A watch is two people sitting in the dark, not talking, between the sleepers and everything else.
Abe had set it at what Hana's watch said was half past three on Monday morning, and I'd said I'd do the first one, and he hadn't argued. Ilan had said the same, quickly, a second later. So the pair of us sat on a slab at the edge of the boulders with our backs to the sleeping and our faces to the Ballroom, with one lamp on the gravel between our boots turned down to its lowest setting, a dull orange coal.
It made a ring about as wide as a dinner plate. Past it, the dark was not the dark of the Pantry. That had been a cupboard. This was a cathedral with no walls, and I'd drawn it myself, on a piece of paper, in a warm hut, with a flask.
Behind us the others slept. Hana whistled softly through her nose. Odalys, in the hollow, had a tiny click at the top of each breath, that I'd lain listening to for three nights without knowing what it was.
I'd spent the whole day wanting to say something, and I didn't know what. It had been going round in me since Corwin's hands.
"I told the inquest I'd rechecked the loop," I said.
Ilan didn't move.
"In 2019. Milo's. I stood up in a witness box in a skirt and said I'd gone back and checked the numbers. I never went back and checked the numbers."
It was out. It lay on the gravel between us, next to the lamp, plain as a boot.
I waited for the doctor. I knew exactly what the doctor would do. He'd tell me about stress, and tiredness, and the fallibility of memory, and how the brain assembles a version it can live in. Fast and kind and wrong. I had the whole sentence ready to hate.
He said nothing.
He sat there with his hands between his knees, breathing through his mouth, which is what he does when he doesn't know what to do. The little lamp made a hollow of each of his eyes. I heard him start to say something and stop, once.
That was all. He reached in his pack and found the water bottle and passed it to me, and I drank. I don't know how long we sat. It didn't make anything better. It didn't make it worse. The lamp went on burning its small orange hole.
It was the phone that did it.
It sat on its flat rock in the hollow, a hand's reach from Hana's head, with the green wire running away along the wall into the dark. I'd been looking at it for an hour. It was the only thing in that room that had a voice in it that wasn't one of ours.
I went and picked it up.
"Sabine," said Ilan, low. "Abe said—"
I turned the handle, and the little wasp went buzzing off down its wire. It rang for longer than I wanted. Then a click, and a hiss, and a voice, small and polite and tired, rolled round like a stone in a tin.
"Black Rigg Control, Gwil Pryce speaking. Is that Camp One?"
"It's Sabine Tull. It's Sabine."
"Good morning, Sabine. Whenever you're ready."
"Teo's alive."
The line hissed.
"Teo Haddow. The one on your list. He's alive, Gwil, he answered his name. At the Junction, last night. We were doing the names, and he said it. Teo. From the dark. He's alive and he's in here with us."
"Thank you, Sabine," said Gwil. He was a very gentle man. He wrote it down, I could hear a pencil. "Can I check I've got that? You're saying that Mr Haddow, who was lost at the Toll, answered a roll-call at the Junction. Is that correct?"
"Yes."
"Say again, please? Your last."
"He answered. He's alive."
"I see." Pencil. "And are you yourself hurt, Sabine? Are you warm? Have you got a headache?"
I opened my mouth, and every word I had was the wrong one.
A big hand came out of the dark and closed over mine on the handset. Not hard. Abe was crouched beside me, with his hair on end and his boots off, as warm and solid as a stove.
"Gwil," he said. "It's Abe. Let me."
I let him. I sat back on my heels with my hands empty, shaking so that I tucked them under my knees.
"I'm sorry, Gwil. She's had a night." A pause. Gwil's voice, a murmur. "Yes. Yes. We did all hear something. That much is so. Seven of us, and a voice, and we couldn't tell you what it was." He listened. His face, in the coal of the lamp, did something I won't describe. "No. I don't. No."
Gwil's murmur went on for some time. I caught pieces. Carbon dioxide. Not unusual. Logged as possible hallucination. Stay put. Stay high. And then, quite clearly: "Nobody can reach you until the water falls, Mr Ostler, I do have to be honest, we're talking days. Is Dr Sarkis there? Might I have a word?"
Abe held out the handset.
Ilan took it as if it were hot. He didn't look at me. He put it to his ear and said, "Gwil. Yes." Then, a long way into a sentence: "No, it's absolutely consistent. We tested it, at the Junction, a lighter, the flame died at the knee. There's CO2 pooling low where the flood's shoved the air about. A headache, fast breathing, an auditory, a voice. Yes. Yes. Textbook. I agree. I'm afraid I do agree."
He handed it back to Abe. I watched him do it, and something in my chest went that I didn't have a name for.
"Traitor," I said.
"Sabine," said Ilan. "I'd rather it was the air."
"I know you would."
Abe said copy and put the handset in its cradle, and the line gave a last small hiss and was quiet. Nobody spoke. I got up and walked to the edge of the lamp and stood with my back to all of them, shaking.
Abe woke them all. I think he couldn't bear to have it said to half.
We sat in a ring on the stones with the lamp in the middle at its lowest, and Hana wiped her face with both hands and said "Is it morning?" and nobody told her. It was half past four. It might have been half past four anywhere.
"Where are we," said Abe. "Say it plain, and then we'll say what we do."
"Fourteen bags," said Hana. "Seven mouths. Two days."
"Gwil says days."
"Two days is days." She had her sack between her knees, and she looked at it as if it owed her money. "Two days. Not a week. If somebody's been at it, less."
"Somebody isn't," said Ilan.
"Two days," said Hana.
"Then we sit tight and ration," said Abe, "and the water falls."
"The water's not falling."
It was Odalys. She hadn't lifted her head. She lay on her back in the stiff orange sheet with her eyes on the roof, as though the roof were a gauge.
"Listen," she said. "Not the Flue. Behind you. The Mere."
We listened. It was there. I'd thought it was my pulse. Down the tilted floor of the Ballroom, in the black, a small steady sound like a tap left running in the next flat. Drip and trickle, drip and trickle, but under it something else, a slow wet pressing against rock.
"It was a trickle on shingle when we came up," said Odalys. "Now it's against rock. It's up a hand since then, I can hear where it sits. It's not the stream and it's not the Toll. It's got its own inflow, it fills from underneath, and it'll go on filling whatever anybody does about the Toll." She turned her head. "A hand an hour. More, after midnight."
"After midnight," said Abe. "It's morning."
"After the next one, then."
"You can't tell that from—"
"Yes, I can," said Odalys. "Put a boot in it when you next go down."
I'd been waiting for somebody to say it. I'd been waiting for a whole night and a day, and nobody had, so I said it.
"Then we don't sit."
"Sabine—"
"We don't sit in a room that fills up. We go. There's a way out of here that's not the Flue, and the Toll, and the Streamway." I didn't look at the lamp. I looked at Abe. "There's the Letterbox."
"Love."
"There's a slot in the far wall, forty centimetres, four metres long, and an aven behind it. I surveyed it. I put 'not pushed' on my own map, and 'unclimbed' on the shaft, and somebody has now put a hand on the wall under it. Somebody pushed it. It goes somewhere."
"Across thirty metres of black water," said Jory.
She was sitting with her gloves on her thighs. She didn't sound unkind.
"There's a shore ledge. In normal water you can walk it."
"This isn't normal water."
"No. That's why I'm saying it."
"A slot forty centimetres high," said Ilan, "with a splinted ankle, in a stretcher, up nine metres of wall—"
"I know. I know all the problems. I've just not got one that's got a door in it."
I looked round them. I hadn't expected anything. Hana had her eyes on her sack. Corwin had his on the dead camera. Ilan had his hand on his mouth.
Abe sat for ages with his hand pressed on his knee.
"A look," he said. "That's all. When we've slept. You go and take a look at the water and the ledge and the slot, nobody goes in it, nobody touches it, you come back and you tell me what you saw. Corwin goes with you, because nobody goes near that water alone. Two lamps. Back in two hours, not a minute over."
"Abe—" said Ilan.
"A look, Ilan."
It was the nearest I'd had to a yes, and it was Abe's yes, which was always a no that had been talked into something. I'd have taken it from the devil.
"Sleep," said Abe, and the lamp went out.
Jory lay down beside me in the dark with her back to the wall. Something nudged my hand: a square of Hana's oat slab, wrapped in its torn bag, from her own pocket. "Eat."
"I'm not hungry."
"Eat anyway."
I ate it. It tasted of cardboard and syrup, and she listened to me chew until it was gone.
"You said go at once," she said. "In the Pantry. You said go now." Ages went by. The Mere dripped. "Should have listened."
That was all of it. It was all I was going to get, so I took it, and lay there with it, and the rest of them slept, or pretended to. Corwin and I took the last watch, because we were awake already, and because nobody wanted either of us near a sleeper's head.
I don't know what time it was when I stopped being able to listen to Odalys's click.
We sat now on a long rock by the phone, Corwin and I, with the lamp off altogether, because Abe's rule was that a watch could do its work with its ears. In the dark Corwin breathed through his nose in small, careful sniffs, bracing to apologise. He had his dead camera in his lap. I heard him pick at its strap.
Under everything there was the hum.
I'd had it in the Pantry, and lost it at the Junction, in the roar. Up here it had come back. It wasn't a sound so much as a pressure in the bones, a long low note in the stone, very far off, like a big animal asleep in the next county.
"Do you hear that?" said Corwin, in a voice no bigger than a thread.
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to." A pause. "It doesn't mean anything. It's just the rock."
He was quiet for a bit. He was working up to it, I could hear, a small dry cough at the bottom of every breath.
"Sabine. The card. I only want to say, I didn't know it'd, that it would come to—"
"Not now, Corwin."
"No. Sorry. No."
I didn't answer. I picked up the handset.
I wanted somebody who thought I was a person. I wanted to hear a man say Say again, please in a patient Welsh voice and write down my name. The phone sat at my feet on its flat rock with the green wire running away, and I held it to my ear, and turned the handle.
Nothing buzzed.
I turned it again. I held it hard to my ear, and I listened for the hiss.
A line has a sound. You don't know it until it's gone, but a live wire hisses, faintly, like a shell held up to your face. This had nothing. It was flat. It was a blind, blank, empty silence, a shell with the sea gone out of it.
"Corwin."
"Mm?"
"It's dead."
"It can't be. It's a, it was a, Gwil was only—"
"Listen to it."
He put his ear to the other side of the handset, a head's length from mine, so close I could smell the damp wool of his hood, and he listened. I felt him go quite stiff.
"Oh," he said.
I'd turned my head to say something, and I looked up, across the black width of the Ballroom, over the tilted floor, down toward the end where the room dropped away to the beach and the water.
There was a light.
It was small. It was at about the height of my own head, a long way off, across the dark. Not the flat white of ours. Yellow. A warm, soft, steady, old-fashioned yellow, the colour of a bulb in a kitchen window at night. The sort of light that comes from a filament, not a chip. I'd seen that light before. I'd seen it on a helmet in the Pantry, and behind me in the Crawl, a glow on the wet.
It didn't move. It didn't bob, as a lamp does on somebody walking. It hung there at head height, perfectly level, perfectly still, as though somebody were standing with their face to us and a lamp on their forehead, waiting to be seen.
"Sabine," said Corwin, in a whisper. "Sabine, is that—"
I was up. I don't know when. I was on my feet with the handset swinging and my voice coming out of me in a scream that went across the whole room.
"Teo!"
It rang off the roof. It rang off the far wall, a long way off, and came back, and went again.
The yellow light went out.
It didn't flicker. It didn't dip. It went, like a thumb on a switch, and the dark stood where it had been.
"Teo!"
Nothing came back. No answer, no scrape, no breath. Corwin's hand had found my sleeve and was holding it with both of his. Behind us, in the ring of boulders, Hana woke and said "What?" in a thick voice, and Jory said "Shh." I stood there with the dead handset against my chest, and the hum went on in my bones, and the water at the foot of the room went on talking to itself in the dark.