The youngest (Pandoid, the deep networks)

The up-people were away. The youngest knew it before the squeeze, by the quiet, and knew it for certain at the top, where the long passage ran off toward the junction with no light in it that moved.

The humming stone was there, alone, on the floor, asleep.

Close to, it was not much like a stone. It was smooth all over, and it had a shape somebody had meant, and one end of it was where the humming lived. It was cold. Everything the up-people left was cold; they did not seem to mind that either. The youngest crouched by it for a while, not touching, the way you would crouch by a small one you did not know, and then put both arms round it and lifted.

It was heavy. It was heavier than anything the youngest had ever picked up, and the youngest had picked up a good deal, because the people are strong and that is not a telling, it is just how they are. The youngest stood, and got the weight against their chest where the fur is thickest, and turned, and began to walk.

The long passage is long. That is in its name. The youngest walked it with the humming stone held close and the arms aching and did not put it down, because if you put a sleeping one down every time your arms hurt you would never get anywhere.

The squeeze was the hard part, and the youngest had known it would be.

You go through the squeeze sideways. There is no other way. The youngest went in sideways with the humming stone held to the front, and got stuck, and came out, and went in the other way with the stone held to the back, and that was worse. In the end it was the first way, with the stone turned lengthwise and the youngest's whole side scraping the rock and the breath held, moving one hand-width at a time, and it was in the middle of that, in the narrowest part, with nothing to be done but go on, that the humming stone woke up.

It hummed. Against the youngest's chest, through the fur, a small even hum the youngest could feel in their teeth.

The youngest stopped.

You do not drop a sleeping one when they stir. You hold still. You hold them exactly as they were, and you do not talk, because talking is what wakes them properly, and you wait. The youngest held still in the middle of the squeeze with the rock on both sides and the cold thing humming against their heart and thought, not out loud, the thing you think at a small one who is stirring: it is all right. It is only me.

The humming stopped.

It went back to sleep. The youngest could feel the difference, the way you can. And then, one hand-width at a time, they went on through.

On the deep side of the squeeze, at the top of the margin, the floor is soft with silt. The youngest had never looked at it before, only walked on it. Now, with the humming stone held close, they looked, and saw the up-people's marks.

Their feet had come through. All three of them, once, a long time ago by the look of the edges. They had come through the squeeze, and walked a little way, and stopped, all together, in a line across the floor, and turned round, and gone back. The marks stopped so cleanly that the youngest stood and looked at them for a whole verse of something, and wondered what it was the up-people had heard, standing there, that made them stop. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps the dark had been enough. But they had stopped in a line, as if the floor had said something after all, and that line was where the up-people's place ended and the people's began.

You move a stone at the edge of a place. Not in the middle of it. At the edge, where the one inside can hear it and know that someone is at the door.

The youngest set the humming stone down on the line, on its end, the humming end up, the way the up-person had set it at the junction. It leaned. The youngest knelt, and turned it, and turned it again, the way the up-person had, until it stood straight on the silt with its face toward the squeeze, toward where they would come from. Nothing on it was scratched. The youngest checked.

Then the youngest stood up, and looked at it, and thought: there. A stone moved first.

They could not hear our ground. But this was their ground, and they listened to it. When they came back through the squeeze they would find their own humming stone standing at the edge of our place, on the line where their own feet had stopped, and their ground would tell them what the people's ground had been telling them for a long time and they had never once heard.

Someone is here.

The youngest went home, and moved a stone at the bottom, and went to find Stone-First.