A Walk Through the Margin

The settlement had been called Pelto. Twenty-three cousins, a stone wall, a grain-house, a living-water system. The Hymn came through the wall on a Tuesday and by Thursday there was nobody left to call it anything.

I arrived on Friday. The Order sent me because I could read the Hymn from the inside. Most who tried didn’t come back whole. I’d been doing it for six years. The reading-readers at the Hall called it the Clear-Road. An enzyme-boost that opened your pheromone-output wide enough for the Hymn’s network to read, and for you to read the network. Most cousins who took it either merged on contact or came out so Hymn-altered they had to be isolated. I came out with headaches and a drinking habit.

Vana was waiting at the settlement gate. She stood the way she always stood now, straight-backed, arms at her sides, the Graft-lines visible on her forearms where the Order’s surgeons had laid in the restriction-enzymes. Vana had been a cousin before she’d been a handler. She’d been my cousin before that. The Graft-lines had changed what she could feel and what she could say about what she felt. The Order called it emotional modulation. I called it cutting out the parts that made her her.

“Kavoi,” she said.

“Vana.”

“Three Hymn-masses inside the wall. The grain-house, the water-room, and a living-chamber on the east side. The masses are still conscious.”

“I know.”

“You haven’t read yet.”

“I can read the settlement from here. The Hymn’s output is through the wall.”

“Then you know we need the carrier.”

“The carrier isn’t inside.”

“No. The carrier left before the merge. A young cousin. Enni. She was carrying the Hymn-seed for weeks before it triggered. The seed used the other cousins as feed-material. Enni walked out through the gate while the merge was still building.”

“Where is she now?”

“We don’t know. That’s what the reading is for.”

* * *

The Clear-Road came in a stone flask, stoppered with wax. I broke the seal and drank. The enzyme hit the back of my throat and my pheromone-output went wide. It felt like every pore on my skin opened at once and the air came in.

I sat on the ground outside the settlement wall. Vana stood behind me. The reading doesn’t take long. Thirty seconds, maybe forty, if you can hold that long. You open your output and the Hymn’s network reads you and you read it back. The network is a vast pheromone-structure, layered, dense, full of archived cousins who aren’t dead but aren’t anything else either. When you read the network you feel them inside it. All of them. All at once.

I opened.

Pheromone. The warmth hit first and the noise with it. Every cousin the Hymn had archived was speaking at once in there, and I could hear them — fear, confusion, one of them calling for a cousin sorted into a different row who couldn’t answer. They knew what had happened to them, which was the part I couldn’t stand about the readings. A child’s marker calling for a mother who was somewhere in the network nearby, sorted into a different row, couldn’t answer.

I went deeper. Past the archive-surface. Into the network’s structure, looking for the carrier’s trail. The Hymn kept records of everything it absorbed. The carrier’s pheromone-marker would be in the feed-path, the thread that connected the seed to the merge-site.

Found it. A thin trail leading east out of the settlement, through brush-country, toward the Grey-margin. The carrier had gone east. She’d been carrying for weeks and she’d known something was wrong with her marker, because the trail showed stops and restarts, the pattern of a cousin checking her own output and not liking what she found.

I pulled out of the reading. The network let me go, or I forced my way out, or the Clear-Road wore off. I was never sure which. I was on the ground, on my back, staring at the sky. Vana’s face was above me. The Graft-lines on her forearms caught the light.

“The carrier went east,” I said. “Toward the Grey-margin. She’s been carrying for weeks. She knows something’s wrong with her.”

“Can you follow the trail?”

“The trail faded when I pulled out. I know the direction. East, into the Grey-margin.”

“Then we go east.”

“We?”

“I’m your handler.”

“I remember what you are.”

She looked at me. The Graft-lines did something to her face when she looked at me, a small tightening around the eyes that might have been the restriction-enzymes or might have been something she was still allowed to feel.

“Are you clean?” she said.

“My counts are within range. I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I meant at all.”

I didn’t answer that. I got up off the ground and we went east.

* * *

The Grey-margin was the strip of country between the settled lands and the true Grey, where the atmosphere started killing biological modification and the Hymn’s network couldn’t hold. Cousins who’d been partially Ridden, taken by the Hymn but not fully absorbed, sometimes lived in the margin. The Hymn’s hold on them was thin enough at the edge that they could maintain some autonomy, but thick enough that they couldn’t go back to the settlements. Settlements burned Ridden cousins on sight. The margin was where they went instead.

Old Hymn in the air and something metallic under it. The trees were wrong, half-archived. Bark with the Hymn’s iridescence in patches, ordinary brown the rest. The ground was uneven. Roots in places, bodies in others. Cousins who’d gone deep enough into the Hymn to stop walking, not deep enough to be taken in whole.

A cousin was sitting by a fire-pit at the edge of a stand of half-archived trees. He was Ridden. I could see it in the way his skin caught the light, the Hymn’s particular sheen on his forearms and neck. He was thin. The margin didn’t grow enough food for anyone to get fat.

“That’s close enough,” he said. His voice was rough. The Hymn altered vocal tissue. Ridden cousins spoke in registers that didn’t belong to a cousin’s throat.

“I’m looking for a young cousin,” I said. “Female. Carrying a Hymn-seed. She would have come through here in the last few days.”

“Cousins come through here all the time.”

“This one came from Pelto.”

“Pelto’s gone.”

“I know it’s gone. I read it. The carrier came from there.”

He looked at me. His eyes had the Hymn’s gold-edge. Not full gold, not like a fully Ridden cousin. The margin kept the Hymn thin enough that some of his original eye-colour still showed.

“You’re a reader,” he said.

“I’m a reader.”

“Then you can read me. Go ahead. See what the Hymn keeps in me.”

“I’m not here to read you.”

“Nobody’s here to read me. That’s the problem.” He poked the fire with a stick. “The cousin you’re looking for. She came through four days ago. Went further east. Deeper into the margin.”

“Did she know what she was carrying?”

“She knew. Could feel it in her marker. Said it was like a second heartbeat under her own, was how she put it.” He looked at me again. “You’re not here to help her. You’ll end her. That’s what the Order sends readers for.”

“The Order contains outbreaks.”

“The Order kills carriers. Different thing.” He picked at the stick. “You smell like the Clear-Road. It comes off readers for days after. The Hymn inside me can smell it and it’s agitated. Go, before it decides to reach.”

I left him there.

* * *

I found Enni two days later in the deep margin. The trees were half-archived, more Hymn than bark. The ground was Hymn-tissue under a layer of dead leaf. She was sitting against a tree that had once been an oak and was now something else, its bark smooth and faintly iridescent. She looked young. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Her eyes were clear. The Hymn-seed hadn’t reached her eyes yet.

“Don’t come any closer,” she said.

“I’m not here to hurt you.”

“Yes you are. That’s what readers do. You find the carrier and then the Order comes and the carrier doesn’t come back.”

“I need to know who you’ve contacted. Who you’ve passed the seed to.”

“I haven’t passed it to anyone. I left Pelto before it triggered. I walked east for days because I didn’t want to be near anyone when it happened.”

“When what happened?”

“When the seed finishes what it’s doing.” She touched her sternum. “I can feel it in here. Growing. Putting out roots. Every day there’s more of it and less of me. My marker is changing. I can smell it changing. The Hymn’s output is layering over mine.”

“How long do you have?”

“Days. Maybe a week. Then I’ll be Ridden and I won’t be having this conversation.”

I looked at her. A sixteen-year-old in the deep margin, sitting against a half-archived tree, knowing what was growing inside her and knowing the Order would kill her for it. She wasn’t crying. She’d gone past crying into something flatter.

“The Order sent me to find you,” I said.

“I know what the Order sent you to do.”

“It doesn’t have to go the way you think.”

“Yes it does.” She looked at me. “You’ve read the network. You’ve felt what’s inside it. The archived cousins. All of them aware. All of them trapped. That’s what’s coming for me. That’s what’s coming for everyone, eventually.”

“It’s not—”

“It is. You know it is. The Hymn isn’t a disease. It’s not an outbreak. It’s something that was already here, or close to here, or whatever preposition makes sense for a thing that was waiting. The Seeping wrote the conditions and the Hymn grew out of the conditions. It didn’t invade. It emerged. And it likes what it sees. It means to stay.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. She was right. I’d felt the network from the inside. The archive was vast and patient and it was growing. Every outbreak added to it. Every carrier who triggered added another settlement’s worth of cousins. The Order was performing triage on something that had already outgrown the scale of containment.

“Can you walk?” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m supposed to take you back. To the Order.”

“And then what?”

“And then the Order does what the Order does.”

“Which is kill me.”

“Which is contain the seed before it spreads further.”

She looked at me for a long time. Then she stood up. She was unsteady. The seed was affecting her motor function. She put a hand on the half-archived tree to balance.

“I’ll walk,” she said. “But I want you to know something first.”

“What?”

“I was bringing food to the Ridden in the margin. The cousins nobody wants. That’s why I was at Pelto. I was trading grain for root-cuttings to take back to the margin. That’s who I am. Or was. The cousin who fed the cousins everyone else had given up on.”

I didn’t say anything. We walked west, out of the deep margin, back toward the settlement and the Order and whatever came next.

* * *

Here is where I tell you two versions of what happened. I’m a reader. I’ve been inside the Hymn’s network six times. I know what it feels like when memory starts to separate from the thing that happened. The network does something to a cousin’s recall. After enough readings you start to lose track of which memories are yours and which are the Hymn’s. So I’ll give you both and you can decide which one to believe.

Version one. We’re walking back through the margin and I stop. I tell Enni to run. Go deeper into the margin. Go past the point where the Hymn can hold. The Grey kills biological modification. If she goes far enough, the Grey might kill the seed before it finishes what it’s doing. It might kill her too. But she’d have a chance. I go back to the Order alone and I say I lost the carrier in the margin. The trail went cold. Vana writes it up. Tuvio, the Order superior, is angry but there’s nothing to be done. I go home. I dream about the network. I wake up. I drink.

That’s the version where I did the right thing. It’s the version where I was brave. I like that version. I visit it sometimes when I’m asleep.

Version two. We’re walking back through the margin and I’m doing nothing. Walking, that was all I was doing. The Order does the deciding, I do the reading, that’s been the arrangement for years now and I’ve been comfortable in it. Vana asked me something once, before the Graft-lines — two cousins sharing a corridor in a settlement then. Something personal. I remember what it was. Don’t remember giving her an answer. There may not have been one to give. Next season she went to the Order and came back with the lines on her arms. I’ve not decided a thing since, not properly.

We’re a hundred paces from the settlement wall when Vana appears. She came looking because I’d been gone too long. She sees Enni. She sees what Enni is carrying. Vana has the Order’s equipment, the enzyme-burner that kills Hymn-tissue on contact. She doesn’t hesitate. The Graft-lines don’t let her hesitate. That’s what they’re for. She puts the burner to Enni’s sternum where the seed is growing and she holds it there until Enni stops moving.

Enni doesn’t scream. She makes a small sound. A single sound. Then she’s quiet.

Vana straightens up. The burner goes back in her coat. She looks at me and the Graft-lines do their work on her face and whatever she might be feeling doesn’t reach the surface.

“The carrier’s contained,” she says.

“Yes.”

“You should go home. You’ve done enough readings this season.”

“All right.”

“Kavoi.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She looks at me for a moment. “Go home.”

I went home. I drank for three days. Woke up on the floor of my quarters with a headache and no memory of how I’d got there. The network is out there and it’s growing, adding archived cousins who know what happened to them and can’t get out. The margin has Ridden in it that nobody’s coming for. Enni’s dead. Vana’s got the lines on her arms and whatever she might feel about any of it doesn’t reach the surface. And me, I can’t decide a thing, and the network’s patient. It means to stay.

I’m telling you both versions because I’m not sure which one happened anymore. The first one is the one I visit when I’m asleep. The second one is the one that wakes me up.