Scarecrow

The pass was a square of stiff yellow card with my name typed on it and a stamp from the Director’s office, and it said I could leave the compound for twenty-four hours, once a month, to visit family inside the dome.

I’d had it for two months and never used it.

Not because I didn’t want to. Because every time I thought about using it, I thought about walking back down the ramp the next day. About leaving twice. I didn’t know if I could do that. I didn’t know if Garnet could.

”You’re using it,” said Liam, on the Thursday. ”This Sunday. Instead of the call.”

”I don’t—”

”You are,” said Liam. ”Because I asked Okafor, and she said that cadets with a family pass may bring up to three squad members as guests, under regulation twenty-two, if the family consents, and I’ve never been to the sixtieth floor of anything in my life, and Garnet told me on families’ day that there’s a pool.” He leaned across the table. ”Lucas. There’s a pool. On the roof. Sixty floors up. Under the dome.”

”How do you know about regulation twenty-two?”

”I’ve started reading them,” said Liam. ”Since fourteen. They’re very useful. Did you know there’s one about goats?”

Toby said yes before Liam had finished asking him.

Seraphina said no. Then she said she’d think about it. Then, on Saturday night, she turned up at the bottom of the ramp at eight o’clock on Sunday morning with a small bag and her arms crossed, and said she was only coming because Liam would drown without her, and walked past all three of us into the lift without another word.

I asked Luna in the reading room on Saturday night.

She was quiet for a long time.

”I have dinner with my father on Sundays,” she said finally. ”At the officers’ mess. When he’s in the dome. He’s in the dome.” She looked at the cell biology book. ”I always go.”

”I know.”

”I’d like to come,” said Luna Windsor. Very quietly. As though she were reading it off a page. ”Tell your sister I’d like to come. Another time.”

”I will.”

She asked me her first question. I got it right. She didn’t write the number in her margin.

Mother was waiting at the lift doors.

I hadn’t expected that. I’d thought she’d be in the big room, in the wheelchair, by the glass. But when the lift doors opened on the sixtieth floor at half past nine on Sunday morning, she was right there, in the hallway, in the wheelchair, with the gray shawl round her shoulders and her hands folded in her lap. Miss Pell behind her, with her hands on the handles.

Garnet in front of her. Shaking. Not from cold.

Genny beside Garnet. Very still. With her hands behind her back.

For a second, nobody moved.

Then Garnet hit me so hard I went back into the lift.

It was a loud day.

It was the loudest day the penthouse had ever had, Miss Pell said afterward, and she didn’t say it as a complaint. Liam talked to everyone. To Mr. Dunmore, in the kitchen, for an hour, about bread, until Mr. Dunmore stopped pretending to be annoyed and started showing him how to fold dough. To Miss Pell, about regulations, and Miss Pell turned out to know all of them, including the one about goats, and the two of them sat at the end of the long table with their heads together like conspirators. To Garnet, about everything, while Garnet sat on his knee and corrected him.

Toby didn’t talk much. He walked round the big room with the glass walls for a long time, very slowly, looking out at the city from sixty floors up. He’d lived in that city his whole life. On the lower floors. He’d never seen it from above. He stood at the glass with his hands in his pockets for nearly an hour, and nobody disturbed him. When Garnet finally went and stood beside him, she didn’t say anything either. She just took his hand. After a while, they started humming. The song. All of it. Both parts. And the four notes at the end.

Mother, in her wheelchair by the window, closed her eyes and listened.

And Seraphina.

Seraphina stood in the doorway of the big room for a long time with her arms crossed, looking at my mother.

Mother looked back.

”You’re Maura’s,” said Mother. Not a question. ”You’ve got her chin. And her temper, Maura says. And her spark from nothing.” She smiled. ”She talks about you for hours. Did you know? She’s very proud of you.”

Seraphina uncrossed her arms.

She came across the big room, slowly, the way you’d walk toward something you weren’t sure about. And she stopped in front of the wheelchair. And then, after a moment, she crouched down, so her face was level with Mother’s.

”She talks about you too,” said Seraphina. Her voice was very low. ”She says you held her hand. In the ward. When she was fifteen.”

”She held mine,” said Mother.

”She says you were braver than anyone she ever met,” said Seraphina. ”She says you read your own charts.”

Mother looked at her for a long time. Then she reached out, slowly, with her thin shaking hand, and touched Seraphina’s red hair. The way Garnet had on families’ day. Just once.

”So does my son,” said Mother. ”Read charts. Every night, I’m told.” She glanced at me, over Seraphina’s head. ”Ruth tells me everything.”

Dr. Halloway came at four, for the dose.

She did it in Mother’s room, with the door closed, the way she always did. And when she came out, with her little silver case, I was waiting in the hallway.

”I need to tell you something,” I said.

She looked at me. Then she opened the door of the little study across the hall, the one with the window, and went in, and I followed her, and she shut it behind us.

I told her.

The pressure behind my eyes. Since the steel ball, eleven weeks ago. Getting worse. The nosebleeds. The Town. The training hall, both sides. The sim. And what Risa had said. Something that hums. Not like nerves. Like something growing.

Dr. Halloway didn’t say anything while I talked. When I’d finished, she put the silver case down on the desk, and opened it, and took out a small light. A pen with a bright white bulb in the end.

”Sit,” she said. ”Look at the window. Don’t move your eyes.”

I sat. I looked at the window. She shone the light into my left eye, very close, for a long time. Then my right. Then my left again.

She didn’t say anything.

She turned the light off. She put it back in the silver case. She closed the case. She sat down on the edge of the desk, with her arms folded, and looked at me.

”Your irises are brown,” she said. ”Like your mother’s. Ordinary brown.” She paused. ”There’s a ring. At the outer edge. Very thin. Very dark. Almost black. Both eyes.” Another pause. ”It wasn’t there when I looked at you in the field, at a quarter to five in the morning, three months ago. I’d have seen it. I look at everything.”

I didn’t say anything.

”Your father’s started the same way,” said Dr. Halloway quietly. ”A ring at the edge. I wrote it down. Four weeks later, the brown was gone. All of it. In both eyes.” She looked at me. ”It didn’t hurt him. Not the change itself. He said it felt like the pressure had finally found somewhere to go.”

”What does it mean?”

”I don’t know,” said Dr. Halloway. She didn’t soften it. She never did. ”Nobody does. Your father was the only one it ever happened to. Out of all of them. Every subject in the program. Every officer on the track. Only him.” She was quiet for a moment. ”And now, perhaps, you.”

”Does it mean the same thing? As him?”

”I don’t know what it meant for him,” she said. ”That’s the truth. He didn’t live long enough for me to find out.” She stood up. ”I’m going to write it down. In your file. My file. Not the one I send upstairs.” She picked up the silver case. ”And I’m going to want to see you every month. On your pass. In this room.”

”Will you tell Mother?”

Dr. Halloway looked at me for a long moment.

”No,” said Mother, from the doorway.

We both turned.

She was in the wheelchair, in the hall, with the door open a crack. I hadn’t heard her come. Nobody ever heard Mother come. Nineteen years in the field, in a house where every board creaked, and she’d learned to move through it like smoke.

”Ruth doesn’t need to tell me,” said Mother. ”I saw it at the lift. The second the doors opened.” She wheeled herself into the study, slowly, and stopped in front of me. And reached up. And put her thin hand on the side of my face, the way she had on the last night before I left, and looked into my eyes.

For a long time.

”His went black in the spring,” she said. Very softly. ”At the end of the program. I was sixteen. I came into the infirmary one morning to see him, and he was standing at the window looking out at the yard, and he turned round, and they were black. All the way.” She smiled. ”I screamed. I’m not proud of that.”

”Did it hurt him?”

”No,” said Mother. ”He said it was like opening a window in a room that had been shut for a long time.” Her thumb moved on my cheek. ”He said he could see further. Not with his eyes. With the rest of him. Further down. Into things.”

She took her hand away.

”Don’t be frightened of it, Lucas,” she said. ”I was. For a whole year. And it was the only thing about him that the program made that never once hurt anybody.”

At a quarter to midnight, Liam shook me awake.

I’d been given the little study with the window. Liam and Toby had camp beds in the big room, by the glass, because Toby had asked if he could sleep where he could see the city. Seraphina had the room at the end of the hall, the one Miss Pell had made up with fresh sheets and a vase of something from Mr. Dunmore’s window boxes.

”Up,” said Liam, in a whisper that could have been heard on the fortieth floor. ”Up. Up. The roof. It’s time.”

”It’s locked.”

”I know it’s locked,” said Liam. ”I asked Garnet. There’s a door at the end of the service corridor behind the kitchen, and a stair, and a padlock on the door at the top.” He grinned in the dark. ”She also told me where Miss Pell keeps the key. But that felt like cheating.”

”So how—”

”Sera,” said Liam.

Seraphina was waiting at the top of the service stair, in front of the roof door, with her arms crossed and a towel over her shoulder.

”This is stupid,” she said.

”You came,” said Liam.

”Somebody has to stop you drowning.” She looked at the padlock. Big, and steel, and old, on a chain through the handle of a heavy door with a small square window in it. Through the window, I could see the dark, and a faint gold glow, and something that moved and shone.

Seraphina looked at me.

”I’m not doing it,” I said. ”It’s Mother’s building.”

”I know you’re not,” said Seraphina. ”You’d turn it into a daisy or something and then feel guilty for a week.” She uncrossed her arms. ”Mum would kill me.”

She put one finger on the shackle of the padlock. Just one. And looked at it.

The steel went red. Then orange. Then a white so bright I had to look away. Not the whole lock. Just the shackle. A ring of white-hot metal the width of her fingertip. It sagged. It parted. The padlock fell off the chain and hit the stair with a clank, glowing, and Seraphina took her finger away and blew on it as if it were a candle.

She didn’t have a mark on her.

”Spark from nothing,” said Liam, softly. Proudly. ”Told you.”

Toby, behind us on the stair, in his borrowed pajamas, with his tuning fork in the pocket, made a small sound like a kettle.

Liam pushed the door open.

The roof of the building was a garden.

I hadn’t known. I’d been in the penthouse for two weeks before the compound, and I’d never once been up here. Nobody had told me. Low hedges, and paths of pale stone, and little trees in big pots, all of them dark and still. And in the middle of it, long and rectangular and shining, the pool.

It was lit from underneath. Pale blue light, coming up through the water, so the whole thing glowed in the dark like a piece of the sky that had fallen down onto the roof. Steam came off the surface, very faintly. Above it, very close, closer than I’d ever been to it, the dome. Curving up and away over our heads. Gold. Glowing. Close enough that I could see the seams between the panels of glass, and the shapes of the struts behind them.

And beyond the glass, the night. The real one.

Liam was already out of his shirt and running.

He hit the water at full speed, in a long flat dive, and went under, and came up shouting. Not words. Just noise. The kind of noise you make when something is too good for words.

Seraphina rolled her eyes, and dropped her towel on a bench, and went in after him. Not running. Walking to the edge, and stepping off it, feet first, straight down, and coming up with her red hair slicked back and her face turned up to the dome, and her eyes closed.

Toby stood at the edge of the pool in his borrowed pajamas and looked at the water.

So did I.

”I can’t swim,” said Toby.

He said it very quietly, so the other two wouldn’t hear. Looking at the water. Not at me.

”Neither can I,” I said.

He looked up at me. Surprised.

”There wasn’t any water in the field,” I said. ”Not like this. Not deep. There was the river, but it was only up to your knees. And the lake on the moon, but that froze.” I looked at the pool, glowing. ”I’ve never been in water over my head in my life.”

”On the lower floors there’s a pool,” said Toby. ”In the heat plant. For the furnace workers’ kids. Liam learned there.” He swallowed. ”Retention kids weren’t allowed. Not till I was twelve. And then I was too scared.”

We stood at the edge together, side by side, looking at the water.

Seraphina swam over.

She stopped in the shallow end, a meter from us, with the water up to her shoulders and the steam coming off the surface around her. She looked at Toby. She looked at me.

”You can’t swim,” she said. Not a question.

”No.”

”Either of you.”

”No.”

Seraphina looked at us for a long moment. I waited for the face. The one she’d made at the beam, when I’d suggested she share the front. The one that said of course you can’t, you’re useless.

It didn’t come.

”Shallow end,” said Seraphina. ”Both of you. In. Now. Before Liam sees and makes it a whole thing.”

She taught us to float.

That was all. Just float. She said that was the only thing that mattered. If you could float, the water couldn’t take you. Everything else was just getting from one place to another.

She made Toby go first. She stood beside him in the shallow end, with the water up to her chest, and put one hand flat under the middle of his back, and told him to lie back. And he wouldn’t. And she waited. And told him again. Not shouting. Not snapping. Very patiently, in a voice I’d never heard her use, low and steady, the way Maura spoke to Pip.

”I’ve got you,” she said. ”I’m not letting go. Lie back. Look at the dome. Breathe in, and hold it, and lie back.”

Toby lay back.

He went stiff as a board. His face went white. His arms flailed. The water closed over his ears and he made a sound like a startled bird.

”Breathe,” said Seraphina. ”Big breath. Hold it. You’re a balloon. Balloons float.”

He breathed. He held it.

He floated.

Not well. Not for long. But for about ten seconds, Toby Marsh lay on his back on the surface of a pool on the roof of a building sixty floors up, with Seraphina Calder’s hand flat under his back, and looked up at the gold glass of the dome, and didn’t sink.

Then he laughed. Out loud. And sank.

Seraphina hauled him up by his pajama collar, spluttering, and he was still laughing.

”Again,” he said. ”Again. Again.”

When it was my turn, the water was cold.

Not really cold. Warm, for water. But colder than Toby had made it look, and colder than the air, and I stood in the shallow end with it up to my waist and couldn’t make myself lie back.

It wasn’t the water.

I’d been holding things for three months. Five breaths at once, in the red. Two hundred and twelve fires. A steel ball in midair. A beam, on the turns. My mother, sixty floors up, from a cave under the city, every night, in a notebook. Thirty-one families. I’d been holding so many things for so long that I didn’t know how to lie back on something and let it hold me.

”You’re thinking,” said Seraphina, beside me.

”Yes.”

”Stop it.” She put her hand flat in the middle of my back. ”It’s water. It’s not going to do anything to you. It’s just going to hold you up. That’s what it does.” She looked at me sideways. ”Like the beam. You don’t have to carry it. Just let it carry you.”

I looked at her.

The water around us had gone warm. I noticed it suddenly. Not hot. Just warm. Warm all the way through, the way the hearthstone had been. She was doing it. She didn’t say anything about it. She was just standing there in the shallow end with her hand on my back, and the water around both of us was warm.

I lay back.

And the water held me.

I lay on my back on the surface of the pool and looked up.

The dome was right there. Gold, and curved, and glowing, close enough to touch if I’d reached up. And through it, beyond it, very faint through the old glass, the sky.

Stars. Not many. The glass took most of them. But some.

And low in the east, coming up over the edge of the dome, nearly full, the moon.

”Lucas,” said Toby, from the shallow end, very quietly. ”Is that it? Is that the one?”

I didn’t need to look for it. I found it the way I always did. A little left of center.

”Yes,” I said.

Liam swam over. Seraphina was still standing beside me with her hand on my back, though I was floating on my own now and didn’t need it. Toby came and stood on my other side, with the water up to his chin. All three of them looking up.

”I can’t see it,” said Liam.

”It’s there.”

”I believe you,” said Liam. ”I just can’t see it.” He was quiet for a moment, which for Liam was a very long time. ”Water on the moon,” he said softly. ”When you were four.”

”It looked lonely.”

Nobody laughed.

”What are you doing.”

We all turned round.

Garnet was standing at the top of the service stair, in the open doorway, in her nightdress, with her hair in two plaits and her bare feet on the pale stone. She had her hands on her hips. She was looking at the four of us in the pool with an expression of the most profound, the most total, the most unforgivable betrayal.

”You’re swimming,” she said. ”On the roof. Without me.”

”Garnet—”

”I told Liam where the door was,” said Garnet. ”I told him. That’s mine. That’s my information.” She came down the last step onto the roof. ”I’m coming in.”

”You can’t swim.”

”Then teach me,” said Garnet. And she walked to the edge of the pool, and sat down on it, and put her feet in the water, and looked at Seraphina.

Seraphina looked back at her.

Then she held out both her hands.

Garnet took them, and slid in, and screamed with delight, and went under, and came up spluttering, and screamed again.

Genny was asleep.

That was what Garnet said, when I asked. She’s asleep. She said she was too old for swimming on roofs. She said it was childish and dangerous and probably against the terms.

I went to the top of the service stair to check.

The door at the bottom of the stair was open a crack. Through it, I could see the dark service corridor. And at the far end, by the kitchen, a small figure in gray pajamas, standing very still in the shadows, with her arms crossed, watching.

I didn’t say anything. I went back to the pool.

Ten minutes later, while I was floating on my back with Garnet sitting on my chest giving instructions, and Seraphina was teaching Toby to kick, and Liam was trying to see how long he could stay underwater, I heard bare feet on the stair.

Running.

I lifted my head.

Genny came out of the doorway at full speed. Across the pale stone. Past the hedges. Past the little trees in their pots. She didn’t slow down. She didn’t say anything. Her face was perfectly serious.

At the edge of the pool, she jumped.

Knees up. Arms round them. A small, tight, perfect ball of nine-year-old.

She hit the water in the exact center of the pool, and it went up in a column, white and enormous, higher than my head, and came down on all five of us like a wave.

When it cleared, she was floating on her back in the middle of the pool, with her arms out, perfectly still, looking up at the dome.

”I was asleep,” she said.

Garnet laughed so hard she fell off my chest.

Miss Pell found us at half past one.

She came up the service stair with a stack of towels in her arms, folded, white, and set them down on the bench by the pool. She looked at the padlock, lying on the stone with its shackle melted through. She looked at the six of us in the water. She looked at Genny, still floating on her back in the middle, as if she’d been there all her life.

”Mr. Dask,” she said.

”Miss Pell.”

”I’ll be including this evening in my weekly report to the Director,” said Miss Pell, in her calm neat voice. ”As I’m required to.” She adjusted her spectacles. ”I believe I’ll describe it as uneventful.” She looked at the melted padlock again. ”And I’ll mention that the roof door appears to have a faulty lock. I’ll have it replaced.” A pause. ”With a larger one.”

She turned to go.

Then she stopped, and looked back at the pool. At Genny, floating. At Garnet, sitting on the steps with Toby, both of them humming. At Seraphina in the shallow end, with her hair slicked back and steam rising round her.

”Your mother is awake,” she said quietly. ”She heard the splash. She asked me to tell you to stay in as long as you like.” She paused. ”She asked me to tell you she hasn’t heard that sound in this building since the day it was built. Children, laughing, on the roof.” Another pause. ”She said it was the best thing she’s heard since the filter.”

She went down the stair.

I floated on my back in the middle of the pool for a long time after that, with my arms out, the way Genny had, and looked up through the gold glass at the moon.

The water held me. I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t have to breathe for anyone, or hold anything up, or put anything out, or keep anything alive. I just lay there and let it.

Beside me, very quietly, Seraphina said:

”You’re not thinking anymore.”

”No.”

”Good,” said Seraphina. And then, after a while, so softly I nearly didn’t hear it: ”You should do this more.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to.

The water was still warm. It stayed warm until we got out.