Scarecrow

The water was heavier than I’d remembered.

I stood beside the skiff on the morning of Day 428 and looked at the vessels lined up beneath it. Six of them. Lids tied down, handles wrapped, each one marked with a strip of cloth so nobody would mistake the drinking water for anything we’d used in the forge.

Liam lifted one and set it inside.

“There’s your difficulty,” he said.

“What?”

“Full of water.”

“I’d worked that out.”

“Good. I was worried we’d need Toby.”

Toby was sitting in the shade with a bowl of breakfast, looking at us over the rim. He had given Liam the bag and made him unpack it once more before deciding he knew where everything was.

He hadn’t offered to come.

I hadn’t asked him to change his mind.

It was a good start to the day.

We tested the skiff empty first.

Not high. A hand’s width above the ground. I kept my eyes on its inner rim and lifted it slowly, feeling for the familiar pull. The hull came up evenly. Stayed there. Settled when I let it down.

Then with water.

Then with Liam sitting where a passenger would sit, complaining about the accommodation.

Sera watched my face. Luna watched the hull. Dot had a hand at each end, close enough to catch a small tip while we were still barely off the ground.

The shaking didn’t come back.

I lowered it again and took my hand away from the stick.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“Another test this evening,” Luna answered.

I nodded.

There would be sunlight enough for both.

Wren had sent the message at dawn.

PREPARING WATER. IF READY, DEPART NEXT DAWN. KEEP MIRROR AT WEST RIDGE.

The answer from twenty-two had come through slowly, passed between the high places until it reached us.

WILL WATCH.

No complaint about how long we’d taken. No demand to know what had kept us.

I would almost have preferred one.

Wren folded the slate under her arm.

“They don’t know what we’ve been doing,” she said.

“I know.”

“So don’t make them spend their first hour with you reassuring you about it.”

I looked at her.

She held my eyes until I nodded.

Then she went to check the blankets.

Before noon, Dot brought the screen to the shade.

The picture showed daylight at the mouth of the upper passage, then the familiar descending steps. Her hand moved slowly. Lamp ahead. Mirror folded against its side.

“This unit is returning to the same position,” she said.

Luna sat beside me. Holt came over with his cup. Risa stayed on the other side of the shelter, close enough to watch without having to lean forward.

Toby had gone to lie down.

Nobody called him back.

The arch stood where we’d left it.

I examined the feet first. The contact beneath the broken rib. The little watercourse beside the inner shoulder. I could only see what the camera showed me, and I made myself say that aloud when Holt asked whether it was holding properly.

“It looks whole. I can’t feel anything through this.”

“Aye.”

Beyond the arch, the pale body had settled nearer the pools. One thick strand lay along the floor where it had been drawn tight above us two days before.

The creature had room to move now.

I hoped that meant it had room to notice something besides pain.

“Same movement,” Luna said.

Dot lowered the lamp.

Light passed slowly over the glass.

Then she raised it and waited.

Nothing happened.

We watched the screen.

A Teeming crossed below, carrying a small pale shape. It disappeared behind the broad foot of the arch. The water caught the lamp and made a little trembling reflection on the wall.

Still nothing.

“Again?” Holt asked.

“Wait,” said Luna.

I counted without meaning to.

Twenty. Thirty.

Then a thin strand lifted beside the glass.

The red curve brightened softly.

Not as much as yesterday. Just a narrow band of light, moving from one shoulder toward the other.

I let out a breath.

Risa heard it.

“Don’t fall in love with the first answer,” she said.

“I’m trying not to.”

“I can see.”

We repeated it twice.

The second answer came sooner. The third took longer.

Dot recorded the intervals beside the movements, without turning them into words.

I wanted to put HELLO on the slate.

Instead, I wrote LAMP DOWN. LIGHT IN GLASS.

Holt read it over my shoulder.

“Less satisfying.”

“Yes.”

“Probably better.”

I nodded.

We’d nearly built a whole enemy out of things we’d guessed. I didn’t want to build a friend that way either. If we were going to make peace, there had to be someone real on the other side of it.

Someone who might be tired, or busy, or not interested in what we had to say just because we’d finally decided to say it.

Luna put a finger on the slate.

“What happens if we don’t go first?”

We looked at her.

“The light has followed ours. Perhaps that’s all it does. Wait and see whether it starts.”

Dot kept the lamp still.

We waited.

A minute passed. Then another. Liam came over, saw all of us staring at an unmoving picture, and sat down without asking.

The creature shifted below the shelf.

A plate lifted. Lowered.

Then the strand touched the glass.

Light moved through the arch.

Dot’s lamp stayed still.

“Now,” Luna said quietly.

The hand lowered it.

Raised it.

On the screen, the strand remained against the red glass for a few breaths before drawing away.

Nobody cheered.

I think we were all afraid of making it smaller than it was by deciding too quickly what it meant.

“That was different,” I said.

Dot turned toward me.

“This unit agrees.”

It was enough for the slate.

THE GLASS FIRST. WE ANSWERED.

Holt rested his cup on his knee. He was smiling a little. Not the broad smile he used when Liam said something foolish. A private expression, almost surprised.

“What?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Thirty years,” he said. “And I’m sitting here hoping it wants another turn.”

I looked back at the picture.

“So am I.”

Then one of the Teeming came up the track.

It stopped below the shelf, its front limbs folded close to its body. The hand’s lamp caught pale dust along one side of it, but I couldn’t tell whether it was the same creature that had carried stone for us.

It climbed another step.

Stopped again.

Dot drew the hand back a little.

The Teeming came forward.

“Is it chasing it?” Liam asked.

“I don’t know.”

The hand stopped.

So did the creature.

For a long moment, the two faced each other across a patch of stone no wider than our supper cloth.

Then the Teeming put a front limb down.

Lifted it.

Put it down again, farther to the side.

“Can the hand do that?” I asked.

“This unit can approximate the movement.”

“Try.”

One small limb touched the shelf.

Lifted.

Touched again.

The Teeming backed away.

Liam sat up.

“Was that wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

I was beginning to dislike how often the truth sounded useless.

The creature stopped at the descending track. Turned. Put its limb down again.

Not on the shelf this time.

On the first step.

“It wants the hand to follow,” Holt said.

“Perhaps,” said Luna.

We looked at the track below. Narrow, wet along one side, with the chamber floor visible beyond it.

“No people,” she said.

“Agreed.”

Dot’s rivers moved faster.

“This unit would like to attempt one step.”

“One,” said Luna. “Then stop.”

The hand lowered itself onto the first tread.

The Teeming went down two more and waited.

Dot stopped.

Below them, the creature’s strand brightened against the glass again.

I couldn’t tell whether the two things belonged together.

I wanted to follow them both.

We went a step at a time.

Not all the way to the floor. The Teeming turned along a shallow ledge halfway down and stopped beside one of the little pools I’d seen in Risa’s light.

It put a limb against the rim.

Then into the water.

Then against the rim again.

Dot angled the lamp.

The pool was nearly empty.

A dark groove led toward it from the larger pool above, but a fall of loose fragments lay across the channel. Water spread around the blockage and ran over the ledge instead.

The Teeming moved one fragment.

Water dripped into the pool.

It stopped and looked toward the hand.

Nobody spoke for several breaths.

Then Liam said, very softly, “It has a job.”

“Or it’s showing us one,” Luna said.

I leaned closer to the screen.

The fragments were small. Loose. Nothing above them rested on the pile. The upper ledge looked whole from this angle, though a picture couldn’t tell me everything.

“The hand can move those,” I said.

Dot kept her grille toward the screen.

“This unit can move the nearest fragment without contacting the wall.”

“Just that one.”

The hand set its lamp on a dry place.

Reached forward.

Picked up a stone no larger than my thumb and placed it beside the track.

The Teeming watched.

A little more water entered the groove.

Then the creature moved a second stone.

The hand waited until it had finished before taking another.

They worked like that for a while. One. Then the other. Small pieces from the top of the loose pile, leaving the larger broken edge alone.

I could hear water through the recording, faint beneath the scrape of stone.

The pool began to fill.

A second Teeming came along the ledge carrying one of the pale bundles.

It stopped well back from the hand.

Dot folded its working limb against its body and drew it nearer the lamp.

The first creature stepped aside.

The carrier came forward, lowered the bundle into the shallow water, and held it there.

Something within it opened.

A small dark shape uncurled beneath the surface. Several thin limbs spread and folded. The carrier kept one limb beneath it the whole time.

Liam had stopped breathing through his mouth.

I noticed because he had been doing it beside my ear for the last minute.

“Little one,” he said.

“Yes.”

I didn’t know whether it needed water to breathe or drink or soften whatever had been wrapped around it. But the carrier stayed beside it with the same attention I’d seen Toby give a cup held to somebody else’s mouth.

That part was familiar.

The first Teeming moved toward the lamp.

Too quickly for me.

I sat forward. Sera’s hand closed on my arm.

“Picture,” she said.

I stopped.

There was nothing I could do through it.

The creature lifted the lamp.

Dot’s rivers flashed pale.

Then it set the lamp farther from the rim, above the rising water.

With extraordinary care.

It backed away.

I looked at Sera’s hand until I could trust myself to speak.

“Thank you,” I said to the screen.

They wouldn’t hear me.

Dot would.

We brought the hand back after that.

It collected the lamp, moved one pace away, and stopped. The Teeming didn’t follow this time. It stayed beside the little pool while the carrier bent over the dark shape in the water.

At the arch, Dot lowered the lamp once more.

The glass brightened.

Then the hand climbed toward daylight.

Luna waited until the picture showed the upper opening before she took the slate from my lap.

“Write what happened before we start talking about what it means.”

I held out the pencil.

“You write. My letters are getting worse.”

She looked at my face.

I wasn’t shaking. Just tired in the ordinary way that meant I’d used enough of the morning.

She took the pencil.

We told everyone at lunch.

Not that we’d made peace. Not that the queen had asked for help through one of its people. We didn’t know either of those things.

We told them about the turns with the light. The watercourse. The little one. The lamp being moved out of the way.

Ilse listened with her bowl in her lap.

“When we go near them,” she said, “we leave them a way to go somewhere else.”

“Yes,” said Luna.

“And if they come near us?”

“We make room before we reach for anything.”

Tamsin looked toward the gully.

“If there’s room to make.”

“If there is,” Luna said.

No one asked her to promise more.

Holt put his bowl down.

“I’ve seen them kill people.”

The fire clicked.

“So have I,” Sera said.

He nodded to her.

“I want to try this. I do. But I might be slower putting my hands down than you young ones.”

Tamsin looked at him, then lowered her eyes.

“You don’t have to go first,” I said.

He rubbed one thumb over the other.

“Aye. All right.”

Toby watched us from his place beside the supply box.

“We could tell each other,” he said. His voice was still rough. “Before we get frightened enough that nobody knows what’s happening.”

“What do you mean?” asked Corr.

“Just say it. I need more room. I need to step back. Then somebody else can stand there instead.”

Luna nodded.

We’d needed a boy who was tired of holding everything to tell us how to put something down.

That afternoon, Teo and I marked the field path on a slate.

He knew which parts had been checked and which still needed looking at. Where the wheat stood close to the new holes. Where the water used to run before the terrace broke.

I drew the chamber as well as I could remember it beside his lines.

The two drawings didn’t fit neatly together.

“I don’t know how deep this part is,” I said.

“Then leave a gap,” he answered.

So I did.

We had water running away from the nursery below and water leaking out of our channels above. It was tempting to make one problem the answer to the other.

But a tempting answer could drown somebody.

I wrote ASK beside the gap.

We hadn’t learned how yet.

At least we knew there was a question.

The evening test went better.

All the water aboard. Blankets. Food. Toby’s bag. Wren, Sera, and Liam sitting where they’d sit tomorrow, leaving one place empty.

For whoever had been flashing twenty-two.

I lifted the skiff and kept it low while we crossed the level ground beside camp. Turned slowly. Came back. Set it down without letting the vessels knock together.

Sera took my wrist afterward.

Not to count anything. Just held it for a moment and looked at my face.

“All right?”

“Yes.”

This time I didn’t have to persuade myself first.

Luna checked the cloth under each vessel for spilled water. There wasn’t any.

“West,” she said. “Twenty-two first. Water and a place aboard. No detours unless someone needs one.”

I nodded.

Wren would navigate. Sera would watch me. Liam had the bag and the strength to help somebody into the hull.

Luna would stay with the camp and Risa. Dot would keep the next appointment at the arch.

For once, going to help one person didn’t mean leaving everything else unfinished in the hands of whoever happened to be standing nearest.

I found Toby beside the skiff before bed.

He was checking the bag’s fastenings.

I stopped a few paces away.

He saw me and sighed.

“Just the fastening.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

I came closer.

“Have you told Liam everything?”

“No.”

I looked at him.

“I don’t know everything. I’ve told him what I know about what’s in the bag.”

He pulled the flap closed and tucked the end away.

“If somebody needs more, bring them home.”

“We will.”

He nodded, then reached into his blanket and held out a folded piece of paper.

“List. So he doesn’t have to remember it all while somebody’s watching.”

I took it.

“That’s a good idea.”

“It’s why I write them.”

He went back to the shelter.

I stayed beside the skiff for a little while, looking at the empty place.

Sera found me there.

“You’re doing the thing,” she said.

“Which thing?”

“The one where you try to arrive somewhere before you’ve left.”

I looked down at Toby’s folded list.

“What if they don’t want to come?”

“Then we leave water.”

“What if they can’t?”

“We find out why.”

I nodded.

She waited.

“What if I’m too late?” I asked.

Her face changed a little.

“They answered this morning.”

“Yes.”

“Start there.”

I folded the list inside the bag where Liam would see it first.

Then I went to bed.

On Day 429, Toby slept through us leaving.

I was glad.

Luna came to the skiff. Dot stood beside her, the morning colors moving through her shell. Beyond them, the camp was beginning to wake. Someone had started the fire. Someone else was complaining about who had put the cups away wet.

Wren had already sent from the high path.

COMING WITH WATER.

The answer was tucked under her knee on the slate.

WATCHING.

The brief window with Earth had passed before we loaded. Dot had kept the record. No new certainty for us to carry out of it, only the names and the small exchange still being tried.

I took one last look at the camp.

Luna lifted her hand.

I lifted the skiff.

We went west.

Over the red canyon walls, over the silver-green that folded in the early wind, following the ridges Wren marked with one finger on her map.

I kept the rim in sight. Kept the lift steady. The water changed how the hull answered when I turned, so I made every turn wider than I wanted.

Nobody complained.

Behind us, the tower caught the sun.

Old Son’s thirty-one flashed across the morning.

Then a ridge came between us and home.

We stopped once on a broad shelf of rock.

Sera told me to drink. Wren checked the next ridge through the glass. Liam retied a vessel whose cloth had loosened, then looked at the empty seat as though checking it hadn’t gone anywhere.

“Do we know a name?” he asked.

Wren lowered the glass.

“No.”

“After all this time?”

“Most mornings, you have enough sun for where and how many. Sometimes what you need.”

She looked toward the west.

“The rest waits.”

Liam didn’t make a joke.

We climbed back aboard.

We found the mirror before we found the person.

A flash on a dark ridge. Two. A pause. Two.

Wren stood enough to answer, one hand braced on the side of the hull. I slowed us and turned so she had the light.

The distant mirror stopped.

Then flashed again, too quickly for me to count.

Wren’s mouth tightened.

“What?” I asked.

“Same thing.”

“Twenty-two?”

She nodded.

I brought us closer.

There was no base on the ridge.

A low shelter of fitted stones sat beneath an overhang. Strips of pale material hung along one side to catch the rain, feeding a narrow trough that led into covered vessels.

Most of the vessels stood empty.

At the mirror, a woman sat on a flat stone with one leg stretched in front of her. The other was folded beneath her blanket in a shape I didn’t like.

She held the mirror with both hands.

Even when our shadow crossed the ridge, she kept turning it toward the sun.

Twenty-two.

Again.

I set the skiff down well away from her.

Liam reached for a water vessel. Wren was out before he’d found the handle.

“It’s Wren,” she called.

The mirror stopped.

The woman looked toward her.

For a moment, nothing in her face moved.

Then she said, “Eleven?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not at eleven.”

“No.” Wren crouched a few paces away. “I’ve told you. I’m at Scarecrow.”

“I know.”

The woman looked past her, at the skiff. At Sera. At Liam carrying the water.

“I know,” she said again, differently.

Liam put the vessel down before he came closer.

Wren offered a cup.

The woman stared at it for so long that I thought she might refuse. Then she set the mirror in her lap and took the cup in both hands.

A little water spilled over her fingers.

She drank.

We waited.

There was no speech I needed to make while she did it.

No explanation worth more than the cup.

When she’d finished, she looked at me.

“Your eyes.”

I nodded.

“Dask?”

“Lucas.”

Her hands tightened round the cup.

Not recognition exactly. Something more complicated. A name she’d heard enough times that she didn’t know where to put it when it arrived attached to a person.

“I’m sorry we took so long,” I said.

Wren glanced at me.

I stopped there.

The woman looked down at the water on her fingers.

“You came,” she said.

“Yes.”

She lifted her head.

“Anja Bell.”

I waited.

“My name.”

Liam knelt beside the full vessel and untied the cloth from its handle.

“There’s more,” he said.

Anja watched him set the lid where it wouldn’t pick up dirt.

Then she looked toward the empty place in the skiff.

I didn’t offer it as an order.

“We can take you home,” I said. “If you want.”

She looked at her shelter. The rain cloths. The mirror in her lap, polished bright by more mornings than I could imagine counting from this stone.

“Can I bring that?”

“The mirror?”

She nodded.

“Of course.”

For the first time, her face changed enough that I could see how much effort had gone into keeping it still.

“All right,” she said.

Day 428–429. Carrying water.

Skiff tested. Empty, then loaded. Again in the evening.

The queen’s light came after ours. Then we waited, and it came first.

We answered.

A Teeming led Dot’s hand to a blocked watercourse. They moved loose stones. The little pool filled.

Another brought a young one. The first moved our lamp out of the water.

No words yet. Something worth trying again.

Holt wants peace. He might need room first. Toby said to tell each other.

Dot and Luna will keep trying while we’re away.

Day 429. West. Four of us. Water. Food. Blankets. The bag. One place left empty.

Twenty-two was watching.

Her name is Anja Bell.

She wants to bring the mirror.