Chapter 8Reads Clean

Wes counted forty dollars out of his pay envelope and held it out to Dolly across the winch-house steps.

“What’s that?”

“Power,” he said. “For the Bucket. I want to go to Eleven.”

Dolly had paid out at six from the bank bag: eighteen hundred a head for the two days and two hundred more each for Varga’s core. Fairweather’s five hundred and fifty-five was already folded in his other pocket. It was Friday. In three years, Friday had never been covered before breakfast.

Ten had been shut since eight the night before. With no shift to go to, all of them had stayed on after the bank bag. Jules had come in a taxi that Dolly had told the cab firm not to send, and had the winch-house bench with her leg up.

He told them all of it first, because that was Jules’s rule.

“Something under Ten got that pocket,” he said. “I want to see what ate it. Ten minutes. Gate shut. I just want to look.”

Dolly didn’t take the money. “Eleven’s a Second Circle shelf. I haven’t got a warden, and I’m not hiring one so you can sightsee.” The forty stayed out in his hand between them. “We don’t land. We hang off the cable with the gate shut, and we look.”

“We hang.”

Petra spoke from the winch house without turning round. “Ten minutes from when we stop. Then up.”

“And the phone every five minutes, not every twenty,” said Jules. “Miss one, and I ring the Authority myself, and you can explain the rest of it to Imogen Tate.”

Pruitt got up off the crate by the door. Hamid went into the winch house and came out with the fire axe in one hand and his pry bar in the other.

Dolly took the forty and counted it as if she hadn’t watched him count it. “Power’s thirty-five.” She gave him five back.

The Authority had hung a sign from Ten’s landing rail, red on white: SHELF CLOSED · PENDING INSPECTION · GAUGE OFFICE. A padlocked chain ran across the landing behind it. Beyond the chain, one lamp still burned at the foot of the slot, over Tate’s certified unit. What was left of the gillback lay across the chimney mouth, picked clean. The Bucket slid past all of it and on down into a stretch of shaft nobody had lit in years.

Pending, Wes thought. Tate’s had me pending since Nine. Somewhere below was a Hollow that belonged to House Vahl, whose heir had lied to the Sink Authority for him. If you’re ever caught, she’d said, I was mistaken.

Sixty-five meters down to Eleven was a minute in the Bucket. Petra slowed it to a crawl for the last ten meters while Dolly pointed her work light down through the floor grating.

Eleven had been wired once, like Ten, then given up on sooner. The floodlights hung dead on their brackets along the back wall. The only light was the Bucket’s own and Dolly’s lamp, which made a white circle on the rock that slid wherever she moved it. Two meters above a rusted landing, Petra stopped them and left the gate shut.

Long and narrow, the shelf ran off into the dark at both ends of Dolly’s lamp. There was no scree along the wall, no bones, no scuttle tracks in the grit. Nothing threw a shadow but the rock.

Out of habit, Wes checked the cage gauge. Its needle lay on zero.

“That’s the cleanest air I’ve seen below the Rim,” Pruitt said.

Nobody would pay a gleaner to stand in it. Through the bars, Wes breathed in and got nothing. No pennies, no rain, none of the faint leftover of a leftover that hung over every shelf he had ever worked. On Four the borer had smelled like that, a hole in the air where the spill should have been. Here the hole was the whole shelf.

“Back wall,” Pruitt said. Dolly brought the lamp round.

At first Wes took it for more wall. It was the same grey as the rock, only smoother. It bulged out of the back of the shelf in a long, low dome, about as wide as Wes’s building was tall. The rock round its rim was banded in paler rings, each a little further out than the last: old blooms, healed over, one inside the next.

Cracks as fine as hairs ran across the dome, branching like a dropped phone screen. Every one of them had gold in it. Not much light came through: a thread in each crack.

“That’s the Hollow,” Pruitt said quietly. “That’s a skin.”

There was a steel post ten meters to one side of it, with a gauge in a weatherproof box on top, wired into a steel conduit that ran up the shaft wall. A plate was bolted to the post at eye height. Wes could read the plate from the cage in Dolly’s lamplight: HOUSE VAHL · HOLLOW RUN RIGHTS · SHELF ELEVEN · LICENSED BY THE SINK AUTHORITY · NO ENTRY.

He could read the gauge, too. “Eight,” he said.

Pruitt squinted at the post and gave up. “You can read that from here?”

“Twenty-nine Sense,” Wes said. “It says eight.”

“A sealed Hollow reads high.” Pruitt didn’t take his eyes off the dome. “Forty, fifty. It leaks for a year before it blooms, a bit more every month. That’s how a House knows when to book the cage.”

“It’s reading eight.”

“Then it isn’t leaking.” For a moment Pruitt was quiet. “Then it’s going the other way.”

Wes put his face to the bars, stopped looking and let the Nose have it.

The shelf gave him nothing, and neither did the dark at either end. He found it at last on the dome: a faint, cold smell of copper along every gold hairline at once. It wasn’t coming out of them. It was going in. A little came off what was left of the shelf’s air. Much more came down out of the rock above the dome, and that part he felt on his left forearm, under the petal, before the Nose had it: a pull through the wall, steady as a drain, from the direction of Ten.

Everything Ten lost is in there, Wes thought, and the cellar got a gleaner’s thread of it.

“It’s drinking,” he said. “And Vahl’s watching that post.”

“A House sets an alarm for a reading that climbs,” Pruitt said. “Nobody sets one for a drop.”

The phone on the cage wall buzzed. Petra picked it up, said “Five” into it and hung up.

The dome ticked in the quiet. A while later it came again.

“Moss said it wasn’t due for three years,” Dolly said.

“Moss reads a calendar,” said Pruitt. “That doesn’t.”

Dolly kept the lamp on the dome, wearing the face she’d had on Nine while she priced the stack of teeth. “What’s in one?” she said. “When it opens.”

“Tunnels. Nests. A heart at the back that drops a cache when it dies.” Pruitt shrugged. “They’re for Houses.”

“How much, a cache?”

“More than the Bucket.”

Dolly said nothing to that. More than Jules’s leg bill, Wes thought.

“Pretty,” Hamid said.

“Wall,” Petra said. She had her head tipped back toward the shaft wall above the cage.

Dolly swung the lamp up. Twenty meters above them, beside the cage run, part of the wall was the wrong shape: flat, grey, the width of the gillback that had gone down past Ten yesterday, lying against the rock with its edges curled under. Its leaves ran along those edges, the same grey as the dead one’s on Ten, but limp, torn at the ends like old flags.

“Up,” said Petra, already pulling the lever.

The Bucket rose. Overhead, the gillback let go of the wall.

It didn’t fall so much as unpeel, one edge first, then the whole flat weight of it at once. It hit the cage roof with a bang that put everybody on the floor. The Bucket swung out from the wall on its cable, then back, then out again. Wes found himself flat against the bars with Pruitt’s elbow in his ribs. Dolly’s lamp rolled across the grating, throwing light up the inside of the cage, down the shaft and into his eyes.

The cable jerked. It jerked again, twanging all the way up the shaft like a stepped-on guitar string. Before Dolly had her mouth open, Petra had felt it come up the lever and stopped the winch.

“She’ll take the weight,” Dolly said, up on one knee. “She won’t take it jerking.”

So they hung there, fifteen meters over Eleven, turning slowly on a cable that hummed.

The gillback had come over the top of the cage and wrapped itself down the gate side. Its underside was pressed flat against the bars, grey and ridged. A slot as long as Wes’s arm opened and closed in the middle of it at chest height, on rows of plates that ground together. It found the bars and rasped at them a meter from Pruitt’s face, a sound like a file on a pipe. Pruitt backed into the far corner without a word.

Rows of hooks ran along the gillback’s edges under the leaves, each the size of a thumb. They had come in through the bars and curled back on themselves. The gate bars bowed inward wherever they pulled. The latch Petra tried twice every morning groaned under the strain. One of the hooks had come through a hand’s width from Petra’s fingers on the lever. She checked the cable and left her fingers where they were.

Hamid swung the fire axe at the nearest edge. It rang off the plate like a shovel off a manhole cover and came back at him. He swung again, with the same result.

“Second Circle,” Dolly said. “That’s not going in.”

Wes took the reserve.

Where the hooks came through the gate, he got the edge in both hands and pulled. One after another the hooks came out of the bars, screeching, until a strip of plate stood clear of the cage. The gillback rolled the edge back down with no hurry at all and hooked it in again a meter higher.

“Oh, fuck you,” Wes told it.

When the reserve gave out he sat down hard against the bars.

“Ninety seconds,” Pruitt said from his corner. “I’m counting.”

Over Wes’s head the latch groaned again.

The leaves were right in front of him, pressed in through the bars. Up close, where they grew out of the body, their roots were soft and pale, like raw chicken skin. On Ten, Hamid’s saw had barely slowed in those roots.

Hamid’s pry bar lay on the floor. Wes grabbed it, jammed it through the bars into the row of roots up to the bend and leaned on it.

The gillback felt that. The whole cage shook. But the bar didn’t move. With everything he had and nothing left in reserve, he might as well have been leaning on a parked car.

He had twelve free points. On Four he’d had the same twelve and never once remembered them. Without the reserve he was a nine, and it was the nine that was failing.

He kept his left hand on the bar, dragged the petal back off the ring with his right and put his thumb on it. He put six in Might.

It wasn’t the reserve; the reserve was still a minute away. It was the nine that changed. The bar in his hands stopped being a parked car and became a bar with a great deal of weight on the other end of it. When he leaned again, something in the roots tore.

Hamid saw where. He brought the axe down through the bars into the same place. This time it went in to the haft.

The gillback let go all at once. The hooks unbent out of the bars with a long, sick screech. It slid down the outside of the cage in a grey sheet, its leaves dragging across the grating under their feet, before it fell away. It hit the shaft wall ten meters down, spread itself flat and held.

“Up,” Petra said. This time the Bucket went.

The gillback came up the wall after them. It kept pace for a few seconds with its torn leaves streaming, while Hamid stood at the gate with the axe ready and nothing to hit. It stopped about level with Ten’s landing. It flattened itself against the rock and stayed there with its leaves stirring. The Bucket went on up without it.

Gillbacks didn’t come shallower than Ten.

The handset swung on its curly cord on the wall of the cage. A small voice was coming out of it. “Petra? Petra.”

Wes got it to his ear. “We’re okay.”

“Who’s bleeding?”

He looked down. On its way out, a hook had caught his right forearm, the one without a petal, laying it open in a line from wrist to elbow. “Me. My arm.”

“Pumping or welling?”

“Welling.”

“Pressure, then. Hold it till you’re up. You’ll live.” There was a pause on the line. “Who else?”

Nobody else in the cage was holding anything shut. Dolly sat on the floor with her lamp in her lap. Pruitt was still in the far corner with both hands flat against the bars. Hamid had his thumb in a fresh notch in the edge of his axe. Petra had her eyes on the cable.

“Nobody,” Wes said.

“Then why’s everybody breathing like that?”

“Cardio,” Wes said, and gave the phone to Dolly.

Pruitt came out of his corner slowly and sat down beside him, watching Wes hold the arm shut. “Did you see its leaves?”

“Grey.”

“Grey and dry. Torn at the ends.” Pruitt rubbed his face with both hands. “That’s a starving animal, son. On a Second shelf, next door to a Hollow.”

“The Hollow’s eating its air.”

That got no argument. Pruitt nodded at the back of Wes’s left hand, where the petal was still peeled back off the ring.

“You spent points,” he said.

“Six.”

“In a cage. Hanging off a cable.”

“It’s my account.”

Pruitt looked at him. “It is,” he said. “Both times, something had to go wrong in front of you first. Me slapping your floor, before you put six in Will. Now the gate.”

Six left, Wes thought. Next time I’d like to spend them before something breaks.

At the top, the gate stuck. The latch pin had bent, so the gate had to be lifted to open. Petra had both hands under it when somebody lifted it for her.

Kessler had been sitting on the winch-house rail in his Authority greys, with the new sword on his hip and no sling. He came across the platform and raised the gate one-handed so Petra could swing it open, and then he saw what he had in his hand: two bars bowed in, the pin bent, the paint gone in thumb-sized hooks. Wes turned his left hand over on his cut arm, ring down against the blood. Hamid still had the axe. He didn’t put it down.

A scrap of grey leaf had caught where the hinge met the frame. Kessler picked it out with his free hand and rubbed it between finger and thumb until it was dust.

“What did that?”

“Gillback,” said Petra.

“On Eleven.” It wasn’t a question. “Buddy of mine at the Office says Tate had your log up on two screens before you were back past Nine.” He turned to Dolly. “I’m warden of record on Ten tomorrow. Eight o’clock, the Office’s cage off the Rim gate, with an inspector who’s never been below Four. Where is it?”

“On the wall,” Wes said. “It followed us up. It stopped level with Ten’s landing.”

Under Kessler’s hand one of the bowed bars gave another finger’s width. His face did something it hadn’t done on Nine or on Four.

“A Second Circle gillback, starving, on the wall by a cage run,” he said, “and you took three blanks past it twice to read a dial.” He let the gate go, his eyes on Dolly. “You want to talk to a board about who left who on Nine.”

Dolly didn’t have anything for that.

Thirty-five dollars, Wes thought. That’s what I paid to take them past it.

“Thursday week,” Kessler said to Wes. “My review. Authority House, fourth floor. I’m going to tell them what I saw from the cage.” He nodded at Wes’s sleeve. “Get that seen to.”

Saskia’s statement says I flared, Wes thought. Kessler went down the platform steps two at a time. From the winch-house doorway, on her crutches, Jules watched him all the way to the bottom.

Dolly got out first and stood in front of her gate in the daylight. Petra ran her hand along the bars one at a time, from the top down, the same as every morning. She didn’t say anything about any of them.

“That’s a new gate,” Dolly said.

“I’ll pay for it,” Wes said.

“You paid for the power.” She jerked a thumb past him at the bags of gill leaf stacked against the winch house, a hundred and ninety leaves that had made the whole cage head smell like a fish counter. “And somebody get those to Mags today. I’m not smelling them for a month.”

Jules had the first-aid box under one arm. She pointed at the bench with her chin.

“That wants stitches,” she said, once she’d cleaned it and had a look. “On a blank. On you it’ll be shut by Monday.” She laid the strips across it one at a time, close and even, pressing each one down with her thumb. “Hold still. What’s down there?”

“A Hollow. Vahl’s. It’s drinking.”

“Drinking what?”

“The spill off Ten.”

Jules pressed down the last strip and looked at him over it. She didn’t ask anything else. She didn’t let go of his arm either.

His phone had found the signal on the way up and was still buzzing in his pocket while she taped. Most of it was Shelfnotes. One wasn’t.

Your cage stopped at Eleven this morning. Eleven isn’t on your permit. — I. Tate