Scarecrow

We built the quiet room on Day 604.

Not under the house exactly. Luna had been right about the street: Liam’s voice carried, and so did carts, and so did the bell Priya rang for supper, and so did the children who’d discovered that the covered walk outside our door made an echo if you shouted into it at the right angle.

So we went down.

Behind the house, under the little garden Sera had started and Luna kept watering, the ground sloped toward the old canyon wall. There was rock under the soil there. Good rock, dense and dry, the same layer the queen’s upper passages ran through. I’d felt it every time I walked past.

I asked the queen first.

She showed me where her own chambers lay below it. Where the broad passage ran. Where the old flooded tunnels had been sealed after the storm. Where there was a pocket of solid stone between our house and her home, untouched by anyone, with nothing living in it but the slow small burrowing things that lived in every rock on Avalon.

There, she said. Close enough to reach. Far enough that the world will have to try.

So I opened it.

I’d made a lot of rooms on Avalon.

The first ones in the canyon, rough and fast, while the Teeming came over the rim at night and Dot kept counting. The dome on the red glass. The houses in the city, the schoolroom, the medical building, the receiving courts with their separate entrances and strips of bare earth for the young. Our own house, built with three people arguing about where the cups went.

I’d never made a room meant to keep something out.

Walls, yes. The outer walls of the city were meant to keep things out. But those were walls against weapons and weather and anything that wanted to hurt us.

This was a room against the whole world.

Against every voice.

I didn’t know how to start.

Toby did.

He came down the steps I’d cut into the garden slope with his hands in his pockets and his head slightly tilted, the way he walked when he was listening to something nobody else could hear. He stopped at the mouth of the space I’d opened and stood there for a while.

”Too round,” he said.

I looked at the walls. I’d made them curved, smooth, the way the queen’s chambers were.

”Round’s good for sound,” I said. ”No corners for it to catch in.”

”Round’s good for sound if you want it to go somewhere,” Toby said. ”It carries. It goes round and round. You want it to stop.” He walked in and put his palm flat against the wall. ”You want it to get lost. Lots of little surfaces. Different angles. Things that soak it up instead of throwing it back.”

He closed his eyes.

”And it’s too close to the water.”

I listened. Under us, faint, I could feel the queen’s channel running through the stone, carrying water from her pool to the lower chambers.

”I can’t hear that,” I said.

”You can’t,” Toby said. ”She will.”

So we started again.

It took all morning.

Toby told me what he wanted and I made it, and then he listened to it, and told me again. The walls went from curved to faceted, hundreds of small planes at slightly different angles, like the inside of a geode. I made the stone itself different near the surface. Less dense. Full of tiny spaces, the way a sponge is full of spaces, so that sound went in and got lost and didn’t come out.

Then Toby put his hands on it and did something I couldn’t see.

I felt it, though. A change in the air. A deadening. Like stepping from a crowded room into a closet full of coats.

”Better,” he said.

I moved the room away from the water. Not far. Toby wanted it close enough to the queen’s chambers that she could reach it. Just far enough that the channel’s whisper didn’t come through the floor.

Then the queen came.

Not all of her. She couldn’t fit, and wouldn’t have tried. She sent her attention up through the stone, and with it, slowly, carefully, a thread of her own silver. Living silver, grown from her own body, the way she’d grown the tap beside her pool.

It came up through the floor of the quiet room in fine branching lines, like roots, like the markings on my arms. It spread through the porous stone Toby had asked for. It settled into the walls.

And it went still.

Not dead. Not dormant. Still in the way a hand is still when it’s holding something that might spill.

This is how it is done, the queen said. The great ones taught it. Silver that listens and does not answer. Silver that holds the world at the door.

The mountain queen was with her, through the connection they shared. I could feel the older mind watching the new silver settle, correcting it very slightly here and there, the way she’d taught our queen to make the tap.

There, the mountain queen said. And there. Leave room for her mother’s voice. Leave room for her father’s. She must not hear nothing. That frightens them too.

So the queen left gaps.

Small ones. Shaped, Toby said when I told him, like the shapes of particular voices. Risa’s. Mine. Sera’s and Luna’s, after we asked. The queen’s own.

”So she’ll hear us,” Toby said slowly, ”and nothing else.”

Until she is ready for more, the queen said.

Toby stood in the middle of the room with his eyes closed for a long time.

Then he opened them.

”It’s the quietest place I’ve ever been,” he said.

His voice was strange. Very soft.

”Is that good?”

”I don’t know.” He looked around at the faceted walls, the faint gleam of the queen’s silver in the stone. ”I think when I was little I would have given anything for a room like this.”

Sigmund tested it after lunch.

He came down the steps, stood in the doorway, and frowned.

”I can’t feel anything,” he said.

”That’s the idea.”

”No. I mean I can’t feel anything.” He stepped inside. Looked at his hands. ”Usually I can feel the whole street. People walking. The queen under us. The brood out past the ridge. Your hearts.” He turned around slowly. ”In here I can only feel you two.”

”Is that bad?” I asked.

Sigmund thought about it.

”It’s strange,” he said. ”Like going deaf in one ear.” He held his hand up toward the wall, palm flat, not touching. ”There’s something there. The silver. It’s not doing anything. It’s just” He searched for the word. ”Paying attention.”

”That’s what the queen said it would do.”

He walked a slow circle around the room, hand still raised.

At the place where the queen had left a gap shaped like Risa’s voice, he stopped.

”There,” he said. ”That’s Risa. I can feel her through that bit. She’s up in the house. She’s annoyed about something.”

”She’s probably annoyed that we haven’t let her come down yet,” I said.

Sigmund almost smiled.

”Probably,” he said.

Risa came down at the third hour.

She’d been told to wait until it was finished. She’d waited until it was nearly finished, which for Risa was a considerable act of patience, and then announced from the top of the steps that she was coming down whether we were done or not.

Sera came with her. Luna too, back from the receiving room where her father had spent the morning with Adela going through Central Allocation’s records again.

Risa stopped in the doorway.

She looked at the faceted walls. The faint silver in them. Toby standing in the middle with his hands in his pockets, looking anxious. Sigmund leaning against the wall by the gap that was shaped like her voice.

Then she stepped inside.

I watched her face change.

It wasn’t dramatic. Just a loosening. A softening around the eyes, as if she’d been holding something tight for a long time and hadn’t known it until it let go.

”Oh,” she said.

She put both hands on her stomach.

I didn’t need to look. I felt it anyway.

The baby had stopped.

Not her heart. Not her growth. Her silver, which had been turning and reaching and noticing, toward my hand, toward the queen, toward the door, toward everything, all day, every day, for weeks.

It had stopped reaching.

It hadn’t gone quiet the way it did when she slept. It was still bright, still busy, still building. But it wasn’t stretching out toward the edges any more. It was just there. Inside. Settled.

Like a child who’s been standing on tiptoe at a window for hours, and has finally been picked up.

Risa sat down on the stone bench I’d made along one wall.

She didn’t say anything.

She sat with her hands on her stomach and her eyes half closed, and her shoulders came down, slowly, inch by inch, until she was leaning back against the faceted wall like someone sinking into warm water.

”She was tired,” Risa said quietly. ”She was so tired. I didn’t know.”

Nobody answered.

”She’s been listening to everything,” Risa said. ”All the time. Every voice. Every queen. The whole city. I thought she was just busy.” Her voice caught. ”She was frightened. She was frightened and she kept listening anyway because she didn’t know she could stop.”

Sera sat down beside her.

Luna sat on her other side.

I sat on the floor at her feet, because that seemed to be where I always ended up.

Within five minutes, Risa was asleep.

Not dozing. Asleep, deep and heavy, the way she hadn’t slept since before the mountain. Her head fell sideways onto Sera’s shoulder and her breathing slowed and her hands stayed where they were on her stomach.

Sera looked down at her.

Then up at me.

She didn’t say anything.

She didn’t need to.

Risa slept for three hours.

We took turns sitting with her. Sera first, because Risa’s head was on her shoulder and she refused to move. Then Luna. Then me.

Toby checked on her twice and left again without waking her. The second time, he stood in the doorway for a long time, just looking at the room, at the faceted walls and the sleeping woman and the faint gleam of silver in the stone.

Then he went up the steps and I heard him sit down on the top one.

I went up after a while.

He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.

”Toby?”

”I’m all right.” He didn’t look up. ”I just. I’m all right.”

I sat beside him.

”It’s the quietest place I’ve ever been,” he said again. Muffled. ”And I made it for someone else.”

”You made it for her.”

”I know.” He lifted his head. His eyes were wet. ”I’m glad. I’m really glad. I just keep thinking about the gray room. In the canyon. Inside my own wall, with Risa’s hand on my chest, trying to remember which heartbeat was mine. If someone had made me a room like this then, I wouldn’t have had to be so frightened.”

I didn’t say anything.

I put my arm around his shoulders. He let me.

”She won’t be frightened,” Toby said after a while. ”Not like that. Not alone.”

”No.”

”Good.”

That word again.

The General came to see the quiet room in the late afternoon.

Luna brought him. He’d asked, she said, very politely, whether he might be permitted to see it. He’d said he understood if the answer was no.

Risa was awake by then. She was still sitting on the bench, still leaning against the wall, looking at her own stomach with an expression of drowsy amazement. When the General appeared at the top of the steps, she looked up and nodded.

”Let him come,” she said.

He came down slowly. He stopped in the doorway, the way he stopped in every doorway, as if entering required a decision.

He looked at the walls.

He looked at Toby, who had come back down and was standing in the corner with his arms crossed, looking defensive.

He looked at Risa.

”May I come in?” he asked.

Risa looked at Toby.

Toby looked at the floor.

”If you’re quiet,” Toby said.

The General came in.

He stood very still in the middle of the room for a long time, the way he’d stood at the edge of the mountain queen’s hollow.

”I can’t hear the street,” he said at last. Very softly.

”No,” Toby said.

”I can’t hear anything.”

”That’s the point.”

The General nodded slowly.

He turned to look at the walls. At the faint silver threads in the stone. He didn’t touch them. He kept his hands behind his back.

”This is for the baby,” he said.

”Yes.”

”Because she’ll hear everything.”

”The mountain queen told us,” Risa said. ”Whole-born young wake all at once. They reach. If nobody holds the world quiet for them, they get hurt.”

The General was quiet.

Then he said, ”Crane would want to know about this room.”

The temperature in the room seemed to drop.

Sera, who had been sitting on the bench beside Risa, went very still. Luna’s head turned. Toby’s arms tightened across his chest.

The General didn’t look at any of them. He was looking at the silver in the walls.

”I’m not going to tell him,” he said. ”I’m saying he’d want to know. Because this” He gestured very slightly at the walls, the stone, the gaps shaped like voices. ”This is a room built by a queen to protect a whole-born child. With living silver that listens and doesn’t answer. That’s exactly what Article Fourteen is looking for. Not just the child. How to hold her. How to make her quiet.”

Nobody spoke.

”I want you to know that I know that,” the General said. ”So that when I go home and someone asks me what I saw on Avalon, you’ll know I chose not to say it.”

He turned to Risa.

”Thank you for letting me see it.”

Then he went back up the steps.

Sera watched him go.

Her face was very hard.

She found him on the porch later.

I didn’t know she was going to. I was in the house with Luna, helping Priya carry in supper, and when I came out to call him in, Sera was standing at the bottom of the porch steps with her arms crossed, and the General was standing at the top, and neither of them was saying anything.

I stopped in the doorway.

Luna stopped beside me.

”You knew the Calder name,” Sera said.

The General looked at her.

”When Liam and I were introduced,” Sera said. ”The first day. Your face changed. I saw it. You knew who we were.”

The General was quiet for a moment.

”Yes,” he said.

”The photograph.”

”Yes.”

”The Kneeling Calder.” Sera’s voice was perfectly steady. Too steady. The way it got before she set something on fire. ”My mother, on her knees in the snow at the gate, with Liam in her arms. Begging them to let her in, because he had pneumonia and he was going to die.”

The General didn’t look away.

”It was the north gate,” he said. ”Of New Halcyon. The first winter after the Accord.”

”I know which gate it was.”

”My troops were holding it.”

Sera went absolutely still.

Luna’s hand found my arm.

”I wasn’t there,” the General said. ”I was at the capital. But my standing order was that no modified were to be admitted without Retention papers. The gate commander followed my order. He kept her there for six hours.” He paused. ”Someone took the photograph from the wall. It went around the upper floors. People laughed. I saw it on someone’s desk a week later and I didn’t say anything.”

Sera’s hands were at her sides.

The air around them shimmered.

I took a step forward.

Luna’s grip on my arm tightened.

”Don’t,” Luna said under her breath. ”She won’t. Let her.”

Sera stood at the bottom of the porch steps, shimmering, and looked at the man at the top of them.

”They let her in eventually,” Sera said. ”After six hours. Because a doctor came out and said Liam would die on the step and someone would have to explain that. They let her in. They gave her the stabilizer.” She took a breath. ”She’s been shaking ever since. Twenty years. Her hands. You can’t stop them shaking. She can’t hold a cup without spilling. She can’t sew. She used to sew.”

”I know,” the General said.

”How do you know?”

”Because it’s in the Retention records. All thirty-one.” He looked down at the porch boards. ”I read them yesterday. All of them. Maura Calder. Dorothy Dask. Thirty-one names, and a gap, and Crane.”

Sera stared at him.

The shimmer around her hands faded. Slowly. The way it did when she chose where the heat would go, and chose nowhere.

”I don’t want your apology,” she said.

”I know.”

”I don’t want you to tell me you’re sorry about the gate.”

”I won’t.”

”I want you to go home,” Sera said, ”and find the gate commander, if he’s alive. And tell him my mother’s name. Not the photograph. Her name. Maura. And tell him she’s still alive. And tell him her son’s alive too, and he can burn a hole in a man’s sleeve at forty paces, and he once set Lucas’s jacket on fire as a compliment.”

The General was silent for a long moment.

”I’ll find him,” he said.

”Good.”

Sera turned and walked away down the path, toward the garden, toward the steps to the quiet room.

The General stood on the porch.

He looked very tired.

Luna let go of my arm.

”Go after her,” she said. ”I’ll take my father in.”

Sera was sitting on the top step above the quiet room, with her knees drawn up and her arms around them.

I sat beside her.

She didn’t look at me.

”I didn’t set anything on fire,” she said.

”I know.”

”I wanted to.”

”I know.”

She was quiet for a while. Below us, in the quiet room, I could feel nothing. The silver in the walls held the world at the door. Risa had gone back up to the house to eat, and the room was empty, and it sat beneath us like a held breath.

”He read them,” Sera said. ”All thirty-one. Mum’s name. Your mum’s name.”

”Yes.”

”Yesterday.”

”Yes.”

She rested her chin on her knees.

”I keep thinking about her hands,” she said. ”Mum’s. When I was little, before I understood, I thought she was just clumsy. I used to get cross with her for spilling things. I used to grab the cup out of her hands and pour it myself.” She swallowed. ”She never told me why. Liam told me. When I was eight. He said Mum shakes because of the medicine that keeps her alive, and if she stops the medicine she’ll die. I stopped grabbing the cup after that. I started holding it with her.”

I put my hand over hers on her knee.

She turned her hand over and gripped mine.

For a long time neither of us said anything.

The sun went down behind the canyon rim. The lamps came on along the covered walk. Up at the house, I could hear Liam’s voice, carrying, the way it always carried, telling somebody something very loudly.

Then Sera said, slowly, as if she was working it out as she went:

”Lucas.”

”Mm.”

”When you finished my silver.”

”Yes.”

”The fire-sickness. That was my body not finishing something. Not making a thing it needed.”

”Yes.”

”And you fixed it. And then later, when you completed the silver. The whole pattern. That was different. That was the silver itself. Not finished, and then finished.”

”Yes.”

She was looking at me now. Her eyes very bright in the lamplight.

”Mum’s shakes,” Sera said. ”The stabilizer. That’s because her silver’s not finished either. Isn’t it? It’s asleep. It’s half there. Her body doesn’t know what to do with it, so it fights it, and the fighting makes her shake.”

I stopped breathing.

”Isn’t it the same thing?” Sera said. ”Isn’t it the same thing you did for me? For all of us? If you finished her silver. Like you finished mine. Wouldn’t her hands stop?”

I didn’t answer straight away.

I couldn’t.

I sat on the top step above the quiet room with Sera’s hand in mine and felt the whole of it arrive at once, the way the baby’s silver must arrive in her when she’s born. Everything, all at once, reaching.

Mother’s hands.

I’d watched them shake my whole life. At the kitchen table in the house in the dead field, holding a cup still enough to drink from with both hands wrapped around it. In the hospital bed in the dome. On the calls home, once a week, the screen showing her face and the edge of her fingers in the corner, trembling against the arm of the chair.

Forty-two, Genny had counted once. Tremors a minute. Then sixteen, the day Toby sang into the radio. Then the deep had said hello at dawn, and the spine had answered, and Dot had counted thirty-one and a gap and one, and Mother had said her own name back on purpose.

But the stabilizer was still in the archive. The doses were still coming. She was still shaking. The dawn count steadied her for an hour. Toby’s song for an hour. It didn’t finish anything.

Asleep, I’d said once, in the canyon. The silver in the stabilizer patients was asleep. Fog. The body fighting something it didn’t understand.

I’d known that for months.

I’d completed five people’s silver, and then everyone on Avalon who’d asked.

I’d never once put those two things side by side.

”Yes,” I said.

My voice didn’t sound like mine.

”Yes. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing, Sera.”

Sera’s hand tightened in mine so hard it hurt.

”Then you can fix her.”

”I could.” I heard myself say it. ”If I could see her. If I could reach her silver.”

”And your mum.”

”Yes.”

”And all thirty-one.”

”Yes.”

”And Crane,” Sera said. ”Crane’s the one. In the gap.”

I closed my eyes.

Crane, at the dawn count. Saying hello every morning. Asking.

”Yes,” I said. ”Crane too.”

And then the rest of it arrived.

The part I’d been not-thinking about for a very long time.

They were eleven light-years away.

Mother. Maura. The twins. Toby’s mother. Hana’s father, with the shake, on Harbor Block 44. All thirty-one Retention families. Every one of them in the domes on Earth, under Crane’s Project, under the Accord, with Article Fourteen in the drawer of someone’s desk.

I couldn’t see them.

I could see the station on its night passes, a moving point of light. I could see the moon of this world and put a lake on it if I wanted. I could see the whole canyon, the whole city, every wall I’d built and every pipe and every stone.

I couldn’t see Earth.

Not from here. Not from anywhere I could stand.

And the thing that connected me to them, the only thing, was the spine. The captive queen in the Meridian. Every morning, at dawn, her silver woke and said hello, and the fragments in the thirty-one woke for eleven seconds and answered, because the needles they’d been given had been shaved from her bone.

Her silver.

Pinned in Sorn housings, in a station full of Crane’s people, orbiting over my head.

”Lucas,” Sera said.

I didn’t answer.

”Lucas, you’ve gone white.”

”I can’t reach them,” I said.

Sera went still.

”The spine,” I said. ”That’s the only way. Their silver came from her. If she were free, if she could wake properly, it might wake in them too. All of them at once. Like the deep woke the hello.” I was talking too fast. ”Or I could go myself. I could get to Earth. But there’s no way to Earth. The ship that brought us crossed on her. On the spine. The Meridian can’t go back without her, and she’s pinned, and Crane’s people hold the station, and if I touch the station Holt’s right, they’ll know, and the next thing out of the sky won’t be oranges.”

I stopped.

I’d stood up without noticing. I was standing on the top step above the quiet room with my hands open at my sides.

They were shaking.

Not from the silver. My silver didn’t make anything shake anymore.

From me.

”I could fix her,” I said. ”I’ve known how for weeks. I’ve done it to everyone I love who’s standing in front of me, and I can’t do it to her, because she’s on the wrong side of the sky.”

Sera stood up.

She didn’t say anything.

She stood in front of me and put both her hands over mine, and held them, until they stopped shaking.

I sat in the dark for a long time after that.

Sera stayed for a while. Then she said she’d go up and tell the others, if that was all right, so I wouldn’t have to say it all again. I said it was all right.

She kissed my forehead and went up to the house.

I sat on the step above the quiet room and looked at the sky.

The Meridian came over the canyon rim about an hour after full dark. A small bright moving point, crossing slowly from west to east.

I watched it all the way across.

I could see it. If I wanted to, I could reach for it. Find the station’s hull, the corridors, the docking rings, the six hundred heartbeats, the grey Sorn housings around the spine at its centre. I’d done it before. I knew where everything was.

I didn’t reach.

I just watched it cross.

Thirty-one, I thought. And a gap. And one.

Somewhere under the station’s hull, in her housings, the spine-queen was asleep. She only woke at dawn, when the deep said hello and she answered. The rest of the time she slept, pinned, under Crane’s people.

My mother’s silver was a shaving of her bone.

Every morning for eleven seconds my mother and that queen were awake together.

And then they both went back to sleep.

The Meridian passed over the far rim and was gone.

I sat in the dark.

Sera came back after an hour.

She didn’t sit down this time. She stood on the step below me with her arms folded, looking up.

”Come in,” she said.

”In a bit.”

”No. Now.” She held out her hand. ”Risa’s eaten everything Priya brought and half of yours. Luna’s walked her father to the guest house and back twice. Toby’s down in the quiet room again, sitting in the middle of it with his eyes shut, and won’t say why. Liam’s on the porch telling Anja a story about a time you got lost in the dome’s laundry for four hours. It isn’t true. He’s telling it anyway, because he thinks if he’s loud enough you’ll come and correct him.”

I almost laughed.

”Come in,” Sera said again. ”You can’t reach your mum tonight. You can’t reach mine. You can reach us. We’re right here.”

I looked at her hand.

Then I took it.

She pulled me up off the step and didn’t let go all the way up the path to the house. On the porch, Liam stopped in the middle of his sentence, looked at me, looked at Sera, and said, ”Four hours. In the laundry. Tell them.”

”It was twenty minutes,” I said.

”It was four hours.”

”It was twenty minutes and I wasn’t lost. I was hiding from Sigmund.”

”Same thing,” said Liam, satisfied, and went back to his story.

Inside, Risa was on the window seat with her feet in Luna’s lap and an empty bowl balanced on her stomach. Luna was rubbing her feet without looking at them, staring at the far wall.

They both looked up when I came in.

Neither of them asked.

Risa held out her hand.

I crossed the room and took it and sat down on the floor at the end of the window seat. Sera sat beside me. Luna let go of Risa’s feet long enough to put one hand in my hair.

”Sera told us,” Luna said quietly.

”I know.”

”We’ll find a way.”

”I don’t know how.”

”Neither do I,” Luna said. ”Yet.”

She left her hand where it was.

Under my back, through the window seat and the floor and the stone and the faceted walls of the quiet room below, I could feel the baby. Not reaching. Not frightened. Just there, inside Risa, settled now, building.

The quiet room had taught her that she could stop.

I wished someone could teach me.

Toby measured Risa before bed.

Twenty-nine and a half weeks.

He didn’t write it in the book straight away. He sat with the reader in his lap and looked at me.

”Sera told me,” he said. ”About your mum. And hers. About the thirty-one.”

”I know.”

”My mum’s one of them.”

I looked at him.

I hadn’t forgotten. Toby’s mother. Her hands shaking since his father died from his first stabilizer dose. The reason Toby wanted to be a medic. The reason he’d read the immunology book in the canyon by lamplight, and sung into the radio for Genny, and counted Mother’s tremor going down from forty-two to sixteen.

I hadn’t forgotten.

I’d just been thinking about Mother, and Maura, and the whole thirty-one, and I’d folded Toby’s mother into the number.

”I’m sorry,” I said. ”I should have said her name.”

”It’s all right.” Toby wrote the number in the book. Twenty-nine and a half. ”I just wanted you to know I know. That you can’t fix her yet.”

He closed the book.

”When you can,” he said, ”I want to be in the room.”

”You will be.”

”Good.”

He went home.

Day 604. What Sera asked.

Built the quiet room under the garden behind the house, between us and the queen. Toby wanted it faceted, not round, porous at the surface so sound gets lost instead of carried. The queen grew living silver into the walls that listens and doesn’t answer. The mountain queen showed her how, and told her to leave gaps shaped for Risa’s voice, mine, Sera’s, Luna’s and her own, so the baby hears us and nothing else. Hearing nothing frightens them too.

Toby says it’s the quietest place he’s ever been. He’d have given anything for it when he was small. Sigmund can only feel the people inside it. He found the gap shaped like Risa.

Risa came down. The baby’s silver stopped reaching. Not asleep, just settled, like a child picked up from a window. Risa says she’d been frightened and kept listening because she didn’t know she could stop. Risa slept three hours, the deepest she’s slept in weeks.

The General saw the room. He said Crane would want to know about it: how to hold a whole-born child quiet is exactly what Article Fourteen is looking for. He wanted us to know he knows, so we’ll know he chose not to say it.

Sera asked him about the Kneeling Calder. North gate of New Halcyon, the first winter after the Accord, his troops, his standing order. Six hours. He saw the photograph on a desk a week later and said nothing. He’s read all thirty-one Retention records. Sera doesn’t want his apology. She wants him to find the gate commander and tell him Maura’s name.

Then Sera asked me: if her mother’s shakes are because her silver is unfinished, isn’t it the same thing I did for her? It is. Completion is the cure for the stabilizer. For Mother, for Maura, for Toby’s mother, for all thirty-one. For Crane. I’ve known how for weeks. I never put the two things side by side.

I can’t reach them. They’re eleven light-years away. Their silver was shaved from the spine-queen’s bone, and she’s pinned in the Meridian under Crane’s people. If she were free, it might wake in them too. The ship that brought us crossed on her. There is no road home that doesn’t go through her.

I watched the Meridian cross the sky and didn’t reach for it.

Sera made me come in. Liam told everyone I was lost in the dome’s laundry for four hours. It was twenty minutes and I was hiding from Sigmund.

Baby: twenty-nine and a half weeks by size. Settled since the quiet room.

Toby wants to be in the room when I can fix his mother. He will be.

Luna says we’ll find a way. Neither of us knows how yet.