Scarecrow

The AVALON compound was in the bottom of the dome.

Not the bottom of the city. The bottom of the dome itself. The car took me down the long avenue away from the Tower, and then off it, onto a road that sloped down, and down, under the gardens and the streets, into a tunnel lit with pale blue lamps. The towers disappeared. The green disappeared. The walls of the tunnel were bare gray stone, and they curved, and the curve was the curve of the dome’s own foundations, going down into the earth.

The driver didn’t speak. He hadn’t spoken since he’d opened the door at the bottom of the Tower and seen me, and looked at the sky, and then at his shoes.

I sat in the back with a bag on my knees and looked at the tunnel wall going past.

It wasn’t goodbye. Not yet. That was what Mother had said at the lift, sitting in her chair with Garnet on her lap and Genny’s hand on her shoulder. The training was in the dome. Five days in the compound, she said, and then two days home, every week, for six months. I’d sleep under the same glass she did. I’d be eleven minutes away by car.

She’d said it very steadily. Like something she’d been practicing.

Genny hadn’t said anything at all. She’d stood behind Mother’s chair with her jaw set and watched the lift doors close.

The tunnel ended at a gate.

A real one. Steel bars, set into a wall of poured stone, with a guardhouse beside it and two soldiers in the guardhouse. The bars slid back when the car came close. The soldiers looked at the car. Then through the window at me. Then away.

On the other side, the tunnel opened out into a space so big I didn’t understand it at first.

It was a cave. Or it had been, once. A great hollow under the dome, carved out of the rock beneath the foundations, hundreds of yards across, with a ceiling so high that the lamps hung from it on chains as long as our field. The floor had been leveled and paved. There were buildings on it, low and gray and square, in rows. A long building with a curved roof. Fields of bare packed earth, marked with white lines. Walls of thick glass, behind which I could see rooms full of machines.

And in the far wall, a door. Huge. Taller than the east locks. Shut.

I found out later where it went.

The car stopped in front of the long building with the curved roof. The driver got out and opened my door and stood back from it, very far back, like the pilot taking her small step.

”Assembly hall, sir,” he said, to the ground. ”They’re expecting you.”

They were.

The hall was long and bare, with a wooden floor marked in lines like the fields outside, and high windows in the curved roof letting in the lamplight from the cave. At the far end, there was a raised platform with a lectern on it, and a flag hanging behind the lectern. The circle-within-a-circle, with the line running out from the inner one past the edge of the outer. A road leaving home.

In front of the platform, there were forty people standing in loose groups on the wooden floor.

All about my age. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Boys and girls. In plain gray training clothes, the same as the ones in the bag on my knee. Talking, in low voices, the way you talk when you’re waiting for something to start.

The door shut behind me.

It wasn’t loud. It was a heavy door, and it closed slowly, and it made a soft thunk when it met the frame.

Forty heads turned.

The talking didn’t stop all at once. It stopped the way the ring street had stopped. Spreading out from the door like rings in water. The ones nearest saw me first, and went quiet. Then the ones behind them followed their eyes and went quiet too. Then the ones behind them. In about four seconds, the whole hall was silent.

Forty people, looking at me.

I stood just inside the door with my bag in my hand and looked back.

I’d thought I’d got used to it. Being looked at. Every person in the dome looked at me the same way. The pilot, the chef, the soldiers at the locks, the people on the ring street pulling their children behind their skirts. Like a loaded gun somebody had handed them.

This was different.

Some of them looked at me like that. Afraid. A girl near the front took a step back without knowing she’d done it. But most of them didn’t look afraid. They looked at me the way you’d look at a story you’d heard all your life, walking in through the door.

They knew me. Every one of them. Not my face. My name.

I saw it go round the room. Mouths moving, very quietly, to the people beside them. I didn’t need to hear it. I could read it on their lips.

Dask.

I looked at them, one group at a time, the way Father taught me to look at a problem. Not all at once. Piece by piece.

They weren’t standing in one crowd. They were standing in families.

I understood it a moment later. Thirty-one Retention families, Crane had said. And these were their children, the second generation, born in the dome. Brothers and sisters, cousins, standing together in little knots of three and four. You could tell them apart. Not just by their faces, though they had their families’ faces. By something else.

Near the windows, a knot of four with hair so red it looked like it had been set on fire. One of them, a boy about my age, was the only person in the hall who was smiling. Not at me, exactly. At the whole room, at the silence, as if it were the funniest thing he’d seen all week.

In the middle of the floor, two girls with pale, almost white-blond hair, standing very straight, very still. The air around them looked different. Colder, somehow, though I couldn’t have said how I knew. One of them was watching me with gray eyes and absolutely no expression at all.

Near the platform, a group of five, dark-haired, all dressed exactly alike, standing in a tight cluster around a tall boy with a hard, narrow face. The lamps directly above them were flickering. Very slightly. As though something in the air was pulling at them.

The tall boy was looking at me too. Not like a story. Not like a loaded gun.

Like something he’d been waiting for.

A door opened at the side of the platform, and Crane came out.

Slowly, with his cane. He went up the three steps to the lectern one at a time, and the whole hall watched him do it, and nobody moved to help. He laid his cane against the lectern and put both hands on it and looked out over the room.

His eyes found me by the door. They stayed there for one second. Then they moved on.

”Good morning,” he said.

He didn’t speak for long. He didn’t need to. He had the kind of voice you leaned toward without meaning to: soft, and warm, and a little hoarse, so you had to be quiet to hear it.

He told them about Avalon. About the green world eleven light-years away, and the kits, and the first wave. He told them that their parents had fought for humanity once, and that the dome had not always been grateful, and that he was sorry for it. He told them that they were the second generation, born inside, stronger and steadier than their parents had ever been. He told them they would be trained for six months, and then they would go.

”You were born for this,” he said. ”I don’t say that lightly. I was there when your parents were made. I’ve watched every one of you since the day you were born. I know what you are.”

I watched the faces around me while he said it. Some of them were shining. The red-haired boy by the windows had stopped smiling and was listening with his head tilted. The white-blond girl with the gray eyes hadn’t moved at all.

The tall boy by the platform, under the flickering lamps, was looking at me.

”One more thing,” said Crane. ”Your class is forty-one, not forty. The last of you arrived this morning.”

He didn’t look at me. He didn’t need to. Forty heads turned anyway.

”Lucas Dask,” said Crane. ”Son of Trevor Dask, who won the war. I trust you’ll make him welcome.”

Then he picked up his cane and went slowly down the steps and out through the side door, and left me standing there.

The barracks was a long low gray building with forty-one beds in it, in two rows, with a locker at the foot of each. The boys’ end and the girls’ end, with a wall between and a washroom on each side.

I’d been given a bed at the far end of the boys’ row. In the corner. Against the wall.

When I got there, there were three empty beds on either side of it.

Not because there weren’t enough boys. I counted. There were twenty-two boys and twenty-two beds, with mine. But somehow, by the time I walked down the row with my bag, the three beds nearest mine had been emptied. The bags that had been on them had moved. Squeezed in somewhere else, doubled up on lockers, shoved under other people’s beds.

Nobody said anything about it. They didn’t need to.

I put my bag on my bed. I sat down on it.

At the other end of the row, the boys had gathered in a loose knot by the door, talking low. I didn’t listen. I didn’t need to listen. I’d been on the ring street. I’d seen the mothers pulling their children behind their skirts.

But a few words came down the row anyway. The way words do, in a long room with a wooden floor.

—killed a man on his porch, my father said. A soldier. Turned him into steam—

—wouldn’t sign, though. Wouldn’t serve. Said he’d rather live in the dirt—

—and ours did. Ours came back and did everything they asked, and he just—

—the crater, though. Did you see the crater? My sister cried for an hour—

I unpacked my bag. Four sets of gray training clothes. Father’s knife. Notebook fifteen. Mother’s photograph, which Genny had slipped into the bag at the last minute, without telling me, wrapped in the yellow socks.

I put the photograph on the shelf over my bed, facing out. The young man on the balcony smiled at the room with his black eyes.

The talking at the other end of the row stopped.

I didn’t look up.

That night, nothing woke at five.

I was awake anyway. I’d been awake most of the night, lying on my back on the narrow bed, looking at the ceiling. The barracks was dark except for a blue lamp over the door. Twenty-one boys breathing at the other end of the room. The faint hum of the vents, carrying in the dome’s air from somewhere far above.

No filter. No sound under the floor, catching and climbing and settling. I’d left it in the corner of my room on the sixtieth floor, with its wire run to the socket and its timer set. It would wake there, at five, in an empty room, and clean nothing.

I thought about Mother, asleep down the hall from it. Breathing without having to think about it.

I thought about Garnet, with a loaf of bread from Thorne & Daughter on the end of her bed.

I thought about Genny’s face as the lift doors closed.

Somewhere in the dark, at the other end of the room, someone was crying.

Very quietly. Trying very hard not to. Muffled into a pillow, the way Genny had cried in the filter shed. A few beds from the door. Small, choking sounds, with long silences between them where whoever it was held their breath and hoped nobody had heard.

Nobody else seemed to have. Or if they had, they were pretending not to.

I lay there and listened to it for a long time.

I didn’t get up. I didn’t think whoever it was would want me to, out of everyone in the room. I didn’t think they’d want the son of the man who turned a soldier into steam on his porch standing over their bed in the dark.

So I did the only other thing I could think of.

I hummed.

Very quietly. Barely at all. The old song, from the orphan halls. The one with no words. The one that meant you weren’t alone in the dark.

I’d never sung it in my life. I’d heard it ten thousand times, coming down the porch steps in the morning.

I only knew the first part. I hummed it twice, as quietly as I could, lying on my back in the dark.

At the other end of the room, the crying stopped.

Not all at once. It caught, and held, and there was a long silence. Then a breath. A long one. Shaky. And then nothing, except twenty-two boys breathing in the dark.

I didn’t hum it again.

I lay there with my eyes open until the blue lamp over the door went white, which was the compound’s idea of dawn.

It was a little after five.