Scarecrow

On Sunday, Mother read me the report.

That was the arrangement. It had been the arrangement since the afternoon in the library, before I left, when a thin woman in a gray dress had sat down in front of Genny’s enormous desk and said he would like me to report to him every week, and Mother had said and then you’ll come and tell me what you told him. Every word.

Every week, Miss Pell wrote her report for the Director. Every week, she brought a copy to Mother before she sent it. And every week, since I’d come to the cave, Mother had read it to me on the Sunday call, out loud, word for word, in a voice so perfectly flat and neat that it was exactly like Miss Pell’s, and Garnet had to be taken out of the room for laughing.

I’d never asked why. I’d thought it was a joke, at first. A way of making the Director smaller. Of turning the thing he did to us into something we could read out loud at a kitchen table.

I understood it better now. I’d spent three months in a cold room learning that you can’t change what you can’t see.

Mother was making sure we could see.

The booth was the one at the end. The one that didn’t quite close. I sat on the stool with the door pulled to as far as it would go and the screen lit up, and there was Garnet’s eye, enormous, and then Garnet’s nose, and then Genny’s hand on Garnet’s collar, removing her.

”Lucas,” said Garnet, from somewhere off the edge of the screen. ”It snowed.”

”I heard.”

”On the first. In the rain. Over Eastgate. We saw it from the roof. Mr. Dunmore said he hadn’t seen snow since he was a boy, and he cried, and then he said it was the cold, and Genny said it isn’t cold, it’s twenty-one degrees, and he said don’t be clever.” She reappeared, upside down, from the top of the frame. ”Was it you?”

”No.”

”Was it Luna?”

I didn’t say anything for a moment.

”I don’t do weather,” I said.

Garnet looked at me upside down for a long moment, with her one visible eye narrowed. Then she said ”Hm,” exactly the way Mother said it, and disappeared again.

Genny sat down in front of the screen with her pen behind her ear.

”Marker,” she said, before I could ask. ”Down one. Again. That’s four weeks in a row.” She looked very hard at me. ”Dr. Halloway says it’s still probably nothing. She’s started writing it down anyway.”

Something in my chest let go.

”And Mother walked to the lift and back. Twice. Yesterday. No frame.” Genny looked at her notebook. ”Forty-three meters. I measured.”

”Crane told me. Last week. He said you walked behind her the whole way with your arms out.”

Genny went very still.

”How does Crane know that?”

”Miss Pell,” I said.

Genny looked at me for a long moment. Then she took her pen out from behind her ear, and opened her notebook, and wrote something down, very small, and didn’t tell me what.

”She’s coming,” said Genny. ”Mother. She’s got the report. She says you’re to sit still and listen properly, and not interrupt, because this week’s matters.”

Mother came into the frame slowly, on her own feet, with one hand on the back of Genny’s chair. Genny got out of it without being asked. Mother sat down.

She looked better every week. That’s the truth. Her face had color in it, a little. Her hair had been cut, short and neat, by somebody who knew how, and it suited her. She’d stopped wearing the gray shawl. She was wearing a blue cardigan I didn’t know, with the sleeves pushed up, and on her right wrist, where the treatment line had been, there was a small square bandage, very clean.

She smiled at me. Then she looked at my face for a long moment, the way she always did, as if she was checking the parts were all where she’d left them.

”Your eyebrow,” she said.

”It’s healed.”

”There’s a line.”

”It’s healed, Mother.”

”Hm,” said Mother. She didn’t ask. Mother never asked what she could find out later. She picked up a sheet of paper from the table in front of her. Typed. One page. With a pencil mark in the corner.

”Weekly report,” said Mother. ”To the Director. From H. Pell. Week fourteen.” She cleared her throat.

And then she read it. In Miss Pell’s voice. Every word.

Health.

Mrs. Dask’s marker has declined by one point for the fourth consecutive week. Dr. Halloway attributes this to the treatment regime and declines to speculate further. Mrs. Dask walked unassisted to the lift and back on two occasions on Saturday, a distance of forty-three meters. G. Dask (Genevieve) measured it. G. Dask (Genevieve) walked behind her mother on both occasions with her arms extended. When asked why, she said ”in case.” The treatment line was removed from Mrs. Dask’s wrist on Thursday. The doses now come in vials, three times daily, administered by Dr. Halloway or, in her absence, by me. Supply is delivered from the Director’s office on Mondays. It has been regular.

Lessons.

G. Dask (Garnet) has learned her eight times table, most of the major rivers of the old world, and how to grow a lemon tree in a bath. The last was not on the curriculum. The tree remains in the bath. Mr. Dunmore has been showering at home. G. Dask (Genevieve) has finished the secondary mathematics syllabus four years early and has asked Mr. Ashby, the tutor, for ”the next one.” Mr. Ashby has requested a meeting with the Director’s office to discuss whether there is a next one.

Moods.

The household has been calm. G. Dask (Garnet) sings in the mornings. G. Dask (Genevieve) has begun to sleep through the night. Mrs. Dask reads, walks, and receives Mrs. Calder on Wednesdays. On the night of the first, during the rain cycle, snow was observed over the Eastgate parks for approximately four minutes. The household watched from the roof. G. Dask (Garnet) asked whether her brother had done it. Mrs. Dask said that her son ”does not do weather.” G. Dask (Genevieve) said that snow inside a sealed dome is ”thermodynamically very stupid” and went to bed.

Remarks.

The household has been uneventful.

Mother put the page down.

”Uneventful,” said Garnet, from somewhere behind her, in a perfect copy of Miss Pell, and Genny said ”Garnet,” and Garnet said ”What, she always says it,” and was taken out of the room.

I’d started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Thermodynamically very stupid. That was Genny. That was exactly Genny.

Then I saw Mother’s face, and stopped.

She wasn’t laughing. She was looking at the page. And then she turned it over, and there was a second page under it. Shorter. Handwritten. Not typed. In small, neat, upright letters, a little shaky at the ends of the lines.

”That’s the report,” said Mother. ”That’s what went to the Director. Every word.” She looked up at me. ”This is the part she left out.”

”She brought it to me on Friday night,” said Mother. ”After the girls were in bed. She stood in the doorway of the study for a long time before she came in. I’ve known Harriet Pell since I was six years old, Lucas. I’ve never once seen her stand in a doorway.” She looked down at the page. ”She asked me to read it to you. She said she couldn’t. She said she’d tried, twice, and couldn’t.”

She didn’t do the voice this time.

She read it in her own.

Dorothy,

When I sat in your daughter’s library and told you everything the Director had asked of me, I told you I had been a coward once and did not intend to be one twice. That was true. It was not all of the truth. I have been a coward a second time, every week since, by leaving something out. This is it.

Eleven years ago a little girl was left on the steps of the school where I teach. Four years old. No name. No papers. A cough she didn’t lose for a year. Nobody came for her. I took her home, because there was nobody else to, and I meant it to be for a week. I named her Juno, because she was born in the month of June, near enough, and because I wanted her to have a big name. She grew into it.

She was tested at thirteen, the way they test all of them on the lower floors now. She tested very high. Her gift was small and strange: she could tell you where north was, in the dark, in a room with no windows, a mile underground. Always. She was never once wrong. The Director’s office said a girl like that would never be lost.

She went with the first wave.

I was not told she had gone until the week after. The launch was moved. There was one night’s notice. She was going to see me on families’ day. I had a cake.

The Director came to see me, at the school, two weeks before I came to your daughter’s library. I have told you that. I did not tell you that the first thing he said, before Orphan Hall Three, before any of it, was her name. He said Juno is well. He said she is struggling with conditions, as they all are, but she is well, and she calls in every cycle, and her base is growing. He said that if I was useful to him, he would make sure that she received everything she needed. More supply on the next ship. A better kit. He said he would send her a letter from me with the second wave.

I have written that letter fourteen times. One for every week.

I believe him, Dorothy. I believe him because I have to. But you were always the cleverest girl on the top floor, and I have watched you watch him for fourteen weeks, and I know what you think of what he says.

Your son is in the cave. He trains in the place she trained. He sleeps in the beds she slept in. He sees through walls.

I would like to know if she is still calling in.

That is all I would like to know. I will not ask anything else. I will go on writing the report.

H.

Mother put the page down on the table.

Neither of us said anything for a long time. Behind her, through the glass walls of the big room, the city was lit up for the evening, and very far away, I could hear Garnet singing in the bath, next to a lemon tree.

I couldn’t breathe properly.

I thought about four short lines and a crossbar, in neat rows, on the wall behind Toby’s bed. Ninety-one of them. The last one not crossed.

I thought about Okafor’s finger on the old slate, on the twenty-sixth line, and the long row of small marks beside it. Ticks. And then a gap. And then nothing at all, all the way to the end.

Quiet in the fourth.

Fourteen months ago.

And for fourteen weeks, a thin woman in a gray dress had been sitting in my mother’s study writing uneventful, because a man with a cane had looked at her across a schoolroom and said Juno is well.

”Lucas,” said Mother quietly.

I looked up.

She was watching me. The way she’d watched me the night before I left, at the bedside, in the field. The way she’d watched me across the kitchen table my whole life. And I saw her see it. All of it. In my face. I’ve never been able to hide anything from Mother. Nobody in our family has. Genny tries the hardest and gets caught the fastest.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.

She knew.

She closed her eyes, very briefly. Just for a moment. When she opened them, she looked old. Older than in the field, when she was dying. Older than I’d ever seen her.

”Ah,” said Mother. Very softly. ”Oh, Harriet.”

”I don’t know for certain,” I said.

That was true. And it wasn’t. And Mother knew that too.

”Of course you don’t,” said Mother. She folded the handwritten page in half, and in half again, very carefully, the way Brock had folded his father’s letter. ”You couldn’t. Not from in there. Nobody’s told you anything.” She looked at me, steadily, through the screen, and I understood that she was talking to me, and also to whoever else was listening to this call, and that we both knew there was someone. ”You’ll ask, if you get the chance. And you’ll tell me what you’re told.”

”Yes.”

”And if you’re told nothing,” said Mother, ”you’ll tell me that.”

”Yes, Mother.”

She nodded. She put the folded page in the pocket of her blue cardigan, over her heart.

”Don’t you write it down,” she said. ”Not in that notebook. Not anywhere.”

I hadn’t told her about notebook fifteen. I’d never told her. I didn’t ask how she knew.

”I won’t.”

We talked about other things, after that, for the last five minutes. We had to. That was how calls worked. You couldn’t just stop.

She asked about the reading room, and I told her about the inner ear. She asked about Toby, and I told her his notes were getting better. She asked about Luna, and I said she was well, and Mother looked at me for a long moment and said ”Hm,” and didn’t ask anything else.

At the end, when the corporal outside the booth knocked twice on the frame to say time, Mother leaned in close to the screen.

”Lucas.”

”Yes?”

”She has a cake,” said Mother. ”Every families’ day. She makes it on the Saturday night. She did it last month. I saw it in the kitchen. A small one. Lemon. And then on the Sunday she takes it to the school and gives it to the little ones.” A pause. ”She’s made eighteen.”

The screen went dark.

I didn’t sleep.

I lay in the dark in the barracks, between Liam and Toby, and looked at the ceiling, and didn’t sleep.

At midnight, I looked through the wall beside Toby’s bed. Through the gray steel of his locker. At the pale strip of rock behind it. I could see the scratches in it, if I looked. Every one. JUNO PELL. 26/34. No callsign. Just a girl who always knew where north was, counting the days till her mother came.

Ninety-one.

The last one not crossed.

At one o’clock, I thought about the old slate on Okafor’s shelf, and the long row of nothing beside the twenty-sixth line, and tried to think of a way it could mean something else. A broken transmitter. A base in a valley where the signal didn’t reach. A girl who’d gone north, in the dark, always north, and was still walking.

I couldn’t make it mean anything else.

At two, I thought about Crane. About his long hands on the lectern. Many of them. About the way he’d looked at the grid of thirty-four faces, just for a moment, with something going across his face I’d seen once before, at our kitchen table. I’d thought it was grief.

Maybe it was. Maybe Crane grieved. Maybe he grieved the way a farmer grieves a field that didn’t take, and then he planted another one, and wrote Juno is well on it.

At three, I thought about Father.

How many are we expecting to bring back?

Nobody ever answered him.

Somebody had answered me. In a cold office, after midnight, off an old slate with a scratch across the corner. And I’d carried it out of there like something precious, and told my squad, and told Luna, and lain here feeling like I’d been given something.

I had.

And now there was a woman sixty floors up who’d made eighteen lemon cakes, and had asked me for it too.

At four o’clock, Toby turned over in the dark.

”You’re not asleep,” he said. Very quietly.

”No.”

”I can hear you not sleeping.” A pause. ”You breathe different.”

I didn’t say anything.

Toby was quiet for a long time. Then I heard him reach up, in the dark, to the shelf over his bed. A small sound. Metal, on wood. And then, very faintly, so faint I almost thought I’d imagined it, a single clear note.

The tuning fork. Tapped on his knee.

He held it in the dark between our beds until it faded. Then he tapped it again. And again. The same note. The first note of the old song. The one with no words, that Miss Pell had sung on the top floor of Orphan Hall Three, to a room full of children who were frightened of the dark.

He didn’t know that. I’d never told him.

He just knew I wasn’t sleeping.

I lay there and listened to it, over and over, until the note and the dark were the same thing. And at some point, a little before five, with the note still going, I made up my mind.

I wouldn’t write it in the notebook. I’d promised.

But I knew what I was going to do.

Okafor had never said whose base it was. The one that came back. Three cycles of nothing, and then a callsign, and eleven seconds of open air with something under the hiss.

I was going to ask Okafor for the eleven seconds.