Scene 2

Stone-First-Who-Waited (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

Time: 2833 UCSD, the survey's third year on the ground, the telling after the light in the warm
Location: Fliade — the line at the top of the margin, the squeeze, and the warm below the roof

Stone-First heard the small one go in.

The scrape of it, which the Told hear at that distance the way the up-people do not seem to hear anything. The small one went in sideways, the way the youngest had, the way the smallest of the up-people did with a stone; a hand-width, a scrape, a hand-width. Then the scraping got shorter. Then it stopped.

Not the stop of coming out the other side. Stone-First knew that one; it has a sound after it, feet on the upper ground. This was the other stop, the one that has no sound after it at all.

"I'm held," said the small one, from inside the rock. The voice came out of the crack flattened, the way voices do from in there. "It's got me at the narrow. I can't go on."

"Then you have found out," said Stone-First. "Breathe out. All of it. Then come back a hand-width, the way you went."

Nothing came back. Stone-First waited, on the silt at the foot of the crack, with the whole body still, and could not go in, and did not try, because an adult going into the squeeze after a small one makes two held instead of one, and everybody below the roof knows that too.

"There's someone in the crack."

The voice had changed.

"Ahead of me. Where it's narrow. Where it's a hand wide. There's someone in it. Standing. In the rock. The way you'd be in the warm." A breath, flattened. "It's not scraping."

"Do not touch it," said Stone-First. "Breathe out."

"It's going on. Up. Where the rock is. It isn't going through, it's — there isn't a through. It's just where the rock is and then it's further where the rock is." The breath again. "It's not ahead now."

Stone-First stood at the foot of the squeeze and did the thing Stone-First does, and it had never in a whole life been harder, and it was not enough, and Stone-First knew that, standing there, and did it anyway, because the other thing, the going in, would have been worse than not enough.

"Breathe out," said Stone-First. "Come back to me. A hand-width."

The scraping started again. Short. Coming the right way.

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