FADING

Day 95 of 100

She had stopped counting at day ninety-two.

It was not that she could not. It was that the numbers had begun to slip. She would lie on the narrow bed in the gray light of the cell and say them over: ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two, and find that the next was not there. A gap. A little neat hole in the sequence, like a missing tooth. She would probe it with her mind and feel only a smooth, pleasant, sliding blankness, like ice, and at the bottom of it a faint cold wish to lie down.

So she counted other things.

Bricks. There were, in the wall opposite the bed, in the dim blue glow of the lamp-ring set into the ceiling, one hundred and four. She had counted them forty times. She had counted the cracks in the mortar. She had counted the buttons on her gown, and there were seven, and she repeated it to herself, seven, seven, seven, as one pats a dog to be sure it is still there.

Seven, she said aloud. Her voice cracked.

Seven buttons. Seven pearls. It's the one in the middle that matters.

She held on to it.

…

They had put her in a cell beneath the Sanctum.

She had learned that on the first night, from the cold. It was the cold of the living rock, a sunless, ancient, patient cold that had been there before the chapel, before the Academy, before the Founders came up the lake in their flat-bottomed boats. It lay on the floor like water. It came up through the plank bed. It was not unlike the cold of the Vault, but gentler, and more thoroughly at home.

The room was a niche in the stone, nine feet by six. A door of oak, studded with iron. A lamp-ring of blue glass in the ceiling that never went out. A pitcher of water, a cup, a bowl. On the second day they had brought a table and a chair, as a courtesy.

Twice a day Dr. Calder came.

She came in her blood-colored gown, with her black leather bag, and sat on the chair and took Mara's wrist between two cold fingers and looked at the sweep-hand of a watch. She did not speak. She had not spoken since the first night, except to say, in a thin hard voice, "Drink." There was a vial. It was blue and bitter and left a taste in the throat like pennies. Mara drank it. She had stopped asking what it was.

It kept her heart going. She could feel it work, a slow, dull, steady stroke in the center of her, like a bell under water. And with each dose, each time the blue fluid went down her throat, she felt a little more of herself slide away.

Not the body. The body she could still feel, though she could see the wall through her hands. It was the other thing.

She had lost the Latin.

It had happened on the fourth day. She had lain on the bed, trying to remember the line over the Vault's gate, Hic custodiuntur, and found that she did not know what it meant. She knew it was Latin. She knew that she had once known. And there was a place in her head, a clean white place, where the verbs had been.

On the sixth, she lost the name of the street where Ruth Pellam lived.

On the eighth, her mother's face.

…

She wept for that one.

She hadn't meant to. She'd been lying on her back with her hand held up to the lamp, watching the blue light go through it, and she had thought, quite idly, I should like to see Mother. And she had reached for the picture. She had always had it: a thin woman in gray, bent over a book, with a pencil in her hair. A sharp nose. Quick brown hands.

There was nothing.

A blur. A gap. A shape like the place a thing leaves on a shelf when the dust has been wiped round it. She'd lain there and stared into the white, and the tears had run down into her ears; and in all the long cold stillness of the cell, there was no sound but her breathing, and the slow stroke of her borrowed heart.

I'm going.

It's not the death. It's the going.

I'll be a thing that walks about and does not know who it is. A page with the words rubbed off.

She had pressed her palms to her eyes and had not been able to stop.

…

The Director came on the ninety-fifth day, a little after noon.

She knew him by the step. It was the tap of the stick, light and regular as a clock, coming down the stair. It paused. A key rattled. The oak door opened on the gloom of the passage, and he stood in it, silver-haired, in a coat the color of mist, with a folding chair under one arm and a small covered basket on the other.

"Miss Ashgrove."

She turned her head on the pillow. It was an effort.

"I trust I do not intrude."

"Would it matter?"

"Not in the least." He smiled, with every appearance of warmth. "But it is as well to be civil. Do you mind if I sit? My knees are not what they were."

He unfolded the chair. He placed it by the bed, beyond arm's reach, and sat down with a small sigh of relief, laying the stick across his knees. The basket he put on the table. He took a handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped his forehead. In the blue lamp-light his face looked very fine and very old, as if carved from candle-wax.

"You are looking better," he said.

"I'm not."

"Well. You look as well as can be expected." He glanced at her hand, where it lay on the gray blanket, with the lines of the weave plain through the palm. "I do hope the tonic is not too disagreeable. Dr. Calder assures me it is the best that can be done. She takes a great interest in you. She is a most conscientious physician."

"She's terrified of you."

"Is she?" The mild eyes widened. "I hadn't noticed."

…

He talked for an hour.

She would remember it afterward as one remembers a fever: in patches, bright and distorted, with great gaps between. He talked as an old man talks, kindly, rambling, at his ease. He talked about the weather, and the chapel, and the Dean's sherry. He told an anecdote about a goat. He asked after her health, and the quality of the bread, and whether she would like a book.

And then, between one breath and another, without any change of tone, he began to speak of the Reservoir.

"It is a remarkable structure," said Halloran. "I wish you might have seen it. Twelve levels, each cut by hand. A column of black glass, eighty feet high, in the heart of the mountain, humming like a harp. When I first conceived it I was a man of sixty. I was a junior commissioner of the Bureau, in a very small office, with a very small salary, and a great many ideas that nobody wished to hear."

"You are old."

"I am seventy-nine."

She stared.

"You do not believe it?" He smiled. "It is the souls, my dear. They keep me. Eleven years of a fisherman's light, three of a schoolmistress, five of a boy of sixteen who played the violin. A little of each, taken now and then, in a glass." He tapped his chest lightly. "I have not been ill since 'seventy-six. I have not had a gray hair since 'eighty. I can run up a stair."

"You eat them."

"I use them. It is quite different." He spread his hands. "A soul is a form of energy, Miss Ashgrove. It is the most refined that exists. A man who learns to draw on it need never want for strength. The Bureau's wards, the Sight-engines, the signal stones, every device you have seen, derive from it. I have fed the American government for twenty years on the light of its own citizens, and I have been paid, in the main, with a pat on the head."

"They didn't know."

"No. They never ask." He sighed. "That is the tragedy of the public servant. One is thanked for results, never for methods."

…

"My mother," said Mara.

It came out of her without her knowing. She had not meant to say it; it was simply the thing in her mind, a bright thin thread in the white, and she followed it.

"What of her?"

"Margaret Ashgrove. She wrote a book. She was on the Committee." She heard how dry her voice was. "She said that a Division could be mended."

The Director's face did not change.

"She did."

"You laughed at her."

"I did not laugh. I was courteous. I always am." He rested his chin on his hands. "I thought it an interesting theory. I thought it a pity. It was, after all, quite correct."

She went still.

"The Reintegration," said Halloran gently. "Yes. I read the manuscript. I read it three times. She was perfectly right, you know. A divided soul can be rejoined. If both halves consent, and the sun is hidden, and the node is sound." He nodded, almost admiringly. "It is a most elegant working. But then, I observed, what is the result? A single, whole, healed girl. A pleasant, useful, grateful citizen, with her soul in order and her heart at peace. And what does that yield?"

"Yield—"

"Nothing." He looked at her. "A healed soul is worth, to the Reservoir, precisely what a healed soul is worth. It is whole. It is closed. It cannot be drawn upon. But a divided one—" He smiled. "A divided soul is open. Every wound is a door. And a Division that has been rejoined in the moment of its greatest tension, at the very instant when the two halves reach for each other and the sun goes dark—"

"It's a conductor."

"It is a lightning rod." The blue eyes gleamed. "At that moment, for ninety seconds, a rejoining soul is the most powerful single source of light upon the earth. And if one were to stand at the base of the Stone, with a device prepared—" He lifted his fingers delicately. "One might take it all."

"You want to use the Reintegration."

"I want to harvest it."

"That's why you wanted her book."

"Of course. And why I lost it." He sighed. "She was a difficult woman. She would not understand. She wrote to the Secretary. A very foolish letter. She proposed an inquiry."

Mara's heart gave a heavy slow stroke.

"Did you kill her?"

It was said quite plainly. She heard it fall into the quiet like a coin.

Halloran regarded her for a long moment with a look of the profoundest and most sorrowful interest.

"Margaret Ashgrove," he said, "was a brilliant woman. She swam the lake at sixteen. It is a curious thing, is it not, how often brilliant women drown?"

He rose.

He took up the basket from the table, and the folding chair, and tapped the floor once with his stick. At the door he turned, smiling, mild, benign, a little weary, and bowed to her with the courtesy of an old-world gentleman taking leave of a hostess.

"Rest, Miss Ashgrove. The eclipse is in five days. You will be wanted. I do hope you will be well enough to walk."

The oak door closed. The key turned.

She lay without moving, and listened to the tap of the stick go away up the stair; and she thought, quite clearly and without any particular feeling, as one reads a line on a page: He killed my mother.

Then it slid, and was gone, into the white.

…

She did not know how long she slept.

The lamp-ring burned. The cell was cold. She dreamed, or half dreamed, of a long gray dock, and a boy; and woke to find that the dream had left a small hard thing in her mind, like a stone in a shoe, and that she had forgotten what it was. She lay and tried to remember. She had the sense that she'd been told something, something she must not lose.

It was a name.

Whose?

She turned her head.

The door was open.

…

It stood a hand's breadth ajar, with the key in the lock and a dim oblong of lamplight in the passage beyond. She stared at it. She thought it was a hallucination. She had had several; once, a whole troop of Wardens, dancing; once, Pryce's skull, grinning from the washstand. She lay and watched the door, and it did not go away.

A shadow fell across the light.

It was small, and round, and wore an apron. It had a basket on its arm and a cloth tied over its hair, and it came in on tiptoe and shut the door behind it with a soft click. It held a finger to its lips. It said, in a whisper like a kettle just before it boils:

"Mara."

She could not speak.

"Mara, love. Oh, God, look at you." The figure was at the bedside, kneeling, with its arms thrown around her and its wet face in her neck. It smelled of carbolic and flour and peppermint. It was warm. It was extremely solid. "It's all right. It's all right, I've got you. I've got you, you stupid, stupid girl."

"Jo."

"Yes."

"Josie."

"Who else would it be?" She drew back, and Mara saw her face: round and freckled and swollen with weeping, and set like a rock. "Hush. Don't talk. Is there anything broken? Can you stand? Of course you can't. I'll— Okafor!"

A second shadow filled the doorway.

It was vast. It was shaggy and bearish, in the stolen blue of a Bureau porter, with a cap pulled low and a mustache the size of a hearth-brush; and it came in with a creak of leather and bent over her, and the small blue eyes under the cap swam.

"Aye, lass," said Okafor huskily. "Aye. It's me."

"How—"

"Dr. Calder left the key." He glanced over his shoulder. "She's on the stair. She'll hold the porters off till we're clear. She said, 'I've not slept in ten days, I shall faint at the top, it will take them twenty minutes to revive me.'" He gave a strangled laugh. "We've twenty minutes. Can she walk, Josie?"

"No."

"I'll carry her."

"Careful. She's— oh, God, Okafor, she's like paper."

"I know."

"I'm— can you hear me, Mara? We're taking you out. The Captain's waiting. He's outside, in the cloister garden. We've a hole in the crypt wall." Josie's hands were moving over her, quick and sure, as they had moved over a hundred beds. "You're going to feel a bit strange."

"I'm strange already."

"Good girl."

He lifted her.

…

She remembered it only in pieces.

The ceiling, going by. The ring of blue glass, passing overhead and dwindling. A stair, and a sound of breathing, and the heavy comfortable tread of a man who could carry a plow-horse. A smell of old stone, and then of earth, and then, suddenly, a rush of cold sweet air that struck her face like a hand, and a smell she had forgotten. Rain. Wet grass. Lilac. The green and living smell of a world with no walls.

The sky.

It was gray, and soft, and enormous, and it was full of a pale clear light, the hour before dusk. She lay in the crook of an Irishman's arm and stared up at it, and a bird went over, a swallow, quick and black, and she followed it with her eyes, and thought, Oh. I had forgotten how high it goes.

"Mara!"

That voice.

She turned her head.

…

He was standing in the long grass of the cloister garden, with his coat torn and his hair wet and his hands held out before him as though he had forgotten what they were for. He had come out from the shadow of the wall. He was running. He was not running; he had stopped, in the middle of the path, and stood there with his face working, as if he had come up against a glass.

"Put her down," said Rooke, in an odd stifled voice. "Put her— let me—"

Okafor knelt, and slid her from his arms.

She felt the grass under her feet, and her knees gave way. She would have fallen. But he was there. He had her by the shoulders; he had gathered her up against his chest, with one arm under her knees and the other round her back, and she lay in them and thought, with dim wonder, that she had known this shape before.

"Cal."

"I'm here."

"It's you."

"It's me. It's me, love. I've got you." His voice was cracked and hoarse. "I've got you. You're safe. You're out."

"You're thin."

"You're thinner."

"I'm not." She frowned. "I'm less."

She felt him shudder.

She was lighter than a child. She could feel it. She felt him lift her, and the surprise in his arms, the instinctive over-correction, as of a man who has braced to raise a trunk and finds a pillow; and she felt him go quite still. Her cheek lay on his shoulder. His heart, under her ear, was going like a drum. His hand came up and stroked her hair, and it shook so that the strokes were broken.

"I've forgotten things," she said.

"I know."

"Latin. And Mother's face."

"I know."

"I'm— there's a bit of me, Cal, a bit gone, here." She touched her own forehead with a finger that she could see through. "I'm not sure how much. I'm afraid to look."

"Don't look."

"But if I—"

"Then we'll find it," said Rooke fiercely. "We'll find every piece. There's a pair of us. And a Stone, and a— and Pryce— and Josie's got a bag full of things." His voice cracked on a note somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "I'll go down into the Reservoir myself, and I'll bring them back one at a time."

She smiled.

It was such a small thing, a smile. She had no strength for more. She looked up into his face, the haggard eyes, the scar, the stubble, the wet line of the tears, and a great stillness settled in her, deeper than the cell's, deeper than the white. She thought she had never seen anything so dear.

Hold on to this one, she thought. Hold on to this.

Whatever you lose. Whatever goes.

Not this.

She put her hand against his cheek. It was so pale that the green of the grass showed through the palm.

"Cal."

"Yes."

"I don't want to forget you."

His arms closed round her.

"I don't want to forget you," whispered Mara. "I don't want to forget myself."