Chapter 2Bound

Nobody answered her.

Inside the whale’s mouth, Jules had stopped breathing loud. Pruitt stood still, blood running off his fingertips onto the rock. Overhead, the floodlights creaked on their cables and settled. Saskia Vahl waited with the air of a woman who had done a great deal of waiting in her life and had never once had to do it for long.

Pruitt cleared his throat and raised his hand. “That’d be me, ma’am.”

Oh, you beautiful idiot, Wes thought.

“Fifteen years in the trade,” Pruitt said. He held up the back of his left hand so she could see the white ring with its six lit notches. “Had a good day.”

Saskia gave the hand the look Jules gave a wound, all interest and no sympathy. “Six notches,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Mister...?”

“Pruitt.”

“Mr. Pruitt. When a Mark takes in more than it can hold, the excess burns off. You know that. You’ve watched it happen.” She said it pleasantly. “At a gleaner’s pace, off a shelf’s leftovers, it’s a shimmer on the back of the hand. Nobody is hurt by it. A Fifth Circle’s cloud in eleven seconds is not leftovers. A First Circle would go up like a flare. And then there wouldn’t be a First Circle anymore. Just a smell.”

Saskia watched Pruitt’s hand come slowly back down to his side. “I was standing on the Rim,” she said, “watching my gauge, with the whole shaft in front of me. Nothing flared.” She glanced at the empty air over the carcass. “It went dark.”

Wes was holding his breath, which made no sense behind a mask. The air down here was cleaner now than it had been in his whole career.

He’d cleaned it.

Saskia turned to him, her eyes a pale, ordinary grey. He’d expected more from a Fifth Circle—lightning, a glow—but they were just eyes, reading the name stenciled on the breast of his overalls.

“Callow,” she said. “Your hand, please, Mr. Callow.”

Wes didn’t move the hand from behind his back.

“I’m asking,” Saskia said, “because I was raised to be polite. I don’t have to ask.” She didn’t move either. From thirty meters away it already felt as if she was standing on his chest.

At last he brought the hand around into the floodlight, where the gold ring glowed with all nine notches lit. Under it, faint as the pulse in a wrist, was the slow beat of whatever was down in the cellar under his ribs.

Something changed in Saskia Vahl’s face. It wasn’t much, but three years of reading Dolly’s moods off the angle of her cigarette, on top of a lifetime of reading landlords and loan officers, had taught Wes how to watch a face. Hers had been a closed door since she landed. Now, for about a second, a line of light showed under it. “Gold,” she said softly.

“Is that bad?”

“I don’t know.”

That was worse. He’d been ready for bad, not for the youngest Fifth Circle Caddock had ever had, if you believed the internet, to stand in the floodlights and say I don’t know.

Then she was in front of him.

She didn’t run or stir the air or crack the stone. One moment she was thirty meters away. The next she was close enough that he could smell her—clean wool, cold air—her fingers already around his left wrist.

Her grip was gentle but also, unmistakably, a vise made of something that wasn’t flesh. If she closed it, his hand would come off at the wrist like the cap off a bottle.

She turned the Mark to the light and watched the pulse under it beat once, then twice. “What does it say?” she asked.

“Gleaner,” Wes said. “Common.”

As soon as she let go, the hand went straight back behind his back. One corner of her mouth moved as she watched it go.

Her gaze dropped to his other hand. “And that,” Saskia said, “belongs to my House.”

Through the whole fight and every second since, the lance had sat in his fist humming, and he had never once bothered to check it. Now that he spared it a thought, it turned out the Mark had a card for it, waiting for him to ask.

Requirement not met, Wes thought. To me it’s just a very sharp stick. Even the spear knows whose it is. He held it out, broken end first. Saskia took it between two fingers like a pen, the black blood still drying on the blade. “Brannock will be relieved,” she said.

“The bald guy?”

“The bald guy.”

“Wes.” Jules’s voice came from inside the whale, thin and much too calm. “My foot’s gone cold.”

All Saskia did was turn her head toward the baleen and lift her right hand. She raised it to about shoulder height with the first two fingers together and drew them sideways through the air, as if wiping a smudge off a window.

There was no snap and no crack as the two baleen plates next to the broken one slid apart along a line as straight as a ruler. With a long, grinding sigh, the loose halves came away and hit the rock in a burst of grit. Where they’d been cut, the stone shone like black glass.

So did the edges of the hole in the stonewhale’s side, where the heart had been.

Something small and deep turned over under his ribs, in the cellar where all that light had gone. It moved the way a sleeper moves when somebody in the next room says their name.

Wes kept his hand behind his back, his face perfectly still. She was watching Pruitt help Jules out through the gap she’d made, Jules hopping on one foot and swearing in a steady, clinical way. When Saskia turned back to Wes, he had the cold feeling that she’d been watching him the whole time.

“In about an hour,” she said, “someone at the Sink Authority will look at a graph of this shelf and see a line fall off a cliff. Then they’ll ask what I asked. They’ll be less polite about it, and they’ll ask in a smaller room.”

Behind her, Pruitt had laid Jules on the rock and was working her boot off. Under the floodlights her foot was the color of candle wax.

“Her foot,” Wes said. “Can this be quick?”

Saskia glanced at the foot, then back at him. “Yes,” she said. “Here’s what happened. A swarm came up out of the fissures. Forty lappers, give or take. They stripped the cloud. That’s what lappers are for. Mr. Callow was Marked in the dregs. He capped out in a few seconds, the way a fresh Mark will, and burned off the rest. A small flare. I saw it from the Rim.”

“You just said it went dark,” Pruitt said.

“I did. Just now. To you.” She kept her eyes on Wes. “That’s the version the Authority will get from me. You’ll want it to be the version they get from you.”

“Why lie for me?” It came out rougher than Wes wanted.

For a moment Saskia was quiet. “Because if the Authority finds something on this shelf it can’t explain,” she said, “it will take that thing apart to see how it works. It’s very slow at that, and it loses things. I’d hate for this one to get lost.” Her head tilted a little to one side. “I don’t know what you are, Mr. Callow. I don’t think you do either. So right now, you belong to whoever finds out first.”

“So you’re lying to the Authority,” Wes said. “For me.”

“For me,” she corrected. “If you’re ever caught, I was mistaken. A Fifth Circle is allowed to be mistaken now and then.” She tucked the broken lance under her arm. “A gleaner isn’t allowed much of anything.”

“And what do you get?” He waved a hand at the cliff, the graph, the whole conversation. “For the favor?”

“It isn’t a favor.” She seemed faintly surprised that he’d think so. “When I want something from you, you’ll know. I’ll be standing in front of you.” She glanced up the shaft. “Your cage has turned round. I passed it on my way down. Your boss was trying to kill your warden with her bare hands.”

She bent her knees, the floodlights swung, and Shelf Nine was three people, a lot of dead lappers and one dead whale again.

After she left, it was quiet. A pebble came down the shaft, pinged off a cable and was gone.

“You,” Jules said. She was sitting on the rock with her back against a fallen slab of baleen, her bad leg stuck straight out. Sweat had fogged the inside of her visor. “Marked boy. Come here. I need your hands.”

Wes came over and crouched beside her. “What do you need?”

“My ankle’s dislocated, and it needs to go back in. It’s out, and it’s pinching off the blood. That’s why the foot’s cold. Much longer and I lose it. I’d do it myself, but I’ll pass out halfway through. Then you’d have to finish it, and you’d do it wrong.”

“I’ll do it wrong anyway. I don’t know how.”

“I’ll tell you how. Kneel down. Hold my heel in your right hand. Left hand on top of my foot. No. Lower. There.”

Every bone in her foot was there under Wes’s fingers: how they fit together, where they didn’t and how little it would take—how little he’d have to think—to make them not fit at all. Her heel sat in his palm like an egg. Only a quarter of an hour ago, the steel jack handle he’d swung at a tongue had bounced.

“Pull toward you,” Jules said. “Slow and steady. Not hard. Steady. Like you’re getting the lid off a jar and you don’t want to break the jar.”

“What if I break the jar?”

“Don’t break the jar.”

Slower than he’d ever done anything, he pulled. Jules made a sound through her teeth like a kettle starting. Something under his hands shifted and ground, then slid back into place with a deep, wet clunk that he felt in his own molars.

Jules screamed once, then laughed, short and shaky. “Good,” she gasped. “Good. That’s—yeah. Good job. You’re a natural. Don’t ever do that again.”

Pruitt splinted it with two strips of cut baleen and half a roll of duct tape out of his overalls. Gleaners, he told Wes, were mostly duct tape and spite.

Afterward Pruitt sat down hard on the rock and held his left hand in front of his face, the one he’d put up. “I lied to a Fifth Circle,” he said, to nobody in particular. “I put my hand up.” He turned it over, palm to the light. “Why did I put my hand up?”

Wes started to answer and didn’t have one.

Lap.

Wes’s head came up a second before Pruitt’s did. Jules froze with one hand on her splint.

Lap. Lap.

It was coming from the back wall, from the fissures where the floodlights didn’t reach. Every lap was faint and wet and a little less faint than the last.

“Your Mark,” Pruitt said quietly. “It’s still new. Still open. They can smell it.”

“She was here ten minutes. They didn’t come.”

“She’s a Fifth Circle. Nothing comes up while she’s standing around.” Pruitt was already getting up, already hooking his hands under Jules’s arms. “Now it’s just us.”

Wes looked around for the lance before he remembered he’d handed it back. What he had was the jack handle, lying inside the whale’s mouth where he’d dropped it. He grabbed it as Pruitt hauled Jules back through the opening. In his hands the meter of steel pipe felt like a breadstick.

“Get her deep,” he said. “Back by the teeth. Go.”

Pruitt went, with Jules hopping and cursing beside him. That left Wes alone in front of the opening when three lappers came out of the dark.

They came fast and low, all six legs going, heads already splitting into petals. With nothing left on the carcass worth having, they came for him.

The first one’s tongue came at his face. He caught it out of the air, which was easier now that he knew he could. Instead of swinging the lapper into the wall, he yanked it toward him and met its head with the pipe as it arrived.

In the whale’s mouth that same steel had bounced. This time it folded around the lapper’s skull. So did the skull.

The second lapper’s tongue took his legs out, wrapping twice around his left shin before it pulled. He hit the rock on his back so hard that his visor cracked a second time. Seconds later he was sliding feet first toward the back wall, where the new guy had gone and screamed and stopped.

Wes clawed at the floor.

His fingers went into the stone.

They sank a knuckle deep and held. At the other end of the tongue the lapper stopped too, all six legs braced. For a second they were two animals pulling in opposite directions.

Wes was stronger.

He let go with one hand, grabbed the tongue and hauled it in hand over hand, the lapper’s legs screeching across the stone. When it reached him he hit it in the head, twice. After the second blow it stopped pulling.

Whatever had put his fingers into the stone went out of his arms all at once. He was only a First again. At breakfast that would have been plenty.

The third lapper wasn’t coming for him. Instead it had gone around him and already had its head and forelegs through the opening Saskia had cut, its tongue shooting into the dark of the mouth after Pruitt.

The second lapper’s tongue had dragged Wes most of the way to the back wall, so this one had a thirty-meter start on him. Wes landed on its back while its tongue was still going in. He grabbed two of the petals, thick and rubbery and hot as a tire left out in the sun, planted his boots on its spine and pulled them apart. The head opened the rest of the way, much farther than it was built to open.

Shelf Nine went quiet again, except for Wes breathing and Jules somewhere back in the whale’s mouth saying “Jesus Christ,” over and over. By the time he climbed off the body, his hands had started to shake.

Each lapper had paid its take as it died, the little share any Mark drinks off its own kill. He’d felt the three go in without asking him, warm pinches in the back of his left hand, gone straight down past the full ring into the cellar.

Above the three dead lappers, the spill began to rise. It wasn’t much: three little gold clouds curling off the bodies like steam off a sewer grate. This morning it would have been more of the air he’d spent his whole career not breathing.

Now his left hand ached for it—not the Mark, the hand, hungry the way your whole body turns its head when you walk past a bakery. Already his fingers were opening on their own. He could feel the motes leaning toward him, the clouds starting to bend—

Someone at the Sink Authority will look at a graph of this shelf.

In his head he could see the graph: a line lying flat along the bottom of the page where he’d left it, then three small bumps as three small clouds went up, nice and normal. Or nothing at all, over three dead lappers that couldn’t have eaten their own spill.

He did the math, and he closed his hand.

Pruitt had come out through the opening at a run, both hands reaching for Wes’s wrist. He stopped a meter short and let them drop.

“Okay,” Pruitt said, out of breath. “Okay. Good. That’s—good.”

The wanting stayed in the bones of Wes’s hand, itching, while he watched the three little clouds, somebody else’s leftovers, drift up past the floodlights toward daylight.

“That’s going to happen every time, isn’t it,” he said.

“I don’t know.” Pruitt rubbed his face with both hands. “Yeah. Probably.”

Over the body of the third lapper, some of the spill wasn’t rising. It had been sinking the whole time. A thin thread of it had curled back down and slid into the lapper’s ruined head, into one of the four torn petals. As Wes watched, the petal darkened and stiffened and began to glow, faintly, like a phone screen lying face down on a table.

“Well, look at that,” Pruitt said. “A drop.”

Everybody had seen drops, Wes included. Hunters wore them on chains in the Rim bars; the ones from big kills sold at auction for more than his apartment. Until now he’d never seen one happen.

Crouching, he peeled the petal off. It came away whole, warm and supple as leather, the color of bitter chocolate under a faint gold sheen. The moment his fingers closed on it, he felt a card waiting.

“Pocket it,” Pruitt said. “Before somebody comes down that shaft and sees you holding it.”

“Isn’t it mine?”

“Unlicensed kill,” Pruitt said, his mouth going flat. “You want to give Kessler a present?”

Wes put the lapper petal in the chest pocket of his overalls and zipped it shut.

Once Pruitt had Jules back out through the opening, they waited for the cage outside the whale’s mouth, Jules lying on the rock with her splinted leg propped on a stonewhale tooth. Pruitt wiped his bloody forearm on his knee. The cage light was a speck high up the shaft when he said, “Press your thumb to it.”

“To what?”

“Your Mark. Put your right thumb on the ring and think show me. Doesn’t have to be those words. My first year, I used to think what now, and that worked fine.”

Wes didn’t press anything.

“Everybody gets a sheet,” Pruitt said. “Didn’t you know that?”

“I knew it. I just didn’t think I’d ever—” He’d known it in the sense that he knew people on the Rim had heated floors. Rather than finish, he pressed his thumb to the gold ring.

He went through it line by line. People posted their sheets on Shelfnotes all the time, like pictures of their cars. He’d scrolled past hundreds, none of them with his name at the top.

“Well?” Pruitt said.

“It says I’m Swallowed.”

“That’s a title. You get those for doing stupid things nobody’s done before. Look at it.”

Wes thumbed the line, and it opened.

“Rare,” Pruitt repeated, when Wes read it out. “What’s your Draw?”

“Forty-one.”

Pruitt turned his head to stare at him. “Say that again.”

“Forty-one. Is that—”

“Mine’s thirty.” Pruitt looked off into the dark. “After all these years. A hunter’s notches go into his arms and legs. A gleaner gets one point of Draw per notch, and most of us dump our free points in it too, because it’s the only number that does anything for us. Blanks come out of Marking at fifteen or so. Twenty if they’re lucky.” He looked at the nine lit notches. “Nine notches, nine points, and you’ve not had time to spend a free one. You came out at thirty-two.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s a number you never tell anybody,” Pruitt said. “Ever. Not Dolly. Not Jules—”

“I can hear you,” Jules said.

“Not Jules, who can hear me. Not some girl at a bar. Not a Fifth Circle with nice manners. You hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“What else?”

Wes hesitated. Pruitt had put his hand up for a Fifth Circle and held Jules’s other arm when the tongue had her. Besides, there wasn’t anybody else to ask.

“Remainder,” he said. “Held. And echoes. One.”

The only sound was a floodlight ticking on its cable. “I know what a gleaner’s sheet says,” Pruitt said at last. “Glean, Common, and a pile of free points in Draw. That’s the whole sheet.” He shook his head slowly at the gold ring on Wes’s hand. “I’ve never seen either of those lines.”

“So what are they?”

“I don’t know, son. I really don’t.”

Wes read the two lines again. Remainder: held. That was the cellar, then. The Sink had a word for it, and the word sat on his sheet under the titles like a line item.

“And the free points? Do I put them in Draw?”

“That’s what everybody tells you.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

Pruitt gave him a long sideways look. “No,” he said. “Don’t put them anywhere. Not yet. Not till you know what you are. Once a point’s in, you can’t take it back out.”

Leaving the points alone suited Wes fine. Free points: 18 meant eighteen of something sitting in an account with his name on it. Nobody could add interest to them or take a fee out of them or call him at seven in the morning about them.

It was the first savings he’d ever had.

High above them, the cage light had nearly reached the shelf.

Dolly came out of the Bucket before it had finished stopping. Never mind the gate: she came over the top of it, all five foot nothing of her, dropped a meter and a half to the rock, staggered and kept coming, her right hand wrapped in a T-shirt. Hamid came out behind her carrying a fire axe, with the look of a man who’d been told to bring it and didn’t want to know why. Behind him Petra stayed on the lever. Three blanks had brought the cage back down a shaft with lappers in it.

Dolly hit Jules first, hard, both arms around her neck. Pruitt got the same. When she got to Wes, she took his face in both hands, one of them in a T-shirt, and held it there without saying anything at all.

Then she saw his hand.

“Oh, kid,” she said. “Gleaner?”

“Gleaner.”

“Oh, honey.”

“What happened to your hand?” Jules asked.

“Broke two knuckles on that little shit’s face,” Dolly said. “Didn’t even mark him.” She looked around the shelf: the dead lappers, the cut baleen, the clean air over the whale. “Where’s the spill?”

Nobody said anything. Dolly tried Pruitt, who studied the ground, so she tried Wes.

“Lappers,” Wes said.

Dolly took a moment longer than he liked, then nodded once. “Lappers,” she agreed. “Get in the Bucket.”

For the ten-minute ride up, Wes stood at the back of the cage with his hand in his pocket and watched Shelf Nine shrink under the floor grating: the stonewhale, the floodlights, the fissures in the back wall, black and quiet now. Somewhere back there was the new guy whose name he’d never learned. From up here, he couldn’t even see the place. All the way up, the needle on the cage gauge lay flat on zero.

Then it was daylight.

On the Drain side, the cage head was a steel platform bolted to the lip of the Sink, on rock stained black with forty years of runoff. Somebody from the Down Church had painted the gate rails gold again. Under a grey sky and a wet wind, a seagull sat on the winch house, unimpressed by all of it.

An Authority van was parked at the platform gate, with two wardens in grey beside it. Next to the van was an ambulance, which was nice.

And there was Kessler, sitting on the van’s back step with an ice pack pressed to his ribs. He looked up as the cage gate opened, saw Wes walk out on his own two feet and looked down again fast.

A woman stepped away from the van. She was in her forties, in an Authority raincoat, with reading glasses pushed up into grey-streaked hair. No Mark on either hand. A blank. She held up a sheet of paper so Wes could see it.

It was a graph. A single line ran flat along the top of the page for most of its length.

Then it dropped straight to the bottom, as if it had been cut.

“Wesley Callow?” she said. “Imogen Tate. Gauge Office.” She looked from the page to him and back, as though one of them had to be wrong. “I’m told you can explain this.”