Chapter 82: What He Chose

The valley had a fire in it and no guns, and for the length of time it took the aid truck's lamps to reach the road and turn, that was all it had.

Rook stood at the second truck's tailgate with the Anchor folder flat under his coat and let the baseline sense lie out over the four hundred yards between the yard and the hall. The roofed buildings flanking the road beyond it were dark, and the sense gave him rock and cold off them and nothing that moved.

Sela had not moved from the tailgate. Renner's lamp had gone with Renner to the first truck and the old man under his blanket. Bram's section lay along the trucks' far side with their rifles on the store's north door, which had only fire behind it now.

The thread on the floor of him stirred.

«They've decided,» the man on the cot sent, unasked.

He took it up. «What.»

«What they do with what they can't carry. You've seen it at the store.» The quiet voice had no more in it than it ever had. «A dozen of them, on the north side of this building, with what's left of the cells. I'm watching them come through their own eyes. The one in front is the one who was against the truck wheel.»

«Osei knows.»

«Your private has said movement, north side into the relay. Your colonel has two doors and a road full of men coming at both.» A pause. «I haven't moved. I told you what finished looks like.»

He let the channel lie. Then he unbuttoned his coat with his left hand and took the folder out and put it on the tailgate in front of Sela, and wrote beside it in the leaning letters.

Keep it dry. I'm going back across.

She looked at the folder and then at the mask, and did not ask what he had heard. She put the folder inside her coat with the letter and the notebook and the prints, and closed the coat over all of it.

"Go," she said.

Along the trucks Bram read the mask and the direction it faced, and said two words, and the heavy rifle came off the store's door and swung to lie along the valley floor toward the hall.

* * *

He ran.

The leg answered late, and on time, and late, and he stopped listening to it, and the rifle he had carried down a vault stair rode slung across his back. Past the first of the fours the store's fire gave out, and after that it was the ward line and the hall's windows and, as he came on, a new light at the hall's north end, pale, low, the color of a stanchion's ward, standing up out of the ground where the annex was. He knew the color from a cell on a bed of felt, and a count of thirteen out of four hundred.

The truck's wheel came up on his right and the man who had been against it was gone from it. Rook found him fifty yards on, on his feet at the head of a file of men who carried no rope.

Rook did not stop for him.

The guns at the hall's doors opened as he came into their range, and the company answered from behind its cots. He came in under the south door's fire with a platoon's rifles going off a yard above his head.

"Hold — hold — that's the asset —" The rifles nearest him stopped and the rest did not, and he went over the cots at the door on his good arm and a knee and was inside.

* * *

At the hall's north end the annex door stood open on a room lit orange, and smoke came out of it along the ceiling and lay across the trusses.

Marrow was on one knee behind a cot at the south door, and he looked up as Rook came over it and said it as a thing decided.

"The annex is lost. They fired it through the window not long since and they've a party on the north wall to keep it lit. Your lieutenant has two in it, and I've told her what I'm telling you: I have a building and two doors, and I am not putting a platoon through a fire for a room. The man on that cot stopped being useful talking when the store went up. The fire's doing by morning what I'd have ordered by noon. I didn't order it."

I'm going in, he wrote.

Marrow read it and did not say that's an order.

"You're the one thing in here I can't spend, and I can't stop you either, and I've stopped pretending the second part is a policy." He turned back to the door. "Osei's at the north end."

* * *

Osei stood at the annex door with her rifle in the crook of her arm and her book nowhere, the hair at her temple gone on one side and the skin under it red, coughing in a controlled way that cost her something each time.

The chapter appears on the author's official page for readers; this copy was taken without consent.

"Hollis is at the window. If he leaves it they come through it and into this building behind two platoons. Wren's on the floor under the sill with the relay. He's on the cot. He hasn't moved." She looked at the mask. "The floor between here and them is alight. It's Core; it doesn't need anything to burn on. I got as far as the table's edge."

The cell had come in through the window and rolled and split a pace inside the door, and the fire had spread from it across the room's width: a band of pale flame a yard deep, the ward-color of it wrong for a fire, the table standing in it with its legs gone black. Beyond the band, on the window side, the smoke stood to a man's chest with the open window pulling at it, and in it Hollis at the window's edge with his rifle up, firing down in short bursts; under the sill, where the window's draught left a little air, Wren with the relay's glow against her; and on the cot along the side wall, sitting up with his hands on his knees, the man with a face, his eyes streaming and fixed on nothing in the room.

I've no lungs for the smoke, Rook wrote. The fire I'll pay for.

"You've skin." She did not take it back. "It's a yard of fire and no air on the far side of it. You'll be in it three times."

Then three times, he wrote.

He gave her the slate, since he would need the hand, and went in.

* * *

The heat came up through his boots and took his legs to the knee, and he did not slow for it. He went through the yard of fire at the pace the leg allowed, which was a walk, and came out the far side with the hem of his coat burning and beat it against the wall until it stopped.

The smoke closed over him and was nothing. The room gave him its three warmths on the sense that had never been eyes.

He went to Wren first.

She was coughing into the floor with the relay under her strapped arm, and when his hand closed on the collar of her coat she came up with it, and did not let go of the relay. He got the coat off his own shoulders one-handed and put it over her head and the strapped arm, and walked her into the fire.

Two steps for her; three for him. The coat took the heat, and Osei's hands came through the smoke from the far side and took her by the good arm, and Wren was through, on the hall's floor, with the relay against her chest.

He went back in.

"Get him out." Hollis said it into the room without turning from the window, between bursts, hoarse, with a cough held down under it. "I've got the window till you're through the door. I can see you thinking about arguing. Don't."

Rook went to the cot.

The man had not moved. His face streamed and his mouth was open and taking the smoke, and he looked at the wall in front of him and saw, Rook knew, a file of men against the outside of it through eyes that were not his own.

Rook got his good hand in the man's collar and hauled.

The man came up off the cot with his weight going where it was put and his feet finding the floor, and stood there in the smoke with Rook's fist in his collar and his hands loose at his sides, waiting to be carried, and Rook could not carry him. He had known that in the yard. He had come anyway.

He took up the thread.

«Walk.»

The answer came at once, with the smoke in the room and none of it in the channel.

«Where.»

«Through the door. After that, anywhere you like.»

«Everywhere I've been since a table, I was carried.» No weight in it. «You can't. You've one arm.»

«I know what I've got.» He held the channel steady. «I'm not going to carry you. I'm asking you to walk. You said nobody had ever asked you anything. I'm asking.»

The man stood a moment longer in the smoke.

Then his weight came forward off Rook's fist. A small movement, the first he had made under his own direction since a door had opened on him. He took a step, and another, toward the pale line of the fire, and Rook went with him with the hand in his collar, because one of them had to be holding something.

They went into the fire together.

The man's coat caught at the hem, and Rook beat it out against the man's leg with the flat of his hand, and they came out the far side of it a pace from the door. The smoke, which had been the whole room to the man beside him, took him at the threshold.

He went down all at once. Rook's fist was in the collar. He went to one knee with the weight and did not let go, and then he got the knee under him and the good arm straight and dragged backward, out of the annex door and along the hall's north wall, the man's heels leaving two lines on the stone and his hands trailing open behind him.

Hollis came out of the annex behind them backward, through the fire at a run, with his coat alight in two places. The fire had reached the window's foot behind him, and the window was shut to anyone with lungs. Cade was there from the east door and had him on the floor and the burning coat off him before Hollis had finished lowering the rifle.

Rook stopped when the cots began. He was on one knee between the first two frames of the west row with his fist closed in a stranger's collar and the arm that had held a vault door useless across his thigh, and he found he could not open the hand, and stayed as he was.

* * *

A medic from the aid truck, which had come back to the hall with the company's dead, was on the man before Osei reached him, and Wren, against a cot frame with the relay in her lap and her face black to the eyes, said in a voice like a rasp, "He was breathing when we went in. I said so into the relay."

"He's breathing." The medic didn't look up. "He's had a lungful of what nobody should have. Get me water and leave him where he is."

Osei stood over them with Rook's slate in one hand and her book, back out of her coat, in the other, and looked at the annex door — the fire standing in it now — and at Hollis on the floor under Cade's hands, and at Wren, and then at Rook on his knee between two cots with his hand in a collar.

She wrote the time.

Wren got his hand open. She did it one-handed, kneeling beside him with the relay set down, working his fingers back off the collar one at a time as a person works a knot that has been pulled wet and let dry, and when the collar was out of it he closed the hand once on nothing and let it rest on his knee. The back of it and the wrist were red to the cuff.

Marrow had come up the hall's length while the medic worked, and he stood at the end of the west row with his coat open and the two platoons' guns going at his back, and looked down at the man on the floor. Then at the mask.

"You've carried out of that room the one man I'd have left in it."

Rook held out the burned hand for the slate, and Osei gave it to him, and he wrote on his knee, badly, and turned it up toward the colonel without getting off the floor.

He walked. I only dragged him the last of it.

Marrow read it. Whatever he thought of it did not reach his face, and he turned back toward the south door and the guns.