Day 212

Day 212 began the way every day had begun since the sky fell: Jace Marrow woke in the dark, counted his breaths until the shaking in his hands stopped, and pulled up the window.

Stage One Peak. He had been sitting on that line for thirty days, and the window never changed no matter how many shamblers he put down on the wall. Everyone said the same thing. You did not climb from One to Two by killing Tier 1 dead. You needed something stronger, or something stranger.

His sister Nia was already up, sitting cross-legged on the other cot with her boots on and her hair tied back. Nia Marrow was two years younger than him and had awakened the same week he had, which made her his sister twice over as far as the Compact was concerned: by blood and by the ash. She was Stage One Mid and bitter about it.

"Briefing's at the wall," she said. "The Warden wants every Hand there."

"Then every Hand will be there."

Greywall had been a water treatment plant before the Ashfall. Now it was a stronghold, and the word meant something specific here. The Compact rated every settlement it knew of on a four-step scale: a camp was anything with tents and a fire pit, an outpost had a wall and a well, a stronghold had a wall, a well, a vault and at least one Three to hold the gate, and a city-state was a stronghold that could feed a thousand people through a winter. Greywall was a stronghold. Millbrook, to the south, had been a camp until Day 190, when it stopped answering the radio. Harrow Bridge, twelve kilometres north along the river, was an outpost. Carrow City, far to the east, was the only place anyone called a city-state, and nobody from Greywall had seen it with their own eyes.

"She's a Three," Nia said, nodding at the woman walking out under the gate. "Three Mid as of last week. I heard it from Ren."

"Which Ren?"

"Okada. The scout, not the trader."

The briefing board stood under the main gate, chalked fresh every morning by whoever had pulled night duty. Jace read it the way he read it every day, the way a man reads a prayer he already knows.

Day 1 was the Ashfall. Day 40 was the founding of the Greywall Compact. Today was Day 212.

Below that, the ladder. The Compact had written it out in full after the first month, when too many people were dying because nobody agreed what the words meant. Awakeners climbed through nine stages: Stage One, Stage Two, Stage Three, Stage Four, Stage Five, Stage Six, Stage Seven, Stage Eight and Stage Nine. Each stage had three sublevels, Early, Mid and Peak, and you had to pass through all three before the next stage would open. Nobody in Greywall was above Stage Three. Nobody anyone had met was above Stage Four. Stage Nine was a word on a board.

Next to the ladder, in red chalk so nobody confused the two, was the grade for the dead. Zombies and mutants were sorted by tier, and the tiers were not stages and did not line up with stages, no matter how often new arrivals tried to make them match. Tier 1 was a shambler, slow and stupid. Tier 2 was a runner. Tier 3 was a mutant, something that had kept changing after it died: extra limbs, armour, a mouth where a mouth should not be. Tier 4 was a mutant that could think. Tier 5 was a rumour from Carrow City that the Warden had chalked up anyway, because she said a thing you refuse to write down is a thing you will not be ready for.

Mireille Dast, the Warden of Greywall, was the Stage Three awakener that made the place a stronghold instead of an outpost. She was fifty, grey at the temples, and she had founded the Compact on Day 40 with eleven other survivors, of whom four were still alive. The Compact had three ranks and she had written those on the board too: the Warden led, the Captains commanded the wall and the runs, and the Hands did everything else. There was one Warden. There were two Captains. There were, as of this morning, thirty-one Hands, and Jace and Nia were two of them.

Tomas Brandt was the Captain who ran the scavenging runs. He stood at the Warden's shoulder with his arms folded and the look he always had, the look of a man who was not the Warden and wanted you to know he had never asked to be. His wife, Ilse Brandt, ran the infirmary, and she was there too, which was unusual; Ilse came to briefings only when she expected to be busy afterward.

"Harrow Bridge has been silent for four days," the Warden said. She did not raise her voice. She never needed to. "They missed three radio checks. They had food for a month and a Stage Two Early holding the wall, so a silence this long is not a supply problem. I am sending a run. Captain Brandt leads. He takes four Hands: Marrow, Marrow, Okada and Kessel. You leave at first light tomorrow and you are back inside this wall before dusk the day after, because you all know the rule and I will not repeat it."

She repeated it anyway, because she always did.

"No fires after dusk. Not a candle, not a cigarette, not a spark off a flint. The dead do not see well, but the mutants see heat, and a fire at night is a dinner bell for everything within five kilometres. Whoever lit the fire at Millbrook killed Millbrook. I will not have it here."

Davor Kessel, who was forty and had been a plumber in this very plant before the sky fell, raised a hand. "Warden. What are we paying for Harrow Bridge?"

"Standard. One white nucleus per Hand per day, and a green each if you bring the outpost back online."

A murmur went through the Hands, because a green was not nothing. The Compact's currency was the nucleus, the crystal that formed in the skull of the dead and the chest of the mutated. A white nucleus came out of a Tier 1 or a Tier 2 and was worth a day of rations. Ten white nuclei made a green, which came out of a Tier 3 and could be absorbed by an awakener for a jolt of stat growth. Ten greens made a blue, and a blue came out of a Tier 4, and Jace had seen exactly one blue in his life, in the Warden's hand, on the day she went from Two Peak to Three Early.

The nucleus exchange was run by Ren Osaka. She was not a Hand. She was not a member of the Compact at all, and said so cheerfully whenever anyone tried to put her on a duty roster; she was a trader who had rolled into Greywall on Day 88 with a van full of batteries and never left. Ren Okada, by contrast, was a Hand, a scout, nineteen years old and the fastest person inside the wall. People mixed up the two names about once a day, and both Rens had stopped correcting anyone and simply answered to whoever was shouting.

"There's something else," the Warden said, and the murmur died. "The vault is short. Forty-one greens on Day 200. Thirty-three this morning. The door was not forced. I have asked Ren Osaka to audit her exchange ledger and she tells me every green she has traded is accounted for. So someone inside this wall is taking nuclei out of the vault without passing through the exchange. I am telling all of you because I want whoever it is to know that I know."

Nobody looked at anybody. Jace looked at the ground.

After the briefing broke up, Dana Pell caught his sleeve. Dana was not an awakener. She was a Hand because the Compact made everyone over sixteen a Hand, and she worked the grain store. Her daughter Wren was ten, the youngest child in Greywall, and she was wrapped around Dana's leg the way she always was when strangers were shouting.

"Harrow Bridge," Dana said. "My brother was at Harrow Bridge."

"I'll look for him," Jace said. "What's his name?"

"Petr Pell. He's not awakened. He'd be in the cellar if anything went wrong, he always said he'd go to the cellar."

"Then I'll look in the cellar."

Wren looked up at him with her mother's eyes and said nothing, and Jace thought about the window he had pulled up that morning, Stage One Peak, the line he had been sitting on for thirty days, and wondered whether the thing that would finally push him over it was waiting at Harrow Bridge, and whether he would survive meeting it.

That night, per the rule, Greywall went dark at dusk. Jace lay in the cold with his sister breathing on the other cot and listened to the dead scratch at the base of the wall, and somewhere far to the east, so faint he thought at first it was wind, something that was not wind was singing.