Scarecrow

”We all go,” I said.

Crane didn’t argue. I think he’d known I’d say it before he left the dome. ”Of course,” he said. ”There’s room.”

”How long do we have?”

He glanced at Dr. Halloway. She was on her feet now, watching the two men in white lift Mother from the bed onto a stretcher that hung in the air beside it on nothing, the way the craft did.

”Ten minutes,” said the doctor. ”Less, if you can.”

Ten minutes. Seventeen years.

I don’t remember most of it. I remember pieces.

Genny in the study, sweeping notebooks off the shelf into her arms. All fifteen. She didn’t wrap them. She held them against her chest with both arms and floated the steel box from Father’s drawer along behind her, and the photograph off the windowsill, without looking at either.

Garnet standing in the middle of the front room, turning in a slow circle, not knowing what to take. Then running to the windowsill and grabbing the hairbrush. Then running to the hook by the door and taking down Mother’s scarf. The blue one. Soft and old and faded at the ends, that Mother had worn the winter she could still get up and kept on the hook ever after.

Me in the kitchen, standing in front of Father’s wall with my hands at my sides, looking at a hundred and eighteen faded boxes and knowing there was no time. Everything alive. Respect this one. I touched carbon with my fingertips. Then I turned around and left it.

The filter humming in the walls behind me, the way it had woken at five. Still running. Nobody to turn it off.

I didn’t turn it off.

They carried her down the path through the wheat on the floating stretcher, with the doctor walking beside her holding the mask over her face. The sky had gone from gray to pale gold. The field was very still.

Halfway down, Mother opened her eyes.

I saw it happen. I was walking beside her on the other side. Her eyes opened and moved, slowly, as though they were very heavy, past the doctor, past the mask, to the sky. And then to the side. To the middle of the field, where the rows crossed.

The scarecrow. Father’s coat. Its faded, disappointed face, turned up to the morning.

Her lips moved under the mask.

Dr. Halloway lifted it an inch. ”What is it, love?”

Mother’s voice was barely there. I had to lean down.

”His coat,” she whispered. ”It’ll be cold. Without anyone.”

Then her eyes closed again.

Garnet was behind us, running to catch up, the hairbrush in one hand and the blue scarf in the other. She’d heard. I saw her face change.

She stopped on the path. She looked at the scarf in her hand. She looked at the scarecrow.

Then she turned and ran into the wheat.

”Garnet—”

”One minute,” she shouted back, without stopping.

She reached the scarecrow and went up on her toes and wound the blue scarf around its neck. Twice. Over the collar of Father’s coat. She tied it in a loose knot at the front, the way Mother used to tie it, and smoothed the ends down flat with both hands.

Then she hugged it, round its middle, the way she did every morning. Hard. For about one second.

Then she ran back to us.

She didn’t say anything. Her face was wet. She took my hand.

On the stretcher, Mother’s eyes didn’t open again. But the corner of her mouth, under the mask, moved.

The craft was bigger inside than it looked. White, and bright, and full of machines that hummed and blinked. They fixed the stretcher to the wall, and the doctor strapped herself in beside it and didn’t take her fingers off Mother’s wrist.

The twins sat together on a bench across from her. Genny with the notebooks still clutched in both arms. Garnet holding the hairbrush.

I sat next to Mother. As close as they’d let me.

Crane sat at the far end, alone, with his cane across his knees.

The ramp came up. The door that wasn’t there was there.

The hum came up through the floor, and the craft lifted.

There was a window. A small round one in the wall by Garnet’s head. She didn’t look out of it. She’d buried her face in Genny’s shoulder.

Genny looked.

I watched her watch it. The field falling away. The house. The empty porch where Father had stood. The tree, and the stone under it with its leaning letters. And in the middle of the wheat, a figure with its arms out, in Father’s coat, with a blue scarf at its neck, the ends lifting in the wind from the craft.

Genny watched until the ridge came between us.

Then she closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall and didn’t open them again for a long time.

Nobody spoke for the first half hour.

Then I said, without looking at him, ”Your file said to wait.”

Crane didn’t pretend not to understand.

”Yes,” he said.

”Approach should be made only following the natural death of both parents.”

”Yes.”

”You didn’t wait.”

He was quiet for a long time. The craft hummed. On the machine by the stretcher, Mother’s heart beeped, slow and even.

”No,” he said at last.

”Why not?”

I turned and looked at him then. Straight at his face. The scar. The steel-framed glasses. The gray eyes behind them.

He looked back at me for a long moment. Something moved in his face that I couldn’t read.

”I watched your father die,” he said. ”On a screen. Seven years ago. One of five warm shapes in a house, going cold, at three in the afternoon. I watched every minute of it. I had a team and a craft and a dose of the first stabilizer ready on the roof, and I sat in my office and I didn’t send them, because the plan said wait, and because I knew he’d kill whoever I sent.” He stopped. ”I found I couldn’t watch it twice.”

I didn’t say anything.

I didn’t know if it was true. I didn’t know if it was the most honest thing he’d ever said, or the cleverest. With him, I was starting to understand, it could be both at once.

”And the crater,” I said.

He inclined his head slightly. ”And the crater,” he admitted. ”The Council was very frightened. They wanted to know if you were still—” He chose the word. ”—stable. I told them I’d find out.”

”So you came with a doctor.”

”I came with a doctor,” Crane agreed. ”Because I believed your mother was about to die. And because I believed that if I could save her, you would let me.” He paused. ”Both things were true.”

He looked at Mother on her stretcher, breathing.

”I’m very glad they were,” he said quietly.

I turned away and looked at Mother’s face instead, and held her hand, and didn’t speak to him again for the rest of the journey.

I saw the dome from the air.

I hadn’t wanted to look. I’d kept my eyes on Mother’s face. But the craft banked as it came in, and the round window by Garnet’s head filled with gold, and I looked before I could stop myself.

It wasn’t a smudge. It wasn’t a soap bubble. It was the curve of a world, rising out of the gray. Miles of it. Clear and faintly shimmering, like oil on water. And under it, a city. Towers, hundreds of them, white and silver. Streets in long curving rings. And green. Everywhere. Trees along every street, gardens on every terrace, parks, water, green on green on green, sealed under a sky of glass with the dead world pressed against the outside of it.

Genny had opened her eyes. She was looking too.

”They had all this,” she said, very quietly. ”The whole time.”

Nobody answered her.

The craft didn’t go in through any door that I could see. It went up, over the curve of the dome, high enough that the city below looked like a map. Then a patch of the glass ahead of us went dark and soft and opened like an eye, and we went through, and it closed behind us.

The air changed. I felt it in my lungs.

We came down on the roof of a long white building with a red cross painted on it, so big you could have seen it from the moon.

They had her off the craft before the ramp had finished coming down.

People were waiting on the roof. More people in white. They took the floating stretcher from the two men and ran with it, actually ran, across the roof to a pair of wide doors, with Dr. Halloway running beside them still holding the mask. The doors opened by themselves. The stretcher went through.

I ran after it.

Into a white corridor that smelled of something sharp and clean. Down it, fast, past other doors, past people who flattened themselves against the walls when they saw me coming. The stretcher ahead of me turned a corner. I turned it too. There was a pair of heavy doors with round windows in them, and the stretcher went through, and Dr. Halloway turned in the doorway and put her hand flat on my chest.

Not pushing. Just there. The way the soldier had held his rifle across his chest. So I’d know.

”You can’t come in here,” she said.

”She’s my mother.”

”I know she is. And I’m the best chance she has, and I can’t do my job with you standing over my shoulder.” Her eyes were steady. She was the only person in the whole building who wasn’t afraid of me. ”I’ll come and find you. The moment there’s anything to tell. I promise you that.”

I looked through the round window behind her. I could see Mother’s hand hanging off the edge of the stretcher. People moving around her. Machines.

I could have walked through Dr. Halloway. I could have walked through the doors, and the wall, and the building.

”Go,” I said.

She went. The doors closed. Through the round window, I watched them close around the bed.

There was a bench in the corridor outside. I sat on it.

The twins came a minute later. Someone had brought them. Genny was still holding the notebooks. Garnet was still holding the hairbrush. They sat down on either side of me without a word.

The corridor was very white and very quiet. Somewhere far off, a machine beeped. People went past the end of the corridor and looked at us and walked faster.

We sat there for a long time.

At some point, Crane came down the corridor. Slowly, with his cane. He didn’t sit. He stopped a little way off and looked at the doors with the round windows, and then at us.

”There’s a room,” he said. ”Down the hall. With beds. And food. You should rest. It will be hours.”

None of us moved.

He nodded, as though he’d expected that too. He stood there a while longer, leaning on his cane. Then he said, very quietly, ”She’s going to live, Lucas. For now. Ruth Halloway is the best doctor in New Halcyon. The stabilizer works. Not forever. But it works.”

”For now,” I said.

”For now,” he agreed.

”And after now?”

He looked at me for a long moment.

”We’ll talk about that,” he said. ”When you’ve rested. When she’s awake.” He paused. ”There’s no hurry. Not anymore.”

He turned and went back down the corridor, slowly, the cane tapping on the white floor.

I understood it a little while after he’d gone.

I was sitting on the bench with Garnet asleep against my arm and Genny staring at the doors. I was looking at the round windows, and thinking about the dose. That dose will carry her a few hours. About the stabilizer. It works. Not forever. But it works.

About where it was kept.

Not in the field. Not in our valley at the bottom of the ridge. Not in Father’s notebooks or the cellar or anything I could make with my eyes, because I didn’t understand it, the way I’d never understood bread.

It was here. In the dome. In a building with a red cross on the roof, under a sky of glass that opened like an eye for the people it wanted and closed behind them.

And so was she.

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

He hadn’t needed to wait for her to die.

He’d only needed her to be dying. And to be the one who could stop it.

Genny turned her head and looked at me. She’d been watching my face. She always knew the shape of a thing before she knew its details.

”He’s got her,” she said quietly.

I didn’t answer.

She looked back at the doors.

”He’s got all of us,” said Genny.