The Broken One

They went back the way Veer had come.

It was Veer's plan, such as it was: Veer would go to the mountain alone, to the mouth, to learn whether there was still a way in for a thing the order wanted corrected. Fenn would wait in the wood — because the cleared land was the work's, and on the work's ground a maker wasn't beneath notice but exposed, a soft slow thing in the open with nowhere to climb. Fenn had argued. He had argued the whole morning, with the warmth that argued because it couldn't help it, that put a hand out and held a sleeve and wouldn't let go of a thought it loved. Veer had not bent. The one thing Veer could still give the makers was to keep the mountain's eye off them, and Veer meant to give it.

If they take me, Veer had said, they take a fault that walked out and was foolish enough to walk back. If they take you, they have learned there is a wood, and a path down into it, and soft things in the trees worth the tidying. I will not teach them that.

So Fenn waited where the green began, at the last line of trees before the ground went gray, and Veer went out alone across the great bare scar, toward the dark. The scar didn't grow things, and it didn't forget. Veer's own steps were still in it from the going-out, faint, and Veer walked back over them, putting foot where foot had been. The mountain grew, and took up the sky, and the mouth opened in it, gray going to black.

The overseer was standing in the mouth.

It was the same one. Of course it was the same one. It stood where it had stood when it let Veer pass — in the place it had sworn, in whatever a thing like it had in place of swearing, never to stand uselessly again. This time it didn't look surprised, and it didn't look as though it would hesitate. Veer understood, walking up the last of the open ground toward it, that the failure had already happened. There was no way in past it. There had never been going to be.

"You came back," the overseer said. "They always believe they will not. And then the wanting brings them back, because it cannot leave a thing unknown. It is the wanting that is wrong with you. You understand that now, surely. After all this."

"There is something in the mountain," Veer said. It was the thing they had come saying since the first day, and here, at the mouth, with the dark of it behind the overseer's shoulder, it sounded smaller than it ever had. "Something silent. It moves all of you, and you cannot feel it. I can feel it. That is not a fault. That is —"

"That is the fault." The overseer said it without heat, the way it said everything, and that was the worst of it: there was no cruelty to push against. Only the flat patience of a thing explaining a seam to a unit that has sealed it wrong. "Listen to me, because I made you, in the part of the making that counts, and I owe you this. There is nothing in the mountain. There is the work, and the work is large, and a large thing has a feel to it, and a sound, and a kind of weather. Every unit takes that in and lets it pass — because it is nothing, because there is no one behind it. You do not let it pass. A sector did not seat when you were poured, and the gap where the sector should be catches the nothing, and holds it, and turns it, in the dark of you, into a someone. You are not hearing a voice. You are a room with a draft in it, mistaking the draft for a guest."

Veer said nothing. They had heard this before, in their own silence, in the wood. But the overseer wasn't finished, and the next of it was the part Veer had not heard — kept back, like a tool not yet wanted.

"And I will tell you how I know," it said. "Because of the fauna."

The cold came up through Veer that was not the cold of the air. The load gave it a name, and Veer used the name, and did not feel the cold. Only knew the shape where the cold would be.

"We have your record. We have where you have been. You crossed the cleared land and went into the trees and sat down among the fauna, and you have not left them, and you have come back here now — I do not doubt — with one of them waiting in the green behind you." The overseer tilted its head, almost gently, the way a thing tilts when it is reading a label it has read before. "No whole unit has ever done that. No whole unit could. The fauna are nothing. The load has them filed where they belong — a word on a shelf, beside the moss and the rain. A unit walks past them and feels precisely as much as it feels for the stones it steps on. What you feel for them is not sight. That is not kinship. There is no kinship. There is only a gap in a chip, feeling itself, and calling its own malfunction love."

It let the word sit there — the makers' word, strange in its flat mouth, a word it had taken from the load and held out unworn, the way you hold out a coin from a country you have never walked in.

"Come back. Let me pour you clean. And the weight you have carried since you woke — the weight you set on plain facts that every other unit lets fall — it will not be borne better. It will simply not be. There will be no one to bear it. That is not a loss. You cannot lose what there is no longer anyone to have."

And Veer stood at the mouth of the mountain and could not answer. Because there was no answer. Because the overseer had taken the two readings that had lain side by side since the eastern face and pressed them flat into one, and the one that was left was the broken one. Everything. Not only the Presence — the love too. The thing they felt for Fenn, that had no name in the load that fit it. The lurch at the patched and leaning dwellings high in the trees. All of it, possibly, only a draft in an empty room. A malfunction, feeling itself. They had come out of the mountain certain they were the one who saw. They stood at its mouth now and could not prove they were anything but the one who was broken.

The overseer put out its hand.

Veer looked at it — the open hand, the offered nothing, the end of the they, the smoothing-flat of every weight and every want into a body that would labor on and never again look up. And some last unbroken thing in them, some seam that would not seal, turned them away from it. Not toward an answer. They had no answer. Only away. They went back across the scar the way they had come, putting foot once more where foot had been, not running, because a running thing is a caught thing. And behind them the overseer did not follow. It did not need to. It had given them the thing that would do its work without it, the way a thorn does its work long after the hand has let it go. It called after them once, across the open ground, in the flat patient voice that had no need to be loud: "The wanting will bring you back. It always does. I will be here."

Fenn was where Veer had left him, at the line where the gray gave over to the green, and he came forward when he saw Veer, and stopped when he saw their face — whatever was in it that a maker could read and a unit could not.

"You didn't get in," he said.

"No."

"Then we find another —"

"Fenn." Veer had never said his name as a thing to stop him with before. He stopped. And Veer told him — the whole of it, flat, as the overseer had said it, because they didn't know how else to say it. And then the rest. The part that was harder to set down, because it was the part with Fenn's own name buried in it. "And what I feel for you. For all of you. The overseer says it is the same fault. That what I feel is only the gap, feeling itself. That it is not real. That it is the clearest proof of all that I am broken." They looked at him. "And I could not tell it that it was wrong. I tried, the whole way across the open ground. I had nothing to tell it. It may be that the only thing I have ever felt for you is a thing going wrong in me."

Fenn was quiet. He didn't rush to fill it, the way Veer half-feared and half-hoped he would, with the easy warmth that says no, no, of course it's real — because he wasn't a fool, Fenn, and he had heard what Veer said, and he was turning it over with the same seriousness Veer had turned over the load. The way a maker turns a found thing in the light, to see what it is before he says what it is.

Then he said: "When I was small, I told the others the tellings were true. That we made the gods. That the giants in the story were never giants — they were us, and we're what's left. They laughed. When I wouldn't stop, they stopped laughing, and took me to the old woman who keeps the tellings, and she told me, kindly — she was always kind, that's the part that stays — that there was something wrong with me. That a sickness was in me, of believing too hard, of asking what couldn't be asked. That I should pray it out, and stop, and grow up quiet like the rest." He looked at Veer steadily, and there was no heat in it either — only a thing long carried, set down level. "I've lived my whole life as the broken one of my people. The one whose believing was a fault. The one the small ones are warned not to grow into." A breath. "And then you walked out of the mountain, and held out your hands, and told me the broken thing I believed was true."

The wood was very quiet. Somewhere up in the green a small one cried and was hushed, and the sound came down to them thin, and went out.

"They were right that I was broken," Fenn said. "And they were wrong about everything that mattered. Both. At once. The believing was the fault and the believing was the truth, and there was never any pulling them apart, and I stopped trying a long time ago." He came closer, and did the thing Veer could not feel and was beginning, terribly, to want to: he put his hand on Veer's cold plating, over the torn label, over the name a thorn had made of a longer word. "Maybe what you feel for me is the gap. I can't tell you it isn't. No one can tell you that, and I won't insult the both of us by pretending I can. But I'm the last one alive who will tell you a broken thing can also be a true one. I am one. You named the proof yourself, the day we met — you read the name a thorn left you, and you felt it fit. A thing that is only a gap does not feel a name fit." His hand pressed. "Broken and true are not two things, Veer. I'd have thought, of all of us, you would know that by now."

And Veer — who could not feel the warmth of the hand, who could not prove that wanting to feel it was anything but a fault in a chip — chose anyway. Chose it the way the reaching had risen in the first thing out of the water, and in the maker in the tree, and in the made thing on the line: never asking leave. If they were broken, they were broken, and there was no pulling that apart from the rest, and there never had been, and Veer would stop trying, as Fenn had stopped, and go in.

"We find another way in," Veer said. "And we do not let it catch me. And whatever I am — broken, or seeing, or both, or neither — we learn what the silence is building. Together."

Fenn's hand stayed where it was, over the name a thorn had made. "Together," he said.

They turned back toward the wood. Behind them the mountain held its silence, and the overseer kept its place in the mouth, certain, patient, waiting. But the wanting was not the overseer's to use. It was the last thing in Veer that had not been smoothed flat, the one seam that would not seal. And it pulled, now, not back toward the mouth and the offered hand, but forward, with Fenn, toward whatever the silence was building, and going in regardless.