That was how I knew it had been listening, or how I decided it had. A distinction with limited value when the object in question was inside a god’s chest and my face was close enough to be crushed if it changed its mind.
Tarrow stood with his rigid arm still lodged in the sternum impression. The narrow crack ran beneath his hand, dark and wet-looking, though nothing wet had touched it. His other hand was clamped around the stone collarbone where the fire’s pale glow had spread. He watched the seam as if it might offer him a reasonable explanation.
Pell held his relic blade across the opening. “We can seal it.”
“We don’t know what it is,” Venn said.
“That’s usually when sealing things is useful.”
Venn’s gaze stayed on the crack. The skin at his wrist was chalk-pale. He had covered it with his cuff before. The cuff had slipped while we crossed the chamber, and nobody had been kind enough to pretend not to see.
I took the bone wedge Jorren had used to keep the rib seam open. “We’ll test what moves before we decide what to seal.”
Pell glanced at the wedge, then at me. “You keep saying ‘we’ when you mean ‘you.’”
“Then you’re welcome to take the front.”
He didn’t. We had all made our peace with the division of labor, which was another way of saying we knew who was most likely to survive the first mistake.
I eased the wedge into the crack. The chest gave a little. Tarrow’s shoulder jumped, and he grunted through his teeth as the fire lit beneath his Saltified arm. I stopped at once.
“Still pulling?” I asked.
“Harder.”
“Can you hold?”
He looked at the impression swallowing his arm. “For now.”
Pell moved closer to brace him. The fire brightened, and something inside the chest shifted against the opening. I felt the tug through the wedge, a small, deliberate pressure from within.
I withdrew it.
The pressure stopped.
We had found the first useful fact of the day. The thing inside followed contact. It did not need Tarrow’s fire to move, and it did not like being touched. A respectable beginning for a creature, a trap, or a very poorly designed door.
I looked at the silver tether running from the membrane behind us. It crossed the chamber and passed through the crack in the living wall, its far end anchored to the people waiting beyond. “Venn, can you read the line?”
Next
Venn has heard Oda warn him not to pull, but the strand inside Istren now turns toward his voice, and the crew must find a way to keep contact from becoming a trap.
He shifted his attention to it. “If it’s a memory structure, perhaps.”
“Perhaps is a generous answer.”
“It’s the one I have.”
He crouched beside me. The chalk on his wrist showed clearly now. I could have asked how long it had been there. I could also have asked whether he planned to tell us before his hand turned to stone. Neither question would have helped us with the chest.
Venn laid two fingers beside the tether, careful not to touch it. “The line is vibrating.”
I felt nothing through my hands. “From where?”
“Inside.”
He closed his eyes. For a moment he looked less like a diver than a man listening at a locked door. Then his jaw tightened.
“What?” I asked.
“There’s another strand.”
Pell shifted the blade so its point covered the crack. “A second tether?”
“I don’t know. It’s caught in there. It’s pulling against ours.” Venn opened his eyes. “If I can touch it—”
“No,” Pell said.
Venn looked at him. Pell held the blade steady. It was a reasonable objection from a man who had once cut my tether. I retained the fact of that rescue. The rest of the memory had been surrendered, and I was grateful not to have to feel it while deciding what to do.
“We need to know whether the line can carry a signal,” I said. “A touch, nothing more.”
Venn flexed his fingers once. “I can do that.”
“Your hand is already salt.”
“It hasn’t reached the fingers.”
“Yet.”
He stared at me, waiting for the order to stop. I could have given it. I also knew what the answer would cost him if I did: another day of guessing while Oda remained where her broken tether had left her.
“One touch,” I said. “You feel a pull, you come back.”
Venn took the silver line between finger and thumb.
The sound from inside the chest was thin and high, like a wire plucked in a room too large to hear it properly. The tether jumped once. Tarrow’s arm jerked in the impression. Pell caught him before his knees buckled.
Then the silver strand inside the crack drew taut.
Venn’s fingers closed hard around our line. His eyes fixed on the darkness. “There’s a voice.”
“Whose?”
He did not answer. His grip began to whiten at the knuckles, not with ordinary bloodlessness. Salt had started to bead beneath his skin.
I caught his wrist. “Venn.”
The voice came again, not through the air. I felt it in the tether where my stone palm rested against the ground, a faint shiver traveling through the metal.
“Venn.”
His breath left him. The controlled set of his face broke, and for one unguarded second he looked younger than the rest of us had ever let him be.
“Oda,” he said.
The line snapped tight enough to drag his hand toward the chest.
I seized his sleeve. Pell braced my back. Tarrow tried to pull his trapped arm free, and the fire flared so sharply that the crack widened by a fraction. Whatever waited inside drew again.
Venn dug his heels into the bone. “She’s there.”
“Can you hear her clearly?” I asked.
Another pulse ran through the line. It was followed by a faint, uneven tap from inside the chest. Three beats, a pause, then one more.
Venn’s face tightened. He began to lean toward the opening.
I understood the temptation. A voice was not a safe road. A voice was not even proof that the mind behind it belonged to the living woman Venn had spent years trying to find. But it was more than the silence we had brought with us, and his body knew it before his judgment could catch up.
“Ask her if she knows where she is,” I said.
Venn swallowed. “Oda, can you hear me?”
The tapping came again, faster. The silver line bit into his palm. Salt crystals appeared along the heel of his hand.
He made a sound like he had been struck. I pulled at his sleeve, but he resisted me.
“Venn, come back.”
“She answered.”
“I know. Come back.”
He stared at the crack. Whatever he heard next, he did not repeat. His lips moved once, silently. Then he loosened his fingers.
Pell and I dragged him away from the chest. The inner strand slackened at once. The tapping ceased. Tarrow sagged against the sternum, breathing hard, his fire dimming to a glow beneath his stone skin.
Venn sat on the bone floor with his damaged hand in his lap. He turned it palm-up. The new salt had sealed one crease, leaving a bright white seam across the flesh. He rubbed at it with his thumb, then stopped when it cracked.
“What did she say?” I asked.
His eyes stayed on his hand. “She said not to pull.”
I looked at the silver line. It lay slack between us and the chest, but a short length of its inner twin remained visible in the crack, curled like a hook. We had reached Oda. Or something wearing her voice had reached Venn. Either way, the line could carry a signal in both directions, and it had already taken a piece of him for the privilege.
Tarrow’s fire had gone quiet. His arm remained fixed in the impression, and the new salt across his collarbone had crept higher while we were listening.
Pell lowered his blade. “We close it now.”
Venn finally looked up. “If we close it, we lose the line.”
I rested my stone palm against the floor. The name Istren was black in it, as permanent as a sentence. “We don’t close it yet. We make sure it can’t pull anyone else in.”
Inside the crack, the silver hook moved once, turning toward Venn’s voice.
He said nothing. Neither did I. The crew’s tether held, but something inside Istren had learned which end of it to pull.