Chapter 5What Sinks

The crack was forty meters away, past the last of the lights, behind a man with a sword. From his yellow circle, Wes started a thread toward it.

A thread had found a four-inch gap in a window by itself on the first night, so he asked this one for more than that. He asked it to come the long way: low, under the lip of the scree, where the floodlights didn’t reach. He had no idea whether anything could hear him ask.

The Nose told him when it did: pennies and rain from behind, getting nearer along the back wall, in no hurry. It arrived at the small of his back, came around his hip and went into the hand on his knee from the blind side. From the front, the hunters’ thread kept coming. The tap in his hand, it turned out, had two spouts.

From where Lund stood, one gleaner sat with his hand on his knee.

That was all there was for half an hour. The shelf did what a shelf did. Along the scree the hunters worked in pairs and threes, turning rocks and hitting what came out, while the clouds went up over the kills in little bedsheets and thinned toward the post. A tall woman with an Authority spear made her kill clean and dragged it in by one leg. The big man with the hammer dragged in a second one he wasn’t allowed to count, since the proctor had said one. He stood over it looking hurt. Brandt, the Dray candidate who had beaten Wes down the Run, hadn’t come back to the post. She had taken her axe past the lights, after the big ones. Now and then a cloud went up out there. Lund checked each scuttle with the reader, noted it on his clipboard and said “Clean” or “Clean. Next.” Nobody shouted at the gleaners.

Wes had spent three years on shelves wanting people to look straight through him, and today they did.

He couldn’t have said where the second spout went. Not into the ring; the ring had been full since the whale. Down past it, into the cellar, where the Shelf Nine cloud sat doing whatever it did. A thread off the floor of Shelf Four joined it without a sound. There was a picture of the cellar in his head now that hadn’t been there before. It had a floor somewhere down there.

Kessler strolled the length of the circles once in the first twenty minutes, like a warden checking his shelf. He stopped behind Wes long enough to read the dial.

“Three down,” he said, low. “One to go. Look at you.” He strolled on down the line.

“Twenty-two, Callow,” Lund said at the thirty-five-minute mark, without looking up. “Four. That’s your pass.”

He reached four points off the post with twenty-five minutes to spare. In all that time the needle hadn’t twitched once. Benny leaned over far enough to see the dial and whistled. On the far circle the third gleaner said “Good,” meant it and went back to her own needle.

Wes let the front thread thin to nothing and sat there with his hand on his knee, passing. Nobody handed him a payment schedule.

“How are you doing that?” Benny said out of the corner of his mouth.

“Doing what?”

“Sitting still. My leg’s gone to sleep.”

“Think about the bus.”

Benny thought about it for a full minute. “Which bus?”

Twenty meters off, Kessler had gone back to the edge of the light with a hand on his sword. From time to time he checked the needle. From time to time he smiled at Wes and went back to the scree. Osei stood at the far end with the dark behind her, watching the hunters because the manual said to.

The ribbon of spill into the crack had stopped.

Through the Nose he knew it before he understood it. The smell from the crack hadn’t gone, only turned around and thickened. Spill that had gone down into the rock was coming back up it in a slow breath, like heat up a chimney.

It’s noticed, he thought. Dinner’s leaving. It’s come up to see where.

Under the crack, the rock lifted.

Osei saw it first, because she was standing on it. Fast for a Second Circle, she was clear with her sword out and shouting ”Breach!” by the time the dark end of Shelf Four came apart behind her.

It came out of the floor like a drill through a wall: not fast, but with nothing able to stop it. A segmented body as thick as a man, grey-white, in rings of plate that ground against each other. The mouth at the front was also the drill: three jaws, each lined with teeth, turning. Nothing on it had ever needed to see.

“Borer!” Kessler was moving before the word was out. “Second Circle. Cage! Proctor, get them in and hold it till I say!”

By then the hunters were running, with Lund hauling the gleaners up by their collars. Wes ran for the cage at the lit end, fifty meters off, beside Benny, who was hopping and swearing on a leg still asleep.

The big man with the hammer didn’t run. He stood in the borer’s way with the hammer up and hit it once across the rings as it came. The hammer came back at him and put him on the rock, where the borer went over him without slowing. What it was after wasn’t him but the thickest spill on the shelf, which hung over Brandt’s dead scuttles at the dark end.

Brandt was still out there. She came out of a gap in the rocks straight into its path, swinging her House-made axe, and the blade glanced off the rings. The thing took her across the middle in a loop of itself, like a hand taking a rope, before it turned back toward its crack.

Osei hit it from the side and put her blade into a ring-gap up to the hilt. The borer rolled and threw her off, across the rock on her back and into the wall, where she stayed.

Kessler met it head on. He put his sword against the drill as it came for him and braced. Steel screamed on teeth and threw sparks up the shaft. His boots gouged two lines back across the rock as he held it, the blood coming out of his mouth again, the floodlights showing all twenty-four years of him.

Ten seconds. Twenty.

The loop with Brandt in it swung round, caught Kessler across the chest and threw him backward into a floodlight pole hard enough to fold it. The borer backed toward the crack with Brandt, who had stopped screaming. Her face had gone the candle-wax color Jules’s foot had gone on Shelf Nine. The dark end of the shelf was taking her in a meter at a time.

The cage gate was half shut. Inside it Lund stood with one hand on the lever and one on the bars, not pulling, the rest of the candidates packed in behind him. “In,” he said. “Callow. In.”

He was in the light. Then he was in the dark.

The floodlights were behind him before Lund had finished saying it. There was no plan. He switched to reserve at a run, and the dark end of Shelf Four arrived around him faster than it had any business doing. Up close the borer smelled of nothing at all, a hole in the air where the spill should have been. Half of it was already into the crack, rings grinding on the broken rock. Brandt’s arm hung out of the loop of it, open-handed.

Wes grabbed the loop. It was like grabbing the side of a truck pulling away, the rings turning under his hands until his fingers found a gap between two of them, went in up to the knuckle and held. For a second the whole thing stopped moving.

He pulled. The loop opened a hand’s width, enough for Brandt to slide as far as her ribs before it closed on her again and squeezed a sound out of her. The plates didn’t give, so he hit the ring with his free fist as hard as he had ever hit anything. The plate dented; his knuckles split.

The drill turned toward him. Up close, its three jaws opened on something worse: a second drill where a throat should have been, smaller and turning the other way.

He had nothing: Kessler’s sword lay under a folded pole at the edge of the light, Brandt’s axe somewhere in the scree. The thing that had thrown a Second Circle into a floodlight had him by his own grip, with the crack behind it. It was going home with both of them.

Something rolled over in the cellar under the splinter. It had done that when Saskia Vahl cut stone with two fingers. Once since, fainter, at his window. It wasn’t a thought so much as the memory of a line.

Wes let go with his right hand, put two fingers together and drew them sideways across the ring-gap in front of him.

The borer came apart along one clean line.

Not through plate but through everything: the ring, the loop, the rock under the loop, which split a hand-span deep. The front third, with both drills in it, dropped into the crack and went on turning as it went down. The back two-thirds let go of Brandt and died with a long hiss of air out of its rings. The grey-white flesh shone like black glass where it was cut.

He stood there with his two fingers out, his right hand feeling as if he’d shut it in a car door. From the crack he heard the front third going down, and down, and then nothing.

Nothing happened at all the second time, when he put two fingers together and drew them across the dead body. Just a man in the dark, pointing.

Brandt lay on the rock with her eyes open. He got his arms under her and lifted. She made a sound through her teeth and said, “Don’t.”

“I’ve got to.”

“Ribs.” She had to stop for breath. “You went in the dark.”

“Yeah.”

“Nobody goes in the dark.”

The reserve had run out on the loop, before he ever drew the line. He carried her toward the lights as a nine, which was enough.

The lit end of Shelf Four looked like a shelf again by the time he reached it. Osei sat against the wall with the third gleaner holding her head. The big man with the hammer sat up too, feeling his jaw. Benny stood in the cage gate with his mouth open. Lund held his clipboard in one hand and a mask he seemed to have forgotten about in the other.

The tall woman with the spear was first out of the cage. Spear still up, she faced the dark end. “Is it dead?” she asked.

“Most of it,” Wes said.

She lowered the spear.

Kessler was on his feet by the folded pole, his left arm held against his side and blood down his chin. Past Wes, at the dark end, two-thirds of a borer lay with a line across it. Kessler picked up his sword, walked past Wes without a word and went down the shelf to it.

The borer’s take had gone in already, like any take—a hot pinch through the petal on his left hand, over before he’d noticed it. The spill was coming up over the carcass: a Second Circle’s worth of it, gold and violet, more than the whole shelf had made all afternoon. On the post, the needle swung up through the yellow and into the orange. The cloud drifted along the floodlights toward the lit end and found him. Under the petal his left hand ached for it the way it had on Shelf Nine over three dead lappers.

He laid Brandt down by the post, where Lund could see her, then stood up into the cloud. Overhead the camera was on him; Lund was watching the needle. Halfway to the carcass, Kessler had stopped and turned round. He was looking at Wes’s hand.

“Go on,” Kessler said, not loud.

Wes shut his hand. He turned his back on the biggest meal he’d ever walked away from and watched the needle on the post instead. It climbed and held, then crept back toward the yellow as the spill thinned with nobody eating it.

He opened it where he stood, with his hand in his pocket.

Pruitt’s first quest had taken a month and paid one point of Draw.

“Hey.” It was Brandt, from the floor, with some of her voice back. “Dray’s going to ask me what happened.”

“Tell them.”

“I was looking at the ceiling,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. Something cut it.” Her eyes closed, but she kept talking. “Ilse. My name. You’ll want it, when they ask you who you went in for.”

At the dark end, Kessler crouched by the cut and put his fingers near its edge without touching it. He turned back up the shelf toward Wes with no smile anywhere on him.

Nothing glowed on the carcass. If a drop had settled anywhere in the borer, it had gone down with the drills, which were still turning somewhere under Shelf Four.

Lund came and found him with the reader. “Kills on a sitting are licensed for the sitting,” he said, his voice back to procedure. “Left hand.” He held out the grey slab as he’d held it at the gate.

Wes peeled the petal back and laid his hand on it. The reader beeped, thought about him and beeped again.

CALLOW, WESLEY · KILL ·

The species field stayed empty. Lund tapped it once, then again, harder, while the cursor sat in the blank and blinked at both of them.

“Borer,” Lund said. “Juvenile.” On the clipboard he wrote it by hand with Second Circle after it, then reader fault in the margin, smaller. “Self-defense on a warded shelf. The warden’s report covers you. You don’t need to file.” He tucked the slab under his arm and went to see about Osei.

While Lund was writing, Kessler had come back up the shelf. He stood by the post with his arm against his side, reading the clipboard upside down.

“Juvenile,” he said.

“That’s what it says.”

“Borers come up as far as Shelf Seven. I’ve seen four in five years. The smallest was on Nine.” Kessler turned back toward the dark end. “That was on Four.”

Five minutes up, in a clean cage, with the daylight coming down through the grating. Brandt lay on the floor with her head on somebody’s jacket. Osei sat against the gate with her eyes shut. Benny had stopped shaking and started talking.

“There’s a scuttle in my basement, in a box,” Benny was saying to the cage. “I hit it with the box. The box had the Christmas lights in it. My wife still won’t go down there.” He turned to Wes. “You went in the dark.”

“People keep saying that.”

“Well, you did.”

From the floor, Brandt had her eyes open again. “What are you?” she said.

“Gleaner.”

Her eyes stayed on him. “Okay,” she said, and shut them.

Under its plastic cover the needle on the cage gauge sat exactly where it should be, five minutes above a Second Circle kill nobody had eaten. Across the cage Kessler stood with his arm against his side, watching the shaft go by. He spoke without turning his head.

“Twenty seconds,” he said. “On camera. With a borer on the sword.”

Wes said nothing.

“Dolly can keep her complaint. The review board’s going to watch that feed before they get to Shelf Nine. By the time they see me pull the cage lever, they’ll have seen the man who held a borer twenty seconds.” His voice was mild. “Think about that before you tell them what you saw.”

“I saw you hold it,” Wes said. “I’ll say that too.”

Kessler turned his head then and kept it turned.

Wes put his back in a corner, pressed his thumb to the ring under the petal and asked.

Eighteen in Might, nineteen in Speed: the nine plate and not one plate more, on a sheet that said gleaner, inside a man who had just crossed most of a shelf in a few seconds and dented a Second Circle creature with his fist. The Sink had the sheet and the man side by side and had never once seemed to notice the difference.

He went down the ten lines again, looking for whatever had carried him into the dark. Remainder: held was the cellar; he knew that one. The reserve wasn’t there. The sheet had the nine and it had the cellar, and not a word about whether the cellar did anything to the nine.

Echoes: 1. The count hadn’t gone down. Whatever the cut had spent, it wasn’t the echo itself.

He stayed on that line until the daylight reached the floor.

On the Rim, the stands had filled by dusk. For the last hour the Shelf Four feed had run live on the big screen. The people who’d come for pretzels had stayed, the people who’d seen it on their phones had come. The House boxes were full behind their glass. In the Vahl box, somebody in a long charcoal coat stood close to the window with her hands in her pockets.

Benny shook his hand at the gate with both of his. “Four points,” he said. “On the nose. Forty-four years a blank.” Wes watched him head off into the crowd to look for his wife.

Pruitt had got himself through to the cage gate, with Dolly beside him in her black coat and cast. “First,” he said. “You were going to be fourteenth.”

“Yeah.”

Dolly looked him up and down, blood on his knuckles and borer on everything else. “You’re licensed,” she said. “Soon as they post it. Gleaner’s rate. Six tomorrow, and bring your own mask, I’m not renting you one.”

“Dolly—”

“Six.” She headed off toward the stands, Pruitt following slowly with one look back.

A man in a good coat found him next, with a Dray crest on the lapel and a card already out. “Ms. Brandt’s family would like to thank you,” he said. “House Dray would like to thank you. Separately.” The card went into Wes’s hand. “Call that number before you call anyone else’s. I mean that kindly.”

“I don’t have anyone else’s.”

“You will by morning.” The man glanced up at the Vahl box and went away into the crowd.

Wes looked up too. Behind the Vahl glass the charcoal coat hadn’t moved, the face above it turned his way.

His phone had been buzzing against his leg since the cage. Jules: saw it. you went in the dark. you absolute idiot. come see me. Hamid: a thumbs up. The Authority: LICENSE ISSUED · CALLOW, WESLEY · GLEANER · CREW PERMIT ELIGIBLE. Fairweather, four minutes later: Congratulations on your license, Wesley!! And one more, from a number he didn’t have, with no name on it.

Pulled the Shelf Four and cage readings. Both read clean. — I. Tate

He was on his second read of that one before he noticed she hadn’t said good.

The board had numbers next to all thirty-one names now. At the bottom, the ones who’d failed the Shelf. In the middle, the Lifts, the Runs, the clean scuttle kills, where a man who’d planned his day right would have been. And at the top, in the same font as everything else, where no gleaner had ever been in the four hundred and twelve sittings of the Licensing Trial:

1. CALLOW, W. · GLEANER (COMMON) · FIRST · 9/9

Phones went up as the crowd made a noise about it. Under the screen, the Shelfnotes ticker had already found him: GLEANER TOPS TRIAL BOARD · “BOTTOM FEEDER” GOES IN THE DARK FOR DRAY CANDIDATE · SHELF 4 BORER “JUVENILE,” SAYS AUTHORITY.

A kill above his Circle, a rescue, a proctor watching, Wes thought. The small print in the email. And under that, smaller, his old plan for the board: Anything with a one in front and another number after.

Kessler came past him on the way to the Authority tent. Somebody had put his arm in a sling. The bruise on his jaw had gone from red to blue in one ride up the shaft. He looked at the board, then at Wes, and the smile came back a second after the eyes.

“Nice cut,” Kessler said.