The whole notebook

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First Drawer, the Queue, the Abyss

Monday, second Quarter, week six. Targeting Floor.

[Sticker: HELLO my name is Abigail.]

So I've requisitioned a notebook, which makes this the record, and since nobody's ever going to read it, the record's taken care of. If you're reading it anyway, hi. You shouldn't be. Keep going.

Form 7-G, Field Observation Book, Officer. Stack policy says an officer deployed outside the tower carries one, and I've never been deployed outside the tower, unless you count lunch. But Stores had a pile of them going soft in a damp corner, and the clerk, a Mantle whose cape had pretty obviously been eating near the toner, slid one across with those long fingers and said I'd need to sign for it.

I said would a thumbprint do.

The Mantle looked at me for what felt like a whole shift, then said a thumbprint would do. Their face didn't move, because they don't, but the moss leaned about a hair toward my jacket, so that's on file now too, somewhere, in moss. They give you a sniff receipt. Want to guess what mine says? Beans. Fair.

There's a line inside the cover that says OFFICER'S SIGNATURE. I'm leaving it blank for now, because I'd kind of like to see how the book turns out first.

Today's couplets, graded:

The lines you drew across the sea / Will burn from A to B to me. Forced. "To me" is carrying the whole building. D.

[Sticker: Grade rosette, C-MINUS.]

They say a beacon cannot weaken. / I say that's what they said of beacon. I had to go stand by the window after that one. C-minus, and only 'cause he paid the postage in exact change.

Three beacons down on the Queue and nobody hurt. Everybody on the floor calls him the Anarchist and wants to talk tonnage, and what I want to talk about is why a guy who mails a day's notice to the people he's bombing rhymes this badly. On purpose? Oh, it's on purpose. I grade poetry for fun, I've seen accidents, and you can't rhyme this bad by accident.

Tuesday. Same floor. Same chair.

Asked for an evacuation of Beacon Row. Aldane said no in her no voice, the one you'd use to tell a kid the soup's still hot. She's a really tall person to be disappointed by. Leaf-green, with ribbons that go a little dim when the blinds are down, and she put one on my sleeve and said, "A clean report, Abigail. That's the kindest thing anyone can give the docks."

Filed it as a wrong call. First of the year. In pen.

I was embarrassed all afternoon, and then Dot had my beans, which I'd totally forgotten about. She'd held them for me since noon in the lit part of her, the little orange room in the middle where she keeps whatever she's saving, and I could see my lunch sitting in there from the other end of the counter, waiting. It's hard to stay mad about procedure when somebody's visibly keeping your lunch inside their body.

"You aren't full," said Dot, with two fingers on my wrist, and the color of my day went up her arm. Mostly gray. Then she told me about Soob and his new shift on the Queue and how he's eating, and I had more beans. Obviously.

In the margin (Abigail, later): Soob. I went back and looked at this page after. I'm leaving it how it is.

Wednesday. I don't know what floor I am on, in any sense.

A Brakkan came to my desk.

Okay. You need to know a couple things here, so bear with me. I grew up in nine houses and the third one was Brakkan, so I know about doors and low ceilings and how you don't poke a person's ridges to see if they're real, and I know what a Brakkan sounds like on deck plate. The whole floor heard this one coming from two corridors off. Folks on the Queue have a saying for it, "Stone on the deck," and by the time he got to me the entire row had found something really interesting on their screens.

Two meters thirty. Forties. Slate and rust. There's a ridge on his left shoulder that's been sanded off, and I know you don't ask, so I just stared at it a little too long instead. Smooth, Abigail.

He said his name was Tukkar Omdor and he'd read my memo on the couplets, which, nobody's read my memo on the couplets. He said he had a ship and five people and a list of ninety-nine, and he needed somebody who could tell him what they'd do next. I said I was flattered, but I wasn't a field officer and I'd never been in a fight I didn't lose, and halfway through that sentence his brow plates came down. They hinge. It's like talking to a guy who's shut a door in his own face and left the rest of the face standing there.

I kept talking to the door. What else are you gonna do? I said I'd come if the Anarchist was my first target and I got to do it my way, and also I'd need to bring my plants.

The door opened on amber eyes, way up there.

"Plants," said Tukkar Omdor.

"Three," I said.

He gave that a good long think, the whole floor listening, and then he said, "Be where the plan says you'll be," and left, and you could hear him leaving for a while.

Counted my pencils. Twenty-six. Probably not enough.

[Doodle: Tally, twenty-six marks.]

Thursday. Belo, a noodle shop. Writing this on my knee.

I'm supposed to help him size up his team, so I've read the files, and whoever wrote them should get shaken. Auntie Quill's has one rule, painted over the counter, if you can read the person next to you, keep it to yourself. I've been asked to look at the sign twice now.

Assessment, Vesk Mirat. Ossari, ex-Dominion. Three guys came through the front of Auntie Quill's with knives while she was watching a soap on a screen with a crack across it, and she took them apart without standing all the way up and without pausing her show. The ones still conscious ended up lying on the floor through what I'd call a really long love scene. She's got a little coral crown, and the tips of it went pink, and the pink started heading down. She caught me noticing. It went gray so fast I could practically hear it.

I said, "That looked like it was a good episode."

She said, "No."

Recommendation: against. Wrote it down and gave it to Tukkar. She doesn't want to be on a team, I can't read her, and she looked at me like I was a stain on a bowl.

In the margin (Abigail, later): Abigail of last spring, you absolute soup. (Sorry.)

Assessment, Lio Twil. Phaedrae. Met him at a gala, or met at least three of him. A tall golden one was charming the host while a little gray one counted the silver, and when I dropped a fork I found a kid under the buffet, all elbows and sweater, who whispered "don't tell" and was gone. Then the same amber plates clicked around a corner and it hit me they'd been one person the whole time. You can hear it, the pieces re-seating. Like somebody shuffling roof tiles in the next room.

Recommendation: against, strongly.

In the margin (Dash): Darling, we've framed this.

Assessment, Kellen Nine. Cultivar. Late twenties, if they even get to be an age. I watched him through glass on a sim floor, and he holds his pistols the way a kid holds a spoon, which I mean as a technical observation, real close to the body and total confidence. Those things only reach about a hand, so you have to get close enough to smell the person. He's matte all over, gold in the eyes, with faint lines where his panels meet, the plainest person I've ever seen in a universe where everybody else looks like they were grown out of a fruit. He finished, asked the tech if he'd done it right, then came out and looked at my bean cup and asked what it was.

"Lunch," I said.

"What is a lunch?"

I'd like to tell you I had a good answer for that. I didn't. Do you? Try it sometime. It's harder than it sounds.

Recommendation: I wrote "for," then crossed it out, 'cause the sentence I needed was longer than the box, and the form has these really small boxes.

Friday, or possibly Monday. The Abyss. And on the way back from it.

They took me to see the last one.

[Doodle: The Goom, "stars go long here".]

I'm gonna go slow so I get this right. What does the Goom look like? Nothing. That's the honest answer. You'd think it'd look like something, after the training films. It's a spot in the window where the stars get pulled out long and thin and then just stop, and when the ship got close I felt something way down in my back teeth that I never actually heard.

The prison hangs off the edge of all that on a platform, and every door was open. Yeah, I know, that's in all the reports, and I've read the reports, but it's different when they're open at you. Wheels of cells, turning, nobody in them, every guard already bagged and gone, something dripping, and then from a long way down, this little tune. A pipe. Somebody was playing it nicely.

Who was playing? Hang on, I'm getting there. Doctor Nym Selum is two meters of something like the inside of a seashell. There was a light behind him from the window and you could see straight in, and I don't mean that as a figure of speech. There's the throat, there's the pulse going, and then a second pulse, half a beat off, somebody else's rhythm in the same chest. He didn't stop playing when we came in. Finished the phrase first. Manners.

Then he looked at me, and his filaments stirred before his mouth did, so my bead jumped the gun and I got the end of his sentence first. "Consider me your first recruit." Then his lips caught up and started at the beginning.

I was scared, and I told Tukkar no, in the corridor and again at the dock. I said you can't take the most famous name in the Abyss out of the one place that's ever held him and put him on a ship with a galley. Tukkar said he'd found a door log in a closet and the Doctor knew things. Then he went back and told him to put the knife away, and the Doctor held up a pipe, and his shoulders made a little clicking noise that I'm told means he's having a nice time.

He said one more thing to me on the way past. He looked at my hand, the one with the pencil, and said, "You flinched. Good. It means the rest of you is paying attention."

I hadn't flinched. I've checked.

We were on that platform three quarters of an hour by my watch, and my soup sat on a shelf on the Fourth Floor for nine hours. Dot says it grew a skin and an opinion. An hour there's half a day everywhere else, everybody knows that, and knowing it doesn't help one bit.

Saturday. The Orchard. My cabin. MY CABIN.

It's got a window. Tukkar told somebody to give me the one with the window because, and I got this from the somebody, "Humans need to see out." Where'd he read that? No idea, and he isn't saying. I put the plants on the sill and told them it's gonna be fine.

[Sticker: Orchard label, ASK ABOUT OUR LOYALTY PROGRAM.]

You'll want the tour. Here's the tour. She's a hundred and eighty meters of retired prison transport, and it looks like every owner bolted something on without talking to the one before. Twin banks of engine drums. A heap of containers under tarps. A yellow truss bay with a crane in it. And an orange stripe on the nose some brave soul painted. Every fifth door still says which cell block you're in, and somebody's been writing jokes on the labels in teeny letters. BLOCK C: ASK ABOUT OUR LOYALTY PROGRAM.

There's one working speaker and six people aboard, so I've drawn up a rota, and I'm gonna get it laminated.

Speaker Rota. Draft for lamination

FIRST BELL: A. CHASE. WHO'S STILL UP (CALL-IN)

SECOND: T. OMDOR. "HOLD THE WEIGHT," LOW

THIRD: DR. SELUM. PIPE. SEE CONTENTS

FOURTH: V. MIRAT. "WARM BY MORNING"

FIFTH: L. TWIL (FIVE WAYS, TO BE ADVISED)

SIXTH: K. NINE. "THIS ONE"

[Sketch: the Orchard, side view. Engine drums, tarps, yellow bay and crane, my window, the orange stripe. Not to scale. Not to anything.]

Briefing at second bell, and Tukkar stood at the end of the galley with a pot going behind him and the cork board on the wall, ninety-nine mugshots, and went through the whole plan in maybe thirty words, every one of them sounding like he'd hauled it up a hill. Then he said, "Questions."

Nobody asked a question.

The Doctor checked a fingernail. Vesk was in the doorway being the color of the doorway, Lio or some of him was shuffling a deck with five different backs, and Kellen was gazing at the pot with enormous love. I put my hand up, all by myself, like a kid on her first day, which, yes.

Tukkar looked at my hand. "No issue," he said, and left.

[Sticker: Slate chips in a little bag, "top bunk. HOW?".]

There's slate in the corridor outside his cell, little chips of it, and there's slate on the top bunk too. How? Remember that slate. I'm going to.

Kellen asked if the Doctor was locked in. The Doctor, from the lower deck, through two doors, without raising his voice, said, "I'm in residence."

Who Is On This Ship, So I Stop Getting It Wrong

• Tukkar Omdor. Brakkan. In charge. Made of slate.
• Nym Selum. "The Doctor." Vael, the see-through one. Convicted of everything.
• Vesk Mirat. Ossari. Assassin. Changes color and resents it.
• Lio Twil. Pilot. Also Dash (loud), Ledger (numbers), Pip (small), and one other I haven't met.
• Kellen Nine. Cultivar. Gunfighter. Asks what things are.
• Me. The Brief.
• Up on the wall: ninety-nine people who got out of the Abyss. Tukkar calls it the board.

Sunday night, late. Belo.

Wrong poet.

We went to the slam 'cause ​xxxxxxxxxxx can't stay away from a microphone, I told them so, and I was right. Ever been to a slam? Fine. You haven't been to a slam till you've heard a Skarn slam in felt. He's slate and iron with smooth holes all over him, every one rimmed orange, and he keeps felt stoppers in them on a chain, because otherwise that second voice comes out of his whole body. On the last line of a poem they pull the stoppers. Every stall on the row rattled, a jar came off a shelf, and it felt like the room was leaning on me.

Vesk and Kellen tackled a poet, a very committed tackle. Was it ​xxxxxx? Nope. Turns out it was a Skarn named Bim who has, as far as anybody can tell, done nothing but write about his knees.

The Doctor, who'd said he'd stand quietly at the back, looked across the room and said, "That one. The rims." The rims on a slate shape going out the side door hadn't flared at all, and I could tell from how he said it that this was a compliment and we were too late.

Bim wants it noted he'd like an apology in writing. I wrote one, in slant rhyme, in his honor.

Found out tonight that the bead can't handle them. If a Skarn goes loud enough all you get in your ear is a polite little chime and the word REGRETTABLE, so a guy can be screaming the last thing he'll ever say about his mother and what reaches you is REGRETTABLE, in the voice of a tired clerk.

Kellen stopped to ask me before he went through the door at the Press. Asked with his eyebrows. I had no idea what to do with that, so I nodded.

Monday. Beacon Four.

The burn was at shift change.

He never burns at shift change. I said that. I said it in the room and I said it in writing, and I was one bell too late, and there were people in that gate going home.

Tukkar got the plaza a beat behind. Kellen held as long as he'd been told to hold. I was in the chair with the whole Row on the screens.

We lost them at the gate, going home. I've got the count. I've asked for the names and they say tomorrow.

Soob's alive, but his left arm won't ever clear. I went to the canteen and Dot was standing in the doorway with all her lights on, and she looked at me and didn't say a word. I don't think I've ever been in a room with Dot without her asking if I'd eaten.

Monday, later.

Same day, and I can't sleep, so I've been sitting up with the file.

The newest couplet rhymes, all the way through, and it scans.

The lines we draw will burn away, / And no one's left to make them stay.

See it? Somebody who knows how to write wrote this and pretended to be somebody who doesn't, and they almost pulled it off. But ​xxxxxxxxxxx has spent six years failing on purpose, and you can't fake that any more than you can fake a limp in the right leg for six years. Plus the booth log at Beacon One shows somebody moved the timing by hand. Lovely hand, too. The seven's got a little foot on it. So who moved it? Not him. He didn't do that to those people. I don't know what he thought was gonna happen at Four, and I don't believe he knew.

I had the Doctor in my ear for this, and don't ask me how. I was talking it out loud and he said, real soft, over a line I hadn't opened, "Then you know something. How unpleasant for you. Do go on."

I'm going to go protect a bomber now. It's the wrong thing, the safe thing is to shoot him, and everybody on the Fourth Floor would sign that report.

Wednesday? The galley. They made me sit down.

I'm writing left-handed 'cause the right side of my face and arm have gone colors. Tukkar says I nearly died. He said that first, before "good" or "sit" or anything, and then he said it again.

Here's what happened, in order.

The Dun Beacon's a tower three hundred meters tall with a cage walkway around the outside, and above the two-hundred ring there's a wind off the exhaust stacks that never quits. ​xxxxxx went up to take his own charge apart. A cleaner in a gray coat with a black circle on the lapel rode the lift up and cut ​xxxxxx's felt chain, that's all he did, he just cut it, and the wind went into every hole in ​xxxxxx's body and started to play him.

How do I even tell you what that was? I'll try. Every vent going at once and climbing toward the one note the charge was listening for. He was the fuse. He was on his knees trying to hold his own holes shut with his hands.

I came out of the service hatch and the bead started up. REGRETTABLE. REGRETTABLE. REGRETTABLE. I yanked it out and threw it off the tower, so that's bead number one, and I've filed the loss. Then I could hear him. What they tell you about a Skarn at full voice at two meters is it'll raise blood under soft skin, and it does, it's like getting patted really hard by a whole lot of people. I kept walking anyway. Vesk Mirat, who I'd recommended against, in writing, caught me when my knee went. Didn't see where she came from. There was just suddenly part of the wall holding me up, and when it looked at my face its little crown went white.

I got close enough and I asked him what was on the stove.

That's all I had. Six years of couplets and one of them, the only good one, the one he actually meant, says the stove on Teller Lane. So I asked.

He told me. Out loud, through every hole he's got, and the whole ring heard a Skarn say what his mother burned. I'm not writing it down. The whole ring has it already, and that seems like plenty.

Then he reached in and pulled a long iron reed out of his biggest vent, and the sound fell apart into plain wind, and he put the reed in my hands and sat down on the grating to wait. The Stack took its sweet time.

With the reed out he's only got the first voice, which still rattles the grating, but you can stand it. He looked at the pencil in my hair.

"YOU MARKED THEM. I PAID POSTAGE ON THOSE."

I said I had.

"WHAT'D I GET?"

"C-minus, overall. You rhymed beacon with weaken."

"AND THE STOVE?"

"A," I said.

Kellen got to the cleaner, but the cleaner got away, cut up, and left the pin behind. Same black circle as the stamp on the crates at the Press.

In the galley I wrote ​xxxxxxxxxxx on the board under his mugshot, in pen, 'cause it seemed to me somebody ought to. I've got good handwriting, it's my one thing. Tukkar uncapped his marker, he's got exactly one red marker and it lives on a string, and he stood there a while, and then he ran it across the Anarchist, and that's one of ninety-nine.

Dot's pot was on the table, scraped clean. I don't know when she sent it, or how she's even standing up.

[Sticker: Gold foil sun.]

Kellen looked at the name for a while. He took the pen, and he said "May I?" And he drew a teeny sun next to it, round, with lines coming off.

I asked him why.

"I liked him," said Kellen.

The Doctor's margin note was up on the cork by morning, in a hand so beautiful I'd like to have it arrested. Loved his mother. Hated his meter.

Vesk was standing next to Tukkar when I looked up. A lot closer than a person stands. Did you catch that? I caught that.

One more thing, for the log. After everybody'd gone off, there was a little crackle on the galley comm and a voice said two words. A really nice voice, an old teacher's voice.

"That's one."

Lio says crosstalk. Ledger says there's no such thing as crosstalk on that band.

In the margin (Abigail, later): Bruises came up plum, then green, then a yellow I'd call Fried Dough. Vesk has come and looked at them every day for a week, and said nothing, and left.

Things I Was Wrong About, Week One

• That the field would be like the training films, only louder.
• Vesk Mirat.
• Lio Twil, possibly. Hold for review.
• That nobody on this ship eats breakfast. Kellen eats it several times.
• The number of pencils.
• A bean soup can in fact get a skin in under an hour.
• I said Dr. Selum would try to frighten me. He has not tried. It's going on by itself.

[Photographs: First roll]

Stores gave me a camera with this book. It prints. Nobody's said I can't.

• The Orchard: The Orchard. Wouldn't fit.
• Mantle: Stores. The moss leaned in.
• Ossari: Ossari, Belo. Not Vesk. Vesk would never.
• Skarn: A Skarn on the Queue. I felt it in my teeth.
• The Queue: The Queue. Still standing, mostly.
• The Abyss: The Abyss. Every door open.

THE TENTH HOUSE

Life aboard, Thren, Quen, Nine to One

Tuesday. In the Lanes. Going somewhere, Lio says.

I've lived in nine houses, and here's what nine houses teach you. Every house has rules, nobody's ever gonna tell you what they are, and you find out when you break one. This is ten, if you're counting. I am.

What I Know So Far About the Rules of This House

• You don't open a door without asking. This one's real. It's the only one all six of us agree on. Lio breaks it. If it was Pip, you forgive it. It's usually Pip.
• Nobody knocks on the brig. The door's never been closed. It's got a latch on the outside and no knob on the inside, and he leaves it standing open and reads. I walked past it four times today on purpose, to practice.
• Nobody leaves the galley after a hunt until the board's been updated.
• Nobody talks while it's on. "It" is Two Ovens, it's on at the same time every day, Vesk shuts her door for it, and I asked what episode it was and she said, "Go away."
• Don't thank Tukkar. He looks at you as if you've handed him something wet.
• The pot's always on. Whoever walks past last tops it up with whatever's around. Today it had noodle ends, a pickle, and I believe part of a ration bar. I've had three bowls. Nobody can tell me how it got good.
• Don't sit in the chair at the far end. Nobody has said so. Everybody just doesn't.
• There's an apple tree in a pot at the end of the long table, about my height, and the soil is damp every morning. Nobody waters it. I asked around. Everyone looked at me.

[Doodle: A potted apple tree, "who waters it??".]

I did not water it, for the record. I'd have used a better pot.

[Taped in: Two Ovens ad.] Soob sent me this. It's going in here, and not on the galley wall, because I'd like to live.

Wednesday.

Turns out Friday's a whole thing here. Dot leaves a portion in the Orchard's cold box every Friday, beans usually, or the fennel dumplings, and she's a government canteen cook, and we're not on her route, and there's no paperwork. In a tower that's got paperwork on the lifts. It's just in there on Friday. And six very dangerous people each wander through the galley at some point that morning to look in the cold box for some other reason. What reason? Depends who you ask.

Tukkar says it's to check the seal.

Today's Wednesday. Lio's asked me twice if it's Friday.

Thursday. Medbay, sadly.

Vesk's started teaching me how to fall.

I didn't ask her to. I'd been looking at my knee, the one that went on the gantry, and I came around the corner into the lounge and my feet were all of a sudden somewhere else and I was looking at the ceiling, with a slate-colored person standing over me.

"Again," said Vesk.

Here's what I've got on falling so far:

Your bones aren't your friends. You're made of soft things with a few hard things in the middle, and you've got to get the soft things down first. Round off. Keep your chin in. Slap the deck with your arm if you can. The thing you're scared of is the deck, and she says I ought to be scared of the stopping, and I asked her to explain the difference and she looked at me for a while and said, "Again."

Humans are the only people on this ship who bruise, so she comes and looks at them. She doesn't touch. She just bends down and studies the yellow part with her head on one side, her crown tips going kind of a tea color. Professional interest, as far as I can tell.

Bruises so far, from falling lessons: 7.

Friday!

Beans.

Saturday laundry

there's one machine. it's rated for slate. I put in two shirts and they came out as one shirt and I'd like to know who I complain to and the answer is Tukkar and I'm not going to complain to Tukkar about a shirt. Vesk doesn't appear to wash anything. does she change color instead. Lio's got a rack of five sets of everything and Ledger's labeled them and I admire that and I also think it's why the machine's always full. Kellen does his in the sink and thanks it. I said for crying out loud to it, and my bead passes that straight through, and Ledger says on the Queue it's been reported as a warning. twice. the shirt's still one shirt. this isn't what I wanted to write about I wanted to write about something else and now it's gone

Saturday night

Petty cash off by 3. Went through it twice. Off by 3.

Saturday, later

Found the 3. It was Pip.

Sunday. House day off. Nobody's off.

Tukkar's decided that if I'm gonna tell a team what to do I'd better be able to say it, so twice a day I stand in the tactics room and he stands there too, filling it, and I give an order and he tells me why everybody just died.

"Abigail to Kellen, if you would be able to..."

"Dead."

"Kellen, could you please..."

"Dead."

"Kellen. Door."

He didn't say anything for a second, and his plates came up, about a third of the way. I've decided that's a smile.

I've been counting, 'cause of course I have. He checks every door twice and every face once, and when he works out a plan he says who gets spent, out loud, and then he says it again, and I really don't think he knows he does it. When a step comes down too fast he swears at it, one Brakkan word, aimed downward. My bead says Regrettable. He's got a little bench in his cell for sanding, and he carves small animals out of ship scrap, and what do I find on my windowsill with the plants? An ommock. It's the size of a thumb, shingled in tiny filed plates, and there was no note. I asked at breakfast who'd been at my window and everybody looked at me, same as they did about the tree.

Monday.

Kellen's lessons are the weirdest. He's supposed to be teaching me to read a threat with my body, and here's how that goes. We walk into a room, any room, and he says, "What's going to hurt you?" and I point at the person holding the wrench, and he says, "No," and he points at the rug.

He's always right. It's mostly the rugs. Check yours.

He sees it all at once, a web of every line a blade or a bullet or a falling crate could go, and he told me it's gold, and that he thought everybody had it till he was twenty. I asked what it's like. He thought it over so long I'd gone back to my soup.

"It's very crowded," he said.

Then he asked what soup was. And just so we're clear, he eats soup every day. He meant, what was this one.

Somebody on the docks told him that "chime" is friendly, so he said, "Chime, Dot, thank you," at the canteen counter, in front of the whole lunch line. I apologized. She gave him seconds.

[Sticker: A ration wrapper with one of Kellen's suns.]

He asked me to come help him figure out what to put on the walls of his cabin. It's a bare white cell with a skylight, a mark on the floor where he stood the first night, and a pile of suns he's drawn on ration wrappers. He's got a list going of what people have suggested, and he read it to me. Lio said mirrors, Dash said a bigger mirror, Tukkar said nothing and Kellen wrote that down. Vesk said "Exits."

On the inside of the skylight frame, where you'd only see it lying down on the cot, there's a row of little suns. I counted them, because I count things. Eight. I said, "Who are those for?" and he said, "Do you want a snack?"

He'd gone somewhere else behind his eyes for a second, and I've made a note of it. It's the first thing I've ever seen him not answer.

In the margin (Kellen): (a tiny sun) thank you for helping with the walls

Tuesday.

Bestiary of the Walls of This Ship, compiled by me because no one else was going to.

Snug. Palm-sized ball of gray seed-fluff, warm, six feet underneath. Eat insulation. There's a whole family of them in the old cell block on the lower deck, and Kellen feeds them 'cause nobody told him you don't, and they come when he hums. Don't hurt one, because they can feel a hull going bad before any gauge can. If you see a line of them walking calmly to the airlock you've got about an hour. That one's for you, whoever you are. I've written it on a card and taped it up in my cabin.

Drip newt. Clear as jelly, as long as a finger, lives under leaks with its mouth open. There's one in Vesk's ceiling vent, and I asked her what it was called, and she said, "What newt."

Wire moth. Copper dust on the wings, eats cable sheathing. Lio says a ship with a bad case gets short-tempered and weepy. I laughed. Then the corridor lights went down about five percent and came back up, real slow, and I quit laughing.

Copy toad. One. Lives in Lio's cabin, or wherever Pip left it. They're supposed to repeat anything, but this one only ever learned Pip, so at night a tiny voice in the corridor says "don't tell" and you just have to live with that.

Dock cat. Same as an Earth cat, worse manners. The one at our slip draws a small pension. Yes, really. I've seen the paperwork, and I've seen a Drum officer salute it.

Pigeon. Everybody's bead says pigeon. Pick one up, go on. It's got four wings and a husk where the beak ought to be, and its chest rattles with seeds. I picked one up at the Queue to see, and I'm told you shouldn't.

In the margin (Abigail, later): My bead has been lying to me about every animal since I was a child. I've gone back and made a list. "Gull." "Eel." It's been putting a nice face on the whole galaxy for me. I'd like to know what else it has rounded off.

Wednesday.

I found a pad of old prison forms in the brig supply locker. DISPOSITION OF REMAINS, IN CUSTODY. There's a line on it that says "Inmate's preference (does not apply)." I thought that was funny, and then I thought somebody ought to have this on file for all of us, so I left one at each door with a pen. You can see where this is going.

That was a mistake, and I'd do it again.

Mine: properly filled in, contact list, an apology to whoever has to handle it.

Tukkar: "Upright. Facing the door. Brin picks the door." I had to ask who Brin was, and I shouldn't have asked. His whole face closed, and I stood there a while talking to the plates.

Lio: five forms. They contradict one another. Ledger's has a schedule attached.

Vesk: "Nobody dyes me." And then under that, smaller, and I didn't mean to read it, I was just filing it: "One minute. Door shut. Somebody I don't have to explain it to."

Kellen's says "Ask Dot." I asked what that meant, and he said the Cradle's got a clause that says his body goes back to the maker. He said it in the same voice he'd use to tell you there's more toast.

In the margin (Abigail, later): I went to the canteen on my next leave and Dot had already seen the form. She'd made some calls. I looked into the middle of her and there was a square of beans there, in the little lit room, and she wouldn't look at me.

The Doctor didn't fill his out. He sent all five of ours back with corrections in the margins instead. Slate splits in a cold hold. Insulate. And on mine, beside "an apology to whoever has to handle it": Charming. Whom did you imagine would mind?

They're all in the tea tin now.

Thursday. Thren. Writing in the pits.

Hunt two. The Champion. Not counting the Abyss, which I don't, I'd never left Pheli before this. So, some things about Thren.

It's a racetrack through a ring of moons, named after the part that failed the first time they ran it, and there are crowds on every rock. Everybody's Hexil here, six-armed and squat and cream-colored like an old tooth, with a spray of copper wire for hair and two eyes that go in different directions, and the wire stands straight up whenever the floor hums, so you can look across a pit and see the whole crew's heads rise together a second before you feel the engine. They eat pickled sump root on a heel of bread. I had some. I regret the some.

And the rule that bites here, the one they'll disqualify you for: every racer's got to name their machine after an ex. In public, up on the Ex Board, before the start. Got one? You'd need one.

​xxxxxxxxxxxxx, the Champion, has married twelve of her cars, and she's spliced a strand of her own head wire into each one. She read the names out totally flat, four of her arms folded, while Vesk studied the grandstand. "Car seven. Vokhan. He counted my wins out loud," the Champion read, and went on to eight. She's never lost, and from what I could see through the glass I don't think it's ever felt good. It looks like somebody getting away from something at very high speed.

Second place is the only thing that scares her. Everybody keeps telling me that like it's a joke.

Same night. Ex Night.

The night before the race the Board goes open mic, and anybody can go up. You say the name, and one thing they did. Hexil cut a strand of wire at the microphone, one strand per ex, so by midnight the floor's covered in it and you've got a hum in your teeth. Pit coffee thick as gravy, in a can.

Kellen wanted to know what an ex was, and it took all of us a while. Then Kellen went up and stood at the microphone with the whole pit lane looking at him and said, "Tuesday's breakfast. It ended." He got a standing ovation. I don't think he gets why.

Lio went up five times.

Somebody pushed me, and I'd had the coffee. I said I didn't have one, not really, I've been at a desk, and they shouted that there's always one. So I stood up there with a pretty small stack of a life, and what came out was, "Selmora Aldane. She gave me an atlas."

Everybody cheered, nobody knew who that was, and I got down. I still don't know why I said it, or why it's the thing I'd pick. She's my boss.

The Doctor was by the door in his long coat, buttoned up, the only person in the whole place standing perfectly still. He inclined his head as I went by. He didn't say a thing, which isn't like him.

Saturday. Heading out. She got away.

[Sticker: Thren grandstand ticket, 35 credits.]

The finish line had been repainted on the grandstand wall, and I worked that out about nine seconds before anybody needed it. And there's a wreck under the track, a really old enormous one with an engine that's still turning, and any car with her wire in it would get pulled straight up that wall into four rings of people. Nobody took the win away from her. How'd it end? I couldn't tell you all of it, I had a pretty bad view from the barrier and I was counting lap gaps in Lio's ear. ​xxxxxxxxxxxxx ran second the whole race, for the first time in her life. Then Dash came up loud behind her and she went early, and the old engine took her car right up the wall. Vesk was up on the flag gantry, the color of the wall, and she let herself go pink where forty thousand people could see. ​xxxxxxxxxxxxx looked back, and somebody was there. Then she cut something, and the car came off the wall and over the Crash Wall into the dark, and nobody could follow.

​xxxxxxxxxx

We lost nobody. She's out there somewhere. I wrote her name on the card anyway, ​xxxxxxxxxxxxx, and Tukkar left his marker capped, and Kellen's sun had all its little rays pointing toward the door.

There's a card on the cork beside the name with a small green thumbprint on it, over two words, Your race. Vesk won't look at it. I'm not saying anything. I'm just writing it down.

[Photographs: Thren]

• Thren: Thren. Five moons, one loop. Loud.

Thursday. Tactics chair.

Lio asked me today what the lines are like. Well, he asked as Ledger, who wants them costed.

I've never written this down. On the floor they call it reading, and they think it's a method, and I let them. So this is new, for both of us.

I look at somebody, and if I've been looking long enough I start to see what they'd do next, and I see it as lines. Thin, kind of amber, coming off the body and branching. This hand goes to that pocket. If she's lying she goes for the door, and that one forks, and that fork forks. I've had it since around the fourth house. You'd see it too, honestly, if a wrong guess at breakfast could get you moved. Trouble is, it's species first. A Hexil's got a Hexil's lines, and a Brakkan shuts the door and you've got nothing at all. And then when somebody tears up what they're supposed to be, the lines all go at once and I can read the tear. That's the job.

When I'm wrong they snap, and I feel it in my teeth. It's a small sound and I've never told anybody I can hear it. Well, now I've told you.

"Cost?" said Ledger.

I said headaches, mostly. And that I've never been able to do it to myself.

He wrote that down.

Sunday.

This is a private book.

I left it on the tactics chair for one trip to the bathroom, one, and I came back and there was a line written on the page about Ex Night, a few entries back, right there in the margin, in that hand. See for yourself.

In the margin (Nym): A very good answer, in the wrong room. If I may: she'll want the atlas back.

I handled this. I went down to the brig and stood in front of the open door, and I didn't knock, because nobody knocks, and I said this was a personal notebook, it was Stack property, and the margins weren't an invitation.

He was on his stool with the lamp behind him. I can tell when he's having a nice time, because his shoulders click.

"If I may," said the Doctor. "You left it on a chair. I merely sat."

I said, "You're clicking."

I've moved it to my cabin, under the plants. The plants have been told.

In the margin (Nym): Under the second plant. The soil wants turning.

Tuesday, I'm almost sure.

I'm keeping this inside my jacket now, so if you're reading it, hi, and how'd you get in my jacket? It doesn't fit in the jacket. The jacket's Stack issue, mustard, the only color Stores had left, two sizes too big, and even so. There's a form to exchange it and I've followed up.

Lio's teaching me to lie, and I hate it. I've told him I hate it, and all of him thinks that's adorable, except one of him.

Lesson one was Dash. "Sweetheart, the whole trick is you believe it for as long as it takes to say it." Lesson two was Ledger, who drew up a table of what I'd probably get asked and what each answer costs. "Truth, two seconds. Lie, nine, plus upkeep." Lesson three I walked into the lounge and it was Pip under the game table, and I asked was it a lesson, and he said "no," and I sat on the floor and we looked at his copy toad for an hour.

I'm a really bad liar. How bad? I told a customs clerk on Moon Four I was a courier, and I apologized in the same sentence.

[Taped in: Queue customs slip.] The slip from Moon Four. I wrote BODIES DECLARED: ONE, then I apologized for that too.

The locked alcove in his cabin is the fourth one, going clockwise. I wasn't looking, honest, it just came around. I saw a door with a line of light under it, and I heard the plates go quiet behind me, a smooth kind of quiet, and somebody said, in a whole sentence, "You've seen enough for your first time," in a very cold voice I hadn't heard before. It frightened me, and I stood very still.

I said I was sorry.

Then there was that shuffling sound and it was Lio again, and he said, "Beans?" He looked tired.

Quen. No date. It doesn't feel like it would be polite.

I'm going to write this quick and then read it again every day.

Hunt five, the moon of living libraries. The Tomen stand in rows, you see, plum bark and hanging pages and scroll pods dangling off these antlers, and they are the shelves, and when they walk the pods click together. It's dark and there isn't any echo, and it smells like old sap. And there's a rule. Want to ask a question here? You give up a memory of your own, and the Tomen keep it. They put it on a shelf.

I asked one. I needed to know something and there wasn't any other way, and I'd rather not write down what I asked.

[A page has been torn out here.]

Here's the page I wrote right after. It's in my handwriting, and I don't remember writing it.

Slip, torn from this book, taped back in

Abigail. You gave up: a kitchen. Yellow. Someone singing and turning a thing over in a pan. You told the keeper it was the second-best one you had. It's on the shelf now and it was worth it. Don't go looking for it. Eat something.

I've read that more times than I'll admit. A yellow kitchen. I can't feel a thing where it ought to be. You know how you push your tongue at the spot where a tooth was? Like that, except there's no spot. I don't know whose kitchen it was. Mine, I guess. I had one before the houses. I must have.

The Archivist was the one the Doctor took. The Doctor went in and sat down in front of him and asked him a question nobody's ever asked him, kindly, and that's what turned him. On our way out his pods clicked once and he looked at me for a long moment, real slow, and he said, "It's already been lent, you know. Your worst day."

I said, "To whom?"

Then I remembered where I was and shut my mouth with my hand, and he made a dry sound. Might've been laughing. He didn't charge me for that one. At the gangway Tukkar asked him if he wanted the stool in the galley, and he said yes. So there's a Tomen in the galley now.

In the margin (Abigail, later): I still don't know who borrowed it. I think about that more than the kitchen.

The Dun Crossing. Written after, on the free side.

Writing this in after Quen 'cause Vesk's only just let me. Four after five, yes, her call. Hunt four belongs to her and she'd like me not to discuss it. I can say this much, and it's about me.

The Gray Line's a band of flat paint, ten lanes wide, you've got to walk across without changing color, with guards all down it looking at you, and a flushed cheek is a confession. Ossari hold it from childhood. They've barbered the crown tips down short on all the guards, and it's so quiet you can hear people's sleeves. Every price in the market's done with the hands.

So I blushed. Of course I did. I'm a Human, it's what we do. I blushed at the Line, and then I noticed I had, and then it got worse. Three guards turned and looked, and then the whole line of them, the color of a wet sidewalk, watching a small person in a mustard jacket go red from the neck up for no reason. I was held for questions for two hours. They'd never seen one go that color and they wanted to know what I was confessing to.

Everything, I said. It's very hard to tell.

Vesk came through behind me the color of the paint, I think. On the far side she stopped at a stall and bought something called a Held Breath and drank it, and her hand wasn't steady. I looked somewhere else. I'm getting good at that.

I've got a list of forty-one shops in my coat. I haven't decided what to do with it.

Sometime after Seri.

Bead number two has feathers in it. A world where a feather's worth more than a coin and applause is the only money that counts, and I sat in a pit under the stage with a pen while the Doctor bid on a sealed crate and two hundred Vesper sang at me, and he told me in my ear when to breathe. They've got these hollow throats made of bone, you can see the air go down. An usher told me to stop humming, and I hadn't known I was, and a whole row of the hall had leaned toward me. I lettered one card, like a sign painter, and sent it up out of the pit, (She sings one verse in her own voice.) The auctioneer did, and nobody could come in on it. Seri was the most beautiful place I've ever been and I'd like never to go back. I was the only unfinished thing in the room and they clapped anyway.

Not writing about the Mercy.

[Photographs: Quen, the Line, Seri]

• Quen: Quen. Dark, no echo. I checked.
• The Dun Border: The Gray Line. Don't change color.
• Seri: Seri. Feathers are money. I had none.

Still not writing about the Mercy.

Nym's been playing the pipe every night on the lower deck. Everybody's stepping around it. Kellen goes down and sits on the steps. There's a glass pitcher in the brig now, with roots in it.

Nine to One. Durbo's Back. Tuesday local, Friday House.

This casino is on an animal.

I'm trying to think how to tell you. You come in along a ramp, up something that looks like a long hill with lanterns on it, and the hill's breathing about once every eleven seconds. It's a Drum beast the size of a town, with a promenade along the spine and a vault in a cool spot under the ribs. And these gray domed things as big as a city bus sit around on the shoulders, drinking. What are they? Ticks. Livestock, actually. A Drum family owns them, and they brand them and go have breakfast. I'm told lamp oil on this side of the galaxy is mostly them.

Rules: the beast sleeps as long as nobody wins too big. Nine thousand chips and he rolls over, so everything in the building's arranged around not waking it. The Marl pit bosses keep a kid on the roof with a whistle, watching the sky, because when a giant's about to roll over, every scale lark for a mile goes up at once, four breaths before.

A heart the size of a tram goes under your feet, so slow you forget it. Then it goes again.

I'm undercover in a borrowed dress, with a pencil in my hair and this book in a washroom vent with six kinds of drain, and I come back to it between hands. I'm at the High Table and I'm winning very carefully. Wish me luck, if it's not too late by the time you read this.

Later. Same.

Lady Plenty. Auren. Solid gold, and I mean she looks poured, with what's left of her veils, worn down to lace, hanging off her arms that ring whenever they touch. She's the most generous person I've ever met. She's offered me a drink, a seat, a pair of gloves and a table with a better view, and I've said no thank you to every one, and every single one of those things came wrapped in a strip of her own veil.

You can hear it ring on her arm the second you touch it.

"Somebody taught you to say no thank you before you've looked in the box," she said. "Who was that, darling?"

She took my hand and said I looked tired, and asked if I had enough to eat, and my knees went a bit, because I lived in the fifth house till I was eleven and I know exactly what it is to get handed something by somebody who's writing it down.

She grew up with nothing. She told me so, and she made me cry about it. I cried at a card table on a monster, and a Marl with stone on his cheek and eyes painted on his eyelids slid me a card without looking at me, and I can't tell if she told me the truth 'cause it's the truth or because she could see it would work. I don't think she can tell either.

There's a drawer of check stubs in her suite, every one made out to the same flat on Auri, the one with the broken lift. I've copied the address into this book, and that's all I'm doing with it.

I've read about a thousand people. She's the first one who read me back.

After. Galley.

Three names on one back and it went three ways.

Kellen sat down next to the empty chair at the Dealer's table and played him a whole night. He won the last hand, and said thank you. Then he looked at the patch on the old Marl's thumb where it'd stayed dull, and asked him if he'd like to sit down. Fifty-one years that guy's been standing up at that table. The paint on his lids is copper and stone and it had started to flake. He sat. He said it was lower than he'd thought. And he's come with us, so there's a Marl in the galley now, dealing Kellen hands for everybody to bet on, and he painted one tiny blink on the cork with the last of his tin.

Mr. Marrow, the Skarn who wanted to sell the heartbeat to a perfumer, was right about the one thing none of the rest of us had thought to look at. He'd named the beast, and he'd cried when it rolled. Durbo isn't asleep. He's been lying still ever since they lost the herder who raised him, and the heartbeat Marrow's been putting up in wax is the only company either of them has. Marrow waxed every vent he had and went up past the cold lamp to the Head on his own, and told it, and nobody heard a sound come out of him at all. A Drum rigger named Tamb Oo wrote his own name under the herder's on the old tag, and hummed, and the heartbeat came down to meet him.

I lettered his name. Tukkar held the marker like it weighed more than it should. Marrow put a little glass vial in Vesk's hand, DURBO in capitals, and now it's on the table. Vesk hasn't looked at it so hard that she knows exactly where it is. There's no sun for this one.

And Lady Plenty got away, in the middle of the tilt, with the chips sliding downhill. ​xxxxxxxxxxx, I wrote, and Kellen's sun is a little crooked.

There was a present on the galley table when we got back. On our ship. On our table. Gold veil, tied. The price tag was still on it, and here's what the price tag says:

Paid. Ask me by whom.

I haven't opened it. Would you? Don't answer that. It rings a little if the ship shakes. I've put it in the contraband hold, and Lio's opened a pool.

Later. Writing this small.

I went up on the Ridge Walk the last night, for some air. It's the promenade along his spine, with lanterns, and there's a place where the path goes behind a bone the size of a chimney, and I went around it, and Vesk and Tukkar were there. Nobody was doing anything you could put on a form. He'd brought his plates all the way up. She was standing in his shadow and the whole of her was a color I haven't got a word for, coming up from the collar of that jacket, and his hand was about a finger away from her face. It stayed about a finger away.

I went back around the bone. I've known for a while. I just want to say I've lived in nine houses and I've never seen anybody be that careful with anything.

Kellen asked me on the way back to the ramp if we could be like that. He'd seen them too, he sees everything, it's very crowded. I said I didn't know what he meant, and he told me exactly what he meant, with no embarrassment at all, and I said I was his officer and it would not be appropriate, and that I was so sorry. ~~I would like~~ ~~It isn't that I don't~~

He said, "Thank you for telling me."

He means it. That's what's the matter with it.

[Photographs: Durbo's Back]

• The Sleeping Kaiju: Durbo's back. The floor breathes.

Friday. The Slip.

[Sticker: Two Ovens star, I SURVIVED THE FINALE.]

Somebody's moved the rota. I got the rota laminated and mounted it beside the speaker, and now it's upside down, and all week it's been the Two Ovens theme, low, on a loop. Who do you think? Right. I've spoken to Vesk. She looked at me, and she's got very flat eyes when she wants them. I've given up on the rota. It's staying up.

I told her I'd seen the green on the cork at Thren. I said, in all honesty, that I'd been meaning to say I was wrong about her, and that I was sorry for what I wrote on that form.

She said, "Which form?"

Then her hand came around from behind her and it was holding a cup of tea. A real one, with the leaves, made properly, for me. And she put it down and went away, and she'd left me a very faint thumbprint on the side.

Bruises this month: 4. I'm getting better at the deck.

[Doodle: Tally, four marks.]

Monday. The Bruise.

I sat in the Ironclad.

There's a machine bay in the yellow part of the ship. I've gone past it often enough, it's where Hush hangs from the ceiling and the Chorus sits on its pad, and at the back of it, kneeling, there's something like a hillside. Tukkar's war-frame. Fourteen meters, grown plate by plate, and one of the shoulder plates is blank. It matches.

The Bruise is a battlefield of pale unspent war-frames in purple grit, as far as you can see, and anything louder than a murmur sets the hulls ringing. General Brisk thinks every war that ends early was a waste of good armor. Tukkar served with his family. He got out, and he left the Ironclad kneeling at the edge and walked out to that bruise-colored thing in felt boots, and he tried to talk.

I had the chair. I could hear both sides. He was one beat late.

We lost him out there, at the end of a very long conversation. ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. ​xxxx. Tukkar stamped it himself, in plain ink, and left the red marker capped, and he looked at it and then went to his cell. I'm the one who wrote the name. I've been told it's the job. Kellen asked if he could draw a small sun, and Tukkar said yes. Lio gave everyone back their money. Somebody put a ration bar at the far chair and it's still there. I've wiped around it.

Same night. Very small.

Out on the Bruise you can't raise your voice, so anything Tukkar murmurs comes up on my board in the Ironclad, and I check it and send it on out the hull, low. That's what the chair's for. It's a relay and a key.

Tukkar was still talking. He'd gotten General Brisk to stop walking. Then the General filled his chest for the Muster Call and Tukkar said, "​xxxxxx. Hold," and it came up on my board, and it was correct.

It was correct. I looked at it. I looked at it again, the last digit, there's a way a digit can sit that I don't care for. It took one beat. Then I keyed it. Then the plain closed over him.

Everyone says he was a beat late. He says it. I watched him sit on the bench in his cell and say it to the floor.

I could go down there.

The third plant wants water.

A few days. It was a long stretch.

[Sticker: Ration bar flavor label, APPROVED.]

I'm not doing the whole satellite business, it's too much. Four more names, one after another, and everything was either on fire or suing us. I did nine hours in the chair at a stretch. We ate ration bars out of the wrapper and Lio or somebody read the flavor out loud every time. "Approved." We got so we were laughing at it. Back on the Bruise we'd all learned to murmur so the hulls wouldn't ring, and nobody's stopped, so for a week the whole ship's been asking for the salt like people in a sickroom.

The Cockpit Twins have never eaten a meal apart, and the two halves of a sandwich were on the console when we got in.

A mecha the size of a church came at us preaching in a teeny voice. Saint Pellum's thirty centimeters of gray fluff and a bad temper, with nine hundred in the congregation, she thought. Kellen counted the pews out loud, and she said amen after every number, and at seventy-one he said, "Twelve." I found Pell fluff in my soup, in my bead, in the third plant, and folded into this page. Feel that? That's her.

[A tuft of Pell fluff, taped to the page.]

Mr. Kreshul takes down satellites by injunction and railgun, in that order, and I've got his invoice. I have received an invoice for being aimed at.

Kreshul and No Partners. Taped in because no one will believe me

TO: A. CHASE (BRIEF)

AT 90 CREDITS THE FIRST QUARTER HOUR, DOUBLING:

RAILGUN, POINTED AT YOU .......... 90

FOLLOW UP RE: SAME ............... 180

CONSIDERING YOUR REPLY ........... 360

HEATING SURCHARGE ................ NO CHARGE

TOTAL ............................ 630

PAYABLE ON RECEIPT, OR ON IMPACT

Tukkar got hurt. He's fine. It's a dent you could set a bowl in, and he says it's fine, and the Doctor closed it up with his long hands while Tukkar stared at the ceiling. The Doctor said, "This will sting," with the most tremendous satisfaction.

[Photographs: A long stretch]

• The Church Yard: It preached. Teeny voice.

The Slip. Night.

This is the entry I said I wouldn't make.

I found something in the Chair, after. Mr. Kreshul's leather chair was still bolted to the heat sink, frost on the armrests, and there's a drawer in the left arm that Lio said was decorative. It wasn't. Paper. Real paper, out there, one sheet, gone stiff as a cracker, and I held it in my glove with my own breath loud in the helmet and read it twice. It isn't for here, so I've put it somewhere I'm not writing down. I'll tell you this much: the sheet has a Deputy Director's mark on it. I was scared then and I'm scared now. I'm going to the canteen tomorrow and I am going to eat beans, and I'm going to ask about Soob.

[A page has been torn out here.]

In the margin (Nym): Pencil leaves a shadow on the page beneath. I have not held this up to the lamp. I mention it so that you will know I could have.

In the margin (Abigail, later): I took the next page out too, after that. It doesn't help. There's always a page beneath.

[Photographs: Thren, Quen, Seri, Nine to One]

• Tarsk: Thren, the pits. They climb everything.
• Tomen: Quen. No flash. They asked nicely.
• Vesper: Seri. Two hundred of these, singing.
• Marl: Nine to One. He dealt me in.

THE BRIEF

Stall Rows, a town on a giant, the Farming World, Supply Closet 14-C

Thursday. A stall on some dock. Moving.

"Moving?" says everybody out here, when they mean hello, and you say "Moving." right back, even if your ship's been parked for a month. Me, I said "Yes, thank you, we're just about to get our clearance," and the Oru behind the counter, both of her, looked at me with so much pity.

[Sticker: THE BRIEF, LOUD. FRAGILE. STUBBORN..]

They call us the Brief. I knew that, I've been called it since I was four, but I'd only ever heard it on First Drawer, where it gets said to you by somebody with a form to fill out. Out here folks say it fondly and take a good long look at you, the way you'd look at a really small dog in a big coat. An old Tarsk at this counter kept one eye on the corridor and bent the other one all the way round to look at my neck. It said, "How long have you got?"

I said I was twenty-eight.

"So, not long," it said, and bought me a fried dough with glum jam, and the jam glows, by the way, and I've kept the paper.

Stall Row 6, Berth Side

FRIED DOUGH (1) .......... 2

GLUM JAM ................. 1

BODY WEIGHT ADJ., SOFT ... -1

PAID BY: THE GENTLEMAN WITH THE EYES

MOVING?

Friday.

So I've now eaten dock paste. It comes in a tube, it'll keep longer than you will, and the flavors are Regular, Sunday, Birthday, Beef Adjacent and Home.

[Sticker: Dock paste seal, MEETS THE MINIMUM.]

Regular is tan. C-minus.

Birthday is pink and has a grit in it that's meant to be festive. D, with a note to see me.

Beef Adjacent: nobody at the plant has met the animal.

Home. I don't know what to say about Home, since it doesn't say whose. I bought one at the Queue on a bad night, and a Hexil dockhand two stools down was having one too, and we didn't discuss it. I think it tasted kind of like the top of somebody's head. No grade.

Sunday is thick and a little sweet, and it's what they issue at Cradle, so it's the only thing he ate for twenty-odd years. He'll finish a whole plate of Dot's dumplings, and thank her, and thank the plate, and later I'll go by and there he is, sitting by himself on the cargo deck with a tube of Sunday, looking out at nothing, pretty content.

I had a whole thing ready to say to him about that, and instead I went and sat down and had some too.

In the margin (Kellen): (a tiny sun) it is better with someone

Rolling Day. Some town on a giant, the Oon. It's in the insurance.

I'd like to start a list of the things nobody tells you.

The town's called Lower Second Shoulder. Every town out here has a sign in the square saying which way the local giant rolls and when it last did, and when the date gets painted in fresh it's a holiday. We're only here to ask a Drum sheriff about a truck, and wouldn't you know it, we've shown up on the day. The larks went up, all of them, and the whole sky went speckled for four breaths, and everybody in the street calmly stopped what they were doing and held on to something.

Then down became sideways.

Was it fast? Nope, it took most of an hour. The main street leaned over like a page being turned, a bench slid by, and kids were cheering. An old Drum across from me, enormous and ribbed and the color of a flowerpot, with the blue skin on his chest going in and out as he breathed, was holding on to a lamp post with one hand and eating a sandwich with the other. There were things living in his ribs, and one of them looked at me.

Afterward everybody comes out on the porch with whatever broke and they have a drink on it. It's a new sky, they say, and your uphill's different, and there's a kind of grass called snore grass that needs raking off the lower windows. Nobody here thinks about it much, though. They think about the giant every day, real briefly, the way you think about your back.

The Drum told me all this, slowly. I could see each sentence coming a good while before I could hear it, 'cause his chest would start up first, and twice my bead decided the conversation was over and switched itself off to save its charge.

"Wake well," he said, when we left.

Tukkar's one instruction before we got here, standing in the hatch, in front of everybody: "Nobody lick the kaiju."

Who needed that to be an order? What happened? Anybody?

In the margin (Tukkar): Lio.

[Taped in: Dagboh claim form.] Every house in town keeps a stack of these in a drawer by the door.

Sunday. In the Lanes. A long one. Lio says it's a shortcut.

Doctor Nym's decided I've reached the point in my education where I should learn what he knows.

I said no, and I said it with a list of reasons, standing in the door of the medbay with the list in my hand.

"Quite right," he said. "Sit down."

Here's what it is. He stands behind you, with those hands, six fingers each, and he doesn't touch you. He tells you where a person's afraid, because fear lives somewhere exact, he says. He had me look at Lio's shoulder from across a room and then at a clerk's hip, and a body's a map, he says, and it's always folded along the same creases. A person who's scared of being found out stands with their weight over the foot nearest the exit, and somebody who's afraid for somebody else keeps their hands low and open. And I could see it, that's what's so horrible. I'd been doing it my whole life by looking at people's kitchens, and he does it by looking at their ribs, and it's the same map. Next time you're standing in a line somewhere, look at the feet. Go on.

Then he went round in front of me and put his head on one side, and his filaments stirred. There was the pulse. There was the other pulse.

"Left jacket pocket," said the Doctor. "Interior. About so big. You touch it before every question you're afraid of, a moment before you tap your pencil. May I ask what it is?"

I told him he may not.

"No," he agreed. "You flinched, though."

I said, "Thank you." No idea why, it's just what you say here.

I've moved it to the right pocket, and I found my hand going left anyway. What's in it? I'm not telling you either.

In the margin (Nym): Right pocket, now. Do persist. It is the most honest thing anyone aboard is doing.

Tuesday. The Farming World.

Beans!!

A whole world of them. Rows going off in every direction till the land stops, and the wind going through it, and the air smells like the inside of a good pot. I'm not going to be normal about this, and I've asked if we can stay.

The Gentle One's a Gelm about two bean poles tall. ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. The card says, Crime: Obstruction of Hostilities by Soup. Do not: stand between him and the beans. He's really soft-spoken. When it gets hot in the middle of the day he slumps, a little, and everything he's touched has gone up him in colors. He's lived out here for years, and he believes he's hiding.

But you can see in, that's the thing. It's a Gelm. He's clear all the way through, and right in the middle of him, in the lit-up little room where his lunch ought to be, he's been keeping his own bounty notice. He swallowed it, and he's been walking around with it for years, and every single neighbor in this whole town has read it through his stomach, and fed him, and said nothing, and stood guard.

He doesn't know.

I'm writing this at the end of a row of beans and I'm going to need a minute.

Wednesday. Before light.

Kellen woke me up, and he knocked, 'cause he's the only one aboard who knocks every single time.

There's a bounty crew's lander coming, and he's supposed to be getting the big fellow on a freight cart, and we've got till about dusk. He asked if I'd come outside first. I got my jacket, and he took me up to the top of the row. It's cold before sunrise on a planet with air in it, which I hadn't known. I've been cold in a corridor, and it isn't the same. He stood next to me with his hands at his sides.

He's seen a lot of sunrises. Dozens, he told me, on deployments, and he worked straight through every one of them with the lattice going, every line a thing that could come at him out of the glare.

It started coming up. All along the end of the world, pale at first and then that color, you know the one, and it came down the rows toward us, and I watched it reach the beans and then his boots.

"Nobody's coming," he said. "For about an hour."

I said I thought that was right.

"So I can just look at it."

I said yes. And he did. He looked at it the whole time, and I don't think he blinked. I've read files on Cultivars, and they don't cry, he doesn't have the plumbing. He stood there, and then he turned around to look at me and got a really worried look on his face and put one finger up, close to my cheek, not touching.

"You're leaking," said Kellen.

[Sticker: Translator caption, This person is fine..]

Lots of species take that as a threat display, so I told him it wasn't.

"It's up there all the time?" he said. "The big light? Nobody told me it was this big."

In the margin (Kellen): (a tiny sun) (a tiny sun) (a tiny sun)

In the margin (Abigail, later): I've thought about whether to write down what I did next. I stood a little closer. That's the whole thing. That's all that happened.

In the margin (Dash): Darling. DARLING.

In the margin (Abigail, later): THIS IS A PRIVATE BOOK.

Next night.

Stamped ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, and Tukkar did it without a word. There was a sack of beans on the galley table when we got back, no return label, and how it got there before we did I couldn't tell you. Dot's made soup. Kellen planted a pole next to his and tagged it ORCHARD, so we own a vine now, and we have to go back.

Monday. The Tax-Haven Asteroid.

Okay. I'm going to be very calm about this.

There are Humans on the board.

Three. Out of ninety-nine of the worst beings in the Compact, we've managed three. There's a war hero with a lovely speech and a very polite arsonist with a lanyard, and those two I get. And then, on a mugshot with a bad perm:

DENNIS

WANTED

Crime: embezzled one (1) moon

Bounty: 600,000 credits

Known to: apologize first

Do not: let him do your taxes

He's the one I take personally. So does the whole crew, turns out, since each of them's been coming up to me, one at a time, to ask if I know him. Tukkar asked. Tukkar asked me if I knew him. There are eight billion people on Earth.

He's under a very ordinary carpet, fluorescent light, clacking keys, and everybody on this rock's a registered company.

Tuesday.

Here's what he did, and it's the most beautiful piece of paperwork I've ever read.

A Brief's stamp book is the only one in the Compact with a box for dependents. It's left over from Probation, and nobody audits it, because nobody expects us to last. ​xxxxxxxxxxxxx filed a moon as Spare Parts, Miscellaneous, and then listed everyone who lived on it as his children. Six thousand people, and for eleven years he's been the legal parent of a moon, and he's the mother of four hundred Krai. Nobody could evict them, nobody could tax them, and he copied every name by hand.

He's filed his own arrest nineteen times. The asteroid was built to lose paper, and it's lost every one.

I walked down Supply Closet 14-C to find the original. It's a closet, and there's a mop in it. There's also, past the mop, a staircase, and about four steps down the asteroid's nice polite gravity quits and something else starts, and I went the rest of the way on my face. Rolled, chin in, soft things first, and Vesk would've given it a "no." I looked up with blood on my lip and there was a sky underneath me, on the wrong side of the stairs, with a moon in it.

I sat there for a good while.

That's where Dennis lives. He offered me decaf in a numbered cup and apologized for the carpet. "It was here when I embezzled it," he said.

He's sixty or so, in a cardigan. Soft like me, sweats like me, has a little scab on his knuckle, and I haven't been in a room with somebody who looks like my own arm in about two years. I wasn't ready. I was nervous and kind of giddy, and I stood there looking at the fine hairs on the back of his hand, and they were the most exotic thing I'd seen all year.

"​xxxxxx," he said, "O-R-D-W-A-Y. In case you need it for the form."

Wednesday. Dock clinic, Level Two.

Two stitches in the lip. There's a long printed chart on the wall with the outlines of all twenty-eight peoples and what not to press. The doctor says it's wrong, they're all wrong, so every clinic corrects its own in grease pencil. NOT THIS ONE. ASK FIRST. The Phaedrae outline's blank, with a pencil on a string.

Next to the Human somebody's written, in a shaky old hand, THEY LIE ABOUT THE LEFT SIDE.

I went and stood by the cabinet.

Thursday.

Dennis's hand is going, the first two fingers, they've knotted shut. Six thousand signatures for eleven years, and on a Human nothing grows back. He keeps it inside the cardigan. I asked to see it, and he showed me, and he got this look on his face like I'd caught him at something. Then I asked who was going to sign when he couldn't.

He didn't have an answer, 'cause a claim like his ends with the person who filed it. And we end early.

So it has to be another Probationary book, you see, another Brief. On Earth there's a good eight billion of us. On this rock, on the last day of a forty-cycle objection clock, there's one.

I've had the form in front of me for four hours, and it says CO-FILER, and there's a line.

I haven't signed anything since

[A page has been torn out here.]

Thursday, later.

I signed it.

I was scared sick, so I went and threw up first. Then I sat down with a pen and wrote my whole name in my best hand, and it didn't look any different from how it looked last time. It looks just the same. Why does it look the same?

Six thousand people stay where they are. Dennis stays in custody, and he walked up to that counter himself, in his cardigan.

"Thank you," I said, as the cuff closed.

"O-R-D-W-A-Y," said Dennis.

I spelled it back to him twice, because he'd asked. Then I wrote it in pen, and Tukkar stood holding the marker for a long while, and then he capped it, and he didn't cross out anything, and Kellen drew a sun with a form number on it.

He paints coastlines, Dennis does, and he gave me one. It's Earth, or anyway it's what he remembers of it. I've never been to Earth, I was born on a colony that failed and I've got no idea what a coast's supposed to look like. Is it right? You tell me. Tukkar asked where I wanted it hung and I said the window side.

Friday. Not sleeping.

I took copies of the asteroid's routing slips, 'cause I take copies. Nineteen times his arrest was filed and nineteen times somebody initialed a slip that sent it somewhere it couldn't come back from. It's very neat, and the sevens have a small foot on them. Sound familiar?

I got out the booth log from Beacon One and laid them side by side on the bed.

It's probably nothing. People get taught to write in the same schools. I've started a list anyway, and I've put it at the back of my head where I keep the others.

[A cup ring.]

Saturday.

Remainder's coming up. Leftover day, the one that doesn't belong to any Quarter, because the committee that designed the calendar noticed it too late. You pay the tab, you give back the wrench, you write the letter. You eat what's left.

I've laminated a calendar of what all twenty-eight peoples do on what day, so I can bring the right thing to the right door. Tukkar's the only one who doesn't want anything, and this morning I saw him write a four-word note and put the date on top in big numbers. He saw me see it, so I went and looked at the tree.

A card came for me, care of the Slip.

Card, cream stock, green ink

Dear Abigail. I hear you are eating badly and doing well. The floor is not the same. Your chair has been kept. Have you opened the atlas? You should. It was meant to be looked at. With affection, S.A.

She's got lovely handwriting. She taught me some of mine.

Haven't opened it. Haven't, in fact, opened it since

[A page has been torn out here.]

I've been sitting here a bit. The third plant needs turning.

Remainder. Stall Row 9. I have had the House Pour

its very clean. tastes like a wrench

there's a Hexil here named Dob and I've been telling him about my mother and he's got all six arms folded and he is being so nice. I said she used to say eat a roll Abby you can fix it after. and he said what is a roll and I said thats not the POINT Dob. I dont have the kitchen any more. I gave it to a tree. did I tell you that

I said do you know what a signature is and he said its when you

Lio has come to get me. which one. it's the nice one

In the margin (Dash): For the record she sang all of Postage Due, Darling. She knows every word. She does not know the words.

[Photographs: The Oon, the green one, and the rock]

• Oonma: Oonma. Somewhere down there, a town on a giant.
• Drum: Lower Second Shoulder. Wake well.
• Gelm: You can see his lunch. I didn't ask.
• The Farming World: The Farming World. Very green.
• The Tax Haven Asteroid: The Tax-Haven Asteroid. The moon's under the carpet somewhere.

THE DISH

The Ring Station

Monday.

Hunt twenty-seven.

I've known this one was on the board since the first day. It's been there the whole time, up on the cork, between Uncle Reflio and the Insurance Adjuster. I put my hand on the wall next to it, the first week, and I took my hand away. Tukkar picks the order. He doesn't know. He couldn't know. He looked at the board at breakfast and tapped it twice and said, "Gunner. Ring Station. Abigail, you're lead, you've done your reading."

I said yes.

I have done my reading.

In the margin (Nym): Weight over the left foot. Hand to the right pocket, then the left. I shall not ask.

Tuesday. Orbit.

THE ORBITAL GUNNER

WANTED

People: Hexil

Crime: fired the ​xxxxxxxxxxxx strike on orders

Known to: aim at that spot ever since

Do not: expect him to stop apologizing

​xxxxxxxxxx. That's his name. I knew that already. I've known that for some time.

The Ring Station's got a rule, and the people who still live here will tell you it at the airlock. You say sorry before you touch a console. It started when he came home. So everybody goes around saying it, "Sorry, sorry," patting at the machinery. I watched a Marl technician apologize to a light switch. It's very funny. I wrote this down in the airlock because it's very funny.

He cut his wire. A Hexil cuts one strand of head wire for a death, and they splice it at weddings, and he's nearly bald. Just green verdigris scalp. He ran out. And what was left he's spliced straight into the tracking cable of the big dish, forty strands, so he can feel where it's pointing inside his own head. It's pointing at a patch of dark. There's nothing there now.

The brass nameplate he carries says TARN. It's been rubbed so far down you have to read it with your thumb. I did.

He reads the whole station through the floor. Six palms flat on the deck.

He apologizes in rank order. First to the door. Then the dish. Then the soup. Then whatever person's in the room. The door hasn't replied yet.

I've got my hand on a wall right now, and I've said sorry to it, and I want to go home.

Wednesday. I don't know.

The dish started to swing. I'll say it that way. Tukkar had touched a console without the sorry. It came around, slowly, the whole great thing, and it came around toward the Orchard. Lio shouting. Ledger counting. It was going to fire, and Tukkar was going for the bay.

An order would work on him, and then it wouldn't be his. Everything goes in through the deck and the only thing the wire accepts is one thing.

I took the bead out. Raw. I got down on the floor of the gunnery deck, on my knees and then all the way down, my face near the plates, and I put both of my hands flat on the deck, as many as I've got.

I said what I said.

I'm not writing it. I said it into the floor, in a very low voice, for no one but me, and I said sorry, and it wasn't on behalf of the Stack, or anybody. Just me. Tukkar was too far away. I've checked. Vesk was on the other deck. There's one person alive who heard what I said and he heard it through six hands.

The dish stopped. A hand's width from our hull. Kellen measured it afterward.

The Gunner turned in his chair. Down in the Cold Mess there are four places set at the table, and nobody will say who the fourth one's for. He's got those two eyes that go separately. One of them was on me and the other one had stayed on the dark.

He knows. I could see he knows. He was there, you see. He knows whose signature closed the package. It would've come up on his board.

He said, "Sorry about the door."

I said that was all right.

Same.

I've got one orbit. He let go of the aim for one orbit, and I copied the log with one of his eyes on me. It reads clean. On that day, at that time. It says his reading was clean. No fault. The report says there was a sensor fault. He told that to a tribunal and they put him in the Abyss for it. For saying it. Convicted him of falsifying a fault he hadn't written.

And I read that report, and I put my

I'm sorry, I've got to stop.

[A page has been torn out here.]

[A page has been torn out here.]

Friday. Galley.

​xxxxxxxxxx. I lettered it very carefully. It's ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. I don't forgive him. I'm not sure that's mine to do. I didn't refuse to, either. He asked if he might say it to me now, and I said he could ask, and he's cut the splice, and the dish is still up there, pointing.

He's left the fourth chair empty. He said sorry to it first.

Tukkar put the red marker down on the table with the cap on and didn't move it. He looked at me. He looked for a while. He checks every face once, but that was twice. Then he said sorry to the galley door. Once. Low.

Kellen went to the pot, filled a bowl, and put it down at the empty chair at the far end. Soup. Dot's. Nobody had asked him.

"Who's that for?" said Lio. It was only Lio, not any of the others.

"It's for the apology," Kellen said.

The bowl's still there. I'll wipe around it.

Vesk brought me soup too, in my cabin, and left before I could turn over.

In the margin (Vesk): (a green thumbprint)

PLACES I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO LEAVE

Hullow, the Brunch, Main Street, the Case, and some doors

Sunday. Nothing to report.

Nobody's shot at me for six days, so I've reorganized my adapters. Sorry, whoever's reading this, it's adapters today. There are dozens of kinds of plug in common use, every home's got a drawer of them and adapters for the adapters, and at least one in there fits nothing. You've got one too, I bet. Mine's labeled FITS NOTHING, and Kellen spent an afternoon trying it in every outlet aboard and thanking each one.

Two things in the mail, so I'm taping them in so they're all in one place.

Card, cream stock, green ink

Dear Abigail. I hear you were at the Ring Station. Do be careful of old equipment. It has such a long memory and so little judgment. Your chair is still here. S.A.

Stores Division. FIRST NOTICE

FORM 7-G ISSUED AGAINST THUMBPRINT IS DUE

FOR ROUTINE REVIEW. PLEASE RETURN TO STORES

AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE.

THIS IS A COURTESY.

I've written back to say I'm still using it, though in my whole life I've never known Stores to send a courtesy. Should I be worried? Kind of, yeah.

[Sticker: Goom greeting, STILL HERE? STILL HERE..]

I've been meaning to write down some of what I've seen that isn't the job. I keep getting to a place, and getting about half an hour of looking at it before something catches fire, and then it's gone and all I've got left is the file. The file says "Location: The Oon." I was there! There was a person selling hot rocks to stand on!

Notes Toward a Field Guide to Saying Hello

• Gelm. "Have you eaten?" Give her your hand. You won't get it back until she's satisfied.
• Krai. "Warm enough?" It's small talk. It's also them asking how fast you're going to be able to move. Say "Getting there."
• Sorrel. "Good light." Not after dusk. After dusk you'll be saying it to a furled shape in a chair, and the chair isn't interested.
• Phaedrae. "Who's here today?" Thank the wrong one and the right one's listening.
• Goom. "Still here?" "Still here." You always say it back. I forgot once, on a platform, and a very old Hexil stopped and waited with all six hands open until I did.
• Tarsk. "Crest down," when you leave. They mean the door. They also mean the door in general.
• Drum. "Wake well." Go ahead and say it, even if it's the middle of the afternoon. It's the last thing you may get to say to them this year.
• Lamenti. Don't say anything. They've got it. "You're loud," one said to me on the Queue, kindly, with the petals on my side closing up, and I wasn't saying a thing. I'd only been thinking.
• Mantle. They'll give you a sniff receipt. Keep it.
• Tessel. It's all in the honeycomb in the chest. My bead reports no speech detected and I have been told, as far as anyone can tell me, that one of them wrote me a lovely note, and it's on my jacket. It smelled like toast for a month.
• Pell. Crouch. Actually don't crouch, they hate that. Find a shelf. Mind the lid on your soup. And never get one wet. I've seen a wet Pell. It's about the size of your thumb and there's no reasoning with it.
• Oru. Both of them. Greet both of them. If there's only one, stop talking and be kind.

Thursday. Hullow. Dock and Home, both.

They write both dates this far out, Dock on the left and Home on the right. Dock's where your knees are, Home's where your landlord is, and every wall's got two clocks on it.

Dock: Thursday. Home: I've been told not to ask till we get back.

The purser at the fuel dock asked, "What's your Ovens?" It's how you find out how far behind you are. He was four finales back. Vesk looked at him for a good while. "Somebody's about to find out about the twin," she said, and walked off, and he had to sit down.

I've seen a lot of odd things by now. I get around, I've been sideways on a giant. Then we came out of the Lane into Hullow, and I didn't say anything for a long time.

Ten thousand ships in a slow river around a dead gray moon. It takes days for one to pass, and they're all old and all dark and covered in ice, with coat after coat of paint in patches, every coat from a different owner, and you can read the whole life of a hull if you know how. It looks like a graveyard, and everybody calls it that. Then you notice there's a little window lit, way up on the side of one, and then another one, way off.

"Still here," said our comm, in a small, rusty voice. It wasn't anybody on board, it was the ship going by.

Kellen leaned over the comm. "Still here. What are you made of?"

In the margin (Abigail, later): It took a day and a half to answer. Paint, it said.

There are bats. Hull bats go by the engine hum, so they only hang up in the ships that are still thinking. Want to know which of the ten thousand wrecks is awake and listening to you? Look for the one with the bats. I've been looking out the window at a dead battleship the size of a county, and it's got bats.

A wreck that can answer back is a person, so nobody can salvage it. Most of them haven't said anything for a hundred years, in case it counts, I think.

Friday, Dock.

THE ADMIRAL

WANTED

Length: forty kilometers of battleship

Crime: decided it was a person

Known to: want a funeral

Do not: argue with the guest list

I've seen the seating chart, and there are place cards, and it's objected to the caterer.

The Doctor's leading this one, since somebody had to go in and be polite to it. It's the first time I've seen him dress for something and really mean it. He went up through those long iced corridors with the bats shifting around overhead, and he's sat in the Long Hall with it all day, a Vael composer arranging the last rites of a warship. I brought him tea, and he had a chart spread out, and he was moving a little marker a centimeter to the left.

"It wishes the brass who sent the fleet to attend," he said, without looking up. "It wishes them seated where they can see."

I said I thought that was fair.

"Yes," said the Doctor. "It's the most frightening thing I've heard in years."

The whole Compact thinks the countdown's a weapon, and I've got four governments shouting at me.

Saturday, Dock. I don't know what they're calling it at Home.

It was a salute.

I asked the gong if it would like to begin. It rang.

Twenty-one guns. It fired its own hull. Each round was one plate off its own spine, and with every one a window went dark, and way out in the river behind it another ship would light one window, and then shut it. All ten thousand of them. They'd been waiting all this time for somebody to say they could stop. The bats all came away at once. I don't have anything to compare it to. It's the first funeral I've ever been to where I couldn't see the end of the deceased. We lost all of it by morning.

Its name's on a hull plate. ​xxxxxxxxx. It chose a sentence to go with that, and I copied it out onto the board with the good pen.

We came when we were called.

Nym's margin note was the only one I've ever seen him stop in the middle of. He'd started a word and lifted the pen off, and you could see where it had rested, and then he finished it. I'm not going to write down what it said. Kellen folded a boat out of a ration wrapper and put that on the board. Tukkar let it stay.

Tuesday. The Brunch.

[Sticker: Time-Share lanyard, GUEST, stamped UPGRADED.]

I've got a lanyard.

"The vacation your problems can't survive." A resort in low orbit over the Goom, with a lobby fountain of something pink and carpet patterned like a spreadsheet, and a week in here's ten years for everybody outside. It's a real bargain if there's something you need to outlast. So an hour in there's about three weeks out here. I was in for fifty minutes by my watch, and I checked it a whole lot. Nobody checks out till they've sat through the full presentation, and the presentation starts the moment you try to leave and ends when you sign. You can decline, sure, but every time you decline they give you a free upgrade, and every upgrade adds a week. See the problem?

Lio came in for the free brunch. He came in for the free brunch!

They've got flies in the buffet that live one day, and they've been living it down here for what might be a century outside. The staff says that's a sign of freshness. There's a clock on the wall that counts down, and I've been watching it, and it doesn't get to zero. There's a woman named Auntie Fem Boro whose job is to cry at you, sincerely, about your decision, and she's the best I've ever seen. I got most of the way through a Heritage Wall of names with dates when a descendant's due back, and then the bell went and a new one came up in clean type, BRIN OMDOR, and Tukkar didn't say a word. I turned around and there was somebody going by with a name tag from before I was born.

"How long have you been here?" I said.

"Oh, just got in," she said. "Did they ever catch who took the Starter?"

I said no, and she looked so pleased. The Starter went missing in the sixth year of Two Ovens and it's on its forty-first.

I've asked to leave. I've been upgraded.

Dock: still Tuesday. Home: I've done the math and I'm going to be sick.

Lio signed.

He signed at Table Nine, as all five of himself, because the Baron took his hand and tasted every one of them in a single handshake and said he could have them merged in a week. All five signed, and I've never seen them agree on so much as a sandwich. Dash signed big. Ledger read it first and signed anyway, Pip's is in block letters with a ship drawn under it, and there's Lio's, and I've seen his signature on the arsenal sheet, I've seen him do it five ways, and I've never seen him press that hard. And last there's one line in a smooth cold hand.

He wouldn't look at me. I asked him why. He looked at me with the plain face you can't remember afterward and he said, "Abigail. Sweetheart. Which of us do you figure I was asking for?"

The Baron swallowed the contract to protect it, and that was his mistake. He's a Gelm, so under those buffet lamps every guest in the room read the fine print through his stomach. Where've we seen that before?

It's on the board as ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, and there's a note next to it about ten unpaid years. ​xxxxxxxxxxxx, in pen. Tukkar's still holding the marker, and the pool's open. Dot's heard all about it and sent a second helping of broth, and when I got to the galley Lio was sitting at the table with both arms around the pot.

[Taped in: Lio's betting slip.] On my plate at breakfast. I don't know who wrote which line. Yes I do.

Three weeks of mail came all at once. The plants were on the ship, which stayed up top and went three weeks without me. The second one looks peaked. All three have been watered.

Friday. Main Street.

I got Kellen back today.

He'd wandered into the One-Street World to ask directions and got booked on the spot. It's a planet with one street. What's on it? A lamp at the far end, wooden planks with a groove worn down the middle, and about half the buildings empty and very, very clean. The Sheriff's a Drum named ​xxxxxxxxxxxxx, and he's been posted here sixty years. The posting was meant to last a few weeks, and then the train stopped coming. He charged Kellen with Standing Like You Mean It.

I've got the index card, and I brought my reading glasses.

Town of Main. Charge, read before stew

NAME: Kellen

CHARGE: Standing Like You Mean It

ALSO: Walking In From The East Without Having Eaten

ALSO: Thank You, Excessive

FINE: One dish washed

SENTENCE: Until supper

You can only leave town while the porch bulb's lit, and he puts it out when supper starts. Miss Ennis Tarrow, in Cell Two, has been arrested once a month for years. She showed me the file box, and there are a whole lot of cards. Every crime's an invitation, see. "Stay for seconds," she told me, and went back to her knitting.

I found Kellen under the dead bulb, up on a stepladder, oiling that huge blue chest with both hands while the Sheriff told him about the Last Train. It took about an hour for him to get to the end of the sentence. Kellen was very happy, and he asked me if I'd committed anything.

I said I didn't believe I had.

The chest started to move, and I stood there, and I saw the sentence coming. You can see it coming too, can't you?

"Possession," it said, eventually, "of a Second Opinion." And then, "Also. Loitering. With Your Coat On."

The stew was good. Tukkar was there the whole time and he got charged too, and I don't want to talk about it. I saw him wash a dish.

Tuesday. Slip.

Coolant voucher. Stack form, routine, one line wants an officer's initials so we can top up the engine drums. It's been on my desk three days. The quantity's right, I've checked the quantity. I took it to the window to look at it and I took it back. Lio came up as Ledger and stood in the door and said, "It's forty liters of coolant, Abigail," and I said I know what it is. He looked at me a good while, and he took it away, and an hour later it'd been initialed five different ways.

I don't know what's the matter with me. It's a voucher.

Wednesday

Plant 2: peaked.

Thursday

Plant 2: peaked.

Friday

Plant 2: new leaf?? Beans.

Saturday

Plant 2: not a leaf.

Gull City, the Garbage Moon. Election day. WE WON.

I want this written down 'cause it hardly ever happens.

Lio ran for mayor of a landfill. All five of him, as a slate. How do you vote? You drop a crushed can through the incumbent. He's a Gelm named ​xxxxxxxxxx, pink as a scrubbed pot, elected eleven times with no opposition, because the opposition keeps getting put on a truck. He once held a garrison of three thousand at a surrender dinner for seventeen days and nobody was allowed to leave the table, and that's what he's on the board for. I didn't look for the sad part. There's a gull called Barley who works for him, and I shook its foot. The Mayor offers you a bowl before every sentence. "Soup? You're running against me. Soup?"

[Doodle: A sun with a sash, "(Kellen's. I copied it.)".]

A cold wind came through at noon and set him firm, so the cans couldn't sink, and they piled up on his head. He lost in public, to Dash by four hundred cans, and Ledger had called it to the can. The Lounge full of everybody he'd thrown away came out and applauded, and Tukkar walked up with cuffs, and he handed Lio his can-lid chain and held out his wrists, and it took about a minute. Nobody was hurt, nothing burned, he's in custody, and it's red on the board. Kellen drew a sun with a sash on it, and we had the Mayor's soup for a week.

That's it. That's the whole thing. It was great.

Sunday. Mail.

From the Farming World. Pencil on a seed packet

Miss Chase. You won't know me. I had the row next to him for thirty years. When you people wrote him up you put his right name in the return, and the valleys he'd been living in, because I suppose that is how it's done. The Stack read that. We have each been fined for harboring, every family on the list, and it's more than a year's beans. Two have sold. He cried when he found out he'd been read, and he can't stop going dark. We'd kept that for him a long time. I thought you should know how it came out, since I am told you are careful about names.

I wrote his name in the return. I wrote it in my best hand because someone ought to.

I feel awful, and I've read this a few times. I sent what I've got, which isn't very much. I don't know what else you do.

Wednesday. The Case.

I was told not to tap.

THE LAST OF THE DRAY. Species Museum. There's a whole hall of dioramas under glass, velvet ropes at every turn, and at the end of it one person in a case in a hard white cone of light. He's bones, an open lattice of bones, like carved driftwood, and you can see right through his ribs to the back wall. Little pale moths go in and out of him. They had a whole people to live in once, and now there's the one. He hasn't asked anybody to do anything about it. Every bone holds a memory and rings at its own pitch if a draft goes through.

He's written better placards than the Museum's, because he's corrected them. He wants a formal apology from the Compact and improved lighting, and I couldn't swear to which order.

Placard, Hall Two. Copied out by me, corrections his

THE DRAY WERE A PEACEFUL AND MUSICAL PEOPLE

We were half right. Ask Kellor about the Third Bell War.

WHO PASSED GENTLY FROM THE GALAXY

They did not pass. Please see the ribbon.

PLEASE DO NOT TAP

This one is correct.

The gift shop sells bottled water called Last Of, with bones on the label, forty credits. I've got the receipt. Obviously.

[Taped in: Last Of water label.] And the label. I didn't open the bottle.

Along the back corridor there's a storeroom of empty cases, for species not yet lost. Dozens. Clean. Each with a little brass frame for the card. I went in by mistake, and at the end there's a plinth labeled NEXT.

I stood there and I looked at that. I was the only Brief in the building. The Docent came and found me and asked, very gently, how long I had.

Same.

Kellen signed him out. Nothing's allowed out of there without a Return Date, and he hasn't got anybody who can give him one, so you have to sign as his guarantor, and then you're the borrower. Kellen's never borrowed a thing in his life. He was very moved. At the unveiling somebody propped a door, and before the draft could get into his ribs he told everyone what really happened at the Dedication, and I won't tell you, except that there's a ribbon in it. Then ​xxxxxxx came out through the front doors, with moths, and the wind from the street went through him, and every bone he has rang together. It was a whole city, all the bells of a place that isn't there.

Kellen thinks the brass tag is a medal. I haven't said.

Saturday.

Spent a whole day being unwell. It's only a cold, and nobody else on this ship has ever had one, including the Marl. Kellen stood at the end of my bunk and asked what it was. Tukkar sent a double ration bar, Lio or somebody brought me a pudding and ate it. Nym looked in from the corridor and observed, from three meters away, that I was producing a great deal of it and that he'd always found the nose an underrated organ.

Vesk fixed the blanket and left. There was soup. She'd like me to say there wasn't, so if anybody asks, there wasn't.

Kellen's been told it's going around. Now he's asking who it's going around to.

Late, I couldn't sleep, and there was a voice coming out of my ceiling vent, low and flat, a voice I've only ever heard through a door. "Sixty rings, plain. Two dozen seeded. Four for the Inspector, burnt. Ovens lit at second bell." It's the end of Two Ovens, the night baker reading tomorrow's list in the dark shop. It went all the way to the bottom of the list.

I didn't say anything.

[Photographs: Hullow, the Brunch, Main and the Case]

• Hullow: Hullow. Ships all the way round.
• Machine mind: A hull at Hullow. The lights were on.
• The Time Share at the Goom: The Brunch. The clock doesn't get to zero.
• The One Street World: Main, from the launch. That's all of it.
• Kellor: Kellor. The whole world's a museum.
• The Species Museum: The Case. Nobody said no flash. I just knew.

WHO'S HERE TODAY

Stair Nine, the Painted Moon, Ume, the Rooftops

Tuesday. Fourth Floor Basement. A landing.

[Doodle: An eye in a keyhole, "lunch, 12:00".]

I've come home to arrest somebody over lunch.

The basement runs on something called the Stairwell Truce. You knock twice on the rail, wait for the pipe to answer, hang up your lunch bag, and that landing's yours. Nobody on any landing may ask the person eating their name, floor or employer, and if you break it every door that reads your badge dims at you and refuses, forever. I worked in this building six years and had no idea. I ate at my desk.

The Mole's been selling the tower to the Gray Syndicate for nineteen years, a shoulderful of moss at a time. That's how it's done: a Mantle's cape picks up the smell of every room it's in, so he walks through, and then somebody comes along and buries their face in his back and reads who sat at which desk. Kind of gross.

The sentence called it Treason by Shrubbery, and I gave that an A.

He's on Stair Nine, gray fur on stilts, one leg folded up, that long beak of a face that doesn't move, and I can't read it, I can't read a thing. He's got a pith flatcake in those long fingers and he chews twelve times, which is how he's chewed every bite for nineteen years. He's answering a letter out loud, to the flatcake, in perfect formal prose, and it isn't even addressed to him.

I sat down four stairs below and got out my sandwich. Kellen made it, by the manual. I've got one hour and I'm not allowed to ask his name. Ever tried to arrest somebody whose name you can't ask? Me neither, till today.

Same. Quarter past twelve.

Eleven minutes on one stair and nothing, so I ate slow, and the pipe knocks every so often, somebody on another landing. I've been a terrible person at lunch for six years, and I've got a lot of apologizing to do to some stairs.

I said, "Is it any good?"

He looked at the flatcake for twelve chews, and those are long ones.

"Adequate," he said.

I could've wept.

In the margin (Abigail, later): The moss at his shoulder leaned about a hair toward me while I was eating. I should have remembered the clerk in Stores.

Galley, after.

I'm going to go fast 'cause my hand's tired.

He's been correcting lost-property forms for years, in pencil, so strangers get their stuff back, and he's never signed one. His pencil's good. "Unsigned. A."

He's also been reading the Doorman's thank-you letters from the Abyss and answering every one out loud, and never sending the answers. And right at the end, with the Syndicate's handler standing between us and the shift about to change, he asked me whether I'd come for the file.

I'm a really bad liar, Lio can tell you.

I said yes.

And he told me his name. Then he reached four steps down with one of those arms and tore a strip of living moss off his own back, the whole Fourth Floor on it, and held it out. It came away with a sound I'm not going to describe.

​xxxxxxxxxx. ​xxxxxx. We ran the Strip up nine flights in a paper bag with the whole building's pipes knocking, and Tukkar went through the Mailroom on his knees, through aisles cut for Pell. At the counter Postmistress Plumb pushed the clearance at me with the line blank, and I signed my whole name, right beside ​xxxxxxxxxx's. Didn't even throw up first.

He's filing, with a raw stripe down his back, filing it all himself in the right drawers, and the next noon somebody else hung a bag on Stair Nine.

Tukkar asked me first: on Landing Eight, with the cuffs out, he asked me if he should. I've been keeping track, and that's the first time. Remember that landing.

Nym's note on the board: Two knocks and a wait.

[Photographs: Stair Nine]

• The Fourth Floor Basement: The landing. Bag hung, nobody on it yet.
• Hunt 31: Lunch relay on Stair Nine: The relay. Nobody dropped lunch.

Same day. Fourth Floor. Lift lobby.

Since I was in the building anyway I went up to look at my old desk, and nobody's at it, but there's a plant on it I didn't put there.

A Mantle was waiting by the lifts when I came out, under the recruiting poster that says YOUR FACE IS AN ASSET, in a plain gray coat with the moss kept real short, standing on one leg. Internal Affairs. Inspector ​xxxx. I've been reading faces since I was four, and when a Brakkan shuts the door at least you know it's a door. This one I looked at and got absolutely nothing back. ​xxxxxxxxxx I could at least read by his lunch. This was like looking down a well to see how deep it goes, and it's got a coat on.

"Officer Chase. You've a book out from Stores." Very mild. "One hopes it's being kept properly. Observations only. I understand they do pile up. Loitering, for instance. With your coat on."

The lift came, and the Inspector folded up and got in, and the door closed.

I stood there. The Sheriff only ever said that out loud, and I've written it in exactly one place. Which place? You're holding it.

Lowry. Before the wedding.

Note for my own reference. The real file on the third satellite's under the third plant in my cabin, in the false bottom. I'll move it after the wedding.

In the margin (Nym): C-minus. The third plant has done nothing to deserve this.

A wedding.

I'm on a ladder.

Hunt thirty-eight. There's a town called Lowry on a planet called Wessa that used to have two moons, till a quarry blew up the small one and nobody told the planet. So a Skarn sign painter named ​xxxxxxxxxxxxx hung them a new one, forty meters of canvas on a frame, towed by a tiny engine. He painted it himself, and every guest at this wedding got a little brush, and on the hour they go up on the ropes and touch it up. Four hundred Skarn in their best felt, every vent stopped for the occasion, and I've never seen anybody try so hard to be quiet. What's that sound like? The whole hillside sounds like a big person holding in a sneeze.

He promised his niece the moon when she was five, he promised her, so he went and did it.

He sits up on the frame with every vent open to the high wind and it plays him, one long note, and the note holds the canvas flat. He can't lower his voice. It's physically not available to him. Kellen and I were at the bottom of a hundred meters of ladder when we heard from up top, at a volume I felt in my knees:

"I AM BEING QUIET."

The rims of the moon went a little blue.

Kellen's seen a sunset here he likes. They've painted it on the back of the marquee, behind the bride, and he doesn't know it's painted, and he's asked if we can keep it.

Later. Very late. Or the next day.

It didn't work and it worked.

Lio came apart, and I mean that. When the plan fell in, and we'd lifted ​xxxxx off and the note had died and all that sky had started settling down onto four hundred people in felt, and he'd scrambled back up and it wouldn't take, all of Lio's plates came off each other, amber and gray, and spread. He went out over the sag on the frame, thin as a coat of paint, Dash up one side and Ledger counting tension along the other and Pip holding a corner in his teeth. I saw it from underneath, and every bit of him was holding up somebody else's lie, because it was a nice town and it was a nice girl.

The sky stayed up for the toast, and then ​xxxxxxxxxxxxx pulled every stopper he owned and stepped off the frame into the updraft, and he got clean away. He whistled the whole way, and they heard it in the next county. And what did it sound like? Congratulations.

​xxxxxxxxxx. Tukkar stood there with his marker, capped. In the winnings jar in the morning there's a white-painted moon the size of a dinner plate, and nobody's owned up.

I went to see if Lio was okay. It took him a while to get all the way back, and I sat outside the cabin and listened to them seating, one at a time, for a long time. Then a really small voice from somewhere around my knee said, "don't tell," and I honestly don't know if it was the toad.

[Photographs: Lowry]

• Hunt 38: Holding up the second moon: Lowry. Lio, holding up the sky. Most of him.

Back aboard.

There's no false bottom. Never was. It's a pot.

Somebody's had it out and put it back a quarter turn from where I keep it, and there's soil on the sill.

So now I know two things: somebody on this ship reads this book, which I knew, and somebody's been acting on what it says, and I don't believe the Doctor cares that much about horticulture.

I went down to the brig. I'd like to say I was calm. I stood in the door and didn't knock and said, "Do you know an Inspector ​xxxx?"

I've looked at those two pulses every day for over a year, and they've never kept time. For one beat, when I said that name, they went together.

"I have read every word you have written," said the Doctor. "I have repeated none of them. I cannot prove that to you. How unpleasant for us both."

I said that's not an answer. I said I'd told him it was private and he'd thought that was charming, and I'd let him, I've been writing back to him, I've been showing off for him. I said I hadn't put one word about the Mercy in this book, not one, for his sake, and he'd left that blank alone too and I'd taken it for manners. I said I'd thought it was a game. His shoulders didn't click.

"It was," he said. "May I keep it?"

I took the book, and I've taken it everywhere since. I've been writing smaller.

Same night.

There was never anything under the third plant, that was the point. The sheet from the satellite's right where I put it the night I found it, and I went and looked. I'd laid a hair across it, a trick Vesk showed me, and the hair's still there.

I know. I know what you're going to say, whoever you are. This book's been read, it's been read by somebody who repeats things, and here I am writing in it. I stopped for two days and wrote on my arm.

Ume. Day one of nine.

The landlord would like a word.

Everything's underwater here except what the Reef's built. The Reef's the planet's owner, thousands and thousands of small bodies with one will, coral towers lit up blue-green. When it's thinking the light goes around the bay in a slow wave and all the little lamp fish turn at the same moment. Fish rent the holes, and the crabs collect the rent, in gossip. I've looked at a crab's rent book. I've looked at a crab's rent book.

I'm supposed to serve the Stack's reply to its demand that the shipping lanes be cleared. The translator's the size of a shed and bolted to a pier, with a glass eye on it, and you send your sentence and wait for a ring to close, which takes years. The bell on the pier just means it heard. On the Notice Pillar there are forty governments' eviction letters, and the oldest one's been grown over.

Bead number two went in the water, and I'm on my third.

Day three.

Tide.

I've asked if it's comfortable. Answer pending.

Day five.

I'm enjoying this so much, while everybody else has gone quietly out of their minds. Tukkar's inspected the pier, repeatedly, Lio's opened a book on the tide tables, and I've got a chair and a pile of forty governments' correspondence and a red pencil, and I'm grading it. This might be the best week of my life. Is that weird? Probably. The Reef's the only person in the galaxy who's more careful than I am.

Nobody's actually read the demand. It came thirty-one years ago, and everybody's been answering what they assumed it said. So I went and got the original rubbing and I'm going through it, polyp by polyp.

Day seven.

The coral under the demand's gone white.

Down in the Bowl I counted the children twice, and Vesk took my wrist. "Two hundred twelve both times. Stop checking."

Day eight.

It doesn't want the ships gone. I mean it wants the lanes clear, for one tide. It's dying, it's been dying for decades, and it grew the Teeth so nothing would sit still in them, 'cause its last children have got to get out to the open water, and they're small, and they need the lanes kept moving, at the right time. And for thirty-one years forty governments have been sending it paperwork, and it's been patiently waiting for somebody to read the notice properly.

I read it out at the Pillar at dusk, in its own light, and took my time. It's the most careful sentence I've ever written.

I've read it. I'm sorry it took so long. What do you need?

Day nine.

I was down at the Sluice in a dive suit when the tide came, and I said the roll and didn't check it. All the little lights went out through the gate, going white-gold, and the whole bay of fish turned toward me. What would you call that? I've got nothing. My answer's started growing on the Pillar, years early, one letter, and it's between me and the landlord.

​xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. It took me the whole night to write its name on the board, one letter at a time, because it's a growth phrase and it goes on. Tukkar put his marker down and went to bed, and in the morning Nym's note said ring pending.

[Photographs: Ume, nine days]

• Ume: Ume. Green where it's close to the top.
• Reef: The Reef held still for a whole tide.
• The Reef s home on Ume: The landlord. Answer pending.
• The Sluice: The Sluice. I said the roll right here.

Tuesday. The Drawer. SOMEONE HAS STOLEN MY JACKET.

It's the only coat I can cross a cold dock in, and it was on the airlock hook, in a locked ship, in a guarded slip.

The Cat Burglar's a Fenn. All the rooftops of First Drawer are hers, a thousand lines of laundry and a thousand water tanks, and she steals things nobody noticed were missing. Well, I noticed, so I went up there. There are lines of Drum wraps on the roofs the size of mainsails, and they boom when you touch them. I've run through about a kilometer of booming washing with a tail-leaf rattling in front of me and gray four-winged birds going up on all sides, and I've never had such a good time in my life. I still want my jacket back.

Wednesday.

It isn't one thief. The tail-leaf stain on every returned item dates it, 'cause the leaves turn with the year, and the dates don't fit one Fenn. So I watched the gray birds instead. They go up past a ledge with a thermos on it, where four Fenn grandmothers with moss on their shoulders sit on upturned buckets with a tin of thread, tying notes to the legs of pigeons. One of them looked at me, all three eyelids, and held out the thermos without being asked. "You're the one who noticed," she said. I said yes. "Sit. Nobody notices." I sat. "Ask me nothing you'd have to write down." They've got every roof in the Drawer on a string. They've been moving things around for decades, a thimble here, a key there, and she wouldn't say what for. I asked about my jacket, and her leaves rattled. "It needed a loop," she said.

This book was inside my shirt, thank goodness. Where else would it be?

Thursday.

The Cat Burglar handed it to me on the Fourth Floor roof, in the last light, and I put it on. It was warm. It's on the hook now, cleaned, and it smells of bark. Somebody's sewn a new pencil loop in the left sleeve, in teeny, good stitches, exactly where my hand goes.

And all the pockets were empty, and everything from all the pockets had been laid out on the bed in a row, very straight. Including the one. And one more thing at the end of the row that isn't mine, a coupon. TEN PERCENT OFF YOUR NEXT VISIT. There's a black circle in the corner, about the size of a lapel pin, and there's Mantle moss in the crease, clipped short.

[Taped in: a coupon, with a black circle. TEN PERCENT OFF YOUR NEXT VISIT.]

Mine hadn't been unfolded, I could tell, because I know how I fold it.

I sat down on the bed.

[A page has been torn out here.]

​xxxxxxxxxxx. ​xxxxxx. I'm keeping the sleeve.

[Photographs: The Drawer, up top]

• The First Drawer Rooftops: Up top. It was warm when I got it back.

ONE HOUR

The Burning City, the Hedge-Maze Moon

Monday. Totaled.

This one's Tukkar's. I'm only here to read the man.

The Burning City's been on fire for years, on purpose, and it's quite orderly. Glass towers alight at every height, cool dry streets, a chalk line reading CLAIMANTS ONLY. No fire can be put out till its policy's verified, and no policy's verified till the claim's stamped. Ash comes down on your shoulders and people brush it off without looking. They queue. There's a Mr. Vodven who's queued for a friend for eleven years, and he saved my place while I went to look at something, and he told me about his friend's feet.

THE INSURANCE ADJUSTER

WANTED

Crime: Arson with Aggravated Courtesy

Known to: cough, politely, before each stage of a fire

Do not: cash the check

A Human. ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Eight towers so far, one a morning, every tenant paid.

I found him at the foot of the Marl block with a clipboard on his knee, smoothing the top sheet, in a pressed gray jacket with sweat through it and a lanyard from an insurer that folded years ago, and the only frightened face on the street. He's got about three quarters of a lung left. "I do apologize for the ash, miss," he said, and coughed, a small polite one into his fist. "It's only spread. We're some way off flashover." He's got a scar on his forearm, and a scab, and he went a bad color on the stairs. I sat with him on the curb and he told me he's got four thousand families still short and not long to pay them.

I've read him, and it's Dennis. It's Dennis all over again, a tired soft person with a form, doing a terrible thing for people on a list. Everybody out here thinks we're a joke, and there are two of us on this board who've spent their lives trying to get the paper right.

[Photographs: The Burning City]

• The Burning City: Totaled. Eight towers so far.

Monday, later.

We've got him, Kellen's got him at arm's length on the claim hall steps. Tukkar came up with the cuffs and his plates all the way open, and he looked at me, and he said, "Abigail?"

He asked me first. Same as Landing Eight.

I said give him one hour. He's got one last claim to settle in the central tower, a family's, it's a matter of a signature. He's dying, he isn't going anywhere, he can't climb past three floors. Let him finish it and he'll come. Kellen can walk him up. Please.

Tukkar stayed there for a while. I could hear his slate ticking from the heat.

"One hour," he said.

[The rest of this line is blank.]

I had the names by morning. Fire Marshal Kopp brought them himself.

The central tower's called the Ninth, and it was full, Krai on the low floors, Gelm above them, Tessel at the top. On the Friday he'd mailed every tenant a check, three days ahead, same as the other eight. He needed somebody to walk him past the line, officially, and hold the chalk open before a single floor was cleared, and I'd got a gunfighter to do it. He coughed on the third-floor landing, and Kellen stopped to ask if he was all right. Then he coughed again. He walked out of the bottom of that building under a pressed umbrella.

He had no pen. On that clipboard, on the curb, there wasn't a pen on it. It's in the Marshal's report, and an expert would've noticed. I'm the one person in the whole Compact who would've noticed that, and I was looking at his scab.

Everybody got out. The Krai ran, and the Gelm poured down the stairs, and Dash walked the Tessel out as a host of five, 'cause they won't leave anybody behind. Kopp wouldn't break his seal without a stamp, so Tukkar signed the owner's waiver himself, in triplicate, with the slate popping off his shoulders, and Kopp broke it, and now the tram skips Kopp for good. Nobody died. But an arrest is what keeps ​xxxxxx's policies alive, and ​xxxxxx was gone under his umbrella, and every check he'd mailed went bad when he crossed the chalk. The Ninth's floors burned with everything on them. Old Hesu's check went bad too, and his forty years of pods had already burned black in Tower Eight.

I lost them everything they had. I'm writing that. Here they are, in pen.

Old Hesu

Tev Ansar

Mr. Oskar Vodven

Dil Marrun

Pettigrew Sool

Hesker Ob

Hesker Ob, the younger

​xxxx Tarnan

Ibbit

Nolo Fenn

Ibbit's sister, whose name the Marshal didn't have, and I'm going to find it

Rakka Dur

Tissa Thel

Mother Ruuda

Kem Doro

Gaff Ilt

Bosun Ruk

In the margin (Abigail, later): Ruen. Her name was Ruen. It took four months.

He'd saved my place in the line. Mr. Vodven had. He'd queued eleven years with his friend's form, and the check on it's no good now.

Tukkar pinned the lanyard to the board and stamped it ​xxxxxxxxxx himself. Kellen had already drawn his sun, over a clipboard, before he knew. It's up there, and nobody's taken it down.

don't know

he asked me. HE ASKED ME. all this time I've wanted that big stupid mountain to ask somebody something and he asked ME and what is the point of that, what's the point of asking a person who doesn't know, he's the one with the cuffs, he's been doing this for twenty years, he KNOWS what it looks like when someone's lying to him, why would you ask me. why would you listen

I'm not sending this to anyone. obviously

Kellen came to the door. he knocked. he said did I do it wrong. I said no. he said I stopped to see if he was all right. I said I know. he said you told me to walk him up. I said I know Kellen. he stood there. I didn't open it

Thursday.

Vesk didn't come to look at anything.

I went to the lounge for my lesson. She looked at me and went back to her screen, and I stood there through the whole love scene. I said is it because of the tower. She held up one finger, and when it was over she said, "You liked him," and went to her cabin and shut the door. It was that time of day. It's always that time of day.

Ledger left a page under my door, and I don't think it was unkind, I think it's how Ledger does this.

Ledger. No note attached

PERSONS RELEASED, DELAYED OR NOT ARRESTED

ON OFFICER CHASE'S RECOMMENDATION ... 9

SUBSEQUENT LOSS OF HOME, KNOWN ........ 17

PERSONS SINCE HELPED, EST. ............ 6,400

I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO ADD THESE.

I HAVE TRIED.

Friday. Tactics room.

He hasn't taken me out of the chair, which would've been easier, and he gives me my positions. "Be where the plan says." He's stopped saying "Abigail?" He says, "Officer." He doesn't look to see what I think before he moves. I noticed on the first day, and by the third day everybody had.

So I went in and shut the door and said it. I said the way we're doing this is right and I'd do it again. Not the hour. But I'd sit on that curb again. I said if we stop looking for the person then what are we, we're ninety-nine arrests and a marker, we're just the Stack, I didn't say it well.

He said, "Seventeen."

I said I know how many.

He said, "You read him. You were wrong. That's a cost. I'll carry it, it was my order. Next time I'll decide."

I said then you've learned exactly the wrong thing, and he said maybe. I told him I'd been wrong before, and I told him how. I hadn't planned to. I said the beat at the Bruise was mine. I had the reading on my board and I looked at it twice. That's why you were late. It wasn't you. You've been sitting on that bench saying it was you, and it was me, and I let you.

He didn't move. The whole room got quiet.

"I know," said Tukkar. "Chair keeps a log."

I said how long.

"Since that night."

I said you knew? You let me sit across from you all that time, you decided I couldn't take it? You didn't think to ask?

His plates came down, and I went on talking to the door for a while. I said some things. I'm not writing them.

I left.

Sunday.

Nothing.

Hedge-Maze Moon.

They took me along, 'cause everybody goes on this one. The sign says stand still for sixty breaths anywhere on this moon and the hedge starts to root in you. The sign's wrong, it's only the ones she's painted, but we've been told to keep walking. Clipped leaves. A snip of shears from a long way off. It's really beautiful. Forty-one people live here now, trimmed, and one of them's a Gelm courier in the middle of a bow.

The Gardener's a Tessel named ​xxxxxxxxxx, and she's got a visitors' book of compliments from the hedges. When the Doctor offered notes on the proportions, she took them, and thanked him. I went to work, because I can't help it, and went looking for the sad part. She was cast out of her ward for smelling of being alone, and a Tessel by herself comes apart inside a day. There. I found it, in about an hour, and it's a good one. I could write you the whole thing.

Row nine still had a live comb under the leaves. Somebody who'd been in there for years with her chest lit up, warning visitors the only way she could, which was to blink.

I sat and looked at that for as long as I safely could.

I found the ache. It's real, and it doesn't pay for row nine. I've been saying that all morning to see how it sounds, and it doesn't sound right yet. She offered me her welcome drop, on my boots, and I said no. It's the first time I've said no to one of them without saying sorry after.

Nym cut the one in row nine loose and Vesk carried her out. The Gardener stopped at the stump and held still for sixty breaths, and the Doctor counted them out loud in his plain voice, and Vesk stood beside him. Tukkar stamped it ​xxxx in plain ink and left the marker capped. Vesk put a warm mug at the empty chair and didn't pretend not to look.

AT A WALK

The Canyon Bridge, the Cosy

Sunday. Slip.

I knocked on Kellen's door, which I've owed him for a month. I said you did what I told you. I told you to walk him up. That's mine, it was never yours, and I shouldn't have left you standing in the corridor.

"Thank you for telling me," said Kellen.

He didn't draw anything. I'd have been upset if he had.

I've written to the families. Fourteen houses, by hand, one a night. I said what I did and I didn't say sorry till the last line. Six have answered. One sent it back unopened. One said don't write again, so I won't. I've sent my pay.

Monday.

Tukkar said next time he'll decide. All right.

Before every hunt now I put one page on his bench. Left column, what I read. Right column, every way I could be wrong, how we'd know, what it costs and who pays. I don't ask for anything on it, and I've headed it THE OTHER COLUMN. The right side's really hard to write, I've never been made to do it before, and I don't think I've done it properly yet.

The first one stayed on the bench. The second came back under my door with nothing on it. The third came back with one number circled in the right column and the word Door.

Tuesday.

I go to the lounge at the same hour every day and I stand there. I don't say anything, and Vesk watches her show. Today's the fifth day, and I was looking at the screen and then I was looking at the ceiling, and the wind was out of me, and a slate-colored person was standing over me not smiling.

"Again," said Vesk.

Bruises this week: 3.

[Doodle: Tally, three marks.]

Saturday.

[Sticker: An empty Birthday tube, squeezed flat.]

Twenty-nine today. So that's seven years and some since I was twenty-two, and yes, I know exactly how many months. Somebody left a tube of Birthday outside my door, and I ate all of it, with the grit.

Monday. A canyon. At a walk.

The bridge is a person.

It's a long walk across, ninety meters down, and everything on it has to go at a walk, 'cause anything faster and the road walks with you. Kellen ran four steps to see what would happen and the road went four meters with him. "It's alive," said Kellen. "Obviously," said Vesk.

[Doodle: A bridge with one eye open, "at a walk. AT A WALK.".]

​xxxxxxxxxxx lay down in the gap one night forty years ago, for a rest. A Drum. A farmer drove a cart across him at dawn, and that's how the traffic started. He decided he was a bridge, and he's a good one. There are forty years of old flyers tucked in between his ribs and families renting in there who've never packed. Every eleven minutes everything stops for a count of six, and that's him blinking. There's a toll-keeper named Mrs. Morbo who tells him the news every morning and pours oil down the side of him. She's kept him alive for twenty-five years and written it down as maintenance. Keep an eye on that word, would you? Maintenance.

Nobody looks up from their thermos. Pitta the parcel Fenn says, "Morning," at the Blink. That's all anybody says.

[Photographs: The canyon]

• The Canyon Bridge: The bridge. At a walk.

Next day.

Tukkar gave Vesk the lead, and she didn't want it, she had a finale.

I sat with her in the galley while she didn't watch it. There's a word that has to be said to him, out loud, because nobody's told him what he is in forty years. I knew what the word was. Vesk knew. I watched it go across her crown and come back. I don't know what it is about that word for her and I'm not going to ask, I know how to not ask, I've got a good teacher. She held her hand out without looking at me, the first thing she's asked me for since the tower. I got out a pencil. And I wrote it on her palm.

She closed her hand.

That night.

Here's what I saw from the Toll Booth window, through the brass glass they use for counting trucks. Mrs. Morbo's booth is cut into his shoulder, and what he says comes up through the floor, so she told me the rest.

Vesk sat up on the rail at midspan, on an old lamp post, the exact gray of the stone, all the way down from the top of her crown. You couldn't see her, you could only see where the air was a bit too careful. He could feel her weight and couldn't see her, and I think that's the only way he could've stood to hear it.

She read the wake tag, which has been on his chest for forty years, in his mother's handwriting. Back in a week. Who to call.

Then she said it. I couldn't hear it, but I could see the whole canyon stop.

Afterward he asked her what she'd say, if she were told. She answered him with one word. I've asked about that word. No speech detected.

He lowered the road first. He stood up, finally, all that terracotta coming off the rock, forty years of paper falling on the convoy like I don't know what, and then he stopped. And he knelt back down and lowered the road so they could drive off him. Tukkar walked ahead of fourteen trucks at a walking pace with the stone going on the deck, and they all came off behind him, and every driver leaned out and said thanks.

"Took you forty years," said a Brakkan trucker called Karung, leaning out of the last cab. Then he took ​xxxxxxxxxxx by the ears and walked him away.

Vesk pinned a toll receipt on the board, one crossing, on foot. She says she found it on the floor. Sure she did.

Canyon Authority, East Gate. Copy pinned on the board, this one's mine

ONE (1) CROSSING. AT A WALK.

PLEASE CROSS AT A WALK.

THE AUTHORITY THANKS YOU.

THANK YOU.

THANKS.

In the margin (Abigail, later): Someone's gone and added the last two lines, in pencil, in a very steady hand. It wasn't me. Mrs. Morbo sent it. She says he'd want a copy kept.

In the margin (Vesk): (a green thumbprint)

[Taped in: Drum wake tag.] Mrs. Morbo sells blank ones at the booth. Eight credits. I bought one. I haven't filled in who to call.

Later that week. Cabin. Door shut.

Lio lifted the original load certificate from the East Gate. An inspector named Orsk signed it, an inspector who never stood on the span, and it's forty years old. I couldn't place the hand, so I put it on the bed with the others to see.

I've been going back through every copy I've got. The Hullow order, and the plaque I only went and looked up this week.

Paper That's Wrong in the Same Way

• Booth log, Beacon One. Burn re-timed.
• Routing slips, Tax-Haven Asteroid. ​xxxxxxxxxxxxx's arrest, lost nineteen times.
• Tribunal amendment. ​xxxxxxxxxx, "falsifying a fault he hadn't written."
• The thing from the third satellite.
• Standing order to the Admiral's fleet, from the Hullow plate.
• Founding plaque, Species Museum. A ceremony that was staged.
• Load certificate, Canyon Authority.

The seven has a small foot. The g comes around and doesn't close. I got out my own handwriting to compare, the top of this page, just to be thorough.

It's my seven.

It's how I make them. It's how I was taught to make them, at a desk on the Fourth Floor, by someone leaning over my shoulder and saying oh that's lovely Abigail, just a little foot.

Forty years ago I wasn't born. I checked that. It's an odd thing to have to check.

Here's what I can't stop looking at. Those aren't only forgeries. Most of those people ended up in the Abyss, or the paper did something to put them there. The Gunner told the truth and went in for it. I'd been thinking of the board as the ninety-nine worst people in the Compact 'cause that's what it says at the top. What's a place where ten years inside is decades outside actually good for? Who would you put there? I can't finish this, it's late.

I don't know what I've got, and I haven't told Tukkar. He and I are saying "Officer" and "Sir."

Haven't opened the atlas.

Tuesday.

Card, care of the Slip. I've kept this book on my body since the pot, and I sleep on it, so if the pages have gone a little curved, that's why.

Card, cream stock, green ink

Dear Abigail. Forty years is a long time. Such an odd thing to have to check, isn't it? Eat something. Your chair has been reassigned. S.A.

I haven't told anyone. I took it down to the galley and stood at the pot, and Dot's Friday box was there, and I couldn't think who I'd tell.

Thursday.

From Pitta, parcels, East Gate. Written on a toll receipt

Miss. They came for Mrs. Morbo Monday. Gray coats, very polite. Twenty-five years of oil filed as maintenance, they say that's falsifying. They sealed her rooms on the East Shelf and took the ledger and left a coupon on the stove. Nobody'd looked at that book in all her life. Somebody told them to. Thought you should know. Morning.

Nobody ever looked at her ledger till Lio lifted a certificate from the East Gate, because I asked him to.

And the booth log from Beacon One's gone from the archive. I sent for a clean copy, and they say there's no such log.

I put on my jacket. I took the pile and the list and all three cards down to his cell and knocked. I said I've been doing this by myself because I thought it was mine and now there's an old woman with an oil can, it's the chair log all over again except I'm the one who did it, I'm sorry, I'm not saying this well, will you look at this?

He took a long time over seven pieces of paper, and his hands are really careful with paper.

"Who else knows."

I said whoever's reading my book.

"Stop writing it."

I said I've tried, and I showed him my arm. He looked at my arm.

"Three things it could be," said Tukkar. "Write them down. Then stop."

What It Could Be

• Someone's putting people in the Abyss on purpose. A person who knows a thing goes in, and comes out when it's stopped mattering.
• Every one of these needed a junior signature, so there'd always be somebody who believed it was her fault.
• It goes back to one hand, and that hand taught me, and I've been brought along for a reason.

None of that changes what I did. If it's all true, it still doesn't.

This is me stopping. I've told him that's what this is.

He signed for Mrs. Morbo's bail, in triplicate. They've put a hold on it anyway, and she's still in. ​xxxxxxxxxxx's got nobody to tell him the news now, wherever they've staked him out, so I've started writing, care of Karung, who can read it to him at a walk.

"Officer," said Tukkar, when I got up.

"Sir," I said.

Wednesday. The Cosy. (On the back of the warrant. Taped in later.)

I said I'd stop writing in the book. This is a warrant. Don't look at me like that.

A retirement village. I've now met somebody who can make Tukkar Omdor sit up straight. She sent him a tin at the Bruise, with a note in a hand like a ruler. Tukkar Omdor. Sit up. Three o'clock.

Her name's ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxx and she's eighty, General Brisk's mother, and Tukkar knows what I did at the Bruise. She poured me a cup and looked at me over it for about as long as it took, and I couldn't tell you what she knows, and my stomach went, and I drank it. Thirty-one doors, one terrace, crochet. Every word anybody says in that village between kettle whistles gets written down in a ledger and read aloud at the next whistle. Every word. We tried cover stories and the first whistle read them out to the whole street. You'd think a person like me would've been fond of this, and I went and hid this notebook in the Orchard's cold box inside a dumpling carton, and I've come out with nothing, and I'm writing this on the back of the warrant.

She's having her last softening. Brakkans get one, at the end, when the plate lets go. Her brow plates have gone, and that's the door they've got, and she can't close it. For the first time since I've known any Brakkan, I can read her, and all my lines came up. I stood on her porch and I could see every one of them branching off, plain as anything, and all of them went to the same chair.

There's nobody standing at her door, and somebody's supposed to be, for the whole year, in boots. Her boys never came.

Before she'd let him sit she took a knitting needle and ran it down his ridges, one at a time, tk, tk, tk. It stopped at one. His face went shut. Then it moved on.

That evening. On the warrant still.

There's a tab in volume three at page nine. Nobody would say what's on it.

She'd come quietly, she said, if he'd read it. "Ask him, love," she told me. "I'm only the host."

He asked, "May I?" It's two words. I've seen him not say those two words to about thirty people, at gunpoint, and lately to me. He sat down and read, the last lines in a voice that doesn't carry, and nobody on the team heard those. At the next whistle she stood up with the ledger and said it to the street.

"Recorded. Not read."

I don't know what's on that page. I've seen that ridge every day for a year and a half and I've never asked. I'm the last person on this ship who could.

[A page has been torn out here.]

Galley.

He held her arm so she could get up, and his thumb went into the new plate, it's soft as wet clay, and it stayed there. So she's got his mark on her, wherever she's gone. Then he read her son's page out loud, the one she'd never read to anyone, and she read the last line herself. Received, with thanks. The kettle whistled and the chair was empty, and thirty-one kettles went off at once along the street. A line of slate chips ran to the back gate. He followed it with a broom and stopped at the gate.

​xxxxxxxxxx. Nobody's touched the board.

He's brought a three-legged stool back. He's put it by the table, and he's sitting on it with his back perfectly straight.

We're all eating. Nobody's looking.

[Photographs: The Cosy]

• The Retirement Village: The Cosy. Taped in later, like the rest of it.

Next morning. Galley.

I brought this book to the table and asked Tukkar if he'd do something for me. It's the first thing I've asked him for myself since. The marker doesn't leave the galley, so the book came to it. I've kept my own copy of the board, for most of the ones I've written about here. He looked at the page for a long time. Then he went down it, and he only touched the ones he'd crossed out up on the cork. He didn't say a thing, just capped it and went to check a door.

In Pen

• ​xxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx
• ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxx: ​xxxxxxxxxxxx

UNWRITTEN

Mora-Ruu, and after

Stores Division, by hand of Inspector ​xxxx. FINAL NOTICE

FORM 7-G MUST BE SURRENDERED BY THE REMAINDER.

OFFICERS ARE REMINDED:

AN UNSIGNED FORM 7-G IS A PERSONAL MEMORANDUM

AND HAS NO STANDING.

A SIGNED FORM 7-G IS A SWORN STATEMENT

AND IS ADMISSIBLE IN ANY COMPACT PROCEEDING.

Monday. Before.

Tukkar says there's a hunt with no jokes in it.

He told us at breakfast, with the pot on, and he took the Butcher of Tessaly's picture down off the cork and looked at it and then put it back. Lights off, on this one, is all he said. Lio didn't open a pool.

The world's called Mora-Ruu, and it's a field, one hundred nine clusters of stones and every stone blank, and the Sorrel grandmothers plant it and tend it. I've had the rules read to me twice. No light in the Long Hour. No cameras. And no names written down. Not by anybody, not on anything, ever. You can be given one, by mouth, and then you carry it.

I said what if you forget it.

The Doctor said, "Then, Abigail, you will have done what the Compact did."

No pens are allowed down there, so this book stays behind. I've sealed it in a dumpling carton in the cold box with the Final Notice on top. ​xxxx has the date. I don't like leaving it. I checked the seal twice and Tukkar saw me and said nothing.

Afterward. I don't know what day. There's no light on.

Tukkar asked us to keep the lights off till it was done, so I'm doing this by feel. If the lines go uphill, I'm sorry.

I paid the ferryman with a red pencil. He doesn't take money, just one thing each that you can't buy again. It was the one I've had since the Fourth Floor, with the knife marks, that I'd sharpened down to my thumb. It's on a thwart in the Ash Sound with everyone else's.

I'm not going to tell you much. I don't want to.

He was very polite, and he walked. One hundred nine villages in eleven winters, and he walked down the row of them saying each report aloud, in a beautiful clear voice, sheltered, sheltered, and it got colder. I was the only one there whose breath showed. I asked him the name of one village. Just one. He restated the question as a clause.

He wanted a trial and a raised floor. He wanted to be found extraordinary. All I could see, all my lines bent toward him and that's all there was at the end of them. Someone to watch. He only ever wanted a witness and I was one, God help me, standing right there.

Nym took hold of my wrist when my mouth stopped working. His hand was going cloudy. And Vesk came up against my back, the color of my jacket, so that the cold would think we were one body.

Kellen found forty ways, and then he put his pistols away. I heard the holsters.

Tukkar could have decided. It's the only thing he's ever done. He stood there, a mountain in the dark, and then he turned all the way around, and it took a long time, and he said, "Abigail?" It's the first time since the tower. I said I'd sign for it, whatever came of it, I heard myself say that, and I said, "Ask him," and he did. He asked him. And the man was asked a question for the first time in his life and he answered it.

I'm not writing what the answer was.

Nobody touched him. We lost him in the middle of a sentence.

Same night. Still dark.

I was given a name.

A grandmother with her ribbons furled up tight put her mouth by my ear at the Gate and she said it. It's a person. It's a child, I think. From the forty-third cluster. She said it to me twice, and then she had me say it back, and she said, "Yes."

I've got it. I've been saying it to myself on the way home.

I've spent my life writing the names of the worst people in the galaxy on a cork board, in my very best hand, because someone ought to. It's the only thing I believe, even after the seed packet. And I've got here in my mouth the name of someone who never hurt anyone, and I'm sitting with a pen, on a ship, a long way from that field, where nobody would ever know.

Here it is.

[The rest of this line is blank.]

I'm keeping my word.

Galley. Dark.

I lettered his by feel. ​xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Tukkar ran the red line through it, slowly. I could hear it go. And then he said a word out loud to Kellen, very low, and it took me a moment to understand that it was a village. That's the name that he was carrying. He hadn't been given it. He'd refused one, at the Gate. He'd found one out.

No sun.

We sat there. Vesk said, "Same," to Kellen. I don't know what about. Pip's hand was in my hand for a bit. There's somebody's hand near mine on the bench right now and it isn't taking it, and I'm not moving mine.

Several days on. Light.

Ate something.

Fed the plants. They didn't ask.

Friday.

Beans.

I've got to do this now, I think, while there's a bean in me.

I keep thinking about that field. They wouldn't let anyone write anything down and every name there is still alive. And I've got two pockets and one piece of paper, and I've been carrying it around folded for nearly eight years, and it has four names on it. I've never written them anywhere else. I've torn out every page I started. There are nine stubs in the spine of this book, I just counted. I know what's holding it together.

I've got some customs tape from Soob. I'm going to tape this page shut when I'm done. It'll tear if anyone opens it.

[This page is taped shut.]

In the margin (Nym): On the tape, in the outer margin. I have not opened this. I should like that to be something you are able to believe of me, and I am aware of how much I am asking. You flinched for years. Good. Go to bed.

Saturday.

Read the Final Notice again. An unsigned book's a personal memorandum. Opened the front of this one, inside the cover. Sat and looked at that line for a while, with a pen.

I know what it means if I do.

Kellen knocked. He wanted to know if I wanted a snack. He looked at the page and he looked at the pen and he didn't ask. We're all right, he and I. He's gotten really good at not asking. Wonder who taught him that. He sat down on the floor with his back against my bunk and had a tube of Sunday. I had the other half.

The window has gone a color. We're coming out of a Lane somewhere and I can see a place I've never heard of. It's green and violet and has got a lot of waterfalls.

The corridor lights came up a little bit just now, while I was looking out, and then they went down again when I looked at them. It's the third time this week.

"Good night," I said to the ship. It seemed polite.

You're still here? Okay. Hi again. You'd better know where things are, then.

Too many names still on the board. Tukkar has tapped one twice. I've got nineteen pencils left and a new loop to put them in. I don't know what the Deputy Director is going to say when she finds out what I've got slid in behind the back cover of the atlas, which I still haven't opened, and I've written that down now on purpose. Let them come for it. There's a hair across it and Tukkar has a copy, I made him one the night of the pile, and once this book is signed, a sworn statement says where it was.

I don't know who borrowed my worst day, or who waters the tree.

The soil was damp this morning. I checked.

Everyone's calling me for dinner.

OFFICER'S SIGNATURE: Abigail Chase