Twenty Graves

They came through the gate of Greywall an hour before dusk on Day 214, eleven people and a tarp, and the first person Jace saw on the inside of the wall was Dana Pell, standing with her daughter on her hip even though Wren was ten and far too big to be carried.

Dana saw her brother before she saw anything else. Petr Pell walked straight through the gate and into her, and Wren got squashed between them and did not complain, and Jace stood back and let it happen, because it was the only good thing that had come off the river road and he wanted to look at it for a while.

Then the Warden came down from the wall and looked at the tarp, and the good thing was over.

"Kessel," she said. It was not a question. She had counted five going out and she could count four coming back.

"Cinder Hound, Warden," Brandt said. "Tier 3. Harrow Bridge is gone. The wall was burned flat, Hollis is dead, the outpost is off the board. We brought the seven from the cellar. The Hound is dead too. Marrow killed it."

Mireille Dast looked at Jace for a long moment. Then she looked at his hands, which Ilse Brandt had wrapped in the gatehouse at Harrow Bridge before they left, and which had stopped hurting somewhere around the sixth kilometre, which Jace thought was probably not a good sign.

"Infirmary," she said. "Then the vault. Then you tell me everything. In that order."

Ilse unwrapped his hands under the infirmary's one working lamp, which she shuttered before she started because the sun was already touching the top of the wall. The palms were red and tight and shiny and the skin did not crack when she pressed it.

"You should have no hands," she said. "A Tier 3 mutant that melts steel, and you held it by the neck. You should have bone showing. Instead you have a sunburn." She turned his hand over. "Did you absorb anything?"

"No."

"Did your window change?"

"No. Stage One Peak. Same as this morning. Same as thirty-two days ago."

"Then something is waiting," Ilse said. "Keep the nucleus close until the Warden has seen it. And keep it dry; Tomas tells me it hisses in the rain."

The vault was a concrete room under the old filtration hall with one steel door and the Warden's own padlock, and the Warden opened it herself and lit nothing, because dusk had come while Ilse was working and the rule did not bend for anyone, Warden included. They stood in the grey light from the corridor and Jace took the Cinder Hound nucleus out of its rag and the whole room went faintly orange.

Ren Osaka was already there, which Jace should have expected. The trader held up a hand, did not touch, and looked at the nucleus from three sides.

"Epic," she said. "I'd stake the van on it. Common is white, Uncommon is white with a vein, Rare is green, Epic is this, and Legendary I've only read about. Don't confuse the exchange grades with the colours, Hand Marrow. A green nucleus is Rare on my board because of what it does, not because of what it is. This thing is not green, blue or white. It's a Cinder Hound nucleus, and it's the only one I have ever seen."

"It's worth what?" the Warden asked.

"On my board? A hundred and twenty greens. Twelve blues. There isn't that much currency inside this wall. It isn't worth anything, Warden, because nobody can pay for it. It's worth a Stage."

"It's Compact property," Mireille Dast said, "under the rule I wrote on Day 40 and have not changed. Any find of Epic grade or above on a Compact run goes to the vault. The Hand who found it has first claim on its use, but the Compact holds it until the Warden decides the use is sound. That is not a punishment, Marrow. That is so nobody absorbs something that kills them because they were in a hurry."

Jace held the nucleus for another second, feeling it tick, and then he put it into the Warden's open hand, and the vault's steel shelf, and watched her close the door on it.

"First claim," he said.

"First claim," she agreed. "Written in the ledger tonight."

"Warden." He had not planned to say it. "The greens. Thirty-three on Day 212. How many now?"

She looked at him with something that was not quite approval. "Thirty. Three more gone in the two days you were on the road. The door was locked. My padlock, my key, on my belt. So I will ask the question I asked at the briefing in a different way, since the first way got me nothing: where are the vault's missing greens going, if they are not going through the door?"

Ren Osaka said nothing. Ren Osaka, Jace noticed, was looking at the floor of the vault, at the drain in the corner, the drain that every room in a water treatment plant had, and she did not say anything about it either.

They buried Davor Kessel the next morning, Day 215, in the strip of ground between the inner wall and the old settling tanks that the Compact used for the people it could not save. There were nineteen graves there now. Davor made twenty. The Warden said the words, because she always said the words, and the words were short: the name, the day he arrived, the day he died, and the thing he did. Davor Kessel, Day 1, Day 213, stood between a Tier 3 and the gatehouse with a pipe wrench. Nia cried again, which surprised Jace, because Nia had barely spoken to Davor in two hundred days; she said later that it was not about Davor, exactly, and that it was about the sound the wrench made when it melted, and that she was going to hear it for the rest of her life.

Ren Okada came and stood by Jace at the grave. The scout had cut the nucleus out of the Hound with Davor's knife, and she gave him the knife now, cleaned, in its sheath.

"He'd have wanted a Hand to carry it," she said. "You're the Hand who killed the thing. It's yours."

"That's two things of his I'm carrying."

"Then carry them."

It was Wren who went missing, that afternoon, and for an hour Jace thought Greywall was going to lose its youngest child on the same day it buried its newest grave.

Dana came running from the grain store with her face white. Wren had been with her, and then she had not been. The grain store was the old chemical shed, long and dark and stacked to the roof with sacks, and the doors were shut, and nobody had seen the girl come out. Petr Pell was already tearing through the stacks. Brandt turned out every Hand on the inside of the wall.

Jace found her. He did not know, afterward, exactly how. He stood in the dark of the grain store with his sunburned hands out in front of him and felt, the way you feel a draught, a small warmth low down and to the left, behind the sacks of oats, and he went to it, and there was Wren Pell, sitting in a hollow she had made for herself, with a torch she had not switched on and a face like a thundercloud.

"I was hiding," she said. "Everyone was crying."

"Everyone was," Jace agreed, and he picked her up, which she allowed, and carried her out into the grey light and into her mother's arms, and Dana held on to her daughter and did not say anything for a long time, and Petr Pell sat down on a sack and put his face in his hands.

That night, in the dark, Nia said: "You found her by heat."

"I don't know what I found her by."

"You found her by heat. Like the Hound. You held the Hound by the neck and now you can feel warm things in the dark. That's not Stage One Peak, Jace. That's something else. The nucleus did something to you before you ever absorbed it."

Jace pulled up his window, in the dark, with his eyes closed. Stage One Peak, it said. Vitality 310. Strength 285. Agility 240. Sense 190. Not a number had moved.

"The window says One Peak," he said.

"The window," Nia said, "is thirty-three days behind."