Chapter 244: The Floor

Rishin slept longer than any of them.

Logan woke first and lay watching him. The old man lay on his side against the rock with Vina curled against his chest, and his open hand rested on the shelf beside her head. The stones on his palm still glowed, but softly now, the way coals glow when the fire has gone down.

His face was smooth. Logan had not known it could look like that.

’He has not slept like this since the rim,’ he thought. ’Maybe not since before the rim. Maybe not since his world.’

He did not wake him. None of them did. Martha cooked without letting her ladle touch the pot, and the units moved about the shelf without a sound, and Billy did not hum once.

When the old man woke, he lay where he was and looked at the stones.

Then he sat up and closed his hand over them, and he was himself again. He ate what Helen handed him without being told twice, which made Helen look at Daniel with her eyebrows raised.

"He is hungry," Daniel murmured. "That is a good sign."

"He is in a hurry," said Helen. "That is not the same thing."

She was right. Rishin finished his bowl and stood up, and he stood at the head of the path with Vina ahead of him and Link ahead of her until the rest of them were ready.

They went on down.

The turns of the path grew shorter as they went. The wall curved in closer around them, and the open dark beside the path narrowed.

At last Logan could see the far side of it. It was rock, like the wall they walked on, and it was covered with kept lights from top to bottom like windows in a city at the bottom of the world.

The humming of the second gate faded somewhere above them. Logan listened for it at every turn until he could not hear it any more.

Pebble went on setting his cairns.

Edda had stopped searching the lights on the path.

She walked beside her father with her hands in her coat pockets. Bram glanced down at her every few turns, and every few turns she shook her head before he could ask.

"There are too many," she said at last. "I could look at every one of them for a whole year and not see her."

"Then we look when we can," said Bram. "And we stop when we cannot. She would not want you walking into a wall."

Edda laughed, a little wetly. "She would say I was walking into a wall already."

"She would." Bram put his arm round her shoulders. "She always did."

Logan walked beside Alice near the back of the family.

Alice had said little since the gate. Every so often she glanced at Billy rolling at Logan’s heel and then at Logan, as though she were checking that both of them were still there.

"Are you angry with me?" he asked.

"Yes." She did not look at him. "No. I am angry with it." She lifted her chin at the dark. "It asked so it could watch. That is cruel."

"Rishin said it longs for love."

"That is what I mean." Alice’s mouth tightened. "Anything that longs that badly for one thing is dangerous."

Logan thought of the thread on the Eighth Layer, burning and old, going down. He thought of the old man walking faster at every turn.

’Like him,’ he thought, and did not say it.

The path ended.

There was no gate and no line cut across the stone. The path simply came down off the last turn of the wall onto a floor, and stopped.

Billy rolled out onto it and stopped, and the units spread out behind him.

The floor was dark stone, flat and smooth as still water. It went away on every side, and Logan could not see its edges.

Above them the walls rose into the dark with kept lights all the way to the top. The whole floor lay under their pale glow.

And on the floor, there were the kept.

They stood everywhere.

There were thousands of them. They stood alone and in pairs and in clusters, each one inside a pale light, and none of them moved. Some sat on the floor with their heads bowed. Some lay stretched out. Some stood with their arms around someone who was not there.

The lights made a soft sound when Logan stood still. It was too faint to be humming, and too steady to be breathing. It was like the sound of the Mere against the shingle, very far away.

Pebble knelt at the foot of the path and set three stones, one on another, on the smooth dark floor.

"So we can find the way back," he said. He said it to nobody, and he did not look up.

’Whose way back?’ Logan thought. He looked at the old man’s bare feet on the dark stone, and he did not let himself finish the thought. Beside him, Alice’s fingers found his and stayed there.

Rishin had not moved from the last step. His fist was pressed against his chest.

Logan saw the glow coming through his fingers. It was brighter than it had been on the shelf, brighter than at any time since the ledge. As Logan watched, it grew brighter again.

The old man opened his hand.

The two stones blazed on his palm. They lit his face from below, white and sudden, and Vina gasped and stepped back against his legs.

"Grandpa. They are so bright."

"Yes."

He was not looking at them. He was looking out across the floor, past the standing and sitting and lying kept, toward a place far off where the lights thinned.

Logan followed his eyes.

He could not find it at first. The floor went on and on, and the kept stood everywhere on it, and his eyes kept catching on faces that meant nothing to him.

Then he saw them.

They were a long way off, past the last of the crowd, where the floor lay open and empty. There were two lights there, side by side and apart from all the others.

One was tall. The other was small. It was no taller than Vina.

Rishin made a sound.

It was not a word. Logan had never heard a sound like it come out of anyone. It was low and broken and soft, and it was the sound of a man who had walked an impossible distance and had finally seen the end of the road.

"Nell," said the old man.

He took a step forward. Then he stopped, because Vina was behind him now and not in front.

Vina looked up at him. She looked out at the two lights, and back at his face.

Then she grabbed his hand in both of hers, ducked in front of him and pulled.

"Come on," she said. "In front of you. I am in front of you. Come on, Grandpa."

She ran.

And the old man ran after her. He ran barefoot across the dark floor and through all the silent kept of the Abyss, toward his wife and daughter.