Nobody could sleep, so Abe sent us to look at the water.
"Gwil wants a level," he said. He was crouched by the phone with the handset against his chest, and the wire ran away from it along the foot of the wall into the dark, a green line you could follow with a hand. "He's got a gauge at the road end and a theory, and he'd like it checked against something wet. Somebody has to go to the Flue head and tell him how high. Corwin, you've the best eyes. Ilan. Sabine, if you're not sleeping you can hold the other lamp."
"I'm not sleeping."
"I know, love."
Hana's watch said ten to midnight. Monday was ten minutes off somewhere above our heads, and nobody would tell us when it came. We'd eaten, one bag between the lot of us, counted out by Hana in bites, and changed our wet socks for drier wet socks. Pim's mat was still on the pile. Nobody had known what to do with it.
It was forty paces. I'd have said four hundred. The Ballroom floor tilted under my boots, and the dark in it was so big it pressed on my face. We went with two lamps along the wall where the wire lay, and the roar of the Junction came up to meet us before we got there. Not a river's noise. A river is going somewhere. This was a noise that had arrived.
We lay on our fronts on the lip of the Flue, three in a row, with Abe's boots behind us, and put our lamps down it.
I'd climbed that rift an hour ago with my neck on fire and a woman in a sheet at my elbow. I'd thought I knew what was down there. Looking down it was nothing but a long grey throat, shining wet, going down and down. At the bottom, a floor of black.
Not dark. Black. Water, with a skin on it, so smooth it gave nothing back, going over the top of the Junction's wall as you see the roof of a drowned car. Where that water was, we'd sat in a ring and told the dark who we were, and the dark had told us back.
The green wire ran down the rift beside the lamps, shining, and went into the black without a ripple, as if it had been drawn there.
"There," said Corwin, very softly. "That's the box. That's under it now."
Nobody said anything. The water below us gave a long slow slap against the rock, as a cow breathes in a shed.
Twenty-four hours, by Gwil's sum, before the whole system sumped, which is cavers' word for flooded to the roof, and I'd believed him. I'd not believed it with my belly till then. The lamps went down the rift and stopped in the water, and no one said a word about the way out.
"That'll do," said Abe, at last. His voice had a catch. "That'll do for Gwil. Come away, lads. Come away from the edge."
Corwin was already fumbling. He'd got his camera out of its case, a squat black thing on a wrist strap, and he was holding it over the lip with both hands. He wasn't taking a picture. He was checking it, I think, as you'd check your pockets after a fall. Is it still here. Is it still mine.
"Do you want to get your flash in my eyes?" said Ilan.
"It's off. I'm only seeing if it, if the haul didn't—"
His hands were shaking. I'd watched them shake all day, that long thin pair. The strap slid off his wrist.
I caught it. It was nothing. A grab, a reflex, the thing I do best, and I had the camera by its strap in my fist a foot off the rock. It swung. The screen on the back woke up against my knuckles.
"Thanks," said Corwin. "Thank you, I'll just—"
I had it in my palm, with the little screen glowing up at me like a window in a house.
A beach.
I'd have known it with my eyes shut. Flat grey shingle in a long curve, the colour of old teeth, and the water behind it black and perfectly still. The Mere. I'd stood on that shingle for a week in 2019 with a laser and a bad temper and a book that hated me, and I knew the tilt of it in my boot soles.
On the shingle, four people in drysuits and helmets, squinting at the flash, with their arms round each other's shoulders. Abe in the middle, big and bearded, a hand on Ilan's neck. Ilan, mouth open, in the middle of a word. Odalys at the end on one knee, hood back, squinting. And on the far side, caught in the last half-second before he'd got there, Corwin himself, hand still coming down from the self-timer, one leg up, on the run.
Underneath the picture, small and white, was the time. 13:05.
"That's the Mere," I said.
"It's old," said Corwin. "It's nothing. It's last spring, it's from the, it's a, just give me—"
I turned away from him. I put my thumb where a thumb goes, and the picture slid sideways, and another one came.
Another time stamp, 14:15. The same beach. The same four people, in the same places, squinting at the same flash, but the light on them was different, flatter, a little grey, as if the lake had breathed. Abe not smiling. Ilan with his eyes shut, asleep on his feet. Odalys standing now, one hand on her helmet. Corwin standing dead still, for once, at the end of the line. And behind them, over their heads, where the flash had reached out across thirty metres of water and thinned and given out against the far side of the Mere, the far wall.
Pale limestone, sheeted with wet. A black slot high up in it, long and low as a letterbox. A ledge below the slot. And under the ledge, a bit lower than the slot, on the face of the rock itself, a smudge.
I put my thumb on the zoom. The picture swelled and went to squares and came back again, and the smudge came with it.
A hand.
Five fingers spread, dark with clay, laid flat against the pale rock and slid down it a few inches. You could see the drag. You could see where the heel of the palm had come to rest.
I turned back to the first picture. I couldn't help it. I pressed the arrow with my thumb and there it was, the same wall, the same slot, far behind four squinting people, a long clean stretch of rock under it. Nothing. A white wall with no hand on it.
I flicked forward again. The hand. I flicked back. The wall. Forward, back, forward, like a child with a flip-book.
"It's not in the first one," I said.
"It's, it's a stain." Corwin had a hand out. It didn't reach me. "It's, a bit of mud on the lens, it's—"
"It's iron," said Ilan, quickly. He'd come up on my other side and was squinting at the little screen as if it were an X-ray. "Iron oxide. It runs on limestone and looks like anything. People see Christ in toast."
"It's got a thumb."
"They always have a thumb."
"It's on the wall," I said. "It's a hand, and it's on the wall."
"Sabine," said Abe, behind me. His voice was low. It was the voice he uses on a horse that's about to put its foot through something. "Give the lad his camera."
"That's the Letterbox." My voice was going up, and it cracked at the top. I'd stood on that beach in 2019 for a whole afternoon with my head back, looking at that slot, and thought, not in this lifetime. "I surveyed it. I stood on that beach and I drew it. I put 'not pushed' next to it in pencil, because nobody's pushed it, because you can't get to it, it's nine metres of wall, it's over the water, it goes nowhere. I put the aven behind it as unclimbed. I put that on a piece of paper that Abe had printed for the Trust." I held the camera up between us, the little lit screen with the hand on it. "Somebody's put a hand on my wall. Somebody went up there. When? When was this? Who climbed that?"
"It was only an hour!"
It came out of Corwin like a cork. He had both hands up in front of his face as if I'd thrown something. "We had a kip! I don't, we were only, the four of us, it was a, an hour or so, and I'd been up since four, and we all lay down on the beach, and when I woke up it was, everyone was—"
He stopped. He'd heard himself. His mouth hung open on the rest of it.
"Everyone was what?" I said.
"Corwin," said Abe.
"The card's blank," said Corwin. He lunged. I let him have it, because I was so surprised, and he had the camera clamped in both hands and his thumbs going on it, button, button, button, in a blind panic, as if there was a way to scrape it. "It's blank. I wiped it. The card's blank, it's, I wiped the card. This is, it's only the buffer, it's only a, it's a memory, it'll go, it's—"
The screen went from white to grey.
It dimmed with a long unhurried sigh, like a candle in a draught, and a little red icon came up in the corner of it, an empty battery with a line through. Corwin pressed the power button. He pressed it again, with his thumbnail. He shook it by his ear. He pressed it and held it, and held it, and said come on in a very small voice, to a thing the size of a sandwich.
It was flat. It was as dead as the bottom of a pond.
Nobody moved on the lip of the Flue. Below us, the water slapped the rock.
"I saw the hand," I said.
I hadn't meant to say it so quietly. It didn't sound like me. I'm a hopeless liar, and I've never been any good at telling the truth either, because I do it too loud. This was true and it came out level. "I saw it. On my own wall. I know that wall like my own kitchen, and I know there wasn't a hand on it in 2019, and I know there's one on it now. I'm not mad. I'm not gassed. I'm not hearing voices. It's on your camera, and you were in it, Ilan."
Ilan was looking at the lamp. He had the face of somebody who has found a hair in his food and decided not to say. "I was asleep," he said. "In both of them. I'm a doctor, Sabine, I sleep when I can. If somebody climbed a wall while I was lying on a beach with my eyes shut, I couldn't tell you."
"You're in the second one with your eyes shut. Standing up."
"Then I slept standing up. It's a skill."
"Abe."
He'd put his palm out. It hung there, down, level, over the rock between us, slow, slow, but he didn't say there, now. He was looking not at me but at the dead camera in Corwin's hands.
"A leader can't be asked to remember every minute of a trip, Sabine," he said. "It was a long day, and we were all, and I don't. I led it, I'll own to that. I'll own to being tired. I don't remember a hand. I don't remember a wall. I remember Ilan's flask."
"Right," I said. "Lovely. Wonderful. Four people on a beach, and three of you remember a flask."
I looked at them. It was a mistake. I could have looked at the hand. I looked at the three of them kneeling in a row on the lip of a flooded rift with two lamps between us, and not one of them would put his face where I could read it. Abe's was a farm gate, shut. Ilan was looking into his own hands. And Corwin, who'd blurted it, who would have told me the colour of the lake if I'd asked him, had gone the grey of a dishcloth, with the camera in his lap, and his mouth moving over his own name.
"Somebody went where my survey says nobody's been," I said. "That's all I'm saying. That's every word."
"Nobody's arguing—" said Ilan.
"You are. All three of you. Without opening your mouths." I got to my knees. My legs wobbled, and I let them. "I'll find out. I'll find out what I like. It's my cave, it was my wall, it's my—"
"Sabine," said Abe. "Love. Come away from the edge."
I came away from the edge.
We went back across the Ballroom in single file, the wire at our boots, the roar of the Junction behind us and the floor tilting slowly toward a lake I could not see. No one spoke. Corwin walked last, carrying a dead thing like a sick bird.
Hana looked up as we came in, at the four of us one after another, as she'd look at a tray that hasn't risen, and went back to her bag. Jory had not stirred. Abe sat down beside the phone and reached out and turned the lamp off, and the dark closed over us, and he said, to it, that Gwil had his level and that we'd all do better for a kip.
Nobody said they would. We lay down in our wet clothes in a ring.
I put my hand flat against my chest, over the book, and held it there.
When I shut my eyes the screen was still behind them, going grey, and in the grey the hand. Five fingers, spread. A smear below them where it had slid.