Tenth bell killed the lumo-panel and thirty men lay down on stained cots to sleep off a beating.
The bunk-shed was a corrugated rectangle of duraplast with two rows of frames bolted to a duracrete floor, and it held heat all night and let go of none of it.
Above the door the panel buzzed at a pitch just under noise, close enough to a sound to keep a man from forgetting it.
Outside, gravel.
Patrols walked the fence line with shock-batons and the boredom of men paid to stop escapes on a world with nowhere to escape to.
Ten lashes for a first offense past curfew.
Twenty for a second.
For a third they put you on the deep shaft, which was the same sentence with more steps.
The crew had taken theirs at muster for the shorted quota, standing, in the open, with both suns up.
Kael’s back had two stripes across it and his leg had swollen tight inside the boot he hadn’t dared remove.
He lay still and listened to men breathing wrong.
“Dorne.” A whisper from the next frame over, a bondsman with a split ear.
“You awake?” “Yes.” “He counted us twice.
After.
You see that?” “I saw.” “Why’d he count twice?” “Because the second count wasn’t ours.” Kael kept his voice flat and low.
“He was counting what’s left to sell.” The man was quiet a while.
“That’s a rotten thing to say out loud.” “You asked.” “I did.” A shift of cloth, a hiss through teeth as the man found a position his back would allow.
“Sarn’s mother’s on the same debt.
Nobody’s going to tell her anything.
They’ll just stop sending the deduction slip and she’ll work it out.” “Go to sleep.” “Yeah.” Kael waited until the breathing across the shed went ragged and even in the shapes it took when men actually went under.
Then he opened his eyes on the dark and got to work.
He had a pebble.
A chip of akulite no bigger than a thumbnail, gray, rough, the sort of grit that collected in a miner’s seams and got swept out in the morning.
He set it on the duracrete a hand’s length below his dangling fingers, and he reached for it without his hand.
The cold stir answered slow.
Sluggish, thick, unwilling, a muscle asked to do something on the second day of learning it.
He pushed harder and it slid away from him.
So he stopped pushing.
Fear had opened it under the rock.
Fear was what it knew.
But fear also scattered it, and he had felt exactly that in the shaft, the power going everywhere at once and taking a two-ton slab three meters sideways when what he’d needed was for it to come off his leg.
That wasn’t control.
That was a detonation aimed by an accident.
He tried the other thing.
He wanted the pebble up.
Not the animal want of the cave-in.
Something cooler and narrower.
The want of a man who needs a tool to function and has decided the tool exists.
Not a plea.
Not a prayer.
An instruction built on certainty.
Up.
The pebble rose.
It wobbled.
It turned in the air like a needle hunting north, and then it steadied, a hand’s length above the floor, in the buzzing dark between his cot and the next, invisible to anyone not already looking for it.
The cost registered at once.
Not strength.
Attention.
Something behind his sternum was spending itself the whole time the pebble hung, draining at a rate he could almost put a number to, and it would come back with rest, and it would come back further if he made it work.
Not a gift at all, then.
A reserve.
He held the pebble twenty seconds.
Then he ran the test he had actually come here to run.
He let the shaft back in.
The white blank of the slab across his shin, the dust hanging wrong, the water at his ear.
The pebble dropped like a shot bird.
He caught it in his palm before it could crack against the floor and lay there with his heart going and the answer in his fist.
Want steadies it.
Fear scatters it.
That was the whole architecture.
Every rule he would ever need came off that one line, and he turned it over twice, and then he set it down inside himself where it would still be in ten years.
Boots on gravel.
He heard them before he heard them.
Not sound.
A prickle at the base of his skull that resolved into direction and then into distance, a beat and a half before any ear in the shed could have caught the first crunch.
His hand closed.
His breathing went long and slack.
His face arranged itself into the loose, stupid arrangement of deep sleep.
Light swept the window.
A baton tapped the frame twice.
“Anything?” Second voice, further out.
“Thirty bodies and a smell.” Boots scraped.
“Rota’s changed, by the way.
We’re on an extra hour from tomorrow.” “On whose authority?” “Foreman’s.” “Foreman doesn’t set our rota.” “Foreman does now, apparently.
Something about the count.” The light went off the window.
“You want to be the one who tells him no?” “I want to be the one who’s asleep.” The footsteps went along the fence and away, and Kael opened his eyes on the dark and had the second half of it.
Sensing.
A beat of warning.
Not sight through walls, not thoughts, not the future.
Just the handful of seconds between boots on gravel and a hand on the door, which was the entire difference between a man being caught and a man being ready.
It had come without him asking, the same as the pebble had come when he stopped begging for it.
Across two rows of cots, Pell rolled onto his side.
He was awake.
Kael knew it before he looked, and looked anyway, and found the man’s eyes open in the dark with the lumo-buzz laying a thin edge of light along them.
Neither of them moved for a while.
“You’re not sleeping,” Pell said at last.
Barely voiced.
It went no further than the two frames between them.
“No.” “Curfew’s curfew.” “I know.” “Ten lashes, and you’ve already got two stripes that haven’t closed.” “I know that too.” Pell breathed out through his nose.
“Then whatever it is you’re doing over there, do it quieter.
The air goes strange.
I can’t tell you how.
I just wake up.” Kael’s whole body went cold and gave nothing away.
“The air.” “That’s what I said.” Pell rolled onto his back and spoke to the ceiling.
“Five years on the deep shaft.
You learn what the air does before a roof comes down.
It does that.
It’s been doing that since you came up the cage.” “And you’re not asking.” “Man who works the shaft learns not to ask a question he doesn’t want the answer to.” A pause.
“That’s not a favor.
If it ever gets one of these men killed, I’ll ask.
Loudly.” “Understood.” “Do you though.” Pell’s head turned.
“Say it as a number.
How many men on this crew are worth your trouble?” “Fewer than there were yesterday.” “That’s an honest answer, at least.
Most men lie there.” He faced the ceiling again.
“Get the swelling down.
Cut the boot off if you have to.
He looked at that leg twice today and he only looks twice at things he’s pricing.” “He looked at it three times.” “Then you already know what tomorrow is.” “Sleep, Dorne.” Kael lay with the pebble in his fist and didn’t sleep for some time.
He had four hours until dawn and a full accounting to make.
He had a rule.
He had a reserve he could measure.
He had a sense that gave him seconds.
He had a body that couldn’t take another muster on that leg and a witness two rows away who couldn’t name what he’d noticed but had noticed it anyway, which was worse than a witness who knew.
That last one went at the top of the list.
At dawn the recruiter’s speeder came in from the settlement road, and Drest walked out to meet it with a data-slate under his arm.
Kael watched from the muster line while the two men talked, and he read the whole transaction off their shoulders without hearing a word of it.
Two names went across.
The slate came back.
Drest thumbed it, and his mouth did the thing it did when he had gotten away with something, and the recruiter climbed back into the speeder without ever once looking at the rows of men he’d just bought from.
That evening there were twenty-eight cots occupied, and the guard rota ran an hour longer, and the deep shaft’s tally stayed exactly where it had been the day before, which meant the same ore had to come out of fewer backs.
Drest walked the line at the end of it, counting.
He stopped at Kael’s frame and looked at the leg, at the swelling that had gone up over the boot rim, and he smiled at what he saw there and wrote nothing down at all.