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

The small one told it standing up, in the open floor, in order, the way Stone-First had taught them all to, with the arm held.

The stone at the top of the shelving. Stone-First stepping off the line, which nobody had ever seen. The squeeze, sideways, a hand-width, and the narrow, and the rock taking them the way it takes everyone. I'm held. Breathing out. And then, ahead, in the narrowest part, where the crack is a hand wide and nothing goes, a shape. The size of a person. Upright. In the rock. Not in a gap in the rock; there was no gap; in the rock, the way you are in the warm, with the rock all round it and through where it was. Not scraping. Going on, up, where the rock was, further where the rock was, and then not ahead.

"Was it warm?" said one of the small ones, and then stopped, because everyone knew the answer to that now: in the squeeze there is no warm to feel, only rock, and the small one had not tried to touch it, because Stone-First had said not to, and because you do not.

"It fitted," said the smallest, from the middle. Not a question.

"It didn't fit," said the small one. "There was nothing to fit. It was where the rock is."

Carried-It-Sleeping lay in the warm and thought about the small ones, who had spent the whole of this season, and the season before it, wanting one thing, which was to fit the squeeze. To be the right size for the one way through. The two who had been trying since the name had taught the next ones, and the next ones had taught the smallest, and it had been the thing a small one was for, below the roof, since the youngest went up the first time. And now the rock had closed on the first of them, which was always going to happen and is how you know you have grown, and in the same breath they had seen a thing for which there was no squeeze, no way, no size, nothing to fit, because it did not need a way.

And the squeeze was still the people's. That was the thing Carried-It-Sleeping got to, lying there, and held on to. It was still the one way to the up-people, and the up-people's one way to the people, and a stone had gone through it each way and a small one with a humming stone, and the smallest of the up-people a hundred times. A way is not less yours because a thing has used it that did not need one.

Carried-It-Sleeping said that, out loud, to the warm, which Carried-It-Sleeping did not often do, and Went-Round, from the far side of the amber, said, "Yes," and nothing else, which Went-Round did even less.