On the tenth day, it rained.
Not snow cold, fine, incessant rain, the kind of rain that wasn't dramatic but was worse than snow because it got through everything. It got through Vael's two clothing layers in two hours. It got through the makeshift tent Marek erected each evening with the waterproofed tarp. It got through the relative waterproofing of the bags and made the food reserves slightly damp in a way that didn't destroy them immediately but brought them closer to deterioration.
Most of all it got through the children's bodies.
The five-year-old boy Seff's son, whom Vael had started calling Pel in his head because he needed a name for him and Pel was the name the sister used had been walking for two hours with a continuous visible trembling in his shoulders that the walking rhythm didn't entirely explain.
Vael slowed and let him catch up.
"Give me your jacket", he said.
Pel looked at him. He had a way of looking at people that was more direct than you expected from a five-year-old something very awake in his eyes that didn't match what the rest of his face showed.
"Yours is wet too."
"Less than yours." Vael held out his hand. "Give."
Pel gave. Vael layered the two jackets his own underneath, Pel's on top, helping him put them on so that his jacket was against Pel's body and Pel's jacket faced the rain. Not perfect. Better.
He kept walking in the rain with one fewer layer.
He felt the cold settle into his shoulders in the half hour that followed not critical, not yet, but notable. He noted it, managed it, continued.
The metro entrance appeared mid-morning in a two-meter-deep trench that the previous week's Draw had created by crossing a particular geological formation with 2247's underground infrastructure. The Draw had uncovered the tunnel roofs for a fifteen-meter stretch grey cracked concrete with rusted metal protruding, and at the center of the collapsed section a rectangular opening with visible stairs below.
Vael stopped at the trench edge and looked down.
No Shroud smell the particular cold smell the Shroud produced when dense. No moving silence. Cold, dry air rising from the darkness dry being the important word, the word that meant shelter tonight.
He lit a torch and went down.
The metro corridor extended in both directions for several hundred meters that the torch only covered forty meters at a time. The 2247 checkerboard black and white tiling, covered by eight hundred years of dust but still recognizable in its structure. The information panels on the walls, their yellowed cracked plastic, their letters partially gone but their fragments readable for someone who took the time.
INE 4. IRECTION MONTROUGE. NEXT ST P ALÉSIA.
Vael walked two hundred meters in each direction. Nothing living.
A hundred and eighty meters in the east direction, he found the bodies.
Three people. In a lateral recess in the corridor an alcove that had served something in the old world, now empty. The bodies had been there long enough that what remained was mainly bones and clothing, but the clothing was still identifiable. Fringe people Vael recognized the seams, the materials, the salvage-sewing style developed in zones without access to Foyer textiles.
Their weapons were beside them. Placed carefully, not fallen. Someone had put them there like that.
There were no marks of violence on what remained of them.
Vael stood before the bodies for a moment. He thought about what he was reading in this scene three people who had come down into the metro and died there without combat. No Shadows. No violence. Just an end in an underground space, their weapons placed beside them with a precision suggesting someone who had had the time and presence of mind to make that gesture.
The cold, perhaps. Hunger. Exhaustion from a Year of Chaos that had been too long for what they had been able to carry.
He went back up and reported to Marek. He said the tunnel was safe. He didn't say what he had found a hundred and eighty meters in the east direction.
In the tunnel, the caravan became something else.
The confined space, the collective body heat that began to make itself felt in the air after an hour, the rain that didn't enter all of this produced something Vael hadn't seen in the group since the Chaos began. Not joy. Something simpler than joy, more fundamental. A release. The collective musculature decompressing one degree after ten days of continuous tension.
The children fell asleep quickly Pel against his sister, Oran's two sons against their father, two other children whose parents had died before this Chaos and who had been distributed informally through the group, simply absorbed by the nearest adults over the days.
Vael waited for half the group to fall asleep and took the torch at minimum.
He walked east.
The bodies were where he had left them.
He stopped before them a second time with dimmer light and more time. He looked at the clothing. He looked at what they were carrying bags opened by time, their contents scattered by eight hundred winters of freezing and thawing. Tools. Food long since unusable. Fortune maps on waterproofed fabric similar to the ones Marek made.
And in the hand of the nearest person fingers still closed around something time hadn't dispersed because it was small enough and dense enough to stay there.
A watch.
From the old world a circular face, hands, a metal bracelet. Not a 2247 digital device but something mechanical, from an earlier era. It had been in this person's hand during their death and it was still there.
Vael looked at it without touching it.
He thought about the bodies. About the carefully placed weapons. About the way the three people had arranged themselves in the alcove side by side, the largest in the middle, the other two against their flanks.
They had arranged themselves to die together.
That wasn't resignation. It was a choice. The last choice available in a situation where all other choices were exhausted.
Vael understood this in an abstract way. He didn't yet know it concretely not yet at fourteen, not yet in this Year of Chaos.
He went back toward the camp without taking the watch.
A hundred meters from the bodies, on his way back, he stopped.
On the tunnel wall, at eye height, three symbols freshly carved into the tiling.
Clean edges. No dust patina. Recent that night, while he slept or while he was looking at the bodies.
He looked at them. Memorized them. Drew them on his fabric in near-total darkness, from memory, holding the torch under his armpit.
He recognized two of these symbols. He had seen them in the snow, traced by the walking Shaped.
The third was new.
He looked at the wall in both directions. Nothing else. Just the three symbols on the white tiling, clean and precise in his torch's minimal beam.
The Shaped from the eighth day had followed them. It had come down into the tunnel after them. It had carved these symbols while eighteen people slept a hundred meters away.
It could have done other things while they slept.
It had carved symbols.
Vael stood still in the cold tunnel and tried to decide what exactly this information meant and found no sufficiently complete answer to be useful. So he set it aside with the other incomplete information in the part of his memory reserved for unanswered questions.
He turned off the torch and came back to the camp by touch in the darkness, counting his steps from the wall of symbols.
He lay down. He closed his eyes.
He didn't sleep.
In the darkness of the tunnel, something very far away in the east direction made the sound Vael associated with metal on tiling.
Toc.
Pause.
Toc.