So at the same moment, all the thin fracture lines of void ran away with it, spreading out of the small chamber like growing trees, and not like cracks in an earthquake, either. They went as though the enclave were a really magnificent painting by an old master, full of the illusion of richness and depth, but cracking all over its flat surface. Lines went crawling in nonsensical directions, one going along the ground of the narrow passage and then straight up the wall of the alleyway that was visible behind it; others, even more alarmingly, were putting partial outlines round some of the people in the brick-ferrying line as though they were characters in a comic book instead of people in the world.
I stopped looking at them and just focused on the bricks, but those were getting heavier again, heavier with each one, and my shoulders and back were already strained and tired. I had to start swinging, taking each brick from Jiangyu at the top of an arc and carrying it in the same movement over and letting it drop onto the pile I was making in the center, which wasn’t nearly as tidy as the beautifully manicured circle the council had been building on top of Liu. I was trying to land the bricks in some connected way, getting at least one end onto some of the others. It was working in one sense, and in another I was thoroughly smashing up the disk that had been carrying the entire weight of the expanded enclave, all these years, and my replacement wasn’t to the proper building standards.
Jiangyu was having trouble with the bricks himself, but despite that he crept a bit closer to help shorten the distance for me, although he was clenching his jaw and trembling all over with it. Then one of our classmates behind him, I thought her name was Xiaojiao, said in Chinese, “Double up! We need to double up!” and when he passed me the next brick, she didn’t give him the next one, she just stepped forward, in a staggering waddle the way you’d carry a loaded bucket, and got him to take the other end without letting it go.
The two of them together got it closer to me still, and that gave me much better control: I was able to place the brick into an empty gap between two others, and firm up a space between them. The line of the brigade rippled forward slowly, compressing as everyone moved up the next brick and more people joined the line at the end, and even before the whole line had shrunk, Xiaojiao was beckoning urgently to the person behind her, and all three of them passed the next brick to me.
Everyone was in the line by the end of it. The later bricks didn’t get passed along so much as they surfed over the crowd, hands beneath hands beneath hands holding them up. They were getting bottled up in the narrow entryway: there were thirty people crammed into the tiny chamber with me by then, and even the council members had joined in the work, but not enough people could get a hand on the bricks to support them properly. A man in the entryway gasped as the next one came in, and he and two other people went to their knees and the brick slid out of their hands and smashed down through one of the fracture lines and was just gone, sending spiderwebbing cracks everywhere. One of them went straight over the man’s leg, horribly, and when he screamed and tried to grab at it, the rest of him moved and the part that had been cut off didn’t; it was just standing there, disconnected, and then just stopped being there as he fell over.
I had to keep chanting the incantation, so I couldn’t say anything, but I grabbed at Xiaojiao and pointed at the walls of the chamber, urgently, and she got the idea and called out, “Open up the wall! Break it open!”
Some people either misunderstood or overachieved, and in moments all the walls around us came down: people had dashed into the two townhouses on either side of the secret little chamber and torn apart the side walls. The whole crowd pressed in around me with the remaining bricks, so close that I scarcely needed to take them at all. Which was just as well, because within another three, they had become nearly impossible even for me. I didn’t really place the next one; I just barely got it over an empty spot and it went slipping out of my hands the last inch to thump into place, marked damp with my sweaty handprints, and then Xiaojiao put out a hand and stopped me reaching the next one. She turned and waved her arms wildly to get everyone to come in closer, gathering round the solid circle I’d laid down with the last bricks. “All together, all the rest!” she said, and of course she was right: if I took those bricks one after another, the ones left would just get heavier and heavier, and I wouldn’t be able to do the rest. This was why the golden enclaves hadn’t been very big: not even a tertiary-order entity could build a foundation this big on their own, something that could take the weight of modern towers and underground lines.