Scarecrow

The filter woke at five.

It always did. Father had built it that way: a low hum that started somewhere under the kitchen floor and climbed the walls until the whole house sounded like a cat purring in another room. By the time the hum reached the rafters, the air in my bedroom was clean enough to breathe without thinking about it.

That was the point. Out here, you thought about breathing.

I was usually awake before it started. I lay in the dark and listened to it come up through the boards the way you’d listen to a heartbeat you weren’t sure of. It caught. It climbed. It settled.

Then I found my boots by feel and went outside.

The house sat at the bottom of a shallow valley that nobody had any reason to look at. Father had chosen it for that.

From the porch you could see the ridge to the east, black against a sky just starting to go gray. Beyond the ridge, very faint, a smudge of light sat on the horizon and never went out.

New Halcyon. The nearest of the bubble cities. Eighty miles away, give or take.

I didn’t look at it long. I never did.

The field started at the bottom of the porch steps.

Father made it the year before the twins were born. Before that, Mother said, the valley had been gray dust and broken glass, like everything else for a hundred miles in any direction. The bombs hadn’t landed here. They hadn’t needed to. The wind brought what was left of them.

He’d stood at the edge of it for three days, Mother said. Not doing anything. Just looking.

Then he went in and changed it.

Not all at once. Father didn’t do anything all at once unless someone was shooting at him. He did the soil first, a few square yards a day, taking apart the ash and the glass and putting them back together as dirt. Real dirt, dark and crumbly, with the right things in it. Then water, pulled up from the deep rock and turned into something you could drink. Then seed.

He made the first seed from a picture in a book, because there were no seeds left out here to start from. Mother said the first crop came up purple and tasted like soap.

The second crop was wheat.

It was still wheat. Two acres of it, gold-gray in the half-light, moving in the wind that came down the valley every morning before dawn. The filter didn’t reach this far. The wheat didn’t need it. Father had made sure of that.

I walked down the middle row with my hands out and let the heads brush my palms.

Then I stopped at the scarecrow.

It stood in the center of the field where the rows crossed: two old fence posts dressed in one of Father’s coats. The coat was patched at both elbows. Its head was a feed sack stuffed with straw. Years ago somebody had drawn a face on it in charcoal. The face had faded to two smudges and a line, and it looked faintly disappointed in all of us.

Father built it the first summer. Mother asked him why. There were no crows. As far as anyone knew, there hadn’t been crows since before either of them was born.

He’d said a field ought to have one.

The wind had pulled the coat crooked in the night. It always did. I straightened it on the posts, tugged the collar up, and brushed a little dust off the shoulder.

”Morning,” I told it.

It didn’t answer. It was a good listener that way.

”You talk to it.”

Genny was standing at the end of the row, glaring at the wheat.

She was nine. She had dark hair she’d cut short herself, with kitchen scissors, after losing an argument with a comb. She was wearing my old jacket with the sleeves rolled four times, and she was glaring at the wheat as if it owed her money.

Genny was the older twin by eleven minutes. She brought it up whenever it was useful.

”I say good morning,” I said.

”That’s talking.”

”That’s manners.”

”It’s a coat on a stick.”

”It’s Father’s coat on a stick.”

She didn’t have an answer to that. She went back to glaring at the wheat.

I walked over to see what it had done.

The east edge of the field had gone brown. Not all of it. A strip a few yards wide, where the ground sloped toward the old riverbed. The leaves were curled and dry at the tips, and the heads hung like they were tired.

Genny crouched at the edge of the brown strip with her hand flat on the dirt.

”Salt,” I said.

”I know it’s salt.”

”It’s coming up from the deep water. When the riverbed floods, it pulls salt up through the—”

”I know, Lucas.”

She did know. I’d told her last spring, when the same thing happened on the west side. She’d been eight then and had listened to the whole explanation with her arms crossed, and then repeated it back to me word for word.

The dirt under her palm shifted.

It wasn’t much to look at. A faint ripple, like heat over a road. The soil in a little circle around her hand darkened by a shade and settled. If you hadn’t been watching, you wouldn’t have seen anything at all.

Genny could change anything within a foot of her body. One foot, in every direction. Not an inch more. She’d measured it with Father’s ruler when she was six and had been furious about the result ever since.

She moved her hand over a foot and started again.

I looked at the brown strip. It was maybe three hundred feet long.

I could have fixed it from where I was standing. All of it, in a breath. I’d have looked at the salt in the soil and turned the sodium into potassium, which the wheat actually wanted, and the chlorine into something harmless. The leaves would have uncurled before Genny got to her second handful.

She knew that too.

”Don’t,” she said, without looking up.

”I didn’t do anything.”

”You were going to.”

I had been going to.

I sat down at the end of the row instead and watched her work. One foot. Then the next one. Her jaw was set, the way Mother’s got when the filter’s bearings needed replacing and Mother insisted on doing it herself.

Father used to sit with me like this. When I was learning to do small things carefully, back when everything I touched came out wrong. He’d sit with his arms on his knees and let me get it wrong for an hour before he said a word.

You can do anything, he’d told me once. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is doing the right thing slowly enough to understand it.

I didn’t understand that when I was seven. I was starting to.

”Sodium to potassium,” I said after a while. ”Not just pulling the salt out. If you pull it out, it has to go somewhere.”

”I know.”

”Eight more protons. And some neutrons—”

”Lucas.”

”Sorry.”

She moved her hand another foot.

Garnet arrived the way she always did, which was singing.

I heard her before I saw her: a high, wandering tune with no words, coming down the porch steps. Then she was in the field, barefoot on the cold dirt in her nightgown, her hair a mess of curls nobody had brushed. She was holding something in both hands like she’d caught a bird.

”Breakfast!” she announced.

Garnet was the younger twin. She was also, as far as I could tell, the happiest person left on Earth. I didn’t know where she’d gotten it from. Not from me. Not from Genny, certainly. Mother said she’d come out laughing, and the midwife, an old modified woman from the ridge settlement who’d delivered half the outcast children in the territory, said she’d never seen a baby do that in forty years.

She opened her hands.

Three pebbles. Ordinary gray riverbed pebbles, the kind that covered the dry bed below the field.

She picked one up between her finger and thumb and closed her eyes.

Garnet’s gift worked through touch. Anything she was holding, she could change. Anything she wasn’t, she couldn’t. She and Genny were both strong enough with their minds to toss a truck across the valley. But for the fine work, Genny needed to be close, and Garnet needed to be touching.

The pebble went soft and red.

She held it out to me. It was a strawberry. It was slightly lopsided, the seeds were too big, and it had a faint gritty texture, like it hadn’t entirely given up on being a rock.

I ate it. It was the best strawberry I’d had all week. It was also the only one.

”Good?” Garnet asked.

”Perfect.”

”It’s crunchy.”

”Strawberries are a little crunchy.”

”Not like that.” She made the second one, frowning with concentration, and handed it to her sister. Genny took it without looking up and ate it in one bite.

”Gritty,” Genny said.

”You’re gritty,” said Garnet, and then hugged the scarecrow, because she hugged it every morning. She said it got lonely at night. I’d stopped arguing with that years ago.

She held up the third pebble.

”This one’s for Mama,” she said. ”I’m going to make it really good. Is she getting up today?”

Genny’s hand stopped moving on the dirt.

The wind came down the valley and moved the wheat, and the scarecrow’s coat lifted a little at the hem.

”We’ll see,” I said.

Garnet nodded seriously, as if that were an answer, and went back up to the house holding the pebble in both hands.

Genny didn’t move for a long moment.

Then she put her palm flat on the next foot of brown soil and kept going.

I made breakfast.

Father had left a cellar full of food. Rows of jars on stone shelves, all of it made from the valley’s dirt and none of it ever going bad. Flat brown bread in sealed tins. Something that was meant to be stew. He’d made enough to last us years, in case.

It all tasted like the cellar.

So most mornings I made eggs instead. Took the bread and took it apart and put it back together as something else. It had taken me two years to get eggs right. The early ones had come out rubbery or blue, and one memorable batch had come out as a single enormous yolk that Genny refused to sit at the same table with. You can’t make a thing well until you understand what it is. Father said that too.

I understood eggs now. I put six on a plate and took one plate upstairs.

Mother’s room was at the end of the hall, the one with the window that faced the field.

She was awake. She usually was, when I came up. She said she liked to hear the filter start, the same as me. I think she just didn’t sleep much anymore.

”Morning,” I said.

”Morning, love.”

Dorothy Dask had been beautiful once. I know that from the pictures, and from how Father used to look at her across the kitchen like he’d just walked in and found her there by surprise. She still was, in the way she smiled. The rest of her had gone thin in the last year, thin and gray, the way a candle goes thin before it gutters. Her hair was white at thirty-nine. Her hands lay on top of the blanket, and they were very still.

The modification was burning her out. The same thing that had burned out Father. The scientists had built them to win a war, and they hadn’t built them to last past it. I’d read every medical book in the house. I’d read them twice. I knew the words for what was happening to her.

I couldn’t fix it, because I didn’t understand it.

That was the worst thing I knew about myself.

I put the plate on the table beside the bed. ”Eggs.”

”Are they blue?”

”One time.”

”It was a very beautiful blue.” She looked at the plate. Then she looked at the cup of water beside it, and I watched her try.

Mother had moved things with her mind her whole life. When I was little, the teapot used to come floating across the kitchen to her every afternoon at four, and pour itself, and go back to the stove. She used to hang the washing on the line from the porch without getting up. Once, when I was five and climbed the filter tower on a dare from nobody, she’d plucked me off the top from two hundred feet away and set me on the ground so gently I didn’t realize I’d moved.

The cup lifted a quarter of an inch off the table and trembled there.

Then it set back down.

I picked it up and put it in her hand. She held it against her chest and didn’t drink.

”How’s the field?” she asked.

”Salt on the east side. Genny’s fixing it.”

”By herself?”

”She told me not to.”

”And you listened.” She smiled. ”Your father would be very proud of you, you know. He never listened to anyone.”

”He listened to you.”

”Eventually. Usually after he’d broken something.” She closed her eyes for a moment. ”Garnet tells me you talk to the scarecrow.”

”I say good morning.”

”She says you have long conversations.”

”Garnet’s a liar.”

”Garnet has never told a lie in her life. She doesn’t know how.” Mother opened her eyes again. They were brown, ordinary brown, warm. ”I used to talk to it too. After your father died. I’d go out at night and tell it everything I’d wanted to tell him that day.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. So I didn’t say anything, and she didn’t seem to need me to.

Garnet came in a minute later with the third strawberry on a saucer. It was the best of the three: red all the way through, no grit at all. She’d worked on it for an hour. Mother ate it slowly, a bite at a time, and told her it was the finest strawberry she had ever eaten, in this life or any other. Garnet glowed.

Mother ate two bites of the eggs.

I took the rest of them back downstairs, and nobody said anything about that.

The day went the way days went.

I walked up to the ridge to check the filter’s intake and cleaned the grit out of the screens. From up there, the valley looked like what it was: one small square of green in a gray world, the house in the middle of it, the wheat around the house, and the scarecrow at the heart of the wheat like the needle on a compass.

On the far horizon, New Halcyon’s glow had faded into the daylight. You could still see the dome if you knew where to look. A soap bubble the size of a mountain, catching the sun.

I didn’t look at it long.

I stopped on the way down at the little stone at the edge of the field, under the one tree Father had grown. Trevor Dask. I’d made the stone myself, the week he died, when I was ten. I hadn’t known how to do letters properly then. They leaned. The k at the end was bigger than the rest, because I’d been crying and pushed too hard.

I’d thought about fixing it a hundred times. I never had.

Genny finished the salt strip a little after noon. Three hundred feet, one foot at a time. She came in filthy and shaking with tiredness and ate half the cellar stew without complaining once about the taste, which was how I knew how tired she was. Then she fell asleep at the kitchen table. I carried her to the couch and put Father’s other coat over her, and she woke up long enough to tell me she wasn’t asleep.

At dusk, Mother asked to see the field.

She hadn’t been out of bed in nine days. Her legs wouldn’t hold her anymore, and she knew it.

I looked at the bed. Then I looked at my hands.

I could change anything I could see. Iron to water, water to air, a whole hillside to glass. I could have turned the bed into feathers. But lifting things, really lifting them, with my mind, the way Mother used to lift the teapot — I’d never been much good at that. I could float myself, slowly, if I concentrated. I could move a cup. A bed with my mother in it was a different matter, and if I dropped it—

”I’ve got it,” said Genny, from the doorway.

She was still filthy. She still had couch creases on one cheek.

The bed rose off the floor.

Not a tremble. Not a wobble. My nine-year-old sister lifted the whole thing, frame and mattress and Mother and blankets and the little table with the water cup on it, and floated it out the bedroom door and down the hall and down the stairs, turning it on its edge so carefully at the landing that the water in the cup didn’t even move. Garnet ran along beside it, then climbed onto the foot of it and rode the rest of the way.

Genny set it down on the porch, facing the field.

The sun was going down behind the ridge. The wheat had gone gold, the real gold, the kind you only got for a few minutes at the end of the day. The east edge was green again. The wind came down the valley and moved the whole field at once, like something breathing.

In the middle of it, the scarecrow stood with its arms out, in Father’s coat, with its faded, disappointed face.

Mother looked at it for a long time.

”Your father built that to keep the crows off,” she said.

”There aren’t any crows,” said Genny.

”No.” Mother smiled. ”So it’s done a wonderful job.”

Garnet laughed so hard she nearly fell off the bed.

We stayed out there until it was dark. Garnet fell asleep against Mother’s legs. Genny sat on the porch steps with her chin on her knees and pretended to be watching the field, and was really watching Mother. Mother held my hand. Her fingers were very cold, and I held on to them until they weren’t.

The stars came out. There were a lot of them out here. More than anyone under a dome had ever seen.

The moon came up over the ridge, and on its face, where the old maps said there had only ever been dust, there was a small bright spot of ice, shining like a lamp.

Garnet woke up just long enough to see it.

”Tell the moon story,” she mumbled.

”Tomorrow,” I said.

”Promise?”

”Promise.”

She went back to sleep. Mother squeezed my hand, once, and closed her eyes.

The wind came down the valley. Out in the dark, the scarecrow’s coat pulled crooked on its posts.

In the morning, I’d fix it.

I always did.