Scarecrow

I asked Mother first.

Not the queen in the Hand. Not yet. Mother, at dawn, through the hello, with the Hand holding the door open from a mile out over the plain the way it had every morning for thirteen days. Only this morning it wasn’t holding it against a wind. The holes were closed. The handlers in the palm were ash on the plain and twelve flat grey sheets at the bottom of ten thousand folds. The queen at the bottom of the Hand held the hello open the way you’d hold a door for someone you liked.

Mother, I said. About what you said last night.

I know, love.

You were right.

I know that too. A pause. I’ve been sitting up with Okafor half the night. Talking about it.

What did she say?

Mother was quiet for a moment. I could feel the room through her. The small warm room with the kettle in it, and thirty-one chairs, and most of them full even at this hour, because nobody in Okafor’s flat slept much any more.

She says you’re to tell her yourself, said Mother. In your own words. Not mine. She says she wants to hear how you put it.

So I told her.

All of it. The way I’d said it on the porch. That they’d been safer leashed. That now they were the ones who fought back. That every Hand would hear what had happened at the bottom of this one, and the first place they’d go was where the woman who did it lived. That home wasn’t Earth any more. That it was here, under the queens, with every brood on the world on one side and everyone we loved on the other.

That we had to bring them.

All of them.

Before the Hands came.

When I’d finished, there was a long silence on the thread.

Then Mother said:

Okafor says: good.

I let my breath out.

She says she was waiting for you to see it, said Mother. She says she saw it herself the moment I closed my hand at the bottom of the Hand. She says she could have told you. She didn’t. A pause. She says a soldier who’s told where the ground is will stand on it. A soldier who finds it himself will hold it.

She knew?

She knew last night, said Mother. She says she’s been making a list.

Of course she had.

She says there are conditions, said Mother.

Of course there are.

She says one: not everyone. Mother’s voice went careful. Reading. Four million people under the dome. The Hand can’t carry four million, and Avalon can’t feed them, and most of them don’t want to go. She says she’ll take whoever’s in danger. The thirty-one. Their families. Anyone the Project marked. Anyone who was in the program. Anyone who signs up and can say why. A pause. She says she’ll decide who. Not you. Not Voss. Her.

Yes.

Two. Voss stays. The dome needs running. Okafor says when the Hands come, and they will, there’ll be four million people under that glass who never chose any of this, and somebody has to stand in front of them. She says Voss has been doing a sum with other people’s names in it for twenty-two years. Now she can do one with her own.

Does Voss know?

Voss suggested it, said Mother. Quietly. Last night. In this room.

I didn’t say anything.

And three, said Mother. Okafor says: ask the queen properly.

I was going to ask her today.

She says not like that. Mother’s voice had something in it that might have been a smile. She says you’re going to go out to the plain and say: will you carry our families from Earth. And the queen’s going to say yes, because she’s grateful. Because you closed her holes. Because Dory talks to her. A pause. Okafor says that’s not asking. That’s collecting.

Then what?

She says what she said before. You don’t ask an ally what they’ll do for you. You ask what they need. Another pause. Okafor says: find out what the queen needs first. And give her that. And then ask.

Marlo woke properly that morning.

He’d been awake, a little, since the Hand. Eyes open a slit. Looking at Jessa. But he hadn’t spoken, and he hadn’t moved, and when Edda looked at him in the medical building she found what I’d known she’d find. The filament.

Same as Jessa’s. Same as Pim’s and Lise’s. A thread from the housing he’d been in, woven through his silver, up the back of his neck and into his skull. The Overseer had opened the housing in the first finger’s hold. Toby had lifted him out. But the thread had stayed. Cut off at the housing end, with nothing pulling on it now, but still there. Still woven through him like ivy through a wall.

I closed it after the dawn.

It took fourteen minutes. Jessa sat on the other side of the bed with his hand in both of hers. Toby stood at the foot. He’d hardly left since he carried Marlo down Luna’s stair. He said he didn’t know why. I thought I did. Toby had walls round everything he loved, and he’d put one round Marlo the moment he went through the Overseer’s door, and he couldn’t take it down until he knew Marlo was safe.

When the last place let go, Marlo opened his eyes properly.

He looked at Jessa for a long time.

”You’ve got short hair,” he said.

His voice was rough. Very rough. Like a door that hadn’t been opened in a year.

Jessa laughed. It came out of her sideways and broken.

”You’ve got long hair,” she said.

”Do I?” Marlo lifted one hand. Slowly. Touched the hair on his shoulder. Looked at it. ”Oh.” He let it fall. ”That’s terrible.”

”It’s awful.”

”Cut it,” said Marlo. ”Please. Now. Before anyone sees.”

”Everyone’s seen.”

”Then before anyone else sees.”

Jessa didn’t cut it. She put her face down on the bed next to his hand and cried, and he lay there with his terrible hair on the pillow and his fingers in hers, and after a while he started crying too.

Toby took his wall down.

I felt it go. Very gently. Like someone setting down something heavy they’d been carrying a long way.

Marlo told us about the holds that afternoon.

Not all of it. He couldn’t, yet. He got tired. His silver was ragged, the way Jessa’s had been, the way Pim’s and Lise’s were, from a year of something pulling it out through his skull. I said I’d finish him when he was stronger, and he said yes please the way Garnet did, and then he told us what he could.

He’d been awake. Some of the time.

”Not like this,” he said. Propped up on pillows, with Jessa beside him and Edda hovering. ”In the housing. You’re not awake. You’re not asleep. You’re just—” He stopped. ”Being pulled. All the time. You can’t think. But sometimes there’s a gap. When they move you. Or when the voice changes. And for a minute you can hear.”

”What did you hear?” said Luna.

Marlo looked at her.

”Everything,” he said. ”The others. In the holds.” He swallowed. ”When the voice was on, it was like being in a room full of people all screaming the same word. When it went off, for a minute, you could hear them. Not words. They don’t have our words. But you could hear what they were.”

”What are they?”

Marlo closed his eyes.

”The big ones,” he said. ”The ones like hills. They’re slow. Very slow. They think the way stone thinks. They were the closest to me. In the housing next to mine, there was one, and I could feel it thinking. It took a whole day to think one thing.” His mouth moved. ”It was thinking about its mother. The same thing. Over and over. For a year.”

Nobody said anything.

”They call themselves something,” said Marlo. ”I don’t know how to say it. It’s a sound. Like rocks settling. Like Tharn.” He opened his eyes. ”That’s as close as I can get.”

”Tharn,” said Luna, and wrote it down.

”The little ones,” said Marlo. ”The ones in hundreds. They’re all one thing. Not one thing made of lots. One thing that happens to have hundreds of bodies. When the voice was on, every body was screaming the same word, and that’s not so different for them, because they always think the same thing at once. But when it was off—” He stopped. ”When it was off, they sang. All of them. Every body. One song. It sounded like rain on a roof.”

”Do they have a name?”

”Mirri,” said Marlo. ”I think. It’s the sound the song makes at the end.”

”And the tall ones,” said Juno quietly. ”The ones the light bends round.”

Marlo looked at her for a long time.

”I don’t know what they are,” he said. ”I couldn’t hear them. Not properly. Every time I tried, it was like listening through a wall.” He shook his head. ”But they could hear me. I know they could. Every time there was a gap in the voice, I’d feel one of them turn. Toward my housing. And look.” His voice dropped. ”Like they were checking I was still there.”

”Like Dory,” said Risa.

Marlo looked at her.

”Who’s Dory?”

We went out to the plain at dusk.

Okafor’s condition. Find out what the queen needs first.

Me. Dory, on Risa’s hip, because Dory was the one the queen talked to. Juno, to understand. Toby, because Toby went where Juno went, and where Marlo’s holds were. And the Overseer, holding its bread, because it went everywhere now.

The thread came down from the palm.

Dory touched it.

There you are.

And I asked.

Not will you carry our families. Not anything about us. I asked the question Okafor had told me to ask, the one she’d told me to ask the very first time, on the morning after the Hand came down. The one I’d been too grateful, and too frightened, and too busy, to ask properly ever since.

What do you need?

The queen at the bottom of the Hand was quiet for a long time.

Then she answered. In words. Our words. She’d been listening to the hello for fourteen days and she’d learned enough to say what she meant, slowly, the way Hana had spoken before I finished her. Every word right.

My fingers are full.

I waited.

They are held in me, said the queen. In my fingers. In the dark. In collars. I did not know what they were. Now I know. A pause. I carried them here. I carried them to other worlds before here. I carried them, and the voice told them what to do, and I carried the voice.

You didn’t know.

I did not know, she agreed. I know now. Another pause. Longer. I cannot carry your families while my fingers are full of the held. It would be the same thing. Carrying people in the dark to a place they did not choose.

Nobody said anything.

Empty my fingers, said the queen. And then ask me.

I didn’t sleep that night.

None of us did, much. We sat round the kitchen table, all of us who’d gone up the stair and most of the ones who hadn’t, and Luna drew the holds on the table where the General’s plan had been, and we tried to work out how.

”How many?” said the General.

Juno closed her eyes. Reached. She’d been able to feel the holds since the Hand. Faintly. The way she felt everyone on Avalon with silver in them.

”The first finger,” she said. ”Four hundred and twelve Tharn. Maybe more. They’re so slow it’s hard to count them.” She frowned. ”Mirri. I can’t count Mirri. They’re one thing. One very big thing in maybe three thousand bodies.” She opened her eyes. ”And the tall ones. The ones the light bends round. I can’t feel them at all. Marlo’s right. It’s like a wall.”

”And the other two fingers?”

Juno shook her head.

”Further,” she said. ”I can feel them. I can’t count them. More of everything.” Her voice dropped. ”And other things. Things I haven’t felt before.”

The General looked at the table for a long time.

”Every one of them has a collar,” he said.

”Yes.”

”And it takes Lucas forty minutes to take one off.”

”Forty-three, for Sesh,” I said. ”Fourteen, for Marlo. It depends how long they’ve worn it.” I looked at my hands. ”And then Genny has to ask a stone to hold the sliver. And the Overseer has to fold a cup.”

”Four hundred Tharn,” said the General. ”Three thousand Mirri. And however many of the tall ones. And two more fingers.” He did the sum. I watched him do it. ”That’s a year, Dask. More. Even if you never stopped.”

”I know.”

”And the families can’t wait a year.”

”I know.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Marlo, who’d been carried up from the medical building on Toby’s back because he said he’d go mad lying down another hour, and was sitting at the end of the table wrapped in two blankets with his terrible hair tied back in a piece of Jessa’s string, said:

”You don’t have to do the collars.”

Everyone looked at him.

”Not all of them,” said Marlo. ”Not yourself.” He looked at me. ”You did mine. And Jessa’s. And Pim’s, and Lise’s. One at a time, from the heart, closing every place it touched.” He shook his head. ”That’s right for us. We’re human. You know how we go. You know where our hearts are.” He swallowed. ”You don’t know where a Tharn’s heart is. You’d have to find out every time. Four hundred times.”

”Then who?”

Marlo looked at the window. At the garden wall, in the dark, where our queen lay along the stones.

”Their own,” he said. ”Their own queens.”

It took me a long time to understand.

Then I did.

The slivers. In the collars. Sesh’s had been a piece of the youngest queen of her own world. The one who sang to the hatchlings. The Sorn had chosen it for her because she was a hatchling and would know the voice.

Every collar was like that.

Every Tharn was wearing a piece of a Tharn queen. Every Mirri, a piece of a Mirri queen. The Sorn had cut their queens and made collars of them and put the collars on their own children. The Sorn think that is funny.

And a queen knows her own young.

”The slivers know where their hearts are,” I said slowly. ”They grew the threads in. They know every place they touch. They know the way back.”

”They’re asleep,” said Luna.

”Since the queen in the Hand told them to stop,” I said. ”In the square. Thirteen days ago. All of them. Every sliver in every collar in every finger.” I looked at the table. At the drawing of the holds. ”But if somebody woke them. Gently. Not with the voice. With something else.”

”With what?” said Risa.

I looked at Dory, asleep in her basket by the stove.

”With there you are,” I said.

We tried it at dawn.

Not all of them. One. The Overseer opened the door into the first finger’s hold, the same door it had opened for Jessa, at the seven thousandth fold. I didn’t have to open the other six thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine this time. The queen at the bottom of the Hand made us a way. Straight down from the palm, a passage through the folds, every one of them standing open, the way a queen grows a passage in the rock under a city.

We went down it in the grey before the light. Me and Risa with Dory. Toby, Juno. Genny, because Genny had asked ten stones to hold ten slivers and nobody in the world knew better than she did what a sliver felt like when it woke. Marlo, on Toby’s back, because he’d said he knew which Tharn had been thinking about its mother for a year, and he wanted it to be that one.

The Overseer. Holding its bread.

The hold was dark and cold and enormous. Long. Curving away into the finger further than the light from Dot’s hand could reach. On both sides, the housings. Rows of them. Floor to ceiling.

And in them, the held.

Marlo pointed.

The housing was enormous. A grey shell the size of a cart, set into the wall of the hold, and inside it, folded up, a shape like a small hill. Plates over it. Grey-brown, ridged, rough as stone that’s been under a river for a thousand years. Not moving. Not breathing that I could see. But I could feel it. Very slow. Very deep. A heartbeat so slow it was more like a tide.

And round its neck, where its neck must be, deep under the plates, a collar.

”That one,” said Marlo.

The hello went up.

I felt it go. Every name. Every base. Every brood. Up through the ring of queens. To the spine-queen. Down into the Hand. To the queen at the bottom of it, who caught it and held the door open.

And Dory woke on Risa’s hip.

She checked us. All of us. Every one. And put the net round us.

Then she looked at the Tharn.

At the small hill folded up in the housing in the dark, with a collar round its neck and a sliver of its own mother’s mother inside the collar, asleep.

And Dory checked it.

There you are.

Nothing happened.

The Tharn didn’t move. The heartbeat went on, slow as a tide. The sliver in the collar didn’t stir.

Dory frowned. She did that now, sometimes. A small fierce frown, exactly like Risa’s.

She checked it again.

There you are.

Still nothing.

”It’s too slow,” said Marlo. Very quietly, from Toby’s back. ”It thinks the way stone thinks. You can’t hurry it. It took a whole day to think one thing.”

Dory looked at him.

Then back at the Tharn.

And she didn’t check it again.

She waited.

I’d never seen Dory wait for anything.

She’d never had to. She’d built herself out of whole silver. She’d walked at a hundred and fifty-one days because she’d decided to. She’d said Mama the same afternoon. When she wanted something, she reached, and it was there.

She reached out to the Tharn. And put her silver against it. Not checking. Not asking. Just there. The way Toby had sat with Wren on the north wall the night her aunt spoke through the band. The way the old queen on the mountain had sat in the light on her terrace while our queen grew, and never hurried her.

A minute.

Five.

Ten.

The hello was holding. The queen at the bottom of the Hand was holding it, the door wide open, the way she’d held it every morning. Dory sat on Risa’s hip with her silver against a small hill in the dark and didn’t move.

Fifteen minutes.

And the sliver in the collar stirred.

Not woke. Stirred. Like something very old turning over in its sleep. I felt it. Felt it feel Dory’s silver against it. Felt it not understand. Felt it think. Slowly. Slowly. The way stone thinks.

Twenty minutes.

There you are, said Dory. Very softly. Once.

And the sliver answered.

It didn’t wake the Tharn.

That was the first thing. I’d thought it might. I’d thought the sliver would wake and the threads would wake and the Tharn would wake and we’d have a small hill thrashing in the dark of the hold, and Toby would need a wall.

It didn’t.

The sliver woke, and turned, and looked through the threads it had grown into the Tharn. All of them. Every place they touched. Slowly. The way stone looks at a river.

And it knew.

I felt it know. Felt it understand, the way you understand something you’ve always known and forgotten. This is mine. This is my young. These are my threads, in my young. I put them here.

I did not want to put them here.

And then it started to take them out.

Not the way I did it. I closed threads from the heart outward, one place at a time, giving the silver its own way back. The sliver didn’t need to do that. The sliver was the threads. It had grown them. It knew every one. It just drew them back into itself. Slowly. Gently. The way a hand closes. The way roots draw back from the edge of a pot when the plant knows it’s going to be moved.

It took an hour.

I didn’t do anything. I watched. Genny watched, beside me, with her hand on the cold grey wall of the hold and her face very still. Toby watched with Marlo on his back. Juno had her eyes shut.

When the last thread came back into the sliver, the collar went quiet.

Not asleep. Empty. A grey band round the neck of a small hill, with nothing in it but a piece of a queen that had taken back what it had put out, and was holding it.

”Now,” said Genny. Very softly.

I unfolded the collar.

Gently. Like opening a hand that’s held something small a long time. The grey band fell away from the Tharn’s neck in a ribbon. The sliver lay in the middle of it. Small. Rough. Grey-brown. Like a pebble from the bottom of a river.

Genny didn’t pick it up.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she looked at the Tharn.

”It doesn’t want a stone,” she said.

”How do you know?”

”I don’t know how I know.” Genny’s voice was very careful. ”It’s the same as asking. You listen first.” She knelt by the sliver. Didn’t touch it. ”It doesn’t want to sleep among hatchlings. It’s not a hatchling queen. It’s old. It’s the oldest thing in this hold.” She looked up. ”It wants to go back.”

”Back where?”

Genny looked at the Tharn. At the small hill. At the place on its neck where the collar had been.

”Into its young,” she said. ”Not as a collar. As a—” She stopped. ”As a mother.”

I didn’t know if that was possible.

The queen at the bottom of the Hand did.

Yes, she said. Through Dory. Through the net. The sliver is a queen. A piece. But a queen. And the young is hers. She can go back in. Not as threads. As herself. A pause. She will not drive it. She will not pull. She will be there. The way the boy’s queen is there for her young. The way Dory is there for all of you.

Will it hurt it?

It will not hurt, said the queen. It will be like coming home.

I looked at Genny.

Genny looked at the sliver.

Then she reached out with Father’s hands, and picked it up, very gently, the way she’d picked up the strawberry Garnet made from a pebble on the first night. And she turned to the Tharn. To the small hill. To the place on its neck where the collar had been, deep under the plates, where the skin was soft and pale and new.

And she held the sliver against it.

And listened.

And asked.

The sliver went in.

Not through the skin. Into the skin, the way water goes into dry ground. Slowly. Without breaking anything. One moment it was in Genny’s palm against the Tharn’s neck, and the next it wasn’t, and the place where it had been was smooth.

For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then the heartbeat changed.

The slow tide of it. So slow it was more like weather than a pulse. It didn’t speed up. It deepened. As if something that had been missing from it for a very long time had come back, and now there was more of it to beat.

And the Tharn opened its eyes.

I hadn’t known it had eyes. They were under the plates, at the front, where a head must be. Small and dark and very deep. They opened slowly. Slower than anything I’d ever seen open.

They looked at Genny.

Then at Dory.

Then, very slowly, at Marlo, on Toby’s back.

And the Tharn made a sound.

Low. So low I felt it more than heard it, the way I felt our queen hum on the day Dory was born. Like rocks settling. Like the bottom of a river moving.

Like Tharn.

Marlo was crying.

”It’s the one,” he said. ”It’s the one that was thinking about its mother.” He put his face against Toby’s shoulder. ”It’s not thinking about her any more. She’s there.”

It took nine days to empty the first finger.

Not nine days of me. Nine days of Dory.

That was how it went, in the end. Every dawn, when the hello went up and the queen at the bottom of the Hand held the door open, Dory went down into the holds on Risa’s hip and checked. And waited. And the slivers stirred, and woke, and drew their threads back, one by one, all along the rows, all through the finger.

And when they had, I unfolded the collars, and Genny asked each sliver where it wanted to go, and almost all of them wanted to go home. Into their young. As mothers. Not as voices.

The Tharn went first. Four hundred and twelve. Then the Mirri.

The Mirri were the hardest, and the most beautiful. Three thousand bodies with one sliver in every collar, three thousand pieces of one queen. When Dory waited by the first of them, all three thousand slivers stirred at once, because the Mirri were one thing, and their queen was one thing too, cut into three thousand. And when they woke, they woke together. And drew their threads back together. And when Genny asked them where they wanted to go, they didn’t want to go into three thousand separate bodies.

They wanted to go back together.

Into one.

So Genny held out her hands, and three thousand slivers came to her across the dark of the hold like a swarm of grey bees, and she held them, every one, in her two cupped palms. And listened. And asked. And they flowed together under her fingers like mercury, into one shape, one small grey stone the size of a hen’s egg.

A queen. Whole. Or nearly.

The Mirri sang.

Every body. All three thousand. One song. Marlo was right. It sounded like rain on a roof. It filled the hold and the finger and the palm, and went down through the open folds to the queen at the bottom of the Hand, and up through the palm to the plain, where every brood on Avalon heard it and stood very still.

Genny stood in the middle of it with a whole queen in her hands, crying.

”Father,” she said. Not to me. To nobody. To the grey. ”This is the shorter way.”

On the ninth day, Okafor sent a message.

Not through Mother. Through the seed. Through Voss. At noon, not dawn, because Okafor had decided the seed was useful and was using it.

Major Okafor asks, said Voss, through the band on Crane’s collar, how many are left in the first finger.

”None,” I said. ”We emptied it this morning. The last Mirri. They’re on the plain.”

They were. Four hundred and twelve Tharn, like small hills on the red glass, very slowly feeling the sun on their plates for the first time in longer than they could count. Three thousand Mirri, moving over them like a cloud of grey sparks, singing. The mountain queen had sent word through our queen that there was deep country under the northern ranges, empty since before she was held, where stone-thinkers would be welcome. The Tharn were thinking about it. It would take them some time.

And the tall ones?

”We haven’t found them,” I said. ”Not in the first finger. They were there when we went in. Marlo felt them. Juno felt the wall where they were. When we went back the next morning—” I stopped. ”They’d moved. Further in. Into the second finger.”

Hiding.

”Or waiting.”

There was a pause on the band.

Major Okafor says, said Voss, that she’s made her list.

I went very still.

She says the queen in the Hand said empty my fingers, and then ask. She says you’ve emptied one. She says that’s not all three, and you’re not to pretend it is. A pause. But she says one finger is enough to carry three hundred people.

”Three hundred.”

Her list, said Voss. The thirty-one. Their families. The program families. The ones the Project marked. Three hundred and four names. Another pause. She says she’s not going to wait for the other two fingers. She says the Hands won’t.

I looked out at the plain.

At the Hand, a mile out, with its first finger empty for the first time in longer than its queen could remember. At the Tharn and the Mirri on the glass beneath it.

”Then I’ll ask her,” I said. ”Tonight.”

Major Okafor says one more thing, said Voss.

”What?”

The band was quiet for a moment. And when Voss spoke again, her voice had changed. Not a Chancellor’s voice. Not a politician’s. The voice of a woman who’d climbed twenty-three floors in a coat and knelt in front of Maura Calder.

She says you’re not to come.

I didn’t understand at first.

”Come where?”

To Earth, said Voss. Major Okafor says when the Hand goes for the families, you’re not to be on it. You’re to stay on Avalon.

Behind me on the porch, I heard Risa stand up.

”Why?” I said.

She says she’ll tell you why herself, said Voss. Tomorrow. At dawn. Through your mother. A pause. And she says to tell you she knows you won’t like it.

The band went dark.

I stood on the porch for a long time.

Then I looked out at the plain. At the Hand. At the empty first finger. At the second, where something that bent the light had gone to hide or wait.

At the sky, very far beyond it, where there was a small blue world under glass, and a moon, and behind the moon, a child who’d been singing in the cold for twenty-two years because nobody had ever come back to answer her question.

”She’s going to send someone else,” said Luna. Very quietly. Behind me.

”Yes,” I said.

”And she’s going to keep you here.”

”Yes.”

Luna came and stood beside me. Then Sera, with her hand on her stomach. Then Risa, with Dory on her hip.

”Because of the other two fingers,” said Luna. ”Because of the ones who moved.”

I looked at the second finger of the Hand.

”Because of whatever’s in there,” I said.

Days 784–793. Full fingers.

Dawn: Okafor wanted my own words, not Mother’s. I told her home isn’t Earth any more, and we have to bring them before the Hands come. ”Good.” She’d seen it the moment Mother closed her hand, and waited for me to see it: a soldier told where the ground is will stand on it; one who finds it himself will hold it. She’d been making a list.

Conditions. One: not everyone. Four million can’t go and most don’t want to; whoever’s in danger, the thirty-one, their families, the program families, the ones the Project marked, anyone who signs and can say why. She decides who. Two: Voss stays to run the dome and stand in front of four million who never chose any of this. Voss suggested it herself, last night. Three: ask the queen properly. Going out and asking her to carry our families because she’s grateful isn’t asking; it’s collecting. Find out what she needs first.

Fourteen minutes to close Marlo’s filament, Jessa holding his hand, Toby at the foot of the bed holding a wall round him since the Overseer’s door. ”You’ve got short hair.” ”You’ve got long hair.” ”That’s terrible. Cut it before anyone else sees.” She didn’t. Toby took his wall down, gently, like setting down something carried a long way.

Marlo on the holds: in the housing you’re not awake or asleep, just pulled, but in the gaps you could hear them. The big ones think the way stone thinks; the one next to him took a whole day to think one thing, and for a year it thought about its mother. Tharn, like rocks settling. The little ones are one thing with hundreds of bodies; when the voice was off they sang like rain on a roof. Mirri. The tall ones he couldn’t hear, like listening through a wall, but they could hear him: in every gap one turned toward his housing and looked, checking he was still there. Risa: like Dory. ”Who’s Dory?”

Dusk on the plain. What do you need? Fourteen days of the hello and she speaks slowly, every word right: My fingers are full. She carried them here and to other worlds before, and carried the voice that told them what to do. She cannot carry our families while her fingers are full of the held; it would be the same thing. Empty my fingers, and then ask me.

Kitchen table. Juno: 412 Tharn in the first finger; Mirri uncountable, one thing in maybe three thousand bodies; the tall ones like a wall. More in the other two fingers. The General’s sum: a year, more, at forty minutes a collar. Marlo, in two blankets, hair tied with Jessa’s string: you don’t have to do the collars. You don’t know where a Tharn’s heart is. Their own queens do. Every collar holds a sliver of the wearer’s own queens; the slivers grew the threads and know the way back. Wake them gently. Not with the voice. With there you are.

Dawn, the first finger, down a passage the queen opened straight through the folds. Marlo on Toby’s back pointed at the one that thought about its mother: a hill of river-stone plates, a heartbeat slow as a tide. Dory checked it. Nothing. Again. Nothing. Marlo: it’s too slow; you can’t hurry it. Dory frowned exactly like Risa. Then she didn’t check again. She waited, silver against it, the way the old one sat on her terrace and never hurried our queen. Fifteen minutes and the sliver stirred. Twenty: there you are, once, softly. It answered.

It knew the threads were its own, in its own young, and it had not wanted to put them there. It drew them back into itself like roots drawing back from a pot. An hour. The collar went empty; I unfolded it. Genny: it doesn’t want a stone; it’s old, it wants to go back into its young, not as a collar, as a mother. The queen in the Hand: yes, it will be like coming home. Genny held it to the soft new skin and listened and asked, and it went in like water into dry ground. The heartbeat deepened. Eyes I hadn’t known it had opened, slower than anything. It looked at Genny, at Dory, at Marlo, and said Tharn. Marlo: it’s not thinking about her any more. She’s there.

Nine days to empty the first finger. Nine days of Dory waiting at dawn. 412 Tharn. Then the Mirri: three thousand slivers of one queen, which woke together, wanted to go back together, came to Genny’s palms like grey bees and flowed together like mercury into one stone the size of a hen’s egg. A queen, nearly whole. The Mirri sang like rain on a roof, down to the queen at the bottom and up to every brood on the plain. Genny, crying, to the grey: ”Father. This is the shorter way.”

The tall ones moved into the second finger. Hiding or waiting.

Ninth day, noon, Okafor through Voss’s seed: one finger is enough to carry three hundred. Her list is 304 names. She won’t wait for the other two fingers; the Hands won’t. Then, in Voss’s own voice: you’re not to come. You stay on Avalon. She’ll tell me why at dawn through Mother, and knows I won’t like it.

Luna: she’s going to send someone else and keep you here, because of the other two fingers, because of the ones who moved. Because of whatever’s in there.