Transit

The number would not come off.

She had tried spit and cold water and the rough seam of her smock dragged back and forth across the meat of her palm until the surrounding skin went angry and pink, but the characters themselves - 0-7741-Σ-III, rendered in a script she could only half-parse - remained fixed and indifferent to her efforts, sunk into her skin by some ink or dye or branded chemistry that the Administratum clerk had applied with a silver stylus and a hiss of vapour and not one glance at her face. He had held her wrist the way Healer Voss held a chicken’s leg when checking for mites: with functional, impersonal precision, the grip of a hand that had performed this action ten thousand times and would perform it ten thousand more and did not, at any point in that long arithmetic, require the cooperation or even the acknowledgement of the thing being gripped. The stylus touched her skin. It stung. He released her and reached for the next child’s hand before Eshri had finished flinching.

She was nine years old and her name was Eshri, though the name existed now only in the mouths of eleven other children and in the fading memories of a village she would not see again, and the Imperium of Man - that vast, groaning, ten-thousand-year-old engine of bureaucratic transcendence that administered a million worlds and could not, in the final accounting, be said to know the name of anyone - preferred the number.

On Kallos Tertius, in the settlement of Grainford, which sat beside the ford where the grain wagons crossed the River Pel and which had been named by people for whom the act of naming was an administrative convenience rather than an art, Eshri had been the healer’s apprentice, and this had been a good thing to be.

Her gift - though she had never called it that, had never called it anything, had never needed to distinguish it from the ordinary texture of her days the way you do not name the act of breathing until something interferes with it - was small and quiet and, by the standards of what the Imperium classified and feared, barely worth the ink it took to note it down. She could make animals trust her. Not command them, not hurl them through the air or set them alight or reach into the tangled wet machinery of their brains and rewrite what they found there; nothing so dramatic, nothing so useful, nothing so terrifying. She simply - reached. A warmth that had no temperature, a presence that had no weight, something that unspooled from a place behind her sternum and said, in a language below language, below symbol, below the level at which minds distinguish between self and other: here. safe. still.

Feral dogs that ran in packs along the irrigation channels and bit the unwary sat at her feet with their tongues out and their eyes half-lidded, as docile as things that had never been domestic and never would be. Injured birds held still while she splinted their wings with straw and twine, their small frantic hearts slowing under her hands to something merely quick. A calving cow that had been screaming in the barn went quiet when Eshri touched its flank, and the calf came easy, and Healer Voss had watched from the doorway with an expression Eshri hadn’t been able to read.

She understood now what the expression had been.

The Arbites arrived six days after the calf. Three of them, in black carapace that caught the light from Healer Voss’s herb-drying lamps and turned it into something cold. They filled the surgery the way a stone fills a boot - completely, uncomfortably, making the space around them feel like an afterthought. The herbs hanging from the rafters, the worn wooden examination table, the jar of wound salve Eshri had helped compound that morning - all of it shrank, became quaint, became evidence of a life that had already ended though the people living it had not yet been informed.

The testing was a needle and a device that clicked and a robed man who held a pendulum over her head and watched it describe an arc that apparently meant something. He spoke to the Arbites. They spoke to each other. No one spoke to Eshri. Then they spoke to her mother, who wept, and to her father, who did not weep but went a colour Eshri had never seen a living face achieve - a grey-yellow, the colour of parchment left in damp, as though the blood had simply decided to stop participating.

They took her. She was not allowed to say goodbye to the dog.

The shuttle roared. The orbital station hummed. The ship - she was told its name by a warden who pronounced each syllable as though reading from a catechism, which perhaps she was - was called the Penitent Surrender, and it was a Black Ship of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, and its purpose was the collection and conveyance of souls.

Not metaphorically. The Imperium did not deal in metaphor where psykers were concerned. Every human being who carried the witch-gene, every mutant whose neural architecture had opened a door (however narrow, however involuntary) into the screaming architecture of the Warp, was the Emperor’s tithe. They were collected along routes that had been established for millennia, gathered from agri-worlds and hive cities and feudal backwaters and orbital stations and anywhere else the human genome had rolled its dice and come up wrong, and they were brought to Terra, and they were used. Some became Astropaths - their eyes burned out, their minds reshaped into long-range communication relays, living components in a network that held the Imperium together the way tendons hold a body together, by enduring constant tension. Some fed the Astronomican, the psychic lighthouse that guided ships through the Warp, and feeding it consumed them the way a fire consumes fuel: necessarily, completely, without remainder. Some were simply too dangerous to live, their gifts too wild or too strong or too close to the frequency at which the Warp’s own predators listened, and these were dealt with in ways the Imperium did not describe and Eshri could not imagine and the reader is not required to dwell upon.

Eshri did not know any of this. She knew the cell.

Four metres by six. Torren, who was eleven and had been a counter’s apprentice on a forge world he named so quickly the syllables collapsed into a single sound, had paced the dimensions out on the first day (or what they had agreed to call the first day, since the light did not change and no clock was provided and the ship’s own rhythms, if it kept any, were not shared with its cargo) and announced them with the satisfied precision of a child who has established one fact in a universe that has otherwise become entirely speculative.

Twelve children. Five to eleven. The walls were unpainted metal the colour of a low headache. The floor was textured steel, cold through the thin mats they had been given to sleep on. There was a waste-grate in one corner and a water spigot in another, and the water tasted of iron and ship, and the light - a single strip recessed into the ceiling, protected by a wire cage - cast a flat, dairy-coloured illumination that did not vary in intensity or hue at any point during their confinement, a light designed not to comfort or to warn but merely to make things visible, which is not the same thing as making them clear.

There was Sera, who was seven and could move small objects without touching them - a pebble, a button, the little metal washer she wore on a string around her neck. The gift manifested as a frown and then a wobble and then motion, never far, never fast, but enough to have swung the pendulum and clicked the needle and inked the number and here she was.

There was Hasp, who was ten and heard intentions - not voices, he was fierce about this, with the desperation of a child who understood instinctively that the gap between hearing voices and hearing the shadows that voices cast before them was, in administrative terms, the gap between a manageable classification and something considerably worse. If someone near him was about to speak, he knew the shape of their words a half-breath before they arrived. This had made him an excellent card-player on his homeworld and a profoundly lonely one, because people do not enjoy the company of those who finish their sentences, and the distinction between hearing what someone will say and hearing what someone is thinking was, Hasp had discovered, not a distinction that most people were interested in making.

There was Leel, who was six and cried.

There was Mikkael, who was five and did not speak.

There were eight others. Eshri learned all their names within the first day, which was a decision she made without knowing she was making it - the way a healer’s apprentice checks a wound before thinking about whether to check it, the way a girl who calms animals reaches for a frightened creature before considering whether reaching is wise. She learned their names and their worlds and the small, specific fears they could articulate and the vast ones they could not, and she held all of this the way she had held the injured birds: gently, carefully, without squeezing.

She became the cell’s mother. This was not a decision either.

On the first night (or what they called the first night), Leel had cried for what felt like hours - a thin, sustained keening, mechanical in its regularity, the sound of a system under load - and Eshri had gone to her and sat beside her and let the warmth unspool, the quiet reaching, the not-voice that said here, safe, still, and Leel had hiccupped and gasped and pressed her wet face into Eshri’s shoulder and slept.

The others watched.

By the second morning Eshri was braiding hair, beginning with Sera’s - a dense tangle that had not seen a comb since the shuttle and was making a credible bid for structural autonomy - and continuing through the cell in order of request, which quickly became order of need, because children under stress will accept almost any structured physical contact as comfort, and the rhythmic pull-and-weave of braiding is close enough to grooming, to the ancient primate vocabulary of touch that means I am attending to you, you are part of my group, that it worked on levels Eshri could not have named and did not need to.

She invented games. A counting game scratched into the floor with a belt-buckle’s edge. A guessing game involving animals - describe one by its features and let the others name it - which lasted for hours because twelve children from eight different worlds scattered across four hundred light-years of Imperial space shared perhaps three animals in common, and the descriptions grew elaborate and then absurd and then, eventually, funny, which was the point, because laughter is a sound that means we are alive and together and something still works, even when everything else has stopped.

She told stories. At night, when the children arranged themselves on the mats in a configuration that shifted each cycle but always placed Eshri at the centre through some unspoken geometry of need, she lay in the flat white light and talked about Kallos Tertius. The River Pel and its spring floods that turned the grain-fields to a shallow golden sea. Healer Voss’s surgery, with its hanging herbs and its jar of wound salve and its smell of dried camphor and animal warmth. The birds she had mended - a crow that stole Healer Voss’s spectacles and sat on a rafter looking offended when asked to return them; a finch that had refused to leave after its wing healed and had established residence among the medicine jars, annotating them with droppings that Healer Voss called unsanitary and addressed with a familiarity she reserved for no human patient.

She told them about the dog.

Her dog. Brindled, brown-black-gold, with one torn ear that had never sat right after a fight with a ratling from the irrigation channels. He slept on her feet every night. He was warm the way a banked fire is warm - constant, heavy, radiating. He twitched in his sleep, legs moving in small running motions, chasing something she couldn’t see, and made a sound that was not a bark but a soft rhythmic exhalation, wff, wff, wff, the soundtrack of a dog’s dreaming, and when she woke in the morning his weight was still there, holding her feet to the earth, and she missed it now with a precision that felt surgical, a pain located so exactly - this weight, these feet, this warmth, this particular quality of breathing dark - that it cut deeper than the general ache of displacement, because it had an address.

The children listened. Even Mikkael, who did not speak, made a small sound through his nose at the part about the dog’s ear. Eshri counted it.

The wardens were Sisters of Silence.

Eshri did not know that name. She knew them as tall women in gold-and-red armour who never spoke and who carried, in their wake, a thing she could not see but could feel - a negation, a field, an invisible weather system that rolled through the corridor ahead of them and erased her gift the way a tide erases writing from sand. Not suppressed. Cancelled. The warmth, the reaching, the animal-calming frequency that lived behind her sternum - it did not retreat or diminish when a Sister passed. It simply ceased to exist, replaced by a smooth blank absence, a wall where a door had been, and the sensation was not pain exactly but something adjacent to it, the phantom ache of reaching for a limb that has been removed, the dissonance between the body’s map of itself and the body’s actual territory.

The other children felt it too. She could see it in the flinch, the hunched shoulders, the way their eyes went flat and inward. Mikkael would whimper. Torren would count under his breath. Sera’s washer would drop to the end of its string and hang motionless.

Three times a day (or what they marked as three times - the Sisters kept a schedule, which was more than the light did), two Sisters walked the corridor, checked the cells, checked the grate and the spigot, and moved on. They did not look at the children.

Except that one of them did.

The shorter one. Her helm was older than her companion’s - the gold leaf worn to bronze at the edges, a dent above the left eye-lens that had been repaired but not polished, like a scar kept as a reminder. She paused. Just for a moment, each time, at the observation window. A hesitation so small it might have been mechanical - a servomotor catching, a boot finding the wrong angle on the deck-plate - and which anyone less observant than Eshri might have missed entirely.

But Eshri was a girl who noticed things. It was part of what made her good with animals: the ability to see what was happening rather than what she expected, to read the angle of an ear or the set of a shoulder or the rhythm of breathing without translating it through the filter of what she wanted it to mean. She read the Sister the way she read animals - below language, below intention, in the body’s own involuntary semaphore - and what she read was discomfort.

Not kindness. Eshri was nine, not naive. The Sister was a warden on a ship that collected children. She performed her duty. She had chosen this role or been chosen for it, and the discomfort - if it was real, if Eshri was reading it and not writing it - changed nothing. The cell was still a cell. The null-field still crushed her gift three times a day.

But the Sister paused.

In a universe that had, in the space of six days, taken her name and replaced it with a number, taken her home and replaced it with a metal box, taken every animal she had ever calmed and replaced them with twelve terrified children, a pause was not nothing.

Nineteen days in the Empyrean.

She did not know this number and would not have understood it if told. She knew only the cell and the corridor that led to the washing-room - a metal chamber where nozzles dispensed water so cold it was an act of aggression, while a Sister stood in the doorway with her null-field rolling in like fog over twelve naked shivering children scrubbing themselves with soap that smelled of an institutional ideal of cleanliness, the kind of clean that has never been dirty and therefore doesn’t understand what it’s for. She knew the rhythm of the ship: a deep vibration in the floor, in the walls, in her teeth, a frequency too low to hear and too persistent to ignore, the sound (she would learn, years later, if she lived years later) of a Geller field holding back the Immaterium, keeping the impossible on the far side of a membrane of technology and prayer.

She knew the screaming.

Not every night. But often enough that the children had evolved a response - Eshri would not have known the word protocol but the concept was hers, invented from necessity the way all essential procedures are invented, not from theory but from the urgent need to survive a recurring event. When the screaming started - from some distant corridor, some other cell, some adult or child or, once, a ragged chorus that sounded like a congregation losing its faith all at once - the children gathered. Eshri told a story. Sera made her washer dance. Torren counted rivets. They built a small architecture of noise and presence and familiar ritual, and they endured the screaming the way organisms have always endured the sounds of things they cannot fight and are not permitted to flee: by asserting that something else exists, that this - the story, the washer, the counting - is also real.

One night the screaming came from very close.

A woman’s voice, or a girl’s - high and raw and sustained beyond anything Eshri had believed lungs could sustain, a sound like wire being drawn through wire, going on and on until it seemed to have exceeded its own duration and entered a territory where sound becomes something else, becomes texture, becomes an alteration of the air itself.

Then it stopped.

What replaced it was worse.

Leel was shaking. Mikkael had compressed himself into the angle where two walls met the floor, knees to chest, arms locked, a child trying to become geometry, to subtract the biological dimensions - the parts that felt, that heard, that remembered - and exist as pure shape, invulnerable because abstract. The others were crying or breathing or staring at nothing, each according to their own collapse, and Eshri sat in the centre of them and reached.

She reached hard. Through the null-field’s residual ache, through her own hammering pulse, through the silence that was somehow louder than the scream had been, she pushed the warmth out, the old warm animal signal - here, safe, still, here, safe, still - and she held them.

“There was a dog,” she said, and her voice was steady.

She had told this story before. She would tell it again. The children knew the beats - the torn ear, the lamp-oil eyes, the sleeping on her feet, the howling at the grain-threshers. They needed the familiar parts the way a fever needs cool water, not because it cures but because it establishes that something other than the fever exists. She told it. They slept.

She did not sleep.

She lay on the thin mat with Leel pressed against her left side and Mikkael against her right and the hard circle of Sera’s washer digging into her hip through the fabric, and she stared at the ceiling - the strip light, the wire cage, the unchanging pallid glow that had become the sky of her entire world - and she let the thought she had been keeping in a sealed room at the back of her mind open its door and walk out and sit down beside her on the mat.

She was going to be used for something. She did not know what. She knew it was not optional. She knew the ship’s name was Penitent Surrender and that the name was not accidental, that the Imperium did not name its instruments of collection with words like penitent and surrender by coincidence, that the name was a description of what was expected of its cargo, and she was cargo, and she was nine, and the ink on her hand would not come off.

She felt like the oldest thing in the cell.

Arrival was indistinguishable from any other moment except that the vibration stopped.

Not gradually. The subsonic hum that had been the permanent weather of their confinement - the Geller field’s song, the ship’s own pulse - cut out, and the silence it left behind had a physical quality, an alteration in the pressure against her eardrums, the way a room changes when someone who has been standing in it for a long time quietly leaves. The corridor lights shifted to amber. The cell door opened.

Six Sisters. The corridor filled with null-field until Eshri’s gift was not merely absent but obliterated, crushed so far below the threshold of sensation that she could not feel even the phantom ache, only a smooth, dimensionless nothing where a part of herself had been, as though the Sisters’ combined presence had edited her internal architecture and removed a room from the floor plan. The children were lined up. They walked.

Corridors she had never seen. Metal stairs that rang under bare feet. Doors that opened with pneumatic sighs and closed with pneumatic finality. Other lines of people moving in the same direction - adults, mostly, with the emptied expressions of those who have been processed past the point of protest, their hands inked with their own numbers, their eyes focused on the middle distance where nothing in particular offered the advantage of not being any of this. Some were old. Some were barely older than Eshri. Some had visible augmetics or psyk-dampener collars or the particular sunken look of people who have been medicated into compliance, their fear chemically rounded off at the edges but still present underneath, the way a rock smoothed by water is still a rock.

The processing hall.

It was enormous. Eshri had no frame for it - the grain-barn in Grainford had been the largest enclosed space she’d known, and this dwarfed it the way the ship dwarfed the shuttle, the way the Imperium dwarfed any single human life. The ceiling was stone, vaulted, high enough to have its own haze - incense smoke or condensation or the simple physics of air stratifying in a space too large for human architecture to heat evenly. Aquilae and scripture were carved into the walls in letters taller than she was, and the floor was black-and-white tile arranged in patterns that repeated and varied and repeated again, a geometry that might have been symbolic or decorative or navigational and which she could not read and did not try, because there were desks, hundreds of desks, arranged in rows that receded toward the far wall like lines of perspective in a drawing, and at each desk sat a clerk or an adept or a servitor (she looked at the servitors once and then did not look again), and at each desk a psyker was questioned and tested and classified and pointed toward a corridor.

Left or right. This future or that one.

The children were separated.

It happened quietly. No hands were wrenched apart, no voices raised. A clerk consulted a data-slate, spoke a number, pointed. Sera was taken left. Torren right. Hasp left. Three of the younger children were guided - gently, even, by a grey-robed adept who took their hands and led them toward a corridor marked with a symbol Eshri didn’t recognize - and gone.

Leel would not let go.

Her hand clamped around Eshri’s with a grip that seemed impossible for six years old, the small bones standing out white under the skin, the fingers locked with the total commitment of a child who has found the one fixed point in a dissolving world and who understands, with the pre-verbal clarity of an organism fighting for survival, that releasing it means being swept away. She was crying - not the thin mechanical keening of the first night but a deep, shuddering, full-body grief, the kind that uses the lungs and the diaphragm and the legs and shakes the whole child like a branch in wind.

“It’s all right,” Eshri said. “It’s all right, it’s all right.” Her voice was warm and steady and entirely, precisely false. It was not all right. Nothing ahead of either of them was all right. Eshri knew this - not the specifics, not the burned-out eyes or the reshaped mind or the particular mechanics of what the Imperium called Astropathic conditioning - but the shape of it, the weight, the way you know a storm is coming not because you understand atmospheric pressure but because the animals go quiet and the light changes and something in the air tastes of iron.

A Sister touched Leel’s wrist.

Not roughly. The gauntlet was precise and impersonal and the child’s hand opened the way a flower opens when you press the stem at the right point, not willingly but mechanically, because the body’s architecture has fail-safes that override the will, and Leel was taken right, still crying, her face turned back toward Eshri as she was guided away, and Eshri watched her go and the warmth reached for her through the null-field and found nothing and reached again and found nothing and Eshri stood very still in the processing hall on Terra, the throneworld, the birthworld, the centre of it all, and felt the last of her cell-family come apart around her like a structure that had been held together by nothing more than proximity and a nine-year-old’s refusal to let it fall.

She was placed in a queue.

The queue was long and quiet and moved with the incremental patience of a system that has all the time in the world because the world it administers is, for practical purposes, timeless - the same queue had moved through this hall for ten thousand years, processing the same tithe, feeding the same machinery, and would continue to do so for ten thousand more, or until the machinery broke, or until there were no more psykers to collect, whichever came first, and none of these possibilities seemed imminent. The people in it did not speak. They stood in the order they had been placed and waited, and the light from the vaulted ceiling fell on all of them with the same flat, noncommittal radiance.

The boy beside her was shaking.

Eight years old, perhaps. Dark skin, dark eyes, close-cropped hair. His hands trembled with a fine, continuous vibration - not fear exactly, or not only fear, but the body’s own distress signal playing on a frequency the mind could no longer modulate, a tremor running on its own power like a machine whose operator has left the room.

Eshri took his hand.

He flinched. His fingers were cold and thin and they closed around hers with a force that was almost painful, the grip of someone drowning who has found something solid, and he held on.

“I’m Eshri,” she said.

He looked at her. His mouth opened and closed and opened. “Ven,” he said. The word came out dry and cracked, a sound that had been stored too long in a closed space.

“I’m from Kallos Tertius,” she said. “We grow grain. There’s a river. The Pel.”

He stared at her with the expression of someone hearing a language they once knew and have almost forgotten - recognizing the sounds, struggling with the meaning, unable to quite believe that someone is speaking it here, in this place, in this queue.

“I had a dog,” she said. “Brown and black with a bit of gold. Like bread just before it’s done. He had one torn ear - he fought a ratling from the irrigation channels. Won the fight, lost the ear. It sort of flopped after that.” She made a gesture with her free hand. “He slept on my feet. Every night. He was warm. You know when you come in from the cold and there’s a stone by the fire someone’s wrapped in cloth? Like that. But breathing.”

The boy’s tremor did not stop, but his eyes focused. They settled on her face.

“He dreamed,” she said. “Dogs dream. His legs would go, like he was running something down, and he’d make this sound - wff, wff, wff - not a bark, just this small soft sound, and I’d lie there and listen to him dream and think about what he was chasing, whether it was the ratlings or the grain-sparrows or just something dogs see that we don’t.”

The boy’s mouth moved. It was not a smile. It was the place a smile would be if the architecture still supported one.

“It’s going to be all right,” Eshri said.

The queue moved forward. They moved with it. His hand was shaking in hers. Hers was not. The light from the vaulted ceiling came down on them like something that had been decided long ago and could not be appealed - impartial, impersonal, interested in illumination rather than mercy, which are, in the end, different vocations.

Somewhere ahead of them was a desk and a clerk and a data-slate and a classification and a corridor - left or right, this future or that one - and at the end of the corridor was a process that would take a nine-year-old girl who could make animals trust her and reshape her into a component, a relay, a piece of the vast shrieking infrastructure that held the Imperium together across the void. She would lose her eyes. She would gain the ability to speak across light-years, her mind a burning filament in a network of burning filaments, each one a person who had been collected and converted, each one a child who had once had a dog or a mother or a name that meant something in a village that no longer remembered them.

She did not know this.

She knew the boy’s hand in hers, cold and shaking. She knew the story about the dog. She knew that telling it helped, the way splinting a wing helped, the way the warmth helped - not because it fixed anything, not because the wing would fly again or the fear would stop or the queue would dissolve and release them back into their lives, but because the act of reaching toward another creature’s pain and saying I see it, I am here, you are not alone was the thing she was, the thing the number on her hand could not overwrite, and she would do it until they stopped her or until there was no one left to reach for, whichever came last.

The queue moved forward.

She held his hand.

She was nine years old, and she was holding the line.