Chapter 11The Skin

Wes got his feet under him before he answered her. His shins had come back from dead to something worse. He stood on them anyway, one hand flat on the basin wall. Sitting at a Fifth Circle’s boots felt too much like waiting for the bill.

“Then tell me what you want,” he said.

“Not here.” Saskia looked up the throat. Somewhere at the top of it Dolly had started shouting again. “Your crew first.”

Pruitt came down off the rim with the lamp, keeping his bad leg straight. He gave Saskia the room he’d have given a live cable and stopped at Wes’s elbow.

“Can you walk?”

“I can climb,” Wes said. “Walking’s a separate question.”

Going up, the throat took twice as long. Pruitt called every slab again from below, holding the lamp up past Wes’s boots, while Wes took each one with his hands as much as his feet. Saskia didn’t use her hands at all. She went up the fallen skin at a walk, never once looking down to see where her boots went. Halfway up she stopped to wait for them at the edge of the gap where the loose slab had gone down, her boot heels out over nothing.

“How’d you get past Dolly?” Wes said when he’d caught up.

“She saw me,” Saskia said. “She didn’t let go of the rope.”

Somebody just walked past me, Dolly had said down the throat.

At the top, the Bucket’s spare work light stood on a slab at the lip, aimed down the throat, so that the last ten meters were white and flat and hard to look at. Hamid sat where they’d left him with the rope round his back, boots braced, his rag-wrapped hands taking in Wes’s line as Wes climbed. Dolly sat on the tail of Pruitt’s line and held it with her good hand. When Saskia stepped up out of the hole into the light, that hand closed on the rope until the knuckles went white.

Past the light, Eleven was as they’d left it: dead floodlights on their brackets, the gillback broken-backed near the landing, the Bucket beyond it with its gate open and Petra at the lever. A thread still leaned off the gillback’s core toward the hole. Now it ran past Dolly’s boots, close enough to step on. Vahl’s post stood ten meters off the dome at the edge of the light. Wes could read its dial from the lip: five.

He came out last, on his hands and knees over the broken edge.

“A Fifth Circle,” Dolly said before he was up. “That’s more than a Second Circle. Everybody up.”

“Dolly—”

“That’s the term. You stood there while I counted it on my hand.” She hadn’t taken her eyes off Saskia. “Everybody up, and I ring Tate from the winch house, and you stand next to me and explain it.”

“The term was for what lives in there,” Wes said. “Things. Not her.”

“She walked past me. She’s in there.”

“She’s on our side of it.”

“She’s on her side of it.” Dolly’s mask turned to him at last. “Think, kid. Everything we take out of that hole is hers the second she says so. Everything in my cage. My permit goes the minute she picks up a phone, and yours with it, and Petra’s, and Hamid’s. You can go on eating her Hollow with her standing there watching. It’s still her Hollow. We’re still in it.”

Wes had an answer to that. It was a bad one, so he kept it.

Through all of it Saskia hadn’t said a word. She stood on the lip with her hands in her coat pockets, watching the gillback’s thread. It was bending, very slightly, away from her and toward him.

“I can taste pennies,” Hamid said.

He said it quietly through his mask. Under the rope his chest was going hard. For half an hour he’d held a man on a line in the mouth of a Hollow, with all of Eleven’s air sliding in past his face. Jules’s fifteen minutes on a cartridge had come and gone during the diver, when nobody had a hand free to change one.

If he can taste it, Jules had said on Ten, it’s been through his cartridge for a while.

“Don’t move,” Wes said.

He held his left hand out over the lip between Hamid’s mask and the dark and wanted it. Not the shelf, only the air in front of one man’s face. All morning the haze had been sliding past them into the hole; now it folded over and poured into the back of his hand in a soft gold rope, with the gillback’s thread lifting off the rock to follow.

Hamid breathed in, held it and let it go. Without a word he unclipped his cartridge, dropped it in his pocket and clicked the spare home from his chest pocket.

Three years in a rental mask, Wes thought. Now I’m the filter.

Dolly had watched it all go into his hand. It was the first time she’d seen him do it. Her eyes went from his hand to the clean air. Then they went to Saskia and stayed.

”Dolly!” Across the shelf Petra had the handset at her ear. “Jules says your time!”

“Tell her I heard.” Dolly tucked the line under her knee, hooked her cast against her chest and went at her own cartridge one-handed.

“Ms. Krane,” Saskia said.

“I’m listening.” Dolly didn’t look up from the cartridge.

“You came for a heart core. Take it out and sell it wherever you were going to sell it. When the Hollow’s cleared, nobody’s names go on the clear.” Saskia let that sit a moment. “Every piece of the Diver’s set that comes out of my Hollow comes to my House. That’s what today costs.”

With a click the new cartridge went home. Dolly breathed through it twice before she answered. “Today.”

“Today.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow isn’t yours, Ms. Krane.”

“Everything he does on my cage is mine.”

“Then he’ll tell you.” Saskia’s voice didn’t change. “Or he won’t.”

Behind the mask Dolly’s jaw worked. She looked at the hole, then down the shelf at her cage with Petra standing in it.

“The core, no names, and your House gets its eel suit,” Dolly said. “Done.” Her good hand went back to the line under her knee. “And you don’t touch my lines.”

“I’ve no use for rope.”

Dolly checked her watch. “Six-oh-eight,” she told Wes. “Go on, then.”

He went back over the edge. Hamid paid the rope out after him, hand over hand, without taking his eyes off the woman in the coat.

Core, no names, eel suit, Wes thought. And tomorrow on my tab.

On the way back down Saskia kept a slab to his left while Pruitt went ahead with the lamp. She waited until the light was a few meters below them.

“When I go down for my Sixth Circle, I go to Shelf Forty,” she said. “Below Thirty, nothing comes up when the book says it will, and nothing reads on a dial until it’s close enough to touch. I want someone at the cage who can tell me what’s moving in the shaft before I go into it.”

The deepest Wes had ever been was the slab he was standing on.

“One read,” he said. “You name the day, I tell you what’s down there, and after that we’re square for your statement on Nine and for this. My crew stays out of it.”

She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no either. She stepped down onto the next slab, the one Pruitt had called, and looked out past the lamp to where the basins went on into the dark.

Forty, he thought. She says it like it’s the next floor down. Under that: One read, Nine paid off. Cheapest debt I ever had, if she takes it.

They went round the emptied basin on its lip. The back half of Saskia’s diver lay in the bottom where it had fallen, its cut end shining. Nobody looked at it for long.

The third basin was bigger than the second and deeper. Its pool lay a hand below the rim on the high side, flat gold, lit from inside and lighting the stone above it. At the low end, where the floor fell away toward another sump, the lip stood a meter over the surface. Pruitt held the lamp out across it. The light went in a little way and stopped.

Under the petal on Wes’s forearm the pull ran down and back, as it had all morning. He followed it with his eyes across the pool, over the low lip and on into the dark past the sump.

“They all go back,” he said. “Every pool in here’s draining the same way. Slow.”

“Into the sumps,” Pruitt said. For a while he stood with the lamp and said nothing. “They named this place the Cistern,” he said at last, and held the lamp out over the pool again. “A cistern’s for drinking out of.”

Along the rim, Saskia had walked on toward the low end until the lamp only just had her. She stood with her back to them, looking down into the sump.

“Before you go any further,” Pruitt said, low, “show me your sheet.”

“You saw it at the gate.”

“Since the gate you’ve put six in Might, had a quest pay you and eaten a pool.” Pruitt kept his eyes on Saskia’s back. “I’d like to know what I’m holding the lamp for.”

The petal still hung off the back of his hand by a corner. Wes lifted it clear and put his right thumb on the ring, keeping his voice under the drip of the chamber.

Pruitt’s lips moved after him on every number as Wes read it out.

“Draw forty-two,” Pruitt said. “I’m on thirty.”

“Took you fifteen years to get to thirty.”

“I’m aware, son.”

Wes kept his thumb on Free points: 0. For a week he’d had free points folded away like a twenty in his shoe, money for whatever broke next. On the sump’s lip they’d gone into his arms and been worth every one. Now the account was empty. If the next thing got hold of him, he couldn’t buy his way off it. He’d get twelve seconds on reserve. After that he’d be what the card said, a First at nine of nine, until the sit was up.

Heavy, he thought. A heavier cellar, a shorter sit: sixty, now. The twelve stays twelve. Whatever the next word is, it’ll cost more than a pool.

At the bottom of the card sat Echoes: 2: two pieces of her stroke, one charge, ready. Pruitt had a rule about that: never walk into a dark place counting on it. Wes let the card go and pressed the petal back down over the ring until its edges held.

“Right,” Pruitt said. Getting up off his good knee, he went along the high side with the lamp held low and read the stone out loud as he went. “That’s sound. That’s sound. That’s greasy, mind your—”

The bad knee went again.

It folded under him sideways on the lip, where the stone was slick with whatever pooled spill left behind. Pruitt pitched forward down the inside of the basin with the lamp going ahead of him. First the lamp went into the pool, then Pruitt, headfirst, with no splash at all. Over his head and shoulders the gold closed and lay flat again. Only his boots stayed out, on the slope above it, kicking.

Down there the lamp went on shining. It lit the whole pool from inside, gold all through, with Pruitt a dark shape in it.

Wes went in after him to the thighs. The pool was heavy round his legs and pushed back, like wading through wet cement. He couldn’t see his own boots. Feeling for Pruitt, he found a shoulder, then the back of the harness. He got his fist through the strap and pulled.

Out of the pool came Pruitt with the gold running off him in slow sheets, his mouth open, nothing going in or out. Wes dragged him backward up the slope by the harness and laid him on the rim.

His lips were blue. For a long second nothing happened at all. Then Pruitt dragged in a breath as ragged as a saw in wet wood. Another followed before he rolled onto his side and coughed until he gagged.

Saskia had come back along the rim. She stood a few meters off with her hands in her pockets. She hadn’t run.

“It’s not air,” Pruitt said when he could. He said it to the stone between his hands. “You’d think you could breathe it. It’s a floor. Face in it and you drown, Mark or no Mark.”

Pruitt got an elbow under himself. “Nobody puts his face in one to find out,” he said.

Down in the pool the lamp still shone up through the gold. Wes had waded back in after it, the gold at his thighs again, when the Draft turned round.

All morning the pull on his forearm had run down and back. Now it reversed, up out of the low end of the basin, out of the sump under the pool: the same turn he’d felt in the basin above, a minute before the divers came. A second later the Nose had it, thick and cold and coming fast.

He couldn’t see a thing through it. The pool was a floor. Something went past his left boot under the gold, smooth and cold, before it came back round the other side.

“Wes,” Pruitt said from the rim.

You can’t take me under, Wes thought, if there’s no under.

He opened his hand over the pool and wanted all of it.

This pool came quicker than the first. The whole surface lifted off the basin in one gold sheet and bent into the back of his hand. The level dropped off his thighs, then his knees, then past his boots. Under it, already coiled twice round his ankles, lay a diver.

It had come up drinking with its jaw open, its head in the pool and its throat full.

After that there was nothing round it but air and dry stone.

It thrashed. On the grease the coils slid off his ankles, and he went backward up the slope on his hands and heels while the jaw snapped at his knees. It missed and snapped again. The diver came a meter after him and stopped. In the basin above, he’d watched these things come up a slope as fast as a dog. This one couldn’t lift its own head.

Its plates sagged as it flattened against the stone like an air mattress with the plug pulled, slower and slower, its jaw opening and closing on nothing. At last it lay still.

“It was holding itself up on the pool,” Pruitt said quietly from the rim.

Wes sat on the slope with his heart going. Below him lay an empty basin, a bare grey floor and the lamp on its side at the bottom, shining at nothing. He hadn’t hit the diver. He hadn’t gone on reserve. He’d eaten its dinner, and it had died.

The second pool followed the first down into the cellar. This time no card came up: the word was still heavy. A moment later the dead diver gave up its spill. None of it was pool. It rose like heat, straight up off the plates in a cloud the size of a car, gold and violet in the lamplight.

Over the diver’s tail the cloud wasn’t rising. A thread of it had curled back down and was sliding in between the plates, the way one had slid into a dead lapper’s petal on Nine. While he watched, the plates darkened along a forearm’s length of tail. Their edges began to glow.

A drop.

If he ate the cloud, the thread would go with it, and nothing would settle.

Every piece of the Diver’s set, Saskia had said.

He left it where it was. That’s the core paid for, he thought. And no names on the clear.

The thread finished going in. Unhurried, the rest of the cloud went up past the lamplight into the dark of the chamber, toward the only way up there was. Saskia watched it go. Then she watched him.

“You let it settle,” she said.

“You said every piece.”

“I did.” She looked at the cloud again, a long way up now. “Most people would have wanted to see whether I’d notice.”

When the glow along the tail had set, Wes went down and peeled the plates off. They came away in one piece, a run of overlapping scale as long as his shin and curved to fit it, cold and supple, with a gold sheen under the grey. The card was waiting.

He didn’t read the rest of it. He picked the lamp up off the bottom on his way, walked the Greaves up the slope and held them out to her.

Saskia took them between two fingers without looking at them. On Nine she’d taken Brannock’s lance off him the same way.

Pruitt had got himself sitting up on the rim with his back against a rock. He still breathed like a man who’d climbed a building. “Two pools and a diver,” he said, and looked at his watch. “And it isn’t seven.”

Up the dark of the chamber the cloud he’d left had found the throat. Wes felt it go on the Draft, a warm pull climbing away up the slabs toward the hole, toward Dolly’s light and Eleven and Vahl’s post.

On Saskia’s wrist the slim band buzzed.

She turned the wrist over and looked at the band, the Greaves hanging from her other hand. It buzzed again and kept on buzzing, a small flat sound in the big dark.

“My post,” she said. “It’s climbing.”

“Your desk said it was broken.”

“It’s climbing now. My House has an alarm on that.” She watched the band. “Inside a minute the desk will be looking at it.”

Pruitt had stopped breathing hard. “Who knows you’re down here?”

Saskia looked at the band until it stopped.

“You do,” she said.