Scarecrow

She was waiting on the field when the lamp went white.

All forty-one of us came out of the barracks in our gray stream, still half asleep, still pulling on boots, and she was already there. Standing in the middle of the biggest field, under the lamps, alone. Hands behind her back. Feet apart. As if she’d been there all night. As if she’d grown there.

The stream slowed down. Then stopped.

She wasn’t tall. Shorter than Seraphina. Broad, though, and square, built like something that had been made to stand in a doorway and not move. Her skin was dark and her hair was cropped close to her skull, gray at the temples. She wore the same gray uniform as the instructors, but hers was old and soft and patched at both elbows, the way Father’s coat was.

And the left side of her face, from the corner of her mouth down to the bottom of her jaw and back almost to her ear, was metal.

Not a mask. Not a covering. It was her jaw. A smooth curved plate of dull gray steel, fitted to the bone so closely you couldn’t see where she ended and it began. When she moved her mouth, it moved with her. The lamps caught it and slid along it.

She looked at us. All forty-one. Slowly, along the row. Her eyes were very dark and very still.

”Sergeant Maris Okafor,” she said.

Her voice was low and rough, and a little strange, the way a voice would be if half of the jaw it came out of was steel.

”I’m going to be the worst thing that ever happens to you,” she said. ”For six months. After that, if you’re lucky, something worse will come along, on a planet eleven light-years away, and you’ll think of me fondly.” She paused. ”Until then, you’ll think of me with your whole body. Every morning. Every night. Every time you sit down.”

Nobody said anything.

”Laps,” said Sergeant Okafor. ”Until I say.”

She didn’t say until noon.

And she didn’t just watch. She ran with us. The whole time. At the front of the stream for the first hour, then at the back, then down the middle, moving through us like a stone through water. When someone slowed, she was beside them. She didn’t shout. She never shouted, that whole first day. She just ran beside you, and said your number very quietly, and kept running. And you found you’d sped up without deciding to.

At the end of the second hour, she did something to the air.

I felt it before I understood it. My legs got heavy. All at once, as if someone had tied stones to my boots. My arms got heavy. My chest. My head. The air was pushing down on me, the whole weight of the cave pressing on my shoulders, and every step was like climbing.

Around me, people were stumbling. Roan went down on one knee. Bree caught him by the collar and hauled him up and kept running, red in the face.

At the front, Sergeant Okafor ran as easily as she had at the start. As if the weight weren’t there at all.

”Pressure,” Liam gasped, beside me. ”That’s her. She does pressure. She can make the air weigh whatever she wants.” He wheezed. ”She did it to a tank once. In the war. Flattened it. Like a can.”

I’d grown up in air that tried to kill you every time you breathed it. Heavy air, at least, didn’t want me dead.

I kept running.

She noticed. Of course she noticed. She dropped back through the stream, past Liam, past the Calders, and came up beside me, and ran there for a while without saying anything. I felt the weight on me go up. And up. My knees started to shake.

I kept running.

She looked at me sideways. With the steel half of her face toward me. Then she said, very quietly, ”Forty-one,” and went on ahead, and the weight on me went back down to what everyone else had.

She didn’t say anything else to me all morning.

She didn’t treat me differently.

That was the thing I noticed, as the day went on. In the afternoon she put us in pairs and had us carry each other across the field, and then carry packs twice our weight, and then crawl under a net of ropes in the dirt while she walked along the top of it. She shouted, at last, a little, in the afternoon. She shouted at Brock for shoving Toby off the ropes, and at Sigmund for using his lightning to burn a hole in the net instead of crawling, and at Liam for setting a rope on fire to see what would happen.

She shouted at me for being too slow on the ropes. Which I was. I’d never crawled under anything in my life.

She didn’t look at me any differently from the way she looked at anyone. She didn’t step back. She didn’t look at my eyes, or at my hands, or at the air around me. She didn’t watch me like a loaded gun.

She watched me like a sergeant watches a recruit who’s bad at ropes.

I hadn’t known how much I’d needed that until it happened.

At the end of the day, when the lamps went from white to yellow and we were all lying in the dirt at the edge of the field unable to move, she walked down the line of us and said, ”Same time tomorrow,” and walked off toward the long low gray building at the end of the cave where the instructors had their rooms.

Then she stopped and turned round.

”Forty-one,” she said. ”My office. Now.”

Her office was small and bare. A desk. Two chairs. A shelf with a few books on it, old, their spines cracked white. A lamp. No window; there were no windows down here. On the wall behind the desk, a single photograph in a plain frame.

She sat down behind the desk. She didn’t tell me to sit. I stood.

She looked at me for a long time. Not at my eyes. At my face. All of it. The way Mother had looked at me during the rally. Slowly, a piece at a time.

”You’re bad at ropes,” she said.

”Yes, Sergeant.”

”You’ll get better.”

”Yes, Sergeant.”

”You ran under pressure like it wasn’t there.”

I didn’t say anything.

”Where did you learn that?”

”I didn’t learn it, Sergeant. I grew up outside. The air out there is heavier. Not like that. But it pushes.”

She nodded slowly, as though that were what she’d expected.

Then she said, ”Look at the wall.”

I looked at the photograph on the wall behind her.

It was old. Faded, and creased down the middle as though it had been folded and carried in a pocket for a long time before anyone gave it a frame. Twelve people in a ragged line, in gray uniforms that weren’t uniforms anymore, torn and black with smoke. Behind them, the burning wreck of something enormous, half buried in the ground, its hull curving up out of the dirt like the ribs of a whale.

They were young. All of them. Some were laughing. Some looked like they’d forgotten how.

At the end of the line, a girl of seventeen with her head wrapped in a dirty bandage that covered the whole left side of her face. She was sitting on the ground. She looked like she couldn’t stand.

And standing next to her, with one hand on her shoulder, holding her up, a tall young man with dark hair, and black eyes, and a soot-streaked face, looking straight at the camera.

Not smiling. Not like the photograph on the balcony. He looked tired. He looked like he’d been carrying something heavy for a very long way.

I stopped breathing.

”Field Unit Seven,” said Sergeant Okafor quietly. ”Year eleven of the war. The battle at the river crossing. Their ship came down on top of our position at night. We lost twenty of us in the first ten minutes.”

She didn’t look round at the photograph. She didn’t need to.

”I lost my jaw in the next five,” she said. ”A piece of their hull. I was lying in the dirt with half my face gone, and I knew I was going to drown in my own blood, and I couldn’t make a sound to tell anyone where I was.”

The lamp on the desk hummed.

”He found me anyway,” she said. ”Your father. I don’t know how. In the dark, in the smoke, with their ship on fire on top of us. He picked me up and carried me two miles to the aid station. Two miles. With their drones overhead the whole way. And when we got there, they didn’t have anything. No surgeon. No plates. They were going to let me die in a corner, because it was kinder.”

She touched the steel side of her face. Lightly. With two fingers.

”So he took the tread off our own burned-out tank,” she said. ”Out in the yard. And he sat on the ground beside my stretcher for six hours, and he made me a jaw. Out of that. Molecule by molecule. He looked at what was left of mine and he made a new one to match it, exactly, and he put it in.” She paused. ”He’d never done anything like it. He’d only ever done war. He didn’t know how. He said he’d just have to understand it, slow enough that he didn’t get it wrong.”

I couldn’t say anything.

You can do anything. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is doing the right thing slowly enough to understand it.

”It’s been on my face for twenty-one years,” said Sergeant Okafor. ”It’s never once hurt.”

She was quiet for a long time.

Then she said, ”I signed the Retention Act. Eight months after the locks. You know what that is?”

”Yes, Sergeant.”

”Then you know what it means. I came back. I took their medicine. I wear their tag.” She touched the side of her neck, under her ear, the same place Liam had. ”I’ve trained their children for nineteen years. Every class they’ve sent me. Including the first wave.” A pause. ”Including the ones who didn’t come back.”

She looked up at me.

”Your father didn’t sign,” she said. ”I heard. I heard he walked to the dome alone the first winter and went into the Director’s office and came out again and went home to the dirt. I heard what they say about him, now. On the lower floors. In this cave. The man who killed a soldier on his porch.”

”The soldier was going for the stairs,” I said. My voice came out rough. ”I was upstairs. I was six.”

She looked at me for a long time.

”I know,” she said quietly. ”I know he was.”

She got up from behind the desk. She came round it and stood in front of me. I was a head taller than her. She didn’t seem to notice.

”I’m not going to treat you any different, forty-one,” she said. ”Out there on that field. Not for him. Not for anything. You’ll run when they run and crawl when they crawl, and you’ll get shouted at for being bad at ropes, and if you shut your eyes in my mess hall again with a boy like Friese in front of you, I’ll want to know why.” She held my eyes. ”Do you understand?”

”Yes, Sergeant.”

”Good.”

She was quiet for one more moment. Then she put her hand on my shoulder. Just for a second. The same way the tall young man in the photograph had his hand on the shoulder of the girl sitting in the dirt.

”He was the best of us,” said Sergeant Okafor, very quietly. ”Everyone in that picture knew it. Don’t let them tell you different.” She took her hand away. ”And don’t tell anyone I said so. I’ve got a reputation.”

”Yes, Sergeant.”

”Get out,” said Sergeant Okafor. ”Dinner. You’re too thin.”

I got out.

I stood outside her door in the cave, under the long lamps on their chains, for a long time before I could walk anywhere.