For a moment the air seemed full of whispers just beyond hearing, the space between them strange and echo-haunted, as if a heavy stone had dropped, rippling the fabric of everything.
A cough broke the spell.
Six strangers surrounded Yaz. She spun around. Zeen was not among them. Two were younger than her, two around her own age, one a man in his twenties, carrying the light, and beside him a scar-faced woman in her thirties perhaps.
Yaz’s frown deepened. What was a grown woman doing here?
‘We had more than an hour’s head start on you, girl,’ the woman said. ‘The younglings came down last gathering.’
Yaz blinked. ‘Four years?’ Four years in the blackness. Four years under the ice.
The woman coughed a bitter laugh. ‘I’ve seen five drops since that old bastard gave me the shove. It’s still Kazik, is it?’
Yaz nodded. Kazik had been regulator even before her grandmother’s testing.
‘Shame. He’s lived too long.’
Yaz looked about her at the others. All of them were lean, cheeks hollow, eyes bright, all grimy, all wrapped in gut-sewn skins. The two boys of her own age held makeshift clubs, smoothed stones the size of a fist lashed with hide to the end of bones that looked suspiciously like the thighbones of a large man.
‘My brother?’ She held a hand to indicate his height. ‘Where is he?’
The others looked down, their mouths in grim lines. Yaz grew suddenly cold, stomach knotting, a twitch coming to her cheek. The scar-faced woman shook her head. ‘Hetta got him.’ She pursed her lips in the direction of sympathy. ‘Nearly got me once.’ She indicated the parallel lines scored across her face as if torn by claws. ‘Nearly got you too.’
‘No.’ Yaz drew a breath, understanding. ‘That was Jaysin. Zeen is bigger.’ As she said it the anger rose in her again. Little Jaysin, timid, eager to please, now torn apart and half eaten. ‘The giant didn’t have Zeen. It was Jaysin’s head on her belt.’
‘Gerant,’ the young man with the light said.
‘What?’
‘Gerant, not giant. The ones that grow too big. They’re gerants.’ The harsh shadows made something sinister of his face.
Yaz shook her head. She didn’t care about that. ‘My brother?’
‘He must have come down somewhere else,’ the woman said. ‘The shafts change between gatherings. We can’t cover them all. We didn’t expect anyone out here, but Hetta must have known somehow. She’s cunning, that one.’
‘The taint told her.’
Yaz glanced back, it was one of the younglings that had spoken, a fair-haired boy now holding his hand to his face in mimicry of Hetta’s black stain. Yaz had never seen hair so pale before, but then she had seen a dozen new things in less than an hour. She turned back to the woman. ‘My brother. Zeen. He’s all I care about.’
The woman nodded, biting her well-bitten lower lip. ‘The other search parties might have got him.’
‘Or the Tainted did,’ whispered the young girl standing beside the fair boy.
The woman shrugged. ‘We’ll join up with the rest of the Broken and find out.’ She held up a hand as Yaz started forward. ‘Once we’re sure the regulator has finished.’
‘He has,’ Yaz said. ‘The Ictha were the last clan. And I was near the end.’
‘Three Ictha.’ The man with the light looked at the woman. ‘I can’t remember the last time there was even one.’
The woman shrugged again. ‘Two now. Or maybe just one. We’ll go find out once Petrick is back.’
‘The boy who attacked the giant?’ Yaz asked. ‘Gerant.’ She corrected herself at the young man’s frown.
Back down the tunnel something rattled. ‘Speak of the devil.’ The woman nodded to the girl who had whispered about ‘the Tainted’. ‘Jerra, go let the rope down.’ The girl ran off into the darkness. ‘Check first!’ the woman called after her. ‘And don’t fall down the hole.’
The woman turned back to Yaz. ‘I’m Arka. That’s Pome.’ She motioned towards the hard-eyed young man with the star. There were other names but somehow they didn’t stick. Zeen was the only name she wanted to hear.
The girl, Jerra, and the boy Petrick, who close up didn’t look much older, came hurrying back, the girl clutching the rope. Yaz wondered how it had been secured. Her mind always threw in tangential questions at unhelpful moments.
‘Hetta?’ Arka asked. Yaz saw the cannibal’s mouth descending towards her leg again, drool hanging from pointed teeth.
‘Still raging.’ Petrick grinned. ‘I lost her in the threads. The new girl stuck her good. Hand and foot!’
Yaz frowned, her hand returning to her side where her knife should be. Even now the loss weighed on her.
‘And the pools? Any more arrivals?’
Petrick shook his head. ‘Think that’s our lot.’
‘Let’s go then.’ Arka led the way, Pome at her side, holding his light-stick aloft as though he were some grand official at a clan ceremony.
Yaz followed, her mind still spinning. Twenty years. That’s how long Arka said she’d been down here. Twenty years. It was as far beyond Yaz’s imagination as a tree. Or the thin green belt the gods were said to have put around the world’s waist, a place where the oldest tales said there was as much life on the land as in the sea.
Arka took the group along a series of tunnels. Many were clearly the work of meltwater but others seemed to defy logic, rising, falling, and twisting in a way that flowing water never would, and yet smooth and round, bearing no mark of pick or chisel.
Yaz jogged in the middle of the band. The Broken they had called themselves. Her new clan, she supposed, bound together by the fact they had survived the drop and wished to keep on surviving.
The darkness gave way to a dim and diffuse illumination as the ice began to be populated once more by the tiny stars. The others seemed to take the same comfort in this that Yaz did, even though they must have seen it every day for years. Little Jerra paused to gaze into the ice and dark-haired Petrick had to give her a tug to get her started again. ‘Slowcoach.’
‘Everyone’s slow next to you.’ The girl blinked, glanced at Yaz, and carried on.
Shortly after that, Arka sent Petrick ahead to warn of their arrival. The boy scampered off at speed and was soon lost in the gloom.
The further they went the more dirty the ice beneath their feet. Eventually they emerged into another rock-floored cavern, not so large as the one in which Yaz had escaped Hetta but still large and better lit.
The air here was warmer than in the tunnels and the soft drip of meltwater filled any brief silence. A crowd of maybe four dozen of the Broken stood in an arc around the entrance,
