Feed the Giants

They said giants were a story. They said the Wall was history with teeth. It kept out bandits. It kept out storms. It kept out nothing they would ever see.

The Wall ran like a cliff around the city. A hundred feet of poured stone and steel. It was old but it held. The children learned its measurements along with their letters. Ten feet thick at the top. Twenty at the base. Stairs only for the Watch. No one climbed. No one looked. It was a rule like gravity.

The city had a name once. The old maps called it Zion Basin. People stopped saying that. They called it the Basin or just Home. It sat between long ridges where the land folded and rose. Beyond the walls, the dry lake went flat and white. Salt wind came in winter. Heat walked in summer.

The elders told the children that once the world went north and woke something that had slept under ice. They said the first of them came out of fog in the Yukon. They toppled towers. They waded through pine. They ate what was in the way. The armies sent fire and sound. The world cracked and grew quiet. Then the walls rose and it all became a chapter.

The chapter turned into a lullaby. Then a joke. Then a dare.

On the morning before the climb, Mara stood in the shadow of the Wall and pressed her palm to its skin. It was cool and damp. A line of lichen ran along a seam. She felt a slow tremor in the stone. It could have been the wind. It could have been a truck on the inner road. She told herself it was both.

Oren came up behind her and touched the same seam. His fingers were scarred from the workshop. He had cut and welded since he was ten. He wore a coil of rope on his shoulder.

“You will not back out,” he said.

“I would not have come if I would,” she said.

Lyse jogged over and grinned up at the Wall like it was a mountain that asked to be climbed. Her hair was cut short for the climb. She had black paint on her cheekbones for luck. She always did that before tests and fights and kisses. The paint did nothing except make her feel brave. That was enough.

Calder and Finn came last with a bundle of metal hooks. They were brothers who argued about everything except this. Finn carried a bag of water. Calder carried a flare gun that would not help.

They met in the workshop at dusk and laid out what they would take. Rope. Hooks. Gloves. A small hammer. One flare. Two knives. Dried meat and flat bread. A coil of copper wire that Oren insisted on because he insisted on tools. They would climb in the dark during the Founders’ Feast, when the Watch drank and pretended not to.

“What will we see,” Lyse asked.

Mara closed her eyes and pictured the outside. The old teachers said there were salt flats. Ruins. Cold in winter. Heat like a hand in summer. She had seen smudged pictures in a banned book. A highway running to a vanishing point. A brown sign with letters scrubbed by time. She said none of that.

“We will see the truth,” she said.

The Founders’ Feast filled the streets with smoke and drums. The leaders made speeches about duty. A child in white held a candle and spoke the lines about sacrifice. The words felt thin in the air. People applauded and raised cups. The old men on the Watch smiled with pink faces.

Oren led them through the alleys to the base of the Wall. They had studied the pattern of the patrols. They had counted steps. They had mapped the blind corner by the old tannery where the stone had cracked and been patched twice. There was a place where the seam ran crooked. The seam was theirs.

They tied the first hook and threw. It caught. They pulled. They climbed hand over hand, feet on rough stone. The city fell away in sound. The drums went small and then thin and then no more. Their arms burned at the halfway point. Oren climbed like he was part of the Wall. Lyse laughed at the pain to keep it from eating her. Calder and Finn went quiet and steady. Mara climbed with a single thought. Do not fall.

At the top there was wind. It pressed at their clothes and eyes. They lay on the walkway and looked at the night spread out beyond. The stars were clean. The moon sat over a flat white plane like a frantic eye behind thin cloud.

Lyse stood first. She walked to the far edge and looked down. The outside face dropped sheer into dark. There were bolts driven into the outer skin where the Watch had once hung cranes. The cranes were gone. The bolts remained like a ladder for ghosts.

Mara went to the inner edge and looked back at the city. The streets were lines of fire. Music drifted up, then faded. She felt a pull in her chest. She knew if she walked down the inner stairs and went home, she could marry a boy who worked in the grain houses. She could have children who listened to the lullaby. She could sit under the shadow of the Wall and grow old and tell them not to look.

She turned away.

Oren threw a second line over the outer face and fixed it to a stanchion. He pulled. It held. He grunted and began to descend. Mara followed. The rope sang against her gloves. She tasted iron.

Halfway down the outside, she stopped and pressed her ear to the stone. There was a sound in it. A deep ticking far away. It was like a clock buried in soil. She held her breath and listened. Something moved with patience.

They reached the ground and stood in the white dust of the dry lake. The Wall loomed over them like a cliff that grew from nothing. It made the city feel like a box of light set inside a mountain. The air smelled of salt and old rain.

They took off their gloves and drank. The dust stuck to their tongues. They coughed. Lyse spat and grinned. “We did it,” she said. “We are outside.”

Finn knelt and pushed his hand into the powder. He lifted it and watched it fall through his fingers. “There is nothing,” he said. His voice was tight.

“There is everything,” Oren said. He turned and pointed northeast. The ground rose toward a ridge where old towers showed black against the stars. “We go there.”

They walked. The lake bed stretched and kept stretching. Their steps made small sounds that got swallowed at once. The stars drifted and turned. The wind cut across the flat and hissed. The white powder reflashed the moon.

They found the first mark at dawn. It was a long groove in the salt that ran on for a quarter mile. The sides were smooth and pressed down. The bottom held lumps of darker earth. The groove crossed their path and kept going north until it vanished in glare.

Calder crouched by it and touched the packed salt. “What is it,” he asked.

Oren did not answer. He walked along the groove and looked for an end. There was none he could see. He kicked at the dark lumps. One split and curled. It was a rind of something like skin gone hard with years.

Lyse made a sound in her throat. Finn stood and stared at the horizon with his mouth a line.

They walked parallel to the groove. After an hour they came to a second one. It ran almost beside the first, then veered and crossed it. At the crossing there was a broken place. In the broken place lay a fragment of something like bone. It was smooth and thick and big as a barrel.

They stood there and did not speak.

A shadow moved on the ridge. Mara saw it and could not tell herself it was a cloud. It went down the far slope and was gone. The wind picked up and carried a smell that cut through the salt. Sour. Animal. Deep.

They walked on and did not joke now. The sun was a hard coin above them. Heat came up from the ground as if the flat lake remembered fire. Oren kept them by the broken bone, then left it and led a line toward the towers.

By midday they reached the edge of the lake bed and climbed a low bank of powder and gravel. Beyond it the land looked chewed. Asphalt thrust up in wrinkled slabs. Rust sat like freckles on old steel. A sign lay face down with bolts torn through it. When Oren turned it with his boot, it showed letters in a language that was theirs but wrong. A place name. A speed that did not matter.

They found a length of reinforced concrete half buried. It had rebar like ribs. The ribs had been bent. Not cut. Not burned. Bent.

Lyse put her hand on one and tried to move it. It did not move. She pulled until her face went red. Calder laughed once and stopped.

By late afternoon they reached the first of the towers. It was a skeleton of a power line. The arms had sagged and dropped their cables. The old glass insulators hung in a few places and caught light. Under the tower lay the cracked rooms of a small substation and a shed with a half-open door.

Oren raised a hand for quiet and moved to the door. He looked in. There was nothing alive inside. There was a console against the wall with switches frozen in rust. There was a chair with its seat torn. There was a painted symbol that had faded into a gray flower. In the far corner he found a crate with a lid that stuck. He pried it. Inside were glass tubes with caps and a folded cloth that made a dry whisper when he touched it.

“Signal flares,” he said. “Old. I will not light them. I do not trust the air here.” He looked at the symbol again. “I have seen this in the workshop. Not the same. A cousin. It means power.”

Finn leaned in the doorway. “We should go back,” he said. “We have seen enough.”

Lyse shook her head. “We have seen the bones. We have not seen the face.”

Mara said nothing. She could feel the tick in the ground under her boots. It was steady and slow. It did not match her heart. It did not match the wind.

They slept for an hour in the shadow of the shed and woke to the sound of something far away. It was not thunder. It was not a truck. It was too steady to be feet and too alive to be machines. It was a breath. It was a sigh. It moved the dust on the floor.

They left the shed and kept moving under the line of towers. The cables lay like old snakes in the brush. The brush had no leaves. It had knives. They bled and kept walking.

They saw it at sunset. The land rose in a gentle swell. Beyond the swell lay a plain of split rock. In the middle of the plain sat a shape like a toppled gate. It was the rib of something once living, only larger than the Wall was tall. The end had been cut clean. The cut edge showed a honeycomb of tunnels packed with mineral salts.

Near the rib lay a skull. It was cracked from eyes to teeth. The teeth were blunt and broad. They were made to grind. The place where a neck might have been was a ruin of stone fused to bone by heat. The ground around it was blackened and smooth as if it had melted and reset. The air smelled of old smoke that never left.

They went near without meaning to. Oren reached out and touched the rim of the eye. It was a place a person could sit inside with space to spare. He pulled his hand back and wiped it on his shirt.

“We should mark the way back,” Mara said.

Oren nodded and tied a strip of cloth to a twisted rod that stuck from the ground. Finn sat and put his face in his hands. Calder stood beside him and said his name without feeling. Lyse walked around the skull and knelt by the blackened ground. She dug with her fingers and turned up a metal disk the size of a cup. There were letters on it. Government. Seal. The date was older than their grandfathers.

“What did they do,” Lyse asked. “What did they try.”

“They tried to stop,” Oren said.

The ground ticked. It did not stop.

They stayed near the skull until the stars came out and the cold pushed against their sunburn. They ate with stiff hands and did not taste much. Mara lay on her back and looked at the torn lines of the towers and the long dark shape of the Wall far behind them. It was small now. It looked like a low ridge. She felt alone and angry and too awake.

The sound came in the second hour of night. It walked through the earth. A step, then another, each one with a long space between. Not a tremor now. A strike. The salt on the floor of the shed jumped once with each one. Finn made a sound like a child. Calder clamped a hand on his mouth.

They moved at once and without words. They put out the cooking flame and kicked dust over it. They crouched under the rusted deck of the substation with the ribs of steel above them and watched the horizon.

The first shape came into view at the line of towers to the north. It was higher than the insulators and thick across the shoulders. It swung its arms with ease like the arms were part of the wind. The head moved with small tilts, as if listening. It crossed under the wires and did not bow. It stepped into moonlight and it was just an animal only huge and upright and wrong. The skin was pale where it was bare. It hung in folds that had rubbed to dark at the joints. Hair grew in coarse patches down the back and across the forearms. The eyes were deep and sunk. The mouth was wide. It did not look up at the moon or down at its feet. It looked at the line of the Wall far behind them and breathed. It blew dust with each breath and the dust came toward them in a soft wave.

Lyse closed her eyes. Oren moved his hand over hers and held it still.

A second shape stepped from behind the first. Smaller. It moved in the wake of the big one like a boat behind a ship. It had a limp. One leg dragged. The foot left a long mark in the dust. It stopped near the skull and set its hand upon it and leaned. The skull rocked under the weight and settled. The sound carried. Finn’s shoulders shook.

The big one turned its head and looked toward their shed. Not a blind swing. A focus. It crouched without hurry and placed a hand on the ground as if to feel what the ground said. The hand was broader than a table. The nails were flat and split and rimmed with black. It pressed down and the powder lifted. It brought the hand to its face and breathed. It made a sound like a sigh but sharp at the end. Then it started toward them.

They did not plan to run. They ran.

Oren hissed and waved them toward the split in the fence behind the shed. They pushed through wires that ate their clothes. The wind pressed them toward the cut rank of old highway. The steps beat behind them, slow and fast at once. They tripped on cable and fell and were dragged up by hands that felt small and weak.

They cut down a ditch and found a culvert half full of rock and a trickle of black water. They slid into it and crawled. The air tasted like old oil. Stones tore their knees. Light moved behind them. It was moonlight broken by a shadow. The mouth of the culvert went dark. A hand came in and felt the edges. It could not reach.

The hand withdrew. The shadow moved. They heard the scrape of stone. The culvert shook. A new light came on outside. It was a blink from the tower. Two blinks. Three. A pattern.

Oren whispered into the stink. “Did you see that.”

Mara saw it. On the far tower, a small lamp had woken. It flashed three times, then stopped. It flashed once. It waited. It flashed twice. The pattern matched the old signal codes Oren had shown her after work. It said nothing in a language they knew. It said simply that something had sensed and was alive.

The culvert mouth cleared. The shadow rose. They crawled on hands and knees until their palms went slick with blood. The culvert opened beyond the road into a small drainage. They tumbled out into a cut where brush had grown over and died standing. They ran bent over until their backs screamed.

Lyse grabbed Mara’s arm and pointed. Ahead, on a low rise, a squat building sat with no windows and a flat roof. It had a door that was not wood. It was steel and stood half open with a rack of crushed cans jammed into the gap to keep it from closing.

They went for it. They should not have. They went anyway.

Inside the steel door the air was cold and dry. The smell was strange and clean. The room beyond held racks of boxes stacked with neat labels, all ruined by time. Some had been pushed over. In the far wall, a panel of dead screens stared out. Above them a sign hung with letters in the old style. Relay. Perimeter. Beacon.

The panel had a small light in the corner. It was red and faint. It pulsed at the same speed as the light on the tower. Oren stood over it like a priest and touched the frame.

“Do not,” Mara said.

“I am only looking,” he said, and he looked, and his face changed.

There were papers on a table in plastic sleeves. They had maps of the Basin and points marked along arcs that followed the Wall at a distance of a mile. Each point had a little note beside it with a code. Some codes had dates. The dates went on for many years and stopped decades ago. Under the list of points was a note in a hand that pressed hard. It was short. It said that the beacons should stay lit except during Culls. It said Culls should be scheduled during Founders’ Feast and Harvest Games. It said failure to provide feed would result in breaches.

Lyse read the last word and put her hand over her mouth. Oren reached for another page and turned it. It showed the same hand writing the same note on a later day with a different date. It had a list of names on the back. No last names. Just first. Seven each time.

Calder took the page and turned it and gave it back like it burned him. Finn stood by the door and shook.

Mara could not speak. She could hear the ticking in the ground and the slow steps coming nearer. She could see the light blinking outside in a pattern that meant not distress and not warning and not help. It meant a call. It meant a dinner bell.

“They leave the lamps on,” Oren said. His voice was flat and small. “They turn them off only when there is no feed. They timed us to the Feast. They always did. They knew we would climb.”

Lyse pressed her forehead to the cool metal of the panel. “We thought the Watch was lazy,” she said. “We thought they looked the other way because they were drunk. They looked the other way because they needed to.”

Finn threw up in the corner and wiped his mouth and laughed for a second that broke and turned into a sound like choking. Calder held him and did not try to quiet him because there was no point now.

The steps came up to the door. The shadow blocked the light. The door handle bent in and squealed. The crushed cans popped loose and fell. The door closed by itself on the hand. The hand pushed. The hinges screamed. The hand pulled. The lock held for one breath. Two. It tore.

The thing that came through had to bow its shoulders and twist its hips. It smelled like wet leather and long sleep. It filled the room and made it feel like a box. Its head brushed the rafters. Its teeth showed when it breathed and they were the wrong shape for meat but there were many and they did not care. Its eyes were black from lid to lid. It reached out with its broad hand and touched the edge of the panel and the panel cracked and spit a little spark that died.

Oren drove his knife into the base of the hand. It went in two inches and stuck. The thing did not cry out. It looked at its hand and at Oren and then put its other hand on Oren’s chest and pushed him back into the racks. The shelves folded. The boxes fell. The breath left Oren with a short sound. He dropped.

Lyse grabbed the flare gun and aimed at the eyes and fired. The flare burst against the brow and stuck and burned. The thing flinched and shook its head. It brought its hand up and wiped at the flame and smeared it. It burned anyway. The smell was hair and old fat. It made a deep rumble that felt inside the ribs.

Calder hit its knee with the hammer. The knee bent wrong and then found itself again. Finn ran at the door and did not get far. The hand swung and met him in the air and Finn was on the floor in a shape that was not a person. Calder screamed his name and kept screaming it. The hand came down and Calder went quiet without a word.

Lyse ran past under the arm while it turned and grabbed Mara’s wrist and pulled her. Mara stumbled and hit the edge of the panel and cut her hip and did not feel it. They went into the back room where the floor sloped into a tunnel with cables in trays along the wall. The cables hummed. The humming was the same as the ticking. The world had a slow heart.

They ran down the slope in the dark. Behind them wood and plastic broke and iron complained. The big body moved after them. It had to twist. It did not stop. Oren’s breath was not behind them. Finn’s name hung in the air like smoke.

The tunnel bent. It led to a chamber with a low ceiling full of dead machines. On the far side a small door sat open. It had stairs beyond. Lyse went first. Mara followed and pulled the door to and braced it with a bar that had been left for that purpose by someone who had thought of this moment a long time ago.

The hand came through the gap and found her ankle and squeezed. Her vision went white. Lyse swung the hammer she had carried down the tunnel and brought it down on the fingers. The hand let go for a blink. Mara dragged herself up two steps. The door slammed. The bar caught. The fingers were not in the gap when it closed. There was skin on the threshold anyway.

They climbed until the tunnel rose into a hatch set in the side of an old berm. They pushed the hatch and came out into night and cold. The Wall stood huge and near, black against the stars. They had run in a long curve. The beacons blinked along the far towers. They counted them without meaning to. One. Two. Three. A pause. The code said feed complete.

They walked toward the Wall like the ground would open and swallow them. Lyse cried without sound. The mark of the coil had cut deep on her shoulder. Mara’s ankle sent knives up her calf with each step. She looked back once and saw a tall shape come out of the hatch in a slow careful way. It sniffed the air like a dog, which was a word she knew and had never had a thing to point at. It turned its head toward them and stood and watched. It did not chase.

The Wall looked close and then far again and then close. The rope dangled where they had left it. The knot held. The night had gone thin and blue. Dawn walked up behind them.

They climbed. Mara could not use her ankle. Lyse went up first and pulled and took the weight. The rope dug into their palms and made skin go away. The Wall was cold. The wind took heat and words and carried both over the city. No one looked up. The Watch were at the far towers or asleep with cups in their hands.

At the top they lay on the walkway and shook. Lyse rolled and retched and pushed herself to her hands and knees. Mara grabbed the rope and began to pull it up. She could not leave it hanging. She could not leave any sign that they had gone out. She could not stop herself from caring about a thing that would not save them.

When the rope was up, the door to the inner stairs swung open. Two Watchmen stood there in dark coats with brass on the collars. Their faces did not carry surprise. One was old. One was young. The old one held a book. The young one held a baton.

The old one looked at them the way a man looks at rain he does not like. He nodded once and said the words as if he said them many times a year and had said them when he was young to an old man who nodded in the same way.

“You climbed,” he said.

Lyse pushed the hair from her eyes. “Help us,” she said. “They are here. They are real. They killed our friends. Open the gates. Bring everyone inside. Stop the lights. Stop the beacons. You have to stop them.”

The old man blinked. His eyes were gray. He ran his finger down the page of the book as if he had to find what came next. He did not have to. He knew.

“The beacons will remain lit,” he said. “The schedule is in effect. The gates will open at midday as planned. The Feast will end at dawn. The lists are posted. There will be a reading in the square.”

Lyse stared. Mara sat up and then lay back down with her eyes wide to hold back tears. The young Watchman looked over their heads at the outside and swallowed and tried to not move his hands.

“Why,” Mara said. Her voice broke. “Tell me why.”

The old man closed the book and kept his hand on it. “When the first walls went up, the things outside were many and hungry and angry. They beat at our gates and we used fire and we lost many. Someone opened a feed line with waste from the slaughter yards. Someone noticed the nights were quieter when the waste was taken out at a certain time and a certain place. Someone wrote it down. The beacons mark those places. It stopped the gate storms. It stopped the tower pulls. It is the reason the children can sleep.”

“You feed them people,” Lyse said. Her voice had no air in it. “You feed them us.”

The old man did not flinch. He looked at her as if he had decided long ago that this was what a face did when it heard certain words. “We feed them what we have,” he said. “We feed them those who will climb. Those who will not be kept from climbing by law or song. Those who cannot be kept inside. They go outside. They keep the many safe. It is not clean. It is not fair. It is what is. This is the Basin. This is Home.”

Mara reached for the flare gun. It was gone. She had lost it in the relay room. There was only the rope and the salt on her tongue and the taste of iron.

“Open the gate,” Lyse said. “At least let us bring back our dead.”

“The gates open at midday,” the old man said. “As planned.”

He turned and walked into the stair tower. The young Watchman looked at Mara and Lyse and his face tried to make a shape that was not allowed. He followed the old man down.

Lyse sat back against the inner parapet and laughed once. It sounded like a cough. It ended in a sob. She wiped her face and stood up. She looked down at the city and then back at the outer edge where the rope had hung and then at the sky that did not care.

“Do you hear it,” she asked.

Mara heard it. The ticking. The heart in the ground. The lights on the towers blinked like small eyes. The beacons were awake. The pattern ran and said what it said in a language that did not need words. The feed was recorded. The list would be read.

Lyse took Mara’s hand and pulled her up. They limped along the walkway to the next stair tower and down into the narrow throat of stone where the smell of sweat and oil was thick. The stairs spat them into a small door on a back street. The Feast was ending. The fires were low. The elders slept with smiles. The children carried paper torches and sang a song about the first builders. The words spoke of safety and duty and the strong hand of the Wall.

They walked through the crowd like ghosts. No one saw the blood on their pants. No one saw the salt in their hair. No one asked where the other three were. The city was full of people who did not look at things if they could help it.

At the square the Speaker stood on the steps of the Hall and rang a bell. People gathered. The Speaker held a paper that looked like the papers in the relay. It shook in his hand and made a sound. He smiled and his smile was a habit.

He read the names of the prize winners of the Games. He read the names of the new apprentices. He read the names of the dead. He read the names of the honored. Then he read a shorter list. Seven names. A weekly rite that no one thought about. The list of Founders’ Offerings. No last names. Just first. A tradition kept so the beacons would glow and the nights would stay calm. Everyone bowed their heads at each name. It was a mark of gratitude and sorrow. It was supposed to be both.

He read Finn and Calder. He read Oren. He read Lyse. He read Mara. He read two others who had climbed the year before and had not returned.

Mara swayed. Lyse put her hand on Mara’s back and held her up. They stood in the square and listened to their names. People around them murmured in respect. They were already gone in the minds of their neighbors. Honored. Offered. Part of the story that kept houses warm.

Lyse leaned close to Mara’s ear. “We could run,” she said. “Into the alleys. Into the old tunnels. Into the hills. We could try.”

Mara looked at the faces. The old men nodding. The mothers holding their children’s hands and telling them this was what love looked like. The young Watchman hanging back by the steps and staring not at them but at his boots. The Speaker folding the paper and putting it in his coat with a practiced motion that meant his hands would not shake if he kept them moving.

“We could run,” Mara said.

They did not.

At midday the gates opened. Carts came and went. The Watch sent out a team with a wagon and hooks. The team wore masks that covered their noses and mouths. They drove to the relay with the lamps and the blinking towers and the dark room with the cracked panel. They filled the wagon with what was left of bodies. They drove back and burned them with a small ceremony behind the tannery. The smoke rose in a straight line. People said a prayer. They were told not to look and they did not look.

Lyse and Mara sat on the stone by the river where the shade lay and the water made a sound like careful speech. They did not talk. They sat until the sun moved and the shadow left them. They moved with it and it left them again.

At dusk a child came and stood near them and asked if the giants were real. He had hair that would not be combed and a tooth missing. He had a wooden toy with wheels. He rolled it and watched it fall.

“Yes,” Mara said. It felt like a word from a language she had not used and had forgotten she knew.

“Are they hungry,” the child asked.

“Yes,” Lyse said.

“Will they eat me,” he asked.

Lyse looked at Mara. Mara looked at the river. The water kept making its small sound. The city hum rose around them like the noise of bees. The Wall took the last light of the day and gave nothing back.

“Not if you stay inside,” Lyse said.

The child nodded and rolled his toy and ran. He ran in a line to his mother who called him and scolded him and kissed his hair. He forgot the question in a minute and asked for bread. He ate. He grew. He slept.

Night came. The beacons blinked outside the Wall. Things moved in the dark with patient weight. The ground ticked.

Mara lay awake and stared at the ceiling and saw the skull and the cracked teeth and the black dome of the eye. She heard the old men say words about duty and safety and the Basin and felt the rope in her hands again.

She thought of the door in the stair tower. She thought of the book and the list and the young Watchman who stared at his boots. She thought of Oren’s fingers and Finn’s laugh and Calder’s name carved into the workbench in the shop. She thought of Lyse breathing next to her, alive, like a crime.

The next morning she went to the shop and found the coil of copper wire where Oren had left it. She put it in her bag. She went to the base of the Wall and pressed her palm to the seam. The stone was cool and damp. The tremor in it was a rhythm now that she knew. She could not pretend it was anything else.

Lyse met her at the corner where the tannery spilled its smell. They did not speak. They walked to the square where a board held notices and lists. There were names for apprenticeships and names for marriages. There were names for Founders’ Offerings for the next Feast. Names written in small careful script. Names picked in a way no one questioned.

Mara took the coil from her bag and weighed it in her hand. She could cut the board down. She could set it on fire. She could take a hammer to the bell. She could stand in the square and tell the children how the world was. It would change the air for an hour. The list would still be read. The lights would still blink. The ground would still tick.

She put the coil back in her bag.

Lyse took her hand. They stood and watched the people pass. The people did not see them. The people were busy with living. They laughed and bought carrots and haggled and kissed and pushed carts and shouted to friends far away. They were not bad. They were not good. They were inside.

Beyond the Wall the lights blinked. The beacons would go on as long as someone climbed. The giants would wait as long as they were fed. The city would sleep. The story would be told. The lullaby would play. The river would talk to itself.

Years later a child would ask again. The answer would feel old in the mouth. The giants would cross the flats in a dry winter and press their hands to the stone and listen for voices inside. The Watch would read from the book. The lists would be made. The names would be spoken. The smoke would rise behind the tannery.

Mara would go to the workshop and run her hands over the bench where names had been cut by boys who thought steel would last longer than breath. She would pick up the hammer and set it down. She would walk to the Wall and press her ear to the seam. She would listen to the heart in the ground. It would keep time.

Lyse would stand on the roof of her mother’s house and look toward the ridges where the old towers still carried their dead wires across the empty and the white. She would hear the steps when the wind was right. She would not climb again. She would think about it when the Feast drums started. She would think about it when she could not sleep. She would think about Oren and Finn and Calder. She would say their names in the dark.

There were no heroes. There were no bright banners. There was a city that ate its curious to stay alive. There were things outside that waited and did not reason in the way a person does. There was a Wall that told a story of safety. There were lights that taught a different one. Both were true and it did not matter.

The ground ticked and the beacons blinked and the children learned the measurements of the Wall. Ten feet thick at the top. Twenty at the base. A hundred feet tall. Stairs only for the Watch. No one climbed. No one looked. A rule like gravity.

Once a year someone climbed.