Chapter 92 The Launch Site

Quarantine was nine days in a white room.

That's all it was. I'd built it up in my head for months, the way you do. The white rooms. Like something out of one of Garnet's books, where the hero goes in one person and comes out another. I'd thought there'd be tests. Trials. Some last thing they did to you, to make you ready.

There wasn't. There was a bed, and a chair, and a basin, and a slot in the door where the food came through. And a wall of glass on each side.

That was the only clever thing about it. The glass.

They'd put Squad Eight in a row. Five white rooms, side by side, with glass between them, so you could see your neighbors but not touch them, not breathe their air, not pass them anything. Toby at one end. Then Liam. Then me. Then Seraphina. Then Luna.

The same order as the roof.

I don't think anyone planned it. I think it was alphabetical, or by kit number, or by whatever the clerk who drew up the rooms happened to feel like that morning. But it was the same order, and on the first night, when the lights went down, I lay on my bed and looked left, through the glass, at Liam lying on his, and right, at Seraphina sitting on hers with her knees up, and it was as if somebody had taken the roof and the pool and the warm stones and built them again in white.

They took the scarf off me on the first morning.

Or they tried to. A nurse in a white suit with a hood and a face shield came in through the airlock with a bag, and pointed at my neck, and said, "Personal effects for decontamination, please," through a speaker in the shield that made her sound like a tin can.

"No," I said.

"It has to be decontaminated. Everything does. It's the regulations."

"Then decontaminate it on me."

She looked at me through the shield. At my eyes. I watched her heart do the thing hearts did, now, when people looked at my eyes for the first time. The little skip. And then I watched it settle, which was more unusual.

"Wait there," she said.

She came back ten minutes later with Dr. Halloway.

Halloway wasn't in a suit. She stood on the other side of the glass, in the corridor, in her ordinary white coat, with her ordinary clipboard, and looked at me, and then at the scarf, and then at the nurse.

"Leave it," said Halloway.

"Doctor, the regulations—"

"I've read the regulations. I helped write the regulations." She made a mark on the clipboard. "Irradiate it in place. Twice. Then leave it." She looked at me over her spectacles. "It's wool, Cadet Dask. Gray wool. From a sheep. On a ridge. Traded for honey." A pause. "Your mother wrote to me."

The days went slowly.

They took blood every morning. They scanned us every afternoon, lying in a long white tube that hummed. They fed us through the slot, three times a day, food that tasted of nothing at all, which Liam said was deliberate so we wouldn't miss it.

In between, there was nothing.

Liam did press-ups. Hundreds of them. He counted out loud, so that by the third day, Toby on his other side was counting with him, very quietly, under his breath, without seeming to know he was doing it.

Toby tapped the glass. Little patterns, with one finger. And if you put your hand flat on the glass on your side, you could feel them come through, very faint. He'd learned to make the glass carry it further than it should. By the fifth day he could send a tap from his room all the way to Luna's, through three walls, and she'd tap back.

Seraphina warmed her room. Of course she did. The air conditioning in the white rooms was set to something the engineers thought was comfortable, which was cold, and on the first night I watched the frost come up on her side of the glass, and then I watched it go away again, and her room went golden, the way the pool had, and she sat in the middle of it cross-legged and read the only book they'd let her bring, which was about blacksmithing.

Luna read too. She'd brought the neuroanatomy book. Mine. The one from the reading room. She'd asked Okafor for it on the last day in the cave, and Okafor had given it to her without a word.

She read it the right way up now.

And every night, at ten, when the lights went down, I counted.

I didn't say it out loud. They'd have heard. Every room had a microphone. I just lay on my back and looked. Left, through the glass, and right, through the glass. And further. Through the walls of the other white rooms, all down the long corridor of Block C, forty of them. Squad Three. Risa, three rooms down from Luna, lying on her side, facing the wall, with her hand flat on it. Squad One. Squad Six. All of them.

Forty.

And then up. Through the ceiling. Through the rock. A long way. To the sixtieth floor, where I couldn't see anything anymore, except in the way that you can see a thing you know is there.

Mother. Genny. Garnet. Miss Pell.

Forty-four.

And then the rest. Okafor. Biscuit. The tea towel. The diamond.

I fell asleep counting most nights. Toby said it was the most normal thing about me.

Dr. Halloway came at nine o'clock every night.

She'd said she would, on the first day. Nine o'clock. As usual. Quarantine is not a reason to stop learning. If anything, it's a reason to start. And she did. Every night. She brought a stool and sat on it in the corridor outside my room, on the other side of the glass, with the intercom on, and her clipboard on her knee, and taught.

The brainstem, on the first night. Again. Because I'd got it wrong, she said, in a way that would matter, and she wasn't sending me eleven light-years with a mistake in the brainstem.

The spinal cord on the second. The heart on the third. Not the muscle. The wiring. Where the signal starts, and how it travels, and what happens when it doesn't.

On the fourth night, I asked her about Luna's nerve. Through the glass. Quietly.

She looked at me for a long time.

"The General came to see me," she said. "On Monday." She made a note. "He gave me the Ministry file. All of it. The kitchen floor. The four seconds. The device." She was quiet. "I've read it twice. It's very good work. Whoever did it was very careful. It'll last her a long time."

"How long?"

"Longer than you're going to be gone," said Halloway. "If you're asking whether she needs it out before you come back, she doesn't. If you're asking whether she'll need it out one day, I don't know." She looked at me. "If she does, you'll be the person who does it. Not me. I'll be here. You'll be there. So you'll learn the vagus nerve properly." She turned a page. "Tonight. All of it. Every branch."

We went until midnight.

On the sixth night, she came with a letter.

She held it up to the glass. It was very short. Written in pencil, in big, careful, wobbly letters, on a page torn out of an exercise book.

Dear Lucas

I sayd Mama on Tusday. She cryd. I didnt. Dr H says you sewd the vessel. Thank you for the vessel.

Hana Osei

PS. Risa says you can see through walls. Please look at me sometimes.

I read it three times. Through the glass. Halloway held it there, very still, while I did.

"Tuesday," I said.

"Tuesday afternoon," said Halloway. "At four. In the garden at the back of the infirmary. Her mother was holding her hand." She lowered the page. "She'd been trying for three weeks. It came out on its own, in the middle of a sentence about a bird."

I didn't say anything.

"I'll give it to Risa tomorrow," said Halloway. "She can read it to you on the ship." She folded it carefully along the creases. "And I'll tell Hana you'll look."

"Tell her I can't. Not from there. It's too far."

"I know it's too far," said Halloway. "I'm not going to tell her that." She stood up. "I'm going to tell her you said yes."

On the ninth night, she didn't teach.

She sat down on her stool in the corridor, and put her clipboard on the floor beside her, and didn't pick it up. She had a parcel on her knee. Brown paper, tied with string. About the size of a notebook, but thicker.

"I had a letter," she said, "from your sister."

"Genny."

"Genevieve Dask. Aged ten. Three pages. Very neat. Several sub-clauses." She almost smiled. "She informs me that your personal allowance is two kilograms, that you are currently carrying one thousand six hundred and twelve grams, and that you therefore have three hundred and eighty-eight grams unaccounted for." She looked at me. "She asks that I fill it with something useful. She specifies, underlined, not sweets."

I didn't say anything.

Halloway put her hand flat on the parcel.

"My notes," she said. "Twenty-six years of them. The parts that aren't in any book. The things I've seen that nobody's written down, because nobody else was in the room. The vagus, properly. The brainstem, properly. The cases I got wrong and why." She paused. "Hana. Every minute of Hana. I wrote it up the night after. You'll want it, one day, when you're doing it on your own and there's nobody there to tell you to seam the vessel."

"That's yours."

"It was mine. I've copied it out. On thin paper, in small writing. It took me nine nights." She held it up. "Three hundred and seventy-four grams. I weighed it. Your sister was very clear about the scale."

She put it in the slot in the door. It went through the airlock with a hiss and a click and a long blue flash of light, and came out on my side, warm.

I picked it up. I didn't open it. I held it in both hands.

"Dr. Halloway—"

"You'll have fourteen grams left," said Halloway. She stood up. Picked up her clipboard. "Don't waste them."

She looked at me through the glass for a long moment. Over her spectacles. The way she had on the night of Hana, with the table between us, when she'd told me to seam the vessel and I had.

"Bring me back a brain I've never seen," she said.

And went.

They came for us at three in the morning on the tenth day.

No warning. The lights came up in all forty rooms at once, white, and the doors hissed, and a voice in the ceiling said Cadets will dress and stand by, and we did.

The suits were waiting in the airlocks. Our suits. The real ones, from Odell's bench, cleaned and sealed and smelling of nothing. We'd been wearing them for months, and they'd never felt like this. Heavy. Final. I stepped into mine and felt it close up my back, ankles to skull, with the long soft hiss, and felt the little hard lump of Genny's diamond over my heart, under the plate.

I put the scarf on over the top. Three times round. Nobody stopped me.

Then the parcel, and the notebooks, and Father's book, and the dusk, into the pocket on my thigh. One thousand nine hundred and eighty-six grams.

Fourteen grams left. I didn't know what for.

They took us out of the dome.

Not by the gate. Not the way we'd come in, nine months ago, in Crane's craft over the ridge. There was a tunnel I hadn't known about, under the eastern edge of the city, wide and low and very old, with rails in the floor. And sealed carriages on the rails, long and windowless, with forty seats in them and nothing else.

We rode in the dark for twenty minutes.

I didn't need windows. I watched it go by. The rock, and then the roots of the dome, the great steel footings going down into the bedrock, and the glass coming down to meet them. And then the glass going over us. Above us. Behind us.

And then nothing above us at all but ash, and the night, and the stars.

I hadn't been outside the glass since the field. Nine months. I'd forgotten what it was like. To look up, and not see a ceiling. To see all the way. I'd forgotten I'd grown up like that, every night of my life, until Crane came over the ridge.

Liam, in the seat beside me, said, "You're doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The face. The looking face." He was very pale. "What's out there?"

"Nothing," I said. "Ash. Stars." I swallowed. "Home."

He didn't say anything else. But he put his shoulder against mine, the way Seraphina had put her hand against mine on the roof. Just touching. And left it there.

The carriage stopped. The doors opened. And we walked out onto the launch site.

It was a long, flat plain of fused ash, glassy and black under the floodlights, stretching away in every direction until it met the dark. I knew what it was. I'd seen the same thing at home. The bright scar of glass running across the flats toward the crater. This had been a battlefield. Something had come down here, or been brought down, a long time ago, hot enough to melt the ground into glass for miles.

In the middle of it, under a hundred lamps, stood the Meridian.

I'd seen pictures. We all had. On the screen in the lecture hall, in the gallery, on the posters they'd put up in the cave the week of the launch date. A long silver ship, clean and bright, with HUMANITY'S HOPE across the side in letters taller than a man.

The pictures were wrong.

Not wrong. Incomplete. The silver was there. The letters were there. Three hundred meters of human steel, standing on its tail on the black glass, with gantries round it and cranes over it and floodlights crawling up its sides like insects. I could see every weld. Every bolt. I could see Odell in some of them, the way he finished a seam, with a little curl at the end. I could see where the fuel ran and where the air ran and where the forty pods were racked, in a ring, two-thirds of the way up, each with a kit under it like a seed under a husk.

That was the human part.

It was built round something.

I stood very still on the black glass and looked.

Down the middle of the Meridian, from its nose to its tail, ran a spine. A long, ribbed column, as thick as a house, with the human steel clamped to it on every side, the way you'd build scaffolding round a tree. And the spine wasn't steel. It wasn't anything I had a name for. It was gray, and dull, and pitted, as if it had been out in weather for a very long time. And it was old.

Not old like the tunnel. Not old like the dome. Old like the black glass under our feet. Old like the war.

And where the human steel met it, here and there, a panel of the same gray stuff showed through. Square, or nearly square. Each one a little bigger than a door. And on each one, in rows, cut into the surface very cleanly, marks.

Not letters. Not numbers. Not any script I'd ever seen in Father's books, or Genny's, or the reading room. Short, deep cuts, in groups, curved and straight, set very close together. Like writing. Like somebody had sat down a long time ago, and very carefully, and written something on the bones of this ship, in a hand nobody on Earth could read.

I looked into it.

I didn't decide to. I just did. The way I looked into everything, now, since the infirmary. All of it at once, all the way to the bottom, like a page.

And I couldn't see anything.

Fog.

The same fog as the kit core, in Odell's workshop, on the day I took it apart and couldn't put it back. The same fog as the silver grains in Mother's vial, that Genny had brought me hidden in her satchel. Gray and soft and without any edges, going on and on, giving nothing back.

The whole spine of the Meridian. Three hundred meters of it.

Fog.

"Lucas."

Luna. Beside me. I hadn't heard her come. Her voice was very low.

"Your face," she said.

"Later," I said.

She looked at me for a moment longer, with her pale eyes. Then she looked up at the ship. At the spine. At the gray panels with the marks on them, shining a little in the floodlights.

"It's fog," she said. It wasn't a question.

"All of it."

Luna didn't say anything. She didn't need to. I watched the frost come up from the black glass round her boots, in a slow white ring, and stop, because she'd decided it would.

"Later," she agreed.

They loaded us by squad.

Squad Eight first. Priority One. Up the long gantry in a cage lift, two hundred meters, with the wind coming across the black plain and the lamps falling away underneath us. Toby had his eyes shut. Liam was saying something under his breath that I think was a prayer, or a list of swear words, or both.

The hatch was human. Steel, with a wheel. Okafor was standing beside it.

She didn't say anything as we went past. She counted. Out loud. The way she had in the wild zone.

"Windsor. Calder. Calder. Marsh. Dask."

Then she followed us in.

Inside, the corridors were human too. Mostly. White walls, white lights, handrails, signs. DECK 4. POD RING. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL. It could have been any corridor in the cave.

Except that every so often, on the inner wall, the side that faced the spine, the white stopped. And there was a gray panel instead. Set into the wall, flush, as if somebody had built the corridor round it and hadn't been allowed to cover it up. With the marks on it.

Toby stopped in front of the first one.

He didn't touch it. He stood very close, with his head on one side, the way he stood when he was listening to the walls of the cave. Then he took the tuning fork out of his pocket. And held it up. Not striking it. Just holding it near the gray.

"It's humming," he said.

"What?"

"The panel. It's humming. Very low." He was frowning. "Lower than anything. Under everything. Like—" He stopped. "Like the ship's asleep. And it's breathing."

Nobody said anything.

"Keep moving, Marsh," said Okafor, behind us. Very quietly. Not unkindly. "It'll keep."

The pod ring was a long curved hall, going round the spine like a belt. And in it, in a ring, forty pods.

They'd been in the cave for months, under the gray sheets. I'd seen them every day. Tall and smooth and seed-shaped, standing on end in their cradles. But here, racked round the spine, with their noses pointing out at forty little hatches in the hull, they looked like something else.

They looked like what they were. Like seeds, on a stalk, waiting to fall.

Each one had a name stenciled on the side. White letters on gray.

The first one, nearest the hatch, said: PRIORITY ONE — DASK, L.

It was open. The inside was padded, pale blue, with a seat in it shaped to me. I'd sat in it a hundred times in the cave. I'd never noticed before that from the seat, through the little round window in the pod door, you could see straight out across the corridor at the inner wall.

At a gray panel. With marks on it.

We were to be sealed in at six the next morning. Launch at nine. Crane, said the voice in the ceiling, would address the cadets at the hatch at eight.

They let us sleep in the pods, with the doors open. Most of us didn't.

I sat in mine with my knees up and the scarf round my neck and Halloway's parcel in my lap, and looked out of the round window at the panel across the corridor. At the marks. Rows of them. Very clean. Very old. Cut so carefully, by somebody, a long time ago, on a world I'd never seen.

I looked into it again. Fog.

I looked at the marks instead. Just the marks. The shapes of them, with my eyes, the ordinary way. Curved and straight. In groups. And I thought, the way Genny would have thought, with her notebook open: if it's writing, it says something. If it says something, somebody meant it to be read.

And then I thought: by whom?

Down the ring, I counted. Out loud, very quietly. Nobody needed to hear it.

"Luna. Liam. Seraphina. Toby."

Then the rest. Down the curve, pod by pod. Risa, with her hand flat against the inside of her pod wall, the way she'd had it on the wall of her white room. Thirty-four more. And Okafor, sitting on an upturned crate at the end of the ring, in the dim light, with Trevor's bridge disc at her throat, not sleeping either. And me.

Forty-one.

"Six," said Okafor, from the end of the ring, without looking up.

Day 276. The Meridian.

Nine days in white. Same order as the roof. Toby can tap through three walls now.

Hana said Mama. On Tuesday. In the middle of a sentence about a bird.

Halloway's notes. 374 grams. Genny's room. Fourteen left.

"Bring me back a brain I've never seen."

The ship is human steel round something that isn't. A spine. Gray. Old as the war.

Fog. All of it. Three hundred meters.

The panels have writing on them. Not ours.

Toby says it's breathing.

There's one outside my pod window. I've been looking at it for four hours.

I haven't touched it.

Yet.