Chapter 93 Strange Metal

Luna came at two.

Of course she did. Two o'clock was coffee. It had been coffee for months, in the reading room, with the book turned round between us and the lamp in the corridor going blue. It didn't matter that there wasn't a reading room anymore, or a lamp, or a book. It was two o'clock. So she came.

I heard her before I saw her. Not her feet. The air. It went a degree colder, down the curve of the pod ring, the way it always did a few seconds before Luna Windsor walked into a room.

She had two cups.

I don't know where she'd got them. There was a galley somewhere on Deck 4, presumably, for the crew, whom none of us had seen. She must have found it in the dark and made coffee in it without anybody noticing, which was the most Luna thing I could imagine. She held one out to me through the open door of my pod.

It was cold. Of course it was.

"Out," she said. "I'm not sitting in a seed."

We sat on the floor of the corridor, with our backs against the outer wall, between my pod and Liam's. Across from us, a meter and a half away, was the panel. Gray. Square. A little bigger than a door. With the marks on it, in their rows, catching the dim blue night-light of the ring.

Down the curve, the others were in their pods. Most of them were awake. You could tell. Nobody sleeps with their eyes open, staring at the ceiling of a seed, at two in the morning on the night before they leave the world. But nobody came out. I think they could feel the cold, and knew it was Luna, and knew it was two o'clock, and left us alone.

At the far end of the ring, Okafor sat on her crate with her chin on her chest. Asleep, finally. Or pretending. With her hand on Trevor's disc.

"Later," said Luna. "It's later now."

So I told her.

I told her about the spine. Three hundred meters of it, nose to tail, as thick as a house. Gray, and dull, and pitted, and old. I told her I'd looked into it from the black glass, the way I looked into everything, and that it was fog. All of it. Every meter. The same as the kit core in Odell's workshop. The same as the silver in Mother's vial.

"The same," said Luna. "Not like. The same."

"I can't tell. Fog's fog. That's the point of it." I looked at the panel. "But it's the same kind of nothing. If that makes sense."

"It makes sense."

She drank her cold coffee. She looked at the panel too. At the marks.

"I can tell you something," she said. "If you want it. It's not much."

"I want it."

"Okafor told us it would be fitted in orbit," said Luna. "In the cave. The day of the launch date. The ship will be fitted and fuelled in orbit. Do you remember?"

"Yes."

"It was. For five months. My father had the reports on his desk every Sunday. Up there, going round, with the cranes working on it." She turned her cup in her hands. "And then, three weeks ago, they brought it down."

I looked at her.

"Not in pieces," said Luna. "Not on a lifter. It came down. On its own. Out of orbit, through the air, and landed on its tail, out there on the black glass, as gently as if somebody had set down a teacup." Her voice was very even. "No boosters. No parachutes. No burn. The engineers on the ground didn't do anything. They just watched it." She paused. "My father watched it too. On the screen in his office. On a Sunday. He didn't eat his dinner. He didn't say anything for an hour."

"Why bring it down?"

"To load the kits. Forty of them, the size of cars. And the pods. It's easier to bring the ship to the kits than lift the kits to the ship." She looked at me sideways. "That's what the report said. Easier." A pause. "Lucas, nothing we've ever built can land a thing this size on its tail. Nothing. Not in the war. Not since. Father said so. Not to me. To the window. But I heard."

The ring was very quiet.

"So the human part isn't flying it," I said.

"I don't think the human part is doing anything," said Luna, "except holding on."

We sat for a while.

The cold coffee was very bad. It always was. I drank it anyway. That was the arrangement.

"There's something else," said Luna. "About where we are."

"The black glass."

"Yes." She put her cup down on the floor between us. Very precisely. "Do you know what this place is called? On the old maps?"

"No."

"Site One." She didn't look at me. She looked at the panel. "It's where the first one came down. In the war. Thirty-two years ago. The first of their ships. The big one. It came down here and burned for three days, and the ground went to glass for twenty miles in every direction." Her breath frosted, very faintly, in front of her face. "My father was a lieutenant. He saw it. He told me once, when I was small, that it was the only time in his life he'd ever seen anything bigger than the dome."

I didn't say anything.

I thought about Mother. In her chair. Telling us, at the kitchen table, about the war, with the cards in her hands. I was on the roof of an invader ship while it burned.

I thought about the poster. HUMANITY'S GODS. A young man and a young woman on a hill of rubble, with fire and broken invader ships behind them.

I thought about the spine of the Meridian. Three hundred meters. Gray. Pitted, as if it had been out in weather for a very long time.

Old as the war.

"It's the wreck," I said.

"I think so," said Luna. "I think they've had it for thirty-two years. I think they kept it, and studied it, and grew the silver out of it, and the kit cores, and whatever's in your mother's vials." She picked up her cup again. "And when they needed a ship that could go eleven light-years in three weeks, they didn't build one. Because they couldn't. They took the one that came here to kill us, and built a human ship round it, and painted HUMANITY'S HOPE down the side."

Her voice didn't change at all.

"We're going to Avalon," said Luna Windsor, "in the bones of the thing that tried to kill everybody."

At three, she stood up.

She picked up both cups. Mine was empty. Hers wasn't. She looked down at me sitting on the floor of the corridor with my back to the wall, and the scarf round my neck, and the panel a meter and a half in front of my boots.

"Sleep," she said. "That's an order. You've got three hours, and then a seed going straight up, and then three weeks in the same seed, and I need you awake at the end of it. I need you to count."

"Yes, Luna."

She looked at me a moment longer. Then at the panel.

"Don't," she said.

"Don't what?"

"Whatever you're going to do," said Luna. "With that face."

And she walked back down the ring to her pod, with the air going warm again behind her, and got in, and didn't close the door.

I didn't sleep.

I sat on the floor of the corridor and looked at the panel for a long time. Not into it. At it. The way you look at a person across a room before you go over and speak to them.

Gray. Square. A meter and a half away.

The marks were very clean. Up close, I could see that they weren't cut, exactly. Cut was the wrong word. A cut has edges, and the edges are rough if you look close enough, and I always looked close enough. These didn't have edges. They went down into the gray and came up again as smoothly as water going over a stone. As if the panel had been made with them already in it. As if they were part of what it was.

I'd never seen anything made like that.

Then I thought: I haven't seen it. I can't see it. I'm only looking at the outside.

That was the thing. That was what had been sitting in my chest since the black glass, under the cold coffee and the wreck and Luna's voice not changing.

Since the infirmary, I'd been able to see everything. All of it. All the way down. Steel and stone and water and blood and the inside of Hana Osei's skull. A page. Every page. And everything I could see, I could change. That was how it had always worked, since I was small, at the kitchen table, with Father's notebooks open. You see it, and you understand it, and you ask it, very politely, to be something else.

The fog had been different. The fog was the only thing I'd ever met that I couldn't see. But I'd never touched it. The kit core was sealed inside its housing. Mother's vial was glass. I'd looked at them, and they'd given nothing back, and I'd put them down.

I'd never put my hand on it.

I knew what Luna would say. She'd already said it. Don't.

I knew what Okafor would say. It'll keep.

I knew what Father would have said, because he'd said it to me in the field when I was six, crouching in the wheat with his black eyes level with mine. You don't touch what you don't understand. You look at it until you do.

I'd looked at it for four hours.

I didn't understand it.

I got up.

Down the ring, nobody moved. Okafor's chin was still on her chest. Luna's pod door was open, and I could see the edge of her boot, very still.

I crossed the corridor. A meter and a half. Two steps.

The panel was taller than me. The marks started a little above my head and went down in their rows to about my knees. I stood in front of it with my hands at my sides, and I could feel something. Not with my eyes. On my skin. On my face. A very faint warmth, coming off it, the way warmth comes off a stone that's been in the sun all day, long after the sun's gone down.

And a sound. Under everything. So low I wasn't sure it was a sound at all, and not just my own blood.

Like the ship's asleep. And it's breathing.

I put my hand on it.

It was warm.

That was the first thing. Warm, and smooth, and very slightly soft. Not soft like skin. Soft like something very hard that's been worn down for a long time by hands. Like the handle of the pump at home, that Father and Mother and I had worked ten thousand times, worn so smooth it felt like it would give if you pressed it.

It didn't give.

I pressed it anyway. Not with my hand. With the other thing. The way I'd have pressed at a piece of steel to ask it to bend, or at a cup of water to ask it to freeze. You reach in. You find the smallest piece of the thing you can find, and you take hold of it, the way you'd take hold of a thread at the end of a ball of wool, and you pull.

There wasn't anything to take hold of.

I've tried to explain it since. To myself. In the notebook. To other people, much later, when I'd stopped being afraid of it.

It wasn't resistance. Resistance is when a thing pushes back. The bolt had pushed back, in the exercise, the day it came apart and sprayed fuel. Rock pushes back, if there's a lot of it. Iron pushes back, a little. Everything pushes back, a little, because everything is made of pieces that are holding on to each other, and when you ask them to let go, they argue.

This didn't argue.

It was like reaching for a thread and finding the ball was all one piece. No end. No beginning. No pieces at all, all the way down. Like pushing on a word in a language you don't speak, and finding it isn't made of letters.

I pushed harder.

I did it the way Garnet did it. By touch. With the yeast. The way she'd shown me at the fern, with her small hand flat on the frond. You don't tell it. You ask it what it wants to be, and then you help.

I asked.

Nothing answered.

So I did it the other way. The big way. The way I'd done it the night I looked at the moon, and found the ice that wasn't there yet, and told it to be.

I pushed with all of it.

My nose bled.

I felt it go, warm, onto my lip. I didn't stop. I could feel the pressure behind my eyes, the old weight, the one that had been needles once and then tore and then went quiet. It was coming back. Not needles. A hand. A big flat hand pressing on the front of my head from the inside.

I pushed.

And the panel didn't change. Not a hair. Not a single grain, under my palm. The marks stayed exactly as they were, clean and smooth and running down into the gray like water over a stone.

But something happened.

The sound stopped.

The hum. The thing under everything, that Toby had heard with his tuning fork, that I'd been feeling on my skin. The breathing.

It stopped.

For one beat. One. I counted it, because I count everything. One heartbeat of mine, against my palm, against the warm gray. And in that one beat, the whole ship was silent. Not quiet. Silent. As if three hundred meters of something very old had been asleep, and breathing, and had felt a hand on it, and stopped breathing for a moment.

To listen.

And then it started again.

Exactly the same. Low. Even. Under everything. As if nothing had happened at all.

I took my hand off the panel.

There was blood on it. On the gray. A smear, where my nose had dripped onto my hand and my hand had been flat on the panel. Dark red on the dull gray, in the blue night-light, across two of the rows of marks.

I took out Okafor's handkerchief. The gray one. Plain. Folded.

It's for later.

I wiped the panel clean. Carefully. Every bit of it. Then I wiped my face. Then I folded the handkerchief over on itself, so the blood was inside, and put it back in my pocket.

Under my palm, where my hand had been, the gray was a little warmer than the rest. I could feel it, when I held my hand near it. A hand-shaped warmth. Fading.

That was all.

"Lucas?"

Toby. From his pod, two down. Very quiet. Half asleep.

"Did you hear that?" said Toby.

I stood in the corridor with my back to the panel and Okafor's handkerchief in my pocket and the blood drying on my lip.

"Hear what?" I said.

"It stopped," said Toby. "The humming. For a second. I felt it in the fork." A pause. "It's back now."

"Go to sleep, Toby."

He was quiet for a moment.

"All right," he said. And his breathing went long and slow again, the way it did.

I didn't say I didn't hear it. I want that on the record. I didn't say anything that wasn't true. I just didn't say the thing that was.

I got back into my pod and sat with my knees up and the scarf round my neck and looked at the panel through the little round window.

I wasn't going to tell anyone.

I knew that before I'd sat down. I sat there for a long time afterward, working out why, the way Halloway would have made me. Not what you feel, Cadet Dask. Why. In order.

One. In three hours, they'd seal us in. In six, we'd be gone. There was nothing anybody could do about it. Not Luna, not Okafor, not the General, not anyone. The ship was going, and we were going in it. If I told them, they'd carry it. That's all telling would do. Give them one more thing to carry, for three weeks in the dark, with no one to put it down for.

Two. I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know if it meant anything. It can't be changed might just be a fact about a metal. Like gold doesn't rust. Like diamonds are hard.

Three.

Three was the true one. I knew it was the true one because it was the one I didn't want to write down.

Three. Since the infirmary, everything had been a page. Everything. I'd stopped being afraid of anything, a little, because there wasn't anything I couldn't see the bottom of. Anything I couldn't take hold of and ask to be something else. And I'd liked that. I'd liked it more than I'd ever told anyone.

And here was a thing that wasn't a page. That I couldn't take hold of. That I'd pushed on with everything I had, until my nose bled, and it hadn't even noticed.

Except it had. For one beat. It had stopped, and listened.

And then gone back to sleep. As if I wasn't worth waking up for.

I was frightened.

I hadn't been frightened of a thing, of a thing, not a person, since I was very small. And I didn't want anyone to know.

At the far end of the ring, Okafor lifted her chin off her chest.

She didn't look at me. She looked at the panel across from my pod. For a long moment. As if she'd heard something, in her sleep, and was waiting to hear it again.

Then she put her hand back on Trevor's disc and closed her eyes.

Day 277. 3:40 a.m.

The Meridian was in orbit for five months. Three weeks ago it came down on its own. No burn. "Like setting down a teacup."

This is Site One. Where the first one came down.

The spine is the wreck. Luna thinks so. I think so.

We're going to Avalon in the bones of the thing that tried to kill everybody.

I touched the panel.

I can't change it. Not a grain. Not with the hand, not with the yeast, not with all of it. Nose bled.

It's the first thing I've ever met that I can't change.

It stopped humming. One beat. Then it went on.

I wiped my blood off it with Okafor's handkerchief. "It's for later." It was for this.

Toby felt it stop. I didn't tell him what it was.

I'm not going to tell anyone.

Mother would say that's choosing for them.

She'd be right.

I'm doing it anyway.