Scarecrow

Liam talked.

That was the first thing I learned about him, and in a lot of ways it was the most important. He talked the way Garnet sang: all the time, about everything, without seeming to need anyone to answer. He talked with his mouth full. He talked while he walked. He talked, I found out later, in his sleep.

”That’s Roan,” he said, sitting me down on the bench at the red-haired table with a hand on my shoulder, ”and that’s Bree, they’re my cousins, Roan’s the one who looks like a startled carrot and Bree’s the one who’s going to punch me in a minute. Roan, this is Lucas. Bree, don’t punch me, it’s his first day.”

Bree punched him. Not hard. On the arm. Then she looked at me, a long look, and nodded once, and went back to her eggs.

Roan, who did look a little like a startled carrot, said, ”Hello,” in a very small voice, and stared at me with his mouth open until Liam leaned over and closed it for him with one finger under his chin.

”He’ll get over it,” said Liam. ”Roan’s the clever one. Clever people take longer to stop staring. It’s all the thinking.”

”And that,” he said, nodding down the table, ”is my sister.”

The girl with the flame-colored hair was sitting at the far end of the bench. She hadn’t moved. She was still sitting with her arms crossed, and she was still glaring. At Liam. And at me.

She had the same long face as Liam, the same freckles, the same hair. But where his face was all wide grin and moving eyebrows, hers was all edges. Her mouth was a straight line. Her eyes were dark, almost black, and very bright.

”Seraphina,” said Liam. ”Sera, if you’re in a good mood. Which you never are, so don’t try it.”

”You’re an idiot,” said Seraphina.

”I know,” said Liam happily.

”You set Brock Haddon on fire in front of the whole mess hall on the first day.”

”His sleeve.”

”In front of Sigmund Friese. Whose father sits on the Council. Who will tell his father. Who will tell ours.” She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. It came out of her very flat and very hot, like the air over a stove. ”And our father will come down here and look at me like it was my fault, because I’m supposed to keep you out of trouble, because I’m always supposed to keep you out of trouble.”

”You’re very good at it,” said Liam.

”I’m terrible at it. Look at you.”

She turned the black eyes on me.

”And now you’ve picked up a stray,” she said.

The table went quiet.

I didn’t say anything. I’d been called worse, by worse, that morning. I looked at her. She looked back.

I’d thought she’d look away. People did, when I looked at them for long enough. She didn’t. She held my eyes, with her arms crossed and her jaw set, as if she were daring me. As if she’d seen the crater from a rooftop and decided she wasn’t going to be afraid of it.

It reminded me of somebody. It took me a second to work out who.

Genny.

”Every time he picks up a stray,” said Seraphina, ”there’s a fight after. And he starts it, and then he wanders off and makes a joke, and I’m the one who has to finish it.” She stood up and picked up her tray. ”So whatever you are, don’t get him killed. I’d have to explain it to our mother.”

She walked away down the mess hall with her back very straight.

Liam watched her go with an expression of enormous fondness.

”She likes you,” he said.

I looked at him.

”No, really,” said Liam. ”That’s how she is when she likes people. You should see her when she doesn’t. She set my uncle’s hat on fire at a wedding.”

The first day wasn’t training. Not really. It was what Liam called ”being counted.”

They gave us numbers on gray armbands. Mine was forty-one. Last.

They weighed us and measured us and made us run. Laps of the great cave, round the packed-earth fields with the white lines, under the lamps on their long chains, while a man in a gray uniform with a clipboard stood in the middle and wrote things down. Not gifts. Nothing about gifts. Just running. Just how far and how fast before you stopped.

I ran.

I’d never run like that before. Not round and round. Not for nothing. In the field, you ran to get somewhere. To the ridge. To the highway. Home before noon.

But I’d walked six miles to the highway and six back. I’d carried water from the creek every summer of my life. I’d dug a grave. I’d been up and down the ridge to the filter’s intake a thousand times. And I’d grown up in air that tried to kill you every time you breathed it, and here I was breathing air that was clean all the way down.

I didn’t stop.

After forty laps, it was just me and Liam and the girl with white-blond hair and gray eyes. Then just me and the girl. The man with the clipboard had stopped writing. Everyone else was sitting on the edge of the field with their hands on their knees, watching.

The girl ran beside me without looking at me. Very straight. Very even. Breathing through her nose. She didn’t speed up. She didn’t slow down. The air around her was cold. I could feel it, running beside her, like running beside an open door in winter.

On the forty-fifth lap she stopped.

Not because she couldn’t go on. I could see that. She just stopped, at the white line, the way you’d stop at the end of a sentence. And walked off the field without looking back.

The man with the clipboard called time a lap later. I stopped.

The cave was very quiet.

Liam was lying flat on his back on the packed earth at the edge of the field with his arms spread out. He lifted his head an inch.

”Show-off,” he said, and dropped it again.

At lunch, Liam ate like it was a competition.

Two trays. Stacked. He went back for a third and was turned away by the woman behind the counter with a ladle, and came back to the table outraged and finished Roan’s instead. Roan didn’t seem to mind. Roan was still staring at me.

”You run like a madman,” Liam told me, with his mouth full. ”Do they teach that out there? In the wasteland? Is it all just running away from things?”

”Mostly walking,” I said. ”Six miles to the highway. Six back.”

”For fun?”

”For parts.”

Liam stared at me. Then he laughed so hard bread came out of his nose, and Bree hit him again.

He asked about everything. He asked about the field, and whether you could really see the sky out there, the real one, not through glass. Whether the stars were actually that many, or if that was just in books. Whether the ash got in everything. Whether we’d had to wear masks all the time. What we ate. What we did at night. He asked about the moon, and when I told him, he put down his fork for the first time all day and stared at me with his mouth open, and then said, very quietly, ”You did that? The white spot? My dad showed me that when I was four. He said it was a meteor.”

”It wasn’t.”

”No,” said Liam slowly. ”I’m beginning to get that.”

He didn’t ask about the crater. He didn’t ask about Father, or the porch, or the soldier. He didn’t ask why my family had never come back.

I found out later he’d decided that on the first morning, before he ever crossed the mess hall. He’d decided I’d had enough people asking.

He told me about his family without being asked.

The Calders were fire. Had been since the program. His father had been one of the first Cinder subjects to wake up and find he could make the air burn. His mother had come out of the next intake the same way. They’d met in the war, in a trench, with the sky on fire over them, and his father always said it was the most romantic moment of his life.

”He’s very loud,” said Liam. ”My dad. We all are. It’s the fire. Gets into your temper. Sera’s the worst. She looks calm, but she’s just better at hiding the smoke.”

He held up the little brass lighter and spun its wheel. A spark jumped off it. And then, instead of dying, the spark grew, and hung in the air over the table, a little ball of flame the size of a walnut, turning slowly.

”We can’t make it from nothing,” he said. ”We need a start. A spark. Something already burning. Then we can do whatever we want with it.” The flame stretched into a ribbon and tied itself in a knot and untied. ”Dad says it’s like being a conductor with no orchestra. You need someone else to play the first note.”

The ribbon of fire went out.

”And they signed,” I said. ”Your parents. The Retention Act.”

It came out before I could stop it.

Liam was quiet for a moment. It was the longest he’d been quiet all day.

”Yeah,” he said. ”They signed.” He turned the lighter over in his fingers. ”They had Sera and me in the dome a year later. Lower floors. Dad’s still got the collar. Not a real collar. A tag. Here.” He touched the side of his own neck, under his ear. ”They put a little chip in. So they know where you are. All of them have one. Sera and I will get ours when we finish training.”

I didn’t say anything.

”He’s not proud of it,” said Liam. ”Dad. He’d never say. But he’s not.” He looked at me. Not grinning, for once. ”He used to tell us about your father. When we were small. He said Trevor Dask was the only one of them with the nerve to look the Council in the eye and say no.” He paused. ”He said it like he wished he’d done it too.”

I looked at the lighter in his fingers.

”Sigmund said—”

”Sigmund says a lot of things,” said Liam. ”His father was put out with everyone else, came crawling back on the Retention Act eight months later, and somehow ended up on the Council voting on everyone else’s collars. Siggy’s spent his whole life telling everyone his father did the right thing.” He shrugged. ”Maybe he even believes it. I’d hate to have to.”

On the way out of the mess hall, someone bumped into me.

Not hard. Not like Brock. More like someone who’d misjudged the doorway on purpose so they could be close enough to say something without anyone else hearing.

It was the thin boy. The one with the sharp face and the big ears, who’d gone white at breakfast when Sigmund said humming. Up close, he was even younger than I’d thought. Fifteen, maybe. Skinny in his gray training clothes, with his armband slipping down his arm.

He didn’t look at me. He looked at the floor.

”Thanks,” he said, very fast and very low. ”For last night.”

Then he was gone, out of the doorway and away down the path toward the barracks, half running.

I stood in the doorway.

Liam stood beside me, watching him go. He didn’t ask what the boy had meant. He’d been at breakfast. He’d seen the boy’s face when Sigmund said it.

”Toby Marsh,” said Liam quietly. ”Youngest in the class. Sixteen next month. His mum’s a sound-shaper, lower floors. His dad didn’t wake up.” He paused. ”He’s been crying every night since we got here. Nobody says anything. We all just pretend we can’t hear.”

He glanced at me sideways.

”Nobody else hummed,” he said.

At dinner, I sat at the loud table again.

I didn’t decide to. Liam just stood up when I came in with my tray and waved both arms over his head until the whole mess hall turned round, and then it would have been stranger not to.

Seraphina was at the far end of the bench again. Arms crossed. Not eating.

She looked up when I sat down.

I looked back.

She didn’t look away. Neither did I. We sat there at opposite ends of the loud table, with Liam talking between us about the best way to set fire to a pudding, and looked at each other for a long time.

Then, very slightly, one corner of her mouth moved.

It wasn’t a smile. Not even close. It was the kind of thing Genny’s mouth did when I’d said something she grudgingly agreed with and would rather die than admit it.

Then she looked down at her tray and started eating, and didn’t look at me again for the rest of the meal.

”See?” said Liam, to nobody, with enormous satisfaction. ”Told you she likes you.”