Scarecrow

It was Liam who found out about the birthday.

He found out the way Liam found out everything, which was by talking to everyone in the compound until one of them told him something by accident. In this case it was the corporal who kept the call room list, who also kept the roster, and who made the mistake of leaving it on his desk while Liam was standing next to it telling him a long story about a goat.

”Saturday,” said Liam, at breakfast, leaning across the table with his voice dropped very low, which for Liam meant that only the people at the next two tables could hear him. ”Toby’s sixteen on Saturday. Did you know?”

”No.”

”Nobody knows,” said Liam. ”He hasn’t told anyone. He’s been here four weeks, and his birthday’s in four days, and he hasn’t said a word.” He looked down the table. Toby was at the end, eating porridge very slowly, with his armband slipping down his arm. He’d moved from the far end of the Calders’ table to the near end, since the squads. Not next to us. But near. ”Who doesn’t tell anyone about their birthday?”

I thought about my seventeenth. The rock cake, on the table by the stove. Mother in bed in the next room. Genny’s knife, wrapped in a bit of cloth.

”People who don’t think anybody will do anything about it,” I said.

Liam looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked down the table at Toby again.

”Right,” he said. ”Well. That’s going to change.”

I’d started eating lunch with Toby the week after the squads.

It wasn’t anything I’d decided. He just started turning up at the fern. The first day, he walked past the corridor with his tray, very slowly, and looked in, and saw Risa sitting against the metal stand and me sitting across from her, and kept walking. The second day, he walked past again, and stopped, and stood at the end of the corridor for so long that Risa said, without looking up, ”Either sit down or go away, Marsh, your heart’s giving me a headache.”

He sat down. At the very end of the corridor. As far from both of us as it was possible to be and still be in the same corridor.

By the end of the week, he was sitting next to the fern.

He didn’t talk much. Not like Liam. When he did talk, it came out fast, all at once, in a rush, as if he’d been holding it behind his teeth for a long time and it had finally got loose. And then he’d go red to the ears and stop.

But he asked questions. That was the thing I hadn’t expected. Toby asked questions the way Genny did. Quietly. Precisely. As though each one were a stone he’d picked up and turned over before he handed it to you.

”What’s it doing?” he asked, on the third day, looking at the cup with the fern leaf in it, which I’d put on the floor between us.

”Breathing,” I said. ”Sort of. Taking things in. Letting things out.”

”How do you know?”

”I can see it.”

He looked at the leaf for a long time. ”All of it?”

”Most of it. Not the important parts.”

”What are the important parts?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. So I told him about the dead cell. How I’d built it perfectly, every piece, and it had stayed dead. How the pieces weren’t what made it alive.

Toby listened to all of it with his chin on his knees.

”That’s like a song,” he said, when I’d finished.

I looked at him.

”You can have all the right notes,” said Toby. ”Every one. And put them in a line. And it’s not a song. Not until someone sings it.” He went red. ”Sorry. That’s stupid.”

”No,” I said. ”It isn’t.”

Risa, beside the fern, had stopped eating. She was looking at Toby with her light gray eyes.

”His heart’s slowed down,” she said to me, as if Toby weren’t there. ”First time since he got here. Sixty-eight.” She went back to her tray. ”Keep talking to him about leaves. It’s good for him.”

Toby went red to the ears, and didn’t say anything for the rest of lunch. But he didn’t move away either.

On the Wednesday, he told me about his father.

I hadn’t asked. I’d never have asked. But Risa wasn’t there that day, she had extra drills with Squad Two, and it was just the two of us in the corridor with the fern and the hum of the lamps. And I was reading at lunch, the immunology book open on my knees, the chapter on what happened to people when the hunters in their blood got something wrong.

Toby was looking at the page. He’d been looking at it for a while.

”Is that about the medicine?” he said. ”The stabilizer?”

”Sort of. Not exactly. It’s about why people need it.”

He was quiet for a moment.

”My dad didn’t wake up,” he said.

I closed the book.

”From the first dose.” He said it to the fern, not to me. Fast, all at once, the way he said everything that mattered. ”He’d been in the program, like your mum. He made sound, like me, only bigger. Much bigger. He could knock down a wall singing. After the locks, he held out on the outside for years. Then I was born, and I was sick a lot, and he signed the Act and came back to the dome with my mum and me, because they said there was medicine now. They gave him the first dose, and he went to sleep, and he didn’t wake up.” He stopped. ”Some don’t. Dr. Halloway said. Not many. One in fifty, maybe. The body doesn’t take it. It’s nobody’s fault.” He picked at a thread on his armband. ”That’s what everybody says. It’s nobody’s fault.”

I didn’t say anything.

”I got my first dose when I was twelve,” said Toby. ”Like everyone. In the clinic on the lower floors. They put you in a bed and give it to you and you go to sleep, and you wake up, and that’s it.” He was still talking to the fern. ”I didn’t sleep. I lay there all night with my eyes open. I thought if I closed them, I wouldn’t open them again. Like him.” A pause. ”My mum sat with me. All night. She sang. She’s a sound-shaper too, only small. She can’t make walls. She can just make things a bit quieter, or a bit louder. She made the whole ward quiet, all night, so nobody would wake up and hear me crying.”

”Is she all right? Now?”

Toby didn’t answer for a long time.

”Her hands shake,” he said finally. ”Since last year. Just a little. In the mornings. She says it’s nothing. She says it’s the cold on the lower floors.” He looked at me, for the first time since he’d started talking. ”It’s not the cold. Is it.”

I thought about Mother’s hands, lying still on the blanket in the bed by the stove. About Genny reading the chart in the hospital, her lips moving over the long words. About Dr. Halloway saying thirty-one families.

Thirty-one families. All of them on the stabilizer. All of them with bodies that were fighting something that had been put in them when they were young, by people who’d known it would happen.

I’d been reading every night for three weeks about one person. About Mother. I hadn’t thought about the others. Not really. Not about Liam’s parents, and Liam’s cousins, and Risa’s grandmother, whose heart had gone very fast and then very slow. Not about Toby’s mother, on the lower floors, singing the ward quiet with her hands shaking.

”I don’t know,” I said. ”I don’t know enough yet.”

Toby nodded slowly. As if that were the answer he’d thought it would be.

”The medic in the infirmary lets me help,” he said. ”Sometimes. In the evenings. Rolling bandages. Cleaning instruments. She says I’ve got steady hands, for someone who’s always scared.” He went red. ”I want to do that. After. If there is an after. I want to be the one who knows what to do when somebody doesn’t wake up.”

He picked up his tray.

”Sorry,” he said. ”That was a lot.”

”Toby.”

He stopped.

I held out the immunology book.

”Chapter four,” I said. ”It’s the easy one. Read it tonight. Tomorrow you can tell me what you think it means, and I’ll tell you if I think you’re right.”

He looked at the book for a long time.

Then he took it, with both hands, the way you’d take something that might break.

That night, in the reading room, I explained the leaf.

Luna Windsor was sitting at my table when I came in. Not at hers. At mine, in the chair across from my chair, with her hands folded in front of her and no book. She’d been waiting.

So I sat down, and I put the cup with the fern leaf between us, and I told her.

All of it. The walls that chose. The gates opening and closing. The sparks, which Risa had shown me how to see. The dead cell, which I’d built perfectly, and which had stayed dead. The fern, which I’d only fed, and which had grown a new frond in the dark. Don’t make the cell. Give the cell what it needs to make itself. The hunters in the blood, and the marks, and how they were taught when they were young what was you and what wasn’t.

And then, because she’d shown me the page with her father’s name on it, I told her why.

I told her about Mother.

She didn’t say anything while I talked. She sat very straight, with her hands folded, and listened, with her pale eyes on my face. When I got to the part about the program, and the orphan hall, and the thing from the wreck of the ship that they’d put into a fifteen-year-old girl, something went across her face. When I got to the marker going up, four points, and the wheelchair, and the shawl, it went across her face again, and stayed a little longer.

When I’d finished, the water in the cup was white with ice all the way to the bottom.

”Nobody knows,” I said. ”Except Risa. And Okafor, a little. And now you.”

Luna Windsor looked at the frozen cup for a long moment.

”You’re trying to teach a body something it was never taught,” she said. ”That’s what you’re doing. That’s what can they be taught again means.” She looked up. ”You wrote it on the last page. I saw it. Last night, before you closed the book.”

”You notice everything.”

”Yes.” She reached across the table, and took the immunology book, which wasn’t there, because Toby had it. She stopped. Looked at the empty space. Then at me.

”Toby Marsh has it,” I said. ”His mother’s hands shake.”

Luna Windsor didn’t say anything for a while.

Then she stood up, and went to the science shelves, in the corner where the lamp didn’t reach, and ran her finger along the spines the way Okafor had along the shelf in her office. She stopped at the cell biology book. Took it down. Came back. Sat.

She opened it to the first page.

”I’m going to ask you questions,” she said. ”From this. Every night. The first ten minutes. If you get them right, you’ve learned it. If you don’t, you haven’t, and you read it again.” She turned a page. ”My father had tutors do this to me for eleven years. It’s the only way anybody ever learns anything properly.” A pause. ”It’s the second thing he taught me that I’m sure is true.”

”You don’t have to—”

”What is the membrane of a cell made from,” said Luna Windsor, ”and why does that matter?”

I looked at her.

She looked back. Perfectly still. Waiting.

I answered.

I got it half right.

”Read it again,” said Luna Windsor, and turned to the next question.

On Thursday, Toby told me what chapter four meant.

He’d read it three times. He said so, red to the ears, sitting next to the fern with the immunology book open on his knees and his finger under a line. He’d made notes. On the back of a meal card, in tiny cramped handwriting, with little drawings in the margins of cells with faces.

He got it right.

Not all of it. But most of it. More than I’d got the first time.

”You can keep it,” I said. ”Till Sunday. Read chapter five.”

He held the book against his chest with both arms, the way Genny held the terms, and didn’t say anything at all.

Liam’s plan was very simple, the way all of Liam’s plans were simple. It was also very loud.

”Saturday,” he said, on Thursday night, in the barracks, after lights out, leaning across the gap between his bed and mine in the dark. Toby was in the showers. We had about four minutes. ”After dinner. Field four. Okafor said yes.”

”You asked Okafor?”

”I asked her for permission to hold a squad training exercise on field four after dinner on Saturday,” said Liam. ”She said what kind of exercise. I said morale. She looked at me for a really long time. Then she said, one hour, Calder, and if I hear about it from anyone on the upper floors, you’ll be doing morale on the beam.” He grinned in the dark. I could hear it. ”That’s a yes.”

”What do you need from me?”

”I’ve got the cake,” said Liam. ”Don’t ask. I’ve got Sera doing candles, because nobody lights a candle like Sera. She said no. Then she said fine. Then she asked how many. I’ve got Windsor—”

”You asked Luna?”

”I didn’t ask Windsor,” said Liam. ”Sera asked Windsor. Don’t ask me how that happened, because I wasn’t there, and Sera won’t tell me, and Windsor doesn’t talk to me.” He paused. ”But apparently Windsor said yes. To Sera. Without a fight. I think it might be the end of the world.” He lay back on his bed. ”And you.”

”What about me?”

”You’re his friend,” said Liam. ”You’re the one he sits next to. You’ll think of something.” He yawned, enormously. ”You always think of something. You just usually think of it too slowly and then turn a building into sand.”

The shower door banged at the end of the row. Toby’s footsteps, coming back down between the beds.

Liam rolled over and was instantly, loudly, asleep.

I thought about it for two days.

What do you give somebody who’s never been given anything? Who sits at the end of the table so nobody has to sit next to him. Who lies awake with his eyes open so he won’t not wake up. Who hums a song he heard once in the dark and gets it wrong, over and over, and keeps trying.

On Friday, at five in the morning, I went out to field one, the biggest field.

The steel splash was still there.

Nobody had moved it. Nobody had known how. It sat in the middle of the field where it had landed, a crown of steel the size of a cartwheel, gleaming dully under the lamps, with its frozen droplets flying out from the center on their thin steel threads. People walked round it on their laps now without looking at it. It had become part of the field, like the white lines.

I crouched beside it, and found one of the beads at the very edge. A droplet of steel the size of the end of my thumb, on its little thread. I broke the thread. It came away cold in my palm.

Then I sat on the edge of the field, under the lamps, with nobody watching, and made it into something else.

Slowly.

Not because it was hard. It wasn’t. It was steel, and I’d known steel since I was eleven. Because it had to be exactly right, and the only way to make something exactly right was to make it slowly, a little at a time, and check.

A handle, the length of my finger. Two tines, coming up from it, side by side, parallel, with a gap between them the width of a pencil lead. Thin. Thinner than I thought they’d need to be. I made them, and looked at them, and made them a little thinner.

Then I tapped it against my knee.

It rang.

A clear, thin, pure note, hanging in the air of the empty cave. Not quite right. A little high. I listened to it until it faded. Then I took the very tips of the tines, and made them a hair longer. A tiny bit of steel, drawn up out of the handle, too small to see.

I tapped it again.

Lower. Closer. Still not right.

I did it eleven times. Longer. Shorter. Longer again. Tapping, and listening, and closing my eyes, and humming the first note of the song under my breath. The first note Mother used to sing, in the dark, in the bed by the stove. The first note Miss Pell had sung in Orphan Hall Three to a room full of children who didn’t know any words. The first note Toby had been getting wrong for four weeks, every night, at the end of the row.

On the twelfth tap, the fork rang, and I hummed, and they were the same.

Exactly the same. The note in the air and the note in my throat, lying on top of each other so perfectly that for a moment there was only one.

I sat there on the edge of field one and listened to it ring all the way down into silence.

Then I turned it over, and on the flat of the handle, very small, the way Genny had done the knife, I made two letters stand up out of the steel.

T.M.

The cake was enormous.

I never found out where Liam got it. Neither did Okafor, as far as I know. It was the size of a cartwheel, like the splash, and it had three layers, and it was chocolate, and it was sitting on a trestle table in the middle of field four when Seraphina led Toby out onto the field on Saturday night with her hand on his shoulder, telling him it was a night drill and he’d better not complain about it.

He stopped dead when he saw it.

There were sixteen candles on it. Unlit. In a perfect ring.

”Sera,” said Liam.

Seraphina rolled her eyes. Then she spun the wheel on her brass lighter, once, and one spark jumped out, the size of a seed.

It split into sixteen. In the air. Sixteen tiny sparks, each one going to a different candle, in a ring, one after the other, so fast it looked like a single circle of light snapping into being on top of the cake.

Every candle lit at once.

And none of them dripped. That was the thing I noticed. The wax should have run down the sides as soon as they caught. It didn’t. Seraphina was holding the flames, all sixteen of them, so they burned straight and still and didn’t melt anything they weren’t supposed to.

Toby stood in front of the cake with his mouth open.

”Happy birthday, Marsh,” said Seraphina gruffly, and looked away, at the far end of the field, as if the lamps there were very interesting.

Then Luna Windsor stepped forward.

She was carrying a steel bowl from the mess kitchen. Inside it was something white, and cold, and smooth, with a mist coming off the top of it. She put it down on the table beside the cake. I could feel the cold coming off it from three meters away.

”Ice cream,” she said. ”Milk. Sugar. An egg. Vanilla, from the officers’ stores.” A pause. ”I wasn’t asked about the vanilla.”

”You made ice cream?” said Liam.

”I made it cold,” said Luna Windsor. ”It made itself into ice cream.” She glanced, very briefly, at me. ”If you give a thing what it needs.”

She took a spoon, and put a scoop of the white stuff on top of the cake, right in the middle of the ring of burning candles. And it should have melted. It was sitting in the middle of sixteen flames. It should have run off the cake in a puddle.

It didn’t.

Because Seraphina was keeping the flames from melting anything. And Luna was keeping the ice cream cold. And they were both doing it, at once, on the same cake, a hand’s width apart, hot and cold, without looking at each other, and without saying a word.

And the air between them, over the top of the cake, didn’t shimmer at all.

Liam saw it too. He opened his mouth. Seraphina looked at him. He closed it again.

”Make a wish,” said Liam instead, to Toby. ”Then blow. That’s how it works. And you’re a Calder now, by the way. Honorary. Bree voted no, but she’s outnumbered.”

Toby stood in front of the cake, with the candles lighting his white face from underneath, and his big ears, and his eyes, which were very bright.

He closed his eyes. His lips moved.

He blew.

Sixteen flames went out at once. Seraphina let them.

Risa came, halfway through. She stood at the edge of field four with her arms crossed, as if she’d just happened to be passing, and said, ”Squad Two isn’t invited, I suppose,” and Liam said, ”Squad Two isn’t. Risa Friese is,” and handed her a plate. She sat down on the grass next to Toby and ate cake and ice cream in silence, and after a while she leaned over and said, very low, so only he and I could hear:

”Seventy-four. And steady. That’s the happiest you’ve been since I’ve known you.”

Toby went red to the ears and looked at his plate.

When the cake was mostly gone, and Liam was lying on his back on the grass with chocolate on his face telling the lamps about the best day of his life, which was apparently this one now, I took the tuning fork out of my pocket.

I’d wrapped it in a bit of paper from notebook fifteen. A torn-out page. I held it out to Toby.

He looked at it for a long time before he took it. Then he unwrapped it, slowly, with his steady hands.

He turned it over. He saw the letters on the handle.

He looked at me.

”Tap it,” I said. ”On your knee.”

He tapped it on his knee.

It rang.

Clear, and thin, and pure, across the dark of field four, under the swinging lamps. And everyone stopped. Liam sat up. Seraphina turned her head. Luna Windsor, who’d been standing a little apart with her hands behind her back, went very still. Risa put down her plate.

Toby’s face changed.

He knew it. He knew the note. He’d been reaching for it for four weeks in the dark, every night, and missing.

He opened his mouth, and hummed.

The first note. Exactly on the fork. The two of them lying on top of each other so perfectly that there was only one sound on field four.

And then, without stopping, the rest of it.

The old song. The one without any words. The first part, and then the first part again, and then the second part, the hard part, the part that went down and then up when you didn’t expect it. All of it. Every note. In his thin, clear, shaking voice, that could make walls out of the air.

He didn’t get any of it wrong.

Nobody moved.

When he finished, the field was so quiet I could hear the lamps hum on their chains.

Toby was crying. Not loudly. Just tears, running down his face, while he held the tuning fork against his chest with both hands, the way he’d held the immunology book.

”It’s from the splash,” I said. ”The steel. On the big field.”

He nodded. He couldn’t speak.

At the edge of field four, in the dark, past the last lamp, somebody was standing with her hands behind her back. I hadn’t seen her come. I don’t think any of us had.

Sergeant Okafor stood there for one moment more. Then she turned round and walked away, without a word, before anyone could see her face.

On Sunday, my call came before Toby’s.

Garnet’s nose filled the screen, and Genny pushed her out of the way, and Miss Pell reported that both girls had eaten their vegetables. Mother smiled at me from the wheelchair with the gray shawl round her shoulders. Her marker was the same as last week. Not up. Not down.

At the end, when Dr. Halloway came into the frame for the dose, I asked her.

”Ellen Marsh,” I said. ”On the lower floors. Toby’s mother. Do you treat her?”

Dr. Halloway looked at me through the screen for a long moment.

”I treat all thirty-one families,” she said. ”Every week. You know that.”

”Her hands shake. In the mornings.”

”I know,” said Dr. Halloway quietly.

”Is it the same? As Mother?”

She didn’t soften it. She never did.

”It’s always the same, Lucas,” she said. ”Faster for some. Slower for others. But it’s always the same thing.”

I didn’t go back to the barracks.

I stood in the corridor outside the call room, with my back against the wall, while the Frieses went in and came out, and then Toby went in. He left his door open a crack, because it didn’t quite close.

I heard him say, ”Mum.”

I heard a woman’s voice, thin and tired and warm, saying his name.

Then I heard a note. Clear and pure. A tuning fork, tapped on a knee, held up to a screen.

And after a moment, very softly, from somewhere on the lower floors of the city, I heard a woman begin to hum.

The first note. Then the rest of it. Thin, and unsteady, and stopping and starting. And Toby humming it with her, steady, keeping the note, so she wouldn’t lose it.

I stood in the corridor and listened to the whole thing.

That night, in the reading room, before Luna asked her first question, I opened notebook fifteen to the list.

To learn. The seven lines under it. Cells. How a body knows what’s itself. Xenotissue. What’s in the stabilizer. Everything Father knew. A leaf first. Slowly.

At the top of the page, above To learn, where it said nothing at all, I wrote one more line.

Not only Mother. Thirty-one families.

Luna Windsor read it upside down from across the table. She didn’t say anything.

She opened the cell biology book to the next chapter, and asked me what the library at the center of a cell was made of.

I got it right.