Chapter 7Dead Air

“Do you miss it?” Wes said into the cage phone.

The Bucket was dropping past Five with a borrowed ratchet hoist, two harnesses and fifteen fresh cartridges that Jules had made Dolly buy. Jules sat up in the winch house with her cast on a crate, at the other end of a curly cord. There was no signal past the lip.

She took longer over it than she ever had. “The ER? No,” Jules said. “I miss being the one at the top with the gurney.”

“I’m on the lever,” Petra said, with her back to them. “Nobody else touches it. The Bucket stays on the shelf with the gate open till everybody’s in. I say up, it’s up.”

Ten was nobody’s shelf. Its floodlights were mostly dead; Dray had set two lamps on stands to light the back wall. By the cage landing a Second Circle hunter in Dray colors called Moss stood chewing sunflower seeds, with the night’s three lappers laid out in a row beside him, the way a man shows you receipts.

“Nothing on Ten worth a House’s time,” Moss said. “Vahl’s Hollow on Eleven isn’t due to open for three years. Things come up for the smell, is all.”

The smell was the chimney: a slot in the back wall two meters wide, running up past the lamps and narrowing shut overhead like the inside of an upturned bottle. The gillback had died wedged across it just above head height, folded in half, armored back toward the shelf and belly toward the back of the slot. Its folded body made a grey ceiling with rows of grey leaves hanging off its edges. Above that ceiling the chimney was full: three days of spill risen into the top of the bottle with nowhere to go, glowing like a fish tank in a dark apartment.

What leaked round the carcass hung below it in a haze as thick as any shelf Wes had worked. In that haze, at the foot of the slot, stood the Gauge Office’s unit: a dial with a white line painted across it, over a pen that scratched at a slow drum of paper. The tag on the stand said CERTIFIED · GAUGE OFFICE over a signature Wes didn’t need to read. The needle lay against the top of the red.

“That kind reads to the second,” Pruitt said.

Wes left the others behind Moss’s yellow tape in their masks. He sat down on Pruitt’s old tarp, square in front of the dial.

“The best gleaner on a Trial board of thirty-one,” Pruitt said, low, from behind him. “Sitting on a pocket like that, how long does he take?”

“Two days.”

“Then take two days.”

That was the job, in front of a pen that would catch every wobble. A gleaner’s rate was a thing he could do now.

The thread came out of the haze under the gillback, thin and flat, into the back of his left hand. By the cage Petra picked up the phone every twenty minutes to say “Twenty.” Whatever Jules said back made her almost smile.

Two hours in, a sound Wes had last heard on Nine came out of the fissures.

Lap.

Moss had his sword out before the second lap, but the first lapper came out of a crack ten meters from the chimney, low and fast, straight for the pocket and the man sitting in front of it. Somebody shouted behind the tape. Wes kept his left hand on his knee, where the thread was, while the pen kept drawing. With his right he picked Hamid’s pry bar up off the edge of the tarp.

The tongue went for that hand and slid off it. Nothing that grabbed a petal held on. He put the bar through the middle of its head while the lapper was still working out what had happened.

Over by the cage, the second one was coming apart on Moss’s blade in a spray of black. The take off the one at Wes’s feet went in. Most of its little cloud rose toward the lamps. A wisp curled back down into one of its petals, which darkened and began to glow. All the while the thread in his left hand never thickened. On the drum the pen had a bump for the lapper and nothing else.

Petal three of three, he thought, and kept his hand on his knee.

The needle came down into the orange by eleven o’clock. At half past, it crossed the white line.

“Under,” Pruitt said. Wes let the thread go.

Down past the ring, the cellar shifted its weight and pressed, the way a load beds down in a truck when you take a corner. Nothing came up out of it. It just sat harder on whatever it was sitting on.

Five hours after he’d sat down, he got up off the tarp. He peeled the petal off the dead lapper, and it came away warm, with the card waiting.

Pruitt put a finger on the petal over Wes’s shoulder. “Draft,” he read. “Huh.”

Wes wrapped it round his left forearm under the sleeve, above the one on his hand. The ends found each other and held. In a slot this full, spill crowded against his skin from every side at once. If the Draft had anything to say, it couldn’t get a word in.

“Lines on,” said Dolly. Under Dolly’s rule anybody past the tape wore a harness on a rope back to someone outside it.

“You know who dies in a pocket?” Dolly said, reaching up to buckle Hamid into his harness. “The second one in.”

Under the carcass Hamid sawed the gills off its lower edges, leaves as long as his forearm and finer than paper, while Wes sat his tarp again and kept the haze thin round him. On his third trip under, Hamid stayed five minutes over to finish a row. “Tastes like a penny,” he called through his mask.

Dolly was at the cage phone before he’d finished. “He says it tastes like a penny.”

“Out.” Wes could hear Jules from the chimney mouth. “Now. If he can taste it, it’s been through his cartridge for a while. Don’t you wait for tasting.”

Petra hauled on the rope until Hamid came out backward, saw in hand. Outside the tape he pulled his mask off and coughed once into his glove: a single gold fleck, faint as a firefly.

“One,” Dolly told the phone.

“One’s a cold. Ten’s a week in bed. He’s done for an hour.”

When Jules called time on the lower edges, there were a hundred and thirty leaves in the bags.

Moss came over from his fissures and drove two anchors into the floor at the slot mouth with the heel of his hand. Petra ran the ratchet hoist from the anchors up to a strap round the gillback’s tail and handed Wes the hand chain. Every pull would drag the tail down toward the floor and the carcass out of its wedge, with Wes standing under it.

“Pull till it clicks,” Petra said. “Then sit.”

He pulled without the reserve first and got a click and a half. The gillback didn’t notice, so he went on reserve.

Chain ran through his hands, the pawl clattering like a bike freewheeling downhill. The carcass came down a hand’s width and stopped. He held it till the reserve gave out. When he let go, the pawl held.

“Sit,” Pruitt said, and took out his watch.

Wes sat on the rock. Pull, click, sit. Twice Pruitt made him sit the full two minutes from the yard.

After the third pull, Pruitt let the second hand go round once and half again. “Try it.”

“That’s only ninety.”

“Try it.”

Wes put his hands on the chain and said yes. The reserve was there. Up in the slot the carcass groaned down another hand.

“Ninety,” Pruitt said, with his watch up. “Not a hundred and twenty. Ninety.”

Thirty seconds, Wes thought, and all I did for them was sit on a tarp.

When he sat again, Pruitt eased down beside him on his bad knees. “Old hunters have a word,” he said, low enough that Moss wouldn’t have it. “Dense. A few come out of a Press stronger than their sheet and say the ring came out dense. I always took it for something old hunters say.” He watched the strap. “A ring’s built to carry nine. Yours is carrying nine and sitting on a whale, and now seven hours of this pocket on top. It doesn’t use the whale. But a ring sat on that much is pressed flat, like a leaf spring with a load on. You say yes, and it springs.”

“And more load?”

“A flat spring won’t go any flatter.” Pruitt put the watch away. “Settles back quicker, though. That’s a guess. You just watched it be a good one.”

On the seventh pull the gillback let go of the chimney. Wes dropped the chain and threw himself backward as it came down the slot in a rush of grey plate and grey leaves. It landed across the mouth where his boots had been, with a sound like a dumpster dropped off the back of a truck. Up in the bottle the cloud shivered.

“Pen’s going up,” Pruitt said.

Wes was back on the tarp before the grit stopped falling. On the drum the line had climbed in a small hump. The hump peaked and turned over while he watched. From there the line started down, much faster than he was taking anything.

“You speed up?”

“No.”

“Then you’re not doing that,” Pruitt said. “So who is?”

On the floor of the slot the loose motes were sliding toward the back wall.

Then Wes felt it. The Nose had only ever given him a smell, but this was a pull across the skin of his left forearm, under the new petal, like the draft under a door in winter. Down and back. A crack ran up the back of the slot where the gillback’s belly had been, as wide as a hand and black. The whole chimney was going into it, slowly at first, then all at once. Behind the wall it went down, fast.

The gillback hadn’t died wedged in a chimney. It had died corking a drain.

It was nearly the same card he’d had on Four, with one word more: still. The Sink’s been keeping count, Wes thought.

He went to the tape, where Petra was. That was Dolly’s rule from the yard: if spill’s going down a crack, you don’t touch it; you tell Petra. Moss was forty meters off at his fissures. “It’s going down,” Wes said. “Into the wall. I didn’t do it, we pulled the plug.” He swallowed. “And the Sink’s put up the card from Four again. It’s offering me what’s going down that crack, like last time. Only now there’s a two after the name.”

Dolly turned from the bags. “And you want to.”

“Yes.”

“Up,” said Petra. “Everybody in.”

Sixty leaves were still on the gillback’s upper edges, nine hundred dollars at Mags’s table. Behind the crack something was eating, an arm’s length from where he’d sat all day.

“I’m saying yes to the card,” Wes said. “I’m not touching it.”

Dolly glanced at the crack. “Then say yes in the cage.”

Yes, Wes thought, with his hand on the gate, and the card went away.

“You’re leaving?” Moss said.

“Read your needle,” Dolly said.

Below the white line the needle was still falling, the pen with it. Moss watched it go, then spat a shell.

Pruitt rode up at the cage gauge with one hand on the bars. “We’re forty meters up,” he said, “and it’s still going.” Under the cage floor the Draft had it, faint and getting fainter, past Ten and down into the rock.

At twenty to six the next morning, Wes and Hamid were walking Dray’s lead-lined crate into the Bucket when Imogen Tate came through the cage-head gate with a cardboard tube under her arm. She unrolled the drum along the crate’s lid before they’d straightened up.

“This is you,” Tate said, a finger on the long, gentle slope. “Seven hours of a gleaner thinning a pocket. I can explain a gleaner.” The finger moved on. “A lapper. The carcass coming out of the chimney.” It stopped at 13:52, pencilled just past a hump. “Your cage left the shelf here. Its log puts it forty meters up the shaft a minute later.”

Past the pencil mark the line kept falling for a finger’s length of paper before it lay down along the bottom.

“This,” Tate said, “I can’t.”

“It wasn’t me,” Wes said.

“No. You were in a cage. That’s why I’m here at twenty to six.”

“There’s a crack at the back of that slot,” Pruitt said. “When we pulled the gillback off it, the pocket went down.”

“Spill doesn’t go down.”

“No,” Pruitt said. “Not by itself.”

Tate took her reading glasses off. “A crack doesn’t empty a three-day pocket in forty minutes either, Mr. Pruitt. I’ve had two readings like this in twenty years. A pocket falling with nobody near it. Shelf Fourteen, nine years ago. Twenty-two, six years ago. Inside a week, a crew on each of those shelves met something that wasn’t on the shelf’s list.” She began rolling the drum up from one end. “On Twenty-two the crew ran into it at the cage. So the Office is closing Ten to blank crews pending inspection, from eight tonight.”

“Dray’s paying me for two days,” Dolly said. “We’ve had one.”

“Then Dray will have its second by eight.”

At the gate Tate turned round. “Is there anything about that shelf you’d like me to know, Mr. Callow, before I send somebody down it?”

There were several things. One of them cost him nothing. “The crack’s behind where the belly was. Low down. Your inspector will want a lamp.”

She wrote that on the tube in pencil. “Seven hours at a gleaner’s rate. That’s what I’ve filed.”

Her hatchback took three tries to back out of Dolly’s spaces. She drove out here before six, Wes thought, to tell me I read like anybody else.

Shelfnotes had the drum by ten past six: SHELF 10 POCKET: TRIAL #1 THINS IT, THEN IT FALLS OUT THE BOTTOM?? Forty replies, with timestamps, put the Bucket forty meters up the shaft while the pocket was still falling. The top one said so who ate it then. Further down, between a man who’d lost a thousand dollars on the cliff and a man who’d won four thousand, someone called b.sato had written: i sat next to him at the trial. he thinks about the bus.

On Ten, Dray’s two lamps were still burning. The patch of rock by the landing where Moss laid out his night’s lappers was bare.

“Nothing came up,” Moss said before Dolly could ask. “First night in four. Around three the wall ticked, back there.” He pointed his chin at the chimney. “Went on about an hour.”

Pruitt walked the shelf with a lamp at knee height. Wherever its light lay flat, loose motes were creeping toward the chimney in long gold lines. Wes didn’t need the lamp; the Draft had the whole shelf pulling at his forearm, all of it one way.

“This whole shelf’s got a hole in the bottom of it,” Pruitt said.

The plates came off like slate off a roof, Hamid freeing each sheet along its seam with the saw while Wes carried them to Petra’s strap two at a time. A little before noon Hamid sawed round a hump behind the head and lifted it off in one piece.

Underneath, in a sac of white gristle, lay something the size of a watermelon. It glowed from the inside like a lamp left on under a blanket.

Its light leaned.

A thread of gold, as thin as the ones Wes made himself, came off the top of it and slid down the sac, across the rock past the certified unit and into the crack.

“It’s bleeding,” Pruitt said.

“It’s going down,” Wes said, loud enough for the handset in Petra’s hand. “Into the wall.” He nodded at the crate. “I want the core in the box before it’s a rock.”

Petra’s eyes went to the crack and back. “So pull it.”

“That’s the House’s,” Moss said from the tape.

“Then the House can have it in the box,” said Dolly, already crouched by the sac. “How long, Pruitt?”

“At that rate? An hour, and it’s a rock.”

Cords of gristle as thick as a thumb held the sac to the body. Hamid put the saw to the nearest and got a quarter of the way through in a minute, the blade smoking.

Petra lowered the handset. “Jules says not Hamid. She says nobody without a Mark puts their arms round one of those.”

Hamid stepped back with the saw. Wes got his arms round the sac, his chest against it, and went on reserve. The cords went one after another with a sound like wet rope parting, and the reserve gave out as the last one did. The core dropped into his arms all at once, warm as bread and heavy as an engine block. A nine could carry one.

Now the thread came off the core itself, over his shoulder and away across the rock to the crack.

Lap.

It came from the fissure the first lapper had used the day before. “First since the chimney went down,” Moss said, already moving.

The lapper came low and fast across the rock with its head already open. Wes had both arms round the core. Slick covered his hands and one forearm, and the lapper wasn’t after any of those. What it wanted was on his chest.

If he put it down, the lapper had it. “Walk,” Dolly said from the crate, where she had the lid up.

Hamid dropped the saw for the fire axe and stepped in front of Wes with it held crossways. The tongue hit the haft, wrapped the handle and pulled him a step toward the fissure before he set his boots. In that one step Moss covered the twenty meters from the tape. He took the lapper’s head off in one stroke. Moss’s ring took its take.

Hamid looked at the tongue, still wound round his axe.

“They don’t come up in the day either,” Moss said.

Wes’s left hand had opened on its own toward the thread past his shoulder. He kept it to the trickle it had taken all day on the tarp, with the pen putting every second on the drum.

From the sac to the crate was eight steps. He had started counting at the first and hadn’t stopped for the lapper. At the crate he bent his knees and set the core down on the lead as if it were eggs, which got him a look from Petra. Hamid dropped the lid one-handed. The thread thinned and snapped off, a tap shutting.

He sat down on the lid. Will thirty-two, he thought. The six points I put in it just bought me eight steps of a gleaner.

“Slow,” Petra said.

At the drum, Pruitt bent over the paper with his nose a hand from it. “A bump when the core opened. A tick; that’s the lapper. Eight steps of a gleaner. A dip when the lid went on.” He straightened up. “That’s all you are on here.”

Moss laid the lapper out straight on the bare patch by the landing, then took a notebook out of his shirt pocket and wrote in it. Wes didn’t ask what.

Topside, Dray’s man would want to sign for the crate, so it went up with the crew eating sandwiches on its lid.

“What was it like?” Pruitt said. “Holding it.”

“You ever deliver food?” Wes said, with his mouth full.

“No.”

“I did, the winter before the clinic. Bike, a hot bag, five flights, no tip. You carry somebody’s pizza up all five with the smell coming out of the bag the whole way.” He swallowed. “Like that. Only it was trying to get into my mouth.”

“And when you’re not holding it to a thread,” Pruitt said. “Where does the spill go?”

Wes peeled the petal back, pressed his thumb to the ring and held it on Remainder: held until the line gave.

He read it out.

“Converts to what?” Pruitt said.

“It doesn’t say.”

Bears on the Mark, Wes thought. Pruitt said a spring. The sheet just said it plainer.

“I carried a core once,” Pruitt said. “My first month down, before I was Marked. A Dray hunter broke his wrist on Six, and somebody had to get the thing to the cage. Forty dollars.” He touched the side of his nose. “Bled out of here for two days. Nobody’d told me a blank doesn’t hold one close.”

“Did you get the forty?”

“Thirty-five. They kept five for the tissues.”

“Tate’s two shelves,” Wes said.

“I heard her.”

“On Four I took what was going down, and the borer came up. On Ten I let it go down.” He looked down through the grating. “She says something comes up anyway.”

“She says it happened twice,” Pruitt said. “Twice isn’t a rule, son.” He folded his sandwich paper into a square, then into a smaller one. “Three times, I’d start to worry.”

Wes let himself have the number all the way to the end of the sandwich: nine hundred dollars for yesterday and nine hundred for today, more than a month on the delivery bike.

At the top a man in Dray colors lifted the lid an inch, read the core with a needle and went off to make a call. When he came back he spoke only to Dolly.

“Full,” he said. “Mr. Varga says a thousand more.”

Hamid considered this. “Good,” he said.

Back on Ten, Hamid cut the sixty leaves off the gillback’s upper edges from the short ladder, coming down every fifteen minutes without being told.

Halfway through the afternoon, Moss stopped chewing. He took his sword out at the lip without hurrying and stood looking down.

Thirty meters below, beside the cage run, a piece of the shaft wall was moving. It was grey and flat and as wide as a two-car garage door, with rows of leaves stirring along its edges where Dray’s lamplight just reached them. The whole slab of it slid slowly down the wall until the light lost it.

“Gillback,” Moss said, his eyes still on the place where it had been. “They come up at night. They don’t go down.” He put the sword away and didn’t take out another seed.

Hamid spent his next turn on the ladder watching the lip more than the saw.

At half past five the Bucket sat at the landing with the last bags in it and the gate open. The dead one lay across the chimney mouth, stripped to the meat. Wes went and stood at the crack.

Up close the Nose caught a thin stream of spill still going down past his boots. The Draft had the rest: a pull on his forearm that didn’t stop at the floor.

He took the wrist gauge out of his chest pocket. In Ten’s dead air the needle lay a hair above zero.

“I want to know where it goes,” he said, loud enough for the cage.

Dolly checked her watch. Ten closed at eight. “Fifteen minutes.”

Pruitt came over. “Sticks at the top, you told me.”

“That’s what Mags said.”

“Then it can only tell you one thing.” Pruitt felt in his overalls and came out with a ball of orange mason’s line. “So ask it one thing.”

They tied the strap to the line with a turn of duct tape every five meters, so Pruitt could count by touch. Wes fed it down the crack. At ten meters he pulled it up. The needle was already swinging back toward zero as it came into the light.

“Not at ten,” Pruitt said.

Nor at twenty. At twenty-two the line went slack, then tight; something down there had caught the strap. “Come on, you little shit,” Wes told it. He worked it by feel, tugging and letting off as if he had a fish on, until it came away with a click. At thirty, still nothing.

Wes let out forty meters of orange line, waited a slow count of thirty and pulled it up hand over hand. The gauge came out of the crack turning on its strap.

The needle stood at the top of the dial. It stayed there when he turned the gauge over. Shaking it did nothing.

Sticks at the top, Mags had said. Nobody needs the top.

That’s where it went, Wes thought. Under that, from the part of him that had said yes at the cage gate yesterday: That’s where it is.

Pruitt took the gauge and held it close to his eyes, like a man reading small print. “That pocket didn’t just drain off,” he said quietly. “Three days of it is sitting down there somewhere.”

“Forty meters down.” Wes looked at the floor of the shelf. “What’s under us?”

“Eleven,” said Moss. “Sixty-five down.”

“And at forty?”

Moss thought about it. “Rock. The top of Vahl’s Hollow, maybe. They’re bigger behind the skin than they look from the shelf.” He put a seed in his mouth. “Told you. Not due for three years.”

Forty meters under Wes’s boots, something ticked like a car cooling.