Chapter 654: The Orrery

The orrery hung in the dark above the great dome like a cage built for a star.

Valerica climbed up to it an hour before dawn, by a narrow iron stair that wound around the outside of the dome, and stood on a little platform at its center with the whole of the Meridian spread out below her and the whole of the sky spread out above. It was a sphere of brass rings, dozens of them, each one wide enough to drive a cart through, nested one inside another and turning slowly on their own axes. And inside the rings, hanging in the empty air, were the bodies.

There were forty-one of them. She counted twice. Lumps of dark meteoric iron, from the size of a fist to the size of a horse. A cluster of small pale stones like a scatter of moons. And at the very center, directly in front of her platform, a sphere of burning glass the size of a man’s head, giving off a soft gold light: the sun.

None of them was moving. They hung where they were, held by the astronomers of the Meridian, a dozen of them standing on platforms around the outside of the cage with their hands raised and their faces tight.

"When the glass turns," Ilario Thane said from the platform beside hers, "they’ll let go. And everything will begin to fall." He held up the hourglass on its chain. "Keep them in their orbits until the sand runs out. Don’t let anything touch anything else. Don’t let anything fall out of the cage."

"What happens if something falls out of the cage?"

"It goes through the dome," said the astronomer mildly, "and possibly through several of my students. So I’d prefer it didn’t."

Valerica looked down. Far below, through the open center of the dome, she could see the others standing on the white floor among the shelves, looking up. Vane, with his hands at his sides. Ashe beside him. Isole and Nyx. Isaac, holding his book against his chest like a shield. Mara, with her ledger.

She looked back up at the sky. The stars were very bright. In an hour they would begin to go out.

"Turn it," she said.

Ilario Thane turned the glass. The astronomers lowered their hands.

The orrery fell.

Not all at once. That was the first thing she understood, and the worst. Each body began to move in its own direction, at its own speed, pulled by the sun and by every other body around it, so that the whole cage became in an instant a storm of iron, forty-one separate falls each bending all the others. A fist-sized stone shot past her face close enough to stir her hair.

Valerica reached out with the Celestial Heart and caught it.

She caught the next one too, and the next. She did what she had always done. She found each body and held it, and set it on its path, and moved on to the next while she still had hold of the first. She held them the way she held a negotiation: clause by clause, each one in its place, the whole structure balanced on her attention and nothing else.

For a while it worked.

The cage settled. Down below, very faintly, she heard someone let out a breath.

Then a large body on the outer ring drifted toward a smaller one on the next ring in, and she caught it, and in catching it she let go of a moon, and the moon went wide and clipped a third body, and the third body tumbled, and she had to reach for all three at once. And while she was reaching, two more began to slide.

She held them. She held all of them. She held them by force, each one gripped and placed, and her head began to ache, and then to pound, and the Celestial Heart pulled at her channels like a rope through raw hands.

Above her, the first stars were beginning to fade.

The sky had been humming in her chest since the Lark came up through the clouds. Now, one by one, the stars went out, and the hum went thin, and the orrery got heavier. As if the sky had been helping her, and was letting go.

A horse-sized lump of iron hit the brass ring nearest her platform with a sound like a cathedral bell.

She caught it before it went through. Barely. Her nose was bleeding.

Too many, she thought. Forty-one bodies, and every one of them needed her, and she could not hold them all, and she could not let go of any of them, because if she let go they would fall, and if they fell...

They would fall.

Valerica stood very still on her platform, with blood on her lip and the whole orrery groaning around her.

She thought of her room in Aelstrom, with four empty rooms down the corridor and all of them crammed into hers. She thought of the Lark, and waking with Nyx on her stomach and Isole’s cold feet at her back and Vane’s arm across her ankles. She had not arranged any of that. She had never arranged any of it. They had simply come, every night, from wherever they had been, and ended up around her, as if she were something they fell toward.

She had spent her whole life holding things in place. Her family’s expectations. Her own face. Every plan and every file and every clause. She had been very good at it. She had thought it was the only way anything stayed where it belonged.

But an orbit was only a fall. A fall that never landed, because the thing it was falling toward was always there.

She let go of the holding. She stopped reaching for each body, one by one, and simply let the Celestial Heart settle in her chest and stay there: heavy, steady, unmoving. She let her field go out from her and fill the whole cage, not gripping anything, just being there to be fallen toward.

The orrery fell.

And everything in it, all forty-one bodies, began to fall around her.

The big lumps on the outer rings bent their paths inward and slid past one another in long, smooth arcs, close but never touching, and the whole cage began to turn around her platform the way the sky turns around the pole. She was not holding it. She was simply there, in the middle, and everything in the orrery was falling toward her and missing, over and over, and that was all an orbit had ever been.

[Rank: 6, Mid Expert]

She barely noticed it. She was watching the bodies turn, and her face was wet, and she was not sure when that had started.

The sand ran out.

Afterward, when the astronomers had taken the orrery back and the bodies hung still again in the grey morning light, Valerica came down the iron stair very slowly, with one hand on the rail.

At the bottom, Isole was waiting with a cloth for her nose. Ashe was waiting with her arms folded and an expression of tremendous restraint. Nyx was simply waiting.

Valerica stopped in front of them.

"Nobody," she said, "is to say anything."

"Nobody’s saying anything," said Ashe.

"Nyx is thinking about saying something. I can tell."

"I’m thinking," said Nyx, "that you proposed to the sky and it said yes."

Valerica looked at her for a long moment. Then she put her face against Vane’s shoulder, very briefly, and stayed there long enough for him to feel her shaking, and then straightened up and took the cloth from Isole and was composed again.

"That," she said, "was not on the itinerary."