Scarecrow

Mother woke me before dawn.

Not with her hands. With the thread. A small tug, very light, the way she used to tap on my door in the house in the dead field when the filter hadn’t woken yet and there was something she wanted me to see.

Lucas. Come down. Quietly.

I got up without waking anyone. Which was hard. Sera was asleep on her side with her hand on her stomach, and Risa was asleep with one arm flung over the edge of the bed toward Dory’s cot, and Luna was asleep at the end with all of the blanket, and every one of them had gone to sleep saying they wouldn’t, because it was the night before, and you didn’t sleep the night before.

They’d slept. All three. Like stones.

I didn’t wake them.

Mother was in the kitchen. In the blue silk dressing gown, with Father’s ring on her hand and Dory on her shoulder. Dory was awake. Very awake. Her silver was turned out, all the way out, the way it turned in a crowd. Only there was no crowd. There was the kitchen and the dark and the kettle.

And Juno.

She was sitting at our table with her hands round a cup she hadn’t drunk from and her eyes half shut. She’d been sitting like that a long time. I could tell from the cup.

”The first queen,” said Mother. ”She’s been calling since three. Dory heard her.” She put her hand on Dory’s back. ”Juno came because she heard it too.”

”What does she want?”

”She wants to tell you what the others have been saying,” said Juno. Without opening her eyes. ”The far ones. Past north. She’s been listening to them for a week.” A pause. ”She’s got it now. All of it. She wants you to hear it before the wedding.” Another pause. ”She says you’ll want to know before you stand under a tree.”

I put my hand on Dory’s back.

And the thread opened. Down through Dory. Down through the first queen at the bottom of ten thousand folds on the plain. And out.

Past north. Past where Juno had ever felt anything.

I’d heard them once before. A week ago, at the edge of the last wedding. Lots of voices, very far off. Not singing. Talking. Low and fast and urgent, the way a brood sounds when it knows something’s coming.

They weren’t urgent now.

They were quiet. Still talking. But slow. The way people talk after news, when the news turns out not to be what they were afraid of. Or not yet.

I will tell it, said the first queen. As they told me. As it was told to them. A pause. It was not told to them. It was pushed through them. The way the voice is pushed. They heard it going past. They could not help hearing.

”Who pushed it?”

The ones who hold them, said the first queen. And the ones who hold those.

It took her a long time.

She did it the way she’d told the council about the Sorn. Every word right. In the words she’d learned from the hello and from Dory and from us. Where she didn’t have words, Juno helped, very quietly, with her eyes shut.

I’ll set it down as near as I can.

The Hands far past north had heard. That was true. The queens in them had felt it, the way you’d feel a string pulled at the far end of a net. Two Hands gone quiet at the edge of everything. A queen who stopped carrying. Then another. The Hesk lying down on a battlefield. The tender’s choir going silent behind a moon.

And their holders had felt it too.

So the holders had asked. Up. To whoever held them. And whoever held them had asked further up again. A long way. Further than the first queen could follow, even listening through a hundred other queens.

And an answer had come back down.

It took a week. The Sorn were very large, the first queen said. Large things are slow to turn their heads.

But it came. Pushed down through the Hands, through the holders, through the queens, the way an order always came. The queens had heard it going past.

And then they’d talked about it. To each other. In the dark. For days.

They are not coming, said the first queen.

The kitchen was very quiet.

The answer said this, said the first queen. Slowly. Getting every piece of it right. Two old Hands, at the edge. Old Hands fail. Old queens go quiet. It has happened before. It is a fault. It is not a war.

It said: on the edge world there is a fragment of the human stock. Defectives. Cast out by their own kind. Gone to ground on a world that was already broken. Small. With old Hands that failed under them.

It said: the human world is still in the tithe. Its rulers still sit. Its paper is still signed. The fragment is not the human world. The fragment is a fault on the edge of the human world.

A pause.

It said: a fault is not worth a Hand.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Juno had opened her eyes. She was looking at her cup.

Mother had her hand very still on Dory’s back. Perfectly still. The way she held things when she didn’t trust herself to hold them any other way.

”A fault,” I said.

That is the word, said the first queen. I have looked for a better one. There is not one. They mean a crack in a thing. Small. Not worth mending. Not worth throwing away. You leave it. You use the thing anyway.

”And Earth?”

The human world is in the tithe, said the first queen. They believe it is. Its rulers sit. Its paper is signed. They have not looked closer. They do not look closely at things in the tithe. There are too many.

So they will not come back to the human world. Not for this. Not for a fault.

Mother sat down.

She didn’t mean to. I could see that. She’d been standing very straight with Dory on her shoulder, and then her knees went, and she was sitting in Luna’s chair at the end of the table with Dory in her lap and her face doing something I’d never seen it do.

”Four million,” she said. Very quietly.

Nobody answered.

”Four million people under glass,” said Mother. ”With the Senate still sitting and Voss still in her office because Okafor wouldn’t let her leave it. With the families gone and Level 62 opened and the files open and none of it fixed, none of it, not really, not yet.” She put her hand over her mouth. Took it away. ”And they’re not coming. For them. Because we’re too small to be worth it.”

”Yes,” I said.

Mother looked at me.

”I thought,” she said. ”Every morning. Since the Hand went over the dome. Every morning I thought, today’s the day the Sorn come back to Earth for what we did. Today’s the day someone pays for us leaving.” Her voice was very level. ”I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t tell Okafor. I just thought it. Every morning. On the porch. With Dory.”

She looked down at Dory, asleep in her lap now, very suddenly, the way babies fall asleep when the thing they were waiting for is over.

”Nobody’s going to pay for us,” said Mother.

”Not yet,” said Juno. Very quietly. ”Not for this.”

Okafor came at first light.

She didn’t need to be fetched. The first queen had called her too, it turned out, through Mother, very early, and she’d been sitting up in the chair in the corner of her room with her slate on her knee since four, waiting for someone to knock. Nobody had. So she’d come.

With Holt. And the General, who’d come in from the foot of his mountain with frost still on his coat. And Luna behind him, in her dressing gown, furious at being left asleep.

”I knew you’d got up,” said Luna. ”I felt the bed.”

”You had all the blanket.”

”That’s not the point.”

Then Sera, then Risa, who’d woken because Luna had, and the kitchen was full.

So I told it again. All of it. The way the first queen had told it, as near as I could. With Juno beside me putting in the words I didn’t have.

When I’d finished, Okafor didn’t say anything for a long time.

She’d put her slate down on the table. Square with the edge. She was looking at it.

”Fault,” she said at last.

”Yes, ma’am.”

”Defectives. Cast out by their own kind. A fragment of the human stock.” She said each one the way she’d read names off the first-day list in the dome. Flat. Plain. Getting them right. ”Not worth a Hand.”

”Yes, ma’am.”

”Well,” said Holt, from the window.

Everyone looked at him.

He had his arms folded. He was looking out at the plain. At the two Hands lying on it with their fingers folded, and the Hesk queen’s kiln-glow, and the Sef’s beam coming down off the rim in the first sun, and the General’s white mountain beyond, with the Nivi queen’s crown just catching the light.

”I’ve been called a lot of things,” said Holt. ”By the Senate. By the Project. By officers with polished boots.” He tapped the window frame. ”That’s the first time anyone’s called me not worth it and made me want to buy them a drink.”

The Overseer was at the passage mouth.

Where it always was, at dawn. With its bread. Garnet had brought it a fresh piece the evening before, the end of one of Thorne’s loaves, and it was holding it the way it held every piece Garnet had ever given it, in both of its long grey hands, very carefully, as if it might be asked to give it back.

Okafor walked out to it.

She didn’t take anyone. She didn’t need to. I went anyway, a few steps behind, because the Overseer only ever spoke in its own words when I was near enough to hear the shape under them.

She stood in front of it.

”You heard,” said Okafor.

”Yes,” said the Overseer.

”Is it true?”

The Overseer was quiet for a long time. Its blank grey face turned toward the plain. Toward the Hands.

”It is what they believe,” it said. ”That is the same as true. For them.”

”Explain.”

”They do not count small things,” said the Overseer. ”It was small, once. It was put on this world with a Hand and an order and a queen in chains, and told: hold it. Report when it is held. It reported. Nobody answered for a long time.” It turned the bread over in its hands. ”That is how it learned. Nobody answers the edge. The edge is very far. There are very many edges. There are very many Hands.”

”How many?”

”It does not know,” said the Overseer. ”It was never told. It was small.” A pause. ”More than this world has stones.”

Okafor didn’t say anything.

”They lose Hands,” said the Overseer. ”Old ones. At the edge. Queens go quiet. Holders die. Worlds that were held stop being held. It happens. They do not come back for them. It costs more to come back than to go on.” It looked at the bread. ”They go on. They have always gone on. They have never once stopped.”

”Then when will they come?”

The Overseer turned its blank face toward her.

”When you are large,” it said. ”When you are no longer a fault. When you are a war.” A pause. ”They are very slow to turn their heads. But when they turn them, they do not turn them back.”

Okafor came back across the glass with her hands behind her back.

She didn’t say anything until she was at the bottom of our porch steps. Then she stopped, and looked up at all of us crowded in the doorway, and at me at her elbow, and at the plain.

”Right,” she said.

Everyone waited.

”Nobody leaves this porch thinking we’ve been forgotten,” said Okafor. ”We haven’t. We’ve been postponed.” She looked at Luna. ”Windsor. What does an enemy that underestimates you give you?”

”Time,” said Luna. Instantly. ”And ground.”

”And?”

Luna thought about it.

”Surprise,” she said. ”Once. Only once. When they turn their heads.”

”Good,” said Okafor. ”Then we use all three. We take every collar we can reach, on every Hand we can reach, as quietly as we can reach it, for as long as they think we’re a crack in a cup.” She looked out at the plain. At the Nivi mountain, and the Sef’s beam, and the Hesk queen in her shell of shells. ”Every queen we sing back is another world they think is a fault. Every one. Until one morning they turn their heads and find out the fault runs right through the middle of them.”

She turned back.

”And in the meantime,” said Okafor, ”Earth is not in a Hand’s shadow. Four million people under glass are not going to pay for us. Not yet. Not for this.” She looked at Mother. Just for a moment. As if she’d known. ”That’s worth more than any war plan I’ve ever drawn. And I’ve drawn a great many.”

Mother didn’t say anything.

But she stood up a little straighter. With Dory asleep on her shoulder.

”Renegade,” said Sigmund.

He’d come up the street while Okafor was talking, with Jessa beside him. He’d heard most of it. His lightning wasn’t sparking. He was holding it very tight.

”That’s what my father would have called it,” he said. ”A renegade fragment. In a Senate report. He’d have drafted it.” He looked at Risa. ”That’s what we are, to them.”

”Yes,” said Risa.

”Doesn’t that bother you?”

Risa looked at her brother for a long moment. She had Dory back now, in the sling. She had an iron ring on her left hand that she’d been turning round and round with her thumb all morning.

”Siggy,” she said. ”I’m getting married in five hours. To three people. Under a tree. On a world the Sorn think is broken, in a city they don’t know is here, with my daughter in my arms and the queen of the Hesk lying on the plain in a shell made of her dead.” She smiled. A small sharp Friese smile. ”I’ve always been a renegade. I just didn’t have the paperwork.”

Jessa laughed. Out loud.

Sigmund looked at her. And then, very slowly, his face did something I’d never seen it do.

He laughed too.

Okafor looked at her slate.

She hadn’t written anything on it all morning. She looked at the blank face of it for a long time. Then she put it under her arm.

”And now,” said Okafor, ”I have a wedding at noon.”

I won’t be able to tell it properly.

I’ve tried, since. In my head. In the notebook, which Luna gave me the evening after and said you write this one, I was busy. I’ve tried to set it down the way Father would have, plain and short and true. I can’t. There was too much of it. It was too big to hold in one place, and it kept spilling over the edges.

So I’ll tell what I can.

The square, at noon. Under the tree.

Everyone. Not just Scarecrow. Everyone who’d ever come through the canyon or down a palm or out of a hold. The families from Earth in their best coats, the ones they’d carried in bundles through the dark of the first finger. The third-wave kids along the schoolroom wall. Edda with her green book. Dov and Priya by the kitchen door. Thorne and Meg beside them, with flour to the elbows, because they’d been baking since four and hadn’t stopped till ten to twelve.

The first loaf out of the oven had gone to Garnet. It always did.

The queen at the garden wall at her full height. The Overseer at the passage mouth with its bread. Pebble on his step, with a stone.

And beyond them, on the plain, everything else.

The Kethri, all winged, in their ring round Sesh and the youngest queen, with the one place in the ring left open. The Hesk in their thousands, lying in the sun with their jaws on the glass, and their queen among them, kiln-glow and woven crest. The Tharn and the Mirri. The light-benders, very faint, at the edge of the air. The Ulu in their pool, lights moving slowly inside them. The Karst at the mouth of the second Hand, where it was dark enough. The Sef on their sand with the beam coming down onto them off the rim, and the spire at the top of the rim catching the noon sun and throwing it everywhere.

And past all of them, the General’s mountain. White. With the Nivi on its slopes, and the frost crown on its top, and the wind coming off it.

And in the corner of our garden, a patch of green by the wall, a yard wider than yesterday, with small white flowers in it. And the last one curled round its queen.

The four of us didn’t walk in together.

That was Luna’s idea. She’d drafted it. Four times. Each of us walks in with somebody who’s ours. And then we’re ours.

Sera came first.

Of course she did. Sera always came through doors first.

She came down the street from the Calders’ house on her father’s arm. Not behind him. Beside him. Rory in his good coat, the one Maura had made him take off the hook on Hearth Block and fold into the bundle because you never know, love, walking very slowly to match her, because she was twenty-seven weeks now and carrying it like it was nobody’s business. In a dress the colour of a kiln at night, dark red, that Maura had made in the last four days out of something none of us asked about.

Rory didn’t say anything the whole way.

He didn’t need to. He’d said it already, in the Calder kitchen, with the walls too thin. He walked beside his daughter down the middle of the square, with ten thousand Hesk watching him from the plain because he was theirs, and a Sef lying in the sun at the edge of the sand that had crawled a foot through the night to lie against his boot.

When they got to the tree, he stopped.

He didn’t give her away. Calders don’t. He just put his hand on her head. The way he’d put it on her head at the lift in the dome, before she left.

”Steady,” said Rory.

It was what he said to the furnace. He’d said it to her once before, Liam told me afterward, at the lift in the dome, the night she left for Avalon. Never in between. Not once.

Sera’s chin went up.

Risa came second.

With Sigmund. Who looked, exactly as Luna had predicted in her second draft, as if he was going to be sick. He held his sister’s arm very carefully, the way you’d hold a live wire, and walked her down the square with his jaw set so hard I could see it from the tree, and his lightning not sparking at all, not one spark, because he was holding it so tight.

Risa had Dory.

She’d said she would. Dory comes with me. Dory’s the reason. She can come down the aisle. And Dory, in the sling against Risa’s chest, in a small white thing Garnet had made her out of a pillowcase, looked out at everyone with her silver turned all the way out and checked them. Every one. As she passed.

There you are. There you are. There you are.

At the very back of the square, by the third-wave houses, a narrow grey man in a dark coat stood very still, with a cane he didn’t need.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t sign anything.

Dory checked him too. As she passed.

He closed his eyes.

Luna came third.

With her father.

They walked the way Windsors walk. Very straight. In step. Not fast, not slow. The General in his uniform, the one he’d worn up the stairs of the Senate Annex with his right hand bare, with frost still faintly on the shoulders of it from the night at the foot of his mountain. And Luna beside him in grey. Not uniform grey. Soft grey, like the morning over the canyon before the sun comes up. With Sera’s badly knitted scarf round her neck, because she’d said she wasn’t getting married without it, and nobody had dared argue.

And on her hand, beside the iron ring, another.

Silver. Old. Plain. A little worn on one side.

I didn’t know where it had come from. I found out later. The General had carried it through the dark of the first finger in his breast pocket and never mentioned it to anyone. Her mother’s.

He’d given it to her that morning. At the door of the map room. Without a word. She’d told me she nearly dropped it.

When they reached the tree, the General stopped. He looked at his daughter for a long moment.

Then he looked at the plain. At the white mountain he’d made, with the Nivi ringing on it, very faint, in the noon wind.

”I’ve had practice,” he said, ”standing very straight for a long time.” His voice was quite steady. ”I find I’ve stopped needing it.”

And he stepped back.

I came last.

With Mother.

She’d said she’d walk me. She’d said it the night of the porch, very quietly, before anyone else could offer. Nobody walked me, love. Nobody stood behind your father. I’d like to walk you. If I may.

So she did.

In the blue silk dressing gown. Not because she had nothing else. Maura had offered. Priya had offered. Meg Thorne had offered, which had made Mother go very quiet for a whole minute. Mother had thanked them all and said no.

”It’s the only thing I own that I chose,” she said. ”I wore it every time I spoke to you. So you’d always know it was me.” She held out her arm. ”I’d like you to know it’s me today.”

So I knew.

We walked down the middle of the square. Past everyone. Mother’s hand on my arm, very still. Perfectly still. Not shaking at all. And as we passed the corner of the garden, by the wall, the last one lifted its old wet eyes out of the moss and the small white flowers and looked at her.

She looked back.

Then we were at the tree.

And there they were. All three. Waiting for me.

Okafor did it the same way she’d done Toby and Wren.

No slate. Hands behind her back. Standing under the tree in her plain dark coat, with the whole of the square and the whole of the plain behind us, and every queen on Avalon very quiet.

”Holt tells me,” said Okafor, ”that this is quite straightforward.”

From the front row, standing, Holt said, ”It is.”

”I’ve decided he’s right,” said Okafor. ”Again.”

She looked at the four of us.

”I’m going to do this four times,” she said. ”Once each. Because nobody here is smaller than anybody else.” She glanced, just briefly, at Mother. ”I’m told that’s in the terms now.”

”Calder,” said Okafor.

”Ma’am,” said Sera.

”Do you want to marry him?”

”Yes, ma’am.”

”Her?” Okafor looked at Risa.

”Yes, ma’am.”

”Her?” At Luna.

Sera looked at Luna. Luna, very straight, with her mother’s ring and her iron one and Sera’s terrible scarf, looked back.

”Yes,” said Sera. ”Ma’am. All of them. Yes.”

”Friese.”

”Ma’am.”

”Him. Her. Her.”

”Yes,” said Risa. ”Yes. And yes.” She looked down at Dory, who was looking up at Okafor with enormous interest. ”And she says yes too, but she wasn’t asked.”

”Noted,” said Okafor.

”Windsor.”

Luna didn’t say ma’am. For once. She didn’t say anything at all for a moment.

Then she said, very clearly, getting every word right, the way she read off a slate:

”I want to marry Lucas Dask. I want to marry Seraphina Calder. I want to marry Risa Friese. Not as a part of something that’s his. As a thing in its own right. All three.” She swallowed. ”Yes.”

Okafor looked at her for a long time.

”That’s the best answer I’ve ever had to that question,” she said. ”And I’ve now asked it five times.”

”Dask.”

”Ma’am.”

”Well?”

I looked at them. Sera in kiln red with her chin up. Risa with Dory and her small sharp smile. Luna in morning grey with her mother’s ring.

I thought about a wall in the rain. A scrap of paper with a house drawn on it. A letter I’d written to my mother that might never get there, with all three of their names in it. I won’t introduce any of you as something smaller because it makes the explanation easier.

”All three in one breath,” I said. ”Yes.”

Okafor nodded.

”Then you are,” she said. ”All four of you. To each other.” She looked over our heads. ”Write it down.”

Wren wrote it down.

She’d been standing at the edge of the square by the north wall with her book under her arm, where she’d stood every morning for as long as anyone could remember. She opened it to the back page. The forty, and everyone after. And under Marsh, Toby she wrote:

Dask, Lucas. Calder, Seraphina. Friese, Risa. Windsor, Luna.

And then, after a moment, in smaller letters underneath:

Married. To each other.

She showed me afterward. She’d underlined each other twice.

Then the queens sang.

Not the old song. Not a wedding song. Something I’d never heard. Something they made up, all of them together, right there, while we stood under the tree.

Our queen first, at the garden wall. Low. The note under everything.

Then the old one on her mountain. The first queen and the second, from their Hands. The spine-queen far overhead. The youngest of the Kethri, small and bright, on Sesh’s shoulder.

Then the new ones.

The Hesk queen, deep and slow, like a kiln door. The Ulu queen, a cold blue shimmer from Hana’s pool. The Karst queen from the dark, singing back a note Toby had played her. The Sef spire on the rim, which didn’t sing exactly, but bent the sun so that the beam coming down off the rim swept once across the square, slowly, over all four of us, and every glassy edge on the plain caught it and threw it everywhere. And the Nivi on the General’s mountain, a thousand branches ringing in the wind.

And very small, from the corner of our garden, under all of it, a sound like water running under moss.

The gardener’s queen. Singing for the first time in longer than anyone could remember.

For us.

Brood mothers, said our queen. Into all four of us. All of us. For the small ones. For yours.

Under Sera’s hand, the baby was humming. Toby’s note, and the three under it. And now something else, very faint. All of them. Every queen who sang.

Toby played.

He’d said at his own wedding he’d be too busy. This time he wasn’t. He sat on the edge of the kitchen step with his fiddle under his chin and Wren beside him, fifteen weeks and counting nothing, and played the song his mother had sung under the tree for him. The wedding song from the lower floors, for when there’s nothing else to give.

And Adaeze Marsh, very small, in her shell-coloured dress, sang it again.

Then Toby played something else. Something fast. Something you had to dance to.

So we danced.

Badly, mostly. Sera couldn’t dance much at twenty-seven weeks and said so, and then danced anyway, slowly, with Rory, who could dance, it turned out, very well, and had never told anyone. Risa danced with Dory, and then with Sigmund, who stepped on her feet twice and apologised both times as if he’d signed something. Luna danced with her father. Very straight. In step.

And then with me.

And then, at the very end, as the sun went down behind the rim and the Sef spire caught the last of it and the whole square went gold, the three of them danced with each other. Under the tree. Holding hands in a ring, the way the Kethri stood, with one place left open.

They looked at me.

I came and filled it.

Late, after dark, when most people had gone home and the square was full of the ends of things, Mother and I sat on the porch steps.

Dory was asleep on her shoulder. Pebble had come and put his stone in her pocket, the fourth this week, and gone back to his step. In the corner of the garden, the small white flowers had closed up for the night.

Out on the plain, very faint, the Nivi were ringing in the wind off the mountain.

”Fault,” said Mother.

”Yes.”

”A crack in a cup. Not worth mending. You leave it, and use the cup anyway.”

”That’s what the first queen said.”

Mother looked out at the plain. At the two Hands. At the beam of the Sef spire, which had stopped with the sun, and the Hesk queen’s kiln-glow, which hadn’t.

”Your father fixed cracks,” she said. ”All his life. That was what he did. He’d find the crack in a thing, and he’d go in through it, and he’d change the whole thing from the inside. The field. The filter. Me.” She was quiet for a moment. ”He always said the crack was the best way in. Nobody guards a crack. They don’t think it matters.”

”I know,” I said.

”So let them think it,” said Mother. ”Let them think we’re a crack. Let them leave Earth alone because we’re not worth the trouble. Let them go on, the way they always go on.”

She put her hand on mine. Very still.

”And go in through it,” said Mother. ”The way your father would have.”

Day 835. Small.

Mother woke me on the thread before dawn. The night before, and all three slept like stones after saying they wouldn’t. Kitchen: Mother in the silk with Dory, Dory’s silver turned all the way out, and Juno with a cup she hadn’t drunk from. The first queen had been calling since three. She wanted me to hear it before I stood under a tree.

Through Dory, past north: the far queens, quiet now, slow, the way people talk after news that isn’t what they feared. The holders felt two Hands go quiet and asked up, and up again, further than the first queen can follow even through a hundred queens. A week to answer; large things are slow to turn their heads. It was pushed down through the queens and they heard it go past. They are not coming. Old Hands fail; old queens go quiet; it is a fault, not a war. On the edge world, a fragment of the human stock, defectives cast out by their own kind, gone to ground on a broken world. The human world is still in the tithe; its rulers sit; its paper is signed; they don’t look closely at things in the tithe, there are too many. A fault is not worth a Hand. Fault means a crack you don’t mend or throw away; you use the thing anyway.

Mother sat down without meaning to. Four million under glass, the Senate sitting, Voss in her office because Okafor won’t let her leave, nothing really fixed. And they’re not coming, because we’re too small. Every morning since the Hand went over the dome she’s thought: today they come back to Earth for what we did, today someone pays for us leaving. She told no one. Nobody’s going to pay for us. Juno: not yet. Not for this.

Okafor had been up since four waiting for a knock; Holt, the General with frost on him, Luna furious at being left asleep, I felt the bed, you had all the blanket. Okafor said each word flat, like the first-day list. Holt at the window: I’ve been called a lot of things by the Senate and the Project and officers in polished boots; first time anyone’s called me not worth it and made me want to buy them a drink.

The Overseer, with Thorne’s bread: it is what they believe, which is the same as true for them. They don’t count small things. It was small once, told to hold this world and report; nobody answered for a long time. Nobody answers the edge. More Hands than this world has stones. They lose old Hands and go on; it costs more to come back. They have never once stopped. When will they come? When you are large. When you are no longer a fault but a war. They are slow to turn their heads; when they turn them they don’t turn them back.

Okafor: nobody leaves this porch thinking we’ve been forgotten. We’ve been postponed. Windsor: an underestimated enemy gives time, ground, and surprise, once, when they turn. Every collar we can reach as quietly as we can for as long as they think we’re a crack in a cup; every queen sung back is another world they call a fault, until one morning the fault runs through the middle of them. And Earth is not in a Hand’s shadow; four million won’t pay for us, not yet. She looked at Mother as if she’d known. Mother stood straighter.

Sigmund: renegade fragment, my father would have drafted it. Risa, turning her ring: I’m marrying three people under a tree in five hours on a world they think is broken; I’ve always been a renegade, I just didn’t have the paperwork. Jessa laughed out loud; then so did he. Okafor looked at her blank slate: and now I have a wedding at noon.

Everyone, and everything on the plain: Kethri with a place left open, ten thousand Hesk and their queen, Tharn and Mirri, light-benders, Ulu in the pool, Karst in the dark, the Sef beam off the rim, the Nivi mountain, the green in the garden corner. Thorne and Meg baking since four; first loaf to Garnet.

Luna’s draft: each of us walks in with somebody who’s ours, then we’re ours. Sera first, beside Rory, not behind, in kiln red Maura made, twenty-seven weeks. At the tree he put his hand on her head: steady. What he says to the furnace; said to her once before, at the lift in the dome, never since. Risa with Sigmund looking sick, Dory in a pillowcase dress checking everyone; at the back Friese, not signing; Dory checked him and he closed his eyes. Luna with the General in step, in soft grey, Sera’s scarf, and her mother’s silver ring that he carried through the first finger in his breast pocket and gave her at the map room door without a word. I’ve had practice standing straight a long time; I find I’ve stopped needing it. Me last, with Mother in the silk: it’s the only thing I own that I chose; I’d like you to know it’s me today. The last one looked up out of the moss at her as we passed.

Okafor: four times, once each, because nobody here is smaller than anybody else; I’m told it’s in the terms now. Calder: yes, all of them. Friese: yes, yes and yes, and she says yes but wasn’t asked. Noted. Windsor, no ma’am: I want to marry Lucas Dask, Seraphina Calder and Risa Friese, not as a part of something that’s his, a thing in its own right, all three. Best answer in five askings. Dask: all three in one breath. Yes. Then you are, all four, to each other. Write it down. Wren, under Marsh, Toby: Dask, Lucas. Calder, Seraphina. Friese, Risa. Windsor, Luna. Married. To each other. Each other underlined twice.

The queens made a song up on the spot. Ours, the old one, first and second, spine-queen, youngest Kethri; then the Hesk like a kiln door, the Ulu’s cold shimmer, the Karst singing Toby’s note, the Sef sweeping her beam once over the four of us, the Nivi’s thousand branches; and from the garden corner, water under moss: the gardener’s queen, singing for the first time, for us. Brood mothers, for yours. Under Sera’s hand the baby hummed all of them.

Toby played his mother’s lower-floors song and Adaeze sang it again. Then something fast. Sera danced slowly with Rory, who can dance and never told anyone. Sigmund trod on Risa twice and apologised as if he’d signed something. Luna with her father, in step, then me. At sunset the three danced in a ring like the Kethri with one place open, and looked at me, and I filled it.

Porch steps after dark, Mother with Dory and Pebble’s fourth stone this week. Fault. A crack in a cup you use anyway. Your father fixed cracks all his life: found the crack and went in through it and changed the whole thing from inside. The field, the filter, me. Nobody guards a crack. So let them think it, and leave Earth alone, and go on. And go in through it, the way he would have.