Chapter 7: Gold at the Root

“Come and sit. Not there — over here, out of the wet.”

He was on a crate with his back to the wall before he’d agreed to anything, and then there were hands in his hair, a comb working up from the ends in short pulls, a thumb on his jaw turning his head one way for a look and the other way for a second look, fingers working the muscle at the top of his shoulder like dough, and a fourth girl saying Move, move, I want to see, so that he stopped counting them.

“Leave him alone. He’s only just up.”

“I’m not hurting him.” The comb pulled again, not gently. “Look at this, though. Look how thick it comes back in.”

“That’s not off her side. Look at the root. Black, all the way in.” She lifted a hank of it and let it drop. “Do you know what black hair and black eyes go for?”

“How much?”

“Ask Mr. Charles what he paid. Better, ask him what he’s going to get.”

Rook kept the grin on. It was the cheapest thing his face could do and it was what they were after, and the hands kept coming, quick and warm and certain of themselves, and somebody had a wet rag and was doing the back of his neck as though he were a child who had been out in the dirt.

So that was the answer. He’d wondered about it the way you wonder about weather. They kept their own sires and sold the rest, and when the blood ran thin they bought in from outside, and the one thing they couldn’t grow for themselves was black.

“Is the old one really going?”

“Mr. Charles says tomorrow, before it’s light.” The girl with the comb made a face. “Good. I can hardly look at him. His hide’s coming off him and he stinks. Rook, don’t you go near him, you’ll stink too.”

Rook looked down at his own hair, standing up where the comb had been through it, stiff with something.

So this was what clean was, up here.

“He’ll go to stud somewhere,” said the one with the rag. “Look at that face. Somebody’ll pay for that face.”

“Nothing good ever came off the old one anyway.” The woman who said it had her hand flat on her belly and her mouth turned down. “This one’ll be another fryer. The one I’m carrying. You watch. I can feel it.”

“It’s not just you. Nine in ten come out fryers.” The new voice came from the door. “It’s nobody’s fault. That’s just how it comes out.”

Rook looked up, and the name arrived with her face the way it always did, and it wasn’t a name he could say out loud, so he only thought it: Pearl.

She was fifteen at the outside. The baby fat was still in her cheeks. Her belly stood out under the smock, high and hard, and she had a baby on her hip that was still on the breast, and she was proud — that was the thing he kept coming back to. She was proud, and by the accounting they used in here she had the right to be.

“The matron’s the one who knows how,” Pearl said. “She’s had two dams and a sire out of her, all three of them kept. And look at little Eight.” She bounced the baby. “Black hair and black eyes, same as him. She’ll be on the first floor her whole life. When Rook’s sold she can have his name. It’s a lucky name. It sounds nice.”

Rook’s mouth did the grin and held it.

He could not tell whether the girl was being kind to him, or showing him a thing she was proud of, or whether up here those two were done with the same face at the same time. The baby looked at him over her shoulder, black-eyed, and put its fist in its mouth and seemed to consider him.

Then something hit the back of his head — a flat hand, hard enough to move his teeth.

“Don’t sit there grinning. Come.”

The comb stopped. He got up and went where he was told, and behind him somebody said something he didn’t catch, and one of them laughed the way people laugh at somebody else’s luck.

The stairwell door was steel, with a lock on it that had a lens in the middle. The Countess walked up to the door and the light came out of the lens and crossed her throat and found the spot beside her pulse, and the spot lit up once, and the bolt went back with a knock.

He put his hand to his neck as he went through.

That was all Charles’s little pen had done — lifted a thing off her and set it down on him. There was nothing under his fingers. There was nothing to scrub off. And the door had opened for the both of them.

Up the next flight, then the next. Every landing had a lock on it and every lock had a light, and she opened them one after another without breaking stride, and he went up behind her, working it out.

Whatever the light was reading in her neck, it was reading the same thing in his.

He’d been promoted, then. Deputy matron, if you liked a title, and he did; there’d be a box on a sheet somewhere with his name in it, a size smaller, under hers. He wondered what the pay was. Two cans a day, Mr. Charles had said, and it was always good to know what you were worth on paper.

The room was built out over the stairwell between the first floor and the second, and it was the only room in the building with a door that shut and a window that opened. Eight feet one way, ten the other, if you were generous about it. A nail in the wall for a coat. A length of pipe for a rail. An iron bed with a mattress on it, and a blanket folded square at the foot.

Next to it, on the same landing, was the feed store.

She put him inside and said, “Sit. Don’t move,” and shut the door on him, and her feet went away down the stairs.

He sat.

Then he put two fingers into the muscle beside his throat and pushed until it hurt, and kept pushing, and found it: something hard, no bigger than a grain of rice, set deep, too deep to be got at with a fingernail or a knife or anything else he had.

He had known it would be there. Knowing and having your fingers on it were two different things.

A stock chip. The job of a stock chip was to say where the stock was, and to say it all day, to somebody. Whether this one also listened, and how well, he couldn’t say, because he had no idea what the tech was down here and no intention of asking. What he did know was that the conversation he’d had in the ward, door shut and light off, hadn’t been acted on yet.

The placement told him the most. Somewhere a rat had sat down with the problem of an animal that could take a handler by the ankle and swing him into a wall, and had worked the whole thing through. An adult human being wouldn’t necessarily win that fight. He’d make it expensive. So there’d be a shock in there, most likely, and possibly worse.

He got up and read the room, the way he read every room he was left alone in — without hurrying, and without moving anything.

It gave up what it had. A blanket folded to the corners, and the corners matched. A coat on the nail with a torn pocket sewn up twice, in two different colors of thread. Two blankets on the bed, in a room that wasn’t cold. A pair of boots underneath, and the left one worn down at the outside edge until the heel had gone over, and the right one hardly touched.

Squared away, and cold, and a bad left leg.

He sat back down on the bed and looked at the wall.

Four flights of stairs, all day, up and down, and they’d given the job to the one with the bad leg.

Out the window he could see the yard down below, and the lean-to at the corner of it with the three vats in it, and the taps on the vats.

The call went up before the singing did. She unlocked the bottom tier and the women came out with their bowls and lined up, and she filled them from the first vat and sent them back in and shut them in, and then the next tier up, and then the next. She changed vats between tiers without looking at what she was doing, the way you change a nozzle. One vat for the ones expecting, one for the ones nursing, one for the fryers.

Somebody in the middle of the line started the song. It was one of the half-grown girls, and the ones up in the tiers took it up before she had the first line out, and by the fourth line the whole building was in on the chorus, thin voices, little ones, some of them too small to have the tune:

Bring the bowl, bring the bowl,
hey-o, hey-o,
every little berry gets a belly full,
hey-o, hey-o.

It went up and down the cage and came back around and started over, and the ones who came late came in on the hey-o.

Rook’s foot was keeping time on the floorboards before he noticed.

He stopped it.

Nobody came up with his two cans. He’d have to ask, and asking would cost more than the cans, and he would rather be hungry than interesting.

Riddle number one. Mr. Charles had stood in that yard and mourned the Countess’s retirement like a man watching money walk out the front gate — fifteen years of breeding left in her, no sheepdog to replace her. And she wasn’t the oldest woman in the building. There were women down there with more years on them and the use of both legs, and any one of them could have carried a bucket.

So why the one with the bad leg, in a building made out of stairs?

He turned it over and got nothing back. He put it down where he kept the other ones.

Which left the store, and he went into the store.

It was a good room if you were a sack of feed. Shelves to the ceiling, a cold mealy smell, a floor gritty with what had spilled and been swept into the corners and left there. Everything was squared off by brand and by size, small in front, big behind, the same label facing out the whole length of every shelf.

All of it except the fryer feed, which looked like a bad afternoon.

He went closer. It wasn’t a bad afternoon.

It was six different packagings of the same feed — whichever brand had been going cheap that month, he guessed — and she had not put them up by color or by size. She had put them up by the date stamped on the bottom of every sack. Oldest in front, newest at the back. Some of them three days apart. Some of them two.

The Countess read.

He looked at that for a while.

Then he turned around. The wall behind the shelves had newspapers pasted over it, layer on layer, against the damp, and every sheet that faced out faced out the same way, so that the same page showed every time, all the way down the wall and around the corner.

He put his hand up to take one down, and heard the stairwell.

He was across the landing and sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees before the lock knocked. If she came in and found him in the store with his fingers in the fryer feed, he’d be down on the ground floor with the rest of them before the lights changed, on a mat, and he’d still be there in the morning. Nobody would have to be told why.

The lock knocked. She came up onto the landing, and into the store, and a sack came off the shelf, and her feet went down again. She never put her head into the room to see how he was sitting.

He waited until the stairwell door knocked shut, and then he got up and went and looked at the doorframe, which was the first thing he should have looked at.

The stairs had light on them and the room didn’t, so a person coming in off the stairs came out of the light into the dark, with a raised sill at the door to catch a foot. Anyone coming in at speed would put a hand out and take the frame.

Her spot was near the top, on the right side going in. Pale, shallow, the finish scuffed and no more than that.

Four inches lower, on the other side, the wood had gone dark and smooth, polished down the way a stair rail goes, the grain worn into a hollow you could lay a finger in.

Wood doesn’t do that in a year.

So the one before her was short. Not much over five feet, and she came in with her left hand out, and she came in that way for years. And the Countess, who had a head on her if she had anything, was new to this room.

He tried to think what the short woman’s name had been. Snowball, maybe — but he’d asked Snowball, back when Snowball was still there to ask, and she’d thought about it and shaken her head.

Nobody in the building knew the name of the woman who had the room with the door on it. They knew she was terrible. That was the whole of her, and it had been enough to keep the shape of her alive in the building after she was gone.

His left eye went dark.

It was not the dark of a room. It came from behind his own face, and then it pulled, and he knew the pull, and it had never once been where he was standing.

He went down onto the floorboards. Not because he knew what he was doing — the eye knew, and the eye had an opinion about where to look — but because his knees went and the floor was there.

The bed was iron, with enough clearance under the frame to get an arm in. He lay down flat with his cheek on the boards and put his arm under, and swept it along through the dust and the grit and something that rolled, an old button, and then his fingers closed on a hair.

Short. Fine. Gold at the root and gold all the way down, and when he brought it out and turned it in the light from the stairwell it was as gold as a coin.

He sat back on his heels with it between two fingers.

The eye didn’t pull for the dead in general. It pulled for the dead who had left something where his hands could reach it, and it had never once been wrong.

She had died in here.

He closed his fist on the hair. Down in the yard, the song started over from the top.