A Single Stone (3 page)

With their chimneys buried in snow, the smoke from the wood fires had nowhere to go but back inside. There was no way to warm themselves and no way to cook. There was no way to get out and no way to remain.

When spring finally came, they had lost several of their number. The elderly, the weak. When they had dug their way out through the softening snow, they began to dig graves.

Over the years, they learned. They found ways to manage better. The ventilation pipes, which bought them time. But most of all the mica, which burned cleanly, leaving nothing in its wake. No smoke or fine particles that would steal your breath and choke you from the inside. When mica was spent, it simply blinked out.

Jena patted the bulging pouch she had lashed against her belt. It was a good harvest. She had been right about the signs.

“Come on, Jena!” Loren called from the middle of the line. Her voice was lighthearted but betrayed a note of impatience.

“Just a minute!” Jena motioned to Min to loosen the rope that looped through her belt. The other girls would follow in turn, working the knots until they yielded. The rope was made of tightly woven rag-vine and was thin but tough, almost wiry. Inside the mountain, they wore it doubled over, giving them extra length in case they needed it for a long descent. When they were tunnelling, it bound the line together, but once the knots were undone, it slipped easily away.

“Come on,” Jena said to Min. She pushed lightly off the ledge and onto the ground below, stiffening as her feet sent a flurry of stones skittering across the slope. Then she checked herself. They were just rollers, surface-dwellers the mountain had shed like dead skin. No one would fault her for that.

She watched Min push herself clear. The girl slid almost soundlessly out and down, her hands extended just enough for balance. When her feet found ground, she stood there, contained, as if the rock were still around her, as if she were unsure how to handle the sudden rush of space.

Jena allowed herself the flicker of a smile. It was seven years since her own first harvest but she remembered that feeling, the odd sensation of her limbs suddenly moving unchecked into the outside. This was as sure a test as any, she had always thought. What came naturally here said more somehow than the years of training.

This girl would do well and that was a relief. The Mothers had trialled five others this season but none had made it past the surface tunnels. One was simply too big-boned, the others lean enough but each lacking something necessary – whether agility or strength or a certain steeliness of will.

From six girls, one. But it was enough. One gave them seven and that was what mattered. Having more in reserve was a luxury; that was all.

The others had emerged and now Kari was out, letting the momentum of her descent carry her down the slope. She skidded to a stop, feet shovelling through the loose stones, and grinned when she saw Jena frown.

“They’re rollers, Jena. Stop worrying.”

“I’m not.”

“Of course you are.” Kari put an arm around her. “You always worry. I bet you did that eye-closing thing too.”

Jena flushed. She hadn’t meant to share her funny little rituals with Kari; it had just happened somehow, a natural consequence, perhaps, of all the nights they spent at arm’s-length from each other, snug in the tiny room that had only been meant for one.

“You did, didn’t you?” Kari laughed and reached back to loosen her braid. She combed her fingers roughly through her hair, working from the bottom up. When they were inside, the girls all wore their hair in this style, pulled back from their faces and woven tightly. It was practical for tunnelling but there was more to it than that; it simply felt wrong to leave something loose that might be contained. It was for this reason, too, that even though their years of wrapping were long past, they still bound their hips and chests when they tunnelled, as if to say,
We are doing what we can
.

Jena glanced down the slope at Min. She had hurried to a nearby bush and was crouched behind it.

Kari’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “They always drink too much the first time.” She turned towards Jena, her expression thoughtful. “She did well, didn’t she? She’ll be good.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Calla said she was a cleanskin.”

Jena’s gaze took in Min’s slender frame, resting briefly on her hips, then shoulders. Through her thin cotton garments, she could see the outline of jutting bone.

There was something right and natural about a girl like that. It sometimes seemed to Jena that those who had been adjusted had a stunted quality, as if they had been reduced from a larger version of themselves. Some said such girls did not take to the line as easily as cleanskins but if that were true, Jena had seen no evidence of it.

In the mountain, in the dark, it didn’t matter what you looked like. It didn’t matter whether you had been born into your smallness or helped along by the knife, by the careful breaking and compression of your bones. It mattered only that you could get the work done.

A few feet further along, Renae sat with Asha, their eyes fixed in the direction of the village. Thinking of home, Jena supposed. Of a soft bed and a handful of something to ease the ache in their stomachs.

As much as it was what every girl dreamed of, tunnelling was hard work. It sapped them of their reserves, and they had little enough of those. Jena too could feel hunger hollowing her out.

But as eager as they might be to head for home and food, it was important they wait. That they take some time to stretch a tentative arm, massage the cramping knots from a leg. That when they stood, they did so slowly, so the sky didn’t rush to their heads, making them dizzy. Making them fall.

Jena had seen it happen in her first season. Had watched a girl waver where she stood, like a flame about to let go in the face of the wind.

I should have run
, she thought later. If she had, she might have reached the girl before she crumpled – limbs folding onto themselves, knees buckling beneath her. But Jena had been young then, and new; she hadn’t known what was coming. For months afterwards, the sickening crunch had replayed itself in her mind.

A fall was bad enough. But fainting was so much worse. A girl unconscious had no chance of remembering what the Mothers drummed into them over years of training:
Do not fall. But if you must fall, make yourself limp. Be like water. Be soft upon the ground.

The girl had hit so hard.

That awful sound. Something shattering. The white gleam of bone breaking the surface.

A break was nothing like an adjustment. There was no planning in it, no control. An adjustment could advance a girl; a break could be the end of her days in the mountain.

Jena turned to Kari. “We’ll wait awhile.”

“Of course.”

Jena felt a flush of gratitude. She knew Kari was eager to get back, to see her mama, to place a hand on her belly and wait for the fluttering movements that had lately begun to ripple her skin. They both were. But their work was not done until the harvest was secured and the line safely home, and this was something Kari would not question. She would wait and keep a watchful eye on the others until Jena said it was time to move on.

Jena raised herself onto the tips of her toes and peered out towards the village, resting an arm on Kari’s shoulder. It would take them over an hour to get back, perhaps two. Although you were never far from anything else in the valley, the paths through the forest were not direct. They looped around themselves, following the flattest ground they could between the rugged outcrops of stone.

Jena had begun to lower her eyes to the slope and choose a place to sit when something caught her eye. Through the air above the village a thin column of smoke was rising. It was faint enough that you might easily miss it in the shifting light. And yet clear enough that once you had seen it there was no question it was there.

She stared uneasily across the valley. There might be smoke in the Square, she told herself. The bakery, stoking its ovens. The smokehouse, where people would be preparing bird and rabbit for the winter stores. Or perhaps one of the kilns, where rollers and water stones were melted and shaped into metal and glass. Like everything else, wood was carefully rationed, but daytime fires might burn for such purposes, for the good of all.

But this was not that kind of smoke. There was a puff of colour, a greenish tinge Jena had seen from only one kind of fire. And it was not coming from the Square. It was fainter over the centre of the village, as if it had drifted there on the breeze, thinning out on its way from somewhere else. She tracked its passage backwards, to where it was thicker. And as she did, the skin on her arms pimpled into gooseflesh.

East. The edge of the village.

But it was too early for that. Much too early.

Her arm stiffened on Kari’s shoulder. She turned and saw the flash of realisation, alarm flooding Kari’s face.

A sick feeling roiled deep in Jena’s stomach, and with it a surge of recognition – that instant when you were made to look squarely at something that changed everything.

The smoke. Its colour. Its origin.

East, where the houses in the very back of the village nestled by the curving wall of the mountain.

Kari’s house. Their house.

“No,” Kari rasped.

Her arm wrenched abruptly from Jena’s shoulders. “I have to go. I …”

And then she was gone, tiny stones scattering behind her as she careered headlong down the slope.

The forest blurred around Jena. Thin branches whipped across her skin. A footfall ahead, Kari was sprinting, arms pumping by her side, hands clawing at the air as if to pull herself forwards. When Kari took off, Jena had recoiled at the way she flailed, legs tangling, arms windmilling as she tried to find speed.

Then she had followed, stumbling behind Kari down the slope.

Wouldn’t she run too, if it were her own mama?

Hadn’t she, when it was?

Kari’s cheeks were flushed and her mouth was open, panting. Her straw-blonde hair, kinked into ridges from the braid, streamed behind her. Every now and then a strand caught roughly on a twig before being yanked clear; Jena was glad to have left her own hair tightly bound.

Their feet pounded the forest floor, their cadence coming together for a time, then separating again. The pattern repeating, over and over. They were safer now, at least. The ground beneath was well worn – smooth and familiar: no loose stones to snag a careless foot, no holes to turn an unsuspecting ankle.

Branch, rock, mossy log. There was no time for the eye to rest on anything. There was only foot over foot, leaping and turning. Jena’s chest pounded, protesting this sudden exertion after the hours of slow, deliberate movement.

“You … okay?” Kari’s breath came in short, rasping snatches.

Their eyes met briefly and Jena read the fear etched in Kari’s. “Nearly there.” The steadiness in her own voice came as a surprise.

In reply, Kari surged forwards, drawing ahead along the widening track. Her shirt had come loose and fluttered at her side like the wing of a wounded bird. The morning’s tunnelling had loosened her wrappings and where the skin was exposed, Jena saw flashes of red – patches of flesh that had been scraped and torn. Each trip laid new wounds over those that had barely healed from the last, each girl’s body becoming its own kind of map.

In the middle of this, scoring Kari’s lower back near her right hip, was a crosshatch of translucent marks, the skin there so white it looked as if it had been polished. Though Kari’s had only been a small adjustment, she would carry these scars always. You didn’t cut into flesh – and bone – without leaving something behind.

As if in sympathy, Jena felt a sudden white-hot strobing in her own back – high up, between her shoulderblades. Though she had never been adjusted, she was not without her own scars.

Something like a sob choked from Kari’s throat. “It was green, Jena.”

“I know.”

“Do you think it’s her? It can’t be, can it?”

Jena knew Kari wasn’t really seeking an answer. Green smoke meant one thing only. It meant a man stumbling through the dusty streets, sentences barely formed, stammering alarm. A Mother hurrying from the Stores with a slim-necked bottle in her hand. To a house where a woman bit hard upon her lip, setting herself against whatever was to come. It meant willow-wort bubbling on the stove. The sleeves of a Mother’s cloak flapping as she fanned the flames. Anxious glances down the hall.

Boiled to its essence, willow-wort was the strongest painkiller they had. At its most potent when freshly distilled, it was used mostly as a birthing tonic. In addition to boiling it, the Mothers would place some directly upon the fire so it would infuse the very air around them. It was this that gave the smoke its greenish hue. It was this that made Jena’s heart catch in her throat.

“But she’s only six moons. It’s too early.”

Jena would have reached a hand to Kari if it would not have risked unbalancing them both. She understood only too well the fear that gripped her.

Early was good in a certain way of looking, if the baby were a daughter, which was of course what they hoped. Early meant small. It meant docile and sleepy, a baby who was content to give herself to the long days of stillness and compression that were to come. Who might one day follow her sisters into the network of narrow tunnels that was their birthright.

It meant all of that, if the child survived. But there was such a thin veil between
early
and
too early
. Six moons was on the very edge of things. A six-moon baby might hover between this world and the next, take a single rattling breath and slip quietly away.

If things went badly, it might take its mama too. People said smaller babies were easier on the mamas and that seemed to be true when they were eight moons or nine. But when a baby was born so early it was as if the mama’s body was caught too much by surprise, everything coming hard and fast and wrong. An early daughter could be the hope of the future but it could also be the death of it.