Scarecrow

Wren had a list.

Of course she did. Wren had a list for everything. The names on the north wall. The arrivals. The search board. The people who’d asked Priya for a second blanket, and the people who’d asked Gareth for a different window, and the people who’d asked Toby whether the itch on their arm was anything to worry about.

This list was shorter than most.

She brought it to our porch on the morning of Day 614, with the dew still on the steps, and put it on the boards by my feet without saying anything.

I picked it up.

At the top, in her neat square hand: Completion. Asked.

Underneath, names.

Juno Pell. Corr. Ilse Brandt. Kellan Reed. Tessa Rook. Nell Armitage. Dev Sen. Mara Keene. Jory Fen. Safi Arden. Eleven more of the third wave. Six from Sigmund’s forty. Ezra Holt.

At the very bottom, in the same handwriting but smaller, almost as if she hadn’t been sure she should write it:

Wren.

And beside it, a mark I didn’t recognise. Not a tick. Not a cross. A small line, crossing itself.

”What’s that?” I asked.

Wren sat down on the step below me.

”That’s me asking you to ask me,” she said. ”Later. Not now.”

I looked at her.

”You don’t want it?”

”I don’t know if I want it.” She looked out at the street. ”I watched Toby. I watched what it did for him. I’m glad. I’m so glad.” She paused. ”But Toby was always going to be someone who needed more. He was always hearing too much. I’m not. I like what I am. I like my telescope and my mirror and my lists.” She turned her head and looked at me. ”I don’t want to be finished on a day when everyone’s rushing. I want to choose it on a day when nothing’s happening.”

”There might not be a day like that.”

”Then I’ll wait.”

I looked at the mark beside her name. The line crossing itself.

”What do I write?” I said. ”On the list. So people know.”

Wren took the pencil from behind her ear and held it out.

”Write not yet,” she said.

So I did.

I’d thought about this for a week.

Since the General said Article Fourteen. Since he’d recited it at our table. Complete integration, whether arising naturally, through treatment, or by descent.

Through treatment.

I’d completed Luna, Sera, Risa, Liam, Toby and Sigmund. And by doing it, I’d made every one of them the thing Crane’s clause was looking for.

I’d told them that. All of them. Before the General left our table that day, I’d sat in the receiving room with the six of them and told them what I’d made them, by accident, without knowing.

Liam had said, ”So we’re special now.”

Sera had hit him.

Luna had said, ”We were always going to be what he wanted. He built the Project to find us.”

Sigmund had said nothing. He’d sat with his arms folded and his jaw set, and then he’d said, very quietly, ”My father wrote held in trust.”

Risa had said, ”I’d do it again.”

And then, one by one, all of them had said the same.

Now there were twenty-nine more names on Wren’s list.

I went to every one of them.

Not all at once. One at a time, over two days, in the medical building or their own homes or wherever they asked. I sat down and told each of them what I’d told the six. Article Fourteen. Through treatment. What it meant. What Crane’s office might do if they ever found out.

Some of them already knew. The city talked. Liam talked louder than the city.

Some of them didn’t.

I watched their faces change.

Two of them took their names off the list.

A boy from Sigmund’s forty, a quiet one who mended nets. He said he’d come to Scarecrow to stop being something someone wanted. A woman from the third wave, Mara Keene’s friend from the walking team. She said she had a sister still in the domes, and she didn’t want to give anyone a reason to look at her family twice.

I wrote no beside both their names.

Wren had told me to.

”They’re allowed to say no,” she’d said. ”And the list keeps it. So nobody asks them again by mistake.”

The others stayed.

Juno was the first to say why.

”Because I’d rather be found whole,” she said, ”than hidden broken.”

Juno went first.

She asked to. She came to the medical building on the morning of Day 614 before any of the others and sat on the examination bed with her hands folded and her chin up and said, ”Me first. I’m the oldest of the young ones. That’s how it works.”

She was first wave. Older than me by five years, though she didn’t look it. The later batch, Halloway’s data had said, the one that wasn’t supposed to burn out. Pell’s daughter, who’d been hidden for two years and then sent to Avalon anyway, and who’d spent eighteen months on a hilltop flashing her base number every dawn with a mirror until someone answered.

Her silver had always pointed north.

That was the first thing I’d known about Juno, before I knew her name. Juno’s arm points straight up. The day the deep stopped under the canyon and looked at the sky. Her arm had found it. It always found things. The deep. The spine. The direction of anything with silver in it.

”What do you think will happen?” I asked her.

”I think I’ll know where everything is,” Juno said. ”Not just north. Everything.”

I looked at her silver.

She was right.

It was there, the pattern of it. Like a compass needle trying to turn in a dozen directions at once and only being allowed to point one way. The unfinished paths. The narrow places.

I asked her one more time.

She said yes.

I began.

It took less than a minute.

I’d done it enough times now that I could see the shape before I started. Where the paths wanted to go. Where they’d been stopped. I opened them the way you open a hand that’s been clenched too long. Gently. One finger at a time.

Juno sat very still.

Then, halfway through, her head turned.

Not toward me. Toward the wall.

”There,” she said.

I kept working.

Her head turned again. Toward the floor.

”There,” she said. ”The queen.”

Then up, toward the ceiling.

”There. That’s” She stopped. ”That’s the spine. On the station. I can feel it. I always could, but not like this. I can feel where it is.”

I finished the last path.

Silver rings settled around Juno’s eyes. Fine markings branched along her wrists, under her sleeves. Different from the others. Straighter. Like the lines on a map.

Juno closed her eyes.

Then she opened them, and turned her head slowly, all the way round, like someone standing on a hill for the first time.

”I can feel all of them,” she said. ”Every queen. Every brood. Every one of us with silver in them. Where they are. Which way they’re facing.” She swallowed. ”I can feel the mountain queen. She’s on her terrace. She’s facing east.”

She turned her head toward the house.

Toward the garden behind it. Toward the quiet room under the garden.

”And her,” she said softly.

She didn’t have to say who.

”She’s so bright,” Juno said. ”In the middle of everything. Like a lamp in a window.”

Corr. Ilse. Kellan, whose fire had always been too hot and too fast, the boy Liam had calmed in the trees the day the third wave fell. Tessa, who’d asked why we weren’t killing the Teeming and now spent her evenings in the courts watching the young. Nell, who’d kept the arrival list for her squad and told me on the first day that she’d thought Scarecrow was a man.

One by one.

Each one different.

I’d stopped being surprised by that. The silver didn’t make people the same. It made them more of what they already were. Kellan’s fire went steady. Tessa’s hands, which had always been able to feel the grain of things, began to feel the grain of everything. Nell found she could remember every name she’d ever written down, exactly, the moment she thought of it.

”I don’t know if that’s an ability,” she said, frowning. ”I think I just remember things now.”

”It might be both,” I said.

She considered that.

”Good,” she said. ”I’ll keep the list, then.”

By the end of the first day I’d done fourteen.

I wasn’t tired. I didn’t get tired any more.

I went home anyway.

Risa was in the quiet room.

She’d moved down there most of the day now. Not because she needed it, she said. Because the baby liked it. She’d go up to the courts in the mornings for the young, and to the house for supper, and the rest of the time she lay on the bench in the faceted dark with her hands on her stomach and talked to the baby in a low voice about nothing in particular.

Edda had been to see her again that afternoon.

”Thirty-six weeks,” Risa said when I came down. ”By size. Edda says any day now, by my body. She says the baby’s not going to wait for the calendar. She says she’s never seen a baby less interested in a calendar.”

I sat on the floor by the bench.

”Any day.”

”Any day.”

”Are you frightened?”

Risa thought about it.

”A little,” she said. ”Not of her. Of the part where she’s out and I can’t keep her quiet any more just by lying here.”

”The queens will be there.”

”I know.”

”And Toby.”

”I know.” Risa reached down and put her hand in my hair. ”And you’ll be in the corner, looking at her bones.”

”I’ll try not to.”

”You won’t manage it.”

The baby kicked.

I felt her silver turn toward me. Bright. Quick. Glad. The way it turned every time I came down the steps now.

And then it turned somewhere else.

Up. Out. Through the gap in the wall, the one shaped like Risa’s voice.

Toward the city.

Toward the medical building.

”What’s she doing?” Risa said.

I followed it.

”The completions,” I said slowly. ”Fourteen people today. Their silver’s new. Bright. She can feel them.”

”Through the room?”

”Through you. Through your gap.”

Risa was quiet.

”She’s counting them,” she said at last.

I looked at her.

”Luna said she counts,” Risa said. ”The kicks. One, two, three, four. Luna said she was counting.” She laughed a little. ”I thought Luna was being sentimental. But she’s counting, isn’t she? Every new one. She’s finding them and counting them.”

I didn’t know.

But the baby’s silver was turning, slowly, from point to point. From the medical building to Juno’s house to Kellan’s to Nell’s. Pausing at each one. Then moving on.

The way Luna moved her finger down a list.

On the morning of Day 615, Juno came to the courts.

She hadn’t been before. Not properly. She’d stood at the edge once or twice, the way most of the first wave did, polite and wary, and then gone back to her hill and her mirror. But that morning she walked straight down the ramp behind me and Risa and stopped on the warm stone floor and turned her head slowly, the way she’d turned it in the medical building.

”They’re everywhere,” she said.

The young were. They always were, in the mornings. Twenty or thirty of them in the lower court, tumbling over each other, the bigger ones chasing the smaller ones and the smaller ones chasing nothing at all.

Pebble saw Risa and came straight over, the way he did every morning now. He pressed his flat head against her stomach and stayed there.

Risa sat down on her stone bench. She’d stopped pretending she could get down to the floor any more.

Juno sat down beside her.

For a while nobody said anything. Pebble hummed. The baby turned toward him, bright and quick, and I felt the game start. The same one as always. Pebble pushed a little pulse of silver at her through Risa’s skin. She pushed one back. He pushed two. She pushed three.

Juno’s head came round sharply.

”She’s playing,” she said.

”Every morning,” Risa said.

”No, I mean” Juno stopped. Her eyes had gone wide. ”I can see it. Not see. Feel. I can feel where she’s pointing. She’s pointing at him. And he’s pointing at her. And the others are” She looked round the court. ”The others are all turning. Toward her. All of them. A little bit.”

I looked.

She was right. I’d never noticed it, because I’d never had a reason to look. But the young in the lower court, all of them, even the ones in the middle of their own games, were angled slightly toward Risa’s bench. The way flowers lean toward a window.

”Like she’s the middle,” Juno said quietly. ”Like they’re all keeping track of where she is.”

Our queen’s voice came up through the stone, warm and amused.

Of course they are, she said. She is the youngest of the brood. The young always know where the youngest is. That is how a brood keeps its smallest safe.

Juno heard it. I saw her hear it. Her hands went flat on the bench.

”She talks to me now,” she whispered.

You can hear me now, the queen said. That is different. I always talked.

Pebble hummed louder. The baby kicked, hard, right where his head was.

Pebble fell over.

He lay on his back on the warm stone with his legs in the air, humming happily, and three of the smaller young came running to climb on him.

Risa laughed so hard she had to hold her stomach.

Juno looked at me.

”She won,” she said.

”She usually does,” I said.

Holt came last.

On the second day. He’d asked to.

”I’ll go when the young ones are done,” he’d said. ”Old men go last. That’s how it works.”

”Juno said the oldest of the young ones go first.”

”Juno’s got it the right way round for the young ones,” Holt said. ”I’m not a young one.”

He came to the medical building in the late afternoon of Day 615, with his stick that he didn’t need and his face like a closed door. He sat on the examination bed and put the stick across his knees and looked at me.

”Tell me the truth,” he said. ”Not the version for the youngsters.”

So I did.

His silver was older than anyone else’s. First wave. The cruder modification, the one they’d stopped using after Holt’s group because too many of them burned out. I’d seen the shape of it the day his fever came, the day I’d fixed the tissue that kept treating his own silver as damage. I’d seen it again when I fixed his knee.

It wasn’t like the others.

It was like a path through a forest that had been cut with an axe instead of a knife. Rough. Broken in places. Grown over in others, where his body had tried for thirty years to heal around it.

”It’ll be harder,” I said. ”Not dangerous. But harder. I’ll have to clear some of what your body built around it before I can open the paths. And I’ll have to ask the queens to help me see where the paths were meant to go, because the pattern’s older than mine. Older than anyone’s here.”

”Will it hurt?”

”No.”

”Will I still be me?”

I looked at him.

”Grumpier,” I said.

Holt’s mouth twitched.

”That’s not possible,” he said.

”You’d be surprised.”

He was quiet for a long time.

Then he said, ”The General asked if he could watch.”

I hadn’t known that.

”He’s outside,” Holt said. ”On the bench. He asked me this morning. Said he’d like to see what the Project should have done for us, the first time.” He paused. ”I told him he could sit on the bench. Not in the room.”

”Do you want him there?”

Holt considered.

”I want him to see,” he said. ”I don’t want him to see my face.”

”All right.”

”Toby can come in.”

”All right.”

”And the queens.”

”They’re already here,” I said.

They were. I could feel them, both of them, our queen below and the mountain queen through her, waiting.

Holt looked at the floor.

”Your father would’ve done this,” he said. ”If he’d known how. He’d have done it for all of us.”

”I know.”

”He’d have done it for Hal.”

I didn’t answer that.

Holt didn’t seem to need me to.

He put his stick against the wall and lay back on the bed.

”Go on, then,” he said. ”Before I change my mind.”

It took nearly an hour.

I don’t think I could have done it without the queens. Holt’s silver was too old and too broken and too overgrown for me to see the whole pattern. I could see where it was. I couldn’t see where it was meant to be.

They could.

Our queen showed me first. A shape like a tree, branching, the way all completed silver branched. Then the mountain queen, slower, older, laid something over it. A different shape. Rougher. Wider at the root.

This is the old pattern, she said. Before your Project learned to cut finer. The first humans they changed were given this shape. It is not wrong. It is only unfinished in a different way.

So I followed it.

Slowly. Clearing first. Gently undoing thirty years of scar tissue his body had built around the rough paths. Then opening them. Not the way I’d opened Juno’s, or Kellan’s, or Nell’s. Wider. Deeper. Following the old shape instead of the new one.

Toby sat at the head of the bed with his hand flat on Holt’s chest. Not holding his heart. Just there. The way Risa had sat with her hand on Toby’s chest, the night the Meridian came over, so he’d remember which heartbeat was his.

Holt didn’t say anything for the first half hour.

Then, halfway through, he said, very quietly, ”Oh.”

”Are you all right?”

”Keep going.”

”Holt.”

”I said keep going, Dask.” His voice cracked. ”I can hear something.”

I kept going.

”What can you hear?”

He didn’t answer.

His hands, lying at his sides on the bed, had turned palm upward. The fingers were curled slightly, the way they curled when he sat at the dawn count. Listening.

Holt’s hands had always listened. That was what Risa had said, the day she first met him. His hands were listening. He’d spent two years in the salvage battalion dragging the quiet ones’ ship out of the Orme, cleaning the bone with his hands, and his hands had learned to hear it.

They were hearing more now.

I opened the last path.

Silver settled around Holt’s eyes. Not rings, like the others. Something rougher. Like the edge of a coin that’s been worn by a lot of handling. The markings on his wrists and forearms branched wide and irregular, like roots, like the old shape the mountain queen had shown me.

I took my hands away.

Holt lay very still.

His eyes were closed. His hands were open.

”Holt?”

”I can hear the bone,” he said.

Toby went still.

”On the station,” Holt said. ”The spine. I used to hear it. On the salvage. Cleaning it. I could hear it humming. Under my hands. I thought I was going mad.” His voice was very quiet. ”I can hear it now. From here. It’s asleep. It sounds” He stopped. ”It sounds tired.”

”Yes,” I said.

”And the queen. Ours. And the old one. I can hear them.”

”Yes.”

”And.”

He stopped again.

His hands had turned. Slowly. Not toward the station, or the queen. Toward the window. Toward the house beyond it. The garden. The quiet room underneath.

”Her,” he said.

His voice broke on the word.

”The little one,” Holt said. ”Risa’s. I can hear her.”

He opened his eyes. They were wet.

”She said hello,” Holt said. ”To me. Just now. She said hello.”

I found the General on the bench outside.

He’d been sitting there the whole hour, Toby said. Hands on his knees. Not moving. Not looking at the door.

When I came out, he looked up.

”He’s all right,” I said.

The General let out a breath I didn’t think he knew he’d been holding.

”He said he could hear the spine,” I said. ”On the station. He used to hear it on the salvage, when he cleaned the bone. He thought he was going mad.”

The General looked at me for a long time.

”The first wave,” he said. ”Holt’s group. The cruder modification.”

”Yes.”

”I signed off on that.” The General’s voice was very quiet. ”Not the Accord. The modification. I was on the review board. Crane brought the first-wave protocol to us, and the board approved it, and I was on the board.”

I didn’t say anything.

”We were told it was the best they could do,” the General said. ”That the finer method wasn’t ready. That we needed soldiers in eighteen months, and this was what was available.” He looked at his hands. ”I didn’t read the risk assessment. I signed it.”

”He’s all right now,” I said.

”Yes,” the General said. ”Because you were here. Not because of anything I did.”

He stood up.

He looked at the door of the medical building for a long moment.

Then he said, ”Will you tell him something for me? When he’s ready?”

”What?”

”Tell him I’m sorry,” the General said. ”For the protocol. Not the Accord. That one I’ve apologised for in my own way. This one I never even knew I owed.”

He walked away down the path toward the guest house.

I watched him go.

Behind me, through the open door, I heard Holt’s voice. Rough and tired and unmistakably his.

”I heard that, Windsor.”

The General stopped on the path.

He didn’t turn round.

”Come back tomorrow,” Holt called, ”and say it to my face. Then we’ll see.”

The General stood very still.

Then he nodded once, without turning, and kept walking.

Twenty-seven completions.

Two said no. One said not yet.

I wrote the numbers in my notebook that night, sitting at the table in the house with the lamp turned low and Sera asleep in the bedroom and Luna across from me with her own notebook open.

Twenty-seven people in Scarecrow whose silver was whole now. Plus the six from before. Plus me.

Thirty-four.

Every one of them exactly what Article Fourteen was looking for.

Luna looked up from her notebook.

”You’re counting,” she said.

”Yes.”

”So’s she.” Luna nodded toward the floor. Toward the garden. Toward the quiet room. ”Risa says she’s been counting all day. Every new one.”

”I know.”

”How many did she get?”

I closed my eyes.

I didn’t follow the thread. I didn’t need to. I could feel the baby’s silver from here, faint and bright, under the garden. Settled now. Asleep, or nearly.

But before she’d settled, she’d turned once more. Slowly. Point to point. Around the whole city.

Juno. Kellan. Nell. Tessa. Corr. Ilse. All the others. Holt, last, in the medical building, his rough wide silver like roots.

Then the six. Luna across the table. Sera in the bedroom. Liam and Toby and Sigmund in their own houses.

Then me.

Then Risa.

Then herself.

”Thirty-six,” I said.

Luna went very still.

”Thirty-four,” she said. ”Plus Risa. Plus her.”

”Yes.”

”She counted herself.”

”Yes.”

Luna put down her pen.

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she said, very quietly, ”Thirty-six. All names.”

It was what Dot said at the end of the dawn count.

All names.

I didn’t know whether the baby had learned it from Dot or from Luna or from the queen or from nowhere at all.

I only knew that somewhere under the garden, in a room built to keep the world out, something small and whole and not yet born had counted every completed person in the city, and come to the end of the list, and added her own name.

The General came back the next morning, as Holt had told him to.

I wasn’t there. Toby was.

Toby told me afterward that the General stood in the doorway of Holt’s house, which he’d never entered, and waited until Holt looked up from the bench by the window. That Holt said nothing at all. That the General said it to his face, the way Holt had asked. I’m sorry for the protocol. I signed it without reading it. I’m sorry you lived thirty years with what I signed.

That Holt sat for a long time with his hands open on his knees.

Then said, ”Sit down, Alaric.”

And the General sat.

Toby said they didn’t talk about the protocol after that. Or the Accord. Or the war. They talked about Trevor. The Varran pass. The officer from headquarters with the polished boots.

Get some dirt on them first, sir. Then we’ll listen.

Toby said that when Holt told that story, the General laughed. Really laughed. The first time anyone in Scarecrow had heard him do it.

Toby said Holt laughed too.

Days 614–615. Completion.

Wren brought the list: twenty-nine names who asked, plus her own, marked ”not yet.” She likes what she is. She wants to choose it on a day nothing is happening. The list keeps her answer.

I told every one of them about Article Fourteen before I started: through treatment. Two took their names off. One wants to stop being something someone wants. One has a sister in the domes. I wrote ”no” beside both. Juno: ”I’d rather be found whole than hidden broken.”

Juno first. Her silver always pointed north. Now it points everywhere: every queen, every brood, every person with silver, where they are and which way they face. She says the baby is like a lamp in a window. Then Corr, Ilse, Kellan, Tessa, Nell and the rest. Each became more of what they already were. Kellan’s fire steadied. Tessa feels the grain of everything. Nell remembers every name she has ever written.

Risa is thirty-six weeks by size. Edda says any day now; the baby isn’t interested in calendars. The baby felt every new completion through the gap in the quiet room. She’s counting them.

Juno came to the courts. She could feel every one of the young leaning a little toward Risa’s bench. The queen says the young always know where the youngest is. Pebble lost the kicking game and fell over.

Holt last. The old first-wave pattern, cut with an axe instead of a knife. The queens showed me the old shape. It took an hour. Toby kept his hand on Holt’s chest. His silver settled like roots. He can hear the bone on the station now. He heard it on the salvage and thought he was going mad. It sounds tired. Then he heard the baby. ”She said hello. To me. Just now.”

The General sat outside the whole hour. He was on the review board that approved the first-wave protocol and didn’t read the risk assessment. He asked me to tell Holt he was sorry. Holt heard through the door and told him to come back tomorrow and say it to his face. He did. Holt said, ”Sit down, Alaric.” They talked about Father. The General laughed.

Twenty-seven completions. Thirty-four whole in Scarecrow, counting the six and me. Every one of them what Article Fourteen is looking for.

The baby counted thirty-six. Risa, and herself.

Luna said: all names.

The General leaves tomorrow.