Scarecrow

Sigmund found me beneath the water reserve with my arm inside a pipe.

It was not where I would have chosen to receive visitors.

I had been making the inner surface easier to clean when someone above us opened the wrong valve. A narrow stream ran down my sleeve before I stopped it.

Sigmund watched from the doorway.

“You could have done that without putting your hand in there.”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you?”

“I wanted to check where someone else would have to reach.”

He considered that while I withdrew my arm.

Water dripped from my elbow.

“Could be easier.”

“That was my conclusion.”

I widened the inspection opening and moved the valve where a person could reach it without climbing over the outlet.

Sigmund handed me the cloth hanging beside the door.

I dried my arm.

He stayed where he was.

“What do you need?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

I waited.

“That isn’t true,” he said.

I waited a little longer.

He looked past me at the water moving through the clear inspection section.

“I wanted to thank you.”

It seemed to cost him more effort than moving anything in the room would have.

I put down the cloth.

“For what?”

His expression sharpened.

“Don’t make me list it.”

“All right.”

Then, because he had apparently decided to make the morning difficult for himself, he listed it anyway.

“Risa,” he said first.

I glanced towards the doorway, although I knew she was nowhere nearby.

Sigmund noticed.

“I’m not thanking you on her behalf. She can do that herself.”

“I know.”

“I’m thanking you because I spent months wondering whether my sister was alive, and when I found her, she’d built a life I hadn’t even known how to imagine.”

He rubbed a hand over his face.

“Then you fixed whatever they left wrong in her. And Sera. Liam. Toby. All of them.”

He looked at the silver markings below my rolled sleeve.

“And you brought the rest of us here.”

I thought of the eastern ridge, the people crowded into too little shelter, the relief in Risa’s face when she learned her brother had been found.

“You helped keep them alive before we arrived.”

“That doesn’t make what you did smaller.”

“No.”

He nodded once, satisfied that I had finally stopped trying to move the conversation away from him.

“Good. Then take the thanks.”

I looked at him.

“All right. You’re welcome.”

For a moment neither of us seemed certain what happened next.

Then a bucket clattered in the room above us and someone asked whether the water was supposed to have stopped.

I opened the correct valve.

Sigmund laughed under his breath.

The awkward part became a little less awkward.

He walked with me towards the medical building.

I expected another question about Risa’s new abilities.

Instead he asked what I had done to Toren’s arm.

“Rebuilt what was missing.”

“I gathered that much.”

“Bones first, with the supporting structures prepared around them. Then the connections that let everything work together.”

“How did you know where they went?”

“I could see where the old ones ended. I understand the structure better now.”

He frowned.

“And before?”

“Books. Practice. Asking people who knew more than I did. Being frightened enough to check everything twice.”

Sigmund was quiet until we reached the steps.

“I want to learn.”

“About arms?”

“About bodies.”

I stopped.

He looked annoyed with himself for having to explain.

“I can feel the current in someone. I know when a heartbeat changes. Sometimes I know something is wrong before anyone else does.”

He looked through the open medical doorway.

“I don’t always know what it means.”

There had been people on the eastern ridge he could not help. He did not name them. I could hear them in the space after he stopped speaking.

“Will you teach me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He looked back quickly.

“I thought you’d want time to think about it.”

“I’ve had quite a lot of time to think about people needing help.”

He looked down at his hands.

Then he nodded.

Toby found us at a table with a drawing of a heart between us.

Sigmund had already corrected my first attempt.

“That’s not how it feels.”

“It isn’t meant to show how it feels. It’s meant to show the chambers.”

“Then why does that one look like a boot?”

“Because I’m drawing it.”

Toby leaned over the page.

“It does look like a boot.”

I put the pencil down.

“Both of you can leave.”

Instead Toby fetched one of the reference books we kept in the medical room and opened it to a much better diagram.

Sigmund studied it.

I showed him how the chambers worked together, how valves kept the movement in the right direction, and how the electrical signal set the rhythm without being the same thing as the muscle’s strength.

That last distinction held him.

“So a regular beat doesn’t mean everything else is all right.”

“No.”

He glanced at Toby.

Toby understood the question before he asked it.

“Mine stopped,” he said. “Lucas kept it moving until we could get me through it.”

Sigmund looked back at the book.

For a while he asked no more questions.

Then he pointed to the place where the signal began.

“Start there again.”

I did.

Risa came in halfway through the lesson.

She stopped in the doorway when she saw her brother bent over the book beside me.

I looked up.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Sigmund gave her a suspicious look.

She came closer and read the labels on his page.

“You’ve spelt that wrong.”

“I haven’t finished.”

“You’ve finished the word.”

He pulled the page away.

Risa kissed my cheek, then put the lunch she had brought on the clear end of the table.

“I approve,” she said.

“Of lunch?” Sigmund asked.

“Of both of you keeping your minds occupied.”

She stayed long enough to answer a question about the differences she had felt since her silver was completed.

Sigmund listened without interrupting.

She described the separation first. The way a distant charge in the atmosphere no longer confused itself with the small currents close to her. The way she could choose what to attend to.

He watched her hands while she spoke.

Then he looked at mine.

I knew the question he had not asked.

So did Risa.

She waited until he met her eyes.

“You can ask him,” she said.

Sigmund looked at the book again.

“I’m trying to learn this first.”

“Those aren’t opposing choices.”

He did not answer.

Risa left the food within reach and went to find Sera.

I made the offer before he went back to the watch.

“If you want me to examine your silver, I will.”

Sigmund stood very still.

“Like hers?”

“Like all of theirs. We can see what’s unfinished, talk about what completing it would mean, and you can decide.”

“You didn’t ask me before.”

I thought about that.

“No. I should have made it clear the offer wasn’t limited to the people in that first room.”

He looked surprised by the answer.

“I was going to wait until you asked,” I added. “That wasn’t fair if you thought you weren’t allowed to.”

He rubbed his thumb against the edge of the table.

“I didn’t want it to look like I was jealous of Risa.”

“Are you?”

He gave me an irritated glance.

“A little.”

I smiled.

“So was Liam when Sera made the first firestorm.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“It wasn’t meant to.”

He laughed once despite himself.

Then he looked down at the drawing of the heart.

“I want to stop feeling as though the useful part of me comes with a door someone else locked.”

I understood that better than he knew.

“Then let’s look at the door.”

We examined him that afternoon, with his permission.

Risa stayed because he asked her to. Toby joined us. Dot recorded the observations Sigmund wanted kept, and our queen listened while the planetary queen helped compare the structure with what we had learned from the others.

His silver resembled Risa’s without matching it exactly.

The same broad ability. Different paths, different habits built through years of using it.

There were narrow places where his body had been carrying strain. There were branches that had never been allowed to finish.

I explained each one.

Sigmund asked practical questions, then asked them again in different words when he wanted to be certain he had understood.

Risa did not hurry him.

When we finished, he wanted to walk outside.

I went with him to the covered path near the new neighbouring brood’s home.

Two young Teeming were investigating a wooden ball while Nessa watched under the attention of an adult from each group.

The ball rolled farther than one of the young expected. It hurried after it, stopped at the marked boundary, and waited for Nessa to return it.

Sigmund watched.

“My father would have opinions about all of this.”

“So would mine.”

He glanced at me.

“Would yours listen first?”

I thought about Father, the things he had taught me, and the things I still did not know about his years before us.

“I’d like to think so.”

Sigmund nodded.

“That sounds nice.”

There was enough in those three words that I did not answer immediately.

At last he said, “Tomorrow. I’d like you to do it tomorrow.”

“All right.”

He kept watching the ball.

“And I’d like another lesson afterwards.”

“That can be arranged.”

At home, Risa knew he had decided before I told her.

“He came to see you?” I asked.

She nodded from her place beside the window.

“He wanted to know whether I still felt like me.”

“What did you say?”

“That I was still annoyed with him for correcting how I packed my books when we were children.”

“That convinced him?”

“More than a speech would have.”

Sera sat on the floor with a strip of cloth across her knees. She was repairing a fastening on Luna’s coat, although she had complained that a person who could control water should be able to avoid losing buttons in it.

Luna had said that made no sense.

Sera had agreed and kept sewing.

“He thanked me,” I said.

All three looked up.

“Sigmund?” Luna asked.

“Yes.”

Sera made a thoughtful sound.

“Did it hurt?”

“Visibly.”

Risa laughed, then shook her head.

“He means it.”

“I know.”

She studied me for a moment.

Then she reached for my hand.

“Good.”

I sat beside her while Sera finished the button and Luna spread a route drawing across the table.

No one needed the room to become silent because we were talking about something that mattered.

I liked that about our home.

Sigmund arrived on time the next morning.

He had eaten. Toby had insisted on that much. Risa came with him carrying a notebook he had apparently tried to leave behind.

“You wanted another lesson,” she told him.

“Afterwards.”

“This is how we prepare for afterwards.”

He took the book and set it down carefully.

Before we began, I asked him to tell me what he understood would happen.

Not because I needed him to repeat my words.

I wanted to know which parts he had made his own.

He described the incomplete paths, the changes to his body, and the distinction between having more power and knowing how to use it well.

Then he asked whether the silver would ever belong to someone else because I had helped him complete it.

“No.”

“Not to the queen?”

“No.”

He nodded.

“Then yes.”

I began.

The silver opened along the paths we had examined. His existing ability did not disappear while something new took its place. It gained the room it should have had from the beginning.

I restored the strained tissues around it and let the branches settle into a structure his body could support without pain.

Sigmund watched my hands until the atmosphere beyond the window caught his attention.

He went very quiet.

Risa leaned forward.

“You feel it?”

“Yes.”

“What does it feel like to you?”

He took time to answer.

“Like standing beside a river I thought was a ditch.”

She smiled.

I finished the last connection.

Silver formed a clear ring around his eyes, and fine branching marks settled along his wrists and beneath his sleeves. His hair remained unchanged.

He flexed his hands.

There was no spark.

No sudden discharge into the room.

He had chosen to remain still, and the power had allowed it.

That seemed to matter more to him than any demonstration could have.

We went beyond the walls to practise.

Risa led him through the first exercises while I watched the completed silver at work.

She asked him to distinguish the charge above the ridge from the little differences between objects close to us. To notice a possibility without immediately making it happen.

He listened.

That alone would have surprised the boy I had first met at training.

A pale arc formed between two prepared conductors well clear of us.

Sigmund held it steady, widened it, then let it stop.

He looked at Risa.

She pointed towards the empty ground farther out.

“Again.”

This time the discharge crossed a greater distance and forked around the path he had selected.

He ended it cleanly.

“No headache,” he said.

“No.”

“No pressure.”

“No.”

He looked at his hands as though he expected some other cost to announce itself.

I waited beside him.

Eventually he lifted his gaze to the sky.

“I could gather it there.”

Risa followed the direction he indicated.

“Yes.”

“And make the air move with it.”

“Yes.”

He did not call a storm immediately.

Instead he asked her how she had learned to release one without leaving the charge waiting to strike somewhere else.

She showed him.

They worked together over the bare practice ground, drawing a small dark cloud into shape, feeling the movement within it, and letting it come apart again before it became rain.

When they finished, Risa was grinning.

“So?” she asked.

He looked at the clear sky.

“So I should have asked sooner.”

His next lesson began with Toby’s pulse.

Toby sat on a stool and volunteered one wrist. Sigmund had to count the beat with his fingers before he compared it with what he could feel through his ability.

He looked mildly offended by the requirement.

I ignored that.

“Now tell me what you know.”

“The rhythm’s regular.”

“What else?”

He described the electrical pattern with impressive precision.

I waited until he finished.

“Is he thirsty?”

Sigmund looked at me.

“What?”

“Is he thirsty?”

“How would I—”

He stopped.

Then he looked at Toby.

“Are you thirsty?”

“A bit.”

I handed Toby water.

Sigmund sighed.

“You’re going to make a lesson out of everything.”

“Only the parts I want you to remember.”

Toby drank and offered his wrist again.

We talked about symptoms, questions, observation, and the danger of deciding a person was merely the interesting thing your ability could detect.

Sigmund wrote more that morning than he had during the first lesson.

When an older woman came in because her ankle had swollen after a long walk, he asked permission to sit with us.

She agreed.

He listened while she explained where it hurt.

Then he asked what she had been doing before the walk.

She had spent most of the morning standing on a stool, reaching shelves she could not easily use.

We treated the ankle.

Then we moved the shelves.

Sigmund helped carry the boxes.

Before the woman left, he asked whether she would mind returning the next day so he could see how the swelling changed.

She agreed, then asked if he would be the one checking it.

“With Toby,” he said.

She seemed satisfied.

Afterwards, he stood looking at the empty chair.

“What?” I asked.

“She trusted me.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t actually fix anything.”

“You listened. You helped her stop doing the thing that hurt. You told her what you knew and what you didn’t.”

He turned towards me.

“That counts?”

“Quite a lot.”

He looked back at the chair, then reached for his notebook.

This time he wrote down her question before adding any of the things he had felt through his ability.

That afternoon he brought me a different question.

He had been speaking to Keir about the ordinary power systems serving the workshops. There were places where a steady electrical supply would help, provided it could be stored and controlled by people who did not happen to be Friese siblings.

“I don’t want somebody’s lights going out every time I leave the square,” he said.

“Neither do I.”

We worked with Aster and Vell on a separate charging point and storage unit, built from materials I could now make easily and controls they could inspect and maintain.

Sigmund supplied the charge in measured steps while Risa watched how he held it.

Aster refused the first arrangement because an essential reading would be hidden once the cover was closed.

Vell suggested moving it beside the ordinary shutoff.

We changed the housing.

When we finished, the unit could power a set of workshop tools without anyone standing beside it. It could be isolated, repaired, and checked by the people using it.

Sigmund watched Gareth test the first tool.

A blade moved smoothly through a scrap of wood.

Gareth held up the cut edge, considered it, and nodded.

“Useful.”

Sigmund looked absurdly pleased.

Risa caught my eye.

I managed not to smile until her brother turned away.

Luna’s reply arrived the following morning.

The pilot brought a sealed personal packet as well as the ordinary station correspondence. He gave it to her directly before unloading the medical supplies.

There was no audience waiting for the moment.

Luna was carrying a stack of clean cloths towards the medical building. She tucked them beneath one arm, accepted the packet, and looked at the name on the outside.

I saw her stop.

Then she looked across the landing ground at me.

I went to her.

“From him?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want somewhere quiet?”

She nodded.

Sera took the cloths from her without asking a question. Risa came with us to the house.

We sat at the table while Luna opened the packet.

For a while there was only the sound of paper.

Her father had received the evidence.

He said that plainly in the first lines, without telling her what to feel about it.

He had read her account of the human holding rooms, the kits, the nursery hostages, and the planetary queen. He had also received the station’s description of unauthorised action and interference with controlled facilities.

The two accounts did not agree.

He was coming to see Scarecrow himself.

Luna read that sentence aloud.

Then she read it again silently.

The date was not yet fixed. His office would send the approach details through the established station channel. He asked that the original records remain available and that the rescued people who wished to speak with him be allowed to do so.

There was no demand to put the queen back in restraints.

There was also no admission that he had known what the restraints were doing.

Luna laid the page down.

“That doesn’t answer it.”

“No,” Sera said.

“He knows how to write something that sounds clear without telling you the part you asked.”

Risa sat beside her.

“What else?”

Luna looked at the final lines.

Those were different.

He was glad she was alive. He had reread the list of people she had brought out. He remembered teaching her to count everyone before leaving a place, and he was relieved to see she had remembered.

Luna stared at the paper.

“He used to make me count people getting off boats,” she said. “Even if there were only four of us.”

Her mouth moved as though she might smile.

It did not quite happen.

“I want that to mean what it sounds like.”

I put my hand beside hers on the table.

“So do I.”

She took it.

We did not try to make the letter into an answer it had not given.

Holt read it after Luna said he could.

He was quiet for a long time.

Then he put it back in its envelope and asked whether she wanted us present when her father came.

“Yes.”

“Then we will be.”

“What if he asks to speak to me alone?”

“You can decide then.”

She looked at him.

He leaned back in his chair.

“He’s your father. That doesn’t make the room his before he arrives.”

Luna let out a breath.

I had watched her face officers, guards, and angry survivors without showing much of what it cost her.

This was harder.

Holt seemed to know that without needing it explained.

He asked her which records she wanted on the table first.

Not as a way to avoid the feeling.

As a way to give her something she could do with her hands while she carried it.

By the time we finished, there was a clear list.

The original transfer records. The copied controls. The voluntary statements. The rescued people’s names.

And space for questions nobody had answered yet.

We told both queens about the planned visit.

Our queen asked whether the human father would expect her to hide.

“No,” Luna said immediately.

Dot translated.

Luna stepped closer to the meeting ledge.

“He will be a guest here. So will the people with him.”

The neighbouring mother asked whether he had helped take her young.

Luna’s face tightened.

“We don’t know.”

It was the hardest honest answer in the room.

The mother considered it.

Then she asked whether she would be permitted to speak about what had happened to her.

“Yes,” Luna said.

The planetary queen, listening from the mountain, offered to make her own account available through the connections she chose. She did not want to leave her young merely to prove to a visiting human that she existed.

Nobody asked her to.

Dot would record what she wanted recorded. She could answer questions if she wished, and stop if she wished.

Luna wrote that down beside the other arrangements.

For a moment, I thought about the first time she had stood in front of us as a cadet, certain she knew who should be giving the orders.

She caught me looking at her.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Her eyes narrowed.

Then she returned to the page.

I decided she had enough to think about without me explaining how proud I was of her in front of everyone.

I would tell her at home.

Sigmund found her outside the receiving room later.

I was close enough to hear because I was fixing a loose board beneath the step. This time the position really was unavoidable.

“I heard he’s coming,” Sigmund said.

“Yes.”

“If you want someone there who knows what it’s like to disappoint an important father, I’m available.”

Luna looked at him.

I expected a sharp answer.

Instead she laughed, once and unexpectedly.

“That might be useful.”

“I have experience.”

She glanced at the silver marks along his wrists.

“He’d object?”

“Mine? Almost certainly. Then he’d ask whether it could be done more discreetly.”

Luna shook her head.

For a few moments they stood in a silence that seemed easier than the one before it.

Then she thanked him.

He nodded and went inside to collect the book he had left on the table.

I finished with the board.

Luna looked down at me.

“You heard all of that.”

“Yes.”

She considered it.

“Good.”

That evening, the first music at the meeting passage was mostly a lesson in where not to stand.

Toby had agreed to play. Both broods had gathered in their own comfortable spaces, with humans on the ledges and the young sheltered close to the adults.

The curved stone carried some notes much farther than he expected.

Dot pointed out a place where the sound gathered too sharply. Toby adjusted it, asked the queens whether the change was comfortable, and tried again.

The tune settled over us softly.

Liam sat with Anja near the upper entrance. Wren was beside Toby, helping him remember the part of a second melody he kept changing halfway through.

Sigmund arrived with Risa and sat a little apart until she pulled him closer with an impatient gesture.

Sera leaned against my side.

Luna rested her head on my shoulder after the first tune ended.

I told her what I had wanted to say earlier.

Quietly enough that it belonged only to her.

She did not answer at once.

Then her hand found mine.

The music began again.

For a while, her father’s letter remained folded in the house above us, and the only thing she had to listen to was a friend making something beautiful.

When we went home, Risa stopped at the bedroom door.

She was looking at Sigmund’s notebook, which he had left on our table after returning for supper. The page showed a neat drawing of the heart, several questions, and one line written more heavily than the others.

Ask the person.

She touched the edge of the page.

“He’ll be good at it.”

“I think so.”

“He’s always noticed more than he admitted.”

Sera came beside us.

“Then he’s in the right place to learn what to do with it.”

Luna folded the notebook shut and set it where he would find it in the morning.

We went to bed with the window open to the night air.

There were things coming that none of us could settle in advance.

A father. Questions. Answers we might not like.

But there was also a lesson planned for the morning, a neighbour’s young sleeping safely beneath the ridge, and warm space beside the people I loved.

I had learned to count those things too.

Day 593–595. Sigmund thanks me.

Sigmund asked to learn biology and practical care. Began with heart structure, rhythm, observation, and asking patients what they feel. Continuing lessons with Toby and Risa helping. He assisted with a swollen-ankle assessment and the shelf changes that prevented more strain.

Offered examination and completion of his silver. He chose both after discussion. Completion successful on Day 594. Electrical ability expanded; atmospheric charge and storm formation now accessible. Silver eye rings and individual branching marks, hair unchanged. No power-related pain or exhaustion during controlled practice. Risa teaching regulation and release. Workshop storage unit commissioned with Aster and Vell; ordinary controls and independent use retained.

Personal reply from General Windsor received. He confirms receipt of Luna’s evidence and intends to visit Scarecrow. Arrival details pending. No resolution of his knowledge or responsibility for the facilities. Luna chose support during the visit. Records and voluntary testimony being prepared, including accounts offered by the queens.

First shared music evening at the meeting passage. Sound adjusted for both broods. Toby played; everyone listened in their own way.

Human and kit roster unchanged: one hundred and seventy-seven. Neighbouring brood remains independent.

Sigmund’s first medical rule is written in his own hand.

Ask the person.