Chapter 40: The Ninefold Mother's Answer

It took six days, and when it came, it did not come as scent.

It came as a delegation, and it arrived in daylight, which Sacha understood immediately as the message it was:

nothing that intended harm walks up to a claim in the open at midday.

The watch saw them at four hundred lengths and held exactly as drilled — the four rules, built in a cellar for a threat Sacha had assumed was a year away and used now for the third time in six weeks.

Nobody closed.

Nobody fled.

A runner came down to the brick at a working pace rather than an alarmed one, and Sacha had nine minutes to prepare for the most important conversation of his second life.

He spent nine of them deciding what not to say.

Nine of them. He noted the number and disliked how much it told him.

They stopped at the outer marks — at the marks, precisely, not through them — and waited, which was another message, and Sacha went out to meet them with two Carapace at a distance he had calculated to be respectful rather than defensive.

They were beetles.

Not Thresh's kind: heavier, fitted, bred close, with the specific uniformity of a line shaped for a purpose over a long time.

They moved as the corridor column had moved.

Behind him, under the brick, Thresh had gone somewhere Sacha could not see it, and had done so without being told to.

He noted it and set it aside for later, along with several other things he wouldn't have room for in the next hour.

He also noted, because the part of him that took inventory never stopped, that nine was the same number as the Mother's name, that the delegation had stopped at his marks rather than through them, and that not one of the nine had even tested an approach on the way in.

Every element of the arrival was a statement, delivered by an organization that had been making these arrivals for longer than his species had existed in this sector.

They're being polite, he thought. And they're being polite in a way designed to make sure I understand that politeness is a choice.

The one at the front carried no mark that Sacha could read, and its sending, when it came, was clean and unhurried and entirely without weight.

[Contact acknowledged.

Claim: registered, provisional.

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Affiliation: none recorded.]

You are the four marks, it sent.

I am.

You are Sector Four.

What's left of it.

Sixty-one, the beetle sent, and Sacha felt something cold go through him, and nine young, and four strands, and one Verge survivor. Minus eight in the ground and two on the road and one small one in a cold chamber that should not have been cold.

Sacha said nothing at all.

You are wondering how, the beetle sent. You have been wondering since the Ascension counted you. You have wondered badly enough to quarter your own colony over it, which cost you the small one, and I am telling you this now because you will not stop making that mistake until somebody does.

Then tell me.

A claim is a shape, it sent. Any claim above the fourth echelon can read the shape of a claim below it. Not the bodies. The structure — its size, its strands, its stresses. The Ascension did not have a spy in your walls. It looked at you, from a distance, the way you look at a wall and know there is a room behind it.

The relief that went through Sacha was so complete and so shameful that he had to hold still for a moment before he could send anything — and underneath the relief, arriving half a second later, something considerably colder.

Above the fourth echelon. He was at the third.

Everything above him could read him like this, permanently and without effort, and no defense against it did not consist of climbing.

There was never an informant.

There was never an informant. You broke your own colony to catch a thing that does not exist, and you will carry that, and you should. The beetle's antennae moved once. Now. The Mother has read your three lines and has an answer to the third of them, and I am to give it exactly.

Why are you telling me this, Sacha sent instead. It costs you nothing to let me keep breaking my own colony.

It costs the Mother a neighbor who is stupid in a predictable way, the beetle sent. You are going to be next to us for some time. She would prefer you competent. Its antennae moved once. That is not kindness. It is the cheapest thing she will ever do for you and she is doing it first so that you will correctly value everything after it.

Give me the rest.

Your one who went north is alive, the beetle sent. He is not held by us.

Sacha kept his sending absolutely flat, which took more than he had.

Then by whom.

The Mother's answer was two lines, the beetle sent. That was the first. Here is the second, and I am to give it exactly, and I am not to explain it, and I have asked twice.

It waited until it was certain he was listening.

Ask the ground you came through.

The delegation left the way it had come, at the same unhurried pace, through the marks rather than around them.

Sacha stood at his own border long after they had gone, and did not go back under the brick or send for anyone.

Ask the ground you came through.

Fourteen days of fracture.

Two thousand lengths of maintained passage.

Corners shaved by mandibles the size of his own.

A cistern with tool-marks on the lip and a track worn between it and a seep by seasons of the same small feet.

A settlement the size of a city with four cisterns and no bodies in it at all.

A wall of writing he could not read, with the last block laid in a hurry.

He had walked his entire colony through a dead civilization, spent a full day memorizing a message he had no way to decipher, and concluded — because it had been convenient to conclude, because there had been a schedule and a wrecking ball and nine young who had not eaten — that whatever had lived down there was gone.

They did not come up, he had told Thresh. Not once, in however many generations it takes to wear a track like that.

He had said it as a fact about the past.

Sacha turned and looked west, at the fracture mouth his people had climbed out of nine days ago, and felt the entire shape of the last two weeks turn over underneath him.

Nobody had come out of the north to take Khrr.

Something had come up.