At the Junction the wind stopped being a surprise and started being a fact.
It came out of the Streamway in one long cold push, smelling of wet grass and dirt, and it leaned on my face the whole way across the chamber. A cold wind in a still passage means water coming behind it. Odalys had said so at the Crawl head, and nobody had needed telling twice, and nobody had said a word since.
The Junction is where the cave stops being a pipe. The roof goes up out of reach of a lamp. Three ways run out of it like the fingers of a glove: the Long Crawl at our backs, low and round and black; a tall crack in the right-hand wall that went up into nothing, which was the Flue, twenty-five metres of wet rift that nobody who'd seen it wanted to climb with a pack on; and ahead, the Streamway, where the stream came from and where we were going.
On Thursday and Friday this had been our camp. Ilan, Hana, Corwin and me, with a tape and a compass and the book, two days sketching the side passages while the riggers went on up the Crawl without us. Hana's stove had stood on that flat rock by the wall. I'd slept on that clay in a row with the others and a gap at the end for the boots, and the gap had stayed a gap. Nobody else. I'd have felt anybody else.
The stream came out of the Streamway mouth, crossed the floor and went down a slot in the far wall with a gulp. On Thursday I'd stepped over it. You could see every pebble in the bed. Now it was the colour of tea left in the pot, and it was loud, and it was shoving past the rocks with its shoulder down. A twig went by in it, then a clot of yellow foam.
"Check-in," said Abe. "Hana, love. Then we'll eat on the move."
Hana had the set out of the top of her bag, where she'd carried it since the Pantry like a loaf. The wire we'd paid out behind us all week came out of the Crawl and ran along the wall to a grey box bolted to the rock, sealed, with a rubber cap on top. She peeled the cap back, clipped the leads on to two brass screws, put her tongue between her teeth and turned the handle.
I watched her. I watched Abe, hunkered beside her with his notebook on his knee. I watched the white helmet at the Streamway mouth, where Teo stood with his back to us, shouldering a tackle bag.
Abe said it was nine, and Hana had packed for nine, and Ilan said it was hypnagogia, and every reason was in somebody's own head. Eight of us at the gate. Nine in the Pantry. No way for me to stand up in front of them and make my own bruise into evidence.
But the surface had paper. Paper doesn't get tired. Paper doesn't love me and doesn't want me to be well. I hate paper, and paper hates me back, and I was going to go and ask it anyway.
I was across the floor with my hand out.
"Give it me."
"Sabine." Hana held the handset against her chest. "That's mine. I do the phone."
"It's two minutes. Please, Hana."
"Sabine, love," said Abe, without getting up. "We do the call by the book. Names, the forecast, the time for the Toll. That's all it's for."
"The book says check the list. They've got a list, Abe. A bit of paper with everyone's name on. If there's a Teo on it, there's a Teo. If there isn't, I'm not mad, and you can all stop looking at my eyes." I was pulling at the cord, not hard. "Hana. Please."
She looked at Abe. He looked at the water. He could have said no. He didn't.
Hana gave it me.
It was warm from her chest, a heavy brown handset on a curly cord. The line hissed like frying. Then a man's voice came through it, a long way up a long wet wire, unhurried, soft at the edges, Welsh.
"Black Rigg control, Gwil Pryce. Is that Camp One?"
Gwil was the duty controller, the man who sits up all night by a green set so the rest of the rescue team can sleep. I'd met him once, at a dinner, over a trifle. He'd asked me about my work and listened to the answer.
"It's Sabine Tull. Gwil, I need you to look at your paper."
"Sabine, is it. Hello. Is Abe there? I've a call-out to go through with him, the time you're due out by, and who comes looking if you're not. If you'd put him on—"
"In a minute. Eight of us came through the gate on Thursday. I stood on the wall and I passed them over, every one. Now there's nine in here, and I need you to tell me who put the ninth one down."
The line hissed. Behind me nobody moved. I could hear Ilan breathe through his nose.
"Eight," said Gwil, carefully, as if it were a word in another language. "Say again the name for me, please."
"Teo."
"Teo." Paper went over, a long way off, like somebody turning a page in a different church. "Bear with me now. I've the party list here with the forms behind it. I wasn't at your gate, Sabine, you understand. I've only what Abe sent. Yes. I have a Teo." A pause. "Haddow, T. Signed Ostler."
Nobody had told me his surname. I'd had him for three days, in my ear, in my back, round my ankle, and nobody had said it.
"Signed Ostler," I said. "What else does it say?"
"Next of kin, initials only: A.O. And a mobile number." Gwil was reading it slowly, as a man reads out a thing he's been asked to check. "It goes to voicemail. We rang it Friday, when the forms came in, as you do."
"Ring it now. Please. Whoever picks up."
"Nobody picks up, Sabine. I'll try again, I promise you."
"Say them again."
"A and O."
"Abram Ostler," I said.
I said it into the handset, but I said it loud enough for the roof. I turned round. Abe was still hunkered by the grey box with the notebook on his knee and his pencil stopped, and everybody else had found something to do with their hands.
"A and O. That's you, Abe."
The wind went on past us, out of the Streamway and across the floor.
"Might be," said Abe. His voice came out easy, even a bit amused, a man asked if he'd left a gate open. "I sign half the forms in this club, love. I couldn't tell you which. Is that all it says?"
"You signed for him."
"I sign for lots of people."
"You signed for a man you'd never—" I stopped. I'd nearly said never met. I couldn't tell if that was right. I'd lost the edge of what I was sure of, like a table I'd been leaning on that wasn't there. "You told me I'd slept on a mat with him. For two nights. And you wrote his name on a form, and your name next to it. Who is he, Abe? Is he yours?"
"Sabine." Ilan, behind me. "That's not helpful."
"Is he yours?"
"Give me the handset, there's a good lass," said Abe, and held out his hand, palm up, which for him is nearly shouting.
I gave it him. I don't know why. My arm did it.
He stood up with it, and turned half away. I'd followed that back up and down hills for fourteen years. I'd have known it across a crowded car park. I had never seen it turned on me.
He held it to his ear with his big hand cupped over the bottom of it, and I stood a yard off with my whole skin listening. The line was tiny and metallic, and the Junction was quiet, so I got most of it.
"Gwil. Abe. Yes. Yes, she's a bit—"
"Abe, is she all right there?" Gwil's voice, small as a wasp. "She sounds wound up. Keep her with the group, will you? Is she fit to move?"
"She's fine, Gwil. She's tired. We're all tired."
"I can hear you," I said, loud, to the handset. "I'm standing right here, Gwil."
Hana flinched, and I'd have given a lot to put that back in my mouth.
"She's fine, Gwil," said Abe, and turned his shoulder to me. "What's the forecast doing? The Junction stream's the colour of tea, I'll tell you that. And we've a wind coming out of the Streamway."
"I'll put it in the log," said Gwil.
The reply took a while. Rain on the moor, said Gwil, steady since midday yesterday. The gauge was up on midnight, within what they'd said. Nothing to change. You'll want to be moving.
"Three hours to the Toll," said Abe. "If the Ducks are kind."
"Then you've time in hand. Copy nine, Abe."
"Copy."
He thumbed the cap back on the terminals, slowly, and wound the cord round the handset three times. He didn't look round.
Nothing in that voice had changed. Brown water in the Junction and a wind in our faces that smelled of the top of the hill, and nothing to change.
"It's not twenty," said Odalys.
She was crouched at the edge of the stream with one hand flat in it, as she'd been in the Pantry. She hadn't been part of any of it. She'd had her eyes on the water the whole time.
"That's up a hand since the Crawl head, and that's not coming from the roof. That's coming off the moor. And the wind's not rain." She took her hand out and shook it. "That's the air being shoved up the passage in front of something. It's coming. I don't know when."
"Gwil's got instruments, Odalys," said Abe.
"Gwil's got a gauge at the bottom of the hill." She wiped her palm on her thigh. "I've got a hand in a river. Three hours is fine. Anything slower than three hours isn't."
"Right," said Abe. "Three. Everybody drink something. Ilan, you stay by Sabine."
That was all it was. Ilan, you stay by Sabine. Everyone found a place to look. Pim looked at his boots and Corwin turned his lamp off and Hana put the set back in her bag, folded up small, as if it had done something wrong. Somebody's glove was wet on the floor and nobody picked it up. "He's a good man, Abe," Hana said to me, low and flat, folding the flap over. It wasn't a quarrel. She said it like the weather. "He is."
Something landed on my knee. I looked down. A flapjack, one of Hana's, a bit squashed.
Jory had gone by without stopping. She was already ten feet away with her back to me, bending over the rope bag, and she didn't turn her head. It hadn't been thrown. It had been put.
I ate it in three bites, standing up, because if I sat down I'd have to be told to.
Ilan came and stood next to me with his arms folded and a bottle in one hand. He'd been a GP for fifteen years and he stood like one, a little to the side, offering you the bottle as if it were an opinion.
"Drink," he said.
"I'm drinking."
"You're not. You're chewing." He put the bottle in my hand and took my wrist in his, without asking, and looked at his watch with his lips moving. "Ninety-four. Quick, but sensible."
"Look," said Ilan, "nobody's saying you're unwell."
"Everybody's saying I'm unwell. Everybody's been saying it for two days in a very polite voice." I drank. It tasted of plastic and peat. "It's Abe."
"What is?"
"All of it. It's Abe. He signed for him. He put the man's name on a form with his own next to it, and then he told me I'd slept on a mat with him, and he's been standing between me and every question since the Pantry with his hand out. Did you see his face? He's behind it." It sounded better in my head. "He wants me down here. He's been waiting six years for me to come back so he can watch me crack. He's put somebody in a corner to see what I do."
"Abe," said Ilan.
"Yes."
"Abe Ostler. Who sat up with you for a week after the inquest."
I didn't have anything to say to that, and I'd rather he'd hit me.
"I'm saying you're under strain," said Ilan, kindly. "It's different." He sat down on a boulder with a grunt and patted the one beside it, and I sat down on it, because I couldn't think what else to do with my legs. "You know why they made you stand up at Milo's inquest?"
I stared at him.
"There was no body," said Ilan, softly, in his bedside voice. "The coroner needed witnesses who'd seen him go. That's all it was. Procedure."
I held the bottle in both hands. The water in it was the colour of the stream.
"Does that help?" said Ilan.
"No," I said.
"No. Well." He looked at his own hands. "I meant it to."
"I know you did."
"I'm not his spy, you know," said Ilan. "Abe asked me to sit with you. He didn't ask me to report."
"Did he say what you'd be reporting?"
"Sabine."
"It's a fair question."
He had put his hand on my elbow, and it was warm, and it was exactly where Abe puts his.
I looked across the Junction at Abe. He had the notebook open on his knee and was writing in it, in his careful farmer's capitals, and now and then he wet the end of the pencil on his tongue. Beside him Teo had put down the tackle bag and was feeding a strap through a buckle. They were three feet apart. Neither of them looked up.
Behind them the brown stream came out of the Streamway mouth with the wind pushing at its back.
"Right," said Abe, to the page, and shut it. "Streamway. Jory in front, the rest as before. Sabine, you're between Ilan and me."
He didn't look round when he said it. He slapped his thigh once, a farmer closing a gate.