Scarecrow

Chapter 213: The Records

The little room had four walls, a window, a curtain, a bird on a shelf, and nothing else.

By breakfast on Day 599 it had Sera, Luna, Gareth, Toren and a great deal of opinion.

”The cradle goes under the window,” Sera said.

”Not under the window,” Luna said. ”Draughts.”

”I’ll stop the draughts.”

”You won’t always be here.”

”Then the window will have a better latch.”

Gareth looked at Toren. Toren looked at the window. They had both been standing in the doorway for a quarter of an hour with a roll of measurements and a pencil, and neither of them had been allowed to measure anything.

I was sitting on the floor in the corner, because there was nowhere else to be, with my back against the wall and a cup of tea going cold in my hands.

Risa was in the bedroom eating.

She had eaten two bowls of porridge, an orange from the General’s crate, and most of a loaf. When I’d gone in to see if she wanted anything else she’d looked up at me with her mouth full and pointed at the empty plate without a trace of shame.

I’d looked at the baby again before breakfast, with permission.

Overnight, the small body had grown. Not by much. A few days’ growth, by the book. The book had stopped being useful about a week ago, but I kept reading it anyway, the way you keep checking a map of a country that’s changed its borders.

The silver was still building.

It had slowed a little while Risa slept, as if it knew she needed rest. When she woke, it had picked up again. I’d watched it lengthen a thighbone and lay down the first fine hairs along an eyebrow and settle a small cluster of cells into the beginning of a fingernail, all within the time it took Risa to say good morning to Sera.

I’d topped up her iron again.

The baby had noticed, the same bright small noticing. Then it had gone back to work.

”A cradle,” Gareth said into a brief silence, ”is not a large object.”

Sera and Luna both turned to look at him.

”I’m only saying. Whichever wall you choose, it’ll fit.”

”It’s not about whether it fits,” Luna said.

”No,” Gareth agreed, after a moment. ”I suppose it isn’t.”

Toren cleared his throat.

He was holding a hinge.

Not the first one, the one he’d carried out of the mountain in a leather roll and finished at a bench in the workshop. That one was on the quiet-room door now, and he’d made a second to match it. This was a third. Smaller. Bright from the file, with the tool marks still on one face where he’d chosen to leave them.

”I made this last night,” he said. ”I thought. If you wanted a cradle that rocks. It needs a pin that doesn’t squeak.”

He held it out.

Not to Sera or Luna. To me, sitting on the floor.

I took it. It moved smoothly. Not perfectly. Well.

”It doesn’t squeak,” I said.

”No.”

”Thank you.”

Toren nodded and looked at the floor, and I saw his restored hand close and open at his side. He did that sometimes, when he wasn’t sure what to do with being thanked.

”I’m speaking to the General this morning,” he said. ”First, Adela said. I asked to go first.”

Sera’s face changed.

”Do you want someone with you?” she asked.

Toren thought about it.

”Toby said he’d sit by the door,” he said. ”That’s enough.”

He looked at the hinge in my hand.

”I wanted to give you that first,” he said. ”Before. So I’d have done something else this morning besides that.”

Then he went.

Gareth watched him go. Then he looked at the window, and at the wall opposite, and at Sera and Luna.

”Under the window,” he said firmly, ”with a draught screen I’ll make myself. Done.”

He went out before either of them could argue.

Luna stared after him.

”Can he do that?”

”He just did,” Sera said, and laughed.

The receiving room had been rearranged overnight.

Adela’s doing, and Holt’s. The long table where the General had read for six hours had been pushed against the wall, its stacks of face-down pages squared and tied with string. In its place were three chairs in a loose triangle. One for whoever was speaking. One for the General. One for anyone the speaker wanted beside them.

Adela sat to one side with her case and her recorder.

The door stood open.

There was a bench just outside it. Toby was sitting there when I arrived, his medical bag at his feet, his hands loose on his knees. He nodded at me.

”He asked for the window side,” he said quietly. ”So he could see out.”

Through the door I could see Toren in the speaker’s chair. His back was very straight. The General sat opposite him, not leaning forward, not leaning back. A sheet of his own paper on his knee and a pencil in his hand.

The third chair was empty.

Toren had chosen that.

I didn’t go in. Nobody did. It wasn’t ours to go into.

I sat on the other end of Toby’s bench and listened, because the door was open and Toren had said he didn’t mind who heard, as long as nobody interrupted.

”Your name,” the General said.

”Toren Hale. I was a hinge maker in the second wave. Then a work-group lead at the mountain.”

”How long at the mountain?”

”Eleven months, I think. They didn’t give us calendars.” A pause. ”I counted by the shift changes. It might be eleven and a half.”

The General wrote that down. Both numbers.

”Tell me how you came to be there.”

Toren told him.

He told it plainly. The second-wave base where he’d landed. The collection notice, the same kind Maeve had kept in her book. Report for collection. Bring essential personal equipment. Further allocation to follow. The shuttle. The receiving facility, not the one at the lake, an earlier one, farther south. The holding room there. Then the mountain.

”Did anyone explain what the mountain was?”

”They said it was a processing site. They said our skills would be allocated.”

”Allocated to what?”

”Work groups.” Toren’s voice stayed level. ”Maintenance. Loading. Some of us cleaned the lower housings.”

”The housings around the” The General stopped. I watched him choose the word. ”Around the queen.”

”Yes.”

”Did you know what they were?”

”Not at first.” Toren was quiet for a moment. ”We knew there was something alive down there. You could feel it through the floor when the machines ran. Like a hum that hurt your teeth. Some of the others said it was a reactor. I didn’t think reactors flinched.”

The General’s pencil stopped.

Then it moved again.

”Your arm,” he said.

Toren’s restored hand was resting on his knee. He looked down at it, then up.

”I lost it in the lower housings. A clamp closed while I was cleaning under it. They took me to the medical room, stopped the bleeding, closed the stump, and sent me back to my group the next week. Said a work-group lead could direct with one arm as well as two.”

”Was there a report?”

”I don’t know. Nobody showed me one.”

”Was the clamp malfunctioning?”

Toren looked at him for a long moment.

”I don’t know that either,” he said. ”I know it had closed on someone else’s hand the month before. I asked them to fix it. I was told it was within tolerance.”

The General wrote.

Then he looked up again.

”Who grew it back?”

”Lucas did.” Toren’s chin lifted slightly. ”Here. In the medical building. With Toby beside me. He asked me three times if I wanted it.”

”Three times.”

”Once when he first looked. Once the morning of. Once just before he started.” Toren paused. ”Nobody at the mountain ever asked me anything three times. Not even my name.”

The General didn’t write that down.

He sat with it instead.

Then he said, ”I’d like to ask about the room. The holding section. Where you slept.”

”That’s what I came to tell you about,” Toren said. ”Not the arm. The arm’s fixed. Ask me about the room.”

So the General asked about the room.

And Toren told him about the board outside the door. The sliding markers beside every name. Inside. At work. Under examination. He told him about the count before every supply shift, and how the numbers were always right even when the names were wrong. He told him about the man in his group who had stopped eating and been marked reassigned, and nobody had ever found out where. About the game scratched into the little table, which they’d played with pebbles. About the woman who paced, wall to wall, and how they’d all learned to step aside for her without thinking.

About the morning the door opened and a girl with white-blonde hair stood in it and said, No work group.

”That was Luna,” the General said.

”Yes.”

”What did you think?”

Toren thought.

”I thought it was a new kind of trick,” he said. ”I’d seen a lot of the old kinds.”

”And now?”

Toren looked out of the window.

Out there, in the square, two of the mountain children were taking turns on Nessa’s wooden hoop. Beyond them, at the edge of the agreed path, one of the neighbouring brood’s young was watching them with its forelimbs tucked under.

Toren’s brother had died in a brood attack. He’d said so at the meeting, in front of everyone.

He watched the young one for a while.

”Now I make hinges,” he said.

The General nodded slowly.

He wrote one more line on his paper. Then he put the pencil down across it.

”I have one more question,” he said. ”You may refuse it.”

”Ask.”

”Did anyone at the mountain ever use my name? Mine specifically. To you, or near you.”

Toren took his time.

”Once,” he said. ”The man in the dark coat. The one who said Lucas was the material subject. Before that, months before, when one of the work-group leads asked about the clamp. He said the standing authority came from the very top of Avalon Command. He said your name like it settled the argument.”

The General’s face didn’t change.

His hand, resting on the paper beside the pencil, went very slightly white at the knuckles.

”Thank you,” he said.

Toren stood.

At the door, he stopped. He didn’t turn around. He spoke to the doorframe, and to Toby on the bench, and to me, and to the man in the chair behind him.

”Did you sign it?” he asked. ”The directive. The one with your name on top.”

There was a silence long enough for a cart to cross the square outside.

”I’m going to answer that question for my daughter first,” the General said. ”Tomorrow. I owe her that. After that, if you still want the answer from me, I’ll give it to you myself. Not through anyone else.”

Toren stood in the doorway a moment longer.

”All right,” he said.

He went out into the sun.

Toby picked up his bag and followed him, not too close.

Eren and Tavia came next, with Maeve.

They had asked to speak together, and for Maeve to sit in the third chair, and Adela had said yes before they’d finished asking.

I stayed on the bench. Sera came and sat beside me with two cups of tea, one of which she handed me with the air of a person who would not accept a refusal.

Through the door, I watched the General stand when the three of them came in.

He hadn’t stood for Toren. Toren had walked in and sat down before he had the chance.

Eren noticed. He looked uncertain for a moment, as if he didn’t know whether standing for them meant something good or something he ought to be afraid of. Then Tavia took his elbow and steered him to the chair.

They told him about the locked room above the old receiving place.

Four nights. The water container on the floor, running lower every day until they were taking turns wetting their mouths with a cloth. The internal handle that turned and turned and connected to nothing. The marks beside the door where Eren had tried to work the fitting loose with his belt buckle and only managed to break the buckle.

”Why were you left?” the General asked.

”They called us retained support labour,” Tavia said. ”They said the transfer would take everyone. Then the shuttle came and only the staff got on, and someone locked the door from outside.”

”Did you see who?”

”No. We heard it.”

”Did anyone say why?”

Eren looked at his hands.

”One of them said there wasn’t room,” he said. ”Then another one said that wasn’t the point. He said the lower systems needed someone to keep the food moving until the repair crew came.”

”Food for whom?”

Eren looked at Tavia.

”For her,” Tavia said. ”The queen. Under the ridge. We’d been carrying the feeding containers down for months. If nobody carried them, the young went hungry, and then the queen went quiet, and then the machines didn’t work properly.”

”So they left you to feed her.”

”They left us to keep her working,” Eren said. ”That’s not the same.”

The General’s pencil hovered.

”No,” he said. ”It isn’t.”

Tavia’s fingers were resting on her knee. Two of them had been crushed in a housing, months before. They were whole now, straight, the nails grown back clean. I’d fixed them on the steps outside the abandoned office, with Sera holding a cup of water to her lips because her hands had been shaking too badly to hold it.

The General looked at those fingers.

He didn’t ask about them.

I thought that was probably the right choice. She hadn’t offered.

Maeve, in the third chair, hadn’t spoken at all.

She had her little book on her lap, the one tied shut with string. Near the end, she untied it and turned it to the page where she’d written the date her friends were taken. Under the date, in fresh ink, she’d written a second line.

Found. Day 589. Both alive.

She held it out.

The General took the book carefully, read both lines, and handed it back.

”Thank you for keeping that,” he said.

”Somebody had to,” Maeve said.

Reed and Vell came after lunch.

Dot came with them, by their request, and stood beside the third chair rather than sitting in it. Dot didn’t really sit. She lowered herself on her legs and folded her arms, which was the closest she came.

Reed went first.

It had been clamped to a floor mount when we found it. Fixed there by the body, unable to move more than a quarter turn in any direction, doing calculations the mountain’s engineers wanted done and nothing else.

The General asked it to describe the mount.

Reed said, through Dot, that it would prefer not to.

The General said, ”Of course.”

Then Reed said it would show him something else instead.

It stood up from the floor and walked a small circle around its chair. Slowly at first. Then faster. Then it stopped, lifted one leg, set it down. Lifted another. Did that with each of its six, in order.

Then it sat again.

”That is what I would like you to know,” Reed said through Dot. ”Not the mount. That.”

The General watched it for a long time.

”I understand,” he said.

Dot turned one lamp toward him, the way she did when she was deciding whether a human had actually understood or was only saying so.

Then she turned it back.

Vell went second.

Vell had been tethered by a heavy cable to its workstation, its own power controls bypassed so that the mountain’s supply ran through it. It asked, before anything else, whether the questions about its power system could wait until after the questions about the tether.

Adela looked at the General.

The General said, ”Yes.”

He didn’t hesitate at all.

Vell’s lights changed slightly.

Then it told him about the tether.

I won’t write all of it here. Vell has asked that some of it stay in the recorded statement and not in anyone’s notebook. But I’ll write the end, because Vell said I could.

At the end, the General asked whether there was anything Vell wanted from him.

Vell considered the question.

”I would like the people who designed the tether,” it said, ”to be asked whether they knew I would rather not be tethered.”

”Asked,” the General repeated.

”Yes. Not punished. That is a different question. Asked first.”

The General wrote that down word for word.

Then he looked up at Dot.

”Is that a common view,” he asked, ”among your kind?”

Dot considered him.

”This unit does not know what is common,” she said. ”This unit was alone for some time. But it is a view this unit holds also.”

The General nodded slowly.

He didn’t look like a man who had expected to be taught anything that morning.

The unnamed kit declined.

It came to the doorway with Old Son, looked into the room at the three chairs and the man in uniform, and stepped back.

”I do not wish to give an account,” it said.

The General was already half out of his chair, the way you rise when someone comes in.

He sat down again.

”Thank you for coming to tell me,” he said.

The kit looked at him for a long moment.

Then it said, ”I may wish to later.”

”Then I’ll listen later.”

It turned and left with Old Son.

The General picked up his pencil. He wrote declined on his paper, and then, after a pause, may speak later. I could see the page from the bench. He didn’t underline anything. He didn’t add a note about it being a pity, or a gap in the evidence.

He just wrote down exactly what it had told him.

Beside me, Sera let out a breath I hadn’t noticed her holding.

”Huh,” she said.

”What?”

”Nothing.” She looked into her empty cup. ”I don’t know. I expected him to argue.”

So had I.

Sigmund found out about the baby properly at midday.

He’d waited a whole day. For Sigmund, that was heroic. He’d walked beside Risa to the landing ground and stood behind her chair and watched her eat three bowls of soup at supper and said nothing at all, because she’d told him later and he’d decided to believe her.

At midday he caught me outside the kitchen, put a hand on my arm, and said, very quietly, ”Now?”

So I took him to the house.

Risa was on the window seat with her feet up, a book open on her knees and her other hand resting on her stomach. She looked up as we came in, saw her brother’s face, and sighed.

”Sit down, Siggy.”

He sat.

She told him herself. I’d offered, on the way over, and he’d said he’d rather hear it from her, and she’d clearly expected him to say exactly that.

She told it better than I would have. Shorter. The trousers. The hunger. The workshop with all the lamps on. Toby’s reader. Twenty-one weeks by size. The queen’s chamber, and the young of the great queens, and the two months.

She left out the last thing.

Sigmund noticed.

”What else?” he said.

Risa looked at me.

”The queen thinks the baby might be stronger than Lucas,” I said.

Sigmund stared at me.

Then at his sister.

Then at her stomach.

”Stronger,” he said. ”Than you.”

”Maybe.”

”You turned a mountain inside out.”

”I didn’t. I opened a passage.”

”You carried a queen across half a continent on a platform.”

”That was mostly balance.”

Sigmund stood up, walked to the window, walked back, and sat down again.

He looked, for a moment, the way he had in the gym years ago when someone had hit him harder than he’d expected. Not angry. Just rearranging the world in his head to fit a new fact.

Then he did something I hadn’t seen him do before.

He held out his hand, palm up, toward Risa’s stomach. Not touching. A few inches away.

”May I?” he said.

Risa looked surprised.

”You’re asking.”

”Ask the person,” Sigmund said. ”It’s in my notebook. First page.”

She laughed, a little wetly, and nodded.

Sigmund closed his eyes.

He’d always been able to feel the electric patterns in living things. The current a heartbeat made. The flicker of muscle. Since I’d completed his silver he could feel them farther and finer, and he’d been practising on Toby’s wrist and the swollen ankle of the woman with the shelves, learning the difference between knowing and guessing.

I watched his face.

For a while it was just concentration.

Then his eyebrows rose.

Then his mouth opened slightly.

”Oh,” he said.

”What?” Risa said. ”What is it?”

He opened his eyes.

”She’s loud,” Sigmund said.

Risa went very still.

”She?”

Sigmund blinked. ”I don’t know why I said that.”

”I said it yesterday,” Risa said. ”I don’t know why either.”

They looked at each other. Then both looked at me.

”I haven’t looked,” I said quickly. ”I’m not going to look unless you ask.”

”Loud how?” Risa said to her brother.

Sigmund held his hand up again, closer this time, still not touching.

”Her heart,” he said. ”The current it makes. It’s small, she’s small, but it’s” He searched for a word. ”Clean. Like a wire with nothing in the way. Mine’s got noise in it. Yours too. Everyone’s does. Little flickers, little arguments in the signal. Hers doesn’t.”

He stopped.

”And there’s more,” he said. ”Underneath the heart. All through her. Like she’s humming.”

”That’s the silver,” I said. ”It’s working.”

”It feels like being near you,” Sigmund said, without looking at me. ”When you’re changing something big. Only quieter. Like it’s practising.”

None of us said anything for a while.

Sigmund lowered his hand.

Then, very slowly, he leaned forward and rested his forehead against his sister’s shoulder.

”I’m going to be the worst uncle,” he said into her sleeve.

”Yes,” Risa said, and put her hand on the back of his head. ”Probably.”

”She’ll be able to knock me through a wall before she can walk.”

”Probably that too.”

He laughed. It came out muffled and shaky.

”Good,” he said.

Everyone kept saying that.

I was starting to believe them.

Dane spoke last.

He hadn’t been on Adela’s list. He hadn’t asked her. He’d asked Keir.

I only found out because Keir came to find me in the late afternoon, while the General was taking water and Adela was rewinding her recorder.

”Dane wants to speak to him,” Keir said.

”Then he can.”

”He wants me in the third chair.”

I looked at Keir.

He looked tired. Not the way he’d looked when we found him at the relay, locked in, his shoulder ruined and his kit crippled beside him. A different tiredness. The kind that comes from carrying something heavy for a long time and finally being asked to put it down somewhere particular.

”Do you want to?” I asked.

”No.”

I waited.

”Yes,” Keir said. ”I don’t know. He asked me. He’s never asked me for anything before. He always arranged things.”

”You can say no.”

”I know.” He rubbed his face. ”I’m going to say yes. I wanted someone to know I didn’t want to.”

”I know now.”

He nodded and went back.

I went back to the bench.

So did Luna. She had been away all afternoon, walking the outer wall with Holt, and I hadn’t asked why. She sat beside me now with her hands folded in her lap and didn’t look through the door.

Dane sat in the speaker’s chair.

Keir sat in the third chair.

They didn’t look at each other.

Dane told the General about the arrangement.

Supplies first. Replacement parts. Medical stock when a request matched the approved list. Transport access in return for coordinating other bases’ production. Credits against supplies for bringing other camps into the scheme. Names. Messages. Which offices had answered.

He had the page he’d started at Holt’s table weeks ago, with three columns. People he’d contacted. What he’d offered. What had actually arrived, where he knew. Some spaces were still blank. He’d left them that way.

He handed it to the General.

The General read it.

Then he read one name in the middle column a second time. A third.

I couldn’t see the name from the bench.

I didn’t need to. I saw the General’s pencil stop over it, and stay stopped, and I saw his jaw set the way Luna’s set when she found a mistake in someone else’s arithmetic.

”Central Allocation,” the General said quietly. ”You dealt with Central Allocation directly?”

”Through a contact,” Dane said. ”I never had a face. Just a code and a voice on the receiver. They signed everything ’for Central Allocation, under standing authority.’”

”Whose standing authority?”

Dane hesitated.

Keir, in the third chair, said, ”Yours. Sir.”

It was the first thing Keir had said.

Dane turned and looked at him.

Keir didn’t look back. He was looking at the General.

”Dane told us that when the transfer came,” Keir said. ”He told us it was covered by your authority. That’s why we went. Some of us knew your name from the war. We thought it meant something.”

The General held his gaze.

”It did,” the General said. ”It meant something I didn’t intend it to mean.”

He wrote a single line on his paper.

Then he put the pencil down, folded the paper in half, and folded it again.

”Thank you,” he said to both of them. ”That’s all I need from you today. I’ll have more questions. If you’ll allow it.”

Dane nodded.

Keir stood first.

At the door, Dane stopped, the way Toren had stopped. He didn’t turn around either.

”I told them it was rescue,” he said. ”When we were leaving the base. I told twelve people they were being rescued. Your name was half of why they believed me.”

The General said nothing.

”I’m not blaming you for that,” Dane said. ”I said it. I just wanted you to know it was said.”

He went out.

Keir hesitated in the doorway behind him.

Then he did something I hadn’t seen him do since we brought Dane home.

He walked out beside him.

Not together. Not close. Just in the same direction, at the same pace, out into the square.

Beside me, Luna let her breath out very slowly.

The General came out of the receiving room at dusk.

He stood on the step and looked at the city for a while. The lamps coming on along the covered walk. The smell of bread from the kitchen. A small voice calling from the schoolroom, then a laugh.

Then he looked at Luna on the bench.

She looked back.

”I’d like to walk,” he said. ”If you would.”

Luna’s hands were folded in her lap.

I watched her think about it. Really think. Not the way she used to, fast, already halfway to the answer she believed was expected of her. Slowly. Asking herself.

”Not tonight,” she said.

The General nodded as though he’d half expected that.

”Tomorrow,” Luna went on, ”I have questions. I’ve written them down. I’d like to ask them with Lucas and Sera and Risa there. Not alone.”

”Of course,” he said.

”And I’d like you to answer them before we walk anywhere.”

”Yes.”

She stood.

They faced each other across the step, the same height almost, the same pale eyes. I’d never noticed how alike their stillness was until I saw it from the side.

”Thank you for the oranges,” Luna said.

Something cracked very slightly in the General’s composure. Just at the corner of his mouth.

”You remembered.”

”Of course I remembered. You brought them home every time.”

”I didn’t think you”

He stopped.

Luna waited.

He didn’t finish.

”Goodnight, Father,” she said.

”Goodnight, Luna.”

He went down the step and toward the guest house by the gate, and the aide fell in beside him from wherever he’d been waiting, and they were gone into the lamplight.

Luna stood very still on the step.

”I’m all right,” she said, before I could ask.

”I know.”

”I’m going to write the questions out again. Neater.”

”All right.”

She took my hand and held it, hard, for exactly as long as it took her to breathe three times.

Then she let go and went home.

That night I sat beside our queen for an hour before bed.

Risa came with me. She’d wanted to walk, she said. The baby was restless and walking helped. She sat on Sera’s ledge and put her feet in the warm water from the queen’s tap and sighed with such contentment that the queen’s attention turned toward her with something like amusement.

She is larger than yesterday, the queen said.

”She?” I said aloud, before I could stop myself.

Risa looked up.

You call her so, the queen said. All of you. I assumed you had looked.

”We haven’t. Risa just” I gave up. ”We all just started saying it.”

Then perhaps she told you.

I translated.

Risa put her hand on her stomach.

”Did you?” she said to it. ”Did you tell us?”

The baby kicked.

I felt it through the stone, through the water, through the little bright thread of the baby’s silver that reached for mine every time I came near now. Risa laughed in surprise.

She reached for me this morning, the queen said.

I went still.

”For you?”

Briefly. When Risa came to the upper passage to bring the water bowls. I felt something small and whole turn toward me, the way young do when they first learn there is more than one voice in the world. A pause. I answered. Gently. Then she turned back to her work.

I told Risa.

She was quiet for a long time, her feet in the water and her hand where it was.

”Is that all right?” she asked at last. ”Her reaching for you?”

The queen considered.

She is mine as all of you are mine, she said. By belonging, not by holding. I will not reach into her. She may reach to me when she likes. When she is older, she may choose to stop.

I translated that slowly, so I wouldn’t lose any of it.

Risa nodded.

”Then that’s all right,” she said.

She took her feet out of the water. I helped her up, and we went home through the quiet streets, under a sky where the Meridian crossed slowly overhead, carrying its captive queen and its six hundred crew and its Sorn housings, and somewhere far below it, in our house, a cradle waited under a window that wouldn’t have a draught.

Sera had left a lamp burning.

Luna was asleep at the table with her neat new page of questions under her hand.

I didn’t wake her.

I read the first line upside down, in her small precise handwriting.

Did you know?

Then I carried her to bed.

Day 599. The records.

Witnesses spoke to General Windsor by their own choice, one at a time, with the receiving room door open and an empty chair for anyone they wanted beside them. Adela Marr recorded. The General wrote his own notes.

Toren told him about the mountain holding section, the board outside the door, and the clamp that took his arm after he’d reported it. A man in a dark coat once used the General’s name to end an argument about that clamp. Toren asked whether he signed the directive. The General said he would answer his daughter first, tomorrow, and then Toren himself, in person.

Eren and Tavia described four nights locked in as ”retained support labour,” left to keep a queen fed so the machines would work. Maeve showed him her book. Found. Both alive.

Reed showed him its legs instead of describing the mount. Vell asked for the tether questions before the power questions and was given that. Vell asked that the tether’s designers be asked whether they knew it would rather not be tethered. Asked first. Not punished. The General wrote it down word for word.

The unnamed kit declined. He wrote down ”declined” and ”may speak later,” nothing more.

Dane spoke last, with Keir in the third chair by Dane’s request. Central Allocation signed everything ”under standing authority.” Keir said whose. The General folded his notes and said he would have more questions. Keir and Dane left in the same direction.

Sigmund was told about the baby. He asked permission before feeling her current. He says she is loud. Clean, like a wire with nothing in the way, and humming underneath, like practising. He says he’ll be the worst uncle. Risa agreed.

Nobody has looked to see whether the baby is a girl. We have all been calling her ”she” since yesterday without deciding to. The queen thinks she may have told us.

The baby reached for the queen this morning. The queen answered gently and will not reach back unless asked.

Toren made a hinge for the cradle. It doesn’t squeak. Gareth decided the cradle goes under the window, with a draught screen. Nobody argued with him in time.

Luna has written her questions out twice. The first one is ”Did you know?”

Tomorrow she asks it.