Eleven in the Hollow

The siren at the Shiban valley mouth went at 5:40, and the spent booster stage came down at 5:52, shed by a rocket out of Xichang somewhere far to the west. I felt it through my boots on the school steps: one thump, then nothing. Behind me in the gym, two hundred people from the upper terraces sat up on their evacuation mats and looked at the ceiling.

"That's it," I told them. "Stay until I call."

The fog was thick enough that the drone spotters were useless, so I went in on foot with Tao Wen's recovery crew, following the stage's beacon on my handset. It chirped louder as we climbed. Tao Wen walked ahead with the saws on his back and kept checking his watch.

"Warden Bei," he said, "the last one vented clean in forty minutes."

"The last one isn't this one."

We found it in the dry hollow above the old Zhou place, where a sinkhole had eaten half a terrace a long time ago. It was a white cylinder about the length of a bus, lying crosswise with its fins crumpled. A thin hiss came from the valve end, and a cold white plume of leftover propellant rolled out and mixed into the fog. Tao Wen put his hand on the skin of it like it was a horse.

"We could start at the far end," he said.

"Nobody cuts until it's done venting. No hot cuts. Not in Longtan."

He spat and sat down on a rock to wait. The operator's yard had raised its weigh price four fen a kilo that month, and every crew in the county knew whoever got their steel to the yard first got paid before the truck queue. I didn't blame him for wanting it. I still wasn't going to let him.

While we waited I pulled up my map. I have kept one since I became warden three years ago: every egg the operator sent us, and a pin wherever the stage actually landed. Nobody asked me to. I like knowing how things behave. The eggs, the ovals the operator publishes for where each stage should fall, come in forty-eight hours ahead, six or seven kilometers long, tilted a little by whatever the upper winds are doing. Every pin inside our border was tumble money for the township, and every egg was a sleepover in the gym for whoever lived under it. For my first two years the pins fell all over the eggs. One went through the Yang family's pig shed. One landed in the river.

I put today's pin in and zoomed out, and I stopped breathing for a second.

The last eleven pins sat on top of each other. All of them were in this hollow, within about three hundred meters, going back to June. The eggs had not changed. Every week I had walked the terraces from end to end, moved the cattle, carried old Mrs. Liu's bedding down to the gym, and then the stage came down in this same dry hole.

I thought maybe the winds had been unusually steady. I checked the published wind columns. They hadn't been.

The insurer's assessor arrived at nine, after the fog lifted, with her own drone and a tablet. Ou Fenna checked every fall in our district for the operator's insurer. She was careful and she was not unkind, and she disputed half our roof claims anyway. I waited until she had photographed the stage from four sides, and then I showed her the map.

"Why do they land in the same place?" I asked. "The eggs are the same size they were last year."

She looked at the screen much longer than she needed to.

"You should ask the operator," she said.

"I'm asking you. You see all the townships. Is it the same everywhere?"

She looked over at Tao Wen's crew, who were finally cutting. Then she said, quietly, "They've been flying the new steering fins since June. The contract says the eggs stay at the old size until the review in spring. Nobody is supposed to publish the actual scatter before then." She put the tablet away. "I didn't tell you that. It's your own drone data."

"Then what were the sleepovers for?"

"The contract," she said again, as if that answered it, and went to measure a scorched patch of grass.

Mrs. Liu broke her hip on the steps below her house in August, going down to the gym at night for a stage that was always going to fall in this hollow. She is eighty-one. The damage schedule prices roofs and pigs and terraces, and it has no line for that. I stood there with the saws screaming behind me and felt my face go hot, and it did not cool off on the walk down.

I went to the township office without changing my boots. Mo Hailei, the township head, was eating noodles at his desk. I put the handset down in front of him with the pins showing.

He glanced at it and kept eating. That was when I knew.

"How long have you known?" I said.

"Since May." He wiped his mouth. "They briefed the heads of the central townships."

"Central townships."

"When the eggs shrink in spring, the new egg is this hollow. Ours. Six of the townships on either side fall off the map, and their money with them." He pointed his chopsticks at me. "If Qiaotou and Dawan find out now, they'll lobby the province to kill the fins, and we'll all go back to the old eggs. If they find out in spring, it's done. Longtan gets every fall on this segment of the track. Tumble money for every one. The clinic gets its second doctor."

"And until spring my people sleep in the gym for nothing."

"For the contract. If we stop evacuating the published egg, the operator can call it a breach." He shrugged. "And a fin can still fail. You'd evacuate anyway."

"I would. But I'd tell them why."

"You'll tell them, and by Friday Dawan knows." He put the bowl down. "Kai. You're a good warden. Walk the terraces. Leave the rest to me."

I picked up my handset. I wanted very badly to throw it at the wall, and I didn't.

"The next egg comes in tomorrow," I said. "I'll walk it. And tomorrow night I'll tell everyone in the gym exactly where the last eleven landed, and who knew."

"Then you'll be telling them without me."

"Fine."

That evening I printed the map on the office printer, eleven red dots in a cluster so tight they blurred into one. I carried it up to the school and taped it to the wall beside the basketball hoop, where everyone would see it when they came in with their bedding. Mrs. Liu's son came in first, with his mother's mat under his arm. He stopped and looked at it.

"What's this, Warden?"

"Sit down," I said. "Get the others. I want everyone to hear it at once."