The family quarters were against the eastern wall.
Not the eastern wall's good section — the section that the wind found first when the wind came down from the northeast in the winter, the section where the corrugated metal had been bolted on later than the rest because the original wall had been shorter and the settlement's growth had required extending it. The extension had been done with the materials available, which had not been the materials anyone would have chosen. The clay seal in the seam above the door had been repacked four times since the family had moved into the quarters. Sigurd's father had repacked it the last two. He repacked it again now, in the spring evening, kneeling at the seam with the small spade and the bucket of clay slurry he had carried from the creek and the focused patience of a man who had done this work enough times that the doing of it required no part of his attention beyond the part that needed to be there.
His mother was at the small table inside the quarters with the mending.
Sigurd watched his father from the doorway. He had finished the water route an hour ago. The yoke was on its peg. The skins were drying. He had eaten what the cooking area had been distributing at that hour, which had been the second portion — the one that came after the first portion that the security man and the older fighters and the children Pruitt had designated as worth feeding well were given. He was not hungry. He was not full. He had eaten what he had been given and had returned to the quarters and was now at the doorway watching his father work the seam.
His father did not look up. He felt Sigurd in the doorway the way he felt most things, which was without requiring his eyes to confirm what his other awareness had already delivered. He kept packing the clay. He said: "The seam is going to need a new strip of metal soon. The flashing has worked itself loose where the bolt holes are."
Sigurd said: "The third bolt from the top."
His father's hands did not stop. He looked up briefly at the seam. He looked at the bolt his son had named. He looked at the bolt above it and the bolt below it. He went back to his work. He said: "Yes. The third one." He kept packing. "How did you see that from over there."
Sigurd looked at the seam. He did not have a good answer. He had not seen the bolt from the doorway. He had felt the seam through the wall when he came through the gate from the cooking area — the small movement of metal that was no longer fully held, the specific frequency of a fastener that had been working itself out of its hole for long enough that the hole was now larger than the fastener and the seam was carrying the wind's load through three bolts that should have been four. He did not have the language for any of that. He had the information.
He said: "I just did."
His father looked up at him. The full look this time, the assessment that his father gave Sigurd sometimes when the small things Sigurd said added up to something his father was filing without yet deciding what the filing meant. His father was a careful man. He had been a careful man before the Shroud and the Shroud had not changed the carefulness, it had only changed what the carefulness was for. He was a journeyman pipefitter from a town outside Portland that no longer existed. He had walked east when the coast went under with Sigurd's mother and Sigurd, who had been a small child then. The walking had taken six months. He had not lost the carefulness in the six months. He had refined it.
He said: "Come help me with the slurry."
Sigurd came. He crouched beside the bucket. He picked up the small wooden paddle and stirred the clay slurry at the consistency his father liked — thick enough to hold the seam, thin enough to work into the gaps the wind had made. His father put the spade into the bucket and pulled out a working portion and went back to the seam. Sigurd watched him work it into the gap above the bolt and around the loosened head and felt the seam through the wall again with the same awareness he had felt it from the doorway. The bolt's hold was three years from going completely. The flashing was eighteen months. The seam itself was good for another five if the bolts were addressed before they fully gave.
His mother came to the doorway. She had the mending in her hands — his father's work shirt, the cuff worn through, her needle making the small careful stitches she had been making since before the Shroud. She watched the two of them work. She watched her son crouching beside the bucket with the wooden paddle and the focused attention he brought to everything he did. She did not say anything because there was nothing to say. She had a quiet woman's understanding of when speaking added something and when speaking did not, and she had stopped using words when they did not add something a long time ago.
His father finished the seam. He stood. He put the spade in the bucket. He looked at the wall. He nodded once at his work. He looked at his son.
Sigurd looked at the bucket. He looked at his father. He said: "I want to learn how to do that."
His father looked at him. He said: "The clay work."
"The repairs," Sigurd said. He paused. The thinking had been moving in him for weeks and had not yet found the words and was finding them now in front of his father in the spring evening with the bucket of slurry between them. "All of them. The walls and the seams and the way you check the roof in the summer for the next year's rain. The forge work too if Walt will let me." He looked at the seam. He looked at his father. "I want to do work that people pay for."
His father was quiet. He looked at his son. He looked at his wife in the doorway. His wife looked at Sigurd with the look she had for him when he said things that were larger than what an eight-year-old should be saying and that she had been waiting for and that she was not going to interrupt.
His father said: "Why."
Sigurd looked at the bucket. He thought about how to say it. He was a careful child — his father's child in this — and he wanted to say the thing correctly because saying it incorrectly would mean saying something less than what he meant. He said: "I see how the cooking area gives food." He paused. "There's first portion. There's second portion. The first portion goes to certain people. We always get second portion." He paused. "I don't mind second portion. I'm not hungry." He looked at his father. "But I see it." He paused. "I see how the security man talks to the first-portion fighters and how he talks to the people who carry water." He paused. "I see how Mr. Pruitt looks at us from the elevator." He looked at the bucket. "I don't mind any of it. But I see it. And I want to do work that changes which portion we get."
His father was quiet for a long time. His mother in the doorway had her needle in the cuff and had stopped moving the needle. The spring evening held its quality outside the quarters — the smell of the creek somewhere east of the wall, the distant sound of the security man working the older boys through the late session, the wind in the corrugated metal of the wall section that had been replaced last year.
His father said: "I know you see it."
He said it the way his father said true things. Not with any heaviness. With the flat acknowledgment of someone confirming what had already been observed.
He said: "Your mother sees it. I see it. We have not talked about it with you because there was nothing for an eight-year-old to do with the seeing." He paused. "But you are eight years old and you see it and you have said you see it. So we will talk about it now."
He sat down on the bucket's wooden cover. He put his hands on his knees. He looked at his son. He said: "The way the settlement is arranged is not the way it has to be arranged. It is the way the man at the top of the elevator has arranged it. Mr. Pruitt put people where they are when we arrived. He put us where we are because we arrived with nothing and could carry things and could fix things and that was useful to him. The tier is not because of who we are. It is because of when we arrived and what we had with us."
Sigurd looked at the bucket. He listened.
His father said: "Your mother and I have been here for six years. We will be here for six more years if we do nothing different. The tier will not change unless we do something different. Carrying water and fixing seams will not move us. The settlement needs both done and pays for both with the second portion. The settlement has decided what those jobs are worth and the deciding is not coming back open." He paused. "The work that pays for the first portion is different work. The work the forge produces. The work that the security man's fighters do. The work the people in the elevator's middle floors do."
Sigurd said: "I want to do that work."
His father said: "I know."
He looked at his son. He looked at the seam he had just finished. He looked at his wife in the doorway. He looked at his hands.
He said: "Walt has been letting you sharpen tools at the bench in the mornings."
Sigurd said: "Yes."
His father said: "Has Walt said anything to you about the sharpening."
Sigurd thought about it. Walt had said small things at the bench in the way Walt said things, which was sparingly and only when the saying produced something useful for what was happening at the bench. He had said the angle of the stone was correct without being told. He had said the boy's wrist knew where the edge wanted to be before the boy did. He had said: you handle iron like it's part of your own arm. Sigurd looked at his father. He told him what Walt had said.
His father looked at the seam. He looked at his wife. His wife had her needle in the cuff and had not yet returned to the stitching. She looked at her husband. He looked back at her. Something passed between them — not words, the longer kind of communication that they had developed across years of doing this together. She nodded slightly. He nodded back.
He looked at his son. He said: "Then ask Walt for more bench time."
Sigurd looked at him. He had not expected this. He had expected a longer conversation about the limits of what an eight-year-old could ask for. He looked at the bucket. He looked at his father. He said: "Walt has bench time set already. The schedule is what the schedule is."
His father said: "Ask anyway. Walt arranges his bench the way he wants it arranged. If Walt wanted you on the bench more he would put you on it. If Walt does not want you on it more he will tell you no and then you will know. But you cannot know unless you ask." He paused. "And while you are asking — ask him to teach you something specific each time. Not just sharpening. The next thing. Whatever he thinks the next thing is. Walt has been keeping that forge alive for forty years. He knows what the next thing should be."
Sigurd looked at the bucket. He thought about the bench. He thought about the test piece Walt had let him hold at the end of the last session — the small bracket Walt had shaped with the apprentice's hammer, the angles correct, the weight distribution right in his hand the way the angle of the stone had been right under his thumb. He had not said anything to Walt about how the bracket had felt in his hand. He had given the bracket back. Walt had taken it without comment and set it on the bench's far side and the session had ended.
He looked at his father. He said: "Yes."
His father said: "Good." He paused. He looked at his wife. He looked at his son. He said: "The other thing. The seams. The walls. The roof work. I will teach you that. Every evening if you have the time and the light. We will work together on whatever needs working and you will learn what I know and when you are old enough and big enough we will see if the settlement will pay you for that work as your own work rather than as my apprentice's work." He paused. "That is not first portion either. That is third tier on the same scale you have been reading. But it is closer to first portion than carrying water is."
Sigurd said: "Yes."
His mother came into the room. She set the mending on the small table. She crossed to where the two of them were sitting at the bucket. She put her hand on her son's head. She did not say anything. She let her hand rest there for a moment. She went back to the table and picked up the mending and went back to the doorway.
His father looked at her. He looked at his son. He said: "One more thing." He paused. He looked at his hands. "What you said about wanting to do work that changes which portion we get." He paused. "Your mother and I have not been waiting for you to do that. We do not need you to do that. The second portion is enough. The seam is sealed. The walls hold. You are well." He paused. "If you want to do the larger work — if that is what is in you, the way I think it is in you — then do it for yourself. Do it because the work is what you want to do. Not because we are sitting in second portion and you think you need to move us." He paused. "We have been doing this together for a long time. We will keep doing it. Whatever you do beyond it is yours to do. Not ours to ask for."
Sigurd looked at the bucket. He looked at his father. He had not expected this either. He had expected — he was not sure what he had expected. Something different from this. Something where the work he was thinking about was something the family needed and he could provide. His father had taken that framework away from him and had handed him back a different one, which was the framework of the work being his own thing to do for his own reasons.
He looked at his father for a long time. He looked at the bucket. He said: "Yes."
His father stood. He picked up the bucket. He looked at his son. He said: "Bring the paddle. We'll clean up." He went outside with the bucket toward the small wash area beside the wall where the slurry's residue could be rinsed without wasting good water.
Sigurd picked up the paddle. He followed his father outside. The spring evening had moved further toward dark while they were inside. The wall section above them held its repacked seam in the new clay. The Black Hills were a darker line at the western horizon. The compound carried its usual evening sounds — the security man's voice at the eastern yard, the distant rhythm of the second shift at the forge where Walt was finishing the last work of the day, the wind moving through the wall sections that had been built with whatever the settlement had available.
Sigurd walked behind his father with the paddle and the bucket between them and felt, through his feet, the ground he was walking on. The packed earth of the path between the family quarters and the wash area. The slight slope of the ground toward the east where the creek had been undercutting the wall's outer footing for years. The position of the elevator's foundation to the north, the deep stable presence of it through the soil — fifty feet of concrete poured before the Shroud, going down to bedrock, the foundation Pruitt's office sat on top of.
He felt all of it the way he always felt all of it.
He had never told anyone he felt it. He was not going to tell anyone now. But he had heard his father say what his father had said and he had heard his mother's hand on his head and he had heard his own voice say yes and the yes was inside him in a way it had not been before, and the inside of him where it was settling was the same inside where the feeling of the ground sat, and he understood — without language, with the information his body delivered to him about things he could not yet name — that the two things were going to be related somehow.
He carried the paddle. He followed his father. The settlement held its evening around them. The wind moved through the seam they had just finished and found nothing to work loose, and moved on.
The eastern yard ran late into the evening when Pruitt was watching.
He had been watching from the elevator's middle window for forty minutes — the window below his office, the one he used when he wanted the view without being seen at it. Brynhild had felt him there before she had looked. She always did. The feeling was not a sense she had named or examined. It was simply present in her — the awareness of the elevator's upper presence on the yard, the specific weight of Pruitt's attention when his attention was on the training, the way the air at the yard's center carried slightly different pressure when he was assessing what the security man was producing in his two best fighters.
She ran the drill.
The practice weapon was the heavy one tonight — the long pole the security man had been using to build her shoulder work, the weight calibrated to the upper end of what she could move with the precision he was asking for. She moved through the sequence with the controlled economy that had been her signature since she was small enough that her signature had not yet been a thing anyone was tracking. The footwork was clean. The hands were correct on the pole. The angles arrived at the right points and left them at the right points and the sequence resolved itself the way well-run sequences resolved themselves, which was through the body knowing where it was going before the mind had to send it there.
The security man — Hollis, thirty years a soldier before the Shroud, a stocky man with one bad knee and the patience of someone who had taught more people than he could remember to do dangerous things correctly — watched her with his arms across his chest and the flat assessment he brought to everything he watched. He did not nod. He did not comment. He waited until she finished the sequence. Then he said: "Again. Slower."
Brynhild took her breath. She moved into the sequence again. Slower.
Gunnar was at the yard's western edge with the wooden axe — the training piece Walt had carved for him last year, weighted at the head to match the steel one Pruitt had promised him when he was sixteen. He was running through his own sequence, the larger movements of someone whose physical advantage was significant enough that the training had begun to address things larger than technique, the body driving the weapon through arcs that would have produced full effect against living targets and that Hollis had been refining for two years. He was breathing hard. He had been running the sequence for forty minutes and had been driving it harder for the last twenty because Pruitt was in the middle window and Gunnar's awareness of Pruitt's presence ran through every movement like a second skeleton.
Pruitt's presence was always in Gunnar.
It was the structure he had been built around. The first thing Gunnar remembered clearly was Pruitt standing at the doorway of the small room where Gunnar had been sleeping with his mother in the settlement's second year, the door open, Pruitt looking at the boy with the expression Gunnar had later learned to read as assessment but had at the time read as something he wanted very much to be the right thing for. He had been five years old. His mother had been Pruitt's wife by then. His own father had been dead since before the Shroud, a face Gunnar did not remember and that his mother had stopped describing when she stopped saying anything about the time before. Pruitt had become the doorway. Pruitt had become the man whose approval was the weather Gunnar walked through every day of his life, and every day of his life Gunnar had been working to make the weather warm.
He was twelve. He was big for twelve. He was the strongest fighter in the yard by enough margin that Hollis had stopped pairing him with anyone except Brynhild because no one else could give him a session that worked his actual range. He was the future of the settlement and he had been told so consistently and he had built himself around the telling. He did not resent the building. The building was the work and the work was who he was.
He drove the axe through the next arc with the additional ten percent that the middle window required of him.
Brynhild ran the slower version of the sequence at the yard's center. The slower version was harder. It removed the momentum that the body used to carry itself through the difficult transitions and required the muscles to hold the positions instead. The pole was heavy. Her shoulders were beginning to burn at the back. She kept the breath even and let the burn happen without letting it into the precision.
She turned through the third position into the fourth and the world stuttered.
Not visually — she did not see anything that was not in the yard. The stutter was inside her, in the place where her awareness usually held only what her senses were delivering. The fourth position resolved into the fifth in her body the way the fourth position had resolved into the fifth in her body every time she had done this sequence in the last six months, but as her body moved through the resolution she felt — for the duration of one heartbeat — that she was holding a different weapon, in a different place, at a different point in a different fight that was not this fight and was not in this yard and was not anything she had any business knowing.
The weapon was not the pole. It was longer. The shaft was lighter than the pole and the head was heavier than the pole and the balance was different and her hands moved on it with the muscle memory of someone who had been holding that weapon for a length of time that did not fit inside her thirteen years. The place was not the yard. It was an open ground with snow on it and a sky that was not the plains sky and figures around her in formation that were not in the eastern yard and were not in any place she had been or seen. The fight was a fight she had been in. She knew she had been in it because her body knew the next move before the move arrived, and the next move was the move that her body produced in the yard a quarter-second later, and the resolution arrived in the yard with the same completion the resolution had arrived with in the snow.
It was over in less than a second.
She finished the sequence. She held the final position. Her shoulders burned. Her hands were on the pole. She breathed.
Hollis said: "Good." He looked at her with a flatness that had a small thing under it she could not read. "Run it once more. Standard pace."
She nodded. She moved into the sequence at standard pace. The stutter did not return. The world did not move under her again. She ran the sequence clean and complete and finished at the final position and waited.
Hollis said: "Reset. Five minutes."
She reset. She lowered the pole. She walked to the yard's southern fence where the water bucket was and ladled a cup and drank it. She put the cup back. She stood at the fence with the pole in her hand and looked at the plains beyond the fence's lower rail because the plains were where her eyes went when she did not require her eyes to be anywhere else.
Her hands knew a weapon she had never held.
She did not have the word for what had happened. She had words for many things — Pruitt had made sure she was literate, the lessons had run in the elevator's lower room had been mandatory for the children he was building toward and Brynhild had taken to letters the way she took to drills, which was completely — but she did not have the word for a weight her hands knew that her life had not given them. The closest she could come was that her hands had been someone else's hands for a quarter of a second. The someone else had been her. She did not know how it could be both at once. She did not know how the someone else had been doing a thing her hands now knew how to do. She did not know what to do with knowing it.
It was not the first time.
It had happened twice before. Once when she had been seven and had been running across the compound path and had stopped because the sky above the eastern wall had looked, for one moment, like the sky above a place she had never been but that she had recognized completely — the colors wrong, the cloud height wrong, the smell of air she had never smelled but that her body had reacted to as if it were home air. The feeling had passed. The compound path had returned. She had filed it the way she filed things she did not have language for, which was by not filing them, by setting them somewhere in her where they did not interfere with anything else.
The second time had been a year ago. She had been sleeping. She had dreamed of a hall — long, the ceiling high, the firelight on a long table, faces around the table that she had never seen and that her sleeping self had been pleased to see, as if returning to a room where everyone she loved was already present. She had woken without distress. She had not told anyone about the dream. She had filed it where the sky had gone.
Tonight was the third.
She stood at the fence with the pole in her hand and looked at the plains. The Black Hills were a dark line at the western horizon. The grass beyond the fence moved in the spring wind. The yard's lamps were burning in the new dark of the spring evening. Hollis was watching the sand timer on the rail and waiting for it to finish. Gunnar was at the western edge with the wooden axe still in his hands, breathing hard, the sheen of effort visible on him in the lamplight.
Pruitt was at the middle window.
She felt him still. She did not look up. The reset was hers and she was using it the way the security man had trained her to use it, which was for the body and not for the man at the window. She let the pole rest against the fence. She let her shoulders down. She breathed.
The thing inside her where the stutter had landed was still warm.
It was not warm in the way bodies were warm. It was warm in the way certain memories were warm even when they had not happened to you — the kind of memories that arrived with the heat of recognition without arriving with the content of the event, the way a familiar smell could carry the warmth of a whole life you had lived without giving you the life itself. She felt the warmth where it was. She did not press on it. She had learned, the two previous times, that pressing on it made it go further. The warmth was hers and not hers and she was going to let it be both and see what happened.
Hollis turned the sand timer. He said: "Brynhild. Sparring."
She picked up the pole. She walked to the yard's center. Gunnar was already there with the wooden axe in his hands and the focused intensity that the middle window's presence had been pushing into him for the last forty minutes still on him. He looked at her. She looked at him. They had been doing this for two years. The sparring was the part of the session Pruitt watched longest, and they both knew it, and the knowing it was part of what made the sparring what it was, which was the rehearsal of the political arrangement Pruitt had been building around them.
Hollis said: "Standard rules. Three rounds. Begin."
Gunnar came at her with the axe.
He came hard. He always came hard. The advantage he had over her in size and reach and weight was the advantage he had been told his whole life to use, and using it was both the technique and the statement, and the statement was that he was the front of the room and was going to remain the front of the room. He drove the axe in a high arc that was meant to push her backward into the position where her reach disadvantage would compound and she would have to give ground to maintain her angles.
She did not give ground.
She stepped inside the arc. She put the pole's mid-section against his forearm at the point where the arc lost its mechanical advantage and turned the axe's momentum into her own angle and brought the pole around through the inside path that his commitment to the high arc had left open. The pole's lower end found his ribs at half-speed. She held it there with the practice weapon's discipline that meant she was not driving the contact and was not retracting it. She was simply present at the point where, with a real weapon and full speed, she would have ended the engagement.
Gunnar stood with the pole at his ribs.
His face did something for one moment. Not anger. Anger was what people who did not know Gunnar expected to see in him when he lost a sparring round. Gunnar did not get angry. He had been trained out of anger by the security man and by Pruitt and by his own decision that anger was wasteful and was what people who were not the front of the room did. The thing that moved through his face was the other thing. The thing that had been moving through his face for the last six months when Brynhild ended their sparring rounds — the recognition that she could end them, that she had begun to end them more often than he ended hers, that the political arrangement Pruitt had been building around the two of them was beginning to assume things about the two of them that were no longer true in the way that they had been true when the arrangement was first conceived.
He stepped back. He reset.
Hollis said: "Point."
They reset. They began the second round. He came at her again. She read his commitment and adjusted. He adjusted to her adjustment. They moved through the round at the working pace of two fighters who had been training against each other for two years and who knew each other's choices well enough that the round became a negotiation rather than an engagement. He scored. The point was clean — a low arc she had been a half-second slow to read, the wooden axe's edge finding her left thigh at the contact point that would have been a wound. She acknowledged it. They reset.
The third round was hers.
She moved differently. The stutter from the earlier sequence was somewhere in her shoulders and her hands and she did not press on it but she did not push it away either, and her body, which had been running drills for three years and had been refining its economy with each drill, used what was in her shoulders and her hands without asking her permission. The pole moved through positions she had not consciously selected. The angles arrived earlier than her training had taught her to expect them. Gunnar's axe came at the place she had been an instant before, and she was no longer at the place, and the pole was at his throat at the rest position before his recovery brought the axe back to ready.
Hollis said: "Point. Match."
Brynhild lowered the pole. Gunnar stepped back. He breathed for three breaths. He looked at her. The thing was in his face again. He let it be in his face for one moment and then he put it away, the discipline of a boy who had been told all his life that the face was something he was responsible for. He nodded once at her. The nod was the one he gave her after their matches — a real nod, the acknowledgment of the round having gone where it went, the working partnership of two people Pruitt had been building toward each other taking precedence over the particular moment of one of them ending the other.
He walked to the fence to get water.
Brynhild stood at the yard's center with the pole and her breath and the warmth that was still in the place where it had landed.
Hollis came to her. He looked at her with the flat assessment. He said: "The third round." He paused. "What did you do."
She looked at him. She did not have an answer that would not require her to talk about the thing she did not have language for. She said: "I read his commitment earlier than the previous rounds."
Hollis looked at her. He looked at the pole in her hand. He said: "You moved differently. I have been watching you train for three years. You moved differently tonight." He paused. "I am not asking because the moving differently was wrong. I am asking because I want to know what it was."
Brynhild looked at the pole. She looked at the plains beyond the fence. She looked at Hollis with the eyes she had for adults when she did not have the answer they were asking for and was not going to invent one. She said: "I don't know."
Hollis looked at her. He had been a soldier long enough that he had developed the read for when a thirteen-year-old was telling the truth about not knowing something versus when a thirteen-year-old was telling him she did not know in order to avoid telling him something else. He read her now. He filed what he read. He nodded. He said: "Reset. Cool-down. We're done tonight."
He turned toward the western edge to address Gunnar.
Brynhild walked to the fence. She put the pole in the rack. She took the cup from the water bucket. She drank it. She put the cup back. She stood at the fence and looked at the plains.
The warmth in her shoulders was still there. It would be there for a while. She had learned, after the dream of the hall, that the warmth lasted for hours sometimes and then faded the way it always faded, into the place inside her where the things she did not have language for lived. She let it stay. She watched the plains. The wind moved through the grass at the fence's outer edge.
Gunnar walked past her toward the gate.
He paused for a moment at the gate's edge. He did not look at her. He said, without turning: "The third round."
She looked at him.
He said: "It's been getting closer for six months." He paused. "Now it's not closer anymore." He paused again. "I'm going to figure out what changed. And I'm going to bring it back."
He went through the gate.
Brynhild watched him go. The lamplight in the yard burned. Hollis was racking the wooden axe at the fence's western post. Pruitt's window above the middle floor was lit but the figure at it had moved away from the glass.
She stood at the fence. The warmth held in her shoulders. The plains held their dark. She looked at the grass moving in the spring wind and felt the thing that was in her that was not hers and was hers, and let it be both, and let the night settle.
She thought, without language for the thought: I have done this before.
She did not know what this was. She walked toward the sleeping quarters with the slow even pace she walked everywhere with. The settlement held its evening around her. The wind found nothing to work loose. The plains went on past where her eyes could find them and kept going past where her eyes could find them in the way the plains always went on, which was further than anything in her short life had given her language to describe.
She went inside. She lay down. She closed her eyes.
She slept without dreams.