Scarecrow

I told them on Day 692.

All of them. In the square, at noon, with Holt’s map on its frame beside Toby’s bench and the young in the shadow of the meeting passage and the queen at the garden wall at the far end. The whole of Scarecrow, standing on the paving in the sun.

And the mirror at its window, across the street, watching.

I’d thought about not telling them. For about an hour. On the garden steps, the night after the terms were signed, with Luna’s copy in my hands and the word Witnessed crooked under Crane’s name.

I’d thought: they don’t need to know about the feed. About Mother and the spoon and the calendar with the red circle. They don’t need to know that the stabilizer for thirty-one families on Earth depends on whether I keep making tungsten. They don’t need to carry that.

Then I’d thought about the dome.

About nobody ever telling us anything. About the first wave’s numbers hidden in a locked file. About Crane at the Friday assembly saying acceptable attrition to a room full of children whose friends were dead. About Holt in the square, before they landed, saying every time, it was worse when we found out.

And I’d thought about Mother’s hands going still on the wall. For me. So I’d know.

So I told them.

I didn’t make a speech. I’m not good at speeches. I stood on Toby’s bench, because it was the only way the back of the square could see me, and I told them what had happened, in order, the way Luna writes things down.

The shuttle. The Overseer. The twelve soldiers with discs behind their ears, and Orrin Tal, who used to sing when he fixed water tanks. Item one, item two, item three.

Crane’s briefing. The Sorn war across a hundred worlds. The Teeming as weapons. Humans as soldiers. The surrender that was really a contract.

Some people gasped at that. Some people didn’t. Holt said afterward that the ones who didn’t gasp were the ones who’d been in the first wave, and had always half-known.

Then the feed.

I told them about the penthouse. The two beds. Genny’s fist under her chin, Garnet’s foot off the edge. Mother in the chair. The dish and the spoon. The calendar.

The next dose is in nine days.

I told them I could have done something. I told them what. I told them I hadn’t, and why.

Never choose for them. Not without asking.

Then the terms. All five, and the amendments. Term two suspended. Material only. The Overseer staying, for a period undetermined, under conditions. Not the courts. Not the deep. Not any house uninvited. Not the garden stairs.

Then Substrate S-1. The grey. Not available.

Then I stopped.

I stood on Toby’s bench in the noon sun with the whole city looking at me, and I didn’t know how to finish.

So I said the only true thing I had left.

”That’s everything,” I said. ”I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know how long it stays. I don’t know what it does when we write not available on the first of the month.” I looked across the square, at the mirror in the guest house window. ”But you know everything I know now. Nobody here has to pretend they don’t.”

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Odile Marr, from Port Ash, who’d been in Scarecrow for nineteen days, put her hand up. Like a child in a schoolroom.

”Can I say something?”

”Yes.”

She didn’t come forward. She stood where she was, near the back, with her grey hair pulled back and her arms folded.

”Two years we were in Port Ash,” she said. ”Sixty of us. No radio. No kit. We heard the shuttles go over. We saw the station at night. And every night, someone would say, they must know we’re here. And someone else would say, then why don’t they come.” She looked round the square. ”And we never knew. Not once. We never knew if they’d forgotten us or left us or were watching us die on purpose.” Her voice was very steady. ”I’d rather know. Whatever it is. I’d rather stand in a square and be told the truth by a boy on a bench than sit in the dark for two years wondering.”

She unfolded her arms.

”So thank you,” she said. ”That’s all.”

Then Kemi Ade.

Then Bryn Tolley. Then Nell, with her squad’s list. Then Corr, and Ilse, and Tessa. Then people I didn’t know very well. Third wave. Sinkhole. Sigmund’s forty.

They didn’t make speeches either. Most of them said one thing. I’d rather know.Thank you for telling us.What can we do?

Nessa said, very loudly, from the front, ”Does it like oranges?”

Everyone looked at her.

”The mirror,” Nessa said. ”Does it eat? Because if it’s staying, someone has to feed it, and I’m not feeding it if it doesn’t say thank you.”

Somebody laughed. Then somebody else. Then the whole square, all at once, the way it had laughed in the kitchen the morning Dov asked Priya, a great loud release of breath that went up off the paving and into the noon sky.

Across the street, at the guest house window, the mirror didn’t move.

But I thought, just for a moment, that it turned slightly. Toward the sound.

Holt spoke last.

He didn’t stand on the bench. He stood beside it, with his stick, and his voice was quiet, and the square went quiet to hear it.

”In the first wave,” he said, ”we had a rule. When things went wrong, we didn’t send one person to the officers to find out what was happening. We sent everybody. All thirty-four. We’d stand outside the command tent and wait until someone came out and told us, all at once, together.” He looked round. ”Because if you send one person, that person has to carry it back alone. And they always carry it back wrong. Not because they’re lying. Because they’re frightened, and they’ve been carrying it by themselves.”

He looked up at me on the bench.

”Dask’s been carrying this by himself for four days,” he said. ”And Luna. And the four of them in that house. Now we’re all carrying it.” He turned back to the square. ”So here’s what I think we do. Nobody pretends. If that thing in the window asks you something, you tell it the truth or you tell it you won’t answer. Either one. But you don’t pretend. And if it frightens you, you come and tell someone. Me, or Wren, or Dask, or whoever’s nearest.” His mouth twitched. ”Nobody in this city carries anything alone. Not any more. That’s the rule.”

Nobody said anything.

Then, from the shadow of the meeting passage, Pebble hummed.

Not the content hum. The hollow-song. Five notes.

Here. I’m here.

And the young behind him took it up, all of them, one after another, in the shadow of the passage. And then the children at the front of the square, who’d learned it on the refuge routes. Ada Fen. Nessa. And then the grown-ups, some of them, the ones who’d sat on the porch steps in the evenings and heard Dory hum it with Toby’s fiddle.

The whole square.

Here. I’m here.

The queen at the garden wall lifted her head.

And across the street, at the guest house window, the mirror stood very still and listened to a whole city, human and brood, sing the song a captive queen had been humming under the voice for eight years, to anyone who could hear.

Dot told the queens.

She did it that evening, at the garden wall, with her front sensor resting on the stones beside our queen’s great head. Everything I’d said in the square, in the brood-speech, word by word. Our queen passed it to the mountain. The mountain passed it to the ring.

Fourteen queens heard it by midnight.

And the mountain queen sent back a single answer, through our queen, through the stones, through Dot.

Good, she said. Now no one in the ring is pretending either.

Nessa fed it.

Nobody asked her to. Nobody would have dared. But on the morning of Day 693, she came out of the kitchen with a loaf of Priya’s bread wrapped in a cloth and walked straight across the street to the guest house, past the ring of twelve soldiers, who didn’t move, and up to the door.

Half the city watched from their windows. Priya watched from the kitchen with both hands over her mouth. Dov was halfway across the street after her before Priya grabbed his sleeve.

Nessa knocked.

The door opened.

The mirror filled it. Seven feet of it. Nessa, who was eleven and came up to roughly the height of its lowest joint, tipped her head all the way back and looked up into it, and I saw her own face reflected there, tiny and stubborn and upside down.

She held up the bread.

”This is for you,” she said. ”It’s Priya’s. It’s the best bread on Avalon. If you don’t eat bread, you can give it to Mr. Crane, because he looks like he hasn’t eaten in a week.”

The mirror looked down at her.

Then, very slowly, its arm came up. Too long. Bending wrong. And it took the bread from her hands, the cloth and all, as carefully as Pebble had carried the nursery stone.

Nessa didn’t move.

”You’re supposed to say thank you,” she said.

There was a long pause.

Then the mirror spoke. Not through the band. Its own voice. None of us had heard it before. It sounded like sand being poured slowly onto glass. Very quietly.

Thank you.

Nessa nodded, satisfied.

Then she said, ”Do you know why it rises?”

Why what rises?

”Bread. Priya says nobody knows why. She says it just does, if you’re patient.”

The mirror tilted, very slightly.

There is a small living thing in the dough, it said. It eats the sugar and breathes out gas, and the gas is caught, and the dough rises. A pause. It is a very old fold. Older than your species. Older than mine.

Nessa considered this.

”That’s interesting,” she said. ”I’ll tell Priya.” And she turned round and walked back across the street, past the soldiers, and into the kitchen, where Priya grabbed her and held her so hard she squeaked.

The door of the guest house stayed open for a long time.

Then it closed.

Crane had bread for breakfast. Wren saw him through the window. He ate all of it.

The Overseer asked to see the forge on Day 694.

Asked. Through Crane, at the dawn count. The Overseer requests an invitation to observe the processing of material for the first delivery.

Not the courts. Not the deep. Not the garden stairs. The forge. Which was mine, which was public, which anyone in Scarecrow could walk into at any hour of the day.

”It’s following the terms,” Luna said.

”It’s testing them,” said Sera.

”It’s both,” said Holt. ”Invite it. Let it watch. Watch it watching.”

So I invited it.

It came at midmorning.

Alone. The twelve soldiers stayed round the guest house. Crane stayed on his bench. The Overseer walked down the street by itself, with the whole city watching from doorways and windows and the porch of the kitchen, and stooped through the forge door, and scraped its mirror on the lintel.

Gareth had wanted to raise the lintel. I’d told him not to.

It straightened up inside. The forge was hot. Kellan was at the far furnace, annealing a rack of quiet stones, and his fire went very still and very small when the mirror came in, and stayed that way. Tessa was at the bench. Holt was in the corner on a stool, with his stick across his knees.

I was at the main anvil, with a block of red glass the size of a cart in front of me.

The first delivery was due in seven days. Tungsten, forty tonnes. Iridium, eight. Cobalt, rhodium, a list of others. I’d been working on it for two days. It wasn’t hard. It was just a great deal of glass.

The Overseer stopped six feet from the anvil.

Its mirror was turned toward the block.

I could see the block in it. And my hands on top of the block. And my face, behind my hands, curved and small.

The Overseer observes, said a voice.

Not Crane’s. Not through the band.

From the mirror.

Everyone in the forge went still.

Nessa had heard it the day before. Two words at a door, and a sentence about bread. I hadn’t. It had used Crane for everything else. Every word on the apron, every word in the map room.

Not here.

The voice came from the mirror itself. From the whole surface of it. Very quiet. Not flat and even like the band. Something else. Something with a texture to it, like sand being poured slowly onto glass. Every word clear. Every word slightly wrong, the way a word is wrong when it’s been learned from a book and never spoken.

Continue, it said.

I looked at it.

Then I put my hands on the block.

I’d done it a thousand times.

Silicon to iron, the first time, on the second day on Avalon, with Dot watching and Father’s voice in my head. Lead into gold is easy. Since then, everything. Copper, carbon, aluminium. Tungsten for the forge. Gold, once, for Garnet, which I’d never been able to send.

It isn’t magic. It isn’t even hard, once you can see it. You look at the atom. You see the nucleus, the protons and neutrons packed in their shells. You see what it is, and you see what you want it to be, and you move what needs to be moved. Add here. Take away there. Each one a tiny, careful act of persuasion.

Silicon has fourteen protons. Tungsten has seventy-four.

It’s a long way.

So I did what I always did. I went step by step. Silicon to iron, twenty-six. Iron to zirconium, forty. Zirconium to something in the middle. Up, and up, and up. Building it a layer at a time, the way you’d climb a ladder.

The block began to darken under my hands.

Grey. Then a deeper grey. Then the dense, dull, heavy grey of tungsten, spreading through the red glass like ink through water.

I took my hands away.

The Overseer hadn’t moved.

Why, it said, do you climb?

I didn’t understand at first.

”What?”

You build upward, said the mirror. Fourteen to twenty-six. Twenty-six to forty. Forty to fifty-six. Each step complete before the next. A pause. Each step costs. The rearrangement of the nucleus releases or absorbs. At each step you correct for it. You absorb the heat. You hold the binding. You spend yourself, a little, each time.

Kellan’s fire, at the far furnace, flickered.

Why, said the Overseer, do you not fold?

I stared at it.

”Fold?”

The nucleus is not a ladder, said the Overseer. It is a shape. Every element is a shape. Silicon is one fold of the shape. Tungsten is another. You do not need to climb from one to the other. You need only refold. Its arm came up, slowly, too long, bending wrong. The seam at the end of it didn’t open. It only turned, as if it were turning something invisible between two fingers. One movement. No steps. No cost.

Nobody in the forge said anything.

The planetary queens fold, said the Overseer. They have always folded. It is why they were made. It is why they are worth keeping. Its mirror turned toward me. The asset climbs. As the asset’s father climbed.

My hands went cold on the anvil.

”What do you know about my father?”

The asset’s father kept notebooks, said the Overseer. Seven. Hand-written. In a code of his own devising, which was not difficult. A pause. They were recovered from the asset’s sister eleven months ago. They have been read.

Genny.

I’ve read all of Father’s notebooks, she’d said, the last time I spoke to her. I have questions.

Notebook four, said the Overseer, page two hundred and twelve. The asset’s father asks the same question the asset is not asking. ”Why must I climb? There must be a shorter way.” He underlines it twice. The mirror turned, very slightly. He did not find it. He was close.

I didn’t breathe.

The asset is closer, said the Overseer.

It left a few minutes after that.

It didn’t say anything else. It stood and looked at the block of tungsten for a while, and at my hands, and at Kellan’s quiet stones on their rack. Then it turned and stooped through the door and scraped its mirror on the lintel and walked back up the street to the guest house.

Nobody in the forge moved until it was gone.

Then Holt said, very quietly, from his stool in the corner, ”Well.”

Kellan’s fire came back up. Slowly. He was shaking.

Tessa put down the stone she’d been holding. She’d been holding it so tightly there were marks in her palm.

”It knows more than you,” she said. To me. Not unkindly. Just true.

”Yes,” I said.

”About your own thing. About the thing only you can do.”

”Yes.”

”And it told you.” Tessa looked at the door. ”Why would it tell you?”

I didn’t answer.

But Holt did.

”Because it wants him to learn,” he said. ”And it wants him to know it’s the one teaching.” He picked up his stick. ”That’s not a gift, Dask. That’s a hook.”

I tried it that night.

I shouldn’t have. I knew I shouldn’t. Holt had said hook, and Holt was right, and I’d gone home and sat on the garden steps for three hours telling myself not to.

Then I went to the forge alone and put my hands on a block of glass and looked at an atom of silicon.

It is a shape.

I’d always seen it as a nucleus. Protons, neutrons, packed tight, held by forces I’d learned the names of in the dome. I’d always seen it as things. Little hard things you could add and take away.

I tried to see it as a shape.

It took a long time. An hour. More. I sat in the dark forge with my hands on the glass and looked and looked, the way I’d looked at the stars the first night on Avalon, until something shifted.

Not the atom. Me.

I saw the fold.

Not the nucleus. The thing underneath it. The shape the nucleus was made of. Like seeing a knot, and then suddenly seeing the rope. It was there. It had always been there. Every element I’d ever made, every atom I’d ever moved, had been a fold of the same rope, and I’d spent two years cutting the rope into pieces and stitching them back together, one step at a time, when all I’d ever needed to do was—

I stopped.

I took my hands off the glass.

I sat in the dark forge, breathing hard.

I hadn’t done it. I’d only seen it. But I knew, the way you know you’re about to fall, that if I put my hands back on the glass and tried, I could.

The asset is closer.

I didn’t put my hands back.

I got up and went home and went down to the quiet room, and sat on the floor beside Dory’s basket, and didn’t sleep.

Sera found me there at four.

She knew. I don’t know how. She sat down on the step at the bottom of the stairs, in the doorway, where Risa’s chair had been, and looked at me for a long time.

”You tried it,” she said.

”I looked.”

”Did you do it?”

”No.”

”Could you have?”

I didn’t answer. That was answer enough.

Sera was quiet.

”Holt said hook,” she said at last.

”I know.”

”Then don’t bite.” She leaned her head against the doorframe. ”Not because it’s wrong. Maybe it’s right. Maybe it’s the best thing you’ll ever learn. But not from that. Not because it wants you to.” She looked at Dory, asleep in the basket. ”If you’re going to learn to fold, learn it from the queens. Learn it from her, when she’s old enough. She’s already woven. She probably folds in her sleep.”

I looked at Dory.

I hadn’t thought of that.

”Ask them,” Sera said. ”Not it.”

Day 697 came.

The dose.

I didn’t know if it would happen. Nobody did. The Overseer had accepted term four. Provided the asset’s cooperation continues. And the first delivery wasn’t due for four more days. I’d cooperated. I’d made tungsten. I’d invited it into the forge.

But I’d written not available on Luna’s copy of the specification, next to Substrate S-1. And I hadn’t folded.

I stood on the red glass at dawn with Toby’s hand on my wrist.

The hello came down.

Up from the deep. Up through the rock. Up through the sky to the station and the spine-queen in her housings, humming the hollow-song under the voice. And the answer coming back.

And the thirty-one, on Earth.

Waking.

One by one. The warm one first, like an oven door opening. Maura. Then the others. Toby’s mother, singing his name. Then, in the middle, careful, the way she’d always been careful—

Mother.

Toby’s fingers tightened on my wrist.

”She’s there,” he said.

I couldn’t see her. Eleven light-years. I could only feel the thread. The thin bright line from the deep, through the spine, to a fragment of bone in a woman in a chair in a penthouse under the central dome.

But I could feel its shape.

For two years, every morning, it had trembled. Not much. A small, steady tremor in the thread, like a hand holding a cup. The stabilizer kept her alive. It didn’t make her well. The shaking was always there.

This morning it was steady.

Not still. Not well. But steadier than it had been in days. The way it always was, Dot said afterward, checking her logs, on the morning after a dose.

”She has had it,” Dot said quietly. ”Last night. This unit is certain.”

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t.

Mother answered for twelve seconds. Then the others settled. Then the gap.

Dot paused. The way she paused every morning now. Listening for the one.

Nothing.

And then, so faint that Dot didn’t count it, so faint that I almost didn’t feel it, so faint that I thought for a long time afterward I must have imagined it:

A flicker.

At the place after the gap. Where the one used to be.

Not a name. Not an answer. Just a tremor in the thread, very small, very brief. Like a hand lifted from a table and put back down again.

I looked across the red glass.

Crane was on his bench outside the guest house. The band on his collar was dark. His eyes were closed. His hands were on his knees.

They were perfectly still.

Days 692–697. Everyone hears it.

I thought about not telling them, for about an hour. Then I thought about the dome, and Mother’s hands. I stood on Toby’s bench in the square at noon and told them everything, in order: the Overseer, Orrin Tal, the three items, the Sorn war, the contract, the feed, the spoon, what I could have done and why I didn’t, the terms, Substrate S-1. ”Nobody here has to pretend they don’t know.”

Odile Marr: two years in Port Ash wondering whether they’d been forgotten or left to die on purpose. ”I’d rather be told the truth by a boy on a bench.” Then everyone. Nessa: does it eat, because she isn’t feeding it if it doesn’t say thank you. The whole square laughed. The mirror turned, slightly, toward the sound.

Holt: in the first wave you sent all thirty-four to hear bad news, never one, because one person carries it back wrong. Nobody pretends. Tell it the truth or tell it you won’t answer. Nobody carries anything alone. Then Pebble hummed the hollow-song, then the young, then the children, then the whole square. The mirror stood at its window and listened.

Dot told the ring. The mountain queen: ”Good. Now no one in the ring is pretending either.”

Day 693, Nessa took Priya’s bread across the street, past the soldiers, and knocked. ”You’re supposed to say thank you.” It did, in its own voice. She asked why bread rises. ”A very old fold. Older than your species. Older than mine.” Crane ate the bread.

Day 694, the Overseer asked to watch the forge. It came alone, and it speaks on its own: a voice from the whole mirror, like sand poured on glass, every word learned from a book. I made tungsten. ”Why do you climb?” Fourteen to twenty-six to forty, each step costing. ”Why do you not fold?” Every element is a shape; you only need to refold. The planetary queens fold. That is why they were made, and why they’re worth keeping.

”The asset climbs. As the asset’s father climbed.” Father’s seven notebooks were taken from Genny eleven months ago and read. Notebook four, page 212: ”Why must I climb? There must be a shorter way,” underlined twice. ”He was close. The asset is closer.”

Tessa: it knows more than you about your own thing. Holt: ”That’s not a gift. That’s a hook.”

I tried that night, alone. After an hour I saw it: not the nucleus, the rope it’s knotted from. Every element a fold of the same rope. I took my hands off the glass. I knew that if I tried, I could. I went to the quiet room and didn’t sleep.

Sera at four in the morning: ”Then don’t bite.” Maybe folding is right, but not learned from that, not because it wants me to. Learn it from the queens. Learn it from Dory when she’s older; she’s woven, she probably folds in her sleep. ”Ask them. Not it.”

Day 697. The dose. I’d written ”not available” and hadn’t folded. Mother answered at dawn, and the thread was steady, the way it always is the morning after. Dot: she has had it.

After the gap, Dot paused for the one. Nothing. Then a flicker, so faint Dot didn’t count it. Like a hand lifted from a table and put down.

Crane on his bench, band dark, eyes closed. His hands perfectly still.