Scarecrow

There was a new name on the door.

It was the night after the Town. I’d come down the corridor past the armory at ten, the way I did every night now, with notebook fifteen under my arm and sand still in my boots, and stopped in front of the reading room to wait for the soldier to check his list.

The list was a card in a little brass frame screwed to the door. OFFICERS AND AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL, it said at the top, in old faded type. Under that, eleven names in eleven different hands. Under those, in Okafor’s square printing, the newest one: DASK, L. (2200–2300).

And under that, in the same square printing, in fresher ink:

WINDSOR, L. (2200–2300).

I stood there and looked at it for a long time.

”Problem?” said the soldier.

”No,” I said. ”No problem.”

I went in.

She was already there.

She was sitting at the table in the far corner, the one by the shelves of military history, with a lamp pulled close and a book open in front of her. A big book. Gray cloth, with a number on the spine instead of a title. She was sitting very straight, the way she always sat, with her silver hair tucked behind one ear and her chin on one hand. She didn’t look up when I came in.

The room was very quiet.

There were four tables. Hers was in one corner. Mine, the one I’d sat at every night for two weeks, was in the opposite corner, by the science shelves, where the lamp didn’t quite reach. Between us there were two empty tables and about six meters of cold floor.

I walked across it. My boots crunched. There was still sand in them. There was always going to be sand in them.

I sat down at my table. I took down the immunology book, and the cell biology book, and Father’s anatomy book, and put them in a row. I took out the cup with the fern leaf in it, which I’d been carrying back and forth in my pocket wrapped in wet paper, and set it under the lamp. And then I took out the handkerchief.

I’d washed it. In the showers, at five in the morning, with the soap from the dispenser, before anyone else was up. I’d dried it on the lamp over my bed. I’d folded it back into a square. Not as perfectly as she had. But square.

I looked at it for a while.

Then I got up again, and walked the six meters back across the floor, crunching, and put it down on the corner of her table. Next to her elbow. Without saying anything.

She didn’t look up.

But her eyes moved. Down, to the white square beside her elbow. Then back to her book.

She nodded. Once. Very slightly. The way Okafor nodded at a recruit who’d done something right and wasn’t going to be told so.

I went back to my table and sat down.

Neither of us said a word for the rest of the hour.

It went on like that.

Every night at ten I came down the corridor, and she was already there. Every night at eleven the soldier came to the door and said time, and she closed her book and stood up and walked out without looking at me, and I followed a minute later, so we weren’t walking down the corridor together. In between, we sat in our corners, with the two empty tables between us, and read.

I didn’t know why she was there.

I thought about it, at first. More than I should have, when I was meant to be reading about the hunters in the blood. Why the General’s daughter would want an hour a night in a cold room full of dust. Why Okafor had put her name on the door, under mine, in fresh ink, the night after the Town. Whether she’d asked. Whether Okafor had asked her.

Then I stopped thinking about it, because I had work to do, and the hour was very short.

But I noticed things.

I noticed she always took the same table. I noticed she always pulled the lamp to the same place, a hand’s width from the edge of the book. I noticed she read very fast, faster than anyone I’d ever seen, faster than Genny, turning the pages with one finger at the corner, and that every so often she stopped, and went back, and read one page again very slowly, with her lips pressed together.

I noticed the books were all the same. Gray cloth, with numbers on the spines. She took them from the bottom shelf in the military history corner, one a night, in order. 31. 32. 33.

I noticed that the room was colder when she was in it.

Not much. Just a little. Enough that by the end of the hour, the water in the cup with the fern leaf had a thin skin of ice on it, every night, and I had to warm it in my hands before I put the leaf back in my pocket.

I don’t think she knew she did it.

I never told her.

On the third night, I tried to fix a cell.

I’d been watching the fern leaf for nearly two weeks. One cell at a time. I could see them now without trying. The walls. The gates opening and closing. The little sparks along the inner walls. The library at the center of each one, with all its plans coiled up inside it, too small and too tightly wound to read. I couldn’t read those yet. I didn’t know if I ever would.

But I knew what a living cell looked like. And I knew what a dead one looked like.

Because the leaf was dying.

It had been dying since Risa snapped it off. Of course it had. It had no roots. It was a piece of a plant in a cup of water. Every night, there were more cells at the edges that had stopped. The gates didn’t open. The sparks were gone. The walls were still there, and everything inside them was still there, every brick. But nothing moved.

I picked one. A dead one. At the very edge of the leaf, where it was going brown. Right beside a living one, so I could see them both at once.

And I looked at the living one, very carefully, for a long time. Every brick. Every part. Where everything was, and how much of it.

Then I looked at the dead one. And I fixed it.

Slowly. One brick at a time. The way Father had made Okafor’s jaw. I found every place where the dead cell was different from the living one next to it. Every broken thing. Every piece that had come apart, or leaked out through the wall, or turned into something else as it died. And I put each one back. Exactly. Exactly where it was in the living cell. Exactly what it was.

It took me forty minutes.

When I’d finished, the dead cell was perfect. I’d never made anything so carefully in my life. It was the same as the living one beside it, in every way I could see. Every brick in its place. The walls whole. The library at the center coiled up tight, every thread of it where it should be.

I sat back and watched it.

The gates didn’t open.

There were no sparks.

Nothing moved.

I watched it for ten more minutes. I watched it until my eyes burned and the pressure behind them started pressing, hard, the way it had on field two. I watched it until I understood.

It was perfect. It was exactly right. It was a perfect, exact copy of a living cell.

And it was dead.

Everything was there. Every brick. And it was dead, because the bricks weren’t what made it alive. Whatever made the living cell beside it open its gates, and spark, and hum, wasn’t any of the things I could see. Or it was all of them, at once, moving, in an order I didn’t know, the way a song isn’t any of its notes.

I could build a cell. I’d just done it.

I couldn’t make one live.

I put my elbows on the table and my face in my hands, and sat there.

When I took my hands away from my face, Luna Windsor was looking at me.

From across the room. Over the top of book 33, with her chin still on her hand. Not the way the others looked at me, on the field, at meals. Not afraid. Not measuring. Just looking. As though I were a page she’d come back to, to read again, slowly.

Our eyes met.

She didn’t look away straight away. I’d thought she would. People did. She held it, for one long second, with her pale face perfectly still.

Then she looked back down at her book, and turned the page, and didn’t look up again.

At eleven, the soldier came, and she closed the book and walked out, and I sat there for my minute, alone, with the perfect dead cell under the lamp.

The water in the cup had a skin of ice on it.

I went to the fern at five the next morning, the way I’d gone every morning since I made it rain.

It was better. That was the strange thing. I’d been so busy with the leaf in the cup that I hadn’t really looked at the plant it came from. Not properly. Only at the soil, every morning, to make sure it was wet.

I looked now.

The five brown fronds were still brown. That wasn’t going to change. But the two green ones were greener. They’d lifted a little, the way a person lifts their head when they’ve been given a drink. And at the base of the plant, down in the dark among the old stems, almost too small to see, there was something new. A little tight green curl, no bigger than the end of my finger. Coiled up like a fist. Like a spring.

A new frond.

I crouched down in front of the pot and looked at it for a long time.

I hadn’t made it. I hadn’t touched the fern. Not once. I’d promised Okafor, and I’d promised Risa, and I’d kept it. All I’d done was give it water. Every morning, out of the air. The way rain would have, if there were any rain down here.

And the fern had done the rest itself.

I thought about the perfect dead cell under the lamp. Every brick in its place. Forty minutes of the most careful work I’d ever done. And it had done nothing at all.

And here was the fern, with nothing done to it but water, making something new out of itself in the dark.

I sat back on my heels in the empty corridor.

The soil in the pot was gray. Old. It had been there for years, Risa said, maybe since before the program. I looked into it, the way I’d have looked into the dirt in Father’s fields. Down to the bricks. It was tired soil. Almost nothing in it. A little iron. A lot of sand. Hardly any nitrogen at all, and nitrogen was the thing every growing thing was hungry for. Father taught me that in the north field when I was seven, making the soil for the wheat.

The fern was trying to grow out of almost nothing.

I didn’t touch the fern.

I looked at the soil. At a little of the sand in it, near the edge of the pot, away from the roots. And I made it into something else. Not much. A pinch. Nitrogen, and a little phosphorus, and a little potassium, the way Father did it for the wheat. The things a plant needs, sitting in the dirt, where the roots could find them if they wanted to.

Then I gave it water, and went to breakfast.

That night, in the reading room, I didn’t try to fix anything.

I sat with the leaf in its cup, and I watched the living cells, and I didn’t look at their bricks at all. I watched what they took in through their gates. What they let out. What they were hungry for. Water, mostly, but not only water. Little things. Sugar. Salts. Things the book had names for and I was only just learning. Every cell, all night, reaching out through its walls for the things it needed to keep itself going, and building itself out of them, piece by piece, the way the fern was building its new frond in the dark.

Making itself.

You couldn’t make a cell live. Not by putting the bricks in the right places. I’d tried. The bricks didn’t care.

But a living cell made itself, all the time, every second. If it had what it needed. If nothing was stopping it.

I opened notebook fifteen and wrote it down, before I could lose it.

Day 21. You can’t build a living thing. I tried. It stayed dead.

But living things build themselves. All the time. If they have what they need.

Don’t make the cell. Give the cell what it needs to make itself.

And then, under that, slower:

Mother’s cells are alive. They’re building themselves every day. They’re just spending everything they have on the fight.

I looked at that for a long time.

Across the room, Luna Windsor turned a page.

On Sunday, Mother’s marker had come down two points.

”Settling,” said Dr. Halloway, over Mother’s shoulder, on the screen in the booth that didn’t quite close. ”Like I said.”

”You said usually.”

”And this is the usual,” said Dr. Halloway. ”Don’t get used to it. But don’t lose sleep over it either.” She looked at me through the screen. ”You look like you’ve been losing sleep.”

”I’m fine.”

”He’s got his father’s way of saying that,” said Mother, from the wheelchair, and smiled.

I told her about the fern. Not about the reading room. Not about the dead cell. Just the fern, and the rain, and the new curl at the bottom of the pot. She listened to all of it with her hands folded in her lap.

”Your father used to talk to the wheat,” she said, when I’d finished. ”Did you know that? In the first year. Before you were born. He’d go out at night and walk up and down the rows talking to it. I asked him what he said. He said he was asking it what it wanted.” She smiled. ”He said it never answered. But he said if you listened long enough, you could tell anyway.”

Garnet wanted to know if the fern had a name.

I said no.

She said that was very rude, and that it should be called Fernando, and that I should tell it she said hello.

I said I would.

The next morning, at five, I did.

On the fifth night, Luna Windsor fell asleep.

I didn’t notice at first. I was deep in the immunology book, in the chapter on how the hunters in the blood learned what to hunt, which was the hardest chapter yet and which I’d been reading for three nights. When I finally looked up, rubbing my eyes, the room was very still. Stiller than usual.

She was asleep with her head on her arm, on the open pages of book 34.

Her face was turned toward me. In sleep, it wasn’t still at all. It was tired. Younger. There was a crease between her eyebrows, as though even asleep she were frowning at something on a page. Her silver hair had come out from behind her ear and fallen across her cheek.

The clock over the door said ten to eleven.

At eleven, the soldier would come. He’d say time. And he’d find the General’s daughter asleep on a book in the reading room, and he’d tell somebody, because soldiers always told somebody. And it would get to Okafor, or worse, to the General.

I sat there for a minute, not knowing what to do.

Then I got up and walked across the room. Quietly, this time, on the sides of my boots, so the sand didn’t crunch. I stopped at the empty table next to hers.

I could see the page under her arm.

I hadn’t meant to look. But I couldn’t help it. It was the way I was made. Things were in front of my eyes, and I saw them.

It was a report. Typed, on thin paper, bound into the gray book with dozens of others. At the top, it said NORTHERN FRONT. YEAR ELEVEN. AFTER-ACTION. RIVER CROSSING. And halfway down the page, where her arm didn’t quite cover it, a list of names under a heading.

FIELD UNIT 7.

And one line, near the bottom of the list, that someone had underlined. Not in the type. In pencil. Faintly. A long time ago, maybe. Or a few minutes ago.

Subject 0142 (DASK, T.). Status: returned to line. Commendation recommended. Commendation denied by order of Front Command.

Under it, in the same faint type, the name of the officer who had signed for Front Command.

I didn’t read it. I made myself not read it. I looked away, at the shelves, at the lamp, at anything.

But I’d already seen the first word. It was a rank. General.

I stood there for a long moment with my heart going hard. Risa would have heard it from across the cave.

Then I reached out and tapped the table beside Luna Windsor’s hand. Twice. Not loud.

Her eyes opened.

She didn’t start. She didn’t jump. She just opened her eyes and was awake, all at once, the way a soldier wakes, and looked at me, standing over her table at ten to eleven. Then, slowly, at the page under her arm. Then back at me.

Something went across her face. Very fast. I couldn’t read it.

”Time in ten minutes,” I said. Very quietly.

They were the first words either of us had said in that room.

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she closed book 34. She closed it carefully, with both hands, over the underlined line, as if she were putting a lid on something.

She didn’t say anything.

I went back to my table. When the soldier came, she was sitting up very straight, with book 35 open in front of her. She’d already taken it down off the shelf.

On the seventh night, the new frond on the fern opened.

I saw it at five that morning. The little tight green curl had unrolled, all the way, overnight, into a frond as long as my hand. Bright green. Brighter than anything else in the whole cave. Every cell in it humming, if you knew how to look.

Risa saw it at lunch, and sat down beside the pot, and looked at it, and then at me.

”Fernando,” she said. ”Garnet named it. Liam told everyone.”

”Of course he did.”

”It’s humming,” said Risa. ”A lot. I can feel it from the mess.” She looked at the new frond for a while. Then at me, with her light gray eyes. ”You didn’t touch it.”

”No.”

”You just gave it things.”

”Yes.”

Risa nodded slowly. ”Huh,” she said, and went back to her tray, and didn’t say anything else. But she sat closer to the pot than usual, the whole meal, with her shoulder almost against the stand.

That night, at eleven, when the soldier came, Luna Windsor closed book 36 and stood up and walked to the door the way she always did. Straight-backed. Not looking.

She stopped in the doorway.

She stood there with her hand on the frame and her back to the room for a long moment. I waited. The soldier waited. Something in the cold air of the reading room waited.

Then she turned her head, just enough. Not all the way. Just enough that I could see the edge of her face in the light from the corridor.

She looked at me. At my table. At the cup with the fern leaf in it, and the skin of ice on the water, and the three books, and Father’s anatomy book with its gray canvas cover.

She opened her mouth.

Then she closed it again, and went out, and her footsteps went away down the corridor, even and unhurried, until I couldn’t hear them anymore.

I sat at my table and counted to sixty, the way I did every night.

Then I warmed the cup in my hands until the ice was gone, and went to bed.