Chapter 86: Turning the Tide

Bram's voice came out of the relay in Wren's lap before the medic had finished counting Marrow's pulse.

"Command, yard. The far gate's open and they're forming in it. Two trucks, men on foot either side, forty, more. A hum out ahead of them, four of it, with a light strung between. Rope behind. They'll be an hour coming at that pace. Say who Command is."

Renner took the set off Wren's knee.

"Yard, Command is the major. Hold the trucks. Nothing goes into that store on anyone's order, and I'm including theirs." She gave the set back and looked at the two lieutenants, and at Marrow on his knees with the medic's hand on his shoulder. "Colonel. You're on the floor."

"I'm on the floor," Marrow agreed. His voice had not come back from wherever the cold had put it. "Tell me what you're doing with my company, Major. I want to have heard it."

"East platoon to the yard by the valley floor, in fours, on the section's flank. South platoon holds this building and the road. Lieutenant Osei's element goes to the yard with the asset, because that's where the screen is walking, and a screen walks toward him. Cade stays on the man. The liaison stays in this hall and writes."

Marrow got one hand off the stone and looked at it.

"That's the order I'd have given," he said. "Go and give it."

* * *

"Hollis." Osei had her book shut and her rifle up before Renner had finished. "You've no hands. You and Cade have the man; if he turns them over, you tell the major. Ilsen, Wren, Rook. Four." She looked at the mask. "Six stands. Two of it are staying here."

They went out through the south door over the cots.

The rifle was where he had set it, against the hall's wall in the road, with the dew on the stock. The burned skin of his hands took the stock badly, and he shifted the sling onto the shoulder that had a working arm under it and let it hang.

"That's where you left it," Osei said, going past.

He had crossed the valley floor twice in the dark by the ward light and a fire, and now the sun stood on the far ridge and the whole bowl of it lay open: the wall's grey run from gatehouse to river, the roofed buildings with their doors standing open, the road going straight up the valley's floor past the hall to the black shell of the store and on to the far gate, where two trucks and a line of men were coming down it toward him. The remnants' dead lay on the floor where they had fallen. A crow had found one.

They went up the road, and the east platoon's fours came off the road onto the valley floor to their left and went past them at a run.

* * *

The yard had the section along the trucks' far side, Bram's heavy rifle across the first tailgate on the road north, and the store behind them gone to walls with a thin smoke standing up out of the stair's mouth. The old man sat on the first truck's bed under his blanket with his back to the cab and watched the road.

The screen came down it at a walk.

Four cylinders between pairs of men, the thread live at knee height, humming at the pitch of a baton and a housing. Behind the screen the two trucks, open-bedded, and in their beds, stacked, the squat grey shapes of cells, dozens of them, their ward-light lying up pale across the faces of the men walking beside them. Rope on shoulders behind the trucks. From the wall's far stretch, above the far gate, two heavy guns laid on the yard, walking the tailgates.

He let the Sight go down the road.

It gave him what it had given him in the lane in the dark, forty times over: each man walking in his own eyes. The spacing was wrong. This column came as forty things, the screen's carriers a half-step out of true with one another, a man on the near truck's flank looking back over his shoulder every few paces at nobody. They had felt the rope go slack from beyond the far gate and had come back.

They've come to do what the colonel ordered, he wrote, and turned it for Osei. Fire the trucks and the stair. What they can't carry.

"Yes." Renner had come in along the store's wall behind the east platoon with the threat-assessment officer, and she read it over Osei's shoulder. "And a screen in front, so that the thing that can stop them can't. They've had a night to build it out of what they had left." She looked at the road. "Corporal. Range."

"Two hundred, Major, closing at a walk. The screen's at a hundred and eighty. I can put the far guns' heads down a minute at a time and no more."

"East platoon on the flank. Nobody fires on the trucks until I say what's in them."

Cells, Rook wrote. Ours. Wired backward. The officer's seen thirteen. There are more than thirteen on those trucks.

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The officer read it and put the glass on the road, and lowered it.

"Then that's where the four hundred went," he said. "They're bringing us back our own stock, to burn our own paper with."

* * *

He had no clean use; he had spent it on a picket at two in the morning, and a second would run wide, and wide or narrow it would die on the thread at thirty yards with the cost paid in full. Reyes's door was shut and he did not put his hand on it.

He had the other one.

The other door, he wrote, and turned it to Osei. The draw. On no order but mine. Write the time, and write that I chose it.

Osei read it. "Written. Wren."

"Seven and ten, ma'am."

"Seven and ten." Osei's pen moved. "Rook. The colonel's not here. Nobody's holding what's on your strap."

I know what's on my strap, he wrote, and did not wait for her to read it.

He set the rifle down against the tailgate and stood up out of the trucks' cover into the road, in the light, where the screen could see him, and the screen's carriers saw him and came on.

He put his hand on the door.

In a hall he had found a door on his own side by its cold. This one he found by its pull.

Let it, he thought.

It came through.

It found the screen because the screen was built to catch it. The thread brightened from dull to white and held, the four carriers leaning into their poles as the load came onto them, and then the near cylinder cracked. He heard the glass go under the far guns. The thread flared and went out, and the carriers dropped their poles and stood in the road with their hands empty.

The draw went looking.

It went as water goes, to the low place, to whatever was built to take it. Twenty yards behind the broken screen, stacked in two open truck beds, were the low places, dozens of them, every one a Meridian ward-cell wired to take a Classified output in.

They took it.

The near truck's bed went white, the pale, low ward-color he had seen in an annex, spilled Core burning on nothing. The cells split one after another as the draw went through them, each catching what the last had failed to hold, and the fire stood up out of the truck bed the height of a man and lay over onto the men beside it. The far truck caught from the near one before its driver had finished turning the wheel.

And the draw did not stop.

It went past the trucks into the road and found the men on it, and the nearest of them stopped being on his feet.

Rook was on his knees in the road. The whiteness had come up to a sheet. Under it, on the inside of him, the draw ran on through the place with no floor, and he went in after it, and found the pull, and followed the pull back along itself to where it left him, and there, on his own side of it, where he had never looked for one, was the handle.

He closed it.

It came to as the other door had come to, against the pull, heavy, wanting to stay open; and the pressure stopped, and the road in front of him was a road with two fires on it and men standing up in the light.

He stayed on his knees. His hands on the road's packed stone were burned and were his. Nothing on his strap had fired. No hand had been at his collar. He had opened it and he had closed it, and there was one hand on him, and it was his own.

* * *

The men on the road broke one at a time, in no order.

The screen's carriers had their hands empty and kept them so. A man behind the burning trucks with a coil on his shoulder looked at the mask, on his knees two hundred yards off, and put the coil down on the stone, and stood beside it. The east platoon came up out of the valley floor on the column's flank in fours and did not have to fire; the lieutenant's voice went up the road. "Rifles down. Down. Flat." Rifles went down. A dozen who had kept their rifles went back up the road past the burning trucks at a run and through the far gate, into the country the camp had never walked, and Renner let them go.

"I'm not sending an archive after a dozen men. East platoon — the far wall. Take those guns and shut that gate." She had the relay from Wren. "Corporal, the road's yours. Lieutenant Osei." She looked down at the mask. "Count."

"Four here. Two in the hall. Six." Osei was on one knee beside him with her book open on the other. "Asset used the other door on his own authority, at seven and ten. It broke the screen and fired their trucks. Then he closed it. I watched him. He's on his knees and he's awake and I've had a word off him."

The word was on the slate on the road beside his hand. It had taken him two tries, and the letters leaned worse than a child's.

Closed.

* * *

The far gate went shut at eight by Wren's watch, and the valley that had been the remnants' for as long as the section had watched it was Meridian's from gate to gate, with two fires on its road and prisoners along its walls with their hands on their heads.

He walked to the store at the pace the leg allowed, with Ilsen beside him not touching him, and sat down on the stair-head's stone where Bram had held the top of it, with the whiteness not yet gone back from a sheet to a line.

The stair went down into a dark that breathed heat. The smoke coming up it was thin, the fire under the floor gone to embers; a man with lungs could go down with a wet cloth and come up again. The old man stood at the top of it with Renner's blanket round his shoulders and Renner beside him, and the grease-pencil private behind them with a lamp.

"You said you know how it opens." Renner did not make it a question.

"It opens from outside for whoever knows the pin." The old man looked at the mask, on the stone, and away. "There's a plate on the frame beside the outer wheel, and under it a pin that stops the wheel coming back. It was built so a fire couldn't open it. A man who knew the plate could. Nobody who was ever carried through that door knew there was a plate."

"Then show me." Renner gave him a wet cloth and took one for herself. "You first, because you know the plate. I go second, because it's my tasking. Private, the lamp; you stop on the landing where the corporal can hear you."

The old man went down.

Rook sat on the stone and listened to them go — one flight, the landing, the turn, the second flight, the private's boots stopping on the landing and the other two going on. Bram stood at the stair-head with the heavy rifle at his side and did not look down it.

"I heard it go from up here last night," he said. "It's a sound I've only had from one side."

Below them, muffled by two flights and a turn, iron moved on iron — a small sound first, a pin drawn and dropped on stone, and then the long low grind of a wheel coming back against its own weight, and then the sound of a door as thick as a forearm leaving its frame.

"That's the other side of it," Bram said.

Renner's voice came up the stair a moment later, flattened by the stone, with no report in it yet.

"It's here. All of it. The lamp's still burning." A pause, and then the report. "Corporal. It's intact. Bring me a second lamp and every man you can spare who can count."