Abe's new rule was pairs. Nobody goes through a duck alone, he said, with his eyes on me, and the pairing was done in the time it took to say it: Jory with Odalys, Ilan with Hana, Abe with Corwin, and me with Pim, because Pim was the one who didn't mind me.
Teo came last, on his own, and nobody said a word about that.
"I'll take him," I said. "Where I can see him."
"Pim's with you," said Abe, not looking up from his strap. "And Teo can look after himself. Can't you, lad?"
"Yes," said Teo, from the back.
He'd hardly spoken since the Duck.
"No lamps in the gap," said Jory, who was going first. "Water's in the lenses and you can't see anything. You'll want your hands."
"Face to the roof," said Odalys. "Left side. It's lowest on the right."
They went. The roof took them one pair at a time, and the gravel bank was empty, and then Pim bumped me with his elbow and we waded in.
It was colder than the first. It went round my ribs and over my chest like a wet sheet being drawn up the bed. The roof came down on my helmet, and I tilted my head, and the stone stroked my nose.
Then I was on my back, with the water in my ears and the roof a finger from my face, and the air.
There was a face's width of it, no more, cold and wet and tasting of rock. Pim's face lay beside mine, a hand's breadth off, with the water slopping round his chin. I couldn't see him. I could hear him breathing through his teeth, and the grey bag dragging on its cord behind him, and the stream chuckling inches from our ears.
"Sab."
It was barely a whisper. In the pocket, it was as loud as a shout.
"Don't talk, Pim. You'll drink it."
"I don't remember him at the hut either." A little slop of water, and he spat. "I thought it was just me. Being tired. I thought, Pim, you daft sod, you've gone and forgot a bloke. I was sat there with the beer and I'm going through the whole table in my head and he's not on it. And everyone's saying Teo, Teo, he did this, he did that, and I'm thinking, yeah. Yeah. Course."
I couldn't turn my head. I had the roof on my nose.
"I like him," Pim whispered, and his breath hit my cheek, a warm puff in the cold. "He carried my bag. He's all right. I just don't remember him. Both. Is that mad?"
"No."
"You say that."
"It's not mad. It's the first sane thing anyone's said since Saturday." I had too much water in my mouth to say anything cleverer. "If I drown in this, I want a plaque. With your name on, as the witness."
He laughed.
It was a stupid thing to say. It's a thing I say. He laughed, a real bark of it, in a space a face wide, and the water went down the wrong way. The air went to coughing. Great wet barks shook the bag on its cord and bounced his helmet off the rock. I got my hand under his chin and held his face up into the gap, and he hacked and hacked, and I said "Pim, Pim, breathe," with nothing in my voice but the whisper of it, and I hung on to his chin and hated my own mouth.
"Don't make me laugh in here," he gasped. "Sab. God."
"Sorry. Sorry. Breathe."
"That's very good," he wheezed.
We came out on the far side on our backs, on a skin of water, with the roar twice as loud. He sat up in the shallows with his chest heaving and his lamp on, and he wiped his nose on his glove and turned his face to me.
"Don't tell Abe I said."
"I won't."
"I'll say it properly. Later. When we're out. Not here." He looked past me, towards the black tunnel and the other pairs coming through. "I just wanted somebody to know."
I didn't say anything. I put my hand on his helmet, flat, and left it there a second.
It was Teo who came through last. Nobody saw him come. One moment the Duck was a black mouth with a ripple in it and the next there was a white helmet in the shallows with its lamp dark and a man under it, standing up out of the water with it streaming off him. He took one look round. Then he went to stand at the back of everybody, against the rock, with his arms down.
Pim saw him too. He didn't say anything, and neither did I.
The Toll begins where the Streamway ends. It ends in a buttress, a big square shoulder of rock that sticks out into the passage like somebody elbowing into a queue, and you squeeze past it and the roof goes up and the noise begins.
Thursday it had been a ledge along the left-hand wall, sixty metres of it, a boot and a half wide at its narrowest and a good metre above the stream, like a landing over a hall. At the far end the roof went up into the foot of the entrance shaft, and then the moor.
I put my lamp on it now and the lamp wouldn't hold still.
The stream had come up and swallowed the ledge to the ankles. It slid across the shelf in a sheet, brown, in a hurry, and spilled over the edge into the real stream, which wasn't a stream any more. It went past below us at the pace of a running man with the whole weight of the mountain behind it. Down at the shaft end somewhere, in the dark, water was coming off the top of the world in a column. A flat roar, with no gaps in it, so big it stopped being a sound and became a place.
I put my hand on the buttress. It was shaking. Every few seconds the roar changed pitch as something the size of a cow went by in the dark with a thud I felt in my back teeth.
"Right," said Abe, and he had to shout to be heard. "Jory. Rig it."
My sister had already put down the red rope bag and was kneeling beside it, going through the kit with her fingers, not looking: steel clips (krabs, we call them) and a coil of thin bright line. She was rigging to the club's bolts along the wall, put in years ago for a day like this. Odalys knelt next to her with a spare hanger in each fist. Her eyes were on the water.
"How long?" Abe shouted.
"What?" Odalys put her hand round her mouth. She'd set a pebble at the water's edge on the shelf when we came out of the Duck and two more further up, one every few paces, and now she checked them. The nearest had gone. She moved it up. Then she held up one flat hand, fingers spread, and turned it over.
"Twenty minutes!" she shouted. "Less, if it's raining on the top!"
"Is it raining on the top?"
"It's been raining on the top since yesterday!" She cupped a hand in the stream and tasted it, and spat. "Grit. Hear that, at the shaft end? That's not drips, that's the whole top of the hill coming down the hole. It's going up in pitch."
"Is that good?" said Corwin.
"No," said Odalys.
The roar took it.
Hana had her back against the rock and her arms wrapped round her pack. "It's well named," she said, to nobody, in her flat kitchen voice. "The Toll. My gran said every crossing wants paying. You get over, and somebody's the price."
"Not now, Hana," said Abe.
"I'm only saying what she said."
"I know you are, love. Not now."
Ilan was swearing at the long bag on his back, which had caught on the buttress for the third time. "Do we need it?" he said. "I'm asking. It's four kilos of orange plastic."
"The Trust's condition," said Abe. "It goes where we go."
"The Trust isn't carrying it."
"Then neither of us has to be happy," said Abe, and that was an end.
I turned my lamp on the back of the queue. I did it to be rude. Teo stood against the buttress with his lamp off and his arms down, in the part of the dark that the rest of us had left him, and he looked back into my beam without blinking, and I put it away again.
"If the water wants somebody," I said to Hana, low, to the back of her wet hat, because my mouth had to say something, "I know whose name I'd put on the list."
Hana turned her head and met my eye.
"Don't," she said.
"I'm only—"
"Don't, Sabine."
I shut my mouth. It was not the first time that day it had gone off without me.
Jory worked in the beam of Odalys's lamp. She made the first anchor at the buttress, around a rock spike at waist height, and I watched her do it. She doubled the line, fed the end back through, and cinched it down in a stopper, the fat one, the tail threaded back through itself so the end lay down flat. Her hands did it. They'd done it ten thousand times. She hadn't looked at it, or at anything.
I looked at the knot. I looked at Jory. I said nothing at all.
"Hold the end," she said to Odalys, and then she was up and out on the ledge, clipped on, her back to us, shuffling sideways along the wall with the water over her boots. The line paid out behind her through Odalys's hands. At every bolt she stopped, and thumbed it, and said "Sound," to the wall, so low I only knew it from her lips. Sound. Sound. Sound.
At about twenty metres she stopped. The wall made a little corner there, a flat place with a ledge twice as broad, and she clipped in hard. Then she turned and put her lamp back down the line, straight at us.
One long, held, and then two short. Dad's code, from the far side of a pitch, when the rope was good and you could come: long flashes for numbers, short ones for letters, and one long and two short for all right. He used to do it on the landing when we were small, with a torch, from his bedroom door, to say the stairs were clear and we could come down.
I got my own lamp up and blinked it back. One long, two short, a lamp on a ledge in a roar. Jory's lamp hung in the dark at the end of it, and went out, and came on again at normal.
She came back along the line fast, with the water at her calves, and began coiling the loose stuff by her feet, not looking at me.
"First section's good," she said, to the rope. "Twenty metres. Bolts are sound. I'll go on when the next lot's across."
Then she took me by the front of the harness and turned me round to the wall like a child being dressed.
"Stand still."
"I'm standing."
"You're fidgeting." She ran her gloved thumb down my leg loops, dragged the chest strap one notch tighter, and hauled on my cowstail, the short lanyard that ties me to the rope. It was the same knot, her own, set hard. She clipped my second lanyard to the spike beside the first. "Both. You use both. I'm not telling you again."
"You've never told me once."
"Then I'm telling you."
Her hands were quick, and rough, and not quite steady. She didn't say anything else. She turned me back round by the shoulders.
"Jory." I was digging in my chest pocket. "Here."
The yellow book came out wet at the corners, a bit furred, with the pencil stuck in its spine. I held it out. My arm had done it before my head had.
She looked at it. Then she looked at me. It was the first time she'd put her eyes on mine since the knot, and they were red round the rims, and neither of us had a word. She took it. She tugged down the zip of her own chest pocket, the dry one, the one she keeps her phone in on the surface, and put the book into it and zipped it up flat, and tapped it twice with two fingers, hard, the way she checks a krab.
Then she turned back to the rope.
"Pim," said Abe, behind us, over the roar, with his watch held up to his eyes. "Ten to two. You're first, with the batteries. Clip in at each bolt, one at a time. Go slow. Tell us at the corner. Hana after him, then Sabine, then the rest. Jory stays on the anchor."
Pim stood at the start of the ledge with the grey bag on his back. The sheet of water slid over his boots and went on down.
"Aye aye," he said.
He looked back along the queue for somebody. I think he found me.
"Very good, then," he said, and clipped in, and put his hand on the wall. "See you on the other side, Sab."