Scarecrow

I didn’t put on a mask.

I noticed that about a mile out, when the ash started to burn in the back of my throat. I didn’t care. I changed the air in front of my face as I breathed it, without thinking, the way you’d swat a fly. Took the poison out. Put it back together as something clean. It was easy. Everything was easy. That was the whole problem.

I kept walking.

The gray went on forever out here. Long low dunes of ash, and the black stumps of trees, and here and there the corner of something that used to be a house. The wind had picked up. It came across the flats in long hissing gusts and threw dust against my legs.

I wasn’t going anywhere. I wasn’t thinking about where I was going. I was thinking about words.

Priority One.

Natural attrition.

Seventy percent.

Assessment: pending.

They went round and round in my head like stones in a stream. Each time one came round, the hot thing in my chest got hotter. I’d felt angry before. I’d been angry at Genny for a week when she was five and turned the cover of my best notebook to tin, and angry at Father for dying, and angry at the filter every time it failed. This wasn’t like that. This was something that had been building under the floor of me for seventeen years, and I hadn’t known it was there, and now the floor was gone.

I thought about a girl of fifteen in an orphan hall, lying down on a table.

I thought about a man crying and holding her hand, and the same man doing the arithmetic on her life.

I thought about seventy-two hours. Born and unborn. An old man closing his door. A soldier holding his rifle across his chest, so they’d know.

I thought about the posters coming down, gradually, over a period of months, so as not to draw attention.

I thought about two small warm shapes in the dark, seen from the sky. Written down. Weighed.

Assessment: pending.

There was a hill in front of me.

I don’t remember stopping. I remember that it was there. A low, broad hill, maybe two hundred feet high, a mile or so beyond the ridge. Ash on its flanks, and old gray rock showing through at the top, and the ruin of something on the crown of it. A farmhouse, maybe, once. A chimney still standing, and the stumps of walls.

I looked at it.

I didn’t decide to do anything. I want to be very clear about that, because it’s the most important thing about what happened next, and I’ve spent a long time since trying to understand it.

I didn’t decide.

I just looked at it, with all of that inside me. And the hill came apart.

It started at the top.

The chimney went first. One moment it was standing, black brick against the gray sky. The next it was gone, not falling, not crumbling, just gone, turned to a puff of white vapor that the wind tore sideways. The walls of the farmhouse went with it. Then the rock under them.

And then it didn’t stop.

It went down into the hill like water into sand. Everything my eyes touched, changed. The rock turned to gas and the gas burned. The ash turned to glass, and the glass shattered from the heat, and the shards turned to something else before they hit the ground. There was no plan in it. No chemistry. Nothing I’d learned from Father’s notebooks or his wall. Just other. Just not this. Whatever was there, I wanted it not to be.

The noise was enormous.

Not like Father’s noise. Not a sound with the inside taken out. This was the opposite. A roar like the whole world tearing down the middle, going on and on. The ground shook under my feet. A column of dust and steam went up from where the hill had been, hundreds of feet, thousands, boiling and black, lit from inside by flickers of lightning where the air itself was coming apart and putting itself back together wrong.

I could feel all of it.

That was the worst part. I could feel every grain of it changing. Every atom. A whole hill’s worth of rock and soil and old brick and dead roots, coming apart and putting itself back together under my eyes, a billion small choices I wasn’t making, all at once. And it felt—

It felt good.

I’m not going to lie about that. Father never lied to me. It felt like the first breath after being underwater too long. It felt like the hot thing in my chest had finally found a door. For the first time in five days, I wasn’t thinking about the words.

The hill was gone. There was a hole where it had been, glowing at the bottom, wider than our whole field.

I kept looking.

The edge of it spread toward me. Glass and fire, running across the flats. It hit a dune of ash and the dune went up in a sheet of white flame. It hit an old fence line and the posts became steam. I watched it come. I didn’t stop it.

Then I lifted my head and looked out past it.

At the horizon.

You could see it from here. You could see it from anywhere out on the flats, on a clear day. Very faint. A smudge of light, low on the sky to the northwest. A soap bubble the size of a mountain, catching the sun.

New Halcyon.

Eighty miles.

I’d never thought about how far I could reach. Father had a limit; four kilometers, the file said, and past that his hold on things faded like a voice across a field. I’d always assumed I had one too. Bigger, maybe. But a limit.

I’d made a lake on the moon from my bedroom.

The line of glass was moving. I could feel it. It had stopped spreading toward me, and started spreading the other way, across the flats, in the direction I was looking. Not fast. But steady. A long bright scar running northwest across the ash, toward the horizon, toward that faint soap bubble of light, following my eyes the way water follows a ditch.

I knew exactly what was at the end of it.

And for one moment, one long, terrible, perfectly clear moment, I wanted it to get there.

I saw it. I saw all of it. The domes of New Halcyon going white the way the moon had gone white, all at once, like flour thrown on dark cloth. The forty-first floor. The Ministry. The office where a careful man in glasses signed his name first. All of it. Gone. Not this. Never again.

There are children in that city.

Mother’s voice. As clear as if she were standing beside me.

There are children in that city now. And an old man who makes bread, who was frightened, and closed his door. That’s all he did.

The line kept moving.

The moment he did, he’d have been exactly what they said he was.

I couldn’t stop it.

I tried. I tried to pull back, the way I’d learned to pull back from a change I’d started wrong, and there was nothing to pull. There was no handle on it. It was all of me at once, pouring out through my eyes, and it would go wherever I looked. And I was looking at the dome.

So I did the only thing I could think of.

I put my hands over my eyes.

It stopped the instant the world went dark.

Not slowly. Not gradually. The roar cut off as though someone had shut a door on it. The ground stopped shaking. I heard the wind come back, hissing over the flats, and the crackle of glass cooling somewhere far off, and the patter of dust and grit falling out of the sky like dry rain.

I stood there with my hands pressed against my face, so hard I saw colors.

I didn’t dare take them away. I didn’t know what I’d see. I didn’t know what it would do if I saw it.

I stood there like that for a long time. Then my legs went, and I sat down hard in the ash, still holding my eyes shut. Something was running down over my lip, warm and wet. I tasted copper.

Like pennies.

I sat in the dust with my hands over my eyes and my nose bleeding, and I shook.

I hadn’t decided. That was what I kept coming back to. I hadn’t decided to do any of it. Not the hill. Not the line of glass. It had just come out of me, all of it, because I was angry and I was looking at something.

Father had said: You can do anything. That’s not the hard part.

I’d thought I understood him. I’d thought he meant it was hard to do things carefully, slowly, right.

He hadn’t meant that at all. Or not only that.

He’d meant this. He’d meant that the hard part was not doing anything. Every single day. With all of that inside you, and the whole world in front of your eyes.

He’d done it for ten years. Out here. With Crane’s canisters falling on the ridge, and his lungs failing, and the dome sitting there on the horizon like a promise somebody broke. He’d done it every day until he died. He’d only let go once. For me. And then he’d scrubbed the porch until his hands bled.

I’d lasted five days.

Class unbounded.

I sat there in the ash, and for the first time in my life, I was afraid of myself.

I heard her before I knew it was her.

Footsteps on the ash, a long way off. Then closer. Then the crunch and slide of someone climbing down over broken glass. Small boots. Short steps. Somebody breathing hard through a mask.

I didn’t take my hands away from my eyes.

The footsteps stopped a few feet in front of me.

I knew who it was. I knew the stillness. I didn’t know how she’d found me, or how long she’d been walking, or what she’d seen on the way. I didn’t know whether she’d seen the column of smoke from the house. I didn’t know if she’d seen the line of glass.

I didn’t know what she thought of me now.

I waited for her to say something. What did you do. Or are you all right. Or Mother sent me. Or my name.

She didn’t say anything.

She sat down.

I heard her do it. Cross-legged in the ash beside me, close enough that her knee touched mine. She didn’t touch me otherwise. She didn’t try to take my hands away. She just sat.

The wind blew across the crater. Somewhere down in the bottom of it, glass ticked and cracked as it cooled.

I sat with my hands over my eyes and breathed. In. Out. It came in shudders at first, catching on something halfway up my chest. Genny didn’t say anything. In. Out. My nose had stopped bleeding. I could feel the blood drying on my lip. Genny didn’t say anything. In. Out.

I don’t know how long it was. A long time. Long enough that the light behind my fingers turned from white to gold.

Gradually, the breaths stopped catching.

Gradually, the hot thing in my chest went quiet. It didn’t go away. I knew, now, that it would never go away. But it went back down under the floor of me, where it had been all along, and lay there, waiting.

Genny’s knee was still against mine.

”I can’t look,” I said at last.

My voice came out raw. I didn’t know whether I’d been shouting, out there. I didn’t remember.

Genny didn’t answer.

”I can’t look at anything,” I said. ”I don’t know what it’ll do. If I look at something and I’m still—if it’s still—” I couldn’t finish. ”I almost… Genny, I almost—”

She moved.

She got up onto her knees in the ash, right in front of me. I could feel her there, very close. Then her hands closed over my wrists. Small, cold, chapped hands. Strong. Stronger than any nine-year-old’s had any right to be.

She pulled my hands away from my face.

I kept my eyes shut.

She waited.

She was so close I could feel her breathing through her mask. She’d put herself exactly in front of me. Exactly where my eyes would land when they opened. Nothing between us. Nothing else for me to see.

She knew what had happened to the hill. She’d climbed down over the glass to get here. She knew what I’d almost done, or near enough.

And she’d put herself right there.

I opened my eyes.

Genny was kneeling in the ash, a foot away, with her mask pushed down around her neck and dust in her short hair and tear tracks through the gray on her face. Her jaw was set exactly like Mother’s. Her eyes were very steady.

Nothing happened.

She stayed exactly what she was. My sister. Nine years old and furious and frightened and brave, and still there.

I looked at her for a long time. She looked back.

Then she took one of her hands off my wrist and wiped the blood off my lip with the cuff of my old jacket, roughly, the way you’d scrub a pot. And she sat back down beside me in the ash, with her knee against mine, facing the crater.

She still hadn’t said a word.

I looked at the crater for the first time.

It was huge. Half a mile across, maybe more. Glass all the way down, black and green and amber, cracked into great plates like a dried lakebed. Steam rose from the bottom in slow white ribbons. Where the hill had been, there was nothing at all.

And running away from it to the northwest, across the gray flats, a line.

A long bright scar of glass, a few yards wide, straight as a ruled line, catching the low sun. I followed it with my eyes, carefully, carefully, feeling nothing happen as I looked. It ran for a mile. Two. Three. It got thinner as it went. Out near the edge of what I could make out, it faded to nothing, a thin glitter in the ash, and stopped.

Beyond it, very faint on the horizon, the dome sat in the evening light exactly where it had always been.

Three miles. Out of eighty.

I looked at it for a long time.

Then I looked away from it on purpose, and looked at Genny instead.

We walked home in the dusk.

Genny held my hand the whole way. She’d never held my hand in her life, not since she was small enough to need it crossing the creek. She didn’t hold it gently. She held it the way you’d hold a rope.

I kept my eyes on the ground in front of my feet.

Garnet was waiting at the top of the ridge. She’d been there a long time, I could tell; she was sitting on a rock with her arms around her knees and her smug-faced mask on crooked, and the gold fishing weight clutched in one fist. When she saw us she jumped up and ran down the slope so fast she nearly fell, and threw herself at me, and held on around my waist with her face pressed into my shirt.

She didn’t ask what had happened. I don’t think she wanted to know.

”Mama saw the smoke,” she said into my shirt. ”From the window. She made me stay here. She said Genny would bring you back.”

I looked at Genny over Garnet’s head.

Genny looked back, and for the first time all evening, very slightly, she shrugged. As though it had been obvious.

We went down into the valley together, the three of us. Into the green. Into the wheat. The filter was humming in the house. The lamp was lit in the front room window, and I could see the shape of Mother in her bed beside it, propped up on her pillows, watching the path.

The scarecrow stood in the middle of the field with its arms out.

When we passed it, I stopped and looked back the way we’d come.

Over the ridge, against the last of the light, the column of smoke and dust from the crater still hung in the sky. It had spread at the top into a great dark anvil, the size of a mountain. Lightning still flickered inside it now and then, small and silent.

You’d be able to see it for a hundred miles.

You’d be able to see it from the dome.

I thought of a canister falling out of the dark onto the ridge, every year, from somewhere up there. I thought of a careful man who was very good at arithmetic.

Then Garnet pulled on my hand, and I turned away from it, and went inside to Mother.