brung a bag. Without one, the most I could take was what I could hold in my hands. My plan was to take as many bits of tech as I could carry and try them out one by one in the hope of finding one that would wake for me. If I did find one, I would bring all the others back the next night, hoping that the Ramparts wouldn’t miss the one I took. Then I could say I found it in the woods. It was a thing that had sometimes happened, though not in my lifetime.
It waked when I touched it, I’d say, so that makes me a Rampart. It was a flat lie, but it seemed a small one next to the lies the Ramparts themselves was telling every time they used their tech and every testing day. I felt ashamed, but I was angry enough to get myself past that feeling. And there was a thought under everything else that pushed me on, though I tried my best not to think it. It was that Spinner had choosed Haijon instead of me because he was a Rampart, and if I become a Rampart too then she might change her mind after all.
What with these hopes and dreams and tangled-up thoughts, and fearing to be catched, and not having a bag, I stood there for a long time like I had put down roots and would be found in full flower when the weather turned.
What pulled me out of that was a shout from outside that give me such a shock I all but yelled my own self. I thought someone had found the window out of its frame and set up a hue. I was so panicked by it I took to my heels, though there was nowhere to run to. I missed the open door in the dark and banged into the wall, which set me down on my tail.
My head was ringing like the tocsin bell, and there was lights in my eyes that was kind of dancing. They’ll get me for sure if I just lie here, I thought, but when I tried to get up my legs didn’t seem to have no bones in them. Then there was another shout in a different voice, and I realised it was just the lookouts calling the change, the one of them as she went and the other one as she come.
I had been in here much too long, in other words. I crawled over to the back wall again and grabbed an armload of stuff from off the bottom-most shelf. I didn’t try to choose, which wouldn’t of been much use in the full dark. I just took what come. Then I put myself up on my two feet again somehow and got myself out of there. Remembering to lock the door and take the key, which if I left it behind would of been like an echo-bird shouting out “Koli Woodsmith done this!” for all the village to hear.
Coming back out of the Underhold was not half so easy as going in. I forgot where the stairs was at first. I had got to free one hand up to feel along the walls, so now I was just holding the tech all cradled in my other arm. A couple of times I dropped something and had to go back for it. I was scared past anything that I might of broke the tech. That instead of making myself a Rampart I was just making myself a wrecker and a reaver. I was moaning, kind of, in my throat, and my knees was shaking so much I must of looked like I was bit by a knifestrike and took the poison.
But I found the stairs at last, and I stumbled and scrambled my way up them to the landing where the window was. I dropped the tech out onto the grass outside, one piece at a time. There was seven pieces, I knowed now, for I counted them as they passed out of my hands. They might of broke then too, from hitting the ground or from landing on top of each other, but there wasn’t no other way to do it. I needed both hands and both feet to climb back out.
I done it slowly, scared of making a sound. The new lookout had only just come on, so she would be wide awake, and there was no way now to lie about