Scarecrow

The twins had their first examination two days before I left.

Genny nearly didn’t let it happen.

She stood in the doorway of the little white room on the hospital’s fourth floor with her arms folded and the gold-sealed terms held against her chest, and looked at the machines, and the bed with paper on it, and the tray of instruments, and Dr. Halloway in her white coat.

”Number two,” she said. ”No tests. No assessments.”

”I’ve read it,” said Dr. Halloway. ”I was there when the Director signed it, if you remember.” She sat down on a stool so that her eyes were level with Genny’s. ”This isn’t an assessment. I’m not going to measure what you can do. I’m not going to ask you to lift anything or change anything. I don’t care if you can throw a truck across the dome. I’m going to measure what’s happening inside you. The same thing I’ve measured in your mother every day for two weeks. That’s all.”

Genny looked at her for a long time.

”Can I read the chart?” she said. ”After?”

”You can read it during,” said Dr. Halloway. ”I’ll explain anything you don’t understand.”

Genny unfolded her arms.

It took all morning. Blood, from the crook of the arm, which Garnet watched with enormous interest and Genny watched with her jaw set. Scans, lying very still on the bed with paper on it while a machine hummed over them. Questions. Dozens of them. Nosebleeds? Headaches? Did your hands ever shake? Did it ever feel, when you changed something, like it was pulling on something inside you?

Garnet answered everything at great length. Genny answered in single words and read every number on every screen.

I sat in the corner and watched Dr. Halloway’s face.

She was very good. She didn’t let anything show. But I’d spent two weeks learning the faces of people in this dome, and I saw the moment she looked at Garnet’s blood on the screen, and stopped, and looked again.

She saw me afterward. In a room, the way the terms said. With a door that closed.

She put two printed sheets on the table between us. Real paper. Not a slate. Two columns of numbers, two names. DASK, Genevieve. DASK, Garnet. Someone had finally learned which twin was which.

”You asked for the real numbers,” she said. ”These are the real numbers.”

I read them. Then I read them again, slowly, with Father’s notebook fourteen open beside them on the table, comparing.

They were close to the slate. Close to Crane’s projections. A little better for Genny. A little worse for Garnet.

”Twenty-five years,” I said. ”Thirty.”

”Without treatment. Yes.”

”And Garnet’s shorter.”

”Garnet’s is shorter.” She didn’t soften it. ”Her gift works through touch. The material’s spread more evenly through her body. More of it, in more places. It burns a little faster.” She paused. ”That’s not certain. Nothing about this is certain. But it’s what the numbers say.”

”When do they start the stabilizer?”

”The Retention children start at twelve,” said Dr. Halloway. ”Before that, the dose is hard to judge, and the body’s still growing, and we’ve seen it do strange things.” She looked at me steadily. ”I’d like to wait. Three years. I’ll watch them every month. If anything changes, I’ll start sooner.”

”Genny will want it now.”

”Genny,” said Dr. Halloway, with something like a smile, ”has already asked me four times. I’ve told her no four times. I’ll tell her no a fifth.” She tapped Garnet’s sheet. ”And I’ll watch this one very closely. I promise you that.”

I looked at Garnet’s column for a long time.

Then I folded both sheets and put them in the back of notebook fifteen.

”Now you,” said Dr. Halloway.

I’d let her take my blood too. Mother had made me. I hadn’t wanted to. I’d sat on the bed with paper on it, with Genny reading the screen over the doctor’s shoulder, and held still while the machine hummed over me.

Dr. Halloway put a third sheet on the table.

There weren’t any numbers in the column at the bottom. Just a line of her small handwriting.

Inconclusive.

”I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. ”Honestly. I’ve looked at thirty-one families for nineteen years, and your mother, and your sisters. Every one of them shows the same thing: the body fighting the material. Rejecting it. Slowly or quickly, but always. That’s what the stabilizer slows down.”

She turned the sheet round so I could see the screen image clipped to it. A picture of something. My blood, I supposed. It meant nothing to me.

”Yours isn’t fighting,” said Dr. Halloway.

I looked up.

”I don’t see any rejection at all,” she said. ”None. The material’s there, more of it than in anyone I’ve ever tested. But your body isn’t treating it as something foreign. It’s—” She stopped, and chose the word carefully. ”Using it. As if it belonged there. As if it were part of you.”

The room was very quiet.

”What does that mean?”

”I don’t know,” said Dr. Halloway. ”Perhaps it means you’ll live to be a hundred. Perhaps it means something else entirely. Your father had headaches, near the end of the program. Pressure behind the eyes. I wrote them down. His eyes changed color a month later.” She looked at me. ”If you start getting headaches, Lucas. Out there. You tell someone. You write it down.”

I thought about Father’s black eyes across the kitchen table. Like a well at night.

”I will,” I said.

”Anything I like,” I said. ”That’s what the terms say. I ask, and you answer.”

”That’s what they say,” Dr. Halloway agreed.

”The stabilizer. What’s it made from?”

She didn’t hesitate. ”The same material they put into your mother. Xenotissue. We grow it in cultures, in a laboratory under the Ministry, and then we change it. Teach it to calm down, instead of spreading. That’s the part that took nine years.”

”Grown from what?”

”From the original samples.”

”From the wrecks.”

She was quiet for a moment.

”That’s what I was told,” she said. ”Thirty years ago. From the wrecks of their ships.”

I looked at her face. She’d learned not to show things. But not as well as Crane.

”And now?”

Dr. Halloway looked down at the sheets on the table.

”Cultures die,” she said slowly. ”Even well-kept ones. After a few generations, they stop growing. They have to be renewed. From fresh material.” She paused. ”I’ve been doing this nineteen years. Our cultures have been renewed eleven times. And I have never once been told where the fresh material comes from. It arrives. In sealed cases, from the Director’s office. Fresh. As if it had been—” She stopped.

”As if it had been what?”

”As if it had been alive yesterday,” said Dr. Halloway quietly.

The room was very still.

I thought about the war. About Mother on the roof of a burning ship. They didn’t surrender. They never once acted like anything that could surrender.

I thought about a line in a file. Partner.

I thought about nine people and can’t.

I didn’t say any of it. I wrote it down instead, in notebook fifteen, under The Accord. Stabilizer. Fresh material. Sealed cases. Arrives.

Dr. Halloway watched me write it. She didn’t stop me.

”You didn’t hear that from me,” she said.

”No.”

”Yes, you did,” said Dr. Halloway. ”I’m too old to start lying now. Ask your next question.”

I asked the one I’d been carrying for two weeks.

”Crane said the Council would take her treatment away. If I didn’t go. He said he’d fight for her and he’d probably lose.” I looked at her. ”Is that true?”

Dr. Halloway thought about it for a long time.

”The law is real,” she said finally. ”Every word of it. The stabilizer goes to the Retention families, and to Project personnel, and their dependents. Nobody else. I’ve seen people die on the lower floors because they weren’t on the list. I’ve signed the forms.”

She was quiet a moment.

”Whether he’d lose,” she said, ”I don’t know. I’ve worked for Halvard Crane for thirty years, Lucas. I’ve seen him argue with the Council a hundred times.” She looked at me steadily. ”I’ve never once seen him lose.”

I sat with that.

”Last question,” I said.

”Go on.”

”If I don’t come back. If something happens to me, out there. And the Council decides—” I couldn’t finish it.

She didn’t make me.

”Then I’ll treat her anyway,” said Dr. Halloway. ”Myself. Until they stop me. And when they stop me, I’ll find a way to keep doing it.” She put her hand flat on the table between us, beside the sheet that said Inconclusive. ”I sat with her for three days when she was fifteen and didn’t know if she’d wake up. I’m not going to sit and watch her die at forty because a committee did some arithmetic.”

I looked at her hand on the table. Old. Steady. The hand that had put a needle into Mother’s arm at twenty to five in the morning and held her wrist until the filter woke.

”Thank you,” I said.

”Don’t thank me,” said Dr. Halloway. ”Come back. Then I won’t have to.”

The last night, I brushed Garnet’s hair.

She sat on the floor in front of Mother’s wheelchair in the big room with the glass walls, with the city glittering below, and I sat behind her on the rug with the hairbrush. Ends first. Then up. Mother watched from the chair. Genny sat beside her on the floor with her head against Mother’s knee and Mother’s hand in her short hair, which she’d never once let anyone do in her life.

Miss Pell was in the library, putting books away. Mr. Dunmore had gone home and left a cake on the counter with GOOD LUCK on it in blue icing, slightly crooked. Nobody had eaten it yet.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

”You’ll call,” said Garnet. ”Every week. It’s number six.”

”Every week.”

”And you’ll tell us about the green planet. What it looks like. Everything.”

”Everything.”

”And if there’s water, you’ll look for fish.”

I almost laughed. ”I’ll look for fish.”

Garnet nodded, satisfied, and leaned back against my knees. The knots at the back of her hair were gone. I kept brushing anyway.

Mother hadn’t said anything all evening. She sat in her chair with her hand in Genny’s hair, looking at me. That look again. As if she were memorizing me.

Only this time, she wasn’t the one going.

”Lucas,” she said finally.

”Yes.”

”When they’re training you. When they’re teaching you to be whatever it is they want.” She was quiet a moment. ”Remember what I wrote. In the field, seven years ago.”

I knew it by heart.

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

”I remember,” I said.

”Good,” said Mother. ”Because they’re going to spend every day trying to make you forget it.”

She held out her hand. I took it. It was warm.

Out beyond the glass, low over the edge of the dome, the moon was coming up. Faint. Blurred by the glass. And on its face, if you knew exactly where to look, a little left of center, a small bright spot of ice, where a four-year-old had once put water because the moon looked lonely.

In the morning, I’d go to the AVALON compound.

I sat on the rug with my sister’s head against my knees and my mother’s hand in mine, and I looked at it for a long time.