Chapter 6Gleaner’s Rate

Wes had his hand out for a rental mask before the rest of him remembered he didn’t need one.

The crate stood by the cage gate where it had stood every morning for three years, giving off the same lemon wipe. Petra, who handed them out, had one halfway to him when her hand stopped. She looked at the petal on the back of his hand and put the mask back in the crate.

Bring your own mask, Dolly had said. I’m not renting you one.

He’d walked down to the cage head before light with forty-one missed calls in his pocket. Not one of them wanted money. The clip everybody kept sending him ended on a blurry still of the Vahl box, with somebody’s red circle round a charcoal coat.

At the gatepost he peeled the petal back and laid his hand on the Authority reader. CALLOW, WESLEY · GLEANER · COMMON · FIRST CIRCLE · 9/9 · LICENSED. In the booth, the clerk frowned at her screen and tapped the glass.

“Again.”

He put his hand back on the slab. The reader took longer to think about him the second time. Somebody in the next crew’s queue stopped talking. When it said LICENSED again, the clerk waved him through without lifting her head.

At ten to six Dolly had her clipboard under the cast and a pen in her teeth. “Shelf Five,” she said round the pen. “Some Rim syndicate ran its juniors through a scuttle bed yesterday. Forty dead scuttles. They want the shells and they don’t want to carry them.” She tore a sheet off the clipboard and held it out. “Sign.”

In Dolly’s capitals it said KRANE · PERMIT CREW · CALLOW, W. · GLEANER. Gleaner’s rate was what the permit paid for: two hundred and sixty a shift, flat, whether there was anything on the shelf to glean or not, on top of his share of the salvage. For three years he’d been paid by the tooth. From today he’d be paid for turning up.

Two hundred and sixty dollars for sitting still.

Dolly took the signed sheet back without looking at him. “The other new guy didn’t come back,” she said.

“I figured.”

“I’m not hiring till Jules is up.” She clipped the sheet under the others. “So you carry.”

The first scuttle Wes stacked on Shelf Five split from rim to rim with a crack like a plate dropped in a restaurant. He’d carried it to the cage on one hand and set it down no harder than a bag of groceries. Cracked plate went to nobody.

“Don’t throw them,” Petra said.

“I put it down.”

Petra ran her thumb along the crack. “Put them down slower.”

Near noon, Hamid levered a slab of scree off a dead scuttle. The live one under it came out between his boots, a plated disc, flat and fast, on legs like folded coat hangers. One leg hooked round his boot. Hamid went backward into the rock wall with the saw up while the other legs walked up his shin.

Forty meters off, the Authority’s warden, an older Second, was getting out of his folding chair. Wes was four meters away. Between him and Hamid stood the morning’s stack of good plate, with the pry bar on top.

He went over the stack and took the bar as he went. A plate split under his boot. On the far side he got the flat end under the scuttle’s rim where it met Hamid’s boot and leaned until the shell came up with a crack and every leg stopped. The hooked one let go last. Hamid stayed pressed to the wall.

About a dish towel’s worth of gold came off the scuttle. The take went in before Wes could stop it. He left the rest hanging over the scuttle for Pruitt.

The warden came over at a jog. “Licensed?”

“Since last night.”

“Then it’s yours.” The man wrote it in a notebook. “Scuttle’s forty dollars. It’ll come through with the gauge reading.”

“Thanks,” Hamid said, picking his saw back up.

Petra came up the far end of the stack to study the two new cracks, one in the scuttle and one under Wes’s boot.

“Slower,” she said.

A forty-dollar scuttle, Wes thought. Its take went down into the cellar with the whale’s spill.

At the noon break Pruitt spread his old tarp for Wes beside his own, under the thickest of the spill the syndicate had left. “Sit where the gauge can see you plain,” he said, getting down knees first. “Nobody ever got called upstairs for looking like a gleaner. And watch the floor. The cloud tells you where it’s been. The floor tells you where it’s going.”

So Wes sat in plain view of the gauge all afternoon and let the thread come, thin and flat. The needle sank and kept sinking. Nobody slapped a floor to make the thread jump.

At two the Bucket went up loaded to the bars with good plate, Wes riding with one palm flat on top of the stack. The syndicate had paid in cash, so Dolly paid out of a bank bag on the way up. Wes’s came to four hundred and twelve dollars.

Dolly had the coffee can from the winch house wedged between her boots, with JULES on masking tape round it. Hamid put money in without counting. So did Petra. Wes put in a hundred.

“Kessler held the borer twenty seconds,” Dolly said, zipping the bank bag. “I watched the clip four times. He was good.”

Wes waited.

“He was good on Four. On Nine he was on his phone.”

“I told him I’d say I saw him hold it,” Wes said. “At the review.”

When the cage jolted on a guide rail, the stack leaned into his palm. He held it there, very lightly, until it settled.

“Then say it,” Dolly said. “It’s true.”

When the Bucket cleared the lip, every phone in the cage went off at once. Wes had forty more missed calls and one text.

Dray will offer you the programme. Read page nine before you say anything. Don’t sign because of my ribs. They’re mine. — Ilse Brandt

At seven the next morning, in Dolly’s yard behind the cage head, Petra tied a bandana over Wes’s eyes and tried the knot twice.

Behind it the yard shrank to gulls, the generator and the steel of the scale under his boots, where Pruitt had set a pallet with a bar across one end, the same as the Lift on the Rim. This time he didn’t get to see what went on it. He could place the rest of them by sound: the hand truck full of cracked teeth, Dolly’s pen on the crew permit, the knock of Jules’s crutch against the fence. She had come in a taxi and was sitting on a crate with her cast up on another.

He heard the first tooth come off the hand truck.

“Wait,” he said. “Before anybody puts a tooth on this, you should know what you’d be standing next to. On Four, at the Trial, the Sink put a card up in front of me that isn’t on anybody’s wiki. It offered me what was going down the crack, and I said yes and took some.” He turned his face to where Dolly’s pen had stopped. “Then the borer came up.”

The pen didn’t start again. Wes heard himself fill the quiet with the joke he’d have made on a shelf. “At least it was a juvenile.”

Nobody laughed. Somewhere in front of him Hamid was still holding the tooth; Wes could hear him breathing round it.

“Did you know it would come up?” Jules said.

“No.”

“That’s what experimenting means.”

“It might have come up anyway,” Pruitt said. “Borers come up. That crack was there before he was.”

“Maybe,” Jules said. “He doesn’t get to know that, so he doesn’t get to use it. Here’s the rule. You don’t experiment around people who don’t know. If you want to find out what you are, you tell whoever’s standing next to you first. If one of them says no, it’s no.”

“Okay.”

“Say it back.”

He said it back, blind, with Hamid still holding the tooth.

“On my shelf, if spill’s going down a crack, you don’t touch it,” Dolly said. “You tell Petra.”

Her pen started again on the permit. Through the steel under his boots Wes felt Hamid set the tooth on the pallet, slower than he needed to.

“So what are we testing?” Dolly said.

“What he can pull,” Pruitt said.

Hamid loaded a tooth at a time. Wes took the bar to his knees after every thud and said fine, then fine, then heavy at nine.

“Your nine plate, give or take a tooth,” Pruitt said. “One more. Everything you’ve got, and don’t say yes to anything.”

With the tenth tooth on, Wes pulled until his shoulders creaked and the bandana went wet over his eyes. The pallet stayed on the platform. The reserve sat right there in the full ring the whole time, close enough to touch.

All I have to do, he thought, is say so. “Can’t,” he said.

Still blind, he heard Hamid stack and stack until Pruitt said, “Now do the thing.”

He said yes to it and took the bar.

Not the cellar. The cellar didn’t so much as shift when he did it. This was the ring itself, the full nine, let go.

The pallet came off the platform so fast the stack on it slid. Hamid lunged for the top tooth and swore. Jules said Jesus from her crate. Wes held the bar at his knees until it began to feel like weight again, then got it down before it came down on its own. The platform rang.

“Twenty-five teeth,” Pruitt said quietly. “Twelve seconds.” He was timing it; at ninety seconds he had Wes say yes again, then again at two minutes.

“At ninety, nothing,” Pruitt said. “At two minutes, there. Twenty-five both times. Ten teeth beat you when you pulled with everything you had. It doesn’t come when you strain. It comes when you decide.”

“On Shelf Nine I put my fingers into stone,” Wes said. “I didn’t decide anything.”

“You decided,” Pruitt said. “You just didn’t stop to tell yourself.”

Wes pulled the bandana off. Teeth that had slid from the stack lay round Hamid’s boots, Dolly had come over with the permit, and Petra was counting the rest on the pallet with one finger.

“You’re a nine,” Pruitt said. “You’re a nine till you decide not to be, and then for twelve seconds you’re something else, and then you’re a nine that needs a sit.”

“Sitting down?” Hamid said.

“Sitting, standing, hanging off a rope. Call it two minutes. The ring doesn’t care which.” Pruitt put his watch away. “Sheet says Might eighteen. Sheet’s right about you standing still.”

“So he can pull,” Dolly said. “In bites.”

“Then I rig it so a bite’s enough,” Petra said. “Ratchet hoist. You pull, it clicks, it holds. You sit. You pull again.”

“Like the jack,” Hamid said.

Hamid went to borrow a ratchet hoist off a crew two permits down. Petra and Dolly went back to the winch house. That left Pruitt, and Jules on her crate.

Two slabs of baleen from the whale leaned unsold against the fence by the gate. Pruitt went and stood in front of them with his hands in his pockets.

“There’s one more thing,” Wes said, low. He held up his right hand with the first two fingers together. “On Four, at the end. The borer had Brandt, and it had me, and I didn’t have anything. So I did what Saskia did. With the baleen.”

Jules went very quiet on her crate. She had been in the whale’s mouth when Saskia Vahl cut two stone plates in half by wiping the air.

“Who saw?” Pruitt said.

“Nobody. It was dark.” Wes lowered the hand. “Kessler went over and crouched by the carcass after. When we came up, he said nice cut.” He made himself say the rest. “It wasn’t the first time, either. At my window, the night you slapped the floor. Something down there turned over when I did it. Not a mark on the sill. Then nothing, all night.”

“You didn’t think to mention it,” Jules said.

“I thought I’d imagined it.”

Pruitt laid a sawn offcut from the scrap on a trestle. Baleen had growth lines running through it, a seam for every year. “A seam, like the one in your sill,” he said. “Show me.”

Wes put two fingers together and drew them along a seam the way he’d drawn them across the ring-gap on Four. The stone sat there being stone.

“What were you, when it worked?”

“Scared out of my mind.”

Pruitt nodded and stepped round behind him. Halfway into the second stroke, something hit the ground at Wes’s heels hard enough to jump the trestle: one of the cracked teeth, dropped from shoulder height. His hand jerked across the baleen, fingers out. The offcut stayed in one piece.

“Not a fright, then,” Pruitt said. “What did it feel like? The time it worked.”

“Like something rolled over. Down there.” Wes found his hand flat on his chest. “Like on Nine, when she cut the baleen. Only it didn’t stop at rolling over.”

It was a strange thing to go looking for on purpose, in a scrapyard on a Tuesday morning. He went down past the full ring, past the splinter, to where the echo had been. It was still there, lying at the bottom like something left in a drawer. It didn’t roll when he nudged it. Under the peeled-back petal his thumb found Echoes: 1 and held on the line until it gave.

He read it out for Jules. “Vahl’s stroke,” Pruitt said. “The one that took the whale’s heart out.”

“It’s there,” Wes said. “It just won’t go. It’s like a phone at zero. It’s still a phone.”

One charge, he thought. The borer took it. The window was only the echo turning over in its sleep.

“So it wants a charge,” Pruitt said slowly, “and a seam to run along, and you with nothing else left to try. Your window had the first two.”

Pruitt turned to the slabs by the fence, to the cut edge that still shone in the daylight. “Then you don’t ever walk into a dark place counting on it,” he said. “Not ever. You hear me, son?”

“I hear you.”

Hamid came back up the wet street with a ratchet hoist on his shoulder. Wes called the others over from the winch house and took the Dray card out of his overalls.

“I’m calling Dray,” he said. “On speaker.”

Nobody said no. Before he’d finished dialing, Petra was up the yard’s A-frame, two steel legs and a beam over the scale, unhooking the old chain hoist so that Hamid’s ratchet could hang there instead.

“Mr. Callow.”

“You said to call this number before anyone else’s.”

“I did.” The voice went with the coat: warm, unhurried, expensive. “Gil Varga. I’m glad you called.”

“I’m calling to ask what work pays.”

There was a short pause on the line. “Then let me tell you what House Dray is offering,” Varga said, “and you can tell me whether it’s work. Eleven thousand a month. House training, a House cage, a House warden, a share of every cache out of the four Hollows Dray holds. And the House would settle your finance account. Whoever it’s with.”

“It’s sixty thousand.”

“We know.”

Every part of him that had stood at the Fairweather kiosk for three years said yes at once.

Up on the A-frame Petra had the old chain hoist off its hook and the whole weight of it in her arms when the near leg skated an inch on the wet concrete. The frame leaned. Wes had the phone in his left hand. He put his right on the leg and stopped it.

“Hold it there,” Petra said from the top, not loud.

He held it without saying yes to anything, the whole lean of the frame in his arm, while Hamid took the old hoist down and passed the ratchet up.

“You topped a board on Sunday, Mr. Callow,” Varga said gently. “A House is a good wall to stand behind.”

“Can you send me the paper?”

“It’s in your email. I’ll wait while you read it. The programme won’t be offered twice.”

Ilse had said page nine, so he thumbed to it one-handed, the A-frame’s leg in his other hand and Varga waiting on the speaker. Everything an associate brought up belonged to the House. Then:

”9.4,” he read out. ”The Associate consents to appraisal by a House appraiser, currently graded Epic, at the House’s discretion.”

By the fence, Pruitt had taken his hands out of his pockets. An Epic appraiser would see everything a sheet could show.

The Draw, the cellar and the echo, Wes thought. Page nine wants all three in a folder.

Nineteen years ago a man with a ring the readers couldn’t grade had gone into Authority House for fourteen months and come out a blank who sold phone cases on Kettle Street. Wes had been handed the rest of it once already, at Bright Start, by a doctor peeling off his gloves. Nothing took. Payment schedule’s in the folder.

“You said the House wanted to thank me,” Wes said. “Separately. Which part of this is the thank-you?”

The pause was longer this time. “Ms. Brandt’s family thanked you,” Varga said. “The House is making you an offer. I’d hoped you wouldn’t need the difference explained.”

“I don’t, now. I don’t want a programme. I want a job. One job, paid when it’s done, on my boss’s permit, with my crew.”

“House Dray doesn’t hire crews, Mr. Callow. It hires names.”

“Then it isn’t hiring me.”

Varga breathed out through his nose.

Up on the beam the ratchet’s hook clicked home. “Off,” Petra said, and Wes let go of the leg.

“There is a job,” Varga said. Two nights ago Dray had killed a gillback on Shelf Ten. It had bolted into a chimney and died wedged in the throat; the cloud had sat there since. No blank crew was allowed within twenty meters until a certified gauge read it under the line. Three gleaners had quoted a week to thin it. Things came up every night for the smell.

“We want it done this week,” Varga said. “Our hunters tried to drag it out. They broke a winch.”

“Ratchet,” Petra said, coming down the frame.

“Your gleaner thins it, your crew strips it. I’d want to hear a number from your boss, not from you.”

Wes covered the phone. “Ask for the gills,” he told Dolly. “Mags pays fifteen a leaf and sells them back in a filter at sixty. Every mask that isn’t out of the rental crate has a slice of one in it.”

Dolly took the phone off speaker, put it to her ear and used the voice she kept for Houses. “No cure, no pay is for people with insurance. Nine hundred a head a day, five heads, two days minimum, standby paid if your warden keeps us topside. My cage. My operator.” She listened. “Your plates, your core and your hide, on the cage-head platform. The gills stay with my crew.”

“Good,” Dolly said when Varga had answered. She handed the phone back on speaker.

“One more thing, since your crew will be working under it.” Paper moved somewhere at Varga’s end. “The Gauge Office won’t certify a pocket like that off a House gauge, so they’re fitting their own. The order came back signed at seven this morning.”

“Signed by who?”

“An I. Tate.”

Wes sat down on the nearest crate with the phone in his hand. Across the yard, the generator coughed.

“Is that a problem, Mr. Callow?”

“No,” Wes said.

Every shelf you set foot on, I’ll pull the reading, Imogen Tate had told him. She hadn’t said she’d bring her own needle.