Water Level

The man in the cage sat with his knees pulled up.

He didn't come out.

Nobody reached in for him. Nobody knew whether reaching in was allowed.

Marlow stepped up and put a hand on the frame of the cage.

“Hey.”

“…It's bright.”

“It's daytime.”

“Bright. It's bright.”

One said it with his eyes closed. Nine years, those eyes had lived by one white lamp.

Marlow took off his coat and draped it over One's head.

“What are you doing.”

“It stinks of the road. Live with it.”

“…That helps. It helps.”

＊

It took One ten minutes to get out of the cage.

It wasn't that his legs wouldn't work. His body wasn't used to ground that didn't move.

He stood, walked three steps, and stopped.

Then he turned to face the wind.

“Wind.”

“Wind, yeah.”

“First in nine years. Nine years, this.”

One spread both arms wide. Then he stopped, embarrassed. He was bad at stopping.

Willa came over.

She halted three steps short, tipped her face up, and looked at him a while.

One looked back at her through the gap in the coat.

“…There's a resemblance.”

“Course there is.”

“Not you. The girl.”

“To who.”

“Don't know. She looks like somebody. Can't recall who.”

Willa didn't get angry at the way he said it.

Instead, she put out her hand.

“I'm Willa Dorset.”

One looked at the hand for a while.

He had not shaken a hand in nine years. Probably not in the two and a half years before that either.

He put his hand out, took hers, and then, once, gripped it harder.

“Eleven years since anybody gave me a name.”

＊

Harlan broke it.

He likely hadn't broken it because he wanted to. It was the job.

“One question. The water level down there. Where is it now.”

“Down. Worked it two hours this morning before I got in.”

“You worked it this morning. Who works it tomorrow.”

One looked at Harlan through the gap in the coat.

Then he said it slowly.

“…Nobody.”

The nineteen men of the drill site stopped working again.

This time they stopped a different way.

“You said three days to the floor,” Marlow said.

“I said it. To the metal floor.”

“And past that.”

“Past that I never measured. No sense in measuring. I brought it down every morning.”

Harlan gripped the edge of the scale.

The unburned side of his face moved, plainly. Marlow had never seen the man move that much.

“The hole fills in.”

“Sixty years' worth?”

“Sixty years' worth.”

＊

Nobody shouted.

There was nobody there to shout at.

The order to bring him up was written by Central, and Central is six days east, and it speaks in paper.

The one who made Central write it was Marlow.

“I said it.”

Having said that, he didn't regret it. It surprised him a little, not regretting it.

“It was my first condition. Bring up the man at the bottom of the shaft.”

“…You,” Harlan began, and closed his mouth.

He closed it, then opened it again.

“That was the right thing.”

“Yeah?”

“It is right. It is right, but what am I to tell nineteen men.”

Marlow looked at the faces of those nineteen.

He knew none of their names. Forty-some days ago he had slept here two nights and been given food. That was all.

Some of them had spent thirty of those sixty years right here.

＊

Drag stepped forward then.

“Foreman Bessel. We need to settle the form of the report.”

“The form.”

“The shaft fills. That cannot be moved. The only thing that can be moved is whose decision filled it.”

“Central's order. There is paper.”

“Produce that paper and Central has a problem. When Central has a problem, it looks for somewhere to put it. Where it looks, it finds these nineteen men.”

Harlan went quiet.

Drag went on. His voice stayed at the same pitch.

“I will file it. The Captain of the Wall ordered a shaft worker brought up outside his jurisdiction. A procedural violation. The punishment stops with me alone.”

“Hold on,” Marlow said.

“I will not.”

“I'm the one who said it. So let me write it.”

“You are not a man of the Empire. There is no box to punish you in.”

Drag looked straight at Marlow for the first time.

“A man with no box does not exist on paper. Responsibility cannot be loaded onto a thing that does not exist.”

There was the sound of Roslyn turning a page on her desk.

“Captain Mortensen. I will say one thing only.”

“Say it.”

“Your brother's box is still empty as well.”

Drag said nothing for a while.

Then he walked off toward the cart.

End of Chapter 24