Chapter 8: Hold

The woman with the mitten went down on her side with the dead lantern in her arms, and the dark came in over her.

Seok-hyun did not decide to move; he had already moved.

He had one thing to say, and it was not for the crawlers.

"Door," he shouted at the roof, and every head in the hall turned to him.

"None but the Gwon house, and the bearers of a tag from my hand, and none who carry a cap."

His father had written in the ledger that a Door rule held at once, and that the Pit read it whole.

If he left out any word of the old rule, the Pit would drop it, and the tags would go dead in six people's hands.

He had said all of it, and the line came back in his eye.

[Door set. Shut one day.]

Fifty meters off in the dark, the man with the good watch rose off his feet.

He went up off the floor, shouting something Seok-hyun couldn't hear.

He sailed in a long arc over the swarm, over the lamps, to the cage.

The chain gate slammed open and shut behind him, and the cage rose with its one passenger and the lead cap rolling on the floor.

For a moment the crawlers stopped to look up.

Then the old porter said, very calmly, "Pick her up."

He had the woman in his arms before Seok-hyun reached her.

[Haul] gave the old man the strength of three, and he ran with her across the black floor toward the lamps by the cage.

The brothers dragged the heavy man between them with his leg a bloody mess.

Da-hae stood on the platform with a lamp in each hand, calling their names.

Seok-hyun ran behind them, swinging the pick left and right.

He felt something bite his sleeve and tear it, and he did not look.

At the platform the lamps stood close together, and the crawlers stopped at their edge, as they always did, and gathered.

There were fifty-seven in the hall, and every one of them had come to the same place.

He counted them as they pressed in, ten deep, along the edge of the light.

They were not attacking.

They were waiting for the light to fail.

"Cage," he said, and the cage came down the shaft.

It held six.

He looked at the old porter laying the woman on the floor of it.

The heavy man on the brothers' shoulders, and Da-hae, who had not moved.

"Go up," he said to her. "All of you."

"I'm not leaving you with that," she said.

"There's nothing to be done with it."

"There is." She looked up, and he saw her face go still, and her lips begin to move. "The slab, Seok-hyun. Over the platform."

"It's the same seam as yesterday."

He looked up with her.

A long crack ran across the amber roof over the right side of the platform, where his father's tags read FALL.

It was a different slab from the one he had held, and bigger, as long as the cage.

Dust was sifting out of the crack in a thin continuous stream.

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