Four thousand, three hundred, and seventeen years.
He stood with this number the way you stand with something you cannot put down and cannot carry comfortably, which is to say you simply stand, and the standing is what passing time looks like when there is nothing else available.
He had known the number would be large. He had estimated three to eight thousand on the basis of changes he had observed in the Commission's architecture, personnel, and documentation formats during intervals of consciousness across the programme's duration. Four thousand, three hundred, and seventeen was within his estimated range. He had been approximately right.
This was not a comfort. It was not meant to be a comfort. It was simply true.
His parents had been dead for four thousand years. His brother. Everyone who had known his name — the name that was gone now, lost in the gap between deaths, broken and rebuilt one too many times until the reconstruction lost the thread of it and could not find it again. Everyone who had known he existed. Every building, every settlement, every relationship that had constituted the world he had been taken from: dust for longer than most civilisations had stood.
He had a flash of his mother's hands. Not her face — he had not been able to reconstruct her face for several centuries. Her hands. The specific way she had held a bowl when eating, tilted slightly toward herself, both hands, as though the bowl might be taken. He did not know if this was a real memory or a reconstruction from general knowledge of how people held bowls. He could not tell anymore. He had not been able to tell for a long time.
He let the flash exist and pass.
He turned from the board. The settlement continued around him, indifferent, nocturnal, doing what settlements did at the fourth hour. A cat crossed the path. He watched it go.
"You found something." Orvienne's voice, from behind him.
"A warrant notice. The year was at the top."
"And?"
He told her the number.
She was quiet for a long time. He waited. He had become extraordinarily good at waiting.
"I'm sorry," she said.
He considered the apology. Not the Commission's apology — not institutional, not performed for record. The specific sound of a person who had just received a number and understood what the number meant and did not have anything adequate to say about it and said the only thing available anyway.
"You were not responsible for four thousand years of it," he said.
"I was responsible for fourteen."
"Yes."
They stood in the middle of Vare's Crossing and looked at the sky. The two moons, three days from alignment. The shapes behind the membrane, visible even through the settlement's light — enormous, slow, pressing with the patience of things that did not experience waiting as waiting.
"The others need rest," he said. "And food. And clothes that are not Commission issue."
"I've arranged the first two." She paused. "There's a room above the supply trader. Enough walls for everyone."
The room was low-ceilinged and smelled of dried grain and something herbal. Four people found their walls.
Sael near the window, at an angle where she could see the sky without being fully exposed to it — the compromise of someone allowing the outside in at a managed pace. The wind moved the covering intermittently. After twenty minutes she stopped tracking it and let it move.
Rhen on the floor rather than the sleeping surface, because the floor was consistent and known and his body had been sleeping on floors for seventy to ninety years and the sleeping surface was new information that he was not ready to process alongside everything else. He lay down and closed his eyes and his breathing changed within minutes.
Eclipse against the wall furthest from the window. Eyes open. Looking at the ceiling with the quality of attention she had watched him give the ceiling of his cell for fourteen years, except this ceiling was different and she suspected the looking was different too.
Yeln spoke.
She had been sitting in the corner completing her accounting since they arrived. When she spoke it was with the deliberateness Orvienne had anticipated — each word placed precisely, the order determined ahead of time.
"My mother's name was Adra," she said. Not to anyone specifically. To the room. To whatever was present and willing to receive it. "She had a stall in the Kael Market in Nahun selling woven goods. She was alive when I was taken. She would be forty years old now. I know she's not alive. Forty years is not —" she paused. "I know she's not alive. But she would be forty. If things had been different, she would be forty."
Nobody responded. Sael had gone still. Rhen's breathing had not changed. Eclipse was looking at the ceiling.
"I wanted to say her name," Yeln said. "I've been saying it inside my head for fourteen years and I wanted to say it to something that wasn't the inside of my head."
"Adra," Eclipse said, from his wall.
Yeln looked at him.
"I'll remember it," he said. "I remember everything."