Chapter 13Brimming

Wes shouted up the throat. Saskia didn’t look down, but Hamid’s face came over the lip beside her, a mask in the white of Dolly’s light.

“Core!” Wes called. “And Pruitt!”

“How big?”

“Truck tire!”

Hamid glanced at Saskia, who didn’t look round. Jules, timing everybody’s cartridges from the winch house, had sent Dolly back to the Bucket at half past six, leaving him both lines and the bag of spares. He took a turn of Wes’s rope round the corner of a slab and sat down into it. Thirty meters below, Wes felt the line come tight at his back like a hand on his collar.

They took the throat in bites. Pruitt went first on his own line, slab by slab, his bad leg out stiff, while Hamid took in every centimeter he gained. Wes came behind with the core on his back, the Hood clipped to his harness. On reserve he went up three slabs at a time, set the core down on the fourth and sat beside it while Pruitt counted thirty over his shoulder. The core lit every slab they passed amber from underneath, so that the throat glowed behind them all the way up like a basement with one bulb left.

Halfway up, Pruitt stopped counting in the middle of a number. “You feel that?”

Wes felt it under the petal on his forearm, where the Draft had gone still.

All morning it had pulled: at six, on the lip, it had pulled in Eleven’s air, the dust, the gillback’s thread; down in the chamber it had drawn every pool back toward the sumps. Now it hung at the top like a held breath, then turned round.

Everything came out past him. Up the throat from behind, out of the dark of the chamber and out of the rock on both sides, the whole Hollow let go of what it had been holding. It didn’t rush; it breathed out long and slow, a sleeper’s breath, until the Nose had it everywhere at once.

“It’s dead,” Pruitt said. “It’s letting go.”

Under that, so far down that Wes nearly missed it, one thread still went the other way. It ran down past the chamber floor, past the sump under the slab, into the rock, where something was drinking it. Not the heart, which lay wedged in its own drain under a mattress of skin. Something under the heart was drinking up through the stone.

A cistern’s for drinking out of, Pruitt had said, holding the lamp out over a draining pool.

“Pruitt.”

“I know.” Pruitt laid his hand flat on the slab. “Keep climbing.”

The haze got out of the hole ahead of them. When Wes’s head came up over the lip, the hole was breathing it out round Hamid’s knees like steam off a manhole. Hamid held his mask to his face with one rag-wrapped hand. A few meters off on the fallen skin stood Saskia, the Greaves still hanging from her fingers.

“It says Unnamed,” Saskia said. She turned the back of her hand to him. “On mine. On every hand in Caddock.”

“No names. That was the deal.”

“It was.” She lowered the hand. “Every hunter in my House read that line over breakfast. Not one of them will stop asking who.”

Neither will Kessler, Wes thought. He set the core down on the lip to look at the shelf.

The whole dome was weeping gold.

Every hairline crack across its face, the cracks he’d watched glow from the cage yesterday, was pushing out spill. None of it rose; it came out heavy and ran down the outside of the dome in long slow runs the color of honey in a jar, joining as they went. At the foot of the dome the runs reached the shelf floor and spread.

Eleven’s floor wasn’t flat. From the dome to the landing it dipped in a long shallow trough, the low ground the gillback’s cloud had crawled across on its way to the cracks. While he watched, the gold found the trough and filled it from wall to wall. In a minute it was a puddle. In two it was a pond twenty meters across, flat and bright, cutting the skin off from the Bucket.

Vahl’s post stood at its edge with gold round its base. Wes read the dial without trying: twelve, then nineteen.

”Wes!” Across the gold Dolly stood at the Bucket’s gate with the handset’s cord stretched as far as it went. “What is that?”

“The Hollow! It’s breathing out!”

“Can you eat it?”

Behind him Hamid had started to cough.

It was one cough inside the mask, small and wet. Hamid turned his head from the hole to cough again. When he looked back at Wes, his eyes over the mask were streaming.

Same as six o’clock, Wes thought. Clean his air, then the pond.

He put his left hand out over the lip, between Hamid and the hole, and wanted it.

It came. In front of Hamid’s mask the haze folded over and started into the back of his hand, the same soft gold rope as at six, while Hamid took a breath.

The rope stopped.

Nothing burned or flared on the back of his hand; nothing went anywhere it shouldn’t. The haze simply stopped coming and hung a hand’s width off his skin, like a dog at a door it wasn’t allowed through. When wanting it harder did nothing, he reached for it with everything, the way he’d reached in the whale’s mouth on Nine, and found nothing to reach with. The tap he’d been opening and closing for two weeks wasn’t stiff. It wasn’t there.

Brimming, he thought. So full wasn’t the last word.

Down under the ring the cellar sat on him. All morning it had been weight. Now it was a pressure that pushed one way only, down, as steady as a full stomach pushing you toward a chair. It wanted him to go down: not to Eleven, further. For two weeks Descent required had been a line on a card. Now he could feel which way it pointed.

Beside him Hamid coughed again, harder.

“I can’t,” Wes said. “It won’t come.”

Hamid looked at Wes’s empty hand, then at his face, then out across the gold at the cage. Without a word he took the last cartridge out of the bag at his hip and held it up so Dolly could see it across the pond.

”Jules says fifteen minutes!” Dolly shouted. ”From when it clicks!”

Hamid clicked it in and checked his watch.

“Pruitt goes now,” Wes said. “While it’s low.”

Where it met the skin, the gold reached the old man’s knees, no higher. Pruitt didn’t argue. Wes took him down off the lip by the back of the harness and walked him out into it, Pruitt holding the lamp over his head with his bad leg dragging, feeling for the floor with his boot before he trusted it with any weight. An hour ago Wes had hauled this man out of a pool blue-lipped. He didn’t let go of the strap once.

At the middle the gold reached Pruitt’s thighs. By the far side it was at his waist and still rising. Dolly got her good hand in his harness from above; between them they got him up onto the rock by the gate.

“In,” Petra said.

Pruitt got in and sat down on the grating with his back to the bars, his lamp in his lap, his watch out.

“Can you eat it?” Dolly said.

Wes opened his hand toward the pond anyway. The gold lay there in its trough under its own weight, not so much as shivering.

“No,” he said, and went back across.

When he came up onto the skin again, gold was still running down the dome. It lapped at the middle of the post now. Saskia had come to the edge of the skin beside him. She looked at the pond, then at the post standing in it, the needle going round past twenty-five, thirty.

“It will read what a Hollow ought to read,” she said. “Forty, by eight o’clock. Nobody looks back at a week stuck on eight when the last reading is forty.” She held out her free hand.

Wes unclipped the Hood from his harness and put it in it. The rolled Sleeve sat in his chest pocket the whole time, a fist of scale against his ribs. He was sure it had started to glow through the cloth. It hadn’t.

Saskia looked at the Hood, then at the Greaves, one in each hand.

“Two,” she said. “The same as last time.”

Wes kept his face where it was.

“My House will want that post read,” she said. “I can keep them off it till the skin heals.”

“How long’s that?”

“A week.” She looked at him a moment longer. “Don’t make me find out it’s less.”

When she stepped off the skin, stone cracked under her boots. A gust flattened the haze on the pond, and she was gone up the shaft into the dark above Eleven’s dead lights. A second later rock dust pattered onto the gold and sank without a mark.

She’ll be past Ten before Kessler’s got his boots on the landing, Wes thought. Under that: She counted them out loud, so I’d hear her do it.

“Core goes first,” Wes said.

Hamid looked at him over the mask.

“It’s bleeding.” It was: a thin gold thread had started off the core where it sat on the lip, leaning out over the pond to join it. “Every minute it sits next to you, it’s making your air worse. I’m Marked. I can walk that with my face out of it all day. You’ve got fifteen minutes.”

“Thirteen,” Hamid said.

“Thirteen. It goes across on your line. I tie your line off on the cage, then come back for you, and you walk over on the line with me next to you the whole way.”

For a second Hamid didn’t move. Then he untied Wes’s rope from round his own back, where it had been since twenty to six, and stood up with the end of it in his rag-wrapped hands. Kneeling by the core, he lashed it twice crossways, a load on a flatbed, and pulled the knot tight with his teeth and both fists. He held the coil out to Wes.

Wes took the coil over his shoulder, went on reserve and picked up the core.

Off the skin the gold took him at the thighs, at the chest three steps later. It was colder than he’d expected and heavier than the third basin’s pool had been, pushing back against every step like a crowd. He couldn’t see the floor, so he felt for it step by step with his boots, the core across his back, its light coming up through the gold under his chin. The gold was over his chest pocket now. Rolled up inside it, the Sleeve lay in pooled spill and did nothing at all for a First.

At the middle the reserve ran out. He stood there as a nine with the core on his back, the gold at his chest, his arms shaking, and counted. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.

He took it the rest of the way. At the far side he heaved the core up over the edge onto the rock by the gate. Between them Petra and Dolly got it rolling into the Bucket with their boots. He passed the line round the cage frame and tied it off with Hamid’s knot, crossways, twice.

“Eleven minutes,” Dolly said, the handset at her ear.

Wes went back along the line. From the cage frame to Hamid’s slab it hung over the pond in a long shallow curve, a hand clear of the gold at the middle. When he came up out of the gold at the skin, he stood in front of Hamid dripping light.

“Harness,” he said. “Not the arm.”

Hamid hung the work light round his neck by its strap and took the line in both rag-wrapped hands. With Wes’s fist in the back of his harness, they went in together.

The gold came up Hamid’s legs, then over his belt. At the chest it stopped him for a moment with its weight. He breathed hard through the cartridge, a long rasping pull and a long push, his eyes on the cage. A low gold mist lay over the pond right at the height of his mask.

“Nine!” Dolly called.

Hamid walked, hand over hand on the line. Wes kept his fist in the back of the harness, his other hand loose on the line beside Hamid’s.

Halfway across, Hamid’s boot went into a crack.

He went down sideways. Before Wes had the harness up, the gold had come over Hamid’s shoulder and up his neck, to a hand under the mask. Wes held him there half-lifted, the strap cutting into Hamid’s back while gold slid off his shoulder in slow sheets. Over the mask Hamid’s eyes had gone very wide.

“Got you,” Wes said. “Get your foot.”

Hamid worked at the boot while Wes held the harness and felt his arm start to go, a nine holding a big man up out of something that wanted him down.

The reserve’s there, he thought. Go on it and I’ll pull his foot off at the ankle.

On the third try the boot came free. Hamid found the floor again, stood up into the gold to his chest, breathed and started walking.

“Seven!” Dolly called.

At the far side Petra reached down for Hamid’s wrist while Dolly took his collar with her good hand. Between them they got him up onto the rock. Wes came up out of the gold after him with the light running off his overalls. On the landing he turned to look back across the pond at the skin. Nobody was standing on it now.

Hamid sat down on the grating inside the gate with his mask still on and looked at his hands for a while. The rag on the left one had bled through. He took it off and wrapped it again, tighter.

Dolly held the handset down to him on its cord. “Jules wants to know did you cough anything.”

Hamid pulled the mask down and coughed once into his glove. He held the glove up to the light: two gold flecks in the creases.

“Two,” Dolly told the handset. She listened. “She says two’s a cold and a half. You’re done for today.”

“Okay,” Hamid said.

Petra had the gate shut, the pin down, before Hamid had got his mask back on. She lifted the gate once, twice, before she put her hand on the lever. “Everybody in?”

“Everybody in,” Dolly said.

The Bucket came up off Eleven’s landing. Below them the pond lay flat and gold in its trough, still filling while the dome went on weeping into it. On the post at its edge the needle stood at thirty-eight. Past it the dead gillback lay with its lid open, its core gone dark. In the middle of the cage floor, under the tarp Dolly had thrown over it, the heart core lit the grating from below like a stove left on.

Wes watched Dolly take out her clipboard. Under CREW in her capitals it said POWER 35, his thirty-five, with 11 beside it from the cage head at five. She wrote 0751 DEP 11 underneath. Two lines now, both with an eleven in them.

“That all of it?” Dolly said without looking up. “Out of there.”

“Core’s under your tarp,” Wes said. “Saskia’s got hers.”

Dolly looked at him over the clipboard a second longer than she needed to. Then she hung it back on its hook on the cage wall.

Pruitt sat against the bars with his leg out, his watch still in his hand. “Brimming,” he said quietly, for Wes. “That’s the one where it stops?”

“It stopped.”

“Then you’re done eating,” Pruitt said, looking at the tarp. “Till you go down.”

Wes didn’t answer; under the ring the pressure sat where it had sat since the lip, pushing one way.

Ten came down the shaft at them, lit.

Somebody had turned on every lamp on the landing. The red-and-white sign still hung on its chain across the rail, SHELF CLOSED · PENDING INSPECTION. Past it, at the far end of the landing, the Office’s own cage stood open. A man in a white hard hat was crouched by the slot at the back of the shelf, over Tate’s unit with a clipboard, not looking up.

Kessler did. Eight minutes early for his eight o’clock, Wes thought.

He stood at the landing rail in his Authority greys, the new sword on his hip, one hand on the sign’s chain. As the Bucket came up out of the dark toward him, he lifted his other hand, flat, palm down. Petra stopped the Bucket level with the landing and left the gate shut.

Kessler came along the rail until he was a meter from the bars. He didn’t look at Wes first. He looked at the tarp: at the amber light coming up round its edges through the grating, at the shape under it, round, flat, the size of a truck tire. He looked at the clipboard on its hook, close enough to read. Wes watched his eyes go down it to POWER 35 and the two elevens.

They stayed there. A little after seven his hand had lit up with the clear on Eleven, like everybody else’s. At the slot behind him, the inspector turned a page.

Kessler didn’t call the inspector over. When he spoke, it was to Dolly.

“Office has put me on your run,” he said. “Warden of record, Drain-side cage, fourteen days. Starts tomorrow.”

“Since when?” Dolly said.

“Since this morning.” He didn’t smile when he said it. “Somebody thought your cage wanted watching.”

He looked past the Bucket, down along the cage run to the stretch of shaft wall under Ten’s lip where since yesterday something grey and flat had lain against the rock with its leaves stirring. The rock there was bare.

“Your gillback’s gone off the wall,” Kessler said. His eyes came back to Wes, then to the tarp.

“Where to?”