Page 96 of The Truths We Hold

“Sixty,” I say.

“Sixty-plus. And we’re eight, plus a professor at thirty percent, plus you.”

“Yes.”

Park looks at me. There is a pause in which a woman who has spent her career hunting things like me decides, entirely, what she is.

“Then what do we do?”

I put my hand flat against the arcade wall, and I go down.

Not into the footings this time. Past them. Through the pier and the pile and the cold clay beneath, into the geological layer, into the seam of ancient rock that runs west from beneath this academy for eleven miles and that I have been walking, quietly, in the small hours, for four months. There is a channel in that dark. There has always been a channel in that dark. It has carried nothing but rumor and the occasional trade for six generations, because the people at the far end of it have very good reasons for not answering when the surface calls.

I open it, and I speak into it, and I use the name I have not used since the settlements went under.

This is Bael. The bridge is standing at Greyson. The institution has come for it with sixty. I am asking.

The dark carries it west.

And while it carries, I think of a small room lit by lichen and a seven-year-old with a stone in her fist who asked me whether the sun is warm the way a fire is warm or warm the way a blanket is warm, and who has been waiting four months for me to come back and answer her properly.

They will send warriors. They will send them because I asked, and because for four hundred years I have taken nothing from them and given a great deal, and because there is nothing on this earth that moves a hidden people faster than the news that someone above ground is standing up on their behalf.

But the settlements have not surfaced in six generations. Not once. Not for a wedding, not for a death, not for the two winters when the deep wells fouled and they buried nineteen of their own rather than risk a light on the surface. And I am about to bring them up into a burning academy full of consecrated silver, for their first contact with the world above in living memory.

Not emergence. Not sunlight. Not the thing I promised them.

Battle.

I feel the answer come back before I hear it. The dark to the west thickens the way water thickens ahead of something large, and then the seam beneath the academy’s foundation is not empty, and then the floor of the arcade opens along a line no mason ever cut.

The first of them comes up out of the stone.

He is enormous and gray-faced and squinting even in this dark, because his eyes have not met surface light of any kind since he was a boy, and his shadow is not like the students’ shadows or like hers. It is worked. Generations of a people who had nothing else to build with, building with the only material they were left.

Nine more come up behind him. Then fourteen. Then more than I can count without turning my head.

He looks at the burning arcade, and at the woman in taped-over Hunter gray with her hand on her sidearm, and at me.

“We came for the bridge,” he says. “Show us where to fight.”

I show him.

The academy carries the battle the way stone carries everything — permanently, patiently, with the dense, ancient awareness of a material that has been absorbing the violence of living beings since before the living beings existed and that will carry the scars of this violence in its grain forever. The scars are the record. The record is the proof that the bridge was worth fighting for.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

ashley

The Command finds me again — not in the dark this time but in the light, standing on the judgment platform with the dawn color blazing and the academy burning around me and three hundred students whose shadows I can feel through the living intelligence and whose fear is a frequency the Command can answer.

It comes up from underneath, the way it always does. Not from my head. From somewhere below my ribs and behind my spine, in the place where my shadow stops being something I use and starts being something I am, and it arrives with the particular sensation of a word standing up.

The first time it happened I was on my knees in the courtyard and it came out of me without my permission and put nine Hunters on the ground. The second and third times I called it deliberately and it broke a disruptor and held four specialists in place, and afterward I threw up in the sanctuary and Bael held my hair and did not say anything at all.

This is not like any of those.

Because I can hear them.