Scarecrow

Luna wrote the question before she wrote the letter.

One line, near the top of the page.

I couldn’t see it from the bed, and I didn’t try. I was sitting with the leg supported, waiting for the stiffness of the morning to ease before the short walk Toby wanted.

Sera was fastening her sleeve. Risa had gone to fetch breakfast.

For a while, the only sound was the pencil.

Then it stopped.

Luna looked at the page as though it had disappointed her.

“Too much?” I asked.

“Not enough.”

She turned it toward me.

Father, what did we really do to win the war?

I read it twice.

“What else do you want to ask?”

“A hundred things.”

“What do you need him to answer first?”

She looked down at the line.

“That.”

I nodded.

She left it where it was.

Day 504 began with the sleeping curtains.

They were ready before the walls were.

Edda regarded this as a failure of the walls rather than a fault in her planning. Vera agreed. Between them, they’d finished the inner divisions and the ties that would hold them open when the space wasn’t being used for sleep.

Sera had marked different hems for the places where the floor wasn’t quite level.

I hung the first curtain and discovered she’d been right about a difference too small for me to have bothered drawing.

The bottom cleared the stone.

No dragging edge to soak up water from someone’s boots.

Sera stood beside my chair and looked pleased.

“You can say it.”

“You were right.”

“Again.”

“Again.”

She kissed my cheek and went to help Vera with the next fastening.

I turned back to the bracket in my lap.

There were worse ways to spend a morning than making sure somebody’s careful work had somewhere to hang.

We finished one outer side before midday.

Ade and Benedikt fitted the covering while Liam held the awkward upper corner. Bram moved the ladder whenever they needed it instead of letting someone reach farther because moving it was annoying.

I worked on the ordinary fittings from below, with each one brought close enough to see.

It took longer than doing everything myself would have seemed to take in my imagination.

In the actual world, the wall went up while my leg rested.

The difference was becoming difficult to argue with.

Nessa came to inspect the entrance.

Nobody had asked her to.

Nobody moved her away either.

She went in, turned, came out, and looked at the place where the curtain tie hung.

“Too high.”

Edda lowered it.

Nessa tried it again.

This time she could fasten the curtain open while keeping her balance on the crutch.

“Good.”

She went to find something else that needed telling.

Edda watched her go.

“Does she do that often?”

“Whenever we get something wrong.”

“That often, then.”

I laughed.

Luna kept the question in her pocket through the morning.

I knew because she touched the folded page whenever someone asked her about something entirely different.

Not constantly.

Enough that I noticed.

At the water shelf, she checked the new measure with Bram and Jonas. At the map table, she approved the next watch times. At the sleeping shelter, she asked Olin whether the new support was still comfortable after his morning turn.

He said it was.

Then asked whether he could be brought outside later.

She looked toward the broad path and the chair with a long support we were adapting for him.

“If Toby agrees.”

Olin sighed.

Dara smiled into her cup.

Everyone in the camp was learning the same answer to some version of that question.

Luna came back to me afterward.

“Do you have a minute?”

“Yes.”

She looked at the unfinished bracket.

“A real one. Not the kind where you’re still working.”

I put it down.

We went to our room.

Luna closed the door against the hammering and sat at the table.

She took out the question.

Then a clean sheet.

“My father taught me a way to write things that weren’t meant for the people carrying them.”

I looked at her.

“Family code?”

She nodded.

“Private tables. References that only make sense with the right key. He said a name on an envelope didn’t make the contents private.”

“That sounds like something he’d know.”

“Yes.”

Her mouth tightened a little.

“The irony isn’t lost on me.”

She laid the clean page beside the first one.

“I can write the question so it won’t read as a question about the war to anyone who opens it on the way.”

“Will he still have what he needs to read it?”

“He should. I haven’t forgotten what he taught me.”

I nodded.

That was an answer about her father.

It wasn’t an answer about whether the letter would reach him.

We both knew the difference.

She didn’t put the ship drawings into the letter.

No copy of Holt’s pages.

No description of the queen opening a plate for the camera.

Not because those things didn’t matter. Because asking for an explanation didn’t require handing someone else the whole collection of reasons we needed one.

The question could stand on its own.

She wrote the rest slowly.

A little ordinary news. Enough that the letter looked like something a daughter might send after too long without hearing from home.

Which it was.

That was the part I kept forgetting while I thought about sealed packets and couriers.

She wasn’t only trying to question a general.

She wanted her father to answer her.

I watched her stop over a line.

“What?” I asked.

“I don’t know whether to tell him I’m happy.”

I looked at her.

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Then that seems like something he should know.”

She held the pencil still for a moment.

Then wrote.

Risa came in with lunch before the letter was finished.

She took one look at the two pages and put the bowls on the shelf instead of the table.

“Is that it?”

“The beginning,” Luna said.

Risa nodded.

“Do you want us out?”

“No.”

So we ate in the room while Luna told us what she’d decided to send.

Sera arrived with a loose thread caught on her sleeve and listened while pulling it free.

“Will Command be able to read it?” she asked.

“Not from the page alone,” Luna said. “It isn’t their code. But I can’t know who else has access to his private things.”

I was glad she said that part.

We had enough unknowns without improving one into a guarantee.

Risa looked at the ordinary news.

“You’ve told him about us?”

“That I’m living with people I love.”

Luna glanced at me.

“I wasn’t going to ask him for a ruling.”

Sera laughed.

For the first time that morning, Luna laughed too.

There was still nowhere to send it that day.

The local mirrors could carry a message between places that could see one another. The shuttle radio could reach a shuttle when one was near enough.

Neither made Earth eleven light-years closer because we’d finally written something important.

The old ordinary channel remained closed.

We could ask the next courier to carry a sealed packet to the station and put it into the route for family correspondence. We could ask for a record of what he’d accepted.

We couldn’t stand at the upper bend and watch it arrive in General Windsor’s hands.

Luna folded the letter anyway.

Made a copy for herself.

Put both where they’d stay dry.

Then she went outside to settle an argument about which shelf the spare lamps belonged on.

I stayed behind long enough to take my own letter down.

Mother. Genny. Garnet.

I had been adding to it for so long that parts of it described a camp we’d already changed.

I began a clean copy.

I didn’t remove Sera, Risa, or Luna from it.

I didn’t turn them into people who happened to be helping me through a difficult time.

I wrote their names.

I wrote that we loved each other, that we had a room together, and that when I thought about what came after surviving another season, they were there.

The words looked larger than the space they occupied.

Then I wrote about my leg.

Not fixed.

Better.

Six steps with Toby beside me and a rail within reach. The stick still waiting at the end.

Mother would understand why that mattered. She’d spent enough time bargaining with her own body for one ordinary movement.

I wrote about the washing shelter and the people we’d brought home.

Fifty-one living here now.

I left out the names of strangers she couldn’t know and kept the things I thought she could picture.

A dry place to sit.

Bread being passed along a table.

Somebody laughing without looking over a shoulder immediately afterward.

Genny and Garnet got their own part.

I asked what they were reading.

Whether the plants at home were still leaning toward Garnet when she passed.

Whether Genny was still pretending she wasn’t interested until everyone stopped trying to explain something, then asking the question nobody else had thought of.

I had no way of knowing how much they’d changed while I’d been here.

That hurt more than writing about the things I’d survived.

I sat with the pencil above the page for a long time.

Then I wrote that I wanted to hear about all of it, even the parts they thought were too small to put in a letter.

Especially those.

When Sera came in, I was reading that line again.

She put her hand on my shoulder.

“Keep it.”

“I was going to.”

“I know. You looked as though you needed someone to agree.”

I leaned my cheek against her hand.

She stayed until I finished copying.

Day 505 began with Olin getting outside.

Not walking.

We brought the chair to the bed, kept the corrected leg supported, and took enough time moving him that he stopped apologizing for how long it was taking.

Toby checked the support again before we left the shelter.

Dara carried the blanket. Vera went ahead to make certain the turning chair hadn’t become a shelf for somebody’s tools.

The path was clear.

We brought him as far as the dry place beside the common roof.

He looked at the tower first.

Then the field.

Then the new sleeping bays, where Edda was hanging the last inner curtain.

For a while, he said nothing.

I sat beside him with my leg stretched out.

Eventually, he looked at my stick.

“Race still postponed?”

“For a while.”

“Good. I’m busy looking at things.”

So we sat and looked at them.

It was a useful way to spend part of a morning.

The sleeping bays were finished by afternoon.

Two dry spaces. Curtains that worked. Shelves within reach. A clear route in and out.

No one had to sleep there that night unless they wanted to.

That made them different from most things we’d built.

Usually a person was waiting in the rain while we made the roof.

This time, the roof was waiting for the person.

Priya put the folded spare bedding into a covered box at the back. Not piled directly against the outside wall. We’d already learned that lesson in damp grain.

Lena came to learn the changed route while there was room to take it slowly.

Juno walked beside her without steering the stick.

At the entrance, Lena paused.

“There’s an echo here now.”

“The new wall,” I said.

She listened again.

Then nodded and continued.

I watched her go through the space by a kind of map I’d never be able to draw for her.

We hadn’t finished merely because everything looked right to me.

The next search began from the northern shelter that same morning.

Ilse and Ade took supplies to replace what had been used during Olin’s rescue, then went to examine a bearing beyond the place Edda and Jonas had been found.

They weren’t following a fresh call for help.

They were checking where the old route disappeared behind the green slope, because we had a shelter and a signal line close enough now to make a careful look possible.

Holt went through the map with them before they left.

He marked the ground he’d walked himself and left the rest blank.

“Don’t let the line persuade you there’s a path,” he said.

Ade folded the page.

“We won’t.”

They took a copy of the new sighting sheet, water, food, and a message saying where the northern shelter was.

Wren sent the usual signal before their departure.

People still listening beyond our view would know we were looking.

We couldn’t make them answer.

We could keep asking.

My leg was worse that afternoon.

Not the repair.

The muscle was tired, and the old guarded movement had returned when I wasn’t paying attention. I’d begun leaning on the stick as if the six steps two days earlier had happened to somebody else.

Toby watched me reach the chair.

“Long morning?”

“Yes.”

“Then a short afternoon.”

I looked at the covered rail.

“I should practise.”

“You have.”

“Not properly.”

He sat opposite me.

“Walking to inspect a curtain still asks your leg to work, Lucas. It doesn’t become rest because you were thinking about something else.”

I knew that as soon as he said it.

I disliked knowing it.

He checked the place we’d changed. Everything was holding.

Then he gave the stick back instead of taking it away for another trial.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

I looked down at it.

The improvement wasn’t gone.

I had simply used what I had for the day.

It took a while to stop treating that as a failure.

Risa found me sulking quietly beside the records table.

She didn’t call it that.

She sat down and asked whether I’d help her sort the lamp fittings.

Small pieces. Ordinary metal. Most already usable once they were put where someone could find them.

We made three shallow trays and labelled them so nobody had to bring an entire box to her to ask for one fastening.

Halfway through, she held up a bent piece.

“Can you fix this?”

“Yes.”

She put it beside my hand.

“Can you do it tomorrow?”

I looked at her.

She looked innocent with considerable effort.

I laughed.

“Yes.”

“Excellent. Now it has somewhere to wait.”

She put it in the unfinished tray.

When Sera came past, she found us eating the bread we’d forgotten to collect at lunch and arguing about whether Risa’s labels were legible.

My leg still ached.

I was no longer thinking about it every moment.

The courier arrived on Day 506.

We heard the shuttle before we saw it.

The watch called it in, and Luna went to the agreed landing place with Corr while the rest of us kept the path clear.

I stayed near the upper shelter until the craft was down and the pilot had stepped out.

It was the man who’d brought the packet with Primary Base printed above our name.

He had another packet.

Two small supply cases came down after it.

“Medical issue,” he told Luna. “Partial fulfilment. Item list inside.”

She took the paper, not the promise.

We opened the cases with Toby there.

Dressings. Cleaning supplies. Several replacement pieces for ordinary medical equipment. Useful things, some of which we’d asked for before the last rescue.

Nothing that replaced Sera’s daily treatment.

Nothing that explained Holt’s earlier modification.

Still useful.

Toby checked the list against what was actually in the cases and signed for that.

The pilot waited until he finished.

Then asked whether there was material to collect.

“No further consignment has been agreed,” Luna said.

He looked toward the supply cases.

“I’m not negotiating. I have a space on the form.”

“Then write none agreed in it.”

He did.

I watched his pencil.

He didn’t look particularly pleased or angry.

Only like someone who would rather every box on the page had an answer before he took off again.

The new station packet contained another request for updated population and medical supply needs. No family acknowledgements. No restored Earth channel. No explanation of where the trial material had gone after the coded destination we’d already recorded.

Luna put those pages aside.

Then she looked at the pilot.

“We have personal correspondence.”

He nodded toward the shuttle.

“I can carry it to the station registry.”

“Sealed?”

“I don’t need it open.”

That was an answer about him.

It wasn’t an answer about everyone after him.

She accepted it for exactly what it was.

We asked how the correspondence would be recorded.

The pilot brought out a separate sheet and showed us the spaces.

Sender. Addressee. Packet count. Date accepted.

He could sign that he’d taken the envelopes. The station would handle onward routing.

No promise about when.

No claim that a general’s name or my family name would make the distance disappear.

Luna read the page carefully.

Then looked at me.

My letter was in our room, with the copy beside it.

For a moment, I wanted another day.

Not because anything in it was wrong.

Because once it left my hands, I couldn’t keep improving it instead of waiting.

Sera was standing nearby with the medical inventory.

She saw my face.

“It’s ready,” she said quietly.

I nodded.

Then went to get it.

With the stick.

Slowly enough that the courier had time to finish checking the supply cases before I returned.

Luna’s envelope was already on the table.

Her name on the outside. Her father’s name and title beneath the routing information.

The coded page was inside, along with the ordinary news she’d chosen to send.

She had kept her copy.

I set my envelope beside hers.

Mother’s name looked strange on a page meant to go somewhere instead of remain folded on my shelf.

I had written the twins’ names too.

Not because I expected the registry to need them.

Because the letter was theirs as well.

The pilot counted the packets and wrote them down.

Luna checked the addressees before he signed.

Then Dot made an image of the receipt, and Wren copied the details into the correspondence record.

It was a great deal of attention for two envelopes.

It still couldn’t tell me whether Mother would ever open mine.

I picked up the receipt.

Luna kept her hand on her letter for one more breath.

Then let go.

The pilot put both into the packet case.

The lid closed with a small hard sound.

I remembered dropping grain into a sack at home. The way a familiar thing could become part of something too large to follow once it left your fingers.

Luna stood beside me with her hands empty.

“Can a reply come back through the same registry?” she asked.

“If one is routed to your base, yes.”

“If.”

He nodded.

He didn’t argue with the word.

We gave him the updated supply request and the current population count. No renewed production agreement. No drawings from the queen’s chamber. No account of the question hidden inside Luna’s letter.

He took the official pages separately.

Then carried the packet case aboard.

We moved back from the landing place.

The shuttle rose.

I watched until the light on its underside was only another bright point in the sky.

The room felt different when we returned.

The shelf still held the copy of my letter.

Luna’s copy was in the dry folder beside it.

Nothing important had been removed from the room except the possibility of deciding not to send them today.

Risa stood in the doorway and looked at us.

“Well?”

“Accepted for the station registry,” Luna said.

“Not delivered,” I added.

“We know.”

Risa came over and put an arm around each of us.

Sera set the receipt on the table, clear of the cups.

For a while, nobody asked what we expected to happen next.

I didn’t know what I expected.

A message. Silence. An envelope coming back unopened. Mother’s handwriting after so long that I’d have to sit down before reading the first line.

I wanted all the distance gone at once.

Instead, Sera kissed me and asked whether I’d eaten.

It was a question with an answer I could manage.

Luna didn’t go to the mirror watch immediately afterward.

I noticed because I’d been afraid she would.

She went to the new sleeping bays and helped Vera tie back the curtains so the air could move through while the outer covering dried from the morning mist.

Then she sat beside Holt at the map table.

He looked at her empty hands.

“Gone?”

“To the station.”

“Aye.”

She sat quietly.

He turned the map so she could see the route Ilse was checking.

“No answer on that one yet either.”

Luna looked at him.

After a moment, she smiled without much happiness in it.

“Is that meant to help?”

“Meant to give your eyes somewhere to go.”

She studied the map.

I left them there and took Toby the clean supply list.

There were enough people in the camp now that none of us had to be the only person who knew when another needed company.

I was still learning to trust that.

The first search report arrived before supper.

Ilse and Ade had reached the ridge beyond the old bearing. They’d found a place where a narrow passage opened onto a sheltered fold of ground.

There were signs of people.

Recent enough to be different from the weathered cloth we’d found before.

Ash beneath an overhang that hadn’t been washed flat by the last rain. A strip of cloth tied where someone approaching from below could see it. Two containers that had once held water, left upright rather than thrown away.

No people in sight.

No answer when they called.

They would leave supplies and a clear message, then return to the northern shelter before dark.

Luna read the report aloud.

“Do we send more people?” Liam asked.

“Not to search blind at night,” she said. “We ask for the drawing and check the approaches tomorrow.”

I watched her put the report beside the map.

Her hands were steady.

Waiting for one answer hadn’t stopped her knowing what to do with another.

We had supper under the extended roof.

Not everyone. There wasn’t room for fifty-one people to decide at once that the new space was the best place to sit.

Enough that the old cooking shelter felt less crowded.

Olin stayed outside longer, wrapped in a blanket with his leg supported. Dara sat beside him. Seth had come back from helping Teo with the new planting ground and was too hungry to talk until the second bowl.

Priya looked pleased by that.

Dov brought a small wooden stop for the sliding shelf in the stores and put it beside her cup.

She picked it up, tried it in her hand, and touched his wrist before telling him where she’d fit it in the morning.

He stayed beside her while she ate.

Across from us, Anja was explaining to Liam that asking whether she’d like company wasn’t the same as announcing he’d be there.

“I did ask.”

“You asked where I wanted you to put your coat.”

“That was a practical question.”

“Yes. You’re improving. Slowly.”

He grinned, and she took his hand beneath the table.

Luna sat between Sera and me.

Risa was on the other side of Sera, telling Vera how the first lamp repair had taken much longer than the second because people kept asking whether it was finished.

“That sounds familiar,” Vera said.

She looked at me.

I looked at my bowl.

Sera laughed.

For part of the meal, Luna stopped touching the place where the folded letter had been in her pocket.

She listened. Ate. Answered a question about the next water measure.

When the conversation moved away, she leaned lightly against me.

I rested my hand over hers beneath the table.

There wasn’t anything to say that would make the courier arrive sooner.

We ate while the food was warm.

That was still something we were allowed to do.

On Day 507, there was no answer.

There couldn’t reasonably have been one yet.

I wrote that in the correspondence record because I knew how quickly a day could become an accusation if nobody kept the dates where we could see them.

Accepted by courier, Day 506.

Destination recorded: station registry for onward routing.

No delivery acknowledgement.

Luna read it.

Then added the packet reference from the receipt.

Her handwriting was neat.

“Now we stop looking at that page for a while,” she said.

I closed the book.

We went outside together.

My leg felt better after the shorter day I’d finally allowed it. At the covered rail, Toby repeated the little walking trial without asking me to beat the earlier distance.

I managed the same six steps with less trembling.

That was the day’s improvement.

I accepted it without asking for seven.

Toby looked almost suspicious.

I enjoyed that.

Olin’s repair was still holding.

He had less swelling, and the new support no longer needed the same small adjustment every time he changed position.

We left it supported.

No weight yet.

He seemed to have accepted that the future didn’t have to arrive by lunchtime to be real.

I could learn something from him.

Outside his shelter, Dara had put the morning’s clean cloth on the low shelf instead of holding it in her lap while she watched him sleep.

She was helping Edda mend a torn bag.

For the first time since they’d arrived, she could look away from the bed for several minutes without glancing back at every sound.

I didn’t mention it.

I took the supply count to Toby, then went to check the new rain cover over the stores.

It was a small repair Liam and Benedikt had finished while the shuttle was here.

The corner stayed dry when Bram tested the gutter.

Another thing that no longer required someone to wake in the rain and worry about it.

Ilse and Ade returned in the afternoon.

They brought a better drawing of the sheltered fold and a piece of cord they’d found beside the containers.

Ordinary cord. Frayed and retied, with a knot made by someone who needed it to hold more than they needed it to look tidy.

I couldn’t tell them who had tied it.

Neither could Holt.

We didn’t ask the cord to become more useful than it was.

The ground beyond the overhang divided into two possible routes. One climbed into exposed stone. The other followed a narrow line of green down toward water.

They’d checked enough of both to know a longer search needed fresh people and more supplies.

The water they’d left was under cover, marked with the date and the direction to our shelter.

The message said we would return.

Not a day we couldn’t promise.

Not a demand that whoever found it remain where they were until we were ready.

Just where help could be found.

Luna marked both routes for the next party.

The map had another question on it.

This one we could walk toward.

That evening, Luna took out her copy of the letter.

I was sitting by the window, rubbing the tired muscle above my knee without pressing on the place we’d changed.

She read the page once.

Then folded it.

“I keep thinking I should have asked it differently.”

“What would you change?”

She thought for a while.

“Nothing useful.”

I nodded.

She sat beside me.

“I used to send him reports because that was how he taught me to write. Where I was. What I’d done. What I intended to do next.”

“And this?”

“This asks him to tell me something.”

I looked at her.

“That’s allowed.”

“I know.”

She leaned against my shoulder.

After a while, she added, “It doesn’t feel like the same thing.”

I kissed her hair.

“No.”

We watched the light leave the new roof.

Neither of us went to check the correspondence book again.

Sera came in with the last of the curtain measurements.

Risa followed with the bent lamp fitting I’d left in the unfinished tray two days earlier.

She put it beside my pencil.

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

She smiled.

We put the work away before making room on the bed.

The letters were gone. The copies remained. The questions had changed nothing about the distance to Earth, but they were no longer only things we said to each other in a room.

Luna lay down between the ordinary sounds of the camp settling outside.

Sera reached for her hand across me.

Risa pulled the blanket over my feet and complained that I was making the arrangement unnecessarily complicated by being so long.

“You knew that before,” I said.

“I hoped you’d improve.”

Luna laughed.

It wasn’t a large sound.

It was hers.

I held onto that while the lamp went out.

Day 507. Luna asks.

Her question written in the family code. Ordinary news with it. Copy kept. Sent to General Windsor through the courier on Day 506.

My letter sent to Mother, Genny, Garnet. Told them about the three people I love. Told them the leg is improving. Asked about the small things at home.

Receipt means accepted for routing. No family delivery confirmed. No reply yet. One day is one day.

Sleeping bays finished. Water supply holding. Stores gutter corrected. Medical supplies received and checked. No recurring material commitment.

Olin’s repair holding. Still supported. My six steps steadier after rest.

Recent human signs beyond the northern bearing. No people found. Supplies and directions left. Two routes to check next.

Fifty-one here.

Tonight, the new roof is already waiting for whoever comes next.