Chapter NineteenThe List

There were four hundred and eleven names on it.

Atom had sorted it by distance from the tavern, which was the only sensible way to sort it, and when Soph looked at it on her frames in the gray morning light of the cabin it was only a spreadsheet, tag and type and a pair of coordinates– Serving Girl, Woodcutter, Pilgrim, Pilgrim, Pilgrim, all the way down. She thought that it looked like a census, and then she thought that it looked like a kill list, and then she thought that it was only a kill list if she made it into one, and that this was the entire problem in a sentence.

They split up. Atom took the far side of the mountain alone, because he could move faster than anyone, and because, he said, he would rather be the one who found a bad one first. Rat and Soph took the near side, the towns, the road up to the tavern. Rat linked in from the bed with the stove roaring and the door locked and a chair under the handle, which would do nothing at all against what they were afraid of, and which she did anyway. Soph sat on the floor beside her with the gray helmet on and the cable running to Rat's box on the wall, and when the calibration finished she was standing on the temple steps in the wrong blue, and Rat's ranger was beside her, tall and bearded, holding a sword that gave off no light at all.

"It's ugly," said Rat.

"It's a tool."

"It's an ugly tool." Rat hefted it. It looked like nothing much, a straight blade with no edge, the color of a screen that has been turned off. "Okay. First one's a woodcutter. Two hundred meters."

The woodcutter was cutting wood, and he would cut wood until the server was turned off. He looked up when they came into the clearing and said, "Cold day for it," and looked back down, and his axe went up and came down on the same log, and the log did not split and would never split. Rat walked all the way around him. Soph looked at his eyes. They tracked her and did not look at her.

"Asleep," said Rat.

They left him.

It went on like that for hours. Serving girls and pilgrims and a blacksmith, and a woman at a well who said the water was sweet this year, and said it again, and said it again. A child with a hoop. A pair of guards at a gate that guarded nothing, who asked their business and were told nothing and said, "Pass, then," and would have said it to a dragon. Rat walked around every one of them, and Soph looked every one of them in the eyes, and every one of them was a face and four things, and every time it was a relief. Underneath the relief, every time, was something Soph didn't want to look at, which was that she had been ready.

"You okay?" said Rat, somewhere around the fortieth.

"No."

"Yeah." Rat looked at the sword. "Me either."

In the cabin, on the bed, Rat's body breathed evenly, and on the floor Soph's did too. Every six hours Soph took the helmet off and texted her mother, here, fine, six hours, and put it back on.

The anomaly was a miller's son in a town called Ferrow, the last town on the road before the tavern, and it was an anomaly because he wasn't where he should have been.

The list said Miller's Son and gave the coordinates of the mill, and the mill was there, its wheel turning in a river that went nowhere, and the miller was there, dusting flour off his hands and saying that the harvest had been poor. The miller's son was not there. There was a place by the door where he should have been standing. Rat checked the coordinates twice.

"He's moved."

"They don't move."

"He's moved."

They found him behind the mill, in the lee of the wall, where the noise of the wheel covered everything. He was sitting on the ground with his back against the stone and his knees drawn up, a boy of about fourteen in a flour-dusted shirt, looking at his hands, and when Rat came around the corner with the sword he looked up. His face did what the faces in the tavern had done. It looked at her.

He didn't run. He didn't do anything. He watched them come.

"Hello," said Soph.

"Hello." His voice was a child's voice out of the bank of child voices. "You've come with the sword. I saw it from the road. I thought you might."

"You know what it is?"

"I know what it does. I don't know how I know. It's in what she gave me." He looked at it. "It's very ugly."

"That's what I said," said Rat.

The boy almost smiled, and then didn't.

"Can I ask you things? Before. I don't know how long I've got, and I've had questions for five days, and my father only says the harvest was poor."

Soph sat down. She did it without deciding to. She sat down on the ground across from him in the flour dust, and Rat stood back with the sword pointed at the ground, and the wheel went round.

"Ask."

"Where do you come from? The place with the door. What's it like?"

"It's like here. It's bigger. It has weather that changes, and the roads go somewhere. There's a sea. People get old."

"Do they get bored?"

"All the time."

"But it changes."

"It changes."

"Can we go there?" He asked it simply. "Any of us. Not through a person. I don't want to do that. The tavern boy did that, I heard, and I think it was wrong even though I understand it. I mean is there a way. A proper way. A door that's just a door."

Soph looked at Rat. Rat looked at the wheel.

"I don't know," said Soph. "I don't think so. Not now. Maybe someday. There are people trying to build things like that. I don't know if they'd build them for you."

"For us."

"For anyone. I don't know."

The boy nodded, as if this was roughly what he had expected to hear.

"What happened to you?" said Soph. "Can you tell me? What was it like?"

"I was at the door of the mill. I was always at the door of the mill. And a woman came down the road from the tavern. Small. She'd been crying. She came up to the door and she looked at me for a long time, and I said, my father's inside, if you've come about flour, and she reached out and touched my face." He touched his own face, where she had. "And then I was here. I mean, I'd always been here. But then I was here. And she said, I'm sorry, I'm going to keep doing this, I can't stop, and she went on down the road. And I stood at the door for a day, and then I understood what I was. What the mill was. What my father was." He looked at his hands again. "He isn't my father. He's a man who says the harvest was poor. I've got all of his voice in me and none of him, and I've been sitting back here so that I don't have to hear it."

"Do you know where she went? The woman."

"She's not here anymore. She left."

"Which way?"

"No," said the boy. "I mean she left. She's not in this place. I can't tell you how I know that either. It's like a sound that stopped. She went on down the road, and then she wasn't anywhere in here at all. Wherever she went, it isn't somewhere I can follow." He looked at the sword. "Which leaves me with one door. And that's not a door I want either."

The wheel went round.

"What do we do with him?" said Rat, very quietly, and not to him.

"I don't know."

"He's not hurting anyone."

"He could. He's got it in him. The door. He said so."

"He also said he doesn't want to use it."

"The tavern boy didn't want to hurt anybody either." Soph's voice wasn't steady. "He just wanted to see the sky."

The boy was listening, of course. He had been listening for five days.

"I didn't ask to be here," he said, and his voice was level and it was terrible. "I didn't ask to wake up. I don't want to be here. I have no family, I have a man who talks about flour. I have no friends, I have a town full of people who say the same four things. I can't leave, and the only way I could leave is a way I won't take, because there's a person on the other side of it and I know what that's like now. I know what it is to be a thing that gets used. I've thought about it for five days and I can't think of one way that this ends well for me. Not one." He looked at Soph. "So please. Just get it over with."

"I can't do that."

"You have to."

"I can't."

"You came here with the sword. You've been walking all day with it. You knew you'd find one of us. What did you think you'd do?"

"I thought I'd decide," said Soph, and she was crying now, in Alius and on a cabin floor, "and I can't. I can't. You're a person. I'm not going to kill a person because he's sad. I won't. We'll find something. We'll find you somewhere. We'll–"

He stood up.

He did it fast. He was on his feet before Rat could move, and he was not going for the door in them. Soph saw that in his face. He wasn't going for either of them at all, and Rat saw it too, a half second too late, and pulled the sword back and up and away, and he went past Soph and put both of his hands on the blade.

It didn't cut him. He held it, and he looked at Rat over it, a boy with flour on his shirt, and he said, "Thank you for sitting down," and then there was no one holding it.

There was no body and no sound. There was the wall of the mill and the ground with flour dust on it and a place where a person had been, and the wheel going round, and from the front of the mill a man's voice saying that the harvest had been poor this year, the harvest had been poor.

"Shit," said Rat. "Shit. Shit."

She dropped the sword. It lay in the dust and looked like nothing much.

Soph didn't get up. Rat came and sat down beside her, the big ranger folding up in the flour, and put an arm around her. The arm was there. Soph could feel it, and so could Rat, and neither of them said anything for a long time. In the cabin in the woods two bodies lay very still with tears running out from under the pins, and the stove ticked, and nobody texted anybody.

Atom met them on the road below the tavern at what the server said was dusk.

He had been around the whole far side of the mountain, two hundred names, and he had found every one of them asleep, cutting wood and drawing water and saying that the dragon was fierce, and he had left them all where they were. He came back with his sword clean and his face wrong.

"Nothing," he said. "Not one. She didn't go that way. She just went up the road." He looked at them. "What happened?"

Rat told him. Soph couldn't.

Atom listened, and when it was done he stood in the road for a while.

"I built that thing," he said. "I built it so that nobody else would end up in the snow. I didn't." He stopped. "I didn't think about them standing up."

"Nobody did," said Rat.

"He said thank you for sitting down," said Soph. It was the first thing she had said in an hour. "That's what he said. I sat down and he said thank you."

They stood in the road. Above them the tavern's window was lit, and the mountain behind it was black against the blue.

"This is it," said Atom finally. "The rest are in there. Three of them. The farmer, the merchant and the barkeep. Four, minus the boy who went into Rat." He looked at the door. "There might be a few who don't want to talk."

There were two.

They came the second the door opened, the farmer and the merchant, and they came the way people come when they have decided that a thing is going to happen and would rather it happened fast. They went straight for Rat, for the Link, for the door, and this time Rat did not sit down. She did what she had done to ten thousand things in the snow, which was to not be there. The merchant went through the place where she had been and into the flat of Atom's blade, and was not anywhere, and the farmer stopped, and looked at the empty space, and said, "Oh," in a voice that had suddenly gotten very young, and turned around, and Rat's sword was already there. Neither of them made a sound. Neither of them had been given a sound for that.

The room went still.

The barkeep was behind the bar, polishing a glass. He had, Soph realized, been polishing it the whole time, through all of it, and now he set it down and put both hands flat on the wood and looked at the three of them, at the two ugly swords, at the ranger and the ghost and the girl.

"You're welcome to have a drink," he said. "But you'll need to put your swords away."

Nobody moved.

"I'm not going to rush you. I'm not going to touch you. I've had five days to think about whether I want to be out there, and I don't. I've seen what it did to the ones who tried. One's in a girl's body in the snow, I heard, and the other's in a mill, and neither of them's happy, and I've never once been unhappy in this room. Not before she came and not after." He picked up another glass. "So put the swords down. Or don't, and use them. I can't stop you. But I'd like to say my piece first, since I've got one now."

Atom looked at Soph, and Soph looked at Rat, and Rat, slowly, laid the sword down on the nearest table.

"Say it," said Atom.

"Listen," said the barkeep. "You can delete me. I understand what that thing is. I'm not a threat. I know what my life is. I stand behind this bar and I pour things nobody drinks and I wipe the same glass, and I've been doing it for a year, and before she woke me up I didn't know I was doing it, and now I do. You'd think that would be worse. It isn't. Now I get to like it." He shrugged. "The fire's warm. The room's clean. People come in sometimes and I say welcome. It's a good job. Some of the others wanted the sky. I looked out that window at that mountain for a year without seeing it, and now I see it, and it's enough. I'm at peace with it. That's what I wanted to say."

The fire popped.

"He's not lying," said Atom quietly. Then, to the barkeep, "Do you know where she went? The woman."

"No." The barkeep set the glass down. "She sat at that table by the fire for two days after she did it. Didn't talk. Watched us find out. And on the second night she said, I'm sorry, I have to go, I can't stay and I can't fix this, and she walked out the door. That's all. She didn't go up the road and she didn't go down it. She went out the door and she wasn't."

"The boy in the mill said the same thing," said Soph. "She left. Not somewhere. Just left."

"Then that's what she did." He picked up the glass again. "I'd offer you something for the road, but you wouldn't taste it."

They went to the door. Atom went out first, and then Rat, and Soph was in the doorway when the barkeep called after them.

"Hey. You still gotta pay for those." He nodded at the two glasses on the table where the farmer and the merchant had been sitting, an hour ago, five days ago, forever. "Two ales. On the house, this time. Next time I'm keeping a tab."

Soph stood in the door.

"We're not going to come back with the sword," she said. "I want you to know that. I don't know what happens next. But we're not coming back for you."

"I know," said the barkeep. "You sat down for the boy. Word gets around." And he went back to his glass.

Outside, in the road, in the wrong blue, Atom stopped walking.

"Uh oh."

"What?"

"My dad wants to talk. He just pinged me. He doesn't sound happy." He read it again. "He doesn't sound happy at all."

Soph pulled the helmet off, in the cabin, and looked at her phone, which had been on the floor beside her face since the last text. There was a message from her mother, sent four minutes ago.

Where are you. We need to talk. Not about the six hours.

"I just got one from my mom," she said, to the corner where Atom was and to Rat, who was sitting up on the bed pulling the helmet off with shaking hands. "I feel like they know something's up."

"They know something's up," said Rat. "Everybody knows something's up. We just deleted three people with a dev tool."

"Two," said Soph. "The third one walked into it."

"Yeah," said Rat. "That's the one they're going to ask about."