Scarecrow

I asked Okafor if I could watch.

I didn’t try to sneak in. I’d thought about it. There was a maintenance stair behind the pressure chamber, and a door with a lock I could have opened by looking at it. But I’d been doing things on my own for three weeks, and I was tired, and something in me had started to understand that on my own was the problem.

So I went to her office on Wednesday morning before breakfast, and stood in the doorway, and said, ”Sergeant. I’d like to watch Squad Three in the chamber.”

Okafor looked up from her slate.

She looked at me for a long time. In the dark. With the steel side of her face toward the door.

”Why?” she said.

I didn’t answer.

She didn’t ask again. She put down her slate. She got up.

”Then I’ll watch with you,” said Okafor.

The pressure chamber was at the bottom of the engineering wing. A long steel tank set into the rock, like something you’d keep a whale in, with a round door at one end as thick as my arm was long, and a row of portholes down one side, and above it, behind a wall of glass, the observation gallery.

The gallery was narrow. A strip of floor and a long desk under the glass, covered in dials and screens. Engineers in gray at the desk. Two medics in white at the far end, with a stretcher folded against the wall. And Halloway, in the middle, at her own screen, with her silver case open on the desk beside it, and her spectacles on.

She saw me come in behind Okafor.

She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me over the top of her spectacles, for one second. And then went back to her screen.

But she’d looked.

Squad One went in at eight and came out at twelve minutes past nine, gray and sweating and fine. Squad Two at nine, Sigmund at the front, very straight. They’d do their four hours in the second chamber while Squad Three went into the first.

And at ten, Squad Three.

Five suits. Walking down the steel steps on the far side of the glass, into the tank, with their helmets sealed. Orrin at the front, big and slow. The two girls from the range. The boy who’d asked about the stars.

And Hana. At the back. Small. Walking very carefully.

The round door swung shut behind them. Somebody turned a wheel. There was a sound like a long breath being let out, very slowly, by something very big.

”Squad Three, sealed,” said an engineer into a microphone. ”Beginning descent. Link active. Pressure falling.”

I put my hands on the edge of the desk.

And I looked.

The ring was eight centimeters when the door shut.

I watched it the way I’d watched it every morning at breakfast. Through the glass. Through her helmet. Through the back of her head. The coin, and the wire, and the dark sun of swollen tissue round it.

The pressure went down.

You could hear it. The tank creaked as the air came out of it, the way the house at home used to creak on cold nights. The numbers on the engineers’ screens went down too. Slowly. Steadily. Eighty percent. Seventy. Sixty. They were taking it down to AV-7. To air so thin you’d faint in it without a suit.

And as the pressure went down outside her, the ring got bigger.

Not fast. Slowly. The way bread rises.

Eight and a half. Nine.

I didn’t understand at first. And then I did. It was the simplest thing in the world. Father had taught it to me when I was six, with a bottle of fizzy water and the cap. Take the pressure off the outside, and the inside pushes out. The swollen tissue round her coin was full of fluid. And the fluid was pushing out against less and less.

It was on page three hundred and something. I knew it was. I’d have read it in a week.

Nine and a half. Ten.

”Squad Three, forty minutes. All suits nominal. All links nominal.”

Nominal.

The link was talking to her. I could see the coin ticking. The little wire carrying it in. And every time it ticked, the tissue round it flinched, very slightly, like skin when you touch a bruise.

Eleven.

I looked at Okafor.

She was standing beside me with her arms folded, watching the tank. Not the screens. The tank. The way she’d watched the bridge.

She didn’t look at me. But she said, very quietly, so the engineers couldn’t hear:

”Which one, Dask?”

I didn’t say anything.

”Which one,” said Okafor again.

And I opened my mouth to tell her. I did. I want that on the record. I opened my mouth, and the name was right there, and—

”Squad Three, one hour. Pressure holding at AV-7 nominal. Suits nominal. Links nominal.”

—and I thought: it’s holding. It’s eleven, and it’s holding. It’s not going any higher.

And I closed my mouth.

And Okafor didn’t ask a third time.

It held for an hour and a half.

I watched it the whole time. Eleven. Eleven. Eleven and a half. Eleven and a half. I didn’t blink. My eyes stung and watered and I didn’t blink, because I had a stupid idea that if I blinked something would happen in the blink.

I could see the five of them moving in the tank. Doing their drills. Walking. Lifting. Orrin bending a steel bar the way they’d been told to. The girls running a circuit. Hana, at the side, making water. Not spheres. Just a thin stream, out of the damp air of the tank, that she poured from one cupped hand to the other, slowly, the way they’d asked her to.

She was good at it. Even then. Even with the ring at eleven and a half and the link ticking and her nose starting to bleed again inside her helmet, very slowly, a thread.

She poured the water from one hand to the other. Carefully. Without spilling.

”Squad Three, two hours thirty. All nominal.”

And then I saw it.

Not the ring.

Deeper.

There was a vessel.

Inside. Under the swelling. Under the bone. In the place I’d been not looking at for three weeks, because I didn’t understand it. A blood vessel. Not one of the little leaking ones behind her eyes. A bigger one. Running along the inside of the skull, between the bone and the brain, like a pipe along the inside of a wall.

The swelling had been pushing on it. For weeks. Pushing, and pushing, the way Okafor said the shells had pushed on the bridge.

And now, with the pressure gone from outside, it was pushing back.

It had a weak place. I could see it. A patch of the wall, a few millimeters, where the vessel had gone thin. Stretched. Like the eighth bolt on the coupling. Like something that had been stretched, and stretched, and was very nearly at the end of its stretching.

I’d seen it before. I knew that shape. I’d seen it in a steel bolt three weeks ago, in the second before it went.

”Okafor,” I said.

She turned.

”Osei,” I said. Out loud. Too loud. The engineers turned round. ”Hana Osei. Squad Three. Stop the chamber. Stop the chamber now.”

The vessel went.

I saw it. I was the only one who could. A tiny thing. A split, a few millimeters long, in the wall of a pipe inside a girl’s head, on the other side of a steel tank and a sealed helmet and a skull.

And then blood.

Not a thread. Not a drop. A rush. Bright and fast and under pressure, pouring out of the split into the space between the bone and the brain, where there wasn’t any room for it. Spreading. Pushing.

In the tank, Hana stopped pouring her water.

She stood very still with her hands cupped in front of her. And the thin stream she’d been making fell out of the air, all at once, and splashed on the floor of the tank.

And then she fell.

Not like a puppet. Not all at once, the way I had in the training hall. Slowly. To her knees first. Then forward. Onto her hands. And then her arms gave, and she went down on her side on the steel floor of the chamber, and lay there.

”Medical,” said Halloway. Very loud. Very calm. ”Squad Three, Osei down. Abort descent. Repressurize. Now.”

Okafor hit something on the desk with the flat of her hand. An alarm went. Red light, turning, all along the gallery.

”Repressurizing,” said an engineer. His voice had gone high. ”Four minutes to equalize. We can’t open the door till it’s equal, it’ll—”

”I know what it’ll do,” said Halloway. ”Four minutes. Go.”

Four minutes.

I looked at the blood.

It was spreading. Under the bone. Over the brain. A dark sheet, getting thicker, pressing down. I didn’t need page three hundred and something to know what four minutes of that would do.

I could stop it.

I could. I was the only person in the room who could even see it. I’d taken her old blood apart in the cistern, forty minutes, carefully, and the ring had gone down and she’d slept all night.

I could do it again. Faster.

I looked through the glass and the tank and the helmet and the skull. And I took hold of the blood.

And I stopped.

I stopped because I couldn’t tell what was what.

In the cistern it had been easy. Old blood. Pooled. Still. Sitting in a pocket on its own, with nothing else in it. I’d taken it apart and nothing else had been touching it.

This wasn’t that.

This was new blood, pouring, moving, mixed into everything. Into the space round the brain, and up against the brain, and into the little folds of it, and round the torn vessel, and along the other vessels, the good ones, the ones that weren’t torn and were still carrying blood to the places that needed it.

And it all looked the same.

Blood was blood. Iron and water and salt. Bright points, the same bright points, in the blood that was spilling and the blood that was keeping her alive. If I took apart the blood that was pressing on her brain, I’d take apart the blood going into her brain too. I couldn’t see the difference. There wasn’t a difference. Not in what it was made of. Only in where it was supposed to be.

And I didn’t know where it was supposed to be.

I didn’t know the map.

Don’t, Father had written. Not without a teacher.

I stood at the glass with my hands on the desk and my eyes wide open and blood going everywhere inside Hana Osei’s head, and I could see every single drop of it, and I didn’t dare touch any of it.

Because I didn’t understand it.

Because I hadn’t studied.

Because I’d had three weeks, and I’d spent them measuring a ring and underlining same.

”Dask.”

Halloway. Beside me. I hadn’t seen her move. She had her hand on my arm, tight, her fingers digging in through my sleeve.

”You can see it,” she said. Not a question.

”Yes.”

”Then tell me. Exactly. What you see. Now.”

”There’s blood—”

”Where. Exactly where. Like you’re reading it off a page. Start at the coin and go in.”

I started at the coin. I went in.

I told her. The swelling. The bone. The vessel running along the inside of the skull on the left side, above and behind the ear. The split in it. A few millimeters. The blood coming out of it, fast, spreading in a sheet between the bone and the—

”Outside the dura or inside it?”

”I don’t know what that is.”

”The tough layer. Like leather. Wrapped round the brain, under the bone. Is the blood above the leather or under it?”

I looked.

There was a layer. I’d seen it. I’d never had a word for it. Tough and gray and smooth, like the inside of an eggshell. And the blood was—

”Above it,” I said. ”Between it and the bone. It’s pushing the leather down.”

Halloway breathed out. Long and slow.

”Good,” she said. ”Good. That’s the best of the bad ones. That’s a pipe and a pocket. The brain’s still under its own roof.” Her fingers tightened on my arm. ”Now listen to me. You’re not going to touch the brain. You’re not going to touch anything under the leather. Do you hear me? Not one cell.”

”Yes.”

”Look at the split. The vessel. Just the split. Can you see both edges of it?”

I looked.

”Yes.”

”Is it the same stuff? Both sides? The same as the rest of the pipe?”

”Yes.”

”Then you know what it is,” said Halloway. ”You don’t have to know anything else. You know steel. You know a seam. You held a bridge together—” she stopped. ”Your father held a bridge together with his eyes. Every rivet. Same stuff both sides. Don’t make anything new. Don’t change anything. Just take the two edges and put them back where they were before they came apart.”

I looked at the split.

Only the split. Nothing else. I held my eyes on it the way I’d held them on Luna’s face in the corridor. The outside of it. The edges. Two edges of the same thin wall, torn apart, with the blood rushing out between them.

The same stuff both sides.

Like a seam. Like a weld. Like Odell’s suits, the third one, the one we’d built together, joining plate to plate.

I took the two edges.

And I put them back.

It wasn’t like the bridge. It wasn’t like the mist. It wasn’t big. It was the smallest thing I’d ever done. Smaller than the nail I’d turned to copper on my first day, smaller than the eleventh frond. A few millimeters of a wall thinner than paper, inside a girl’s head, on the other side of a steel tank.

I did it bright point by bright point. Joining them. The way they’d been joined before.

It took nine seconds.

The rush stopped.

”It’s closed,” I said.

”Is it holding?”

I looked.

”Yes.”

”Two minutes to equalize,” said the engineer, high.

”Now the pocket,” said Halloway. She was very close to me. I could feel her breathing. Fast. Not as fast as mine. ”The blood that’s already out. Above the leather. Pushing down. Can you see the edge of it? Where it stops?”

”Yes.”

”Take it apart from the outside edge in. Not the middle. The edge farthest from the split. Slowly. And leave a little right on top of the split. A little plug of it. Don’t touch that. That’s the scab. That’s holding your seam. You understand?”

”Yes.”

”Like the cistern,” said Halloway. ”Only now you know where it’s supposed to be.”

I didn’t ask how she knew about the cistern.

I took the pocket apart. From the outside edge in. Slowly. The way she said. The iron back into the iron, the water into the water. All of it outside the leather. None of it under. And I left a little plug of dark, right on top of the seam, and didn’t touch it.

The leather came back up. Slowly. Like a mattress when somebody gets off it.

”Equalized,” said the engineer. ”Opening.”

The round door swung. The medics were already down the steps with the stretcher. Okafor was gone from beside me. I hadn’t seen her go either. She was in the tank, on her knees, with Hana’s helmet off and Hana’s head in her lap.

”Now come with me,” said Halloway. ”You’re my eyes until I say otherwise.”

It took six hours.

I don’t remember all of it. I remember the infirmary, and the lights, which Halloway turned down without my asking. I remember a table, and Hana on it, very small, with her short black hair shaved off on the left side and her face gray. I remember Halloway’s hands, steady, in thin gloves. A drill, very small, very quiet. Two medics who didn’t look at me once.

And I remember Halloway’s voice. The whole six hours. Never stopping. Never going up.

”What’s it doing now?”

”Is the seam holding?”

”Is the leather coming up or going down?”

”There’s pressure under it. I can’t see under it. You can. Tell me where.”

”Don’t touch it. Just tell me.”

I told her. Everything. Every vessel. Every pocket. Every millimeter. I was a lamp in a dark room, and she was the one with her hands in it, and she asked me where to look, and I told her, and she knew what it meant. She knew all of it. Every name. Every part. Every map.

She’d had twenty-six years. She’d studied every one of them.

And twice, only twice, she said: ”Now you. This one thing. Exactly this and nothing else.” And told me what. And I did exactly that and nothing else.

The last thing was the coin.

”It comes out,” said Halloway. ”Today. All of it. Every strand of wire.” She looked at me over her mask. ”I can take the coin. I can’t take the wire. It’s too fine. It’s grown in. I’d do more damage getting it out than it did going in.” She held my eyes. ”You can see every strand.”

”Yes.”

”Then you take it out. Not cut. Not break. Unmake it. Strand by strand. From the deep end, back toward the coin. Turn the wire into nothing she’ll miss. And if anything near it so much as twitches, you stop and tell me.”

It took two hours. The wire was finer than hair. It went in deeper than I’d thought. Into places I didn’t have names for.

Halloway gave me the names. One at a time. As I got to them.

When it was out, the ring round where the coin had been was already going down.

I sat on the floor of the corridor outside the infirmary afterward with my back against the wall and my hands shaking.

I don’t know how long. My nose was bleeding a little. Not much. I didn’t wipe it.

Halloway came out at some point. She’d taken her mask and gloves off. Her face was gray, and her spectacles were pushed up on her forehead, and there was a line pressed into her face where the mask had been. She stood in the corridor and looked down at me.

Then she sat down. On the floor. Next to me. With her back against the wall. Which I’d never thought Dr. Halloway would do in her life.

”She’ll live,” said Halloway.

I put my face in my hands.

”She’ll be slow for a while. Weeks. Months, maybe. Words. Her left hand. We’ll see. She’s young, and the leather held, and the pocket came out before it pressed too long.” She paused. ”And she’ll never link again. Not with anything. Ever. She won’t be going to Avalon.”

”I knew,” I said into my hands.

Halloway didn’t say anything.

”I knew. Ten days. I saw it in the corridor. I measured it every morning. I came to you and said hypothetically.” I couldn’t stop now. ”And she asked me not to tell, because of the stipend, and I didn’t, and I told myself I’d keep an eye on her. And I kept an eye on her. I had a column. With numbers. And I didn’t know what any of them meant, and I underlined same—”

”Dask.”

”—and this morning Okafor asked me which one. Twice. And I nearly told her, and the screen said nominal, and I didn’t—”

”Lucas.”

I stopped.

She’d never called me that. Not once. In seven months.

”I said,” said Halloway, ”that if you came through my door with a name, I wouldn’t ask why you waited.” She was looking at the opposite wall. ”You came through it. Today. Late. Too late to do it the easy way. Not too late.” She was quiet for a moment. ”I’m not going to ask.”

We sat there for a long time.

”How did you know about the cistern?” I said eventually.

”Risa Friese,” said Halloway. ”Last night. At three in the morning. She came through my door in her nightgown and stood in the doorway and said, my roommate’s name is Hana Osei, and she’s been bleeding on her pillow for seven weeks, and Lucas Dask has been doing something to her at the cistern, and I think whatever it is isn’t enough. And then she burst into tears and went back to bed before I could get my shoes on.”

I didn’t say anything.

”I was going to pull Osei out of the chamber this morning,” said Halloway. ”Before the descent. I had the order written. And then Crane’s office sent down a note at half past seven that every cadet was to complete the trial without exception, on the Director’s personal instruction, because the Council was watching the numbers.” She took her spectacles off her forehead and looked at them. ”I should have pulled her anyway. I was going to, at the first sign. I’d have been too late. I couldn’t see the vessel.” She put the spectacles back on. ”You could. And I knew where to find it.”

She turned her head and looked at me.

”Neither of us could have done that alone,” said Dr. Halloway. ”Do you understand? Neither of us.”

”Father wrote don’t,” I said. ”In his anatomy book. On the pages about the brain. Don’t. Not without a teacher.”

Halloway was quiet for a long time.

”I know,” she said. ”I was there when he wrote it.”

I turned my head.

”I was twenty-four. The youngest doctor in Program Cinder. And he was sixteen, with his eyes three weeks black, sitting on my examining table. And he asked me if he could look inside a man who’d died that morning. To learn.” She was looking at the wall again. ”So I took him down to the mortuary. And I showed him. For six hours. The brain. Every part. Every name. And at the end of it, he went very quiet. And he said, I can see all of it, Doctor. And I don’t understand any of it.” She breathed out. ”And then he took a pencil and wrote that line in his book. And he never asked me again. He was posted to the river the next week.”

I didn’t say anything.

”Nine o’clock,” said Halloway. ”Every night. Here. Until the Meridian. I’ll teach you the eleven pages.” She got up off the floor. Slowly. Stiffly. Twenty-six years of standing at tables. ”You’ve got a teacher, Lucas. That’s what the line said. It didn’t say never.”

She sent the stipend form that afternoon.

I know because I saw it. She wrote it at her desk, with me sitting in the chair across from her with a bag of ice on my nose, and she turned it round and showed me before she sent it. She didn’t have to.

Cadet H. Osei. Squad Three. Injured in service during a sanctioned trial, conducted at the Director’s personal instruction and over the objection of the medical officer. Permanently unfit for link duty. Recommended: full service stipend to the family for life, under Regulation 19.

Signed: R. Halloway, Chief Medical Officer.

”Over the objection,” I said.

”I objected,” said Halloway. ”In writing. At seven forty. It’s in the file.” She signed it. ”Crane can write to me.”

Risa was sitting outside the infirmary when I came out.

On the floor. Where Halloway and I had sat. With her knees up and her arms round them, in her training clothes, with a cold cup of tea beside her she hadn’t drunk.

She looked up at me.

”Is she—”

”She’s alive,” I said.

Risa put her face down on her knees.

I sat down beside her. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.

”I told,” said Risa into her knees. ”Last night. I’m sorry. I had to. I couldn’t—”

”You were right.”

”You’re not angry?”

”You did the thing I didn’t.” I looked at the infirmary door. ”She’s alive because you went through that door at three in the morning in your nightgown.”

Risa lifted her head and looked at me. Her eyes were red.

”She’s alive because you could see the vessel,” she said.

”Both,” I said. ”Halloway says neither of us could have done it alone.” I thought about it. ”Neither of the three of us.”

Risa didn’t say anything for a while. Then she leaned sideways, very slightly, until her shoulder was against mine. Just touching.

We sat there until Okafor came down the corridor, and stopped, and looked at the two of us, and didn’t send either of us anywhere.

I wrote it down that night.

Not in the column. I tore the column out. All of it. The dates and the numbers and the underlined same. I didn’t throw it away. I folded it up very small and put it inside the back cover of notebook fifteen, where I’d see it every time I opened it.

Then I wrote on the clean page.

Day 205. Hana Osei. Alive.

I couldn’t fix it. Not alone. I didn’t understand it.

Halloway couldn’t see it. Not alone.

Risa told. I didn’t.

Count them: Squad Three went into the chamber. Five. Five came out.

And at the bottom, in the list, under Brains. Now.:

9:00. Every night. A teacher.