The youngest (Pandoid, the deep networks)

This is told the way things are told below the roof: by someone who was there, to someone who was not, until the one who was not can tell it too.

The light in the deep does not change. It is amber on one wall and blue-green on the other, and it has been like that since before anybody's telling begins. So nobody in the deep says morning. They say before the telling and after it, and everyone knows which telling is meant, because there is only ever one going on.

The youngest of the people was awake before the telling, which is the wrong time to be awake, and was going up.

Going up is allowed. Going up past the margin is allowed too, where the warm stone stops smelling of the people and starts smelling of the runners, so long as you move a stone first. That is manners. You shift a stone, and the stone tells the ground, and the ground tells whoever is standing on it, and then nobody is surprised by anybody. The youngest knew the manners. The youngest had been told them many times, by Stone-First, who was called that for a reason.

The youngest did not move a stone.

Here is why, and it is not a good reason, but it is a true one. Everything the youngest knew had been told to them. The first warm seep, the long dark before the fungus came, the coming of the up-people: all of it was somebody else's, told down and down until it reached the smallest ears in the deep. The youngest could tell every one of those stories without a mistake. Not one of them had happened to the youngest. And a young one who has never been anywhere first has nothing that is theirs to tell, which is a small thing to be short of, and the youngest was short of it all the same.

So the youngest went up quietly, to be somewhere first.

The squeeze is the way. It is a crack in the rock at the top of the margin, and the big ones stopped fitting through it before the youngest was born, which is why nobody had been past it in a long time. The youngest fitted. It scraped, and the youngest let it scrape, and came out the other side into the upper levels, where the runners graze and the light is thinner and the air has the roof in it, cold and sharp and far away.

And there, at the end of a long passage, was the light that moves.