Scarecrow

I told them in the room with three beds, after the lights in the corridor had gone down for the night.

Garnet was sitting cross-legged on her bed under the duck blanket, with the picture book Maddy had given her open on her knees. Genny was on her own bed with Mother’s four pages held against her chest. She hadn’t let go of them since noon.

I sat on the floor between them, with my back against the wall, and told Garnet everything.

Not gently. Mother had said all of it, and she was right. I told her about the orphan halls, and Nell, and the program. The posters and the medals. Seventy-two hours. Born and unborn. The old man in the bakery closing his door. The moon, and the note in the margin. Locate. The noise, and what it had been. The two warm shapes in a list before she was born. Assessment: pending.

I told her about Avalon, and the first wave.

I told her about the Retention Act, and the thirty-one families on the lower floors, and the medicine they’d had every week for nineteen years.

And I told her about Father walking eighty miles to strike Mother’s name off a list.

She listened to all of it with the book forgotten on her knees and her mouth a little open, the way she listened to the moon story. She didn’t cry. When I told her about the old man in the bakery, her lip trembled, and she pressed it together. When I told her about the two warm shapes in the list, she looked across at Genny, and Genny looked back.

When I told her about the stabilizer, and the law, and frightened people are very careful with their medicine, she went very still.

”So if you don’t go,” she said slowly, ”Mama doesn’t get her medicine.”

”Maybe. He says he’ll fight for her. He says he’d probably lose.”

”Is that true?”

”I don’t know,” I said. ”That’s the thing about him. I never know.”

Garnet thought about it with the full force of her nine years.

”He saved her,” she said. ”In the field. He came and he saved her.”

”Yes.”

”So he’s nice.”

”He saved her,” I said. ”And he did it so I’d have to go. Both things are true at the same time.”

Garnet frowned.

”That’s very confusing,” she said.

”Yes.”

”I don’t like it.”

”Neither do I.”

Genny had been silent the whole time. Now she put Mother’s pages down on the bed beside her, very carefully, and put both hands flat on top of them.

”No,” she said.

”Genny—”

”No. We don’t do it. We take Mother home. Back to the field.”

”She needs the stabilizer every week.”

”Then I’ll learn to make it.” Her voice was very quiet and very hard. ”I’ll read every notebook. I’ll read every book in this hospital. I’ll steal the formula if I have to. I can change anything within a foot of me. If I know what it’s supposed to be, I can make it.”

”It took eleven doctors nine years to understand it,” I said. ”Dr. Halloway said so. And they still don’t, all the way.”

”Then I’ll take ten.”

”And Mother has a month without it.”

That stopped her.

She stared at me across the dark room. Her mouth was a hard straight line.

”And you,” she said. ”Avalon. The first wave he won’t tell you about. The part of the file that’s all black.” Her voice cracked straight down the middle. ”You go and you don’t come back. And Mother’s alive, and we’re in the dome eating pudding, and you’re dead, eleven light-years away, and we don’t even get a stone to put by the tree.”

The cup on the table between the beds was rattling. The lamp on the wall flickered.

She was nine. She’d sat in a hospital corridor for five days and read every chart they’d let her near. She’d heard Crane tell Mother about Father. She’d carried Mother’s four pages against her chest all day as though they were the last thing holding her together.

I got up off the floor and went to her bed. She put her hands up as if to push me away. I didn’t let her. She stood rigid for a long moment with her fists against my chest. Then she put her face into my shoulder.

The cup stopped rattling.

Garnet got off her bed with the duck blanket still round her shoulders and climbed onto Genny’s, and put her arms around both of us, and held on.

Afterward, we sat on the floor.

I don’t know why. Nobody decided to. We ended up there, the three of us, with our backs against Genny’s bed and our knees pulled up, the way you’d sit in a shelter waiting for a storm to pass.

After a long time, Garnet said, ”Lucas?”

”Mm.”

”Does the dome have a library? A real one?”

Genny made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.

”I think so,” I said.

”And the bakery,” said Garnet. ”Mama’s bakery. On the ring street, by the east locks. Is it still there?”

”I don’t know.”

”I want to see it,” said Garnet. ”The bread in the window at six in the morning, with the steam on the glass. The way Mama said.” A pause. ”I want to taste what it’s supposed to taste like. So I can make it right. Inside too.”

”The old man would be there,” said Genny. ”The one who closed his door.”

”Maybe,” said Garnet. ”He might be very old now.” She was quiet for a moment. ”Maybe if I went in, and bought some bread, and said thank you, he’d stop being frightened.”

Genny turned her head and stared at her with an expression between fury and despair and a kind of terrible wonder.

”You’re impossible,” she said.

”I know,” said Garnet comfortably.

She was quiet a while longer. Then she said, to the room, not to either of us:

”I want Mama to live. I want to finish the scarf. I want to read all the books. I want Lucas to put fish on the moon. He promised.” She stopped. ”I think we should stay. In the dome. And Lucas should go. If it means Mama lives.”

She said it very small. But she said it.

I looked at Genny.

Genny was staring at the floor between her knees. Her jaw was locked.

”I think we should go home,” she said finally. ”All of us. Mother too. And I’ll learn the stabilizer, and if he sends soldiers, I’ll throw the soldiers. And if it doesn’t work—” Her voice cracked. She pushed through it. ”Then we’ll sit with each other. Afterward. Like Mother said.”

She looked up at me.

”That’s my vote,” she said. ”Home.”

One for stay. One for home.

They were both looking at me now.

I thought about Mother’s last page. Never choose for them without telling them.

I’d told them. Everything. They’d had their say.

And I thought about the slate, still in my pocket, that I’d finally looked at the night before, sitting in the corridor after everyone was asleep. Two columns of numbers. One shorter than the other. Twenty-five years. Thirty, if we were lucky.

I thought about Mother’s hand, warm, closing around mine at six in the morning.

I thought about a month.

”It isn’t a vote,” I said.

Genny’s face went very still.

”I’m sorry,” I said. ”I wish it was. Mother told me to tell you, and I have. She told me to let you have a say, and you’ve had it, and I heard every word. But she also told me, in the field, that she couldn’t choose for me. And I can’t make you choose for me either. It isn’t fair to you. It’s mine.”

I made myself hold Genny’s eyes.

”I’m going,” I said.

Garnet let out her breath.

Genny didn’t move. She sat with her back against the bed and stared at me, and I could see her taking it apart in her head, every piece, the way she took apart the salt in the soil.

”Because of Mother,” she said.

”Because of Mother. And because of the numbers. Yours and Garnet’s.”

”Because it keeps us alive.”

”Yes.”

”Even if it kills you.”

I didn’t answer that.

She looked at me for a long time. Then she reached out and took my hand. Not gently. The way she’d taken it walking home from the crater. Like a rope.

”Then I vote you come back,” said Genny.

Her voice was perfectly flat. Her eyes weren’t.

”That’s my vote. You can’t say it doesn’t count. You go to the green planet and you do whatever he wants and you fight whatever’s in the black part of the file. And then you come back. To Mother. To us. That’s the condition.” Her grip tightened. ”Promise.”

”I promise.”

”Say all of it.”

”I’ll come back.”

She held on to my hand a moment longer. Then she let go and wiped her face with both sleeves, hard, and got up off the floor, and picked up Mother’s four pages from the bed, and held them against her chest.

”Come on,” she said. ”We have to tell her.”

Mother was awake. The lamp beside her bed was turned down low. She watched the three of us come in through the door with the round window, Genny first with the pages, then Garnet in her duck blanket, then me. She looked at our faces.

She didn’t need us to tell her.

”All right,” she said quietly.

That was all. She held out her arms, and Garnet climbed up into them, and Genny stood beside the bed with her hand on Mother’s ankle, and I sat in the chair and held her hand, warm, and none of us said anything for a long time.

After a while, Mother said, ”Genny.”

”Yes.”

”Have you still got my pages?”

”Yes.”

”Good,” said Mother. ”Then tomorrow, you’re going to write the terms.”