Chapter 9Bait

“She pulled the Bucket’s log,” Pruitt said.

He had Wes’s phone and was reading Tate’s text again by the blue of the Fairweather kiosk, halfway down Kettle Street at ten at night, with two bags of gill leaf at his feet. The kiosk spat Wes’s fourth fifty back out. Wes flattened it on his thigh and fed it in again. On the screen the balance went up anyway: $60,370.00. THANK YOU, WESLEY! Dolly waited a step uphill, out of the blue light.

“Because I was in it,” Wes said.

“Because you were in it. Next she’ll pull the log off Eleven’s post and see the gauge at eight, same as you did. A sealed Hollow ought to be at forty. Then it’s a file. Sooner or later the file goes to somebody who rings Vahl.”

“How long?”

“Office time? A week. Tate time? She was at our cage head at twenty to six yesterday.” Pruitt thumbed past the text and held the phone out, screen up. “That’s the Hollow.”

Wes read it walking, with both his bags in his other hand. THE CISTERN · SHELF 11 · RATED SECOND · RUN RIGHTS: HOUSE VAHL. Once a skin cracked gold it took from one day to three to come through, then stayed open a week before it healed. It was named for its pools, chambers where spill lay on the floor like standing water, too heavy to rise. Divers lived in them, eel-shaped things that came up when a pool went down. Last time, four Vahl hunters led by S. Vahl had cleared it in thirty-one hours. They came out with a heart core the size of a truck tire and two Rare pieces of a Diver’s set. The photo from the landing showed three hunters grinning at the camera and one in a long charcoal coat looking at something off to the side.

Under it somebody had written vahl dont sell it they wear it. Under that: last time it went gold in the cracks on a tuesday. vahl was in by thursday.

The cracks on Eleven had been gold that morning. It was Friday.

A grey link at the bottom went to the Second Circle Descent page, Press line Shelf Twelve, which said Gleaner: two on record. Kessler had told him one gleaner in a thousand made it. That had been Kessler rounding up.

At the bottom of the hill, concrete steps went down under a storm grate the size of a door. Dolly took them first, one at a time.

The Grate smelled of wet cardboard and hot solder. Only Mags’s lamp burned, at the far end, past six or seven people along the wall in a line that didn’t look like one, each holding something wrapped. Through the canvas of one backpack Wes could see a glow no brighter than a watch face. Dolly walked past all of them to the front.

“Krane,” said Mags, without looking up from her scale.

“Mags,” Dolly said. Wes hadn’t known they knew each other.

“Gill,” Mags said, reading the bags before either of their faces. She held a leaf up to the lamp and let the light come through it, grey and even. “Ten leaf. Fresh. Nobody’s brought me Ten leaf this year.” Her eyes came up over her glasses to Wes. “Who’s working Ten?”

“Nobody, since eight last night.”

“Then I’ll take all of it.” She counted every leaf into a crate without hurrying. Two thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars came out of the cash box in fifties. Dolly took a folded copy of Jules’s bill out of her coat, DRAIN GENERAL · OKAFOR, J. · $14,000.00, with a column down the margin in Jules’s ballpoint: Hamid 1,100. Teeth 3,240. Can 655. Owing 9,005. She borrowed Mags’s pen, wrote Gill 2,850 under the column and buttoned the money into her coat with the bill. “That’s Jules’s.”

Six thousand one hundred and fifty-five to go, Wes thought. On the table where the money had been, he laid the wrist gauge. The needle was still at the top.

“Told you it sticks,” Mags said.

“What’s the top?”

“That’s a warden’s unit. Top’s a Third Circle kill at arm’s length. What were you holding it next to?”

“A crack.”

Mags rapped the gauge once, hard, on the edge of the table. The needle fell off the top and settled just off zero on the Grate’s stale air. She handed it back. “Then I’d stay off that crack.”

“Past a Third Circle kill,” Dolly said, half to herself. “That’s more than a Second-rated Hollow ought to have in it.”

“We had that gauge forty meters down a crack on Ten,” Pruitt said, “sitting in the pocket that fell out of the shelf. The needle read the spill, not whatever’s at the bottom drinking it.”

Mags looked from one of them to the other and laced her fingers on the pad. “Whatever you three are working up to, say it, Krane.”

Dolly didn’t, so Mags waved the backpack forward. “Then go and say it on the steps,” she said. “I’ve got a line.”

Dolly stopped three steps up with her good hand on the rail. Rain had found the grate overhead and came through it in a thin string that hit the concrete between her and Wes.

“You want my crew in Vahl’s Hollow when the skin comes through, before Vahl gets there,” she said. “That’s Hollow-jumping. It’s eight years inside, and they take the permit too. Mine, and every one on my crew that’s got one.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. You’ve been licensed five days.” Behind them Mags’s scale clacked. “If my cage goes down there, I want to know what I’m putting in it. On Nine I asked you where the spill went. You said lappers, I filed lappers, and I never asked again. I’m asking again.”

She waited until he looked up at her. “Where’s the spill, Wes?”

“I ate it.”

At the bottom of the steps Pruitt stopped with the empty bags balled in his fist. Down the tunnel the backpack went onto Mags’s table without anybody in the line looking round.

“All of it,” Wes said. “In eleven seconds. Saskia Vahl timed it on her wrist, then signed a statement that said lappers.”

“And Kessler,” Dolly said. “What did he see from the cage?”

“The shaft go dark under him. He came up my stairs the night you filed. He thinks Saskia’s paying me, and he wants half.”

Dolly’s jaw worked. “That little shit came up your stairs.”

“At his review I can say he held the borer, or I can say he left his post.”

“Say both.” She looked up the steps at the strip of streetlight. “Whatever’s behind that skin. Can you hold it?”

On Nine she had asked Kessler the same thing. “I don’t know,” Wes said.

“Kessler said yes.”

The string of rain kept coming down between them. “Two weeks you sat on that,” Dolly said. “You should’ve told me.”

“You said lappers.”

“I know what I said.” She kept her eyes on the street. “I’d lost one of mine that morning.”

Down at the table Mags’s cash box shut. “I could ring Imogen Tate in the morning,” Dolly said. “Vahl sends four hunters down, nobody does eight years, and I go back to pulling teeth out of whatever a House killed, for three percent, and selling them back to the House.” Her good hand closed on the rail. “I never owned one thing I brought up that shaft. Not one.”

She went back down the steps to Mags.

Dolly put her hand flat on the pad, where the backpack had been. “Say I brought you a heart core,” she said. “Second Circle, the size of a truck tire. In lead.”

Mags didn’t ask where from. “That’s not a Kettle Street sale. That goes out of the city.”

“Where?”

“There’s six other Sinks in the world, Krane. Every one’s got Houses of its own, and not one of them owes ours a favor. You’d get a third of what it fetches on the Rim. I want a week to move it, and I don’t ask whose Hollow.”

“A third,” Dolly said.

“Anything with a card, I read the card first. If it says it’s a piece of a set some House wears, it stays in your pocket. I don’t want it in my tunnel.” Mags looked past them at the line along the wall. “And when a Hollow’s cleared, every Marked hand in this city lights up at once. Half my line will know the night you did it.”

Wes looked at the back of his hand, where the petal covered the ring.

“You can leave your names off,” Mags said. “The Hollow’s name still goes up on every hand.”

“And cartridges,” Wes said. “Second-rated.”

From under the table Mags brought up a carton of cartridges, each fatter than the rental ones, with a red band round it. “Ninety each. An hour in Second air. Half that if you’re working.”

Wes thought about Hamid on a rope at the mouth of a Hollow. “Twelve.”

“My run,” he told Dolly when she turned round.

Mags counted twelve into a bag while Wes counted a thousand and eighty dollars of Dray’s money onto her table. First time I ever bought anything for somebody’s lungs, he thought. I always rented mine.

At the top of the steps Dolly stopped for breath with her cast against her coat. “Your rate’s going up.”

“To what?”

“I’ll think of a number.” She started up Kettle Street without waiting for him.

The cage head was still dark at twenty to five the next morning, apart from a work lamp on a pole with the generator running at its foot. After a day on Petra’s trestles the Bucket’s gate was back on its hinges, its new latch shining where the old one had been dull. When Petra dropped the pin, it hung up a finger short of home. She took the file out of her back pocket, gave the pin two strokes, blew on it and dropped it again. This time it went home with a click.

Wes stepped up to take the gate. Without looking at him she put a hand out flat, so he stepped back.

She took the bars in both hands and lifted. Nothing gave, not the pin and not the two bars she’d heated straight. She pulled the pin, swung the gate wide, shut it, dropped the pin and lifted again with her whole weight under it.

“Nobody rides a gate I haven’t tried twice,” she said, and took her tools into the winch house.

Pruitt had come down early too and watched all of it from a crate by the Bucket. When she’d gone he got up and went to the two bars she’d straightened, where the steel at chest height was scored in rows of fine lines. “Where were you?” he said. “When it hit us.”

“On the bars. Then on the floor, by the hinge.”

“It got its mouth on the bars about here.” Pruitt laid his hand flat beside the first scratches, on the latch side. “A meter off my face, so I went to the far corner.” His thumb followed the lines bar by bar toward the hinge and stopped above the spot where Wes had sat down. “It didn’t follow me.”

He took his hand off the bar. “That thing on the wall’s starving. Nothing that hungry picks a fight with steel, so it didn’t drop on the Bucket for the gate. It came for you.”

Past the lamp, the lip of the Sink was a few lights hung round the edge of nothing. “Your gauge pegged past a Third Circle kill in that crack,” Pruitt said. “Whatever’s in that dome has been eating Ten’s spill through the rock for three days, and it’s still hungry.” He turned round to face Wes. “You’ve got a Fifth Circle’s cloud in you, son. You smell like dinner.”

Wes looked down the cable to where the lamp gave out. Somewhere under Ten, something flat and grey was lying on the wall by the cage run, waiting for dinner to come past.

“Show me what you’re taking down there,” Pruitt said, “before the others get here.”

Wes peeled the petal back, the strips pulling at his elbow, and put his thumb on the ring.

He read it out under the generator. “Grit’s up,” Pruitt said.

“That’s the third petal.” Wes kept his thumb on Free points: 6. That was the last of the account until a Press. This time he wanted to know what he’d spend it on before the bill came.

Twelve seconds on reserve, he thought. Then ninety in the sit before it comes back. Out of every hundred and two seconds, I’m only what the sheet says for ninety.

“Speed’s no good once something’s holding on,” he said. “The petals look after Grit. Sense reads a dial across a shelf, and Will got Dray’s core in the box. On the cable it was Might that got the gillback off us. The Hollow’s page says divers. Eels. If they pull, it’s Might. If they bite, it’s Grit.”

“And if they do both?”

“Then it’s whichever one’s got hold of me.” He let the card go. “Soon as the reserve’s gone and something’s holding on to me, the six go in. Before it breaks anything.”

Pruitt nodded slowly.

At ten to five Hamid came up the platform steps, took Mags’s bag off Wes without asking and went round with it, two red-banded cartridges to each blank going down and his own two into his chest pocket. Dolly came up behind him with her clipboard. Jules sat just inside the winch-house door with the cage phone in her lap and her foot up on a crate, in the boot Drain General had swapped for her cast.

Wes hadn’t slept, so by five o’clock he had a plan.

“Before anybody gets in,” he said. “The cloud on Nine wasn’t lappers. I ate it.”

Hamid stopped with a cartridge in each hand. Petra was already in the cage and didn’t turn round.

“I know,” she said. “I was on the cage floor going up, holding my foot. You can see down through the floor.”

“You never said,” Wes told her.

“Dolly said lappers.”

“Whatever we bring out, Jules’s bill comes off the top,” Wes said, while Hamid handed Dolly her two. “Then the cage’s cut. Then even shares.”

“Don’t make my leg the reason.” Jules didn’t raise her voice. “So what’s yours?”

He’d had an answer ready for every question he expected. Not that one.

“I want it.”

“Okay,” she said. “That one I believe.”

“How much?” Hamid said.

“Less than Vahl got last time. A lot less, where we’d have to sell it.”

Hamid thought about that. “I want my eleven hundred back.”

“It’s a Second-rated Hollow,” Petra said from the cage. “We’re blanks.”

“I know.”

“I’m not saying no. I’m saying it.” She put a hand on the frame. “And the gillback’s on the wall at Ten. I’m not taking her past it.”

“Then I’ll take it off the wall.”

Petra gave him the look she gave a strap before she hung weight on it. “First.”

“Off it how?” Dolly said.

“Nobody stands next to me,” Wes said. “It wants me, so I’m not waiting for it at the gate this time. I’m going out to it. Onto its back. Yesterday it picked the spot and came down on the roof. Today I pick.” He held his hand out, and Hamid put the pry bar in it. “The core’s under the hump. I get this under there, tear the cords that hold it, and it’s dead.”

Hamid had sawn round that hump himself on Ten. “Third plate back from the head,” he said. He drew a square on the air with one finger. “There’s a seam all round it, like a lid. The sac’s under the lid.”

“How far above it?” Petra said.

“Three meters.”

“Three. On a line. Tied to my cage. And I don’t move her while you’re out.”

“I’m on the rope,” said Hamid.

“Then we go,” Dolly said. “Here’s how.” She held up her good hand and counted on it. “Petra’s on the lever.”

“On Nine, Kessler decided at the gate who got left,” Petra said. “Nobody decides at the gate. I go up when everybody’s in.”

“And if it’s on the cage?”

“I go up when everybody’s in.”

“Everybody’s on a line, and nobody goes in after anybody. Past the skin it’s the two with Marks.” Dolly’s eyes went to Pruitt. “You’ve only got six notches.”

“I told him that,” Wes said.

“He told me twice.” Pruitt turned to Wes. “You can read a dial at forty meters, son. You can’t read a floor. And somebody on your line has to be able to see you.”

“Jules runs the clock,” Dolly said.

“Fifteen minutes on a cartridge, skin or no skin. I don’t care what it says on the band,” Jules said from the door.

“Nothing comes out of my shaft I can’t sell, and Mags is buying.” The thumb went down last. “And if what’s in there is more than a Second Circle, everybody comes up, and I ring Tate from the winch house with Wes standing next to me to explain it.” She checked her watch under the lamp. “Kessler’s on Ten at eight with an inspector. We’re past Ten by a quarter past five, or we’re not going.”

She wrote on the clipboard braced against her cast and turned it round so he could see. Under CREW in her capitals it said POWER 35, the same as Wes had paid yesterday. “And the log’s going to say Eleven, before anybody asks. It said Eleven yesterday.”

He put his phone away with Tate’s text still on it: Eleven isn’t on your permit. She hadn’t asked him a question, so he hadn’t answered one.

Jules called him over to the winch-house door before he got into the cage. She took his right wrist without asking, turned the arm to the light and ran her thumb down the strips one at a time. One at the elbow had lifted at a corner. She held it down until it stuck. “Anybody who comes up hurt comes up to me,” she said, loud enough for the cage. “Not an ambulance. An ambulance asks what shelf.” She glanced past him at Pruitt and lowered her voice. “And if one of them goes down in there, you drag them by the harness. Not by the arm. You’re a nine. You’ll have the arm off.”

“By the harness.”

She let go of his wrist. “Get in, then.”

Petra shut the gate behind them and dropped the pin. On the wall of the cage, the gauge sat at zero.

The Bucket went down at a walking pace while the lip shrank over their heads. At Shelf Nine the whale went by under the grating, a ridge of bone somebody had started to quarry and given up on.

Pruitt came and stood next to Wes at the bars. Dolly was on the handset to the winch house, telling Jules where they were.

“You don’t have to come in,” Wes said, keeping his voice down.

“You said.”

“This time there’s nobody to hear you say no.”

Pruitt watched the rock slide past the bars. “Yes,” he said.

Ten’s sign still hung red on white from the landing rail, with the padlocked chain behind it. Dolly read her watch as it went by. “Ten past,” she told the handset. Forty meters back, at the foot of the slot, Tate’s certified unit stood under a lamp somebody had left burning on a stand. Its pen would be scratching for her right now, on a drum that went round too slowly to see.

Dolly put her work light down through the floor of the cage. The gillback had moved. Yesterday it had stopped level with Ten’s landing and lain flat against the rock. Now it was fifteen meters below Ten’s lip, spread across the shaft wall beside the cage run, close enough that the cable would pass within a meter of its edge. Its leaves hung limp and grey along its sides, torn at the ends.

Petra stopped the winch without being asked. When Wes moved along the bars to the far side of the gate, the leaves along the gillback’s near edge came up off the rock one after another and turned after him, a row of torn grey flags all leaning the same way.

“There,” Pruitt said quietly. “See it?”

Wes saw it. Most of what he’d fought since the whale had come to him: lappers, this same flat grey thing yesterday on the cable. Fine, he thought. I’ll come and get you.

“It won’t come off the wall again,” Pruitt said. “Not with leaves like that. It’s got one grab left in it, and it’s saving it for you.”

Petra let the Bucket down a meter at a time, pausing after each. Whenever the cage stopped, the leaves settled. Whenever it moved, they came up again and found Wes wherever he stood. Three meters above the gillback, with the gate toward the wall, she set the brake and kept her hand on it.

Hamid buckled Wes into a harness, tied the line to its back loop and the other end round the cage frame by the hinge, then took a turn of it round his own back and sat down into it in the open gate, both boots braced against the sill. Pruitt stood at his shoulder with his eyes on the wall and his watch already in his hand. Dolly put the lamp on the plates.

Jules’s voice came small out of the handset on the cage wall. “Somebody talk to me.”

“Busy,” Dolly said. She lifted the handset off its hook and clipped it to her belt by the cord, so the line stayed open.

One go, Wes thought. After that it’s ninety seconds on a rope.

He pushed the pry bar through his belt, took the line in both hands and went over the sill backwards. Three meters of rope put his boots on its back.

It was colder than the rock round it. He stood out from it on the line like a window cleaner on the side of a building, with ridged grey plate under his boots in overlapping rows, each ridge furred with old grit. Along both edges the leaves had begun to lift and settle, lift and settle, an arm’s length either side of him.

“Head’s to your left,” Pruitt said from the gate.

Wes counted plates from the head. One. Two. His right boot went off a ridge. For a second all of him hung on the line with his knees against the plate before he got the boot back.

The gillback felt him. Its near edge came up off the wall like the corner of a rug when somebody opens a door in another room. The far edge followed. Both kept coming, curling up and over toward him with the hooks first, each one the size of a thumb, folding him in against its own back.

“Both edges,” Pruitt said from the gate, not loud. “Wes. Both.”

Third plate back. His fingers found the seam, a groove as deep as a fingernail running all the way round the plate, exactly where Hamid had drawn it on the air.

He said yes to the reserve.

The pry bar went into the seam to the bend. When he leaned on it, the lid came up a hand’s width, then a forearm, with light pouring out from underneath. A hook closed on his left hand and slid off it. Another went through the shoulder of his overalls and held.

The edges met over his head. Dolly’s lamp was gone.

Inside the fold it was close and wet and smelled of nothing at all. Leaves lay flat against the back of his neck like wet newspaper, and somewhere past them the hooks were working through his overalls toward skin.

“Lost him,” Dolly said somewhere past the plate. “Hamid?”

The line at Wes’s back went hard.

The only light left was the glow coming up out of the gap into his face. Holding the lid up on the bar with his left hand, he jammed his right arm in up to the elbow. It was hot in there, and his fingers found the cords by feel: gristle as thick as his thumb, three of them, four.

He tore them. They went one after another like a cable going. On the way back out, the edge of the lid opened his forearm along Jules’s strips.

The gillback went stiff.

Every hook let go of the wall at once, the one in his shoulder with them, and the whole flat weight of it dropped with him standing on it.

He was off its back in the first meter. The line came tight with a crack that went up into the cage frame, swinging him shoulder first into the shaft wall with his hands up too late to do any good. He hit, bounced, hit again more softly and hung there. The gillback went on down past his boots, turning over once in Dolly’s light, with Hamid’s pry bar still standing up out of the seam.

Above him in the gate, Hamid had the whole of Wes’s weight on his back, every pound a blank had. He didn’t say anything. His face over the sill had gone the dark red of a man holding up the back end of a car. The Bucket bounced once on its cable before Petra held it.

Dolly’s lamp came off the falling body and found Wes on the wall.

The take had gone in already, warm. The rest came off the gillback as it went: a Second Circle’s worth of gold unwinding from it like smoke. Spill rose. This spill went down. The Draft had it before his eyes did, a tug on his left forearm from below and behind the rock. It poured after the body in a long bright ribbon, past his boots and on into the dark.

The skin had been drinking Ten’s spill since Wednesday and still hadn’t opened. Kessler would be on Ten at eight, one shelf above whatever came out of that door.

Go on, he thought at it. Take it to the door.

He’d never fed anything on purpose in his life.

Somewhere below him, a long way down, something heavy hit rock.

Hamid brought him up hand over hand until Wes could get a boot on the sill. Inside, he sat down on the grating with his back against the bars. His right sleeve was dark to the elbow, his shoulder ringing like a struck pipe. Pruitt took the arm without asking and pressed both thumbs down on the cut. He didn’t say one word about it.

Hamid sat down against the gate and turned his hands over. The rope had taken the skin off both palms. After a moment he wiped them on his knees and stood up again.

“She held,” Petra said, looking up the cable. Her hand hadn’t left the brake.

Dolly unclipped the handset from her belt and checked her watch. “Fourteen past,” she told it. “It’s off the wall. So’s he, nearly.” She listened to whatever Jules said back. “His arm. Again.” She hung it on its hook.

Eleven was a minute further down. Petra took the last ten meters slowly while Dolly’s lamp went down through the grating. The shelf came up out of the dark as it had the morning before, long and narrow and bare, with its floodlights dead on their brackets. The gillback lay broken-backed on the rock not far from the landing, Hamid’s bar still standing in the seam behind its head. The lid hung open where Wes had levered it. Under it the core glowed in its sac, with a thread already leaning off it toward the back wall.

There’s a thousand dollars, Wes thought. In an hour it’s a rock.

“Leave it,” said Dolly.

None of the cloud was rising.

It went across the floor of Eleven in long low threads, every one of them crawling toward the back wall and out of the reach of Dolly’s lamp. She swung the light after them. At the dome they ran into the gold hairlines, and every crack they reached got brighter. On the post ten meters to one side, Vahl’s needle crept up off eight toward ten.

He held his thumb on the ring under the petal, his eyes still on the dome.

All Tate’s drum would show was a gillback dying, he thought. Trust the sheet to notice.

The lamp-lit face of the dome came up a shade sharper while he watched, every hairline on it a separate thread of gold.

Petra stopped the Bucket two meters above the landing and left the gate shut. Through the bars the Nose had it, a whole gillback’s worth, all of it going one way. Behind it there was nothing. Eleven’s air was what it had been the day before, a room with the furniture taken out.

They hung there twenty minutes by Dolly’s watch.

The dome ticked.

It ticked again before the first one had finished. Soon it was ticking all over, from every crack at once, faster and faster, like gravel thrown at a window.

Wes watched Vahl’s needle fall back to eight. Then to seven. Then to six.

“Pruitt,” he said.

“I see it.”

Across the face of the dome the gold hairlines joined up. A section of skin the size of a billboard went dark round its edges all at once, like the dotted line round a coupon. It sagged. With a long grinding roar the whole section fell inward, away from them, into the wall. Slabs of grey skin as thick as mattresses slid down into the dark behind it and kept sliding, banging and grinding, for as long as it would have taken the Bucket to drop a shelf.

Dust came off the fall in a cloud. It didn’t come out over the shelf. It went in after the slabs, drawn into the hole as if the dark behind the skin had breathed in.

The roar stopped. Somewhere inside, pebbles went on rattling, further and further off.

“What was that?” said the handset on the cage wall. “Dolly. What was that?”

Dolly didn’t answer it yet. Where the section had been, the dome had a hole in it you could have backed a truck into, black inside, with gold still burning round its edges. Vahl’s needle stood at five.

“They blow out,” Pruitt said. “Every Hollow I ever heard of, they blow out.”

On Four Wes had taken the borer’s meal, and on Ten he’d let whatever was behind the skin eat. The last gold threads were going in across the floor, past the dead gillback.

This time, he thought, I brought it one.

Dolly picked up the handset. “The door,” she told Jules. She hung it up and turned to Petra.

“Land her,” she said.