Keeps-A-Hand-On-It (Pandoid, the deep networks)

The smallest heard it from the middle of the warm, lying down, with a hand still on the stone, because the game had stopped around the hand and nobody had said to take it off.

Carried-It-Sleeping, long ago, when Carried-It-Sleeping was the youngest, had heard a name go by twice before knowing it was theirs; that is in the telling. The smallest did not have that. The smallest had heard the words all season. The one who keeps a hand on it was what the small ones said, the way the small ones have a thing they say for everyone, which is not a name, and which the old ones do not say. The smallest had thought nothing of it. You do not think about a thing that is said of you by people the same size as you.

What was different was the voice. An old one's. Then another old one's, from the edge of the amber where the ones who do not say much lie. Then everyone's, going round, old ones and small ones and Carried-It-Sleeping too, who had let the words go by all season and did not let them go by now. And the smallest understood, the way you understand on the hundred-and-first time a thing you have been told a hundred times, that the words had stopped being the small ones' and become the people's, and that the people's word for a person is a name.

Keeps-A-Hand-On-It.

The smallest had been born after the two stones. The up-people were a told thing. The line was where the line was, and the smallest had never been up the squeeze and had never wanted to go and still did not. And now a thing the smallest did in a game, in the middle of the warm, because the waiting was the best part and could be made longer, was going up the shelving to the line without them, in Stone-First's hand, to keep three up-people who could not hear the ground standing still in the open for as long as it takes to tell them a telling.

The smallest took the hand off the stone, slowly, because it was done, and lay still, and let the name go by a third time, to be certain, the way everyone does. It was. It did.