Scarecrow

She spoke first.

It was the eighth night. I’d come in at ten, and she was already there, the way she always was, at her table in the far corner with a gray book open in front of her and the lamp a hand’s width from its edge. I’d walked across the cold floor to my own table, crunching. I’d taken down my books. I’d put the cup with the fern leaf under the lamp.

I’d been reading for about twenty minutes. The hardest chapter yet. How the hunters in the blood learned what to hunt. It turned out they weren’t born knowing. They were taught. When they were young, all of them, in one small place in the chest, they were shown every mark the body had. Every single one. This is you. This is you. This is you. And any hunter that tried to attack one of those marks, while it was still young, while it was still learning, was killed before it ever got out into the blood.

What was left knew what to leave alone.

I was reading that paragraph for the third time when she said, from across the room, in her low clear voice that didn’t go up or down:

”You saw the page.”

I looked up.

She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at her book. Book 37. But she’d stopped turning pages.

”Last week,” she said. ”When I fell asleep. You saw it.”

I could have lied. I thought about it, for about as long as it takes to breathe in.

”I saw the line,” I said. ”The one in pencil. Not the name.”

Her eyes came up. Light, and very pale, almost no color in them at all. Like ice on a pond when the sky is white.

”Why not?”

”I didn’t think it was mine to read.”

She looked at me for a long time.

Then she closed book 37, carefully, with both hands. She stood up. She took it, and walked across the room, across the six meters of cold floor and past the two empty tables, and stopped in front of mine.

She was holding book 34. Not 37. She’d had it under the other one all along.

She put it down on my table, beside the cup with the fern leaf in it. She opened it to the page. She didn’t have to look for it. It fell open there by itself, the way a book does when someone has opened it to the same place a hundred times.

She put one finger at the bottom of the page, under the line in pencil.

Under it, in faded type, was the name of the officer who’d signed for Front Command.

Gen. A. Windsor.

”My father,” said Luna Windsor.

I didn’t say anything for a while.

Neither did she. She stood by my table with her finger on the page. The room got colder. The water in the cup by the lamp grew its skin of ice, and then thickened, and then went white.

”He’s on every one,” she said finally. ”Every report from the northern front. Eleven years of them. Two hundred and six. They’re all on that bottom shelf. Somebody brought them down here when the program started and nobody’s opened them since. The dust was a finger thick.” She took her hand off the page. ”I’ve read thirty-seven. I’m going to read them all.”

”Why?”

She was quiet for a moment.

”Because he told me the war was won by soldiers,” she said. ”Ordinary ones. People like him. He told me the modified were weapons. Useful weapons. Very expensive. Very dangerous. Like tanks. He said you don’t give a tank a medal.” She looked down at the page. ”I believed him. My whole life. It’s what everyone believes, on the upper floors.”

”And now?”

”And now I’ve read thirty-seven reports.” Her voice didn’t change. It never changed. ”Field Unit Seven held the river crossing for nine hours with twenty people dead in the first ten minutes. The report says it was held by Subject 0142, acting without orders, under sustained fire. Then it says commendation recommended. And then it says denied. And then my father signed it.” She paused. ”That’s not a tank. Tanks don’t act without orders. Tanks don’t carry anyone two miles.”

I looked up at her.

”Sergeant Okafor,” I said.

”She came to my bunk,” said Luna, ”the night after the Town. While everyone was at dinner. She didn’t say anything about the sand. She didn’t say anything about Seraphina, or the tower, or the steam. She said, I hear you think you know what the modified are, Windsor.” Luna’s mouth moved, very slightly, at one corner. Not a smile. The place where one would go. ”And then she said there was a shelf in a room past the armory that she thought I should read, all the way to the end, before I decided. And she said she’d put my name on the door.”

”Under mine.”

”Under yours,” said Luna Windsor. ”She said that was on purpose.”

The room was very cold.

She didn’t go back to her table.

She pulled out the chair on the other side of mine, the one nobody had ever sat in, and sat down in it, very straight, with her hands folded on the table in front of her. Across the cup with the fern leaf in it. Across Father’s anatomy book.

She looked at my books. All of them. The way she’d looked at them from the doorway the night before, but closer. She read the spines. Cell Biology. Immunology. The Human Body. She looked at the cup with the leaf in it, and the white ice on the water. She looked at notebook fifteen, closed, with Father’s pen on top of it.

”You read chemistry,” she said. ”When you started. I watched you. The first night I came, you had a chemistry book open, under the biology ones. You kept going back to it.”

”Yes.”

”And now it’s all biology. Cells. Blood. Bodies.” She looked at me. ”Everyone else in this cave is reading tactics. Squad formations. Landing drills. The terrain reports from Avalon, the ones they’ve let us see. They’re getting ready for a war.” She paused. ”You’re the most dangerous person in the program. Everyone knows it. Crane knows it. My father knows it. And you sit in a cold room every night reading about leaves.”

”You noticed.”

”I notice everything,” said Luna Windsor. Not boasting. Just telling me the weather, the way Risa did. ”It’s the only thing my father ever taught me that I’m sure is true.” She tilted her head, very slightly. ”Why chemistry? Why not tactics?”

I looked at her.

I didn’t tell her about Mother. I’d told Risa, on the floor beside the fern, and I didn’t know yet if I’d been right to. Mother was the one thing in the world that was only mine, and Genny’s, and Garnet’s.

But she’d asked me why chemistry. And that was a different question. That one had an answer that wasn’t anybody’s secret. It was only very hard to believe.

”When I was four,” I said, ”I asked my parents if there was water on the moon.”

She waited.

”They said no,” I said. ”So I looked at it. Out of my bedroom window. And I put some there.”

Luna Windsor looked at me for a long moment.

”That’s not funny,” she said.

”No.”

”It’s not true either.”

”It is,” I said. ”It’s a lake. Or it was. It froze the second it got there, because I was four and I didn’t know about the cold. It’s ice now. A little left of center, if you know where to look. My father spent the rest of his life teaching me chemistry so I’d never do anything that big again without understanding it first.” I looked down at the cup with the fern leaf, and the ice she’d made without knowing. ”That’s why chemistry. Because I can turn anything into anything. And if you can do that, you’d better know what you’re doing.”

She didn’t say anything.

She looked at me with her pale, still face, the way she’d looked at the frozen scarecrow on the assessment field. Measuring how hard it was going to be to break.

”Show me,” she said.

”There aren’t any windows,” I said. ”We’re under a city.”

”There’s one,” said Luna Windsor.

She said it the way she’d said left is a dead end in the Town. As though it were simply a fact about the world, and she was sorry I hadn’t noticed it.

”Behind the armory,” she said. ”There’s a door with no handle on this side, painted the same color as the wall. It’s an emergency stair. It goes up through the rock to the maintenance gallery at the base of the dome. My father brought me through it once, when I was eight, on an inspection.” She paused. ”There’s a window in the gallery. In the dome itself. For the engineers. You can see the sky.”

”How do you open a door with no handle?”

”You don’t,” said Luna. ”You freeze the lock until the metal shrinks, and then it opens.” She stood up. ”I noticed it the first day. I notice everything.”

”Okafor gave us one hour,” I said. ”One. Not two.”

”Then we have nineteen minutes,” said Luna Windsor, looking at the clock over the door, ”and we should stop talking.”

The door was exactly where she’d said.

It was round the back of the armory, in a dead-end corner where nobody went, painted the same dull gray as the rock. I’d walked past it twenty times and never seen it. She stood in front of it and put two fingers flat on the metal beside the lock, and the metal went white with frost in a little circle, and then there was a small sharp click, like a knuckle cracking.

The door swung inward an inch.

Behind it, a stair. Steel, narrow, going up into the dark in a tight spiral, with a cold draft coming down it that smelled of dust and old air and, very faintly, of outside.

We climbed.

It was a long way. Three hundred steps, maybe more. I stopped counting. There were lamps every fifty steps or so, little caged bulbs, about half of them working. In between, it was dark, and I followed the sound of her boots on the steel ahead of me, even and unhurried, never faster, never slower. She didn’t stop to rest. Neither did I. Neither of us was going to be the one who stopped first.

At the top, there was another door. This one had a handle. She opened it.

And there was the sky.

The gallery was a long narrow walkway that ran round the inside of the dome where it met the ground, like the brim of a hat. On one side, the gold glass of the dome, curving up and away over our heads. On the other side, a railing, and below the railing, a long way below, the city. All its towers. All its lights. Spread out in the dark like a field of lamps.

And in the glass of the dome, set into it at the height of my face, a window.

It was small. About the size of a door, set on its side. And it wasn’t gold, like the rest of the dome. It was clear. Old, and scratched, and a little cloudy at the edges, but clear. For the engineers, she’d said. So they could see what the weather was doing to the outside of the glass.

Through it, I could see the sky. The real one. Black, and deep, and full of stars.

I hadn’t seen it since the field.

I stood there for a moment with my hands on the railing, not saying anything. Luna Windsor stood beside me and didn’t say anything either. Below us, the city hummed. Above us, the stars didn’t.

Then I looked for the moon.

It was low, and off to the left, nearly full, just clearing the line of the dead hills far out past the edge of the dome. White. Cold. Blurred a little by the old glass, so the edges were soft.

I looked at it. And I found the place, without even thinking, the way you find your own face in a mirror. A little left of center.

”There,” I said, and pointed.

Luna leaned toward the window. She looked for a long time. She narrowed her eyes.

”I can’t see anything,” she said. ”It’s too far. The glass is too old.”

”It’s there.”

”I believe that you believe it’s there,” said Luna Windsor.

I looked at the window. At the old cloudy glass. I could have changed it. A small curve, in the middle of the pane. Thicker in the center, thinner at the edges. A lens. I knew how lenses worked. Father made me grind one out of riverbed sand when I was nine, so I’d understand what light did when you bent it.

But it was the dome. The glass that kept the air in for a whole city. And I didn’t know what was holding it up, or how thick it needed to be, or what would happen to it if I made one piece of it thinner. And I’d learned something on field two, and in the reading room, about how easy it was to change things, and how hard it was to know you’d changed them right.

I put my hands in my pockets.

”I can’t make it clearer,” I said. ”Not without touching the dome. And I’m not touching the dome.”

Luna looked at me sideways. Something in her face moved. I didn’t know what.

Then she put her hand flat on the glass. Just beside the window.

The air in front of the old pane went cold. Very cold. I felt it on my face. And on the inside of the glass, where our breath had been fogging it, the fog began to gather. Pulling together. Into the center of the pane. Into a circle, about the size of my two hands. And then it froze.

A disc of ice. Perfectly clear. Thicker in the middle than at the edges, so slightly I had to look twice to see it. Hanging on the inside of the window, held to the glass by nothing but the cold.

A lens.

”You told me what you wanted,” she said. ”I heard you. Thicker in the middle.” She took her hand away from the glass. ”I don’t need to touch the dome. Water’s easy. Water does what I tell it.”

I stared at her.

”Look,” said Luna Windsor.

I looked through the ice.

The moon jumped.

It was bigger. Sharper. Not much. Not like a telescope. But enough. The soft edge went hard. The gray patches on its face came out in their shapes, the old seas and the long scars and the rings of the craters. And a little left of center, where the gray was darkest, there it was.

A spot. Small. Bright. Brighter than anything around it. Not white, like the rest. A different white. Blue at the very edge, if you looked for long enough. Like the sun on a frozen pond, seen from a long way off.

”There,” I said again. Quietly.

Luna Windsor leaned in beside me, so close that I could feel the cold coming off her, and looked through the lens she’d made.

She looked for a long time. I watched her face while she did it. I couldn’t help it. In the light from the window, it was very pale, and very still, the way it always was. But her eyes weren’t still. Her eyes were moving, over the face of the moon, and stopping, and going back, and stopping. Reading. The way she read the pages she went back to, slowly, with her lips pressed together.

Then they stopped, a little left of center, and stayed there.

”It’s ice,” she said.

”Yes.”

”You said it was a lake.”

”It was,” I said. ”For about half a second. Then it froze. There’s nothing up there to keep it warm. I didn’t know that. I was four.”

She didn’t say anything for a while.

”It’s still there,” she said. Her voice had gone very quiet. Not flat. Quiet. ”Thirteen years. Nothing on the moon to hold it. No air. Sun on it every month, hot enough to boil it. And it’s still there.”

”It’s in a crater. The sun doesn’t reach the bottom.”

”No,” said Luna Windsor. ”That’s not why.” She was still looking through the lens. ”It’s still there because it’s cold. Cold keeps things. That’s what nobody understands about it. Everybody thinks cold is for breaking. For freezing scarecrows on a field so they shatter. That’s what my father taught me it was for.” A pause. ”But that isn’t what it’s for. Cold holds things still, so nothing can take them away. Nothing on earth keeps like ice.”

The city hummed below us.

”Why?” she said.

”Why what?”

She took her eye away from the lens and looked at me. Close. Closer than anyone except my sisters had looked at me in a long time.

”Why did you put it there? You were four. You could have made anything. Why water? Why on the moon?”

I thought about my bedroom window in the field. The dark. The moon in the corner of the glass. Mother saying no, sweetheart, there’s no water on the moon.

”It looked lonely,” I said.

Luna Windsor looked at me for a long moment.

And then she smiled.

It wasn’t much. It was very small, and it was gone almost as soon as it came. One corner of her mouth, and then the other, and something at the edges of her pale eyes. But it was a smile. A real one. I’d never seen her do it. I didn’t think anyone in the compound had. I’d have bet Liam a whole tray that her father hadn’t seen it in years.

”That,” said Luna Windsor, ”is the stupidest reason anyone has ever had for anything.”

”I know.”

”I believe you,” she said. ”About the moon.” She turned and looked through the lens again, at the little bright spot a little left of center. ”I didn’t think I would. But I do.”

We were eleven minutes late.

The ice lens melted off the window as we went, running down the old glass in a thin line, the way she’d known it would. The emergency door shut behind us with a click. The lock frosted, and then slowly warmed, and you’d never have known it had been opened.

Sergeant Okafor was standing at the bottom of the corridor, by the armory, with her hands behind her back.

We stopped.

She looked at the two of us. At me, with dust on my knees from the stair. At Luna Windsor, standing very straight beside me with frost still fading on two of her fingers.

”It’s eleven minutes past,” said Sergeant Okafor.

”Yes, Sergeant,” we said. Together. In the same voice.

She looked at us a moment longer.

”Did you see it, Windsor?”

Luna went very still.

”Yes, Sergeant,” she said.

”Good,” said Sergeant Okafor. ”Bed. Both of you. And if I ever find that door open again, I’ll weld it shut and put you both on the beam until launch.”

She walked away.

Luna Windsor stood in the corridor and watched her go. Then she turned, without looking at me, and walked off toward the girls’ barracks, straight-backed, even and unhurried, the way she always did.

At the corner, she stopped.

”Dask,” she said, without turning round.

”Yes.”

”Tomorrow night,” she said. ”At ten. You can explain the leaf.” A pause. ”I’ve been watching you look at it for a week. I want to know what you’re looking for.”

Then she was gone.

I lay in the dark between Liam and Toby for a long time without sleeping.

I thought about the moon, and the ice, and the little disc of ice on the window, thicker in the middle. I thought about cold keeps things. I thought about her face when she smiled. I thought about the name at the bottom of the page in book 34, and how she’d carried that book around under another one for a week, and decided to show it to me anyway.

Then, because I couldn’t help it, I thought about the hunters.

About the chapter I’d been reading when she first spoke. About how they weren’t born knowing what to hunt. How they were taught, young, in one small place in the chest. This is you. This is you. This is you. And the ones that learned wrong never got out into the blood.

Mother’s hunters had been taught when she was very small, long before the orphan hall, long before anyone put anything from a wrecked ship into her. They’d been taught everything that was her. And then, when she was fifteen, something new had come in, and they’d never been taught it. Nobody had ever stood in that small place in her chest and said this is you too.

So they’d been fighting it for twenty-four years.

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, small, at the bottom of the list, under What if it had the right one?

The hunters are taught. When they’re young.

Can they be taught again?

I put the notebook back.

Beside me, Toby was humming. All the way through. Both parts right.

I fell asleep before the end, and dreamed about a small bright spot on the moon, a little left of center, that nothing had been able to take away.