Chapter 24: Eight

Thresh drew the far side over two nights, and it was a worse map than the first one, and it said so.

I crossed once, it sent, marking a thin line east of the corridor and then leaving a great deal of floor blank around it. At speed. At night. Bleeding. I was not looking at anything except the next place to put a foot.

Draw what you saw anyway.

It will be wrong.

It'll be wrong in specific ways, Sacha sent. That's different from being blank. If you tell me there's a drop at forty lengths and there isn't, my people find out there's no drop. If you tell me nothing, they find out about a drop by falling into it.

The beetle worked slower after that, and marked several things with the deliberate uncertain smear it used for I believe this and I am not sure, and Sacha found that he trusted the finished map more for the smears than he would have for confidence.

What emerged was thin but real:

past the corridor's eastern extent the foundation network opened into something wider and wetter, and there was food there — actual food, decomposing organic matter in quantity, the first Thresh had described anywhere.

That mattered more than anything else on the map.

A route that arrived somewhere with water and rot was a route a colony could live at the end of.

It also, Thresh noted without emphasis, put them roughly two hundred lengths from the outermost scent-markers of the Ninefold Mother.

That close.

The Mother is not the danger there, Thresh sent. The Mother does not hunt. She holds. A pause. The danger there is that you will be in her house, and she will know it, and she has been deciding what to do about things in her house for longer than either of us has been alive.

There was one more thing on the map, off at the very edge, that Thresh marked and then sat beside without explaining.

What's that?

Where I came up, the beetle sent. Seven of us came up there. It was the last place we were eight and then it was the first place we were seven, and I do not know which of those it is on a map.

Sacha looked at the mark for a while.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Do you want it left off?

No. Thresh did not move. Leave it. Your people should know there is a bad place there. That is a use for it.

Choosing the eight took Sacha most of a day and was, by a considerable margin, the worst work he had done since the second death.

He had a list of criteria that made sense. Small frames, for the gaps. Cerci for vibration-sense in unmapped dark.

Increvable for duration, because the route had no water in its middle third.

One Carapace, over his own objection, because if something down there needed to be held off in a passage barely wide enough for two abreast, then one broad back was worth four fast ones. Khrr leading.

The criteria were sound. What the criteria did not tell him was who.

He walked the lines twice.

On the second pass he found himself hesitating in front of a small Cerci female — one of the sharpened generation, born in the deep ground, night-adapted in a way the duct-raised ones had never been — and realised he was hesitating because she was the best scout he had, and that his hesitation was not tactical.

He put her on the list.

Then he stood there for a while afterward, disliking himself in a way he had not expected to be doing at this hour.

You have done this before, Thresh observed, later.

I've allocated crews before. It's not the same. I was never the one who decided which of them ended up in the building.

And now you are.

Now I'm the only one who is.

Yes, Thresh sent, with something that was not unkind. That is the whole of it. You have been a god for two months and you have spent the entire time being a very good officer. This is the first hour of the other job.

Sacha did not sleep that night, in the limited sense that this body slept.

He went over the eight names four times looking for a substitution that improved the group and each time arrived back at the same list, which was supposed to be reassuring and was not, because the list being correct was never the part that had bothered him.

At some point in the small hours he caught himself doing something he had not done since the first week:

reaching, out of pure reflex, for a phone that had not existed for two months, to call somebody more senior than himself and ask them to sign off on it.

There was nobody more senior than himself.

There was not going to be, ever again, in any decision that mattered.

He put that down carefully, the way he put everything down, and went back to the list.

They left on the ninth evening before the date.

There was no ceremony, because there was no grammar for ceremony and Sacha would not have known how to build one that meant anything.

The eight assembled at the fracture mouth.

The rest of the colony did not gather to watch, on Sacha's order, because sixty roaches converging on a departure point was a pattern, and patterns were the thing they could least afford to make where anyone might read them.

He walked the line one last time.

Eight bodies.

He touched an antenna to each, which meant nothing operational and cost nothing and was, as far as he could tell, the only thing he had.

Khrr went last, and stopped in front of him, and waited.

Sacha had spent four days trying to think of what to send and had arrived at nothing that the channel could carry and nothing that scent could hold.

In the end he did the only thing available, which was to lay a single glyph on the floor between them — the one they had built in the first week, back at the water heater, that had originally meant come back to the reporting crawl and had never been given any other use.

Khrr read it.

Held still a moment.

Then it marked the same glyph beside his, which in two months it had never once done, and went into the dark.