"I looked for him too," the voice said, right against my ear. "Six days. I came up with the Derbyshire lot."
Him. Nobody had said Milo's name to me in three days. I hadn't said it out loud in six years if I could get round it, and here it was in the dark, not even said, just pointed at, warm, from a mouth I couldn't see.
My ear was wet. No, not wet. Warm, and going cold already, like a breath on a window going back to glass.
I lay and counted my own pulse to forty, rigid, before my thumb would move. Then it found the lamp switch before the rest of me had agreed to anything.
The light jumped out of my forehead and hit the roof, and I was up on my knees with my helmet cracking off the rock, shouting. I don't know what I shouted first. His name, I think, the one he'd given us, and a lot of language, and "Get off me", though nothing was on me.
The beam went down the row. Ilan's face screwed up like a fist. Corwin's arm across his eyes. Pim, a sleeping bag with hair coming out of the top. And past Corwin, in the pinch, where he had been all evening: the white helmet, its lamp dark. He was sitting with his back to the rock and his arms round his knees and his eyes shut.
Three body-lengths from my mat. Corwin's legs in between. The gravel was smooth except for the trench I'd ploughed crawling over to his boot at bedtime, and that had my knee-marks in it and nobody else's; the wall side was bare rock.
His chest was going a shade too fast, and slowed as I watched.
"Get up," I said. "You were just here. You were on my ear. Get up and tell them."
He opened his eyes into my light and didn't squint. Then he shut them again.
"Sabine." Abe was up on one elbow at the far end. "Love. Lamp."
"He talked to me."
"Is it water?" Hana had both fists in the neck of her sleeping bag. "Is it the water come?"
"It's not water. It's him."
"Is it morning?" said Pim, from inside his bag.
"Turn that off," said Odalys, without lifting her head.
Lamps came on round the Pantry one after another, grudging, and every one of them swung to me. Not to him. To me, on my knees in the middle of the mats with my hair in my eyes and clay cracking on my cheeks and my mouth still open. I had woken the whole camp. We had twenty hours before the Toll went under, the ledge we had to walk out along, and I'd spent the first of them shouting at a man with his eyes shut.
"He was right here," I said. "At my head. He said my name. He said he'd been on the search." My mouth wouldn't do the rest. "He said he looked for him."
"For who?" said Pim.
Nobody answered him. Hana looked at her bag. Ilan looked at Abe. Abe looked at the roof.
"You were dropping off," Ilan said. He'd got himself up on an elbow, already in his doctor voice, fast and kind. "That's hypnagogia. The borderland, the bit between awake and asleep, the brain throws up voices, faces, your own name especially, your own name's the classic. Half my patients hear the doorbell. It's completely normal. It's actually reassuring."
"I wasn't asleep."
"That's also classic."
"Look at the gravel," I said. "Look at it. He'd have had to come over Corwin to get to me. Corwin. Did anybody come over you?"
Corwin took his arm off his eyes. He looked at his own legs, and at the pinch, and at me, and he cleared his throat, as he does before anything that matters to him.
"No," he said. "Nobody came over me. I'd know. I'm a terrible sleeper. I felt you go over at bedtime, and I've felt nothing since." He blinked into my light, pleased to be useful. "It could be the stream. Water over a lip makes, um, voices. Formants. There's a paper." He trailed off. "Sorry. There is a paper, though."
"Teo, lad," Abe said, over my head, gently. "Were you talking to her?"
The eyes opened again. "Been here," Teo said.
That was all. Two words, flat as a paving slab, and he shut his eyes and his chest went on rising and falling, and every lamp in the chamber went from him to me and came down on his side without anybody moving an inch.
I wanted to go over there and open his eyes with my thumbs. I got as far as putting one hand down on the gravel, and Jory said, "Don't," from behind me, and I didn't, and I hated her for it.
"Jory," I said. "Out here."
She didn't come, so I went and got her. I took her by the sleeve of her fleece and pulled, and she came, because the other choice was a fight in front of everybody, and Jory would rather swim a sump than fight in front of everybody.
The crawl mouth was at the near end, low and round and wet, where the Long Crawl came in. We got into it on our elbows, head to head, lamps turned down to a glow so the others could pretend to sleep. The stream ran past our hands, cold enough to make my wrists ache. Jory's face in that light was all bones and clay and she wouldn't put it anywhere near mine.
"You know I'm not mad," I said.
"I know you're tired."
"Wednesday. At the hut."
Rigg Hut, the night before the gate. The generator had died at ten and the whole place went black at once, and everybody did what people do in the black: laughed too loud, swore, felt about for their head-torches, trod on each other's feet. I'd been on a bottom bunk with my boots still on. And in the middle of it, close, from the bunks by the door, a whisper. Teo's gone ahead. The last word cut off, as if a hand had shut on it. A whisper in the dark I took for Jory's. I'd thought, who's Teo, and then, Jory knows everybody, and I'd turned over and gone to sleep with my boots on.
"Somebody said his name," I said. "In the dark, when the lights went. Whispered it. About him going on. It was you."
"I never said that."
"By the door. It was you."
"I slept in the van."
"You what?"
"The van. The hut stank of feet." She was looking at the stream, at her own hand in it. "I slept in the van."
"Since when do you sleep in vans?"
"Since Wednesday."
"Look at me."
"Go to sleep, Sabby."
"You've not looked at me since the gate. You looked at the roof all through the names. You looked at your glove. Look at me now."
She did, then. Just for a second, in the glow, and her eyes were red round the rims, from the clay or from something, and then she took them back.
"You've got that face on," she said. "You had it at the gate. In the crawl, I could hear you having it from four people back. Since you were six. And we stand there, and we clear up after. That's why. All right? Go to sleep."
I lay there with my chin in the wet and stared at her, and she stared at the water, and the stream went on past both of us as if we weren't worth stopping for. If it wasn't Jory, it was somebody. And I'd gone to sleep.
I turned my head and shouted it back into the Pantry, which was stupid, because they were all lying there listening anyway.
"Who was whispering at the hut? Wednesday, when the lights went. Somebody whispered about him. Hana? Odalys? Anyone?"
"Don't look at me, love," said Hana.
"No," said Odalys.
Corwin coughed and said nothing. Ilan had lain back down with his arm over his face.
Then there was a rustle from the end of the row, and Pim's face came up out of his sleeping bag, creased, eyes still shut, talking out of the bottom of a dream.
"Hang on," he said, to nobody. "I thought he'd gone on ahead? Abe said behind."
I was out of the crawl mouth before he'd finished. Gravel in both palms.
"Thank you. Pim. Thank you. Say it again."
"Say what?" His eyes were open now and he looked like a lad who'd been caught talking in assembly.
"Ahead. You heard he'd gone on ahead. And Abe says he was behind me at the gate. So which? Ahead or behind, Abe? Pick one. You can't have both."
"Both," said Abe. He said it at once, smooth as poured milk. "He took the gear down to the gate early, first thing, and walked back up the track for the van. Ahead, then behind. There, now."
Hana said, "There you are," to her bag. Ilan, under his arm, made a small noise that meant the same. Corwin turned his lamp off.
Pim didn't say anything. His eyes came to me, and went to Abe, and came back to me a second longer than they needed to. Then he said, "Yeah. Course. Very good," and pulled his bag up over his head.
It wasn't much. A lad half-asleep saying a thing he hadn't thought about. So I kept going. Of course I did.
"Oh," I said. "Oh, I see it. It's a test."
"Sabine," said Jory, behind me.
"It's a test, isn't it. It's the club. You had a meeting. You had a meeting at the hut while I was asleep in my boots, and somebody said, let's see if she's fit. Let's see if she can go back underground after Milo without—"
Abe's eyes closed, for no longer than a blink, on the name.
"—without going to bits. So you brought a man from somewhere and sat him in a corner, and if I say eight I'm mad and if I say nine I'm a liar. Well, I noticed. Well done me. Can I have my certificate? Does it come with a badge? Do I get a little torch?"
I knew it was a mistake while it was still in my mouth, and I let it out anyway, and it went into the chamber and lay down on the gravel like something that had died. Hana turned her face to the wall. Ilan took his arm off his face, and found my eyes properly, and said, very gently, "Nobody's testing you, Sabine."
In the pinch, Teo hadn't moved. Arms round his knees. Eyes shut. The lamp on his helmet dark and the clay on his cheek gone pale as it dried.
"Twenty hours," said Abe. "Fourteen of them walking. Lamps off, all of you. Sabine. Please."
Abe doesn't say please.
I switched off.
There was shuffling in the dark. Ilan got up with his mat and moved down to Abe's end, "to give you two a bit of room," he said, which was a doctor's way of saying he'd had enough of my elbows. Jory crawled past me to the wall side, where Ilan had been. I lay down on the outside, on my side, with my face to my sister's back and my own back to the room. I wanted to face the pinch. I wanted to face Jory more.
"If anybody comes near my ear again," I said, to the whole black room, "I'll bite it off. Whoever. I'm not fussy. I've had my tetanus."
Nobody answered. Pim breathed out through his nose, once, which might have been a laugh. From the far end there was nothing at all, not a creak, not a breath, and I lay there and listened to the nothing for a long while, and it didn't change.
The stream talked. Somebody's drysuit creaked and settled. Somebody else sniffed.
Then hands. Jory's, in the dark. She'd rolled over to face me without a sound, and her hands came feeling down my front, rough, the way you'd frisk a bag for keys. They found my harness, and the cowstail clipped to it, the short safety lanyard with the clip on the end, and they found the knot at the end of it and stopped.
"What's this," she said.
"It's a knot."
"It's a granny's shoelace."
She had it undone before I could argue. I felt her fingers working, quick and certain, a pull, a turn, the tail fed through and drawn up, the way Dad taught us on the back step with a bit of washing line while Mum shouted that tea was on the table. She did it without a light. She'd always been able to do it without a light.
"I taught half this lot to rig," Jory said into the wall. "Pim, Corwin, Ilan, Odalys. And you're still the worst."
"I had the same teacher as you."
"He liked you better. Didn't make you any good."
She tugged the knot once, hard, to set it, and her hand went away, and she turned her face back to the rock.
I had nothing to say to that. It happens to me so rarely that I lay there poking at it, like a gap where a tooth was.
I was not going to sleep. I'd decided. I lay with my eyes open on the black, which made no difference to the black, and I listened for the gravel. The gravel did nothing.
Twenty hours, Abe had said. Nineteen now, or eighteen. I couldn't see my watch without a light, and I wasn't putting a light on.
I'd met Milo Hart twice, both times in a helmet with mud on it. I couldn't have told you his face. I lay there trying to build it, a chin, a nose, the colour of his eyebrows, and every time I got close, the face I got was grey and narrow with two days of stubble, looking at me out of the pinch. Milo would have been older now. Not far off forty. I didn't know if he'd had a brother. I'd never asked. At the inquest his mother sat three rows back and I looked at my own shoes the whole time.
The stream went on in the crawl mouth. Jory's throat caught, and let go, and caught, and let go, and somewhere in all that I went under, the way you do on night shifts and long drives, without telling myself.
I woke because I was warm.
That was wrong before anything else was. Nobody is warm in the Pantry. The cold comes up through the mat and the drysuit and lives in the bones of your backside, and you sleep cold and wake colder, and that's the deal. But I was warm. All down my spine, from my shoulder blades to the small of my back, through my fleece and through whatever was against my fleece.
A back. Broad, and pressed to mine. Breathing. I could feel the ribs go out against my ribs, and stop, and come in.
I didn't move. The drysuit would have creaked.
In front of me, close enough that her hair was in my mouth, Jory's throat caught, and let go.