The Third Stack

The gruizeyard at Ecclesfield is not somewhere you go on purpose. I want to be clear about that, because what I am about to tell you makes it sound like I went on purpose, and I didn't. I went because Grit Marsh told me there was a contact out at the Third Stack who owed him a several baggies of rockcrust and thirty-odd ¢hits, and that this contact would only deal through an intermediary, and that Grit would split the recovery with me forty-sixty in my favour because he had a prior engagement and also because, as he put it, it was better if the person asking wasn't Grit.

I should have asked why. I didn't. I took the job.

The gruizeyard starts about twenty minutes' walk north of Hellsborough, past where the Middlewood road turns to rubble, and it takes its name from the fact that old gruizers go there to stop working. They pile up at the edges of the crosslands in stacks of rotting chassis and dead armour, the organic network too thin out here to reach them. There's less murk in the crosslands than in Hellsborough or The Dark Peak — you can sometimes see actual sky — but the murk that is there is old and has gone its own way, and the organic network runs in patches rather than a continuous layer, which means things that need it to navigate just wander until something stops them.

You have to understand what that means in practice. In Hellsborough, the network keeps the made purposeful. Out in the crosslands, a made that's separated from its anchor just keeps going, picking up whatever signal it can reach. And symbiots without hosts are worse, because a symbiot isn't looking for a signal. It's looking for a person. It will find the first available warm entity and try to fix that problem, and it won't wait to be asked.

I mention this because I didn't know any of it at the time.

The Third Stack is what the crosslanders call three old industrial chimneys that stand in a row at the edge of what was a steelworks before the crosslands were the crosslands. Two of them are broken off at the mid-point and the rubble is still where it fell, half-buried in grass, bracken and the particular variety of bramble that grows where the organic network has given up. The third chimney is intact. It is not comfortable to look at, the third one. Something about the proportions. It stands about forty metres tall, which is not objectively alarming, but there is a quality to it: it stands with more intention than stone should have, and the organic network, which runs nowhere near here, does not seem to have told it that. Van wrote something about industrial structures in the crosslands absorbing a kind of residual psychic pressure from the generations of workers who passed through them, and when I am standing in front of the Third Stack I think about that and also about how Van wrote most of his field notes after the fact and from the safety of a pub.

Grit's contact was a Wood — one of the red clan. She was sitting on a piece of broken chimney with a small fire going and a crossbow balanced across her knees and the expression of someone who had been waiting longer than they'd wanted and wasn't inclined to be pleasant about it. Her name was Ina. She had clan markings on her jaw and a psycmask pushed up on her forehead — the Van Hallam design, the breathing type, no hivemind link — and her hands were wrapped in what looked like insulation tape.

She looked at me for a long time before she spoke, and when she did, she said: where's the rest of you.

I said I was it.

She said: the ripperwing has been on us for forty minutes. If there's only one of you it'll come down sooner.

I looked up. The ripperwing was a dark shape maybe two hundred metres up, turning slow lazy arcs in the murky air above us. I'd noticed it earlier and thought nothing of it. I tend to think nothing of things until they have become, by the criteria I was apparently supposed to be using, a significant threat.

You should know about ripperwings if you're going out that far. They work by patience. They identify a target area and orbit it until they have a complete picture of what's moving and what isn't, and then they do something about the moving parts. The wingspan is significant enough that your brain initially reads corvid and then recalibrates in a way that is not comfortable. The first pass is reconnaissance. Ina knew this. I was learning.

We did the handoff quickly. Grit's outstanding ¢hits in my jacket pocket, the crust in my hand, because there was no dignified way to carry it across the gruizeyard and I had stopped trying to find one. Ina watched the ripperwing the whole time I was there, and when she told me to go she said it the way you say get out of a burning building: not unfriendly, but immediate.

I was fifteen minutes into the walk back when I heard the first click.

Small sound. The kind of sound that, in a pub, you'd think was someone's glass hitting the table at a distance. Out there, in the gruizeyard, with the murk sitting about knee height and the distant shapes of dead gruizers in the murk and nothing else moving, it was not that. I stopped. Looked around. Nothing I could see.

I kept walking.

The second click came three minutes later, closer. Still no source I could locate. And then the third click, and then silence, and the silence was the thing, because the silence was different. Something had changed in the air, the way it changes when a door opens somewhere in a building. Not the sound that had stopped — the something else that had started.

I want to be careful about how I describe what happened next, because I've described it several times now and I keep getting the details slightly wrong, and I think that is part of it. The inside of my head became busier than it had been. As if someone had opened a second window onto something I hadn't known was there. Not another voice — nothing I could parse as language. More like the arrival of information in a form I didn't have the vocabulary to read. Urgency. Loss. A particular quality of searching, the way you search for something you can't afford to have lost.

I'm not proud of this. I ran. Running in the gruizeyard is not a strategically sound decision — you can't see everything at knee height in the murk, and the ground is uneven, and there's always the question of what you're running toward. But I ran anyway, because the alternative was to stay still, and staying still was exactly what the thing searching through the inside of my head wanted me to do.

I went over something I couldn't see in the murk — old chassis, I think — and went down hard on my hands and knees, and the crust I'd been carrying scattered across twenty feet of wet mud. I lay there for a moment listening to my own breathing and wondering if the clicking was still happening.

It wasn't. Whatever it was, it wasn't there anymore. Later, reading Van's notes, I found a single line he had written and not crossed out: the disassociated symbiot that loses a target doesn't give up, it files the scent. You don't know if you're still logged until the next time something on the network notices you.

I stayed down for what felt like a reasonable interval and then got up and assessed the damage: two bleeding palms, ruined trousers, no crust. The ¢hits were still in my jacket. I walked the rest of the way back to Hellsborough quickly and without looking behind me, which is the kind of discipline you only develop after sufficient practice.

The ripperwing wasn't circling anymore when I came back through the edge of the gruizeyard. I couldn't tell if that was good.

Van's notes on symbiots say the disassociated one is desperate rather than malicious. It isn't trying to harm you. It is trying not to be alone. The difficulty is that bonding, done right, is slow — both parties in it together, building up to it over time. A forced bond from a symbiot that's been wandering without a host has none of that. It arrives unfiltered, and what it delivers is whatever the previous host was carrying in their last hours with this creature.

Van doesn't speculate on what that might be. The notes in that section are short and the handwriting changes partway through, as if he came back to finish it later and had been thinking about something else in the interval.

The hum I had behind my left ear for the following week may or may not have been related. It faded eventually. I think about it sometimes when I'm quiet.

Ina, for what it's worth, didn't seem surprised when I found her in Hellsborough three days later and mentioned the clicking. She said: it would have been looking for a host. We lose a few of them, out at the gruizeyard. The disassociated ones cluster around where the last host went down, waiting. If you stood still, it might have settled on you and then you'd have a different problem.

I asked what kind of problem.

She said the kind where three days of memories follow you around until they fade, and then she drank her ale and changed the subject.

I did not press it.

Grit, when I reported back and handed over the ¢hits, said he'd heard the ripperwing had taken a scrufftail on the far side of the Third Stack and that probably was why it had eventually moved on. I told him about the crust. He was less philosophical about this than I would have liked.

The Third Stack still stands, apparently. Someone told me one of the crosslander clans has started using the intact chimney as a marker, which means it's on their territory now, which means if you go out there you'll need to be clearer about your business than I was.

Bring something they want to trade and make sure it isn't breakable.

And if you hear clicking with no visible source, don't stop moving. Movement is not a guarantee. It's just better odds.

Can I get you a pint?

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