Cinderborn

Chapter One: Shaft Eleven

The dust on Geharra had a taste. Teshin Grael had never known any other flavor, so for the first nineteen years of his life he assumed dust was what the world tasted like everywhere, on every world, in every mouth. Basalt grit and iron filings and the faint sweetness of lubricant burned off a piston head. It coated his tongue by the second hour of a shift and stayed there through sleep.

He was forty meters into the new expansion cut, braced against the tunnel wall, hammering the shoulder of a piston-drill into rock that had not moved in a hundred million years. The drill kicked. His arms absorbed it. That was what his arms were for.

Cinder bone was denser than Alloy bone by a factor of three. Teshin knew this the way he knew the color of the ceiling — as a fact handed down, unquestioned, printed on the medical card clipped inside his collar. Reinforced skeletal lattice. Expanded pulmonary volume. Elevated hemoglobin affinity. Reduced neural plasticity, index four. The last line had four words and a number and it described the inside of his head, and he had read it perhaps two thousand times without ever really being able to think about what it meant. That, he would learn much later, was the point.

"Grael." Pavan Ghoss's voice came flattened through the tunnel's bad acoustics. "Grael, come look at this."

"Working."

"Come look at this or I'm going to keep saying your name."

Teshin let the drill idle down. The silence afterward was never really silence; it was the low industrial breathing of the Shafts, the shudder of ventilation ducts, water somewhere, a distant conveyor. He wiped his face with his forearm, which only redistributed the dust, and walked back along the cut.

Pavan was crouched at the face where the crew had been working the southern branch. He was a stocky man of twenty-six with a broken nose that had healed crooked and a habit of humming when he was frightened. He was humming now.

"Listen," Pavan said, and rapped the rock with his knuckles.

Teshin heard it and felt the hair rise on his forearms.

Basalt didn't sound like that. Basalt gave you a dead thud, a sound with no future in it. This gave back a note. A hollowness behind it, a resonance, the particular tone of rock with air on the other side.

"Void," Teshin said.

"Void," Pavan agreed. "And we're at two-forty depth. There's nothing charted at two-forty. Nothing. I checked the map twice."

Other members of the crew drifted over — Kessa Ombre with her drill still slung, old Tibbet whose lungs whistled, the twins from Shaft Nine whose names Teshin could never keep separate. Somebody put a hand flat on the rock as if it might be warm.

"Gas pocket," Tibbet said. "Could be gas. Could be we all die in nine seconds."

"It's not gas." Teshin ran his palm across the face. The rock was smooth in a way that wasn't natural, and once he noticed it he couldn't stop noticing it. Fifteen years underground taught your hands things your mouth couldn't say. A natural fracture plane had grain to it, a direction, a history. This had none. This had been cut and then filled.

"Somebody sealed this," he said.

"Somebody sealed what?"

"That's the question."

Kessa laughed, one hard syllable. "We report it, Brune comes down and takes it, and we go back to hauling."

"So we don't report it," said Pavan.

"We don't report a void and it collapses and we're crushed, and the report writes itself in blood."

Teshin said nothing. He was looking at the rock and something in him had gone very still and very attentive, the way it did once or twice a year — a sensation like a door opening a finger's width somewhere behind his eyes. It never lasted. He'd learned to distrust it, because the thoughts that came through that gap were the kind of thoughts that got people taken away.

"Charge it," he said.

They charged it. Three shaped packs, low yield, angled to shear rather than shatter. Teshin set them himself because he was better at it than anyone in the crew, and nobody, including Teshin, ever wondered why a man with neural index four should be good at the geometry of directed blast.

They retreated ninety meters, crouched behind the ore sled, and Kessa turned the key.

The blast came up through Teshin's boots before it reached his ears. Dust rolled over them in a warm gray tide. He held his breath — Cinder lungs could go four minutes on a bad day, six on a good one — and when he opened his eyes the tunnel ahead had a mouth in it.

They went in with hand lamps.

The chamber was small. Perhaps six meters by four, ceiling low enough that Tibbet had to stoop. The walls had been sprayed with a sealant that had gone brittle and hung in curling flakes like dead skin. The air inside was dry and old and it smelled of nothing at all, which was itself extraordinary; every space in Geharra smelled of people.

And along one wall stood racks.

Metal racks, bolted to the stone, holding rows of cylinders about the size of a thumb joint, black, ridged, each seated in a socket with a dull contact plate. Teshin's lamp swept across them and stopped on a stamped emblem repeated at the head of every rack: a five-pointed star inside a ring of interlocked hands, and beneath it, in a typeface no one used anymore, three words.

COLONY VESSEL ASTERAND. SURVEY DIVISION. PRIMARY ARCHIVE.

Behind him Pavan whispered, "That's the ship."

"That's the ship," Teshin said. His mouth had gone dry past the dust.

Every child in the Shafts learned about the Asterand. It was on the wall of the crèche in a mural fifty years old: the great vessel arriving out of the dark, three hundred and four years ago, disgorging its colonists onto a moon with a poisoned surface and a merciful underground. In the mural the colonists were painted in three distinct colors — a bright gold Lume at the top of the composition with his arms spread, a silver Alloy holding a wrench, and at the bottom, kneeling, a broad-shouldered figure in cinder-gray holding a pick. The mural was titled *The Three Gifts*.

There were no cylinders in the mural. There was no archive.

Teshin took one step closer and the lamp caught something on the floor: a desk unit, folded flat, and beside it a stylus, and beside the stylus a plastic cup. A cup. Someone had stood here with a drink in their hand, three centuries ago, working, and then they had walked out and someone had filled the doorway with rock.

He reached out and lifted one of the cylinders from its socket. It came free with a small click, and there was a weight to it that felt entirely disproportionate to its size, the way a sealed letter feels heavier than paper.

"Put it back," said Kessa. She was standing in the mouth of the hole. Her voice had changed. "Teshin. Put it back and get out here. Somebody logged the blast."

Somebody always logged the blast. Seismic monitors ran through every stratum; that was safety, that was sensible, that was what they were told. Teshin heard, far off, the whine of a rail-cart on the spur line and the specific two-tone chime of a security escort.

Afterward he could never say precisely why he did what he did next. It felt less like a decision than like a reflex he hadn't known he owned. He turned his back to the doorway, brought the cylinder to his lips, and slipped it between his back molars, sideways, seated along the gumline where a wad of chew-leaf would go. Cinder enamel was as dense as Cinder bone. He clamped down carefully and felt the casing hold.

Then he stepped out into the tunnel and put his hands where they could be seen.

Mettik Brune arrived four minutes later.

The overseer of Shaft Eleven was Alloy caste, a narrow man with a long jaw and pale lashes and a stiff-collared coat he never dirtied. He carried a shock-baton he did not need, since the four Spire security troopers behind him carried rifles. Brune walked into the tunnel the way a man walks into a room he owns, looked once at the hole in the rock face, and something happened in his expression that Teshin would think about for weeks. It wasn't surprise. It was recognition, and then a fast careful flattening.

"Names," Brune said.

They gave their names. He didn't write them down.

He went inside with two troopers and a portable lamp. He was in there eleven minutes. The crew stood in the tunnel with the dust settling on their shoulders, and Teshin breathed slow through his nose and tried to make his tongue forget that there was a foreign object in his mouth.

When Brune came out, the troopers were carrying the racks. All of them, stripped from the wall, cylinders and sockets together, loaded into two hard cases. Brune had the folded desk unit under his arm. He stood in front of the crew and produced a smile that had nothing behind it.

"You've found a natural formation," he said. "A gas-bubble cavity, sealed by a mineral intrusion. Interesting geologically. Worthless otherwise. It is being sampled and will be backfilled tonight."

Nobody said anything.

"There was writing on the wall," Pavan said.

Teshin closed his eyes.

Brune turned. "Say that again."

"Writing." Pavan's chin came up. He was a good man and a stupidly brave one. "The ship's name. There were data cores in there. I've hauled ore for eleven years, sir, I know what a gas bubble looks like, and gas bubbles don't have—"

The baton took him across the side of the head before he finished the sentence.

Pavan went down. He got a hand up and Brune hit that too, and then he hit him again, in the ribs, in the back, in the ribs, and the sound was not dramatic, just wet and repetitive, and Kessa made a noise and Teshin's whole body went forward one half-step before the nearest rifle came up level with his chest.

He stopped. He stood there and he watched. He would remember standing there.

When Brune was finished he was breathing harder than the work warranted. He straightened his collar. Pavan lay curled and twitching, blood running from his ear into the dust and making little dark beads.

"Ghoss will recover," Brune said pleasantly. "He's built for it. That's the beauty of you people; you can be corrected without being wasted." He surveyed them. "For the disruption of scheduled output and for spreading unfounded claims, this crew's oxygen ration is docked twenty percent for eleven days. All eleven of you. Ration cards will be updated within the hour."

Twenty percent for eleven days. Teshin did the arithmetic without meaning to and felt the shape of it: headaches by day two, nosebleeds by day four, and old Tibbet with his whistling lungs would be in the medical bay by day six and would probably not come out.

"Sir," said Kessa, very carefully. "Tibbet's sixty-one."

"Then Tibbet should have taught you all better," Brune said, and walked out.

They carried Pavan to the crèche clinic on a cargo pallet. Teshin took a corner and did not speak the entire way, because he could not open his mouth, and because if he had been able to, he was not sure what would have come out of it.

Home, for a Cinder, meant a berth: a rectangular alcove in a stack of nine, curtained, one meter twenty of ceiling, a locker, a light. Teshin's stack was in Warren D of the Eleventh Shaft dormitory, four hundred berths breathing in the same recycled air. He did not go to his berth.

He went two levels down and one arm over, through a passage that flooded when the sumps backed up, to a door with a hand-lettered sign that read DREN — TOOL REPAIR, NO CREDIT.

Orsha Dren was seventy-four years old and had worked the rock for fifty-one of them. She was small now, folded in on herself, hands like knots of wire. Cinder bodies aged strangely: the skeleton lasted, everything else surrendered. She opened the door with a spanner in her fist, looked at his face, and stepped aside.

Teshin closed the door and spat the core into his palm. It came out slick and warm.

Orsha looked at it for a long moment without touching it.

"Where," she said.

"Two-forty depth. Sealed chamber, walled off with three meters of infill. There were sixty, seventy of these. Brune took the rest and called it a gas bubble." His voice was shaking and he hated it. "They had the ship's mark on them, Orsha. The *Asterand*. Survey Division."

Orsha Dren sat down slowly on her work stool. Then she began, quietly, to laugh, and the laugh turned into a cough, and the cough went on long enough that Teshin had to fetch her the water cup.

"Fifty-one years," she said when she had breath. "Fifty-one years I have been telling children a story that everyone agreed was a lie. Including, some nights, me." She wiped her mouth. "Bar the door, boy. And then help me move the bench."

Under the bench, under a plate of decking she had cut and refitted herself decades ago, wrapped in three layers of static cloth, was a machine.

It was old. It had the fat, rounded look of pre-collapse fabrication, and a lens turret, and a screen the size of two hands. Orsha unwrapped it with the tenderness of someone handling a sleeping infant.

"Optical archive reader," she said. "Salvaged from a scrap consignment in the year I turned twenty-three. Everyone assumed it was a ventilation regulator. I let them." She looked up at him and her eyes were wet and hard. "Sit down, Teshin. You'll want to be sitting."