INTERVAL

Ivo Marn did not answer him. He had already turned, and he was moving east along the Scoop at a stiff, urgent, sixty-year-old trot, and the thing that frightened Sen was not the words. It was that a man who had spent eleven years standing very still in this valley was suddenly in a hurry.

"Mr. Marn—"

"Now."

So Sen ran.

A mile and a half is nothing. You can walk it in half an hour with a cut lunch in your coat.

You cannot run it on glass.

The Scoop was a mirror with a crust of snow on it, and under the snow it was slick as poured oil in some places and rotten as pastry in others, and where the crews had been working there were tailings — chips and shards and half-shattered offcuts a hand deep across forty meters of ground.

Sen went down twice in the first two hundred paces. The second time he took a chunk out of his palm and didn't feel it until much later, which he would remember afterwards as the first sign that something in him had already worked out what was happening.

You could not get a rhythm. That was the thing nobody who hadn't done it understood. On a road you find a pace and your body takes over and does the rest without you. On the Scoop every third step was a negotiation — is this one solid, is this one going to go — and after four hundred paces the negotiating was costing more than the running.

His breath came out in front of him and hung there and he ran through it.

Behind them the light was going. Ahead, small and grey in the last of it, the First lay across the whole east end of the valley with the town up in its ribs and cook-smoke still going as though it were an ordinary evening, which for another two minutes it still was.

Then the bone-horn went.

It went late. That was the thing. It should have gone the moment the birds stopped and instead it went a full minute after, ragged on the first note, because somewhere in Cradle a man had had to be found and woken and put in front of a horn that hadn't been sounded in earnest since before Sen could remember.

The note came out flat and hung there and did not roll the way it should have.

"They're not ready," Sen said.

"No."

"They've had eleven years—"

"Yes," said Ivo Marn, and there was something in it that made Sen stop asking.

He saw them at the halfway mark, where the Scoop shallowed out and the ground rose enough to look back west.

They came across the glass.

That was the part Sen was never afterwards able to explain to anybody, and the part nobody who hadn't been there understood when he tried.

They did not come down the road. There was a road. They ignored it. They came straight across the open floor of the Scoop in a column four wide and longer than he could see the end of, and they did not go round the tailings or the cut faces or the deep water standing in the old workings. They went through.

And the glass was polished enough to hold them. Every one of them had another one walking underneath it, upside down, in perfect step, through a sky.

Grey. Seamless. Faceless. Twelve meters of nothing at all, eighty times over, and no sound coming off any of it — not a footfall, not a servo, nothing. A mile of them moving over a mile of mirror and the loudest thing in the valley was Sen's own breathing.

He stopped running without deciding to.

He had been nine years old the last time, and he had been behind a door, and afterwards he had spent eleven years assembling the morning out of sounds and other people's sentences. He had never once seen what came for him.

Now he had, and it was worse than the version he'd built, because the version he'd built had been angry.

"How many," he said.

"Don't count them." Ivo had a hand on his arm. He had not slowed down and he was breathing badly. "Don't ever count them, it doesn't help. Move."

"There's no—" Sen's mouth had gone stupid. "There's no big one. There's no—"

"I know." Ivo pulled at him. "That's worse. Move."

They ran.

Ivo Marn was sixty-one years old, and he had a registrar's body and a registrar's lungs, and by the time they were three-quarters of the way in he was making a sound at the top of every breath that Sen did not like at all.

"Stop," Sen said. "Stop, stop—"

"No."

"You're going to—"

"Sen." The old man got his hand into the front of Sen's coat and pulled him down to his own height and looked at him, and his face was grey and wet and absolutely certain. "Listen to me. If they wanted this valley they would already have it. They have come a very long way for one thing. You know what it is."

"I don't—"

"You do."

The horn went again ahead of them, better this time. Somebody in Cradle had got themselves organised.

"Go," Ivo said. "I'll come."

Sen looked at him for about a second and a half.

Then he got the old man's arm across his shoulders and took most of his weight and started moving again, and Ivo Marn swore at him, comprehensively and with real feeling, in a way that nobody in Cradle would have believed of the registrar, for most of the next mile.

They came in through the wall at the gap between the fourth and fifth ribs, and Cradle was coming apart.

Not in fear, exactly. In mess. Ten thousand people who had drilled for this twice a year and treated it as a joke both times were finding out, all at once and personally, that they had no idea where anything was.

A woman went past Sen the wrong way with a chair. Somebody's grandmother was being carried up the slope in a barrow. There was a man at the third row trying to get a goat through a doorway and refusing, with total conviction, to be talked out of it.

Nobody looked west. That was what Sen noticed, and he was still turning it over a long time afterwards. The whole town was running east with its arms full and not one person had turned round to see what was coming, because turning round would have made it real, and there was a great deal to carry.

Up ahead, the bone doors had already started to move.

The throat of the First is a chamber the size of a market square, cut into the neck at the east end where the ribs give out, walled in bone four meters thick. Its two doors run on a mechanism nobody living understands. They take a quarter of an hour to close, and they do not stop, or reopen, for anybody.

They were most of the way shut when Sen came up the last of the rise with Ivo half on his back.

There were people in the gap waving them on — three men and a woman, leaning out past the edge of a door that was grinding closed at the speed of an hour hand.

Sen did not remember the last thirty meters. He never got them back. He had going up the rise with Ivo's whole weight on him and the gap down to the width of a cart, and then he had the inside, and nothing in between.

What he kept was the boy. Twelve years old, sent in twice and back out both times, standing in the closing gap with his arm stretched as far as it would reach and a look on his face like a man doing sums. That boy was the last thing Sen saw of the outside for four days.

And the sound the doors made when they came together, which was not a slam. It was a long low grinding sigh and then a settling, like something enormous sitting down.

Then it was dark, and hot, and the noise was unbelievable.

Ten thousand people fit into the throat. That is the whole design of it. They fit the way water fits a jug — completely, and without any room left over for anything else.

There were lamps up on the bone shelves and children on shoulders and somebody's dog going out of its mind near the back and four separate arguments happening in the first thirty seconds, and over all of it the smell of ten thousand people who had been running.

Sen got Ivo down onto a step and the old man sat with his head between his knees and did not move for a long time.

"Sen. Sen."

Bel came through the crowd sideways, shoving, with her wrap still on from the cut face and glass dust in her eyebrows, and she hit him hard enough in the chest to move him.

"You absolute—" She stopped. She had a good look at his face and whatever she'd been going to say went somewhere else. "You were out there. You were still out there."

"I was at the machine."

"You're always at the machine." She was holding both his arms above the elbow, too tight. "There's stew at mine."

"Bel—"

"There's stew at mine, and it's going to be there in the morning, and you're going to come and eat it." Her jaw was going. "All right?"

"All right."

"Say it properly."

"I'll come and eat your stew."

"Right," said Bel, and let go of him, and turned round and started shouting at somebody about where the water was, because that was the only thing she had left to do with her hands.

And then nothing happened.

That was the part. That was the whole of it.

They waited. The first hour was the worst hour of Sen's life to that point, because everyone in the throat was braced for the sound of the doors being hit, and every cough and every shifted crate and every dropped lamp went through ten thousand people like a current.

Then the second hour was worse than the first, because the first had at least been an hour in which something might happen.

Somewhere around the third they sent a boy up the shaft to the lookout, four vertebrae east and high enough to see back over the whole town, and he came back down and had to be handed over people's heads, and he was passed to the council and everybody within forty feet went quiet to hear it.

"They stopped at the wall," the boy said.

"And?"

"And nothing. They're stood at the wall. They're not—" He was not old enough to be doing this, and his voice went. "They're not doing anything. They're just stood there."

A councilman asked him whether they had made any demand.

"No, sir."

"Did they signal? Did they—"

"They're just stood there," the boy said, and started to cry, and was taken away by somebody's mother.

The noise in the throat changed after that.

Sen would think about this for years, and would never be able to describe it to anyone who hadn't been in the room. It didn't get louder. It got thinner — ten thousand people who had all been holding one big shared idea, which was they are going to come through the doors, and who now had to put that idea down and pick up a much smaller and much worse one.

Beside him on the step, Ivo Marn had got his breath back and was sitting up with his satchel on his knees and his hands folded on top of it, looking at nothing.

"This is what they do," he said.

"What?"

"This." He nodded at the room. "Not the doors. This. They'll stand out there and they won't ask for anything and they won't leave, and by the fourth day this room will do the work for them." He said it flatly, like a man reading a weather report. "It's in the accounts from Ost. It's in the accounts from everywhere, if anybody in this valley ever read any of them, which they don't."

"How long can they stand there?"

"As long as they want to." Ivo turned his head. "That's what I'm telling you. It costs them nothing. There isn't a man out there who wants to be home for anything."

Sen didn't say anything.

"I wrote to Ost," Ivo said, after a while. "Years ago. Their registrar wrote back for a time and then he stopped, and last spring one of mine came back to me with a seal on it I didn't know." He was quiet a moment. "I've thought about that once or twice."

It went straight past Sen, the way things do.

Late, when the lamps were down to four and most of the room had got itself into some kind of sleep, Sen sat with his back against four meters of bone and his cut hand wrapped in somebody's scarf.

He had been in this room before.

Same bone. Probably, if he thought about it, close to the same corner — the floor sloped the same way under him, and some part of a nine-year-old had filed that and kept it for eleven years without asking permission.

He had been small enough to get through a crowd like this at knee height without a single hand landing on him. He had gone the whole width of the throat and up the slope to where the doors were grinding shut, and he had turned sideways and got out through the gap, because there was a sound outside that he could not leave alone.

Nobody had stopped him. That was the part that had taken him years to stop being angry about, and then a further few years to understand: ten thousand people had been looking at the doors, and he had been below the height that anybody was looking at.

He had never told anyone that. There were a great many things Sen had never told anybody, and he had found out this afternoon that at least one of them was shared, and it had not made him feel less alone in the way he'd have expected.

He closed his eyes.

And there it was.

Through four meters of bone and a mile and a half of open glass and an army standing at the wall — the chord. Low and enormous and steady, the way it had been every day of his life, the way it had been while he ate his lunch in the hole in the ground.

The machine was still out there. Alone, in the dark, in front of all of them. Kneeling with its hands open.

Still going.

Still listening.

For eleven years that sound had been the most comfortable thing Sen knew, and he lay in the dark with ten thousand people breathing around him and understood, for the first time, that it had never been comfort.

It had been a question.

And it had been waiting a very long time for an answer.