Scarecrow

I didn’t sleep.

I lay in bed and listened to the filter, and at some point it stopped sounding like a heartbeat and started sounding like what it was: a machine my father had built out of a burned-out truck, because the people he’d saved had put him outside without one.

At half past four, I gave up and went down.

Mother was awake. Of course she was. She was sitting up against her pillows by the stove with the lamp turned low, looking at the photograph on the windowsill. She’d had Genny turn it around in the night, I found out later, so it faced the room instead of the field.

”Morning,” she said.

”It’s not morning.”

”It’s morning in this house.” She nodded toward the study. ”Go and get it.”

I got it.

I carried the folder out to the kitchen table under Father’s wall and set it down and looked at it for a while. Gray card. Tape gone brittle and yellow at the edges. RESTRICTED. MINISTRY OF DEFENSE. DO NOT REMOVE.

Someone had removed it. Father, I supposed. I didn’t know how. I’d find out.

I cut the tape with his knife and opened the cover.

On the stairs behind me, very quietly, someone sat down.

I didn’t turn around. I knew who it was: the way she breathed, the bare feet, the stillness. Genny had promised to learn everything. I wasn’t going to be the one to stop her.

Mother saw her too, past me, through the door. She didn’t say anything either.

I began to read.

The first thing in the folder was a poster.

It had been folded into quarters, and the creases had worn white. When I opened it out, it covered half the table. A young man and a young woman stood back to back on a hill of rubble, in gray uniforms, with fire and broken invader ships behind them. The young man’s eyes were black. The young woman had one hand raised, and a ruined tank hung in the air above her palm like a toy.

Across the top, in huge red letters: HUMANITY’S GODS.

Across the bottom, smaller: They fight so you can live. Honor the Living Weapons.

I looked at the young woman’s face. The painter hadn’t gotten her right. Her chin was too sharp, and her hair was too long, and she was too tall. But it was her. It was unmistakably her, at sixteen, holding up a tank.

”They put that on every wall in the city,” Mother said from the front room. ”Every school. There was one across from our apartment, nine stories high. Your father used to close the curtains.”

I folded it back up very carefully and set it aside.

Under it was the program.

PROGRAM CINDER. Classified. Ministry of Defense, Office of Xenotechnical Integration.

It was dense. Pages of it, typed, with diagrams. I’d learned to read Father’s chemistry. I could read most of this, and what I couldn’t read, I could guess, and what I guessed made my hands cold.

The invaders’ wrecks had been full of something. The documents never named it properly. They called it recovered biological material, or xenotissue, or once, in a scrawl in the margin, the stuff. It was alive, or something close to alive, and it did things to matter that nothing on Earth should have been able to do. The scientists in the program had learned to grow it. Then they’d learned to put it into people.

There were intake records. Long lists, typed in columns. Subject number. Age. Sex. Origin. Orphan Hall 3. Orphan Hall 3. Orphan Hall 7. Orphan Hall 3. Hundreds of them. The ages ran from fourteen to nineteen.

There was a column at the end, headed Outcome.

Most of the entries in it said Deceased.

I ran my finger down it. Somewhere in the middle of the second page, it stopped.

Subject 0117. F. Age 15. Orphan Hall 3. Outcome: Integration successful. Telekinetic, Class A. Assigned: Field Unit 2.

And half a page further down, in the same column:

Subject 0142. M. Age 16. Orphan Hall 7. Outcome: Integration successful. Molecular manipulation, Class unbounded. See attached. Ocular changes noted. Assigned: Director’s discretion.

Class unbounded.

I looked at the word for a long time. Then I turned the page, to the attached.

It was eleven pages about my father. Tests. Measurements. A diagram of his eye, with notes in a cramped, neat hand. He could change any matter he could see, out to a little over four kilometers; past that, the notes said, his hold on things faded like a voice across a field. Inside that range, the scientists had tried to find his upper limit. Over three months, they had put larger and larger things in front of him: a car, a building, a hillside. There was no limit. The last line of the report said, simply: Subject 0142 represents the most significant result of the program to date and must be retained under direct supervision at all times.

Under that, a signature.

I didn’t read it yet. I didn’t want to. I turned the page.

The war ended on page forty.

I could tell, because the paper changed. Before, it was thin and gray, rationed, typed edge to edge to save space. After, it was thick and white, with a crest at the top of every page and wide clean margins. The war was over. Someone had found good paper again.

The first memo on the good paper was eleven months after Victory Day.

OFFICE OF MODIFIED AFFAIRS. Internal. Subject: Long-term outlook for Cinder-integrated personnel.

I read it twice. The second time, I read it out loud, quietly, because I needed to hear the words in the air to believe that someone had written them down.

”Medical review of surviving Cinder subjects indicates progressive systemic degradation consistent with xenotissue rejection. Onset typically within two years of active deployment. Projected functional lifespan post-integration: fifteen to twenty-five years. Treatment research is theoretically possible but would require significant resources over an extended period. Given the projected population (three hundred and eleven surviving subjects), and given that natural attrition will resolve the modified population within two decades, treatment research is not recommended as cost-effective.”

From the front room, Mother said nothing at all.

”They knew,” I said.

”Yes.”

”They knew you were going to die. They knew why. They could have tried.” I heard my own voice getting louder and couldn’t stop it. ”And they did the math and decided it was cheaper to wait.”

”Yes,” said Mother.

”Natural attrition.”

”I know, love.”

On the stairs behind me, Genny made a sound, very small, and stopped it.

There was more. There was always more. A memo recommending that the modified be ”relocated to reduce public anxiety.” A survey of public opinion: sixty-eight percent of dome residents agreed that modified personnel ”posed an ongoing risk to civil safety.” A note from the Ministry of Information, recommending that the posters be taken down ”gradually, over a period of months, to avoid drawing attention.” A list of the apartments that would become available on the upper floors once the modified had been moved out, with the names of the officials who’d been promised them.

I read it all. I made myself read it all.

Then I turned the page and found the order.

DIRECTIVE NINE. By Authority of the Council of New Halcyon. Effective immediately.

All Cinder-integrated personnel, together with all dependents, born and unborn, are hereby required to vacate dome residence within seventy-two hours, for the protection of public safety.

It was one page. That was all. One page, a dozen lines, to end three hundred lives. Under the text was a row of signatures: the Council, nine of them, in different inks.

And above them, first, larger, in neat black ink, the signature of the man who had recommended it.

The same signature I’d seen at the bottom of my father’s eleven pages. Must be retained under direct supervision at all times.

I could read it this time. It was a careful hand. A scientist’s hand. The kind that wrote small, so it could fit notes in the margins.

Dr. Halvard Crane. Director, Office of Modified Affairs. Formerly Chief Scientist, Program Cinder.

I sat very still.

I went back through the folder, turning the pages faster now. The same name. Over and over. At the bottom of the intake lists. At the bottom of the attrition memo. Not recommended as cost-effective. On the program reports, the testing schedules, the diagrams of my father’s eye. On the letters in the bundle that Mother had touched one by one in the dark. Regret to inform.Unable to accommodate.

He’d made them. He’d tested them. He’d written down when they would die and decided it wasn’t worth trying to stop it. And then, when the war was over and they’d become inconvenient, he’d signed his name first on the order that put them outside.

Halvard Crane.

I said it out loud. I didn’t mean to. It came out of me like something I’d swallowed wrong.

In the front room, I heard Mother breathe out, slowly.

”Yes,” she said. ”That’s him.”

I took the order into the front room and held it up where she could see it.

She didn’t need to look. She looked anyway. Her eyes went straight to the signature, and stayed there, and something in her face went still and old.

”The man in the lobby,” I said. ”At the Ministry. The one who said born and unborn.”

”Yes.”

”It was him.”

”It was him.” She let her head rest back against the pillows. ”He came down himself. I hadn’t expected that. I’d thought they’d send a clerk. But the clerk at the desk called up, and said Subject 0117 is in the lobby, and he came down all eleven floors in the lift to see me.”

”You knew him.”

”Lucas.” She said it very gently. ”I’ve known him since I was fifteen.”

I waited.

”When they did it to us,” Mother said, ”in the program, you were asleep. They put you under, and then they put the stuff in, and then you woke up or you didn’t. Half of my hall didn’t. I was the last one of my group to come round. Three days. They told me afterward they’d nearly given up.” Her fingers moved on the blanket. ”When I opened my eyes, there was a man sitting beside the bed. Young. Thin. Glasses. He had my hand in both of his. And he was crying.”

She looked at the paper in my hand.

”He said, You’re awake. Oh, thank God, you’re awake. He said I was the bravest girl he’d ever met.” A long pause. ”He was the one who held my hand when I woke up. He came to our wedding. He gave a speech. And he came down eleven floors to tell me that my child would be put outside, and he was very polite, and he looked me in the eye while he said it.”

The room was very quiet. The stove ticked. The filter hummed.

”I don’t understand,” I said.

”No,” said Mother. ”Neither did your father. I’m not sure I do, even now. I think…” She stopped and tried again. ”I think he believed every word, every time. When he held my hand, he meant it. When he signed that, he meant that. I think he’s the kind of man who can love a thing he’s made, and be proud of it, and then throw it away when the numbers say so, and never once feel that the two are different.”

I looked down at the signature. That careful hand. Small, so it could fit notes in the margins.

”Is he still alive?”

Mother didn’t answer right away.

”Yes,” she said finally. ”As far as I know.”

Something in the way she said it made me look up.

She was watching me. Very steadily. And under the tiredness, there was the thing I’d seen on my birthday, the thing I’d had no word for.

”How do you know?”

”That’s tomorrow,” she said.

”Mother—”

”That’s tomorrow, Lucas. There’s a lot more in that folder. There’s more than I can tell you in one morning, and I haven’t the breath for it.” She closed her eyes. ”Go on. Finish what’s on the table. Then put it away, and we’ll do the rest tomorrow.”

I went back to the kitchen.

Genny was sitting at the table.

She’d come down off the stairs while I was in the front room. She had the folder open in front of her, at the intake lists. She’d found the line. Her finger was resting under it. Subject 0117. F. Age 15. Orphan Hall 3.

She didn’t look up when I came in.

”She was six years older than me,” Genny said.

I sat down across from her.

She turned the pages slowly, back and forth. The poster. HUMANITY’S GODS. The memo on the good white paper. Natural attrition. The list of empty apartments, with the officials’ names beside them. She didn’t read every word. She didn’t need to. Genny always knew the shape of a thing before she knew its details.

”They called them gods,” she said.

”Yes.”

”And then they threw them out like garbage.”

”Yes.”

She closed the folder. She put both of her hands flat on the cover, the way she put them on the soil when she was about to change it. For a moment, I thought she was going to. I thought she was going to turn the whole thing to ash, right there, within her foot.

She didn’t.

She slid it across the table to me and sat back.

”Don’t tell Garnet,” she said. ”Not yet.”

”I won’t.”

”She still thinks everybody’s nice.”

I thought about Garnet hugging the scarecrow every morning. About her outrage on the highway. She put it down nicely.

”Some people are,” I said.

Genny looked at me with Mother’s eyes.

”Not him,” she said.

She went upstairs. A minute later, I heard her moving around in the twins’ room, and Garnet’s sleepy voice asking what time it was, and Genny saying early, go back to sleep, in a voice I’d never heard her use, very soft.

I sat at the kitchen table under Father’s wall, with the folder closed in front of me.

The sun was coming up over the ridge now. It came in through the window and lay across the table, and across the wall, across the faded gray boxes and the faded orange ones, across Everything burning. Also everything alive. Careful.

I thought about a thin young man with glasses, holding a girl’s hand, crying.

I thought about the same hand, years later, signing its name first.

I picked up Father’s knife and turned it over until the light caught the letters on the handle.

Then I opened notebook fifteen, and under Bread, and Fish (on the moon), and Mother, I wrote a fourth line.

Halvard Crane.

I didn’t know yet what I’d need to understand about him. I only knew I would.