyone past the third row heard it:

"That'll do, Luna."

He turned and walked off the stage.

I didn't look at Luna. I didn't look at anyone.

I was looking at the map.

The General had gone, but the screen was still on. The map of AV-7. The forty blue dots with their faint widening circles. And the five green ones, at the top, in the hills, under the white mountains.

I was looking at it the way I'd looked at Crane's screen through the panel in the ring. Not with my eyes. With my page.

Because the screen wasn't just a picture. It was a screen. Glass, and wire, and light, and under the light, the thing that made the light. A map layer. And under that, another one. And another. The way a map in a book has the coastline on one page and the rivers on a sheet of tracing paper laid over it.

The General had shown us the top layer.

There were more underneath.

I looked down through them. One. Two. Three. Most of them were just more of the same. Contour lines. Rivers. Names that meant nothing to me.

And then the fourth layer.

Thirty-four small dots.

Not blue. Gray. The same gray as the callsigns on Crane's screen. The same gray as the ones that didn't call in anymore. Thirty-four of them. Spread out across the continent. Wide apart. On the coast. In the river valleys. In the hills.

I put the two layers together in my head. The forty blue. The thirty-four gray.

And something cold went down my back. All the way down. Like Luna's hand.

Every blue dot was next to a gray one.

Not on top of it. Not in the same place. Near it. A few miles. Ten. Twenty. Every one of the forty landing zones was within a day's walk of a first-wave base.

Of a base that had gone quiet.

I found the five green ones. Squad Eight. Northern region.

Luna's was in the middle of the band of hills. Next to a gray dot I didn't know.

Liam's was by a river, to the west. Next to a gray dot.

Seraphina's was in a high valley, between two ridges. Next to a gray dot.

Toby's was the one at the foot of the white mountains. And next to it, a little way up, in the mountains themselves, there wasn't a gray dot. There was nothing. Just white. But someone had drawn a very small circle there. In pencil. On the map layer. As if they'd been looking at that empty white place and wondering about it.

And mine.

Mine was the one on its own, a long way out to the east. In the foothills.

The gray dot beside it was the closest of any of them. Two miles. Less.

And it had a name on it. Very small. In the same faint gray.

WREN.

I told them on the gallery that night.

All of it. The four layers. The thirty-four gray dots. Every blue one next to a gray one. Toby's pencil circle in the white. Mine, two miles from Wren.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

The moon was up, in the window. The white spot on it, where the water was. The five of us in a row on the cold stone, with our backs to the wall. Seraphina at one end. Luna at the other.

"They're putting us where the first wave was," said Liam finally. Very quietly. Not like Liam at all. "Where they went quiet."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Nobody answered.

"To find out what happened to them," said Seraphina. She was looking at her hands. The warmth wasn't going down the row tonight. It was staying in her. "That's why. They don't know. Or they do, and they want to know more. So they put forty of us next to thirty-four empty bases and see what happens to us."

"That's—" Liam stopped.

"That's arithmetic," said Luna.

She hadn't said anything since the stage. Not at dinner. Not on the walk up the stairs. She'd sat at the end of the row with her knees up and her arms round them and looked at the moon.

"Acceptable attrition," said Luna. "The more land is secured. Every blue dot next to a gray one." She turned her head and looked down the row at us. "They're not sending us to build bases. They're sending us to stand where the others stood. And watch what comes."

"Then we don't go," said Liam.

"We go," said Luna.

"Luna—"

"We go," said Luna Windsor again. Very calm. Very clear. Her squad leader voice. The Hearth, out voice. "Because if we don't, they'll send the second wave instead. In two years. Forty more. Or they'll send us anyway, in chains, with worse suits. And Lucas's sisters lose their medicine, and Liam's mother loses the stipend, and Toby's mother, and Seraphina's, and everyone's." She looked at me. "And Wren is two miles from Lucas's zone. Alone. For a year and a half."

Nobody said anything.

"We go," said Luna. "But we go knowing. That's the difference. The first wave didn't know. We do. We've got the map they didn't want us to see." She looked at me again. "And we've got eyes they didn't count on."

"A hundred miles," said Toby.

It was the first thing he'd said all evening. He was sitting next to me, with his tuning fork in his hands, turning it over and over.

"Between Luna and me," he said. "A hundred miles. And the mountains." He looked at the fork. "I can't make a sound that goes a hundred miles."

"You'd be surprised," said Seraphina. Softly.

"I can't," said Toby. "I've tried. In my head. All evening. Twenty miles, maybe. Thirty, if the air's right and there's nothing in the way." He turned the fork over again. "The link only works every nine days. Through the ship. What if it's not the ninth day?"

Nobody had an answer.

And I sat there with my back against the cold stone and thought about the moon.

I'd been four.

I'd looked out of my bedroom window at the moon and wanted it to have water. And it had. Three hundred and eighty-four thousand kilometers away. I'd looked at it, and seen it, and changed it. From a bedroom in a valley.

Range limited by complexity, not distance.

That was what Crane had said. In Laboratory One. To Fenwick. On day one hundred and twelve. Underline it.

The moon was simple. Rock and dust. Old and still and the same all the way through. I could see the moon from anywhere. I could see it now, through the gallery window, all the way down to the white spot where the water was. Every crystal of ice.

It was people I couldn't see from far away. People were complicated. Moving. Changing. Too many things at once. Like mud. Like fog.

But I didn't need to see people.

"Toby," I said. "Give me your fork."

He gave it to me. He didn't ask why. Toby never asked why.

I held it in my hand. Steel. Old steel. The kind they made before the war. Full of little impurities, carbon and manganese and a dozen other things, all mixed up. Complicated. Not as complicated as a person. But a mess.

I didn't change the fork.

I took a little of it. Just a little. From the bottom of the handle, where he never held it. A piece the size of a grain of wheat. And I took everything out of it that wasn't iron. Every bit of carbon, every bit of manganese, every speck of anything else. Until what was left was iron. Only iron. Perfectly, completely, all the way through. The simplest thing I could make that was still a thing.

And then I put one flaw in it.

Just one. A single tiny gap in the pattern, deep in the middle, where one point was missing. In one exact place. Like a hole in a wall that you'd recognize anywhere because you'd made it yourself.

And I put the grain back on the end of the handle. Joined. Same stuff both sides.

"Here," I said. And gave it back.

Toby looked at it. He couldn't see any difference. Nobody could have. A tiny bright speck at the end of the handle, that was all.

"What did you do?"

"I made a lighthouse," I said.

I looked at the grain of iron.

Then I closed my eyes. And didn't look at it. And thought about the moon. About three hundred and eighty-four thousand kilometers. About how simple a thing has to be before distance stops mattering.

And then I looked for it. With my eyes closed. Not at the fork. For the shape. For the one missing point, in the one exact place, in the middle of a grain of perfectly simple iron.

And there it was.

Bright. Clear. Exactly where it was. In Toby's hand, a foot away from me. I could have found it with my eyes shut in a room full of iron.

"Walk away," I said. "Down the stairs. As far as you can go. Don't tell me where."

Toby looked at me. Then he got up. And went.

We waited.

I kept my eyes shut. The others didn't say anything. I could feel Seraphina's warmth start to come down the row again, slowly, the way it used to.

I followed the grain.

Down the three hundred and eleven steps. Along the corridor at the bottom. Out across the dark end of field one. Past the trestles where the beam was. Through the training halls. Down. Into the engineering wing. Down further. Into the bottom of the cave, where the pressure chambers were.

And then, I think, he started running.

Out of the engineering wing. Along the long gray corridor where there were no cameras. Past the infirmary. Past the mess. Down a maintenance stair I didn't even know was there. Further. Deeper into the mountain than I'd ever been.

He stopped.

"He's under the east cistern," I said. "About a hundred and forty meters down. In a pump room. He's sitting on something. I think it's a pipe." I opened my eyes. "About a mile and a half from here. Through solid rock."

Liam's mouth was open.

Toby came back up the stairs twenty minutes later, very out of breath.

"Pump room," he said, before anyone could ask. "Under the cistern. I sat on a pipe." He looked at me. "How far?"

"I don't know," I said. "I didn't find the end of it. I think it might not have one. Not for something that simple." I looked at the moon. "I found the moon from a bedroom when I was four."

Nobody said anything.

Then Luna stood up. And walked down the row. And held out her hand. Palm up. In front of me.

"Make five," she said.

I made five.

One from the end of Toby's fork. One from the clasp of Seraphina's belt, which was steel. One from the buckle on Liam's boot. One from Luna's snowflake clip, the one the General had chosen for the gala, which she'd kept in her pocket ever since and never worn again. She held it out to me without saying anything, and I took a grain from the back of it, where it wouldn't show.

Five grains of perfectly simple iron. Each with one flaw. Each flaw in a different place.

Five lighthouses.

"And yours?" said Seraphina.

I thought about it.

Then I took the dusk out of my pocket. Father's spectacles. The old steel frames, from the infirmary step, from before I was born. And I took a grain from the hinge on the left side, where the metal was thickest. And made it simple. And put one flaw in it.

"Mine's in his," I said. "So whoever's looking for it is looking for him too."

Luna sat back down at the end of the row.

She held her snowflake clip in her hand. The tiny bright speck on the back of it. She looked at it for a long time.

"Then this is the rule," said Luna. "Squad Eight. Not the Director's rule. Not the General's. Ours."

We waited.

"Every night," she said. "Wherever we are. Whatever's happened. At the end of the day, when the light goes, Lucas looks." She turned the clip over. "And he counts. Out loud. Into the link, if the link's working. Into the air, if it's not. Five names. In order. Every night." She looked at me. "So that wherever any of us are, at the end of the day, somebody's counted us."

"And if I can't find one?" I said.

Luna looked at me. With her pale eyes. In the light from the moon window.

"Then you go back for the one you didn't count," said Luna Windsor.

Okafor was in her office when I went down at midnight.

The lamp was off. She was at her desk with her hands folded on a slate.

"You saw the map," she said. Before I'd sat down.

"Yes."

"All of it?"

"Four layers."

She was quiet for a while.

"I asked," said Okafor. "Three weeks ago. When the assignments first came down to the sergeants. I went up to the General's office and I asked why my squads were being spread out a hundred miles apart. On a world I've never seen. Next to bases I've watched go gray, one tick at a time, for eighteen months." The steel side of her face caught the light from the door. "I got operational reasons."

"Above the rank of sergeant."

"Above the rank of sergeant," said Okafor.

She looked at her slate.

"The first wave landed the same way," she said. "Thirty-four pods. Thirty-four zones. Spread out. For maximum coverage." She didn't look up. "I trained them to work in squads too. For six months. And then they put them on that ship and dropped them one at a time." She turned the slate over. "Six lost in the first month."

I didn't say anything.

"What did you do on the gallery?" said Okafor.

I told her. The fork. The grain. The lighthouse. Toby in the pump room, a mile and a half through solid rock. Five grains of iron. Luna's rule.

Okafor listened. She didn't write anything down.

When I'd finished, she reached into the drawer of her desk. And took something out. And put it on the desk between us.

A small steel disc. The size of a coin. Old. Scratched. With a hole through the middle, so you could wear it on a cord. It was very worn on one side, as if somebody had rubbed it with their thumb for years.

"From the bridge," said Okafor. "The same rail he made my jaw from. He made this from the end that was left over. He gave it to me in the aid station. He said so I can find you next time." She pushed it across the desk to me. "I never knew if he meant it. I never had to find out."

I looked at it.

And I looked at it properly.

Deep in the middle of the steel, in a grain of iron so perfectly simple it shone like a star, there was one point missing. In one exact place.

A lighthouse.

He'd made one. Twenty-six years ago. On a bridge.

"Make it six," said Okafor. "I'm not on your squad. But I'm on your bridge."

Day 232. The squads lock. Forty pods. Forty zones. Every blue next to a gray.

Mine is two miles from WREN.

Toby's is under the white. There's a pencil circle in the white.

Range limited by complexity, not distance. Iron is simple.

Six lighthouses. One flaw each.

Luna's rule: every night, when the light goes, count five names out loud.

Six.

Father made one first.

Then go back for the one you didn't count.