Chapter 166
The north end of the remade field. A whole row of barley along the rim has gone grey, colour first, and the stalks have begun to soften, their edges blurring like a pencil drawing being rubbed out. The grey edge lies against the field like fog against a window.
running barefoot through the gold toward the rim, braid flying, scythe in her hand.
Kompis on deck: the faint golden pulse-line that runs along his panel borders skips a tick, though his heart doesn't.
Vigolas, Greed-sight on: the gold is leaking out of the world, field, rim and sea dimming, as if value itself were draining away.
Rougeina: the barley-moths at the rim have gone grey and still. Nothing to swap with.
Mingus: ears flat, staring at a point in the air where nothing is. Then he trots out of the barley and stands in front of his people.
Vigolas slams his palms onto the greying rim.
The stalks under his hands flush gold, exactly as they were, and then, in the next panel, grey again, softer than before. The edge doesn't even notice.
beside him, catching his wrist.
kneeling at the rim, both hands round a single half-grey stalk. Not unfolding anything. Not using anything. Just talking to it, steadily, like she talks to the names.
Inside a panel gone almost entirely grey, the stalk she holds is gold. Line by line, the colour comes back into it, from her fingers outward.
All along the rim the grey is advancing, but wherever Öde has been, where her hands have touched and her voice has gone, the barley stays gold. A wavering line of gold through the grey, exactly the path she has walked.
eyes gold, seeing it: in a world with no threads at all at the rim, one thread is still there, running from Öde's heart into every stalk she named. Thick. Unbreakable.
But it's an acre, and she's one girl. Further along the rim, where she hasn't reached, the grey finds a gap and pours through: a whole wedge of field greying, softening, a fence post rubbing out, the grey flowing inland toward the farmhouse.
turning, seeing it, too far away.
In the widest grey gap at the field's edge, where the Null pours through, a golden retriever walks calmly out into the grey, turns round once the way dogs do, and lies down, chin on his paws.
And the grey stops at his paws. All round him the field is flat and grey and soft-edged and soundless, but from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail he is gold, every hair, and the barley in a little ring round his body stays gold with him. The grey parts round him like water round a stone.
Behind him, the whole golden field. In front of him, the whole grey nothing.
Mingus yawns.
at the gap, frozen, ready to dive after him, and then just staring.
lying in the grey, tail giving one lazy thump. The barley under the thump stays gold.
Something moves inside it. A shape, big. Grey barges, grey hooks, gliding silently out of the haze, sideways along the rim.
Out of the grey, with no sound at all, comes Mother Skrap, huge again, and she is wearing the grey barley. The dying rim of the field is hanging off her like a cloak of dead wheat. The softening fence posts are bolted to her arms. She has salvaged the field's dying edge.
(The SFX box is empty.)
She strikes from the grey side. Vigolas doesn't see her coming. Greed-sight finds no gold in her: everything she's wearing is dying, worthless to anyone but her. The blow sends him tumbling down the furrow.
The crew blind in the grey:
Kompis spins, eyes gold, and finds no threads. Only grey.
Rougeina reaches for a moth to swap with, and the moth is grey. Nothing to trade.
Gleaners wade out of the haze with hooks, grey on grey, invisible.
(Every SFX box in the row: empty.)
on one knee in the grey, eyes shut, listening.
And there, through the soundless grey, steady, warm, the only sound in the world: ba-DUM. ba-DUM. ba-DUM. Mingus's heartbeat, from the gap.
his own heart falling into step with it, golden pulse-line racing round the panel border again.
From Kompis to every one of the crew, golden heartbeat-lines leap through the grey like lit fuses: Vigolas, Rougeina, Smurjan, Öde, Drekk, all tied to Mingus's beat. In a world that has gone grey and silent, six people can suddenly hear each other's hearts. A heartbeat counts itself.
On the next beat they move together. Rougeina swaps not with a moth but with Kompis's heartbeat-line, appearing behind a grey Gleaner. Vigolas spins and punches where the beat tells him. Kompis fires Ivar blind, and the shot lands.
Smurjan stands up out of the grey, his three shadows standing up round him, three hearts that have been half a beat apart since the Compost Fields. In the gold of the Shared Beat, all three fall into step.
The dead barley bursts off her in a storm of grey chaff. The fence posts snap off her arms. Shrinking, staggering, she reels back into the haze.
The grey edge still lies against the field. But the rim holds: gold where Öde has walked, gold round the sleeping dog, gold along a line six heartbeats wide where the crew is standing. The Gleaners' grey barges slip back into the haze.
back to back with Vigolas at the rim, both of them panting.
still lying in his gap, chin on paws, eyes half-closed, the grey politely not touching him.
(Mingus thumps his tail once. Yes.)
The crew asleep in shifts along the rim. Öde awake, sitting with her back against a fence post, reading the names on her arm aloud, softly, again. 111. Every one still flickering.
as a voice comes out of the grey haze, close, rusty, kind, like a grandmother at a bedside.
(Öde's thumb stops on a name. She doesn't answer.)