Scarecrow

The courier case came down on Day 716.

Not one case. Eleven.

Gareth found them in the supply drop. Stacked at the bottom of the last crate, under the flour and the lamp oil and a box of seed potatoes that Priya had been asking for since the spring. Eleven grey cases with the General Staff’s stamp on the lid. Each one sealed. Each one with a lock that would only open for Luna’s hand.

He carried them up the street two at a time. It took him six trips. He didn’t say a word the whole way.

When the last one was on the kitchen table, he stood back and wiped his hands on his apron and said, very quietly, ”They’re dated.”

Luna didn’t move.

She was sitting at the table with her coat still on. She’d been at the north wall with Wren when Gareth found them, and someone had run to fetch her, and she’d walked back up the street very fast without running and come in and sat down and not taken her coat off.

She looked at the cases.

Eleven. In a row. Gareth had put them in order. The dates were stencilled on the lids, small, in the corner. The first one was from five weeks ago. The day after the last case had come. The last one was from three days ago.

Every other day.

Nothing yet. Still looking. Careful.

Every other day, for five weeks, he’d kept sending them. Into a courier dock where they’d sat unopened in the Overseer’s office. And now they were here.

”He kept sending,” Luna said.

Her voice was very small.

On top of the last case, tucked under the strap, was a slip of paper.

Station issue. Plain. Folded once. Sera found it and unfolded it and read it and handed it to me without a word.

Four words. In a quick, slanting hand I didn’t recognise.

Released. Not by me.

And underneath, a single letter.

R.

”Ruan,” said Sera.

”Not by me,” I said.

We looked at each other.

Then, slowly, we both looked out the kitchen window. Across the street. At the guest house, where the mirror stood at its window every morning for the dawn count, and had stood there this morning, the way it always did. Watching every name.

”Why?” said Sera.

I didn’t know.

Luna opened them in order.

She wouldn’t let anyone help. She sat at the kitchen table with her coat on and the page of numbers in front of her, the one keyed to the date and the hour of the gallery window when she was eight, and she opened the first case and took out the folded sheet inside and began to decode it.

It took her eleven minutes.

Then she opened the second.

Risa sat beside her. She didn’t say anything either. She had Dory against her shoulder, asleep, and her free hand rested on the table next to Luna’s, not touching, just close. When Luna finished the second sheet and her hand went still on the pen for a moment, Risa’s hand moved an inch and covered it.

Luna didn’t look up.

But she turned her hand over under Risa’s, and held on, and went back to the numbers with her other hand.

The first four said almost nothing.

Nothing yet. Still looking. Careful. Different words, the same meaning, every other day. Short. The kind of message you send when you don’t have anything to say and want someone to know you’re still there.

The fifth was longer.

The sixth was longer still.

By the seventh, Luna had stopped saying anything at all. She decoded and wrote and turned each sheet face down when she finished, and her face had gone the colour of the red glass under the dawn count.

Sera put a cup of tea beside her. Luna didn’t touch it.

Sera stood behind her chair for a moment, looking down at the face-down pages. Then she bent and kissed the top of Luna’s head, quickly, the way you’d touch a lucky stone on your way past, and went back to the stove.

Luna’s pen stopped.

Then started again.

It was dark when she finished.

She sat back in her chair. She’d been at it for nearly three hours. The tea was cold. Dory had woken and been fed and gone back to sleep. Liam had come to the door twice and been sent away by Sera with a look.

Luna turned the pages face up.

Eleven sheets of her small exact hand. She squared them on the table.

Then she looked at me.

”I need everyone,” she said. ”Holt. Sigmund.” A pause. ”Risa needs to hear it with Sigmund.”

Risa’s hand, still on the table, went very still.

We met under the map.

Holt in his chair. Crane wasn’t there; the band had been lit all evening, and the Overseer hadn’t come out. Sigmund at the end of the table with his arms folded. Risa beside him, with Dory asleep in the sling. Sera and me. Toby, Liam, Wren with her book.

Luna stood at the head of the table and read.

Not all of it. She said some of it was hers. But most.

Day 683.

I have found the office that uses my seal. It is not in my building. It is not on the General Staff. It is called Central Allocation, and it occupies two floors of the Senate Annex that are not on any directory. Its staff are listed as Project personnel. Its budget is listed as Defence. Its director is listed as nobody.

I have been inside it once. At night. I did not stay long.

Day 691.

Central Allocation is a joint office. It has two principals. Both signatures appear on every order it issues. One of them is Crane. You will not be surprised.

The other is Senator Friese.

Sigmund didn’t move.

Risa’s hand came up and pressed flat against Dory’s back.

Luna kept reading.

Friese drafted the Accord’s language. I told Sigmund that, on Avalon. I did not tell him that Friese has spent twenty years since building the machinery to use it. Every recovery order. Every transfer. Every route sheet with a person line on it. Every shipment from Avalon that went somewhere other than Earth. Two signatures. Crane’s, and his.

The nine cadets you asked about. The recovery orders for Day 300. I have seen them. Crane signed them. So did Friese.

Friese signed first.

Nobody said anything.

Sigmund had gone white. Not the way people go white when they’re frightened. The way metal goes white when it’s too hot. I could see his silver, the old third-generation pattern I’d finished in the spring, and it was bright. Too bright. Little sparks running along the paths I’d opened, up his arms, down his spine, the way they used to run before I finished him, when the lightning had no way out.

Risa put her hand on his arm.

The sparks jumped to her. She didn’t flinch. She’d been taking her brother’s lightning since they were small. She held on, and let it run into her, and her own silver took it the way the ground takes a strike, and earthed it.

Sigmund looked at her.

”He signed first,” he said.

”I heard.”

”Pim Arden. The Quints. Lise Varga.” His voice was very flat. ”Father signed first.”

”I heard, Siggy.”

Sigmund’s jaw worked.

Then, very slowly, he unfolded his arms and put his hand over hers. On his own arm. And held it there.

”Keep reading,” he said to Luna.

Day 699.

Chancellor Voss knows.

I went to him. I thought, if anyone in the Senate would act, it would be the Chancellor. He has been in office for eleven years. He has always spoken against the Project’s excesses. I thought he did not know.

He knows everything. He has always known. He told me so, in his office, with the door closed, very kindly. He said the Accord was the price of Earth’s survival and that the price had to be paid by someone, and that it was better paid by children of the modified than by everyone. He said he was sorry. He said he had daughters too.

He did not threaten me. He did not need to. He told me which of my aides reported to Central Allocation. All of them.

Day 707.

I have stopped going to the office. I work from the flat. I am collecting proof. Every order with two signatures. Every route sheet. Every name. I am making copies and putting them in places I will not write down here.

I am staying alive.

I do not know if these are reaching you. I am sending them anyway. If they are held, someone is reading them who is not you, and I want that someone to know I am still here.

Day 713.

That was the last one. Three days ago.

Luna’s voice changed when she read it. Not much. It went a little lower. A little slower.

Luna.

Your pages came. All eleven. Today. In a grey case with no stamp, left on my desk at the flat while I was out. I do not know who brought them. Someone who could get into a locked flat in the Senate Residence, past my door guard, without being seen.

I have read them in order. I know everything you knew, the day you knew it.

The nine. The receiving code. The three in the east. AV-9. The Hand. Central Allocation. ”Ask.”

I am asking.

You wrote: expected back. I am. I will be. I do not know when.

Windsors don’t cry. I have broken that rule twice in my life. Once on the shuttle apron. Once today.

Tell Dask’s daughter the forager is still foraging.

Your father.

Luna lowered the page.

Her face was perfectly composed. Her voice had been perfectly steady. Her hands, holding the sheet, were shaking so hard the paper rattled.

Sera got up.

She went round the table and stood beside Luna and didn’t say anything. She took the page out of Luna’s hands, very gently, and put it on the table. Then she put her arms round her.

Luna stood stiff for a moment.

Then she put her face against Sera’s shoulder.

Risa got up too. Carefully, with Dory in the sling. She came round the other side and put her free arm round both of them, so that Dory was pressed between them, warm and asleep and completely unbothered.

The three of them stood there at the head of Holt’s table, under the map, holding on.

Nobody else said anything. Holt looked at the map. Liam looked at the floor. Wren closed her book.

After a while, Luna lifted her head from Sera’s shoulder and turned and kissed Risa’s cheek. Then Sera’s. Quickly. Fiercely. The way you’d sign your name to something.

”Thank you,” she said.

”Don’t,” said Sera.

”I’m thanking you anyway.”

”Then I’m ignoring it,” said Sera, and kissed her back. On the mouth. Briefly. In front of everyone.

Liam made a small noise. Sigmund looked at the ceiling.

Luna went pink, and laughed, and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.

”Right,” she said. ”Right. Where was I.”

”Someone took your pages to him,” Holt said.

He’d been quiet through all of it. He sat under the map with his stick across his knees, looking at the eleven decoded sheets in their neat pile.

”Into a locked flat,” he said. ”In the Senate Residence. Past his door guard. Without being seen.” He tapped the table. ”Your pages weren’t on any shuttle, Luna. You never sent them. They were in your notebook. In your coat.”

Luna went very still.

She put her hand to her coat. To the inside pocket. Where she kept the arrivals list and the page of numbers and the eleven folded pages she’d been writing to her father for five weeks.

She took them out.

Eleven pages. Folded into quarters. All there.

She unfolded the top one.

It was her handwriting. Her numbers. The page about Central Allocation and AV-9 and Ask.

But it wasn’t the original.

She held it up to the lamp. The paper was wrong. Not ours. Not the third wave’s survey stock. Smoother. Whiter. Station paper. And the ink, under the lamp, had a faint grey sheen, like the shell of something that caught the light.

”It’s a copy,” she said.

Her voice had gone very quiet.

”Someone took them out of my coat,” Luna said, ”and copied them, and put the copies back, and took the originals to my father. Eleven light-years. Into a locked flat. In three days.”

Nobody said anything.

Then everyone, slowly, turned and looked out of the map room window. Across the dark street. At the guest house.

Where the window, for once, was empty.

”Why would it do that?” said Toby.

Nobody knew.

”It reports to the Hand,” said Luna. ”Not to the Project. It told Dot that. It doesn’t care what the Project thinks.” She looked down at the copy in her hand. ”Central Allocation is the Project. Friese and Crane. My father is going after Central Allocation.” She swallowed. ”Maybe it wants him to.”

”Maybe it wants to see what he does,” said Holt. ”The way it wanted to see whether Dot would lie.”

”Maybe,” said Luna.

”Or maybe,” said Risa quietly, ”a three-foot Teeming tapped the ground at it and said I see you, and it didn’t know what to do. And it still doesn’t. And this is what it does when it doesn’t know what to do.”

Everyone looked at her.

Risa shrugged. Dory stirred against her chest, and Risa’s hand came up automatically to her back.

”I’m not saying it’s kind,” she said. ”I’m saying I don’t know what it is. Neither do any of you.”

I went to the practice ground first.

Sigmund was in the middle of it, in the dark, alone. The ground was scorched in a perfect circle round him, black on the red glass, twenty feet across. He wasn’t throwing lightning. He was holding it. Standing very still with his hands at his sides and the light running up and down his arms, round and round, the way water runs round a drain.

He didn’t look at me.

”I’m fine,” he said.

”I know.”

”I’m not going to burn anything.”

”I know.”

He held it a while longer. The lightning ran up to his shoulders and back down to his fingertips, and the air smelled of rain.

”He used to tell us we were the future,” Sigmund said. ”At dinner. When we were small. Before the Project. He’d pour wine and say you two are the future of this family.” His jaw moved. ”I thought he meant the Senate. A Friese in every chamber.”

”And now?”

”Now I think he meant it exactly,” said Sigmund. ”Property. Held in trust. By descent.” He looked down at his hands. ”He wrote by descent and then he went home and told us we were the future.”

The lightning ran down into his fingertips and stopped there.

”Risa took it,” he said. ”In the map room. All of it. She just took it.”

”She always does.”

”She shouldn’t have to.” He looked up at me for the first time. ”She’s got a baby. She’s got you. She’s got Sera and Luna and the whole city. She shouldn’t still be earthing my lightning like we’re nine years old in Father’s house.”

”Then let her,” I said. ”And then let her stop. When you’re ready.”

Sigmund was quiet.

Then he opened his hands, and the lightning went down into the ground, all of it at once, harmless, into the red glass.

”Not yet,” he said.

”Not yet,” I agreed.

Later, much later, when the others had gone home and Sigmund had gone to the practice ground to put his lightning somewhere it could do no harm, I found the three of them on the porch.

Sera and Luna on the top step, sitting close, Luna’s head on Sera’s shoulder. Risa in Gareth’s chair behind them, with her feet tucked up and Dory asleep in her lap.

Nobody was talking.

I stood in the doorway for a moment and didn’t come out.

It had been happening for weeks. I’d noticed it the way you notice the light changing in autumn. Not all at once. A little more every day. Sera kissing the top of Luna’s head on her way past the table. Luna taking Risa’s hand without looking, the way she’d taken it at the kitchen table that morning. Risa, last week, falling asleep on the porch with her head in Sera’s lap and Sera’s fingers in her hair, while I sat at the other end of the step and Luna read to all of us from a third-wave novel she’d found in the cargo, very badly, doing all the voices.

The terms, Sera had said, back in the early days. Nobody is pretending. Nobody is rushing. Nobody gets hurt in secret.

Nobody was pretending now.

Luna lifted her head from Sera’s shoulder and looked round and saw me.

”You’re hovering,” she said.

”I’m not hovering.”

”You’re standing in a doorway looking soppy. That’s hovering.”

”Let him hover,” said Risa, from the chair, with her eyes closed. ”He’s earned it.”

Sera reached up without turning round and caught Luna’s chin and kissed her, absently, the way you’d straighten someone’s collar. Then she held her other hand out behind her, toward me, still without looking.

”Come and sit down,” she said. ”You’re letting the cold in.”

I came and sat down.

And Luna put her head back on Sera’s shoulder, and reached her other hand back without looking for Risa’s foot, tucked up on the chair, and held onto it. And Risa, eyes still closed, smiled.

Under the garden, Dory’s check came round.

All four of us. The queen. Dot at the wall.

Everyone home.

There was one more page.

Luna found it the next morning, when she went back through the cases to put them in order. In the eleventh case, underneath her father’s last letter, flat against the bottom where she’d missed it in the dark.

Not numbers. Not her father’s hand.

A small, square card. Station issue. Written in pencil, in a neat, careful, teacher’s hand that I knew at once, though I hadn’t seen it in nearly two years.

Luna brought it to me on the garden steps.

I read it.

Then I read it again.

Lucas,

I know what Crane is. I have known for some time. I am with the girls. I have not left them for one night since you went, and I will not.

Genny has been learning the dome’s systems. I have been teaching her. She is very quick. She has her father’s hands.

Your mother is holding.

— H. Pell

I sat on the garden steps with the card in my hands for a long time.

Miss Pell.

Who’d met me in a stairwell, away from the cameras, the week before launch. Who’d told me Crane had started asking about Garnet’s blood work. Who’d stopped telling him anything true about the girls.

I am with the girls.

I will not.

”Who is she?” Luna said softly.

I looked at the card.

”Juno’s mother,” I said. ”The one who took her in.”

I took the card to Juno.

She was on the roof of the schoolroom, where she always was at that hour, with her arms round her knees and her head turned east. Toward the dead space. Toward the three.

I climbed up beside her and held it out.

She knew the handwriting before she’d taken it. I watched her know. Her whole body went still, the way it went still when she felt a brood turn, and then she reached out and took the card with both hands, as if it might break.

She read it.

Then she read it again. Then she turned it over, as if there might be more on the back, and there wasn’t, and she turned it face up again and held it in her lap.

”She didn’t write my name,” Juno said.

”No.”

”She wouldn’t.” Juno’s voice was very steady. ”She’d know someone might read it. She’d know if she wrote my name, they’d know where to look. Where I was. Who to use.” She touched the card with one finger. ”So she wrote to you. And she wrote the girls. And she wrote I will not.”

”Juno.”

”That’s how she writes when she means I love you,” Juno said. ”She never said it. Not once. Not when she took me in, not when she hid me for two years, not when they came for me anyway and put me on the transport. She said eat your vegetables and I will not let them and uneventful.” Her mouth shook. ”I will not. That’s the most she ever said.”

I didn’t say anything.

Juno sat on the roof with the card in her lap and her head turned east, toward the three, and cried without making a sound.

After a long time, she said, ”Can you send something back? With Luna’s numbers?”

”Luna can.”

”Tell her.” Juno wiped her face. ”Tell her the mirror girl found everyone. Tell her I can feel every brood on Avalon. Tell her I can feel the three in the east and I’m going to get them out.” She looked down at the card. ”Tell her I will not either.”

The next morning I came down to the kitchen and found Risa and Sera at the stove.

Dory was on Risa’s hip, wide awake, watching the pot with enormous interest. Sera was stirring the porridge and arguing with Risa about salt, the way they argued every morning, without heat, as a sort of ritual.

”It needs more.”

”It needs exactly what it’s got.”

”You’ve never once put enough salt in anything.”

”You’d salt water if I let you.”

Sera turned round to say something else, and Risa leaned in and kissed her. Quick and easy and without any fuss at all, the way you’d hand someone a spoon. Then went back to watching the pot.

Sera stood there for a moment with the spoon in her hand.

Then she said, ”That’s cheating,” and added more salt.

Luna, at the table, didn’t look up from her numbers. She was writing Juno’s message. I will not either. But I saw her mouth twitch.

Dory laughed.

Out loud. At nothing in particular. At the pot, maybe, or the steam, or the three of them, or the kitchen being warm and full and loud on an ordinary morning in the middle of everything.

Sera looked at her. Then at Risa. Then at Luna, and then at me in the doorway.

”Don’t,” she said.

”I didn’t say anything.”

”You were going to look soppy again.”

”I’m allowed to look soppy,” I said. ”It’s my kitchen.”

”It’s our kitchen,” said Luna, without looking up.

”Our kitchen,” Sera agreed, and pointed the spoon at me. ”Sit down. Eat your porridge. It’s got the right amount of salt in it now.”

”It’s got too much,” said Risa.

I sat down. I ate my porridge.

It had too much salt in it.

I didn’t say so.

Days 714–717. Windsor code.

Day 716: eleven courier cases at the bottom of the supply drop, under the seed potatoes. Dated every other day for five weeks. He kept sending. On the last one, a slip: ”Released. Not by me. — R.” We looked at the guest house.

Luna decoded them in order with her coat on, three hours. Risa’s hand on hers. Sera kissed the top of her head on the way past the stove. Luna’s pen stopped, then went on.

Central Allocation: two unlisted floors of the Senate Annex. Budget listed as Defence, director listed as nobody. Two principals, both signatures on every order: Crane, and Senator Friese. Friese drafted the Accord and spent twenty years building the machinery to use it. The nine recovery orders for Day 300: Friese signed first.

Sigmund’s silver sparked the way it used to before I finished him. Risa took the lightning into her own and earthed it, the way she has since they were small. ”Father signed first.” ”I heard, Siggy.” ”Keep reading.”

Chancellor Voss knows everything and always has. Very kindly, door closed: the price had to be paid by someone, better by children of the modified. He has daughters too. He told the General which of his aides report to Central Allocation. All of them. The General works from his flat now, collecting proof, making copies, staying alive.

Day 713: Luna’s eleven unsent pages appeared on his desk in a locked flat in the Senate Residence, past his guard. ”I am asking.” Windsors don’t cry; he has broken that twice, on the apron and that day. ”Tell Dask’s daughter the forager is still foraging.”

Sera held Luna. Risa came round the other side with Dory in the sling between them. Luna kissed both their cheeks, fiercely. Sera kissed her on the mouth in front of everyone. Liam made a noise. Sigmund looked at the ceiling.

Holt: those pages were never sent. They were in her coat. The ones in her coat are copies, on station paper, the ink with a faint grey sheen. Someone took the originals eleven light-years in three days. We all looked at the empty guest house window.

Luna: maybe it wants him to go after Central Allocation. Holt: maybe it wants to see what he does. Risa: maybe it still doesn’t know what to do since Pebble said hello, and this is what it does when it doesn’t know. ”I’m not saying it’s kind.”

Sigmund on the practice ground in a scorched circle, holding the lightning, not throwing it. Friese used to pour wine at dinner and tell them they were the future. He meant it exactly. Risa shouldn’t still be earthing his lightning like they’re nine in Father’s house. Let her, I said, and then let her stop. He put it all in the ground. ”Not yet.”

On the porch late: Luna’s head on Sera’s shoulder, Risa in the chair with Dory. It has been happening for weeks, like light changing in autumn. Nobody pretending. Luna: ”You’re hovering.” Sera kissed her absently, held her hand out behind her for me. Luna held Risa’s foot. Everyone home.

At the bottom of the eleventh case, a card in pencil. ”I know what Crane is. I am with the girls. I have not left them for one night since you went, and I will not. Genny has been learning the dome’s systems. I have been teaching her. She has her father’s hands. Your mother is holding. — H. Pell.”

Miss Pell. Juno’s mother, who took her in.

Juno read it on the schoolroom roof. Pell didn’t write her name, so no one would know where to look. ”I will not” is how Pell says I love you; she never said it, only ”eat your vegetables” and ”uneventful.” Juno’s answer, in Luna’s numbers: the mirror girl found everyone, she can feel the three and will get them out. ”I will not either.”

Next morning Risa kissed Sera at the stove mid-argument about salt. Sera: ”That’s cheating,” and added more. Luna’s mouth twitched. Dory laughed at nothing. ”Our kitchen.” Too much salt. I didn’t say so.