Chapter 5

Voss had put a checkpoint in the arch.

It was a good one; Nora had to give him that. Pallets and a car door and two riot shields had been lashed into a barricade across the gateway, with a gap in the middle just wide enough for one person. Four of his people stood behind it in black fleeces, with a camping stove going and a hand-lettered sign propped against the plaque: TERMINAL EXPEDITION — AUTHORISED STAFF ONLY. Behind them the dry ledge ran away into the dark beside the black water, and the iron wheel with its three worn hollows shone in someone’s head torch.

“Morning,” said the man in the gap. He was young and nervous and had a baton he kept touching. “Sorry. Commander’s orders. Registered staff only past this point.”

“We cleared it,” said Gus. “The whole gallery. Yesterday. There’s a notice about it, it went to everyone. Firstfoot. You’ll have seen it. It’s got our names on it.”

“I’m sorry, sir. Commander’s orders.”

“Your Commander’s orders,” said Beatrice, in the voice Nora imagined she used on drunks in A&E at three in the morning, “can come and discuss them with me in person. I’m Dr Prothero from the General. Last night I closed holes in thirty-odd people from this town with my bare hands, and one of the holes I couldn’t close belonged to a woman called Rosamund Achterberg. Move.”

The young man looked at her. He looked over his shoulder at the ledge. He looked at Gus’s sword and Nora’s staff-rule and the fire axe on Gus’s back. When he moved his hand from the baton, blood ran out of his cuff.

Beatrice set the hockey stick against the barricade. “How long has that been bleeding?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Show me.”

He held out his arm. Under the fleece, a strip of shirt had been tied round a deep cut. Beatrice loosened it and put her hand over the wound. The light came, and Beatrice bent closer as the torn edges drew together into a pink, angry seam.

She kept her hand on the young man’s arm until the light had gone, then tied the strip of shirt back over the seam. “Keep it clean.” She glanced at Gus. “Skin I can do. Bone, not yet.”

Then the big quiet man came up behind the young man out of the dark of the arch. Gethin Lloyd, Sentinel, level five. He looked at the three of them, and at the hockey stick in Beatrice’s hands.

“Rosamund,” he said.

“Last night,” said Nora. “At the hall. Holding the door.”

Something went across his face and was put away again. He looked over his shoulder at the dark of the arch, where voices were coming and going. Then he looked back at Nora and lowered his voice.

“The Commander knew which way you went yesterday,” he said. “Which ramp, what time, the grille, the whole route. Before you’d come back up. Somebody told him. I’d be careful who you trade with.”

Nora felt the cold of the arch go straight through her coat. Forty minutes, Rook had said, on the first morning. She had not thought far enough about that.

“Why are you telling us?” said Gus.

“Because Rosamund sold me my ferry ticket every Friday for six years, and she always said good morning,” said Gethin Lloyd. “Let them through, Kieran.”

“Sir, the Commander said—”

“The Commander said authorised staff.” Gethin glanced at the ranking in the air beside him. “The node says she’s senior staff. That’s authorised enough for me.” He stood aside. “We’ve not got past the big hall. There’s a shaft at the far end of it, where that heron thing went down. The cage is broken. Commander’s sent for rope.”

“Thank you,” said Nora.

“Kieran should have sent for a dressing,” Gethin said. “Thank you for seeing to him. And don’t get killed where I have to write it down.”

“We’re back before eleven,” Beatrice said, when they were through. “That’s when they come up the hill. The hall held last night with all of us in it.”

They went through the cleared gallery fast.

It was strange to Nora how quickly a place could stop being terrifying. The cabinets under the water, the fish wall with its little yellow fish swimming the wrong way, the window over the great hall: she knew them now, and the knowing took the fear out of the first hour and put a kind of hard impatience in its place. The dead Warden still lay on its side in its basin. Voss’s people had been at it with crowbars and got nowhere. The thread from Lorraine’s band, thin as a hair, ran straight down the central channel to the shaft.

The hookjaws came for them in the cabinet gallery, the way they had come for them on the slipway three nights ago: six of them, out of the black water, spreading in their wide grey crescent.

It was not the same fight. Nora understood that within two seconds and nearly laughed.

She put a Quickscript anchor on the ledge rail at her feet without breaking stride, one second, and fed a Bolt into it. A second went on the stone ahead of Beatrice. Then she stood back.

Gus couldn’t swing high or twist with his ribs strapped. He didn’t need to. He waited for them on the narrow ledge, and when the first came at him low, the way they did, he put the sword through its neck with Edge burning along it.

The Sweep carried a blue half-moon of it into the one behind. That one staggered, and he finished it on the backswing. The next pair came over the rail together and found the snares.

Two cracks of blue, and they went over backwards into the water and didn’t come up. The last two hung back at the far end of the ledge, where the slipway ones had always hung back, waiting for the others to do the work. Nora put a Bolt into each of them from fifteen metres. Seventy-nine. Seventy-nine. They didn’t need a second.

It took perhaps twenty seconds. On the slipway, six of them had nearly killed them both and taken Danny.

Beatrice had not had to use Rosamund’s hockey stick. She stood with it half raised and looked from one dead hookjaw to the next.

“Right,” she said. “I see. You’re not normal people any more, are you.”

“We’re level five,” said Gus. He was grinning and trying not to. Nora knew exactly why: because it was horrible, and it felt wonderful. He stood among six of the things that had taken his brother off the mud three nights ago, with the sword loose in his hand and not a mark on him. For a moment he let himself feel exactly how strong he was now. Then he wiped the blade, checked both edges, and put the feeling away carefully, like something he would want again later.

Nora checked anyway. On the shingle yesterday morning a hookjaw had taken two Bolts and a miss to die. Now one did seventy-nine, and the thing just stopped. The fire axe had done thirty a swing; the sword did forty-three before Edge.

“What are you, then?” said Beatrice. “In numbers. I’d like to know what I’m walking behind.”

Gus, very pleased with himself, put his whole sheet up where they could both read it.

“You’re an invoice with a sword,” said Beatrice.

“I’m a sum,” said Gus. “I’m a very good sum.”

Beatrice tapped the injury line. “That stays until I’ve treated it. Even if you gain another level.”

“You do know how to spoil a moment.”

Nora was looking at the skill levels. “Guard four. It never told you that.”

“It only tells you about the big ones,” Gus said. “I asked.”

“And you,” Beatrice said to Nora. Nora showed her, because fair was fair.

“Two empty aspects,” said Beatrice.

“Not for long,” said Nora.

Up at the hall, Imogen Pask had watched them go from the doors until they were out of sight at the bottom of Chapel Hill, and then she had gone back inside and done the sums.

Three hundred and eleven people. Nineteen sacks of porridge oats, which was nineteen days if nobody came and three if everybody did. Forty-two litres of milk, which was today. Four camping stoves, two of them Bernadette’s. One doctor, who had just walked out of the door with a sword-carrier and a woman who shot lightning. She wrote it all in the hall’s booking diary under Tuesday: Brownies (cancelled), because that was the only book she had. She looked at it and decided she would not think about it again until noon. The phones still worked inside the town and nowhere beyond it. A few families had driven out on the first morning, and nobody had come back to say what they found. Calls to Leeds and Bristol rang and rang. Texts sat at sending. The radio was a hiss with a voice in it sometimes, too far away to make out.

The hall had slept. That was the strange thing. After a night like last night it should have been a room full of people lying awake staring at the ceiling. Instead, when she had walked the rows at five, they had been asleep: properly asleep, mouths open, children curled against parents. Open House, the interface had said, radius increased. She did not know what that meant, and she found that she did not care how it worked, only that it did.

In the kitchen, beside the camping mat where Lorraine Petch lay under three blankets, Bernadette Okoro sat and talked to her. Not to anyone else. To Lorraine, who could not hear, in the same comfortable voice she used to use on Year Sevens who wouldn’t eat their peas, about the weather and the price of butter and a man in the queue who had tried to take two rolls. Every so often she wet a cloth and touched it to Lorraine’s lips.

“She can’t hear you, Bernie,” Imogen said.

“You don’t know that,” said Bernadette. “Nobody knows that. I’d want somebody to talk to me.”

Out in the yard, Tomasz the Mender was on his knees in front of the broken doors with both palms flat on the frame where it had come away from the wall. The cracked brick under his hands was creeping back into line, one course at a time, slowly, the way frost creeps up a window but backwards. His brother handed him tea and he didn’t look up. At a quarter to ten a notice opened above his head and he read it and swore in Polish and went on working.

At ten there was an argument, and it was not about porridge. A man from the Harbour estate had kept one of Voss’s leaflets back from the stove. He stood on a chair and read it out: food, power and protection for all registered staff.

“Registered,” he said. “That’s all it takes. Put your name down, walk down the hill, get fed. Why are we sitting up here in the cold with a cook and a woman with a torch?”

Half the hall wanted to hear it. Imogen could see that in the way they didn’t look at her. A woman from Mill Lane told him what she thought of Voss’s leaflets in words Imogen would not have used in front of the Brownies, and he told her back. Then Jarek Wiśniewski stood up.

“He’s right,” Jarek said. He was a Breaker. He had been at the yard doors all night, and his knuckles were split. “They’ve got generators down there. They’ve got guns. They’ve got a Marshal.” He didn’t look at his brother. “I’m going.”

“Jarek,” said Tomasz, from the doors. He was kneeling with his palms flat on the frame he had mended, and he didn’t take them off it.

“Come with me.”

“Somebody has to fix the door.” Tomasz didn’t look round. “One breaks it, one fixes it. You said.”

Jarek stood there a while longer with his coat over his arm. Then he went.

Eleven people went down the hill at half past ten, Jarek among them. Imogen stood at the door and counted them out the way she’d counted them in. She wrote it in the diary under Brownies (cancelled): 311, and under that, 300.

She looked at it for a long time and didn’t tell anyone. It had counted them out too. Then she sat down for the first time since five and was immediately found by three children.

“Why don’t we get a class?” asked the oldest, who might have been nine.

“Because you’re not staff, love,” Imogen said, before she could think about it, and then heard what she’d said. The children went away satisfied and she sat there feeling cold.

Not staff. The interface had decided who counted and who didn’t, and it hadn’t asked anybody.

At eleven in the morning, as it turned out, it changed its mind about one of them. Precious Adeyemi from the Harbour estate turned eighteen at four minutes past, the time her mother had always told her. Her mother had been counting it down in a whisper since breakfast. At four minutes past, a notice appeared in the air in front of her for anyone near enough to see.

The hall went quiet. People moved back without being asked and made her a space in the middle of the floor. For ten minutes three hundred people did not make a sound while a girl sat cross-legged on the badminton court with her eyes shut and her lips moving. When she opened them and chose, a Common class called Signaller that let her send three words to anyone she could see, the hall cheered the way it had cheered Bernadette. Precious sent her first message across the hall to her mother, who read it in the air and laughed out loud, and nobody ever found out what the three words were.

Margaret Ogden was by the doors where she had been for two days, the phone in her lap. Imogen went and sat beside her because it was the only useful thing she could think of to do.

“They’re going down to look,” Imogen said. “Those two. And the doctor.”

“I know,” said Margaret.

“If anyone finds him.”

“I know,” said Margaret again. Then, after a while: “It keeps asking me. Every time I look at the air. Class assessment is available.” She turned the phone over in her lap. “There’s one in there I nearly took last night. I won’t tell you what it’s called. You’ll laugh.”

“I won’t laugh.”

“You will.” Margaret almost smiled. “I’ll take it when he’s home. He can laugh first.”

They sat together, two women in their sixties in a draughty hall on the side of a hill, and watched the door.

The shaft was as Gethin had said. It was a square dark hole in the floor at the end of the hall, two metres across, with the remains of an iron cage hanging off a chain at the top, its floor torn out. Nora shone her light down. It went down a long way and found water.

The thread went down with it.

“Rope,” said Gus. “We’ve got rope.”

“Twenty metres of rope, and that’s thirty at least.” Nora stood back from the edge. “And whatever’s at the bottom of it knows that’s where people come down.”

“And you can’t climb,” said Beatrice to Gus, “with your ribs, unless you want to arrive at the bottom with a lung in your lap.”

Gus looked down the shaft for a long, hungry moment. Nora knew exactly what he was thinking. The thread went down there. Danny’s thread, wherever it was, almost certainly went down there too. It was the straightest line to everything he wanted.

“There’s another way,” said Beatrice. She was looking not at the shaft but at the wall beside it, where a narrow door stood flush with the stone, so flush that Nora had missed it the day before. It had no handle. Set into the stone above it at eye height was a small plain plaque.

She stood in front of it and the words came.

“Well,” said Gus. “Hello.”

“We don’t know where it goes,” Nora said. “The shaft goes where the thread goes. The door goes wherever maintenance went.”

“Voss’s people are bringing rope,” said Beatrice. “If we take the door, they’ll be down that shaft ahead of us.”

Behind them, far off along the walkways, a voice Nora knew was calling for rope.

“You two go down the shaft,” Gus said. “Rope as far as it reaches and climb the rest. You’re both lighter than me. I’ll take the door and meet you.” He said it lightly, and Nora could see what it cost him.

“No,” said Nora.

“It’s the quick way. It’s where the thread goes—”

“And it’s where the Warden came up, and we don’t know what’s at the bottom, and you can’t climb back up if we need you.” She looked at him. “We don’t split up. Not in here. The door, together, or nothing.”

He looked at her and then at Beatrice, who folded her arms.

“Door,” he said. “Together.”

Nora put her hand flat on it. It was warm, very slightly, like a radiator turned low. Somewhere inside the wall something clicked, and the door swung inwards on silent hinges onto a dry stone stair going down.

“Quickly,” she said. “Before he finds out he isn’t senior.”

The stair went down two turns and came out in a long, low passage lined with doors.

The first door opened onto a room with no furniture at all. The whole floor of it was the city.

Nora stood in the doorway and couldn’t speak. It was a map, a model, worked in stone and bronze into the floor from wall to wall: every terrace and stair and street of the drowned city laid out in miniature, the roofs no bigger than her thumbnail, the bridges like threads. And real water ran in it. Tiny channels carried it from the high terraces at the edges down through the streets, in bright moving lines, to the centre of the room. There a dark glass dome no bigger than a teacup sat inside a little cage of bronze ribs, and every channel in the model ran towards it.

“It’s a working model,” she said. “It’s a survey. Somebody built a survey that runs.” She went down on one knee at the edge and put her face close to it. “Look. We’re here.”

She traced it for them with a finger a hair’s breadth above the moving water. The arch at the near edge, where Voss’s checkpoint was. The long gallery behind it, and the great hall with its basins and the square black shaft. This passage, running out sideways from beside the shaft to a court with a trough in it. From the court, a bridge as thin as a thread over a street, to a long tilted hall where basins stood one below another down a slope. And below the basins, in the deepest corner of the model, nothing she could read. That corner had cracked and sunk long ago. Silt had come in over it and dried to a grey skin, and whatever had been laid out there was gone under it. Only a little patch of blue water showed through.

“The shaft goes straight down to that,” she said. “So does the thread. We go round, as far as the map goes. After that we’re on our own.”

Marks were cut here and there into the bronze among the roofs: small signs, picked out in a darker metal. A hand against a door. A bird’s foot in a ring, on a building that might have been the one they were standing under. And low down, at the edge of the silt beside the little blue patch of water that must be some kind of sump, half buried, a figure lying on its back with its hands folded on its chest and a ring round its wrist.

She didn’t know what it meant. She looked at it for as long as she dared before she drew it in the notebook, exactly, with its position.

Then she did what she would have done with any survey: she looked for the ways out. The arch, where Voss was. The shaft, where the Warden had gone. And one more. From somewhere under the silt, a line of tiny steps climbed away through the model’s outer wall to a squat round tower at the landward edge of the city, at the far northern end of the beach, where the shingle gave out into rocks. A stair, and a way out that didn’t go past anyone’s checkpoint. She drew that too, carefully, with a box round it.

“Lovely, isn’t it,” said someone behind them.

Sebastian Rook was sitting on the sill of a window high in the side wall, where a light well came down from the street far above, with his legs dangling and his blue rope coiled beside him. He had come down the light well on the rope, as if that were the obvious way to come into a room.

“Light well,” he said, seeing Nora’s face. “The door’s no good to me. I’m not senior.” He swung down on the rope and landed lightly at the edge of the model. “I’m not as quick as you two. You’ve made a lot of noise on that ranking since yesterday.”

“Where’ve you been?” said Gus, pleasantly.

“Round. Looking.” Sebastian crouched by the model and looked down at it for a long time, the way Nora had: at the shaft, at the sump, at the line of tiny steps climbing to the round tower. “Haven’t seen Voss’s lot since yesterday, if that’s what you’re asking. They’re all at the arch with their sandwiches.” He looked up. “There’s something big in the black water past the stair down there. One of it. Don’t kneel by the edge.”

“Thanks,” said Nora. Then, because she had wondered it since yesterday morning and never asked: “How did you know when Voss would get to the grille? That first morning.”

“Everyone knows Voss’s timetable.” He didn’t even look up. “He tells it to the air at the terminal every morning, and the air tells anybody who asks. Try it.” He smiled. “Least I can do.” He stood and coiled his rope over his shoulder. “Hope you find him, Gus.”

He went back up the rope, and his feet went off the sill, and the rope hissed once against the stone, and he was gone.

Nora tried it. “Where is Voss?”

It told her at once, the way it had told Gus about Danny. But she was senior, and it told her things it wouldn’t tell the hall. Whether it would tell Rook where she was, she had only his word. And a quarter of an hour ago she had heard Voss’s people shouting for rope in the great hall, not eating sandwiches at the arch. She didn’t say so. She kept both thoughts, the way she kept two readings that disagreed until a third settled it.

The second door opened onto the workshop, and that was worse, in a different way.

It was a room for two people. She understood that before anything else. Two benches stood under two windows that looked out over a court where green water lay in a trough. Two rows of hooks held two sets of tools, worn to the shapes of two different pairs of hands. There were two stools, and two cups on a shelf above the benches, one squat with a thumb-rest on its handle and one tall and narrow. On the end of one bench, cut into the wood with a knife and re-cut many times, was a small sign: a bird’s foot inside a ring. On the end of the other was a hand held up flat against a door.

Nora stood between the two benches. It was very quiet. The light came in through the two windows and lay across the two stools the way it must have lain every morning when they came in. On the lower one, a folded rag covered a split in the seat; she could see where it had slipped and been pushed back often enough to polish the wood beneath. The light had lain there every morning since, for however long it had been, on two people’s tools on two people’s hooks, and on the squat cup and the tall one, waiting for somebody to come back and drink. Nobody had. Whatever had happened to the people in this city had happened to these two as well. They had put their things away at the end of an ordinary day, and the day had not come back. She thought: there is no record of their names, and then she thought: there is, it’s in the wood, it’s in the cups. She had to put her hand on the bench for a moment, beside the squat cup.

“Somebody lived here,” Gus said behind her. “Not lived. Worked. Two of them.”

“The bird’s foot was on my rule.” Nora put her fingers on the mark, lightly. “She was a surveyor. This was her bench.”

“You keep saying her,” said Gus.

“I know.” She looked at the squat cup with the thumb-rest, the kind of cup made for a small hand that wanted something to hold on to, and at the stool on that side, set lower than the other. “Her cup. Her stool. I’m guessing. I think I’m right.”

Beatrice had gone to the drawers. “There’s things in here,” she said. “Gloves. Two pairs.”

They were in the third drawer on each side, behind a warped divider, with their cuffs folded together, as if the people who owned them had put them away carefully at the end of a shift and meant to come back in the morning.

Nora’s were grey, fine and supple, with dark stitching along the knuckles and a small empty metal surround worked into the back of the left cuff. Inside the right cuff, stitched in the same thread, was the mark she already knew.

Gus’s were brown and heavier, with overlapping leather plates across the knuckles and broad cuffs. Inside the left cuff was the hand against the door.

“A set,” said Gus, very softly, the way another man might have said a prayer. “Six pieces. She had a set, and he had a set.” He held the gauntlets up to the window light, turning them, flexing the fingers. “Question marks, Nora. It’s got question marks. It’s teasing me.”

“I’d noticed,” said Nora, holding her own gloves against her chest.

In a flat tin in the bottom of the surveyor’s drawer were two dark discs with three short lines cut above a curve.

“Two,” said Beatrice, looking over her shoulder. “One each. How very domestic.” She laid a finger in one of the empty surrounds. “Do they come out again? I’d like to borrow one if we have to cross more wet stone.”

“Five minutes to change them,” Nora said, reading. “Tell me before we cross.”

They fitted them sitting on the two stools at the two benches. She pulled the gloves on and they settled over her fingers. The rune seated into the left cuff with a small click. When she stood up and put her weight on the wet patch by the window, her boot held as though the stone were dry.

Through the open workshop door, water dripped in the court. Nora went to look. Beside the green trough, a little bronze frame held a ceramic bowl under a pipe. Frost spread across the bowl whenever the pipe fed it, thinned, and spread again. The metal bands round it were exposed.

She put her notebook beside it, open at the fish spout, and called Gus over.

“This is what I was looking for. A source I can study.”

She paid for Trace and the bowl lit: lines of working ran from the pipe to the bronze frame to the gutter, cold made out of moving water, in steps. She tried to hold the shape of it in the place beneath her ribs where Spark lived, and it slid away like a word on the tip of the tongue.

She held it a minute longer and watched the number not move. Trace cost more than rest gave back while she held it; she could feel the hollow under her ribs going down.

“How long?” said Gus.

“Most of an hour. Maybe more.”

He looked back towards the passage. “We’ve already lost the shaft.”

“We’re back before eleven,” said Beatrice, from the workshop door. “If we sit here for an hour, we aren’t.”

Nora let Trace go. The frost spread across the bowl, thinned, spread again, as patient as a tide. She drew it in the notebook, the pipe and the frame and the bands. Beside it she wrote: water-driven. Most of an hour. Then she closed the book on it.

“There’ll be others,” she said. “Everything here runs on water.”

She went back inside. Beatrice had gone back to the surveyor’s bench and was looking past it. “Nora,” she said, in a different voice. Nora turned and saw the wall.

It was the wall beside the surveyor’s bench, between her window and the door, and it was covered in marks.

Tally marks. Little groups of five, four upright strokes and one across, cut neatly into the plaster in two long rows. At the head of the rows someone had carved a small figure: a person lying on their back with their hands folded on their chest and a ring round their wrist. The same figure as on the map.

Under it, the bird’s foot.

Nora counted. She did it without meaning to, the way she counted the courses in a brick wall, her lips moving. Five, ten, fifteen. Nine groups of five. Forty-five. Then three single strokes, and nothing.

“Forty-eight,” she said. She looked at the three strokes. The last group of five was unfinished. “And then she stopped.”

“Why would she stop?” Gus said.

Nobody answered. Nora drew the figure with the ring round its wrist, carefully, and wrote 48 beside it, and under it, and then she stopped.