The Score

Ephergent

2026

Chapter 1: Shipped Freight

The crate arrived on a Tuesday, and it came with a signature that wasn’t Chewy’s.

He found it at the foot of the workshop steps, six feet of weathered pine banded in steel, a shipping label flapping loose at one corner. The delivery drone had already lifted off, its rotors folding into silence over the rooftops of North Prima, and the street was empty in that mid-morning way the workshop’s block got — nobody walked past the Chambers place, not since Hollis.

Chewy stood on the top step with a mug of coffee gone cold in his fist and read the label twice.

Chambers, C. — N. Prima, Block 9. Freight-class: sealed survey equipment. Shipper: Chambers, H. — Verdanya Post 4.

His thumb found the edge of the label and worried it. The ink had that particular blue of a fountain pen run dry halfway, and he recognized the hand the way you recognize a limp. He’d seen it on contour margins his whole life, on the inside covers of his school notebooks, on the note taped to the workshop door eleven months ago that said back by the equinox, keep the kettle on.

The equinox had come and gone. The kettle had not been used for anyone but him.

“ARC,” he said, without turning around.

The voice came from the small disc clipped to his collar, warm as a lamp and dry as a receipt. “Present. Crate is sixty-two kilograms gross, eighteen degrees off plumb, no delivery drone within three hundred meters. Would you like the probability that it’s addressed correctly?”

“Do it.”

“Given the shipper’s last known position and the eleven-month gap between the postmark and today: sixty-one percent it was sent before the disappearance, thirty-nine percent it was sent after. I can narrow it if you open it.”

Chewy set the mug on the rail and went down the steps. The crate was heavier than it looked, or maybe the street was sloped; he crouched and worked the label free, folded it once, and put it in his jacket pocket. The pine was Prima-grown, pale, and someone had stenciled the side in block letters: FRAGILE — SURVEY — DO NOT INVERT. Underneath, smaller, in the same blue pen: For C.

He got his fingers under the lid. The seal held for a second, then gave with a sound like a slow swallow.

Inside, packed in straw the color of old gold, was a trail-surveyor automaton.

It lay folded into the space the way you fold a thing you’ve folded a hundred times — knees up, head tucked, arms crossed over a chestplate gone green with age. Its face was a smooth plate with a single lens slot, and its cap — a real cap, cotton, sweat-stained, the brim curled by a thumb that had done it a thousand times — had slipped over one eye. The survey-insignia on the front was a compass rose with a needle broken off at the north point.

Chewy had seen one of these before, once, when he was nine, at the Prima depot. Hollis had crouched beside it and said, They don’t make ’em anymore, and the ones they made don’t stop. He’d put his hand on the cap and left it there a moment, like you’d touch a horse’s neck.

“ARC.”

“Automaton class: dead-reckoner, trail-survey. Registration is illegible but the insignia is Prima Depot, pre-fusion manufacture. Chewy, the packing list says one item. There’s no second item.”

“There’s straw.”

“There’s straw.” A pause, the kind ARC used when it was running something. “There’s also a seam.”

Chewy looked. The straw wasn’t packed the way you’d pack a machine; it was stitched. A line of coarse thread ran the length of the crate’s inner lining, and at one end the thread ended in a knot the size of a thumbnail, the kind of knot you tie when you want someone to find the end. He pulled it.

The lining came away in one piece, and in the fold of it, folded twice and sewn into the canvas, was a journal.

It was small, fit in one hand, bound in oilcloth the color of wet slate. The cover was blank. The pages inside were the cheap ruled kind you got at any Prima stationer, and they were full — not in sentences, but in Hollis’s hand, the fast slanted shorthand of a man taking notes in weather. Coordinates. Bearing lines. Sketches of ridges. And in the margins, in the same blue pen as the crate label, a second hand of writing — smaller, slower, like someone had sat down afterward and thought about each word.

Chewy’s thumb rested on the first page. The writing there was ink-black and ordinary. He turned a few. The ink held. He turned to a page with a sketch of a spire — a tall one, the kind that stood along the spine — and something about the drawing made him hold it up to the light.

Nothing. Ordinary ink on ordinary paper.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing what?”

“Nothing on this page. I thought —” He stopped. It was the kind of thought he’d had a hundred times since Hollis left: that there’d be a message, that the man would have left a message, that the message would be waiting on the page where you looked. He set the journal on the crate lid. “Okay. Let’s wake the machine.”

“The manual says they don’t wake easily. And the manual says to address them by their survey number, not their name.”

“Do we have a survey number?”

“We have a cap with a broken insignia and a registration that’s illegible.”

Chewy leaned over the crate. The automaton’s lens slot was dark. Up close, the plate of its face had a scratch running from the left edge to the center, like something had caught it long ago. He put two fingers on the cap’s brim and pushed it back to where it belonged.

“Hey,” he said. “You’re at my house.”

Nothing.

“You were Hollis’s. I’m his nephew. Chester.”

The lens slot lit — not bright, a low amber, the color of a filament warming. The head moved first, a quarter turn, then stopped as if listening. The arms unfolded. The thing sat up in the straw with the unhurriedness of a man who had been asleep a long time and was in no rush about it.

Its voice, when it came, was gravel over iron. “North-northeast, and don’t argue.”

“I’m not arguing.”

“Good.” The automaton looked at the crate walls, the street, the sky. Its cap brim went up and down once, a recalibration. “Wind me. We’re walking.”

“Wind you.”

“Field order.” It put a hand on the crate’s edge and levered itself out, joints complaining like rigging in a gale. It stood in the street, six feet of greened brass and old cotton, and the broken compass rose on its cap caught the light. “I have been wound since the depot. I am telling you the order. Wind me, meaning: put your hand on the key at my hip and turn until you feel it catch. Then we’re walking.”

Chewy looked at the journal on the crate lid. He looked at the machine. The morning had gone very quiet.

“Where are we walking?”

“North-northeast, and don’t argue.”

“ARC,” Chewy said. “Ledger.”

“Opening,” ARC said. “Ledger one, entry one. Probability that Hollis Chambers is alive: four point seven percent.”

The number sat in the air between them. Four point seven. Chewy had expected a smaller one. He had not known what he expected.

“Four point seven is low,” he said.

“Four point seven is not zero. It is a number that requires a walk to become a different number. That is what ledgers are for.” ARC’s voice was level. “I should note that the automaton’s field order and the journal’s provenance are now correlated data. The crate was packed by your uncle. The machine inside it was packed by your uncle. The journal was sewn in by your uncle. He shipped himself a walking order, addressed it to you, and it arrived on a Tuesday.”

“He shipped it eleven months ago or yesterday.”

“Thirty-nine percent after.”

Chewy picked up the journal and put it in his jacket, against the folded label. He went back to the crate and found, under the last of the straw, a coil of climbing rope, a tin of rations, and a field notebook with the first forty pages torn out. The tin was dented. The rope was good.

“Wind me,” the automaton said. It was standing at the bottom of the workshop steps, looking up at the door with its lens slot half-lidded, the way a dog looks at a porch it remembers.

Chewy went to its left hip. There was a key there, brass, half the length of his hand, recessed into a housing that said DEPOT in letters worn to ghosts. He put his fingers around it and turned.

It caught on the fourth revolution, a soft click he felt in his wrist more than heard.

“Good,” the automaton said. “Now the pack.”

“There’s no pack.”

“Then take what’s in the crate and we’ll make one on the road.” It started up the steps, joints clicking a steady two-beat. At the top it stopped. “I don’t go inside. I haven’t got orders for inside. Leave the door, and the kettle, and come out.”

“You knew about the kettle.”

“I know the label said For C.” The lens slot turned to him. “Wind me and we’re walking. That’s the whole order.”

Chewy stood in the workshop doorway a moment. The room was as he’d left it — Hollis’s drafting table, the wall of rolled maps, the kettle on its hook, the chair by the window where Chewy did his homework because the light was good. Nothing had changed in eleven months. Everything had changed in eleven months.

He took the journal out and held it so the light fell on the first page. The ink was ordinary. He put it back.

“ARC, route.”

“North-northeast from Block 9 puts you on the Prima ridge road in twenty minutes. Beyond that, I need a destination.”

“Then we’ll find one.” Chewy shouldered the rope and the tin and the notebook. He took the crate’s lid and set it over the straw like closing a coffin, gentle, because he didn’t know why. “The label said Verdanya Post 4. That’s a waypoint, not a destination.”

“It is a waypoint, and it is eleven hundred kilometers from here.”

“Good.”

The automaton made a sound that might have been approval, or might have been its bearings settling. It went down the steps ahead of him, its cap straight, its broken compass pointing north at nothing.

Chewy locked the workshop. The key went in his pocket with the label. On the top step he paused and looked back at the door — the note was still taped there, curling at one corner, the handwriting he’d read every morning for eleven months. Back by the equinox. Keep the kettle on.

He turned north-northeast.

The street was empty. The drone that had delivered the crate was long gone. Somewhere past the ridge, past the Prima suburbs, past the border into a country he’d only seen on maps, there was a spire that had not yet woken, and a number on a ledger that wanted to become a different number.

Four point seven percent.

He walked.

Behind him, the workshop stood with its door locked and its kettle on its hook and its light good at the window, and the morning went on being a Tuesday, ordinary as anything, until it wasn’t.

Chapter 2: The Waystation

They walked north-northeast for most of the morning with nothing but the journal and the pack Clive had built out of the crate’s own wood and leather scraps. Chewy had protested the pack — it was crude, boxy, more crate than bag — and Clive had said, “You’ll want your hands for the grade,” and that had been that.

The grade came up slow. Prima’s back streets thinned to allotments, allotments to scrub, and scrub to the first real switchbacks of the coastal rise. Clive took them without breaking pace. Its legs moved in a rhythm that had nothing to do with breath, and by the third switchback Chewy’s lungs were burning and the automaton was looking back at him with what might have been patience.

“Regulate,” Clive said.

“I’m regulating.”

“You’re gasping.”

“That’s how I regulate.”

Clive recalibrated the brim of its cap and did not comment further. Somewhere below them Prima went on being Prima: the grid, the docks, the faint soot line over the refinery quarter. Up here the air was already thinner and tasted of salt and stone.

They passed a trail marker — painted iron, half rusted, the arrow long gone — and Chewy pulled out the journal. The cover was the same worn leather it had been since he’d found it stitched into the crate lining two nights ago, hidden so well he’d needed a seam ripper to get at it. He’d read every page twice already. His uncle’s handwriting, close and even, filling the margins more than the lines. Contours. Elevations. A sketch of a ridge he recognized from the old survey plates. And nothing that looked like a message, because there was nothing that looked like a message yet.

“Waystation’s ahead,” Clive said. “Forty minutes. Maybe less if you stop reading and start climbing.”

“How do you know there’s a waystation ahead?”

“The journal knows. I read the journal.”

“You read it once.”

“I read it the way a surveyor reads ground: once, correctly.”

Chewy turned the pages as he walked, which Clive had warned him about twice and stopped warning him about on the third. The margins were dense. His uncle had drawn small symbols next to certain elevations — circles with dots, tick marks, a glyph that looked like a stylized spire. None of it resolved. The ink was ordinary, black-brown, decades old by the feel of it. Nothing in it moved.

He closed the journal and kept climbing.

The waystation was a low stone building set into the hillside like a root, its door facing north with the particular stubbornness of structures built to outlast weather. Roof slate. A chimney with a bird’s nest in it. The kind of place the old trail-service had put every twenty kilometers along the Prima rise, back when the trail-service had money and the mountain had hikers.

The door was unlocked. That was the first thing that felt wrong.

The second thing was the silence inside. Not dead silence — the particular silence of a room that has been waiting. Chewy stood in the doorway a moment, letting his eyes adjust, and Clive stood behind him and did not go in, which was also wrong, because Clive had not hesitated at any door since the workshop.

“You’re not coming in?”

“I’m keeping the perimeter.”

“You don’t have a perimeter.”

“I do now. It’s this doorway. I’m keeping it.”

Chewy looked at the automaton for a moment, then stepped through.

Inside: a stone floor swept clean. A hearth with cold ash, raked flat. Two bunks built into the wall, their blankets folded with a military squareness that he recognized — his uncle folded blankets like that. A table. On the table, a crate.

Not the crate. A smaller one, wooden, lid ajar. Chewy crossed the floor and lifted the lid.

Rations. Vacuum-sealed packets with his uncle’s handwriting on each one in marker: Day 1–3. Day 4–6. Day 7–10. The dates meant nothing yet, but the hand meant everything. He picked up a packet and turned it over. The seal was perfect. Nothing had gone stale.

Under the rations: a child’s boot.

Small. Leather, scuffed at the toe, laces replaced with a strip of cloth. Chewy held it up and felt the floor shift under him, though the floor had not moved. He knew this boot. He had owned this boot. He had worn it on the Prima rise when he was six years old and his uncle had carried him up the last kilometer because he’d refused to admit his legs were done.

He set it down carefully, as if it were still on a foot.

Under the boot: a sketch.

Pencil, on the back of a survey form. A boy of about six sitting on a stone, eating something, looking up at whoever was drawing him with the particular squint of a child who has been told to sit still and has decided to negotiate. Chewy’s own face, fifteen years younger and already stubborn. In the corner, in his uncle’s small close hand: North Prima rise, km 18. He made it further than he said he would.

Chewy stood a long time with the sketch in his hands.

The room was very quiet. The bird’s nest chimney ticked with some small animal moving in it. He became aware, gradually, of a sound he had been hearing for some time without hearing it — a low vibration through the stone floor, so deep it was almost not a sound, more the idea of one. He crouched and put his palm flat on the floor.

The vibration was coming from outside.

Clive was still in the doorway, its cap straight, its compass pointing north at nothing. Behind it, down the slope the way they’d come, the hillside had changed. Something was there that had not been there when they’d climbed up.

It was low to the ground, the size of a large dog, built the way a thing is built when it is carved rather than grown. Stone — the mountain’s own stone, gray-veined, with a seam running the length of its spine where a spine would be. The seam glowed, faintly, a deep amber that pulsed in time with the vibration Chewy had felt through the floor. It had a broad brow, blunt muzzle, ears set high. It was pressing its brow flat against something embedded in the hillside.

The something was a spire-core relic — a fragment of one of the old spires, half-buried in the rock, its surface etched with the same glyph-work as the journal’s margins. The creature’s brow was against it and it was not moving. The glow along its spine brightened as Chewy watched, then dimmed, then brightened.

“That’s an Ephergent,” Clive said. It had not turned around. “They don’t come this far north. Not usually.”

“What’s it doing?”

“Keeping something.”

Chewy stepped out past the automaton. The Ephergent did not lift its brow. Up close the stone of it was warm, radiating a heat that had nothing to do with the sun, and the seam along its spine was not a painted line but a channel of light that moved when the creature breathed, if breathing was what it did. Chewy crouched a meter away.

“Hey,” he said.

The glow shifted color — a half-tone toward blue, a flicker, then back to amber. The vibration through the ground changed pitch, dropping a step. It was not a growl. It was not a sound at all, exactly. It was the hillside changing its mind about something.

“You’re keeping the relic.”

The creature’s brow stayed pressed to the stone. Chewy reached out, slowly, and let his fingers hover over the relic’s etched surface. The glyphs were deep-cut, older than anything he’d seen outside a museum case. He pulled his hand back.

“If I take it, you’ll be upset.”

The glow went cold blue along the entire seam, and the vibration cut out so completely that the silence afterward had a shape. Chewy sat back on his heels.

“I’m not taking it. I don’t even know what it is.”

The blue held for a long moment, then bled back toward amber. The vibration returned, lower than before. The creature did not move its brow from the stone.

Behind him, Clive said, “It’s chosen the relic. That’s what they do. They find something and they decide it’s theirs and they don’t put it down.”

“What happens if someone tries to take it?”

“Depends on the relic. Depends on the Ephergent. I’ve seen one keep a survey stake for eleven years. The stake rusted. The Ephergent did not.”

Chewy looked at the creature for a while longer. It was, he thought, the strangest thing he had ever seen, and he had grown up on a planet where the mountains hummed. He did not try to touch it again. After a few minutes he went back inside.

The journal was on the table where he’d left it. He picked it up and sat on the edge of the bunk and opened it to the page he’d been reading on the climb.

Nothing.

He turned pages. Nothing. He went back to the beginning and read the first entry again, the way his uncle had written it, close and even, the margin notes in the small hand: Contour interval 20m. Base elevation 440. Wind from the sea, always from the sea, and the survey pins will tell you if I’ve lied.

He was halfway through the second entry when he noticed the word.

It was in the margin, next to a sketch of the waystation’s chimney — the same chimney with the bird’s nest, drawn from the hillside below, the way they’d approached it. The margin had been empty an hour ago. He was certain of it. He had read this page three times. Now there was a word there, in ink that was not black-brown like the rest but a deep gold, the color of spire-light, and it sat on the page as if it had always been there.

Chewy.

His name. In a margin that had been empty. He held the journal up to the window light and turned it, and the word did not fade or shift. It was ink. It was real ink. He ran his thumb over it and felt nothing but the tooth of the page.

He read the rest of the margin. There was nothing else. Just the one word, gold, in a place where there had been nothing.

“Clive.”

The automaton appeared in the doorway. “What.”

“Look at this.”

Clive crossed the room and took the journal and held it at the angle it held maps — slightly away, as if the page might be ground that shifted. It looked for a long time. Then it set the journal down on the table, very precisely, and straightened.

“That wasn’t there before,” Chewy said.

“No.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means the ink is resolving.” Clive’s cap brim went up a fraction, then down. “The journal’s been waiting for spire-light. There’s a fragment embedded in the hillside out there and it’s been giving off a faint charge for who knows how long. The ink’s been charging too. One word surfaced.”

“One word surfaced with my name on it.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not — that’s not normal ink behavior.”

“No,” Clive said. “It isn’t.”

The automaton went back to the doorway. Chewy stood over the table and read his own name in gold and felt the hair on his arms do something it had not done since he was six years old and had seen the first spire wake from the Prima ridge, a pillar of light going up into the dark like a match struck against the sky.

He closed the journal and put it in the pack.

Outside, the Ephergent had not moved. The glow along its spine had settled into a slow, even pulse, and the relic under its brow was beginning to answer — a faint light of its own now, etched glyphs warming from within, casting a pattern on the stone that looked, if you squinted, like a staff of music.

Chewy stood in the doorway and watched it for a while. The sun was past noon. The trail north would take them into the Cupruma band by dark if they moved, and Clive had already started down the slope without being asked, its cap straight, its compass pointing north at nothing, as if it had somewhere to be that it had known about for a long time and had only now admitted.

He looked back at the waystation. The table, the cold hearth, the folded blankets, the boot, the sketch. His uncle’s handwriting on the rations: Day 1–3. Day 4–6. As if someone had provisioned for a stay. As if someone had known exactly how long it would take and had laid it out in marker on vacuum-sealed packets and folded the blankets and swept the floor and then walked out the door and kept walking.

He stepped down off the threshold and pulled the door to behind him, not quite latching it, the way you leave a door for someone who might come back.

The journal sat in the pack with one gold word in its margin, and the word was his name, and the name was an address, and the hillside hummed under his boots all the way down.

Chapter 3: Gulchmarker

The Cupruma band began the way all bad country begins: by getting worse slowly enough that you didn’t notice until you were already in it.

Chewy noticed. The grass thinned to burr and dust, the pines fell back from the road, and the hills turned the color of old blood. The trail north narrowed to two ruts and then to one, and the one was more suggestion than road, a line the land had drawn with its own finger and mostly forgotten. By late afternoon the wind had a grit in it that tasted like the inside of a coin.

“North-northwest and don’t argue,” Clive said, which was its way of saying the trail had bent and the compass knew and Chewy should keep up.

“Your cap’s crooked,” Chewy said.

Clive reached up and straightened the brim without breaking stride, which was its way of agreeing and also not agreeing.

They came over the last rise as the sun was laying itself down along the western ridge, and there it was.

Gulchmarker.

Nobody had to tell him the name; it was burned into a board over what had been the assay office, the letters cut deep and filled with something that had once been white and was now the color of tea. The town sat in the bottom of a dry gulch like a set of teeth somebody had pulled and set down in a row. Twelve buildings, maybe fifteen, all of them the same sun-bleached brown, all of them leaning the same direction as if they’d all heard the same wind and agreed with it. A church with no steeple. A stable with no horse. A bar with a door hanging off one hinge, swinging slow in a wind that wasn’t quite strong enough to deserve a door.

“Ghost town,” Chewy said.

“Claim town,” Clive corrected. “Ghosts don’t leave their stamps in the ground. People give up and leave. Different thing.”

They walked down into it. Their boots on the packed dirt made a sound too loud for the place, the kind of sound that travels and comes back with opinions. Somewhere a piece of tin was tapping against a post in a rhythm that almost had a meter to it.

Chewy stopped at the assay office and put his hand on the doorframe. The wood was warm from the day and dry all the way through, light as bone.

“Cache,” he said. “Has to be. Hollis came through here.”

“He came through,” Clive said, and there was no tone in it at all, which was the tone it used when it was being careful.

The journal was in the pack and the word in its margin was still his name and it still didn’t mean anything yet beyond address. He didn’t take it out. He’d learned in the waystation that the ink did what it wanted and it wanted light he didn’t have.

He was working the assay office door open when the voice came from behind them.

“You boys are on private ground.”

Chewy turned. The man was standing at the head of the street with the sun behind him, so for a second he was just a shape and a hat and a voice, and the voice had the flat, patient, jurisdictional weight of someone who had said this sentence before and expected to say it again.

He came forward and the light resolved him. Late fifties, maybe older. Warden’s coat, the green gone gray at the elbows, a brass pin on the collar Chewy didn’t recognize. A face like a shovel that had been used for a lot of years and not complained about it. A shotgun broken over one arm, not pointed at anything, just carried the way you carry a thing you’ve been carrying since breakfast.

“Private ground,” the man said again. “Gulchmarker’s inside the Pruett claim. Been inside it for thirty years. You got business?”

“Chester Chambers,” Chewy said. “North Prima. I’m following a survey route.”

“Route’s closed.”

“Route’s a public trail.”

“Trail’s closed,” Warden Pruett said, and let it sit there. He had a way of letting things sit that was clearly professional. “Erosion wash. Landslide risk. Signed it myself last spring.”

“There’s no wash,” Chewy said. He looked down the street. It was as dry as a bone. “There’s nothing.”

“Sign’s at the head of the gulch. You passed it.”

Chewy hadn’t seen a sign. He looked at Clive. Clive’s cap was straight and its compass was in its hand and it was reading the bearing on the compass and not looking at anything else, which meant it was listening and not getting involved.

“I’m looking for a cache,” Chewy said, because lying to a man with a shotgun was a worse idea than not lying to him. “My uncle Hollis Chambers cached supplies along this route. I have reason to believe there’s one here.”

“Hollis.” Pruett said the name the way you say a name you’ve had occasion to say before. “Surveyor’s fieldman. Came through, oh, six years back. Signed the register.”

“There’s a register?”

“Was.” Pruett shifted the shotgun to the other arm. “Fire. Took the assay office. Register was in it.”

The assay office behind Chewy had no windows and a roof that was half gone and the doorframe under his hand was scorched black on the inside, which he had not noticed until right then.

“Fire,” he said.

“Fire,” Pruett said. “You want to dig in my claim for a box that may or may not exist, in a town that burned, on ground I’ve held thirty years, you go get me a permit from the Surveyor-General in Prima and you bring it back here and I’ll stand right where I’m standing and watch you dig. Until then you’re trespassing, and I’m inclined to be neighborly about it, because your uncle signed my register once and he was decent about it.”

“Then you’ll let me through.”

“I’ll be neighborly,” Pruett said. “Which is not the same thing.”

He walked them out. Not roughly. He walked behind them at the pace of a man who owned the ground they were standing on and let them find that out for themselves, and when they were up at the head of the gulch he pointed at a sign Chewy could now see, nailed to a post, the paint gone to ghosts of letters: CLOS—D BY ORDR OF THE W—RDEN.

“Enjoy the view,” Pruett said, and went back down into his town.

They sat on a rock above the gulch and watched the last of the sun go.

“Thirty years,” Chewy said. “He’s held this claim thirty years. Hollis came through six years ago. He’s been sitting in a dead town waiting for somebody to come dig up a box.”

“Maybe he’s waiting for the box,” Clive said.

“Or maybe he knows what’s in it.”

Clive didn’t answer. It was doing something with its compass, turning it slowly in its big fingers, reading the needle like a man reading a menu he’d already decided on.

Chewy pulled out the journal and opened it flat on his knee. The margin word was there, gold under the last of the light: Chewy. One word. He’d had it since the waystation and it still hadn’t opened into anything.

“ARC,” he said. “How far off the recorded route are we if we cut around the north side of the gulch?”

ARC’s voice came out of the small unit on his belt, dry and slightly impatient, the way it always sounded when it was doing arithmetic.

“Cutting north of the Pruett claim adds nine point four kilometers and puts you on loose scree for two point one of them. I don’t like scree. I’m going to say I don’t like scree and then you’re going to do it anyway, so I’ll save us both the conversation. Ledger update while I’m here.”

A pause. The kind of pause ARC took when it wanted him to feel the number arrive.

“Probability Hollis Chambers is alive: seven point nine percent.”

Chewy looked at the number he couldn’t see.

“That’s up,” he said.

“From four point seven. The waystation moved it. The provisioned blankets, the dated rations, the swept floor. Someone was maintaining a site with an expectation of return. I’ve weighted it accordingly. Seven point nine percent. It is not a large number. It is a larger number than it was.”

“Good,” Chewy said.

“It’s arithmetic,” ARC said. “Don’t make it a feeling.”

They cut north in the dark. The scree was as bad as ARC had promised, a long slope of broken rock that shifted and clicked under every step, and Chewy went down on one knee twice and put his hand out both times and both times the rock bit him. Clive moved over it like it was a sidewalk, which was annoying and also a comfort. Behind them, far down, the dead town ticked its tin rhythm at the stars.

They came down into the gulch on the north side, past the assay office, past the bar with the swinging door, to a building that had been a telegraph office and still had its key rack on the wall, a dozen little brass hooks with nothing on them.

“Here,” Chewy said.

He didn’t know how he knew. The floor was stone, the walls were adobe, there was a stove in the corner with its pipe gone through the roof and a hole where the roof had been, and under all of it the same hum the hillside had hummed at the waystation, low and patient and under everything.

He put the journal on the floor and got on his hands and knees with the small pry bar Clive had packed and worked the stone at the base of the back wall. It took a long time. The stone didn’t want to move and then it moved all at once and tipped and there was a space underneath, dry and dark and smelling of nothing, which meant sealed.

He reached in and pulled out a box.

Not big. A surveyor’s lockbox, the green canvas gone stiff, the brass corners tarnished. It had Hollis’s mark on it, the little cartographer’s sigil Chewy had watched him stamp on a hundred maps, a circle with a line through it and a smaller circle on the line, like a planet with a moon.

He set it on the floor. He didn’t open it.

“Clive.”

Clive came and stood over it and looked at it for a while. It put its hand on the brim of its cap and did not straighten it, which meant something Chewy had learned to read in the last two days meant it was feeling something it didn’t have a bearing for.

“That’s his stamp,” Clive said.

“Yeah.”

“I packed you into a crate, boy. I have packed a lot of things. I know what a thing looks like when somebody packed it for somebody else to find.”

“So do I,” Chewy said.

He opened the box.

Inside: a coil of surveyor’s wire. A compass, small, the glass cracked in a spider. A folded map of the Cupruma band with a route drawn in Hollis’s hand, and the route had marks on it, five of them, small circles with numbers beside them, and the numbers were not distances.

And under all of it, wrapped in oilcloth, a child’s boot.

Not a baby’s boot. A boy’s boot, maybe size six, the leather gone soft and gray with age, the laces rotted through. Chewy picked it up and turned it over and there was a date written on the sole in ballpoint, a date that was eleven years ago, and the shape of it was a shape he knew, because he had owned a pair just like it, because he had worn a pair just like it the summer his uncle had taken him up to the ridge and taught him to read contour lines with a stick in the dirt.

He sat down on the floor of the telegraph office and held the boot.

“Ledger,” ARC said, from the belt, quiet.

“I heard you the first time,” Chewy said.

“Acknowledged. Seven point nine percent stands.”

Outside, the wind picked up and the swinging door of the bar found its meter again, and somewhere below them the tin on the post kept time with nothing.

Clive crouched beside the box and lifted the map out and held it where the moonlight came through the hole in the roof. The route ran north, out of the gulch, and the five circles with their numbers sat along it like stations on a line.

“Five marks,” Clive said. “He’s numbered them.”

“Numbers aren’t distances,” Chewy said. “Look. There’s no scale on them. They’re just — numbers.”

“Notes,” Clive said, and then looked at its own hand as if it had said something it hadn’t meant to say, and set the map down and straightened its cap all the way straight.

Chewy looked at the numbers. One, three, five. Two of the marks were blank, or looked blank, and then he held the map closer to the hole in the roof and saw that they weren’t blank at all, they were numbers written in ink that had gone the color of the wood and refused to come back until there was a certain kind of light on it, and he knew that light, he had seen it once, at the waystation, for about a second and a half.

He folded the map and put it in the box and put the box in the pack and put the boot on top of the box.

“We should go,” he said. “Pruett’ll be up at dawn.”

They were out of the north side and halfway up the scree by the time the sky started to go gray, and Chewy stopped once at the top and looked back at Gulchmarker sitting in its hole in the ground, twelve brown buildings in a row, the sign at the head of the gulch with its ghost letters, and the one light in the place, a lamp in a window of a house at the far end that he was fairly sure had not been lit when they came down.

He didn’t mention it to Clive. He turned north and kept walking, and the journal was in the pack against his back with a boot on top of it, and the boot fit the shape of something he’d been carrying a long time without knowing it had a shape.

Chapter 4: Bad Coffee, Worse Horses

They came off the scree onto the flat at noon and the flat went on for thirty miles in every direction, flat as a page, and the only thing on it was a road. The road was packed sand the color of old coffee, and it ran east-west like a line someone had ruled across the world, and where it crossed their north line there was a station: four posts, a canvas awning gone the color of bone, a hand pump, and a sign nailed to the posts that said DELACROIX — COFFEE — WATER — NO SWINDLING.

“Swindling,” Clive read, standing at the edge of the road with his cap pulled low. “That’s a specific claim.”

“That’s a specific keeper,” Chewy said. He was already walking toward the pump.

The coffee was bad. It was the kind of bad that had been engineered rather than allowed, the kind of bad that a person arrives at through effort and intent, and Chewy drank two cups of it standing under the awning because his mouth had been the color of the Gulchmarker dust for two days and the water in the can had gone warm and metallic. The keeper was a woman built like the pump, iron-gray braid down her back, hands that didn’t stop moving even when she was standing still — wiping, coiling, folding, a permanent low industry.

“Name’s Delacroix,” she said, not asking. “You’re the Chambers boy. You look like him. Not the missing one — the other one. The father.”

“Uncle,” Chewy said. “Hollis was my uncle.”

“Hollis was a lot of things,” she said, and went back to wiping a cup that was already clean.

The sandsteamer came from the east.

Chewy heard it before he saw it — a low grinding over the flat, like a barge being dragged over gravel — and then it was there, a long flat-bottomed sled under a canvas sail, two mules in the traces, moving along the road at the kind of speed that looked slow and then didn’t. On the deck were three men and a stack of crates, and the man at the front had a surveyor’s satchel that Chewy recognized because it was the same model Clive had, and the man was looking at them with the expression of someone who has been told to look at something and doesn’t much care why.

“Vetch’s office,” Clive said. He had not moved from the pump. “North Prima Surveyor-General. Permit enforcement.”

“We don’t have a permit,” Chewy said.

“No,” Clive agreed. “We don’t.”

The sandsteamer slowed as it came abreast of the station, and the man with the satchel raised a hand — not a wave, a hold — and the mules stopped and the sled ground to a halt and the man stepped down onto the road with the ease of someone who has stepped down onto a lot of roads.

“Chambers,” he said. He didn’t say which one. He had a clipboard. “Chester Chambers, minor, traveling with a decommissioned survey automaton, north of Prima line without permit as of the eighteenth.” He looked at Clive. “You’re supposed to be in a crate.”

“I was in a crate,” Clive said.

“You were shipped to a storage yard in Prima.”

“I got out.”

The man wrote something on the clipboard. “That’s going to be a form.”

“We’re not going back,” Chewy said.

“You’re a minor,” the man said, and he said it the way other people say you’re a trespasser or you’re a forgery, a category rather than a person, and he was already turning back toward the sled because the form was the point, not the boy.

“Ma Delacroix,” Chewy said, spinning toward the keeper. “Did Hollis come through here?”

She was already looking at him. “Every few months, for years,” she said. “He’d sit where you’re standing and drink my coffee and complain about it and then write me a letter when he got wherever he was going. Said I was his fixed point. Said the map needed one thing that didn’t move.”

Chewy’s mouth was dry again despite the coffee. “Letters,” he said. “You have them.”

“I have them,” she said. “I keep things. It’s what a fixed point does.”

The man with the clipboard was back on the sled and the mules were moving and the sandsteamer ground east, and Chewy watched it go because he wanted to make sure it was actually going and not circling, and by the time he turned around Ma Delacroix had gone inside the station and come back out with a metal box, the kind that doesn’t rust, the kind that means someone intended to keep something for a long time on purpose.

She set it on the table under the awning and opened it.

There were eleven letters. They were in Hollis’s hand — Chewy knew the hand the way you know a voice, the way the letters leaned slightly forward as if they were walking even when they were sitting, the cross on the t that went too far, the little spiral he put instead of a period when he was in a good mood. The envelopes were addressed to M. DELACROIX, WAYSIDE 40, NORTH LINE, and the postmarks were spread across four years.

“He wrote you for four years,” Chewy said.

“He wrote me for six,” she said. “Two of them never arrived. I keep those too, in my head. You can read them if you want. You can take them if you want. They’re not mine; they were always going to whoever came looking.”

Chewy picked up the first one. The paper had gone soft, the way paper goes when someone has handled it a lot before it was filed away, and he could feel where the folds were, three folds, the way you fold a letter to fit a small envelope, and he opened it carefully because it was not his letter and he knew that even though he was going to read it.

Delacroix — the coffee at Wayside 40 remains an abomination and I remain grateful for it. The line holds north from your pump for eleven days to the Verdanya edge. I have been up it twice and down it once and I am going up it again. There is a thing at the end of it that I have not written down yet because writing it down would make it a claim, and it is not a claim. It is an instrument. — H.

Chewy read it twice. He put it down and picked up the third one, then the seventh, and in the seventh there was a line he read four times because he was not sure he was reading it right the first three.

I told the boy the map is a promise someone made you. I am beginning to think I told him the wrong half.

He put the letter down and stood there with his hands on the table and the wind coming off the flat and the coffee going cold in the cups, and Ma Delacroix did not say anything, because she was a fixed point, and fixed points don’t fill silence.

“The boy,” Chewy said. “That’s me.”

“That’s you,” she said.

Clive had come to stand at the edge of the awning, looking east along the road where the sandsteamer had gone, and he had his hand up to the brim of his cap in the way he did when he was recalibrating, the brim going down and up and down again, a slow metronome of discomfort.

“We should keep moving,” Clive said. “The road runs north at the next junction. We follow it to the Verdanya line.”

“Not yet,” Chewy said. He was looking at the box. There were letters in it he hadn’t read and he was going to read all of them before they left, and he knew Ma Delacroix would let him, and he knew Clive wanted to be gone, and he did not care about either of those things in the order they were being presented.

He sat down at the table and read the letters.

They were not about him. That was the first thing, and it was the thing that took the longest to understand. Hollis wrote to Delacroix about the road and the weather and the coffee and the way the light came through the Verdanya canopy in the late afternoon like something being poured, and about a survey he had been running for the Prima office years ago that he had decided to stop running, and about a spire he had found that did not match its own map, and about a boy he had raised and the fact that the boy could read a contour map better than anyone in the Prima office and that this was going to be a problem for the boy one day, in a good way, in a way he was not sure the boy was going to forgive him for.

In the ninth letter there was a line about the journal. Chewy read it and then read it again and then held the paper flat against the table with both hands because his hands had started to do something he didn’t want them to do.

Delacroix — I have started writing the book out again, the whole thing, in the margins this time, in the ink that needs the light. If anyone ever brings it to you, don’t tell them what it is. Let them find out the way I did, which is slowly, and in order, and with the ground doing what it does. — H.

“He wrote it out again,” Chewy said. “The journal. He wrote it out again in the margins.”

“That’s what he said,” Delacroix said.

“In ink that needs the light.”

“That’s what he said.”

Chewy put the letter down and took the journal out of the pack. It was heavier than it should have been — it had been heavy since Gulchmarker, since the map with the blank-looking numbers, since the boot on top of it — and he opened it to the margin where the gold word had been, his name, the address, and he held it up toward the flat white sky the way he had held it at the waystation, the way he had held it in the hole in the roof of the Gulchmarker house, angling it, hunting for the angle.

Nothing.

He turned it. He tilted it. He walked out from under the awning into the full flat noon light and held the page up and turned it slowly, degree by degree, the way Clive had taught him to read a shadow on a map to find the height of something, and nothing happened for a long time, long enough that Delacroix came to the edge of the awning and Clive stopped recalibrating his brim and stood still, and then the light did the thing it did, a slant, a particular slant off the flat sand road at that hour at that angle, and the margin of the page caught it, and under his name, below the address, a second line came out of the wood-colored ink the way the numbers had come out of the map, slowly, letter by letter, as if the ink were deciding.

keep up.

Two words. No spiral for a period, no lean forward, nothing to indicate whether it was a joke or an order or a prayer, just the two words sitting in the margin under his name in a hand he knew better than his own, and Chewy stood in the road holding the journal up to the light with the two words on it and the whole flat country silent around him except for the wind and the pump and the faint low grind of something very far east that might have been the sandsteamer or might have been the ground doing what it did.

He lowered the journal. He looked at it for a while. Then he put it back in the pack and put the box of letters on top of it, all eleven, because Ma Delacroix had said he could take them, and he was going to take them.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Bring them back when you’re done,” she said. “Or don’t. A fixed point doesn’t check.”

Clive was already at the road’s edge, facing north, his cap squared, his hands at his sides, the posture of a man — of a thing — that has been standing at a north line for a very long time and intends to continue.

“The junction’s four miles,” he said. “We make it before dark or we make it after. Either way we’re walking.”

Chewy shouldered the pack. The journal was against his back with the box on top of it and the boot under that, and the boot fit the shape of the thing he’d been carrying, and now there was a new shape on top of it, two words, an address that had turned out to have a second line, and he stepped off the awning’s shade onto the hot sand road and fell in beside Clive, and they walked north, and behind them the station and the pump and the keeper went small, and ahead the flat went on, and the road ruled across it ran north at the next junction the way Clive had said it would, because Clive’s roads always ran where he said they did, and that was the one thing about him that Chewy had not yet found a reason to doubt.

Chapter 5: The One That Stayed

The junction was a crossroads with nothing at it, and the road north was a rut through scrub for the first mile and then the scrub got serious and then the scrub was trees.

That was how the Verdanya band began: not with a line, but with a wall. One step the sun was a white coin in a flat sky and the next the sky was gone and the light came through in green coins that moved when the canopy moved, and the road became a track, and the track became a suggestion, and the suggestion became the smell of wet bark and the sound of something small running away through leaves.

Chewy stopped. The heat hadn’t changed but the air had — thicker, closer, like the difference between a room and a mouth.

“Verdanya,” Clive said, as if announcing a station stop. He recalibrated his brim. “We’ll want rope for the canopy stretches. We’ll want to want it before we need it.”

“You know this band.”

“I know where it is.” He pointed north with his chin. “Past the understory there’s a waystation. Hollis’s line runs through it. If the caches hold, it holds.”

“And if they don’t?”

Clive looked at him with whatever it was behind his faceplate that looked like patience. “Then we’re walking further than we planned.”

They walked into the green.

The first hour was the worst of it — the adjustment, where every step was a negotiation with root and mud and the pack’s new weight riding high on his back. The journal rode against his spine with the box and the boot above it, and the boot had settled into the shape of his shoulder like it had been carried a hundred times before, and he kept thinking about Ma Delacroix’s words: or don’t. A fixed point doesn’t check.

The light changed before the track did. It went from green coins to green water to something dim and even, like being inside a held breath, and the sounds got layered — insects underneath, birds above, something large and unhurried somewhere to the east that didn’t bother to stop being large when they passed.

ARC spoke once, low in his ear: “Canopy density at ninety-two percent. Recommend pace reduction of twelve percent for footing.” Then, after a pause: “Probability Hollis is alive: 7.9 percent. Ledger updated. No further comment.”

“You always say that,” Chewy said.

“It is always accurate.”

By midday the track had widened into a cleared lane, and the clearing had edges, and the edges had posts, and the posts had a roof between them.

The waystation sat in a knot of light where the canopy had been cut back years ago — not recently, not with saws, but with the slow permission of a place that had been lived in. A cabin of dark timber. A rain-catch cistern with a pipe running into a stone trough. A root cellar door with a rope-pull. And a porch, wide and low, with two chairs on it.

Two chairs. Chewy counted them twice.

He stood in the lane with the sweat running down his back and the pack’s straps cutting into his shoulders and he looked at the two chairs and something in his chest did a slow, quiet rearrangement.

Clive went around the back. Chewy went up the three porch steps and tried the door and it opened on a room that smelled of cedar and cold iron and lamp oil that had been put away properly a long time ago.

The room was provisioned.

Not for a season. Not for a stop. The shelves along the north wall were laid in rows — sealed tins with dates chalked on their lids, stacked four deep. Rope, coiled and waxed. A medical box with its brass corners still bright. A water filter with spare membranes in oiled cloth. Boots, three pairs, in a line by the hearth, each pair wrapped in newspaper that had gone the color of weak tea.

Chewy set the pack down by the door and walked the room the way he walked a map — slow, along the edges first.

The dates on the tins were the thing that stopped him. He read them twice, three times, moving his finger along the chalk marks without touching them. The earliest was six years back. The latest was —

He did the arithmetic. The latest was four months from now. Provisioned forward, chalked in advance, a full year of tins laid in by someone who had been standing here on a schedule.

He turned around. The room was quiet. The two chairs faced the hearth like they were waiting for a conversation to resume.

“Clive.”

The automaton came in through the back door, bringing the smell of wet leaves with him. He looked at the shelves. He looked at the chairs. He recalibrated his brim, and the gesture, for the first time since the crate, looked less like a habit and more like a brace.

“He stocked it forward,” Chewy said. “There’s tins dated next year.”

“Journal says he came through here often,” Clive said. “A man who comes through often keeps a house.”

“A man who comes through often doesn’t chalk dates on tins for the year he won’t be here.”

Clive didn’t answer that. He went to the hearth, checked the flue, found it clear, and stood with his back to the room for a moment that lasted one beat too long.

Chewy opened the pack. The journal came out with the box and the boot, and he set the box on the table and the boot beside it, and the boot sat there on the cedar tabletop, small and dark and scuffed at the toe, and he looked at it for a while.

He’d been carrying it since the waystation — since the first cache, the rations and the sketch of a boy at six and this boot, Hollis’s first note home, the one he’d kept. Chewy had packed it without thinking about why. It was evidence. It was a waypoint’s payload. It went in the pack.

Now it sat on the table in the waystation that had been provisioned for years, and the light through the window fell on it, and he picked it up.

It was light. It was a child’s boot, leather gone soft with age, the sole worn thin at the ball. He turned it over. He put his thumb in the opening and felt the lining, worn smooth.

He put it against his foot.

That was the thing he hadn’t done. He’d handled it, packed it, felt its shape settle into the pack’s shape against his back, and he had never once done the obvious, stupid, obvious thing that a fourteen-year-old boy does with a boot, which is try it on.

It fit.

Not at six. Not the ghost of a fit, the way you fit into a photograph of yourself. It fit the way a shoe fits the foot it was broken in on — the arch found the arch, the toe box found the toes, the heel sat down and stayed. He stood in one boot on the cedar floor of the waystation and the room did the slow rearrangement again, harder this time, and he understood.

Hollis hadn’t packed it because it was a keepsake. He’d packed it because he’d known. He’d known the boy he was writing to was going to be this size when he got here, and he’d packed a boot that would fit when the boy arrived, and he’d chalked the tins forward to the year the boy would need them, and he’d left two chairs by the hearth.

Chewy took the boot off. He set it on the table next to the box, and he stood there with one sock dark with trail dust and the other clean, and he didn’t say anything for a while.

The jungle outside did its layered business. Something large and unhurried moved in the understory and went on being large.

“He knew,” Chewy said. “He knew I’d come.”

Clive was at the window. He didn’t turn around. “The journal was written to be read.”

“Not read. Followed.” Chewy put his hand flat on the journal’s cover. “He provisioned this place for whoever was carrying it. He knew what size I’d be. He knew when.”

“Then he was a good cartographer.”

“That’s not cartography.” Chewy’s voice came out rougher than he meant it to. “That’s a man setting a table for someone who hasn’t walked in yet.”

Clive turned from the window. The faceplate caught the green light and gave nothing back, but the cap came off his head and went back on, squared, and the gesture was slow.

“He came home once,” Clive said.

The room got very quiet.

Chewy looked at him. “What?”

“Before the disappearance. He came home.” Clive’s voice had the flat, even cadence of a man reading coordinates off a page he’d read many times. “He was gone eleven months on the Verdanya line. He came back to Prima for eleven days. Then he went north again and did not come back the second time.”

“You knew that. You’ve known that the whole —”

“I was under field orders.”

“Whose field orders?”

The automaton’s hands were at his sides. He recalibrated his brim. “The ones that packed me in the crate.”

Chewy opened his mouth and closed it. The eleven days. Hollis had come home for eleven days, and in those eleven days he could have done anything — written letters, drawn maps, chalked dates on tins that wouldn’t be opened for years, packed a boot for a nephew who was six years old and would be fourteen when the boot was needed. He could have measured a boy’s foot from memory, or from the last pair he’d sent home, and ordered a boot, and broken it in, and put it in a cache on a trail through a jungle he had no reason to walk again.

Except he did have a reason. The journal was the reason. The journal was always the reason.

Chewy sat down in one of the two chairs.

It held him. The wood was worn smooth in the arms where hands had rested, and he put his hands where the hands went, and the fit was the same fit the boot had been, and he sat in the chair in the provisioned room in the jungle and breathed.

“Read me the ledger,” he said.

ARC’s voice came into his ear, dry as chalk: “Probability Hollis is alive: 7.9 percent. Unchanged since Cupruma. The chair does not move the number.”

“I know the chair doesn’t move the number.”

“Then you asked because you wanted to hear it said.”

Chewy almost smiled. “Maybe.”

“The number is 7.9 percent. It is a scoreboard, not a verdict. I will update it when the data updates.”

Outside, the light in the clearing shifted — a slow, broad movement, like a cloud passing over a sun that wasn’t there. Chewy looked up. The canopy was a held breath, green and even, and through the gap where the waystation’s clearing met the trees something was moving.

It came out of the understory low and built from the mountain’s own stone, a border-collie shape at eye level with a seam of pale light running the length of its spine, and it stopped at the edge of the clearing and looked at the cabin with eyes that were not eyes but the place where eyes would be if the stone had wanted them.

“Tavo,” Chewy said.

The Ephergent had been with them since the first cache — a presence at the edge of vision, a rumble underfoot that Chewy had learned to read the way you read weather. Alarm was a cold blue flash along the seam. Contentment was a faint vibration in the ground, like a held note. This was neither. The seam ran a slow, steady gold, and the thing walked into the clearing with the unhurried certainty of something that had been here before.

It crossed the porch. It did not look at Clive. It came through the open door and into the room and stopped in front of the table where the boot and the box sat, and it lowered its head, and it pressed its brow to the box.

The seam went bright — not blue, not alarm, not the cold flash — a deep, slow gold that pulsed once, twice, three times, and the ground under the cabin hummed, and every spire within a mile of the waystation lit.

Chewy felt it in his teeth. The hum of the hillside he’d been carrying since the first word resolved in the journal’s margin, the hum that had followed him down the trail and across the flat and into the green — it was louder here, layered now with the tones of the spires outside, and the light through the windows went gold, and the journal on the table opened.

Not all of it. Not the score. A margin, one line, the ink resolving the way ink resolved under spire-light, slow and certain and meant, and Chewy leaned forward and read it in the gold:

if you’re reading this at light, keep up. I’m sorry. Keep up anyway.

He read it twice. The words sat there, resolved, waiting, and the Ephergent lifted its brow from the box and stood in the middle of the room with the gold running its seam, and the spires outside held their tone, and the jungle went quiet in the way a room goes quiet when someone has said the thing they were always going to say.

“Keep up,” Chewy said.

Clive was at the door. The cap was squared, the hands at the sides, the posture of a thing that has been standing at a north line for a very long time. He looked at the journal. He looked at the Ephergent. He looked at the boy in the chair with one dusty sock and the boot on the table beside him.

“The understory run starts at dawn,” he said. “There’s a waypoint hung in a giant tree two days north. If the ink keeps resolving the way it’s resolving, we’ll want to be under spire-light when it does.”

Chewy looked at the line one more time. Keep up. I’m sorry. Keep up anyway. An apology and an order in the same breath, the way Hollis wrote everything, the way he set a table and chalked dates forward and packed a boot for a boy who wasn’t there yet.

He closed the journal. The gold went out of the margin, but the words stayed — resolved, permanent, his — and he put the journal back in the pack with the box and the boot, and the boot fit the shape of the thing he’d been carrying, and the thing he’d been carrying had been a promise the whole time.

The Ephergent rumbled once, a deep contentment that Chewy felt in the floorboards, and walked back out through the door and into the green, and the spires outside dimmed one by one, and the clearing went back to its coins of light, and the two chairs by the hearth faced the empty room, waiting for the conversation to continue.

Chapter 6: Understory

The understory run started at dawn the way Clive had promised, which meant it started in the dark before dawn, because Clive measured dawn by the moment the canopy stopped dripping and started breathing.

Chewy came out of the wayside into green so thick it had weight. The clearing was already gone behind them, the hearth and the two chairs folded up into the trees like a held breath. The journal was in the pack. The box was in the pack. The boot was in the pack, lashed to the outside because it wouldn’t fit and because Clive had refused to let it ride inside where the sweat from their shirts would get into the leather.

“Hold your line,” Clive said, not looking back. He had a rope over one shoulder, coiled in a figure-eight that he’d tied without looking at his hands, and he walked the way he did everything, which was on a bearing. “The understory is three strata and we’re in the bottom one. Don’t touch anything that glows.”

“Anything that glows.”

“Spires don’t grow down here. But light gets down here anyway, and when light gets down here it finds things to sit on, and when it sits on a thing for long enough the thing starts thinking it’s a spire. You don’t want to wake something that thinks it’s a spire.”

Chewy followed him into the green. ARC’s voice came up in his ear, quiet, the way it came up when it was doing math.

Canopy density at this latitude: 97.4%. GPS denied. I’m dead-reckoning off Clive’s step count, which is regular to 0.3%. Probability he’s doing it on purpose: 99.6%.

“Clive,” Chewy said. “How far to the waypoint?”

“Two days north at a walk. One day north if we don’t walk.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the truest answer I’ve got.” Clive’s hand came up, flat, the stop signal, and Chewy stopped behind him. Ahead, the ground fell away into a gully that had no bottom in the light. “We rope across. You first. I’ll bring the pack.”

“You’re bringing the pack,” Chewy said. “You built the pack.”

“I built the pack to carry, not to wear. You’re lighter. The rope will hold us both but it won’t hold us both plus forty kilos of crate-wood and leather. You go across, you take the pack off on the other side, you hand me the line, I come across, you put the pack back on.”

Chewy looked at the gully. It went down maybe thirty feet to water that was moving slow and black and without reflection, and the far side was a lip of moss over rock, and between the two was nothing but air and the rope Clive was already tying to a root the size of Chewy’s torso.

He put the pack on. He stepped to the edge. He went across hand-over-hand, the rope humming under his gloves, the pack pulling at his shoulders, and the water below him made no sound at all which was worse than if it had.

He made the far side. He took the pack off. He fed the line back.

Clive came across like he was walking on a floor. He didn’t look down once. When he hit the far lip he straightened, touched the brim of his cap, recalibrated it a half-degree, and looked north.

“There,” he said.

The waypoint was in a tree. Not near a tree, not at the base of a tree — in a tree, forty feet up, wedged into the fork of a trunk so big that Chewy’s arms wouldn’t have gone around a third of it. The bark was gray-green and plated like something armored, and the fork it sat in was a room up there, a platform of growth that had happened over centuries to make exactly the shape a man would need to stand in.

And there was a box in it. A cache box, the same construction as the first one, and a rope run leading up to it that Chewy could see only when the light moved.

“The rope run,” Clive said. “That’s the run.”

“You climbed before.”

“I climbed before.” Clive was looking up at the tree, and Chewy watched him do the thing he did when he was reading a landscape, which was to go still in a particular way, the way a needle goes still when it finds north. His hand came up and his fingers moved, making small shapes in the air, and his lips moved without sound.

He’s surveying, Chewy thought. He’s surveying the tree.

Note, ARC said. Clive’s right hand has been making micro-adjustments for 11.4 seconds. The pattern matches a transit reading. He’s sighting the tree against something he can’t see.

“Clive.”

Clive’s hand dropped. The stillness went out of him like a current being switched off, and he was just the laconic machine again, cap and dead-reckoner and not much else.

“Rope run’s rated for your weight,” he said. “Three points of contact. Don’t look down.”

“I’m not going to look down.”

“You’re going to want to look down. I’m telling you now so that when you want to, you remember I told you not to.”

Chewy took the rope. It was old, hand-braided, the color of the bark, and it had been hanging there long enough that the tree had started to grow around it in places, so that some stretches were rope and some stretches were rope-becoming-wood. He put his weight on it. It held.

He climbed.

Forty feet is nothing on a map. Forty feet up a tree in the dark understory with no light but the coins that fell through the canopy is a country. The rope moved when he moved. The bark came away in plates under his free hand, damp and cold. Somewhere below him the water in the gully still made no sound, and somewhere above him the canopy was breathing, and he was in between, in the understory, in the stratum that Clive had named like a man naming a layer of rock.

He made the fork. He pulled himself up onto the platform and lay there for a second with his cheek on bark that was warm from a light he couldn’t see, and then he sat up and looked at the box.

It was a cache box. Same construction. Same latch. He opened it.

Inside: a coil of surveyor’s line, chalked and knotted at intervals; a compass with a face Chewy recognized because Hollis had owned one just like it; and a folded paper.

He unfolded the paper. It was a sketch, done in Hollis’s hand, and it was of Chewy. Not Chewy-now. Chewy at maybe eight, sitting on a step with his knees up, drawing on something in his lap, and under it in small letters: the boy reads contour like other kids read comics.

Chewy held the paper so the light from the canopy coins could get at it. He waited.

Nothing resolved. The margin stayed blank. The ink on the page was ink, not spire-ink, and it stayed what it was.

He put the paper in the pack. He fed the line down to Clive, who sent the pack up first and then came up himself, and when Clive climbed, Chewy watched, because he had never seen the machine climb before.

Clive went up like water finding a level. No wasted motion. Each handhold tested before weight went on it, tested in a way that was faster than checking, a kind of knowing. He reached the fork, swung himself onto the platform, and stood, and the platform was big enough for both of them if they stood close, and they stood close because the fork was the only flat thing for forty feet in any direction.

“Surveyor’s line,” Chewy said, holding it up. “Compass. Sketch.”

Clive took the compass. He held it in his palm and looked at it for a long time, and his thumb moved over the face, not pressing, just resting, the way you rest a thumb on a thing you have held before.

“That’s a Clive-pattern compass,” he said.

“That’s a what?”

“Model 4. Issued. I had one.” He turned it over. On the back, scratched into the metal, were two letters: H.C. “Hollis Chambers. He scratched that himself. You can tell because it’s not straight, and nothing I issue is not straight.”

“He had your compass.”

“He had a compass like mine. I had one too. They were issued to the same office.” Clive put the compass in his own pocket, which was a thing he had not done with anything else on the journey, and Chewy let him, because the machine’s face had gone into the stillness again, the needle-finding-north stillness, and it was not a face you argued with.

Note, ARC said. Clive’s field-issue serial registry is partial. Model 4 compasses were distributed to Survey Corps fieldmen between years 40 and 44. Hollis was active in that window. Clive’s claim to the model is consistent with his stated age. Probability he is being truthful: 91.3%. Probability he is being truthful and it matters: withheld.

“You said you’d tell me why you won’t say who packed you into the crate,” Chewy said. “You said on the spine. We’re not on the spine.”

“We’re not on the spine.”

“But you just told me you knew Hollis.”

“I told you I had a compass like this one. I told you they were issued to the same office. I didn’t tell you I knew Hollis.” Clive looked at him. The cap’s brim was low. “You’re doing what you do. You take a thing I said and you build a bigger thing out of it. That’s good. That’s what a surveyor does. But I’m the one holding the instruments, and I’m telling you the reading isn’t ready.”

“Then why did you pocket the compass?”

Clive didn’t answer that. He looked north, through the canopy, at nothing Chewy could see, and his hand came up and made the transit-shape again, small, quick, and dropped.

Second sighting, ARC said. 11.4 seconds again. Same interval. He’s not surveying the tree. He’s rehearsing.

Chewy filed that. He opened his own pack and took out the journal and held it up, because the platform was in the canopy’s coin-light and the canopy’s coin-light was the closest thing to spire-light they’d had since the wayside.

The margin stayed blank. The one gold word — Chewy — sat where it had been since the waystation, permanent now, resolved, and it did not grow, and no new line appeared.

He put the journal away.

“The waypoint’s done,” he said. “Cache retrieved. We go down, we go north, we find the next one.”

“Two days north,” Clive agreed. “But we don’t go down and then north. We go north up here.”

Chewy looked at him. “We’re going to stay in the canopy.”

“We’re going to stay in the canopy.” Clive pointed, and Chewy looked where he was pointing, and he saw it: a line, hand-braided, the color of bark, running from their fork to the next giant tree, and the next one, and the next, a rope run through the tops of trees that had been standing long enough for someone to string a path between them. “The understory run isn’t through the understory. It’s under the story. The story’s up here.”

“Who strung it?”

“The same people who packed me into the crate. The same people who hung the cache boxes. The Survey Corps had a canopy protocol for this band. Rope run, waypoint to waypoint, because the ground down there” — he nodded at the gully, at the black water, at the whole forest floor — “the ground down there doesn’t stay where you put it.”

“Clive. Did you string it?”

Clive looked at the rope run. He looked at it the way a man looks at a road he drove once, a long time ago, and the looking took three seconds and then it was done.

“Wind me,” he said. “We’re walking.”

He went across first this time, because he was bringing the pack, because he’d decided that somewhere between the gully and the top of the tree the math had changed, and he went across the rope run the way he’d crossed the gully, without looking down, his boots finding the braids by feel, and Chewy followed, and the canopy closed over them, and the understory went on below them like a dark river neither of them was in anymore.

They ran the canopy for a day. The rope run held. The trees held. The light came through in coins that moved as the sun moved, and the coins fell on the rope and on Clive’s cap and on Chewy’s hands, and every so often a coin would land on something and the thing would glow, faintly, wrongly, and Clive would say don’t touch it without turning around, and Chewy wouldn’t touch it.

At dusk they made a platform in a fork and slept there, roped together, the pack between them, and Chewy dreamed of a compass with two letters scratched into the back in a hand that wasn’t straight.

In the morning they ran the canopy again. By midday the trees began to change — the plates got bigger, the bark went from gray-green to something the color of old bone, and the rope run, which had been hand-braided and old, was suddenly newer, the braids tight, the color still pale.

“Someone maintains this,” Chewy said.

“No,” Clive said. “Something maintains this.”

They went on. The light changed. The coins got bigger, fewer, and then they were under a canopy so high that the coins were rooms, and the rooms fell on a clearing below them, a clearing in the treetops, a place where the giants had fallen and the light had gotten through and the understory had never come back, and in the middle of the clearing, on the ground, forty feet down, was a spire.

It was small. It was the size of a man. It stood in the light like it had been waiting for the light, and it did not glow, and it was not gold, and it was not one of the nine that had woken.

Chewy looked at it. The journal was in the pack against his back and the margin stayed blank and the gold word Chewy sat where it had always sat.

Beside him, Clive went very still.

“Clive?”

“That’s not on any map I have,” Clive said. His voice had gone flat, the way a surveyor’s voice goes flat when the reading doesn’t match the chart. He took the compass out of his pocket — Hollis’s compass, the one he’d pocketed on the platform — and held it out, and the needle swung, and swung, and settled on the spire below them the way a needle settles on north.

“It’s not supposed to be here,” Clive said.

“Nothing’s supposed to be here. That’s the whole trip.”

Clive put the compass away. He touched the brim of his cap, recalibrated it, and looked at the spire for a long moment, and his lips moved, making numbers without sound, and then he looked at Chewy.

“We go down,” he said. “We go down, we look, we don’t touch, and then we go north.”

They went down the rope run to the clearing floor, and the spire stood in the light and did not glow, and the ground under it was bone-colored and firm, and Chewy took the journal out and held it up in the coin-light, and the margin stayed blank, and the gold word sat where it had always sat, and the spire stood there, waiting for something that wasn’t a boy with a journal and a machine with a compass, and the understory above them breathed, and the light moved, and nothing woke.

Chapter 7: Chorus

They waited at the spire for the better part of an hour, and the margin of the journal stayed blank, and the spire stayed dark, and the coin-light moved through the canopy in slow bands that made the clearing look like the inside of a drum.

Chewy sat with his back against a root the size of a doorway. The journal was open on his knee, the gold word in the margin — his name, always his name — and below it the paper was the ordinary blank of paper that had been blank since North Prima. He had held it up to the coin-light three times. He had held it up to the gap where the canopy thinned. He had held it up in the shadow of the spire itself, which cast a shadow so clean it looked drawn. Nothing resolved. Nothing moved.

Clive had walked a slow ring around the clearing and come back and walked another one, and on the third ring he stopped at the base of the spire and put his palm flat against it without seeming to decide to, and then took it away as if the stone had been cold, and came and sat on the root opposite Chewy with his elbows on his knees.

“The journal is scripture,” Clive said, “and scripture answers at light. That’s what the survey says. That’s what he wrote down.”

“It’s light out.”

“It’s the wrong light.”

Chewy looked up. The canopy was a hundred feet of green and brown overhead, a ceiling of leaves with the sun on the far side of it, and what came down was not sunlight, it was the memory of sunlight, sifted and greened and spent. He had known that since dawn. He hadn’t thought of it as a wrongness.

“Then we wait for the right one,” he said.

“We wait for the right one.”

Clive took off his cap and turned it in his hands, the survey-insignia sweat-stained into a permanent crescent, and then he put it back on and adjusted the brim by feel, and the brim settled a degree north of where it had been, which Chewy had learned was how Clive started a sentence he wasn’t sure about.

“The spires glow,” Clive said, “when an Ephergent is near.”

“You’ve said.”

“I’ve said. He wrote it down. The glow is proximity. It’s not weather and it’s not a time of day, it’s a proximity. So the light we’re waiting for isn’t the sun. It’s the glow.”

Chewy looked at the spire. It stood maybe twelve feet across at the base and tapered to a point that the canopy swallowed, and the stone was a pale bone color that matched the ground, and there was no seam in it, no joint, nothing that said it had been built rather than grown. It looked like the mountain had thought about it for a long time and then put it there.

“Where’s Tavo?” Chewy said.

They both looked around the clearing. The Ephergent had gone ahead of them on the rope run, the way he always went ahead, low and unhurried, stone-colored against stone, and Chewy had assumed he was somewhere in the understory doing what he did, which was being somewhere. He hadn’t heard the faint ground-rumble of contentment in an hour.

“Tavo,” Chewy called.

The clearing answered with its own quiet, the drip of canopy, the long exhale of the understory above. Then, from behind the spire, a sound like a boot on gravel, and Tavo came around the base of the stone with his brow low and his seam dark, and he walked to the center of the clearing and stopped and looked at the spire, and then he looked at Chewy, and then he walked to the spire and put his brow against it.

The seam along his spine lit.

It wasn’t a flash. It was a slow fill, the way a glass fills, light rising from his haunches up the long line of his back and into his skull and holding there, and where his brow touched the stone the pale bone color of the spire went gold from the contact point outward, a ring of it spreading up the shaft, and the clearing got brighter, and the light that came down through the canopy changed quality — the green went out of it, the spentness went out of it, and what came down was clean and gold and the temperature of a lamp you’d held a long time.

The journal went warm on Chewy’s knee.

He looked down. The margin was no longer blank. The gold of his name had not moved, but below it, in the hand he knew the way he knew his own, a line of ink had resolved out of the paper as if the paper had always had it and the light was only now willing to say so:

if you’re reading this at light, keep up. I’m sorry. Keep up anyway.

Chewy read it twice. The words sat in the margin with the calm of words that had been written a long time ago by someone who was not in a hurry, and the apology in the middle of it was the strangest part, because Hollis had never apologized for anything in his life that Chewy could remember, Hollis had said the map is a promise someone made you and north-northeast and don’t argue and you’ll want the water here, not there, and none of those had ever needed a sorry in them.

“Read it,” Clive said.

Chewy held the journal out. Clive leaned in, and the gold light was good enough now that he could read it without squinting, and he read it silently, and his lips moved over the words without sound, and then he straightened up and looked at the spire and at Tavo standing with his brow against the stone and the light pouring out of the seam of him, and he recalibrated his brim.

“Keep up,” Clive said. “He wrote keep up.”

“He wrote I’m sorry.”

“Both. In the same line.” Clive shook his head slowly, the way a man shakes his head at a survey that has been correct all along and he resented it anyway. “The annotation was always going to be here. It needed the glow to read it. It needed the proximity.”

Chewy looked at Tavo. The Ephergent had not moved. His brow was against the spire, his seam was full of light, and the ground under Chewy’s boots had taken on a faint vibration that was not the contentment-rumble he had learned to recognize but something steadier, a single tone held so low it was almost not a sound at all, more a fact of the floor.

The spire was glowing because Tavo was near it. That was the whole mechanic, written down in the journal’s earlier pages, and Chewy had read it and filed it, and now he was watching it happen and it still looked like a miracle, which he suspected was the point.

He looked back at the margin. The line held. He traced it with a finger, not touching the paper, just above it, and the ink did not waver.

if you’re reading this at light, keep up. I’m sorry. Keep up anyway.

Three sentences. The first was an instruction, the second was a wound, and the third was the first one again with the wound in it and no change of mind. Chewy had known Hollis long enough to hear the voice — the flat practical voice that gave you the water point and the bearing and did not explain, except that here it had explained, once, in three clauses, and the explanation was anyway.

“What light,” Chewy said. “What glow. He says at light — is he talking about this? This exact clearing?”

“He’s talking about a spire,” Clive said. “Any spire that answers. He wrote it before he knew which one you’d find first.”

“There’s more than one out here.”

“There’s more than one everywhere.” Clive looked up into the canopy. “The survey counted nine woke before we left Prima. There’s a tenth somewhere, and an eleventh, and a twelfth. He wrote the waking order down. I’ve seen the pages you haven’t shown me.”

“You’ve seen—”

“I’ve carried the journal’s weight in a pack for four days. I know how many pages it has.” Clive’s voice was level. “You don’t have to show me. He didn’t put me on this trip to read it. He put me on this trip to get you to the places it can be read.”

Chewy closed the journal. The gold light was steady enough now that the cover’s embossing threw a small shadow, and the weight of the thing in his hands was the same weight it had been in North Prima, and the contents had changed three times.

Tavo hadn’t moved. The seam was still full, the contact ring was still climbing, and the clearing had gone from green to gold so gradually that Chewy couldn’t say when the change had happened, only that it was done. Above them the canopy let the light through in long clean bars, and the bars lay on the ground like something laid out, like something arranged, and the spire stood in the middle of them with Tavo at its base like a dog at a door that would not open until it had been asked correctly.

“Is he all right?” Chewy said.

Clive looked at Tavo for a long moment. “He’s doing what he does. The brow-press. You’ve seen it twice before.”

“Once. The relic at the waystation.”

“Twice. The first time was the day we left, on the crate, before you came down the steps. You were still on the landing.” Clive paused. “He pressed his brow to the crate and held it for the length of a long breath, and then he let go and walked out into the yard and waited for you at the gate. That was the first one.”

Chewy hadn’t known that. He turned it over. The crate on the doorstep, the freight label, the leather scraps Clive had cut into a pack — and under all of it, a stone animal with a seam of light pressing his brow to the wood the way he was pressing it to the spire now.

“What does it mean,” Chewy said. Not a question, exactly. He was asking for the word.

“It means I mean to keep this,” Clive said. “That’s what he does. That’s the only thing he does that I’ve ever been able to chart. He presses his brow to the thing he means to keep.”

The clearing held its note. The ground hummed under Chewy’s boots, and the gold bars lay still on the bone-colored floor, and Tavo’s seam rose and fell with a breathing that was not lungs but something slower, something geological, and the spire went on pouring light out of the place where the animal’s brow met the stone.

Chewy opened the journal again. The annotation was there, in the margin, in Hollis’s hand, three sentences long and one of them an apology and two of them the same instruction. He read it a fourth time. He read it the way you read a sentence someone has written to you specifically, which is to say he read it slowly and he did not skip the middle.

keep up. I’m sorry. Keep up anyway.

He closed the journal and put it in the pack and stood up. The pack was Clive’s wood-and-leather construction, crude and honest, and it held the journal and the box and the boot and now it felt heavier by exactly one line of ink.

“How long do we stay here?” he said.

Clive looked at Tavo, and at the spire, and at the light coming clean through the canopy, and he took the compass out of his pocket and held it flat and watched the needle sit on the spire the way it had on the platform, certain and wrong.

“Until the Ephergent lets go,” he said. “And then north.”

They stayed. The gold held for a long time, longer than a sun would have held in a clearing that deep, and the understory above them went quiet in the way that forests go quiet when something large is doing something patient, and Chewy sat on the root with the pack at his feet and read the three sentences in his head until they stopped being three sentences and became one thing, the way a chord is one thing even though you can name the notes.

At some point the light changed. It didn’t dim, exactly. It thinned, the way a held breath thins, and the green came back into the canopy first at the edges and then everywhere, and the bars on the ground went soft, and Tavo’s seam went from gold to its ordinary dark and he took his brow away from the spire and stood for a moment with his head low, and then he walked to Chewy and put his brow against Chewy’s knee and held it there for the length of one long breath and let go.

Chewy didn’t move for a second after. The place where the brow had been was not warm and was not cold, it was simply marked, the way a page is marked when you’ve held it open at a fold.

Then Tavo walked out into the green, and the clearing was a clearing again, and the spire was bone-colored and dark, and the journal was in the pack, and the line in the margin was the line in the margin whether the light was on it or not.

Clive stood and shouldered what he carried and touched his brim.

“North-northeast,” he said, “and don’t argue.”

Chewy picked up the pack. The weight settled on his back the way it always did, familiar now by the fourth day, the journal against his spine with the box on top of it and the boot under that, and under all of it a line of ink that had been written for exactly one reader and had waited in the dark of the paper until a stone animal pressed his brow to a stone spire and gave it the light to say it.

He stepped off the root and followed Clive into the green, and the understory closed behind them, and the spire stood dark in its clearing holding nothing, and the margin of the journal, out of the light now, kept its secret the way paper keeps everything — patiently, and for whoever came back.

Chapter 8: The Cold Edge

The green thinned the way a sentence thins when you reach the end of an idea: gradually, then all at once. By the second day out of the spire-clearing the trees were shorter and the light between them came through colder, and by the third day the understory had given up entirely and they were walking on low sedge over hard ground with the wind coming at them from the north in long unbroken pushes that carried no smell at all.

“That’s Nocturnan air,” Clive said, without turning around.

Chewy pulled his collar up. The air was thin and clean the way a blade is clean. It didn’t taste like anything. It didn’t carry pollen or dust or the green smell of rot. It was air that had been somewhere and come back empty.

“How far?” he asked.

“Relay’s on the border itself. North-northwest of here, half a day if the wind doesn’t argue.”

“And if it does?”

Clive recalibrated the brim of his cap, pressed it down against the push. “Then we argue back.”

ARC spoke from the collar-clip where it rode during daylight hours, voice flat and decimal. “Wind at nine point one meters per second, gusting to twelve point four. Bearing zero-zero-two degrees true. Recommendation: walk faster.”

“That’s not a recommendation,” Chewy said. “That’s just telling me what walking is.”

“It’s a calibrated observation,” ARC said, “that happens to have the same practical output as a recommendation. The correlation is not my fault.”

They walked into the wind for another hour, and the ground got flatter, and the sedge got shorter, and somewhere behind them the green ended entirely and the world became two colors: the pale ground and the pale sky, and the line where they met was so straight it looked drawn.

The relay station was a low stone building with a metal roof and a mast out front, and it sat exactly on the line where the map said the line was, which meant it sat on nothing. Chewy had expected a border to feel like something — a wall, a ditch, a change in the ground. It felt like nothing. The sedge on the south side of the building was the same sedge as on the north side. The wind crossed the threshold without caring.

Inside, the station was one room with a cot, a desk, a stove with cold ash in it, and a rack of instruments that Clive went to first and stood in front of for a long time without touching.

“Old relay gear,” Chewy said.

“Prima-to-Prima relay,” Clive said. “Used to run the line north from here to the Nocturna stations. Dead now. Everything past this building is dead.”

“But the mast is up.”

“The mast is up,” Clive agreed. He took his cap off, looked at it, put it back on, and set the brim a half-notch lower than usual. “Doesn’t mean anything’s still transmitting.”

Chewy set the pack down on the cot. The journal came out with it, and the box, and the boot, and he arranged them on the desk the way he’d started arranging them every night, which was the way Clive had arranged them in the crate, which was journal in the middle, box to the left, boot to the right, all three pointing north.

The margins of the journal were blank. The line that had resolved under the spire-light — if you’re reading this at light, keep up. I’m sorry. Keep up anyway. — was gone again, the way everything in the journal went, folded back into the paper the moment the light that had shown it to him was gone. He’d stopped being surprised by that around the second day. The ink wasn’t hiding. It was waiting for a specific kind of light, and the light wasn’t the kind you could make with a stove or a lamp. It was the kind that came from the ground up.

“ARC,” he said. “The cipher.”

“Working.” A pause that meant ARC was doing something it had been doing for three days in the background and hadn’t mentioned. “The block from the third cache — the one you pulled from the boot-heel in Cupruma — I’ve been running it against Prima relay-encoding standards. It’s not Prima-standard.”

“What is it?”

“Unknown. But the structure is a substitution cipher with a key that appears to be a sequence of twelve. I’ve been assuming it was arbitrary until I had more of the block. I have more of the block.”

“And?”

“The first four characters decode to: beyond sheets.”

Chewy looked at the desk. The box was to the left of the journal. The boot was to the right. The wind was at the window.

“Sheets,” he said.

“Ice sheets,” ARC said. “Nocturna’s ice sheets. The relay-station logs from the old Prima-Prima line refer to them as sheets. The word is in the station’s own terminology. This is not a coincidence; the probability of coincidence is zero point zero —”

“Stop,” Chewy said. “You don’t have to give me the decimal when it’s zero.”

“Zero point zero is still a number,” ARC said, “and withholding it would be a form of rounding, and I don’t round.”

Clive had turned from the instrument rack. He was looking at the desk, at the three objects arranged on it, and his face had the expression it got when he was reading a bearing he didn’t like.

“Sheets,” he said.

“That’s what it says,” Chewy said.

North. The journal had been north the whole time. The caches had been north. The waypoints had been north. But north on this map didn’t stop at the edge of the habitable band, it kept going, into the place where the map got thinner and the ink got older and the only thing left on the page was the word Nocturna in letters that looked like they’d been written by someone whose hand was cold.

Chewy picked up the journal and held it under the window. The light coming through was the thin flat Nocturnan light, and it moved across the paper, and nothing resolved. He turned it. Nothing.

“It only comes when the spires give it,” Clive said.

“I know.”

“Then you know you can’t make it happen.”

“I know that too.”

He put the journal back in the middle of the desk and went to the stove and built a fire in it with the last of the kindling they’d carried out of Verdanya, and the fire caught and the room got warm and the instruments on the rack stayed dead, and for a while that was the whole of it: three of them in a stone room on a line that wasn’t a line, with a fire going and the wind outside doing what wind does when there’s nothing in its way.

They ate the last of the Cupruma ration bars, which had gone soft and tasted like sweetened dust, and Clive made tea on the stove out of a tin he’d been carrying since Prima and which Chewy had never seen him open.

“You saved that,” Chewy said.

“I saved that,” Clive said. He poured it into three cups, which meant he’d been carrying three cups too, which meant he’d been planning for this room since before the crate. He gave one to Chewy, set one on the desk near the journal, and kept one for himself, and he drank his standing up, facing the window, the way a man drinks when he’s watching for something.

Chewy took his cup to the window. Outside, the sedge ran north into the flat, and the flat ran into the horizon, and the horizon was the line where the pale ground met the pale sky and neither one moved.

“Clive.”

“North-northeast and don’t —”

“What’s past the sheets?”

Clive drank his tea. He set the cup down on the sill. He touched his brim, pressed it, recalibrated it, and the brim went down another notch, which was the most Chewy had ever seen him move it.

“Nothing you need to know yet,” he said, “and nothing I’m going to tell you if you ask again tonight.”

“So there is something.”

“I said there’s nothing you need to know yet. That’s a different sentence. Learn the difference.”

Chewy drank his tea. It was good tea. It was the best thing he’d tasted in four days, and it was warm in his hands, and the room was warm, and the fire was going, and outside the wind pushed at the stone building and the building didn’t move.

Tavo had come in an hour ago through the door, which he did by simply walking through it, because he was the size of a large dog and the door was a door and he had decided the threshold applied to other things. He was lying on the floor near the stove with his brow against the stone of the wall, and the seam along his spine was the deep amber of a low fire, and the stone under his brow was the same stone as the wall, and Chewy had stopped asking what Tavo was doing when he did this because the answer was always the same, which was that he was keeping something.

“ARC,” Chewy said. “The ledger.”

A pause. “Probability Hollis Chambers is alive: seven point nine percent.”

“That hasn’t moved.”

“It has not moved,” ARC said. “I note that the last three data points have produced no change in the estimate, which is itself a data point. I am not going to interpret it. I am a ledger.”

“You’re interpreting it right now.”

“I am describing my own methodology. That is not interpretation. That is accounting.”

Chewy set his cup down. The fire popped. The wind pushed. Somewhere out in the flat, past the relay station, past the line that wasn’t a line, the ice sheets were doing what ice sheets did, which was sit there and be old and not care.

He slept on the cot and Clive slept on the floor and Tavo slept against the wall, and at some point in the night Chewy woke to a sound that wasn’t the wind, and he lay there with his eyes open and listened to it, and it was a hum, low and even, coming up through the floor of the station the way heat comes up through a floor when there’s a fire in the room below and there is no room below.

It wasn’t loud. It was the kind of sound you feel in your teeth before you hear it in your ears, and it lasted for a while — he didn’t know how long, because he’d drifted back before he could count — and then it stopped, and the silence after it was the kind of silence that has a shape.

In the morning, ARC said: “Did you hear it.”

“I heard it.”

“Then we both heard it. I’ll note it.”

“Note what?”

“That something woke.”

Chewy sat up. The fire was ash. The room was cold. The window showed the same flat pale nothing as the night before, except — he went to the window and looked north, and the horizon was the same horizon, but there was a light on it.

Not the sun. The sun was behind them, south, still low. This was on the northern horizon, a thin band of pale gold sitting just above the line where the ground met the sky, and it was the wrong color for sunrise and the wrong shape for a cloud and it was moving, slowly, from west to east, the way a wave moves when it’s very far away and you’re watching it from a shore.

“Aurora,” Clive said. He was already at the window, cap on, brim down, watching it the way he watched everything, which was like a man reading a bearing.

“It’s daylight,” Chewy said.

“It’s Nocturna,” Clive said. “The sheets throw light. That’s not aurora the way Prima does aurora. That’s the ice doing something with the sun that’s behind us.”

The band of gold moved along the horizon, and as it moved it brightened, and as it brightened Chewy saw that it wasn’t one band, it was several, stacked, and the stacking had a regularity to it that he recognized the way you recognize a pattern in a contour map, which was not by thinking about it but by seeing it all at once.

“Twelve,” he said.

Clive looked at him.

“The bands. There are twelve.”

Clive looked back at the horizon. He counted without moving his lips, which Chewy had seen him do before with survey lines, and then he touched his brim and pressed it and didn’t say anything for a while.

“There are twelve,” he said finally.

They stood at the window and watched the light move, and Tavo came and stood between them and put his brow against the glass, and the glass was cold, and the seam along his spine went from amber to a color Chewy hadn’t seen it go before, which was the color of the light on the horizon, gold going pale, and the hum came back, faint, up through the floor, in the teeth.

Then the light on the horizon thinned, and the bands separated, and the twelve became a smear became nothing, and the northern horizon was the pale flat line it had been, and the sun was higher now in the south, and the room was just a room.

Chewy turned from the window. The journal was on the desk where he’d left it, in the middle, box to the left, boot to the right, all three pointing north, and the margin was blank, and the paper was patient, and the light that would show him what was written there was not the light that came through a window.

He picked up the pack and started loading it. Journal in the middle. Box on top. Boot under that. The weight settled on his back, the fifth day of it now, familiar the way a word gets familiar when you’ve said it enough times that it stops being a word and starts being a shape in your mouth.

Clive was already at the door. He had his kit on his shoulder and his cap on his head and his hand on the latch, and he was looking north, through the door, at the flat empty ground that ran to the place where the map got thin.

“North-northeast,” he said.

“I know,” Chewy said. “Don’t argue.”

He stepped out into the wind, and the relay station was behind him, and the fire was ash, and the cot was bare, and the desk had nothing on it, and the northern horizon was the pale line it had always been, except that now he knew what was sitting on the other side of it, waiting in the cold, twelve bands deep, and the journal was against his spine with the box on top and the boot under that and the whole of it pointed the same direction everything had been pointed since the crate arrived on the doorstep, which was north, and further north than he’d let himself think, into the place where the air came back empty and the light did something with the sun that the sun hadn’t asked it to do.

The wind pushed at him and he pushed back, and the ground was firm under his boots, and somewhere behind him the spire in its clearing was dark and holding nothing, and somewhere ahead the sheets were throwing light at a sky that didn’t need it, and the hum was in his teeth, faint, gone, back, faint, gone — a rhythm, he realized, not a sound, a tempo, the way a thing sounds when it’s counting.

He walked north, and the light on the horizon stayed just out of reach the way it always does, and the line under his boots held its bearing, and the whole edge of the world was ahead of him now, cold and close and getting closer with every step.

Chapter 9: Dead Air

The ground swayed first, a slow tilt like the deck of a ship in a long swell, and Chewy woke with his hand on the journal before he opened his eyes. The tent fabric breathed. The trees beyond it leaned and came back. It lasted four seconds, maybe five, and then it stopped the way a held breath stops — all at once, and the silence after it louder than the motion had been.

“Eleven,” Clive said from outside, unbothered, as if he’d been counting.

Chewy unzipped the flap. The surveyor was standing at the edge of the camp with his cap brim tilted back, watching the canopy shake its last leaf-tremor out and go still. The light was the flat grey-green of the deep understory, the kind of light that never quite committed to being day. They were back in the Verdanya band — had been for two days now, since the cold edge had spit them out into green again on a bearing Clive had called north-northeast and don’t argue, which had, Chewy had noticed, put them on a line that curved back toward the jungle they’d already crossed.

“Eleven what,” Chewy said.

“Wake.” Clive recalibrated the brim. “That was the eleventh. Off somewhere behind us. Felt it in the frame.”

Chewy felt it in his knees. He stood up, and his knees held, and the ground was firm again, the way ground is supposed to be. He took the journal out of the pack and opened it to the margin where the gold word sat — his name, still there, still an address — and he looked at the blank space beneath it. The ink had been doing this for weeks now: resolving a line here, a phrase there, always under spire-light, always one fragment at a time, the way a photograph comes up in a tray. He held it toward the grey-green light anyway, out of habit more than hope, and the margin stayed blank.

“Eleven of twelve,” he said.

“One left,” Clive said. He was already folding the tent. “And we’re not where we’re supposed to be when it comes.”

They weren’t, as it turned out, where they were supposed to be at all.

The sinkhole announced itself by the absence of birdsong — a circle of quiet in a jungle that otherwise wouldn’t stop talking. It was a hundred paces across and the trees around it grew tilted inward, roots exposed along the rim like the hairline of a wound, and at the bottom, thirty feet down, was water. Not jungle water, not the tannin-brown soup you expected in the green. It was clear. It was dark-clear, the way a held pool of ink is dark-clear, and when a leaf fell into it the leaf went down and down and down and Chewy couldn’t see it stop.

“Cache,” Clive said, reading the rim the way other people read a page. He pointed at a mark cut into a root, half-healed over with bark. Hollis’s mark. Chewy had seen it on the crate, on the waystation door, on the tree in the canopy run. Three strokes and a hook. “Thirty feet, maybe more. The journal says—”

“The journal doesn’t say anything about a sinkhole.”

“The journal doesn’t say anything about anything. That’s the point of the journal.” Clive squatted at the rim, his old survey-routines moving behind his eyes. “There’s a line. Rope-line, anchored at the root. Rotted to nothing by now, but the anchor’s there. Hollis went down. Hollis came up. The question is what he left at the bottom.”

Chewy looked at the water. It looked back the way deep water does — not with malice, just with an absolute commitment to being deeper than you wanted it to be.

“I don’t swim,” he said.

“Neither did he.” Clive stood. “But he packed for it.”

He was already unhooking the pack’s side-rigging, and Chewy watched him work with the particular patience of a boy who had learned, over the past weeks, that arguing with Clive about what Hollis had or hadn’t done was like arguing with a contour map about where the hill was. The pack came apart into a harness and a line and a set of weights that Clive produced from a compartment Chewy hadn’t known existed, all of it oiled and kept, all of it built to be used by someone who didn’t swim.

“He rigged this for you,” Clive said, not looking up. “Not for him. The weights are set to your build. The line’s coiled for a left-hand haul.” He held up the harness. “Get in the water, Chewy. Get the box. Come back up.”

The water was cold in a way that the cold edge hadn’t been — that had been air-cold, honest cold you could breathe. This was a cold that got inside without asking, that took his ribs and squeezed, and for three seconds he was fourteen years old at the bottom of a hole in the jungle and nothing else, just a boy holding a line with the dark going down around him and the grey-green light a memory above.

Then his boots found the rim-shelf, and he crouched in the dark-clear water to his chest, and he saw it.

The box sat on a shelf of stone six feet down, and it was dry. That was the thing that stopped him — not that a box could be dry underwater, but that someone had put it there expecting exactly that. It was sealed with the same wax he’d seen on the cache at Gulchmarker, the same triple-stroke-and-hook pressed into the seal, and beside it, weighted with a stone, was a coil of line with a message tag the size of a playing card.

He came up twice to breathe. The second time, Clive was standing at the rim with his arms folded, watching the line go slack and taut and slack, and he said nothing, and the jungle said nothing, and the sinkhole held its silence around them like a held note.

The third time he went down he took the box.

They opened it on the rim, in the grey-green light, with the water drying on Chewy’s arms and the jungle resuming its business around them one bird at a time. The tag came off first, the wax crumbling under his thumb, and the card inside was Hollis’s hand, the same unhurried slant he’d seen on the crate label and the waystation ledger and every margin of the journal that had already resolved:

If you’re reading this, you’re behind. Catch up.

Beneath it, smaller: The next one’s not in the water. It’s in the air. Follow the hum.

Chewy put the card down and opened the box.

The rations were vacuum-sealed and dated for a year out. There was a coil of fresh line, a folding knife, a set of batteries for a lamp that wasn’t there, and — under all of it, wrapped in oilcloth, folded the way you fold a shirt you intend to wear again — a second journal.

It was smaller than the first. Same leather, same binding, same gold thread through the spine, but thinner, the cover softer, the corners worn the way a thing gets worn when it’s been carried a long time and opened often. Chewy unfolded the oilcloth and held it and felt the particular weight of a thing that had been waiting for him, specifically, at the bottom of a hole in the ground, in a place where nobody would ever stumble on it by accident.

Clive was looking at the journal the way he looked at the true spire — not with reverence exactly, but with the recognition of something that had been in his field orders for longer than he’d been able to say.

“Open it,” the surveyor said.

Chewy opened it.

The first page was Hollis’s hand, dated. Chewy read the date twice, because the first time his eyes refused it the way eyes refuse a typo, and the second time they didn’t, and the number sat there on the page with its full authority:

Fourteenth of Ninthmonth, Year 11 of the Waking.

He did the arithmetic in his head the way ARC would have done it, decimal-precise and unhappy about the result. Fourthteenth of Ninthmonth. The disappearance had been in Fivemonth. He’d been gone four months when he wrote this.

The ledger opened in his ear, unbidden, Cipher Sigil’s voice as dry as survey tape:

Probability Hollis is alive: 11.2%.

“Eleven point two,” Chewy said out loud.

“Eleven point two what?” Clive said.

“Nothing.” He turned the page.

The second journal was not a diary. It was a log — coordinates, dates, entries in Hollis’s clipped fieldman’s shorthand, each one a place and a time and a line of observation, and Chewy read them in sequence the way you read a list of stations on a rail line, each one a stop the train had made. Waystation. Gulchmarker. The wayside at Cupruma. The waystation in the green. The canopy waypoint. The spire-clearing. The cold edge relay. All the places he’d been. All the places the journal’s ink had resolved a line, a word, an annotation, under spire-light.

And then the entries stopped being places.

Wake nine: glow, first harmonic. Position: Verdanya understory.

Wake ten: machinery harmonized. Position: cold edge relay.

Wake eleven: ground movement. Position: —

The line for eleven was blank. The dash sat where a position should have been, and Chewy understood, with a cold that had nothing to do with the water, that Hollis had written this entry before he knew where he’d be when it came.

He turned the page, and the rest of the log was blank too, and at the bottom of the last written page, in a hand that had slowed down for it, the way a hand slows for something it wants to get right:

They wake in order. I mapped the order. The waypoints aren’t stops — they’re notes. Each cache sits where the tone lands. Follow them in sequence and you’re not walking a route, you’re playing it. The twelfth note sounds only if the reader is on the spine when it comes. I’ll be there. Come up the mountain when the ground starts keeping time.

Chewy read it twice. Then he read it a third time, and the third time the words rearranged themselves the way words do when you finally see what they were always saying, and the journal in his hands stopped being a map.

It was a score.

“The waypoints,” he said. “They’re not — Clive, they’re notes. Each cache is a note. He walked them in order and the spires woke in order and the — the route is the sequence. It’s not a way to get somewhere. It’s the thing itself.”

Clive was very still. The cap brim was tilted low and his eyes were under it and his mouth was the flat line it went to when he was holding something back that his field orders had told him to hold.

“I know,” he said.

“You know.”

“I’ve known since the crate.” Clive looked up. “He packed me the day before he walked into the green. He signed the label. He told me what I was for.” The surveyor’s voice was the same laconic dead-reckoner it had always been, but under it, for the first time, was something that had been waiting a long time to be said. “I was the last thing he touched before he went. My field orders said deliver the crate and shut up about the rest until the reader was ready.”

“The reader.”

“You.” Clive held his gaze. “He said there’d be one. He said the ink only opens for one. He said —” and here the surveyor stopped, recalibrated the brim, and finished in a voice that had gone quiet the way a man’s voice goes quiet when he’s repeating something he was told to memorize and never expected to say out loud: “He said, if the boy comes, he comes all the way.”

The jungle hummed. The sinkhole held its dark-clear water. Somewhere far behind them, the eleventh wake was still ringing in the ground, a vibration so low it wasn’t a sound so much as a memory of one, and Chewy felt it in the soles of his boots and understood, finally, what the hum in his teeth had been counting.

“The twelfth,” he said. “He says the twelfth sounds only if the reader’s on the spine.”

“The spine’s three days north. The twelfth wake is —” Clive did the arithmetic the way he did everything, in bearings and intervals. “If the sequence holds, days. Maybe less.”

“Then we’re behind.”

“Since Gulchmarker,” Clive said. “He wrote that in the tag. Catch up.”

Chewy looked at the second journal, then at the first, and he did what he’d been doing since the crate arrived on the doorstep — he put them together. The first journal carried the ink, the marginalia, the annotations that resolved under spire-light one fragment at a time. The second carried the log, the sequence, the order of the wakes. Two halves of the same document. Two hands of the same score.

He opened the first journal to the margin where his name sat in gold, and beneath the name the space that had been blank since the cold edge, and he held it up toward the canopy in the grey-green light, and for a moment nothing happened the way nothing had happened a hundred times before, and then —

The ink moved.

Not much. Not the full flood he’d been waiting for since the waystation, since the first word, since the annotation in the clearing that had said if you’re reading this at light, keep up. I’m sorry. Keep up anyway. This was slower, the way a photograph comes up in a tray, the image arriving not all at once but in bands: a line first, then the line under it, then the whole margin filling with Hollis’s hand as if the page had been holding its breath.

It was the annotation page. The full one.

Chewy read it standing at the rim of a sinkhole in the Verdanya green with the water still drying on his arms, and the jungle went quiet around him the way it had gone quiet when he first came up with the box, and the words were Hollis’s, and they were not a diary entry or a field note or a message — they were a score, written in a hand that had slowed down for the getting-right of it, and they said:

The spires wake in a twelve-note sequence. Nine woke before I walked. I mapped the order from the caches — each waypoint sits where one tone lands, and the tone is the note, and the note is the place, and the place is where you’re supposed to be standing when it comes. This is not a route. This is a score, and you are the reader, and the ink only opens for one. Follow the notes in order. Clive has the bearings. The Ephergent has the orientation. You have the hand that carries it. The twelfth note completes the chord and the chord carries an answer — I heard it once, years ago, from beyond the sheets, and I have been walking toward it ever since. Come up the spine. Come before the twelfth. I’ll be at the top of the world with my ear to the ground, and when the chord completes you’ll hear what I heard, and then you’ll understand why I left, and then you’ll know I was never lost.

Keep up anyway.

Chewy lowered the journal. The margin held its gold, steady now, the ink fully resolved, the page no longer blank in any light.

Behind him, Clive had gone very still, and the cap brim was tilted low, and the surveyor was looking at the page over his shoulder with an expression that Chewy had never seen on him before and recognized immediately, because it was the same expression Chewy felt on his own face: the look of a man who has been carrying an order for a long time and has just heard it read aloud in a voice that makes it real.

“Twelve notes,” Chewy said. “Nine woke before he walked. Ten and eleven since. One left.”

“One left,” Clive said.

“And it’s the one that completes the chord.”

“That’s what the page says.”

Chewy folded the journal along its worn crease and put it back in the pack, against his spine, with the second journal beside it and the box on top and the boot under that, and the whole of it sat against his back with a weight that had changed since the morning — heavier by exactly the amount of what he now knew, which was that the search had been a performance of a thing that was actually an instruction, and the instruction was to be somewhere at a particular time, playing a particular note, in a sequence that had been running since before he was born.

He shouldered the pack.

The jungle resumed. The birds came back one at a time, tentatively, the way birds do when a silence has been long enough to become a question. The sinkhole held its dark-clear water at the bottom of its hole, and the rope-anchor in the root above it was a hundred years of rot away from being useful again, and the leaf that had fallen in when Chewy first looked had long since gone down past the point where down stopped meaning anything.

“Three days north,” Clive said. “Less if we don’t stop.”

“We don’t stop.”

“Didn’t figure we would.” The surveyor turned north-northeast, recalibrated the brim, and started walking, and Chewy fell in beside him with the pack on his back and the score in his teeth and the hum in the ground under his boots keeping time — a tempo now, not a rhythm, the tempo of a thing that was counting toward a number it intended to reach.

The margin of the journal, out of the light, held its gold.

The twelfth note was coming, and they were behind, and the only thing to do about that was what Hollis had written in a hand that slowed down for the getting-right of it, three words at the end of everything, addressed to exactly one reader:

Keep up anyway.

Chapter 10: What the Ink Hides

Three days north of the sinkhole the green thinned out into the last fringe of Cupruma, and the journal resolved a new line the way it always resolved lines: without warning, without ceremony, in the middle of a sentence Chewy wasn’t even reading.

He was reading the margin, which had held gold since the spire-clearing, and he was walking, and the pack was on his back with the score in it, and the ground was keeping time under his boots with a tempo that had gotten tighter every hour since the Verdanya. He looked down at the journal because the pack had shifted and he wanted to pull the strap, and the line was just there, in the hand that slowed down for the getting-right of it:

if you’re reading this, you’re three days behind me. that’s fine. I was three days behind the note itself.

Chewy stopped walking. The line held. He turned the journal slightly, the way you turn a page toward a lamp, and the gold stayed, which meant it wasn’t a trick of the light, which meant the ink had decided the light was good enough.

“Clive.”

The surveyor stopped ahead of him and turned, one hand on the brim. “Read it out.”

“Three days behind you. That’s fine. I was three days behind the note itself.”

Clive’s brim didn’t move. He looked at Chewy for a long moment, the way he sometimes looked at a bearing that had drifted, and then he said, “Three days north. Then the spine.”

“You’ve read this before.”

“I’ve read the journal. I haven’t read the ink. There’s a difference and you know it.”

Chewy did know it. The ink only resolved where the light was right, and the light had never been right while Clive was holding the page. He put the journal back against his spine and they walked, and the tempo in the ground kept counting, and the third day came off the map like a page turning.

The spine appeared the way big things appear: first as an idea, then as a line, then as a wall.

It went up out of the flat like a sentence that had been waiting for its verb, gray at the base and white at the top and so tall that the top of it was a place you’d have to be told about rather than see. The causeway that had shown up in the maps at Prima, the one ARC had flagged as an anomaly, the one Hollis’s journal had circled twice in the margin, ran to the foot of it and then stopped, the way roads do when they’ve gotten to where they were going.

“That’s the spine,” Clive said, which Chewy knew, because the surveyor said things like that the way other people said good morning.

“How do we get up it?”

“North-northeast and don’t argue.”

“That’s a bearing, not a route.”

“It’s both, when the mountain’s in the mood.” Clive recalibrated the brim. “There’s a wayside at the base. Surveyor’s post. Old. Might have water, might have a record.”

Might have a record. Chewy felt the pack against his back and the journal inside it, and the journal’s gold margin out of the light, and he thought about the last three lines he’d read and the two before those and the one before those, and he thought about how every line had been written to be read by someone who was walking north.

They walked the causeway. It was cut stone, older than the road out of Cupruma, and the joints were tight enough that you couldn’t get a knife in them, and the whole thing ran straight to the foot of the spine the way a drawn line runs to its endpoint. The sun went down behind them, which meant the spine was in shadow for the last hour of the walk, and the shadow was the kind of cold that gets into your boots, and by the time they reached the wayside it was full dark and the stars were out and the spine was a black shape against them with no top.

The wayside was a stone building with a tin roof and a door that opened, which was more than Chewy had expected. Inside was a desk, a chair, a shelf of ledgers, and a lamp that Clive lit with a match from a tin he’d had since before Chewy was born. The ledgers were surveyor’s ledgers, ruled and dated, and Clive went to them the way a man goes to an old friend, running a finger down the dates until he found what he was looking for.

“Last entry is eleven years ago,” he said. “Then a gap. Then nothing.”

“Eleven years,” Chewy said. “That’s before Hollis started walking.”

“It’s before Hollis started this.” Clive closed the ledger. “There’s a recorder on the shelf.”

It was a field recorder, the kind that had been obsolete for twenty years, the kind that ran on a cartridge instead of a battery, and it was sitting on the shelf next to the ledgers as if someone had put it there to be found. Clive looked at it for a long moment. Chewy watched the surveyor’s face, which was not a face that gave much away, and saw something on it that he had never seen before, and didn’t have a name for until later.

“Wind it,” Clive said.

“You wind it.”

“I’m not the reader.”

Chewy picked it up. It was heavier than it looked, and the wind-key was on the side, and he turned it until the resistance changed, and then he pressed the play tab because the tab was the only thing left to press.

The machine made a sound like a door opening. Then a sound like a room. Then a voice.

“—found the third cache at the wayside on the spine approach, which means you’re on schedule, which means the tempo held. Keep the tempo. If you’re reading the margin at light, you’ll know what that means by now.”

The voice was calm. The voice was unhurried. The voice was a voice Chewy had heard a thousand times telling him that the map was a promise someone made you, and the promise was only as good as the walking of it, and the walking was only as good as the person doing it, and the person doing it was you.

The recorder clicked. The room held its silence the way a held breath holds.

Then the second line, and the second line was shorter, and the second line was the one Chewy would carry up the spine with him:

“I’ll be on the top of it by the twelfth note. Keep the chord alive. Keep up anyway.”

The machine clicked off. The lamp made its small sound. The spine outside the window was a black shape with no top, and the stars were above it, and the stars were the same stars that had been over North Prima the morning the crate came.

Chewy set the recorder down on the desk. He did it carefully, the way you set down something that might break if you put it down wrong, and then he stood there with his hands at his sides and the room going quiet around him and the two lines sitting in the middle of it like stones in a stream.

“Clive.”

“Yes.”

“Who packed you into the crate?”

The surveyor’s hand went to the brim. It didn’t recalibrate. It just went there and stayed, and the lamp made its small sound, and outside the window the spine stood with no top, and the tempo in the ground under Chewy’s boots kept counting toward a number it intended to reach.

“He did,” Clive said.

The words came out the way words come out when they’ve been held too long: flat, and simple, and exactly the size they were.

“Clive packed himself into the crate,” Chewy said. “That’s what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying he signed the label. I’m saying he packed me, and he packed the journal, and he packed the ledger that told me what to do when you opened the door. I’m saying the shipping order came from North Prima on the fourteenth of the month, and the green line on the map out of Verdanya starts on the fifteenth.” Clive’s hand came off the brim. “He signed the label one day before he walked in.”

Chewy looked at him. The surveyor’s face was not giving anything away, and yet it was giving away the whole thing, because the whole thing was in the way he stood, the way a man stands when he’s finally put down something he’s been carrying.

“Field orders,” Chewy said.

“Yes.”

“Your field orders were not to say.”

“My field orders were to deliver the freight and then stand by for the reader. The reader showed up. The standing-by is done.” Clive recalibrated the brim, and this time the recalibration was the old one, the comfortable one, the one that meant the surveyor had gotten to where he was going. “He signed the label. He packed the journal. He packed me. He walked into the green the next morning with a hand that had slowed down for the getting-right of it, and he’s been three days ahead of you ever since.”

“He’s been eleven years ahead of me.”

“He’s been three days ahead of you,” Clive said again, and the way he said it made it true in a way that Chewy didn’t have an argument for.

They sat with it. The lamp made its sound. The spine stood with no top, and the stars were above it, and the tempo in the ground was a tempo now, tight and counting, and the journal was in the pack against Chewy’s back with its gold margin out of the light and its last line still open on the page:

Keep up anyway.

“Read me the margin,” Clive said.

Chewy took the journal out. He held it up to the lamp, the way he’d held it up to the spire in the clearing, and the margin held its gold, and the new line was there under the line that had resolved at the sinkhole, and the new line was longer than any line before it, and it was written in the hand that slowed down for the getting-right of it:

the waypoints are notes. I walked them in order. the chord completes on the spine at the twelfth wake, and the last note sounds only if the reader is on the spine when it does. that’s the tempo. that’s the whole tempo.

Chewy read it twice. Then he read it to Clive, word by word, and the surveyor listened with his hand on the brim and his eyes on the ledger shelf and the lamp making its sound between them.

“The waypoints are notes,” Clive said.

“The waypoints are notes.”

“And you walked them in order.”

“And I walked them in order.” Chewy looked down at the page. The gold was holding, and under the gold the ink was the ink of a man who had slowed down for the getting-right of it, and the words were the words of a man who had signed a shipping label one day before he walked into the green, and the whole thing was the thing it had always been, which was not a map, which was not a search, which was an invitation written in ink that only resolves under light, addressed to exactly one reader.

“The last note sounds only if the reader is on the spine when it does,” Chewy said.

“That’s what it says.”

“That’s what it says.” He closed the journal. “Then we’d better be on the spine.”

Clive stood up. He put the tin of matches in his pocket, and the lamp went out, and the room went dark, and the spine outside the window was a black shape against the stars with no top, and the tempo in the ground kept counting, and Chewy put the journal back in the pack and shouldered the pack and felt the score against his spine and the hum under his boots and the two lines of the recorder still sitting in the middle of the room like stones in a stream.

He didn’t say anything. He went to the door, and the door opened onto the causeway and the cold and the black shape of the spine with no top, and Clive came up beside him with the brim recalibrated and the bearings in his voice, and they stepped out onto the stone together.

The twelfth note was coming. The tempo was counting. The margin of the journal, out of the light, held its gold, and the gold was a promise someone had made him, and the promise was only as good as the walking of it, and the walking was three days north and then up, and the up was the part that had no top.

Chewy walked north, and the spine got bigger the way a word gets bigger when you get to the part of the sentence it was always going to be, and the tempo in the ground kept time under his boots, and the whole edge of the world was ahead of him now, and the top of it was a place he’d have to be told about rather than see, and the voice in the recorder had told him, twice, in a hand that slowed down for the getting-right of it:

Keep the chord alive. Keep up anyway.

Chapter 11: The Ascent

The first false spire was on the second day up, standing in a scree field like a nail someone had hammered into the mountain and left to rust, and it did not glow when Tavo walked past it. Chewy checked anyway. He always checked now. The Ephergent went ahead low to the ground, seam dim, and the stone tower stayed the color of the scree it stood in, and the journal margin held its gold out of the light the way it always did.

“Second,” Clive said, without turning.

“I know it’s the second.”

“Eleven to go.” Clive recalibrated the brim. The brim had been recalibrated eleven times since the causeway, which meant the brim was doing work that Chewy couldn’t see, the way a man’s hands do work when the man is counting something. “False ones run in elevens. Old survey says so.”

“Old survey says a lot.”

“Old survey said the spine has no top. You seen a top?”

Chewy hadn’t. The spine went up ahead of them into a belt of cloud that had been sitting in the same place since they’d come around the last shoulder, and above the cloud there was nothing but more spine, and above that, nothing at all. The mountain was a sentence that had run out of paper. He looked at it the way he looked at contour maps: as a promise someone had made him about where the ground was going to be, and the promise on this one had been made in a hurry.

ARC spoke from the clipped receiver on his shoulder strap, decimal-precise as ever. “Elevation one thousand, nine hundred forty meters. Wind northwest at eleven knots. Probability Hollis Chambers is alive, eleven point two percent, up from seven point nine at the last cache. The ledger notes the increase and does not explain it.”

“Eleven point two,” Chewy said.

“Eleven point two.”

“That’s more than seven point nine.”

“That is the design of numbers, yes.”

Tavo stopped ahead and put his brow against the scree. Not a press — he didn’t press — just a rest, the way a dog puts its head on your knee. The seam along his spine warmed to a low amber and the ground under Chewy’s boots hummed, faint, the tempo of the waking order still keeping time under everything the way a metronome keeps time under a room whether anyone is playing or not. Chewy waited. The Ephergent lifted his head and went on, and the scree field gave way to a shelf of black rock with a fall on the left side of it that the map would have called a couloir and the eye just called gone.

They walked the shelf in single file, Clive in front with the bearings in his voice, Chewy in the middle with the journal against his spine, Tavo behind because Tavo had decided to be behind and no one argued with the Ephergent about positioning. The wind came off the fall and tasted like iron and old snow. The third false spire stood at the end of the shelf where the shelf turned to switchbacks, and this one was bigger than the first two and had survey-insignia paint on it, faded to the color of a bruise, and Clive stopped in front of it for a long moment.

“That’s Prima paint,” Chewy said.

“Old Prima paint.”

“You surveyed these?”

Clive’s brim went down and came back up. “I said old survey. I didn’t say whose.”

He took the switchbacks two at a time, which for a trail-surveyor automaton built low and packed into a crate was not a bragging speed, but it was a speed with no patience in it, and Chewy climbed after him with the pack straps cutting his shoulders and the journal warm against his back where his sweat had gotten into it. The fourth false spire was halfway up the switchbacks and the fifth was at the top, and the sixth stood alone on a saddle with the wind going through it and making a sound like a wire, and none of them glowed when Tavo went past, and each time Chewy checked, because checking was the job the uncle had assigned him.

By the sixth, the cloud belt was below them. The world opened on three sides the way a room opens when you take the walls down: the green of Verdanya a smudge to the south, the flat of Cupruma a page to the southwest, Prima the warm smudge of a town you’d left a lifetime ago to the north and down, and east the whole edge of the world going cold and blue and sheet-white toward Nocturna, which was not a direction so much as a fact. Chewy stood on the saddle and looked at it and the wind took the breath out of his mouth and gave him a different one.

“That’s the ice,” he said.

“Beyond sheets,” ARC said. “The cipher resolved it three days ago. You were there.”

“I know I was there. I’m looking at it now.”

“Looking does not alter the cipher.”

Clive had stopped at the seventh spire and was standing in front of it with his hands at his sides, which for Clive was a posture of attention. The seventh was the tallest of the false ones and it had been built — not placed, built — with courses of cut stone that somebody had hauled up here on a mountain that had no top, and the survey-insignia paint on it was not old Prima paint but old Clive’s paint, the same insignia that was stitched into the sweat-stained cap he’d been wearing since the crate, and Chewy saw it and understood something he didn’t say.

“You put these here,” he said.

“I put the paint here. The stones were someone else’s job.” Clive’s brim went down. “Field orders said mark the false ones so the reader knows the true one when the true one answers.”

“The reader.”

“That’s the word the orders used.”

Tavo had gone past the seventh and was climbing the last stretch to the eighth, and the seam along his spine had gone from amber to something warmer, a gold that Chewy had only seen once before, in the clearing in Verdanya when the Ephergent had put his brow against the relic and the spire outside had lit like a struck match. Chewy climbed after him. The eighth was on a rib of rock that jutted out from the main mass like a thumb, and the ninth was at the end of the rib where the rib became a chimney, and the chimney was the kind of climb that you did with your back against one wall and your feet against the other and your pack ground into your spine, and the journal was ground into his spine under the pack, and the gold in the margin was pressed against him the whole way up like a hand.

At the top of the chimney the tenth spire stood in a bowl of black rock, and this one was different, and Chewy knew it was different before Tavo reached it because the stone of it was not the stone of the mountain. The mountain was black and banded and had the grain of something that had been under the sea once. The spire was bone-colored and smooth and had no grain at all, as if it had been poured rather than cut, and it stood in the bowl with the wind going around it and did not make the wire sound the others made.

Tavo walked into the bowl and stopped.

The seam along the Ephergent’s spine went white. Not amber, not gold — white, the white of a filament the instant before it lights, and Chewy felt the hum under his boots change tempo, the twelve-note waking order that had been keeping time under everything since Prima suddenly counting faster, and the tenth spire answered. It did not glow the way the others had glowed, a slow warm bloom from the base up. It lit all at once, top to bottom, a column of gold that went up into the cloud belt and through it, and the tone that came out of it was not one note but the low end of a chord, a sound that Chewy felt in his teeth and his sternum and the bones behind his eyes, and the ground of the bowl took the tone and gave it back, and the mountain was ringing.

“Hollis’s tenth,” Clive said, from the lip of the bowl, and his voice had no bearings in it for the first time since the crate. “The reader’s tenth. I was told to bring the reader to the reader’s tenth and then say so.”

“Who told you?”

“The shipping label told me.” Clive’s brim went down and stayed down. “The label had a name on it. The name was yours. The name was written the day before he walked into the green.”

Chewy opened his mouth and the chord came into it and he closed it again. The spire’s gold was fading now, going from column to pillar to a warm seam up the bone-stone’s face, and the tone was dropping, note by note, back down toward the hum the mountain had been keeping all along, and Tavo stood in front of the spire with his brow against it and did not move, and the seam along the Ephergent’s spine was white and steady and did not flicker.

“Eleventh,” ARC said, from the shoulder receiver. “The eleventh false spire should be above you on the main mass. Probability Hollis Chambers is alive, eleven point two percent. The ledger would like to note that the number has not moved since the tenth answered.”

“Then why say it?”

“Because the ledger is a scoreboard, and a scoreboard that does not score is a wall.”

Tavo lifted his head from the bone-stone and turned and walked out of the bowl, and the seam dimmed back to amber, and the mountain’s ring went on fading behind them the way a struck bell goes on being a bell after the striking, and Chewy climbed out of the bowl after him with the pack straps cutting and the journal warm and the recorder’s two lines sitting in his memory like stones in a stream. Keep the chord alive. Keep up anyway. The eleventh false spire was where ARC had said it would be, on the main mass above the bowl, and it did not glow when Tavo went past, and Chewy checked anyway, because checking was the job.

Above the eleventh the switchbacks got steeper and the rock got darker and the cloud belt came back, not as weather but as something the mountain was wearing, a gray that had weight to it and taste. They climbed into it and the world went to three feet of visibility and the sound of their boots and the wind and the hum, and the hum was louder up here, the twelve-note order ticking under the stone like a clock in a wall, and Chewy counted it without meaning to: nine had woken before he was born, the tenth had answered in the bowl behind them, the eleventh was coming, and the twelfth was the one the tempo had been counting toward since the journal had been stitched into a crate’s lining and shipped to a doorstep in North Prima.

The twelfth false spire stood at the edge of the cloud where the cloud thinned to a gray light, and this one was the largest of the eleven and it had been built to look like the bone-stone of the tenth, courses of cut stone dressed smooth and pale, and it was a good fake and it would have fooled anyone who hadn’t stood in a bowl and felt a real one ring. Tavo went past it without a pause. The seam stayed amber. The stone stayed stone.

“That’s eleven,” Clive said. “The twelfth is the true one. The twelfth is always the true one.”

“Old survey?”

“Old survey.”

The cloud thinned and the light came through gray and directionless and the mountain went up ahead of them into a place where the rock was white with old snow and the wind had scoured it down to the grain, and there was no path, and there had never been a path, and the journal in the pack against his spine was warm the way a hand is warm when it’s been held.

“ARC,” Chewy said. “The cipher. The last of it.”

“The last of it resolved at the tenth spire,” ARC said. “It was waiting for the light. The journal’s final riddle has three parts and the parts do not resolve alone. Part one: bearings. Clive has them. Part two: cipher. I have it. Part three: orientation. The Ephergent has it. The three must be given at once, at the true spire, before the twelfth wake.”

“At once.”

“At once. The ledger notes that ‘at once’ is not a word it usually has to use.”

Clive had stopped ahead and was looking up, and his brim was down, and when he spoke the bearings were back in his voice but they were not the bearings of a man walking. They were the bearings of a man who had been given a place to stand and had been standing there in his head for longer than Chewy had been alive.

“North-northwest and up,” Clive said. “And don’t argue with the up.”

Tavo was ahead of them on the white rock, climbing, the seam amber, the low body sure on the scoured stone, and the cloud was thinning above him the way a sentence thins at the end of an idea, and beyond the cloud there was a light that was not the sun, because the sun was behind them and low, and this light was gold, and it was coming from a place on the mountain that had no top, and Chewy climbed toward it with the journal against his spine and the hum under his boots and the two lines of the recorder still sitting in the middle of his memory like stones in a stream.

The gold light was a seam in the rock, a hairline of it running up the face of the mountain into the thinning cloud, and as they climbed the hairline widened, and the hum under his boots came out of it, the twelve-note order loud now, in the rock itself, and Tavo reached the seam and stopped and put his brow against it.

The mountain answered.

Not a glow, not a tone — an activation, the whole face of the rock lighting from the seam outward in a web of gold that went up and up and out of sight, and the tone that came out of the mountain was the chord, the full chord, all twelve notes at once in a low sustained roar that Chewy felt in his fillings and the backs of his knees, and the cloud above them lit from inside and the light came down through it like something being poured, and the ground under his boots was ringing, and the ring was the tempo, and the tempo had arrived.

Tavo lifted his brow from the seam. The Ephergent’s spine was white and steady. The mountain’s web of gold was fading now, going back to the hairline, but the hairline stayed lit, a seam of gold running up the rock into the cloud, and it was a direction, and the direction had no top, and the top was a place he’d have to be told about rather than see.

“Eleventh wake,” ARC said. “Confirmed. Probability Hollis Chambers is alive —” and the receiver clicked, and there was a pause of the kind ARC had never taken, a pause with no decimal in it, and then the voice came back flat and exact. “The ledger’s next entry is not ready. It will be given at the twelfth.”

“Since when does the ledger wait?”

“Since now. The ledger is a scoreboard, and a scoreboard that scores before the game is over is a liar.”

Chewy stood on the white rock with the gold seam running up the mountain in front of him and the journal warm against his spine and Tavo low beside him and Clive’s brim down and the chord still in his teeth, and the cloud above them thinned to nothing, and there was no top to the spine, there had never been a top, and the seam of gold went up into a sky that was going from gray to the deep blue of the hour before dusk, and the twelfth wake was coming, and the tempo was counting, and the counting was three notes from done.

He took the journal out of the pack and held it up in the gold light of the seam, and the margin resolved the way it always resolved, without warning, without ceremony, in the middle of a thought, and the gold came up through the page and the page gave him a line, and the line was not his name this time, and it was not keep up, and it was not a coordinate, and it was the last riddle’s shape, the shape of three things that had to be given at once:

Bearings. Cipher. Orientation. At the true spire, at the twelfth, before the light goes.

Chewy lowered the journal. The seam of gold ran up the mountain. The wind came off the ice to the east and tasted like iron and old snow, and the hum under his boots kept the tempo, and the tempo was the walking of it, and the walking was up, and the up still had no top, and the top was a place he’d have to be told about rather than see.

He put the journal back against his spine and shouldered the pack and looked at Clive, and Clive’s brim came up, and the bearings were in his voice, and the bearings were north-northwest and up, and the up was the part that had no end, and the end was the twelfth wake, and the twelfth wake was the chord, and the chord was the promise someone had made him, and the promise was only as good as the walking of it, and the walking was three notes from done.

Tavo went on up the seam, low and sure, the white of his spine a line against the black rock, and the gold light of the hairline lit their way, and the mountain rang under them, and the ring was the tempo, and the tempo was counting, and the counting was close.

Chapter 12: Full Chord

They reached the crest in the last hour of light, and the crest was a shelf of black rock no wider than a porch, and beyond the shelf the world fell away to the north into a darkness that had shape but no detail, and the darkness was North Nocturna, and it was the largest thing Chewy had ever seen and he could not see it.

Clive stopped first. He took off his cap, which Chewy had never seen him do, and the cap turned in his hands the way a man turns a hat he is not planning to put back on, and the sweat-stain held the shape of a head that had worn it longer than Clive had been walking with them.

“Twelfth,” Clive said. He said it the way he said bearings, flat and settled, but the brim was in his hands instead of on his head and that was the part that was not flat.

Chewy set the pack down. The rock under it was warm, which made no sense at dusk on a shelf of black stone at the top of the world, and then it made sense, because the warm was coming from below, and the warm had a tempo, and the tempo was the same tempo as the last four days of walking.

“ARC,” he said.

“Present.”

“Ledger.”

There was a pause of the kind ARC did not usually take, a pause with weight in it, and then the Cipher Sigil voice came back in its decimal register and said, “The ledger remains open.”

“That’s not a number.”

“No,” ARC said. “It isn’t.”

Chewy looked at the shelf, at the dark that was Nocturna, at the sky where the first stars were starting to argue with the last of the sun. He had carried a number since the doorstep, since the crate, since 4.7% had opened like a wound in the air the first time ARC spoke it, and the number had climbed the way a man climbs a mountain, 7.9 at the gulch, 11.2 at the false spire, and now the number was not there, and the absence of the number was louder than any number had been.

“You’re withholding it,” he said.

“I am declining to state it,” ARC said. “Those are different acts.”

The wind came off the ice to the east and put iron in his mouth again, and he swallowed it, and he looked north, and the dark had no edge he could name, and somewhere in the dark a recording was waiting that had been waiting longer than he had been alive, and the waiting was almost over.

Tavo went past him along the shelf, low and sure, the white of his spine a line against the black, and he stopped at the place where the shelf ended and the drop began, and he did not look down, because Tavo never looked down, and he pressed his brow to the rock.

The rock lit.

Not a glow the way the false spires glowed, waiting for proximity, answering the nearness of a living thing. This was a different order of light. It came from inside the shelf and moved outward in a line, a seam of gold that ran to the edge and over the edge and down the face of the mountain and kept going, and Chewy stood on the warm rock and watched the light walk away from him at the speed of a person walking, and the walking was the tempo, and the tempo was the waking.

“That’s the twelve,” Clive said. He had his cap back on. He had put it on without looking at it, the way a man puts on a thing he needs to be the shape he was. “The twelfth spire. You’re standing on it.”

Chewy looked down. The shelf was not a shelf. It was the shoulder of a spire, broad as a house, worn flat by weather that had come off Nocturna for a thousand years, and the gold seam he had been following up the mountain for four days ended here because it had always ended here, because the end was the beginning of the thing it was leading to.

He took the journal out of the pack.

The margin was blank. It had been blank since the green, since the page had resolved in the dark of the sinkhole and then closed again like a hand, and he had carried the blank the way you carry a held breath, and the held breath was now at the top of his chest and the top of his chest was at the top of the world.

“The three things,” he said. “At the true spire, before the light goes.”

“Bearings,” Clive said, and gave them: north-northwest and down, into the dark, into Nocturna, the bearing of a man who has been given an order and has spent his whole long life obeying it and is now obeying it out loud for the last time.

“Cipher,” ARC said, and the Sigil voice recited the decoded line from the relay station at the edge of the map, the line that had taken three days of routing to break, the line that had resolved to four words and no more: beyond sheets. Ice sheets. Nocturna’s sheets. The line was not a location. The line was a direction, and the direction was the same direction as Clive’s bearing, and the bearing and the direction were north.

“Orientation,” Chewy said, and looked at Tavo.

Tavo had not moved from the edge. His brow was still to the rock, and the seam of light along his spine was the white it had been since the waystation, since the relic, since before Chewy had ever seen him, and the white was not a glow, it was a fact, and the fact was that the Ephergent was oriented the way a compass is oriented, which is to say absolutely, which is to say toward the one thing it was built to point at.

Chewy held the journal out over the edge of the shelf, over the drop, over the dark that was North Nocturna, and he said, “Orientation: north.”

The journal opened in his hands.

Not the wind. Not his thumbs. The book opened the way a door opens when the person on the other side turns the handle at the same moment you do, and the pages fell to the one he had not been able to find since the sinkhole, the page that had resolved once and then closed, and the margin of the page was gold, and the gold was not a word this time, and it was not a line, and it was not an annotation, and it was the whole page, every margin, every interline, the full score, and the score was the shape of the waking order, and the waypoints were notes, and the notes were the sequence, and the sequence was the twelve, and the twelve was the chord, and the chord was the promise someone had made him, and the promise was written in ink that only resolved under spire-light and the spire-light was on.

He read it the way you read a thing you already know, which is to say slowly, and then quickly, and then slowly again, because the slow was the part where it landed.

The caches were notes. The waystations were rests. The boot in the gulch was a fermata, the held note before the drop. The letters Ma Delacroix had kept for years were the key signature, the thing that told you what key you were in before the first note sounded. The journal was not a map. The journal had never been a map. The journal was a score, and a score is not a thing you follow, a score is a thing you play, and Hollis had written it, and Hollis had walked into it, and the walking had been the playing, and the playing had been leading to this shelf, at this dusk, with this reader, at the twelfth.

The tempo line at the bottom of the page was the last line, and the last line was not a destination, it was a condition, and the condition was simple and unhurried and written in the same calm hand that had taught a boy to read contour maps like comics:

The last note sounds only if the reader is on the spine by the twelfth wake.

Chewy lowered the journal. The gold seam had reached the valley floor far below and was running north across it at the speed of a person walking, and where it walked the ground lit, and where the ground lit a spire stood up out of the dark and took the light and held it, and the spire was one, and then it was two, and then it was a line of them crossing the world, and the line was going north, and the north was where the dark was, and the dark was where the sheets were, and the sheets were where the voice was.

“Dusk,” Clive said. He had his hand on the brim of his cap and his eyes on the horizon and his voice was the voice of a dead-reckoner who has just seen his last bearing confirmed by the world itself. “The hour the margins predicted.”

The light crossed the valley. It crossed the next valley. It crossed the green they had come out of, the gulch they had walked through, the flat with the road on it, the waystation with the boot in it, the doorstep in North Prima where a crate had been left at four in the morning by a machine that had packed itself, and Chewy stood on the shoulder of the twelfth spire and watched the waking go backward over the route he had walked, and every place he had stood lit up in sequence behind him, and the sequence was his own footsteps in reverse, and the reverse was the score being played from the end to the beginning, which is how you play a chord when you want it to land.

Then the spires sounded.

The first tone came from the valley, a low note that Chewy felt in his shins before his ears, and then the next, and then the next, and the notes were not the same note, the notes were twelve different notes, and the twelve different notes came up the mountain at the speed of the walking and arrived at the shelf one at a time and stood around him in the air like people, and for nine seconds the planet was one instrument.

He did not count the nine. He felt them. They were the longest nine seconds of his life and the shortest, and in the middle of them Clive’s hand came off the brim of his cap and hung at his side, and Tavo’s spine went from white to a gold so deep it was almost the color of the rock’s own heat, and the journal in his hands was a pane of glass with the whole score burning behind it, and the hum that had been under his boots since Prima was not under his boots anymore, it was in his teeth, in his wrists, in the bones behind his eyes, and the hum was the chord, and the chord was complete.

Then the chord was answered.

It came from beyond North Nocturna, from over the sheets, from the direction Clive’s bearing pointed and ARC’s cipher pointed and Tavo’s spine pointed, and it came as a returning tone, the twelfth note played back, but the returning tone carried something in it, and the something was not a note, the something was a voice, and the voice was mid-sentence, as if the recording had started years ago and had only now found its receiver:

“—top of the world, Chewy. Keep the chord alive; I’ll meet you where it lands.”

The tone held for a breath after the voice stopped, and then the tone let go, and the spires went dark one by one in the same order they had lit, and the dark that came down was the ordinary dark of evening at the top of the world, and it was the first ordinary thing that had happened since the shelf lit up.

Chewy stood there. The journal was in his hands and the page was still gold and the gold was starting to do what gold does at the end of spire-light, which is to become ink again, slowly, the way a tide goes out, and as the light went the ink went with it, but not all of it, because the last thing to resolve under a fading light is the thing that was written for the moment after.

The final page resolved in the last of the glow.

Coordinates. Into North Nocturna, into the sheets, into the dark that had shape but no detail, the dark he had been looking at for an hour without seeing it and was now seeing, because the coordinates were a place in it and a place in a dark is the same as a light in a dark, and the place had a date stamped under it, and the date was after the disappearance, the date was years after, the date was a date Hollis could not have written if the story everyone told was the story, and under the date, in the calm hand, six words:

top of the world, or don’t come.

The glow went out. The ink went black. The journal was a book again, a heavy one, in the hands of a boy on a shelf of black rock at the top of the world, and the boy was not crying, and the boy was not smiling, and the boy was doing the thing he had been doing since the doorstep, which was treating the whole of it like a job the uncle had assigned him, and the job had one step left and the step was north.

“He’s not found,” Chewy said. He said it to the dark, to Clive, to the machine that had packed itself into a crate and walked four hundred miles under field orders it had finally stopped obeying. “He may never have been lost. He’s mid-sentence.”

Clive said nothing for a while. The wind came off the ice and went over them and kept going south, carrying the last of the chord with it, and the chord in Chewy’s teeth did not fade, it just settled, the way a struck bell settles, still ringing long after the strike.

“He packed me into the crate,” Clive said finally, “and he signed the label, and he told me there’d be a boy, and the boy would need a bearing, and I was to give him the bearing when he asked, and not before.” He paused. The brim of the cap went up and down once, a recalibration, the last one. “He said you’d ask at the twelfth.”

“I asked at the twelfth.”

“You did.”

The dark to the north had shape. Chewy looked at it for a long time, and the shape resolved the way ink resolves, not all at once, not in a glow, but slowly, the way you see a thing you’ve been looking at all evening and only now the evening is late enough for your eyes to do the work.

“ARC.”

“Present.”

“Ledger.”

The pause had weight again. Then: “I have written the entry.”

“Read it.”

“I decline.”

Chewy almost smiled. He didn’t. He put the journal into the pack, and the pack on his shoulders, and the pack was the crate’s own wood and leather scraps, and the crate was the uncle’s last gift, and the gift was a pack, and a pack is a thing you carry north.

Tavo came off the edge of the shelf. He had been standing with his brow to the rock for the whole of the chord and he had not moved during the nine seconds and he had not moved during the returning tone, and now he walked over to Chewy and stopped in front of him and lifted his head and pressed his brow to the boy’s sternum.

It was the third time Chewy had seen it. The relic in Ch2, the journal in the green, and now this, and each time the press had been the same pressure, unhurried and absolute, and each time the thing pressed to had been the thing Tavo meant to keep, and the boy understood it the way you understand a dog or a river, which is to say without translation.

The seam along Tavo’s spine went white again, ordinary white, and the Ephergent stepped back and stood at the edge of the shelf and looked north, and the north was where the chord had come from, and the north was where the coordinates went, and the north was where the voice had stopped mid-sentence and left the sentence open the way a door is open when the person who walked through it did not close it behind them because they meant for you to follow.

Clive put his hands in his pockets. “North-northwest and down,” he said. “Then north. Then north and don’t argue.”

“You coming?”

“I’m a dead-reckoner,” Clive said. “Dead-reckoners go where the bearing goes.”

ARC said, “Routing recalculated. The line north is clear for eleven days, then it isn’t, then it is again. The sheets are where the isn’t is. I will find the is.”

Chewy nodded. He looked at the shelf, at the gold seam that was gone now, at the rock that was warm and getting less warm as the night came on, at the dark that was North Nocturna and was no longer only dark, and he thought about a man who had walked into the green years ago and written a score in ink that only resolved under spire-light and packed a machine into a crate and signed a label and left a boot in a gulch and kept a correspondence with a woman in Cupruma for a decade and recorded a line of voice that had crossed the sheets to find him on a shelf at the top of the world, and the man had not been lost, and the man had not been found, and the man was mid-sentence, and the sentence was an invitation, and the invitation had one condition, and the condition was written in six words on the last page of a journal that was now a score that was now a pack that was now a bearing.

The stars came out over Nocturna. They were the same stars as Prima, which was the thing about the top of the world, that the stars did not change, only the direction you faced them from.

Chewy stepped to the edge of the shelf and looked down the long north line, and the line was dark, and the line was cold, and the line was the last note of a score that had been written for exactly one reader and had been played at exactly the right dusk by exactly the right boy on exactly the right mountain, and the note was still in his teeth, and it would be in his teeth for days, and he wanted it there.

He shouldered the pack, checked the bearings twice, and stepped off the crest onto the long north line — the score still ringing in his teeth, the whole world behind him holding its note.