Scarecrow

I didn’t try to wake him on the riverbank.

I wanted to. I knelt there in the dark with my hand on the rust of his shoulder and the words still going through me, copy, Scarecrow, worn smooth, and every part of me wanted to reach into the iron and change it. Turn it back. Make him flesh again, there and then, on the red mud by the black river.

Genny put her hand on my wrist.

”Don’t,” she said.

”I wasn’t going to.”

”You were.” Her silver lines ran square and bright from her shoulder to her fingers, and her fingers were very firm on my wrist. ”You were going to change him. I could feel it. Like when Father used to stand in the kitchen doorway and decide something.” She didn’t let go. ”You don’t know what’s him and what isn’t yet. You said so.”

I looked at her.

At my sister, twelve years old, with a silver streak in her hair where Mother’s grey one was, kneeling on a riverbank in the jungle with her hand on a boy made of iron.

”No,” I said. ”I don’t.”

”Then we take him home,” said Genny. ”And we ask.”

I carried him home.

Not in my arms. He was too heavy for arms. A boy made of iron weighs what a small cart weighs. I held him the way I held myself now, and the air round all of us, Genny and Juno and Dot and Brock, the way you’d hold a full cup without spilling a drop.

And we went.

Back over the jungle. Back over the black canopy, and the river where Bryn Tolley’s group went wrong, and the forest past Lantern, and the hills, and the plain. It was full dark by then. The Tharn on the plain were small black hills against the red glass. The Mirri were a faint grey shimmer over them, asleep.

Scarecrow was all lamps.

Everyone was on the glass.

Of course they were. Risa had told Sera and Sera had told Priya and Priya had told the square, and by the time we came down out of the dark over the canyon rim, half the city was standing on the red glass at the edge of the plain, looking up.

I set him down in front of them.

Gently. On his side. Exactly the way he’d been lying in the river. Curled. Arms over his head. Rust on his shoulders and mud in every crease.

Nobody said anything.

Then Risa came forward.

She had Dory on her hip. She knelt down beside him, the way I’d knelt on the riverbank, and looked at him for a long time.

”He used to steal my bread,” she said. Very quietly. ”In the mess. Every morning. For a month. Until Sigmund told him to stop.” Her voice wavered. ”And then he stopped, and he started leaving me his instead. On my tray. Without saying anything.” She swallowed. ”I never found out why.”

Dory leaned down off Risa’s hip, toward the iron.

And checked him.

There you are.

He didn’t answer her.

Not that night. The silver deep in the iron turned over again, the way it had on the riverbank when I said his name. Like a sleeper hearing something through a wall. But it didn’t wake. It didn’t speak.

”He’s very deep,” said Juno. She’d come down off my arm onto the glass and knelt on Brock’s other side, with her hand pressed flat against her chest. ”Deeper than the Tharn were. He went iron all the way. Not just his body. Him.” She closed her eyes. ”I think he forgot how to be anything else.”

”Then he needs to remember,” said Genny.

Everyone looked at her.

She was standing very straight at Brock’s feet, with her hands in her pockets and her silver streak bright in the lamplight.

”The Tharn sliver remembered,” she said. ”When Dory waited. The youngest queen remembered, when the queens sang. Lucas’s paths remembered, when they showed him where to go.” She looked at me. ”Everything that’s been asleep a long time remembers if somebody’s patient enough.” Her chin came up. ”So we’re patient.”

”How long?” said Sera.

Genny looked at Brock.

”As long as it takes,” she said.

We put him in the hollow.

The queen asked for him. Before I could ask her. When I came down the passage carrying him, she was already up at her full height at the far end, with her plates lifted, and she said:

The north shelf.

Where the Overseer had been. Where the young of eighteen had been, before they went to the courts.

The Overseer was there now. Of course it was. Sitting folded on the edge of the shelf, not close, holding its bread. The bread with the small neat hole in it.

It got up when it saw what I was carrying.

It moved along the shelf. All the way along. To the very end. And sat down again, folded, with its bread, and turned its mirror away, toward the wall.

Giving him the shelf.

I laid Brock down on it. On his side. Curled.

The Overseer didn’t turn round.

”It knows that shape,” it said. Its own voice. Very quiet. ”The shape of something holding a door. With its arms over its head. Because the door is all there is.” A pause. ”It sat like that. Under the mountain. For four hundred years.”

”He held a ford,” I said. ”For his squad. In a river.”

The Overseer was quiet for a long time.

”Then he is like it,” it said. ”A little.”

”A little,” I said.

We were patient for three days.

It was harder than it sounds.

Not for Genny. Genny sat beside the north shelf for hours, with her hand flat on the iron of Brock’s back, listening. She did it the way she’d listened to the paving stone the first time. Slowly. Asking. Learning where everything was, and what it had been, and what it was trying to become.

Not for Dory. Dory came down with Risa every dawn, when the hello went up, and every afternoon, when the light came slanting down the passage, and sat on Risa’s lap beside the north shelf with her silver against the iron. Not checking. Waiting. The way she’d waited by the Tharn in the first finger.

Not for the queen. The queen hummed. Low and long and steady, all day, all night, the hum she made for the young when they were sleeping. Only she made it for him.

It was hard for me.

I kept wanting to change him.

I could see how. I could see every grain of the iron he’d turned himself into. I could see the silver inside it, holding his shape like a mould, the way Genny said. I could see exactly where flesh had become iron, and what the iron had been before, and how to turn it back.

I didn’t.

Because Genny was right. I didn’t know what was him and what wasn’t.

And because every time I put my hand on the iron and felt the sleeping silver inside it, I remembered the locker room. Brock with his face red and his hands shaking, going iron in front of me because his father’s letter told him to fix it. And me shutting my eyes and counting to forty-one so I wouldn’t kill him.

And Brock stopping. Himself. Because he’d understood why I’d shut my eyes.

He’d chosen to stop.

I wasn’t going to take that away from him now.

Mother asked about him at the second dawn.

Okafor’s heard, she said. Through the hello, which was thin and faint now, with the first queen more than three days out. Through Dory, who held it anyway. She says Haddon was one of hers.

He was everyone’s, I said. He was the worst.

She says that’s what she means, said Mother. A pause. She says she had him on the beam every morning for a month in the first year, and he never once complained, and she never once found out why he was so angry. Another pause. She says she found out later. About the letters. From his father.

The car.

The car, Mother agreed, and I could hear the edge of a smile. Genny’s car.

I glanced at Genny. She was on the glass beside me, with her eyes shut, very straight. She’d heard. Her ears had gone pink.

Okafor says, said Mother, the Haddons are on her list now.

I went very still.

His father lost his post, said Mother. After the car. They’ve been on the lower floors since. Okafor says she’s been to see them. His mother. His sister. His father, who wouldn’t open the door the first time and did the second. A pause. She says his father’s asked her every week since the cadets left whether there was any word. Every week. She says he never asks about anything else.

Did she tell him?

Not yet, said Mother. She says she won’t tell a man his son’s alive until his son says something. Her voice softened. She says that’s the order.

He said something on the third night.

Not at dawn. Not when Dory was there, or the queen was humming, or Genny had her hand on him. At midnight, when the hollow was dark and the young were asleep and nobody was there at all except me, sitting with my back against the edge of the north shelf because I couldn’t sleep. And the Overseer, folded at the far end, holding its bread.

I felt it before I heard it.

The silver in the iron. Turning over. Not the way it had been turning over for three days, slow and deep, like a sleeper. Faster. Like someone sitting up too quickly in bed, not knowing where they are.

And then, through the iron, very faint, not the shape of words this time but the words themselves:

Did they cross?

I sat up.

Did they, said the voice again. Rough. Worn. Iron-flat. Is everyone. Did they all.

I put my hand on his shoulder. On the rust.

”Yes,” I said. Out loud. In the dark. ”Everyone crossed. All of Squad Two. Sigmund last.”

Silence.

Then:

Friese?

”Sigmund’s fine,” I said. ”He’s more than fine. He’s on his way to Earth right now. To bring your family home.”

A long silence. Very long.

...Dask?

”Yes.”

That’s— The voice stopped. Started again. You sound like Dask.

”It’s me, Brock.”

Why are you— Another stop. Where’s the river?

”You’re not in the river any more,” I said. ”I took you out. You’re in a hollow. Under a city. With a queen.”

A very long silence.

...A what?

It took him an hour to understand.

Not because he was slow. Because there was so much. I told him as simply as I could. Sitting in the dark with my hand on his iron shoulder, the way Toby sat with his hand on people’s hearts.

How long he’d been in the river.

Where he was.

That the Teeming he’d held the ford against had been pushed. That they hadn’t wanted to. That the thing pushing them was gone now, and the Teeming were our friends, and there was a queen at the end of this hollow humming him to sleep every night because she’d decided he was hers for a while.

That Sigmund had waited three days on the far bank. That he’d put a cross by Brock’s name and hadn’t slept for a week.

That Sigmund had said the worst person in Squad Two and the bravest.

He was quiet for a long time after that.

...He said that?

”To Risa. The first night he got here.”

Huh. A pause. He never said anything nice to me in his life.

”He wasn’t saying it to you.”

No. Another pause. That’s the only way he could say it.

He changed back at dawn.

Not because I changed him. Because he chose to.

The hello went up. Dory came down the passage with Risa, and sat on the north shelf beside the iron, and checked him.

There you are.

And this time, he answered.

Not in words. In silver. The silver inside the iron, the mould that had held his shape for a year and a half at the bottom of a black river, woke all the way. I felt it. Felt it reach out to Dory’s check the way a hand reaches for a rope.

And then it started to move.

Not the way it moved when I changed things. Not the way the queen grew things. The way Brock had done it in the locker room. All at once. From the inside. The iron going soft and dark and warm, from the heart outward, the way ice goes soft in spring.

Only it got stuck.

I felt it get stuck. At the heart. The heart had gone iron all the way, the way Genny had said. Not just the outside. The inside. The muscle, and the chambers, and the blood in them. And Brock’s silver was trying to turn it back, and it was turning back. It was flesh again. Red and soft and whole.

But it wasn’t beating.

It had been iron for a year and a half. It had forgotten.

”Lucas,” said Genny. She had her hand flat on his back. ”His heart.”

”I know.”

”It’s not starting.”

I knew that too. I could see it. A heart, whole and warm and perfect, sitting very still in a chest that was going from iron to flesh round it. Not beating.

I could make it beat. I could reach in and change the cells. Make them move. Force them.

I didn’t know if that was him.

”Risa,” I said.

Risa didn’t ask what I meant.

She’d known Brock longer than any of us. She’d sat across from him at the mess table every morning for a month while he stole her bread. She’d been in Squad Two until her father had her moved.

And she’d been taking her brother’s lightning into her own silver and earthing it since they were small.

She put Dory into Genny’s arms.

She knelt down beside the north shelf. Beside Brock, half iron, half flesh, curled on his side with his arms over his head and a heart in his chest that had forgotten how to beat.

She put her hand flat on his chest. Over his heart.

”Brock,” she said. Very quietly. ”You owe me a month of bread.”

And she let the lightning go.

Not much. Not a storm. Not a ring of white fire fifty feet high. A single small bright pulse, from her palm into his chest. The kind of spark Sigmund used to throw at her across the dinner table in their father’s house when they were small and Father wasn’t looking.

Brock’s whole body jerked.

And his heart beat.

Once.

Then again.

Then again, and again, and again, faster, steadier, the way a drum starts when someone finally picks up the sticks.

And the iron went.

All of it. From the heart outward. The way it had been going, only now it didn’t stop. Down his arms. Down his legs. Out to the ends of everything. Rust flaking off a back that was suddenly skin. Mud cracking off a face that was suddenly a face.

He uncurled.

Slowly. His arms came down from over his head. His knees came down. He rolled onto his back on the north shelf of the hollow, among the sleeping young, and opened his eyes.

Brown. Ordinary. Human.

He looked up at Risa.

”Friese,” he said. Hoarse. Very hoarse. Like a door that hadn’t been opened in a year and a half. ”What are you doing?”

”Collecting,” said Risa.

And burst into tears.

He couldn’t stand for a day.

Edda wouldn’t let him. She came down the passage at a run when Dot went to fetch her, with her green book under her arm and her bag of bandages, and took one look at Brock on the north shelf and said absolutely not in the voice she’d used on Marlo.

So he lay on the north shelf, under a blanket Priya brought, with his left arm in a sling because the elbow was still bent where the log had hit it. I’d offered to straighten it. He’d said in a minute in a voice that meant not yet. And he looked at the hollow.

At the shelves of young, in their silver wrappings. At the ten small round cups on the east wall where the Kethri slivers had slept, nine of them still there and one empty. At the queen at the far end, at her full height, humming.

At the Overseer, folded at the end of the shelf with its bread.

”What,” said Brock, ”is that.”

”That’s the Overseer,” I said.

”The what?”

”It used to work for the Sorn. It doesn’t any more.” I looked at the Overseer. It had turned its mirror round, finally, toward Brock. ”It gave you its shelf.”

Brock looked at it for a long time.

The Overseer looked back.

”It sat like you,” it said. ”Under a mountain. Holding a door. With its arms over its head.” A pause. ”For four hundred years.”

Brock was quiet.

”Did anyone come and get you?” he said.

”A boy,” said the Overseer. ”And a juvenile with bread.”

Brock looked at me.

Then at the Overseer.

Then he said, very quietly, ”Huh.”

Genny came down that afternoon.

She’d been with him since dawn. Since the moment the iron went. She’d only gone up to eat because Pell had come down the passage and stood at the bottom of it until Genny noticed her, which was Pell’s way, and nobody ever argued with it.

She came back down with a bowl of Priya’s soup and sat on the edge of the north shelf.

Brock looked at her.

At the silver rings round her eyes. At the silver streak in her hair. At the square silver lines running down her arms like a page of chemistry.

His face changed.

”I know you,” he said slowly.

Genny’s chin came up.

”Yes,” she said. ”I’m Genevieve Dask. I put your father’s car on the barracks roof when I was nine.”

There was a long silence.

Then Brock started to laugh.

It hurt him. I could see it hurt him. His chest had been iron for a year and a half and his ribs weren’t used to moving. But he laughed anyway, lying on the north shelf with his bent arm in a sling, until tears ran down his face and Edda came down the passage to see what the noise was.

”Best day of my life,” he said, when he could. ”That was the best day of my life.” He wiped his eyes with his good hand. ”He had to get a Ministry crane. He lost his post. He wrote me a letter that said fix it.” He laughed again, more quietly. ”I never fixed it. I went iron in a locker room and your brother shut his eyes and counted to forty-one so he wouldn’t kill me, and I stopped, and I never fixed anything.” He looked at Genny. ”Best day of my life.”

Genny didn’t say anything for a moment.

Then she held out the soup.

”Okafor’s been to see your father,” she said. ”He asks every week whether there’s any word. Every week. He never asks about anything else.”

Brock stopped laughing.

He looked at the soup. He didn’t take it.

”He asks about me?”

”Every week,” said Genny. ”Since the cadets left.”

Brock didn’t say anything for a very long time.

Then he took the soup.

He didn’t eat it. He held it in his good hand, on his chest, very carefully, the way you’d hold something you were afraid of spilling.

”Okafor’s bringing them,” I said. ”Your family. Your mother and your sister and him. They’re on her list. The Hand’s on its way to Earth right now. With Sigmund on it.”

Brock looked at me.

”He’s bringing my father?”

”He’s bringing everyone.”

Brock looked at the soup for a long time.

”Then I’d better fix my arm,” he said.

I straightened it at dusk.

He asked me to. I didn’t offer again. He held out his left arm, bent wrong at the elbow where a log had hit it at the bottom of a river a year and a half ago, and said, ”Now. Please.” The way Garnet said yes please.

I looked inside.

The bone had healed, the way bones heal when nobody helps them. Crooked. Iron first, then flesh, then the flesh had remembered being bent and healed that way. I could see where it should go. I could see what it had been trying to become, the whole time, under the iron.

I listened first.

Then I helped it.

It took four minutes. When I’d finished, he held the arm out straight in front of him, and turned the hand over, and made a fist, and opened it.

Then he looked at me.

And his face did something I’d never seen it do in all the months in the dome. Not red. Not angry. Not shaking. Something very still and very plain, the way Sigmund’s face went when he said noted.

”Dask,” he said.

”Yes.”

”I’m sorry.”

”You said that already. In the locker room.”

”I know.” He didn’t look away. ”I’m saying it again. Because last time I said it because you shut your eyes. This time I’m saying it because you opened them.” He swallowed. ”You looked for me. In the river. Nobody else could have found me. You looked.”

I didn’t say anything.

”Copy, Scarecrow,” said Brock.

Dot counted him at the next dawn.

She did it the way she counted everyone. Out loud. On the red glass. Every name. Every base. Every brood. Up through the ring of queens to the spine-queen, and from her down and out, eleven light-years, to a flat with thirty people in it holding hands round a table.

And this time, after the names she’d been counting every morning for a year, a new one.

”Haddon, B.,” said Dot.

A pause.

”This unit counts him. Here. Not lost.”

And through the hello, faint and far, thinner than ever with the first queen so far out into the crossing that she was barely there at all, something came back.

Not from Earth.

From the Hand.

From the first finger of the Hand, somewhere in the dark between Avalon and Earth, where Toby was carrying the hello the whole way so that the families could be counted. Toby heard it. Toby heard everything. And Toby turned round to whoever was standing beside him, in the dark of the first finger, and said it.

And whoever was standing beside him said something back.

Dot heard it. Very faint. One word. In a voice that never in its life said more than it had to.

”Noted.”

Brock, on the glass beside me, wrapped in Priya’s blanket, leaning on Genny because Edda still wouldn’t let him stand on his own, made a sound I’d never heard him make.

Then he put his face in his good hand and laughed until he cried.

Days 802–806. Copy.

I didn’t wake him on the riverbank. Genny put her hand on my wrist: you were going to change him; I could feel it, like Father deciding something in the kitchen doorway; you don’t know what’s him and what isn’t. Then we take him home, and we ask.

I carried him the way I hold myself, a boy of iron weighing what a small cart weighs, back over the canopy and the plain in the dark. Half the city on the glass. Risa knelt: he stole my bread every morning for a month until Sigmund told him to stop, and then he left me his, on my tray, without a word. I never found out why. Dory leaned down and checked him. There you are. The silver turned over and didn’t wake.

Juno: deeper than the Tharn; he went iron all the way, him too; he forgot how to be anything else. Genny: everything asleep a long time remembers if somebody’s patient enough. As long as it takes.

The queen asked for him before I could ask: the north shelf. The Overseer moved to the very end and turned its mirror to the wall. It knows that shape, something holding a door with its arms over its head because the door is all there is; it sat like that under the mountain four hundred years. He held a ford. Then he is like it, a little.

Three days. Genny listening with her hand on his back. Dory waiting, dawn and afternoon. The queen humming the hum for sleeping young, for him. Me, wanting to change him and not. He chose to stop, in the locker room. I wasn’t going to take that away.

Mother: Okafor says Haddon was one of hers; a month on the beam and never once complained, and she found out later about his father’s letters. The car. Genny’s ears went pink. The Haddons are on her list: lower floors since he lost his post; his father wouldn’t open the door the first time and did the second, and asks every week whether there’s word, and nothing else. She won’t tell a man his son’s alive until his son says something.

Third night, midnight, only me and the Overseer: Did they cross? Everyone, Sigmund last. Friese? On his way to Earth to bring your family. Dask? You sound like Dask. Where’s the river? You’re in a hollow under a city with a queen. ”...A what?” An hour to understand. Sigmund’s three days and a week without sleep; the worst and the bravest. ”He never said anything nice to me in his life.” He wasn’t saying it to you. ”That’s the only way he could say it.”

Dawn: he chose. Dory checked; his silver reached for it like a hand for a rope and the iron went soft from the heart out like ice in spring. It stuck at the heart: flesh again, whole, not beating; it had forgotten. I could have forced it. I didn’t know if that was him. Risa gave Dory to Genny and put her hand on his chest: you owe me a month of bread. One small pulse, the kind of spark Sigmund threw at her across Father’s table. His heart beat once, then again and again, like a drum when someone picks up the sticks, and the iron went all the way. He rolled onto his back and opened brown eyes. ”Friese. What are you doing?” ”Collecting.” She burst into tears.

Edda: absolutely not, he lies there a day. Bent arm in a sling; in a minute, not yet. ”What is that?” The Overseer gave you its shelf; it sat like you under a mountain four hundred years. ”Did anyone come and get you?” ”A boy. And a juvenile with bread.” ”Huh.”

Genny with Priya’s soup: I’m Genevieve Dask; I put your father’s car on the barracks roof when I was nine. He laughed until it hurt: best day of my life; a Ministry crane; he lost his post; a letter that said fix it; I never fixed anything. Okafor’s been to see your father; he asks every week. He held the soup on his chest like something he might spill. Your family’s on her list; the Hand’s on its way with Sigmund on it. ”Then I’d better fix my arm.”

Dusk: ”Now. Please.” Iron, then flesh that remembered being bent. Listened first. Four minutes. A fist, opened. His face very still and plain, the way Sigmund’s goes when he says noted. I’m sorry. You said that in the locker room. Then because you shut your eyes; now because you opened them. You looked for me in the river. ”Copy, Scarecrow.”

Next dawn Dot counted a new name: Haddon, B. This unit counts him. Here. Not lost. And faint from the first finger, somewhere between worlds, where Toby carries the hello: Toby turned to the one beside him, and the one beside him said one word. Noted. Brock, in Priya’s blanket, leaning on Genny, laughed until he cried.