Blank Lines

They ran north through the night.

Kale kept his promise. Until dawn, the wings never once came after them.

At dawn, just once, a wing showed in the southern sky. It was not flying high. Beating with the right one lagging, it came to rest on a hilltop and watched them.

It did not come after them.

“…He widened the promise,” Drag said.

“Wasn't it, I won't follow while it's night?”

“That man never did more than he said. He never did less than he said either.”

Drag did not look at the southern sky.

Marlow understood that he did not look because if he looked, he would stop.

＊

They came out of the sea of glowing grass, and where the black earth turned back to red earth, they stopped the cart.

They built a fire.

It had been three days since they built a fire in a place where the grass did not glow. Nobody said so, but every one of them looked a little easier in the brightness of it.

Roslyn had her stack of paper spread across her knees.

She had the newest page open. Numbers packed close together. The numbers copied off the stakes in the field. There were hundreds of them. Nowhere near twenty thousand.

At the very top of it, on one line only, a name was written beside a number.

Garry Knotts.

Marlow took an old piece of paper out of the inside of his coat.

The edge of it had gone black. Thirteen seven-digit numbers. Given to him to keep by One, at the bottom of the shaft.

“I need a favor.”

Roslyn looked up.

“Copy these into your ledger. Thirteen of them. The numbers of the men who died at the bottom of the shaft.”

Roslyn took the paper. She took it and looked at the numbers for a while.

“What shall I do about the name line?”

“Marlow Kane. Thirteen times.”

“The same name, thirteen times.”

“Same name, but there were thirteen of them. If you don't write it, it comes out as one.”

Roslyn pushed her glasses up.

Then she took up her pen and began writing, one line at a time. Number. Name. Number. Name.

Thirteen times she wrote the same name. Not once did she change the speed she wrote at.

When she had finished, Roslyn asked.

“There is one more, is there not.”

“…Yeah.”

“What shall I write?”

“One.”

Roslyn's pen did not stop.

Beside the number she wrote One. A name of a single character.

Then, beside that, she added one more thing.

Alive.

＊

Drag stood up from the other side of the fire.

He came over beside Roslyn and sat down. Once he had sat, he said nothing for a while.

“…Captain?”

“Can I ask you for a line.”

“For whom?”

“My brother's.”

Roslyn turned to a page at the back of the ledger. There was one empty line there.

A line that had been empty since before they left the city. A column Roslyn had made herself, set beside the tenth man in the Black Book.

“What shall I write?”

“Kale Mortensen. Alive.”

Drag left a short pause.

“Has wings. Borrowed.”

Roslyn wrote it.

When she had finished, she set down her pen and said, in a small voice:

“…One blank line fewer.”

“Is that so.”

“Fewer is a good thing. For me, it is.”

Drag did not answer.

He did not answer, but he did not get up either. He sat beside Roslyn until the fire burned low.

Roslyn did not write that down.

＊

Willa was sitting on the cart bed with her arms around her knees.

Marlow climbed up and sat beside her.

For a while neither of them said anything.

“Hey.”

“What.”

“Do you think One's really okay?”

“He's probably not okay.”

“…I don't care if it's a lie, just say he's okay.”

“No. You hate being lied to.”

Willa laughed a little. Air leaking through the gap in her front teeth, the way she always laughed.

“…Yeah. I hate it.”

The fire made a sound.

Off in the distance, Mirabel sat alone, looking north. Any other night she would have been talking at somebody. Tonight she was quiet.

“Hey, Marlow.”

“What.”

“When we get back to town.”

“Mm.”

“Can we live together again? In the barn. Where the north wall's fallen in. Watching the sunset up on the aqueduct and stuff.”

Marlow did not answer right away.

There was a white room in his head. Walls of metal that did not rust. A voice with no rise or fall in it. Thirty years. You may not leave this building.

Willa was fifteen. In thirty years she would be forty-five.

He did that arithmetic one more time.

“…Yeah.”

He said it.

“Really?”

“Really.”

Willa laid her head on Marlow's shoulder.

“Oh, gooood.”

Marlow thought that it was the first time in three years he had told this girl a lie she couldn't see through.

To a girl who hated being lied to.

Willa was breathing in her sleep almost at once. Marlow did not move. He did not move until morning.

＊

In the morning, Silas was looking at something in the shadow of the cart.

A thin pane of glass, about the size of a palm. White letters floated inside the pane.

Marlow had never seen such a thing.

“What's that.”

Silas did not answer.

He did not answer, and went on looking at the pane. Behind his glasses, his eyes were not smiling. It was the first time Marlow had seen this man's eyes not smiling.

“Hey.”

“…It is a message from Central, if I may. Central sends letters to its people on panes such as this.”

“What's it say.”

Silas turned the pane toward Marlow.

White letters, set out in lines.

Imperial Year 348. Drill site, shaft mouth collapsed.

Specimens ascended from the shaft: one.

Moving northwest. The eastern outpost lies on its course.

Estimated arrival, the Sea Wall town. Twenty days.

Marlow read it three times.

The fourth time, he could not. The letters would not go into his eyes.

The eastern outpost. Brin is there. Boro is there. The place Harlan and the nineteen miners who walked west should have reached by now.

The Sea Wall town. Vesta's shop is there. Bolts of linen lined up on the shelves, with a tube sewn into one of them. Nim's shop is there. The goblin who bragged three times about meat at thirty percent off is there. Gus is there. Sam's sister is fixing her brother's supper and waiting.

Twenty days.

From here to the town takes half a month even if you push the cart.

“…What's a specimen.”

Silas did not answer.

His face said he did not know.

＊

Marlow walked over to Mirabel.

Mirabel was still sitting and looking north. It seemed she had been like that all night.

“Hey.”

“…Mm. I heard.”

“What came up.”

Mirabel did not answer.

She did not laugh the way she always laughed. She did not say kiddo, the way she always said it.

She lifted her left arm and opened and closed the metal fingers, one at a time.

“…I told you Central made me first, didn't I. A blade to guard the water.”

“You told me.”

“Two hundred and ten years I kept wondering. Guard it from what? Anybody can see the water only ever goes down.”

Mirabel stood up.

She faced northwest.

“Now I know.”

That was all she said, and then she walked toward the cart.

As she walked, without turning around, she said it in her usual voice.

“Shall we go, kiddo? Only twenty days, right?”

Her voice was much brighter than usual.

＊

They turned the cart northwest.

Willa woke up on the cart bed and grabbed Marlow's sleeve.

“…Are we going home?”

“We're going home.”

“To town?”

“To town.”

Willa did not ask anything more.

She did not ask, and she kept hold of Marlow's sleeve, and faced forward.

Red earth ran all the way to the horizon. Past it there was an outpost, and twenty-three days of wasteland, and a broken aqueduct, and up on top of it a place that turns red in the evening.

Something was heading there ahead of them.

Marlow pressed the left side of his belt. The leather pouch was heavy with seventy-six grains. On the right side, one glass cylinder.

On the cart bed was sea water, a hundred and twenty bottles minus what they had used.

There were still days left on the promise to Central.

The promise to Willa was a lie.

Which one he would keep, he had not decided.

Without deciding, the cart began to move.

End of Chapter 33

End of Volume One