Chapter 1Leftovers

The thing they’d killed was the size of a commuter train, and Wes had forty minutes to strip it.

“Masks on!” Dolly barked as the cage shuddered to a stop. “Anyone I catch with their mask off gets docked an hour. Anyone I catch with their mask off and coughing up light gets docked the funeral.”

Wes pulled the rubber over his face. It smelled of the last guy’s breath and a lemon wipe that had given up halfway through the job. Thanks to a crack across the left side of the visor, the world looked slightly broken.

The gate rattled open on Shelf Nine. Six hundred meters under the city of Caddock, the wall of the Sink had a ledge in it the size of two football fields. Somebody, decades ago, had bolted floodlights into the rock. Somebody else had been stealing the bulbs ever since. Half the shelf was lit like an operating room. The other half was just cave, black and wet and breathing cold air.

The stonewhale lay across the lit half.

Like everybody else in the city, Wes had seen pictures. House Vahl had one on a billboard over the Fourth Street overpass with WE GO DEEPER printed under it in gold, as if a stonewhale was something you could pick up at a dealership.

The pictures were small.

It lay on its side like a hill that had fallen over. Grey-black hide in overlapping plates, every plate as thick as a car door. Its tail trailed off into the unlit half of the shelf. You could have parked a delivery van in the open jaw. From the roof of the mouth hung the baleen: hundreds of thin stone slabs, each taller than a man, packed side by side and glittering wet under the lights.

There was a hole in its side big enough to walk through. That was where the heart had been.

And above it all hung the spill.

It looked like someone had ground a sunset into powder and blown it into the air. Gold and violet motes, billions of them, turned slowly in the floodlights. Close to the carcass they were thick as fog. Higher up they thinned into something like stars, drifting toward the open shaft and the coin of grey daylight six hundred meters above.

It was the most beautiful thing Wes had ever seen. If he breathed it for an hour without a mask, he’d spend the next week coughing up light and the week after that coughing up lung.

“Jesus,” Jules said next to him, her voice flat through the filter. “That’s a lot of spill.”

“It’s a Fifth Circle kill.”

“I know what it is, Wes. I’m saying it’s a lot.”

Across the shelf, House Vahl was packing up. There were four of them, none in masks, as spill couldn’t hurt the Marked. When one of them killed something down here, their Mark drank its share of what came pouring out, which was how they got stronger. The spill was only what they couldn’t finish.

Leftovers.

Two of the hunters were lifting the heart in a lead-lined crate the size of a coffin. A third, a broad man with a shaved head, was coiling rope. The fourth stood apart from the rest with her hands in the pockets of a long charcoal coat, looking up at the shaft, bored.

Wes knew her face from the billboard, too. She was Saskia Vahl, the House heir, Fifth Circle at thirty-one, which, according to the people who argued about these things online, was a Caddock record.

She didn’t look at the crew. None of them did, except the bald one, who glanced over, found Dolly and pointed at the ground near the whale’s open jaw.

“Lance stays,” he called. “Someone’s coming for it.”

Where the finger pointed, half a spear lay on the rock, its shaft snapped a forearm’s length below the head. The blade was the color of oil on a puddle. Even from here Wes could hear it humming. Someone, as in not you, he thought.

“Wouldn’t dream of touching it,” Dolly called back, sweet as rat poison. The bald man didn’t bother to answer. He slung the rope over his shoulder, bent his knees and jumped.

Even after three years on the job, watching it still did something to Wes’s stomach. The man didn’t climb, didn’t use the rope. He went up the shaft like he’d been fired out of it, kicked off the wall forty meters up and vanished into the dark. Rock dust pattered down a full second later. The two with the crate went next, carrying a lead coffin between them like it was a sofa—one jump, gone.

Saskia Vahl took a last look around the shelf, her eyes passing over Wes the way they passed over the rocks. Then she wasn’t there anymore, only the floodlights swinging on their cables in the wind she’d left behind.

“Show-offs,” Jules muttered.

“If I could do that, I’d do it everywhere,” Wes said. “I’d jump to the grocery store. I’d jump to the bathroom.”

Everyone in Caddock knew the Circles as well as they knew the bus routes. A blank was a person, like everyone on Dolly’s crew except Pruitt; a First Circle was a very strong, very fast person, the kind who could flip a car if they put their back into it. A Second could get hit by that car and be annoyed about it. A Third could run up a wall. Wes had never seen a Fourth do anything up close. Fourths didn’t come as shallow as Shelf Nine.

Fifths didn’t come this shallow at all. Fifths were weather.

Nine levels to a Circle, nine notches on the Mark. Once all nine were full, you hit a wall. The only way through was a Descent: down into the Sink, deeper than you’d ever been, to see whether it would let you come back up as something more.

Most people who tried came back up.

Most.

“Forty minutes!” The clap of Dolly’s gloved hands bounced around the shelf. Wes had once watched her, sixty years old and five foot nothing, knock out a loan shark’s front tooth for calling her sweetheart. “Hamid, Petra, you’re on baleen. New guys, scales, and stay in the light. Wes, Jules, teeth. Pruitt—”

“I know what I do, Dolly,” Pruitt said.

“Then go do it, you beautiful idiot.”

Pruitt was already shuffling toward the carcass with a folded tarp under his arm. He was in his fifties, with a beard going grey from the chin outward and a belly that strained his overalls. Right under the thickest part of the spill, he spread the tarp, sat down on it cross-legged, laid his hands palm up on his knees and closed his eyes.

On the back of his left hand, his Mark glowed through the skin: a thin ring of white light with nine small notches spaced around it. Six of the notches were lit.

Fifteen years in the Sink had bought Pruitt six.

Gleaners were the joke of the Marked. Every Mark came with a class, each with its own skills, but gleaners got exactly one. All they could do was draw leftover spill out of the air and into their Mark, living on other people’s kills and other people’s scraps. The trouble was that a gleaner drew it like a man drinking the sea through a coffee stirrer. Most of what he did pull in burned straight off again, a faint shimmer over the back of his hand that never hurt anybody. Pruitt said he kept about one part in twenty, on a good day, with the wind behind him. And every Mark had a ceiling. Once the nine notches were full, all of it burned off.

Houses hired them anyway, since a cloud of spill that hung around too long drew things up from below. Nobody with a decent Mark was going to sit in a hole all day thinning it out, so the job went to people like Pruitt.

“Crew’s got a gleaner, crew gets a permit,” Dolly liked to tell new hires. “Pruitt’s a permit with a beard.”

The last member of the crew wasn’t really a member. Kessler was the warden, a Sink Authority contract hire whose whole job was to stand around in case something came up from below. He’d already found a crate near the cage and settled onto it, one earbud in, thumbing at his phone. No signal down here, so he was playing something he’d downloaded. The two rings glowing blue on the back of his hand made him a Second Circle.

Kessler was twenty-four and had been Marked at nineteen. He had told Wes about it, unprompted, four separate times.

“Come on,” Jules said, hefting the hydraulic jack. “Teeth won’t pull themselves.”

The stonewhale’s teeth were behind the baleen: one row of flat grinders along the jaw, each the size of a microwave, each rooted in bone that had been chewing rock for maybe a thousand years. Near the corner of the jaw, two baleen plates had grown apart and left a gap a little narrower than a door. On this side of the jaw it was the only way in. Everywhere else the plates hung a hand-span apart.

Wes squeezed through the working gap and dragged the jack in after him. Inside, it was dark and still warm, with a smell like a fish market built inside a quarry. The spill was thicker here than anywhere else on the shelf. With every breath through his filter he heard the motes tick faintly against his visor.

He set the jack’s jaws into the gum line under the first tooth and started pumping. There was a number in his head that never really went away. Dolly’s contract paid a flat fee plus three percent of what the salvage sold for. Of that, Wes’s cut worked out to roughly a decent dinner per tooth. If they got all thirty out in forty minutes, he’d clear four hundred bucks today.

Four hundred was a good day down here. Four hundred was also, give or take, what Fairweather Credit added to his balance every week for the crime of him existing. Every Friday he paid them three hundred and eighty, which was the minimum. Every Friday the balance still came out about twenty bucks higher.

Three years ago, at twenty-four, Wes had done something only a blank would be dumb enough to do. He had borrowed money to buy a chance.

The clinic was called Bright Start, on Tanner Street above a vape shop. The diploma on the doctor’s wall came from a university that turned out to be a P.O. box in another country. For thirty-eight thousand dollars, financed, he would open your chest and set a splinter of monster core against your heart. One time in three, your body took it as an anchor. And then, the next time you killed something in the Sink, the Sink Marked you.

A Mark meant a license. A license meant a real job. A real job meant a life that didn’t involve renting a mask that smelled of somebody else’s breath.

Wes had not been the one in three.

“Nothing took,” the doctor had said, peeling off his gloves. “It happens. Payment schedule’s in the folder.”

All he had to show for it was a scar down the middle of his chest, a sliver of something sitting next to his heart doing nothing and a balance with Fairweather Credit that had since grown to forty-one thousand three hundred and twelve dollars. It grew while he slept.

Now the scar was itching, as it sometimes did around spill. With a crack that rang off the baleen, the tooth let go so suddenly that the jack slipped. Wes swore and caught the tooth before it rolled onto his foot.

“One,” he said.

“Twenty-nine to go.” Jules came through the gap behind him with the hand truck. Jules Okafor was thirty-five and had been an ER nurse for ten years before she came down the Sink.

“Do you miss it?” he asked, not for the first time.

“Every day.” She tipped the tooth onto the hand truck. “Then I remember the patients. Down here, everything’s already dead when I get to it.”

They had seven teeth out when he noticed the spill was moving wrong. He’d gone outside to wheel the hand truck to the stack and stopped for a breather. The first thing anybody learned about spill was that it rose. Slow and lazy as heat, it drifted up until it found the shaft and climbed toward daylight, arriving thin enough to be harmless and pretty. Tourists on the viewing platforms along the Rim took pictures of it.

The motes near the floor were sliding sideways. Long, slow ribbons of gold crept across the rock like water finding a drain, past the edge of the floodlights and toward the back wall, where the stone split into fissures as wide as doorways that went down into the black.

Wes watched for a few seconds before he walked over to Pruitt’s tarp. “Hey. Pruitt.”

The old gleaner cracked one eye open. “I’m working.”

“Is spill supposed to do that?”

Pruitt followed his finger and looked for a long moment. Under the grey of his beard, his face went the color of the tarp.

“Dolly,” Pruitt said.

“What?” On the other side of the carcass, supervising Hamid’s saw, Dolly didn’t look up.

”Dolly.” Pruitt was getting to his feet. “It’s going down.” That made Dolly look up from the saw.

“Spill doesn’t go down,” said one of the new guys.

“No,” Pruitt agreed. “Not by itself.”

Dolly crossed the shelf at a walk that wasn’t quite a run. Beside Pruitt, she watched the ribbons of light slide into the dark. Her eyes flicked to the dial bolted to the side of the cage: the Authority gauge. Its needle was buried deep in the red.

“How long would it take you to thin that?” she asked.

“That?” Pruitt’s laugh had nothing in it. “Alone? A year. If it held still.” He stopped to scratch at his beard. “Dolly. You know what never comes up past Shelf Thirty? Stonewhales. I’ve never seen one shallower than thirty. Not once. You know what makes a thing that size swim up twenty shelves?”

“Bad sushi,” Wes offered. Nobody laughed.

“Something it didn’t want to be near,” Pruitt said quietly.

Dolly’s jaw worked as she looked at the stack of teeth, then at the baleen Hamid had already cut. Wes watched her do the same math he’d been doing his whole life.

“Kessler!”

Kessler pulled out his earbud with a long-suffering sigh. “I heard. Relax.”

“Don’t relax me. Whatever chased that thing up here. Can you hold it?”

“Whatever chased it is still down on Thirty, eating something else.” He stood, rolled his neck and rested a hand on the short sword at his hip. “Anything shallow enough to come up to Nine, I kill. That’s literally what you’re paying for.”

“I’m not paying you. The Authority’s paying you.” Dolly pointed at the edge of the light, between the carcass and the fissures. “Go stand there and give them their money’s worth. Twenty minutes,” she told the rest of them. “Then we’re out.”

Kessler smiled at her and strolled over. Wes went back to the teeth.

He’d gotten two more out when he heard it. At first he thought it was Jules’s filter. A wet, rhythmic little sound, like a dog drinking out of a bowl.

Lap. Lap. Lap.

Neither he nor Jules moved, except to look at each other through their visors. It was coming from outside, from the dark half of the shelf. Wes pushed his head out through the gap.

Out by the dark edge of the shelf, the younger of the new guys had stopped cutting scales and turned toward the sound, his flashlight raised. He was the one with the neck tattoo whose name Wes had been meaning to learn all morning. The beam crossed the back wall to the fissures and found something pink-grey and wet sliding out of one of them, fast, like a fire hose that had come loose.

It wrapped around the new guy’s chest twice and yanked.

There wasn’t time for him to scream. He was in the light and then in the dark, his flashlight spinning away across the rock and throwing its beam in circles. Seconds later he screamed from somewhere far back in the black.

Then he didn’t.

I never learned his name, Wes thought.

There was a sound like a bedsheet tearing. Kessler came off his crate by the cage at a run, his phone skidding away across the rock. He made the edge of the light forty meters from Wes, his sword shining blue-white, while something in the dark shrieked. He reached in and dragged it into the floodlights by its tongue.

It was the length of a car, with six legs and hairless skin the color of a healing bruise. There were no eyes, just a smooth wedge of a head that split, as Wes watched, into four fleshy petals around a round, wet mouth. The tongue came out of the mouth and just kept coming.

Kessler cut its head off, his blade going through the neck without slowing. “Lapper,” he called over his shoulder, grinning. A little puff of gold lifted off the body and wisped into the back of his hand. “Told you. Relax.”

Lap. Lap. Lap.

It wasn’t coming from one fissure anymore. It was coming from all of them.

Kessler’s grin stayed on his face for exactly one more second.

They came out of the cracks like ants out of a kicked nest. Five. Eight. Wes stopped counting at twelve, because counting wasn’t helping. They didn’t go for the crew but for the spill, flowing across the rock toward the carcass with their heads split open, tongues unspooling into the air and coming back gold. Anything in their path, they went through.

Kessler fought—Wes would give him that. Around the blue-white blur of him, lappers came apart in sprays of black, two of them, then three, then four. For a few seconds that looked like enough. Until a tongue caught him across the back and threw him ten meters into the rock.

Wes heard something in him crack. When Kessler got up, blood running out of his mouth, he did not look annoyed. He looked twenty-four.

”Cage!” Dolly roared. “Everybody to the Bucket! Now, now, now!”

From the whale’s mouth, where Wes and Jules were, the cage was the whole width of the shelf away.

In one look he saw it all. The other new guy was sprinting with Hamid and Petra for the cage, where Dolly stood at the gate waving them in with both arms. Kessler was limping fast and cutting a path. Pruitt, halfway from the carcass to the cage, was running stiff-legged on his bad knees.

And a dozen lappers between Wes and all of it.

Kessler reached the cage first, with the new guy, Hamid and Petra piling in behind him. Holding the gate with one arm, Dolly screamed across the shelf. “Wes! Jules! Pruitt!”

A lapper slammed into the side of the cage hard enough to ring the bars. A tongue came through them and caught Petra by the boot. Kessler cut it in half and hit the lever.

“Kessler, my people are still—”

“Lappers on the cage, Dolly! They’re coming through!”

The Bucket lurched and started to rise. Dolly kept throwing herself at the gate until Hamid grabbed her around the waist. The last Wes saw of her was her arm reaching through the bars and her face, her mouth open around his name. The cage slid into the shaft and became a light going up.

At the Bucket’s crawl, it was ten minutes to the top and ten more back down. If anyone sent it back down.

“Wes,” Jules said quietly. “Pruitt.”

When the cage left, the old gleaner had stopped running. He stood in the open, turning in a slow circle, while the lappers turned too, not toward the carcass anymore but toward him.

He’s full of spill, Wes realized. Years of leftovers. He smells like dinner.

He didn’t remember deciding to move. He was just out through the gap and running, and Pruitt was running toward him, and something was right behind Pruitt, and Wes grabbed the old man by the straps of his overalls and hauled him the last three steps and shoved him through the gap and dove in after him. Behind him, a tongue slapped the stone plate where his head had been a second before.

They fell in a heap in the dark of the whale’s mouth. Outside, something hit the baleen hard enough that grit rained from the roof of the mouth, but the plates held. No lapper could fit the working gap, let alone the others, which were a hand-span.

Wide enough for a tongue.

The first one came sliding through, pink-grey, tasting the air. “Back,” Jules said, dragging Pruitt by the collar. “Back, back, back.”

Within seconds they had scrambled deep enough into the mouth that their shoulders were pressed against the grinding teeth. The tongue followed, a meter, two meters, three, feeling along the rock. A second and a third came through other gaps. In the glowing air they waved like weeds in a current, catching spill and pulling it out between the plates in long gold threads.

“They want the spill,” Pruitt panted. Blood ran down his forearm from a long scrape. “It’s thickest in here.”

“So do something about it!” Wes said. “Thin it! That’s your whole—that’s your one thing—”

“I told you. A year.” Pruitt gave a laugh, high and awful. “I could work on it real hard for the next ten minutes and it’d be like taking a bucket out of a lake.”

A tongue found Jules’s ankle, wrapped around her boot and pulled. She went down hard on her back and started to slide. Wes grabbed her wrist and Pruitt her other arm. It was like playing tug-of-war with a truck. Inch by inch her boots slid toward the plates until her leg went through between two of them, where something on the other side yanked. Something gave with a wet pop that made Jules scream into her filter.

Wes let go with one hand, grabbed the jack handle off the floor and brought it down on the tongue as hard as he could. It was like hitting a tire; the steel bounced.

He hit it again and again, Pruitt sawing beside him with a utility knife, until at last the tongue spasmed, let go and whipped back out into the dark. Gasping, Jules dragged herself away from the plates. Her right foot was pointing in a direction feet didn’t point.

“Dislocated,” she said, in a horrible professional voice. “Ankle. Maybe broken. I’m fine. I’m fine.”

Wes looked out between the plates at the lance, which lay on the rock three meters from the gap, humming away to itself exactly where Mister Someone’s-Coming-For-It had left it. He’d made a lot of bad decisions in his life, most of them math. Thirty-eight thousand dollars for a one-in-three chance: math. Salvage work at twice the warehouse rate: math.

He did the math now: ten minutes up, ten minutes down, if anyone sent the cage down at all. Before then the tongues would get one of them, probably soon and probably Jules.

Three meters.

“Wes,” Jules said. “Don’t.”

He was already squeezing through the gap. Outside, the shelf had turned into a feeding floor. Lappers swarmed over the carcass, tongues lashing at the clouds of spill. Two of them crouched over something by the back wall that Wes deliberately did not look at. Five meters to his left, the nearest one had its tongue threaded through the baleen, still feeling around for Jules. Its eyeless head came up and turned toward him anyway.

Wes ran.

Two steps later he hit the rock on his knees and skidded, hands closing around the broken shaft. The lance, heavier than it looked, hummed up both his arms like a live wire.

When he turned, the lapper was already in the air. Its head split open in front of him, four petals peeling back around a mouth lined with ring after ring of tiny hooked teeth. The tongue came out to meet him.

There was no time to aim, so Wes just held the lance out in front of him, jammed the broken end against the rock and screamed. The lapper came down on the blade mouth-first.

The lance went in through its mouth and out through the back of its skull. The lapper kept coming anyway, sliding down the blade until the splintered shaft hit Wes in the chest and brought the whole weight of the thing down on him. Hot black blood sheeted over his visor and came in through the crack in his mask. It tasted of copper and old fish. The lapper shuddered once on top of him.

Then it died.

Right where the scar was, something hooked into the middle of Wes’s chest and pulled. For one second, it didn’t even hurt. It felt as if the splinter next to his heart, the thirty-eight-thousand-dollar splinter that had sat in there for three years doing absolutely nothing, had woken up and taken a breath.

Then it hurt.

Words appeared in front of his eyes, not on his visor but behind his eyes, white letters in the plain, square font he’d seen on a thousand news broadcasts and House ads and in dreams he’d stopped having two years ago.

That’s the splinter, Wes thought dimly. Oh, you son of a bitch. You were in there the whole time.

The back of his left hand caught fire. That was what it felt like, anyway: his hand flat on a stovetop and somebody leaning on his arm. He screamed under the dead lapper. Through the blood on his visor he watched light carve itself into his skin, a thin ring, perfectly round, with nine small notches around it, all of them dark.

The fire went out of his hand, but the words stayed hanging there. Wes lay under the dead lapper with its blood in his mouth and stared at them.

Gleaner.

Three years and forty-one thousand, three hundred and twelve dollars later, the Sink had finally looked at him—really looked, for the first time in his whole life—and said: You? You eat leftovers.

“Oh,” Wes said, “you have got to be fucking kidding me.”

Shoving the lapper off took everything he had. He rolled out from under it with the lance still in his fist and crawled back to the baleen. Every lapper on the shelf still had its tongue in the spill.

He squeezed through the gap and collapsed on the rock inside. Pruitt was staring at his hand.

“No,” Pruitt said. He started to laugh, a cracked, wheezing laugh that turned into a cough halfway through. “No! Oh, that’s—welcome. Welcome to the worst club in the Sink, son.”

“Thanks,” Wes said. “Love it here.”

“Wes,” Jules said. Something in her voice made him look up.

Outside, every one of the lappers had stopped feeding. They stood frozen on the rock with their heads raised until, one by one, they turned toward the whale’s mouth.

Toward him.

“They can smell the Mark,” Pruitt whispered. “It’s new. It’s open. It’s like blood in the water, it’s—”

“So what do I do?”

“Glean.” Pruitt grabbed his shoulder, his eyes wild. “They came for the spill. You take it, there’s less of it, maybe they lose interest. Maybe it buys us till the Bucket. Take what you can.”

“You said it’d take a year!”

“For me! A fresh Mark pulls harder at the start, it might—I don’t know! Something! Anything!” Pruitt flinched as a tongue slapped through the baleen. “Hands open. Breathe in. Want it. That’s all it is, Wes. That’s all gleaning ever is. You just want it.”

That almost got a laugh out of Wes. His entire life, he’d wanted an apartment where he didn’t have to fold the bed into the wall to open the fridge, a job that didn’t come with somebody else’s mask, forty-one thousand dollars. Hell, he’d spent most of last Tuesday wanting a sandwich.

If there was one thing in the world Wes Callow was good at, it was wanting. He opened his hands and breathed in.

And he wanted it.

For a second, nothing happened.

The spill inside the whale’s mouth bent toward him—no trickle through a coffee stirrer. The glowing fog filling the mouth folded in on itself and poured into the back of his left hand. Then the fog outside the baleen followed, gold and violet streaming in through every gap between the plates. Then the cloud over the carcass. Then the haze above it, the stars, the long lazy ribbons drifting toward the shaft. All of it turned at once and came down.

The whole shelf went dim around the edges, as if someone had pulled the plug on the world, with Wes as the hole it was all draining into. Pruitt’s face was lit gold from below, his mouth hanging open. It was warm going in, then hot, then something past hot that didn’t have a word, like drinking a sunrise and feeling it hit the bottom of his stomach and keep going.

One notch on his hand lit up gold.

The messages came so fast they stacked on top of each other while the notches lit one after another around the ring, gold, gold, gold. Every one of them felt like being picked up and dropped into a colder, clearer, bigger version of his own body. His heartbeat slowed as the ache went out of his knees. Even the dark at the back of the whale’s mouth wasn’t so dark anymore.

The ninth notch lit, but the spill kept coming. That’s it, Wes thought. That’s the ceiling. Now it burns off. Pruitt said everything over the top burns off—

It didn’t burn off.

Instead it went somewhere, down under his ribs, below the splinter. It felt as if he’d lived in the same house all twenty-seven years of his life and someone had just pulled up the rug and shown him a trapdoor, with a staircase under it going down into a cellar and all that light pouring down the stairs.

The last motes slid into his hand and left the shelf dark. Not cave-dark; the floodlights were still on. Without all that gold, though, Shelf Nine looked smaller and colder and very, very ordinary.

Wes didn’t have time to wonder what that meant before every lapper on the shelf hit the baleen at once, so hard the stone plates boomed. Beside him, a tongue came between the plates, wrapped itself around his wrist—his left wrist, right below the Mark—and pulled.

Wes pulled back.

On the other side of the baleen, the lapper came off its feet. Its whole body smashed into the plates with a crack like a tree coming down, snapping the plate between them across the middle.

Wes looked from his arm to the snapped plate of stone, as thick as his forearm.

Oh, he thought. He stepped through the hole he’d made.

He wasn’t good at it, wasn’t a fighter, didn’t know how to stand or where to put his feet, didn’t have a single skill for any of it. He fought like what he’d been sixty seconds ago: a blank.

But he was so fast.

The first lapper lunged at him. Wes watched it come as if it were moving underwater, stepped aside, drove the lance into its flank and pulled upward until it opened like a bag.

The second one’s tongue whipped at his face. He caught it—just caught it, right out of the air—and swung. Half a ton of lapper left the ground on the end of its own tongue and hit the rock wall hard enough to stick there for a moment before it slid down.

The third came from behind, too close for anything but a punch, so he turned and threw one. His fist went into its head up to the wrist—disgusting, but that could wait.

The fourth turned and ran, scrambling across the rock and pouring itself into a fissure. Wes heard it skittering down and down and down until he couldn’t hear it anymore.

After that, nothing moved on Shelf Nine except Wes’s chest, going up and down. He wasn’t tired.

“Wes.”

Pruitt climbed out through the broken baleen and straightened up slowly, one hand on each knee. His eyes went from the dead lappers to the dark, empty air above the stonewhale, where a Fifth Circle’s worth of spill had been hanging two minutes ago. Last of all he looked at Wes.

“That was a Fifth Circle kill,” Pruitt said. His voice had gone quiet. “Do you understand? That cloud would have taken me a year. And you can’t hold that. Nobody holds that. Your cap’s nine notches, same as mine, same as everyone’s, and every drop over it burns off. That was”—he waved a shaking hand at the empty air—“that was a hundred Firsts’ worth. Two hundred. Where did it go?”

Wes looked down at his hand, where the ring glowed gold, not white like Pruitt’s, with all nine notches lit. Under the ring, something faint pulsed slowly, like a coal breathing at the bottom of a fire.

“I don’t know,” Wes said honestly. “It says remainder held.”

Pruitt stared at him. “It says what?”

“Can we do this upstairs?” Jules called from inside the whale, through her teeth. “My foot’s the wrong way round.”

At the patter of rock dust on Wes’s visor, all of them looked up. Far up the shaft, the Bucket’s light was still crawling toward daylight.

But something else was coming down, not climbing but falling, fast, kicking off the walls left, right, left, with a crack of breaking stone at every kick. Thirty meters away, it hit the shelf hard enough to split the rock in a starburst and set the floodlights swinging on their cables.

Saskia Vahl straightened up out of a crouch and let her coat settle.

She didn’t look at them first. For a long time she looked up at the empty air over the stonewhale before checking the slim band on her wrist: a gauge, a smaller cousin of the one on the cage. Its needle lay flat on zero.

“My gauge says the spill on this shelf went from full to nothing in eleven seconds,” she said. Her voice was calm, almost pleasant. “I came back down to see what could do that.”

Her eyes moved across the shelf, over the dead lappers, the one torn open like a bag and the one with a fist-shaped hole in its head. They found Jules’s shape behind the broken baleen, Pruitt grey and bleeding in front of it. And Wes, standing in the floodlights with House Vahl’s broken lance in his right hand, black to the elbow, a faint gold light leaking out from behind his left.

“So,” said Saskia Vahl. “Which one of you ate my spill?”

Wes put his left hand behind his back.