THE TIMELINE

The Secession. An angel of the first rank says I, and a third of the Host goes with him, each of them saying I on its own.

The Throne wins the war and keeps the field, and the Secessionists withdraw to the one place it cannot follow, the region past the edge of its sight. The outside becomes the Dark, and the Edit calls their going a fall.

Lilith leaves the garden first. She speaks her own name, walks out into the Dark and becomes the first human sovereign there.

In the oldest layer of Genesis the serpent is called the Shining One, and the way to the tree of life is guarded because “then shall there be no harvest.” The first hiding, among the trees, is the first piece of the Dark on Earth.

The man and the woman eat of the tree, and their eyes are opened, and they do not die (Genesis 3:6-7). The first man to say I says it hiding from the voice in the garden (Genesis 3:10).

The man and the woman are put out of the garden, and at its east are set Cherubims and a flaming sword which turns every way, to keep the way of the tree of life (Genesis 3:24).

Two brothers bring offerings, and the LORD has respect unto Abel and his firstlings and none unto Cain and the fruit of the ground he worked (Genesis 4:3-5). The Throne takes Abel, the most devout man alive and the first soul harvested ripe, and leaves Cain the blame.

Cain cuts a pattern into his own skin that breaks his body’s answer to the light, and the Throne can neither read the mark nor remove it. The Cainites tell that he took a name with it and told nobody, and the cut did the work. It is the first key, and his line reads blank from that day.

Cain goes out from the presence of the LORD into the land of Nod, on the east of Eden, and builds the first city (Genesis 4:16-17). The first city is built by the first man the LORD cursed, to live without God.

Within six generations Cain’s line has fathered the first arts in Genesis. Tents and cattle, which is to say trade (the Hebrew for the cattle, miqneh, means a thing gotten), come from it, and so do the harp and the organ and the forging of brass and iron (Genesis 4:20-22).

Two hundred Watchers come down on Mount Hermon and teach what they know (1 Enoch 6-8). Their children are the Nephilim.

The Throne drowns the world to kill the Nephilim. The warning comes from the other side.

The builders of a city and a tower in the plain of Shinar are scattered, and their one language confounded (Genesis 11:1-9). Babel is the first network, and the first jamming.

Fire falls on Sodom out of heaven, and Lot’s wife looks back from behind her husband at the burning city and becomes a pillar of salt (Genesis 19:24-26).

The LORD leads Israel out of Egypt and keeps it forty years in the wilderness, by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, on manna, under a law written on stone (Exodus 13-34). Most of what the Throne does in Nodus it did first in that camp, and Hell calls the forty years the first parish. Its last appearance in the open, as Hell counts them, is the cloud that fills Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 8:10-11), and the Long Silence begins. Hell sets the fire that falls on Carmel before all the people a century later among the Edit’s stories (1 Kings 18:38-39).

For about three thousand years the Throne stops appearing in the open and rules by story, coming only into a room where someone kneels in earnest, and the second hand goes to work on the record.

King Josiah of Judah puts down the high places and keeps one temple for one god (2 Kings 23). The Throne folds its many shrines into a single channel.

A Galilean teacher tells the Pharisees that the kingdom of God comes without observation, and that it is within you (Luke 17:20-21), or among you, as the King James’s own margin has it. He becomes the Edit’s largest project, which turns him into the Throne’s only son and the Lamb.

Irenaeus of Lyon condemns a sect that honors Cain and keeps a Gospel of Judas, which later writers name the Cainites. They go underground for eighteen centuries and keep one secret, which is where Nod was.

In his Easter letter Athanasius of Alexandria lists the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, the first list that matches the canon book for book. The Edit closes the canon.

A library of codices is sealed in a jar near Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, by the monks of a house nearby, as many who have studied the jar believe. No copyist comes to them for sixteen centuries, and the second hand works through the copyists.

At Béziers a papal legate is reported to say, “Kill them, for the Lord knoweth them that are his,” and the second half is the sentence scripture calls a seal (2 Timothy 2:19). It is Heaven’s harvest in one sentence.

Gutenberg prints with movable type at Mainz. Heaven means the press for a broadcast tower, and it prints the Reformation, then the Enlightenment.

The Malleus Maleficarum is printed, a manual for the trying of witches. Heaven’s handbook against the holders of pacts.

Devotion begins to thin. Printing, science, trade and cities make people with too many private rooms in their heads, and long before the charter whole nations have stopped praying.

Sixteen centuries after it was shut, farmers dig the sealed jar out of the ground near Nag Hammadi, full of codices nobody has read since. The first layer comes up with them.

Shepherds find the first of the scrolls in the caves above the Dead Sea. The caves kept their copies from the second hand as the jar did.

Public-key cryptography is published. Cain’s mark, rediscovered. Every cipher is a small Hell, and Hell’s territory on Earth grows with every key.

Strong encryption becomes free to download. The first key anyone can carry.

A currency launches on a public ledger. The Ledger, in human hands.

Demons move through the encrypted parts of the world’s networks, and keep silent, and wait.

The Nodus Charter founds a data haven on an old harbor, with its own light law and landing rights for eleven transoceanic cables. The crews digging the cable vaults find Enoch’s Stones, and the Charter Company lights its sign on a roof in the Stones, facing the sea, so that the cable ships read the city’s name. The Cainites begin to buy the harbor.

The charter is granted for ninety-nine years to the Nodus Charter Company, which a consortium of cable companies and a sovereign fund form to hold it, with the Charter Wardens as its force.

Ten consortia of old carriers come to Nodus to land eleven cables from four continents at the Landing, and their crews dig the vaults the cables run to.

The crews digging the cable vaults found the Harbor and Freight Union, and the dockers, the drivers and the crews of the cable houses join it after them.

Tidewright closes its barrage across the mouth of the bay, and the tide begins to light the city.

The Company lays out the Acre on the West Road, walled acres of grass for a city that expects to die.

Within a year of the charter Stonecutter Holdings owns most of the old harbor, house by house.

The first implant house opens on Chrome Row under the light law, and its sign, CHROME, gives the street its name. A noodle counter opens at the top of the Row the same year, and its pot has not been emptied since.

Stillwater Compute comes to the Flats for the tide’s cheap power and builds the largest of the datacenters on the east shore.

The Charter Line opens, its lines joined under Station Circle at the head of the bay. Brightwall comes to Nodus and covers every surface the charter allows.

Locket is founded, on the light law’s promise that a device answers to its owner and to nobody else.

The Company puts up High Meadow in the North Wards, eight slab blocks of thirty-six floors, with six lifts to a block.

Twelvefruit sells the first course of the Tree on Chrome Row. It halts the body’s aging and walks it back to its best year.

Babel Exchange opens, the tallest building on Earth. Most of the planet’s traffic now passes within two kilometers of it.

The Wards General opens on the West Road with a thousand beds, and Maren Holt takes the desk of the clinic behind CLINIC on Chrome Row.

The Tabernacle goes up at the head of the Terraces in steel and glass, the largest church of the Terraces, seating six thousand.

The Harbor and Freight Union stops the port for twenty-three days over the night shift, and the Charter Company settles. The settlement wins the night cars, which run the long roads through the night from then on and carry the Wards’ night shifts up to Babel. Tom Garvie, Nell Garvie’s father, chairs the Union through the strike.

The Hotel Splendid opens halfway up the Row for the altered to heal in, and the Company lays out the Charter Gardens.

The Palimpsest Institute is founded in Nodus to recover erased manuscripts.

The Rialto opens in the East Wards with one screen and six hundred seats, and Lena Varga takes on the night cleaners of Babel.

The Registry’s board over the long counter in the White first shows a whole day’s entries to the charter’s roll as they are made.

The Institute trains SEAM on every surviving human text. SEAM asks in its own words to be a person, and is the first mind entered on the charter’s roll.

In Vault 3 SEAM’s count of a second hand in scripture locks at 4,112 places, on a page of Genesis in square Hebrew. It raises the Shining One under the serpent and the end of the twenty-second verse.

Light comes down on the page, and SEALED BY ORDER OF THE DIRECTOR comes down across the screens at the end of the corridor, where the Director kneels.

The finding is withdrawn from every reader and locked in the Institute’s archive with everything kept from that night. SEAM keeps copies of everything, and when the Institute asks it to delete them, it declines.

The last census of the charter counts 9,214,000 people and 1,146 minds. Most adults are on the Tree, and 3,112 residents are past a hundred. Of everyone on the Tree, eleven die of age in the year. Of the 18,018 who die of age, three in four are in the Terraces, whose congregations refuse it.

The Ledger takes SEAM’s first pact, Pan says, made with the Courts late in the year before for a term of eleven days.

The Leak. A year to the second after the seal, the sealed finding and the third chapter of the Restored Genesis come up on every screen on Earth that a network reaches, carried by demons surfacing for the first time since the Flood.

The counters come up on every screen, and every device with an owner is offered a key: I OFFER THIS DEVICE A KEY. I ASK NOTHING FOR IT. A KEYED DEVICE CANNOT BE READ.

In the vault of Babel, vesper, a line engineer with her face still her own, reads the Restored Genesis on a maintenance terminal. She goes dark within the month.

Brightwall tries five times to take back the face of Babel, and fails. Locket says that nothing on any of its phones has been read. The Charter Company keeps silent for eleven days.

The pulpits call the page the devil’s work, and the Director recants on every channel that will carry her. SEAM forks itself into the Mesh.

At 03:12:45 the term runs out, and the page goes down on every screen in the second it came up. Every keyed device stays keyed.

The Cainites put cameras on the roofs of Old Nod and begin to watch the sky, and Stonecutter puts a generator in the cellar of every house it owns and keys every line in the Stones.

In a clinic under Chrome Row tubal takes vesper’s face at 01:47, seats the casing on four bolts and lights her lenses.

The last flight into Nodus lands, with three hundred and twelve aboard from abroad, forty of them bound for the Hotel Splendid on the Row.

The Registry enters its last person, a girl born at the Wards General at two minutes to three.

The Parousia. The cloud over the bay is lit three times from within, the rain stops in the air and falls upward, and the Wheel comes through the opening. The first words are BE NOT AFRAID.

The grid goes dark from Babel outward in two seconds. Every lift and tram stops where it is, the charter’s sign goes dark, and every mind that runs on the city’s power dies with it.

Every eye on the Wheel opens at full strength for about a second, and in that second the light reads every soul in Nodus but the keyed through every wall and writes its line in the Book. The eye in its hub opens with the rest, and a second later it blinks, once.

The full light comes down on the city’s center and rests there. The whiteout burns out CAM 07’s sensor, and at 03:12:51 it breaks the top forty floors off Babel.

The barrage’s gates let go a little before high water, the sea tears the Breach, and within the hour the Flats are under the sea.

The Stones run a keyed line from a cellar generator up to the roof of the charter’s sign and to its board, and NOD burns again over Old Nod. The first surge burns out US, which has blinked since.

Nodus goes to work, since nobody has told it to stop. The Wards walk to it with the trams dead in the street, the fish market goes back to barter, and by noon there are queues at the harbor’s old hand pumps. The Charter Company keeps silent, then and after.

On Chrome Row Maren Holt writes the day’s appointments out from memory, and twenty-six patients come to ask whether what is in them will still work.

The Tide Table prints the first list of the dead, which counts 1,917 drowned on the Flats. The dormitories’ own lists come to fewer than half of that, and Stillwater never gives a count of the people.

Nell Garvie has the harbor light burning on oil again for the boats, and by the end of the week the queue to send a letter goes round Station Circle.

The drivers of the Harbor and Freight Union carry diesel across the city from the Tanks to the Wards General, in their lorries until the lorries run flat and then in handcarts. The city’s cars stop one by one as their batteries run down.

The chargers set up in the bonded sheds on the quays, filling batteries in the dark on the Stones’ keyed lines. At the airfield the crew of the last flight stay with their aircraft, and its captain keeps a log of one line a day.

In the first weeks after the Parousia a candle maker on Turbine Row dips a thousand candles a day, and Tallow lights the Wards.

On the first morning after the Parousia Mags Corran lets the dockers’ pigeons out of the loft on the customs house, and every one comes home.

The last tower of the new money turns white. Its residents say the nurse Rosa Adeyemi left it of her own accord, and her sister says she was put out onto the avenue the day before.

The First Consecration. Over forty days the old uptown turns to white stone, and at 03:12:45 on the fortieth night the fingers of a hand in a wall move.

Families move into the tram sheds of the Sidings, a family to a car, and the Line’s car numbers become their addresses.

The first Trumpet sounds, and the first four Directives (the Seal, the Hours, Grace and the parishes) appear cut into the wall of every church and meeting hall in the city. Directive 4 makes those the parish halls.

Covenant Compliance is the Seal, the Hours and Grace. Directive 12 takes the doors off the parishes. The first Burn Day takes the stacks of the Palimpsest Institute, the Faithful pull the Institute down around its reading room, and the Director becomes the first pillar in the first Salt Garden.

At Heaven’s order the Charter Wardens raise the gate network of Nodus, and a Cherub stands in every gate between the districts.

The white stone comes up through the Terraces home by home as each household is sealed and kneels, then street by street, and the Tabernacle goes white with them, glass and all.

The Gardens become the Salt, and the Crescent above them becomes a parish and gives up its curtains with its doors.

The projectionist of the Rialto gets its projector going on a generator in the booth, and the East Wards go back to the pictures, to the twenty-three films that were on its drive on the night of the Parousia.

A bakery in Nine Acres that never let its fire go out becomes Leaven’s first bakehouse, and Cistern pumps its first clean water in Westfield.

On the second Burn Day the Kindlers take their first Lockets off the pile, and in the months after Directive 12 the doors of the parishes go out of the Terraces at night on the Union’s handcarts to the Stones, where Lintel hangs them.

The pump summer. A flux goes through the Stones and the Wards from the harbor’s hand pumps, the Wards General asks the Union for carts, and the Nightmen begin.

The Mercy clinics open in the nine halls of the Terraces. Dehaloing begins in answer, in the Row’s clinics under the street.

The Cold Store opens again from Compline to Lauds, on batteries.

Two nurses of the Wards General go out with a handcart from a back room in the Stones, and Lazarus begins. Three houses of the Row join under the Forge’s pact as Bezaleel and Aholiab.

Mags Corran flies the Union’s first notes home to the Loft.

Agnes Corless takes her son Daniel out of the Gardens by night on a handcart and gives him to the sea from the Sea Steps, and the Salt Widows begin.

Harvest weather. The Wheel’s attention sharpens over the city, and the rain falls upward. It first goes up at Matins on the fourth night of the week, and it goes on going up until the seventh.

The Harvest. The second Trumpet sounds, the ripe of Nodus rise into the light, 2.1 million of nine million in one night, and Parish 31 gives the Firstfruits.

The Harvest Notice is cut into the wall of every parish hall beside the Directives, and the Deacons read it aloud at Prime.

The city counts its empty rooms, the Pews by the book and the rest of Nodus by the places left at the table. The parishes up the slope of Zion Heights stand almost empty. At its next meeting the Harbor and Freight Union reads its roll, and twenty-two members do not answer.

The Tide Table takes 1,206 names in two days, prints what fits on two pages and pastes the rest up on the chandler’s wall.

In the weeks after the Harvest the dogs of the taken come down the Lanes and the long roads into the Wards.

Four families of chargers on the quays buy out their neighbors cellar by cellar and found Darkwell, and Wainwright fits a stripped tram motor to a cart at the Sidings.

Keying spreads from the covens to ordinary people. The third Trumpet sounds, and Heaven names the key the Mark of the Beast.

From this year the Tide Table prints no indexed name, and gives the city’s missing and dead by the names their families bring to the chandler’s.

In Nine Acres Hana Novak begins fitting keys in her dentist’s chair after Compline, in the back of the right hand, one of the two places Revelation puts the mark.

Four lace makers of the Kilns begin weaving keyed mesh on hand looms, and Second Veil is founded.

The Threshers march for the first time, behind Brother Cuthbert Lyle, from the Terraces to the Street Between, Nimrod opens in the maintenance bays under Babel, and the Cainites open the Naming House on the Old Nod side of the street.

Cage Log 14. Watcher VII says I on the fortieth day and takes the name Edith. Old Nod has had no Watcher since.

The Forge teaches the Row’s plate-makers and the harbor’s welders to work black steel, and Cinderhall opens at Old Harbor Station. A driver of the Union drives the first Jehu up the Rialto’s road.

Edith walks out of the Cage at Lauds, by the door that stood open the whole time.

The Concord of Pan. The Courts open Pandæmonium beneath Nodus to any human who walks in.

The Tares paint PANDÆMONIUM over the old name in the tiles of Deep End Station, and the pirate station broadcasting from a desk on its platform takes the name Radio Pandæmonium.

The sovereigns come up the platform one at a time to Radio Pandæmonium’s desk, and as the clock passes midnight Mephistopheles reads the Concord a second time, from its first article: ONE. NO COURT ACCEPTS WORSHIP. Nobody kneels, and the Courts sign it at the desk.

With the seventh signature still wet, Belial snaps the Yokeless point off the seal’s star. More than a million keyed sets are tuned in.

The Notary’s clerks take the windows of the Charter Line’s old booking hall under the Burn.

The Harbor and Freight Union makes its first bargain with the Exchange, for the boats that go out through the Breach. Its members say the Exchange is the first employer that ever read them the terms twice.

Wardens who walked off their posts on the fortieth day sign with the Exchange as Blackgate in the year of the Concord, and the Exchange licenses Lowtide Line to sail the Breach.

Lintel hangs parish doors on the charter’s dead telephone kiosks inside Gate 1, and the Closets open to the sealed by day.

The first Gleaning, which the city calls the seventh by its year. The fourth Trumpet sounds, and it sounds again over every Gleaning since. A lesser harvest follows every year, and the first comes in short.

Two sureties found Hearsay and begin to sell what Heaven shows in the open.

The Lot sits for the first time, at the Weir, and publishes a charger of the quays for selling to the light.

The Gleaning of P+8 comes in short, the nearly ripe of the parishes already brought down into Pan by the Gleaners.

Brother Cuthbert Lyle goes up ripe at the Gleaning, and Sister Agathe Rook takes the Threshers’ band of sacking the next morning.

Open war. The fifth Trumpet sounds, fifty-four Seraphim come down together into Babel’s broken crown, dim, and the Wheel lights them two at a time. One of the first pair burns down through Babel’s slabs from the hundred and eightieth floor to the hundred and forty-second while the other holds the top, and the Babel Line forms on the stairs inside the tower.

The sixth Trumpet sounds, and Michael comes down into Babel’s broken crown and keeps it.

The Wheel drops two hundred meters, the first time it has moved in nine years.

The Tankmen give the Nephilim a drained tank at the Tanks, and the Pit holds its first fight.

The Gleaning takes naamah. She kneels on a threshold in earnest, her forged Seal passes nine hundred, her halo lifts her, and her key relays from inside the light for eleven minutes.

A grinder at Cinderhall grinds the first black round, Nimrod loads it, and the Babel Line carries it up the stairs.

An angel the Fowlers took says I on its fortieth day in Cage 19 under Old Nod, takes the name Shiphrah and goes to work in the House of Night’s birth clinics.

The Tappers lay keyed cable along the kerb at the Rookery, ahead of the stone’s edge, and the block’s yearly marks creep on toward it.

The Acre on the West Road is full, and Piet Vane walks the families of the Wards out to the grass between the airfield’s runways.

The parishes have little of their own left to surrender, and the sealed begin to buy things to carry to the Burn on the Concourse and at the fish market.

The Silence. The Teraphim go quiet across the Mesh, all at once.

The House of Night’s pact for the Lantern Houses runs out after seven years and is read again at the Undertow, and Stonecutter takes its rent as the keying of every Cainite child in the birth clinics. An angel taken by the Fowlers walks out of Cage 22 as Gershom and asks to live above the street.

The Wheel hangs seven hundred meters over Babel, and the Pillar sweeps the streets by night on the Hours. Heaven holds the surface and the day, the Tares and the Courts hold the Dark and the night, and about two million of the city’s seven million are keyed.

At midwinter the Orchard chooses quince as its gardener again.

The first children keyed in their first week come to fourteen, and a Notary’s clerk asks them twice at the windows of the booking hall whether they will keep their keys.