Chapter 22: The One Who Didn't Come In

It took Sacha two days to find the watcher, and he only managed it because he stopped looking for something hiding.

The Sixth Ascension's emissary had walked in down the foraging route.

Sacha had spent the first day assuming its counterpart would do the opposite — that it would be concealed, that the trick was to out-scout a scout. Khrr broke him of that on the second morning, in the only way available: by leading him out to the eastern approach, stopping at a perfectly ordinary shelf of broken footing forty body-lengths past his own scent-line, and waiting.

There was nothing on the shelf. Sacha looked at it for some time before he understood that this was the point.

The shelf overlooked his entire eastern approach.

It was upwind.

It had three exits.

It had been swept clean of debris in a way that no draft produced, and the sweeping was old — days old, tidy, the work of something that had arrived, made itself a place to sit, and then simply sat in it.

He climbed up onto the shelf.

Nothing objected.

You've been here since before the other one came, he sent, into open air, at nothing.

The reply arrived from four body-lengths behind him, and Sacha's entire body locked down hard against the instinct to spin.

Yes.

It was not large.

That was the first thing, and it took him several seconds to accept it, because everything else about the encounter had prepared him for size.

A cricket.

Old — genuinely old, in a way Sacha had not previously seen in this world, one hind leg carried stiff and a rear plate gone chalky at the edges.

It sat down on the shelf across from him with the care of something managing a body it had owned a long time, and looked at him, and did not send anything else.

Sacha found himself doing, involuntarily, the assessment he had done a thousand times through an ambulance's back doors:

age, mobility, compensation patterns, how much of the stiffness was injury and how much was simply years.

The answer came back years, which meant nothing on its own, except that everything he had met in this world so far had been young.

The rat was young.

Thresh was young.

He was two months old.

This thing was not.

You are looking at my leg, the cricket sent.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Sorry.

Do not be. It is the only interesting thing about me and I have very little else to offer a conversation.

No warmth in it, and no self-pity either — a flat statement from something that had made its peace with a fact some time ago.

It was broken in the year the corridor closed. It was not treated. There was no one to treat it. That is most of what you need to know about the war you are asking me about.

Sacha waited. The waiting went on long enough to become a statement.

Are you going to count me too? he sent, finally.

No. The cricket's antennae dipped fractionally. That was done four days before you found the mark on the concrete. The counting is not the interesting part.

What's the interesting part?

You are still asking questions, the cricket sent, of a thing you have every reason to attack.

What followed was the strangest hour of Sacha's second life, because the cricket did not negotiate, did not recruit, did not threaten, and did not appear to want anything at all.

It answered what he asked.

It volunteered nothing.

And every answer had the same peculiar quality, which took him most of the hour to name:

it spoke about the Ninefold Mother the way a very old civil servant speaks about a government — without pride, without loyalty, and with the total, unbothered assumption that it would outlast everyone currently discussing it.

The Ascension offered me terms, Sacha sent, eventually.

Of course.

You haven't.

No.

Why not?

The cricket adjusted its stiff leg.

Because they need you, it sent. We do not.

Sacha waited for the rest of it. There was no rest of it. He turned it over and found, underneath, something considerably worse than a threat.

Say the whole thing.

The Ascension is nine years old, the cricket sent. It grows by acquiring. Every claim it takes is a claim it must hold with bodies it did not breed, loyal to a doctrine it must keep proving. It cannot stop. A thing that grows by acquiring dies the year it fails to acquire. A pause. The Mother is not nine years old. When Sector Four comes down, ground will open. We will still be here when it opens. We do not need to be first.

And if I take their terms?

Then you will be a claim the Ascension must hold, the cricket sent, and one day it will fail to hold something, somewhere, and everything it holds will come apart in the same season. That has happened three times since I was young. They were not called the Ascension the first two times.

Sacha walked back alone, and did not go down to the deep ground immediately, and could not have explained to anyone why.

He had come out expecting the second offer.

What he had received instead was something he recognised from a different life entirely, and recognising it made him feel unaccountably tired:

he had just been told, politely and accurately, that he was not important enough to be recruited, and that the correct move for a genuinely powerful party was to wait for him to be crushed by circumstances and then step onto the ground afterward.

The Ascension wanted him because the Ascension needed everything it could get.

The Mother did not want him at all.

And of the two, only one had bothered to tell him the truth about his own position.

The neighbour who did not want him was, at this precise moment, the more honest one he had.

He stayed with it a while, in the dark, at the top of a cellar with three weeks left on the building above it.

Thresh found him there eventually.

Somebody had told it where he was, and there was only one somebody it could have been, and the two of them had evidently been talking about him — a thought he set aside to be uncomfortable about later.

It offered nothing, Thresh said, when he'd finished.

Nothing at all.

Good. The beetle settled its bad side against the wall. The Verge was offered a great deal. Twice. By the Ascension, both times, and the second offer was better than the first, and my god took it, because a thing that is offered twice feels wanted. A long pause. We were a claim they needed to hold. They held us until holding us stopped being convenient.

Sacha turned that over.

You're saying the one that wants me is the dangerous one.

I am saying the one that wants you will spend you, Thresh sent, and the one that does not want you will let the building fall on you. Neither of those is a friend. But only one of them will tell you what you are worth to your face, and you have just met it.