Chapter 96: The Way Down

The first bowl broke before anyone reached the shelter.

Dinraal heard it strike the path.

A sharp sound.

Then a child crying.

He turned so quickly that the silver moved over his fingers before he saw Mira standing beside an older woman, staring at the pieces of a blue bowl.

Nothing had attacked them.

Nobody was hurt.

The bowl had simply slipped.

Around them, the practice procession stopped.

Thirty people, several bags, two walking frames, and a borrowed cart occupied a path wide enough for perhaps half of them to stand comfortably.

Tiamat, near the front, raised a hand.

“Stay where you are.”

Dinraal crouched beside the broken pottery.

“I can—”

Mira shook her head fiercely.

“It was hers.”

The older woman rested a hand on her shoulder.

“I know, love.”

“I said I could carry it.”

“And you did. Most of the way.”

Dinraal looked at the scattered pieces.

He could join them.

He could make the bowl look whole enough that the break would be difficult to find.

But Mira was looking at the woman, not at him.

He collected the pieces carefully and put them in an empty cloth bag.

“We’ll take them with us.”

Tiamat came back along the line.

She looked at the narrow path.

The stopped cart.

The people trying to make room without stepping into the drainage ditch.

Then she took out her slate.

Nobody had reached the shelter yet.

They had already learned three things.

Children did not need to carry fragile possessions during a practice.

The cart was too wide for this route.

And if one person stopped, everyone behind them stopped too.

Dinraal stood with the bag of broken pottery.

“Should we begin again?”

Tiamat shook her head.

“We should finish this one.”

She moved the cart into a wider patch beside the path and asked two adults to carry the supplies.

Then she turned toward Mira.

“Would you walk with me?”

Mira looked at the older woman.

She nodded.

The procession began moving again.

Dinraal followed at the rear, carrying a bowl nobody was going to eat from that morning.

At the shelter, Rhiannon had made soup.

Good soup.

She would have regarded any other arrangement as a personal failure.

Aurelius stood beside the serving table, helping people find cups.

Aramaeis sat near the entrance with the household list.

The First Weapon occupied the surface room, where his presence had persuaded two reluctant children that entering the building might be worthwhile.

Dinraal put the broken bowl on the repair table.

Tiamat stopped the clock.

“Seventeen minutes.”

Julius looked up.

“From the school?”

“From the first signal.”

He wrote it down.

“Too long?”

“For this group, on this route, carrying what they carried, that is how long it took.”

Julius waited.

Tiamat looked at him.

“We improve the route before we criticize the people.”

Dinraal smiled faintly.

He found Isolde in the sleeping section.

She was helping the older woman settle beside Mira.

The child had stopped crying, but she kept looking toward the bag containing the bowl.

Isolde crouched beside her.

“Nobody needed that bowl for the meal.”

“It was hers.”

“I know. We’ll look at it after.”

“Will it still be blue?”

Dinraal answered from the doorway.

“Yes.”

Mira looked at him.

He had not promised that it would be exactly as it was.

He had promised the part he could preserve.

That seemed enough for the moment.

She accepted a cup of soup.

Outside, Tiamat walked the path again with Halen and two members of the neighbourhood team.

Dinraal watched them go.

A few weeks earlier, he would have followed automatically.

Now he sat beside Aurelius and took the bowl the older man handed him.

“What did you learn?” Aurelius asked.

“That carrying a cart downhill is easier in a drawing.”

Aurelius smiled.

“Useful.”

Dinraal looked around the room.

People were talking again.

A child had found the blocks.

The older woman was telling Isolde where the blue bowl had come from.

“Yes,” Dinraal said. “It was.”

The reports from Avalon arrived in pieces over the following weeks.

Their first great hollow was being built beneath the plain.

Kwame Osei had taken charge.

The builders came from many places.

People who knew waterworks.

People who knew tunnels.

People who had spent years living beneath the ground while danger moved above them.

Dinraal read that part twice.

The drawings showed rooms that did not quite follow the lines he expected.

A passage bent where the rock demanded it.

A floor stepped to guide water.

Small rooms opened from larger ones.

Enna studied the plans with Halen.

Asha stood nearby, turning the geological sections.

“We don’t have this rock.”

“No,” Halen said.

“Or this depth.”

“No.”

“Or the same thermal structure.”

Enna looked up.

“Then we won’t build their hollow here.”

Asha folded her arms.

“I was establishing that.”

“Good. Now tell us what their choices can teach us about ours.”

That became the useful question.

Hearth did not need to reproduce a chamber beneath another world.

It needed to stop treating its own quarry shelter as the only shape a shelter could have.

The lower terraces were too far from the quarry for some residents.

The school route was narrow.

The coastal workers spent much of their day beyond any reasonable walking distance of it.

Alexander marked three areas on the local map.

Not construction orders.

Places to investigate.

Dinraal pointed toward the hillside behind the school.

“There’s a drainage gallery through here.”

Meret shook her head.

“Not for shelter.”

“Too wet?”

“Sometimes. And sometimes is enough.”

They crossed it off.

The second site had better rock but a poor approach.

The third was near the workshop stores.

Halen asked for a proper survey.

Dinraal offered to help.

This time, he added, “With what I can actually tell you.”

Halen nodded.

That was becoming an important distinction.

The silver could help him notice weaknesses in material he touched.

It did not make him a substitute for every instrument, every builder, or the history of water moving through a hill.

They set a date.

Then they went back to the first path, because the people using it still needed somewhere to put their feet.

The path took five days.

Not because it was large.

Because it had to remain usable while they worked on it.

Halen widened two turning points.

Meret redirected runoff that crossed the lower section after rain.

Gilgamesh moved stone.

Dinraal cut and fitted the pieces too awkward for the ordinary equipment, then helped the crew lay the rest.

The new edge was low enough to step over deliberately and high enough to stop a cart wheel sliding into the ditch.

Tiamat asked for places where someone could pause without blocking the whole procession.

Rhiannon asked for a place to leave water.

Johanna asked that nobody put the water where a tired person would have to bend beneath someone else’s elbow to reach it.

Dinraal began to suspect that most useful construction consisted of learning how many different ways a person could become uncomfortable.

On the fourth afternoon, Sera Venn arrived with two workshop trainees.

They brought a repaired brake assembly for the narrow supply cart.

She set it on the bench and explained how it worked.

Dinraal listened.

When she finished, he asked, “Who else has tested it?”

“Cressa. Enna. And Beren, who said the handle was in the wrong place.”

“Was it?”

“For him, yes.”

“What did you do?”

“Made it adjustable.”

She showed him.

A simple change.

One he would probably have missed if he had made the whole mechanism with silver and admired how neatly it worked in his own hands.

“Good,” he said.

Sera smiled.

Then she looked toward the path.

“May we try it with a load?”

Halen gave permission.

They used stone.

Nobody suggested using a child to see whether the new brake would hold.

By the end of the day, the cart stopped where it was meant to stop.

Sera recorded the result.

Dinraal signed only the part of the work he had actually done.

The blue bowl was repaired at their kitchen table.

Mira came with the woman who owned it.

Her name was Adela.

Dinraal had learned that during the practice.

He wished he had learned it earlier.

The bowl’s pieces lay on a folded cloth.

He arranged them carefully while Mira watched from the opposite chair.

“Will you make it look new?”

He looked at Adela.

She shook her head.

“It wasn’t new when my sister gave it to me.”

Dinraal nodded.

The bowl had a worn rim.

A faint patch where the glaze had thinned.

One old chip near the base.

He left those alone.

The silver helped hold the pieces steady while he worked the joins.

He could have made another blue bowl.

That would have been easier.

It would not have been this one.

Isolde sat beside Mira, separating seed packets for the next lesson.

Adela told them about the kitchen where the bowl had once lived.

A window that would not close properly.

A neighbour who always knocked while already opening the door.

A sister who claimed the bowl was too large, then borrowed it whenever visitors came.

Dinraal worked slowly.

The seams remained visible when he finished.

Fine lines through blue.

Adela ran her thumb over one.

Mira leaned forward.

“Does it hurt it?”

“No,” Adela said.

“Can you still use it?”

She lifted the bowl.

Looked inside.

Then toward Dinraal.

“With care,” he said. “I’d keep it away from sudden changes in temperature.”

Adela nodded.

Mira looked relieved.

Isolde put one of the seed packets into the bowl.

Adela laughed.

“Already putting me to work?”

“Only if you want to.”

She looked at the packet.

Then at the little plant near the window.

“Yes,” she said. “I think I do.”

When they left, Mira carried the seeds.

Adela carried the bowl.

Dinraal’s next assignment was underground.

He had expected that.

He had not expected Halen to tell him to leave so soon.

They stood beside the proposed second shelter site, on a rise above the workshop quarter.

Dinraal had placed his hand against the exposed rock and spent the morning comparing what he could sense with the survey team’s readings.

A fractured section.

A change in the stone.

A colder seam that Meret wanted checked for water.

Useful information.

Incomplete information.

Halen marked the last observation.

“Thank you.”

Dinraal looked toward the rock.

“Where do you want the first cut?”

“Nowhere today.”

“We have time.”

“We need the water survey.”

“I could clear the entrance while—”

“No.”

Halen said it without apology.

Dinraal looked at him.

The builder held up the slate.

“I have enough work here for six people before we touch the face. If you open it now, we’ll all feel obliged to use the opening you’ve made.”

Dinraal started to answer.

Then stopped.

Halen was right.

It would be a beautiful entrance.

It might also be in the wrong place.

“All right.”

The builder nodded and turned toward his crew.

Dinraal remained standing for a moment.

Nobody hurried to give him another task.

It was an unfamiliar kind of freedom.

He walked back through Hearth carrying his gloves.

At the workshop, the evening class had begun.

At the school, Nessa was reading to a group beneath the shelter roof.

At home, Isolde was in the garden.

She looked up.

“Early.”

“Apparently they have work to do before they need me.”

“Good.”

He sat on the bench.

For a while, she continued tying stems.

Then she handed him a second piece of cloth.

“This one needs support.”

He took it.

No one was confused about whether he could help.

They were becoming clearer about when.

The air system on Avalon did something Hearth could not yet reproduce.

Hana had established a continuing exchange between the air, water, and rock in the new hollow.

Doctor Bell had measured it for days.

It continued without Hana remaining there.

Maura had spread the heat through the surrounding strata.

The account was extraordinary.

It was also specific.

A particular place.

Particular materials.

People whose abilities had developed through years of work.

Asha read the observations with an intensity that made Dinraal worry she might forget to blink.

Enna let her finish.

Then placed Hearth’s ventilation diagram beside the report.

“We still need filters.”

“I know.”

“And fans.”

“I know.”

“And the repair team still needs to understand them.”

Asha looked up.

“I wasn’t going to remove anything.”

“Good.”

Dinraal studied the two diagrams.

One showed something approaching a living cycle.

The other showed ducts, service panels, power connections, and a replacement schedule.

“It feels smaller,” he admitted.

Enna looked at him.

“Our system?”

“Yes.”

“It is smaller.”

“That wasn’t quite—”

“It also serves a smaller room.”

Asha smiled faintly.

Enna tapped the maintenance panel.

“This is work we can do now. That”—she pointed at the Avalon report—“is work we may learn from. We don’t make the people waiting for a shelter depend on whether we understand another world’s miracle by next week.”

Dinraal nodded.

They sent questions.

Careful ones.

Measurements they could compare.

Properties of the rock.

What Doctor Bell had ruled out.

No request that Hana abandon her work and somehow solve Hearth’s air from a distance.

Meanwhile, Meret’s team installed a second water isolation point.

The workshop produced spare fan mounts.

Two more people learned how to change the filters.

Dinraal spent an afternoon testing the manual controls with the silver withdrawn.

He found a handle that could not be reached easily from below.

They moved it.

The air continued to move.

The first practice from the school took fifteen minutes.

The second took twelve.

Then it rained, and the third took fourteen.

Julius brought the figures to Tiamat with the air of a man concerned that improvement had become unreliable.

She looked at the weather notes.

“It rained.”

“Yes.”

“The children wore coats.”

“Yes.”

“The lower turn was muddy.”

“We’ve repaired it.”

“Then the next figure will tell us whether the repair helped.”

He looked at her.

“So fourteen is not a failure.”

“Fourteen is a time.”

Dinraal, sitting beside the table, tried not to smile.

He had once made the same mistake with different numbers.

The practices changed as the residents taught the organizers what mattered.

Some groups needed to walk together.

Others moved better if people left from their own houses and met at the entrance.

The children were paired, but nobody assumed an older child could be made responsible for every difficulty a younger one might have.

Adults stayed within reach.

The shelter always had something waiting.

Food.

Water.

Books.

A familiar person near the door.

Aurelius began taking that last post.

Not every day.

Not alone.

He helped train the others who sat there.

Dinraal watched him explain it to a young volunteer.

“Ask their name.”

“If I already know it?”

“Then use it.”

“And if they’re frightened?”

“Don’t make them explain that before you help.”

The volunteer nodded.

Aurelius pointed toward the two exits.

“Know where those go. Know who is on the other side. If you tell someone they can leave, be certain they can.”

Dinraal looked away before his father noticed him watching.

Later, Aurelius found him carrying empty bowls.

“You could have joined us.”

“I was learning.”

The older man smiled.

“So was I.”

By the third week, Avalon’s young grey was teaching other grey.

The first patch of dark protective material had become a larger section.

Then a ridge.

Then the next ridge had begun learning from it.

Aster reported that neither she nor Lucas needed to remain at every part of the process.

Enna read the message aloud to the evening class.

She did not turn it into a lecture about humility.

She asked a practical question.

“What happens here when the person who knows how to repair the water pump is ill?”

Three people began answering at once.

Two named Meret.

The third named a technician.

Enna waited.

Then Sera Venn said, “We should be able to answer without a person’s name being the whole answer.”

Enna nodded.

“Show me.”

The class spent the following evenings making instructions.

Not grand manuals.

Short records tied to the actual equipment.

Where the tools were kept.

Which label no longer matched the old drawing.

How to check whether a fault had been isolated.

What could be repaired by the workshop and what required a qualified engineer.

Dinraal helped with illustrations.

He was better at those than he expected.

He had spent years understanding damaged systems by where his hands needed to go.

Drawing those places made him notice how much he usually failed to explain.

One evening, a trainee frowned at his sketch.

“I can’t tell which side I’m looking from.”

Dinraal began to point.

Stopped.

Turned the paper around.

“You’re right.”

He drew it again.

The trainee smiled.

There was nothing remarkable about being corrected.

That was what made the evening feel important.

At home, Isolde looked through the pages.

“You should keep a copy.”

“Of pump instructions?”

“Of something you made that will be useful when you aren’t in the room.”

He looked at the drawings.

Then put one in the desk.

The bad news arrived on a day that had begun well.

The second shelter site had passed its water inspection.

Halen’s crew could begin the entrance.

The repaired path had reduced the school group’s time again without anyone running.

Marian’s beans had produced their first proper harvest.

Isolde had picked them that morning and set them in Adela’s blue bowl, which its owner had lent her with considerable ceremony.

Dinraal was washing soil from his hands when Eve called.

Her voice was level.

Too level.

“Could you come to the relay room?”

He turned off the water.

“Is it an approach?”

“No. News from Avalon.”

“Are they safe?”

“The message concerns another world.”

Isolde looked up from the table.

He met her eyes.

They went together.

Inside the relay room, Eve had closed the ordinary displays.

Arcturus was on the communicator.

Alexander stood beside the map.

Asha sat very straight with a page in front of her.

Enna had both hands flat against the workbench.

Dinraal stopped just inside the door.

“What happened?”

Eve looked at him.

“Orrin.”

The name meant nothing to him.

Then it did.

A world on the list of places still subject to the houses.

Two million people.

The houses had arrived outside the expected collection cycle.

Nine Hands.

They had taken every child under sixteen.

Four hundred thousand.

For a moment, Dinraal heard the number without understanding it.

Then he tried to imagine the school field.

The children waiting for the story.

Mira carrying seeds.

He could not make enough fields.

“Where?” he asked.

“Outward,” Eve said. “Toward the far yard.”

“The sorting worlds?”

“No.”

Asha’s voice was barely audible.

“They didn’t sort them.”

Nobody in the room moved.

Dinraal read the account himself.

Then read it again.

There was no route they could reach.

No transport whose position they knew well enough to intercept.

The news had arrived after the departure.

Avalon had learned too late to stop it.

Hearth was farther away still, with no physical passage between the two communities and no means to place a ship beside those children.

He looked up.

“Do they know what the houses intend?”

Eve answered carefully.

“The assessment is that they intend to use the children against the Hungry.”

“As fighters?”

“No.”

The room seemed to lose air.

Dinraal stared at her.

Eve did not make him ask again.

“As material to occupy them. To delay them.”

Isolde took the back of a chair.

Her knuckles whitened.

Dinraal reached for her.

She shook her head once.

Not refusing him.

Trying to remain standing under what she had just understood.

Asha had written the number at the top of her page.

Nothing beneath it.

Alexander looked toward Arcturus.

“Any instruction from Avalon?”

“They are continuing the defensive work,” Eve said.

Dinraal turned.

“Continuing?”

The word came out too sharply.

Eve held his gaze.

“They cannot reach the children. They intend to secure the worlds they can defend, then evacuate the remaining places before the houses do it again.”

He knew the reasoning.

He had made decisions like it with smaller numbers.

Ships that could be reached.

Ships that could not.

Time that would not expand simply because the people asking for it deserved to live.

Knowing did nothing to quiet the anger.

He looked at the map.

For one wild moment, he wanted Asha to have missed something.

A route.

A pattern.

A way through the silver that had been waiting for him to stop being cautious.

Then he looked at her face.

She wanted it too.

That was precisely why neither of them should pretend.

He left the room before he said something unfair.

Isolde followed.

Outside, the afternoon continued.

A delivery cart rattled past.

Someone laughed near the workshop.

From the school came the sound of chairs moving.

Dinraal stopped beside the wall.

The silver had spread over his hand.

He had not asked it to.

Its edges pressed into the stone beneath his palm.

Isolde touched his wrist.

He drew it back.

A shallow mark remained.

He looked at it.

Then closed his eyes.

“I can’t do anything.”

She said nothing.

“Not for them. Not now.”

“No.”

He had needed the truth.

He hated hearing it.

For a while, they stood beside the building.

Then he said, “I was going to ask whether there was another route.”

“I know.”

“I knew there wasn’t an answer.”

“You wanted there to be one.”

He opened his eyes.

Isolde was crying quietly.

The sight cut through his own anger.

He turned toward her.

She stepped into him.

He held her while the town moved around them.

Neither tried to hide from the people who passed.

Neither could have explained what they needed anyway.

After a long time, Isolde said, “We have to go home.”

He looked down.

“The beans,” she said.

For a moment, he did not understand.

“They’re still on the table.”

He almost said it did not matter.

Then he stopped.

She was asking for somewhere to be.

Something their hands could do while their minds caught up.

He nodded.

They walked home without speaking.

The meal waited.

Neither wanted it.

Dinraal sat at the kitchen table while Isolde washed the beans again because she had forgotten she had already done it.

Then she stopped.

Looked down at her hands.

Turned off the water.

“I can’t keep doing ordinary things as though—”

Her voice failed.

Dinraal stood.

She leaned against him.

For a while, the only sound was the water dripping from the beans into the bowl.

A knock came at the door.

Dinraal almost ignored it.

Then he heard Aurelius.

“May I come in?”

Isolde wiped her face.

Dinraal opened the door.

Aurelius carried nothing.

No food.

No report.

He looked from one of them to the other and understood enough.

They sat together.

Dinraal told him.

The number.

The timing.

The destination.

The purpose the people on Avalon feared.

Aurelius listened without attempting to make the account bearable.

When Dinraal finished, the older man remained quiet.

Then he looked toward the bowl.

“Would you like me to put those on?”

Isolde nodded.

He stood and found the pan.

This time, he knew where it was.

Dinraal watched him fill it.

The small competence nearly undid him.

“You don’t have to make us feel better.”

Aurelius turned.

“I know.”

He set the pan on the stove.

“I’m making supper.”

Dinraal looked down.

His father returned to the table while the water heated.

He did not tell them they had to be strong.

He did not explain that they would be needed tomorrow.

He put a hand over Dinraal’s.

After a while, Isolde placed hers beside it.

They sat until the water began to boil.

The next morning, Dinraal tried to double the building shifts.

Halen refused.

Not loudly.

Not in front of the crew.

He took Dinraal aside near the new entrance and showed him the work schedule.

“Those people finished after dark yesterday.”

“We can bring others.”

“To do what?”

“Haul material. Prepare supports.”

“We can add haulers. We cannot invent another qualified inspection team before lunch.”

Dinraal looked at the schedule.

“We need to move faster.”

“Yes.”

Halen waited.

Dinraal heard the difference between agreement and obedience.

“How?”

The builder pointed.

“This delivery is late. That crew is waiting for a lift. These supports are being made one at a time because the workshop needs a second jig.”

Dinraal read the notes.

Specific problems.

Not a refusal to care.

“I can clear the delivery.”

“Yes.”

“And make the jig with them.”

“If Enna agrees the design is ready.”

He nodded.

Halen lowered the slate.

“I heard about Orrin.”

Dinraal looked away.

For a moment, he expected a familiar sentence.

Something about doing what they could.

Halen did not say it.

He looked toward the half-opened entrance.

“I’m not putting a tired crew under that roof because someone far away did something monstrous.”

Dinraal stood very still.

Then he nodded.

“You’re right.”

He meant it.

The words tasted bitter anyway.

Halen clapped his shoulder once.

Then returned to the work.

Dinraal went to the landing ground.

He found the delayed delivery.

He arranged the lift.

At the workshop, he helped build a second jig.

By evening, more supports were ready than the original schedule had allowed.

Nobody had worked an unsafe double shift to make them.

Hearth held a public meeting that night.

Mara Den insisted on it.

People had seen the faces coming out of the relay room.

Rumours were already moving faster than facts.

The meeting hall filled.

Some people stood outside by the open windows.

Dinraal sat beside Isolde near the front.

He did not give the first explanation.

Eve did.

She named Orrin.

Said what had been reported.

Distinguished the abduction from what the people on Avalon believed would follow.

She did not describe the feared purpose in terms the youngest children in the room would carry into their sleep.

She said the children had been taken toward the enemy’s distant battlefront and were in grave danger.

That was true.

It was enough for the public room.

Parents could ask further questions privately.

Mara explained what Hearth was changing.

Additional work where it could be done safely.

The second shelter.

Improved transport arrangements for residents who could not walk the routes.

More trained people on every watch.

Then someone near the back asked why the fleet was not going.

Dinraal stood.

He had known the question would come.

“We do not have their location,” he said. “We do not have a route that would put our ships where they are. Leaving without either would not bring us closer to them in any useful way.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know what our navigators can establish. I know what the relay carries. I won’t tell you our ships can reach a place we cannot locate.”

The man looked angry.

Dinraal did not resent him for it.

“So we stay here.”

“We keep people alive here,” Dinraal said. “And we help the people who can reach other worlds build the means to get more of their children out.”

It was not enough.

He could see that in the room.

It was what they had.

Afterward, people came forward.

Not all to argue.

A retired driver offered to take the shelter transport shift.

Two people asked about the workshop classes.

A woman brought a list of neighbours who would need help on the steep paths.

Dinraal stayed until the last person had been heard.

Isolde returned to the school the following day.

Dinraal went with her to carry containers.

At the door, Nessa stopped them.

“The children know something happened.”

Isolde nodded.

“What have you told them?”

“That children on another world were taken from their homes. That the adults here are working to keep this place safe. That they can ask us questions.”

Dinraal looked through the doorway.

Mira was drawing.

Two boys were building a long arrangement of blocks.

Another child sat beneath the window holding a book without opening it.

“What are they asking?”

“Whether their parents know where the shelter is.”

Isolde closed her eyes briefly.

Then opened them.

“We can show the parents.”

Nessa nodded.

“That was my thought.”

They changed the afternoon.

No timed practice.

No race.

Children showed their families the route they had learned.

Where the path widened.

Where the handrail began.

Which door led outside.

Who would be waiting.

Dinraal walked with Adela and Mira.

Mira explained everything.

Some details were wrong.

Teren corrected them gently at the entrance.

Adela listened as though the child were giving her information she could not have obtained anywhere else.

At the sleeping area, Mira pointed to the corner near the lamp.

“That’s where we sat when I broke the bowl.”

Adela nodded.

“Yes.”

“It’s better now.”

“The bowl?”

Mira considered.

“The path.”

Dinraal looked toward the entrance.

She was right.

That did not repair anything on Orrin.

It did mean the next frightened child walking here would have an easier way.

He stayed while Mira showed Adela the second exit.

He let her finish the explanation herself.

The month turned through work and weather.

The first shelter acquired a better surface room and a covered waiting area.

The second remained a construction site, but it was a construction site with drainage, inspected supports, and a crew that could explain the next three stages without calling Dinraal.

The route from the school became familiar enough that people stopped searching for signs at every turn.

The slower residents had transport assignments with actual names beside them.

The workshop classes produced their first independent repair teams.

Aurelius came home with stories about books people had borrowed and arguments they had started.

Aramaeis continued matching possessions to people.

Rhiannon trained others to run the shelter kitchen and complained that this meant they were rearranging it.

Tiamat told her that was evidence the training had worked.

Gilgamesh learned to drive the narrow supply cart because Cleopatra refused to let him carry everything simply because he could.

On Avalon, the wheel stood again on the north field.

Eve showed Dinraal the picture one evening.

The little houses hung from it.

Lights glowed against the dark.

Beyond it lay the places where their friends were building hollows and preparing for weddings.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he asked for a copy.

At home, he placed it beside Isolde’s notebook.

She found it after supper.

“It’s beautiful.”

“Yes.”

She touched the edge of the page.

“Do you still want to go on it?”

He looked at her.

The question reached back through several difficult weeks.

An evening on a bench.

A promise made without thinking it needed courage.

“Yes.”

“So do I.”

He took her hand.

They did not say that happiness would honour the children who had been taken.

They did not require the wheel to justify itself that way.

They wanted a life in which children could ride it.

They wanted their own lives too.

The picture remained beside the notebook.

The harvest supper was smaller than Rhiannon would have arranged.

That was because Isolde arranged it and refused assistance beyond what she asked for.

Aurelius came.

Aramaeis.

Rhiannon and Tiamat.

Gilgamesh and Cleopatra brought chairs and then carried them back outside when Isolde said they would eat in the garden.

Adela lent the blue bowl again.

This time, she stayed.

Marian’s beans were only part of the meal.

There were not enough to feed everyone by themselves.

Dinraal found that appropriate.

Other people had brought bread.

A dish from Rhiannon.

Something Cleopatra had obtained through means she described as entirely respectable.

Tiamat looked unconvinced.

They sat beneath the evening sky.

The new support beside the bean plant cast a thin shadow across the wall.

For the first few minutes, conversation stayed cautious.

Everyone knew why.

Then Aurelius asked Adela about the bowl.

She told him about her sister.

Gilgamesh said something foolish about carpentry.

Aramaeis corrected him.

Rhiannon corrected both of them.

The conversation found its way.

Dinraal tasted the beans.

Looked at Isolde.

She was watching him with absurd seriousness.

“Well?”

He swallowed.

“They’re good.”

“Just good?”

“Very good.”

“You paused.”

“I was eating.”

She laughed.

It was the first unguarded laugh he had heard from her in several days.

He wanted to keep it.

Instead, he passed the bowl.

That was the only useful way to make it continue.

Later, after the guests had gone, Dinraal and Isolde remained outside.

The plates were stacked.

The chairs could wait until morning.

From the road came the sound of someone walking home.

The First Weapon slept near the gate.

Isolde leaned against Dinraal’s shoulder.

“I don’t want every conversation about our future to happen after something terrible,” she said.

He turned toward her.

“Our future?”

“A child.”

He was quiet.

Then he nodded.

“Neither do I.”

“We keep asking what we need to know.”

“There are things we do need to know.”

“Yes.”

She turned his hand over in hers.

“But there’s a question we can answer ourselves.”

He waited.

“Do we want one?”

The garden seemed very still.

He thought of the room inside the house.

The spare bed Aurelius sometimes used.

The desk.

The notebook.

The things they would have to change and the things they would learn too late.

He thought of being frightened.

He could not remove that part.

“Yes,” he said.

Isolde’s fingers tightened around his.

“So do I.”

Neither smiled immediately.

The answer had weight.

It was also a relief.

Dinraal looked at her.

“I don’t know when we’ll be ready.”

“I’m not asking for a date.”

“All right.”

“I just didn’t want the answer buried under everything else.”

He touched her cheek.

“It isn’t.”

She kissed him.

Afterward, they sat close enough that he could feel her breathing settle.

They had not announced anything.

They had not promised themselves an easy path.

For the first time, though, they had spoken about the child they wanted without making the desire wait behind every possible reason to be afraid.

Inside, the clock marked the hour.

Across the field, the relay room’s window remained lit.

Dinraal listened.

Then he looked back at his wife.

The watch was being kept.

They stayed in the garden.