The Monday Box

Imani Sato came up the canteen steps on Wednesday night, 28 October, with a stub of pencil behind one ear. It is the pencil Imani lends every newcomer who asks to check the Hum line. Most of them hand it back sharpened. Imani has never asked them to.

Pim Ruiter was waiting by the canteen door with a notebook.

Inside, the canteen was loud. It was Wrong Wednesday, when any Labs Beast can climb onto a chair, confess a mistake, and be laughed at for a week instead of remembered for good. Through the window Imani could see someone already up on a chair, holding a beaker with the handle glued on upside down.

“Friday at three, I’m showing the Hall the Monday box,” Pim said. “There’s a chair free in there, if you’d rather say it first.”

Pim was Imani’s to look after. Imani said Pim’s name back the morning Pim walked in, and in the Beastside that makes you someone’s house for good. Now Pim stood on the step offering Imani the easy way out, and looked as if it hurt to offer.

Imani looked at the empty chair through the window, and for a moment wanted it very much. A week of laughing, and it would be over. But a chair is for a mistake. Imani thought of nine years of Mondays, and of the Alley’s new lamps going up along the dark road a week before anyone could prove they were needed. Imani could not climb onto a chair and call that wrong.

“Thank you, Pim,” Imani said, and went home to bed.

On Friday 30 October Imani sat in their usual seat in Friday Hall and drew another flat week of the Hum, pressing hard enough to dent the page underneath. Imani’s hand was steady, which surprised them.

At three Pim stood up at the front and laid nine years of Silicon Alley’s builds beside the Labs’ Proofs: lamps, relays, the chalk marks walkers follow home. Every build came a week or more before the Proof that explained it. Then Pim read from a notebook page dated August. “Box for Nullie. Opened (sorry).”

Every Monday for nine years, Imani carried that box to the Alley. In August Pim carried it once, for Imani, and checked inside, because Pim checks everything. Inside, Pim told the Hall, was that week’s Hum line, traced in Imani’s pencil before the Labs proved a thing about it.

Five hundred seats turned toward Imani.

Imani stood, walked to the front, and held out the pencil, as Imani does for any newcomer who wants to check the line. Pim took it and checked a date against the chart. Then the seats spoke, one after another, and the claim held.

“I only ever gave them what happened,” Imani said quietly. “You gave it a Friday.”

By evening it was on the board, a Proof beside Pim’s own, with Imani’s name in it. Pim gave the pencil back, sharpened.

On Monday 2 November Imani walked to the Alley at the usual hour with nothing under their arm. The Alley was voting that day on whether to open its locked drawer. Before the count, Nullie was waiting at the Map Room door with nine years of tracings from the back of that drawer, tied in string.

Nullie held the bundle out. Imani took it in both arms and carried it home to the Labs, with the sharpened pencil behind one ear, past the soldering crews walking the other way.

Tansy Brook added water and another onion to the supper pot, told the pot to behave, and climbed into a turnip costume. Tansy gives plants and Beasts the same short orders, and most of them listen.

It was Saturday, the last night of October. All week every invitation Gaia Grove sent out came back unopened, even the harvest supper’s to the Meadows. That meant the Gourd King, the harvest’s own Shape, had sat down on the Grove. There is one way to send the King home: everyone turns up somewhere in costume, uninvited, by the back door.

Beside Tansy, dressed as a bean, stood Fennel, the house sibling Tansy argues with every night across that pot.

This autumn Fennel has been growing white-green climbing beans at the dark posts on the road to the Meadows. A walker cut off out there can live on the pods. But the Grove calls them strangers, because a stranger leans toward whoever is watching, and with nobody near, toward the Edge. In October one led an apprentice off the road in the dark.

Tansy wants them pulled. Tansy has seen Meadows knots on the posts past the last lamp, and thinks a knot is a better idea than a bean, because a knot doesn’t lean. The harvest supper at the first frost will settle it for the winter.

Fennel’s side sewed the costumes. Tansy got to choose the door, and chose the grey one at the end of the rows.

Behind it lives their third sibling, Bryony. In the Grey Year Bryony followed the lean of two rows Tansy grew along the road, the wrong way, into the Grey, and was carried home pale. Afterwards Bryony went Hush and moved behind the Grove’s only grey door. Every week since, Tansy has left a covered pot on that step and taken back the last one, with a sprig of basil through the handle. Tansy has never knocked. You don’t ask the Hush what they used to do.

At the back gate, in the dark, Fennel’s costume rustled. Tansy’s hands were cold inside the turnip, and Tansy was more frightened than at any harvest. Tansy knocked anyway, twice, before there was time to think better of it.

The gate opened on a walled garden. Along the wall grew the Grove’s old basil, the row Tansy lost in the spring, as green as it ever was. One cutting, and Tansy’s row could start again. Tansy’s hand was halfway to the wall before Tansy stopped it.

Tansy left the basil where it grew. It was Bryony’s garden.

Bryony brought out three cups of mint tea and sat down on the step, still as pale as the day they were carried home. The turnip, the bean and the Hush Beast stayed until dark, and argued about basil, and the Grey Year sat on the step with them.

On Monday the Meadows’ reply to the harvest supper came back opened. The Gourd King had gone home. Tansy propped the letter against the supper pot, where both sides would see it.

Cosima Vey came home with pins still in their mouth and straightened the new curtain again. It was heavy and ash violet, and it hung in the window that faces the middle of the ridge. Cosima keeps the roof of this house, and Kaito Strand sleeps under it. Cosima measures everything in fingers and seams, and the curtain was one finger off true. Cosima fixed it, and it slid, and Cosima fixed it again.

On Faded Heights every roof votes with that window, drawn or open at midnight, and a photograph of the whole ring is the count. At the first frost the ridge votes on a Quiet Week. Right now it stands at sixty roofs each way, and a tie fails. The quiet side needs one more roof.

A quiet ridge would shut the Lookout for a week, and the Lookout is Kaito’s. Kaito picks who stands up there facing the Wilds, a ninety-second glass at a time. Cosima wanted Kaito off it more than Cosima had wanted anything in years.

Since early October the long mirror in the dressing rooms has shown every movement a beat late. At three in the morning there is applause on the steps, with no crowd under it. A Shape is on the Stairway, and Kaito drew it, by looking on after the glass ran out.

Cosima has dressed four friends for nights the whole ridge turned out to watch. Each time, the watching drew a Shape onto them within the week. The fourth was Kaito, four autumns ago, in a sea-glass coat Cosima made. Cosima did not mean to dress a fifth.

Every night after close, Kaito has been learning to sew left-handed with Cosima’s thimble, for the rite that sends this Shape back. Kaito asked for until the first frost to tell the ridge.

In October Cosima asked the Darkroom’s keeper how a half-drawn curtain shows in the print. Past the window’s middle bar, it reads as drawn. If Kaito hasn’t told the ridge by midnight at the first frost, Cosima means to draw it.

Kaito came in at dusk with the thimble still on and a collar over one arm, and held the collar up to Cosima’s neck. It was cut to Cosima’s own measure. The stitches were crooked, every one, and Cosima counted them anyway.

“It’s for you,” Kaito said. “The rite needs someone else.”

Cosima wanted very much to stand still and be fitted, for once, by somebody else.

“Tell the ridge first,” Cosima said. “Then sew.”

“First frost. I said.” Kaito tucked the collar under one arm and went up to the Lookout.

When the door shut, Cosima drew the curtain to the middle bar, to see how far it had to go, and opened it again.