Scarecrow

Garnet knew something was wrong.

She didn’t know what. Nobody had told her. But she’d watched for three days as Mother and Genny and I went quiet whenever she came into a room, and she was Garnet, so she didn’t ask. She did something about it.

On the morning of the fourth day, she came into the front room with a tray.

It was the big tin tray, the one the rock cake had bent. She’d hammered it mostly flat again. On it were three cups of tea and three strawberries, each on its own saucer, each one perfect. Not a grain of grit. She’d been practicing.

She set the tray on the end of Mother’s bed, very carefully, and stood back.

”I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said. ”But you all look sad. And strawberries help.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Mother held out her hand, and Garnet went to her, and Mother pulled her down onto the bed and held her so tight that Garnet squeaked. Mother didn’t let go for a long time. Over Garnet’s curls, her eyes met mine. They were wet.

”They do help,” Mother said into Garnet’s hair. ”They help very much.”

Genny ate her strawberry in one bite and said it was the best one Garnet had ever made, which was the first time in her life she’d said anything like that, and Garnet looked at her as though she’d been handed the moon.

Then Garnet went out to the field to tell the scarecrow about it.

Mother watched her go.

”The last one,” she said quietly. ”The thick one. Bring it.”

It was in the back of the folder, behind everything else. I’d seen it there the first morning, and I’d known without being told to leave it alone.

It was nearly an inch thick by itself. Newer than the rest: the paper white and sharp, the binding a hard black plastic clip. The cover had a symbol on it I’d never seen. A circle, with a smaller circle inside it, and a line running from the edge of the inner circle out past the edge of the outer one, like a road leaving home.

Under the symbol, two words.

PROJECT AVALON.

And under them, in red: EYES ONLY. DIRECTOR’S OFFICE.

”How did Father get this?” I asked.

It was the question I should have asked about the whole folder. DO NOT REMOVE. Someone had removed it. Out of a locked office in the Ministry of Defense, and out of the dome, and eighty miles across the ash to our door.

”The second soldier,” Mother said.

I looked at her.

”The one who was with Halvard. The one who ran.” She shifted against the pillows. ”He came back. A year later, almost to the day. On foot. Alone. No mask but a wet cloth over his face, and his eyes so red from the dust he could barely see. He’d walked eighty miles. He came down the ridge with his hands up, and your father met him at the edge of the field, and I was sure, I was absolutely sure, he was going to do it again.”

”He didn’t.”

”No. The boy—he was only a boy, Lucas, nineteen, twenty—he went down on his knees in the dirt and held out this folder. All of it. He said he’d seen what Halvard was planning. He said he’d stolen it from the Director’s office, a page at a time, for a year. He said someone had to know, and he couldn’t think of anyone else who’d believe it.”

”What was his name?”

”He wouldn’t tell us. He said it was safer.” Mother looked at the window. ”Your father gave him water, and a mask, and a filter for his face. And he walked back to the dome. We never saw him again. I don’t know if he made it.” She paused. ”I’ve thought about him a great deal.”

I looked down at the black clip, at the red letters. EYES ONLY.

Someone had walked eighty miles each way to put it in our hands.

I opened it.

The first page was a picture of a world.

Not ours. I knew that before I’d read a word. It was a photograph, or something like one, grainy and strange: a planet hanging in black space, half in shadow. Its oceans were a darker blue than ours had been in the old books. Its land was red and gold and a deep, strange green. There was a thin white haze around the edge of it, like breath on glass.

Under the picture, a caption.

AV-7. Designation: AVALON. Distance: 11.2 light-years. Surface gravity: 0.94 standard. Atmosphere: nitrogen-oxygen, partially breathable. Assessed: viable for human settlement following terraforming.

I sat and looked at it for a long time.

I had grown up in a valley the size of a few fields, with a dead world on every side of it. I had never seen the ocean. I had never seen a forest. I had read about them in Father’s books, and looked at the pictures until the pages wore thin, and then I’d closed the books and gone out to the wheat.

And here was a whole world. Green. Alive. Waiting.

”It’s beautiful,” I said.

”Yes,” said Mother. ”Keep reading.”

I kept reading.

PROJECT AVALON: Proposal for Extra-Solar Settlement. Prepared by the Office of the Director, Dr. H. Crane.

It was a plan. A huge one. Crane laid it out section by section, in clean, confident language, the way Father laid out a chemistry problem.

Earth was finished. The poison in the ground and the air would last for centuries. The domes could not hold out forever: their air plants were failing one by one, their populations shrinking every year. Humanity needed a new home, and Avalon was the best candidate ever found.

The trouble was getting there, and surviving once you’d arrived.

The getting there was mostly black. Whole paragraphs had been covered over in thick black bars, the way someone had blacked out parts of Father’s file. Through the gaps I could pick out words. Crossing technology.Derived from.Partner.Per the terms of the. Then black again. One sentence near the bottom of the page had survived complete, as if whoever was doing the blacking-out had missed it.

Transit will be facilitated under the provisions agreed in the Accord, and is not to be discussed outside this office.

I didn’t know what the Accord was. I’d never heard of it. I read the sentence three times, and I put my finger on it, and I filed it away, the way Father taught me to file away the things I didn’t understand.

The surviving part was clearer.

Avalon was hostile. The atmosphere was thin. The surface was ”biologically active.” There was a whole section titled Annex C: Indigenous Threats, and it was entirely black, every line of it, three pages of solid black bars. Ordinary settlers would not survive the first year.

The settlement would need to be made safe before the settlers arrived. It would need terraforming machines: kits, Crane called them, sent down to the surface to build bases from the raw rock. And the kits would need protecting, and feeding with matter, and pushing outward into hostile land.

It would need a spearhead.

Recommended: Deployment of Cinder-derived assets as primary terraforming and defensive force.

I stopped.

”Cinder-derived,” I said.

”Keep going,” said Mother.

The next section was called Asset Acquisition.

It began with a sad, careful paragraph about the original Cinder subjects. Regrettably, first-generation assets are unsuitable for long-term deployment owing to projected functional lifespan. Natural attrition, again. It said that some could be used in a short-term role, for the first wave, ”where expected losses would be acceptable.”

And then it said: However, preliminary evidence suggests that the offspring of Cinder subjects inherit integrated traits without the instability of direct integration. Second-generation assets therefore represent the most promising resource available to the Project.

Then it listed them.

There weren’t many. Children born to the three hundred and eleven, in the years after the exile, out in the ash. Some of them had been born before Directive Nine and taken into the domes as orphans when their parents were put out. Each had a name, or a description, and a location if known, and an assessment.

I found us on the second page.

DASK, L. Male. Born outside dome, approx. Year 15. Parents: Subjects 0142, 0117. Location: confirmed (see attached survey). Assessment: Class unbounded (provisional; cf. Lunar Anomaly). PRIORITY ONE.

And under it:

DASK (unnamed). Twins, sex unknown. Expected approx. Year 23. Pregnancy of Subject 0117 confirmed via orbital thermal survey. Assessment: pending. Priority: to be determined.

The room had gone very quiet.

I looked at the words orbital thermal survey for a long time. They’d looked down at our house from the sky. They’d seen the twins as two small warm shapes in the dark, and written them down, before they had even been born.

Genny was sitting in Father’s chair. I hadn’t heard her come in. She’d read it over my shoulder.

Assessment: pending.

She didn’t say anything at all.

I turned the page because I couldn’t look at that one anymore.

The next section was worse.

Recruitment Strategy: Second-Generation Assets.

Second-generation assets are likely to have been raised with hostility toward the Project, owing to parental influence. Direct coercion is inadvisable given asset capabilities. Recommended approach: patience. Approach should be made only following the natural death of both parents, when assets are most isolated and most receptive.

Primary leverage: family. Assets raised in the wasteland will place high value on the welfare of siblings and dependents. Offer of dome residence, medical care, and comfort for dependents is expected to be highly effective. Dependents may be retained in the dome during asset deployment to ensure continued cooperation.

Tone of approach should be apologetic, sincere, and personal. Where possible, the Director should make the approach himself.

I read it twice.

I didn’t read it out loud. I couldn’t.

It was a plan for me. Written ten years ago, when I was seven. A plan for exactly what to say to me, and when. For waiting until Mother died. For coming to the door, sorry and kind, and offering to look after my sisters.

Dependents may be retained in the dome during asset deployment to ensure continued cooperation.

I understood the letters on my birthday now. When the time comes, you and your sisters will not be alone. I will see to it personally.

He wasn’t threatening me. He was following his plan.

There was a section on expected losses. I read it because I’d promised myself I’d read everything.

First wave (first-generation assets and unproven second-generation): acceptable attrition up to seventy percent.

Seventy percent. He’d written it the way Father wrote the boiling point of water.

There was a section on what would happen when Avalon was secure. Settlers would follow, from the domes, in their thousands. Cities would be built. There was a drawing of one: white towers, green parks, a river. A new beginning for humanity. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing in the whole folder.

There was nothing in that section about the assets at all. Not a line. As though, by then, there wouldn’t be any left to mention.

I closed the file.

”There’s one more page,” said Mother.

I looked at her.

”At the very back. Inside the cover.” She was watching me. ”I wrote it. The night after your father died. I wanted it to be the last thing you read, so I put it there.”

I opened the back cover.

Taped to the inside, on a sheet of plain paper from one of Father’s notebooks, there was a letter. Not typed. Handwritten, in pencil, in a hand I knew better than my own. Rounder than Father’s. Leaning a little to the right. Pressed hard into the paper in places, as if she’d been trying not to cry and failing.

Genny leaned in beside me. I didn’t stop her. Together, we read it.

Lucas,

If you’re reading this, then I’m gone too, or nearly. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, my love. I tried to stay as long as I could.

They will come back when we are gone. You’ve read the file. You know they will. It’s what they’ve been waiting for.

He will come himself. He will be kind. He will be so sorry. He will look you in the eye, and he will mean it, and that is what will make it so hard. He will offer you everything you want. Doctors for the girls. A safe home. A purpose. Some of it may even be true.

Do not trust him. Do not trust any of them. Not him, not the men who send him, not the ones who sign their names after his. Whatever they promise you about your sisters, remember what they promised us.

They gave us medals and flowers. Then they gave us seventy-two hours.

I don’t know what you’ll choose. I don’t know what I’d choose, in your place. You’ll be alone with it, and you’ll be young, and you’ll be so tired. I know that. Whatever you choose, I’ll understand. Your father would too.

But choose it with your eyes open. Never forget who they are. Never let them make you forget who you are.

You are not a weapon. You are not an asset. You are not anybody’s Priority One.

You are my son, who made a lake on the moon because he thought it was lonely.

Look after your sisters. Look after yourself.

I love you more than all of it.

Mother.

I didn’t know how long I sat there.

Genny had gone very still beside me. She was holding the edge of the page between her finger and thumb, the way you’d hold a moth. Her eyes were wet. She didn’t wipe them.

Mother was watching us both from the pillows. She didn’t say anything. She’d said it all already, seven years ago, in pencil.

I looked down at the letter. You are not anybody’s Priority One.

I looked at the file on my knees. DASK, L. PRIORITY ONE.

I thought of Crane’s careful hand. Approach should be made only following the natural death of both parents. I thought of a canister falling out of the dark onto the ridge every year, while we slept. I thought of seventy percent. I thought of two small warm shapes, seen from orbit, written down in a list. Assessment: pending.

I thought of the old man in the bakery, closing his door.

Something was happening in my chest. It had been happening, slowly, for five days. The hot low thing that had started when Mother told me about the socks. It had been spreading the whole time, under everything, while I read and listened and nodded and filed things away.

It wasn’t spreading slowly anymore.

I stood up.

The file slid off my knees onto the floor. Genny looked up. Mother said my name. I heard her. I couldn’t answer.

The cup on the side table was rattling against its saucer. I noticed it from very far away. The windows were humming in their frames. The air in the room had gone tight and strange, like the moment before lightning. Like the air in a doorway, eleven years ago, the moment before a noise.

”Lucas,” said Mother again, very quietly.

I walked out.

I went through the kitchen and out the back door and down the steps. Past the filter shed. Past Father’s stone under the tree. Past the edge of the wheat. Past the scarecrow, with Garnet’s bracelet on its wrist, where Garnet looked up from the wheat and called my name too, in a frightened voice I’d never heard her use.

I didn’t stop.

I walked out to where the grass ended and the gray began, and I kept walking.