Scarecrow

On the morning of Day 445, Sera couldn’t fasten her sleeve.

She tried twice. Then held it out to me.

“Would you?”

I did.

The little fastening had been easy yesterday. I remembered watching her close it before we sat outside. Remembered being glad that the shaking had grown smaller.

I hadn’t written that down.

I wrote it down now.

Sera watched the pencil move.

“Put that I slept, too,” she said. “Most of the night.”

I added it.

“And that I’m hungry.”

“That sounds better.”

“It is better. It doesn’t make the sleeve less annoying.”

I brought her breakfast before I brought the books.

By noon, I had three drawings of the same small part of her hand and no explanation for any of them.

I could see the difference. That was the maddening thing.

I had seen her exhausted before. Hurt. Cold. Far too close to dying. I had looked at her while she slept after the ridge and learned how much work a body could do when nobody asked it to do anything else.

This was different.

There were places beneath her skin where the altered tissue lay among the ordinary tissue. The places I’d come to associate with the fire. Along their edges, something should have passed from one arrangement into another.

It wasn’t passing properly.

Knowing that didn’t tell me what ought to happen instead.

I could have pushed things together until they looked like my memory.

I kept my hands on the notebook.

Liam let me look at his arm.

He sat beside his sister with his sleeve rolled up and an expression that dared me to find anything wrong with him as well.

“Don’t make fire,” I said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You usually are.”

“Only when people make remarks.”

Sera smiled without lifting her head from the folded blanket.

I looked until the familiar pressure began behind my eyes. Then stopped and drew what I’d seen.

There were differences between them. There had always been differences. Liam’s fire wasn’t Sera’s fire, any more than my bad leg was a useful picture of how somebody else’s good one ought to work.

But one of the things I kept failing to find in her was present in him.

Small. Repeated. Part of a process rather than a structure.

I put a circle around it.

Then a question mark.

Liam watched me do it.

“You’ve found something?”

“Something to look at again.”

He nodded as though that was enough.

It wasn’t enough for either of us.

We asked about their family that afternoon.

Not whether anyone had been ill. People were ill in the domes all the time. We asked about heat that wouldn’t settle, hands that shook, exhaustion after very little flame.

Sera remembered a woman visiting their house when she was small. A relative she hadn’t seen often. Gloves in a warm room. Her father moving a chair nearer the window.

Liam remembered the chair.

He didn’t remember the gloves.

“Someone said fire-sickness,” Sera said eventually.

Her voice had gone quiet.

“Who?” Toby asked.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t meant to be listening.”

Liam looked at her.

She looked back.

Neither had a secret answer waiting behind the memory. No family remedy. No name I could find in Halloway’s notes and follow to a neat paragraph that told me what to do.

Toby wrote the words down anyway.

Then asked what else the woman had been able to do.

They remembered her laughing.

I was glad he asked.

Rest helped some things.

It didn’t stop whatever was happening.

By Day 447, Sera needed a pause halfway through walking from her bed to the bench. She hated the pause more than the bed.

We moved the bench closer.

She looked at it, then at me.

“Very subtle.”

“I thought so.”

“The ground has apparently become shorter.”

“Unusual place.”

She laughed, and had to sit down because laughing had taken more out of her than it should have.

I sat beside her until she could speak comfortably again.

Then she put her head against my shoulder.

For a while, we didn’t make jokes.

The camp kept moving around us.

Dev’s splint needed checking. Safi was staying awake through meals and had begun objecting to people asking whether she was awake. Anja could reach the water jars without help, although Toby still had opinions about how quickly she ought to do it.

Kellan came to Sera with a problem he couldn’t explain properly.

He stood in the doorway looking at the blanket over her knees until she told him to either come in or stop blocking the light.

“My flame keeps spreading sideways,” he said.

“Show me with your hands. No fire in here.”

He did.

She watched, asked two questions, then made him show her where he was looking when it happened.

I went outside to fetch more water.

When I came back, she was explaining something about attention and Kellan was listening with his whole face.

He thanked her before leaving.

She waited until his footsteps were gone.

“Don’t,” she told me.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’ve got the expression.”

I put down the water.

“You’re very good at that.”

The expression she gave me in return was tired and pleased.

“That one is allowed.”

On Day 448, I got the first thing wrong.

I thought the difference might be a damaged boundary. A place where the altered tissue couldn’t hold what it needed. Something leaking away.

There was a line in Halloway’s notes about loss and replacement. I read it too often. Began fitting what I saw around it.

Dot asked me to show her where the supposed loss went.

I couldn’t.

“Then why have you drawn an arrow?” she asked.

I looked at the page.

Because it looked like an answer with an arrow.

I rubbed it out until the paper went thin.

Dot waited while I did it.

Then put the next clean sheet beside my hand.

That evening, Risa found me still at the table.

Sera was asleep. Toby had checked her. Liam was sitting nearby with a book he hadn’t turned a page of for some time.

Risa took the pencil out of my hand.

“I need that.”

“You need food.”

“I ate.”

“When?”

I looked at the light beyond the shelter.

She waited.

“I had some this morning.”

“That was an answer. A terrible one, but an answer.”

She put a bowl in front of me and sat on the other side of the table.

I ate because she was watching. Then because I discovered I was hungry.

Halfway through, I put the spoon down.

“I should have noticed before she told me.”

Risa’s expression changed.

“Was she shaking before she told you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did she say she’d been hiding it?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t get to invent that she was, so you can blame yourself for missing it.”

I looked at the bowl.

“She told you,” Risa said. “You listened. Stay there.”

Later, outside, I kissed her.

Not because she’d made me eat. Not as payment for being sensible while I was frightened.

Because she’d leaned against the wall beside me, and for a moment I remembered how much I’d wanted to stand somewhere with her without having to pretend that was all I wanted.

She put her hand against my cheek.

“There you are.”

“I haven’t gone anywhere.”

“You go quite a long way without moving your feet.”

I rested my forehead against hers.

She let me stay like that until my shoulders loosened.

Then she told me I was washing the bowl.

The dawn list still came.

Eleven seconds. Names. Numbers we copied because they belonged to people, even when we couldn’t make the numbers do anything useful.

On Day 449, I listened for Mother with Sera asleep a few paces away.

Dorothy Dask.

The name came and went.

Maura Calder followed later in the sequence.

Liam was standing beside the receiver. He closed his eyes when he heard it.

Afterward, neither of us spoke about the two women on opposite sides of a distance we couldn’t cross.

He asked whether I wanted tea.

I said yes.

He made three cups and carried one to his sister when she woke.

It took me until Day 451 to see the missing thing move.

Not in Sera.

In Liam.

He’d been sitting quietly long enough to complain that he had become furniture. I was looking at the same small region I’d drawn six times, trying to stop my memory from filling in the parts I hadn’t actually followed.

Something formed at the edge of the altered tissue.

Briefly held its shape.

Moved away.

Another took its place.

I watched the sequence twice before blinking.

Then I looked at Sera, who had agreed to sit beside him for the comparison.

The beginning was there.

The next part wasn’t.

What little of the finished thing I could find in her looked right. There just wasn’t enough of it, and the places that ought to have made more kept stopping short.

I said nothing for so long that Liam stopped complaining.

Sera reached for my wrist.

“Lucas?”

“I think I know what to draw now.”

That wasn’t the same as knowing what to make.

The shape was complicated. It changed when it joined the tissue around it. I had to learn which changes belonged to the thing itself and which belonged to what it touched.

I went back to the books.

Halloway hadn’t written a cure for a Calder illness she might never have seen. She’d written about bodies. About the danger of understanding the end of a process and assuming the beginning didn’t matter.

Father’s book gave me names for some of the ordinary parts.

Dot helped me keep the drawings in order.

Old Son sat with us one afternoon and asked whether the two forms I’d labelled differently were the same thing turned around.

They were.

I had been prepared to spend the rest of the evening being confused by them.

I thanked him.

He said, “I have had difficulty with that also.”

Then went back to his chemistry page.

On Day 452, Luna made me leave the table while there was still daylight.

She didn’t drag me. She stood beside it and asked when I had last been able to see the page without rubbing my eyes.

I resented the question because I knew the answer.

We walked to the end of the high path. Slowly enough for my leg. No farther than I could return from without paying for it tomorrow.

Below, Teo was working among the wheat.

There was water in the channel.

“Corr went below this morning,” Luna said.

I turned toward her.

“With Risa and Wren. Dot’s hand went with them. The guide met them at the arch.”

“The piece?”

“Still in the hollow. It moved when the queen touched it.”

I let out a breath.

“They checked the supports. Water too. Nothing needed opening.”

I looked down at my hands.

Somewhere in the last week I’d begun acting as though every useful thing we had learned would stop happening if I didn’t stand beside it.

Luna took one of those hands.

“They can keep going,” she said.

“I know.”

“You’re learning.”

We sat on a flat stone with the field below us.

She had the next search route folded in her pocket. I could see the corner of it. The old ridge trail hadn’t disappeared because new children had arrived or Sera had become ill.

“Have you been out there?” I asked.

“Only as far as the water cache. We left more. Nothing we can date since the last visit.”

“I should help.”

“You are helping here.”

“That sounds like something I’d tell someone who couldn’t come.”

“It can be true when you’re the person hearing it.”

I leaned against her shoulder.

After a moment, she rested her cheek against my hair.

We stayed until the shadows reached the nearest row of wheat.

When we stood, she kissed me once and took my hand for the difficult part of the path.

She didn’t take out the map.

The first copy never went near Sera.

I made it in a shallow glass dish on Day 453, from ordinary material I could see. So little that my ordinary eyes couldn’t have told me whether anything was there at all.

To the other sight, it was almost right.

Almost was a frightening word to put beside medicine.

One part faced the wrong way. I had copied the arrangement as it rested against something else, not as it existed alone.

I took it apart.

Wrote down why.

Made another.

By the time the light changed, I had one I could follow all the way around without finding a part I’d guessed.

I still didn’t give it to her.

Toby asked me what I thought would happen if I did.

We sat outside so Sera could hear us without having to move from her bed.

“I think it would take the place of what she’s not making enough of.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“What happens after?”

“I’ve seen what it becomes in Liam. I need to find the same end in her.”

“Will it repair the part that isn’t making it?”

“No.”

That answer came too quickly.

Sera looked at me.

I swallowed.

“I don’t know how to repair that part,” I said. “I can see where it stops. I can’t see a change I trust myself to make.”

She was quiet for a while.

Then asked whether she would still need it tomorrow.

“If it works today, probably.”

“And after that?”

“Probably.”

Toby wrote down the questions we still had.

Sera watched him finish before she spoke again.

“All right. Let’s find out whether it works at all first.”

We spent another day comparing.

I took small samples with Toby’s help and Sera’s permission, so I could look outside her body without making a change inside it. Liam gave one too, with less joking than usual.

It wasn’t a whole person in a dish. Halloway had been very clear about that, and Toby reminded me when my voice began getting too certain.

But the copied compound behaved like the small amount of the finished compound that remained in Sera’s sample.

It joined where the other joined.

Changed as the other changed.

Left the same ordinary pieces behind when the short sequence ended.

I drew every stage.

Then put the drawings beside Liam’s.

For the first time in ten days, the comparison gave me somewhere to go.

That night Sera asked whether I was afraid to try.

I was sitting beside her bed with the notebook shut. She had asked for no reading after supper, and I’d managed almost an hour without opening it.

“Yes.”

“Of hurting me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid of staying like this.”

I looked at her hands.

She moved one beneath the blanket.

“Look at me when I say that.”

I did.

“I know it might not work,” she said. “You explained. Toby explained. I asked the same thing three times and you both answered it three times.”

“You can ask again.”

“I know.”

She held out her hand.

I took it.

“I want to try when you think you’ve learned enough to try. I don’t need you to stop being frightened first.”

I bent and kissed her forehead.

She caught my collar before I could straighten.

“Here as well.”

So I kissed her properly.

Her hand was still shaking when she let go.

We began on Day 455.

Toby stayed beside her. Liam sat where she could see him. Luna kept the doorway clear without making it look like a doorway somebody might die behind.

Risa was there because Sera had asked her to be.

No fire. No demonstration afterward. No seeing how much she could do if she felt a little better.

I placed a small amount of the finished compound where I could follow what happened to it, replacing only part of the shortfall I’d measured.

Then I stopped making anything and watched.

It moved.

Joined.

Changed.

The first sequence completed.

I wrote the time with a hand less steady than hers.

Nothing dramatic happened.

Sera didn’t sit up shining. Her hand didn’t become still the moment I leaned back. She asked for water, drank it, and told Liam to stop holding his breath.

We waited.

I checked again at the intervals Toby had written down, and rested my eyes between them because there was no use becoming blind to a change by staring until everything hurt.

The compound continued to do what we’d hoped.

By afternoon, the heat beneath her skin had eased a little.

By supper, she held her own cup with both hands and didn’t need to put it down between every mouthful.

“Better?” I asked.

She considered rather than rescuing me with the answer I wanted.

“A little.”

I wrote that down exactly.

By the next morning, some of the improvement had gone.

I knew it might.

Knowing didn’t make it easy to see.

The place that ought to have made the compound was still failing to finish it. What I’d supplied had been used. The body hadn’t learned the trick because I’d done it once.

Sera watched me compare the new drawing with yesterday’s.

“So we do it again?”

“If you’re willing.”

“I was willing yesterday.”

“You can change your mind.”

“I haven’t.”

We did it again.

Carefully. With the same notes. Toby beside her, and enough time afterward to watch.

The improvement returned.

This time, she stayed awake through the whole of Liam’s account of something Kellan had burned onto the bottom of a pot.

“I’m not sure the treatment’s doing me any favors,” she said.

Liam made a wounded noise.

I laughed before I could stop myself.

On Day 457, she fastened her sleeve.

I was pouring water when she did it.

Missed the cup.

“Lucas.”

I looked down at the spreading puddle.

“Yes.”

“You’re going to have to improve if we’re both meant to be getting better at using our hands.”

She held up her wrist.

The fastening was closed.

I put the jug down very carefully.

Then sat beside her and began crying in a way that annoyed me because I hadn’t decided to do it.

She put her hand against the back of my neck.

“Oh,” she said softly.

That made it worse.

Liam left while she was holding me.

I found him later in the narrow passage between the shelters, pretending to examine a rope that didn’t need examining.

His face was wet.

I stopped beside him.

“Dust,” he said.

“There isn’t any wind.”

“Local dust.”

I nodded.

For a little while, we both studied the rope.

Then he gripped my shoulder so hard it hurt.

“Thank you.”

“I haven’t cured it.”

“I heard you the first eight times.”

“She’ll need—”

“I know.”

He let go of my shoulder and pulled me against him instead.

I stood badly on my leg and held him back.

Neither of us said anything else until someone needed to get past.

The daily work didn’t become simple because it had worked twice.

We learned how long the copied compound lasted before it began changing in the dish. Not long enough to make a jar and forget about it. I marked that failure on the page too.

Dot kept copies of the sequence. Toby kept the observations in words somebody else could read. I could make the compound now. I couldn’t teach another pair of eyes to be mine by writing neatly.

That frightened Sera when we talked about it.

It frightened me too.

“We keep trying to find another way to make it,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “We do.”

No promise that I would never be ill, never be absent, never make a mistake.

A task we hadn’t finished.

For now, each morning had a new part in it.

On Day 459, Sera walked to the bench without stopping.

The closer bench. We hadn’t quietly moved it back to test her.

She noticed that and squeezed my hand before sitting down.

Luna brought breakfast. Risa brought the book Sera had asked for, and Liam arrived with enough advice to make his sister threaten to set fire to his boots when she was allowed.

“Encouraging,” Toby said from the doorway.

“The threat?” Liam asked.

“The length of the sentence.”

Sera laughed.

This time, she didn’t have to close her eyes afterward.

Later, Dot showed her the latest picture from below.

The newly freed dark piece lay beside the older one. Pale fiber underneath. Space around both.

The queen’s strand rested nearby.

Sera watched the little movement across the screen, then asked Corr whether the side catch on the empty frame had stayed open.

He told her it had.

She nodded and handed the screen back.

“When I’m stronger,” she said, “I’d like to go.”

“We can ask.”

“Good.”

She settled against my side while Risa read aloud and Luna peeled something that had been presented as breakfast fruit with more confidence than its appearance deserved.

I looked at Sera’s hand resting on my knee.

Not perfectly steady.

Steadier.

Tomorrow, I would make what she needed again.

Today, she turned the page for Risa.

Days 445–459. What was missing.

Fire-sickness is a remembered name, not an explanation. Found the unfinished process by comparison. Liam helped. Sera helped every day.

First explanation wrong. First copy wrong. Correct both on paper.

Finished compound missing in sufficient quantity. Can replace it. Cannot yet repair what should make it.

First treatment Day 455. Small improvement. Less by morning. Repeated. Improvement returned.

Sleeve fastened Day 457.

Daily treatment for now. Copies of everything. Work on keeping it stable and making it without me. Still no forge.

Queen’s hollow checked. Freed piece moving. Both water channels open. Ridge cache supplied; no new dated sign.

Sera walked to the bench today.

Liam had trouble with local dust.

I had trouble with a jug.

She turned the page herself.