Chapter 16: The Heart

Sun-ja came down the lane at noon on Tuesday with a bucket in each hand, and both buckets were full of embers.

Behind her came the rest of the lane, in coats, carrying jars.

Seok-hyun stood at the lamp house door and watched them come, and he did not understand until the first jar was set on the counter.

It was a glass pickle jar with a tin lid, and inside it lay one ember, fist-sized and dull red, burning without smoke.

"Every house got one at New Year," Sun-ja said. "For twenty years."

"Your father left it on the step in the dark, and nobody ever said a word."

"We were told to keep it on a shelf. It keeps the pipes from freezing," Sun-ja said.

"You never sold them."

"What would we sell the pipes for?" She put the bucket down.

"There are four hundred and twelve houses between the station and the Cheoram bridge, and most of them kept the jar."

He had spent five days counting how to climb from a hundred and four embers to four hundred.

He had five hunters, and a Pit that paid its kills into their hands.

The answer had been sitting on the shelves of the town the whole time.

Since Wednesday Da-hae had said nothing about the diner and the man at the Nine's table.

She had come to the lamp house each morning at half past five and written the hour on her hand.

Today she stood at the counter with a tally book and did not look up.

"Two hundred and ninety-six," she said when the last jar was down. "I counted twice."

"I can't tell you what to do with them," she said, still not looking up. "I'd lay them."

He carried them down himself, in six trips, in the cage, with the old porter riding the gate.

He knelt at the black table by the cage and set them in the burned ring one at a time.

Each time he said it.

"For the Heart."

By the hundredth jar, the town had begun to come down behind him in ones and twos, on tags he handed out at the cage.

They stood along the edge of the platform and said it with him.

The widow of one of the Nine said it.

The bus man said it, with his cap in both hands.

The museum director said it, and her glasses fogged.

The embers went dark one after another and the hum in the stone climbed until the lamps along the lane burned white.

[Tithe: 400 of 400. The Pit rises at the next turn.]

It was ten to two.

He had four minutes before the bell, and the Ledger had told him nothing about what he would have to say when it rang.

He sent the town up.

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