Chapter 4: Blood Draw

He turned around before the footsteps reached him.

“What are you going to do to me?”

Corvin’s hand was already out for his arm. Nate pulled back and turned and put his shoulder against the rail. The iron was cold through the sweater, and past the rail the dark went down a long way.

The hand stayed out for a second. Then it came up, and one finger tapped Nate’s forehead, twice, light.

“Kid. I’m not going to hurt you.” He said it flatly, the way he might have said the wind was coming from the north. “There’s a test. It’s short. It tells you what you can do, and what you can do decides how you live here. That’s all it is.”

“Whether I’m the man you’re looking for.”

“Voss.” It took Nate a second to hear it as his own name. It was the only thing he had left, and Corvin had just used it to close a door.

“What’s the priest, then?”

Corvin’s brows drew down and stayed down, and for a moment he looked less like a man enjoying himself and more like a man doing sums.

“When the test is over I’ll sit you down and give you the whole of it. All of it. In order. It’s a long story and it doesn’t come out in a corridor.” He tipped his head at the guards, at the wind, at the door behind them. “You want it here?”

“I’ve known you half a day,” Nate said. “You want me to lie down in a machine because you say it’s short. Half a day, and the one thing I’ve got to go on is your face, and your face doesn’t look like a good man’s.”

He had expected something for that. He had half expected the hand again.

Corvin went still. Then the laugh came out of him whole, head back, eyes shut, and it rolled off the rock and came back off the far wall, and the guards at the end of the walk turned to look. It went on longer than the joke deserved. When it stopped, he straightened, took his hat off, set it back on, and squared the brim with two fingers.

“You’re right,” he said, to nobody, in the flat voice of a man settling an account. “I’m not a good man.”

He was still smiling when he looked up, and the smile changed his face. It took the weight out of it and put something else in, and for a moment Nate was standing in front of a man it would be easy to follow and hard to be afraid of, and he thought, with a clarity he resented, that perhaps this one was decent after all.

Because of a face. Because of the shoulders and the hat and the way the man put himself between Nate and a desk.

He knew what that was worth. He knew exactly what it was worth, and he was going to spend it anyway, because nobody else in this canyon had a reason to carry him out of a ruin and find him clothes and stand outside a door for him. A man with plans for him did not have to be gentle about it. That was the whole of the arithmetic, and it worked out, and he did not like the answer, because it was not proof of anything.

Corvin put his little finger out.

“Don’t you want to know why you were lying in a pod under Station 42?” he said. “Don’t you want your memory back? Don’t you want to know who you are?”

Nate looked at the offered finger. It belonged to a man a machine at a gate had called a commander, and it was being held out in the dark like a boy’s.

“Or do I have to prove I’m decent first?” Corvin said. “That’s hard. I don’t carry a certificate. Ask me what I am and I’ll tell you, and you can weigh it.”

Nate thought: a liar, probably. Something worse, maybe. He thought: and he’s the only door in this canyon that opens.

“You’re on this road already,” Corvin said. “Saying yes to me won’t put you anywhere worse than standing here saying no. Do the test. Then we talk, and I answer for the rest.”

“Fine,” Nate said.

He turned and went back through the door. Joss Pike’s eyes came up off the screens.

Joss rang for a doctor. Corvin said, “I’ll be here when you come out.”

Joss’s eyes went down and stopped at the cord at Nate’s neck. “What is that?”

“I’ll hold it for you,” Corvin said, and his hand came out, palm up, and one eyebrow went up with it.

Nate lifted the cord over his head. The crystal hung at the end of it, six-sided, clear, warm from his skin. It was the only thing in this world that was his, and he put it into a black glove and watched the glove close on it. Against the leather, the thing looked almost lit.

He followed the doctor out to the elevator and down the face of the cliff.

The white room had a low ceiling and one door and no windows, and the machine stood against the far wall with its mouth open.

“Shirt off. Lie down in it.”

“That’s an MRI,” Nate said.

The doctor stopped with her hand on the frame. “A what?”

“Nothing.” The word had come up out of him before he could stop it. He had no idea where it came from, or why it fit better than anything else he could think to call the thing. “Nothing. Sorry.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” she said. “There’s no needle in it. Are you all right in there?”

“It’s powered?”

“Solar,” she said. “There’s an array up on the ridge.”

She set the machine going, and the room filled with a low knocking. Then she put her elbows on the frame and settled in, the way people do when they mean to talk.

“The Commander brought you in.”

“Corvin.” He said it to hear it. “Why does everyone call him that? Everyone down there nodded at him.”

“He’s the Commander of the Order.”

“That’s a thing people say like it means something.”

“It means something to them.” The knocking went on. “Do you remember anything from before?”

“No.”

“Nothing at all?”

“My name.” He looked at the ceiling. There was a stain on it shaped like a boot. “That’s it. That’s the whole of what I’ve got.”

She let that sit, and then, because she was not a woman who could leave a silence where it was: “He’s handsome, isn’t he.”

“Who?”

“The Commander.”

“I’ve known him half a day.”

“That wasn’t the question.” She smiled at the wall. “I only got a look at him at the gate. I didn’t want to be caught staring. Are you two friends, then? Half a day, and he stands outside the door of a scan.”

“I don’t know what we are,” Nate said. “I don’t know what I am.”

“That’s the test’s job.” She straightened. “That’s the scan done. I need a little blood off your fingertip. It’s a prick, that’s all.”

She took his hand and turned it over, and a small cold point went into the pad of his third finger. The blood came up in a bead, and she caught it in a tube and capped it, and the knocking stopped, and the room was very quiet. The whole business had taken less time than it had taken him to decide about it. He looked at the door, which was behind him and closed, and at the small red mark on his finger.

Six levels up, in the office cut into the rock, the far wall was a grid of screens. Two men stood in front of it with their backs to the room. On the screen in front of them a boy lay in a white room with his shirt off and a woman’s hands moving over him.

Joss Pike wore a black suit. On the cuff of it, small and grey, was a number: 20.

“You didn’t answer me,” he said.

Corvin’s knife went across the back of his hand and back again, rolled between his fingers, and stopped. The flat of the blade took the light off the screen and threw it at the ceiling.

“Say he’s a volunteer,” Joss said. “The war starts and men line up to hand over their bodies to be remade, and the engineers never got to him, and the station came apart around them and they ran and left him in the tank.” He opened one hand. “That’s your answer. I’ve looked at a lot of men, and I can tell you he isn’t the one you’re after. Leave him here. I’ll put him on water detail. He’s got the face of somebody who takes an order.”

Corvin’s knife went away somewhere. He took the pendant out of his coat, held it up to the lamp, and turned it slowly, one face at a time. The crystal caught the light and held it. In the middle of it was something that was not crystal: a thread of smoke, stopped where it stood, going nowhere.

“There ought to be a twist here,” he said. “Otherwise your story’s no good.”

The door opened. Nate stood in the doorway. Nobody had knocked.

“Walk with me,” Corvin said. He crossed the room and put the crystal back into Nate’s hand, cord and all. “I owe you something, and the report won’t be up for a while. Let’s eat.”

The cafeteria at the foot of the cliff was a half roof on iron posts and a floor that had been poured badly and a light strung between two of the posts, swinging. Past the edge of the roof the wind came down the canyon and got into everything. It had been warm at sunset. It was not warm now.

Corvin set the tray down. On it were a spread of brown paste, something flat and grey that had been baked until it stopped being bread, and a cup of something brown.

“What is it?” Nate said.

“Beans. Protein.”

“And this?”

“Bread, more or less. Carbohydrate.”

“The drink?”

“They brew it here. Every station eats differently. I’ve never had this one’s menu.”

Nate took some of the paste on the end of the spoon and put it in his mouth. It tasted the way a garage smells. He set the spoon down and did not touch the bread.

Corvin watched him for a moment. “I’ll get you water.”

He went off across the yard. Nate looked at the people. They came in out of the dark in work clothes with the dust still on them, took up trays, sat, and ate without looking up. One woman ate with her eyes shut. The man at the next table got through his cup and then sat with both hands around it for a while before he stood and put the tray back on the rack. Nobody talked. The wind moved the light, and the shadows of the posts went back and forth across the floor.

Corvin came back and set a cup of water down.

Nate broke the grey thing in half and ate it slowly, wetting it down. It was not good, but it was food, and his body took it without asking him. Under the table he turned the crystal over once in his fingers and put it back inside his shirt.

“You promised to tell me,” he said.