Chapter 98 Avalon

The sun went down over the western rim an hour after I landed, and the canyon went from red to purple to a deep blue-black, and the sky went from green to a darker green to something that wasn't any color I had a word for.

And then the moons came up.

The big one first. Over the eastern rim, slowly, enormous. Pale gold, not white, with dark patches on it in shapes that weren't the shapes on ours. Bigger than our moon by half again. It filled the top of the canyon with a soft yellow light, and the red glass under my boots woke up and caught it, and for a moment the whole floor of the canyon was a long river of gold.

The small one came an hour after. Fast. Much faster than the big one, crossing the sky in a hurry, as if it were late for something. It was very small. A bright hard point, not much bigger than a star, with a little shape to it if you looked carefully.

I looked carefully.

There wasn't any ice on it.

Garnet's going to want fish on it, Liam had said. And I sat on the warm glass with my back against the pod and laughed again, on my own, in the dark, quietly. And then I stopped laughing, because there was nobody to laugh with.

My wrist screen had been flashing for an hour. I'd been ignoring it.

ATMOSPHERE: BREATHABLE. EXPOSURE: 5 H 41 M. LIMIT: 6 H. RETURN TO FILTERED ENVIRONMENT.

Okafor had told us. In the cave. The surveys from orbit had said it, two years ago, and the first wave had confirmed it, in the call-ins, before they went quiet. The air on Avalon is good for six hours. Then you need two hours in a filter. Or you start to feel it.

I'd thought I'd feel it as a headache. Or tiredness.

I didn't feel anything. So I looked.

It was in my blood.

A molecule. Small. Neat. Shaped a little like a key, a little like a hook. I didn't know its name. Nobody did; nobody on Earth had ever seen it outside a survey report. It came in with every breath, along with the oxygen, quite harmlessly, a few at a time. And then it stayed. It found the places in my blood where the oxygen was meant to sit, and it sat there instead. Not many. Not yet. One in a thousand, maybe. It wasn't hurting anything.

But it wasn't leaving, either.

In six hours it would be one in a hundred. In twelve, one in ten. I could see how it would go. Slowly. Gently. A guest who sits down in your chair and never gets up, and then another, and another, until one day you can't find anywhere to sit.

I could have taken it out. I could see it, which meant I could change it. One little key in a thousand, unhooked, turned into something else, breathed out.

I didn't.

Most of medicine, said Halloway, in my head, is getting out of the way. There was a filter in the pod. It had been built for exactly this. Two hours, and my blood would be clean, and I wouldn't have spent anything I'd need tomorrow.

I climbed back into the pod and sealed the hatch.

Day 297. Night.

Two moons. The big one's gold. The small one's in a hurry. No ice on it.

The air: something in it that sits where oxygen should sit and doesn't leave. Six hours. Then the filter.

I didn't take it out myself. Halloway would be proud. Or she'd say "Noted."

I'd made a promise.

First night. After we've counted. Luna had said it in the cave, and on the squad channel, and in the last hour before the drop. I'm holding you to it.

I'd counted. It was the first night.

And she was a hundred and forty miles west of me, at the bottom of who knew what, with no link and no way to hear anything I said.

I sat in the pod with the filter humming and the lamp on its stalk, and thought about that for a long time. About promises, and what they're for. About Genny, on the back stairs, saying write it down. If it isn't written down, it didn't happen.

So I wrote it down.

Luna.

It's the first night. I've counted. You're 140 miles west. You haven't moved since you landed. I'm writing this because I said I would tell you tonight, and I can't, so this is the next best thing. I'll read it to you when you get here. Every word. You can check it against the page.

The night before launch, after you went back to your pod, I put my hand on the panel across from mine.

I couldn't change it. Not a grain. I've never met anything I couldn't change. I pushed until my nose bled.

And the ship stopped. The hum. For one heartbeat. Like it was listening.

Risa felt it. Toby felt it. Crane knew by six in the morning, because every sensor on the spine logged it. That's what he wanted me on the platform for. He wasn't angry. He was happy. He said it was the most interesting thing that had happened to him in thirty years.

And Okafor told me, when she sealed my pod, that Father did the same thing, at Site One, when he was younger than I am. He couldn't change it either. He said, "But it listened."

I didn't tell you because I was frightened. Not of the ship. Of not being able to see the bottom of something. I've been able to see the bottom of everything since the infirmary, and I liked it more than I've told anyone, and this was the first thing that said no.

I'm not frightened now. Or I am, but less. I don't know why. Maybe because I've written it down.

That's all of it. That's the whole thing.

Come and get it read to you.

L.

I read it over twice. Then I closed the notebook and turned off the lamp and lay back in the pale blue seat, which still had the shape of me in it from twenty days, and slept for the first time on another world.

I woke before dawn. Of course I did.

Habit. Five o'clock. The filter cycle at home, the dawn cycle, Father's machine coming on in the walls before the light, so that I'd grown up waking at the sound of it. There wasn't any filter here except the pod's, and that didn't make a sound like home. But I woke anyway. My body didn't know it had gone anywhere.

I lay in the dark and counted.

Luna.

The snowflake. West. A hundred and forty miles.

And it moved.

Not far. Twenty paces. Then a turn. Twenty paces. A turn. Twenty paces. A turn. Twenty paces.

A square.

She was walking a square. A perimeter. Round her pod, or her kit, or whatever she'd landed in. Exactly twenty paces a side, exactly square, the way she'd have measured out a defensive position on field one with Okafor watching.

Walking.

Alive.

I put my hand over my mouth and lay very still in the dark for a long time.

Seraphina.

The clasp. East. Ninety miles.

Moving too. Not a square. Back and forth, back and forth, in short quick lines, the way you'd move if you were gathering something and carrying it to one place. Wood, maybe. Stones. Something to burn. She was building a fire. Of course she was. Seraphina Calder had landed on a strange world in the dark, and the first thing she'd done when the sun came up was build a fire she didn't need, because it was hers.

Liam.

The buckle. Northeast. Two hundred miles.

Moving. Fast. In a big loose loop, going round and round something, and then off in a straight line for a bit, and then back again, and round again. Circling. The way he'd circled the edge of the wild zone twice, in the dark, crying, the night Okafor killed our links. Looking for something. Looking for us.

Then he stopped. And sat down, I think. And didn't move for a while.

And then got up and started again.

Toby.

The fork. North. Two hundred and sixty miles. High.

Still.

I waited.

The sky outside the pod's port went from black to a dark green to a pale green, and the canyon walls went from black to purple to red. And I lay there and held on to the fork with everything I had, the way I'd held on to the grain in the pump room, the day I made the first lighthouse.

Still.

The sun came up over the eastern rim.

Still.

A grain of iron doesn't tell you if somebody's alive. It only tells you where it is.

It was in his breast pocket. I'd seen him put it there. In the pod, before the drop. Strapped in, very straight, with the fork in his breast pocket where he could get at it.

So either Toby was lying very still.

Or the fork wasn't in his pocket anymore.

I couldn't stay in the pod.

I know. Days one and two, stay put. I know. Luna's orders, and Okafor's rules, and every drill we'd ever done. But the pod was two meters long, and I'd been in one for twenty days, and Toby's fork wasn't moving, and if I lay there any longer looking at it I was going to do something stupid, like start walking two hundred and sixty miles north.

So I climbed the canyon wall instead.

Stay put means stay near your kit. Stay where they can find you. The canyon wall was a hundred meters from my kit, straight up. I could see the pod the whole way. That was put. I decided that was put.

Luna would have had something to say about it. I'd tell her. I'd write it down.

The rock was good for climbing. Layered, like the pages of a book, with ledges every few meters where the layers had weathered back. I didn't need to make holds. I did anyway, once or twice, where the ledges were too far apart: a little shelf of rock, asked politely to stick out a few centimeters further than it had been. The rock didn't mind. Rock usually doesn't.

It took me forty minutes.

At the top, I pulled myself over the edge on my stomach, and lay there in the wind for a moment with my eyes shut, breathing.

Then I opened them.

The red glass ran away behind me, south, in its long channels, for miles. Cracked and dark and shining in the morning, all the way to the horizon. Dead. Nothing growing on it. Nothing moving. Like the plain at Site One. Like the flats at home.

But north, half a mile from where I lay, it stopped.

It didn't fade. It stopped. The red glass ran north in its channels, and then, along a line as clear as the edge of a page, it ended, and the green began.

I've tried, since, to describe the green.

To Garnet, who wanted to know if it was like the wheat. To Genny, who wanted the wavelengths. To Mother, who just wanted to know if it was beautiful. I've never got it right.

It went on forever. That was the first thing. From the edge of the glass, north, to the edge of the sky, rolling, over low hills and into shallow valleys and up the other side, without a break, without a road or a wall or a field boundary or anything at all that a person had made. Green, and a darker green in the valleys, and a paler, silver-green on the tops of the hills where the wind came across it.

And it was moving.

Not the way the wheat moved at home, all one way, when the wind came over the ridge. It moved in ripples. Slow, wide ripples, going out across it in rings, like the rings in a pond when you drop a stone. And where the rings went, the green turned, all at once, a little, the way a field of faces turns when somebody walks into a room.

It was turning toward the sun.

I went down to it.

Half a mile. Down off the rim, and across the last of the red glass, with the pod behind me and below me in the canyon, where I could see it if I looked back. I looked back every hundred paces. Put. Still put.

And then I was standing on the edge of the glass, where it stopped. And in front of my boots, the first of the green.

It was a plant. Of course it was. But not like any plant I knew. Knee-high, a single stem, with fronds coming off it in a spiral, like a fern that had been twisted. Silver-green on top. Darker underneath. Each frond narrow and long and very slightly furred, so that the light ran along it like light along a cat's back.

There were millions of them. As far as I could see.

I crouched down in front of the first one.

And it turned toward me.

Slowly. The fronds nearest me, first. Lifting, very slightly, and swinging round on the stem, the way a sunflower turns over the course of a day, except that this took about four seconds. Turning to face me. Then the next ones. Then the whole plant, leaning, very slightly, in my direction.

Then the plant beside it.

Then the one beside that.

I stood up. Took a step to the left.

They followed. All the plants within a few meters of me, leaning, turning, following. Not toward my face. Toward my chest. Toward the warmest part of me. The way a cold hand goes toward a fire.

I laughed.

I couldn't help it. I stood on the edge of a green world under a green sky and laughed out loud, and walked in a slow circle, and watched a whole field of plants turn round in a slow ring to follow me, like an audience, like Garnet's face at the window when I came up the path. And I laughed until I had to sit down, on the warm red glass at the very edge, with my knees up, and the plants all leaning toward me in a semicircle, as if they wanted to hear what was so funny.

Then I looked into one.

Of course I did. I'd been holding off. I'd wanted to look at it the ordinary way first, for a little while, with just my eyes. The way you want to look at a present before you open it.

Then I opened it.

Chemistry.

That's the only word. Chemistry I'd never seen. All of it. Every page.

The green wasn't the green of plants at home. Not chlorophyll. Something like it. A ring, the same shape, almost, with a different metal in the middle. Copper, I think. Copper, where ours have magnesium. It caught the light differently. It wanted the gold of this sun, not the white of ours, and it took it, and did something with it I could follow for three steps and then lost.

The sap was sweet. Not sugar. A sugar. One I didn't have a name for, with a ring of seven where ours have six, folded over on itself like a hand closing.

And the roots.

I followed the roots down into the ground at the edge of the glass, and they were eating it. The red glass. Very slowly. Little threads of root, finer than hair, pressed against the edge of it, and wherever they touched it, the glass was softer. Taking it apart. A grain at a time. Turning it back into something the next plant could stand in.

The green wasn't stopping at the edge of the glass.

It was taking the glass back.

I don't know how long I sat there.

Hours, I think. I lost track. I looked at one plant, and then the next, and then the ground, and then a small thing like a beetle with six legs and a shell that was half transparent, which walked up a stem and down again without paying me any attention at all. And everything I looked at was new. Every molecule. Every shape. Every page, written in a hand I'd never seen, and the hand was so clear. So simple, once you saw it. So obviously right.

I hadn't felt like that since I was very small.

Since the kitchen table. Since Father's notebooks, and his finger on the page, and his voice saying now look, Lucas, look how it fits. Since before Mother's hands stopped. Since before anything.

I was happy.

I want to put that down plainly. I sat on the edge of the red glass on another world with the plants leaning toward me, and I was happier than I had been since the day Father died.

And then I saw the silver.

It was in the plant. In the stem. In thin lines running up the middle of it and out along each frond, like veins. Like nerves. Fine threads, and on the threads, grains.

Silver grains.

Very small. Packed close. Lined up along the threads like beads on a string.

I'd seen them before. Twice. In Maura Calder's kitchen, with her shaking hand in mine, looking into her nerves for the first time and finding them packed with tiny silver grains, all along the sheaths. And again, in Mother's vial, that Genny had brought me in her satchel. The same size. The same spacing. The same shine.

And both times, fog. Both times, I'd looked into them, and they'd given nothing back.

I looked into these.

And I could see them.

Every grain. All the way down. Not fog. Not a wall. A page. Written very small and very close, in the same clear hand as everything else on this world, and I could read it.

They were busy.

That was the first thing I understood. Each grain was doing something. Taking the warmth from the frond nearest me, the faint heat of my body falling on it, and passing it to the next grain along the thread. And that one passing it on. And the next. Hand to hand, all the way down the frond and into the stem and down the stem to the root and back up the other side, to the fronds on the far side, telling them: there. Warm. Turn.

The plant didn't have a brain. It didn't need one. It had these.

They were how it turned toward me.

I sat very still.

And then, slowly, because I'd thought of something, and I was frightened of it, I looked at myself.

Not my rib. Not my blood. Deeper. The way Halloway had taught me to look at Hana, at the threads in her head, reaching across. I looked at my own nerves. My eyes. The long cables running back from the back of each eye, into the middle of my head. The place that had torn, in the exercise, and gone quiet.

I'd looked at them a hundred times. Since the infirmary. They'd always looked like me. Like part of me. I'd never noticed anything there that wasn't.

I noticed now.

Silver grains. All along them. Packed close, lined up like beads on a string, woven so far into the sheaths of the nerves that you couldn't tell where the grain stopped and the nerve began. The same size. The same spacing. The same shine.

And I could see them.

Every grain. All the way down. Not fog. A page.

Busy.

Yours isn't fighting, Halloway had said, the first week in the dome, with a sheet of paper on the table that had no numbers on it at all. Just one word, in her small handwriting. Inconclusive.

I'd thought she meant something about my blood. Some marker. Some number on a chart she didn't know how to read.

She hadn't known what it meant. Neither had I.

This was what it meant.

In me, the silver was awake. It was woven in. It was doing something, passing something along, the way it did in the plant. It was part of me. It was the reason I could see.

And in Mother, it was fog.

In Maura, it was fog. In Toby's mother, whose hands shook. In all thirty-one families of the Retention Act, one spoon on the first of every month. Fog. Asleep. Sitting in the sheaths of their nerves like a guest who doesn't leave, and their bodies fighting it, every day, every hour, the way your body fights anything that sits where it shouldn't and won't say what it is.

The rejection. That was the rejection. Not the silver. The silver asleep.

I didn't know how to wake it.

I want to be honest about that. I sat on the edge of the glass with my heart going like Crane's on the platform, the eager kind, and I didn't know anything. I didn't know what the silver was. I didn't know why it was awake in a plant on Avalon and in my eyes and asleep in my mother. I didn't know if awake was even the right word, or if I was a boy on a strange world making up a story because he wanted one.

Certainty is a symptom, Halloway had written. Look for what you're not seeing.

I didn't know anything.

But for the first time since Maura's kitchen, I knew where to look.

Not can't, love. Not yet.

My wrist flashed. EXPOSURE: 5 H 50 M.

I got up. My legs had gone stiff. The plants leaned after me as I stood, all round me in a ring, turning, following the warmth. I looked down at them for a moment.

"I'll be back," I said. Out loud. To a field of plants.

Then I walked back across the red glass, and up the rim, and down the wall of the canyon, and into the pod, and sealed the hatch.

And in the pod, with the filter humming, the shame came.

I don't know where from. It just came. It came up out of the floor of me like cold water, the way it had on the gallery, the night they gave us the launch date.

I'd been happy.

I'd sat in a field for six hours and laughed, while Luna walked a square a hundred and forty miles away on her own, and Liam went round and round in circles looking for us, and Toby lay in the snow two hundred and sixty miles north and didn't move. While Wren, if she was alive, was somewhere in the hills I hadn't landed in. While the thirty-four were wherever the thirty-four were. While Mother sat in her chair on the sixtieth floor with her nerves full of fog, and Maura's hands shook so hard Rory had to kneel down and hold them.

I'd been happy. The happiest since Father.

I sat in the pod with my hands over my face.

It was Okafor's voice that came, in the end. Not Mother's. Not Halloway's. Okafor's, crouched in the door of Seraphina's pod, very quietly, the last thing she'd taught any of us.

You're allowed to want things, Calder.

She'd said it to Sera. She hadn't said it to me. But I'd been in the pod across the corridor, with the door open, and I'd heard it.

I took my hands away from my face.

I'd been happy. And while I was happy, I'd found the first thing in a year that might save my mother's life. Those weren't two different things. They'd happened in the same field, on the same morning, because I was the kind of person who sat down and looked at a plant for six hours when I should have been ashamed of myself.

Father would have sat down too.

I think he'd have laughed as well.

At dusk, I counted.

Luna. The snowflake. Still walking her square. Twenty paces a side.

Seraphina. The clasp. Still. In one place. Sitting by her fire, I thought.

Liam. The buckle. Still, now. Stopped circling. Asleep, I hoped.

Toby.

The fork.

North. Two hundred and sixty miles. High.

I held on to it with everything I had.

And it moved.

Three meters. Slowly. Then stopped. Then another three. Slowly. The way you move when you're very cold and very tired, or hurt, and you've been lying still all day, and somebody's come.

Somebody's come.

I don't know why I thought that. I didn't know anything. A grain of iron only tells you where it is.

But it moved.

Day 298. Avalon. First full day.

Luna's walking a square. Sera's built a fire. Liam circled for hours, then stopped.

Toby didn't move all day. At dusk, three meters. Then three more.

I went to the edge of the glass. Half a mile. The pod in sight every step. Luna, that's put. I'm writing it down.

The plants turn toward warmth. Copper where ours have magnesium. A seven-ring sugar. The roots eat the glass. The green is taking it back.

The plants have silver in them. The same grains as Maura's. As Mother's vial.

In the plants I can see it. It's not fog. It's awake. It carries the warmth from frond to frond.

I have it too. In my eyes. All along the nerves. Awake. Halloway: "Yours isn't fighting."

In Mother and Maura it's asleep. That's the rejection.

I don't know how to wake it.

Not can't. Not yet.

I was happy today. Happier than since Father.

I was ashamed of it.

I'm allowed.