Scarecrow

”Forty-one,” said Sergeant Okafor. ”Front.”

It was the next morning. We’d run our laps under pressure. We’d crawled under the ropes, and I’d been less bad at it, and she hadn’t said anything, which Liam told me afterward was the highest compliment she’d ever paid anyone. Now we were standing in a long gray line at the edge of the biggest field, sweating, waiting for whatever came next.

She hadn’t said anything to me since her office. She hadn’t looked at me any differently. I’d half thought I’d imagined it. The photograph on the wall. The hand on my shoulder.

I stepped out of the line.

”Everyone in this class showed what they could do,” said Sergeant Okafor. Loud, so the whole line could hear. ”Everyone except you. You’ll run when they run and crawl when they crawl. And you’ll show when they show.”

The line went very quiet.

I looked at the glass wall along the side of the field.

Crane was behind it. On his stool, with his cane across his knees. And beside him, more people than yesterday. Instructors. White coats. A man in a dark suit with a heavy gold chain around his neck, who I didn’t know. They’d all come. They’d all been told.

I looked back at Sergeant Okafor.

She was looking at me with her dark, still eyes. Not like a loaded gun. Like a sergeant looks at a recruit.

”Something small,” she said. Quietly, this time. Just for me. ”Pick one thing. Look at that one thing. Nothing else. Not the glass, not the line, not the lamps. One thing.” A pause. ”Your father used to say it to the new ones. In the unit. Pick one thing.”

I’d never heard him say it.

I’d never needed to. I’d been four, and the moon had been in the window.

There was a target set up in the middle of the field. A steel ball, the size of my head, sitting on top of a tall steel post. A big one. It must have weighed as much as I did. Brock had tried to dent it on the first day and only scuffed it.

I walked out to it.

Forty people watched me do it. I could feel every one of them on the back of my neck. I could feel the glass wall on my left, and Crane behind it, and the man with the gold chain. I could feel Sigmund in the line, the air prickling around him. I could feel Liam, holding his breath. I could feel, very faintly, the cold place in the line where Luna Windsor was standing.

I stopped about ten feet from the post.

And I felt the floor of me shift.

Not much. Just a little. The hot thing, stirring, at all the eyes. Down under the boards of me, turning over in its sleep. The pressure in my ears. The air in front of me, starting to go tight.

Not here. Not with all of them. Not with Liam standing there and Toby at the end of the line.

Pick one thing.

I looked at the ball.

Just the ball. Nothing else. I let everything else go soft and gray at the edges, the way the world goes when you stare at one thing too long. The post. The field. The lamps. The line. The glass. All of it, fading, until there was nothing in front of me but a steel ball on a stick, the size of my head, catching the light.

I looked at it the way Father taught me. Not at the outside. Down into it. Iron. Carbon, a little. A few other things, very little, scattered through. All of them packed tight together, in a lattice, like bricks in a wall, holding each other up.

I knew steel. I’d made the hinges for the filter shed out of riverbed rock when I was eleven. I’d made the blade of a knife. I knew every brick in that wall.

And I knew water. I’d known water since I was four years old, standing at a window in the dark, looking at the moon.

I didn’t make it all at once. That was the thing. I didn’t let go. I took it one brick at a time. I took the iron, and the carbon, and the little scattered other things, and I unmade them, slowly, down to their pieces, and I put the pieces back together the other way. Hydrogen. Oxygen. Two and one. Over and over. Starting at the top of the ball and working down.

It went silver, then clear.

For one second, the steel ball on top of the post was a ball of water. Perfectly round. The size of my head. Hanging there in the air with the lamps shining through it, holding its shape for one heartbeat out of pure surprise.

Then it fell.

I didn’t let it land.

I followed it down. With my eyes. The whole way. I watched it come off the top of the post and start to lose its shape. Stretching. The bottom of it flattening, the sides bulging, the top pulling up into a point. Splashing outward even before it hit anything, a crown of droplets lifting off the edges like a flower opening.

A foot above the ground, I turned it back.

All of it. In the middle of its fall. Every drop. Hydrogen and oxygen, back to iron and carbon, the bricks back in their wall, so fast it hardly felt like doing it at all.

It hit the packed earth with a sound like a bell.

And stayed there.

A splash. In steel. A crown of steel droplets, frozen in the act of flying outward from a center, every one of them a perfect bead, some still in the air on thin steel threads that had been streams of water a heartbeat ago. The size of a cartwheel. Gleaming under the lamps.

It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever made.

I hadn’t meant it to be. I’d only meant to turn it back.

The cave was completely silent.

Not the quiet of people who’d seen something. Not the quiet of people waiting to see something. A different quiet. I’d heard it once before. On the ring street, when the people stopped and stared, and a mother pulled her little boy behind her skirt.

I looked up from the splash.

The line was very still. Forty people, looking at the steel flower on the ground, and then at me. Liam had his mouth open. Toby had his hand over his. Brock, next to Sigmund, had taken a step back, all the way out of the line, without seeming to know he’d done it. Seraphina, at the end of the Calders, had uncrossed her arms.

Behind the glass, the man with the gold chain had stood up. He was talking fast to Crane. Crane wasn’t answering. He was looking at the splash.

And Luna Windsor, in the middle of the line, very straight, very still, was looking at me.

She hadn’t looked at the splash at all. Only me.

”Back in line, forty-one,” said Sergeant Okafor.

Her voice was perfectly ordinary. As if I’d done twelve push-ups.

I walked back to the line. The line moved apart to let me in, more than it needed to. Nobody looked at me. Everybody looked at me.

As I passed her, Sergeant Okafor said one word. Very quietly. Out of the steel side of her mouth, so nobody else could hear.

”Good.”

I took my place in the line beside Liam. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t make a joke. For the second time in four days, Liam Calder had nothing to say.

Then, out of the corner of his mouth, he said, ”That man behind the glass. With the gold chain.”

I looked.

The man in the dark suit was still standing. Still talking to Crane, low and fast, with one hand jabbing at the glass toward the splash on the field. He was tall, and narrow, with short neat dark hair going gray. He had a hard, careful face.

I’d seen that face before. Younger. Across a mess hall, with its chin on its hand.

”Senator Konrad Friese,” said Liam. ”Sigmund’s father.”

I looked down the line.

Sigmund was standing very straight in his place among the Frieses, looking through the glass at his father. His father wasn’t looking at him. His father hadn’t once looked at the line, or at his son, or at his daughter Risa standing beside him. His father was looking at the steel splash on the field, and at me, and talking to Crane.

I watched Sigmund’s face while he watched his father not look at him.

Then Sigmund turned his head, and found me watching, and his narrow face went perfectly blank.

They didn’t take the splash away.

They left it there, in the middle of the field, gleaming under the lamps. Sergeant Okafor ran us round it all afternoon. Laps, under pressure. Every time I passed it, I could see people looking at it. Then at me. Then quickly away.

At dinner, there was more room at the loud table than there had been at breakfast. Roan sat at the far end. Bree stayed where she was, but she watched me while she ate, the way you’d watch a dog you weren’t sure about.

Liam sat next to me and ate three trays and talked about nothing at all, loudly, for the whole meal, so that nobody else at the table had to.

Seraphina sat at the far end. She didn’t glare. She didn’t look at me at all. She ate her dinner looking at her tray, with an expression on her face I couldn’t read. When she got up to leave, she stopped beside our end of the table, and stood there for a moment.

”Was it hard?” she said.

I looked up at her.

She was looking at me with her black eyes. Not angry. Not daring me. Just asking.

”Turning it back,” she said. ”In the air. Was that hard?”

Nobody had asked me that. Not ever. Not about anything. Not the moon, or the hill, or the stone, or the wall. They asked what I could do. They asked how big. They asked how far. Nobody had ever asked if it was hard.

”Yes,” I said. ”The water was hard. Keeping it slow.”

She nodded slowly, as though that were the answer she’d thought it would be.

”The spark’s hard,” she said. ”Out of nothing. Everyone thinks it’s easy because it’s small.” She paused. ”It isn’t.”

Then she walked away down the mess hall, with her back very straight, before I could say anything.

Liam watched her go.

He didn’t say see, she likes you. He didn’t say anything at all. He just looked at me sideways for a long moment, with an odd expression on his long freckled face, and then went back to his third tray.

That night, the barracks was quiet in a new way.

Nobody talked at the far end of the row. Nobody whispered. Twenty-one boys lay in their beds in the blue lamplight, and I lay in mine in the corner with three empty beds on either side of me, and you could have heard a pin drop.

Then, from somewhere near the door, a cool, careful voice said, very clearly, into the dark:

”Freak.”

Nobody laughed.

Nobody said anything at all.

But nobody told him to stop, either. And I lay there in the dark and listened to the word go out into the long room and settle there, among the beds, like dust, like the steel splash sitting on the field outside. Something everyone had seen. Something that was going to be there in the morning.

I didn’t answer. I looked at the ceiling.

There was a pressure behind my eyes.

I noticed it then, lying there. I didn’t know how long it had been there. Since the field, maybe. Since the water. Not pain. Not really. Just a weight, very faint, sitting just behind my eyes, like the beginning of a headache that hadn’t decided yet whether to come.

If you start getting headaches, Lucas. Out there. You tell someone. You write it down.

I reached up in the dark, to the shelf over my bed, past Mother’s photograph and the yellow socks, and found notebook fifteen and Father’s pen.

I couldn’t see the page. I wrote it anyway, by feel, very small, at the bottom of the list.

Day 5. Pressure behind the eyes. After the steel.

Then I put it back on the shelf, and lay with my hands folded on my chest, and looked up at the dark ceiling of the barracks, and thought about a tall young man with black eyes in a photograph on a sergeant’s wall, sitting on the ground for six hours making someone a jaw, slowly enough that he didn’t get it wrong.

At the other end of the row, very softly, somebody started to hum.

Not me.

The old song. The first part, twice. Badly. Off-key, and shaky, and stopping and starting again, the way you’d hum something you’d only heard once in the dark and were trying very hard to remember.

Toby.

I lay there and listened to him get it wrong, both times, all the way through.

I didn’t hear anyone say freak again that night.