First Claim

The Warden made Jace wait four days, and she made him work while he waited.

On Day 216 he pulled wall duty with Nia and put down nine shamblers with Davor's knife, and the knife was better than his own had been, and he hated that it was. On Day 217 he walked the river road as far as the fourth kilometre with Ren Okada and found nothing but prints. On Day 218 Ren Osaka paid out the run: two white nuclei for his two days on the road, counted into his palm from her tin, and no green, because Harrow Bridge had not come back online and would not. That brought him to sixteen whites and two greens, and the window noted it the way the window noted everything, without comment.

On Day 219 Mireille Dast sent for him.

She was in the radio room with Tomas Brandt and his wife. Ilse Brandt had a clipboard, which meant she had been asked for an opinion and had written it down so nobody could later pretend she had said something else. The Captain had his arms folded. The Warden had the Cinder Hound nucleus on the table in front of her in its rag, and the room was faintly orange, and warm, the only warm room inside the wall.

"Harrow Bridge," the Warden said, without preamble. "I am closing it. I have written the outpost off the board this morning, and I will not reopen it; the wall is slag and the river is too close to the tree line. The seven from the cellar were sworn in as Hands last night, Petr Pell included, which puts us at thirty-seven Hands. The Hound that killed Hollis and Kessel is dead. There is nothing left on the river road to go back for. That matter is finished, and I want everyone in this room to hear me say so, because I do not want it dragged back onto the board every time somebody misses Kessel."

Nobody argued. Brandt looked at the floor.

"Which leaves this." She put a finger on the rag. "Ilse."

"Four days of observation," Ilse said, reading. "Hands healed without scarring by Day 216. Resting temperature a full degree above baseline on every reading since. Patient can locate a warm body in a dark room at fifteen metres, confirmed twice, once with the Pell girl and once with my husband standing behind a tank, which he enjoyed less than she did. Window unchanged at Stage One Peak. My opinion is that the nucleus has already begun its work from the outside, and that the body is ready, and that the longer the window is left behind the body, the worse the correction will be when it comes."

"Tomas."

"I don't like absorbing things we don't understand," the Captain said. "I said so on Day 40 and I'll say so until somebody buries me. But I watched him hold that thing by the neck. If the door's going to open for anyone, it's going to open for him, and I'd rather it opened here, in this room, with Ilse standing by, than on the wall at night with nothing but Nia to catch him."

The Warden picked up the nucleus and held it out across the table.

"First claim," she said. "I hold the Compact's finds until I decide the use is sound. I have decided. It's yours, Marrow, and it's yours for a reason: because you killed the thing that grew it, and because this wall needs a Stage Two more than it needs twelve blues it cannot spend. Take it. Here. Now."

Jace took it. It was heavier than he remembered, or he was more tired. He sat down on the radio room's one chair because Ilse told him to, and he unwrapped the rag, and the room went from faintly orange to properly orange, and he pulled up the window one last time because he wanted to see it before it changed.

Stage One Peak. Vitality 310. Strength 285. Agility 240. Sense 190. Thirty-seven days on the line.

"Hold it against your chest," Ilse said. "Both hands. Breathe. If you feel your heart go wrong, you say so, and I pull it off you, and we stop."

He held it against his chest.

Heat went into him the way water goes into dry ground. It did not hurt, at first. It filled his palms and his forearms and his shoulders and it pooled behind his breastbone and sat there, ticking, exactly the way the nucleus had ticked in its rag on the river road, and then it stopped ticking and started to climb, and that hurt. It climbed up the back of his neck and into his skull and it found the place where the window lived and it pushed on it, hard, the way the Hound had pushed on the wall at Harrow Bridge, and Jace understood, with the small cold part of his mind that was still watching, that the window was a wall, and that it was going to go red, and then it was going to go.

It went.

The nucleus was gone. There was nothing in his hands but a rag and a smell like a struck match, and the radio room was no longer orange, and Jace was on the floor without any memory of leaving the chair, and Ilse Brandt was kneeling over him with two fingers on his throat and a look on her face he had last seen when she was unwrapping his hands.

"Heart's fine," she said, to the room, and then, to him, "Window."

He pulled it up.

Stage Two Early. Vitality 420. Strength 370. Agility 310. Sense 260. He read the numbers out loud, slowly, because his tongue felt too big, and Ilse wrote them on her clipboard, and the Warden nodded once.

"Two Early," Brandt said. "Thirty-seven days at One Peak and it takes an Epic to get him over. Warden, that's the whole problem in one sentence. Nobody on this wall climbs on whites and greens. We've got thirty Hands sitting at One Mid who are never going to move, because the only thing that moves them is a Tier 3, and the only Tier 3 we've met cost us Kessel."

"I know what it cost," the Warden said.

"Then you know we need more of them. More Hounds. More Epics. And the only place anyone has ever reported a Tier 3 in numbers is the one place we can't go."

Nobody said Carrow City. Nobody needed to.

Ilse helped Jace sit up and he sat with his back against the radio table and felt the room. That was the only word for it. He did not look; he felt. Four warm shapes, the Warden and the Captain and the Captain's wife and himself, and beyond the wall of the radio room, at fifteen metres, at twenty, at thirty, more shapes, dozens of them, the whole of Greywall laid out in the dark behind his eyes as a field of small warm lights. He could feel Nia on the wall. He could feel Wren Pell in the grain store, hiding again, probably. He could feel the dead at the base of the wall as an absence, a cold that was colder than the ground.

And to the east, at a distance his new sense could not put a number to, he could feel something that was neither warm nor cold, something that was very large and very even, like a held note.

"Warden," he said. "The Choir. It isn't a sound. It's a... it's a temperature. It's one temperature, all the way across, like a lake."

Mireille Dast looked at him for a long time.

"Then it's a Tier 4," she said. "Or it's the Tier 5 I chalked on the board and nobody wanted to read. Either way, it's thinking, and either way, it sent the Hound." She picked up her coat. "Ilse, keep him here tonight. Tomas, double the wall and tell the Hands we have a Stage Two inside Greywall as of Day 219, because they need something to hold on to. And Marrow."

"Warden."

"The Hound was the easy part. Get some sleep."

That night, per the rule, Greywall went dark at dusk, and for the first time since the Ashfall Jace Marrow lay in the dark and was not in the dark at all.