Green

From the grate, I look out at the jungle below. The fungi are out tonight—blue-green at the top, darker green into the branches, then a colour past violet down where the roots tangle. The Verakhi have a word for it. Pure Carbons grew up above the canopy and never learned theirs.

I stand on a grate not rated for me with a pack on, eight minutes past its limit. The Vell Range runs a hundred kilometres past the foot of the Spire. From here, I see a third of it. The trees go on, and the small fires of the fungi go with them.

Clinic's two grates over. Borrin will be thirteen minutes into the forms by now. He's the one who fills the forms. Week sixteen today, which is the spore-test day. After today, the spore can't take. People do something with small parties when somebody hits sixteen. We aren't.

I look at the third colour for another minute. Then I climb down.

* * *

The screening chair is the chair. There's only one. The jelly is the jelly. The technician's lattice has seen worse years than my hands have. He has decided not to talk to me, which is fine.

Yellow comes pulsing out of the wall behind him. There's a crack in the panel, and someone has spliced a power tap into the leak instead of sealing the panel—the way most repairs in the Carbon Skeleton get done. Divert, don't fix. The wall beneath the leak is damp. Yellow beads collect on the join and slide down it. You can watch them.

The technician says to his panel, "Sixteen weeks."

"I know."

"Sixteen weeks. Past the bleed window. Should clear today." He hasn't looked at me yet.

"Yes."

"Gown."

I lift it. The jelly is cold. Colder than it ought to be at body temperature, which is the temperature it's supposed to be at when they put it on you.

He runs the wand.

Borrin is two walls over with the counsellor. I can hear his speech through the wall, pleading—pleading the way Retro-Graded people speak what silicon once denied them.

He has been like this for eight years. Six cycles before this one. After the sixth, we said the word enough to each other, and we meant it. A fortnight later, he stopped saying it. So did I. Last week, the test came back positive, and he sat on the kitchen floor and put his head against the warm plate where the lentils were, and didn't say anything for an hour. He hasn't been quiet like that since, even when he should be.

I look at the wall and not at the wand.

The wall hits me before the sound does. A scream is a structural event in the Carbon Skeleton. The lattice carries it.

Then the sound. From two booths over. A woman, mid-thirties by the timbre.

"NO! No, no, no, no, NO!!! NO—"

Then another sound, smaller, a man saying her name over and over. "Mira. Mira, love. Mira, look at me, look at me, look at—"

"OH, GOD! OH, GOD! OH, GOD!!!"

"Mira—"

"OH, GOD! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT—"

Then the word, through the partition, in a voice I think is the head technician's. Flat. Like reading a number. "Green."

The technician with the wand does not look up. He has gone very still. The wand is still on me. He is waiting for me to be a different problem from the one in the next booth.

I sit up. The cold jelly slides down my belly and onto the gown, and I don't care.

Through the opening in the partition, I see a gurney moving fast, the woman's face on it with her mouth open, a medic's gloved hand. The glove ought to be sterile-blue. It isn't. There's a smear on the outside of the index finger where the medic touched something inside the woman, and it has spread across to the webbing between the thumb and forefinger. Green-black. They're calling it Green.

The technician is still holding the wand on me. He is still not raising his eyes.

"I need air," I say.

"Lift the gown back down."

"I NEED air."

"Madam—"

I am already at the door.

* * *

I take the service ladder up, then the catwalk, then the grate I was on a quarter hour ago. I don't think; my feet know the route. Pipe Runners use this catwalk, and I run the lines through this quadrant. Nobody else will be up here.

Except something is on the grate.

In the vent that opens onto the grate, warm air pushes through a hatch that hasn't sealed. Condensation has settled in the drip-gutter below—a puddle the size of two cupped hands, no deeper than a knuckle. And there is a thing in it.

It is the size of a small loaf of bread. The shape is wrong for that size—too long, too narrow, ridged along the top, becoming narrower at one end into something that might be a head. A row of eight or nine soft nodules runs down its back. They are radiating with light.

Slow. Then faster. Then slow again.

I crouch. My belly does not like crouching. I do it anyway.

The thing is wet because the puddle is wet and because it is leaking its own moisture, slick like a fresh leaf. Its skin moves under its own surface—slow ripples passing along the row of nodules. The pulses go blue, green, white, then back to blue. One cycle takes about four seconds. There is a smell. An orchid that's been left in standing water.

I have seen warning posters. Lattice Guard puts them up in the lift wells. The drawing is a thing the size of a dog, more than enough legs, with HOSTILE BIOLOGICAL HAZARD across the top in red. The drawing shows no nodules. It hasn't got anything as small as the thing in the puddle either. The posters are meant to scare you off from touching.

The thing in the puddle is too small to be hostile. The argument is stupid, biologically. I make it anyway.

I put my hand near it. The pulses change—faster at first, then settle to an even rhythm. It doesn't match my beat, or the Spire's hum, or any rhythm I know.

I think it has noticed me.

I think it might be saying something. It calmed down, I think, or it was asking. I haven't done anything to it, exactly. I have crouched. I have put my hand near it. The rhythm has changed twice, and I am not the one who changed it.

I pick it up. It weighs almost nothing in my hands. I am going to feed it through the slats and let it drop down to the Vell Range—about six metres to the floor. The puddle in the gutter will dry by morning. None of this needs to be a thing I remember later.

That is the plan I have when the woman with the blade comes around the corner.

She is Verakhi. I know her gear before I know her face. The shards in her belt are silicon shards, sharpened, the kind you take from a Lattice Guard's chest plate after the Guard has stopped needing it. She has a knife in her hand. The knife is also a piece, longer, with a binding on the grip.

She sees me, then sees what I'm holding, and her eyes go from there to my belly.

"YOU PEOPLE." Loud, like she's been waiting to say it her whole life. The accent is the one the jungle leaves on a voice that grew up under it. "You carry Green. You CARRY them. In there. IN THERE!!! How many??? How many have you brought up?!"

I don't say anything.

She comes at me. She comes at the belly, not at the hatchling. The hatchling she could take from me. The belly is what she means.

There is a fraction of a second when my hands could open and let the hatchling drop. They don't open. I notice that they don't, and I am not going to look at why right now.

Pleading for myself isn't a thing I do. Not starting now, week sixteen on a grating with a Verakhi about to be on me. I plead what might work on her instead.

"Please. Please, please, please. He's been waiting eight years—EIGHT FUCKING YEARS—please don't, please... please..."

She hears me. It does not stop her. It buys me a second, maybe two. Something happens to my eyes inside that second.

The hatchling's nodules look grey to me. The wall I am backed against looks grey. The puddle looks grey. Only the blade keeps its colour, because the blade is the only thing my eyes have any business looking at right now. I have been told this happens under threat—adrenaline narrows the field down to what matters. I have not had it happen to me before.

I twist out of it. The hatchling stays in my hands. The blade goes past my belly and into the grate.

She pulls it out for the second strike.

The second strike does not happen. There is a snap. Not a sound, more a hiccup in the air around her. The Verakhi drops sideways. Her body has stopped being hers for a few seconds.

A Lattice Guard comes down the catwalk after the snap. I can tell he's a Boron issue from his chest plate and the way he walks; the plate matters more than he does.

He looks at the Verakhi. Then at me. The hatchling gets a glance, and his face does the thing faces do when they are deciding whether something is their problem.

"Are you injured?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

He nods. Picks up the Verakhi by the harness webbing. Logs something on his wrist. Goes back the way he came. He does not ask about the hatchling. The hatchling is, technically, the kind of thing he should care about. He doesn't care about it. I file this and don't unfile it.

The colour comes back in stages. The wall first. Then the puddle, after a beat. My hands follow. The hatchling last, because the hatchling's colour is not an easy colour for the eye to come back to.

Its nodules have slowed. They are barely pulsing now. The rhythm is gone.

I look at the slats. I look at the Vell Range below. The third colour I haven't a word for is brighter than I noticed at the start of the night, or maybe it isn't, and I am noticing it for a different reason.

I nudge the hatchling through the slats. It is small enough to go. For a moment, it sits on the lip, and I think it might not. Then it slides. The drop is six metres. A wet sound from below.

I sit on the grating with my hand on my belly. I don't take it off.

* * *

Going back into the clinic takes me longer than coming out. The light in the atrium is the leaked Lumen yellow, the kind that drips on damp walls. The yellow is what the world is again. The colour I have no word for stays up on the grating where it lives.

Borrin is in the atrium. He is standing. He has the look on him I have seen twice in eight years and never wanted to see a third time.

Then he sees me, and the look slides off, and what comes up underneath it is the relief.

"Sela!!! Sela. Clean. CLEAN, Sela." He has my hands in both of his, and he's bringing them up to his face. "No bleed. No Green. Sixteen weeks confirmed. We're past it. We're past it, Sela. We're PAST it!!!"

I make my face do the thing.

"That's good," I say.

"That's... that's good." His voice goes smaller—the same small it was through the wall. He is still holding my hands. He says, very small, "I thought we'd lost it."

I had not been ready for that. I thought he had been in there filling forms.

"I thought we'd lost it," he says again, into my hands. "The whole. Time. In there. I thought we'd lost it. I thought... I thought..."

Behind him, the receptionist is looking at me. She has been looking at me since I came in. She knows where I went, why I went, and what I came back with on my hands. She doesn't say a word. She covers for me with her face the way the clinic covers for everybody.

I put a hand on the back of Borrin's neck. The cloned skin there is warmer than mine. Retro-Graded skin runs warm. The body hasn't yet learned to bank its heat.

"We're past it," I say.

"We're past it."

We sign the remaining forms. The technician with the wand has gone off shift. We get our discharge slip. We take the lift down to our level. Borrin stands close. His shoulder is against my shoulder. He doesn't say anything else for the whole ride down, and I don't either, and when we get out at our floor, he puts his hand on the small of my back, and we walk to the door.

He opens the door. He has always opened the door. The flat smells of the lentils I left on the warm plate and the damp that the radiator can't quite get to. He takes my coat. He hangs it. He turns the light on. It is the leaked Lumen yellow. It drips off the panel onto the wall.

I stand in the doorway with my hand on my belly.

He looks back over his shoulder, asking without asking, and I cross into the flat and let him close the door behind me.

Later, when Borrin has gone to sleep, I go to the kitchen window. The Crown sits low over the Spire, the cloud lit from inside by the upper tiers—yellow-white where the Lumen carries through, blue-grey where it doesn't. Between the breaks, far up, the colour I haven't a word for is there as well. Past violet. Under it. In the sky now, where I had not thought to look for it.