Chapter 53 The Tide of Blank

They went out to study it the way Rosa insisted on studying everything: in daylight, in pairs, with one person always anchored at the last white post with a rope around their waist and a copy of the camp's boundary line in their pocket. The band of paleness had stopped a mile short of the posts overnight, as if it had come to an edge only it could see. Up close, at half that distance, it resolved into something Clary had no proper name for and therefore named the way a cartographer names everything: the tide of blank. It did not rush. It did not roar. It advanced the way morning advances under a door — total, unhurried, indifferent to what stood in its way — and the sound it made was worse than any sound, because it was the sound a page makes when nothing is written on it. "Experiments," Rosa said, uncapping her flask with the calm of a woman who had decided years ago that fear was a scheduling problem. "Jem, the sign." Jem, grey-faced but game, unslung his pack and took out a sign he had made that morning: a board with WELCOME TO MARGIN burned into it in his own uneven hand, letters gone over twice. He walked it forward, laid it down in the tide's path, and stepped back smartly. They watched the blank arrive like weather watching grass. The board did not burn, break, or blow away. The word simply went out of it — not faded, Clary saw, but *unwritten*, the letters leaving the wood the way a note leaves a bell — until there was a plain plank lying in a pale field with nobody's intention on it anywhere. Then the plank's edges went soft, and then the plank went, and then there was level page where a boy's work had been, and Jem said a rude word under his breath with great feeling. "Now mine," Rosa said. Hers was a stone from the cairn at the north post, carved deep with the camp's mark, and she had spent the previous evening having every hand in camp touch it in turn while she read out their names — a ritual she did not explain. She set the stone in the tide's path. The blank came. The carving paled, wavered — and held. Faded to a ghost, held again, and then returned, faint but entire, like a bruise coming back up through skin. Rosa picked it up, weighed it, and allowed herself one grim nod. "It can take a thing you made," she said. "It struggles with a thing you share. Write that down, someone." Clary was already writing. In her survey book the observations lined themselves up into a grammar: the tide unwrote solitary work fastest; it unwrote walls and fences and closed shapes almost gleefully, as if stopping offended it personally; it slowed for anything being actively drawn — Jem's morning boundary-line patrol, walked and retouched daily, still showed its ink though it ran within twenty yards of the pale. And it had not yet touched anything drawn by many hands together, which was how the camp itself survived, ringed by lines that belonged to everyone and therefore, apparently, to no eraser in particular. Tamsin had brought her watercolors. She worked fast, standing on the rise with her box open on her knee, and what she painted was not the landscape but the event of it: a long wash of no-color moving through color, rendered in greys so patient they made Clary's teeth ache. When she finished and turned the board around, everyone went quiet, because the painting did the thing paintings weren't supposed to do — it let you look at the blank without your eyes sliding off. You could point at it. You could say *there*. Rosa studied it for a long moment and then said, in the tone of a woman revising a doctrine, "That goes on the hall wall. Every arrival sees it before they draw a single step west." It was Wren who found the footprints. She had edged closer than anyone liked, roped, with Clary beside her, following the tide's overnight high-water mark along a shallow vale. The prints were pressed into the crusted surface of the page — boot heels, a long stride, someone walking purposefully west with the confidence of a person who has a plan. Forty yards of them. And then, mid-stride, they stopped. Not turned. Not dragged. Stopped, the last left print deeper than the rest, as if the walker had been lifting his back foot when the ground stopped agreeing to hold him. Beside the print lay a torch — real, metal, dented, the ordinary dented torch of an ordinary nineteen-year-old — and a pencil worn down to a stub. Wren knelt. She did not touch the torch at first. She looked at it the way you look at a thing in a museum of disasters, and then she picked it up and clicked it twice, and the beam was strong and stupid and ordinary, a circle of light on pale nothing, and she said, in a small clear voice that Clary heard with the whole of her skin, "This is Colm's. He never went anywhere without it. He used to signal me across the valley with it when Mum called us in." She clicked it off. "He walked in on his own feet. He wasn't taken. He *walked*." "He went looking for something," Clary said quietly, "or something asked him to come." That night, back at Margin, Jem told them the part he had been keeping to himself, sitting close to the fire with his cast nearly against the coals. "You'll think it's the wind," he said. "Everyone thinks it's the wind, first nights. But wind doesn't scratch. It's like — you know when someone draws two streets away and you can't hear it but you know it's happening? It's like that, from the west. And sometimes—" he looked at the fire, "—sometimes it does your name. My name. Like handwriting, if handwriting could talk. Only I never told anyone here my second name, and it knew it." Nobody spoke. Beyond the ring of posts the dark lay flat and enormous, and somewhere out in it the tide walked its slow circuit of the drawn world, erasing as it came. Then Wren stood up. She had Colm's torch in one hand and the stub of his pencil in the other, and her face in the firelight was sixteen years old and done with being protected. "It said my name too," she said. "At the footprints. Both names, ours together, the way he used to call me in for tea." Her chin was steady. "It didn't learn that from the wind."