Scarecrow

The twins turned ten on a Thursday.

I wasn’t there. I was in the suit bay, in the long link session, with the test instance saying hello again, Lucas and Odell swearing at a valve. I didn’t even know what day it was until Okafor stopped beside me at dinner and put a folded piece of paper on the table next to my tray.

Special visitor’s pass. Cadet Dask. One (1) family member. Saturday, 10:00 to 16:00. Approved: Office of the Director.

”Your sister applied,” said Okafor. ”In writing. Through the proper channels.” She sounded almost impressed. ”Three pages. With references to Regulation twenty-two. She cited sub-clauses.”

”Which sister?”

Okafor looked at me as if I’d asked which way was down.

”Which one do you think,” she said.

Miss Pell brought her down in the lift.

I was waiting at the bottom, by the big steel doors, with the dusk in my pocket. Not on. I’d thought about it, on the way. And decided. Take them off for the people who love you.

The doors opened.

Miss Pell first. In her gray coat, with her spectacles on and her hands folded in front of her. She looked older than on the screen. Tired round the eyes. She looked at my eyes and her heart didn’t skip at all. She just nodded, very slightly, the way she’d nod at a page she’d already read.

And beside her, very straight, with a satchel over her shoulder and her hair in two tight plaits and a look on her face like she was about to sit an examination, Genny.

Ten.

She’d grown. Two inches, maybe. Her face had got longer. She looked more like Mother than she used to. She had a new pinafore, dark blue, with a school badge on it, and ink on the cuff. There was always ink on the cuff.

She looked at me. At my eyes.

She’d seen them on the screen. Weeks ago. She’d asked does it hurt. But a screen’s not the same. I watched her see them properly. Up close. In a room.

Her face didn’t change. Not at all. She just looked. The way she looked at a page of Father’s notebooks, very carefully, all the way across, from the top left to the bottom right.

Then she held out her hand.

”Hello, Lucas,” said Genny. ”Happy birthday to me.”

I shook it. It was a very formal handshake. She’d practiced it. I could tell.

Then she let go of my hand, and stepped forward, and put both her arms round my middle, very tight, and pressed her face into my shirt. And held on. For a long time. Without saying anything.

Miss Pell looked at the ceiling.

”Where’s Garnet?” I said, when Genny let go.

”She has a cold,” said Genny.

”Officially,” said Miss Pell.

I looked at her.

Miss Pell didn’t look back. She was looking at the lift doors, which had closed behind her. Her hands were still folded. Her voice didn’t change at all.

”The Director’s office,” she said, ”requested that Garnet attend a routine medical appointment on Saturday morning. At the Halcyon clinic. Blood work. Routine.” She paused. ”It was scheduled on Thursday afternoon. Two hours after Genny’s pass was approved.” Another pause. ”Garnet developed a cold on Thursday evening. Quite a bad one. I put her to bed myself. I’m afraid she won’t be able to attend any appointments until it’s quite gone.”

Genny was looking at the floor.

”Is she all right?”

”She’s eating ice cream in bed and reading about horses,” said Miss Pell. ”She’s furious that she couldn’t come. She sent you this.” She took a small paper bag out of her coat pocket and held it out. ”She said to tell you it’s from the lemon tree. And that you’re not to share it with anyone except the girl who keeps things cold.”

There was a lemon in the bag. Small and green-yellow and lumpy. The first one. I could see it.

”She said,” said Genny, not looking up, ”that she’s sorry about the cold. And that she’ll have another one whenever she needs to.”

I took Genny round the cave.

All of it. Everything she wanted to see, and she wanted to see everything. She had a notebook. Of course she had a notebook. A new one, with a stiff black cover, and 16 written on the front in her careful hand.

”Father’s went up to fourteen,” she said. ”You’ve got fifteen. So I’m sixteen.”

She wrote everything down. The height of the cave. The temperature on field one. The number of steps up to the gallery, which she counted out loud all the way to three hundred and eleven and then said I knew that, you told me, I was checking. The rain cycle, which came on while we were crossing field two, and which she stood in the middle of with her face turned up, getting soaked, with her eyes shut.

”It’s not real,” she said. ”Is it.”

”No. It’s sprinklers. On the ceiling.”

”But the water’s real.”

”Yes.”

”Then it’s a bit real,” said Genny. And wrote that down too.

She met the squad at lunch.

Mrs. Gant gave her two pieces of the real pie. Without being asked. She looked at Genny over the counter, and then at me, and then gave her two pieces, and a great deal of gravy, and said, ”You look like a fence post as well. It must run in the family.”

Genny looked at the pie. Then at Mrs. Gant.

”Thank you,” she said. ”I’ll eat all of it.”

”You will,” said Mrs. Gant.

Liam talked to her the whole time. About Hearth Block. About the time their dad had tried to fix the boiler himself. About whether you could make a pie hotter than a Calder could stand. Genny listened to all of it, very seriously, and asked him three questions about the boiler that he couldn’t answer.

Seraphina gave her a little warm thing for her pocket. A smooth stone she’d heated, that would stay warm for hours. ”For the lift,” she said. ”It’s cold in the lift.”

Toby didn’t say anything. But when she sat down next to him, he tapped his tuning fork on the edge of the table, once. And held it up to her ear. And Genny listened to the note go all the way out, until there was nothing left, with her eyes very wide.

”That’s the first note,” she said. ”Of the old song. Mother sings it.”

Toby nodded.

And Luna.

Luna was at the end of the table. Very straight. She’d said hello when we sat down, and nothing else. She was watching Genny the way she watched everything. Carefully. Without seeming to.

Genny finished her second piece of pie. She put her fork down. She wiped her mouth with her napkin. And then she turned and looked straight down the table at Luna Windsor.

”Are you the one who brings him coffee?” said Genny. ”At two in the morning?”

The table went very quiet.

Liam choked on his water.

Luna didn’t move. Her face didn’t change. She looked at Genny for a long moment.

”Yes,” said Luna.

Genny considered that.

”Good,” she said. ”He doesn’t drink enough water either. Could you bring him some of that as well?”

”I’ll see what I can do,” said Luna.

Under the table, very faintly, I felt the cold come off her, the way it did when she was trying not to smile. Liam was still coughing. Seraphina had both hands over her mouth.

”How did you know about the coffee?” I said, later. On the stairs.

”You wrote it in a letter,” said Genny. ”Three weeks ago. You said a friend has been helping me with neurology at night. And then you said she brings coffee, and then you crossed it out.” She looked at me. ”You didn’t cross it out very well. I held it up to the lamp.”

At three o’clock, she asked to go somewhere with no cameras.

She asked it the way she asked everything. Directly. At the top of the gallery stairs, with her notebook open. ”Is there anywhere down here with no cameras? I’d like to go there now, please.”

I took her to the cistern.

Down the steps below the laundry, into the cold and the drip and the dark, where Hana had made her spheres. The one lamp at the top of the steps. The long black pool. Nobody ever came here.

Genny sat down on the edge of the stone with her satchel on her knees. She looked at the water for a while. She wrote down the temperature. She wrote down the drip rate, which she timed with her watch.

Then she closed the notebook and opened the satchel.

”Two things,” she said. ”First the present. Then the other thing.”

The present was in a matchbox.

An old one, with a picture of a ship on the front, worn soft at the corners. She held it out to me in both hands. The way Mrs. Osei had held out the dish of lamb.

I opened it.

There was a twist of tissue paper inside. And in the tissue paper, the size of a pea, catching the one lamp at the top of the steps and throwing it back in a hundred tiny pieces, a diamond.

I looked at it for a long time.

”I made it,” said Genny.

”I know.”

”Within a foot. That’s my range. Miss Pell measured it. Thirty-one centimeters, all the way round, like a bubble.” She was watching my face very closely. ”So I can only do things to things that are right next to me. I can’t do the moon. I can’t do a whole field. But I can do small things. If they’re close. If I hold them very still.”

”How long?”

”Three weeks,” said Genny. ”Every night. Under the covers. With a torch.” She pushed her plaits back over her shoulders. ”It’s pencil lead. Graphite. Carbon. Same stuff as a diamond. Just arranged wrong. Father’s notebook nine, page twelve, has the drawing. The two shapes. Flat sheets and the other one, the hard one, where everything’s joined to everything else.” She looked at the diamond in the tissue. ”I took the lead out of eleven pencils. Miss Pell thinks I’ve been eating them.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

”It’s for Avalon,” said Genny. ”Diamond’s the hardest thing there is. It doesn’t break. It doesn’t burn, not unless it’s very hot. It doesn’t rust. It doesn’t go wrong.” She looked at me. ”So whatever happens on Avalon, there’s one thing in your pocket that won’t go wrong. And I made it.”

I looked at the diamond.

Not with my eyes. With my page. All the way down. Because I couldn’t help it, and because it was Genny’s, and I wanted to see what she’d done.

It was nearly perfect.

Every point of carbon joined to its neighbors. Four ways. The hard way. The way Father had drawn it in notebook nine. Row after row, layer after layer, perfectly even, perfectly simple. She’d done it one point at a time, under the covers, with a torch, over three weeks. I could see the patience in it. I could see every night.

And deep in the middle, there was one point missing.

Just one. One tiny gap in the pattern, in one exact place. Where she’d been tired, maybe, on one of the twenty-one nights, and missed one. And never known.

I sat on the edge of the cistern and looked at it for a long time.

”What?” said Genny. ”What’s wrong with it?”

”Nothing’s wrong with it.”

”You’ve gone quiet. You’ve gone the way Father went quiet. What’s wrong?”

”Genny,” I said. ”It’s a lighthouse.”

I told her.

About the gallery. About Toby’s fork, and the grain of iron, and the one missing point. About the five grains, and Father’s dusk, and Okafor’s disc from the bridge. About Luna’s rule. Five names, every night, when the light goes.

About how a thing that’s simple enough, with one flaw in one exact place, is a thing I can find from anywhere.

Genny listened without moving. Her eyes got wider and wider. By the end, she wasn’t even holding her notebook.

”So you’ll be able to find it,” she said. ”On Avalon. From anywhere.”

”Yes.”

”And you’ll know where you are. Because you’ll know where it is.”

”Yes.”

Genny looked at the diamond for a long time.

”I didn’t do it on purpose,” she said. ”The gap. I didn’t know.”

”I know.”

”It’s a mistake.”

”Some flaws are the point,” I said. ”Odell taught me that.”

Genny nodded slowly. As if she’d confirmed something she’d already written down and underlined.

”Then put it where your heart is,” she said. ”In the suit. Inside the plate. So it’s the last thing anything gets to.”

”I will.”

”Promise.”

”I promise.”

And I did. That night. I took the diamond to Odell, and he looked at it for a long time through his lens, and swore very softly, and then cut a tiny pocket into the inside of the chest plate of my suit, right over the heart, and sealed it in.

It’s still there.

”Now the other thing,” said Genny.

She reached into the satchel again.

And took out a small glass vial.

Clear glass. With a black cap. Half full of something clear. And at the bottom, settled, a fine silver dust that caught the light from the lamp at the top of the steps.

I knew it. I’d seen it on the screen. On the little table beside Mother’s chair.

”Not on the screen,” said Genny. Very quietly. ”You said. So I didn’t.”

”How did you get it?”

”It’s Tuesday’s. The afternoon one. Mother let me.” She held it very carefully, in both hands. ”She said, give it to your brother, and tell him to look, and tell him I’d rather know. And then she took the evening one early so nobody would count.”

I looked at the vial.

”Miss Pell knows,” said Genny. ”She put it in her coat for the lift. Soldiers don’t search Miss Pell. Nobody searches Miss Pell.” She held it out. ”Look. Please. You said you’d be able to see it now. In a room with it. All the way to the bottom.”

I took it.

I looked.

The glass first. Ordinary glass. Sand and soda and lime. I could have told you where it was made.

The liquid. Water, mostly. Salt. Sugar. A dozen other things I knew now, from Halloway. Things to carry the medicine, and keep it from going off, and make it go into the blood. I could name every one. Halloway had taught me most of them on the third night, with a vial of carrier solution from her own case. Without the silver. She’d never had the silver. It came up from Level 62 sealed, and went out sealed, and nobody in the infirmary was allowed to open it.

And the silver at the bottom.

I looked at the silver.

I’d seen it before. In Maura Calder’s hands, in the kitchen at Hearth Block. Little hard bright grains, packed into the sheaths of her nerves. I’d seen the outside of them and stopped there, because I hadn’t known enough, then, to go further.

Now I went further.

And it was fog.

Not mud. Not the way mud was, too many things moving at once. Not complicated. The opposite. It was still. Perfectly still. Silver and fine and lying at the bottom of the vial like dust on a windowsill.

And I couldn’t see into it.

I could see the shape of each grain. The outside. Tiny, smooth, all exactly the same size, like seeds. I could see the water touching them. I could see the light bouncing off them.

But inside, there was nothing. Not dark. Not empty. Just nothing. A soft gray blankness that my eyes slid off, the way they’d slid off the mist in the training hall before I fell. The way they slid off the core of the kit, in Pryce’s kit room, months ago. Fog without a reason.

The way Father’s had slid off the hull of a ship hanging over a city.

”What is it?” said Genny.

I didn’t answer straight away.

”Lucas. What is it?”

”I don’t know,” I said. ”I can’t see it.”

Genny went very still.

”You can see everything,” she said.

”Not this.” I turned the vial in the light. The silver shifted at the bottom, very slowly, like sand in an hourglass. ”There are three things I’ve ever found that I can’t see into. The core of the AVALON kit. A ship Father went into, in the war, that Mother tore open for him. And this.”

The cistern dripped. Somewhere in the dark, a drop hit the water, very loud.

”The same thing,” said Genny. Not a question.

”I don’t know. They look the same. To me. They feel the same.”

”That’s the same thing,” said Genny Dask.

She didn’t cry. Genny never cried when she was frightened. She went the other way. Very quiet. Very precise. Very cold, like the cistern. She took the vial back and held it in both hands and looked at the silver dust at the bottom for a long time.

”So the medicine that keeps Mother alive,” she said slowly, ”has something in it from the ship. From them.”

”Maybe.”

”And the Council makes it. On Level 62. Under the Senator’s committee.”

”Yes.”

”And you can’t see it. So you can’t make it.” She looked up at me. ”That was the plan. Wasn’t it. In your notebook. Who makes them. And how to make them without him. I read it on the screen, last month, when you held the page up by mistake.”

I hadn’t known she’d seen that.

”Yes,” I said. ”That was the plan.”

”And now you can’t.”

”No.”

Genny looked at the vial a long time more. And then she did something very Genny. She opened her notebook. Number sixteen. To a clean page. And wrote, in her careful hand, at the top:

What is the silver.

And underlined it twice.

”Then I’ll find out,” she said. ”You’re going to Avalon. I’m not. I’m staying in the dome with Miss Pell and the lemon tree and the tutors and the clinic that wants Garnet’s blood.” She closed the notebook. ”So I’ll find out who makes it. And what it is. And how.” She put the vial back in the satchel, very carefully, wrapped in a sock. ”And when you come back, I’ll tell you. And you can tell me what the ship looked like.”

”Genny—”

”I’m ten,” said Genny. ”I’m not little. Not like that. We’ve already done this.” She looked at me. ”Count us too. When you do the names. Every night. Count us.”

So I made three more.

Right there. On the edge of the cistern. In the dark.

One from the clasp of Genny’s satchel. One from the little steel buckle on the strap of her shoe, for Garnet, because Genny said Garnet would want hers to be a shoe so she could stamp it. And one from the steel ring at the end of a hair ribbon, the blue one, that Genny took out of her plait and held out and said for Mother, she can wear it on her wrist, she won’t take it off.

Three grains of perfectly simple iron. Three flaws. Three lighthouses.

Seven. Eight. Nine.

”Ten,” said Genny, ”with mine.” She touched the place on my chest where the diamond would go. ”That’s ten. Father had one.”

Miss Pell came for her at four.

At the bottom of the lift. Genny hugged me again, harder this time, and didn’t say anything at all. Then she let go and stepped back and was very straight again, very formal. She shook my hand.

”Thank you for having me,” she said. ”It was very educational.”

”Thank you for coming.”

”I applied,” said Genny. ”Three pages. I cited sub-clauses.”

”I heard.”

She looked at me one more time. At my eyes. Right into them. The way Luna had in the corridor.

”They’re not pretty,” she said. ”Garnet’s wrong. They’re not pretty.” She considered it. ”They’re interesting. That’s better.”

And she got into the lift.

Miss Pell stopped beside me as she followed her in. Just for a second. She didn’t look at me. She looked at the lift doors.

”She’ll find out,” said Miss Pell. Very quietly. ”Whatever it is. She’ll find out. She’s been reading the clinic’s supply invoices since September.” A pause. ”I’ll keep her safe while she does. You have my word.”

The doors closed.

Day 237. Genny. Ten.

She applied. Three pages. Sub-clauses.

Garnet has a cold. Officially. Crane wanted her blood on the same morning.

A diamond. Pencil lead. Eleven pencils. Three weeks. One point missing. She didn’t know.

It’s in the suit now. Over the heart. Odell swore.

The silver in Mother’s vial is fog. Like the kit cores. Like the ship.

Genny: ”What is the silver.” Underlined twice.

Ten lighthouses. Father had one.

”Interesting. That’s better.”