The Wall

El Bastión is built on the bridge of the Arca Aurora. Ada had been up to that bridge many times, nearly always holding the hand of a small boy who wanted to see the stars through the big window. That night she went up escorted by two soldiers of The Vanguard, with a crate in her arms and the feeling of breaking into her own house through the window.

“Weapons through the arch,” said the guard at the entrance. “El Bastión inspects here.”

“I’m not carrying any.”

“Go through the arch anyway. It’s the custom.”

Ada went through the arch. It beeped at her transit suit’s buckle. The guard waved her on, the way you wave away a fly.

---

From outside, El Bastión was walls. Walls of Aurora plating welded in layers, walls of tamped earth, walls of blocks cast at La Fragua Baja, built one on top of another for forty-six years around the bridge, which had come down whole and upright. It was the only place in La Cicatriz with armed soldiers day and night, and the only one the Armisticio gave the right to stop and inspect any convoy from any house entering the zone.

Inside, it was the bridge.

Ada knew it the moment she came through the last hatch. The consoles were the same, though now they had maps, mugs and stripped-down rifles on them. The ceiling was the same, with the same rust stains in the joints that someone in maintenance had been promising to clean since year thirty of the crossing. The big window was boarded up except for a narrow strip through which you could see the night.

In the middle, on its pedestal, the captain’s chair was still there. Nobody sat in it.

REYNA OSTRACH. Colonel of The Vanguard. “El Muro”, the Wall. Seventy-one. In Year 1 she was joint military police on the Aurora’s bridge, back when “joint” still meant something. Since then she has treated her neutrality as an order she refuses to disobey. What you need to know: she knows the name of every recruit she has lost, and she never sits down inside El Bastión.

She was standing by the empty chair. She was shorter than Ada expected, with very short grey hair, a straight back and a face that seemed made for expressing nothing. She looked at the crate. Then at Ada. She looked at Ada for longer.

“I remembered you taller,” she said.

Ada went still.

“You knew me?”

“You used to come to the bridge holding a boy’s hand. You’d lift him onto the navigation console so he could see the stars. The captain allowed it. I didn’t.” Ostrach paused. “The captain overruled me, as usual.”

“I don’t remember you.”

“Nobody remembers the police on a bridge. That’s the idea.”

---

Ada set the crate down on a console and opened it. Mamparo’s lens came on, amber and faint, and turned slowly until it found the Colonel.

“Colonel,” said Mamparo.

“So it’s you.” Ostrach came closer. She looked at him from close up, the scratched plates, the old frost in the joints. “Forty-six years in the Cementerio. What have you got inside?”

“I don’t open the seven.”

“Good.”

She said it quickly and quietly, almost with relief. Ada heard it. She stayed looking at the Colonel, who had already turned away.

“What do you mean, good?”

“I mean good. Don’t open it.” Ostrach went over to one of the consoles and stood in front of a map of La Cicatriz. “That core is cargo recovered by one of my patrols. From this moment he is Armisticio cargo and he stays in El Bastión. Tomorrow, when the workshop opens, they’ll make him a shell, because cores without a body switch off. And whatever he’s got inside stays inside.”

“He’s mine.”

“He’s nobody’s. He’s the Vanguard’s because we found him.” Ostrach didn’t turn round. “And you, recruit, until day 238, are nobody’s either.”

---

The wall was in the bridge’s old shuttle hangar, at the end of a corridor, in a big cold room whose walls were still black with smoke from the Forty Days. Ostrach didn’t show it to her. Ada found it on her own, while Osk was finding her a cot.

Names. Hundreds of them. Engraved by hand on hull plates bolted to the wall, in columns, each with a trade and an age. Some were Vanguard soldiers who had died in the last thirty years. Most were from day 236 of Year 1.

There was a small sign at the entrance: 412. And below it, in the Colonel’s handwriting: READ ALOUD EVERY YEAR, ON THE DAY OF THE FALL.

Ada read slowly, because she knew these names. The bosun with the metal legs. The deck-six cook, the one who made the seaweed soup. The hangar chief who wouldn’t let her out at night. She looked for the eight pilots from the seven, the ones who had died in their pods one every few years while Mamparo logged them, and they weren’t there: nobody had come to put them up. At the very top, alone on her plate, was the captain: ARRIETA · CAPTAIN OF THE ARCA AURORA.

And in the centre column, at eye level, together, in the same hand:

LYS, ADA · TANDA PILOT · 24

LYS, AURELIO · CADET · 13

Ada put her hand on the plate. It was cold. She ran her thumb over the letters of her own name. Then over the other one. Those letters were slightly more worn, as if someone had touched them many times.

She didn’t know how long she stood there. When she turned round, the Colonel was in the doorway.

“Who put my name up?” asked Ada.

“Someone who had lost them.”

“When?”

“In Year 12. When the Armisticio was signed.”

“Who?”

“He asked me not to say.”

“I’m alive.”

“So I see.”

“Then take it down.”

Ostrach came into the room. She stood in front of the wall, next to Ada, looking at the two lines.

“Nothing gets taken off this wall,” she said.

---

They talked there, both standing, because Ostrach didn’t sit in El Bastión.

“You were on the bridge on day 236,” said Ada.

“I was.”

“What happened?”

“They shot at us.”

“Who did?”

“Everybody.”

“The seven came off before the crash. It came off whole, with the doors shut and nine pods inside. That doesn’t happen by itself. Someone released it.” Ada turned to face her. “Why were we in the middle of the fight? We were supposed to be going to Tirane. We had a dock waiting for us.”

Ostrach took a while to answer. When she did, it wasn’t to the question.

“There are truths that are only good for starting wars, Lys.”

“And lies that are good for putting up with them.”

“Exactly.”

Ada looked at her. The Colonel had meant it, without irony, like someone agreeing with a thing she had been thinking about for a long time.

“You lie to keep the peace holding?”

“I don’t lie. I keep quiet.” Ostrach went on looking at the wall. “Keeping quiet is a wall. Lying is painting a door on the wall so people walk into it head first. I don’t paint doors.”

“And if someone wants to know what’s behind the wall?”

“Let them ask themselves why it was built.”

They were silent. Through the strip of window came the blue light of the sentinel, going round above the core of La Cicatriz as it had every night for forty-six years.

“I read this whole wall every year,” said Ostrach at last. “Four hundred and twelve names. It takes me an hour and ten minutes. Some people come just to hear one. They stand until I say it and then they leave.” She paused. “I have read your name thirty-five times.”

“And the other one?”

“That too.”

“Does anyone come to hear it?”

Ostrach didn’t answer.

---

Commander Ysolde Kray reached the entrance arch at midnight, alone, on foot and unarmed, with a sealed paper in her hand.

Ostrach went down to meet her. Ada went after her without being asked and stood in the shadow of a wall.

“Colonel.”

“Commander.”

“The Cátedra de Ascensión claims the core recovered in fragment AU-C7. And the sleeper from pod nine.”

“The Cátedra can claim whatever it likes on Ithera. It doesn’t rule on Ithera. The Armisticio says so, the demilitarisation article. You know that.”

“I know, Colonel. That’s why I’ve come unarmed.”

“That’s why I’m letting you through the arch.”

The two of them looked at each other for a while. Two women in uniform, from two generations and two houses, who respected each other enough not to pretend they got on.

“My Chancellor won’t settle for a no,” said Kray.

“Your Chancellor has been settling for my noes for thirty-five years. He’ll get used to another one.”

Kray put the paper away. Then she saw Ada in the shadow of the wall, and something in her face changed.

“You’re the one from the Tortuga?”

“I’m the one from the Tortuga.”

“Where did you learn to get through that crack?”

“Right there. At fourteen. The hangar chief wouldn’t let me out at night.”

Kray let out a breath through her nose. It was nearly a laugh.

“I’ve been flying in the Guardia for twenty-two years,” she said. “I’d like to see you fly again. From a distance, preferably.”

Ostrach moved two steps away to speak to the guard at the arch. Kray took the chance and lowered her voice.

“The Chancellor wants to see you. Unharmed. I don’t know why.” She paused. “That worries me more than it worries you.”

“What does a Chancellor want with a tanda pilot?”

“He hasn’t told me. He asked me a very odd question.”

“What?”

“Whether you asked the time when you woke up.”

Ada didn’t move. For a second the blood drained from her face, and Kray, who had spent twenty-two years reading recruits’ faces, saw it.

“Did you?”

“All pilots do,” said Ada. “It’s a habit.”

“Right,” said Kray, and didn’t believe it. “I’ll be back, Colonel,” she added, louder. “With another paper.”

“Bring it,” said Ostrach. “We read papers here.”

---

Ada slept on a barracks cot, under a blanket that smelt of old smoke, and dreamt of the glass of a pod and a nose squashed against the other side. Two raps of the knuckles. What if you’re late?

She woke at first light.

The Tozuda had spent the night on El Bastión’s landing pad, with Mamparo’s crate in the hold and a Vanguard seal on the ramp, because the Colonel had said the core wasn’t moving until the workshop opened. Vedma had said fine. Chemo had said fine. Tais hadn’t said anything.

Ada went out onto the pad. The pad was empty.

On the ground, where the Tozuda’s ramp had been, lay a Vanguard seal cut cleanly through with a well-edged tool, by someone who knew where to cut. Three fingers below the lock.

Corporal Osk was there, standing, looking at the seal with his hands behind his back.

“Took off on the hour,” he said. “Four o’clock exactly. I’ve got it in the log.”

“She closes on the hour,” said Ada.

“What?”

“Vedma. She closes on the hour. With whoever’s inside.” Ada looked at the sky, where there was no sign of the ship. “And I wasn’t inside.”

The Colonel appeared behind them, without a sound, the way walls appear when you turn round.

“She’s left you,” she said.

“She told me on the first day we weren’t friends. She said it so there’d be no misunderstanding.”

“And now what?”

“Now I go and find him.”

“With what? You’ve got no ship, no money and no house.”

Ada had no answer. She stood looking at the cut seal on the ground.

It was Osk who spoke, looking straight ahead, in the slowest voice Ada had heard him use.

“If you want to know what happened on day 236,” he said, “ask at El Faro Roto. They’ve got the Aurora’s last line of position. Exactly where it was when it was shot.”

The Colonel turned to her corporal very slowly.

“Corporal.”

“Colonel.”

“I didn’t ask your opinion.”

“No, Colonel.” Osk kept looking straight ahead. “That’s why I’m giving it to you without being asked. On the hour.”

Ostrach looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at Ada. Then she turned and went into El Bastión without another word, and Ada realised it was the first time she had seen the Wall lose an argument.