Scarecrow

The first page said requirements.

The second said minimum monthly allocation.

I read them both twice before asking Luna whether those were meant to be the same thing.

“No,” she said.

She took the slate from me, found the line she wanted, and turned it so Sera and Risa could see.

Tonnes of refined material. Collection dates. Purity requirements. Boxes where the mass we supplied would go.

There was no box for saying we hadn’t agreed.

Sera looked at it for a while.

“Then we’ll have to write outside the boxes.”

It was the morning of Day 465.

The gray cloth was drying beside the shelter. Risa had washed it, and it had become a slightly more honest shade of gray.

I had been looking forward to measuring a window.

Instead, I sat down with the slate.

Some of the list made sense.

Materials for structures. Conductors. Parts that could become filters if somebody with the right equipment made them into filters.

Nothing on the page proved where they would go.

A bar of ordinary metal didn’t know whether it was going to hold up a dome or become something aimed at the people living beneath it.

I couldn’t tell by looking at the bar either.

Dot put Ruan’s recorded words beside the document.

An assessment.

Not an agreement to quotas.

Luna listened once, then asked Dot to keep both together.

“What can we actually supply?” she asked me.

I looked at the figures.

“That depends.”

“Good. Start with what it depends on.”

We brought the question to everyone after breakfast.

Not the figures alone.

The question underneath them.

Would we send material up without knowing whether it reached the domes?

Priya sat beside Dov. Toby and Wren had come together from the signal frame. Anja stood with Liam until Holt told them there were chairs and a person ought to use one when it was available.

The newest children stayed near each other.

Ossa listened from her bed, with Merrin awake beside her.

I read the list aloud.

When I finished, Kellan asked whether the metal could help his mother.

“Yes,” I said.

He waited.

“If it goes where they say it does.”

The hope didn’t leave his face.

It became harder to look at.

Holt put his cup down.

“You can want the domes repaired and still want a receipt.”

“Would a receipt tell us the truth?” Risa asked.

“Not necessarily. But refusing to give you one tells you something too.”

Wren looked at the document.

“What happens if he can’t do it for a month?”

Nobody answered immediately.

She looked at me rather than the slate.

“If you’re hurt. If somebody needs you out on a ridge. If the ground opens again. Do they call it a failed quota?”

Luna drew a line beneath the collection dates.

“That’s one of the things we need answered.”

Ossa spoke from the bed.

“Do they know how many of us are still missing?”

“We sent the names we could confirm,” Luna said. “We asked for their records too.”

Ossa nodded, but her hand moved toward Merrin’s blanket.

I kept looking at that hand while people talked.

We didn’t agree to the monthly figures.

We did agree to offer one small trial consignment, if the shuttle returned for the assessment. Ordinary materials, with each piece weighed and marked, and a request for the next destination attached to the record.

Nothing from the queen’s chamber.

Nothing we couldn’t identify.

No promise that a small delivery meant every box on the page would be filled afterward.

Some people wanted to send nothing until we had the route.

Some wanted to send everything we could make, because their families were beneath the domes and waiting for perfect proof felt too much like refusing them.

I understood both enough to find the decision painful.

Luna wrote down the disagreement as well as the choice.

Then she asked me what the small consignment would cost in time.

I nearly said not much.

Sera looked at me.

I stopped.

“Let me measure it.”

The measurement was less impressive than the demonstration.

It included fetching the ordinary stock, sorting it, and putting the work where I could see it properly.

It included looking twice at something I didn’t trust.

It included stopping to drink.

Sera sat beside the bench with the list. She wasn’t supplying heat. She was watching the sequence and catching the places where I’d begun doing something without noticing I’d begun.

“Write that down,” she said when I changed the position of the next piece.

“Moving it?”

“Checking why it looked different.”

“It only took a moment.”

“It took a moment you weren’t making the next one.”

I looked at the neat figures on Command’s page.

Then at the much less neat page she was making.

By the end of the morning, I preferred hers.

I made a bad decision with the last piece.

Not a dangerous one. An ordinary stupid one.

I’d finished what we needed for the trial and still had material in front of me. The next bar would be easy. I knew what it should be. My eyes hurt a little, but they had hurt more before.

I reached for it.

Sera put her hand over mine.

“Why?”

“It’s here.”

“That isn’t a reason.”

“We could send another.”

“We could send twenty others if you keep using that answer.”

I looked at her hand on mine.

The shaking was faint today. Not gone.

There were things I needed to be able to see tomorrow.

“I hate stopping when someone might need it.”

“I know.”

She waited until I looked at her face.

“I need you to stop while you’re still able to sit with me afterward.”

That was harder to argue with than a rule.

I set the unfinished piece aside.

We sat outside the forge.

For once, I was the one who leaned back and shut his eyes while Sera brought the cup closer.

“I don’t want to become another reason you can’t do things,” she said.

I opened my eyes.

“You aren’t.”

“I heard you think about tomorrow’s treatment when I touched your hand.”

“You couldn’t hear that.”

“No. But I’ve known your face a long time.”

I took the cup.

She looked down toward the field.

“I want you to come home because you want to be with me. With us. Not only because you’ll feel guilty if you don’t.”

“I do want to.”

“Then let that count too.”

I put the cup down and drew her closer.

She came willingly, resting her cheek against my shoulder.

For a while, I didn’t try to make wanting her sound useful.

Risa took me to the place she’d been considering for the room.

Not far from the others. On the high ground, where the shelters already stood, with enough space between the nearest door and the path that a new wall wouldn’t trap people moving through.

The ground had been checked when we’d moved uphill. I looked again at the exposed stone around it, and Luna brought the earlier marks so I didn’t have to pretend a new glance was better than the observations we’d already made.

No digging down into unknown spaces.

A low room resting where we knew the surface, with light walls and room around it.

Risa stood where the window might go.

“Here.”

I looked past her.

Wheat. The upper stretch of the canyon. A piece of sky large enough to watch the weather arrive.

“You’ve been thinking about this.”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Long enough that I’m going to be annoyed if you make the window somewhere else.”

I smiled.

She took my hand and put it against the place she’d chosen in the empty air.

“Here, Lucas.”

We walked the shape of it.

Risa wanted space beside the window, not just a view through it. Sera wanted a table she could draw at without moving everyone’s cups first. Luna wanted a door that could close without cutting off the only breeze.

I wanted all three of them there.

That was a poor instruction for building walls, but they seemed to understand it.

Luna put four stones down for the corners.

Sera moved one.

Risa moved another.

I waited.

Then they all looked at me.

“You can have an opinion,” Luna said.

“I thought I was being agreeable.”

“You’re being suspiciously quiet,” Sera said.

I pointed to the space between the table and the window.

“I want somewhere to sit where I can put my leg out without making one of you climb over it.”

Risa moved her stone farther away.

“There.”

Such an easy thing.

I hadn’t realized I’d been waiting for somebody to tell me it was too much room.

We didn’t build it that afternoon.

I was tired. Sera was tired. Luna had promised to go over Ossa’s route with her, and Risa had a water check to finish with Teo.

We left the four stones where they were.

I thought that would feel disappointing.

Instead, when I passed them on the way to fetch supper, I found myself smiling.

Nobody had taken them away because the day’s work wasn’t finished.

The room was still allowed to wait for us.

Luna came back late enough that her food had begun to cool.

Ossa had remembered another turn in the route. Then a place where the trail disappeared under loose stone. Then the day she and Merrin had stopped carrying a mirror because he could no longer walk while she carried it.

Luna told us only the part Ossa had agreed could be shared.

Afterward, she ate without speaking.

I wanted to ask whether the old route might lead to anyone else.

The question was there, ready.

Then I remembered breakfast above the wheat.

I asked whether she’d like the soup warmed.

She looked up.

“Yes. Please.”

I did that instead.

Risa sat beside her while she ate. Sera leaned against me, and nobody required Luna to turn a difficult conversation into a useful report before she could finish her bowl.

On Day 466, we put up the room.

Not all at once.

I shaped the ordinary supports where I could see them, and Corr helped set them in place. Liam and Anja brought the panels in from the storage stack. They argued about which end was heavier until Anja suggested they change ends and find out.

Liam agreed too quickly.

She laughed when he discovered the difference.

Holt came over to offer criticism and stayed to hold a corner square while we fitted the next piece.

Nobody asked him to stand longer than his knee liked. He told us when he wanted the stool.

Toby stopped with Wren on their way past.

“Another medical shelter?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

Wren looked at the four corner stones still visible beneath the new wall.

Then at Sera’s drawing.

“Oh.”

Toby looked at her, understood, and smiled.

He didn’t make a joke.

I was grateful enough that I probably would have forgiven him if he had.

Sera fitted the ordinary latch herself.

Sitting down. No fire.

The work took longer than it would have before the illness. She paused once, annoyed, then began again with a different grip.

I held the door steady.

That was the job she’d given me.

When the latch clicked into place, she tried it twice and looked up.

“Now open it.”

I did.

“Close it.”

I did that too.

She smiled at the sound.

“A door,” she said.

There was dust on her cheek.

I brushed it away with my thumb, then kissed her.

Behind us, Liam said he could come back later with the other panel if we’d become occupied.

Sera told him to put it where she’d marked or carry it around until he learned to read.

He put it down.

Anja looked delighted with both of them.

The room had no bed.

We hadn’t decided that part of being together yet, and building four walls wasn’t going to decide it for us.

It had a broad seat under the window, a table, shelves low enough that Sera wouldn’t have to ask me to reach everything, and a long clear space where my leg could go.

There was another chair because Luna sometimes wanted to face people while she talked instead of leaning against them.

Risa tried every seat before approving any of them.

Then she and Sera hung the curtains.

They were too long.

I opened my mouth.

Risa pointed at me without turning around.

“We’ll hem them.”

I closed it again.

Luna laughed so suddenly that all three of us looked at her.

She shook her head.

“Nothing. Keep going.”

We did.

That evening, Luna closed the door.

Then opened it again to check the latch.

Then closed it.

I sat beside the window and watched her hand rest on the wood.

“All right?”

She turned toward me.

“Yes.”

Her eyes were bright.

The word was true, and not quite enough.

I stood and went to her.

She put her arms around me before I reached her properly.

I held her, my cheek against her hair, while the new room settled around us with little sounds of people moving cups and cloth.

“I thought I wanted quiet,” she said into my shoulder.

“Do you?”

“Not only quiet.”

I understood when Risa began telling Sera where the lamp should go, and Sera disagreed, and Luna didn’t pull away to organize either of them.

She kissed me instead.

Later that evening, Corr brought the record from below.

He stopped at the open door, looked at the room, and asked whether we wanted the report there or at the worktable.

“Here,” Sera said. “Come in.”

He showed us the picture.

The two dark pieces remained in their separate hollows. The queen had moved a strand between them while Corr watched, and both had answered with light. Nothing had been put back into a frame.

The water marks were steady.

At the upper shelf, the guide had inspected the lamp, then set it beside the model with both channels open.

Sera leaned forward to see.

“Did it put the lamp on the dry side?”

“Yes.”

She smiled.

“I’d like to see that again for myself.”

“When you’re ready,” Risa said.

“Soon, I hope.”

I looked at the steps marked on Corr’s drawing and thought about a place to rest halfway down. Sera saw the thought beginning.

“You can think about that,” she told me. “A seat would actually help.”

Corr laughed.

We asked him to stay for a cup. He did, and told us about the awkward turn he’d made carrying the lamp, which wasn’t in the written report and was the part that made Luna laugh.

When he left, we still had the evening.

The shuttle returned on Day 467.

Ruan wasn’t aboard.

The same pilot came down, carrying a sealed packet and a receipt for the messages Ruan had delivered to the station office.

Delivered to the office.

Not to the families.

Wren read that line aloud before anyone could turn it into a celebration it hadn’t earned yet.

There was no complete launch manifest.

There was a note saying the request had been forwarded.

There was also a collection order.

The pilot gave it to Luna with an apologetic expression that didn’t change the figures printed on it.

The full monthly allocation had acquired a start date.

Today.

“No,” Luna said.

The pilot looked at her.

“We have an assessment and one trial consignment. No agreement to recurring deliveries.”

“I don’t set the schedule.”

“Then you won’t have difficulty carrying that answer to whoever does.”

He looked toward the marked pieces beside the path.

“Is that everything available?”

“That’s everything offered,” Sera said.

She stood beside me, with the stool behind her if she needed it.

Risa held our copy of the record.

The pilot looked between us.

For a moment, I thought he might decide it was easier to leave without anything.

Then he put the collection order down and said, “I’ll need an amended receipt.”

Dot had already made one.

We loaded the pieces one at a time.

Marked. Weighed. Described in words that said what they were, not what somebody hoped they might become.

The pilot checked each against his instrument and signed for the amount taken.

I watched his hands.

I wondered whether he knew where the material would go after he set it down.

So I asked.

“Station receiving,” he said.

“And then?”

He shook his head.

“I fly the shuttle.”

It was the second version of that answer we’d heard.

I didn’t know whether it meant somebody was hiding something or whether everybody had been taught to know only their own small part.

Neither possibility made the next part easier.

“Can you follow it?” I asked Dot.

“I can follow the shuttle while it broadcasts within range.”

“And the shipment?”

“The pilot has accepted our identifying marks in his record. I do not have access to the station’s internal movements.”

I looked toward the hull.

“Could you get it?”

“I do not know how.”

No shame in her voice.

No promise to find a way because I’d asked with the wrong sort of hope.

I nodded.

“Then keep what we can see.”

She did.

The shuttle rose with our material and another set of questions.

For a while, Dot had a track.

Altitude. Direction. A cargo acknowledgment repeated on the local channel.

Then the signal weakened as the vessel moved away.

The last message confirmed its climb toward the station.

After that, nothing we could follow.

No message saying a dome had received a repaired filter.

No picture of a bar being unloaded beside a familiar door.

Just the end of the part they let us see.

I stood at the table longer than I needed to.

Risa came beside me.

“They haven’t answered where it goes,” she said.

“I know.”

“You haven’t agreed to the next load.”

“I know that too.”

She took my hand.

“Then come away from the screen.”

We walked to the new room.

I stopped outside the door.

Risa looked at me.

“What?”

“I keep thinking I could have made more.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not helping.”

“Would it help if I said you couldn’t?”

I looked at the ground.

She stepped closer.

“You could have made more. You could also have made yourself too tired to see what Sera needed this morning, or missed Luna telling you about Ossa, or left this as four stones forever.”

“Those aren’t all the same.”

“No. But they’re all things that happen to people.”

She touched my face until I looked at her.

“I don’t want you to stop caring about the people far away. I want you to remember you’re one of the people here.”

I leaned into her hand.

She kissed me gently, then again when I put my arms around her.

The screen could go on showing nothing without me watching it.

Inside, Sera was hemming the curtain.

Slowly. With a few words under her breath that Liam would have been proud of.

Luna had put the collection order on the table, facedown.

Beside it was the page with our measurements for the room.

I sat in the space they’d left for me.

Sera shifted until her shoulder touched mine. Risa sat on my other side. Luna turned her chair toward us, tucked one foot beneath herself, and looked unexpectedly young.

“Do we have to talk about it now?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

She smiled.

Not because the question had disappeared.

Because it could wait until we’d had supper.

We ate with the window open.

Somewhere outside, Holt was telling someone that a chair needed to face the view, not the path. Toby laughed, and Wren said something too quietly for us to hear.

Liam and Anja passed carrying the repaired pot between them, although it didn’t need two people.

Sera saw me notice.

“Don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You had the expression.”

Risa laughed into her cup.

Luna reached across the table and took my hand.

I looked around the room.

The curtain still needed its last few stitches. The shelves were almost empty. My cup had left a wet ring on the table, and I was apparently going to have to learn not to do that.

I wanted to learn.

I wanted another evening here. Then another. Ordinary ones, if we were lucky, and somewhere to bring the difficult ones when we weren’t.

Sera rested her head against me.

Outside, the first lamp came on beside the path.

I stayed where I was.

Days 465–467. What the numbers leave out.

Requirements became minimum allocations on the next page. Still not agreed.

Camp chose one small trial consignment. Disagreement recorded. Actual work measured, including the parts between making things.

Ruan’s packet reached the station office. No confirmation to families. Manifest request forwarded. Not answered.

Shuttle returned with a collection order. Corrected receipt accepted. Took only what we offered.

Dot followed it while the local signal lasted. After that, no route we can verify.

No next shipment promised.

Built the room. Together. Window seat. Drawing table. Door out of the wind. Gray curtains too long.

No bed yet. We haven’t decided that part.

Luna closed the door. Risa brought me away from the screen. Sera left the last stitches until after supper.

My place was there when I came in.