Chapter 55: Twenty Days

The Ascension's deadline arrived on a morning indistinguishable from any other, and Sacha spent it doing the least dramatic thing available: standing at his own border and waiting, because there was nothing left to prepare that hadn't already been prepared.

The emissary that came was the second one, unhurried as always, and it stopped at mark three, and Sacha understood before it sent a single thing that the conversation had already changed shape somewhere he had not been present for.

You carried a message under contested ground, it sent, to end a three-year deadlock the Mother had been unable to close on her own terms. You did this six days before our own terms expired, which we do not believe was an accident, and which we have spent those six days pricing properly for the first time.

And?

And the price is higher than we quoted, the emissary sent, with something that was almost, in a beetle bred for procedure rather than feeling, close to weariness. You are no longer a small ambiguous claim adjacent to contested ground. You are the only claim in this sector capable of moving anything — information, goods, bodies — across a corridor we have spent nine years failing to hold. Acquiring you cheaply is no longer available to us. It was available twenty days ago. It is not available today.

Sacha kept his sending level, though it cost him more than any conversation since the crawlspace.

He had spent the night before rehearsing three versions of this conversation and had discarded all three by morning.

Each one assumed he would be the one setting the terms.

He had not expected to simply be told.

So the terms change.

The terms are withdrawn, the emissary sent. Not replaced. Withdrawn. My superiors do not yet know what to offer a thing they cannot price cheaply, and an organization that grows by acquiring does not enjoy paying full value for anything. You will hear from us again. It will not be soon, and it will not be small.

It turned to go, and stopped, and Sacha had the distinct sense of watching a procedure-bound thing say something that was not, strictly, part of any form.

May I ask you something outside the terms, the emissary sent, and did not wait for permission before continuing, which Sacha understood was itself the closest thing to an apology this creature's grammar allowed. Why did you carry the rat's answer yourself. You have a lieutenant. You have an authority differentiated enough that either of them could have gone in your place and cost the colony less if it failed.

Stolen novel; please report.

Sacha thought about it honestly before answering, because a flippant answer to a genuine question felt like the wrong note to end seventy-eight days on.

Because he spent three years not answering, out of fear of exactly this — of being priced by someone who saw him as a transaction instead of a neighbor, he sent. If the answer arrived carried by anyone but the one he'd actually spoken to, it would have been exactly the thing he was afraid of, delivered anyway.

For what it is worth, the emissary sent, the being who counted you sixty-one on your first day would not recognize this conversation. Neither, I think, would you.

[Sanctuary: internal structure — three anchors, stable.

Divine Creature — Echelon 4 of 9.

Progress toward Echelon 5: significant.]

Sacha read it standing at the border where an emissary's trail was still fading, with Vek on one side of him and Khrr — thinner, scarred, finally reachable across any distance either of them had yet tested — somewhere behind him organizing the wounded, exactly as it had the very first week, in a language that had needed no words at all.

Three anchors.

Himself, ground he had claimed and defended.

Vek, ground she had chosen and held.

Khrr, no ground at all, and somehow counted anyway — which told him something about what an anchor actually was that he suspected would take him the rest of this life to fully understand.

Seventy-eight days since the cellar.

Seventy-eight days since he had been nothing with a name he'd chosen out of spite that had never once needed to be spite at all.

Thresh found him there afterward, and stood a while before sending anything, which had become its way of telling him a thing mattered.

Seventy-eight days, it sent. My colony had four hundred and did not survive one bad season. You have sixty-two and have survived a dynasty, a doctrine, and a wall of the dead, and you did all three of them by refusing to do the thing that would have made any of it simpler.

Which thing.

Decide alone, Thresh sent. You keep handing it away. To Vek. To Khrr. To a colony that did not have an answer and gave you one anyway.

Its antennae moved once. My god decided everything alone, right up until the day there was nothing left of us to decide anything for. I did not understand, until today, that the opposite was also a strategy and not simply a weakness you had not yet paid for.

Sacha did not have an answer to that either, and for once did not feel the need to manufacture one.

He did not know what the Ascension would bring back, or when, or in what shape.

He knew that twenty days ago he had been a small claim with one hard point and a threat with a clock on it, and today he was something a nine-year-old doctrine did not know how to price, standing between a dynasty that remembered its debts and a settlement of two hundred pale strangers who had left one entry on their wall unclosed.

What are we for, Vek had asked the whole colony, and the colony had answered with everything except an answer.

Sacha looked east, toward ground he did not yet hold, and understood that he was about to spend a considerable amount of time finding out.