Scarecrow

The queen sent us a warning about rain while the sky was still clear.

Not rain that afternoon.

Not water rising in one damaged passage.

A change in the season.

Dot brought the message to the map table on Day 539, with a drawing the guide had helped correct three times before it came aboveground.

The shallow channels were filled in.

The narrow ones were crossed out.

Along the lower edge of the page, where we’d drawn a place people sometimes stopped to rest, the queen had put the sign for moving away.

Holt looked at it for a long time.

Then reached for his weather books.

“Aye,” he said quietly.

Luna leaned forward.

“You’ve seen it before?”

“Some of it.”

He found the page.

The drawing beneath his hand showed the same crossing, with a line of water far above the place we’d been using.

He had underlined one sentence so hard the pencil had almost cut the paper.

Do not shelter below the old stain.

We put both records on the table.

The queen knew what the water did beneath the ground. Holt knew some of what it had done above it.

Neither record was the whole canyon.

Together, they were better than either alone.

Luna asked Dot whether the queen was moving her young.

“Yes,” Dot said.

“Already?”

“Yes.”

That changed the morning.

We had been talking about a weather warning.

Someone who lived below us had begun acting on it.

Sera set the unfinished shelf drawing aside and pulled a clean page toward her.

“Roofs first?”

“Routes first,” Luna said. “Then roofs. If a shelter becomes unsafe, I want to know how we get everyone out of it.”

I looked at the new sleeping bays.

They were on high ground. Sound ground, as far as we could see and test.

That didn’t mean the route between them and the water shelf would remain the same when the hillside began emptying itself around us.

I put my cup down.

We started with the places people needed to reach.

The morning work didn’t cancel the medical work.

Sera had her treatment. Toby checked Olin’s healing and Emmet’s breathing. I did the short exercise for my leg before going to look at drains, because we had finally learned that inspecting half the camp was not an adequate substitute for doing it properly.

Holt stayed at the table.

He wasn’t going out to show us every old water mark by standing beside it.

He marked them on the map while Corr and Ilse checked the nearest ones.

When they returned, the marks were where he’d said.

Higher than the paths we’d been congratulating ourselves on repairing.

I stood beside one stain in the rock and put my hand level with it.

Above my shoulder.

“That wasn’t all one night,” Corr said.

“No.”

We didn’t know which part had been one night.

That was enough reason to move the stored rope and the spare bedding out of the low recess before anyone decided it was a convenient place to wait out the rain.

The queen’s brood helped clear the lower channels.

Ours helped make the upper crossing safer.

By midday, there were Teeming and humans carrying different things along the same route, with the guide waiting where the path narrowed so one group didn’t have to guess whether the other had seen it.

Bram brought filled water containers up.

Two of the queen’s people took loose stone down.

Nobody pretended the arrangement felt ordinary yet.

It worked anyway.

Nara watched from the new shelter while I rested beside her.

“Are they frightened?” she asked.

“Of the storm?”

She nodded.

“I don’t know how much. They know it’s coming.”

She watched a pale-wrapped young one carried past the lower opening, away from a passage the queen had marked unsafe.

“That’s why they’re moving them.”

“Yes.”

After a moment, she stood and went to help Vera move the dry blankets.

I didn’t ask whether seeing the young had changed anything for her.

She had found something useful to do with what she’d seen.

That was enough.

Risa asked me to come to the medical shelter after lunch.

She didn’t have to explain which conversation she meant.

Toby had spent the previous days checking what he could use to confirm the pregnancy. The small diagnostic reader among our equipment had needed an ordinary optical repair before he would trust its results.

A replacement part from the station supplies had helped.

A properly seated clear window, which I’d made while Risa watched the shape, had done the rest.

The machine wasn’t discovering anything my eyes could name better just because they were unusual.

It was doing one narrow job it had been built to do.

Toby had checked it against its reference material before asking Risa to use it.

Now the result was in his hand.

Risa sat beside me.

Her fingers were cold.

“It’s positive,” he said.

Neither of us spoke.

He let us have a moment before continuing.

“This supports pregnancy. It doesn’t tell us everything about how it’s developing. We still need to follow that carefully.”

Risa nodded.

Then looked at me.

I had imagined the moment several times.

That hadn’t prepared me for it.

There was no visible change in the room. The same shelf. The same folded cloth. Toby’s notes open beside the lamp.

Risa’s hand was still in mine.

But the possibility we’d been carrying had become something we had a reason to believe was real.

I looked at her.

She was crying without making a sound.

“Risa?”

She laughed once, unsteadily.

“I know. I thought I’d already done the surprised part.”

I pulled my chair closer.

She leaned into me.

For a while, Toby kept his attention on the notes and gave us the privacy of not being watched.

Then Risa sat back and wiped her face.

“I want this,” she said.

Not to Toby.

To me.

I felt my own eyes fill.

“I do too.”

The words came out more quietly than I’d expected.

They didn’t need to be louder.

We asked questions afterward.

A few useful ones. Several that were really fear trying to look organized.

Toby answered what he could and wrote down what needed a better reference or a more experienced person than any of us.

He didn’t pretend that being good at keeping injured people alive made every part of this familiar.

I was glad of that.

We had no reason to assume a child would be born with our modifications simply because both parents had been changed.

We had no reason to announce that couldn’t happen either.

We would learn what we could without turning Risa into a problem to solve every hour.

She said that last part herself.

I looked at her.

She looked back.

“I know you.”

“Yes,” I admitted.

Toby closed the notes.

“We start with ordinary care. Then we deal with actual questions as they become answerable.”

Risa nodded.

When we left, she kept hold of my hand all the way back to our room.

Sera was drawing a gutter when we came in.

Luna stood beside the window, reading a report from the northern shelter.

Both looked up.

Risa stopped just inside the door.

“Toby says the test is positive.”

Sera put the pencil down.

Luna lowered the page.

For a moment, none of us moved.

Then Sera crossed the room and put her arms around Risa.

Carefully at first.

Risa laughed through another rush of tears.

“You can hug me properly.”

Sera did.

Luna came close and touched Risa’s cheek before joining them.

I stood there feeling foolishly uncertain about where my hands belonged until Risa reached back and caught one.

Then there were four of us in the middle of the room, holding on in an arrangement nobody would have designed if they’d been asked to make it practical.

I didn’t want to move.

Neither did anyone else.

We sat down eventually.

Risa told them what she’d told me.

That she wanted the baby.

That she was happy.

That being happy hadn’t removed the fear.

Luna listened with both hands around hers.

“We don’t have to choose only one thing to feel.”

“I’ve noticed,” Risa said.

Sera sat beside me, her shoulder against mine.

After a while, she looked at Risa and asked, “Do you still want me not to draw a room?”

Risa laughed.

“For today.”

“Cruel.”

“For today,” she repeated.

Luna smiled.

Then her face became serious again.

“Who do you want to tell?”

Risa looked around at us.

“Not everyone yet. Let this be ours for a little while.”

We agreed.

I didn’t think keeping it close made it smaller.

For that afternoon, the room held more future than I knew what to do with.

The queen asked about the upper water reserve the next day.

Dot brought the question while we were inspecting the new drain beside the sleeping bays.

Not a picture mistaken for a command.

A question.

How long could our people remain above if the lower route closed?

We didn’t have a comforting answer ready.

So we counted.

Water already stored. Water we could collect from the roofs. How much the sick people needed. How many containers could be filled and moved before the weather broke.

Bram brought the inventory. Priya corrected the part that treated cooking water as though it wasn’t drinking water once it entered a pot.

Jonas found an empty space in the tally where we’d counted a damaged container as full capacity.

We changed it.

Luna sent the real answer below.

Not enough for a long isolation.

Enough to improve before the storm arrived.

The queen answered with a drawing of a high seep her brood could reach from beneath.

A possible second source.

We put it on the list to inspect.

An alliance was becoming a way to discover what we’d forgotten to ask ourselves.

We didn’t drink from the new seep because the queen used it.

Her people weren’t ours. What sustained one body might do something else to another.

Teo and Toby checked a sample against what we already knew of the local water. I looked at the ordinary substances I could identify and refused to turn the unfamiliar parts into harmless ones by giving them a hopeful name.

The first useful result was simpler than drinking.

It was suitable for some of the washing and cleaning work we’d been using our better supply to do.

That alone stretched what we had.

We kept the containers separate and marked them differently.

Nessa asked why.

Priya explained it once.

Then Nessa caught Liam reaching for the wrong one and explained it again with greater force.

He put it back.

“I was moving it.”

“Then move it where it belongs.”

Risa heard that and had to sit down because she was laughing too hard.

For a little while, the coming storm felt like something we could prepare for rather than only fear.

By Day 541, the sky had begun to change.

The light came through green at noon, then darker beneath the cloud gathering beyond the eastern ridges.

The air felt heavy against my skin.

Holt watched from the common roof with the weather book open on his knee.

“Soon?” I asked.

“Soon enough.”

He pointed to the low edge of the cloud.

“Don’t use the clear bit above us as a promise.”

I looked at it.

A strip of bright sky directly over Scarecrow.

It was very easy to want it to mean something.

Below, the allied brood kept moving supplies and young through the safer passages. The traffic was orderly, but it hadn’t stopped since dawn.

Our queen had also sent a message north.

Dot listened to the reply and came to the table.

“The northern queen will permit a warning party along the upper route.”

Luna looked up.

“Human?”

“With the guide’s people. To leave directions and weather marks. No entry into the nursery passages.”

A limited agreement.

A useful one.

We accepted it as offered.

Corr and Ilse took the warning party out while there was still light to travel safely.

Two of our queen’s people accompanied them.

They carried water, simple signs, and the route to our northern shelter. The message wasn’t that everyone had to come to Scarecrow.

It was that the lower ground was going to change, and there were places to wait that wouldn’t fill first.

The northern brood knew some of those places better than we did.

Our guides knew how to bring the question without turning the meeting into another border dispute.

I watched the party leave.

Then turned to the work I could do here.

The barrier I’d made during the standoff still stood across the exposed approach.

It would stop a charge.

It would also catch runoff in exactly the place we didn’t want water gathering.

I hadn’t thought about that while the broods were coming.

Now I could.

I opened a protected route through its base and reshaped the visible stone so the water would pass without cutting under the walking path.

Strength meant very little if I used it to build the wrong thing beautifully.

The larger work was easier than it would have been a month before.

I felt the change as I followed the pressure through the wall.

The ordinary stone was still made of the same things. I hadn’t discovered a new kind of force waiting behind my eyes.

I’d learned how much of the old force I had been spending badly.

The queen’s lesson had become part of how I looked.

Keep the useful structure.

Find the places carrying the load.

Change what needs changing without fighting every grain beside it.

I remade the drain and reinforced the two exposed corners before the familiar pressure warned me to stop.

Then I stopped.

The result wasn’t only more stone altered.

I could still think clearly enough to inspect the water route afterward.

Risa brought the test bucket. Bram poured while I watched.

The water passed through and away from the shelters.

No pooling beneath the wall.

No hidden triumph in the part where I forgot to look.

Risa smiled at me.

“That will do.”

She sounded so much like Holt that I laughed.

My leg had its own smaller victory that afternoon.

A little farther along the covered stretch.

A steadier turn.

Less need to pull myself forward with the rail.

I still used the stick outside it. The wet ground was not a place to prove that a good morning had made me somebody else.

Olin watched from his chair while Toby checked the corrected leg beneath the support.

“Race getting closer?” he asked.

“Only if you give me a head start.”

“Unreasonable.”

He smiled, then looked down while Toby adjusted the blanket.

His bones were healing in the new alignment. There was a long way between that and walking.

We told him the truth.

He had begun to trust that the truth could contain something good without having to be perfect.

Emmet sat nearby, breathing more comfortably than on arrival and complaining that coughing still hurt.

Nara told him that complaining used breath too.

He considered that and decided the complaint was worth it.

I sat with them until my own leg stopped trembling.

That evening, Risa asked whether I was happy.

We were in our room. Sera had gone to collect supper. Luna was finishing the last route check with Wren.

I looked up from folding a dry shirt.

“Yes.”

“About the baby.”

I put the shirt down.

“Yes.”

She nodded, but didn’t look away.

“I keep catching you with that face.”

“What face?”

“The one where you’re trying to build a wall around a thought.”

I sat beside her.

“I’m frightened of not being able to make things safe enough.”

“I know.”

“And I keep thinking about Mother. Father. What was done to them because somebody found a use for what they could do.”

Her hand moved into mine.

“But when I think about you,” I said, “about us having a child, before I start putting every danger around it—yes. I’m happy.”

She leaned against me.

“Good.”

I kissed her.

For a little while, I let the happy part have the whole room.

Luna came back with the first worrying weather report.

The northern shelter was dry.

The lower approach beneath it was already carrying water from rain we couldn’t see beyond the ridge.

Corr and Ilse had reached the agreed turnaround. They were returning by the upper route with the guide’s companions.

No new survivors found that day.

Two old stopping places marked unsafe.

One more cache moved above the expected waterline.

Luna put the report down and sat on the bed.

“That’s the last party out until we see what this does.”

I nodded.

We would keep watching.

We would answer if someone reached us.

We wouldn’t keep sending people into ground that was changing just because the map still had blanks.

Sera arrived with supper and looked at the page.

“Are they on their way home?”

“Yes,” Luna said.

Sera handed her a bowl.

“Then eat while they walk.”

It was advice we’d all become better at giving than taking.

Luna took it that night.

The first hard rain reached Scarecrow on Day 542.

It struck the roof like handfuls of gravel, then settled into a continuous noise that made ordinary conversation feel farther away.

The new gutter held.

So did the stores cover.

One curtain fastening worked loose in the spare sleeping bay, and Vera fixed it before the wet edge reached the bedding box.

We had jobs to do.

We didn’t have a disaster yet.

Bram checked the water marks from inside the shelter while Jonas wrote them down. Priya kept hot food moving without sending people across the open ground for every bowl.

Holt took the reports at the map table, which finally proved the value of his insistence on putting it where rain wouldn’t find the pages.

Dot sent hands along the upper paths and brought the images back through the local links that still worked.

No power through a camera.

No pretending I could mend an unseen washout because I wanted to.

When a small edge failed near the empty storage platform, we marked it closed and used the other route.

Sometimes the right repair was making sure nobody stepped there.

Our queen sent a warning before the lower channel changed.

Dot translated it in short phrases.

Water rising behind stone.

Old obstruction moving.

Do not enter the narrow passage.

Luna stopped the inspection party before they left the upper shelf.

A little later, we heard the change from above.

Not a collapse beneath our feet.

A deep rush as water found the opening it had been pressing against.

The marked passage filled.

The nursery route the queen had cleared remained above it.

Corr stood beside me in the shelter doorway, watching runoff race along the path we’d repaired.

“We’d have been down there.”

“Yes.”

He looked toward Dot.

She had already turned to the next message.

The warning had become one line in a busy afternoon.

I didn’t think any of us would forget what that line had done.

The neighbouring broods were moving too.

Dot could distinguish the name-patterns now even when she couldn’t translate everything passing between them.

Not all their movement was toward us.

Some were abandoning low ground. Some were closing routes. One queen refused passage through a narrow place her own brood needed for its young.

Another offered a ridge crossing on the far side of her territory.

Three weeks earlier, I would have seen the bodies moving and thought an attack was forming.

Now we had people who could ask.

That didn’t make every answer friendly.

It made the differences visible.

Luna kept the human watches in place. The new alliance didn’t cancel the need to protect our people.

But she moved one watch from a useless position facing a nursery evacuation to the exposed route where someone genuinely could approach unseen.

I watched the change on the map.

Knowing more didn’t make us less cautious.

It let us stop wasting caution in the wrong direction.

Near dusk, the receiver spoke.

Not the Earth channel.

The local receiver connected to the tower, listening without sending anything back.

A human voice broke through the rain noise, thin and incomplete.

“—lower rooms—water—”

Risa looked up.

Dot began recording.

The voice vanished.

Returned.

“—seven—can’t move—”

Luna came to the table.

Nobody touched the transmitter.

We had disconnected the high-power ground system after learning what it did to the queens. A frightened voice didn’t make reconnecting it harmless.

Risa adjusted the receiving controls.

Another fragment came through.

Not enough to place the speaker.

Enough that seven had become a number I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Holt opened a clean page.

“Time,” he said.

Wren gave it.

He wrote exactly what we’d heard.

Then left space.

A second call followed from another direction.

Different voice. Different level in the receiver. More hurried.

Something about a slope. Something about a shelter that wasn’t safe.

We couldn’t see the distant mirror stations through the weather.

Our own lantern marks could serve the nearest paths, not carry a conversation across a ridge hidden in rain.

Dot listened to the human receiver and the quiet exchanges below us.

One of the neighbouring queens complained of a fresh burst of pain.

Someone else was calling loudly enough to hurt her.

Luna shut her eyes for a moment.

Then opened them.

“We need to get the warning to them.”

“Yes,” I said.

“But we need to find them first.”

Risa kept her hands on the receiving controls.

The voice returned long enough to give part of a landmark.

A split ridge.

Holt looked up from the page.

There were several split ridges within the country we’d walked.

He didn’t choose the one he wanted it to be.

He marked the possibilities.

We asked our queen.

Not to command the whole underground.

To pass a question to the neighbours willing to hear it.

Human voices calling from low shelters. Water rising. Possibly seven people. A split ridge visible from the place they had chosen.

Dot could say more of that than she could have a month before.

For the rest, we used the maps.

The queen answered while the storm beat against the roof.

She would ask.

One neighbouring queen replied quickly.

Another did not.

A third sent back a place where humans had once been seen, without claiming they were still there.

Holt put the new mark beside one of his possibilities.

Not a location found.

A place less unknown than before.

I looked at the weather beyond the shelter.

The rain was running white across the dark ground.

I could not fly a hull safely into that merely because someone might be waiting at the end.

I hated the limit.

I still had to use it.

The station message came through an overhead shuttle before full dark.

A short, directed transmission on the local channel. The sort of contact we’d used with pilots before, far below the broad ground output that had hurt the queens.

The pilot asked for receipt through the usual brief local link.

Dot kept watch on the allied brood’s response while Luna acknowledged at the established low setting.

No distress.

Then the instruction followed.

Primary Base was to hold position.

Secure its personnel, equipment, and material reserves.

No unauthorized deployment to other sites during the weather event.

Requests from outlying groups were being assessed by Command.

The voice sounded as though it had read the same words to more than one place.

Luna wrote them down.

When the pilot asked whether she required repetition, she said no.

The shuttle moved out of the contact window before we could ask anything useful about the people on the ground.

The receiver returned to rain and broken voices.

“Assessed,” Liam said.

Nobody answered him.

We had all heard that word before.

I looked at the instruction.

Material reserves came before any mention of the people calling from other shelters.

It might have been ordinary wording copied by someone who hadn’t imagined what it would sound like while a voice broke on the word water.

It still told us to stay.

Holt put his pencil down.

“Can they get anybody to those sites?”

“We don’t know,” Luna said.

“Did they say they were sending anyone?”

“No.”

The first voice returned through the receiver.

“—still here—”

Then static.

I felt Risa’s hand touch my arm.

Not holding me in place.

Making sure I knew she was beside me.

I looked toward the door.

The people here needed me too.

That didn’t make the people outside disappear.

We prepared before deciding which route could actually be used.

Water. Blankets. Medical bags. The carrying frame that had brought Olin through the narrow crossing.

Liam and Benedikt checked the fittings. Tamsin laid out the ropes. Anja counted the food that could be carried without turning a rescuer’s bag into something too heavy to lift at the wrong moment.

No one left in the dark merely because packing made waiting feel worse.

Dot asked again through the queen.

Risa listened for the landmark.

Holt compared the answers.

I sat with a piece of ordinary stone in my hands and made a fitting I hoped we wouldn’t need.

My power felt strong enough to do a great deal.

It could not make an unknown path known.

It could not make the wind stop being wind around a hull full of frightened people.

The lesson the queen had taught me mattered here too.

Force wasn’t the first answer.

Find where the work actually needed to happen.

The queen’s next message gave us that place.

A neighbouring brood had heard humans near a high cleft above a watercourse.

Seven living bodies had been seen there before the storm. One had been carried by the others.

The approach from the surface was partly gone.

There was another approach beneath the ridge.

Narrow.

Dry so far.

Our queen’s people could reach the near end. The neighbouring brood would permit them through with a human party if the route to its young remained clear.

Luna looked at the map.

Then at Corr.

He leaned forward.

“We can reach the near end from the upper shelter path.”

“In this rain?”

“With the handline and the guide. Slowly.”

Holt put a finger beside the old water mark.

“Stay above that turn.”

Dot asked for confirmation from below.

The answer came back.

Above the turn.

For the first time that evening, we had a route instead of a wish.

We didn’t leave immediately.

We checked who was going, what they could carry, and who would remain responsible for everyone here.

Sera stayed at Scarecrow. Her morning treatment would be done before any departure that involved me, and the first plan didn’t require me beyond the upper approach.

Luna would lead the initial party with Corr and the guide, to see whether the passage matched what we’d been told.

Ilse would manage the human watches with Holt.

Toby would stay with the patients until we knew what medical help the people beyond the ridge actually needed.

Risa kept the receiver.

She chose that work herself.

It was important work, and being pregnant did not make her incapable of choosing it.

I wanted to go all the way with the party.

I also knew that a narrow unknown passage in a storm was no place to discover that my improved leg couldn’t do the thing I hoped it could.

I would prepare the exposed entrance where I could see it, then wait for the first report.

The rest of the plan would be made from that.

Later, while the watches changed, Risa and I had a few minutes alone.

She sat beside the receiver with the headphones resting on the table rather than over both ears.

“Will you be careful?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She looked at me.

“Not the kind of yes that means you know I want to hear it.”

I took her hand.

“I’ll stay at the entrance until we know the passage. I’ll come back before I decide being tired is something I can fix by wanting harder.”

She nodded.

That was a promise with edges she could hold.

I touched her cheek.

“I want to come back to you.”

“I know.”

“To all of this.”

Her other hand rested against her middle for a moment.

Then she leaned forward and kissed me.

When we separated, she put the headphones back on and listened for the people who were still calling.

I stayed beside her until Luna came for the map.

The storm darkened the sky before the next morning arrived.

Black-green cloud over the ridge. Water throwing itself against the stone. The tower disappearing upward into weather that made its height feel less like an advantage than a question.

Our high-power transmitter remained disconnected.

The lamps marked the safe upper path.

Below it, the guide waited with two of the queen’s people, their limbs braced against the running water.

They had not come to attack the humans beneath the tower.

They had come because humans were missing from their brood.

Luna stood beside me under the shelter roof.

The station instruction lay on the table behind us.

Hold position.

She looked at the waiting guide.

Then at the map showing a dry passage where Command’s instruction had shown us nothing at all.

“We can reach them,” she said.

I looked at the storm.

At the handline.

At the people who had come to help us try.

“Yes,” I said. “I think we can.”

Day 543. Before the weather breaks.

Queen’s warning matched Holt’s records. Lower passage flooded after warning received. No one inside. Nursery moved to safer routes.

Water reserves increased. Separate cleaning supply checked. Roofs holding. Drain through old defensive barrier completed. Sleeping bays dry.

Risa’s test positive. Early pregnancy. Toby following. She wants the baby. So do I. Sera and Luna know. Keeping it close for now.

Leg improving. Use the stick on wet ground. Stronger does not mean ready for every route.

Calls from other human shelters. No broad transmission from us. Queen passing questions between independent broods. Possible seven people located beyond damaged surface approach.

Neighbour permits passage with guides. Initial route check prepared. People here remain covered.

Command says hold Primary Base. Other sites under assessment.

We have a way to look for the people they are assessing.