"Lamps off," Abe said. "Names."
We had been on the rock for three days by then, and lamps off was the one order nobody argued with. It saved the batteries. It let the eyes come back. It let you hear the mountain, which was mostly water: a drip somewhere behind my left ear, the stream muttering in the crawl we had all just wormed through, and under both of them a low hum in the stone that Corwin swore was the far end of the system breathing and I said was my own blood.
The dark in a cave is not the dark of a bedroom. There is no grey in it. You hold your hand against your nose and get nothing, and after a while your mind starts painting on the nothing, and you learn to stop looking.
I sat with my back on the wall and my knees against Ilan's ribs. Somebody's boots were jammed against my hip; Pim's, by the size of them. The Pantry, Jory had named it, the widening at the end of the Long Crawl, the first place in three days where you could lift your head without kissing limestone. Ninety centimetres of ceiling. Wet clay underneath, cold through the drysuit into the bones of my backside. It smelled of neoprene, wet wool, and people who had not washed since Thursday.
Names was Abe's thing. At every stop longer than a brew he put the lamps out and we said ourselves into the dark, one after another, and he slapped his thigh once for each of us and gave the total at the end, and "all well". His father had done it with sheep through a gate on the fell, Abe said, slap, slap, slap, so the dog knew he was paying attention. It was hokey. It was a grown man playing farmer in a hole in the ground. I loved him for it, and I'd have died before telling him so.
"Abe," said Abe.
Slap.
"Jory." My sister, dry and close, two bodies down.
Slap.
"Ilan." Against my ribs, so quiet it came through my knees more than my ears.
Slap.
"Hana." Flat Yorkshire, no nonsense in it.
Slap.
"Odalys."
Slap.
"Pim," on a yawn.
Slap.
"Corwin." He cleared his throat first, as if his own name might not come.
Slap.
"Sabine, unfortunately," I said.
Pim snorted. Slap.
"Teo," said a voice at the far end.
Slap.
I was still grinning at my own joke, and the grin stayed on my face with nothing behind it.
"Nine," said Abe, cheerful as market day. "All well."
It was a hoarse voice, rough as though it had been kept in a drawer. I ran it past every voice from the last three days, and the gate and the van before that, and it did not sit in any of them. My stomach had gone before my head did. I could feel it, a cold drop under my ribs.
"Lamps," I said. My voice came out ordinary. I was proud of that afterward.
Lamps came up. I turned my head slowly from left to right and let my beam sweep the crowded rock, and the helmets flashed back at me off their reflective strips. Abe, big and bearded with his forehead furrowed against the glare. Jory, her rigger's gloves still on. Ilan. Hana. Odalys. Pim. Corwin.
And past Corwin, in the mouth of the small dead-end where the roof pinched down: a white helmet, scuffed, no lamp lit on it. A man under it, sitting with his knees drawn up, his head turned a little from the light.
The Pantry felt like a lift with one too many in it. My knees knew it first. They pulled in against my chest to make room for somebody who had not been there when I sat down.
"Very good," said Pim, and laughed, and stopped when nobody joined him.
"Who's that?" I said.
That was when the silence started.
"If anyone's a ghost," I said, "now's a really good time to say so."
Nobody laughed at that either.
"Sabby," said Jory.
"I'm asking who that is."
"That's Teo," Hana said gently. "Sabine. That's Teo."
"I know he says he's Teo."
"Sabine." Abe had his hand out, palm down, the thing he does to a nervous horse or a pitch that hasn't been rigged right. "Love. It's been a long crawl."
"There were eight of us. Eight came in."
"Nine, love."
"The stile's broken. The top step. You all moaned about it." My teeth had started to ache from being clamped. "I stood on the wall and I got every one of you over. A hand or a shoulder, every single one, and I took your bags off you one at a time and passed them down, and then I climbed over last. Nobody came after me. My shoulder knows eight. It's still got the bruise from Abe."
I dug the book out of the chest pocket of my suit, the yellow one with the pages that take pencil in the rain. Abe makes the surveyor copy the roster into it at the gate, a rescue rule, so the people who go in are written down before they go. I'd never looked at the roster. I'd stood on the wall with the pencil in my teeth and written down who actually came over, and grumbled the whole time, because I hate paper and paper hates me back.
I had it open on my knee before anyone could stop me. The first page said, in my awful pencil: Gate, Thursday, twenty to seven. Then the names, in the order they came over the wall. Abe. Jory. Ilan. Hana. Odalys. Pim. Corwin. Me. Then an eight, gone wobbly where my glove slipped, with a ring round it and a tick.
I turned the book toward them so the beams would find it.
Nobody read it. Ilan looked at my face instead, then at my eyes, one and then the other, as if he were checking a wound. Pim was looking at nothing. Corwin had turned his lamp off again, as though this were a private matter and he was giving us the room.
"Is this going to take long?" said Odalys. "My feet are wet."
"Everybody's feet are wet," I said.
"Mine are wetter."
"You were up at four," Ilan said. "You haven't eaten properly since the entrance shaft. I watched you skip the last two feeds. We've been in that crawl for eleven hours." He kept his voice mild. "Nobody thinks you're making it up."
"Put it away," said Jory. Two words, flat, to her own boots.
"I'll put it away when somebody reads it. Read it. It's one page. Even Pim can read one page."
"Oi," said Pim, without much behind it.
"Then somebody tell me when he came over the wall."
Nobody said anything. The drip went on behind my ear.
"He came in behind you," Abe said at last. "Parking the van. You wouldn't have seen him."
"I was last."
"You were last but one, love."
He said it warmly, smooth and ready, as if he'd had it waiting. There was a place in my chest where a memory had been standing upright for three days, and it was leaning now, only slightly, only because everybody I trusted was pushing on it.
I'd had that lean before. Six years ago, deeper in this same mountain, my survey loop came back to the wrong place, like walking round the block and fetching up fifty yards from your own front door. My gut said wrong. My tired notes said near enough. I went with the paper. A man called Milo Hart went down a passage on my numbers and didn't come back. At the inquest I said I'd rechecked the loop. I hadn't.
I looked at the ninth man.
He had lifted his head. I put my lamp on him, full beam, which is rude underground and which I did anyway.
Forty, perhaps. Hard to say under the clay. A narrow face gone grey with cold, stubble two days thick, dark eyes that squinted into the light and did not flinch out of it. The strap on his helmet was frayed to threads at the buckle. No Wetherall sticker on the shell, unlike the rest of ours. His lamp was an older model than anything we owned.
He was eating. A flapjack, the oat kind Hana bakes in a tin before every trip, gripped in a clay-black hand. He had split the skin of a knuckle somewhere in the crawl, and the blood had run into the crumbs, and he was licking it away without any embarrassment at all.
"Lovely," I said. "A ghost with a packed lunch."
It came out too loud and too high, and it went round the chamber and came back to me off the rock, and Hana flinched as if I'd sworn at her gran. My face went hot inside the clay. I'd meant it to break something. It broke nothing.
He was breathing hard through his nose. I could see his chest go. Alive, warm, bleeding into his supper. A man of meat.
I went before I'd decided to. On my hands and knees, across Corwin's legs, Corwin saying "Oh, mind the camera," and Jory saying "Sabby, don't," behind me, and my helmet scraping the roof where it dropped. The clay sucked at my palms. I came to the mouth of the pinch and stopped, close enough to smell him: wet nylon, old sweat, oats.
He didn't move. He watched me come like a dog watching you from its basket.
I put my hand flat on his boot.
He let me. The leather was soaked and cold, colder than mine, and solid under my palm, a real foot inside it with a real ankle. The lace had a knot in it, a fat double one where it had snapped and been tied back together. I felt the knot with my fingertip. It was wet. It was there.
"There," said Abe, behind me. "Teo. Sabine. Now you've been introduced properly, we can put this to bed."
I took my hand back. "We have not been introduced."
"You've been sharing a sleeping mat for two nights."
I hadn't. I'd slept with my back against my sister for two nights, or lain there not sleeping, which is the same mat. My hips remember every squeeze I've ever been stuck in. They'd remember a man on my mat.
I crawled back to my place. Nobody helped me and nobody stopped me.
"Hana," I said. "How many did you pack for?"
She had her eyes on her hands. "Nine," she said, after a moment. "I've always packed for nine."
The phone went, then.
It was an old field set, a squat green thing on a wire that ran back through the crawl and up the shaft to the surface, and it gave a dry electrical buzz like a wasp in a jar. Everybody moved at once, grateful for it. Hana had it up before the second ring.
"Camp One." She listened. The wire hissed. "Say again." She listened for longer. The chamber had gone quiet in a different way now. I watched her face in her own lamp. I watched her write a number on the back of her glove with a wax pencil, and then a second one under it.
"Forecast's moved," she said. "The pulse. There's a front stalled over the moor and it's been dumping since noon."
A pulse is a flood wave. Rain falls on Black Rigg and soaks down through the peat and the cracks and turns up underground hours later, all at once, as a wall of water.
Abe took the handset. "Ostler, Camp One." He spoke to the surface in his big steady voice, the leader's voice, and asked all the right questions, rate of rise, the gauge at the resurgence, and wrote in his own book on the flat of his knee.
"Ask them who's on their list," I said. "Ask them if there's a Teo on it."
Abe kept his eyes on his book and turned his shoulder to me as if I were a draught and went on talking.
"Fifty-one hours," he said, when he'd done. "From now. Then the whole streamway sumps." A sump is where the passage fills to the roof with water and there's no air to put your face in. "Nobody in or out till it falls. Days."
Nobody spoke.
"The Toll goes first." He tapped the book. "The ledge at the foot of the entrance shaft, where we came off the ropes. Walking width, over the stream. It's our way out. At the rate they're quoting, it's under in twenty hours. If we're not past it by then, we're sat in here for a week. Or longer."
"Twenty," said Odalys.
"Fourteen to get out from here, if we don't dawdle. So we sleep six. Then we go, whatever passes for morning down here." He looked round the ring of lamps, meeting each pair of eyes in turn, and you felt chosen when it was your turn. "Nine of us, all well. That's what I told them."
"Copy nine," said the handset, tiny and metallic. He hadn't hung it up.
He hung it up.
I looked at my sister. Jory looked at the roof, then at her gloves, and pulled one off finger by finger, and would not turn her head.
"We go now," I said. "Now. Fourteen's nearly twenty. Fourteen's twenty if anybody so much as turns an ankle. Any team that gives a flood six hours is in love with its own luck. I'd rather be knackered on the far side of the Toll than rested on this one. I mean it."
"A party out on its feet is more dangerous than a wet ledge," said Abe. "I've seen it. You've seen it. Hands up for six hours' kip."
Ilan's hand went up. Pim's, with a yawn on the end of it. Corwin's, halfway, then right up. Hana's. Jory's, still not looking at me. Odalys put hers up without lifting her head off her pack.
Abe slapped his thigh at each, like at names, and raised his own. "Seven to one."
The ninth man had his arms round his knees and kept them there. Nobody asked him to vote. Nobody looked at him to see if he would.
One by one the lamps went out. Abe's was last. In the end of it, before he thumbed the switch, I looked down the row to the pinch, and the ninth man's eyes were open, and on me, and he did not look away when I caught him. Then the dark came down over both of us like a lid.
I stayed sitting with my back against the clay, the book shut in my fist, the pencil behind my ear. I wasn't going to sleep. I lay down anyway, because sitting up alone in the dark felt like asking for something, and I listened.
A sleeping person has a sound, as particular as a fingerprint. Pim snored in two notes, up and down, like a saw. Hana muttered whole sentences to her dog. Abe breathed slow and huge, a big animal in a barn. Ilan ground his teeth. Corwin whistled a little through his nose. Odalys had a small click at the top of every breath. And Jory, at my back, had the catch in her throat she's had since she was nine, a tiny swallow every few breaths, that I've been falling asleep to my whole life.
I knew them asleep the way you know your own family's feet on the stairs. All of them asleep, and me awake.
Water dripped. Clay dried on my face and cracked when I frowned. The cold came up through the mat into my hip and lay there. Back along the crawl the stream was talking to itself, and I lay and listened to it for a long while, trying to decide whether it had a new note in it, a thicker one, or whether I only wanted it to, so that somebody would have to get up and agree with me.
And at the far end, beyond Corwin's whistle, in the pinch where the roof came down: nothing. No snore, no whistle, no click. The ninth man was not asleep. I could hear him not being asleep the way you can hear a clock in the next room that has just stopped.
I closed my hand round the book.
"Sabine," said a voice, quite near, so softly it might have been the water. It was the hoarse voice from the roll-call, low and level, and it wasn't asking me anything.
The gravel hadn't moved. I'd have heard the gravel.
Clay. Wet wool. Oats, and under the oats, blood.
"Go to sleep, Sabine. It's a long way out."
I felt the warmth of the words on my ear.