Being a First-Through

The job is simple to describe. You go first, and you come back and say what is there.

Most days that means a parcel, a passenger, a tallyman’s manifest and a sandwich. Some days it means standing in front of a housing that has done something nobody has an explanation for, with four hundred people behind a cordon rope waiting to hear what you found.

What a crossing is like

Almost nothing. That is the honest answer and new players are always slightly disappointed by it.

You step onto the plate. The air changes. You are somewhere else. There is no flash, no lurch, no tunnel, no noise. The only reason you know you crossed is that the smell is different and the boots you are wearing belong to a different station.

Nothing dead crosses with you — not clothes, not boots, not a bag — so you undress at one end and dress at the other, and every hall in human space has a rail of boots in it that nobody owns. The exception is your weave: a garment grown rather than made, close-fitting, long-sleeved, about the weight of a good shirt. It is alive, so it crosses.

One part of it is uniform and the rest is you. At the left shoulder is the Threshold flash, grown into the cloth, which cannot be faked because it cannot be attached — that is the part a tallyman looks at. Everything else is yours. A living weave takes dye, so nobody keeps the off-white it comes out of the vat in for long: deck colours so you can be found in a hall, the colours of wherever you grew up, a band at the cuff for every door you have stood. The Threshold has tried four times to standardise it and lost four times.

What it costs

Each crossing takes something off you that does not come back. It is small and it accumulates and it is visible: the weave goes mottled across the shoulders first, then the forearms — faint cloudy pale patches where the dye has bleached out of it.

Which is the joke nobody finds funny. The dye is how you say who you are, and the dye is exactly what makes your mileage readable from the other side of a hall. Some people stop dyeing around eighteen and let the colour grow out. Nobody says anything about that either.

Somebody who has done two thousand crossings has no colour left in their sleeves at all. They have white ones.

Around twenty-two a body stops being able to do it at all, and after that you cannot cross, not once, not ever. The word for that is frayed out, and being landlocked is the ordinary end of every first-through’s career, and nobody in six hundred years has worked out what a person is supposed to do afterwards.

That is not a secret. The adults will tell you if you ask them. Some of them will tell you if you don’t.

Carrying

Anybody over about twenty-two who wants to go anywhere has to be carried, in your arms, through the door, by you.

It is harder than crossing alone and it costs more. A child is cheap — minutes, maybe. An adult is dear: a fortnight off the end of your life, counted, and three or four in a row finishes anybody. Nobody pretends otherwise and nobody rounds it down.

A carry can also set — the door going solid under you with somebody in your arms, refusing to open for two. When that happens there is exactly one correct answer and every instructor at the Yards says it the same way:

Put them down. Not ease off. Put them down, on whichever side you are on, and let go, and do not spend four seconds being brave about it.

Pushing a set is how people get hurt, and it is always, always a decision somebody made while having a bad day and deciding they could have it both ways.

Your knack

Most first-throughs have one. They surface somewhere in the first year or so and nobody can tell you when, and “what’s your knack?” is the first thing one first-through asks another.

The Listen tells you something about the far side before you step through — air, pressure, heat, whether there is a floor, whether anybody is standing there. It is never detailed and it is the single most valuable thing anybody out here can have, and it is why a first-through survives a door that has moved. Two or three per intake.

The Quick is reflex and speed past what a body should manage. Common, obvious, and the one every twelve-year-old in the Yards wants.

The Set is taking what ought to break you. The Reckoning is always knowing precisely where you are. The Knowing is understanding a mechanism by putting your hands on it. The Read is seeing what people are about to do, and is rare, resented, and worth not mentioning.

The Hold — keeping a door where it is, for a few minutes, by paying attention to it — is rarer than all of them and you will probably never meet somebody who has it.

Everybody also has Life Support, which is the weave rather than you, and which can be taken off you by anybody with the right tool in under a minute. That is worth remembering.

What keeps you alive past a door

Two things, and there is no third: what you trained your body to do, and what you are wearing.

Your pressure-skin holds you at survivable pressure and temperature for two environments only, chosen when you draw your kit — vacuum and cold, or vacuum and hard radiation, or a toxic atmosphere and heat. You choose in advance, and you choose wrong roughly once per career.

Your sensor hood gives you infrared, a pressure gradient and an echo mode, which is the stated reason a first-through can walk into an unlit unmapped station and not die in the first ten metres.

Your charge at the small of your back is finite and only refills when you rest.

And if there is trouble it will be a stunner, a shock baton and four restraint loops, because out here almost nobody reaches for a blade. A weapon that reliably kills a person reliably opens a wall, and a wall is the only thing between everybody in the room and vacuum. Winning a fight means the other person is on the floor and tied. Losing one means you are.