And splitting his consciousness across eight spiders was so . . . fascinating . . . in a way he could not have explained to anyone, not even Dad.

  Tonight.

  To be alone. To link properly with his spiders.

  Tonight, I’ll learn everything!

  This was going to be difficult. Fear and regret and anger—strange, undirected anger at the past, at events that were no longer real—swirled and roiled inside Stef’s head. A sleepless night and the realization that she was no longer a new immigrant, scared and broke and confused by the oddities of a new culture, and some core of honesty that perhaps she had always possessed . . . all of these had tipped her into a state where she needed to decide, or so it seemed. Then she’d realized the decision was already formed in her mind, hard and complete.

  She walked along the familiar, shadow-filled bonestone corridor that led to Reverend Mother’s study. It was a contrast to the airy, quartz-walled tunnel lit by rivulets of magma that she had walked through as a schoolgirl, in trouble again, on her way to see the principal.

  An unseen boundwraith dragged the ceramic door into its cavity in the wall, and Stef entered the room, hands folded like any penitent nun, knowing that this would be a transgression that could not be washed away by entering Contrition Trance or enacting the Seven Steps of Regret.

  “Sister Stephanie-Charon Mors. Do you need to talk? That is unusual.”

  This was the hour when, without appointment, any nun could enter. Usually it was the weaker ones with some pedantic difficulty that was problematic only because they made it so.

  “Yes, Reverend Mother.”

  “Come in, and sit.”

  Reverend Mother was narrow with age, but straight-backed on her hard, cushionless bonestone stool. The whites of her eyes were clear as a girl’s.

  Stef sat in the comfortable visitor’s chair. In contrast to Reverend Mother’s stool, it was designed to make a point. The intended message was the power of humility. Stef had always thought it meant Reverend Mother was a tough old bitch who needed nothing but her own certainty.

  “Would you prefer helebore tea,” added Reverend Mother, “or to come to the point?”

  “You said”—Stef consciously tightened her stomach to exhale, calming herself—“I was the worst nun in the order.”

  “You’ll remember I qualified that sentence. You’re one Hades of a teacher, Sister Stephanie-Charon.”

  Stef was blinking. Then she focused on Reverend Mother, knowing that this was the moment.

  “I don’t believe.”

  “What don’t you believe?” asked Reverend Mother.

  Behind her was a private altar, a worn block of pale-grey stone on which worn icons, chiselled in millennia gone by, were barely visible. It was a fragment of a titanic human knuckle, perhaps belonging to the same long-dead person whose petrified skull now formed City Hall’s central building. Whether huge people had once walked the earth, or whether mages had caused the transformation (either fatally or post mortem) no one knew, and only scholars cared.

  The Order of Thanatos had myths to explain everything, but few of them were rational.

  “Any of it,” said Stef. “I don’t believe any of your stories.”

  “You mean the Teachings Thanatical.”

  “Yes. I do love teaching, just teaching the children. You were right in that.”

  Reverend Mother’s eyes were shining. Stef tightened her jaw muscles, knowing that the old woman could use mesmeric language to induce compliance, but not in someone who remained alert and sure of her position.

  This was not a time to think of Bone Listener Jamie Thargulis and his dark eyes, because dreaminess would open the door for Reverend Mother to use her verbal skills.

  “You’re a logical thinker, Sister, but there’s a clear boundary”—softly—“between faith and logic.”

  “Yes, Reverend Mother. And we probably agree on where the boundary lies.”

  “But you don’t have the desire to leap over it?”

  “That’s not the way I think of it.”

  “I see.”

  Reverend Mother’s eyes were shining like ice. Again, Stef tightened her muscles, pulling her attention back into the moment.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “For deceiving you, when you gave me a home here.”

  “No.”

  Ice was in Reverend Mother’s voice as well.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s yourself, Stephanie, that you have deceived.”

  This time, Stef’s diaphragm tightened by itself.

  “You didn’t call me Sister.”

  “No. I did not.”

  “I’m really—”

  Reverend Mother held out her hand, palm down.

  “Leave me now, Stephanie.”

  Stef stood up, fighting back the stinging in her tear ducts. Then she nodded, because to make the usual Sign of Thanatos would be an insult now, and turned away.

  She went out into the corridor, and walked on, aware of the grinding noise behind her—the door rolling back into place, dragged by the boundwraith—and of the chill draught and ancient smell, and the way that she had just severed a major lifeline, for the second time in her life.

  Alone in his bed, grinning, Carl descended into ecstasy. One by one, he merged with seven of his spiders, while allowing the remaining spider to remain quiescent, hidden in a turn-up of Bone Listener Brixhan Somebody-or-Other’s trousers.

  But those seven, what they saw!

  First, they climbed from behind the bone-and-scarab-carapace adding-machine, then crawled from Dad’s office, out into the corridors of the Archives. Security scanwraiths passed over them, ignoring their presence, for Carl’s spiders were formed from computational blood and so belonged here.

  They explored.

  From the ceiling of a vast hall, all seven spiders watched (from disparate viewpoints) as lines and rivers of their own kind—thousands, maybe millions of blood-spiders—streamed across floors and walls and ceilings, into and out of ducts, carrying their fragments of data and logic around the organized Archivists, merging the Bone Listeners’ investigations.

  It was wonderful. It was a place of ecstasy.

  And this was not even the Lattice, which his spiders had yet to explore.

  Three words, so far, had come to her.

  I deeply regret . . .

  Stef was alone in her dorm-cell, seated at the small stone table, holding her carved-bone fountain-pen, without any idea what she should write with it. Then she pushed aside her notepaper, as a tear dripped downwards, softly forming a wet disk on stone.

  This was heartrending, but she had to continue.

  It occupied vast pits, extending its massive volume into areas of stone cells, threading through them, granting tiny insignificant men and women—the Archivists, all of them Bone Listeners with an aptitude for pain—access to its arcs and nodes of bone. Information and inference, learning and logic, coexisted in its vastness . . . without self-conscious awareness. Had it been alive, capable of sensing itself, it would have been a godlike being, ruling or destroying or ignoring the Earth, whatever it saw fit. As it was, it formed a repository of more than facts—it held the emotions and satori-bliss of insight, the nirvana of information-merging, the dreams and pain of wisdom.

  Its struts were of bone. It was vast and three-dimensional.

  This was the Lattice.

  And through his seven spiders, even without Bone Listener awareness, Carl could sense its power. He watched as guardian-moths of living copper, their wings razor-edged, flitted among the struts, while spiders crawled and flowed, conjoining the Lattice with the tiny frail Archivists who used it.

  Carl, via his spiders, followed one such flow of spiders as it split into smaller and smaller tributaries, eventually leading to a single stone couch (one among dozens, maybe hundreds involved in this information quest) on which an Archivist-Scribe lay with eyes wide open, allowing exit and entry of blood-spiders to his own self.

  Scarlet spiders danced across his staring eyeballs, and pulled themselves down into the sockets, merging with his thoughts, before dragging themselves back out. The Archivist-Scribe’s gaze was fixed, for he could not blink, but the smile on his mouth was wide. He was merged with the flow whose medium was computational blood, manifested as a sea of spiders.

  But Carl was observing, not using the Lattice.

  Now it was time to hunt for facts, to prove to himself that while he could not hear the bones, his spiders could resonate with others of their kind, allowing him to sense information currently in the flow, though he could never initiate investigation himself.

  Perhaps that limitation hid an advantage, for he would never feel the depths of pain that every Archivist experienced, during each moment inside the Lattice.

  It took a long time.

  Later, both Carl and his spiders slept exhausted, and his dreams were strange.

  Jamie Thargulis dreamed of Stephanie-Charon Mors in another guise, as if she were divested of her nun’s habit—a fantasy—to live as an ordinary woman. Her ordinary name would be Stephanie, but Stephanie what?

  Even asleep, he dared not hope she might be Stephanie Thargulis someday. After a time, the dream dissipated, and he came awake, his cheekbones chilled by evaporating tears.

  Next evening, Carl began to write the essay, knowing this was going to be something special.

  He began by rhetorically asking what it meant to assign an age to a city. Was there an official founding date? Should one begin with the date the first stone was laid? Or with the completion of its first tower, or the flight of its first gargoyle?

  In quick, brief paragraphs, he laid out his reasons for agreeing that this year, 6607, was a good year to consider the Tri-Millennial Anniversary (three thousand three hundred and thirty-three years, in the official terminology) of the founding of Tristopolis. In that first year, City Hall was inaugurated, and seventeen of its greatest towers were completed.

  But while I agree with the founding year, he continued, the date within that year is contentious.

  He stopped, found his old dictionary, and checked the spelling of “contentious.” Yawning, he nodded, then decided this was enough for the first night. Besides, he had facts but not what you might call a theme. He wanted this essay to shine, to excel, to amaze Sister Stef. Thank Hades he had until Sepday to finish.

  Lying down on the bed, he thought about linking to his spiders, but drifted into ordinary sleep.

  Next morning, in the schoolyard, Carl stared up at the indigo sky, allowing his eyes to defocus. His spiders were in Dad’s office and—Dad was at work.

  He broke contact.

  Any Archivist was sensitive to resonance, and if Dad sensed computational blood that was not quite his own . . . Carl, blinking, thought he saw someone draw back inside an upper window of the school. Had Sister Stef been watching him?

  A game of snatchball was starting up, but Carl had no interest, except that it meant no one was looking his way. Eyelids fluttering, he sank inside his awareness, linking to his other spider, which remained hidden inside the turn-up of a Bone Listener’s trouser leg.

  Now, Carl caused the spider to clamber out of hiding, and scuttle across a wide-seeming floor to hide beneath a filing-cabinet formed of bone. This must be the subterranean OCML—the Office of the Chief Medical Listener. Here, forensic Bone Listeners carried out autopsies on suspicious deaths. There might be police officers in attendance.

  I could be in big trouble.

  He checked his spider was out of sight, then broke the link. In the schoolyard, the snatchball game swirled in joyful chaos, a communal celebration of physicality and energy that had nothing to do with him.

  Alone in her cell, Stef stared at the wall, seeing the memory of nightmare: shuffling men and women on the docks of TalonClaw Port, heading for the gangways that led downwards, into the great dockside holds.

  At the time, as a girl, she had noticed only the well-dressed passengers on the overhead bridges, boarding the vast teardrop-shaped suboceanic liners, with their shining rear propellers. If she thought at all about the devastated, hopeless individuals who would board via the hidden tubes beneath the waves, it was with a snooty superiority: she would never travel third-class.

  “I didn’t know.”

  Her eyes, so animated in class, now held only loss.

  “Oh, Pop. I loved you.”

  No other sound entered the cold stone cell.

  In the evening, once more alone in his room, Carl resumed the link. His lone spider traversed several ceilings until he came to a room in which postmortems took place. There, he was sickened to watch a Bone Listener drive platinum divining forks into a corpse that could never feel pain.

  During life, microstructures laid down in bone resonated with the neural patterns and neuropeptide flow of thought and emotion and memory. The bones stored interference patterns that could scatter or concentrate necroflux in ways Carl did not understand.

  He felt awful as he withdrew.

  But later, when he should have been asleep, he could not help himself. He re-formed the link and rode the spider as it dropped to a uniformed porter’s shoulder, and hid beneath the epaulette. The man assisted in moving a onto a gurney, and then along corridors to an underground garage.

  A black ambulance was waiting with its wings furled, but the porter and his colleagues rolled the gurney past it. They stopped at the rear of an ordinary-looking indigo van. On its side shone the Skull-and-Ouroboros logo of the Energy Authority. The porters loaded the corpse into the back, beside two other pale bodies; then they sat down on metal benches inside the van.

  Someone closed the doors, and soon the van was in motion. No one sensed the scarlet spider clinging to the porter’s shoulder, beneath his epaulette.

  An hour later (during which Carl had broken the link only twice, to go to the bathroom and to make himself a cup of helebore tea), the porter was in the Westside Energy Complex. Here the air seemed awash with half-glimpsed black waves, as if necroflux were visible to arachnid sight. The spider’s form was suffering in this environment, so Carl caused it to move quickly, wanting to see as much as possible before the spider disintegrated.

  For a time he watched workers direct quicksilver shrikes—a flock of living metal birds—to strip away the flesh from corpses on biers. The shrikes, as if in payment for their sustenance, dragged thin dark threads from the bodies, and dropped them on the floor. Afterwards, when the bones were stripped and the flock was nesting overhead once more, the human workers coiled the dark threads around spools of bone. The threads were nerves, and Carl had no idea why they might be useful to keep.

  But his spider had limited time, so it scuttled fast across the ceiling, following his sense of energy in the air, heading for the greater concentration.

  Soon, it was perched high on the external cladding of a reactor pile, one of many that stood in long rows inside the cavern complex. This was a huge place, immense to human eyes, impossible for Carl to comprehend through his spider.

  More workers (these in heavy protective suits with gauntlets) were loading bones into an opened reactor, stacking them in careful alignment inside the resonance cavity. Once filled, the reactor would contain the bones of two thousand dead people. Waves of necroflux would pulse back and forth, building intensity until the energy could be used to deliver warmth and lighting and motive power to the city overhead.

  No one intended the side effect, as the sweeping necroflux replayed a tangled burning chaos of thoughts and emotions, the mashed-together pain of two thousand lives, forced into one tortured whole. That awful crescendo was playing out now in each reactor pile, over and over, until the bones were used up, and more fuel was required.

  Oh, Hades.

  It was terrible. It was impossible to look away.

  I knew it, but I didn’t understand.

  Everyone knew, and everyone ignored the reality.

  I can’t look.

  But he did look, remaining linked with his spider until the spillover resonance finally shook it apart. Then its began slopping away into liquid blood, thickening and denaturing into stickiness, and the link was gone.

  In his room, Carl sat with his mouth open, breathing fast, wishing he’d severed the link earlier.

  But I’ve got it.

  He had needed a theme. He’d read the dates, but the history had been far removed, listing events that seemed unreal.

  I wish I didn’t.

  But he had his essay now.

  Finally, it was Sepday and the beginning of class.

  The essay was inside Carl’s desk. He felt its presence like a glow from beneath the ancient, defaced desktop. He had written something special, and he knew it.

  “I mentioned we would try something new.” Sister Stef spoke without smiling. She’d looked serious for days. “We’re going to read our essays aloud, one at a time.”

  Normally, the thought of such a thing would have terrified Carl. But with an essay like the one he’d written, a feeling of unstoppable triumph was rising inside him.

  “We’ll take turns, but I’ll ask for volunteers to start—”

  Carl’s hand was up, as if it had risen by itself.

  “—so it’ll be Carl first, then Angela.”

  He felt warm, energised.

  “Of course,” continued Sister Stef, “Ralen can just relax. Welcome back, from all of us.”

  That was when Carl realized that Ralen had been sitting in his normal desk all along, so subdued—his gaze directed down at his desktop—that the usual signals of dissatisfaction and potential violence had been absent.

  Oh, no.

  Poor Ralen was devastated, as Carl knew Dad had been when Mother died, when his world was ripped away from him. And that was awful.

  I can’t read it. Not aloud.

  Because the cleverness of his essay was also shocking, depending on the listeners’ ignorance—if Carl read it aloud—of the reality of life and death. He’d thought he was being smart, writing about things that people didn’t want to know, but now—

  “So, Carl. Will you start?”

  “I . . . I didn’t do it, Sister. I . . . forgot.”

  “You forgot.”

  “Yes, Sister.” He felt a whirlpool of sickness inside. “Sorry.”