Scarecrow

The training hall was the only room in the compound with a wooden floor.

It was long and high, at the end of the cave past field four, with rafters overhead hung with ropes and rings and canvas bags full of sand, and racks along the walls with padded staves and practice blades. The floor was old pale boards, worn smooth, with white lines painted on them for sparring rings. It smelled of sweat and dust and canvas and, very faintly, of the oil they used on the boards.

It was where Sergeant Okafor taught us to fight without powers.

”Because one day,” she said, on the first morning, walking down the line of us standing on the white lines in our socks, ”you’re going to be somewhere you can’t see, or can’t spark, or can’t sing, or your iron won’t come, or your hands are frozen, or you’re too tired to lift a pebble with your head. And something’s going to come at you anyway. And you’re going to have your hands and your feet and whatever’s lying on the floor.” She stopped in front of me. ”Even you, forty-one. Especially you. You close your eyes, you’re just a big boy who’s bad at ropes.”

”Yes, Sergeant.”

”Pair up,” said Sergeant Okafor. ”Not with your squad.”

I got Toby anyway, because nobody else would pair with either of us. He was very bad at it. So was I. We spent most of the morning falling over each other on the white lines, carefully, apologizing.

Seraphina got Brock Haddon.

I don’t know exactly how it started.

I’ve asked people since. Liam, who was two rings over. Risa, who was in the next ring with a girl from Squad Five. Toby, who was underneath me at the time. Everybody remembers it a little differently. But everybody remembers the word.

Brock was losing.

That was the first thing. Seraphina was small, smaller than him by a head and a half, and he was heavy and slow without his iron, and she was neither. She moved the way she’d moved at the front of the beam, her whole body going before her feet. She’d put him on the boards three times in ten minutes, and every time he went down, the people in the rings around them laughed, a little. Not much. Just enough.

The fourth time, he got up red in the face.

And he said something. Low, so Okafor at the far end couldn’t hear. But Seraphina heard it. And Liam heard it, two rings over, because Liam’s head came round so fast I thought it would come off.

Then Brock said it again. Louder. With a grin, for the people in the rings around them. And he did something with his body. He dropped down onto one knee on the boards, with his hands clasped in front of him, and his face turned up, and his mouth open, like a person begging.

”Please,” he said, in a high voice. ”Please let us in. Please, sir. Please. I’ll do anything.”

Somebody laughed.

Not many. Two or three. Somebody from Squad Two. Somebody from the far end of the hall.

And Brock, still on one knee, grinning, said the word.

”The Kneeling Calder,” he said. ”That’s you lot, isn’t it? That’s your whole family. Your mum on her knees in the snow at the gate, begging the soldiers for a bit of medicine. It’s on the wall in my dad’s office. Everyone on the upper floors has one. It’s the funniest picture in the—”

Seraphina’s lighter was on the bench at the side of the ring, with everyone’s lighters, and Okafor’s rule was that nobody touched them during fight drills.

She didn’t need it.

I’d seen her make a spark out of nothing on the assessment field. One tiny point of light, the size of a seed, in the empty air, and everybody had pretended not to talk about it afterward because the Calders all needed their lighters and she didn’t.

This wasn’t a spark.

The air around her went white.

Not red. Not orange. White, like the inside of a forge. It came out of her all at once, from everywhere, from her hands and her hair and the air around her body, in a single great rolling sheet, the way the fire had come out of Liam’s lighter on the assessment field, except there was no lighter and it was ten times bigger and it was angry. It went up. Straight up, in a column, like a tree of fire growing out of the boards.

It hit the rafters.

The canvas bags full of sand caught first. Then the ropes. Then the rafters themselves, old dry wood that had been hanging there with oil and dust on it for twenty years, went up with a sound like a giant breathing in, and the whole ceiling of the training hall was on fire.

Brock wasn’t grinning anymore.

He’d gone iron. All of him, at once, without thinking, the way his arm had gone on the assessment field. He was crouched on the boards at the edge of the white line, gray and shining, with his arms over his head, and the fire was pouring off the rafters onto him and running off his iron back like water.

Everybody else was running.

Thirty-nine people, in their socks, on old dry boards, under a burning ceiling. Shouting. Pushing toward the doors at the far end. Okafor’s voice over all of it, very loud, very calm, saying walk, walk, walk, and nobody listening.

And Seraphina was standing in the middle of it all, in the white, with her fists clenched and her red hair lifting off her shoulders in the heat, and her face—

Her face wasn’t angry anymore.

It was frightened.

Because the fire wasn’t stopping. She’d let it out, and it had gone up into the rafters, and the rafters were feeding it, and it was eating its way along the ceiling toward the ropes and the racks and the walls, and it was bigger than anything I’d ever seen a Calder make. Bigger than her. And she was standing under it with her hands up, trying to pull it back, and it wasn’t coming.

”Sera!” Liam was shouting, from two rings over. ”Sera, let go of it, let it go—”

”I’m trying—”

A burning rope fell out of the rafters and hit the boards beside her and the boards caught.

Luna Windsor was ten meters away, on the far side of the next ring.

She had her hands up. I saw them. The air in front of her had gone white with cold, and frost was racing out across the boards from her feet in a wide circle, and she was looking up at the burning ceiling, and I knew what she was about to do.

And I saw her remember the Town.

The square. The steam. Fire and ice meeting in the air, too hard, too fast, and the white wall rolling out across everything, and the tower shearing, and the wall coming down. She stopped. Her hands stayed up. The frost stopped spreading. She didn’t throw.

She looked across the burning hall at me.

Just for a second. Pale, and very still, in the middle of the smoke.

You, her face said. Not me. Not this time.

I looked up at the fire.

The easy thing would have been the Town.

Look at the rafters, all of them. Look at the ropes, the bags, the racks, the burning boards. Let them all go to sand, the way I’d let the walls go, and the tower, and the padded arms. Sand doesn’t burn. In a breath, it would all be over.

And the ceiling of the training hall would come down on thirty-nine people in their socks.

Because the rafters were holding up the roof. And the roof was holding up the rock. And I didn’t know how much, or where, or what would happen if I took them all away at once. I’d learned that on field two, and on a stair three hundred steps high, standing in front of a window in the dome with my hands in my pockets.

So I didn’t look at the wood.

I looked at the fire.

Not the flames. What the flames were eating. Not the wood. The air. Because that’s what fire was. Father taught me when I was six, crouched over the stove in the field with the door open. Fire isn’t a thing. It’s something happening. Wood and air, coming together, fast, and letting go of everything they’ve got. Take away the wood and it stops. Take away the air and it stops.

Not all the air. Just one part of it.

The oxygen.

I could see it. I’d always been able to see it. Little pairs, in the air, all around us, everywhere, mixed in among all the other things the air was made of. Most of the air wasn’t oxygen at all. Most of it was nitrogen, which did nothing. Which just sat there. Which didn’t burn, and didn’t let anything else burn either.

I knew how to turn one into the other. It wasn’t even hard.

That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was the thirty-nine people breathing it.

I’d read about it three nights before. With Luna Windsor across the table asking me questions out of the cell biology book. What happens to a cell without oxygen. How long it lasts. Which ones go first.

The brain. The brain goes first.

Four minutes, the book said. Maybe less.

If I turned the oxygen in the training hall to nitrogen, all of it, all at once, the fire would go out in a heartbeat. And so would everyone in it. Not dead. Not straight away. Just down. On the boards. Unconscious, in the smoke. And then I’d have four minutes to work out how to put it back, in every breath, in every person, before the first cell in the first brain stopped.

I wasn’t doing that.

So I didn’t look at the hall.

I picked one thing.

The first flame. The biggest. The column of fire in the middle of the hall, going up from the boards around Seraphina’s feet into the rafters. Not the air around it. The air in it. Inside the flame, where the burning was. And I turned the oxygen in it to nitrogen. Only there. Only inside the shape of the fire. Not a hand’s width further. Not into the air Seraphina was breathing, a foot away.

The column went out.

Not slowly. All at once, like a candle with a cup put over it. One second, a tree of white fire. The next, nothing. Smoke, and a blackened circle on the boards, and Seraphina standing in the middle of it with her hands still up.

Then the next one. The rope on the boards beside her. The flames on the boards themselves. The nearest rafter. One flame at a time. Looking at the shape of each fire, and only at the shape of it, and turning the air inside it into air that wouldn’t burn. Then the next. Then the next.

It was like the steel ball. Like going down into it one brick at a time. Except there wasn’t one ball. There were a hundred fires. Two hundred. And every one of them had a different shape, and the shapes kept moving, and in between every one of them were people. Running. Breathing.

Toby, flat on the boards beside me where we’d fallen over, with his mouth open, staring at the ceiling.

Liam, two rings over, running toward his sister.

Brock, iron, on his knees, with the fire running off his back, and then not.

Risa, at the door, holding it open, with lightning crawling up her arms so nobody could close it.

Luna, standing very still, with frost on the boards around her feet, watching me.

I didn’t look at any of them. I looked at the fire.

The rafters went out one by one, along the length of the hall, from the middle to the ends. Like somebody walking down a corridor turning off the lamps.

The last one was over the door. A canvas bag full of sand, burning on its rope, swinging. I turned the air inside the fire. It went out. The bag swung on its blackened rope for a moment, smoking.

Then the rope broke, and the bag fell, and hit the boards, and split open, and the sand ran out across the floor.

Somebody laughed. High and shaky. Liam, I think.

And then the training hall was very quiet. Full of smoke. Black rafters. Black rope ends hanging down. Black circles on the boards. Thirty-nine people standing in their socks, coughing, staring up at the ceiling and then at me.

Everyone was breathing.

I counted. I made myself count. Every one of them.

Then I sat down on the boards, rather suddenly, because my legs had stopped working.

The blood came while I was still sitting there.

Both sides this time, out of my nose, running down onto my lip and my chin. And behind my eyes, the pressure wasn’t a hand. It was two thumbs. Pressing. Hard. Like someone was standing behind me trying to push my eyes back into my head, and very nearly managing it.

Toby was beside me in a second. He had a bandage. I don’t know where it came from. He must have been carrying it. He folded it, with his steady hands, and pressed it under my nose, and tipped my head forward, not back.

”Forward,” he said. ”Not back. You swallow it if you go back. The medic said.”

I held the bandage. My hands were shaking.

Across the hall, Seraphina was standing in the black circle where her fire had been.

She was looking at me.

Okafor sent everyone out.

Brock first. She walked over to him, where he was still crouched in his iron at the edge of the white line, and stood over him until the gray went out of his skin and he was just a big frightened boy in his socks on the boards. She didn’t touch him. She didn’t raise her voice.

”Office,” she said. ”Now. And then fifty laps. And then fifty more. And if I ever hear that word in my cave again, Haddon, from you or from anyone, you’ll be running laps on Avalon by yourself.”

Brock went.

Then she turned to Seraphina.

”Hall,” she said. ”Every board. Every rafter. Every rope. Clean. Tonight. You don’t sleep until it’s done.”

”Yes, Sergeant,” said Seraphina. Her voice was perfectly flat.

Okafor looked at her a moment longer. Then at me, sitting on the boards with Toby’s bandage pressed under my nose. Then at the black rafters, with their black rope ends hanging down.

She didn’t say anything to me at all.

She walked out. Everyone followed. Liam tried to stay, and Seraphina said ”Go,” in a voice I’d never heard from her, and he went. Toby helped me up and walked me to the door with his hand under my elbow, and I stopped there, in the doorway, and looked back.

Seraphina was standing alone in the middle of the burned hall.

She wasn’t crying. She was looking up at the rafters. At the black wood, and the black ropes, and the long scorch marks along the ceiling where her fire had run.

”I had it,” she said.

She didn’t turn round. But she was talking to me. I knew she was.

”You didn’t,” I said.

”I had it.” She turned. Her face was white under the soot, and her black eyes were very bright, and she was furious. More furious than I’d ever seen her. More furious than in the Town, or on the beam, or at the line. ”I was pulling it back. I’d have got it. And you—” She stopped. ”In front of everyone. In front of Brock. You stood there and put it out for me like I’m a child who’s knocked over a lamp.”

”Sera—”

”Don’t,” she said. ”Don’t call me that. You don’t get to call me that.”

I stood in the doorway with the bandage under my nose.

”There were thirty-nine people under that roof,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

”I didn’t do it for you,” I said. ”I’m sorry. I know you’d have liked it better if I had.”

I went out.

Behind me, I heard her pick up a broom. Then I heard her throw it, as hard as she could, at the far wall of the training hall. Then, after a long moment, I heard her go and pick it up again.

Liam told me about the picture.

He found me at the fern after dinner, which I didn’t eat. He sat down beside me on the floor without asking, and didn’t say anything for a long time, which was the second-longest Liam had ever gone without saying anything.

”It’s a photograph,” he said finally. ”From the first winter. The Act had just passed. Everybody who was outside, all the families, they all came to the gates to sign. And it was snowing, and the soldiers made them wait. Hours. Out in the snow. With the kids.” He picked at the floor. ”I was four months old. I had pneumonia. I’d had it for a week. Mum carried me from the ruins on her back. Eleven kilometers. And they made her wait at the gate in the snow with me burning up on her shoulder, and I stopped breathing properly, and she—”

He stopped.

”She got down on her knees,” he said. ”In front of the soldier at the gate. In the snow. And begged. And somebody took a picture.”

”And they let her in.”

”They let her in,” said Liam. ”I lived. They gave me the medicine. That’s why I’m here. And Sera, the year after, inside the dome, where it was warm.” He looked at the fern. ”And somebody on the upper floors printed the picture, and it went round, and now it’s on walls. In offices. As a joke. The Kneeling Calder. They laugh at it at parties.” He was quiet. ”Mum knows. She’s always known. She says she’d do it again tomorrow and she’d do it in the snow without her coat on. She says let them laugh.”

”Seraphina doesn’t.”

”No,” said Liam. ”Sera doesn’t.” He almost smiled. ”Sera’s always been Mum’s. Ever since she was tiny. She’d sit on Mum’s lap by the stove and Mum would make little sparks dance on the end of her fingers, and Sera would try to catch them.” He looked at me. ”She’d burn the whole dome down for her. You know that? Without blinking. Without her lighter.”

”I know.”

”She’s not angry at you,” said Liam. ”Not really. She’s angry because she couldn’t stop it. Because she let it out over that word, in front of everyone, and then she couldn’t get it back, and you could.” He stood up. ”That’s the Calder temper. It’s not the fire. Anybody can make fire. It’s not being able to put it back.”

He held out a hand and pulled me up off the floor.

”Come to dinner,” he said. ”Sunday. After the calls. We get a pass, once a month, for families inside the dome. I asked Okafor if I could bring someone.” He grinned, a little. ”She said if it was you, I could bring you and keep you.”

”I don’t—”

”Mum wants to meet you,” said Liam. ”She heard about the Town. She thinks it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened.” He paused. ”And Sera’ll be there. So you can both sit at opposite ends of the table and not look at each other. It’ll be very restful.”

That night, in the reading room, Luna Windsor didn’t ask me any questions.

She was sitting at my table, the way she did now, with the cell biology book closed in front of her. When I came in, she looked at me. At the dried blood still in the corner of my nostril. At my hands, which were still shaking, a little, when I put my books down.

”You didn’t look at the hall,” she said.

”No.”

”You looked at each fire. One at a time. Only the inside of it.” She said it the way she’d said left is a dead end. ”Two hundred and twelve fires. I counted. You put out two hundred and twelve fires one at a time, inside their own shapes, and you didn’t touch the air anyone was breathing.”

”I read about it,” I said. ”Three nights ago. With you. What happens to a brain without oxygen.”

She didn’t say anything for a while.

”I nearly froze it,” she said. ”The ceiling. All of it.”

”I know. I saw.”

”I didn’t,” said Luna. ”Because of the Town.” She looked at the cup with the fern leaf in it, and the water in it, which was starting to frost. ”If I had, it would have been steam again. All of it. Down on everyone.”

”Yes.”

”So I looked at you,” said Luna Windsor. ”I don’t know why.” She opened the cell biology book. Closed it again. ”That’s not true. I do know why.”

She didn’t say why.

She opened the book again, and found the chapter on what a cell does when it runs out of air, and turned it round on the table so it was facing me.

”Read it again,” she said. ”All of it. You got lucky today.” A pause. ”Don’t get lucky next time. Know.”

I read it again.

All of it.

Before I closed the notebook that night, I wrote under the list:

Day 36. Training hall. 212 fires. Oxygen to nitrogen, inside the flames only. Nobody stopped breathing. Nosebleed, both sides. Pressure very bad. Hands still shaking.

And under that:

A brain without air: four minutes. Maybe less.

Don’t get lucky. Know.