Scarecrow

Halloway taught the way Okafor ran laps.

Every night. No days off. No excuses. Nine o’clock, in the infirmary, at the desk with the silver case on it, and a book open, and the lamp turned right down. And at eleven she’d close the book and say that’ll do, and I’d go, and come back the next night at nine and she’d open it again exactly where we’d stopped.

She didn’t lecture. She asked.

”What’s that?” she’d say. And point at a drawing. A slice of brain, gray and folded, with a hundred labels in tiny writing.

And I’d tell her. Or I wouldn’t. And if I didn’t, she’d tell me once, and then ask me again. And again. And again, two pages later, when I’d forgotten I’d been asked. And again the next night, at the very start, before she’d even said hello.

”Thalamus,” she’d say, before I’d sat down. ”Go.”

”The relay,” I’d say. ”In the middle. Everything coming in goes through it first. Sight. Sound. Touch. Except smell.”

”Why except smell?”

”Because smell’s older.”

”Good,” Halloway would say. ”Sit down.”

It was the slowest thing I’d ever done. Slower than the nail. Slower than the cell biology book. Slower than learning to read Father’s handwriting when I was five, which had taken a whole winter.

But it went in. That was the thing. It went in and it stayed.

Because every night, after the drawing, she’d say: ”Now look.”

She had me look at everything.

At her. At the medics. At Orrin, who came in with a sprained wrist from the beam and sat very still while Halloway said the median nerve, Lucas, follow it up from the wrist, tell me where it goes. At myself, in the steel basin, which I hated.

And at Hana.

That was the first thing Halloway asked her. On the second night. Standing at the end of Hana’s bed behind the curtain with her hands in the pockets of her white coat.

”Cadet Osei. Lucas is learning the brain. The best way to learn it is to watch one heal.” She paused. ”Yours is healing. I’d like him to watch it. Only watch. Never touch. An hour a night. You can say no.”

Hana looked at me. For a long time. Her left hand was on the blanket. She was making it open and close, very slowly, the way Halloway had shown her. Open. Close. It didn’t close all the way yet.

”If,” said Hana. Slowly. Finding it. ”It. Helps. The next. One.”

”It might.”

”Then. Yes.”

So I watched Hana Osei’s brain heal.

An hour a night. Sitting in the chair by her bed, with the lamp down, while Halloway sat on the other side with the book open on her knee. I’d look. And describe. And Halloway would tell me what I was looking at, and what it meant, and I’d write it down.

It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

I want to say that properly. I’ve seen a lot of things. I’ve seen the moon with water on it. I’ve seen a whole hall of fuel turn into snow. I’ve seen two moons rise over a world nobody had ever named.

Nothing was as beautiful as that.

There was the place where the blood had pressed. On the left side. Over the part, Halloway said, that made words. A patch of it, the size of a coin, that had been squeezed too long and gone quiet. Not dead. Halloway was very clear about that. Stunned. Like a field after a hard frost.

And round the edges of it, every night, things were growing.

Tiny things. Finer than the link wire. Little threads, reaching out from the cells that were still awake, into the quiet patch, looking for the cells on the other side. Feeling their way. Like roots. Like the first green coming through the soil at home in the spring, a few square yards a day.

And sometimes, while I was watching, Hana would be trying to say something. Lying in the bed with her face screwed up, reaching for a word. Window. Biscuit. Risa. And I’d see it. In the quiet patch. One little thread, reaching, reaching. Touching the other side.

And joining.

And Hana would say the word. All at once. Like it had always been there.

And then she’d look at me, with the word still in her mouth, and I’d nod. And she’d smile. Lopsided, because the left side of her face was still slow.

”Saw. It?” she said, the first time.

”Yes.”

”What. Did. It. Look. Like?”

I thought about it.

”Like the eleventh frond,” I said. ”Uncurling.”

Hana didn’t know about the fern. But she smiled anyway.

”You want to help it,” said Halloway, one night, on the walk back to her desk. ”Don’t you. The threads. You want to reach in and join them up. Faster.”

”Yes.”

”You could. Probably. You can see every one.” She sat down. ”Why don’t you?”

I thought about it. She waited. She always waited.

”Because I don’t know which ones go where,” I said. ”She’s not just growing threads. She’s choosing them. Some of them reach and touch and then let go again. Some of them join. I don’t know why. I don’t know which are the right ones.” I looked at my hands. ”If I joined them, I’d be choosing for her. And I’d choose wrong.”

Halloway looked at me over her spectacles for a long time.

”That,” she said, ”is the most important thing I’m going to teach you. And you’ve just taught it to yourself.” She turned a page. ”Most of medicine, Lucas, is getting out of the way. The body knows more than we do. It’s been doing this for a very long time. Our job is to stop the bleeding, and keep it clean, and keep it fed, and then sit on our hands while it does the clever part.”

”Father wrote that. In the margin. On the page about bones.”

”What did he write?”

”Set it straight. Then wait.”

Halloway was quiet.

”Yes,” she said. ”He would have.”

I asked her about the samples on the fifth night.

The two little glass tubes she’d taken out of my eyes in Laboratory One. Mine. Until I’ve looked.

”Have you looked?”

”Yes.”

”What did you find?”

Halloway closed the book. She took off her spectacles and rubbed the bridge of her nose. It was the first time I’d ever seen her look tired.

”Something I don’t understand yet,” she said. ”And I’m not going to tell you a thing I don’t understand. I’ve watched what happens when people say things they don’t understand to boys like you. You build lists out of them.” She put the spectacles back on. ”When I know, I’ll tell you. You. First. Before anybody upstairs.”

”Before Crane?”

”Crane,” said Halloway, ”has asked me for those samples four times. In writing.” She opened the book again. ”I’ve told him four times that they were contaminated and I had to discard them. In writing.” She pointed at a drawing. ”Cerebellum. Go.”

After Halloway, I went to the reading room.

Every night. Eleven until I couldn’t see straight. Okafor had given me the key for the whole night now, not just an hour. She’d put it on the end of my bed the morning after the chamber without saying anything. A new key. Still warm from her pocket.

I read the books Halloway didn’t have time for. Neurology. Neuroanatomy. Things with long names. I read them with Father’s anatomy book open beside me at the eleven blank pages, and every night I filled in a little bit more. In pencil. Very small. Under his one line.

Don’t. Not without a teacher.

And under it, now, in my writing:

Teacher: R. Halloway. 9:00. Every night.

And then the names. Page after page. Starting to fill up.

It was on the sixth night that Luna came.

It was two in the morning.

I know because the lamp in the corridor outside the reading room clicked over to its night setting at two, and went from yellow to a dim, sleepy blue, and that was when the door opened.

I didn’t look up. I was halfway through a drawing of the spinal cord in cross-section, trying to remember which tract went where, with my head on my hand and my eyes stinging. I thought it was the night porter. He came round at two sometimes and looked at me and went away again.

Then I smelled coffee.

Real coffee. Not the gray stuff in the mess that tasted of the urn. The real kind, dark and bitter and hot, that you could only get in the officers’ mess on the hundred-and-fortieth floor, where the General had his breakfast.

Luna put a cup down beside my elbow.

She didn’t say anything. She sat down across the table. In her chair. Where she’d sat every night for six months, until the last two weeks, when I’d stopped coming at the usual time and started coming at eleven and staying until I fell asleep on the book. She had her own cup. She held it in both hands and the coffee in it didn’t steam, because her hands had made it cold. She didn’t seem to mind.

She reached over. Turned the neuroanatomy book round, just a little, so she could see it. Upside down.

Then she said:

”Name the twelve cranial nerves.”

I looked at her.

”In order,” said Luna. ”From the front.”

”I haven’t got to those yet.”

”Page two hundred and four,” said Luna. ”You got to them on Tuesday. I watched you. You read them twice and then you went on to the spinal cord because the spinal cord had a better drawing.”

I stared at her.

”I read everything you read,” said Luna Windsor. ”Upside down. Across this table. For six months.” She took a sip of her cold coffee. ”Cranial nerves. From the front. Go.”

I got four. Then I got stuck.

She told me the fifth. And then made me start again from the first. And I got five, and got stuck. And she told me the sixth. And made me start again.

It took forty minutes. By the end of it, I could say all twelve, in order, without stopping. And so could she. She’d never looked at the book except upside down. She’d never written any of it down.

”How do you remember them?” I said.

”The way you remember the first lines of a song.” She turned the book back round to face me. ”You say them until they’re not words anymore. Until they’re just the shape of a thing.” She finished her coffee. ”Same time tomorrow. Spinal tracts. You skipped the bit about pain.”

She got up.

”Luna.”

She stopped at the door.

”Why?” I said.

She stood in the doorway for a while. With the dim blue light from the corridor behind her and her empty cup in her hand.

”On Avalon,” she said, ”we’ll be five people. On our own. On a world nobody’s ever stood on, a long way from Halloway. And one of those five people is going to get hurt.” She said it very simply. The way she’d said Hearth, out. ”Not might. Will. Liam will catch fire. Toby will hold a wall too long. Seraphina will burn herself out. I’ll freeze something I didn’t mean to.” A pause. ”You’ll fall.”

I didn’t say anything.

”And when it happens,” said Luna, ”you’ll be the doctor. There won’t be anyone else. You’ll be the only person on that world who can see inside us.” She looked at me. ”I’m the leader. I need to know my doctor knows the names of things.”

”That’s the leader’s answer.”

”Yes,” said Luna. ”It’s a good answer. It’s true.”

”Is it the only one?”

Luna looked at me for a long moment. In the doorway. In the blue.

”It’s the one I’m giving you at two in the morning,” she said. And went.

She came the next night. And the next. Two o’clock, every night, when the lamp clicked over to blue. Two cups. One hot, one cold. And the book turned round so she could read it upside down.

She was a terrible teacher. Worse than Halloway. Halloway asked you a thing three times. Luna asked you a thing once, and if you got it wrong, she looked at you. That was all. She just looked. With her pale eyes and her face perfectly still. And you felt it all the way down, and you never got that thing wrong again as long as you lived.

I got the spinal tracts in two nights. The bit about pain too.

I got the arteries of the brain in three. Every one. Where they went, and what they fed, and what happened if they stopped. The one that had split in Hana’s head had a name. I learned it. I wrote it at the top of a clean page in the anatomy book, and underlined it, and wrote the date beside it. And I didn’t write anything else on that page.

Luna saw. Upside down. She didn’t say anything.

But the next night she brought biscuits as well.

On the ninth night, I told her about the column.

I hadn’t meant to. We were doing the brainstem, at about three in the morning, and she’d just asked me what the vagus nerve did, and I’d told her. It goes down from the brain to almost everything. The heart. The lungs. The gut. It slows things down. It’s the brake. And she’d nodded, and turned a page, and I’d said:

”It was Hana’s ring. Nine point five.”

Luna didn’t look up.

”I know,” she said.

”You know?”

”Risa told Seraphina. Seraphina told Liam. Liam told me.” She turned another page. ”In about eleven seconds. On the morning after the chamber. He was very upset. He thought I’d be angry with you.”

”Were you?”

Luna was quiet for a while.

”I asked you,” she said. ”What nine point five was. And you closed the book.” She still wasn’t looking at me. ”And I said I wouldn’t ask again. And I didn’t. Because I’d said I wouldn’t.” A pause. ”And I sat in the gallery on Wednesday with Squad Eight waiting for our turn, and I watched you go out with Okafor, and I didn’t know why. And then the alarm went.”

I didn’t say anything.

”I wasn’t angry,” said Luna. ”I was something else. I haven’t got a word for it. I’ve been looking. It’s not in any of these books.” She closed the one in front of her. ”Next time, tell me.”

”As my leader.”

”No,” said Luna.

She looked up. Right at me. At my eyes. The way she had in the corridor, with her books on the floor.

”Not as your leader,” she said. ”As the person who brings you coffee at two in the morning.”

The lamp in the corridor hummed. Somewhere very far off in the cave, a pump came on.

”All right,” I said.

”All right,” said Luna. And went back to the book. And her face was perfectly still. But the edge of the table under her hands had gone white with frost, very slowly, in little ferns.

On the eleventh night, she asked me to look.

We’d finished the brainstem. It was half past three. She’d been quiet for a long time, turning her cold coffee round and round on the table.

”The vagus,” she said. ”The brake. You said it slows the heart.”

”Yes.”

”Mine’s fifty-two.” She didn’t look at me. ”It’s always been fifty-two. Since I was six. Since Albert’s hand. Father took me to a doctor in the Ministry, a week after, and I had a small operation. In my neck. I don’t remember it. I just remember the scar, after, and Father saying now you’ll be steady.” She put her fingers, very lightly, on the left side of her neck. Just under the jaw. ”And I was. I’ve been steady ever since. Except in the corridor. And on the gallery, in the rain.”

The reading room was very quiet.

”You can see it,” said Luna. ”Whatever he had them do. You can see it now. You know the names.”

”Yes.”

”Look,” she said. ”Please. And tell me what it is.”

I asked her first. Out loud. Even though she’d asked me.

”You’re sure?”

”I’m sure.”

So I looked.

Only there. Only at the place under her fingers. I held my eyes on it the way I’d learned, the way Halloway had taught me, only what you need, nothing else. Through the skin. Past the little white line of the old scar. To the nerve. The vagus. Going down from her brain toward her heart, the way it did in everyone, like a long gray cable.

And on it, just there, wrapped round it, very small, there was something that wasn’t her.

A tiny thing. The size of a grain of rice. Silver-gray. Wrapped round the nerve like a ring round a finger. Old. Grown in, the way the link wire had grown into Hana. The nerve round it was thickened a little, the way bark thickens round a wire on a fence post.

And it was ticking.

Very faintly. Very slowly. A tiny, even pulse, going into the nerve. Like the link coin. Like a clock. Fifty-two times a minute.

Telling her heart how fast to go.

I told her.

All of it. Exactly. The way Halloway had taught me. Like you’re reading it off a page. Where it was. What it was wrapped round. What it was doing. Fifty-two.

Luna sat very still and listened.

When I’d finished, she didn’t say anything for a long time. Her fingers were still on her neck. Over the scar.

”Can it come out?” she said finally.

I looked at it again. At the grain of silver. At the nerve, thickened round it. At the way it had grown in, over eleven years, until you couldn’t quite see where it stopped and she started.

”I don’t know,” I said. ”Not yet. I don’t know enough. If I took it out wrong, I could—” I stopped. ”It’s on the brake. For your heart. If I got it wrong, your heart might not know how to go at all.”

Luna nodded. Slowly.

”Not without a teacher,” she said.

”Not without a teacher.”

She took her fingers away from her neck. She picked up her empty cup. She stood up.

”Then learn faster,” said Luna Windsor.

And at the door she stopped, and turned round, and looked at me with her pale eyes in the blue light.

”That’s your exam,” she said. ”Whenever you’re ready. Not before.”

And went.

I didn’t sleep that night.

I sat in the reading room until the lamps went from blue to gray to white, with Father’s anatomy book open at the page about the neck. And I read everything. The vagus. Where it went. What it touched. What happened when it was cut, or pressed, or pulled. Every word. Slowly. Not skipping.

And at the bottom of the page, under Father’s drawing of the nerve, I wrote it down. In pencil. Very small.

Day 226. L.W. Left vagus, upper neck. Foreign body, approx. 3 mm, silver-gray, encircling. Pacing. 52/min. 11 years.

And under that:

Exam. Not yet.

Learn faster.

And then, because it was true, and because some things do go in the notebook after all, I turned to the back of number fifteen, to the page where I’d written Luna and Eight and ”Fine,” and added one line underneath.

Coffee. 2:00. Every night.