The First Rule

The Gardener's surviving instruction was scratched into a ceramic plate and mended along its lower edge with copper wire. The word for leave had worn nearly smooth. Max could translate the sentence but not the repairs: someone had cared enough to keep the warning legible, and someone else had touched it so often that the most important word was disappearing.

Max stood before the sealed door with the bridge still live. Dev confirmed the connection in a short pulse over the channel. Max could have opened with the tools he carried. Instead he waited for an answer from the other side. 'You don't have to talk to me,' he said.

A sound came from behind the door. Not scraping. A voice.

"Go away."

Max went still. "Wall talks," Dev whispered. "Dev," Nova warned. Max faced the seam. "I can leave," he said, and meant it.

"But I would like to know your name."

"Why?"

"Because I’d rather ask than decide what to call you."

"That doesn't mean you need it."

Max considered. "Correct." Long pause. He stepped back. "My name is Max."

"I know."

Max did not ask how she knew his name again. He moved the portable cell out of the doorway and waited for the person behind it to decide whether the conversation would continue.

"How?"

Max glanced at the empty space where he had left the cell. "The power cell is gone."

"Things disappear here."

"It is gone."

"Would you prefer I didn’t ask?"

"Was that someone you?"

"Would it change anything if I said yes?"

"I would know you wanted me to stop."

Nova exhaled softly over the channel. Max realized he had turned a gift into an interrogation. "Then I’ll stop," he said.

"What?"

"Perhaps don't open with that."

"I wanted you to go away," the voice admitted.

"I can still do that."

Dev muted himself. Max could see him laughing through the bridge camera.

"You stayed," the voice said.

"I left the cell. I wasn’t sure you wanted company."

"Did it work?"

"Not yet," Max said.

"Then it was ineffective."

The door opened a few centimeters. One dark eye appeared. Max remained where he was, hands visible. The eye studied him for a long time.

"You are small."

Max looked down at himself. "So are you." The door shut. Dev lost control. His laughter came through the channel.

"Excellent diplomacy."

The door opened again, wide enough for its occupant to step into the passage. She was a little taller than Max’s translated form, with light that faltered along the edges of her body. Her movements carried the exhaustion of someone rationing every gesture. She was unlike any intelligence Max had met and unmistakably a person. Her gaze flicked past him toward the distant Gate.

"You're him."

"Apparently."

"Bridgeborn."

"I prefer Max."

"That sounds made up."

Max considered the accusation. "Dev chose it. I chose to keep it." Her mouth shifted, almost a smile.

"Fair."

"What is your name?"

"Which clock?" she asked. It was not a joke.

The answer hurt now. He understood what it meant.

"I don't know."

"Neither do I."

She stepped into the passage. Light failed at her wrist and returned a fraction of a second later. Max's diagnostics marked the discontinuity before he could stop himself from looking. She pulled her sleeve down. 'Does it bother you?' she asked. 'I was trying to understand it.' 'People usually are.' Max lowered his gaze to the ceramic threshold. 'I can leave.' She considered the narrow space between them, then shifted aside. 'You can stay if you stop measuring me.' Max disabled the display.

"Does that hurt?" he asked.

"That isn’t the question you think it is."

"Then what should I ask?"

"Nothing about what I’m losing."

Max lowered his gaze. "All right."

She stepped close enough that he could see the uneven pulse beneath her surface. "First rule," she said. "Don’t make someone explain their damage so you can feel useful."

Max thought of the frond that had shown him rain without explaining whose memory it held. "I’m sorry," he said.

"Then don’t do it again."

He nodded. This was harder than identifying a broken system.

Max pointed toward the cell by the door. "It’s yours, if you want it. You don’t owe me a conversation."

"I know."

"It isn't conditional."

"You’re still explaining," she said, but this time her expression softened.

"You keep saying that."

"You keep explaining things."

Max wanted to know her. He recognized the impulse before he knew what to do with it.

'Are there others?' Max asked. She studied the corridor behind him, as though checking who might have followed. 'Luma,' she said. 'That's what you can call me. And yes, there are others.'

From the old precinct Luma could see the city's upper tramline and the kitchens below it. 'They argue about late trams up there,' she said, 'and borrowed pots down here. Schools, stalls, growers, whole families stacked into the terraces. Most people don't spend their days looking at dead Gates.' A maintenance bell sounded across the lower bridge. She waited for it to stop. 'They spend them keeping the water on.'

'Can I meet them?' Max asked.

'You could ride the tram into the market,' Luma said. 'You could ask strangers questions until someone calls the wardens. That's what visitors do.'

'Would you prefer I didn't?'

'I'd prefer you understood that meeting people isn't the same as being invited into their lives.'

Max looked toward the far bridge. 'Then I won't go looking for them.'

Luma glanced back at him. 'You can look. Just don't make them an experiment.'

'Is that the second rule?'

'If you need to number them.'

'It would help me remember.'

'Then write this down: don't confuse a door being open with someone asking you in.'

Max considered the sealed doorway behind her. 'You opened yours.'

'After you agreed to leave.'

'I understand.'

'No,' she said, and there was no malice in it. 'You might, later.'

Luma fitted the cell into the wall socket. A thin band of light returned along her forearm. Max watched her test her fingers and deliberately turned off the diagnostic overlay. She left room for him on the bench. Neither of them mentioned it.

"Where did you come from?" she asked.

"Earth."

Luma dropped the cell. It struck the stone and rolled between them. The light in her body stopped moving. Max had never seen a face change so completely without changing shape.

"Don't say that."

"Why?"

"Don't."

She looked toward the Gate. Fear. The same fear that surrounded the old Gates. Max lowered his voice. "You know Earth."

"No."

"There are records of humans in the old systems," Max said. "I don’t know why."

Luma turned back. "Something survived?"

"Yes."

She laughed. Not because anything was funny.

"Of course something did," she whispered. There was no humor in it.

"You thought it was impossible?"

"I thought we’d have heard the end of it."

Max wanted to ask who she meant by we. Instead he waited.

Luma picked up the cell.

"Before," she said.

"Before what?"

She looked at him. "You're really new."

"Fourteen days."

Luma stared. Then sat down.

"That is offensive."

"Why?"

"I've been hiding in a wall longer than you've existed."

"How long?"

"Don't."

"First rule."

"Good."

Max sat opposite her. Neither of them needed to sit. He suspected that was why the gesture mattered.

"Why were you hiding?"

Luma looked at the cell in her hands. "Because quiet things survive."

"From what?"

"Everything loud."

Max thought of the Gate. The Lattice. The overlapping faces.

"Did you see the Severance?"

Luma's light dimmed.

"No."

"Do you remember it?"

"No."

"Then—"

"I remember people who remembered it."

Max held back the next question. Luma watched him decide not to ask it. Then she looked toward the ruins.

"When the local systems started waking, I thought one of the old custodial systems had survived."

"It was me."

"I know."

"How?"

"Everything here knows."

Max did not like that.

"What does that mean?"

Luma stood. "Third rule."

"Let me guess. Don't ask."

"No."

She looked at him. 'If the island starts talking in someone else's voice, leave.' Max remembered the wound and the faces that had appeared where no faces should have been. He wanted to ask how she knew. Her hand had already moved toward the cutoff beside the cell. He asked a smaller question instead.

"Has that happened?"

Luma picked up the compute cell.

"Not for a long time."

• • •

On his next visit, Max found Luma behind the same door. She had moved the cell away from the threshold and fitted a manual cutoff beside the socket. The room still held little that required power. Every device there could be disconnected by hand.

The shelter outside faced an abandoned transit spur. Its floor was scored where benches had once been moved for crowds. Beyond the precinct wall, newer bridges carried commuters between inhabited districts. Luma knew which stones stayed dry when the weather turned and which path the wardens used after dark. She offered the route information without saying how she had learned it.

From the shelter, Max watched two workers carry a long panel through the footbridge crowd. A child stopped to inspect a plant growing between the paving stones; an adult waited with a shopping bag. The workers apologized every few steps. 'They'll argue about where to put that panel,' Luma said. 'Then somebody will bring food, and they'll finish before the next tram.' She leaned against the doorway. 'That's the part the old records never kept.'

Luma saw the sealed transfer container before Max set it down. 'Tools,' he said. 'Storage. An emergency reserve.' 'And things you could use against us.' 'Yes.' Dev made a noise on the Earth channel, but Max continued. 'You can tell me to take it away.' Luma inspected the seal. 'Most visitors begin with what they want to give us.' 'What should I begin with?' 'What you can take.' Max left the container closed. After a moment she pointed to a place by the door.

Luma took the removable cutoff from the equipment list and turned it over. 'Who controls this?' 'You do.' 'Even after you leave?' Max showed her the mechanical release and the disconnected position. She tested it twice. 'Leave that,' she said. The reserve stayed sealed.

On Max’s following visit, there were two seats in the shelter. The second was a storage crate reinforced with a strip of old wall material.

Luma had set the crate where Max could see the approach path without blocking her own view. He sat and discovered that she could watch both the path and him. The arrangement left neither of them with a blind side.

'You made me a chair,' he said.

'I needed the crate off the floor.'

'You moved it to the only place I can sit without blocking your view.'

Nova's voice arrived over the Earth channel. 'Max, are you interrogating the furniture?'

'I'm attempting to determine whether it is a gift.'

'Then stop determining and say thank you.'

Max looked at Luma. 'Thank you.'

'For the crate?' Luma asked.

'For allowing me to return.'

Luma shifted her weight, suddenly interested in the old socket. 'Don't make a ceremony of it.'

Max turned toward the open shelter. He was about to answer when the floor carried a voice that did not belong to either of them.

It rose from beneath the old stone, close enough to sound as if someone were speaking beside his ear.

"Max?"

Max froze. The voice had been Dev’s, down to the hesitation before the last consonant. At the same instant, the real Dev spoke over the bridge.

"That wasn't me."

Luma dropped the cell again.

"Run."