Read a preview
Chapter 1
Chapter One: Nine Years of Grey
The cough woke her before the shift bells did.
Romy Hume lay still in the dark of the sleeping niche and counted, because counting was the only useful thing she could do at that hour. Four short barks. A pause. Then the long one, the one that sounded like a rag being dragged over gravel, that went on until Adam ran out of air and had to start again.
She slid off the shelf-bed and crossed the two steps of floor to his.
"Sit up," she said. "Come on. Up."
He was eleven and light as a bundle of pipe cladding. She got an arm behind his shoulders and hauled him upright, and he folded forward over his own knees and coughed until his eyes streamed. She rubbed slow circles between his shoulder blades and looked at the allowance meter on the wall, because there was nowhere else to look.
The meter was a brass dial the size of her palm, with a needle and a seal from the Air Office. It said four hours and ten minutes.
That was what the household had left for the day. Four hours and ten minutes of clarified air, piped from the Bellows through a finger-thick line into their room, out of a nozzle the size of a thumbnail. The rest of the day they breathed what Gallery Nine breathed — mixed air, two parts scrubbed to one part raw, warm from the machine and tasting faintly of hot iron and something underneath the iron, something sharp and mineral, like a struck match held too close.
The mixed air was survivable. The Air Office said so. A healthy adult could live sixty years on it, and most vent-hands did, if the galleries didn't take them first.
Adam was not a healthy adult.
"Ten minutes," Romy said, and reached over and turned the valve.
"Don't." His voice came out in pieces. "Save it. For the shift."
"Ten minutes."
The nozzle hissed. Clarified air had no smell at all, which was the strangest thing about it, and the most expensive. Adam put his face into the thin cold stream and breathed, and Romy watched his shoulders come down out of their hunch, one notch at a time, the way a fist unclenches.
The needle on the dial crept backwards. Four hours. Three fifty-five. Three fifty.
She turned it off at three forty-eight and told herself she'd only gone two minutes over.
"Better?"
"Yeah." He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. In the dim standing-light his skin had the grey undertone that everyone in the gallery tiers had and nobody mentioned, ash worked into the living layer, the mark of breathing what they breathed. On Adam it was worse. On Adam it looked like something had been drawn out of him and never put back.
"Six days," he said.
"I know how many days it is."
"I'm just saying."
"I know." She got up and started dressing, because the shift bells would go in twenty minutes and she had a hundred and twelve stairs to climb. "Go back to sleep."
"Romy." He was sitting up properly now, arms around his shins. "If you make clerk, they move us up a tier, don't they? Clerks get six hours."
"Six and a half."
"Six and a half," he repeated, like a prayer he'd learned phonetically.
She pulled her work coat off the hook. "Sleep."
*
Sennet was a city cut sideways into the flank of a mountain, and it was easiest to understand if you thought of it as a lung lying on its side.
At the bottom and out at the edges were the galleries — long horizontal cuts in the rock where the Bellows' heat pipes ran, where the vent-hands worked, where the air came out mixed and the walls sweated and everything you owned eventually turned the colour of a wet cinder. Above and inward were the middle tiers, the fuel tiers and the market tiers, better sealed, better lit. And at the top, deep in, behind nine sets of pressure doors that sighed when they opened, were the Sealed: the offices, the Council, the physiology wing, the families who had breathed clarified air for so many generations that their children were born pink.
And underneath all of it, in a chamber no one in Romy's tier had ever seen, the Bellows worked.
The founders had built it. That was all anyone could tell you. It was four hundred years old and it drew in the planet's own air — raw Vesh air, which burned the throat and greyed the skin and killed an unprotected adult in under an hour, faster if they panicked and ran — and it stripped it and cooked it and gave back something a human being could live on. The founders had left no drawings. They had left the machine, and a governing Council to allocate what it produced, and a phrase carved above the fourth gate that Romy had seen exactly once, on a school walk when she was nine: WE MADE THIS AIR FOR YOU.
Her mother used to say that the founders should have made a bit more of it.
Her mother had walked out into a dust season nine years ago and had not come back.
*
Romy's shift was in the heat galleries, checking clamp pressure on the return lines. It was not skilled work. It was the work you got at seventeen if your household standing was low and your mother had exited the population rolls under the notation ABSENT, PRESUMED OUTSIDE.
Rulf Bekker, the gallery foreman, fell into step beside her on the walkway an hour in. He was fifty and had the vent-hand's barrel chest and the vent-hand's permanent squint.
"Measure's Fourthday," he said.
"It is."
"You eating?"
"Enough."
"Eat more. They weigh you first, it goes into the calculation." He scratched his jaw. "Don't run the stairs the day before, either. And don't let them rush you into the booth cold. Sit in the corridor five minutes, breathe slow, settle your heart down."
Romy checked a clamp and wrote the number in her book. "You've given this speech before."
"Thirty-one years of it." Bekker leaned on the rail. Below them, the return lines went off into the dark like the ribs of something enormous. "What are you hoping for?"
"Two minutes," she said. "Clerk grade."
"Modest."
"Realistic." She moved to the next clamp. "Ma was eight and a half. They offered her Outrider and she turned it down, and they cut the household rating for refusal, and that's why we're down here. I'm not expecting eight."
Bekker was quiet for a moment. Everyone in Gallery Nine went quiet in the same place, when the subject of Sabine Hume came up.
"Eleven makes Outrider," he said at last.
"Eleven makes a corpse in fifteen years."
"Eleven makes a corpse in fifteen years with a household allowance of nine hours a day," Bekker said, "and a brother who's still alive at the end of it."
Romy didn't answer, because there wasn't an answer, and because he had said out loud the thing she had been circling for a month.
*
The Measure was the same for everyone, which was the part Sennet was proudest of.
At seventeen you went to the physiology wing and sat in a sealed booth, and they bled raw air in by degrees — a percent, then five, then twenty, then all of it — and they counted your minutes. Not how long you could hold your breath. How long you could *breathe it* before your body began to fail: throat closing, eyes streaming, blood oxygen sliding, the grey coming up in your skin like a bruise arriving early.
Two minutes made you a clerk. Four made you a supervisor. Seven put you in the fuel tiers.
Eleven made you an Outrider: half-mask, open sky, the ones who went out to keep the Bellows' intakes clear and to harvest the tolerant crops in the terraces below the seals. Outriders were paid in air. Outriders were honoured. Outriders were dead by forty, with lungs like scorched paper, and everyone knew it and everyone applauded them anyway.
Below two minutes there was no grade at all. Below two minutes you were *frail*, and your household allowance was set by pity, and pity in Sennet was metered in ten-minute increments.
Adam had been tested early, at seven, because of the coughing. The clinic had bled in raw air at four percent and he had lasted nineteen seconds before his throat shut.
His allowance was calculated against household standing. Household standing was set by the highest Measure in the household. There was no other lever. There was no appeal, no purchase, no route around it; the Air Office had been very clear on all three occasions Romy had gone and asked.
So there were six days, and then there was a booth, and then there was the rest of Adam's life.
*
On the way home she took the long way, through the maintenance seam behind Gallery Seven, where there was a window.
It was not a real window. It was a ten-centimetre disc of founders' glass set into the seal wall, greasy with four hundred years of somebody's breath, at the end of a dead-end passage that smelled of rust. But it looked out.
Romy put her eye to it.
The plain went out from the foot of the mountain in long low folds, the colour of an old coin. There were lichen fields where the Outriders farmed, stitched out in rectangles. Beyond them, nothing much: dust, stone, the thin bright thread of a dry river. The sky was a pale hard green that evening, which meant wind.
She had looked through this window every week since she was eight years old, and every week she had thought the same two things, in the same order.
The first was: *that is what killed her.*
The second, which she had never said out loud to anyone, not to Adam, not to Bekker, not to the counsellor the school had made her see: *it doesn't look like it wants to kill anybody.*
It looked like a place. It looked, appallingly, like somewhere you could walk.
Romy put her forehead against the cold seal wall for a moment, and then went home to make her brother eat.
