Digital Refresh

Ready Room, CSV Saratoga - Tuesday 23 November 2004

"It is not a mission," Shay said, for the third time.

"It has a shuttle," said Hal.

"It has a shuttle because the alternative is asking Dustin to fold six people onto the first target T'ven ever locks onto on purpose, and Marky has opinions about that."

"I have opinions about that," Marky agreed, without looking up. He was going through a medical kit on the table, item by item, the way he did everything, small precise movements and his sleeves turned back exactly twice. "Two of them. The first is no."

"What's the second?" Hal asked.

"No."

Dustin was sitting on the arm of the couch with his heels hooked on the cushion, eating a cookie he had not been offered. There was a crayon in his shirt pocket. There was always a crayon in his shirt pocket.

"I could do it," he said.

"I know you could," Marky said. "That isn't the part I'm worried about."

Nobody in the room was worried about the fold. Dustin had put four thousand people through one in September - a whole town, two buses, three hundred and forty-one years - and set every last one of them down without a bruise, then gone back for the ranch besides. The door had a track record.

It was the reaching that didn't. That was the boy by the viewport, and today was the first time anyone had asked him to lock onto something awake, on purpose, with the room watching.

T'ven had not said anything yet.

He was standing near the viewport with his hands behind his back, which was what he did with them when he did not know where else to put them, and he was doing the thing Shay had watched him do in every briefing for a week, which was to hold himself very still, as though stillness were a kind of politeness.

Seventeen years old. Taller than most of the room, which in this crew was not saying a great deal.

"T'ven," Shay said.

"Sir."

"You can sit down."

"I'm all right standing, sir."

"That wasn't a medical observation." Shay let it go. He had learned, in the fortnight since the boy had come aboard, that pushing produced a straighter spine and nothing else. "Walk it through for Hal. He wasn't at the last one."

T'ven turned around. When he talked about the work he came unstuck a little, which was the only reliable way anyone had found to get him to talk.

"I reach," he said. "That's the first half. It isn't like sensors, it doesn't sweep, it's more like - " He stopped and started again, and Shay noted the stop, because the boy always apologized to a sentence before he finished it. "If you're in a house and somebody two rooms over is unhappy, you know. You didn't listen. You just know. I do that, except the house is bigger."

"How much bigger?" Hal asked. Hal always asked. It was why you brought him.

"I don't know yet. That's what the training is for."

"And Dustin?"

"Dustin's the door." Dustin said it himself, cheerfully, spraying a small quantity of cookie. "She reaches, I open. That's the whole trick. It's not a trick, it's just what we are, but it's easier if I call it a trick."

"He," Marky said mildly.

"Sorry. He reaches, I open." Dustin grinned at T'ven, entirely without malice. "You've got a girl's patience is all I meant."

"I'll take it," said T'ven.

"The training," Shay said, before this could become the next forty minutes, "is that they learn to do it on purpose, together, with adults in the room, on a target we have already looked at from three directions and found boring. Devaintre picked it. Devaintre, say hello."

"Hello," said the room.

Hal looked up at the ceiling. Everyone did, the first hundred times. Devaintre had been in the walls of the Saratoga since the crossing and there was still no good place to point your face.

"Hello, Hal," the voice went on. It was a warm voice. It had been a warm man. "You look well."

"I look the same."

"That is what I said."

"Devaintre picked the target," Shay repeated. "Tell them why."

"Because it is dull." A pause, the small deliberate pause that Devaintre used the way other people used a smile. "There is a landmass. There are approximately nine hundred thousand people on it. There is no famine, no fleet, no active bombardment, and no distress traffic on any band we can hear. It is the least interesting place I could find in four days of looking, and I looked hard, because I wanted the boys to have something they could not possibly get wrong."

"Thank you," said T'ven.

"You are welcome. Try to prove me wrong slowly."

Shay closed the folder in front of him.

"Marky's the medic. Hal's the historian, which today means he writes down what happens and stops me remembering it the way I'd prefer. I'm there because I'm the one who has to sign it." He paused. "Matthew and Brant would normally be on a rotation like this. They're on the Alligator Alley run until the eighth. It's a training exercise on a quiet rock. We'll manage."

Nobody in the room thought about that again for eleven hours.

The Estate, one hundred acres outside Philadelphia

Colt was up on the wall with his shoes off when Runi came to find him.

It was a good wall. It ran the whole east side of the property, old fieldstone, and it was warm through the seat of his jeans in a way nothing at the old place had ever been warm, and there was a plum tree grown up against it that nobody had pruned in nine years. He had made a serious study of that tree. He came out here to not think, which was a thing he had only recently found out he was allowed to do.

He knew Runi was coming about four seconds before he arrived, which was four seconds more than anyone else got.

"You are barefoot," Runi said.

"You're in a bedsheet."

"It is a robe."

"It's November."

"I have been cold for five thousand nine hundred years." Runi got up onto the wall. He did it without appearing to climb, which he did on purpose, and which Colt had decided some time ago not to give him the satisfaction of asking about. He was a full head shorter than Colt sitting down. He looked nine, maybe ten, bronze in the last of the light, black ponytail down the back of a shaved skull, and his eyes caught the low sun and threw it back orange.

They sat.

Colt reached up into the branches over his head, found the one plum November had forgotten, and ate it in two bites like a boy who had been told not to. Then, around it, in a language that had been old before there were cities to speak it in, he said something short.

Runi went very still.

"Do not," he said, "say that to me on this wall."

"Amenhotep said it to you on a different one." Colt spat the stone out into the dark. "You built this one facing east. So whoever came out to sulk in the morning would get the sun first." He was grinning now, and for a second it was not entirely his own grin - it was older, and it knew things it had no business knowing on a Tuesday. "You didn't have to do that."

"I did not do it for you."

"You did it for everybody, which is worse." Colt knocked his shoulder against the old man's arm, a wholly ordinary thing for a boy to do at the end of a day. "Softy."

Runi did not answer that. He reached over without looking and pushed a strand of hair off the boy's forehead, the way you straighten a thing that is yours, and had his hand back before Colt could decide whether to make anything of it.

"Say it," Colt said.

"Say what?"

"You came out here on purpose. You never come out here on purpose. You send Duncan and then Duncan stands there being Scottish at me until I come in."

Runi almost smiled. On him it moved about a millimeter.

"Someone is coming," he said.

Colt sat up.

"Coming here?"

"Coming near. Tomorrow, or the day after. I cannot be precise, it is not a thing that arrives on a road." Runi looked out at the field and the long grey line of the treeline, and Colt watched him do the thing he did perhaps twice a year, which was to look for a word and not find one immediately. "There are several. Most of them are quiet. One of them is not."

"Dangerous?"

"No." Runi said it without hesitation, and Colt let his shoulders down, because in six thousand years the man had never once softened a threat to spare anybody's feelings. "Not dangerous. Loud."

"Loud how?"

"There is a boy," said Runi, "with a gift he cannot control."

Colt did not say anything for a moment.

"Like yours," he said.

"Like mine. Not as strong. Not yet, and possibly not ever, but that is not the interesting part." Runi turned his head. "The interesting part is that he is ashamed of it."

"How can you tell that from - " Colt gestured vaguely at the field, at the sky, at the enormous invisible whatever-it-was. "From here. From that far."

"Because he is holding it closed," Runi said, "and I can feel him doing it. It is like listening to a man hold his breath in another room. You do not hear the breath. You hear the effort."

The sun went down behind the treeline. Neither of them moved.

"He'll come here," Colt said. It was not a question.

"They will come near. Whether they come here depends on what happens to them first, and I do not know what that is, because it has not happened." Runi slid down off the wall. "Tell Mary to lay in more food. Human food."

"You don't know how many."

"Then tell her a number that will embarrass us."

Somewhere quiet, the following afternoon

The fold opened the way Dustin's folds always opened, which was to say that there was suddenly a place where a place had not been, and none of the six of them could afterwards describe the sound.

They came out standing in a field.

It was the kind of field that has a purpose. Somebody had cut it, not long ago, and stacked the cut hay in a way that meant somebody intended to come back for it. Beyond the field there was a fence, and beyond the fence a road, and along the road at intervals of about two hundred meters there were poles with things mounted on top of them that Shay identified as sirens before he had consciously identified them as anything.

"Devaintre," he said.

"I am hearing what you are hearing," said the voice in his ear, "and I would like the record to show that four days ago there was nothing here."

"Nine hundred thousand people," said Hal, turning slowly. "That's what you said."

"That is what there were."

T'ven had gone white.

He had not moved. He was standing exactly where he had come through, hands at his sides now, palms out and open, and he was looking at nothing.

"T'ven," Marky said, in the voice he used for that. "Talk to me."

"They're not scared."

"Say again?"

"They're not - " He shut his eyes. "There's a war on. It's everywhere. It's on this whole - I can feel it from here, it's the loudest thing I've ever - and they're not scared."

"Everyone's scared in a war," said Shay.

"No, sir." T'ven opened his eyes. "They're tired. They're tired the way Mom is tired after roundup. They know where everybody is. They've got a system." He turned to look at Shay and there was something in his face that Shay had not seen there before, which was that the boy had entirely forgotten to be careful. "They're not waiting to be rescued. Nobody down there is waiting for anything. They're winning, sir, slowly, and it's costing them everything, and they're doing it anyway."

Dustin had gone very still.

Shay noticed it the way you notice a machine change pitch.

"Dustin."

"I heard him." Dustin was looking at the road. "It's just - I do the other thing. I'm the other thing." He said it without self-pity, which somehow made it worse. "You find them, I get them out. That's the whole - that's what we -"

"Dustin."

"They don't want out." He turned around. He had a crayon in his shirt pocket and he was nine years old and he had moved a town of four thousand people across three hundred and forty-one years without dropping one of them, and he looked, for the first time in Shay's experience of him, completely at a loss. "I don't have anything else. I only know how to open the door. What do you do when they don't want the door?"

"You ask what they do want," said Marky.

"I don't know how to do that."

"Then that's the training," said Marky.

Dustin laughed. It came out wrong.

Then he sat down in the hay.

He did it very carefully, and that was the part Marky was still thinking about two days later, that Dustin had not fallen, he had chosen a spot. He got himself down onto the cut grass like a man setting down something breakable, and then he put one hand out flat behind him, and then he was not sitting up any more.

"Marky."

"I have him." Marky was already there, on his knees, kit open, two fingers under the jaw. "T'ven, I need you to not reach for him. I know you want to. Don't."

"I wasn't -"

"You were about to." Marky did not look up. "Hal, my light."

Hal put the light in his hand without being told what kind.

"Devaintre," Shay said, "beam-out."

"I cannot," said Devaintre.

"Say again."

"I cannot, Shay. We came through a fold. The Saratoga is not in this sky." A pause, and Shay heard, in eleven years of listening to that voice, the first crack he had ever heard in it. "I have you on a channel and I do not know how. I am telling you now so that you do not spend the next hour asking me to do a thing I cannot do."

Shay looked around the field. Cut hay. A fence. A road with sirens on it.

"Then we walk," he said.

They got about six hundred meters.

The Field

T'ven felt him arrive before anyone saw him.

It was not like reaching. Reaching was something you did, and this was something that was done, and afterwards T'ven would spend a long time trying to explain the difference to people who had never had a door in the back of their head.

It was like being read.

Not roughly. That was the thing that frightened him most about it later, when he had time to be frightened: it was gentle. Somebody put a hand flat against the front of his mind the way you would put a hand flat on a horse's neck to let it know you were behind it, and then took the hand away again.

"Sir," he said. "Captain. There's -"

"I see him," said Shay.

There was a child standing in the road.

He was small, and he was barefoot in November, and he was wearing a black robe that went down past his ankles and dragged. His head was shaved except for a long black ponytail from the crown. He was perhaps four foot nine. He was standing in the middle of the road with his hands folded in front of him like a man waiting for a train, and the low sun was behind him, and his eyes were orange.

Shay put a hand out sideways. Marky, who had been about to stand up with Dustin in his arms, did not stand up.

"Hal," Shay said quietly. "What am I looking at."

"I have absolutely no idea," said Hal, delighted.

The child came down the road toward them. He did not hurry. When he was ten meters out he stopped, which T'ven understood at once was a courtesy, because ten meters was the distance at which a man with a phaser stops feeling that he has to draw it.

"Your boy is unwell," the child said.

His accent was enormous. T'ven could not have placed it within four thousand miles or four thousand years.

"He is," said Marky.

"I have a house. It is forty minutes on foot and eleven in a truck, and I have a truck, and I have a woman in the kitchen who will be insulted if you arrive without an appetite." The child's eyes went across all of them, unhurried, and stopped on Shay. "You are in charge."

"I am."

"Then I will say it to you, and you may decide. My name is Runihura. I am the head of the household. Everyone in it is a vampire except the cook, the doctor, the schoolteacher, two children and a girl of nine, and I am telling you that first because you will find it out in the hallway otherwise, and I would rather you were rude to me here in the road."

Nobody said anything.

"Sir," said T'ven.

"Not now."

"Sir, he's telling the truth, that's - I'm not reading him, I can't read him, he's -" T'ven stopped. He looked at the child in the road. "He's letting me know he's telling the truth. There's a difference. I've never had anybody do that on purpose before."

Runihura inclined his head, very slightly, as though someone had noticed his coat.

"Captain," said Marky. "I would like to say something in front of everyone rather than pull you aside, because pulling you aside would be a lie of a kind."

"Go on."

"His pulse is thirty-one. I don't know what it should be, because I don't have a baseline for whatever Dustin actually is, and neither does anyone. I have a field kit and no diagnostic bed and no ship." Marky looked up. "I want the truck."

Shay looked at the road, and the sirens on the poles, and the small ancient child standing at the polite distance in the dust.

"Runihura," he said.

"Runi. Only my dead use the whole of it."

"Shay. Captain, CSV Saratoga. We're not from here."

"I had gathered."

"We came to train two children and we walked into somebody's war, and I'd like to state plainly that we didn't come to fight it and I'm not offering to."

"I have not asked you to," said Runi.

"Not yet."

"No," Runi agreed. "Not yet."

Shay found, to his considerable irritation, that he had almost smiled.

"Get the truck," he said.

The Well House

The truck was a mud-colored flatbed with a bench seat and a heater that worked, and it was driven by an enormous man named Samson who had been introduced by first name only and who had looked at Marky's medical kit for slightly too long.

"Ex-military?" Marky asked.

"Intelligence."

"That's a yes."

"That's a yes," Samson agreed, and did not elaborate, and drove.

The house, when it came, was not what T'ven had built in his head.

He had built something out of a film. What he got was a working estate with the lights on: a long gravel turn, outbuildings, a paddock with actual horses in it, a kitchen wing throwing yellow light out across the grass, and somebody's laundry on a line that nobody had brought in before dark.

There were children on the front steps.

That was the thing that undid him. There were four of them, and one was about nine, and she was sitting on the top step with a book, and she looked up at the truck the way children look up at a truck, which is to say with mild interest and no fear at all.

"Deanna," said Samson, out the window. "Inside."

"It's not even cold."

"It's not about cold, it's about your brother's blood pressure. Inside."

She went, without hurrying, in the manner of the profoundly unimpressed.

They put Dustin in a downstairs room that had been a study and was now, as far as Marky could tell, a room that this household kept ready. That in itself told him something. There was a bed with a rubber sheet under the cotton one. There was a lamp on a long arm. There was a chair pulled up beside it that had been sat in a great many times.

"You do this a lot," he said.

"We do this constantly," said the young man who had brought the lamp. He was seventeen or eighteen, pale, red-haired, and freckled to a degree that Marky privately considered a medical event. Edinburgh, from the voice. "Duncan. I'm - I suppose I'm the one who does the rooms."

"Marky. I'm the one who does the boys in them."

Duncan smiled, briefly and shyly, and lined the towels he already had squared to the edge of the shelf before he went to fetch more that no one could conceivably need.

"He came in on one of these beds," said Samson, from the door, not unkindly. "Seven years back. Runi sat the chair four nights. Now the lad can't walk past a made-up room without improving it."

"I'm in the room," said Duncan, gone scarlet to the roots of the red hair, and left at speed.

T'ven stood in the doorway and did not come in.

"You can come in," Marky said.

"I know."

"That wasn't permission, it was an instruction."

T'ven came in. He sat down on the floor with his back against the wall, which was not what Marky had meant, but was closer.

"He's going to be fine," Marky said, some time later.

"You don't know that."

"No," Marky agreed. "But he's warm, he's breathing at eleven, his pupils are even and he twitched when I put the cold stethoscope on him, which is a nine-year-old's response and not a coma patient's. I'd rather tell you the truth twice than tell you nothing once."

T'ven put his head back against the wall.

"It's my fault."

"How do you figure?"

"I reached too far. Devaintre said it was quiet and I went looking anyway because I wanted to be good at it, and I found the loudest place in - and he opened a door to it because I asked him to." T'ven's voice did not rise. That was the part Marky filed. It did not rise at all. "He's nine."

"He's a great deal older than nine."

"He's nine," said T'ven.

Marky did not argue with him, because he thought the boy was probably right.

The Kitchen

Mary Connolly had been the cook at that house for thirty-one years, through an owner Marky was given to understand had been comprehensively disposed of, and she had views about a doctor who had not eaten.

"Sit."

"I'm on -"

"Sit down."

Marky sat down.

The kitchen was enormous and none of it matched. There was a range that had been installed before the war and a range that had been installed the previous spring, and a scrubbed table long enough for eighteen, and about half of that eighteen were in the room at that moment, and only three of them were eating.

That was the part that took getting used to.

"They can't," said Mary, following his eyes without appearing to look at him. "The most of them. Micah'll hold a biscuit for the look of the thing but it goes in the bin after." She put a plate down in front of him. "So it's me, and Colt, and the Harrises, and the two wee ones that came in September. Six mouths in a house of thirty. You see why I'm pleased with you."

"I brought cookies," said Marky.

There was a pause in the kitchen of a quality he had not previously encountered.

"You what," said Mary Connolly.

"I brought cookies." He put the tin on the table, feeling for the first time in some while distinctly foolish. "I always bring cookies. It's - the ship makes them, it's a whole - it's a thing I do, it's meant to be a morale measure and it turned into a thing I do, and I brought them into a house where almost nobody can eat and I'd like to formally apologize."

Mary Connolly opened the tin.

Then she sat down, quite heavily, in the chair opposite him.

"Thirty-one years," she said, "I have fed this house. And in thirty-one years no one has ever once brought me anything."

She ate one.

Then she cried a little, and swore at herself for it, and Duncan came and put his hand on her shoulder and did not say anything, and the enormous man called Samson took the tin without asking and carried it out to the front steps where the nine-year-old was still not inside, and Marky sat in a warm kitchen in a strange universe and understood, with the particular clarity that comes at the end of a bad day, that he was going to like these people very much and that this was going to make everything considerably harder.

The Long Gallery

Shay found Runi in a room full of dead things.

That was unfair and he knew it was unfair while he was thinking it. It was a gallery, a proper one, running the length of the west wing, and it was full of cases, and the cases were full of objects, and the objects were, without exception, older than every institution Shay had ever sworn an oath to.

"You may touch them," said Runi.

"I'd rather not."

"Everyone says that. Then they touch them." Runi was standing at a case near the far end with his hands folded. "That one is a bowl. It is the oldest thing in this room and it is a bowl, and I keep it at the end because people walk past the weapons to get to it and I like watching them realize."

Shay walked past the weapons.

It was a bowl.

"How old."

"Older than me." Runi did not move. "I want to say something to you and I want to do it badly, which is to say directly, because I have found that the courteous approach wastes a night. May I?"

"You're going to anyway."

"That is true, but it is better if you say yes."

"Say it."

"You were made," said Runi.

Shay did not answer.

"I do not mean it as an insult and I am not guessing. I have been reading minds for the length of six civilizations and I do not do it to guests, and I have not done it to you." Runi turned around. The orange eyes were entirely steady. "I do not have to. You stand in a room the way a thing stands that was put in the room for a purpose. I know it because I have stood that way. I stood that way for two thousand years."

"You're a child."

"I am five thousand nine hundred and eleven years old, I was turned four days before my thirteenth birthday, and I have never once in all of it been a child." Runi paused. "Neither have you. They gave you a number instead."

Shay looked at the bowl.

"Two point seven eight B point nine six C," he said.

"There. You did not even have to look it up."

"No."

"Sit down, Captain."

There were two chairs. Shay had not noticed them and was fairly sure they had not been there. He sat down in one anyway.

"I was Section Thirty-One," he said.

"I do not know what that is."

"That's the first useful thing anybody's said to me about it since the crossing." Shay put his hands on his knees. "It's the part of a good organization that does the things the good organization needs done and can't be seen doing. It's older than the organization. It doesn't have a building. And at some point - I could not tell you when - somebody wrote a specification for a holographic officer and under ethical subroutines they put a dash."

"Deliberately."

"Deliberately. It's not a fault, it's not corruption, it's not a thing that happened to me on a bad day. It's a design decision, made by a person, in a room, who then went home." He heard his own voice go flat and let it. "I was shipboard security. That's what I was for. Not the enemy. Not an outside threat. Me. I was the thing that kept our own crew inside the lines, and when somebody stepped outside them far enough, I terminated them, and I did not have anything installed that would have made that difficult."

"How many," said Runi.

"I don't know."

"You do not know."

"My program didn't keep time," said Shay. "It kept relevant numbers. Kill counts weren't relevant to the mission profile so they weren't logged, and I have gone into my own architecture four times looking for them and they are not there. Somebody took the trouble." He looked up. "I can't tell you how many people I killed and I can't tell you how old I am, and those are the same missing file."

Runi was quiet for a while.

"I killed a great many," he said. "I know the number. I have written it down every year for six thousand years in a book, and there are nine hundred and ninety-one books, and I could go and get the correct one."

"Does it help?"

"No," said Runi. "But I chose to do it, and so I owe it to them to be able to say it. That is the difference between us and you should not let anyone tell you it is a small one."

Shay looked at him.

"Say that again."

"You did not choose. I did." Runi leaned forward slightly. "I was made a weapon by another man's hand, as you were. But then the war came, and I stood up, and I made myself The Destroyer, and I hunted them for three years across half the world, and I finished it, and it was mine. Every one of them was a decision I made with a mind I had. You have been carrying my kind of guilt with someone else's kind of crime and it does not fit you, Captain, and I think it has been rubbing you raw ever since the feelings arrived."

"That's convenient," said Shay.

"It is not convenient, it is worse." Runi sat back. "Because it means you cannot atone. There is no repair for a thing you did not do. There is only the very stupid ordinary work of being someone else afterwards, which is slower, and has no ceremony attached to it, and nobody thanks you."

Shay laughed. It surprised them both.

"That's the first honest thing anybody's told me about it."

"Yes. I am told I am tiring."

They sat.

"May I now say the part that will annoy you?" Runi asked.

"You've been building to it for ten minutes."

"You grew one," said Runi.

"Grew what?"

"A conscience. They did not give you one. You came through your door, and you got emotions you had no training for, and instead of doing what a weapon does with new information, you sat down in a corridor with a boy who terrified you on purpose, and you let him teach you, and you came out of it his friend." Runi's voice did not change at all, and somehow that made it land harder. "Nobody installed that. It is not in your specification. You made it out of nothing in three weeks."

"And you?"

"I could not," said Runi. "Six thousand years and I could not. So a goddess made a boy and sent him to me, and he lives in this house, and he is upstairs right now being rude about my robe, and he is my conscience because I was not able to grow one myself and Isis knew it."

He stopped.

For a moment - and it was the only moment in four days that Shay would ever catch it - the composure cost him something to keep. The orange eyes were too bright. The small folded hands did not shake, quite, but the not-shaking took effort, and whatever lived under the five thousand years of stillness pushed once, hard, against the inside of it, the way the sea leans on a wall it has been leaning on since before the wall had a name.

Then it settled, because it always settled, because holding it was the one thing he had ever been better at than anyone alive.

The room was very quiet.

"I am five thousand nine hundred and eleven," said Runi, "and you are three weeks old, and you are ahead of me. I wanted to say it out loud to somebody before I died, and I have been fairly sure for some time that I am not going to."

Shay did not have anything to say to that.

So he sat in a room full of the oldest objects in two universes, next to a child who was older than all of them, and he did not say anything, and it was, he thought afterwards, the least alone he had been since the crossing.

The Orchard

Colt found the tall one at the bottom of the orchard at two in the morning, sitting on the ground with his back against a tree, doing something complicated with his face.

"You're doing it wrong," Colt said.

T'ven's head came up fast.

"Sorry. That was - " Colt sat down on the grass about six feet away, which he had worked out was the right distance for this by trial and a good deal of error. "That came out like I meant it mean. I didn't." He had come out with both jacket pockets full of Mary's shortbread, because he was a great many things but one of them was still a boy who robbed a kitchen at two in the morning, and he set a piece down on the grass in the no-man's-land between them without a word, the way you leave food out for something you have decided not to look at directly.

"Doing what wrong?"

"Holding it shut." Colt pulled his knees up. "You're squeezing. I can see you doing it from the house."

"You can't see anything, you're not -"

"I'm not a telepath," Colt agreed. "I'm something worse. Go on and ask."

T'ven did not ask.

That, Colt decided, was probably the best thing anybody had done for him in about a year.

"You heard me," Colt said. "Earlier. On the stairs."

The tall boy shut his eyes.

"I'm so sorry."

"I know."

"I didn't - I wasn't reaching, I swear on - I was standing there and it just came, it came at me, and I heard - " T'ven stopped. He had gone a colour that was visible even by starlight. "There's a man in you."

"Yeah."

"There's a whole life in you, there's - I heard sand, and I heard somebody's name, and I heard you dying, and it wasn't you dying, it was somebody who -"

"His name was Amenhotep," said Colt. "He was a Pharaoh. He was Runi's, back then, back when Runi was a man called Tumaini and had a heartbeat, and he died getting between Runi and something, and I've got all of it. Every day of it. I got it when I was twelve years old on a bad night and nobody asked me first."

T'ven stared at him.

"You have his memories."

"I have his whole self. Isis put him back in the world and she used me to do it." Colt pulled a blade of grass and started shredding it, which was a habit he had never managed to break. "So that's what you heard. And you're going to sit out here all night deciding you violated me, and I want to head that off, because I've watched Runi do the same thing for a year and it is boring."

"It's not boring, it's -"

"You didn't take it," Colt said. "I leaked."

T'ven opened his mouth and closed it again.

"I leak," Colt repeated. "All the time. Ask anybody. I sing in my sleep in a language that's been dead since the Bronze Age and Duncan has to come turn me over. It gets out. You were standing in the hall and it got out and it landed on you and you didn't want it and you couldn't stop it." He looked up. "Which of us does that sound like?"

T'ven did not answer for a long moment.

"Both," he said.

"Yeah."

Colt let a breath out. Then he did a thing on purpose that he hardly ever did on purpose.

He sat up straight, and his chin came up, and when he spoke his voice had not changed at all but everything behind it had. It was amused, and it was nearly six thousand years old, and it was plainly having the time of its life.

"You should know," said the man in the boy, "that I was enormously important. People carried me. I had a chair for it. I never once walked across a hot floor and I see no reason to begin in an orchard, in the cold, for you." A pause, laid down like a card. "There were coins with my face on."

"That's the worst - "

"It is the finest thing you have heard all night." The grin that broke over Colt then was pure boy again, wholly his own, the two of them folding back together like a hand closing. "See? He came all the way up, and nothing broke. Nobody died. You just got sassed about the weather by a dead king, and the world's still here. That's the trick I can never say right. You don't lock the door on it. You let it up for air, and it turns out to be funny."

"He's funny," said T'ven, helplessly.

"He's a menace. He'd have liked you." And then, quieter: "That's carrying it. That, right there."

"He's going to offer to train me," T'ven said. "Isn't he. Your - Runi."

"Probably. He's good at it. He's the best there's ever been at it, and I mean that literally, there is nobody older." Colt threw away the shredded grass. "And he's going to teach you to build a wall, because that's what he did, and it worked, and he's been behind it since before there were cities."

"That's what I want."

"I know. That's why I'm out here instead of him."

T'ven looked over.

"I'm not going to teach you to close it," said Colt. "I'm going to teach you to carry it. There's a difference and it took me about eight months and two very stupid fights to find out what it is."

"Why you?"

"Because I got handed a job by a goddess," Colt said, "and I have done it for a year, and I have been good at it, and I have never once picked one." He said it without drama, which was the only way he could get it out. "Isis told me what I was for. Runi got told what he was for. You got born with a thing you never asked for and a church that beat you for it. Everybody in this orchard got assigned."

He stopped.

"So I'm picking this one," he said. "Nobody told me to. Nobody's going to thank me for it. I'm just going to do it because I looked at you on those stairs and I knew exactly what your face was doing and I could not stand it."

T'ven put both hands over his face.

Colt let him. He was good at letting people.

"Okay," T'ven said eventually, from behind his hands, wetly.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Okay." He wiped his face with his sleeve, which is the only technology a seventeen-year-old has for this. "How do we start?"

"We start," said Colt, "by you telling me what you can hear right now. All of it. Everything, including the stuff you're embarrassed about, including me. And you don't apologize once. Every time you apologize we start over."

"That's cruel."

"That's the exercise."

T'ven took a breath.

He started talking.

It took him four tries to get through it without apologizing, and the sun came up somewhere around the third.

Infirmary

Dustin woke up on Thursday morning, thirty-nine hours after he had sat down in the hay, and the first thing he said was:

"Did I miss anything?"

Marky, who had slept nine of those thirty-nine hours and none of them well, put down the chart he had been keeping by hand because there was nothing else to keep it on, and said:

"Not a thing."

"Liar."

"Comprehensively." Marky put the light in his eyes, one and then the other. "How do you feel."

"Hungry."

"Anything hurt?"

"No." Dustin thought about it seriously, which he did about most questions. "No, I feel - I feel really good, actually. I feel like the first day of summer."

"Do you know what happened?"

"Nope."

Marky waited.

"I don't," Dustin said. "I've been thinking about it since I opened my eyes and I've got nothing. I opened the fold, we came through, that boy said they weren't scared, and I remember thinking oh, I don't know what I am if I'm not the door - and then I'm here and there's a lady downstairs who has apparently been making soup at me for two days."

"That's Mary. Let her."

"I'm going to." Dustin sat up, and did it easily, and Marky watched him do it and felt something unclench that had been clenched since Tuesday. "Marky."

"Mm."

"Was it bad?"

Marky considered lying, and then did not, because he had never once got away with it.

"Your pulse was thirty-one on the road and I had a field kit and no ship," he said. "So yes. For about four hours it was very bad, and then it stopped being bad, and it never got bad again, and I have run every test I have twice and there is nothing wrong with you. Your levels are better than your baseline. Whatever it was, you are on the other side of it."

"So what was it?"

"I have absolutely no idea," said Marky.

Dustin grinned.

"You hate that."

"I loathe it."

"Say the thing."

"I am not saying the thing."

"Say the thing, Marky."

Marky closed the chart.

"My professional medical opinion," he said, "is that you are nine years old, you have not stopped since the crossing, you carried four thousand people through three hundred and forty-one years in September and then went straight back to work, and you have never in the whole time I have known you slept a full night on purpose." He stood up. "You needed rest. You got some. Now eat the soup."

Dustin lay back on the pillow and laughed until he had to hold his ribs.

"That's it? That's the diagnosis?"

"That is the diagnosis."

"That's the worst diagnosis I ever heard."

"It is the only one I have and I am extremely attached to it," said Marky, "and I will be putting it in the log in exactly those words, and in eleven years when somebody asks what happened to you on that road, the answer in the file is going to be he was tired." He picked up his kit. "Because that is what the evidence says, and because I would rather write down a small true thing than a large impressive one."

He got to the door.

"Marky."

"Yes."

"Thanks for not making it a mystery," said Dustin.

Marky stood in the doorway of a strange room in a strange house for a moment.

"Everything about you is a mystery," he said. "You are allowed to have one thing that isn't."

The Terrace

They put the terms together on Friday, on a terrace, over a table that Mary Connolly had covered without being asked.

It was not a negotiation. Shay had been in negotiations. This was six people and a household deciding to say out loud a set of things they had all independently worked out on Wednesday.

"Say it plainly," said Runi.

"All right." Shay put his hands flat on the table. "You're not coming with us."

"No."

"You've got a war and it's yours and you're winning it slowly, and if I picked this household up and moved it somewhere safe I would be doing the single most destructive thing anybody's done to you since Windsor."

"That is correct," said Runi.

"Dustin worked that out lying in the hay before he went down. I'd like that on the record because he's nine and it took me two more days."

"It is on the record," said Devaintre, from the small speaker in the middle of the table, which Duncan had rigged up out of a radio and about which Hal had been insufferable.

"What we do have," said Marky, "is a Rescue Center."

Runi turned his head.

"Go on."

"Clan Short. It's - " Marky stopped, and Shay watched him do the thing he did about twice a year, which was to decide to say the real version. "It's a place where children who have had something enormous happen to them go, and where somebody is awake at four in the morning, and where nobody asks them to be all right on a schedule. I run it. I am eleven years old and I run it, which is a sentence I have stopped apologizing for."

"You are eleven."

"I am eleven physically and I was a doctor for nineteen years before that and the crossing did what it did." Marky shrugged. "It's a long story and Hal has written it down badly."

"I have written it down accurately," said Hal.

"You have written it down at length."

"Those are the same."

"They have never once been the same."

Runi held up a hand, and the table went quiet, and Shay noted the speed of it.

"You are describing the Hawks," Runi said.

"I thought I might be."

"We take in the ones who were turned badly. The half-lives, the ones who were made and then abandoned, the children who were used and then thrown away when they stopped being useful." Runi's hands were folded on the table in front of him. "We give them three choices and we let them take the third one if they want it, which most people will not do. And we are always short of somewhere quiet to put them while they decide."

"We're always short of people who understand what was done to them," said Marky.

The two of them looked at each other across the table for a while.

"We fight the same war," said Runi.

"We fight the same mission," said Marky. "You fight a war. I've never fought anything in my life. But underneath it, yes. Same mission."

"Then say what you want."

"A bridge." Marky put a finger on the table. "One of yours at my Center. Not a prisoner, not an exchange, not a hostage, and not a gesture - somebody who actually works, who knows what a half-life needs at three in the morning because they were one. And one of mine here, for the same reason in reverse, for as long as it's useful and not one day past."

"And the feeding," said Runi.

"And the feeding," Marky agreed. "Which we are going to write down, in a document, in daylight, and we are both going to be embarrassed the entire time, and we are going to do it anyway, because the alternative is two organizations making assumptions about each other at four in the morning."

"Agreed," said Runi.

"That was fast."

"I have had six thousand years of watching people not write it down."

Marky put his pen down for a moment.

"You should know you're not the only door that's knocked," he said. "There's a Clan officer - Adam Casey, he runs an assault unit - who's been working your war from the other side of it for a while. If the paperwork we do this week turns up looking familiar in a month, or somebody arrives at your gate with a Clan writ and Colt's adoption already half-signed, that's why. Two of us found the same house."

Runi was quiet for a moment.

"Two buses to the same station," he said.

"Something like that."

"Then we are the early bus," said Runi, "and I find I do not mind. I have been missed by the world for six thousand years. Being met twice in one season is a novelty I intend to enjoy without examining." He folded his hands. "Write it down, doctor. Let the other door do its work in its own time. This one is ours."

They wrote it down.

It took most of Friday, and it was, as promised, mortifying. Hal enjoyed himself enormously. Jennifer swore at the phrasing of clause four for eleven consecutive minutes and then produced a better version of it. Mary Connolly fed everyone twice. Devaintre, from the radio, caught three things that would have caused a war in six months and was not thanked enough for any of them, and said so, and was then thanked excessively by Hal for forty minutes, and asked to be un-thanked.

Hank came back with them.

He looked about eleven. He was somewhere north of thirty and had been turned by a man who told him it was love, and Runi had rebuilt him from the blood out to break that, and he was the second person in six thousand years to walk in daylight.

He stood in the field on Saturday morning with a canvas bag and Duncan's second-best coat and looked at the place where the door was going to be.

"You don't have to," Marky told him.

"I know," said Hank. "That's the whole reason I'm going."

Colt walked T'ven out to the field.

"Eight days," Colt said.

"Eight days."

"And you don't practice in between. I mean it. You'll build a wall by accident and I'll have to take it apart."

"Yes, sir," said T'ven, and then went scarlet, and Colt laughed at him for a hundred meters.

At the fence Colt stopped.

"Hey."

T'ven turned around.

"You didn't apologize once today," Colt said. "The whole day. Not one."

T'ven opened his mouth.

"Don't you dare," said Colt.

T'ven shut it.

Then he grinned, and it was the first entirely unguarded thing his face had done in front of another person in eleven years, and Colt saw it, and had the enormous good sense not to say a word about it.

Shay was the last one through.

Runi stood in the field in the November sun, in a black robe, in daylight, with his hands folded.

"Captain."

"Runi."

"You have a man you owe a conversation to."

Shay stopped.

"I have not read you," said Runi. "I want that understood. I have not read you once in four days and I will not. But you have been carrying it around this house like a bag you keep setting down in doorways, and I have six thousand years of watching men do that, and there is a shape to it."

"His name's Davis," Shay said. "Andi. Captain of the Potemkin. He asked me straight out, in front of my own people, whether I was a previous asset of the darker side, and I said yes, and I said we'd discuss it later." He looked at the treeline. "That was a couple of weeks ago. He hasn't asked again. That's the part I can't - he hasn't asked again."

"Of course he has not."

"Why 'of course'?"

"Because he is waiting for you to be ready," said Runi, "and he will wait until he dies, and that is a kindness, and it is also the single heaviest thing one man can put on another." He tilted his head. "You told me because I cannot use it. I am not in your Clan, I am not in your fleet, I do not know what a Section Thirty-One is and I will be dead of nothing at all before it matters to me. I was safe. That is why it came out here."

"Yes," said Shay.

"Then it has come out," said Runi. "It exists in the world now. Somebody has heard it and did not put down his cup. That is the only part that was ever going to be difficult and you have done it, four days ago, in a room full of pots."

Shay stood in the field a while.

"He's on the Potemkin until the ninth," he said.

"Then you have until the ninth to be a coward," said Runi, "and I recommend it. Two days of it. No more."

Shay laughed.

Then he put out his hand, and the oldest thing in two universes took it, and his grip was the grip of a small boy, and it was exactly as strong as it needed to be and not one ounce stronger.

"Eight days," said Shay.

"Eight days."

"Runi - the bowl."

"Yes?"

"What was in it?"

Runi looked up at him with his orange eyes, and for the first time in four days, he smiled properly.

"Someone's dinner," he said.

The fold opened.

They went home.

Dustin ate three helpings that night in the Saratoga's mess and fell asleep at the table before dessert, and Marky, who had been waiting three days for exactly that, let him.

Authors Note:

A training exercise that found the wrong door. Two boys who cannot put down what they were given, and two men who were made into weapons - one of whom chose it afterwards and one of whom never got the chance. Our thanks to the household on the hill; the door swings both ways now, which is what a bridge is for. Shay has a call to make and eight days to make it in. This is not a cliffhanger. I have been reliably informed that the Cliff Hanger Police have my address.