An hour out of the Pantry, the man behind me stopped every time I stopped.
I tried it at a place where the floor dipped into a puddle and the roof came down to meet it. I put my elbows in the water and froze. Behind me the scrape of knees on gravel froze too. I lay there with the cold soaking up my sleeves to the armpits, and he lay there, and the only thing moving in that whole pipe of rock was the drip off the end of my nose.
I went on. So did he.
In front of me, for an hour, I'd had the soles of Ilan's boots, worn smooth at the heels, going up and down like a pair of slow pistons. Behind me I had a light, and a sound when I stopped. I didn't look round. You can't look round in the Long Crawl, not without lying on your side and screwing your neck like a bottle cap. I didn't want to anyway.
"Seven hours to the Crawl head, if we're light and lucky," Abe had said in the Pantry, with the stove packed and the lamps up and everyone's breath smoking. "And the Toll's thirteen off. There, now. Plenty." Then he'd set the line, and I'd lost.
The trickle down the middle of the floor was fatter than it had been going in. On Saturday it had been a wet stripe you could keep a knee either side of. Now it was a proper little stream, as wide as my hand, so cold it made the bones in my wrists ache, and it was going somewhere in a hurry.
"Lovely day for it," I said to Ilan's boots.
"What?"
"Nothing. Talking to the rock."
"Don't," said Ilan, over his shoulder, into the floor. "It answers, in here. Echoes. You'll frighten yourself."
Behind me, nothing. A breath. The squeak of a wet glove on stone.
At a bend where the roof lifted enough to kneel, I rolled on my hip and turned my lamp back down the passage, full in his face, which is rude, and which I'd done to him twice now and would keep doing until he complained.
He didn't complain. He was lying on his elbows, a body length off. Grey narrow face, eyes screwed up against the glare, mud to the eyebrows. He didn't put a hand up to shade them.
"You go first," I said.
"Abe set the line."
"Abe's not here. Abe's an hour up the pipe. You go in front of me."
"Line's set." He didn't move. "Go on, Sabine."
I went on. I went on fast. I crawled as if the rock behind me were on fire, knees banging, helmet clacking on the roof every third shove, elbows going into the stream and out again, and the light behind me shrank a little and then came back. It never got bigger than it had been. It never got smaller for long.
I caught Ilan up so quickly I nearly put my helmet in his backside.
"Sabine. Do you want me to kick you in the teeth? Because that is where my foot is going to go."
"Sorry."
"We're at the Wringer," he said. "So stop."
The Wringer is the tightest place in the Long Crawl. It's a flattened slot of rock, like the gap under a heavy door, about a body long. You go through it on your side, one arm out in front, one arm pinned back along your ribs, head turned, and you breathe out to get your chest in and you don't get to breathe in properly again until you're through. Going in, I'd done it with a tackle bag clipped to my ankle and Corwin pushing my boots and Pim telling me a story about a pony, and it had been horrible, and I'd nearly been sick, and it had been fine.
Ilan went through it like a man posting himself. Right arm, head, shoulder, a long wet scrape, his boots going in after, one, two, and gone. Then his voice came back muffled from the far side.
"Right arm forward. Head left, or your helmet wedges, very common mistake. Breathe out on the hip bit. I'm going on, Hana's waiting at the bend. Don't be heroic."
"Never am," I said.
His light went away. The slot went black on the far side. The trickle ran into it ahead of me and turned into a thin noisy sheet on the floor of it, and I lay at its mouth and listened to the man behind me come up a body length and stop.
I went in left arm first.
I don't know why. It was the nearest arm. I wanted to be through that slot and out the other side and a good long way from the breath behind me, and I put it in, and my head after it, turned the wrong way, so my lamp was looking at the roof an inch from my nose and the helmet was already grinding.
The Wringer took me by the hips and kept me.
One arm out ahead, one jammed back along my ribs. The water came down the slot in a cold string and found the gap at my neck seal like it had been sent for. I pushed with my toes and nothing moved. I pulled with the front hand and nothing moved except my glove, which slid. I breathed in to try again, and the rock came in to meet my chest from both sides, from above and below, and there was no more breath to be had.
"Right," I said, to nobody.
Then I said a word my mother would have washed out, and then I stopped saying things, because every word cost a breath I couldn't get back.
The trickle pooled where my cheek was. I turned my face away from it and that wedged the helmet harder. I turned it back and the water was at the corner of my mouth. It tasted of iron and peat and somebody's boots. If it came up another finger, I'd be breathing it.
Panic doesn't arrive. It's already there, curled up under your breastbone, and it just stands up. Mine stood up. My legs started going on their own, kicking at the floor, at the walls, scrabbling. I twisted further into the wrong shape. The drysuit snagged on something behind my knee and held. I could hear myself making a noise I'd never made.
Hands closed on my boots.
Both of them, one round each ankle. Not pulling. Holding, the way you'd hold a ladder for somebody, so the kicking stopped because there was nothing to kick with.
"Left," said the voice behind me. Hoarse. Level.
I spat water. "What?"
"Left. Turn your hip."
"I'm stuck, you bloody…"
"Breathe out and stay out."
I didn't want to do a thing he said. I want that written down somewhere. I lay there in the slot with the water at my lip and his hands on my feet, and every bit of me that was still me said no, and then I did it anyway. It let out every scrap of air I had, down to the sour bottom of my lungs, and stayed out. My chest went flat. The rock let go of it by the width of a fingernail.
He turned my left boot outward, a quarter turn, as calmly as turning a tap.
My hip came round. Something in the drysuit tore with a little zip. And I went forward the length of my own forearm, all at once, as if the mountain had spat.
"Again," he said.
I breathed out and stayed out and he pushed my boots, once, hard and even, and I came out of the far end of the Wringer on a skin of water and lay on my face in the stream, heaving air into me, great ugly gulps of it, cold and wet and better than anything.
My lamp was full of my own breath. When it cleared I was in a bell of rock where the roof lifted, the only place for a long way where you could get your knees under you and turn round. The roof was full of holes there, black ones, round as drainpipes, going up into nothing. I didn't look at them long. I got on my knees, and I turned round, and I put my lamp on the slot I'd come out of.
I wanted to see him come through. I wanted to see him do what I'd just done and get stuck and kick.
His light was on the far side, low, a glow in the water. Then it moved. Then something came into the slot toward me.
Boots. Soles first.
He was coming through feet first, which nobody does, and which nobody had told me you could. The boots came out of the rock at me, side by side, mud packed in the treads, then the shins, the knees of a suit, inching. There was no kicking and no noise. The rock was letting him through as if he'd been there before and paid.
I didn't decide anything. My hand went out and closed round his ankle, above the boot, where the suit stopped and the neoprene sock started.
He stopped.
He could have kicked. I'd have gone over backwards into the stream and that would have been the end of it. He didn't. He let me. The leg stayed in my hand, heavy and still.
It was warm. That was the thing. Through the wet neoprene, through my glove, it was warm, warmer than my hand, and under my fingers something was going. A pulse. Slow and thick and even. Mine was going like a hammer in a tin, and his went on underneath it, slow, as if he were lying in bed.
"Got you," I said. My voice cracked in the middle.
The leg didn't move.
"Let go," said the voice from inside the rock.
I held on a bit longer, because he'd said to. Then I let go.
The boots went back. Slowly, as they'd come, soles first into the dark, inching, until the treads were gone and there was only the slot with the water running down it, and a glow beyond, and then not even the glow.
"Teo?"
"Go on."
That was all. Not loud. It came down the slot with the water.
I went on.
I don't remember the first part. My knees remember it. They went, and I went with them, and my elbows, and the stream under me got into the torn place behind my knee and ran cold down my calf into my boot. I was shaking so hard my helmet chattered on the roof. When I could hear anything over my own teeth, there was a light behind me again.
Not close. Round a bend or two. It lit the rock round me, a little, from behind.
When I stopped, the scraping behind me stopped.
I didn't speak to it. I'd decided that much, somewhere in the first hundred metres. He'd had my feet. He'd had my breath. He'd had me saying "Got you" like a child playing tig. He wasn't having my voice as well. So I sang. I sang the rugby song Dad used to sing in the car when Mum wasn't in it, all the verses I knew, which was four, and then the first one again, and my voice went off along the crawl ahead of me and came back off the rock sounding like somebody else's.
Somewhere in the second go round I thought: Milo.
Milo Hart, big and quiet in a red helmet, who'd laughed at something I said on the Mere beach and then gone down a passage on my numbers. I'd met him twice. I'd never seen his face without a helmet round it. I tried to put that face on Teo and it slid off. Milo had been fair. Milo had been young. This one was grey all through.
And Milo was dead. The dead go cold. That's the one thing everybody knows about them, the thing even Hana's gran would have agreed with. You don't put your hand on a dead man's leg and find it warm and ticking.
"So that's settled," I said, between verses, and the crawl gave it back to me, settled, settled, and I didn't sing again after that.
The roof came down. The roof went up. I went through the stream and out of it. Both hip bones were all bruise from the Wringer, and my hands had gone from cold to numb to a dull hot ache that meant they'd come back later and hurt. The light stayed behind me. When I stopped to get the water out of my eyes, it stopped. When I went, it came.
An hour and a half, near enough. It felt like a week. Then the roof lifted away from my helmet, and lifted again, and there were voices, and lamps, and the smell of the stove, and I fell out of the crawl into the Elbow like a calf coming out of a cow.
The Elbow is the one place in the Long Crawl where you can sit up properly. A bend in the passage where the roof opens out to the height of a kitchen table, the floor all gravel, room for the lot of us to sit in a crooked ring with our knees touching. The line rests there. Everyone flops and steams and eats.
They were all there. Lamps tipped down to save the eyes, faces smeared, a pan of water on Hana's stove just starting to tick. Abe at the far side with his back to the wall. Pim next to him with his legs stretched out and his eyes shut. Jory, Odalys, Hana by the stove, Ilan peeling a glove off with his teeth.
And between Pim and Abe, Teo.
Sitting with his knees up and his back to the rock, eating a flapjack. Mud on his face, mud in his stubble. Not breathing hard. His helmet was off and in his lap and his hair was flat and wet with sweat or water, and he was chewing, and he looked up at me when I came out of the crawl, the way you look at weather.
I turned round on my knees.
The light behind me was still coming. It came round the last bend, low and wobbling. Then boots came out of the crawl. Then knees, and a camera case clipped to a chest, and a long thin body, and Corwin's face under his helmet, purple with effort and running with water, saying, "Sorry, sorry, ahem, sorry, is there tea?"
I looked at Corwin. I looked at Teo. I looked at Corwin again, as if he might change.
"No," I said.
"Sabine," said Abe. Big, warm, tired. "Sit down, love, you're dripping on the stove."
"He was behind me." I pointed at Teo with my whole arm, like a child. "He was behind me. At the Wringer. He had my feet. He got me through. I had his leg in my hand."
"Did he," said Abe. "Good lad."
"And then he was behind me right up to here. His light. Every time I stopped. And now he's there. He's in front of Pim. He's had time to take his helmet off and start eating."
"That's his second," said Hana, flat.
"Nobody went past me. Nobody. It's one pipe. You can't pass anyone in that pipe without climbing on them."
Pim opened his eyes, saw my face, and laughed. "He's quick, Teo. Very good." He looked round for someone to agree. "…No?"
"After a squeeze like that," said Ilan, fast and kind and pleased with himself, "you get a big dump of adrenaline, and then a crash, and your memory for the next twenty minutes is Swiss cheese. Well documented. People in car crashes lose the whole drive home. You were head down in a stream with your blood full of rocket fuel. Somebody could have gone over the top of you singing and you'd not know."
"I was the one singing."
"There you are, then."
"He went past you, love." Abe, slow, the voice for a horse that's got its leg through a gate. "At that bell past the Wringer. Where you can turn. He'll have nipped by while you were on your knees getting your breath. You'd not have noticed a bus."
"He didn't come through. I watched the hole. He went back."
"Back where?"
I opened my mouth and nothing was in it. Back into the rock. Back where he'd come from, feet first, the wrong way round, into a slot you can only just get through forwards.
"Did you count him in that time too, Abe?" I said. "Slap, slap? Good lad, all well?"
It came out of me in the voice I use for traffic wardens. Abe's face did a small thing, and then went kind again, which was worse. Hana looked at the stove. Pim looked at his own feet. Even Ilan stopped peeling his glove.
"Can we not," said Odalys, from the wall. She had her eyes shut and her hood up. "The roof's dripping on me and I want my tea before it's cold."
"It's not even hot yet," said Hana.
"Then I want it before it's cold."
Jory didn't say anything at all. She was sitting with her boots out, re-coiling a sling that didn't need it, and she didn't look up.
Teo finished eating. He brushed the crumbs off his knee into his palm and tipped them into his mouth, and he looked at me while he did it, steady, the lamp on the helmet in his lap shining at the roof. He didn't say anything either.
I turned to Corwin. He'd got himself out of the crawl and was sitting in the gravel with his camera case in his arms like a baby, getting his breath.
"Corwin. You were behind him. Behind Teo. At the Wringer. Where did he go?"
Corwin's eyes went to me, and then past me to Teo, and then to the floor, and his lamp dipped with his head.
"I, um. When I got to the Wringer there wasn't anyone. I thought he went past you."
I sat down in the gravel because my legs gave out. The stove ticked. Somebody passed me a cup and I held it without drinking.
My right hand was still curled the shape of his ankle.