Scarecrow

By morning, the storm had found a new sound.

Yesterday it had struck the roof in handfuls. Now it dragged across it, a long, steady rush that made me imagine the whole hillside leaning against our room.

I lay still until I was certain the movement beneath my hand was Risa breathing.

Then she opened one eye.

“If you ask whether I slept, I’m going to ask whether you did.”

“That seems unfair.”

“So does being watched before breakfast.”

I moved my hand from her waist to the mattress.

She caught it and put it back.

“I didn’t say stop.”

Across the room, Sera was sitting on the edge of the bed with her feet on the floor. Luna stood beside the window, holding the curtain away from a narrow strip of grey light.

“How bad?” I asked.

“Wet.”

“We should record that.”

“Holt already has.”

Luna let the curtain fall and came back to us.

She kissed Risa’s forehead, then bent to kiss me.

“The roofs are holding. No new arrivals overnight. Two voices on the receiver that Wren thinks belong to the same group. Corr is checking the lower observation point with Ilse.”

“Already?”

“They slept. You’re allowed to do that even when other people are working.”

Sera held out her cup.

“And before you begin rearranging the day, I would like my unpleasant breakfast.”

I sat up carefully.

My left thigh pulled, then eased when I changed the angle of my leg. Tired muscle. The familiar place above the knee. No new sharpness.

Risa noticed the pause.

“All right?”

“Yes.”

She waited.

“Stiff. Better than I thought it would be.”

“That answer I believe.”

I made Sera’s treatment fresh, as I did every morning.

Outside, someone was arguing with a fastening that had apparently developed opinions during the night. Inside, Sera watched my hands and drank when I passed her the cup.

She made a face.

“One day,” she said, “you’ll discover a way to make that taste of something pleasant.”

“I could make it taste different.”

“That’s a frightening distinction.”

Luna laughed quietly.

For a little while, the room held four people getting ready for a day.

I needed those moments more than I used to.

Perhaps I was only getting better at noticing them.

Breakfast had been moved away from the windward edge of the common roof.

Priya stood behind the food with a cloth over one shoulder and an expression that discouraged people from discussing emergencies before taking a bowl.

Dov had made a little wooden wedge for the troublesome serving shelf. She pressed down on the shelf to test it, then touched his shoulder as she passed.

He looked at the wedge as if it had surprised him by doing its job.

At the next table, Liam was trying to untangle a fastening on Anja’s coat.

“You’ve made it worse,” she told him.

“I’ve made it different.”

“That seems to be going around,” Sera said.

Wren sat beside Toby with the night’s receiver notes. His bowl was in front of him. Hers was empty.

She tapped the edge of his with a finger whenever he became too interested in the page.

He took another mouthful without looking up.

Holt had his knee propped beneath the map table and his weather book open beside it.

When I approached, he looked at my stick.

“Using it today?”

“I used it yesterday.”

“Eventually.”

“It’s early for this.”

“I’m old. I have to start while there’s time.”

He shifted the map towards me.

The seven people we’d brought home were marked in the margin. A line beneath their names separated them from the voices we still couldn’t place.

One voice had mentioned a leaning roof and white water on both sides. Another had called for a woman named Tali.

That did not tell us whether Tali was missing, injured, or standing somewhere beyond the speaker’s sight.

Holt had written the name without deciding for us.

“Corr can see the shoulder above the old wash,” he said. “If their description belongs anywhere near us, that’s the place to begin looking. If it doesn’t, she’ll come back with that answer.”

Luna bent over the map.

“We won’t use yesterday’s passage without asking again.”

“Already on the page.”

“I’m saying it for him.”

“I can hear both of you,” I said.

“Good,” Holt said. “Saves time.”

The guide arrived before we finished eating.

Water ran from the ridges of its plates and pooled beneath its feet. It carried the lamp Sera had repaired, held high enough to keep it away from the mud.

It did not come into the crowded part of the shelter.

It waited beside the outer post until Dot joined it.

The exchange was brief.

Then Dot turned towards us.

“Water has entered an upper nursery approach. The young have been moved beyond it. The route used to carry their food is narrowing.”

Luna straightened.

“Collapse?”

“Loose material. Water. A distinction I am still asking about.”

The guide touched the ground, then raised one forelimb beneath the edge of the lamp.

Holding something up.

Dot’s lights changed.

“They can support the lower obstruction. They cannot open the upper channel without bringing more loose material down.”

I looked towards the passage.

Risa looked at me.

“Breakfast first,” she said.

“I hadn’t said anything.”

“You were leaning.”

I finished the bowl.

We divided the work at Holt’s table.

Luna would take Liam and Corr to the observation point once Ilse returned with the first report. They would carry rope, dry coverings, and enough food to leave behind if they could reach people but couldn’t safely bring them back.

No one knew yet whether there was anyone there to reach.

Sera would stay above with Holt. Toby would remain near Jace and Milo. Old Son had already started moving dry supplies away from the roof edge where spray was reaching them.

Risa and I would go with Dot to look at the queen’s water problem.

“Look,” Sera repeated.

“Yes.”

“Then tell us what it needs.”

“Yes.”

She studied me for another moment.

“I dislike how agreeable you’re being.”

“I’ve been practising.”

She caught my sleeve before I turned away.

Her hand had more strength in it now. Enough that the small pull brought me back willingly.

“Come home with something left,” she said.

“I will.”

Luna squeezed the back of my neck as she passed.

“Both of you.”

Risa lifted a hand.

“I heard.”

The upper passage smelled of wet stone and the sharp, earthy scent that came from deeper below.

We did not take yesterday’s rescue route.

The guide brought us to the familiar stopping place, waited for an answer from within, then led us along a broad shelf to a chamber I hadn’t entered before.

A shallow stream crossed its far side.

Beyond it, several Teeming stood beneath a low opening with their forelimbs braced against a slab. Smaller shapes moved behind them, carrying pale bundles along a higher ledge.

I watched long enough to see one bundle stir.

Young.

Already clear of the water.

The guide held up a limb when I moved towards the stream.

I stopped.

A Teeming crossed the wet floor ahead of us. One foot went deeper than I expected before finding purchase.

The guide pointed to that place.

“Undercut,” Risa said.

Dot asked, and the answer came back.

“Yes.”

We stayed on the dry shelf.

The queen waited beyond the higher opening.

I saw her plates first, pale in the lamp’s light. Then the silver beneath them, carrying a slow movement that I could feel without knowing how to describe it.

It was not a voice inside my head.

I still needed Dot.

But I had begun to recognize the difference between the queen attending to something and the ordinary shifting life around her.

Her attention settled on us.

On me.

Then on Risa.

The pattern changed.

Risa looked up from the water.

“What?”

Dot did not answer at once.

The queen repeated the pattern, more slowly.

One of Dot’s hands closed around the edge of her own frame.

“Dorothy?” I asked.

“I am checking a distinction.”

The queen shifted a forelimb towards a passing nursery carrier, then towards Risa.

Risa went very still.

“Oh,” she said.

There were only the three of us on the shelf.

The guide had moved ahead to the water. The other Teeming continued their work.

Dot lowered her voice.

“She recognizes that you are carrying young.”

Risa’s fingers found mine.

The queen waited.

I looked at Risa rather than answering for her.

She took a breath.

“Yes,” she said.

Dot passed the answer.

The silver beneath the queen’s plates moved in a pattern I had not seen before.

It was slower than the warning signals. Broader than the little exchanges about routes and water.

“She asks whether the growth is wanted,” Dot said.

Risa’s grip tightened.

“Yes.”

This answer came without a pause.

“Very much.”

The queen lowered her head until the front of it rested nearer the height of our shelf.

I thought of the first time I’d seen enough of her to understand what was beneath Scarecrow.

How certain I’d been that something that large could only be waiting to kill us.

Risa swallowed.

“How did she know?”

Dot asked.

The reply took longer.

“She knows your ordinary pattern from previous visits. Something within it is changing. She distinguishes that change from the injury in your ankle and from fatigue.”

“Can she tell if it’s all right?” I asked.

Dot turned back before the queen could answer.

“I cannot translate that into a reliable medical question yet.”

The words stopped me.

I nodded.

“Then don’t make it one.”

The queen was not a reader Toby had learned to use. Risa was not one of her own species. Recognition wasn’t an answer to every frightened question I could put behind it.

Risa rubbed her thumb along my hand.

“We know one thing,” she said. “We can keep knowing one thing for a minute.”

“All right.”

Dot conveyed something else.

“She asks whether the others in your shelter know.”

“Sera and Luna,” Risa said. “Toby. We haven’t told everyone.”

Dot explained the boundary as carefully as she had explained the boundaries of a nursery route.

The queen answered once.

“She will leave the telling to you.”

Risa let out a breath I hadn’t noticed she was holding.

“Thank her.”

The next exchange began with the nursery carriers.

The queen indicated them, then us, then the roof somewhere above the rock.

Dot listened.

A small sound came from within her frame.

“What is it?” Risa asked.

“The word is familiar. I have been translating it in too narrow a way.”

“Which word?”

“Brood.”

The water moved across the chamber. A carrier paused to let another pass along the high ledge.

Dot turned one hand towards the queen.

“I asked whether she meant allies.”

“And?” I said.

“She understood the distinction. She used the other word again.”

The queen touched the ground beneath herself.

Then the shelf beneath us.

Then lifted her limb towards Scarecrow.

“She considers the people above part of her brood,” Dot said.

Neither of us spoke.

“She knows you did not hatch here. She knows you are not her species. Those are not errors in the statement.”

Risa looked from Dot to the queen.

“All of us?”

The reply came quickly.

“All of you who make your home here. Those who came yesterday as well.”

I thought of Brin holding her lamp with both hands. Of Milo trying to breathe without waking everyone beside him. Of Jace looking at his ruined feet as if an apology might make them easier to carry.

The queen had not met them as we had.

She had sent her people to help bring them home.

“What does that mean to her?” I asked.

Dot asked several questions before she answered.

“It means she includes you when she thinks about who must be fed, sheltered, warned, and protected. It does not mean she believes she may command you.”

“Ask that part again.”

Dot did.

The queen’s answer included the familiar stop signal.

Then a space left open beside it.

“You may refuse,” Dot said. “You may leave. She would still want to know whether you had reached somewhere safe.”

Risa made a small sound beside me.

I couldn’t tell whether it was almost a laugh or almost something else.

I understood both.

The queen indicated me again.

This time the silver beneath her plates brightened in separate paths.

I felt the answering awareness beneath my skin. Not an instruction. Not a pull that moved my hands.

More like recognizing that someone across a room was looking directly at me.

“She knows you especially clearly,” Dot said. “There is much silver in you. More than in many of the people she has encountered.”

“Because of what they did to me.”

Dot conveyed it.

The queen’s forelimb drew inward.

“Yes. She does not mistake the taking and putting for your choice.”

Then her attention shifted to Risa.

Dot listened again.

“She knows Risa clearly as well. There is much silver in her, and her way of using it reaches into the patterns the queen recognizes. Now there is this change within that familiar life.”

Risa looked down at herself.

“She isn’t saying the baby has it?”

“No,” Dot said. “I have no statement about that. She is speaking about you.”

I was grateful for the care in her voice.

The queen moved one limb between us, stopped before touching either of us, then laid it on the stone.

“She is particularly concerned for you both,” Dot said. “Recognition makes the concern immediate. It is not a ranking of whose life matters.”

“And the people with less silver?” Risa asked.

Another short exchange.

“The people carrying bowls. The people keeping the roofs. The young who are not hers. She named those separately.”

I looked at the hand resting on the shelf.

It could have broken me without much effort.

I put my free hand against the stone beside it.

Not touching her.

Near enough to make the choice visible.

“We think about keeping you safe too,” I said.

Dot translated.

Behind the queen, a carrier resumed its journey with a pale bundle held carefully beneath its body.

There was more.

The queen turned towards the water, then back to my hand on the stone.

“She asks whether you remember the large queens she described,” Dot said.

I nodded.

“The planetary queens.”

“The ones whose reach joined many territories. Yes.”

The thought of the spine aboard Meridian returned so sharply that I could almost see the grey surface again.

Three hundred metres of something we had called a part of a ship.

Something taken from a life.

The queen made a pattern Dot asked her to repeat.

Then repeat again.

“I need an example,” Dot said, apparently to both of us.

The queen indicated a loose piece of ordinary stone beside the stream.

Then my hand.

I looked at Dot.

“She is asking you to change it.”

“To what?”

“The form does not matter for this question.”

I made the stone into a shallow cup.

No large effort. No material taken from the wall. Just the loose piece, held where I could see it.

Water collected in its hollow.

The queen watched.

The pattern that followed was unlike the one she’d used when teaching me to carry a load through several supports.

Dot’s lights became still.

“She says the planetary queens could change substances.”

I kept looking at the cup.

“Shape them?”

“Shape them. Alter what they were. I am asking whether those are distinct actions in her account.”

We waited.

Risa leaned against me, her shoulder warm through both our coats.

The queen repeated one pattern, then another.

“Yes,” Dot said. “Distinct. She means both.”

For a moment I heard only the water.

All the years of being looked at because of my eyes. All the people who had measured what I could make and what I might be worth if they could get me to make more of it.

My father, before me.

A part of me wanted to ask a hundred questions at once.

Another part wanted to put the cup down and go back to breakfast.

Risa’s hand closed around mine again.

“Lucas.”

“I heard.”

“I know.”

The queen did not say I was one of them.

Dot made that clear before I could fit a frightening answer into a question she hadn’t asked.

“She knows you belong to another species. Of the other species she knows, she thinks of you as the nearest to Teeming.”

“Because of the silver.”

“And because of this ability. Because of what you do with it.”

The queen indicated the cup, the braced opening, then the path leading back towards our shelters.

“She has seen you change the ground to carry injured people. Make places for water. Mend a passage for her young. Those actions resemble what the great queens did for their broods.”

I looked away.

“She hasn’t seen everything I’ve done.”

Dot did not soften that when she translated it.

The queen’s answer was slow.

“She knows there was fighting here. She knows her people frightened you, and that people died. This is not a claim that nothing happened before you understood one another.”

The cup overflowed.

Water spilled down its side and rejoined the stream.

“She is describing who she recognizes now,” Dot said.

Risa rested her forehead briefly against my shoulder.

I stood still until I could speak without forcing the words.

“Are any of them alive?”

Dot did not need me to explain which queens I meant.

The answer took very little time.

“No,” I said, before she translated.

Dot turned towards me.

“No. That is not her answer.”

I looked up.

“She does not know.”

The queen held one limb towards the dark beyond the chamber.

“Some voices stopped. Some were taken beyond reach. Stories came through other queens, sometimes long after the events they described. She cannot tell you which silences mean death.”

I thought of names on our own pages.

Brock.

Sigmund.

Others we had not stopped looking for because looking was difficult.

“Then we don’t write dead,” I said.

Dot passed it on.

The queen’s limb settled against the stone.

“No,” Dot said quietly. “We don’t.”

We stayed there longer than I expected.

I asked whether the queen believed my ability had come from the silver alone.

She did not know how the Sorn had changed us. She recognized something. Recognition was not a record of the work done to my body.

I asked whether she could teach me to do what the planetary queens had done.

Dot spent a long time with that answer.

“She can teach what she knows. She cannot offer memories she does not possess. Some of what she has shown you was learned in her brood through generations. Some is her own work. She does not claim the reach of a planetary queen.”

“Or promise I could have it.”

“Correct.”

The uncertainty should have disappointed me.

Instead, I found I could breathe more easily with it.

There was something to learn without a demand to become enormous by tomorrow.

Risa glanced towards the stream.

“Perhaps start with the water that’s actually here.”

The queen followed her movement.

For the first time since we’d arrived, Dot made a sound I recognized immediately.

She laughed.

“What?” I asked.

“She agrees with Risa.”

“Of course she does.”

We sent a message above before beginning anything.

Dot’s hand carried the short account to the entrance connection: a visible upper drain needed shaping, the lower obstruction was being supported by the brood, we would remain on the dry shelf, and we needed two shallow collecting pans and another lamp.

Nothing about Risa.

Nothing about planetary queens that could change matter.

Those were conversations to have when we were not standing beside rising water.

Risa checked the shelf behind us and chose a place where the lamps could be hung clear of our feet.

I sat on a flat stone to study the crossing.

The water entered through a crack I could not see beyond. That part belonged to the Teeming working on the other side.

In front of us, it crossed an open basin and ran towards the narrowing food passage. A higher groove led away towards a clear outflow the guide showed us from the shelf.

The groove was too shallow.

Making it deeper would take water away from the passage, but cutting straight into its base would weaken the ledge beside it.

A month ago I might have made the ledge thicker and hoped the extra material would solve everything.

Now I asked the queen to show me where her people were taking the weight.

She did.

Not with a picture of the whole mountain.

With a limb against one face of the stone, then another. With a carrier setting down its load while a worker changed position. With a patient refusal when I indicated a place that only looked sound from where I sat.

We moved the lamp.

A fine line appeared beneath the surface dust.

A fracture.

“Glad we asked,” Risa said.

“So am I.”

I left that stone alone.

The pans arrived with Ade.

He stopped at the boundary and waited for the guide to bring them across.

“Sera says Luna has found a roof,” he called.

My head lifted.

“People?”

“Someone moved under it. Too far down to count. They’re looking for a way along the shoulder.”

I started to stand.

Risa put a hand on my sleeve.

Not holding me down.

Just there.

“What would you do from here?” she asked.

I looked at the water.

Then at the ledge we had come to repair.

“Nothing.”

“Then let Luna do what she went to do.”

Ade waited.

“Tell Sera we heard,” I said. “And tell her this part should take less than an hour if the lower support holds.”

“Should?”

“That’s why I said it.”

He nodded and went back.

Risa crouched beside me, then decided the stone was more comfortable and sat instead.

“I wanted to go too,” she said.

“I know.”

“I didn’t want you to think I was being wise at you.”

“That would be irritating.”

“It looked irritating.”

I kissed the side of her head.

Then we went back to work.

I changed the upper groove in short sections.

A curved floor first. Then a raised inner edge to keep the water away from the damaged support. Each new part joined the sound stone beside it instead of pressing against the fractured face.

The queen watched.

Twice she stopped me through Dot.

The first time, a worker below needed to move.

The second, I had made a clean angle where a curve would carry the load with less material.

I changed it.

The difference was small to look at.

It was not small inside my head.

The strain settled instead of spreading. I could keep track of the finished section without holding every part of it in my attention as if it might otherwise cease to exist.

“Better,” I said.

Risa watched my face.

“Actually better?”

“Yes.”

The next section went more easily.

I did not make it larger because it had.

By the time the water began moving into the new channel, I had shaped more stone than I would once have attempted in that space. My eyes ached lightly. My hands were steady.

The queen had not poured strength into me.

She had shown me where I was wasting mine.

That felt like something I might be able to keep.

The lower blockage moved with a grinding sound.

I stopped immediately.

Across the chamber, the workers changed their stance. One backed out and another took its place.

Dot raised a hand.

“Wait.”

We waited.

Water rose in the basin, darkening the edge beneath our shelf.

Risa moved the spare lamp farther back.

There was no panic in the motion. Just a thing that needed doing before it became difficult.

The queen signalled.

Three workers pulled together.

A clot of stones and pale mud slid into the lower hollow. Water followed it, then broke towards the groove I’d opened.

For a few seconds, both routes ran full.

I could see a place where the current was striking the new outer edge too hard.

“May I change that?” I asked.

Dot relayed it.

The workers cleared the far side.

The queen answered.

I lowered a short section, gave the current a gentler turn, and left the rest alone.

The water settled into its new path.

Behind the braced opening, the floor of the food passage began to emerge.

No cheer went up.

A carrier stepped forward, tested the exposed stone, and waited.

Another crossed after it.

Work resumed.

I sat back with my stick across my knees and found that I was smiling.

Risa saw.

“What?”

“Nothing dramatic.”

“Good. I like those.”

We did not leave until the flow had stayed steady long enough for the queen’s workers to trust it.

Before we went, Risa asked Dot to tell her something.

“I’d like to tell the others myself. About the baby. Soon. Not while everyone is worried about a roof down the hill.”

The queen acknowledged it.

“And they should hear what you said about them.”

Dot looked towards me.

“All of it?”

“The brood part,” I said. “The rest when we can explain it properly.”

The queen lifted her forelimb towards Risa once more.

This time Risa held out her hand.

They paused with a little space between them.

Then the queen touched one narrow part of her limb to Risa’s palm.

Gently enough that her hand did not move.

I had seen Risa hold lightning.

I had seen that limb press against stone under a load I couldn’t have carried.

Neither of them used that strength now.

Above, Sera met us with dry cloths and news.

“Three people,” she said. “All alive. They’re still bringing them up.”

I stopped beneath the roof.

“How?”

“Along the shoulder. One of the neighbouring brood showed Corr a crossing they couldn’t see from our side. Luna made footing over the wet section. Liam and Corr have the rope.”

“Any injuries?” Risa asked.

“One cut arm. Everyone cold. That’s what we know.”

Sera looked at my face.

“And you?”

“Tired. Not empty.”

She handed me the cloth.

“Sit down and prove it.”

I did.

They came home before the next change of watch.

I watched from the dry edge of the common shelter while Luna helped the first woman up the last step.

The woman wore a coat tied shut with cord. Behind her came a man with a bandage around his forearm, followed by another woman who kept looking back down the path.

Liam carried a bundle of wet belongings.

Corr had the rope over one shoulder.

There was mud nearly to Luna’s waist.

She found me watching and raised one finger.

Wait.

I waited while she put her people into Toby’s hands.

Only then did she come over.

“Three,” she said.

“I heard.”

“There’s a lot you don’t hear when you’re under a hill.”

“I have news too.”

She looked from me to Risa, then to Sera.

“Good news?”

“I think so.”

Luna leaned down and pressed her forehead against mine.

“Then save it until I stop dripping.”

The new arrivals were Tali Brenner, Cass Renn, and Edan Pike.

Adults. Second wave.

Tali had been the person called for on the radio. She had gone to tie down the far edge of their roof and been cut off when water took the strip of ground between them.

Luna told us that part later, over food.

“They could see one another,” she said. “That was making it worse. Edan kept trying to climb down.”

“I would have,” I said.

“Yes. Corr said that too.”

The neighbouring guide had shown them a narrow ridge behind the roof. Once they reached it, they could bring all three out along the same line.

No tunnel. No long carry.

A rope, a better route, and people arriving before the roof finally went.

Edan’s arm needed cleaning and dressing. All three needed warmth and sleep.

Beds were more complicated now.

Sera and Old Son had cleared a dry section of the common shelter while we were below. Screens gave the newcomers some privacy. Extra coverings came from the raised store, still dry because several people had spent the previous week arguing about shelves.

I watched Tali lie down.

She put one hand beyond the edge of her bedding until Cass took it.

Then she closed her eyes.

We told Sera and Luna in our room first.

About the queen recognizing Risa.

About the word Dot had asked her to say twice.

About the old queens and what they could change.

Sera sat beside Risa on the bed.

“Was it frightening?”

“A little,” Risa said. “Then it wasn’t.”

Luna looked at me.

“And you?”

“I don’t know what to do with some of it.”

“You don’t have to do anything tonight.”

That should have been obvious.

It hadn’t been.

Risa took a breath.

“I want to tell people.”

We all looked at her.

“About us having a baby. I know it’s early. I know there are things we don’t know. I don’t want to spend every meal wondering whether someone will notice me looking ill.”

Sera put an arm around her.

“We’ll be beside you.”

Risa looked at me.

“Yes,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“After supper. Before Holt decides you’re hiding a structural problem.”

“He’ll ask whether we’ve drawn it.”

Luna laughed.

Sera reached for my hand.

For a moment, the four of us sat close together while the rain pressed against the window covering.

Then we went to supper.

Risa told them herself.

She stood beside the table with one hand on the back of my chair and said she had something good to tell them.

That quieted the shelter faster than shouting would have.

“I’m pregnant,” she said. “It’s early. Toby’s looking after me. We’re happy.”

There was a pause.

Then Priya put down the ladle.

“Oh,” she said, and came around the table.

After that, there were too many voices for a little while.

Gentle congratulations. Questions Risa answered and questions she said we couldn’t answer yet. Liam hugged his sister first for reasons neither of them explained, then hugged Risa with enough care that she told him she wasn’t made of thin glass.

Holt caught my eye across the table.

He nodded once.

I had to look down at my bowl.

When I looked up again, he was arguing that someone should find Risa a chair before everyone congratulated her into exhaustion.

She sat in mine.

I found another.

Dot waited until the shelter had settled.

Then she told Scarecrow what the queen had said.

Not every exchange. Not the things we were still trying to understand about my ability.

“She considers the people who live here part of her brood,” Dot said. “She knows you are another species. She means that your safety and your home matter to her as the safety and home of her own people do.”

Brin sat near the new screens with her lamp beside her bowl.

“Even us?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What does she want for that?”

It was a fair question.

Dot answered without haste.

“The same care you have already begun giving. Warning when there is danger. Respect for the places where her young live. Help where you can offer it. You may still refuse a request.”

Brin looked at me.

“And you believe her?”

I thought of the worker testing the wet passage before another carrier crossed.

Of a limb resting against Risa’s palm.

“She sent people to help bring you home,” I said. “Today we helped keep her food passage open. I believe what we’ve done together.”

Brin touched the handle of her lamp.

After a moment, she nodded.

Holt leaned forward.

“Then tell her the roof held,” he said to Dot. “And tell her we’ve got three more under it.”

Later, Risa and I stood just inside our doorway.

Luna was washing the last mud from her hands. Sera had put the house drawing on the table, held flat beneath four cups.

Nothing had been added to it yet.

There was still room on the page.

“Sixty-four,” Risa said.

“Sixty-two humans. Dot and Old Son.”

She looked down at herself.

“Eventually we’ll have to change it again.”

I put my arm around her.

“Eventually.”

Below us, beyond stone and rain and the routes we were only beginning to learn, the queen’s people were carrying food through a dry passage.

Somewhere farther away, there might still be a voice large enough to cross a world.

We didn’t know.

I could leave that unanswered tonight.

Risa leaned against me, and Sera called us in before the room lost its warmth.

I followed her inside.

Day 545. Her brood.

Three more home. Tali Brenner, Cass Renn, Edan Pike. Second wave. Neighbouring guide helped Luna, Liam, and Corr reach them along a ridge. Edan’s arm treated. All resting.

Sixty-four people at Scarecrow. Sixty-two humans, Dot, Old Son.

Nursery food passage draining again. Upper channel shaped from visible sound stone. Brood held the lower obstruction. Queen corrected the load path. More work done with less strain. Leg tired, no new injury.

The queen knew Risa was pregnant. Recognized a change in her familiar pattern. Risa chose to tell the camp tonight. We are happy. Still learning how to say that without immediately listing everything we fear.

The queen calls us part of her brood. All of us. She recognizes me and Risa especially clearly through the amount of silver in us. Belonging does not mean obedience.

She thinks of me as the nearest to Teeming among the other species she knows. Says planetary queens could change substances as well as shapes. She does not know how our modifications were made, or what I might learn to do.

She does not know whether any planetary queens remain alive.

Unknown stays unknown. We have enough names written beneath that word to understand why it matters.

Holt asked us to tell her the roof held.

Dot did.