Sync

They made a circle.

It was Venn's idea, or perhaps it was nobody's. It came about in the manner of such things, without anyone proposing it. Elena put out a hand, and Thomas took it. Thomas put out the other, and Gregor took that, with the hen tucked under his arm. Gregor held out his free one, and Sera took it, green fingers curled round weathered ones. Matteo, supported on either side, was lifted to his feet and slipped into the line.

Nine people. Nine minds. A ring in a bubble of silver, in the heart of a collapsing world, round a girl with a blazing stone.

"Jin," said Zoe, through her teeth.

"Yes. Yes. Right." He stood at the edge of the circle with the shining sphere of Matteo's notes still turning round him, and his hands moving in the air. "I'm setting the sync now. You'll feel it. It'll be like, like tuning a string. Don't fight it. When it finds you, let it."

"How long?"

"A minute."

"I haven't got a minute!"

"Then I'll make it thirty seconds." He grinned, a wild, white, exhausted grin. "I'm an engineer, Zo. Give me a deadline and I'll do anything."

Venn took Archie's left hand.

He did it without ceremony. He reached out and gripped it, hard, in a big warm callused palm. His own hand was shaking. "Don't let go," he said. "Whatever happens. Okay?"

"Okay."

"I mean it. I'll kick your ass."

"I believe you."

Zoe took the right.

She did it with the pendant still held up in her other fist. She stepped into the ring beside him, and her fingers slid into his and laced, and he felt the small bones of her hand, and the heat in them, and the tremor. She did not look at him. She stared straight ahead with her jaw set. But he felt her thumb move, once, slowly, over his knuckle.

Here, it said. Here. I'm here.

…

"It's not working," said Jin.

The sound of it fell into the silver stillness like a stone into a pool. The ring shifted. Eyes opened.

"What do you mean it's not working?"

"I can see the phase readings." The engineer was staring at the air before him, where a thin web of glowing lines crawled across nothing, a nine-stranded braid of different colors. "They're close. They're so close. But there's a gap. Three of the lines won't lock." He swallowed. "There's something in the way."

"Which three?"

"Mine," said Jin, hoarsely. "Venn's. And," he looked up, with an apologetic grimace, "Archie's."

Nobody spoke.

"It's not you," Jin said to the others. "The rest of you are, it's perfect, you're singing. But the three of us, we're." He took off his glasses. They were broken, and he held them in his hand. "I think it's because we're afraid."

"Of what?"

"Of the same thing." He turned, slowly, and looked at them. "Of being, of being the one who wasn't enough."

…

It was Venn who said it first.

He said it in a rush, the way a man jumps into cold water. "I'm scared I'm not worth it."

The ring went very still.

"I'm not saying it for sympathy. I just. I have to say it." He didn't look at anyone. He looked at the floor, and then at the ceiling, and finally at the pillar of white fire. "My whole life I've been the pretty one. The fun one. The one who makes people laugh. And I've been so good at it, so good, that I don't think anyone's ever asked what's under it." His voice cracked. "I think there's nothing. I think if you took the face and the jokes away there'd just be a boy who's frightened out of his mind."

"There's not nothing," said Thomas, gruffly.

"How would you know?"

"Because I've watched you." The big gray man's hand tightened on Elena's. "In two cities. I watched you stand between a stranger and a blade. I watched you sit up with a broken man on a ship when everyone else was afraid to go near him. You're not the pretty one. You're the kind one. It's a different thing entirely."

Venn gaped at him.

"Oh," he said.

"Yes. Oh."

Venn laughed. It was a wet shaky sound, with nothing of the old gloss in it, and for a moment his whole beautiful ruined face seemed to break and re-form into something rougher and warmer and far more alive. His grip on Archie's hand tightened. A thin gold line in the web, a line that had been wavering, slid slowly into place.

"Two," said Jin, in a whisper.

…

"My turn," said Jin.

He put his glasses back on. They hung crooked on his nose. He stood in the circle with his fists clenched, and he looked at Zoe for a long moment, and then past her at nothing.

"I don't think I deserve to be here either," he said.

"Jin—"

"No, let me." He drew a breath. "My grandmother died alone. Because I turned a phone over on a desk. I didn't, I don't think you ever stop. You're not supposed to. I thought if I could just do enough good, build enough, fix enough, then somehow it would, it would balance." His voice cracked. "It doesn't. It never balances. And I'm so tired of trying."

"You don't have to balance it," said Zoe.

"Then what do I do?"

"You live," said Elena, softly. "That's all I learned in fifteen years. You can't pay it back. But you can be what she'd want."

"Which is?"

"Happy, I expect."

"She'd have hated that," said Jin, and gave a short strangled laugh. "She'd say I was being frivolous."

"She'd have said it with a smile."

The thin man stood very still. His lip trembled. Then, slowly, as a man lowers himself into a hot bath, he let out a breath, and his shoulders came down. A second line in the web, silver-blue, slid into the braid and locked.

"One left," he said.

He did not look at Archie.

He didn't need to.

…

Archie stood in the ring with a hand in either of his.

He felt them pulse. Venn's, big and warm and slightly damp. Zoe's, small and steady and fierce. Between them he stood quite straight, like a post between two walls, and looked out across the circle at the faces of the people he had walked a hundred worlds to find.

He had no speech.

He had never been able to make one. He'd stood at the back of rooms all his life, and been talked over, and nodded. He was the kind of man who wrote his toasts the night before and then did not give them. He opened his mouth and found that nothing was in it.

Then, because there was nothing else to do, he began.

"I'm not good at this," he said.

Nobody laughed. They waited.

"I came into this because I had nothing to lose. That's the truth. I want you to know that. I signed because I had six months and no one to tell. I didn't come for the world, or for you, or for any of it. I came because I thought I'd be spared the trouble of doing something with my life." He swallowed. "And I was wrong."

He turned his head to the left.

"Jin. I found a brother. I didn't know I wanted one. You said one word at that first dinner, Code, and went back to your lettuce, and I thought, here's another man behind a wall. And you were. So was I. You were the bravest person I've ever met. You sat down on the floor of a wrecked ship and read a machine's mind. For me."

Jin's mouth was open. His glasses had fogged.

"Venn." He turned to the other. "A free soul. That's what you are. You came into every room like a dog out of the rain and made it better. You took a hammer to the end of the world with a hole in your lung, and you grinned. I've never once seen you give up on a living creature." He smiled crookedly. "I don't think I'd be here if you hadn't come back for me."

Venn made a small choking sound.

Archie turned right.

"And Zoe."

He stopped.

It was a difficult moment. He could feel the whole circle holding its breath. Her hand in his was shaking, and the pendant above her head throbbed so brightly that he could see his own shadow on the dome. He wanted to say a hundred things. He wanted to say all of them at once. Instead he said the only one he had, and it came out as simple as a child's.

"And a reason to live."

Her breath caught.

"I didn't have one. I want you to know that. Not before you. I'd have gone on in my little room until the lights went out." His voice shook. "You gave me one. You stood up in a ruined hall with a gash on your hand and shouted at the dark. I thought: I want to see what that girl does next. I've been wanting to ever since."

Tears were running down her cheeks.

She did not wipe them. She did not look away. She stood there in the silver light, and her hand tightened in his until it hurt, and he felt the last line in the web, the stubborn faint gray one, tremble, and strain, and turn.

"And the rest of you," said Archie, looking round the circle. "The ones who need to go home. I'll hold your hand all the way."

"We know you will, son," said Gregor.

"It's a promise."

"We know."

The gray line locked.

…

It began as a sound.

It was a low humming note, very pure, that grew up out of the nine of them like a tide rising in a harbor. It did not come from the pillar or the dome. It came from the circle itself, from the place where the hands met. It deepened. It spread. The stopped threads of the dying lattice, hanging in the silver bubble, began to quiver, and ring, and glow.

"It's catching," whispered Jin.

"It's singing," said Sera.

She had begun to sing. It was a wordless melody, clear and strange, in the old rootsong of the Tree, and Elena was humming under it, and Thomas, and Gregor, and Matteo's thin reedy tenor, and Venn's, loud and tuneless and wonderful. Zoe was laughing and crying at once. The pendant above her head was a star.

And Archie, between them, in the middle of the sound, felt something happen.

It was not painful. It was not even strange. It was only that the edges of himself softened, like the edges of a drawing rubbed with a thumb. He could feel Venn's fear and Venn's joy. He could feel the thin cold clean line of Jin's mind, and the ache in Gregor's, and the weight in Elena's, and under it all a vast, bright, patient presence he could not name. Nine. They were nine, and they were one, and none of them had lost anything at all.

Oh, he thought.

That's what it was for.

…

The pillar spoke.

It said one word. It said it in the voice of the Tree, and the rain, and a ship humming in the dark. It said it so softly that it seemed hardly to be spoken, but the whole of the Core received it, and every thread of light in the dome shivered and turned toward the circle like flowers toward the sun.

It said, Yes.

The silver bubble burst.

Time came crashing back in a rush. The roar returned, but it was not the roar of a world being torn down. It was a long clear peal, like a vast bell being rung, and under it the Core came apart in perfect order, plane by plane, thread by thread, folding in on itself with the tender precision of a flower closing at night. The dome opened like a hand. White light poured through it.

It was not fire. It was not wind. It was only light, soft and infinite and warm, and it poured over them all.

"Hold on!" Venn was shouting. "Don't let go!"

"I won't!"

"Archie!"

"I've got you!" He gripped. "I've got you! Both of you! I'm not letting go!"

The floor fell away.

They were falling, nine of them, in a ring, hand in hand through a sea of white. The air rushed upward. He could not hear anything but the singing. Zoe's hair streamed over his shoulder. Her face was against his arm. He turned his head, and saw, in the light, her eyes wide open, wet and shining and blazing with a wild joy.

She was laughing.

He was too.

And the white closed over them all, and the world went quiet.