Scarecrow

There was one plant in the whole compound.

I’d been looking for it since I woke up. Five o’clock, the way I always woke, in the dark, with nothing under the floor to wake me. I’d lain there listening to twenty-one boys breathe and thought about Sergeant Okafor saying a leaf, and realized I didn’t know where I was going to get one.

We were in a cave. Under a dome. Under a city. There was rock above us, and rock below us, and lamps on chains, and steel, and concrete, and a lot of people who didn’t like me. There wasn’t any dirt. There weren’t any windows. Nothing grew down here except mold in the showers, and I wasn’t starting with mold.

I found it at lunch.

It was in the corridor outside the observation room, the one with the glass wall that looked down on the biggest field. Someone had put it there years ago, in a clay pot on a metal stand, under a lamp that was a little brighter than the others. A fern. Or it had been a fern. It had seven fronds left. Five of them were brown at the edges. Two were still green, more or less, in the middle, if you were being generous.

It looked like the kind of plant that had been put somewhere to make a place look nicer, and then forgotten, and had been dying very slowly and politely ever since, so as not to bother anyone.

I knew how it felt.

I sat down on the floor across the corridor from it, with my back against the wall and my lunch tray on my knees, and looked at it.

I’d always looked at things the same way.

Father taught me when I was five. Not the outside. Down into it. You let the surface go soft, and you go through, the way you’d look through the top of a pond to the stones at the bottom. And then through the stones. And then through whatever the stones were made of. All the way down, until you got to the bricks.

I’d done it ten thousand times. Rocks. Water. Steel. Air. Bread. It was as easy as breathing. Easier. I didn’t have to remember to do it.

So I did it to the fern.

I went through the green. Through the surface of the frond, which was waxy, and thin, and folded in on itself in a way that rock never was. Down into it. And I saw the bricks, the way I always saw them. Carbon. Hydrogen. Oxygen. A lot of water. Nitrogen, a little. Magnesium, sitting in the middle of these strange, beautiful flat rings, hundreds of thousands of them, all packed together. Chlorophyll. I knew the word. I’d never seen one before. I’d never thought to look.

I knew every brick.

I didn’t understand any of it.

That was the thing. That was what I’d felt last night in the reading room, with the three books open in front of me, and couldn’t say. I could see every piece of that leaf. I could have told you exactly what it was made of, down to the last atom. I could have turned it into glass, or water, or gold, in the time it took to blink.

But I didn’t know what it was doing.

It was like being handed a book in a language where you knew all the letters. Every single one. And not one word.

I sat there with my lunch going cold and looked at it until my eyes ached. I tried to go slower. I tried to look at one part at a time. Pick one thing. I picked one little piece of the green frond, the size of a grain of sand, and went down into it, and tried to see it whole.

It was walls.

That was what I saw first. Walls. Thousands of little boxes, packed side by side, each one with a stiff wall around it, like bricks in a building. And inside each box—

”You’re robbing it,” said a voice.

I came up out of the leaf so fast it hurt.

There was a girl standing in the corridor between me and the fern. Not close. Just there, with her arms crossed and her tray balanced on one hip, looking down at me.

She was tall for a girl, a little shorter than her brother, and narrow the way all the Frieses were narrow. Sharp chin. Sharp nose. Straight dark hair pulled back in a tail so tight it looked like it was a punishment for something. Her eyes were gray. Very light gray. The color of the sky in the field just before snow.

I knew the face. I’d seen it twice. Once on a field, throwing lightning that made everybody in the line take a step back. And once, at the demonstration, standing very still beside her brother, while their father talked to Crane through the glass and didn’t look at either of them.

Risa Friese.

”I’m not robbing it,” I said.

”You were looking at it like you were going to rob it.” She looked at the fern. Then at me. ”There’s one plant in this entire cave, and you’re sitting on the floor staring at it like it owes you money. What’s it done to you?”

”Nothing.”

”Then what are you going to do to it?”

”Nothing,” I said. ”I’m just looking.”

”Nobody just looks at anything the way you look at things,” said Risa. ”Everyone’s talking about it. You looked at a steel ball the other day and it turned into a fountain. People are scared to make eye contact with you. Brock asked Okafor if he could wear sunglasses.”

”Did she let him?”

”She made him run forty laps in them,” said Risa. ”In the dark. It was the best thing I’ve seen in this cave.” She looked at me a moment longer. Then she sat down on the floor across the corridor. Not next to me. Beside the fern, with her back against its metal stand, so the dying plant was between us like a chaperone.

She put her tray on her knees and started eating.

I didn’t know what to do. Nobody had sat down next to me since Liam. Nobody had sat down near me since Liam, except Toby, and Toby only sat near me the way a very small dog sits near a very large one: carefully, and ready to leave.

Risa didn’t look ready to leave. Risa looked like somebody who had found the only quiet corridor in the compound and intended to keep it.

”You’re Sigmund’s sister,” I said.

”Yes,” said Risa. ”I’ve been trying to get out of it my whole life. They won’t let me.” She ate a forkful of something gray. ”He’s an idiot, by the way.”

I didn’t say anything.

”I know you’re not going to say it,” she said. ”So I’m saying it. You don’t have to agree. Just so it’s said. My brother is an idiot. He’s not stupid. He’s very clever. He reads more than anyone I know. But he’s an idiot.” She chewed. ”He calls you freak because he’s not creative. He’s been calling people things since he was six. It’s the only thing he’s ever been good at that Father noticed.”

”He’s good at lightning.”

”I’m better at lightning,” said Risa. Not boasting. Just telling me the weather. ”Father didn’t notice that either.” She pointed her fork at me. ”And I’m telling you now, so you don’t get any ideas. I’m not helping you with him. Whatever happens. Whatever he does. He’s an idiot, but he’s my idiot, and I’m not getting in the middle. Don’t ask.”

”I wasn’t going to ask.”

She looked at me suspiciously.

”I wasn’t,” I said. ”I don’t need help with him.”

”No,” said Risa slowly, ”I don’t suppose you do.” She considered this. ”That’s worse, actually. Don’t tell him I said that.”

”I don’t talk to him.”

”Good,” said Risa. ”Then we’ll get along.”

And somehow, sitting on the floor of a cave on either side of a dying fern, we did.

”Your heart’s going very fast,” said Risa, after a while. ”For a boy who’s just looking.”

I looked at her.

She didn’t look up from her tray. ”When I said robbing. It jumped. It’s come down since. About eighty now. Eighty-two.” She chewed. ”You’re very calm for a freak. Brock’s is at a hundred and ten whenever you walk into a room. I can feel it from across the mess. It’s like sitting next to a drum.”

”You can feel that?”

”Everyone’s a little bit electric,” said Risa. As if everyone knew that. ”Hearts. Nerves. Brains. Little sparks, all the time, running up and down. Every person’s like a radio playing their own song.” She tipped her head back against the metal stand. ”When I’m in a room with a lot of people, it’s like standing in a room full of radios. All playing different songs. All at once. The mess is the worst.” She paused. ”That’s why I eat here. It’s quiet here. The fern barely hums.”

”It hums?”

”A little. Everything that’s alive hums a little.” She glanced up at the brown fronds over her head. ”This one’s very quiet. It’s not going to last much longer, I don’t think.”

I sat very still.

I’d spent the whole of lunch looking at that fern. Every brick of it. Carbon and hydrogen and the magnesium in its strange flat rings. And I’d never once thought to look for that. The sparks. The little messages running up and down. The humming.

I’d been looking at the bricks.

I’d never thought to watch the people walking through the gates.

”Can you feel it when something’s wrong?” I said. ”In a person. With their heart. Or their—” I didn’t know the word. ”Their song.”

Risa stopped chewing.

She looked at me properly for the first time. Those very light gray eyes. Measuring. Not the way Crane measured, or the General. The way you’d measure a jump before you took it.

”Sometimes,” she said. ”If it’s very wrong. If I know them.” She looked down at her tray. ”My grandmother’s stopped. When I was eleven. I was in the next room. I felt it go.” She moved a gray lump around with her fork. ”It went very fast, and then very slow, and then it didn’t.”

”I’m sorry.”

”It was a long time ago.” She ate the gray lump. ”Why?”

I didn’t answer straight away.

I hadn’t told anyone. Not here. Not Liam, who’d have told everyone by dinner, out of kindness. Not Toby. Not Okafor, except last night, and only the marker, and only because she’d made me. Everyone in this cave knew my father had turned a man into steam on our porch. Nobody knew my mother was in a wheelchair sixty floors up with a shawl round her shoulders, getting thinner.

I didn’t know why I wanted to tell Risa Friese. I’d known her for ten minutes. Her brother called me freak in the dark.

But she’d sat down.

”My mother’s sick,” I said. ”From the program. Her body’s fighting what they put in her. It’s been fighting it for twenty-four years. It’s losing.” I looked at the fern. ”I want to understand it. All of it. How a body works. Well enough to fix it. Sergeant Okafor says I have to start with a leaf.”

Risa didn’t say she was sorry. She didn’t say anything for a long moment.

Then she reached up over her head without looking, and felt along the fronds of the dying fern, and found the greenest one. Not a whole frond. Just the tip of it, two fingers long, the best green on the plant. She snapped it off.

She held it out to me across the corridor.

”Then you’d better start,” she said. ”And you’d better not kill the rest of it. It’s the only quiet place in the cave.”

I took the leaf.

”Risa.”

Neither of us had heard him coming.

Sigmund was standing at the end of the corridor, with his tray in his hands. He was looking at his sister on the floor beside the fern. Then at me, on the floor across from her. Then at the green leaf in my hand. The air in the corridor started to prickle. The lamp over the fern flickered once.

”Go away, Siggy,” said Risa. ”I’m eating.”

”You’re eating with him.”

”I’m eating near him. There’s a fern in between. It’s very well chaperoned.” She didn’t get up. She didn’t look round. ”Go and eat with Brock. His heart’s going at a hundred and ten. You’ll have lots to talk about.”

Sigmund stood there for a long moment.

He looked at me. I looked back. I didn’t look at anything else, and I kept it soft, and I didn’t go down into anything. I just looked at him. A tall narrow boy with very neat hair, standing at the end of a corridor with his lunch going cold, whose father hadn’t looked at him once through the glass.

He didn’t say freak. He didn’t say anything.

He turned round and walked away, and the lamp over the fern stopped flickering.

Risa let out a long breath through her nose.

”I told you,” she said. ”I’m not getting in the middle.”

”You didn’t get up.”

”No,” said Risa. She went back to her tray. ”That’s not getting in the middle. That’s just not moving. It’s different.”

I didn’t think it was. But I didn’t say so.

That night, in the reading room past the armory, I put the leaf in a cup of water under the lamp, and opened the three books, and Father’s book beside them, and read about walls.

Cells had walls. Plant cells, anyway. Stiff ones, like bricks, made of long strands of sugar woven together. And inside the wall, another wall. Thinner. Softer. Alive. The book called it a membrane. The book said it was the most important thing in the cell, after the library at the center. The book said it decided what came in, and what went out, and what was kept away. The book said that every cell, in every living thing, was always, every single moment, deciding.

How a body knows what’s itself.

I put the book down.

Then I picked one cell. Just one. At the very tip of the leaf in the cup, where Risa’s fingers had snapped it from the frond.

I didn’t go down to the bricks. Not this time. I stopped before that. I stayed up at the level of the cell, the whole of it, the way you’d stand at the edge of a city instead of staring at the stones in one wall. And I didn’t look at what it was made of.

I watched what it was doing.

It took a long time. Most of the hour. My eyes ached and then burned, and the pressure behind them came, and sat down, and stayed. I didn’t stop.

And slowly, very slowly, I started to see it.

The wall wasn’t still. That was the first thing. I’d thought it was still. It was moving all the time. Little gates in it, thousands of them, opening and closing. Opening for water. Opening for something that came in, and closing again. Turning things away. And all along the soft inner wall, very faint, so faint I’d never have seen it if Risa hadn’t told me to look, there were sparks. Tiny charges. One side of the wall a little different from the other. Messages, going in and out.

It hummed.

Not much. A leaf, in a cup, under a lamp, snapped off a dying fern. But it hummed.

At eleven, the soldier came to the door and said, ”Okafor says time.”

I closed the books.

I opened notebook fifteen to the list, and under 1. Cells, very small, I wrote:

One. Walls that choose. They hum.

It wasn’t much. One cell, out of more cells than there were stars over the field. I didn’t understand what it was doing. I only understood that it was doing something, and that I’d never once in my whole life thought to watch.

It was a start.

I woke at five.

I didn’t go back to sleep. I got up and went down the long corridor in the dark, past the mess, past the call room, to the corridor outside the observation room, where the fern sat in its clay pot under the lamp.

The soil in the pot was dry and hard and pulling away from the sides.

I didn’t touch the fern. I didn’t look into it. I wasn’t ready for that, and Okafor would know, somehow, and I’d never see the inside of the reading room again.

But I looked at the air over the pot. And I found the water in it. A little. Not much. Floating there, the way it always floated, in every room in the world. And I gathered it, slowly, a little at a time, and let it fall.

It rained, for about a minute, over one dying fern in a cave under a city.

Then I went back to bed.

At lunch, I went to the corridor with my tray. Risa was already there, sitting with her back against the metal stand, eating something gray.

She looked at the dark, wet soil in the pot. Then up at me.

”You watered the fern,” she said.

”It was thirsty.”

”You made it rain. In a cave. On a fern.” She looked at me for a long moment, with those light gray eyes. ”You’re very strange. You know that?”

”Yes.”

”Good,” said Risa. ”As long as you know.” She went back to her tray. After a moment, without looking up, she said: ”It’s humming more.”

I sat down across the corridor, on the other side of the fern, and ate my lunch.

We didn’t talk much. We didn’t need to. It was the only quiet place in the cave.