第62章 Three and Two

They spent one more day, because Torren refused to walk toward an unknown rhythm without sleep, and because there was a debt to settle that Elena had been carrying for a decade. Ria found her at the drafting hall, where the walkers' tally board had been mounted under glass like the relic it was, and where Elena was copying the outward entries by lamplight. Ria had come up from Undercity Seven with the spring delegation — she managed the scrubber choirs now, the work-note and the song-note both — and she stood in the doorway with two trays and the expression of a woman calling in a loan. "Dinner," Ria said. "You owe me a dinner. The note said if you came back. You came back ten years ago, and I have been patient, and my patience ended this morning." Before the dinner, though, there had been the morning with the tally board, because the wrong knock had changed the shape of everything, and shape was the walkers' profession. They had brought Kael's recording to the drafting hall and played it against the board's oldest annotations, and it was M. Okafor who went still first, her ear still trained after a century on rhythm the way other people were trained on faces. The walkers' tally, she confirmed, ended at the turning point by decision, not exhaustion. But there was one further entry — a single line, cut small and high on the stone where marks became marginalia, in script so old that Sena had needed the whole morning and two cups of tea to render it. The heart rendered it truer. The line said: Past this point the questions change. We heard one asking in a grammar we did not own. We turned back for the others. Forgive us; we were thirty-one, and it sounded old. "We thought we were being prudent," Okafor said, looking at her own handwriting across a century. "We wrote it as prudence. Reading it now, at this end of my life, I would call it what it was." She touched the glass over the mark. "It frightened us. A knock that didn't want anything we knew how to give. We spent a hundred years learning every door that wanted opening, and we walked past the one door that only wanted company." "Then the debt is ours," Elena had said, and meant it, and Okafor had looked at her for a long moment with the expression of a woman handing forward a tool. The meal itself was nothing grand — canteen tables, recycled-everything stew, the two of them in a corner away from the delegations — and it was, Elena thought, one of the best meals of her life. Halfway through, Ria put something on the table between the trays. It was a piece of paper, folded into eighths, soft as cloth from handling, and Elena knew what it was before she opened it. Her own handwriting, ten years younger, ten years more frightened: If I come back, dinner is on me. If I don't, you were right about me being stupid. "You kept it," Elena said. "I kept it angry, at first," Ria said. "Then I kept it the way you keep anything from before the sky. Proof that the world used to be a certain size." She turned her cup in her hands. "I never told you why I didn't want to know, back then. It wasn't the danger. Well. It was the danger. But underneath the danger it was this: I grew up in the sealed wings, Elena. I know what happens to places that get shut. Nothing dramatic. Things just get smaller, year by year, quieter year by year, until one day the corridor is a memory with a hatch on it. I couldn't shake the feeling that if I learned what you were doing, I'd have to want it too, and wanting things was how the wings got emptied." She looked up, and smiled the crooked smile Elena had followed through a thousand maintenance shifts. "Eat your stew. Come back from the dark. Bring me something else to keep." They left at first light, five of them onto the first span of the road between worlds, past the green beacon burning on its iron, past the greeters' auxiliary drawn up in solemn row with Tomas at parade rest, past the old man, who touched his staff to the ground once, like a gavel, and said nothing at all. The gallery upward was everything the reports had promised and nothing any of them were ready for. It rose through cloud and through the memory of cloud, through altitudes where the window column's shimmer hung to one side like an aurora nailed in place, and the niches woke as they passed and slept behind them, a hospitality of light extended precisely as far as trust. Vess walked ahead and taught them the marking as they went. At the turning point — a broad landing where the homeward road bent away below toward the ring and the road outward ran straight into the unmapped dark — the walkers' marks ended. Thirty years of tallies, and then the last mark, and then blank stone. Vess knelt and took a scribe from her kit, one of the ranked tools her mothers' generation had laid out on the meadow grass, and offered it to Kai handle-first. "Our rule," she said. "Whoever walks new ground cuts the first mark. Otherwise the count belongs to nobody." Kai cut the mark deep and clean, the way his grandfather had cut weather-signals into the tower lintel for sixty years. One stroke for the day. Then, because the old man had told them to count honestly, he added a second stroke, smaller, beside the first. "What's that one?" Torren asked. "The question we're following," Kai said. "Three and two. I'm not writing it down as an answer to anything." They walked outward, and the road received them. For three days it was generous — way-stations older than the homeward ones, their benches worn hollow, their water taps running cold and mineral, the crystals sparser but still waking, still faithful. On the fourth day the crystals began to sleep through their passing, one by one, like sentries deciding, and on the fifth day the road stopped being a road. It broke across a chasm of pure dark like a sentence across a silence.