Carried-It-Sleeping (Pandoid, the deep networks)

Carried-It-Sleeping had felt the piece go, and had let it, because it had asked Stone-First and Stone-First had let it, and that was the shape of things now: a small one going up was a thing you let, if a stone had been moved and the line had answered.

Then the piece had not come back, and had not gone on either.

That is a thing you can feel, lying in the warm. A small one up the shelving takes a piece of the shape with them and the piece moves: up, and then it is on the line and you feel it there, and then it comes down. Or it goes on, past the line, and thins, the way the youngest's did once, and you wait. This one went up and stopped and did not come down and did not thin. It stayed, somewhere past the line, at the same distance, for as long as a short telling, and Carried-It-Sleeping lay in the warm and knew exactly what that was, because everyone below the roof has had that day, and the day has a shape, and the shape is a piece that neither goes nor comes.

The rock had closed on the small one.

Carried-It-Sleeping did not get up. There is nothing to do from the warm about the squeeze, and the one thing you can do, which is to go up and stand at the foot of it and say breathe out, was already being done by the one person below the roof who would do it best. So Carried-It-Sleeping lay still and did the hardest thing, and listened to the smallest, nearby, who had felt it too and was lying very still as well, learning what it is to wait for a piece that is held.

Then the piece moved. The right way. Down.

It came down the shelving slowly, and a stone moved at the bottom, not well, and the small one came into the amber scraped raw down one side and holding the arm, and did not go to Carried-It-Sleeping and did not go to the small ones. They stood in the middle, in the open floor, in the place where the light had stood, and said, to the warm, in a voice that had not come back yet:

"I don't fit."

Several of the old ones made the small sound, because that is a telling everyone below the roof has told once, and it is a good one, and it is always short.

"And there was someone in the rock."

Nobody made any sound at all.