Part 2: The Outer Reaches

Two thousand meters above the slums, past the yellow ceiling of the smog, the Morozov Caldera holds air that nobody has breathed for a generation. The snow there is white. The basalt is black and clean. Wind turbines turn on the rim, steam rises out of the rock, and avalanche tripods stand along the passes like gallows.

At the top he fell to his knees in the drift and stared at his palms. The snow was not greasy. It did not stain his knuckles with soot or burn his nose with fluorocarbon stink; it was cold, blinding and clean. He pushed his goggles up and looked into a rift in the clouds, at the pale blue of an open sky he had never seen in his life.

Nadia turned her face away into the gale, so that he would not see an old-worlder cry. She had been fourteen when she was thrown out, and she still remembered the sterile gardens of the domes. The white snow brought all of it back at once: the clean, automated paradise she had been born to and would never see again.

On the high ground stood the Copper Ridge Spire, a forty-meter radio mast with a dynamo shack at its foot, and in the shack lived Orson Vance. He was eighty-two, Arthur Vance's elder brother, once the chief archivist of the inside, the man who had warned his brother where the machine was going and been ignored. Out here he copied the old knowledge by hand onto cotton paper, page after page, until he had thirty crates of it.

Two winters ago the border police came to burn it. Jesse Holt's militia counter-attacked up the ridge and were driven back by tear gas and automatic fire. The crates could stay behind the lead door; the boy could not, and Orson knew it. He buckled his own gel vest onto Toby, who was thirteen and drowning in it, put in his arms a tin of the only pages that had no copy, the witness accounts he had taken down himself in the First Years, and lowered him down the dumbwaiter shaft.

"Run to Kira, little finch," the old man whispered, locking the brass latch. "Tell her that machines record data, but paper remembers grief." Then the dumbwaiter dropped down the face of the cliff in the dark, the boy inside it with the tin of pages clutched against the vest.

Last winter, Tomas Varek set a trap there. He was fifty-eight, Elias's chief enforcer, still handsome, still proud of the forms he had stolen from Silas's dojo, and he wanted the one rival the wastes had left him dead: Roach. Years at the top of the Syndicate had made him arrogant. He meant the killing to prove to every faction that he was the last predator in the wastes worth fearing.

Roach came at him off the roof of a derailed boxcar. Varek fought like a machine, every deflection on time. Roach fought like a man who did not care whether he lived. He took a crushing hit to the ribs, dragged Varek down into the gravel and put a shotgun shell into a solvent canister under the rail ties. The explosion threw them both against the iron of a train truck. Half-blind with soot, Roach pinned Varek to the frozen steel with his railway machete and cut his face apart, slowly, line by line.

"You think Silas's math makes you a god? Out here, math is just meat waiting for an iron hook. Live in the dark and look at what you are."

Varek lost his rank, his face and his name in the Syndicate. He crawled into the boxcars of the switchyard and has lived there ever since, alone, with a naginata ground from a railway leaf spring. Only one thing still moves him. There are rumours of a masked fighter who uses Silas's forms. Varek means to find Silas's child and kill her.

No soldier had done it. A machine had, a machine nobody even remembered laying, and Soren came out of that caboose hating everything the inside had made. She fights one-armed now, a ceramic karambit in her only hand, and she is faster than most people with two.

Five hundred feet under a collapsed quarry there is a cavern where it is always warm. Geothermal steam runs through its radiators, misting valves keep the air wet, and terraces of tubers, citrus and herbs grow under the lamps. In a laboratory at the back, a pre-collapse gene sequencer still hums.

He took her on in Year 19. Coming up late from the shelters, he saw a seventeen-year-old of the perimeter guard slip into a ventilation shaft, followed her down to the Trench Dojo, and watched her work through her father's forms from an open journal. They were forms computed for a heavier man, and her left knee would not last a year of them. When he stepped into the light she had a blade out before his lantern touched the floor. He took her down to the Vault that same night, the first soul from above to see it, and at the Potting Bench he taught her where a joint gives and how a wound is closed. He asked only that she never bring anyone. She never has.

"He held the gate with a staff and his bare hands. That is all I was ever told of him. I found his journals in the dark and met my father in his handwriting."

The wastes have started to notice. Elias hears of it and is afraid, because he knows a ghost when he hears one described. Roach hears how the escorts were thrown and recognizes the hands that once took his blade. Varek is hunting her. Jesse Holt, her own commander, has begun to suspect where his soldier goes at night. Toby is her eyes and ears in the slums. Somewhere in the ruins a deserter watches her and recognizes the forms. Only her mother sees nothing.

At the gate she met Silas Locke. She read his strikes as they came, trapped his staff with her side-handle baton and held it while the others beat him down. He did not look at her. He looked past her, at Lyra, and Ines lowered her baton. The others did not lower theirs, and he died.

She keeps the yards around her transport like a checkpoint. Lyra would have her executed if she knew who she was. Jesse pays her in ammunition to teach his militia to disarm. Elias offered her a captaincy, and she refused. And she shadows the masked girl who fights like the man she helped kill.

The wastes are too wide and too hungry for everyone to hate everyone. In this twenty-fourth year the fighting has narrowed to five quarrels, each between two people who can no longer walk around one another. None of them is a war. Each is one debt, come due.

He follows it instead. He lets the masked fighter do her work among the tankers, takes nothing, and reads her retreat the way he once read sewage through a grid: always downward, always toward water. Every trail ends at the great brick outfall of the sewer runoff, where the storm drains empty under the slums. He waits there in the dark above the spillway, a breaching shotgun across his knees and a dosing cuff cinched round his right arm, breathing in a wet rattle and spitting black into the current. He does not know her name, or whose daughter she is. He knows the forms.

"Something patient waits for me on the road home," she wrote, in the one journal she keeps herself. "I cannot lead it to my mother's door." Whatever waited on that wall must never follow her back to the perimeter, and to the basement where her mother reads the law.

He marched twelve militia and four sledgehammers into the Vault. Wei Lin met them at the end of the radiator walk, read Jesse in one look, and quietly offered him what the Doctrine had always denied him: the machine could find the tumour, and the laboratory could answer it. Jesse could not take it. A commander who lets a machine buy his life has no line left to hold. But he would not strike first, and the old man would not move from the laboratory door. They stood a pace apart until the lamps burned low, and then Jesse marched his men back out.

Twenty-four years ago, in the logistics office of Sector Zero, a clerk with a barcode on his collarbone taught a fourteen-year-old apprentice to keep a ledger, to write the loss in the same ink as the gain. On the evacuation ramps he pressed his last ration card into her hand. Neither of them has ever spoken of it.

Toby is Kira's eyes in the tunnels, and this spring his eyes began to find the same shape behind her: a broad figure in a long dark green greatcoat, three streets back on every convoy night. He took it for a hunter. He laid false trails for it, and it followed none of them. It followed only Kira.

He has told no one. He carries the page inside Orson's oversized vest and cannot decide what it is: proof that the woman who killed Kira's father now hunts his daughter, or something he has no word for yet. He has started asking about her, and the slums talk.

This spring a scavenger in Varek's yard gave up something worth having: the masked fighter had come back to the slums with a cut forearm, and an old man in a canvas apron had closed it and asked for nothing. Varek searched the snow of the eastern spur where the convoys had been hit until he found where she had knelt, and beside the blood a spent auto-injector. He knows auto-injectors; he jabs his own cloudy Syndicate syrettes into his thigh before every fight and again whenever he is hurt. This one was clean glass and bright steel, finer than anything the Syndicate could make.

Wei Lin meets him where he met the militia's hammers, at the end of the radiator walk, hands wrapped in canvas and wire, his sasumata within reach. He reads the man like any patient: the stimulant racing his heart, the needle scars on his thigh, a body burning itself to keep standing. He will not give up the name. Varek does not ask twice. He will cut the terraces one by one, the tubers and the citrus and the herbs that keep the shelters alive, until the name comes or there is nothing left to cut. He lifts the naginata. The old man, who in a century has never struck first, stands between a seven-foot blade and the only clean food in the wastes, facing a giant who feels no pain at all.

At the Valve Station of the Syndicate cisterns he closed the overflow that spills into the old storm drains, the only water in the Warren that does not have to be boiled twice, and sent his terms down the drains with the last of it: the ghost, delivered, and the water runs again. It is the lever he pulled on a container block in Year 9, and on the shelters in the winter to bring Nadia down, and it worked both times. Roach will not answer. He does not bargain with the Syndicate, he wants the masked fighter for himself, and he sits above the outfall every night while the Warren's children drink the runoff.

Elias waits on the catwalks above the Valve Station in his charcoal overcoat, two revolvers and a pulse emitter under the coat, leaning a little on his cane. He expected Roach. He is insulted to be sent a one-armed girl, and he looks at her the way the old world always has. He cannot let her reach the wheel. A valve opened by force is a lesson every dry tap in the slums would learn by morning: that the Syndicate can be beaten.

For years Elias's assassins followed Nadia into the passes and came back frostbitten, or did not come back. Last winter he stopped sending them. A ledger, he reasoned, does not chase a debt into the mountains. It makes the debtor walk in.

She came down off the Caldera in four days, through the Dead-Zone Tunnels, a rifle on her back, a holdout pistol in her sleeve and a roll of paralytic darts in her cuff. She did not surrender, and he had not expected her to. What passed between them on the catwalks above the tanks, neither has told. The shelters' water runs again, and she went back up to the passes with her debt to him unpaid.

Toby would tell the lie again. What he cannot do is stay away from the yard. Before Varek came, he hid Orson's tin of pages under the floor of a boxcar on the western sidings. Now that boxcar stands in the middle of the row where Varek sleeps, forty paces from the counterweight that still lies where Mara died. So in the spring the boy went back, through the drainage conduits where a man of Varek's size cannot follow, in Orson's oversized vest, and stole a tin box from under a giant who knows he lies, in the one place on earth he cannot bear to stand. Varek found the floor plates lifted in the morning. Now he hunts the boy for two thefts.

Soren went for her, karambit low. The older woman caught the hooked blade in the fork of a tungsten truncheon, turned it out of her fingers and put her on her back in the ash. Then she looked at the scarred stump of Soren's shoulder, and her face changed. She kept the knife, as she keeps every knife, and let Soren go.

She comes back with a new blade ground from black ceramic and a row of talon kunai across her chest and tungsten bolas at her belt. Ines will not kill her; the oath she swore after the gate forbids it, and the pity Soren cannot forgive is the nearest thing to penance Ines has found. She will take this blade too, and the next, for as long as the younger woman keeps coming.