Chapter 35: The Far Side

The column came up on the fourteenth day, into wet air, at a fracture mouth that Khrr's directions had described with an accuracy Sacha would think about later.

He sent scouts first — three, staggered, with a full hour between each — because coming up out of the ground into a territory forty lengths from the Ninefold Mother's outer markers was not a thing to do as sixty-one bodies in a queue.

The staggering was Essaim doctrine, not his.

He had asked, this time, before deciding — the habit was three weeks old and still felt strange every time he used it — and what came back was an ordering he would not have thought of:

not three scouts at equal intervals, but three at increasing ones, so that if the first two returned clean the third went up into a surface that had already been quiet for two hours. It cost more time. It bought a better read.

He took it, and noticed that he no longer felt the small ugly resistance he had felt the first time a foraging block corrected his spacing.

That was probably progress.

He did not have time to examine it.

The first came back at the fourth hour with the wet ground exactly as promised: seepage running down a face of old brick, rot in quantity, more food in one place than the colony had seen since the duct.

Sacha made her repeat the report twice, because after fourteen days of dry fracture he did not trust his own eagerness to hear it.

The second came back at the sixth with the Mother's markers, read at distance and confirmed. Forty lengths, as Khrr had written.

Not two hundred, as Thresh had drawn.

He noted that the beetle had been wrong and that the beetle had marked that section as uncertain when it drew it, and that the difference between those two facts was most of what made Thresh worth having.

The third went up at the eighth hour and did not come back at all.

Sacha held the column underground for thirteen hours, and they were the worst thirteen hours of his second life, because there was nothing to do in them.

He could not go up himself and leave sixty bodies leaderless in a fracture mouth.

He could not send a fourth after the third without paying twice for the same information.

He could not retreat; behind him lay fourteen days of gaps and no water and a fold that had cost four days to open.

He could not even hold indefinitely — the column had come up because the column was out of food, and every hour underground was an hour the nine young spent not eating.

So he did the only useful thing available, which was to sit down and work out what the third scout's absence actually meant, rather than what it felt like.

It felt like a kill.

It was not necessarily a kill.

A scout who does not return has been killed, or taken, or trapped, or has found something significant enough to keep watching, or has gone the wrong way in unfamiliar wet ground and is currently lost within a hundred lengths of where it should be.

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Of those five, exactly one was a reason to abandon the surface, and he had no evidence for it over the other four.

He wrote himself the stopping condition before he needed it, because he had learned that lesson at the cost of an eleven-day-old.

At hour twelve we go up regardless, in blocks, nursery last. Not because it is safe. Because staying is not either, and I am not going to let waiting feel like caution.

Then he sat in the dark with sixty of his people and waited out the remaining hours, and hated it precisely as much as he had hated it in the back of a truck with the doors closed and the outcome on the other side of them.

At the twelfth hour, as he was laying the movement order, something came down the fracture mouth toward them.

It was not the third scout.

Every drilled body in that column held position exactly as taught, which Sacha registered somewhere at the back of his attention as the four rules finally earning what they had cost.

It was one of the eight.

An Increvable — one of the two who had carried failing Cerci on their backs through the dry stretch, nineteen days and a lifetime ago.

It was thinner than Sacha had ever seen a roach that was still walking.

Most of one antenna was gone, and one of the rear legs was not taking weight, and it had clearly been coming down that fracture for some time before anyone heard it.

It stopped in front of him.

It did not report to the column, or to the nearest body, or to anything else.

It found the god in a chamber of sixty and came directly to him, which meant it had been holding something for long enough to have decided exactly who it was for.

Then it did the only thing it had strength left to do, and laid a report on the floor in Khrr's grammar with a leg that was not working properly.

Six alive.

Khrr taken.

North.

Sacha read it three times, and then made himself do the thing that had to come first, which was not reading it a fourth time.

He got the Increvable off the floor and onto damp substrate. He got water into it — the seep on the surface was forty lengths away and unreachable, so he sent two Essaim up the fracture with soaked scraps and had them back inside twenty minutes, which was a rotation the colony had never drilled and executed anyway.

He kept his own antennae on it the whole time and read what he could:

nineteen days of hard travel, one antenna taken cleanly rather than torn, the rear leg damaged in a way that suggested weight rather than a strike.

It had walked back into the gaps alone, on that leg, carrying three words.

How long, he asked it, when it could hold a thought.

Four days. The marks came slowly. Khrr sent me on the second day. I was the slowest. It said the slowest should carry it because the slowest would still be walking when the fast ones stopped.

Sacha absorbed that.

Khrr had chosen a courier by working out who would survive the journey rather than who would complete it quickest, which was correct, and cold, and exactly the kind of arithmetic Sacha had spent three months modelling in front of it without ever once explaining.

Where are the six.

Holding. North face of the wet ground, under brick. The leg gave and it started again. Khrr said hold and do not follow. It said the god would come and the god would need somewhere to put sixty bodies.

That was the part that reorganised everything, and Sacha sat back from it and let it land properly.

Khrr had been taken four days ago.

Before it was taken, it had established a defensible position for a colony that at that point had no confirmed plan to arrive.

It had detached a courier chosen for endurance.

And it had left standing orders that its own people were not to come after it.

Every one of those decisions was correct.

All three of them together described somebody who had understood, in whatever time it had, that the arrival of sixty-one people mattered more than the recovery of one.

You did not get that from me, Sacha thought, for the second time in eight days. I would have given the same order. I don't know that I would have given it about myself.

Taken was not a word he and Khrr had ever built a mark for.

There had never been a reason to. What was on the floor was the glyph for carried — the one from the nursery relays, the one that meant a body being moved by other bodies — with the possessive inverted, which was not grammar either of them had invented and which Sacha understood instantly and completely anyway.

Somebody had come for Khrr specifically.

Somebody had taken it alive, and carried it, and gone north.

North was the direction Khrr's own message had told them to go.