Scarecrow

Toby wanted a room with no windows.

”Not the quiet room,” he said. ”That’s Dory’s. And it’s the wrong shape. It swallows everything. I need something that swallows everything except the voice.” He was sitting on our porch steps with the fiddle across his knees, the morning after the dawn count, still pale from the flight. ”I need to hear it on its own. Properly. Not through a fiddle in a valley with a thousand Teeming in front of me.”

”You heard it properly in the valley,” Sera said. ”You held it for forty minutes.”

”I matched it for forty minutes,” said Toby. ”That’s not the same as knowing it. I could hold it because I was standing in it. I don’t know what it looks like from the outside. I don’t know where it starts or how it’s built or what happens to it when it goes round the world.” He turned the fiddle over. ”If we’re going to stop it everywhere, and not just where I’m standing, I need to know it the way Lucas knows iron.”

So I built him a room.

It was under the medical building, where the old storage cellar had been. I dug it out further, down into the red glass, until it was twenty feet below the street, and then I lined it the way the queens had lined the quiet room. Every wall at an angle. Every plane turned a little away from every other.

But not all of them.

On the south side, the side that faced the way the station came over, I left one wall flat. Polished smooth. A long tall plane of red glass, angled up toward the sky like a dish, so that anything coming down from orbit would strike it and be thrown straight down into the room.

Everything else slid off.

The voice wouldn’t.

”This unit has questions,” said Dot, when she saw it.

”So do I,” said Toby. ”Come down. You can help me answer them.”

They were down there for three days.

Toby, and Dot, and every scrap of listening gear Dot could pull out of the third wave’s salvage. Gareth ran a cable down the stairs from the main power. Priya brought food, and left it outside the door, and came back an hour later to find it untouched, and brought more.

I went down on the first afternoon, when the station came over.

The room was dark except for Dot’s lamps. Toby sat cross-legged on the floor in the middle of it, facing the flat south wall, with his eyes closed and his hands on his knees. Dot was beside him with every instrument she had pointed at the wall.

I felt the voice come over.

Even in the room it was huge. The flat wall caught it out of the sky and threw it down on top of us. Move. North. Together. Grinding and endless and cold. I’d felt it in the valley, but I’d been busy then. Busy shaping stone, busy reaching for the old queen, busy being afraid.

Now there was nothing to do but listen.

It was horrible.

Toby didn’t flinch.

He sat there with his eyes closed and his face completely still and let it fall on him, the way you’d stand in a cold river to learn which way the current went. And every so often his lips moved, and Dot’s lamps flickered, and she made a small mark on something.

When the station had passed over and the voice had gone, Toby opened his eyes.

”It’s got four parts,” he said.

”Four?”

”The carrier. That’s the drone at the bottom, the one I cancelled. Then the words. Move. North. Together. Those ride on the carrier. Then there’s a third thing, very high, very fast. Like a click.” He tapped his fingers on his knee, quick and even. ”Dot thinks it’s timing. Keeping everything in step. So all the broods move at once.”

”And the fourth?”

Toby was quiet for a moment.

”The fourth’s a voice,” he said. ”A real one. Underneath everything. Very faint. You can only hear it when everything else is at the bottom of its wave.” He swallowed. ”It’s the spine-queen.”

I went cold.

”She’s not saying anything,” Toby said quickly. ”Not the words. They’re not hers. Someone’s pushing them through her. Like Lucas said. A voice through a speaking-tube.” He looked at the flat wall. ”But the tube’s alive. And it’s her breath they’re using. And underneath, where they can’t quite cover it” He stopped.

”What, Toby?”

”She’s humming,” Toby said. ”Under it. Very quietly. The same few notes, over and over. The whole time.” He looked up at me. ”I think she’s trying to sing over it. I think she’s been trying the whole time, and nobody could hear her.”

Dot wrote down the notes.

She didn’t have a way to write music. Nobody in Scarecrow did, except Toby, who kept it in his head. So she wrote them as numbers, the way she wrote everything. Frequencies. Durations. A long string of figures on a sheet of the third wave’s survey paper.

Toby looked at it for a long time.

Then he picked up the fiddle and played it.

It was five notes. Low, then lower, then a step up, then two steps down. Then a pause. Then again. Not a tune exactly. More like the shape of a word you say over and over to yourself when you’re frightened and alone.

I knew it.

Not from the station. From the courts. From the lower court in the mornings, where the young tumbled over each other and the attendants kept them in line and the queen hummed under everything, low and constant, so that all the young always knew where she was.

”That’s the hollow-song,” I said.

Toby stopped.

”The what?”

”The queens sing it. To their broods. All the time. Under everything.” I’d heard our queen do it every day for two years. I’d stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat. ”It means here. I’m here. It’s how the young find her in the dark.”

Toby looked at the paper.

”She’s singing to her brood,” he said slowly.

”She hasn’t got a brood. She’s been in the station for” I didn’t finish.

”Then who’s she singing to?”

Nobody answered.

Then, very softly, from the top of the stairs, where Risa had come to the door with Dory in the sling, Risa said:

”Anyone who can hear.”

That was the second day.

On the third day, Toby came up out of the room and found me in the forge.

”I can do it,” he said. ”I think. I know the carrier now. Not just where I’m standing. All of it. How it’s built. Where it’s weakest. What it does when the station’s coming over the horizon and when it’s directly above.” His eyes were very bright. ”I can make the counter-note. Not just play it. Make it. Shape it. Write it down so someone else could make it too.”

”On a fiddle?”

”No,” Toby said. ”In something that’ll hold it. Something that’ll keep singing it after I’ve put the bow down.” He looked at me. ”In stone.”

I’d been thinking the same thing since the flight home. Since the bowl on the ridge, and the old queen’s brood gathered in front of it, and nobody there to play.

”How big?” I said.

Toby thought about it.

”Small,” he said. ”As small as it can be and still hold the note. Something a brood can carry. Something they can take with them when they move.” He paused. ”Something they can keep in the hollow.”

It took us a week to make the first one.

Not because it was hard to make stone. I could make stone in my sleep. Because it was hard to make stone that sang.

Every stone rings, if you strike it right. Every stone has a note. But the note depends on everything: the size, the shape, the grain, what it’s made of, how it’s cut, where the faults are. Change any one of those, and the note changes. And Toby’s counter-note wasn’t one note. It was the carrier turned upside down, half a wave out, and it changed as the station moved. Higher when the station was coming up over the horizon. Lower when it was overhead. Higher again as it went away.

A stone that only rang one note would cancel the voice for a minute, maybe two, and then fall out of step.

We needed a stone that could follow.

”Like the walls in the quiet room,” I said, on the fourth night, sitting on the forge floor surrounded by failed stones. There were thirty-one of them. Liam had started naming them. ”Every face at a different angle. Each one catching sound a little differently.”

Toby looked up.

”Faces,” he said.

”What?”

”Facets. Not one note. Lots of faces, each with its own note. And as the voice changes, a different face catches it and rings.” He was already reaching for a lump of red glass. ”Like a bell with a hundred mouths.”

I made it.

It was the size of a hen’s egg. The same size, I realised afterward, as the nursery stone Pebble had brought to the porch. Faceted all over, every face a little different from every other, the way the queens had grown the quiet room. Two hundred and twelve faces. Each one tuned.

Toby tuned them.

He sat with the stone in his palm and the fiddle under his chin, and he played each face’s note, one at a time, and I shaved each face a hair’s breadth at a time until it rang back true. It took all night.

At dawn, the station came over.

We were in the listening room, the two of us, with Dot. Toby put the stone on the floor in front of the flat south wall.

The voice came down.

Move. North. Together.

And the stone sang.

It wasn’t loud.

That was what surprised me. In the valley, with the bowl, Toby’s note had been enormous. It had filled the sky. This was barely louder than a breath. A faint, high, shimmering hum, so quiet you could only just hear it if you held your breath.

But it was right.

As the voice came down, the stone caught it. One face. Then another. Then another, as the station moved and the carrier shifted. Every face ringing the exact opposite of what was coming down, at the exact moment it came down, in a long continuous shimmer that followed the voice across the sky like a shadow.

And in a small circle around the stone, about the size of the room, the voice went flat.

Not gone. You could still hear it, high above, pushing. But it couldn’t get in. It slid off the circle the way the world slid off the quiet room. The words fell off it. Move and north and together, falling away, harmless as dust.

Toby sat on the floor and stared at it.

”It’s working,” he said.

”It’s working.”

”It’s small,” Toby said. ”It’s so small. And it’s working.” He laughed. It came out shaky. ”Lucas, a brood could carry that. One of the young could carry that in its mouth.”

Dot’s lamps had gone very bright.

”This unit measures a circle of quiet,” she said, ”eleven meters across.”

”Eleven,” said Toby. ”That’s not enough. A hollow’s bigger than that. A brood on the move spreads out over miles.”

”Then they carry more than one,” I said.

Toby looked at me.

”How many?”

I thought about the old queen’s brood, spread out across the valley in a long dark line from horizon to horizon.

”A lot,” I said.

It was Dory who solved that.

Not on purpose. She was three weeks old and she didn’t know what we were making. But Risa brought her to the forge on the fifth evening, because Dory had been checking on me every four minutes all day and wouldn’t settle, and Risa said she might as well check on me in person.

The first stone was on the bench. Toby had been playing it all afternoon, testing it, holding it up to the light.

Dory saw it.

I don’t know what she saw. A baby that age can’t see much. A blur of light and shape. But her silver reached out, the way it reached for everything, and touched the stone.

And the stone rang.

Just faintly. The high shimmer. As if she’d struck it.

Dory went very still.

Then her silver came back, and it had something in it. A shape. Something she’d learned from Pebble, and from the young on the porch, and from Dot reading her the queen’s teaching. The shape for something small and round and smooth that the young carried to a new hatchling, so it would have something from the brood when it woke.

Nursery stone, she said.

Risa looked at me.

”She thinks it’s a nursery stone,” she said.

I looked at the stone on the bench. The size of a hen’s egg. Smooth. Round. The same as the one Pebble had brought.

”It’s not,” I said.

”Isn’t it?” said Risa.

I took it to the queen.

She was still at the garden wall. She hadn’t gone back down since Dory was born. Her head was on the stones, her plates rising and falling, and when I came out with the stone in my hand, she lifted her head and looked at it.

What is that? she said.

I told her.

The voice, and the four parts of it, and the carrier, and the counter-note. The listening room, and the two hundred and twelve faces, and the circle of quiet eleven meters across. The spine-queen, humming the hollow-song under the voice, to anyone who could hear.

And what Dory had called it.

The queen was quiet for a long time.

Then she said, Bring it closer.

I held it up. She lowered her great head until the stone was nearly touching her plates, and I felt her silver reach out and touch it, the way Dory’s had.

It rang.

Louder, for her. Much louder. A clear bright shimmer that I felt in my teeth.

Oh, said the queen.

That was all. Just oh. The way Sera had said it the first time she held Dory.

The young carry nursery stones from their own hollow, the queen said slowly, to a new hatchling. So it will have something of the brood, when it wakes. Something to hold. Something that says, you are not alone, you belong to us. She looked at the stone. And this says the same thing. To a brood that cannot hear its queen. It says: here is quiet. Here you can hear. You are not alone.

So it is a nursery stone.

It is a quiet stone, said the queen. But the young will carry it the same way. Her plates shifted. Make more. As many as you can. The young will carry them. From our hollow to the next. From the next to the next. The way they carried the news of the Accord. Brood to brood. Queen to queen.

All the way south?

All the way to wherever the voice is, said the queen.

So we made more.

Not just me and Toby. Everyone.

I could make the stones. I could make a hundred in an hour, faceted and rough, the right size, the right shape. But I couldn’t tune them. Only Toby could hear the counter-note well enough to know when each face was true.

Until Holt said he could hear it too.

He came to the forge on the sixth day and picked up a stone and held it in his open palm, the way he held his hands at the dawn count. And after a minute he said, ”That one’s flat. The face by your thumb.”

Toby stared at him.

”How do you know that?”

”I can hear it,” said Holt. ”Since Dask finished me. I can hear the bone on the station. I can hear the queen at the wall. I can hear that.” He handed the stone back. ”It’s flat.”

It was.

After that, Holt tuned stones too. Slower than Toby. But steadily, all day, sitting at the forge bench with his stick across his knees and a stone in each hand.

Then Juno. Then Kellan, whose fire made the forge hot enough to anneal the glass so it held its tune. Then Tessa, who could feel the grain of things, and could tell before I’d cut a single face whether a stone would ring true or crack. Then Nell, who kept the count.

By the end of the week there were forty of us in the forge, and the courts, and the listening room, working in shifts.

And the young carried the stones.

Pebble was first.

Of course he was.

He came up the agreed path in the morning, the way he always did, to see Risa and Dory on the porch. But this time an attendant came with him, and a stone. A quiet stone, faceted and red, tuned by Toby himself.

The attendant put the stone on the porch boards.

Pebble looked at it.

Then he looked at Dory, in Risa’s arms, and pulsed something at her.

Dory pulsed back.

”He asks if this is the one she made,” Dot said, from the bottom of the steps.

”She didn’t make it,” Risa said. ”Lucas and Toby made it.”

”She has told him,” said Dot, ”that she named it. And that naming is a kind of making.”

Pebble seemed to accept this.

He picked up the stone in his forelimb, carefully, the way he’d carried the nursery stone, and turned, and went back down the steps to the attendant. And the attendant took him down the agreed path to the courts, and from the courts down the passage to the deep, and from the deep along the long tunnels toward the mountain.

The first quiet stone, carried by the first of the young, from our hollow to the next.

By nightfall the mountain had it.

By the next night, Lantern.

It took eleven days to reach the old queen.

Eleven days, from hollow to hollow, young to young, across a thousand miles of forest and river and red stone. Our queen followed it the whole way, through the mountain queen, through Lantern, through every brood that passed it on. And every night when I sat at the wall she told me where it was.

The Hollow has it. They have kept one, and passed nine on.

First Garden. They have kept three.

It has crossed the river.

And every brood that kept a stone, she said, sang back.

Not to us. Not to the queens. To the station. When the voice came over, they gathered round their stones, and the quiet came up around them, eleven meters, twenty, a hundred, as more stones were laid together. And in the quiet, for the first time, they could hear their own queens over the noise.

And their queens sang the hollow-song.

Here. I’m here.

The same five notes the spine-queen had been singing, alone, under the voice, for anyone who could hear.

On Day 648, the stones reached the old queen.

Not one stone. Forty. The broods between had kept some, and passed on more, and by the time the young of the last brood before the dry valleys carried them over the edge of the red scrub, there were forty quiet stones in a long line of young, each one carrying one in its mouth like a nursery stone.

The old queen’s brood was waiting in front of the bowl.

I’d left it on the ridge, eleven days before. The great curved shell of red stone, three hundred feet across, opening south. The brood had gathered in front of it every time the station came over, the way the old queen had promised. They’d waited for the note.

Nobody had played.

They’d been driven every time. Ten miles north, twenty, before the station passed. And every time it passed, they’d turned round and walked back to the bowl, and waited again.

Now the young came over the ridge with forty stones.

And the old queen’s attendants took them, one by one, and laid them in the bowl.

At the focus. Where Toby had stood.

The station came over at noon.

I was at the wall with our queen, with my hand on her head, following it through her. Through the mountain, through Lantern, through every brood between, all the way to the dry valleys.

I felt the voice come down.

Move. North. Together.

I felt the forty stones catch it.

And I felt the bowl take their small shimmer, forty tiny voices each eleven meters wide, and fold it, and throw it. The way it had thrown Toby’s note. Out across the valley. Over the old queen and her whole brood, from horizon to horizon.

The voice went flat.

The whole valley.

The words fell off it, the way they’d fallen when Toby played. Move and north and together, dropping away into the red dust, harmless.

And the old queen’s brood stood in the quiet.

They didn’t move. Not north. Not anywhere. They stood still in front of the bowl with the station passing over them and the voice pressing down from the sky, and for the first time in two weeks it couldn’t touch them.

The old queen lifted her great cracked head.

And she sang.

The hollow-song. Five notes. Low, and lower, and a step up, and two steps down.

Here. I’m here.

And her brood, all across the valley, answered her.

That should have been the end of it.

It wasn’t.

Two days later, Lantern’s brood found something in the forest.

They’d been carrying stones for a week by then. They’d kept six for themselves. And on the evening of Day 650, when the station had passed over and the voice had gone, one of Lantern’s foragers came back from the south edge of the forest and told her queen what it had seen.

A thing on legs.

Tall. Grey. Standing in a clearing where nothing grew. Three legs, like a tripod, and on top of it a box of something the forager couldn’t name, the same colour as the grey hull Dot had seen at the station.

And when the station came over, the box sang.

The voice. The same one. Not from the sky. From the box. Close. Loud. Pressing down on everything for half a mile around, so that even with the stones in her hollow, Lantern’s young had felt it.

Juno felt it too, when Lantern told our queen. She turned her head toward the south-east and went white.

”I know that shape,” she said. She swallowed. ”Lucas, you found one. On a tripod. Above the approach to a camp. Powered by an ordinary battery. You disconnected it.”

I remembered.

A grey device on a tripod, made of a material I couldn’t change, humming over a valley full of terrified people. I’d thought it was the only one.

It wasn’t.

”It is a relay,” Dot said. ”A repeater. The station’s voice cannot reach everywhere with the same strength. These boost it. Wherever the voice is weak, there will be one.” Her lamps flickered. ”This unit estimates there could be many.”

Lantern asks, said our queen, what she should do.

Everyone looked at me.

I opened my mouth.

And our queen said, before I could speak, She is not asking you, Lucas. She is asking her brood. She is telling us what she has decided.

What has she decided?

The queen was quiet for a moment, listening.

Then she said, She has sent her eldest attendants. With stones. To stand round the thing on legs, in a ring, so that its voice cannot reach her young. A pause. And her soldiers with them.

Her soldiers?

The Teeming were made for war, said the queen. Long ago. By those who made the spine. You know this. Her voice was very calm. We have not used what we are for a very long time. We have hidden. We have fled. We have let the grey things take our young and press them into the shapes they wanted.

And now?

Now Lantern has a stone, said the queen, and she can hear herself think.

The forager came back the next morning.

The thing on legs was gone.

Not taken away. Not switched off. Gone. Lantern’s soldiers had walked into the clearing inside a ring of quiet stones, where its voice couldn’t touch them, and torn it down, and broken the box open, and carried the pieces back to their queen. Dot asked for them, through our queen, and Lantern sent them, young to young, brood to brood. They reached Scarecrow nine days later.

Grey. Sorn material. A battery inside, of human make, with a Project stamp.

And a destination code on the casing.

The same as the one on Dane’s route sheets.

Days 638–660. Quiet stones.

Toby needed to hear the voice from outside. I dug him a listening room under the medical building: every wall angled away except one flat polished face to the south, to catch whatever came down from orbit. Toby and Dot, three days.

The voice has four parts. The carrier. The words riding on it. A fast high click that keeps every brood in step. And underneath, very faint, the spine-queen, humming five notes over and over: low, lower, a step up, two steps down. The hollow-song. It means ”here, I’m here.” She has no brood. Risa: she’s singing to anyone who can hear.

Toby wanted the counter-note in stone, so it keeps singing after the bow is down. One note falls out of step as the station moves. So: facets, a bell with a hundred mouths. Two hundred and twelve faces, each tuned by Toby, each shaved by me. It took a week and thirty-one failures; Liam named them all. It’s the size of a hen’s egg. At dawn it caught the voice and the words fell off. A circle of quiet eleven meters across.

Dory touched it and it rang. She called it a nursery stone. The queen: it says the same thing, here is quiet, you are not alone. Make as many as you can, and the young will carry them brood to brood.

Holt can hear the tuning. (”That one’s flat.”) Then Juno, Kellan for annealing, Tessa for grain, Nell for the count. Forty of us in shifts.

Pebble carried the first one. Dory told him she named it, and naming is a kind of making.

Eleven days to the old queen. Every brood that kept a stone could hear its queen over the noise, and every queen sang the hollow-song back up at the station.

Day 648: forty stones laid at the focus of the bowl on the ridge. The bowl threw their quiet across the whole valley. The brood stood still under the voice for the first time. The old queen sang. Her brood answered.

Day 650: Lantern’s forager found a grey thing on a tripod in a clearing, singing the voice close and loud. A relay, like the one I disconnected above the approach that time. Dot thinks there could be many.

I opened my mouth to say what to do. The queen: Lantern isn’t asking you. She has decided. A ring of stones and her soldiers. ”The Teeming were made for war. Now Lantern has a stone, and she can hear herself think.”

They tore it down. The pieces reached us nine days later: Sorn material, a battery with a Project stamp, and on the casing the same destination code as Dane’s route sheets.

The first thing we have made together that was meant for the war. And they used it before we could tell them how.