The Spindle

Chapter One: The Best Reader in the Low Line

The dead at kilometre thirteen forty came in three kinds, and Juno Farrant could tell them apart from fifty metres out.

There were the crush deaths, which came from the cable itself. Every few weeks a section of the old sheath let go, four hundred tonnes of laminate peeling off the spine and folding into whatever had built itself underneath. Those bodies came out flat and clean, and their prosthetics were usually intact, because the cores sat deep in the skull where the bone did its last honest work.

There were the brine deaths, from the channels that ran alongside the wreck where the flats had subsided. Those were bad. Salt got into everything and the contacts corroded, and you had a day, maybe two, before a core was nothing but a bead of grey glass with a stranger's whole life fused shut inside it.

And there were the thread-heads, who died sitting up.

The one in front of her now was a thread-head, and he had been sitting up for at least four days. He had wedged himself into a maintenance alcove on the cable's split flank, a hollow of shadow in the great rusted flank of the thing, and he had run his jack line into a bare stretch of aught-lattice where the sheath had worn through. His head was tipped back. His mouth was open. The line was still in his palm.

Juno crouched at the lip of the alcove and let her eyes adjust.

"Anybody know him?" she said.

Nobody answered, because nobody was there. It was an hour past first light and the flats were the colour of wet ash, and the only sound was the wind moving over four hundred kilometres of fallen rope.

She went in.

The man was maybe thirty. Thin in the way the flats made people thin, with the grey line of a cheap dermal jack running up the inside of his forearm. His fingers had curled. Juno had seen enough of them to know he had not been frightened at the end; the hum did not frighten people, that was the trouble with it. It gave them a warm room and a soft voice and then it took the top off their brain like a boiled egg.

She put two fingers against his jaw and turned his head. There, behind the ear: the little raised weal of a prosthetic port, home-fitted, done with a heated needle by someone who had watched a video about it.

"All right," she said. "Let's see what you kept."

The salvage crews would be along by noon. They came out from the yards at thirteen twenty in their converted haulers, and they took the metal and the meat and the water in the tanks and they did not care about cores, because cores were worth eleven marks apiece to a fence and it was not worth their time to dig. Juno's time was worth exactly that much. She had made her peace with it a long while ago, in the way you make peace with a wall.

She worked the port loose with a spreader and a warm blade. The core came out on the third pull, slick, no bigger than a fingernail, its casing scarred with the maker's grid. She wiped it on her sleeve and set it against the jack in her left palm.

This was the part she was good at. This was the part she was better at than anyone in the low line, and she had never once been able to explain how.

The contact took. There was the usual half-second of static that felt like putting your hand into cold water, and then the man's life came up under her fingers, not in order, not in words, but in weights.

He had loved a dog. That came first and strongest — a brindled, ugly, thick-shouldered thing that had slept against the back of his knees. He had loved a woman too but not as steadily. There was a room with a green wall. There was a long stretch of something that felt like hunger and shame twisted together, which was the year he had started threading. And under all of it, thin as a hair, there was somebody else in there. A field of yellow grass under a sky he had never stood beneath. A voice saying a name that was not his name.

Juno pulled her hand back.

The hum did that. It laid other people's leftovers in you like silt. Everybody at thirteen forty had a little of it — a dream in an accent you had never heard, a sudden certainty about the tuning of an engine you had never touched. It was the price of living on a computer four hundred kilometres long.

She put the core in the tin she kept in her coat and looked at the man's face for a moment, because it cost nothing.

"You had a good dog," she told him.

Then she went home.

***

Her workshop stood at kilometre thirteen forty on the north side, in the lee of a fallen strand-bundle that made a wall forty metres high and half a kilometre long. Somebody's grandparents had built the front of it out of hull plate. The back of it was the cable itself, and on cold nights you could put your hand flat on that wall and feel the hum come up through the plate like a cat purring under a blanket.

Milo was asleep at the bench.

He had his head on his arms among the tools, sixteen years old, all wrist and elbow, and there was a jack line coiled by his hand with the connector still damp. Juno stood in the doorway with the light behind her and looked at him for longer than she meant to.

"Milo."

He came up fast, the way he always did now, with his eyes doing that half-second of searching for the room.

"I wasn't—"

"You were."

"Only for a bit." He rubbed his face. His pupils were still wide. "Tibo found a clean patch out past the fifty marker. It's not even dirty lattice, it's proper coherent, it doesn't—"

"I pulled a boy out of an alcove this morning who found a clean patch," Juno said. "He'd been dead four days. He had a dog once."

Milo's jaw did the thing his mother's had done, a small sideways set, and Juno's chest went tight and unfair.

"I'm careful," he said.

"Everybody's careful."

"You thread."

"I read," she said. "That's not the same and you know it isn't. I take one dead person at a time, with a wall between me and the line. You put yourself in the open channel with your head unlatched and let two hundred years of other people's rubbish blow through you." She dropped the tin on the bench harder than she needed to. "There's a difference between drinking from a cup and lying down in the gutter with your mouth open."

"That's disgusting."

"It's meant to be."

He didn't laugh, but the corner of his mouth moved, which was as much as she got these days. He picked up the tin and shook it. "How many?"

"Nine since yesterday."

"Halkin'll only pay for seven."

"Halkin will pay for nine," Juno said, "because I'll tell him what's on them, and he doesn't get that from anybody else."

She filled the kettle from the condenser and set it on the ring. Out through the slot window the flats went on and on, grey to the horizon, and the cable lay across them like something shot out of the sky and left to rot — which was exactly what it was. Two hundred metres wide at the base here, sheath gone in long patches, the aught-lattice showing through in bands of dull silver that never quite stopped catching light even when there was no light to catch.

One hundred and ninety years ago there had been a tether. Forty thousand kilometres of it, anchored to the flats and strung up past the sky to a counterweight, and up and down it had gone the whole traffic of a world. Somebody had cut it. Nobody agreed on who. It had come down across a quarter of the planet in eleven minutes and made a scar you could see from orbit, and where it fell it killed a great many people and where it lay it fed a great many more, and now there were four hundred kilometres of inhabited wreck with a hundred thousand people in it, addressed not by streets but by the numbers still stencilled on the cable's own skin.

And at the far end of the flats, on a clear day, if you climbed up onto the spine and squinted west, you could see the last three hundred kilometres that had never come down at all.

The Standing Reach. Leaning like a mast in a gale, held up by the piece of counterweight that had stayed in the sky, so tall that its top was in a different weather than its bottom. Up there the old families lived in pressure terraces above the cloud. Two centuries old, some of them, so the stories went. Never sick. Never tired.

Juno had seen it every day of her life and had never once wanted to go.

"Auntie." Milo was still turning the tin over in his hands. "When I thread — sometimes I get somewhere nice."

"I know."

"There's a room with high windows. Real glass, not plate. And it's warm, and it's quiet, and there's a woman there who—" He stopped. "It's stupid."

The kettle started to tick.

"It's not stupid," Juno said. "It's just not yours."