Chapter 8

The cold came up the steps to meet them. Gus felt it first in his new-knitted ribs, a long ache down that side, and then everywhere.

The steps went down into a hall. It was long and high and so cold that his breath hung in front of him in a cloud and did not drift. The walls glittered with frost. Light came from everywhere and nowhere, a pale blue light like the inside of a glacier. Down both long walls of the hall, and across its middle in rows, were alcoves cut into the stone, each the length of a person, each a little way above the floor, like the berths on a ship or the shelves of a cold store.

There were people in them.

They lay on their backs with their hands on their chests and their eyes closed. Frost had settled on their eyelashes and in their hair. Each had a band of soft white light round one wrist. From every band a thread rose, thin as a hair and bright, straight up through the cold air to the ceiling, where the threads gathered into the mouth of a dark round shaft and vanished upward, forty of them, like rain that had stopped in the air and stayed.

They were all asleep in rows.

It was the quietest place Gus had ever been, a ward at four in the morning, the quiet of a great many people asleep and a great many others gone. He took his next step more quietly. He thought of the corridor outside his dad’s room at the end, and the way the nurses had lowered their voices there, not for the man in the bed but for the ones sitting beside it. Every one of these belonged to somebody. Every one had gone out of a door on an ordinary night, to check on a boat or put the bins out or look for a brother, and had not come back. Somewhere up in the town somebody was sitting by another door, waiting.

Beatrice went to the nearest alcove. She put two fingers on the throat of the man lying in it and was still.

“Alive,” she said. “Same as Lorraine. Thirty beats. Six breaths.” She moved to the next. “Alive.” The next. “Alive.”

Every alcove had a small plaque above it, and when Gus stood in front of one the words came.

Raymond Ogden lay in the alcove in his depot fleece, with frost in his grey moustache and his hands folded on his chest, looking about fifteen years younger asleep than Gus had ever seen him awake.

Gus thought of Margaret by the hall doors with her phone in her lap, looking at every pair of shoes that came in before she let herself look at the face. Raymond and I do things together. I’ll tell her, he thought. I’ll tell her myself. He’s here. He’s breathing.

Gus went down the row.

He went past a woman in a dressing gown, and a teenage boy in a hoodie with SALTINGS SURF CLUB on the back, and a man in pyjamas and one slipper.

He stopped and went back to the boy.

Eighteen, maybe, just. Thin, sunburnt, a little gold ring in one ear and frost in his eyelashes. My sister’s lad. They took him off the beach at Saltings. Turned eighteen in August.

“Rook’s nephew,” he said aloud. “Nora. That could be Rook’s nephew.” He stopped long enough for her to copy the plaque. Then he went past an alcove that was empty, with a plaque that said Unit 0034 — Petch, L. — Status: displaced. Recovery pending. Behind him Nora said, very quietly, “That’s hers. That’s where Lorraine’s thread comes in.” A moment later she said, “The glass roofs,” and nothing else. He went past Kev Bright, Danny’s crewmate, the one they’d had by the boot on the slip, still in his lifejacket, the boot torn half off his foot.

The next alcove was Danny.

He lay on his back in the cold blue light in the T-shirt he’d been wearing under the lifejacket that had come apart in Gus’s hands, with his hands folded on his chest and frost in his eyebrows. He looked so much like their dad had looked at the end that Gus’s knees went out from under him.

“Dan,” he said. “Danny. Danny, it’s me.”

He put his hand on his brother’s chest. It was so cold it burned. Under his palm, very slowly, Danny breathed in, and after a long time, out.

“Wake up,” Gus said. “Come on. Come on, you lazy bastard, wake up, we’re going home.”

Danny didn’t wake. The band on his wrist glowed. The thread rose out of it, straight and bright, to the ceiling.

Gus looked at the thread. He drew the sword.

“Gus.” Nora was beside him. He hadn’t heard her come. “Gus, don’t.”

“I’m cutting him loose.”

“Gus—”

“I’m cutting him loose, Nora, I’m not leaving him here on a shelf—”

“Look.” She had her hand up, Trace lit in her eyes, and her voice had gone flat and careful. “Look at it. It doesn’t stop at his wrist. It goes in. It goes all the way in, Gus. It goes round his heart.”

He looked and couldn’t see it. He believed her anyway, because she had never once in six years told him a thing she wasn’t sure of.

“There,” said Beatrice. She was standing three alcoves down, in front of one with a man in it, a big man in a watch volunteer’s armband. The teacher, the one whose spear they’d found broken in the yard. His thread rose from his wrist a little way and then stopped, frayed, broken. The light in his band had gone out.

“His thread tore when they dragged him,” Beatrice said. “Look at his wrist. They shelved him anyway, and he died here.” She looked up at Gus. “If you cut that, Gus, you kill your brother. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But you do.”

Gus stood in the cold blue light with the sword in his hand, and for a minute he hated both of them more than he had ever hated anyone in his life.

Then he put the sword away.

Nora read it aloud, quietly, like a plaque in a church.

“Restricted,” she said. Then, to the air: “What is integration?”

“Transfer,” said Beatrice. “Transfer where? What’s an amplifier?”

“Something that makes a small thing bigger,” said Nora. None of them liked that at all.

Past the last row of sleepers, at the very end of the hall, there was one more berth.

It was older than the others. The stone of it was worn smooth like the wheel at the gate, and the frost had not settled on it. It was empty. The plaque above it was blank, as if whatever name had been there had been taken down. But cut into the edge of the stone, small and deep and re-cut many times, was a bird’s foot inside a ring.

Nora stood in front of it. Gus came and stood beside her.

“She was here,” he said.

“She was here,” said Nora. “And then she wasn’t.” She put her gloved hand on the edge of the stone, on the mark, as she had on the bench, and then flat on the berth itself. The stone was dry, and very faintly warm. “Then where did she go?”

Beyond the empty berth, against the far wall, something unfolded.

There were three of them. Nora named them as they woke, reading off her Trace: Tallyman · custodial · Level 6, twice, the tall thin harvestmen they had fought at the hall, six legs and a suitcase body and a round lens on the front. The third was half as tall again, with two lenses set one above the other: Tallyman Overseer · custodial · Level 9 · Armour 14. They had been standing so still against the far wall, among the frost, that nobody had seen them. Now they unfolded one after another and turned their lenses down the hall, and where the lenses passed the frost glowed white.

“Eyes,” said Nora. “Don’t let them look at you.”

There was a stair at the far end of the Holding, past the Tallymen, going up. Behind them were the iron door and the black water and the dead thing on the steps. The Tallymen were between them and the stair. They were coming down the hall between the rows of sleepers, their lenses sweeping the alcoves as they came.

Sweeping the sleepers.

Gus understood it a second before it reached Danny. They weren’t coming for the three of them. They were doing their rounds. Wherever a lens passed over a berth, the band on the sleeper’s wrist brightened and the thread above it drew a little tighter, like a winch taking up slack.

He didn’t decide. He went three steps sideways past Kev’s torn boot and stood in front of Danny’s alcove with his sword up and his back to his brother. The first lens swept down the row towards them. The light hit the flat of the blade and broke on it like water on a breakwater.

He stared at it. The warm white light was pouring against his Guard like a hose against a window, and it wasn’t getting through. Not a flicker reached Danny, or his own wrist.

“It can’t get through,” he said. “Nora! It can’t get through the Guard!”

He had to know. He dropped the Guard for half a second, deliberately, and the warm light touched his wrist and began to close. He brought the Guard up again and the band unravelled into nothing. Down, it closed. Up, it broke. It was a rule. It was a rule, and rules were things you could use.

“Stay there,” Nora said behind him. “Just stay there. I’ve got the small ones.”

She had already started. He saw her go left along the aisle at a walk, not a run, slapping the floor twice with her gloved hand: Quickscript, one second each, two marks, two little knots of light left glowing on the stone among the sleeping people. She fed a Bolt into each, Frost into one and Spark into the other, and the knots went white and blue and waited. Then she stepped between them and turned round.

“This way,” she said to the two Tallymen. “Look at me.”

They looked at her. Gus saw the light come out of both lenses and touch her wrist. He saw her stand there and let it, and nearly lost his mind.

They came for her together, long legs reaching, one down each side of the aisle, the way a pair of anything would come for one thing standing still. The first stepped over the white mark. The second stepped over the blue.

Frost exploded up the first one’s legs in white spikes and locked it mid-stride. The second went rigid in a crack of blue, its lens flickering. Nora put a Bolt into each of them from three metres, one, two, without hurrying.

The light on her wrist went out like a blown match. The two of them folded into the aisle between the sleepers. Nora stepped back from a falling leg, stumbled against a berth, and caught herself with her free hand. The other stayed up. Gus understood that she had planned every step of that in the second after they unfolded, all except the last one.

The Overseer had not moved. It had watched.

Now it came down the hall, slow and tall, its two lenses working separately: the lower one swinging along the alcoves at the sleepers, the upper one on the living. The lower lens came down the row towards Danny, and Gus braced. Before it reached him Beatrice was there.

She came from the side with Rosamund’s hockey stick in both hands and swung it into the lower lens, as Rosamund must have swung it on the promenade on the first night. The glass starred. Armour fourteen: it didn’t break. The upper lens turned down and found her.

Gus saw it happen from four metres away. The light took her across the shoulders. She turned in it, surprised, and the band was already round her wrist, white and soft. Her face went grey. She sat down in the aisle as though somebody had pulled a chair out from under her. A very fine thread came up out of the band and rose, wavering, looking for the ceiling.

“Go!” Nora shouted. “Gus, go, I’ve got him!”

He went.

Nothing in his side stopped him. Driving Step took him four metres in a second, low and fast across the frost. He came out of it under the Overseer’s body with the sword already moving. Behind him Nora’s Frost Bolt hit the starred lower lens and turned it white and blind with rime before it could find Danny.

The Overseer reached for him with a long leg. Warden’s Grip took it and held it for one second, and in that second he cut.

It was like cutting scaffolding. The leg sagged. The thing came round on it, slow, and brought another leg down at his head. He took it on the Guard and felt Stoneback put the weight into his heels instead of his arms.

The upper lens swung back to Beatrice on the floor, to finish what it had started. Gus stepped across her and put the Guard out over both of them, Interpose, a sheet of pale light. The lens splashed off it and broke.

He cut again. Strike, Edge, the cold of Brinefang going into the joint. The Overseer staggered and came on.

“It’s telling me how hurt it is,” Nora said behind him, in a strange voice. “It’s never done that. Badly. It’s badly hurt.”

Sundering was paying for itself already, and Runic Guard’s refunds kept the Guard alive. The Edges were eating his mana.

Beatrice’s thread was nearly at the ceiling. He could see it in the edge of his eye, wavering up into the dark towards the others.

Nora was kneeling beside Beatrice, with an anchor lit on the floor by her wrist. Her raised hand followed the thread as it climbed; then she lowered it without casting.

“It needs somewhere to go,” Nora said. She looked up at the Overseer, at the light running along its legs. “Gus. Hold its leg. Next time it reaches for you. Hold it for me.”

He didn’t ask. Nora came up off her knees and across the aisle to him as the next leg came. Warden’s Grip took it, and for one second it was held. In that second she was beside him with her gloved hand flat on the leg. Quickscript, one second. She caught the line between her two marks as she had caught the little signal at the cistern door, and this time she did not look up when he spoke.

He saw it in her face before he saw it in the air. Beatrice’s thread stopped rising. It bent, as if a wind had caught it. It came down out of the dark and went into the Overseer’s leg where Nora’s mark was.

The Overseer stopped. Both its lenses flared and dimmed and flared. A band of soft white light closed round its own leg above the joint.

“You’ve tagged it,” Gus said. “You’ve tagged the bloody thing—”

“For two minutes,” said Nora, through her teeth. “Kill it.”

He drove the third Edge up through the upper lens.

The lens burst. The band on its leg went out, and Beatrice’s thread, with nothing at either end, unravelled into the air. Behind him she made a sound like someone coming up from deep water. The Overseer stood over him, swaying. Then it came down in sections, like a dropped tripod, and the last of its legs came down across his thigh. The spike on the end of it went into him above the knee like a hot nail. Nora put a Spark Bolt into the hole where the lens had been, and it lay still.

Gus looked at the Overseer out of habit.

“Typical,” he said.

Gus sat down on the edge of Danny’s alcove and stayed there, breathing.

Beatrice was on her feet when he looked round, holding her bare wrist. Her lips were blue.

“It took something,” she said. “On the way.” She looked at the air in front of her, and her mouth went thin.

“I can’t Mend you,” she said to Gus. “Not yet. Not with that.” She was shaking too hard to undo the first-aid pouch. She handed it to Nora. “Press there while I get the dressing out. Then help him up. And don’t you dare bleed.”

“Go,” said Beatrice. “Now, before more come.”

Gus looked back down the hall.

The sleepers lay in their rows in the blue light, and Danny was in the fourth alcove from the end on the left with his hands on his chest. Nora was beside him, looking at the same place.

“Fifteen days,” he said. “Fifteen days, Danny. I’m coming back. I swear to God I’m coming back.”

Then he turned and went up the stair with his arm over Beatrice’s shoulders and hers round his waist, each holding the other up, and Nora behind them. None of them looked back again, because they couldn’t have gone if they had.

The stair went up a very long way. Nora counted the steps, because it was something to do with her head that wasn’t the hall behind them: four hundred and twelve.

It was narrow and dry, the first warm air they had breathed in an hour. At the top, a small square guardroom opened off it, with a heavy door on its far side and three arrow slits in the outer wall. They barred the stair door behind them and sat down on the floor with their backs to the wall, and for a while all any of them did was breathe.

“A hundred and fifty,” said Gus, from the floor, without opening his eyes.

“Shut up,” said Beatrice, without any heat at all. When the trembling in her hands eased, she unwrapped the outer turn of his dressing. She had recovered enough mana for one Mend. It closed the puncture, but when Gus tried to bend the leg she put her hand on his knee and made him straighten it again.

“Slowly. You’ve still got torn muscle under there.”

She secured the dressing and looked at the two of them.

“I want to say something,” she said, “and I want you both to listen, because I’m a doctor and I’m good at this part. They are alive. All forty of them down there, and Lorraine at the hall. They are being kept alive, carefully, by something that wants them alive for fifteen more days. That is not nothing. That’s not a mortuary. That’s a waiting room.” She looked at Gus. “Fifteen days is a very long time in a waiting room. I’ve seen people walk out of worse.”

Gus looked at her. Then he put his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook. Nora put her arm round him and held on, and Beatrice put her hand on the back of his neck. The three of them sat on the floor of the guardroom like that for a while.

Later, when Gus had lifted his head, Nora sat with her back to the wall and looked at her gloved hands.

Half an hour ago she had taken hold of a thread that was going to a woman’s heart and put it somewhere else, and the woman was sitting next to her now, blue-lipped, alive, complaining about the cold. Beatrice’s thread had been minutes old and loose, still looking for somewhere to go. The forty in that hall went round hearts and had been tight for days. It was not the same thing.

She opened the notebook and drew the loose end before it reached the ceiling. Beside it she drew Danny’s, with no loose end at all.

Reroute a fresh thread into something custodial, break the thing, and the thread had nowhere left to go. That much she had seen work, once. Fresh first; tight later, if tight could be done at all. Forty of them. Fifteen days.

It was a start.

The notices she had not had time to read in the fight were still stacked in the corner of her eye. She read them now.

Thirty-one, just before Gus’s third Edge went in.

She brought her whole sheet up, because she wanted to see all of it at once, like a whole building.

She read it once, then pressed on the end of the first line until it opened.

Practice is recorded. So it was watching what she did and would choose from that. She knew what she wanted it to make of her. Not a battery of Bolts. A net: anchors and snares and workings laid down before anything walked into the room, so that by the time it did, the room was already hers. She had done it twice today, to things far above her level, and the interface had given her a name for it. She looked at the two drawings, then added the position of each anchor. The pencil shook less now. When Gus asked what she was doing, she showed him where a third mark could have gone.

The guardroom’s outer door was barred on the inside, like everything in this place. The bar lifted without trouble. Beyond it was a short stone passage, and beyond that, open air.

They came out at the top of a squat round bastion at the landward edge of the city, above the seabed and below the old seawall, at the far northern end of the beach, where the shingle gave out into rocks. Behind them the drowned city went down into its hollow in the last of the light, terrace below terrace, roof below roof, and the water that ran in all its streets had turned the colour of pewter. Somewhere down there a bell, or something like a bell, struck once and was quiet.

Far to the south, along the curve of the shore, the gateway was lit.

Floodlights stood on poles around the great arch. Below them, across the strip of firm mud they had walked twice now, a line of pallets and wire had been dragged into a barricade.

“He’s closed it,” Beatrice said. “The front door. He’s put a fence round the whole city.”

“He can have the front door,” said Nora.

She called up the ranking.

“Eight,” said Gus, reading it over her shoulder. “He’s been busy.”

“So have we.” She closed it and worked it out anyway. Eight was twenty-eight hundred, and they were at twenty-six fifty. One hundred and fifty, and something feeding Voss every kill. She could see it from here, like the lit arch.

Nobody was watching the north end of the beach. Nobody was looking at the bastion at all.

Gus was standing at the edge of the bastion with his hands in his pockets, with his weight off the strapped leg. In his breast pocket, buttoned down, was an orange whistle with DH scratched into the side.

“I’m telling Margaret myself,” he said. “Tonight. Before anyone else does.”

“Yes,” said Nora.

“And I’ve been thinking.” He didn’t look round. “Stone and warden go together. It told me so. One of four. So what goes with brine? What goes with the crab? There’s a whole table of these somewhere, Nora, and I’ve got one square of it.” He was quiet a moment. “I want to be the thing in this city that’s hardest to get past.”

“You want a list.”

“I’ve got a list,” said Gus. “I’ve crossed a newt off it.”

Then he stopped talking, because something was moving in the city below them.

They both saw it. It walked on the terraces of the hollow, the near ones now, not the far. It was as tall as the towers it walked between. It stepped from one roof to the next with that same slow care, and with each step it came a little further down the slope. This close she could see what it was made of. Its body was a long column of dark glass, the same glass as the dome. Inside it, faintly, something burned: the gas-flame light that had burned in the Warden’s side, but a hundred times as much of it. It was walking down towards the stepped basins and the black water, and the long cold hall beneath them.

It stopped on a roof above the water stair. Something at the top of it, which might have been a head, turned slowly towards the bastion.

Hears, Nora thought, from the bridge. Stops when it stops. She put her hand on Gus’s arm and he went still under it. Beside them Beatrice held her breath.

Then it stepped down, out of sight, into the streets.

“That’s the thing from the bridge,” Gus said. “It’s closer.”

“It’s right over them,” said Nora. “It’s standing right over the Holding.”

After a while she asked the air, under her breath, “What is it?”

Gus didn’t say anything. He looked at the dark and the cold and the hall full of sleepers somewhere under the thing’s feet, and she knew he was counting days.

It took them the best part of four hours to get back to the hall, the long way round by the rocks, with eleven o’clock coming up behind them. Gus had to stop every few hundred metres to rest the leg. Beatrice walked beside him the whole way and said nothing about it, which he appreciated more than he could have told her.

Halfway up Chapel Hill, three words came up in the air in front of them, white and steady: DOOR IS OPEN. On the hall roof a small figure with a torch was looking down the hill. Precious Adeyemi had been sending it, Imogen told them later, every ten minutes since dark, to anyone she could see.

It was twenty to eleven. As they came past the garden gate Gus saw that something stood on Rosamund’s grave beside Margaret’s scarf: a cactus in a terracotta pot, a little lopsided. A big man in a black fleece had carried it up the hill at teatime, Imogen told them later, with a small red address book in his other hand. He had given the book to Jamal, stood a minute at the grave with his hands behind his back, and gone without giving a name.

The hall was dark apart from the camping lanterns. At the kitchen door Nora stopped dead. “Lorraine’s thread,” she said. “Without Trace.” She read the new line out: Linesman: you sense custodial tethers within fifteen metres. “Like a draught under a door.” Margaret Ogden was sitting by the doors where she had sat since the first morning, with her phone in her lap. She looked up when they came in. Gus watched her look at their shoes first, the way she did, and then let herself look at their faces.

He went and crouched in front of her, carefully, keeping the leg straight.

“Margaret,” he said. “I found Raymond.”

She didn’t move.

“He’s alive,” Gus said. “He’s asleep. They’re all asleep, down there, in rows, and he’s in one of them, in his depot fleece. He’s breathing. I put my hand on him. He’s got frost in his moustache and he looks about fifty.” He found he was holding her hands and didn’t remember taking them. “He’s alive, Margaret. We can’t get him out yet. But we know where he is, and we’re going back for him. We’re going back for all of them.”

Margaret Ogden looked at him for a long time. Then she looked down at the phone in her lap. She turned it over, face down, and put it on the floor beside her chair.

“In his fleece,” she said.

“In his fleece.”

“He’ll be furious about the moustache.” Her voice cracked right down the middle, and she laughed through it. “He’s very particular about the moustache.”

Nora knelt beside him and took something out of her inside pocket, and Gus knew what it was before he saw it. One of the two rings from the Warden’s nest: plain gold, worn thin at the back.

M & R · 14.6.88

Margaret looked at it in Nora’s palm for a long time. Then she took it and closed her hand on it.

Then she looked at the air in front of her, where Gus couldn’t see.

“It’s been asking me,” she said. “Three days. Every time I look.” She drew a breath. “All right, then. All right.”

Gus couldn’t see her offers. He saw her choose. Something settled into her, as it had settled into him in the kitchen on the first night: a straightening of the shoulders. Then she did what Rosamund had done and turned the sheet so he could read it, because she wanted somebody to.

“Vigil,” said Margaret. “I told Imogen she’d laugh.” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Well. I’ve had the practice.”

Then her face changed. She closed her hand tighter on the ring and looked at the floor, as if she could see through it, down the hill and under the sea.

“Oh,” she said. “He’s cold. He’s so cold.” And then, very low, “But he’s there.”

Imogen, who had come up behind them in the dark with a lantern and was not laughing at all, put her free hand on Margaret’s shoulder and left it there.

Then, quite clearly, in the type that every waking eye in Greyhaven would see, the interface spoke again.

Nora read the middle line twice.

“Ranking order,” said Gus. He looked at the doors, and the dark, and the hill going down to the sea. “Then we pass him.”