Scarecrow

They called it the Town.

It was on field two, under the biggest lamps, and it had taken the instructors three days to build. We’d watched them doing it from the beam, every time we passed. Walls going up. Concrete blocks. Steel frames. Doorways with no doors. Narrow streets that bent round corners and stopped dead. A little square in the middle with a dry fountain in it. And at the far end, rising over everything, a tower made of scaffolding and steel plate, four stories tall, with a red flag on a pole at the very top.

”It’s a ruin,” said Liam, at breakfast, with great authority. ”From the war. A pretend one. Like the ones out past the dome.” He pointed his fork at me. ”You’ve seen real ones.”

I had. I’d grown up in one. Father used to take me through the old suburbs on salvage days, past the houses with their roofs fallen in and the trees growing out of the kitchens. They didn’t look like the Town. The Town was too neat. Too square. Somebody had built it to look like the idea of a ruin.

But I didn’t say so.

”Squad Eight,” said Sergeant Okafor, at the edge of field two, an hour later. ”You’re up.”

We’d watched four squads go before us. Squad One had taken eleven minutes. Squad Three had taken nine. Squad Two, with Sigmund out in front and Brock smashing through every wall that got in his way and Risa throwing lightning ahead of them down the streets, had taken six minutes and forty seconds, and Sigmund had come out at the far end with the red flag in his fist and looked straight across the field at me.

Risa had come out behind him, and looked at me too. She’d raised one eyebrow. Very slightly. As if to say: I told you I’m better at lightning.

”Rules,” said Sergeant Okafor.

She stood in front of the five of us with her hands behind her back.

”The flag’s at the top of the tower. You get it, you bring it back here. Powers allowed. All of them.” She looked along the line. ”There are things in the Town that will try to stop you. They’re on rails, and they’re padded, and they hit hard. If one of them touches you, you’re out. Sit down where you are and wait. If three of you are out, your whole squad’s out.” She paused. ”The clock starts when you cross the line. Points for time. Points for how many of you come back. Points taken away for anything I don’t like.” She looked at me. ”That’s a long list. Don’t find out what’s on it.”

”Yes, Sergeant.”

”Who’s leading?”

Nobody said anything.

It was Thursday. We had a day left to give her a name. We hadn’t given her one. We’d tried, once, at dinner, and Seraphina had got up and left in the middle of it, and Luna Windsor had finished her soup and then left too, at exactly the same pace, in the other direction.

”Nobody,” said Sergeant Okafor. ”Wonderful.” She stepped back off the line. ”Go when you’re ready, Squad Eight. The clock doesn’t care.”

We crossed the line together.

That was the last thing we did together for about four minutes.

The first street was narrow, with walls on both sides higher than my head, and it ran straight for twenty meters and then bent left. Seraphina was at the front before anybody else had moved. She had her brass lighter out, the way Liam had his, and her thumb on the wheel.

”Left at the bend,” she said. ”Then straight through. I’ll burn anything that moves.”

”Right at the bend,” said Luna Windsor, behind her. Very calm. ”Left is a dead end. I watched Squad Three go left. They lost a minute.”

”Squad Three are idiots.”

”Squad Three are a minute slower than they needed to be. Because they went left.”

”Then we’ll go left faster,” said Seraphina, and went left.

Liam went with her. Of course he did. He was her brother. He grabbed my arm as he went past and pulled, and I went too, because he was pulling, and because I didn’t know which of them was right and I didn’t want to be the one who decided.

Toby stood in the middle of the street, looking one way and then the other.

Luna Windsor looked at him. Then she went right. Alone.

Toby made a small sound, like a kettle, and went after Seraphina.

Left was a dead end.

It was a dead end with a padded steel arm on a rail in it, which came swinging out of a doorway at chest height the moment Seraphina turned the corner. She saw it at the last second. She threw her spark, and it went from a spark to a sheet of fire the size of a door, and hit the padded arm, and the padding went up like dry grass.

It kept coming.

It was on fire now. That was the only difference. It came down the rail at the four of us, burning, swinging, and Liam yelled and threw his own fire at it, which didn’t help at all, and Toby opened his mouth and sang one high clear note, and the air in front of us went hard.

The burning arm hit Toby’s wall and bounced. Sparks went everywhere. Smoke filled the narrow street. Somebody was coughing. Liam, probably. Possibly me.

”Back,” said Seraphina. ”Back, back, back—”

We went back.

We came round the corner into the first street again, and Luna Windsor was standing at the bend, with her arms folded, waiting for us. There was frost on the ground all around her feet in a perfect circle. Behind her, down the right-hand street, I could see a padded arm frozen solid to its rail, with icicles hanging off it.

She didn’t say anything.

She didn’t have to. Her face said a minute, very clearly, in a general’s voice.

Seraphina’s face went red to the roots of her hair, which was already red, so it was more of a general deepening.

”Don’t,” she said.

”I didn’t say anything.”

”You were going to.”

”I was going to say,” said Luna, ”that if we stop standing here, we can still beat Squad Three.”

Seraphina turned round and marched past her down the right-hand street without a word. Luna let her get three paces ahead. Then she followed.

I looked at Liam. Liam looked at me.

”I think that went well,” said Liam. ”Considering.”

It didn’t go well.

It went the same way, over and over, all the way down the streets of the Town. Seraphina wanted to go fast and burn things. Luna wanted to go carefully and freeze things. Every corner, they stopped, and argued, in short sharp sentences, in voices that never got louder, and the air between them got hotter and colder at the same time until I could see it shimmering. Every time, one of them gave in. Every time, the other one made sure she knew it.

Liam tried to make jokes. They didn’t land. Toby stopped trying to keep up with the arguments and just stayed close to me, with his eyes very wide, singing a wall up every time something came at us out of a doorway.

And I didn’t do anything.

That was the part I kept thinking about, afterward. I didn’t do anything. I followed. I kept my eyes down and my hands at my sides, and I looked at the backs of their heads, and I didn’t look at anything else. Not the walls. Not the padded arms. Not the tower.

Because I’d been looking at the Town since we crossed the line. Without meaning to. The way you look at a room when you walk into it. And I knew exactly what it was made of. Concrete. Steel. Paint. Bolts. A lot of sand, in the concrete. More than you’d think.

I knew every brick of it.

I could have put my hand out and taken the whole thing apart in the time it took Seraphina to say left.

And that was what frightened me. Not the arms. Not the clock. That. Because Okafor had said points taken away for anything I don’t like, and she’d looked at me when she said it. And there were forty cadets watching from the edge of field two, and Crane behind the glass of the observation room, and the man from the Council with the gold chain, maybe, and the General, maybe. And they’d all seen the steel.

And they were all waiting for me to do something like that again.

So I didn’t.

I kept my eyes on the backs of their heads, and I followed.

The square was where it all went wrong.

It was the open space in the middle of the Town, with the dry fountain in the center and the tower at the far side. Four streets came into it, one from each direction. And from every one of those streets, the moment we stepped into the open, padded arms came swinging out on their rails. Six of them. Eight. More than any other squad had faced. I found out later that Okafor had added three overnight. I never found out whether it was because of me.

”Tower,” said Seraphina. ”Go. Go. I’ll hold them.”

”Hold them from the fountain,” said Luna. ”It’s the only cover—”

”I don’t need cover—”

Seraphina threw fire at the nearest arm. Luna threw cold at the next one. And they were standing three meters apart, and they’d thrown at the same moment, and they’d both thrown too hard, because they were both angry, and the fire and the ice met in the air in the middle of the square.

I’d never heard a sound like it.

It wasn’t a bang. It was a crack, and a roar, and a hiss all at once, like the whole world clearing its throat. The ice went to steam in an instant. The steam went everywhere. A white wall of it rolled out across the square, hot and wet and blinding, and swallowed the fountain and the tower and the streets and all five of us.

I couldn’t see.

That was the first thing I understood, standing in the white. I couldn’t see anything. Not the walls. Not the arms. Not my own hands. And for the first time since I was four, standing at a window in the dark, I was frightened of not seeing. Because if I couldn’t see, I couldn’t do anything.

Then the steam began to thin, and I could.

And I saw all of it at once.

Liam, halfway up the scaffolding of the tower, where he’d gone when Seraphina shouted go, clinging to a steel strut with both arms, while the whole tower swayed under him. The ice had hit its base. Ice, and then fire, and then steam, on cold steel, all in one second. The bolts had sheared. The tower was leaning. Slowly. Toward the square.

Toby, by the fountain, with his mouth open, singing his wall up against two padded arms coming at him from two sides at once, his face white, his voice cracking.

And behind Toby, the wall of the nearest building, which the steam had hit, and which was hot on one side and freezing on the other, cracking down its whole length, from top to bottom, with a sound like a tree coming down. Starting to fall. Outward. Onto Toby.

Seraphina, on one side of the square, turning, seeing it. Too far away.

Luna, on the other side, turning, seeing it. Too far away.

There wasn’t time to pick one thing.

So I didn’t.

I looked at the Town.

All of it. The square. The fountain. The tower, with Liam on it. The cracking wall over Toby. The arms on their rails. The streets behind us, and the walls along them, and the doorways with no doors, and the bolts, and the paint, and the concrete, and the sand in the concrete. More sand than you’d think.

I didn’t go slowly. I didn’t take it one brick at a time. There wasn’t time for that.

I let it all go.

Not to water. Not to anything clever. I just took the bricks apart, and let them fall back into the simplest thing I could think of, the first thing Father ever taught me to make, standing in the dry dirt of the north field when I was four years old with my hand in his.

Sand.

The Town went soft.

That’s the only way I can describe it. Every wall, every street, every arm on every rail, went soft at once, the way a sandcastle goes when the tide comes in. It didn’t fall. It poured. Down and outward, in a long sighing rush, like breath leaving a body.

The wall over Toby came down on him as a sheet of fine gold sand, and knocked him flat on his back, and buried him to the chest, and that was all.

The padded arms on their rails slumped and spilled, padding and all, into little hills.

The tower went last. It leaned, and leaned, and then all four stories of it turned to sand in the air, still leaning, and came down in a long golden slide into the square. And Liam came down with it, riding the top of it, sliding down a dune that had been a tower a second before, on his back, with his arms out, laughing, all the way to the bottom.

And then it was very quiet.

Field two was a beach.

A long, flat, golden beach, under the big lamps, in a cave under a city, rippling gently in little dunes where the streets had been. Here and there, something stuck up out of it. A steel rail. A bolt I’d missed. The dry fountain, which I hadn’t touched, sitting by itself in the middle of nothing like a birdbath on the moon.

And on the sand at the bottom of the slide, beside Liam, the red flag. On its pole. Which had been steel. Which was now sand, holding the shape of a pole for one more second out of pure surprise, and then not.

The flag fluttered down onto the beach.

I walked across the sand to it.

It was the loudest walk of my life. Every step crunched. Forty people were watching from the edge of the field, and none of them were making any sound at all.

I passed Toby, sitting up in his little drift with sand pouring off his shoulders, staring at me. I passed Seraphina, standing very still, with her lighter still in her hand. I passed Luna Windsor, with frost still on her fingers, and sand up to her ankles.

I picked up the flag.

Liam, lying on his back beside it, looked up at me, with sand in his hair and in his eyebrows and in his ears.

”Best,” he said, ”day of my life.”

I walked back across the beach to the line, and held out the flag to Sergeant Okafor.

She looked at it. She didn’t take it.

”Four minutes and twelve seconds,” said the corporal with the timer, beside her, in a very small voice.

Sergeant Okafor looked at the flag for a long time. Then she looked past me, at field two. At the beach. At the dry fountain, sitting alone in the middle of it.

”It took us three days to build that,” she said.

”Yes, Sergeant.”

”The objective,” said Sergeant Okafor, ”was to take the tower. Not to delete the Town.”

”Yes, Sergeant.”

”Squad Eight,” said Sergeant Okafor, to the corporal, without looking at him, ”zero points.”

The corporal wrote it down.

She still hadn’t taken the flag. She was looking at the beach. And the steel side of her mouth didn’t move, because it couldn’t. But the other side did. Very slightly. Just at the corner. As though something were trying very hard to get out, and she was standing on it.

”Get off my field,” she said. ”All of you. Go and shake out your boots.”

I didn’t notice the blood until we were halfway to the mess.

Toby noticed. He made his little kettle sound and pointed at my face, and I put my hand up to my lip, and it came away red.

My nose was bleeding. Not much. A thin line, running down onto my lip, warm. And behind my eyes, the pressure wasn’t a weight anymore. It was a hand. Pressing. Steady and hard, as if someone were standing behind me with their palms over my eyes, trying to push them back into my head.

”It’s fine,” I said. ”It’s nothing.”

”It’s blood,” said Toby.

”It’ll stop.”

Luna Windsor walked past us.

She was going the other way. Toward the girls’ barracks. Alone, with her back very straight, and sand pouring out of her boots with every step, in two thin golden trails behind her.

She didn’t stop. She didn’t look at me. But as she went past, without breaking her stride, she held something out sideways, at the level of my hand.

A handkerchief. White. Folded into a perfect square.

I took it. It was ice-cold. She’d chilled it. All the way through.

By the time I looked up, she was ten paces on, and hadn’t turned round.

I held the cold square to my nose, and the bleeding stopped.

Seraphina found me after dinner.

I was sitting on the floor in the corridor across from the fern, on my own. Risa had already been and gone. She’d looked at me, and at the handkerchief, and said, ”So that’s what a hundred and forty feels like,” and taken her tray somewhere else, which I’d decided was her way of being kind.

Seraphina didn’t sit down. She stood over me, with her arms crossed.

”You could have done that at the start,” she said.

”Yes.”

”At the line. Before we even went in. You could have looked at it and turned the whole thing into a beach and walked across and picked up the flag. Thirty seconds.”

”Yes.”

”Then why didn’t you?”

I looked up at her.

”Because then it wouldn’t have been the squad,” I said. ”It’d have been me. And everybody watching would have seen that. And Crane would have written it down.” I looked back at the fern. ”And next time, you’d all have stood at the line and waited for me to do it.”

Seraphina was quiet for a long time.

”Toby was under that wall,” she said finally. Not angry. Very low.

”I know.”

”I saw it. I couldn’t get there. I was too far. And I was—” She stopped. ”I was busy being right.”

I didn’t say anything.

She uncrossed her arms. She looked at the fern for a while. Then she turned and walked away down the corridor, and stopped at the end, and said, without turning round:

”Okafor’s putting off the leader thing. She told me. She says Squad Eight doesn’t get a leader until it can walk down a street.” A pause. ”She’s right.”

Then she was gone.

I didn’t learn anything in the reading room that night.

I sat at the table under the lamp, with the immunology book open in front of me, and Father’s anatomy book beside it, and Luna Windsor’s handkerchief folded beside that, still faintly cold, and I didn’t read a word.

I kept thinking about the Town.

It had been so easy. That was the thing. Three days of building. Concrete and steel and bolts and paint and a tower four stories tall. And I’d looked at it, all of it, all at once, and let it go, and it had gone. In a breath. It had been the easiest thing I’d ever done.

And I’d sat in this room for a week, every night, and I still didn’t understand one leaf.

I opened notebook fifteen, and wrote, under the list:

Day 18. Sand. The whole Town. Easy. Nosebleed after. Pressure bad.

And then, under that:

Taking things apart is easy. Father could do it from four kilometers away. I can do it from anywhere I can see.

Keeping a thing alive is the hard part.

Nobody ever taught me that part.

I closed the notebook, and put the handkerchief in my pocket, and went back to the barracks.

Liam had sand in his bed. He’d brought it in his clothes, in his hair, in his boots. He was lying in it, delighted, telling Toby for the fourth time about the slide.

Toby was listening. He was smiling. He hadn’t stopped smiling since dinner.

I lay down between them in the dark, and closed my eyes, and the pressure behind them eased, a little.

I could still feel the cold of the handkerchief in my pocket, through my shirt, right over my heart.