Chapter 830: What Lily Held

The camp outside Greywatch felt very large after the ten had gone north.

Lily walked it every morning. She went from the cook fires on the west side to the sentry line on the east, and she spoke to whoever was awake. She did not do it because anyone told her to. She did it because Almond always had, and somebody needed to.

The Empress walked with her.

She was good at it. She knew how to stand at a fire for exactly one minute, ask exactly one question, and leave people feeling that they had been heard. She had done it for an empire for longer than Lily had been alive.

"You’re watching how I do it," the Empress said on the second morning.

"I’m learning," Lily said.

"You don’t need to. They don’t want me." The Empress nodded at a group of Asuras who had stood up the moment Lily walked past. "They want to see you. They want to know that someone from that family is still here."

The hunting went on.

Maya had taken over the parties. She used her Thread orb to tie each hunting group together on a single line, so that nobody could be pulled away in the grass. It worked. They lost nobody on the fourth day, and nobody on the fifth.

By the fifth evening, the camp had made fourteen hundred orbs. One hundred and thirty of them were E.

Kayla came to find Lily every night before dark.

"Sit," she said.

Lily sat.

Mend.

Kayla’s hands went over her the same way every night. They were slow and careful, and they always ended in the same place.

"Fine," Kayla said. "Both of you."

"You don’t have to check every night."

"I’m going to check every night until it’s born, and then I’m going to check every night after that," Kayla said. "Get used to it."

Lily laughed, and did not argue.

On the fifth night, something big came.

The sentries felt it first. The grass to the north went flat. It was not the wind. It went flat in a wide ring, as if something very heavy had sat down on it.

Then the people at the north edge of the camp started to choke.

It happened all at once. They grabbed at their throats. They opened their mouths, and nothing went in. Men and women dropped to their knees with their faces going dark.

"Smother!" someone screamed from the wall of Greywatch. It was one of Hessa’s hunters. "It’s a Smother! Get away from it! It ends breath!"

Lily was halfway across the camp. She ran.

By the time she reached the north edge, the ring of flattened grass had grown. Thirty people were down. The camp was breaking, people running south over each other to get away from the edge.

And in the middle of the flattened grass sat the Smother.

It was round and gray and very still. It looked like a great bag of skin with no face at all. It did not move. It did not need to. It simply sat there and swelled a little with each breath it took.

Every breath it took was a breath that no one around it could take.

Shelter.

Lily did not think about it. Thirty people were dying in front of her, and she had one thing that could stop a person from dying.

The pale glow spread out from her hands. It was no bigger than it had been after the Husher. It covered six people, then eight. Under it, the people stopped dying. Their lungs were still empty. But they did not get worse, and they did not die.

It was much heavier than it had been before.

She felt it in every part of her. Lifting it raw was like lifting a cart with her bare back, and this time the cart was full of people.

"Lily!" Kayla was there. Kayla had her by the arm. "Lily, stop! You can’t hold that!"

"I’m holding it."

"You’re holding it raw. You’re holding it with everything you’ve got. You know what that does to you." Kayla’s voice broke. "You know what it does to both of you."

Lily did know.

She looked down at the eight people under her glow. Beyond them were twenty more, outside it, going still in the grass.

The flattened ring was still spreading. It was coming toward her.

The Empress stepped past her.

"Rampart," she said.

It was the first time anyone in the camp had seen her use the orb she had made. A line of pale light rose out of the ground in front of the fleeing crowd. It was low, no higher than a man’s knee, and it ran fifty yards to either side.

The panicked crowd hit it, and stopped.

Not because it held them back. Because it held them up. Every person who touched it found their feet planted, and their balance back, and their panic gone. They stood behind it in a line, still breathing, still alive.

"Nobody passes this who doesn’t choose to," the Empress said. She was pale and very calm. "I have spent a long time keeping things standing. It seems it came through the door with me."

"The line won’t stop the Smother," Maya shouted. She was already tying ropes onto the people behind the Rampart, to haul the fallen back. "It doesn’t walk. It doesn’t need to cross anything. It just breathes, and the edge of what it takes keeps moving."

Lily stood very still.

The edge of what it takes keeps moving.

The breathlessness did not have a body. It was not a thing walking toward them. It was the Smother’s ending, spreading outward across the grass, crossing the ground one foot at a time.

And things that crossed a line were hers.

"Kayla," Lily said. "Take Shelter from me."

"What?"

"You can’t hold it like I can. But you can keep them alive another minute with Mend. I need my hands."

Kayla stared at her. Then she dropped to her knees in the middle of the eight bodies and spread her hands over them.

Mend.

It was slower, and it was weaker. But it was enough to keep them for a minute.

Lily let go of Shelter.

The weight came off her all at once. She staggered. Then she straightened up and walked forward, until she stood just behind the Empress’s Rampart, facing the spreading ring of flattened grass.

She raised both hands and drew a line across the air.

Threshold.

It was the hardest thing she had ever done raw.

At the Shelf, she had decided where whole armies went when they crossed a chokepoint. Here, she could barely draw a line fifty yards long. It shook. It flickered. It felt like holding a thread taut against a river.

But it was there. And she knew exactly what it did.

Whatever crossed it did not go where it meant to go.

The edge of the Smother’s ending reached the line. It was the invisible place where breathing stopped. It crossed over, the way it had been crossing the grass all night.

It did not come into the camp.

It went back.

The ending folded back on itself. It turned around at Lily’s line and went back the way it had come. It did not go out into the grass or up into the sky. It went home, straight into the Smother.

The great gray bag swelled.

It swelled once, hard, and then it went rigid. It had ended all the breath in a ring around itself. Now that ring was folding inward, and the only breath left inside it was its own.

The Smother began to shake.

People in the camp started breathing again. Lily could hear them behind her, great tearing gasps, as the flattened grass sprang back up around the fallen. Kayla was shouting for help. Maya’s ropes were hauling bodies back across the Rampart.

Lily held the line.

Ten heartbeats. Fifteen. The Smother shook harder. Its gray skin wrinkled and sagged and folded in on itself.

At twenty, it stopped moving.

At twenty-two, Lily’s line went out.

She did not remember falling. One moment she was standing, and the next she was on her back in the grass, staring up at the pale rings of the higher layers, and Kayla was bent over her with her hands pressed flat on her stomach.

"Don’t," Lily whispered. "Don’t tell me yet. Just check."

Mend.

It took a very long time.

Then Kayla let out a sound that was half a sob and half a laugh. She put her forehead down on Lily’s shoulder.

"Fine," Kayla said. "Both of you. You stupid, stupid woman. Both of you are fine."

Lily closed her eyes. She was shaking all over.

"I was careful," she said.

"That was not careful."

"I let go of Shelter first. I let you take it. I didn’t hold two at once." Lily swallowed. "For me, that was careful."

They lost nine people.

The Smother had taken them in the first moments, before anyone could reach them. There were three Asuras, two men from Skytheum, and two young constructs who had woken up only a year before the Convergence. There were also an old woman who had cooked in Ainen’s kitchens for thirty years, and a boy of sixteen who had been on sentry duty because he had begged to be.

Lily made Maya write every name down.

"Big D isn’t here," she said. "He’ll want them. All of them."

Then she went to look at the Smother.

It lay deflated in the grass, gray and empty. Kayla had followed her, with her arms crossed and a very hard face.

"I’m only going to touch it," Lily said.

"With which imprint?"

"The one that killed it."

She knelt and put her hand on the dead gray skin, at the place where it had swollen hardest.

Threshold.

The skin folded. It went in on itself neatly, all the way down, as if it had been waiting for this. The orb it left was the color of the sky just before dawn, a deep blue going to gray.

[Power Orb: Turnback]

[Quality: D]

[Draw a line. What crosses it goes back the way it came.]

Her status changed.

[Life Rank: D]

[Power Orbs: 2 of 10]

Kayla read it over her shoulder. She was quiet for a moment.

"Next time," she said, "you use that. Not the raw one. You use the handle."

"Next time I’ll use the handle," Lily said.

Behind them, a little apart from the rest of the camp, John was standing at the edge of his own people’s ground. He had not come out during the fight. He was watching Lily now, with his hands in his pockets.

When she looked over, he smiled and gave her a small nod. Then he turned and went back into the dark.

Kael Vantress came out of the north at dawn.

He came at a run. He took six steps at a speed no one could follow, then dropped to a stumbling walk until he caught his breath, and then took six more. The sentries saw him from a mile out.

Lily was waiting at the north edge of the camp when he arrived. She had not slept.

Kael stopped in front of her. He was gray with dust and soaked with sweat, and he was grinning like a boy.

"It’s ours," he said. "Brightwater. The Lull is dead. The line held for us. It glowed, Lily. Sixty thousand places, and a river running through the middle."

All around them, people stopped what they were doing. The word went back through the camp like a wave.

"Almond?" Lily asked.

"A day behind me. Walking. He’s fine. He’s a D now." Kael’s grin faded a little as he looked at her. He looked at the trampled grass, and the line of fresh graves at the edge of the camp, and then at her face. "What happened here?"

"A Smother," Lily said.

"How many?"

"Nine."

Kael was quiet. Then he looked at the faint lines of her status, still hanging in the air where she had forgotten to close it.

"You’re a D too," he said slowly.

"Since last night."

Kael looked at her for a long moment. Then he shook his head, and laughed, and it was tired and amazed all at once.

"Your family," he said. "I swear. I go away for six days."