Chapter 26: Nine

Sacha did not wait for Khrr to come back.

That was the decision, and he made it inside a single hour on the night the eight left, and it was the first order he had given in two months that he could not undo, could not test first, and could not explain to anyone whose agreement he wanted.

The reasoning was ugly and simple.

Nine subjects under a season old.

That figure had been sitting in him since the emissary walked out of his gallery, and he had spent nine days doing what he always did with a bad finding — building perimeter, doubling watch, preparing for the threat to come from outside.

The threat had not come from outside.

The threat had already been inside for long enough to walk four turns into the deep ground, count a nursery, and leave.

And I have spent nine days pointing every scout I own at the horizon.

He did not tell Thresh.

He did not tell the lines.

He built it himself, over a day and a half, out of the only material he had that nobody else could read: the drill grammar he and Khrr had spent two months inventing, which existed nowhere except between the two of them and in the marks on the reporting crawl floor.

Then he broke his own colony into pieces.

It was not framed as a security operation, because a security operation that announces itself catches nothing.

It was framed as a redistribution — the deep ground was cold and the nursery needed relocating before the date, everyone knew that, and nobody questioned it when Sacha split the colony into four groups and put each one in a separate chamber with a separate rotation and separate feeding times.

What the four groups did not know was that he had built the split so that no individual could see more than a quarter of the colony at once.

Ever.

Under any rotation.

If someone was counting for the Ascension, they were now counting a quarter.

And if the next figure that came back out of his territory was wrong in a way he could predict — if it came back as fifteen, or sixty-one and a half, or any of the four specific wrong numbers he had deliberately engineered — then he would know which quarter it had come from.

He set the whole thing up in thirty-six hours and told precisely nobody what it was for.

The engineering of the four wrong numbers was the part he was quietly proud of and would later be least able to defend.

Each chamber was given a slightly different count of its own membership through the routes and rotations available to it — one that would over-report by four if you counted at feeding, one that would under-report by six if you counted at watch change, and so on.

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None of the discrepancies were large enough to look deliberate.

All of them were large enough to be distinctive.

It was a good trap.

He had built worse ones with more resources in his old life, standing over a patient whose symptoms did not add up, ordering the one test that would separate two diagnoses that looked identical from the outside.

The difference, which did not occur to him for another six days, was that a test on a patient ends when the result comes back.

The cost showed up faster than the result.

Splitting a colony that had spent two months learning to move as one thing broke every efficiency the Essaim lines had grown into existence.

Food transfer times doubled.

Two of the four groups stopped being able to run a full watch and had to be propped with borrowed bodies, which undercut the isolation he'd built the whole thing around.

On the third day a young roach died in the second chamber of something Sacha was fairly sure a properly staffed nursery rotation would have caught, and he made himself go and look at it rather than take the report secondhand.

He had traded the colony's actual functioning for information about a betrayal he could not prove existed.

He went and looked at the dead young one because he had a rule about that, and the rule had survived two deaths and a change of species.

You looked.

You did not take the report secondhand and you did not let distance do the work that distance always wants to do.

It was very small.

It had been alive for eleven days.

It had died in a chamber that had a rotation on paper and not enough bodies to run it, and there was nothing on it that told him whether a properly staffed nursery would have caught the thing in time or not, which meant he was going to carry it as though the answer were yes.

He stayed with it a while.

There was no one to hand it to and nothing to write.

Thresh worked it out on the fourth day, because of course it did.

You have cut your own colony into four, it sent, without preamble. Nine days before the ground opens. With your best eight underground and unreachable.

Yes.

Why.

Because the number nine can't be counted from outside, Sacha sent, and I have been behaving for nine days as though it could.

The beetle absorbed that.

When it answered, it was slower than usual, and Sacha understood that he was being taken seriously in a way he had not entirely wanted.

The Verge never looked inward, Thresh sent. Not once. It did not occur to my god that the danger could be domestic, and I do not know to this day whether it was, and I have had a season to think about very little else. A long silence. You are wrong about the timing. You should have done this on the first night.

I know.

But you are not wrong to have done it.

The answer came on the sixth day, and it was not what he had built the trap to catch.

None of the four numbers came back wrong.

Nothing left his territory carrying anything.

The Ascension did not send a second emissary, and the eastern approach stayed exactly as quiet as it had been.

What happened instead was that one of the four groups — the third, in the old duct chambers, the one with the highest proportion of duct-raised older stock — simply stopped reporting on schedule.

Not fled.

Not attacked.

It missed a rotation, and then it missed the next one, and when Sacha went up himself he found fourteen roaches sitting in a chamber they had not been ordered to leave, doing nothing at all, oriented in no particular direction.

He knew what he was looking at before he had a word for it, because he had seen the human version a hundred times in the back of a truck — the specific stillness of people who have stopped believing that anything they do will change what happens next.

Not rebellion.

Not sickness.

Fourteen subjects who had been split off from their god, given no explanation, and left alone long enough to arrive at the only conclusion available to them.

He walked in among them.

Nothing scattered.

Nothing oriented.

A duct-raised female he had known since before the deep ground let him touch an antenna to her back and did not respond to it at all, and that was the moment the thing landed on him properly.

He had spent two months teaching them that when the god moved, it meant something.

Then he had moved them for a reason he refused to give, and they had done what any thinking population does with an instruction that has no visible logic behind it.

They had stopped assuming there was one.

[Sanctuary: internal cohesion falling.

Faith: declining.]

The first negative reading he had received since the crawlspace.