Scarecrow

That was the year the war started properly.

Not with a battle. Not with a Hand coming over a rim, or a voice from the sky, or anything the Sorn did at all. They didn’t do anything. They didn’t know we were there. To them we were a fault, at the edge, on a broken world. Something you didn’t mend. You used the thing anyway.

It started with a map.

Garnet’s. The one she’d drawn on the floor of our kitchen with nine lines going out from a dot like the spokes of a wheel. Okafor kept it in the breast pocket of her coat, over her heart, folded twice. She took it out every morning after the hello and looked at it. Then she put it back.

By the end of that year, she’d crossed out eight of the circles.

I want to set that year down properly. But it was a whole year, and there was too much in it to tell every day. So I’ll tell it the way Garnet drew it. One circle at a time.

The salt world.

The Steady’s first crossing. The heavy queen on her low stone shelf at the heart of the ship, humming like a stone being rolled, carrying something she’d chosen. Keir flying. Aster. And one of the three Keir had taught to fly besides himself: a third-wave girl called Safi Arden, very quiet, with steady hands, who’d never been off the ground before Keir put her in the seat beside his and said watch.

The salt queen went with them. In the bottom deck, in a great square crate of her own crystal, so she wouldn’t get wet.

That was the thing about the salt world. Nobody had thought about it until they got there.

It was white. All of it. A dry sea, Genny had said, the night the salt queen came back. Flat and white and blinding under a hard blue sky. And the salt queen’s young lived in the cracks, the way she’d said. Small square crystal things, pink in the light, tucked into the long dark fissures that ran across the white like the lines on an old hand.

And the Sorn were flooding them.

Luna told me about it after. She’d gone. She’d asked to go. She said she’d spent a whole year running operations from the map room and she’d like, just once, to see one of the circles she’d crossed out.

”They’d found water,” said Luna. ”Under the salt. A long way down. And they were pumping it up. Into the cracks.” She was quiet for a moment. ”The young are salt, Lucas. All of them. All the way through. Water doesn’t hurt them. It dissolves them. And the Sorn were flooding the cracks one at a time. Slowly. Not to kill them. To make them come up. Out of the cracks. Onto the white. Where the handlers could collar them.”

”And the ones that didn’t come up?”

Luna didn’t answer.

She’d taken the water away.

That was all. That was what Luna did. Not a wall, not a stair, not mist. She stood at the edge of the biggest crack on the salt world with her hands flat on the white and felt for every drop of water the Sorn had pumped up into the cracks. Every one. For miles. And asked it to go back down.

It went.

Down. Out of the cracks. Back through the salt into the dark where it had come from, a long way under, where nobody could pump it up again because Luna sealed it there. Froze the top of it. Her father’s cold, in her own hands, a mile down.

And the cracks dried.

And the young came up. Not because they were made to. Because their queen was standing at the edge of the biggest crack in her great square crystal crate, with the lid off, singing.

And the handlers, when they came, came onto the white. Into the open. Where the General was waiting with a wall.

”It was so dry,” said Luna, afterward, on our porch. She had Ash on her lap. Ash was patting her face very seriously, with both hands. ”I’ve never been anywhere so dry. I could feel every drop for a hundred miles. And there weren’t any.” She was quiet. ”Except the ones I’d made go back down.”

”Did it hurt?”

”No,” said Luna. ”It was like holding my breath.” She looked down at Ash. ”For a very long time. And then letting it go.”

Okafor crossed out the circle that night.

3.

The furred world.

Cold. Wide and flat and grassy, with snow half the year, the way the furred queen had said. Her young huddled against her in the winters. Great grey-brown haystacks of fur, with small dark eyes deep in it and a smell like a dog in from the snow.

The Sorn had been using them to pull.

Sleds. Enormous ones, piled with something grey that the Sorn dug out of the frozen ground. Across the snow. Hundreds of the furred young in collars and harness, pulling, day and night, through the whole of the winter, until they lay down in the snow and didn’t get up.

The Calders went.

Rory and Maura. And Liam, because Liam said he wasn’t letting his father have all the fun, and Pip, because Pip said the furred queen was like Biscuit and she wanted to see her babies, and Maura said absolutely not, and Rory said let the lass come, love, and Maura said Rory Calder in the voice that stopped Hesk, and then let him come anyway.

Liam told me about it after. With his grandson on his knee, setting small careful fires on the end of his finger and then putting them back.

”Dad melted the snow,” said Liam. ”Not all of it. Just round the young. Just enough. They’d been pulling through it for so long their legs were frozen to the harness. He held his hands out over a hundred of them at once, like he does at the heat plant, and the snow went soft and the ice in their fur went to water and they could move.” He shook his head. ”And Mum held it. The heat. Kept it right where he put it, so it didn’t melt the ground under them and drop them in a bog. You can’t do that, you know. Hold somebody else’s fire. Nobody can. She’s done it since before I was born.”

”And you?”

”I took the collars off,” said Liam.

I looked at him.

”Not me,” said Liam. ”Garnet. Garnet took the collars off. I just held her up while she did it.” He grinned. ”She’s not as fast as you. She has to go round the outside first. She says that’s how she does everything.” He looked down at his son. ”But she got every one.”

That was the other thing about that year.

The twins.

The queens had made them like me, a long time ago, in our hollow, with three queens singing and Mother through the hello. They’d always had the framework. The queens had only filled it. And Genny had never changed anything in her life; she said she didn’t want to. She listened. She asked. She sang through the doors.

But Garnet touched things up.

She always had. Since she was small. Her drawings, coming up her arms in silver, small and wobbly. The light-benders, drawn from the outside first so she could see what went in the middle. The animals on the carousel.

And that year, she learned to touch up a collar.

I taught her. On Avalon, on the red glass, with one of the empty ones from the doors in the shelters, the ones the Hesk had given us. She held it in her hands and looked at it for a long time.

”It’s like drawing,” she said finally. ”Isn’t it. You look at the outside. Then you look at what’s inside. Then you draw it how you want it instead.”

”Yes.”

”Only you don’t use a pencil.”

”No.”

Garnet considered the collar very seriously. Then she put her thumb on it. Very gently. The way she’d put a smudge on a drawing to make it softer.

And it opened.

So on the furred world, it was Garnet.

Twelve years old, going on thirteen, with her silver hair like a dandelion clock and her tongue between her teeth, standing on the snow in the middle of a few hundred great grey-brown haystacks of fur with her brother’s brother-in-law holding her up when she got tired. Going round the outside of each one first. Then the middle.

And every collar opened.

Not all at once, the way mine did. One at a time. Slowly. Carefully. The way she drew.

When she was done, the furred queen came across the snow to her. And put her great soft head down. And Garnet buried both hands in the fur, the way Pip had on the green.

”You’re like a dog,” said Garnet. Very seriously. ”A really big one. That’s a compliment.”

The furred queen made the low sound Juno said was the nearest a queen had to a laugh.

4.

The dark world.

The moth queen’s. A world that turned so slowly round its sun that one side was always dark. Her young lived in the dark side and only came to the edge of the light at the turning, she’d said. The great false eyes on their wings were for frightening things away.

The Sorn had built lights.

That was all. Lights. Great grey towers on the edge of the dark side, all along the line where the light stopped, with lamps on top so bright you couldn’t look at them. Pointing in. Into the dark. Where the young were.

The young couldn’t bear light. They’d been made, the silver had grown them, for dark. And the lamps drove them back, and back, deeper and deeper into the dark side, until they were packed together in the deepest, coldest part of it, where the Sorn could collar them in their thousands while they were too frightened to move.

Toby went.

He took Harriet.

Nobody could stop him. Okafor tried. Wren tried, and Wren had a way of trying that usually worked. Toby just said she sings, very quietly, and picked her up, and walked up the ramp of the Open Hand with her in a sling against his chest.

”She sings,” he said again, at the top. ”And they’re in the dark. And they’re frightened. And nobody’s going to be able to see them, or find them, or tell them where to go.” He looked down at his daughter. ”Except by sound.”

Wren looked at him for a long time.

Then she went up the ramp too. With her book.

”Somebody has to count,” she said.

I wasn’t there. I felt it through Dory, through the hello, on our porch at night with Ash asleep on my chest.

The dark side of a world that never turns. Blacker than the Karst caves. Colder than the Nivi mountain. And somewhere in it, thousands of great moths, wings folded, false eyes hidden, packed together and shaking.

And then a fiddle.

One note. Low. The first note of the old song at dawn. Out into the dark.

And a baby, very small, in a sling, singing it back.

Harriet’s note. Toby’s note. The counter-note, the one he played to carry. Thin and high and absolutely clear, in a darkness that had never had a sound in it but the Sorn’s.

The moths heard it.

And came.

Toby played them out.

Not to the light. Away from it. Away from the lamps on the edge of the dark side. Deeper in, the other way, to where the Sorn hadn’t built anything, because nothing lived there, because it was too cold and too dark even for the moths.

They followed his note. And Harriet’s. Thousands of them, wings folded, moving through the dark toward the sound.

And Genny walked among them, with her eyes shut, because there was nothing to see, and sang the lullaby through every collar until they stopped pulling.

And Garnet followed Genny, with her eyes shut too, going round the outside of each collar first and then the middle, by feel.

And Wren counted.

Every one. Out loud. In the dark. So that if one went quiet, everyone would know.

The lamps went out at the end of it.

All of them. All along the edge of the dark side. Mother did that. She hadn’t gone either. She did it from our garden, on Avalon, sitting on Genny’s bench with Dory on her lap and her eyes closed and her hands perfectly still.

Through Dory. Through the hello. Through Genny, on the dark world, who could feel every lamp along the line of light because the lamps were grey, and Genny could feel grey.

And Mother reached through all of them, all the way across, and held every lamp on every tower to the width of a hair.

And turned it round.

To face the sun.

The moth queen came to the edge of the light, at the turning, the way her young always had.

She opened her wings. All the way. And there they were. The eyes. Gold and black, great and round, staring out at a world that had driven her young into the dark.

And the Sorn on the towers, the ones who were still there, looked at them.

And ran.

5.

The coral world.

Warm. Shallow. Full of things. Hana went, and Kwame, and the Ulu queen, who’d never been to sea that wasn’t a pool or a lake, and wanted to.

The Sorn had been draining it.

Not all of it. A bay. A great wide shallow bay of coral, the coral queen’s young, every colour, full of holes. Walled off from the sea with grey, and drained, slowly, so that the coral was out of the water for longer every day and dying in the sun.

Hana didn’t wait for Okafor’s order.

She told me afterward, a little guiltily, that she didn’t hear it. She stood at the top of the grey wall with the sea on one side and the drained bay on the other, full of coral turning white in the sun, and something happened to her.

”Papa,” she said. ”Little fish.”

And Kwame looked at her, and knew.

And the two of them, father and daughter, with the Ulu queen drifting in the sea behind them, a great slow bell of clear glass with blue light running down her threads, picked up the sea.

Not a wave. Not a flood. The sea. All of it that would come. Kwame turned it the way he turned his river, the way he’d held the floodgates on the river line two days alone. And Hana held it, in ropes, in a hundred ropes, a thousand, the way she’d held the Hesk on the ridge on Earth.

And they lifted it over the grey wall.

And put it down. Gently. In the bay.

The coral turned from white to pink. Then to every colour. Very slowly, all afternoon, while Garnet went round the outside of each collar and the coral queen sat in the shallows singing and Hana sat on the top of the grey wall with her feet in the water and cried.

”Papa,” she said. ”Look. Look, it’s coming back.”

”I’m looking, little fish,” said Kwame.

6.

The gas moon.

Genny and Garnet’s. Nobody else’s. Okafor said so. She said it was a world with no ground to stand on and the only two people on Avalon besides me who could fly and open a collar were thirteen years old, only just, and she’d rather send them with Keir and the Open Hand and the gas queen than send me, because she needed me at home, and because she’d watched them on the dark world and the furred world and thought they could.

Pell didn’t say anything.

She went to the ramp. And straightened Garnet’s collar, which didn’t need straightening. And pushed Genny’s hair behind her ear.

”Be careful,” she said.

”We’re always—” said Garnet.

”You’ve never been careful in your life,” said Pell. ”Be careful anyway.”

The gas queen’s young lived in clouds.

Great drifting clouds of them, floating, through air so thick you could swim in it. And the Sorn had been popping them.

Not all of them. Enough. Enough to frighten the rest into holding still. Into drifting into the great grey nets the Sorn had strung between towers that floated in the thick air on their own, like the gas queen. Collared, in the nets, for something the Sorn wanted them for that nobody knew.

When the Open Hand came out of the dark, the Sorn saw it. They saw it at once. The light-benders couldn’t hold the light round something in air that thick. And they did what the Sorn always did, when a thing they held stopped being useful.

They popped the nets.

Every young in every net. All at once. The nets opened and the young fell out of them into the thick air. And the thick air was full of something the Sorn had put in it. Something that went into the young and made them heavy.

They sank.

Thousands. Down through the thick air. Into the dark below, where the air got thicker and thicker until nothing could float in it at all, until it crushed whatever went down far enough.

Garnet caught them.

I felt it. Through Dory. Through the hello. On our porch on Avalon, with Sera on one side of me and Risa on the other and Luna at the end, all of us very still.

Garnet, out of Aster’s door into the thick air of a gas moon, with her silver hair streaming. Round the outside first. Then the middle.

And she held them.

Thousands. Sinking. Heavy with whatever the Sorn had put in them. She held every one, the way she’d held the Kethri in the forest. Only these were heavier. Much heavier. Getting heavier every moment.

”Genny,” said Garnet. Through the hello. Very small. Very far. ”Genny, they’re too heavy. I can’t—”

”Yes you can,” said Genny.

And Genny went down.

Not out of the door. Down. Into the thick air. Past her sister. Past the sinking young. Down into the dark below, where the air got thicker and thicker. Where nothing could float.

I’d never known Genny could fly that fast.

She went all the way down. To the bottom of the thick air. Where it was so heavy it was nearly liquid. Where the Sorn’s poison had sunk, because it was heavier than anything else.

And she listened.

The way she listened to stone. To the poison. To what it was made of. And she asked it, very politely, the way I asked grey to move, the way she asked everything, to be something else.

Not changed. Genny didn’t change things. She’d always said so.

She asked.

And it listened.

The young got lighter.

All at once. Every one. The poison went out of them, down, to where Genny was, at the bottom of the world, asking. And Garnet, at the top, holding them, felt them go light in her hands, light as they’d always been, light as air.

And let go.

And they floated.

Up. Through the thick air. Past Garnet. Past the Open Hand. Up and up, in a great drifting cloud, the way they’d floated before the Sorn came. And at the top of the cloud, very large, very slow, turning in the light, the gas queen. Singing.

Genny came up last. Slowly. Through the cloud. With something cupped in her hands.

The poison. All of it. A small grey bead, no bigger than a seed.

”It didn’t want to be poison,” she said, when she came back aboard, very tired. ”It was just made that way. It said it would rather be something else.” She looked at the bead in her hands. ”I don’t know what yet. I’m going to ask it.”

Garnet, beside her, on the floor of the squad deck in a heap, was crying.

”That was so rude,” said Garnet.

7.

The marsh.

The last circle that year. The heron queen’s. Reeds and mud and mist, and her young, tall and grey-blue, wading.

The Sorn had dug.

Channels. Deep ones. Through the marsh. Draining it, the way they’d drained the coral bay, so that the mud dried and cracked and the young, who’d been made to wade, stood on dry ground for the first time in their lives and didn’t know what to do.

And then the Sorn flooded it again. All at once. And the young, who’d forgotten how to wade, sank.

They’d been doing it for a long time. Draining and flooding. Draining and flooding. Until the young didn’t know which way was up, and stood very still wherever they were put, and let the Sorn collar them.

Mother went.

She asked to. On the red glass. Very quietly.

”It’s the mud,” she said to Okafor. ”They’re sinking in it. Thousands. And the ones that aren’t sinking are standing very still because they don’t know what’s going to happen next.” She looked at Dory, on Risa’s hip. ”I know what that’s like.”

Okafor didn’t argue.

So Mother went. And when the Open Hand came down out of the dark over the marsh, and the Sorn opened their channels and flooded it, all at once, and the young began to sink, Mother stood at the top of the ramp in her plain dark coat with Father’s ring on her hand.

And lifted every one.

Not high. Not far. Just out of the mud. A few inches. Every one. Thousands of tall grey-blue wading young, sinking in the flood, held exactly. The width of a hair above the mud. So they wouldn’t sink. So they could stand.

The way she’d held three bowls and the flour and the eggs.

And she held them there while the General froze the Sorn’s channels shut, one by one, so the flood couldn’t come again. And while Garnet went round the outside of every collar. And while the heron queen walked out into the middle of the marsh, on her long grey legs, and stood on one leg in the shallow water, very still, and sang.

When it was done, Mother put them down.

Gently. In the shallow water. On their long legs. Exactly where the water was the right depth for wading.

And the young looked down. At the water round their legs.

And waded.

8.

That was the year.

Eight circles, crossed out. Eight worlds. Eight queens home. And all the young who’d wanted to come to Avalon came, and all the ones who wanted to stay, stayed.

The park grew. A salt terrace beside the Sef’s. A cold grassy hill beside the Nivi mountain, where the furred young huddled. A dark grove under the Kethri trees, where the light-benders bent the light away so the moths could sleep. A shallow warm bay at the end of the seventh lake, for the coral. A sky full of floating clouds, drifting over the whole of the park, that the children chased on the wheel. A marsh, at the edge, where tall grey-blue things stood on one leg in the mist.

And the city north of the Hands grew too. Twenty thousand. Then more. Every third night, the Open Hand or the Steady went over the dome on Earth like heat over a stove, and Voss opened the east locks, and they walked through.

Dory turned two that year.

She looked five. She talked like seven. She checked every person and every brood and every queen in the park every morning, the way she always had, only now she did it walking from one end of it to the other on her own two feet, with Pebble a step behind her, and Ash a step behind Pebble.

Ash turned one. She looked three. She’d stopped looking at people as if they owed her an explanation. Now she looked at them as if she was deciding whether to give them one.

Harriet sang every morning at dawn. Rory the second set fire to things and his father put them back.

And one evening near the end of that year, Luna put her notebook down on the kitchen table.

Square with the edge.

And didn’t open it.

”Luna?” said Sera.

Luna looked at the notebook. Then at Sera. Then at Risa. Then at me.

”I said when the plan was done,” she said.

Nobody said anything.

”The plan isn’t done,” said Luna. ”The plan’s never going to be done. Okafor’s going to need a bigger slate. Garnet said so.” She put her hand flat on the notebook. ”I was waiting for something that isn’t going to happen.”

”Luna,” said Risa. Very quietly.

”So I stopped waiting,” said Luna.

She looked down at her hand on the notebook. And then, very slowly, she moved it. From the notebook. To her stomach.

Sera made a sound.

Risa put both hands over her mouth.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I just looked. The way I always did. Through. All the way.

And there, very small, so small I almost missed it, a spark.

And in the middle of it, a thread of silver.

Whole.

Humming.

Not Toby’s note. Not the three from our wedding. Something else. Something very cold and very clear, like water at the bottom of the canyon. Like the first frost coming in across it at night.

Like the General’s ice.

”Edda says early,” said Luna. ”Very early. She says not to count on anything.” She looked at me. Her face did the thing it did. ”I’m counting on it anyway.”

The far queens spoke on the last night of that year.

Through the first queen. Through Dory. At dawn, on the red glass, with Okafor beside me and her slate in her hand with 8 on it.

They’d been quiet all year. Talking slowly in the dark of their Hands, the way they’d talked after the news that we were a fault. Not urgent.

They were urgent now.

They have noticed, said the first queen. Very slowly. Every word right.

Not you. Not yet. They do not know what you are. A pause. But they have noticed that the faults are in a line.

Eight old Hands and towers at the edge. Eight worlds that stopped being useful. All in one year. All in one direction from one broken world.

They have started to wonder why.

Okafor looked at her slate for a long time.

Then she took the map out of her breast pocket. Garnet’s map. Unfolded it. Eight circles, crossed out. And the ninth line, going out, very long, nearly off the edge of the page.

”Well,” she said. ”Took them long enough.”

She folded the map. And put it back over her heart.

”Holt,” she said. Without turning round.

”Ma’am,” said Holt, behind her.

”Get the shelters ready,” said Okafor. ”Not today. Not this year, maybe.” She looked out at the plain. At the Hands, and the two ships, and the city, and the park. ”But they’re turning their heads.”

Days 1110–1475. The map.

The year the war started properly. Not with a battle; the Sorn did nothing; they didn’t know we were there. With Garnet’s map in Okafor’s breast pocket, taken out every morning after the hello. By the end of the year she’d crossed out eight circles. I’ll tell it the way Garnet drew it, one circle at a time.

Salt. The Steady’s first crossing, the heavy queen humming on her stone shelf, Keir and Aster and Safi Arden, a quiet third-wave girl Keir put in the seat beside his and said watch. The salt queen in a crate so she wouldn’t get wet. A blinding white dry sea, the young pink square crystals in the cracks. The Sorn pumping water up from far below into the cracks, one at a time: water dissolves them, so they come up onto the white to be collared. Luna, who’d asked to see one circle she’d crossed out, felt every drop for miles and asked it back down and froze the top of it a mile under. The cracks dried; the young came up to their queen; the handlers came onto the open white where the General’s wall was. So dry; like holding my breath a very long time and letting it go. 3.

Furred. Cold grassland, snow half the year. Sorn sleds of something grey dug from frozen ground, hundreds of furred young in harness pulling till they lay down. The Calders, and Pip because she’s like Biscuit; Maura said absolutely not; let the lass come, love; Rory Calder; then let her. Rory melted the snow round a hundred at once, ice in their fur to water, legs free of the harness; Maura held his heat where he put it so the ground didn’t drop them in a bog; nobody can hold someone else’s fire; she’s done it since before Liam was born. Garnet took the collars off; Liam held her up. I’d taught her on the glass with a spare collar from the shelter doors: it’s like drawing; outside, then inside, then draw it how you want it; no pencil. Her thumb, gently, like softening a smudge, and it opened. Slower than me, one at a time, but every one. You’re like a dog, a really big one; that’s a compliment. 4.

Dark. A world turned so slowly one side is always night; the moth young live in it. Sorn towers along the line of light with lamps pointing in, driving them back and back till they’re packed shaking in the coldest dark to be collared. Toby took Harriet: she sings, and nobody can find them in the dark except by sound. Wren went too: somebody has to count. Through Dory I heard a fiddle in blackness deeper than the Karst caves and a baby singing the counter-note back, the first sound in that dark not the Sorn’s. They followed it away from the lamps, deeper, where nothing lives. Genny sang the collars quiet with her eyes shut; Garnet opened them by feel; Wren counted every one aloud. Then Mother, on Genny’s bench on Avalon with Dory on her lap, reached through the hello and Genny’s feel for grey and held every lamp to the width of a hair and turned it to face the sun. The moth queen opened her wings at the turning, the great gold-and-black eyes, and the Sorn on the towers looked at them and ran. 5.

Coral. A bay walled off with grey and drained a little more each day, the coral whitening in the sun. Hana on top of the wall didn’t hear the order: Papa, little fish. Kwame turned the sea the way he turned his river and held the floodgates; Hana held it in a thousand ropes as she held the Hesk; they lifted the sea over the wall and set it down gently. White to pink to every colour all afternoon while Garnet opened collars and Hana sat with her feet in the water crying: look, it’s coming back. I’m looking, little fish. 6.

The gas moon, the twins only; no ground, and nobody else but me can fly, and Okafor needs me home. Pell straightened a collar and pushed back a strand of hair: be careful anyway. Young floating in thick air; the Sorn popped some so the rest drifted into nets strung between floating towers. Air too thick for the light-benders; seen at once. They opened the nets and the air was full of something that made the young heavy, and thousands sank toward depths that crush. Garnet held them all, heavier every moment: Genny, they’re too heavy. Yes you can. Genny dived faster than I knew she could to the bottom where the poison had settled, listened to it like stone, and asked it, not changing it, asking, to be something else. It listened. The young went light in Garnet’s hands; she let go and they floated up in a great cloud, the gas queen turning at the top, singing. Genny came up with it all in a grey bead like a seed: it didn’t want to be poison; it was made that way; I’m going to ask it what it’d rather be. Garnet in a heap: that was so rude. 7.

Marsh. Channels dug to drain it dry and flood it all at once, again and again, till the young forgot which way is up and stood still wherever put. Mother asked to go: they’re sinking, and the rest stand still not knowing what happens next; I know what that’s like. At the top of the ramp in her dark coat with Father’s ring she lifted every one the width of a hair out of the flood, as she held the bowls, while the General froze the channels shut and Garnet opened collars and the heron queen stood on one leg in the middle and sang. Then she set them down exactly at wading depth. They looked at the water round their legs. And waded. 8.

Eight worlds, eight queens home; whoever wanted Avalon came, whoever wanted home stayed. The park grew a salt terrace by the Sef, a cold hill by the Nivi mountain for the furred young, a dark grove under the Kethri trees where light-benders bend the light so the moths can sleep, a warm bay at the end of the seventh lake, floating clouds the children chase from the wheel, a marsh at the edge. Twenty thousand in the city, then more, every third night through the east locks.

Dory turned two, looks five, talks like seven, checks the whole park every morning on foot with Pebble a step behind and Ash behind Pebble. Ash turned one, looks three, now looks at people deciding whether to give them an explanation. Harriet sings every dawn; Rory the second sets fires and his father puts them back. Near the year’s end Luna set her notebook square on the table and didn’t open it. I said when the plan was done. It’s never going to be done; Okafor needs a bigger slate. I was waiting for something that won’t happen, so I stopped waiting. Her hand moved from the notebook to her stomach. Sera made a sound; Risa covered her mouth. I looked: a spark, and in it a whole thread humming something cold and clear, like water at the canyon bottom, like the first frost, like the General’s ice. Edda says very early, don’t count on anything. I’m counting on it anyway.

Last night of the year, the far queens urgent again through the first queen and Dory, Okafor beside me with 8 on her slate. They have noticed. Not you, not yet; they don’t know what you are. But the faults are in a line: eight old Hands and towers at the edge in one year in one direction from one broken world. They’ve started to wonder why. Okafor unfolded Garnet’s map, eight circles crossed out and the ninth line nearly off the page. Took them long enough. Holt. Ma’am. Get the shelters ready. Not today, not this year maybe. But they’re turning their heads.