Scarecrow

I wrote to Hana before we went.

It was the night of Day 723. Three days before the storm. I’d been carrying her letter round in my head since Risa read it out, the way you carry a stone in your shoe: not hurting, exactly, but always there.

The doctor says the words came back because someone saw them coming back.

Yesterday I wanted spoon and said moon.

I’d seen her words. At the cistern, in the dome, with my hands on her head and her blood pooling behind her eyes. I’d watched the threads in the word place reach across the stunned patch and join, the way a fern uncurls. I hadn’t known what I was looking at. I’d only known it was healing.

I knew now.

I’d finished thirty-four people. I’d seen what silver did when it was whole. I’d seen Juno’s map-lines and Holt’s roots and Nell, who remembered every name she’d ever written. I’d seen Toby, who’d always heard too much, learn to hear exactly what he meant to.

Hana’s silver was unfinished. Like all of ours had been. And somewhere in it, threaded through the place where her words lived, there’d be narrow paths. Stopped places. The scar from the pressure chamber, where the vessel split and her body had built round the damage the best way it knew.

I could see it. If she were here. I could open it.

If she wanted.

Luna encoded it for me.

I wrote it out first, in plain words, at the kitchen table, with Dory asleep in the basket at my feet. It took me a long time. Longer than it should have. I kept writing too much and crossing it out.

In the end it was short.

Hana.

This is Lucas. Thank you for the letter. Risa read it five times. She has it inside her shirt. Dory said ”Mama” the night Risa read it to her, which I think was your doing.

I want to tell you something, and then I want you to decide. Not me.

Since the dome, I’ve learned what the silver is. I’ve learned to finish it. Thirty-four people here have asked, and I’ve opened the paths that were left narrow. Toby. Risa. Sigmund. Holt, who was the hardest.

Your silver is still unfinished. All of ours were. The place where your words are has a scar in it from the chamber. Your body built round it as well as it could. That’s why spoon comes out moon.

I can finish it. If you want. I can open the narrow places, and the scar, and let the paths go where they were meant to go. I think your words would come all the way back. I think some other things might too.

I’m not saying you’re broken. You aren’t. You carry letters in your head across three blocks of the dome and nobody can read them. That’s not broken.

But if you want it, I can do it. And if you don’t, that’s an answer too, and I’ll write it down beside your name, and nobody will ask you again.

Either way, come to Avalon. When you’re ready. Not before. There’s a room in Scarecrow with your name on it. Gareth will build you a window. Priya will feed you until you can’t move. There are no horses. But there’s a Teeming called Pebble who brings stones to the porch, and I think you’d like him.

Mother’s rule: never choose for them without asking.

So I’m asking.

Lucas.

Luna read it before she encoded it.

She didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, ”You crossed out fix.”

”Three times.”

”Why?”

I thought about it.

”Because she’s not broken,” I said. ”She’s unfinished. Everyone was. I was.” I looked at Dory in her basket. ”Fix is a word for things. Finish is a word for people.”

Luna looked at me for a long moment. Then she picked up her pen and began turning my words into numbers.

When she’d finished, she held the page up so I could see the last line. Below my name. In her own hand.

P.S. The horse voices are still very bad. — L.W.

The storm came on Day 726.

Risa felt it first. Three days before, she’d said, it’s coming. Two days before, it’s big. The morning of, she came up from the quiet room with Dory on her hip and stood on the porch with her face turned east and said nothing at all, which was how I knew.

By noon, the sky over the eastern ridge had gone the colour of a bruise.

By four, the wind had come up. Hot, from the south-east, smelling of rain that hadn’t fallen yet.

By six, the first thunder.

Far away. A long low roll, like something very large turning over in its sleep. Over the eastern mountains, past the jungle, past the dead space.

Risa stood on the red glass with Sigmund beside her.

They didn’t speak. They held hands. Not tightly. Just touching. The way you’d hold a rope between two climbers. And I watched their silver, both of them, go up into the sky, the way Risa’s always did when she felt weather.

Up. And out. And east.

Leaning.

”It’s moving,” said Risa. Very quietly. Her eyes were closed. ”The eastern front. It’s coming over the dead space. We can make it stay.” Her hand tightened on Sigmund’s. ”The islands too. The western front’s already there. It’s fat. It doesn’t need much.” A breath. ”The delta’s slower. The delta’s going to take longer.”

”How long?” said Luna.

”Two hours. Maybe three.”

”Then that’s the window,” said Luna. She had her notebook open on her knee, on the step, with the map drawn in it. ”Three hours. All three sites. Then you let it go.”

”Then I let it go,” said Risa.

Sera came out of the house with her coat on and her rifle across her back, which she never needed and always brought. Toby behind her with his fiddle case. Juno, already pale, with her head turned east.

Keir and Aster were on the apron. The transport’s rotors were turning slowly.

I went down the porch steps to Risa.

She didn’t open her eyes. But she reached out with her free hand, the one that wasn’t holding Sigmund’s, and found mine. Squeezed once.

”Go,” she said. ”Bring them home.”

Behind us, in the kitchen, the party had started.

I could hear it from the apron. Toby had left a second fiddle with Dov, who could just about play it, and someone had found a drum. Priya’s bread. The smell of Liam’s new drink, which was green this time and had something in it that made your eyes water at ten feet.

And Liam’s voice.

Over all of it. Very loud. Telling a story about the first week on Avalon, when he’d landed in a bog with half a kit and a broken leg and tried to signal for help with a mirror and set his own boot on fire.

People were laughing.

At the end of the long table, beside Holt, the mirror sat.

It had come.

I’d felt it come. At half past five, stooping through the kitchen door, not scraping the lintel. It had sat down where it always sat. And Liam had looked at it down the length of the table, raised his green drink, and said, very loudly, ”You came. Everybody, it came to my party. That’s a gift. That’s practically a present.”

And everybody had laughed again.

And the mirror had sat there, with its bowl of stew untouched in front of it, and its face turned toward Liam.

We flew east.

Into the storm.

Keir didn’t say a word the whole way. He flew low, under the cloud, with the rain coming in sideways against the canopy and the lightning going off all round us. Not near. Never near. Risa was holding it away from us, Aster said, the way you’d hold a curtain aside for someone to walk through.

But all round.

Every few seconds, a strike. Blue-white, branching, splitting the dark. Over the jungle. Over the mountains. Over the long flat dead space past where Sigmund had held his wall, where nothing grew and nothing lived.

Juno sat on the crate in the middle of the hold with her eyes shut and her head turned forward.

”Closer,” she said.

Then, a few minutes later: ”Closer.”

Then: ”There.”

It was a hill.

That was all I could see at first, in the lightning. A low rounded hill in the middle of a grey plain, with no trees on it and no grass and nothing growing anywhere for miles around. The ground was pale and dead, like ash.

Keir put us down at the bottom of it, in the rain.

Sera was out first. Then Juno, stumbling, with her hand pressed against her chest. Then Toby. Then me.

I looked at the hill.

It wasn’t a hill.

It was a shell. Grey. Seamless. Half buried in the dead ground, so that from the air it looked like a rise in the earth. But it was the grey. The same grey as the Overseer’s mirror. The same grey as the band on Crane’s collar.

A month ago I’d have looked at it and seen a wall.

Now I saw a weave.

Very tight. Very dense. Folded over and over into something I still didn’t have the word for. But I could see through it, a little. The way you can see through cloth if you hold it up to the light.

And underneath it, the relay.

It was huge.

Bigger than the one Lantern’s soldiers had torn down. Much bigger. A great grey column, rising up through the middle of the shell from somewhere deep in the ground, like the spine of something. And all round the base of it, in a ring, housings. Like the ones in the mountain. Like the ones in the station, round the spine-queen.

Seven housings.

Four of them were empty.

Three were not.

I couldn’t breathe.

I could see them. Faintly. Through the weave of the shell, through the grey of the housings, through the narrow channels running from each one into the column. Three shapes, curled. Human-sized. Human-shaped. With silver in them.

Bright silver. Almost whole. The way Juno’s had been almost whole before I finished her. The way Dane’s route sheets had said: closest.

And behind each left ear, a disc.

And from each disc, a filament. Running down into the channels. Into the column.

Into the voice.

”Oh,” said Juno.

She’d felt it the same moment I saw it.

”They’re not held,” she whispered. ”They’re wired in. Like the queen in the station. Like the mountain. They’re—” Her voice broke. ”They’re using them. Their silver. For the relay. They’re amplifiers.”

The voice was coming.

I felt it before Toby said anything. The station was coming up over the eastern horizon on its night pass, behind the storm, and the voice was coming with it. Move. North. Together. Coming down through the clouds and the rain and the lightning.

And the column in the middle of the shell felt it coming.

And woke.

And the three in their housings woke with it.

I felt their silver flare. All three at once. Bright and terrible, the way Dory’s had flared the morning she screamed. Not by choice. Pulled. Dragged up through the discs and the filaments and the channels into the column, and the column took it, and pushed.

Out. Over the dead plain. Over the jungle. Toward the broods in the east.

Move. North. Together.

In three human voices.

Toby had his fiddle out before I could say anything.

He stood in the rain at the foot of the grey hill with the fiddle under his chin and his eyes closed, and he played. The counter-note. The one he’d held for forty minutes over the old queen’s valley. The one he’d tuned into two hundred quiet stones.

It wasn’t enough.

I felt it hit the column and slide. The column was too strong. Three amplifiers, right there, pushing out with everything they had. Toby’s fiddle against that was like a candle in a gale.

”I can’t,” Toby said through his teeth. ”I can’t. It’s too close. It’s too loud.”

Then the ground shook.

The Bowl Queen’s soldiers came over the rise.

I’d known they were coming. They’d started walking six days ago, from the dry valleys, a thousand miles, the furthest of any brood. I’d thought they’d be late. I’d thought they’d still be in the jungle.

They weren’t.

They came out of the rain in a long dark line, the great plated soldiers of the brood that had waited by the bowl. Thirty of them. Forty. And every one of them carrying, in its forelimb, the way Pebble carried a nursery stone—

A quiet stone.

They didn’t stop. They didn’t hesitate. They came down the rise and across the dead plain and up to the foot of the grey hill, and they put the stones down. In a ring. All the way round. Forty stones, two hundred and twelve faces each, tuned by Toby and Holt and Juno and Kellan and forty people working in shifts in the forge in Scarecrow.

And Toby played.

And the stones caught his note, and folded it, and threw it.

Inward.

I felt it hit.

Not the shimmer of one stone, eleven meters wide. Not the bowl, throwing forty stones’ worth across a valley. This was forty stones in a ring, all pointed in, all singing Toby’s note at the same place at the same time.

At the column.

The voice went flat.

Not slowly. All at once. Like a door slamming. The move and the north and the together fell off it, dropped into the dead ground, and the column shuddered, the whole grey length of it, and went silent.

And in their housings, the three went still.

”Now,” said Toby, through his teeth, without opening his eyes. ”Now, Lucas, now, I can’t hold it like this for long—”

I put my hands on the shell.

I didn’t unfold it.

I want that written down. I’d promised. Not the Overseer’s shell. Not while Mother was on its wall. And this wasn’t the Overseer’s shell. But it was the same weave, the same fold, the same word I didn’t know yet. And the mountain queen had said not alone, and not yet.

So I didn’t touch the grey.

I touched the ground under it.

Ordinary ground. Dead and pale and grey with ash, but ground. Silicon and carbon and iron and all the things I’d been climbing between since my second day on Avalon.

I opened it.

The way I’d opened the floor of the forge to make Toby’s listening room. The way I’d opened the canyon wall to make the first rooms of Scarecrow. I reached down under the grey shell, under the column, under the ring of housings, and I made the ground go.

Not fast. Not violent. Gently. Down. Away. Like sand running out of an hourglass.

The shell tilted.

The column, with nothing under it, leaned.

And the housings, at its base, came loose from the ground they’d been sunk in for two years, and slid. Toward me. Down the slope I was making for them. Out from under the edge of the grey shell, into the rain.

Seven housings. Four empty.

Three not.

Sera got the first one open.

She didn’t wait for me. She went at it with her hands, and the housing was the grey and she couldn’t change it, but the seal round the edge wasn’t. The seal was ordinary. Some kind of polymer. And Sera put her palm flat against it and burned.

It went in seconds.

The lid of the housing came away in the rain, and inside, curled on her side, with her knees drawn up and a disc behind her left ear and a filament running from it down into the channel at the bottom of the housing—

”Jessa,” said Juno.

Jessa Quint.

Squad Four. Who’d asked to be put in a pod beside her brother and been refused. Who Halloway had taken blood from twice a week since she was eleven.

She was thin. So thin. Her hair had grown down past her shoulders, tangled and dull. Her skin was grey from two years without light. Her eyes were closed.

But she was breathing.

And her silver was there. Bright. Almost whole. Pulsing very faintly in time with something that wasn’t her own heart.

The column. Still trying to pull, even with the voice gone flat.

I knelt in the rain beside the housing and looked at the disc.

I could see it now. Not just the grey of it. The filament. Running from the disc, under her skin, into the bone behind her ear, and from there into her spine. The way the filament ran from Crane’s band into his. Fine as a hair. Woven into her silver like a thread pulled through cloth.

I couldn’t unfold the disc.

But I could see where the filament touched her.

And her, I could change.

”Toby,” I said.

He was still playing. Still holding the note. His face was grey and his arms were shaking.

”Toby. I need her heart.”

Toby opened his eyes.

He looked at Jessa in the housing. At me. At the column, silent, leaning, held flat by forty stones and his own two arms.

Then he took one hand off the bow.

The note didn’t stop. The stones held it. Forty of them, still ringing, still throwing it inward. Toby had built them to hold it. Just for a moment. Just long enough.

He knelt beside me and put his hand flat on Jessa’s chest.

”Got her,” he said.

It took eleven minutes.

I didn’t pull the filament out. You can’t pull a thread out of cloth without tearing the cloth. I went into Jessa’s silver, the way I went into anyone’s when I finished them, and I found every place the filament touched her. Every place it had woven itself through her paths. Every place it had been drawing her up and out and into the column for two years.

And I closed them.

One by one. Gently. The way you’d close a door behind someone so it doesn’t bang. Each place the filament had opened, I sealed. Each path it had been pulling on, I turned back toward her. Toward her own heart. The one Toby was holding.

The filament went slack.

The disc behind her ear went dark.

And I put my fingers under it, very carefully, and lifted it away from her skin, and it came, trailing a thread of grey that had nothing left to hold onto.

Jessa Quint opened her eyes.

She didn’t scream.

She looked up. At the rain. At the lightning splitting the sky over the dead plain. At Toby’s face, very close, with his hand on her chest. At Juno, behind him, crying. At Sera.

At me.

Her mouth moved.

”Dask?” she said. Her voice was a rasp. Two years of not using it. ”Lucas Dask?”

”Yes.”

”Are you real?”

”Yes.”

Jessa looked at me for a long time.

”Marlo,” she said.

My heart stopped.

”Marlo,” Jessa said again. Her hand came up. Shaking. Grabbed my sleeve. ”My brother. They took him. Not here. Somewhere else. A year ago. They came in grey and took him out of his housing and put him on a shuttle and I felt him go. I felt him go up.” Her fingers tightened. ”Where is he? Do you know where he is?”

I didn’t.

”Not yet,” I said.

Jessa’s face crumpled.

”Not yet,” she whispered. ”Not yet.”

And she held onto my sleeve and cried, in the rain, in an open housing on a dead plain, with forty Teeming soldiers standing round her in a ring and a column leaning above her that had been pulling her silver out through her skull for two years.

The other two took twenty minutes.

Pim Arden. Lise Varga.

Pim first. Tall and serious, the way I remembered. He’d been very good at knots. When I lifted the disc away and he opened his eyes, the first thing he did was look at his own hands, and turn them over, and flex his fingers.

”Still work,” he said. Hoarse. ”Good.”

Then he looked at me.

”Dask,” he said. ”Took your time.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It came out of me cracked and wet, in the rain, kneeling beside him.

”Sorry,” I said. ”I didn’t know.”

Pim looked at me for a long moment.

”Nobody did,” he said. ”That was the point.”

Then Lise.

She didn’t speak at all. She opened her eyes, and looked at Toby’s hand on her chest, and at the lightning, and at the Teeming soldiers standing round in the rain. And she reached up, slowly, and put her own hand over Toby’s.

And held it there.

We were in the air in forty minutes.

Three of them in the hold, wrapped in every blanket the transport had. Juno with Jessa’s head in her lap. Sera with Lise. Pim sitting up on his own, against the bulkhead, because he said he’d been lying down for two years and he’d rather not.

Toby was asleep before we cleared the rise. Face down on a cargo strap with his fiddle in his arms. He’d held the note for an hour and a half.

Behind us, the column fell.

The Bowl Queen’s soldiers did it. They waited until we’d lifted, and then they went up the grey slope I’d made, onto the leaning column, all forty of them at once. And they did what Lantern’s soldiers had done to the tripod in the forest.

I watched it go over through the hold window. Slowly. Like a tree. Into the dead plain, in the rain, in the lightning.

And then it was just a heap of grey in the ash.

And four empty housings.

Juno felt the other two sites as we flew.

The islands first.

The western front had been fat and slow, Risa said, and it hadn’t needed much pushing. It sat over the island chain like a lid. And under it, the white-mountains brood and the brood of the far west, who’d never been in the ring until the stones reached them, came up out of the sea caves where they lived and went for the relay.

There was a fragment in it. The mountain queen’s. Cut from her four hundred years ago, wired into the relay to sing her voice at the western broods.

They brought it out.

Juno felt it happen. She sat up so suddenly that Jessa, in her lap, startled awake.

”She’s got it,” Juno said. ”The old one. On her terrace. She’s got it back.” Her eyes were wide. ”Lucas, she’s singing.”

I closed my eyes.

And I felt it too. Very faint. A thousand miles away. Through the ring, through Juno, through the thin thread under the world.

The mountain queen on her terrace. In the storm. In the light of the lightning.

Singing the hollow-song.

To a piece of herself she’d been without for four hundred years.

Here. I’m here.

The delta took the longest.

Risa was nearly out by then. Sera said afterward, from the way Risa looked when we landed, that she’d been holding three storms for three hours and it had taken everything she had and some of Sigmund’s.

But it held.

And under it, the delta brood, half underwater, went into the mud where the water tasted wrong and found the relay.

And in it, a fragment.

Not the mountain queen’s. Very old. From a queen who wasn’t in the ring. Who wasn’t anywhere, any more, that any of the fourteen could feel.

The delta queen took it anyway.

Juno told me. She said the delta queen took the fragment into her own hollow, into the warm deep water at the heart of her brood, and laid it among her eggs.

It is no one’s, the delta queen said to the ring. So it is mine.

We landed at Scarecrow two hours before dawn.

The storm had gone. Risa had let it go the moment the delta relay fell. The sky was clear and black and full of stars, and the red glass was wet and shining in the lamplight.

Risa was on the apron.

Sitting on the ground. She couldn’t stand. Sigmund was beside her, holding her up, both of them soaked and grey-faced and shaking. Edda was crouched in front of them with her bag open.

Dory was in Luna’s arms, at the edge of the apron.

Awake.

The cargo door opened. Juno came down the ramp first, with Jessa leaning on her. Then Sera, half carrying Lise. Then Pim, on his own, slowly, holding the rail.

Then me.

Dory’s check came round.

Me. Risa. Sera. Luna. The queen.

And then, for the first time, further. Not through the hollow; the queens had opened it, just a little, just for this. Across the apron. To the three strangers coming down the ramp in blankets, with grey skin and long tangled hair and silver round their eyes that was almost, almost whole.

There you are, she said.

Jessa Quint stopped on the ramp.

She looked at the baby in Luna’s arms.

She’d felt it. I saw her feel it. Her hand went to her chest, the way Juno’s did when she felt a brood turn.

”Who’s that?” she whispered.

”That’s Dory,” I said. ”She counts everyone.”

Jessa looked at Dory for a long time.

Then she said, very quietly, ”She counted me.”

Kellan, in the kitchen doorway, told me afterward what happened at the party.

Liam had kept going. All night. Through the storm, through the thunder, through every crack of lightning that made people jump. He’d told every story he had and invented four more. He’d made Toby’s understudy play until Dov’s fingers bled. He’d poured green drink for anyone who’d take it and some who wouldn’t.

And the mirror had sat at the end of the table and watched him.

The whole time. Not the sky. Not the windows. Liam.

Until about one in the morning.

Kellan said it happened all at once. Liam was in the middle of a story about the bog and the boot, and the mirror’s head turned. Not toward Liam. East. Toward the wall of the kitchen that faced the dead space, a thousand miles away.

It stayed like that for a long time.

Then it turned west. Toward the islands.

Then south. Toward the delta.

And then, very slowly, it turned back to Liam. Who hadn’t stopped talking. Who’d watched it turn east and west and south and hadn’t missed a single word.

The mirror looked at him.

And Liam raised his green drink to it.

”Storm’s nearly over,” he said. ”Shame. I was just getting going.”

The mirror didn’t answer.

But it didn’t get up, either. It sat there at the end of the table until the party ended at dawn. And when the last people were leaving and Nessa was clearing the bowls, it stood, and stooped toward the door.

And stopped beside Liam.

The Overseer, it said, in its own voice, sand on glass, has attended a party.

”You have,” said Liam.

It was loud.

”It was meant to be.”

The mirror looked at him for a long moment.

Yes, it said. The Overseer understands that it was meant to be.

And it went out into the dawn.

Days 723–727. Weather.

I wrote to Hana before we went. I can finish it, if she wants: the narrow places, the scar from the chamber where her words are. Her body built round it as well as it could. That’s why spoon comes out moon. Not broken. Unfinished. If she wants it. If not, that’s an answer too, written beside her name, and nobody asks again. Either way, come to Avalon when you’re ready. A room, a window, Priya’s food, no horses, a Teeming called Pebble who brings stones. Never choose for them without asking. So I’m asking. I crossed out ”fix” three times. Fix is a word for things. Finish is a word for people. Luna’s P.S.: the horse voices are still very bad.

Day 726. Risa and Sigmund on the red glass holding hands like a rope between climbers, leaning on three fronts. Three hours. ”Go. Bring them home.”

Behind us, Liam’s party. The mirror came. ”That’s practically a present.”

The east site wasn’t a hill. A grey shell, half buried. Through the weave: a great column, seven housings round its base, four empty. Three not. Human. Discs behind their left ears. Filaments into the column. Juno: they’re not held. They’re wired in. Amplifiers, like the queen in the station.

The station came over and the column woke, and their silver was dragged out through the discs into the voice. Toby played. Not enough. Too close, too loud.

Then the Bowl Queen’s soldiers came over the rise, forty of them, a thousand miles in six days, each with a quiet stone. A ring, all pointed in. Toby played and forty stones threw his note inward at the column. It went flat, like a door slamming. ”Now, Lucas.”

I didn’t touch the grey. I’d promised. I opened the ground under it, gently, like sand through an hourglass. The column leaned and the housings slid out into the rain. Sera burned the seals.

Jessa Quint. Thin, grey, hair to her shoulders, breathing. Toby took one hand off the bow, and the stones held the note on their own. His hand on her heart. I didn’t pull the filament; you can’t pull a thread from cloth without tearing it. I closed every place it touched her, one by one, and turned her paths back toward her own heart. Eleven minutes. The disc lifted away. ”Lucas Dask? Are you real?” Then: Marlo. They took him a year ago, out of his housing, onto a shuttle. She felt him go up. Not yet.

Pim Arden: looked at his hands. ”Still work. Good. Took your time.” Nobody knew; that was the point. Lise Varga said nothing. She put her hand over Toby’s on her chest and held it.

The Bowl Queen’s soldiers brought the column down behind us like a tree.

The islands: the western broods came up out of the sea caves and brought the mountain queen’s fragment out. She has it back after four hundred years. She sang the hollow-song to it.

The delta: a fragment from a queen no one can feel any more. The delta queen laid it among her eggs. ”It is no one’s. So it is mine.”

Risa on the apron, unable to stand, Sigmund holding her up. The queens opened the hollow a little. Dory’s check went past the four of us to three strangers coming down the ramp. Jessa: ”She counted me.”

Liam talked all night. At one in the morning the mirror turned east, then west, then south, then back to Liam, who hadn’t missed a word. ”Storm’s nearly over. Shame.” At dawn, by the door: ”The Overseer has attended a party. It was loud.” ”It was meant to be.” ”Yes. The Overseer understands that it was meant to be.”

It knows.

Three home. Three to the north wall, beside ”Taken, not lost,” in Wren’s hand: ”Home.”