Sometimes you could hear the Schlund breathe when everything else forgot how.
That was the thought that woke him. Not the pain in the shoulder, not the cold in the fingers of a hand that wasn't there, not the ache of work bending itself into his back. The breathing. A low, patient hum that approached and retreated like a tide that had read a manual. The hut wore it in its floorboards. The leaf-stuffed mattress hummed back in a weaker key. Breuk lay on his side and watched the fungi-lamps along the seam of wall do their tired glow. He tried to count between pulses and lost himself in the number three.
Sleep refused to negotiate. He sat up, slow as you talk to a wounded dog, and reached for his jacket. The right sleeve made sense. The left hung empty, willing to be pinned and forgotten, not willing to be forgiven. He shrugged into it, jaw tight, mouth set in the old line: work first, medicine later, feelings never.
Outside, the Grund had that hour it keeps only for itself—mist wearing the paths like a shawl, water clicking from root to root, huts huddled as if they knew the word village in their bones. He stepped out and that first breath always surprised him: mineral and leaf and the faint iron-lick of tools left overnight, a smell you could swallow and live on.
He walked without deciding to. The ground sloped toward the center, where a rack held buckets and a pump waited for someone to ask it to care. He didn't. He passed under a rib of metal that had once been a pipe and now was an arch. The Schlund's hum found him under it, a heavier note, a weight exchanged between stone and something older than stone.
If you hold very still, he thought, you can almost hear the city above forgetting you.
He didn't like the thought, so he obeyed it.
The administration hut—if administration could be made out of welded plate and scavenged beams and a door that had two handles because one of them would always be broken—sat where the ground thickened. Someone had nailed a board over the board that had once said something else; in scratched letters, it now said: VERWALTUNG. Half the letters leaned against each other like drunks, holding their dignity by agreement.
Breuk put his palm to the door and listened. The Schlund's hum lived here too, but more faintly, like a memory that had put on manners. He pushed. The hinges did their little opera. The darkness inside did not fight the candle someone had left to die in a saucer; it wore the light thin.
Empty tables. Dust that had learned to pretend to be cloth. Shelves bowed under paper that had gone the color of tea. Maps with mold freckles. Ink lines that had tried to outlive the hands that drew them and were losing.
He moved like a thief who had decided to rob his own house. A stack of lists had been tied with wire, the wire long since rusted into the paper's skin. An old ledger that had once cared about goats and now cared about keeping its spine uncracked. Compartments that had become attics for things that once had names.
That was what he was doing, he realized. He was hunting names.
In the corner, on the highest shelf where even careful hands would hesitate, a book sat where it did not belong. Not because it was preserved—it had the same tired edges, the same surrendering corners—but because it had a mind about itself. Black leather dulled to brown where fingers would have loved to grip it. A symbol pressed into its face: circles within circles, three short lines like hands reaching into a well.
Breuk went on his toes and used the tips of two fingers to pull it toward him. The cover stuck, kissed the shelf with that long kiss of paper to wood, and then let go. A page near the back tore with the little sigh of something failing in the way it always knew it would. Dust jumped like startled fish.
He tucked the book under his arm (his arm, the one that still obeyed) and left the administration to keep pretending.
Back in his hut, he lit the end of a piece of wick with a coal stolen from last night's fire and set the book down on the crate that had become his table. The Schlund hummed through the legs. The candle made the leather sweat.
He opened to the first page and found it took up the whole of him.
And the angel who fell lived among the people as their friend.
The script was hand and it was tired and it had wanted to be beautiful and failed honestly. An illustration followed, done with the kind of patience you rarely see outside of hunger: a man with a human's shoulders and a scar's memory where wings might have been, crouching to help a child lift a basket. He was neither handsome nor unhandsome. He looked like a person who had decided, and decided, and decided again.
Panels—if the mind could call them that—took the next pages. A market under trees. Light slipping through leaves that were nothing like the fungus light here. Stalls with spices that made the paper look like it smelled. The people above, in clean cloth and metal-woven coats, smiling the way men smile when they invent trade and call it friendship. The people below bringing plants in baskets, machines broken into knowledge, knowledge broken into survival.
He brought commerce between heaven and earth. Spices for knowledge. Plants for machines. Peace for hope.
Breuk let the words sit in him. Peace for hope. He wondered which side had paid in which currency.
A meeting hall, painted into being with ink mixed with something that made it shine in the candle, lined with faces that didn't like each other and would die before saying so. Soldiers who thought discipline was a religion. Men with the kind of hands that point and never lift. The angel at the center, his mouth drawn straight as a rule, looking at a map that looked like the Grund had been laid on a table and asked to explain itself.
But peace holds only as long as hunger forgets itself. The people above wanted more. Their light must shine on everything—including the Grund.
"Of course," Breuk said, and surprised himself with the sound of his own voice.
He turned a page. The ink thinned here, either the artist had tired or the money had. A diagram sprawled across two sheets, lines connecting circles like veins in an old man's hand. A central shaft was drawn like a throat and labeled in a hand that had trembled: SCHLUND. Around it, bands, like rings of a tree that grew inward. Arrows pointing: fall → feed → circle holds.
He built the Circle of Peace. An invisible wall, fed by the Schlund, which takes all things.
The hum beneath his feet stroked his bones as if the book had called it. Breuk ran a finger along the word SCHLUND. The letter S was the kind that had been taught by a teacher with a stick.
All that falls becomes part of the circle. No man of the Grund shall ever see the stars again. None from above shall climb once more.
He read it twice. A third time. It did not become less heavy.
He turned another page, and another, and found the book had been made to run out here. The edges of the last handful of pages were burned, the flame having bitten and been pulled away, the words stopping mid-sentence like a man at the end of a rope.
And so he saved the world by dividing it.
Breuk closed the book without knowing he had. He sat. The candle sputtered, asked for more wax, received none, decided to be small and still useful.
He saved them by burying them.
That was the thought. It arrived with no heat and then gained it, the way metal does when you hold it too long.
He put the book aside with the care you give a sleeping animal that you want to move without waking. He stood. The Schlund's hum had grown since he'd started reading, or he had tuned his body closer to it until it felt like a second heart.
He stepped outside. The Grund's night had not changed. Wires sang the way they sing when they are cold. Water made the sound it always made when it was falling somewhere close but out of sight. The dark was a dark that had been fed and had learned to be kind.
Above, the ceiling pretended there was no ceiling a little worse than usual. The far, sickle-pale, reactor light did its ghost trick and left a smear on his sight when he blinked. Breuk tilted his chin until his neck made its complaint known and stayed like that anyway.
The hero who rescued them buried them.
He let the sentence dissolve on his tongue and swallowed it.
"World saved," he said. "Whose world."
He said it like a man asking the clerk to repeat the price when he already knows he can't pay it.
He walked. Not toward the Schlund, not toward the huts, just along the pathways that had made themselves between root and rust. The hum stayed steady. He could not tell whether it comforted him or threatened him. It felt like the city's pulse and also like his own, and the part of him that had learned to second-guess survival hated anyone who tried to imitate him that closely.
He paused at the edge platform he'd decided to hate because it told the truth without drama. He fished a screw from his pocket and rolled it across his palm. He thought of throwing it up and catching it again. He didn't. He tucked it back as if he might need it for something honest.
He thought of Lig's face, too close in that classroom dream, the mouth asking What do you actually want? He thought of Jeremiah's hands, palms toward him, telling him how to fall on purpose and how to get up like you meant it. He thought of Tara's fingers, frowning into the guts of a dead machine and convincing it to try again. He thought of Limar's bad jokes flattening thin air into something like companionship. He thought of Tev's solid quiet, the kind that makes a room bear its own weight.
He thought of the necklace pressing its circle through cloth into bone, how during the fall it had become a small gravity of its own and the world had thickened around him like syrup and he had not broken the way he should have.
He made the mistake of talking to himself.
"If I break it," he said, "I let them see the stars. I let… up and down bleed again."
The word bleed made something in him answer, and not a good something. He saw the elder in the under-village, the man with the pipe and the thin smile, falling in a way memory refuses to fix the angle of. He saw the fight around the Schlund when they had stopped bringing offerings for a week, the way peace rushed out of a place when certainty left it. He had told himself then that Lig had pushed him to say too much, pushed the people, and that was true and not true. He had believed what he said. He had wanted bodies to move because he couldn't stand still.
"If I don't," he said, "then it stays like this. What he built stays. They never know what was above them. The ones above keep forgetting what's below."
He didn't add and I never get back. He let the sentence hang wordless and heavy.
Jakk's voice came back to him, but as if someone had filtered it through the candle flame: Here, we build bridges. Ladders are for leaving. Bridges are for living.
"Bridges to where," he said, and was angry that the grief in it sounded like pity. "Across to what."
He imagined the angel—this man with no wings and too many decisions—standing over a drawing of rings and a shaft, pencil shaking a little, mouth set. He imagined him choosing to damn the Grund to survival and the city to peace and himself to a legend that would not forgive him. He imagined the part no one had written: the hour afterward, alone, the way a chest feels when it contains only the breath you made yourself and no one else's approval.
It insulted him to respect that.
He leaned forward on the rail, one hand, because there was only one hand, and watched the dark refuse to soften. The hum from below climbed his arm and made the little muscles of his forearm think about surrender. He felt the necklace answer—small, electromagnetic, or it was only blood and superstition. He could not tell. The mind chooses magic when it cannot name a machine.
"Tell me," he said to the dark, "which one of us is the angel who stayed."
He waited for the joke to land. It didn't. The night was not his audience.
He went back to the hut and laid the book on the crate and stared at it like it might blink. He put his right palm on its closed cover and felt the cold come up through the leather. He closed his eyes and was immediately not alone.
Lig sat across from him in the darkness the way Lig sits in a person's mind—politely, as if invited, and with the permanence of furniture. "What do you actually want," he asked again, kinder than last time and therefore more dangerous.
Breuk did not answer. Jeremiah took the chair Lig wasn't using and set a match to a cigarette that didn't exist; the smell was exactly right anyway. "Walls keep things out," Jeremiah said. "But they also keep things in. Decide which thing you're being kept from and which thing you're keeping from the ones you love."
Tara leaned in the doorway, hands in empty air like they were looking for bolts. "If you cut a live wire, you don't stop electricity," she said. "You move it through your heart."
Limar popped a head in upside down. "Hey, boss, if you're going to break the world, can you give me five minutes to find a helmet?"
Tev said nothing and there was, inside his silence, the entire map of a safe route.
"Fine," Breuk said to no one and all of them. "Fine."
He slept with the book under his palm and his other palm over his chest and woke with lines pressed into both.
When the village rose to its little day, he let it rise without him for an hour, and then he joined it. He carried wood until his shoulder told him to change the angle. He helped Jakk pull a line straight where it had decided to be lazy. He hummed into a pipe until it remembered its note.
The work did not answer the questions. It made them orderly.
Twice that day he found himself looking toward the path to the Schlund. Twice he decided the stew still on the fire would be useful to someone if he chopped more root into it. Twice he told himself he would go when the light did the thing it did in the late afternoon when it pretended to be warmer. He did not.
That night the fire gathered the usual faces. The old man smoked and watched the kids test string tricks with serious eyebrows. The woman ladled stew into bowls whose dents had their own family names. Jakk chewed in his careful way, measuring every bite like it might owe him information.
Breuk stared at the flames and thought about legendary men making practical monsters and being worshiped for it. He thought about the word remember. The old man had said the Schlund remembers those who jump, and the book had said the Schlund forgets those who give. He did not like the math of that.
"Everyone belongs somewhere," the old man said without looking at him. "Some know. Some look."
"And some knock holes where there were walls," Breuk said.
"That too," the old man allowed. "But sometimes a wall is holding water. Break it and you drown the ones who trusted it."
"What if it was holding them thirsty," Breuk said.
The old man puffed the pipe and made the ash believe it had been useful. "Then you teach them to dig," he said. "You don't call down thunder."
Breuk didn't argue. He could taste thunder in his mouth. It tasted like iron and burnt sugar.
When the fire dropped to coals, he went back to the platform. He did it the way a man goes to a church he doesn't believe in because he needs the furniture for thinking.
He took the screw out again and tossed it up. It rose, hesitated, returned. He caught it. He laughed once, quietly, like a cough.
He lowered himself and lay on the boards and put his ear to the wood. The Schlund filled his head. It sounded like a generator under a sleeping city. It sounded like a heart too disciplined to skip. It sounded like hundreds of small voices far away saying "yes" at regular intervals because someone had told them to.
"If I starve you," he whispered, "do you forget them. If I feed you, do you forget me."
The board carried the whisper down and did not return with an answer. He closed his eyes and let the hum write inside his skull.
The necklace warmed against his chest. He couldn't tell if it was because of him or because of the hum or because his body had made a decision he hadn't signed.
"You slowed me," he said to the coin through his shirt. "You chose me."
The thought landed wrong. He didn't like the theology of it. He didn't like being chosen by anything that wasn't a person he could punch or forgive.
He thought of Kane's voice, mild and articulate and rotten with first principles. Faith is leverage, Kane had said. You can lift a city with it. Or crush it.
"Leverage," he repeated, and that was when the thought stitched itself: the Schlund hum, the necklace heat, the ring drawing that fed the wall, Lig's question hammering a nail at the center.
You could break the wall. You could strengthen it. Both would be easy if you had the right place to push.
He rolled onto his back and watched the coin of reactor light blink slow, three beats on, one beat off. He matched his breath to it for a minute and then refused to. He refused anything that asked his body to obey.
He went back to the hut, took the book, and hid it in a crack under the floorboards because secrets belong in the ground if they want to keep being secrets. He lay down with his hand on his chest and slept like a man nailed to two clocks.
In his dream, the angel stood at the lip of the Schlund. He had Breuk's face and not. He had no wings. He had a rope in his hand that led nowhere. The people behind him were quiet, the people above him were noisy, and he was the only mouth that could speak both languages. He said nothing. He jumped. The Schlund took him with the courtesy of a theater curtain. The wall did what walls do. No one cheered.
When he woke, his mouth tasted like copper and he had made the mattress damp with sweat. The village began to talk around him—pumps waking, kids already arguing with the idea of gravity, Jakk's footsteps with a basket's weight.
He sat up, leaned his shoulder against the wall, and let the Grund's morning pour over him in the slow, green way it did.
He had not chosen.
He understood something about why the last man had.
He hated him less for it.
He hated him more.
He stood, because the body had to move while the mind fought itself to a draw. He tied his boot with one hand and too much patience. He stepped out into the not-quite-day with the coin at his chest, the hum under his feet, and the screws in his pocket.
He would work the west line with Jakk. He would check the valve that sang the wrong note. He would answer no question honestly if it asked him the end of his plan. He would go to the Schlund when the light pretended to be warmer. He would not decide until he was standing where the breathing was loudest.
"Sometimes," he thought, and the words were not his, and they were, "the angel who stays is the one who refuses to pick a heaven."
The Grund accepted him for one more hour. The Schlund waited like a problem that had learned patience. Above, a coil of light blinked and blinked and blinked.
He walked toward the bridge. He did not throw the screw. He did not run.
He did not promise himself anything he couldn't pay for later.
The hum gathered him in, the way tide gathers a rock and pretends to move it by loving it enough. He let it.