Scarecrow

I couldn’t sleep.

Not that night. Not the next. Not for a week. Because once I’d heard it, the keeper humming under the ring at the end of a thread nearly off the edge of anything, I couldn’t stop hearing it.

And not just it.

Everything.

It came in at night. When the house was quiet. When the lamps were down and Kwame was asleep between us with his hand open on the blanket and the air round him very still, and Hana was asleep, and the whole city was asleep under the two moons.

And I lay in the dark and heard.

Every queen on Avalon. Singing to her young. Our queen at the garden wall. The first queen in the hollow. The old queen on her mountain, singing in her sleep. Tally’s queen in her green shallows. The blue queen’s song coming up through the ice at the bottom of a sea on another world, faint, so faint. The red queen singing down into her cracks. The small green queen in her moss.

Every child. Fifty-eight thousand of them. Every silver. Listening.

Every finished person on Avalon. Three and a half million of them, with silver in them that had started to listen. I could hear it. Not their thoughts. Not their voices. Their silver. The way it hummed. The way it was changing. Very slowly. Every one. Like a field of wheat when the wind first comes.

And under all of it, further, much further, out past every world I’d ever stood on, along threads I didn’t know were there, something else.

Grey.

”You look terrible,” said Sera.

On the fourth morning. At the stove. With Ash on her hip. She didn’t look round. She didn’t need to; she could feel heat now, across a room, and she could feel mine.

”I can’t sleep.”

”I know you can’t. You’re running hot. All night.” She put her free hand flat on the iron of the stove. ”Like a forge with the doors shut.”

”It’s loud.”

”What is?”

I didn’t know how to say it.

”Everything,” I said.

Mother found me on the porch that evening.

She sat down in the other chair. She didn’t say anything for a long time. She looked at the city, and the plain, and the rails going out like spokes with a train on one of them, very small, its plume of steam lit gold.

”Hana says you’re hearing everything,” she said.

”Yes.”

”All at once.”

”Yes.”

Mother nodded slowly.

”I held two hundred and forty children on the porch,” she said. ”A week ago. At once. The width of a hair.” She looked at her hands in her lap. Very still. ”The next morning I woke up and I could feel every cup in the kitchen. Every spoon. Every plate. The bowls on the shelf. The chairs. The flour in the bin. The eggs.” A pause. ”Everything I could have held. All at once. Waiting to be held.”

I looked at her.

”I couldn’t get out of bed,” said Mother. ”For an hour. It was too much. Every object in the house, pressing at me. Like the chair, a long time ago. Like not being able to button my coat. Only the other way round. Too much instead of not enough.”

”What did you do?”

”I held one,” said Mother. ”Just one. The spoon by my bed. I held it. And let everything else go.” She turned Father’s ring on her finger. ”It’s what I did the first time. In the kitchen. Before I knew. One bowl. Then three. Then the flour and the eggs.” She looked at me. ”You don’t hold everything, Lucas. Nobody can. Not even Dory. Dory holds what’s in front of her and lets the queens carry the rest.”

”How do I choose?”

”You listen to one thing,” said Mother. ”The thing that matters most. Tonight. And let the rest be there without you.” She stood up. ”Your father did it in the war. He said the whole battlefield used to come at him through his eyes. Every bolt. Every plate. Every crack. And he’d pick one. And look at that. And the rest would wait.”

She went inside.

That night I listened to one thing.

Kwame. Asleep between us. His breathing. The air round him, very still. His silver. Small. Listening to everything, the way the old queen said. Water, and air, and something else. The Kethri queens’ wind. The moth queen’s dark.

I listened to that.

And the rest waited.

And I slept.

Genny brought back four more that month.

Queens. From the wall. The long room’s chalk wheel, with its sixteen lines going out to names. Children from the halls who’d come home with nobody singing, whose queens were in pieces on the floor on white cloths. One at a time, Genny asked them. If they’d like to come to the long room and put their hand by the pieces. If they’d like to try.

Not all of them did. Some of them weren’t ready. Some of them were frightened. Some of them sat on the porch every morning and held on with Mother’s two hundred and forty and didn’t want anything else yet.

Genny didn’t ask twice.

But four lines on the wall had children who wanted to.

A queen from a world of wind, whose young had lived in the air and never touched the ground. The Kethri queens sang under her, because they knew wind, and she came back on top of the tallest tree in the forest past the park, very thin, very light, translucent, like a kite made of glass. Her seven young stood on the branches round her with their arms out. And the wind came.

A queen from a world of salt water, like Stillwater’s lake but bigger. The coral queen sang under her. She came back in Hana’s coral pool, with Hana holding the water warm and still, and lay there afterward among the coral like something poured.

A queen from a world of fungus. Pale. Soft. Growing in the dark. The moth queen sang under her, in the dark grove. Nobody saw her come back. Genny said she was there in the morning, white and spreading under the grove trees, and her three young were asleep on her.

And a queen from a world nobody could describe. Not Genny. Not her five young, who’d come home from the halls and sat on the porch for a season and then, one morning, all five of them, walked to the long room and put their hands on the floor beside three slivers on three white cloths.

She came back at noon. On the green. Under the silver tree. In front of everyone.

She was a sound.

Not a shape. Not a body. Not anything you could see. A sound. Low, and rising, and very wide. That stood in the middle of the green under the silver tree and filled the whole square, and the whole city, and went out over the plain. Not loud. Just everywhere.

Her five young lay down on the grass in the middle of it. And shut their eyes.

And Toby, at the edge of the square with Harriet in her sling, sat down on the ground very suddenly and put both hands over his face.

”That’s music,” he said. Through his fingers. ”That’s—Lucas. That’s what music’s made of.”

Garnet put them on her map.

Seven circles now. Three crossed out. Four new. Seven lines going out from the dot to seven worlds nobody had ever heard of.

And on the wall of the long room, twelve more lines with names going to them. Children waiting. Children not ready yet.

And twenty-two lines with pieces on them and no names at all.

I heard it on the last night of the month.

I’d been listening to one thing every night. The way Mother said. Kwame. Or Efua, who slept with every cup in the room full and her hand in the water of the nearest one. Or Dory, holding. One thing. And the rest waiting.

That night I listened to the keeper.

Under the ring. Humming. Because the heavy queen had asked. She lay on the red glass every night now, beside the Ground, with her head turned toward the sky, listening. And she’d asked me, through Dot, that morning, if I could hear it too. If I could tell her it was still there. Because some nights it was so faint she wasn’t sure.

So I listened. For her.

And it was there. Humming. Very faint. Very far. At the top of the small grey world under the ring. Steady.

And past it, very much further, along the longest thread, the ninth line, nearly off the edge of anything, I heard something else.

I didn’t understand it at first.

It was grey. That was all I knew. Grey that wasn’t asleep. Grey that had never been anything else. Like the halls. Like the small grey world. But bigger. Much bigger. So much bigger that the small grey world under the ring was a pebble beside it.

And in the grey, voices.

Not one. Not the one note the old queen talked about. Many. Hundreds. Thousands. All speaking at once, the way the queens sang at once, but not singing. Speaking. Flat. Certain. The way the keepers from home had spoken to the heavy queen at the top of the world. The way something speaks that has never once in its life not been answered.

Keepers.

All of them.

Home.

I lay in the dark with Kwame asleep beside me and Hana asleep beyond him and listened.

I didn’t understand most of it. They weren’t speaking to me. They weren’t speaking in any language I knew. But silver listens, and mine had been listening to everything for a month, and some of it came through. The way a voice comes through a wall.

A keeper said no.

That, over and over. From everywhere. Passed from one voice to the next.

A keeper said no.

A queen could not be lifted.

The benches are empty.

Something is happening. In a line.

And then, from somewhere at the middle of all of it, very old, very large, larger than the keeper under the ring, larger than anything I’d ever heard, one voice.

Not loud. It didn’t need to be.

Then take them.

The voices went quiet.

All of them. Thousands. At once. Listening.

Every world we hold, said the voice. Every child born whole. Every one. Now. Before they are taught.

A pause.

Before they learn to stop.

I didn’t sleep.

I lay in the dark until dawn with my eyes open and every bit of my silver turned toward the ninth line, listening. And the voices didn’t speak again. Not to each other. They spoke outward. Along threads. Hundreds of threads. Thousands. Going out from the place at the end of the ninth line in every direction, like the spokes of Garnet’s wheel. Like the rails going out from the city.

To every tower. On every world.

Take them.

Okafor was at the foot of the steps of Scarecrow before the count.

She looked at my face. She didn’t ask anything. She turned round and walked up the steps and across the square to the map room, and I followed her, and she sent Dot for everyone.

They came in their coats over their nightclothes. Again.

I told them.

All of it. The grey at the end of the ninth line, so big the small grey world was a pebble. The voices. A keeper said no. The one voice at the middle.

Then take them. Every world we hold. Every child born whole. Now. Before they are taught. Before they learn to stop.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

”Every world,” said the General. Very quietly. ”How many worlds?”

Nobody knew.

Then Genny, from the floor by the wall, where she’d been sitting with her notebook since she came in.

”I counted towers,” she said. ”A month ago. When I started hearing them. I told Okafor.” She didn’t look up. ”I didn’t tell anyone else.”

Okafor looked at her.

”Tell them,” she said.

Genny turned to a page in the notebook. And held it up.

It was a number. Very small. In her square handwriting. In the middle of an empty page.

I read it.

Then I read it again.

”That’s towers,” said Genny. ”Not worlds. Some worlds have one tower. Some have hundreds. The red world had twenty-six.” She put the notebook down. ”I don’t know how many worlds. I don’t know how many children. I only know how many towers I can hear.” She looked up. ”And I can’t hear all of them. Only the near ones. Only the ones along the threads I know.”

Nobody said anything.

”Every one of them,” I said, ”has been told. Last night. To take every child born whole.”

Okafor stood at the head of the table for a very long time.

Then she took Garnet’s map out of her breast pocket. And unfolded it. And laid it on the table. Seven circles. Three crossed out. And the dot.

And then she took out the other one. The old one. The first one Garnet ever drew. Nine lines from a dot. Eight circles crossed out. The ninth going out nearly off the edge of the page.

She laid them side by side.

”Eleven circles,” she said. ”Crossed out. Eleven worlds. And the Kethri forest, and the halls.” She looked at the two maps. ”In four years. With every ship we have. With every queen. With Dask and the twins and Dorothy and everyone in this room.” She put her hand flat on the table between them. ”And Genny can hear a hundred times more towers than that. And they’ve just been told to take every child.”

She looked up. At me.

”We can’t be on every world, Dask.”

”No.”

”We can’t be on a hundred. We can’t be on ten.” Her voice didn’t change at all. ”By the time we get to the next circle on Garnet’s map, the children there will be gone. To another hall. Under another ring. Being taught.”

Nobody said anything.

The map room was very quiet. The lamps hissed. Outside, through the window, the sky over the square was going grey with the dawn. In a few minutes the hello would come down out of it and go into everyone on the red glass and come back up.

The way it had every morning since Day 401.

Through every queen on Avalon. Along the silver. Already on both sides.

That’s why the hello reaches in a breath, the first queen had said, a long time ago. When Aster asked how a ship could cross the dark. Not across the dark. Along the silver. Already on both sides.

I stood up.

”The hello,” I said.

Okafor looked at me.

”It goes along the silver,” I said. ”Not across the dark. Along it. The silver’s already on both sides. Everywhere the Sorn have been. In every world. In every tower. In every collar.” I could hear my own voice going faster. ”In every child born whole.”

Nobody said anything.

”The keepers sent take them along the threads,” I said. ”Last night. To every tower. And every tower will push it into every collar. One note. The way they always do.” I looked round the table. ”But the threads go both ways. The silver’s on both sides. If they can send one note along it—”

”—we can send all of them,” said Genny. Very quietly. From the floor.

Okafor didn’t move.

”Explain,” she said.

”At Halden,” said Genny. Standing up. With her notebook. ”I sang to three hundred slivers. With every queen on Avalon under me. Through the housings. And they stopped.” She looked at Okafor. ”At the halls, every queen sang names. Down the cracks. And the children stood up.” She put the notebook on the table. ”We’ve never sung to a world we weren’t standing on.”

”Can you?”

Genny didn’t answer at once.

”I don’t know,” she said. ”I’m one. I’m too small.” She looked at me. ”But I’m not one. I’ve never been one. Every time, it’s every queen on Avalon under me. And Dory holding. And every child with their hand on the ground.” She swallowed. ”And now there are more than forty queens. And they’re all getting stronger. And so is everyone listening to them.”

”Sing what?” said the General.

Genny looked at him.

”Not stop,” she said. ”Never stop. Never anything they’d have to do.” She looked at the window. At the dawn coming. ”What I sang at Halden. What every queen sang at the halls. You can stop now. You can stand up, if you’d like. You don’t have to.” She was quiet. ”And their names. Every queen who has young out there. Every queen in pieces on the wall. Singing their names. Along the threads. To wherever they are.”

”And the ones whose queens are gone?” said Ruth. From the door.

Genny looked at her for a long time.

”Tally,” she said. ”And Reed. And Moon. And the feathered one. And Jory. And every child on Mother’s porch who stood up because the one next to them did.” Her voice was very quiet. ”They know what it sounds like. To be asked. They could sing that.”

Okafor looked at the two maps on the table for a very long time.

Then she picked up her stylus. And turned the slate over. To the back. Past Selwyn. Past Now. Past A keeper said no.

And wrote one word.

She showed it to us.

Everyone.

”Ask them,” she said. ”Not tell. Ask. Every queen. Every child who can hear one. Every person on Avalon whose silver has started listening.” She looked at me. ”Dask. You can hear them all now. Every one. All at once.”

”Yes.”

”Then you’ll know,” said Okafor, ”if it’s working.”

The hello came down while she was saying it.

Out of the dawn sky. Into the map room. Into all of us. The way it had every morning for years. And I heard it go. Out. Along the silver. Into everyone on the red glass, and the plain, and the city, and every town along every rail line. Into every queen. And out further. To the red world. The ice. The moss. To the keeper under the ring, humming.

And further.

Along threads I’d only started to hear a week ago. Thin. Grey. Going out in every direction. Toward towers I’d never seen. Toward worlds nobody had a name for.

Toward children who were, right now, at this moment, being told: take them.

And for the first time, the hello reached them too.

Very faint. Very far.

But it reached.

The long table sat that night.

Not on the first of the month. Not when it was supposed to. Kwame called it, from the head, the way Okafor called the map room. He walked out under the silver tree at dusk and sat down at the end of the long table, alone, and waited. And people came. The way they came to everything. Every seat. Every town. Every brood, with someone in each seat who could hear its queen.

And thousands more, on the green, standing.

I told it again. Everything. The voices at the end of the ninth line. Take them. The number in Genny’s notebook. Okafor’s word on the back of the slate.

Then Kwame said, ”Your turn,” to the first seat.

It was Carver’s.

A farmer. Old. With soil under her nails. She stood up very slowly and looked at the long table, and at the green full of people, and at the silver tree.

”We came through the glass,” she said. ”A hundred and ninety thousand of us. Because somebody opened a door.” She looked at her hands. ”We’ve been growing apples for a year. And potatoes. And the silver in my granddaughter’s eyes started listening last month, and now she can tell me which tree’s going to fruit before it flowers.” She looked up. ”If there are children out there being taken, and singing can reach them, then Carver sings. Every one of us. Every night. As long as it takes.”

She sat down.

”Your turn,” said Kwame.

It went all the way round.

Every seat. Every town. Every brood. Stillwater, who said their lake had been singing to them since Kwame told it about rivers and they’d like to give some of it back. Ashby, who said they’d dug salt for thirty years and knew what it was to be told to dig. The Reach. Halden, very quietly, the old man with the filter round his neck, who said sixty thousand people died in his dome in four minutes because nobody could make the silver stop pushing, and he’d like very much to be part of making it stop.

And the broods.

The Hesk seat, the boy with markings like scales, who closed his eyes for a long time and said: she says yes. She says the Hesk were held once. She says she remembers what it was to hear nothing but one word.

The Karst seat. The Drenn seat. The Kethri. The salt young. Every one.

Yes.

The last seat was new.

Nobody had made it. Voss had put it there, at the foot of the table, beside her own small table with the book. A plain chair. Empty. With a slate on it that said, in Voss’s careful writing: The ones without queens.

Tally sat in it.

With Reed beside her. And Moon in her lap. And the feathered child standing at her shoulder, because it didn’t like chairs yet.

Kwame looked at her.

”Your turn,” he said.

Tally didn’t stand up. She sat very straight in the plain chair with Moon in her lap and the notebook open on the table in front of her. To a clean page.

”Genny says,” she said, ”the ones whose queens are gone could sing being asked.” She looked down the long table. ”We do not know how to sing. Most of us. We were taught not to.” She looked at Reed. At Moon. At the feathered child. ”But we know what being asked sounds like. Because someone asked us. On a bench. On the ash. On a porch.”

She turned the notebook round. So the long table could see the page.

It was empty except for one line at the top. In Genny’s square letters, which Tally always used.

WILL YOU COME WITH ME?

”That is what I said,” said Tally. ”To every one. On the ash. In the halls. At the pumps in Carver.” She looked down at it. ”Not stop. Not stand up. Just that. Will you come with me. You do not have to.” She looked up. ”If that is a song, we can sing it. All of us. Every one without a queen.”

Nobody at the long table said anything.

Then, from the green, very quietly, the feathered child opened its mouth. And sang Harriet’s note. The one it had learned on the porch. With the third part slightly wrong.

And from all over the green, from children who’d come up out of the halls with nobody singing, from children who’d sat on Mother’s porch every morning holding on, from children who’d chosen their birthday on the night Dory blew out five candles and a sixth for Pebble, other voices.

Very faint. Very badly.

Singing it back.

Voss wrote it down. Then she put her pen down. And put her hand over her mouth.

The queens answered at dawn.

Through Juno. After the count. On the red glass. Juno sat down with her eyes shut and the seed in her hand and asked them. All of them. More than forty. And their answers came back so loud and so fast that she sat there with tears running down her face and couldn’t say any of them for a long time.

When she could, she said them.

Our queen: Yes.

The first queen: We sang across the dark alone, in chains, for a very long time. We would like to sing across it together. For everyone’s young.

The old queen, on her mountain, woken: I have been asleep in the light. I will wake for this.

The heavy queen, on the red glass, with her head turned toward the sky: My son will hum under it. All the way from the ring. He says he would like to.

Tally’s queen, in her green shallows: I was in pieces in backs on the human world. I would like to sing to the ones still in backs.

The red queen. The blue queen. The small green queen. The four new ones, from the wall. The queen who was a sound, who didn’t say anything at all, who just got louder, very slowly, until the whole of the plain was full of her.

Every one.

Yes.

Genny wanted to try it first. Small.

”One,” she said. In the long room. At noon. Sitting on the floor in front of Garnet’s chalk wheel, with her hand flat on the boards beside the slivers. ”One thread. One tower. One world. Before everyone.” She looked up at me. ”And you listen. And tell me if it gets there.”

”Which one?”

Genny shut her eyes.

”The nearest one I can hear,” she said. ”That isn’t on Garnet’s map.” A pause. ”There. It’s very small. One tower. On a world that’s mostly water. I can hear it pushing. Swim.”

I listened.

I found it. Faint. Very far. Grey, pushing one note into the water of a world I’d never seen. Swim. Swim. Swim. And under the water, collared, very small, very many, young. Swimming. Round and round. Because they’d been told to.

And something else. Newer. Louder. Coming along the thread into the tower from the far end of the ninth line, the way I’d heard it in the night.

Take them.

”It’s there,” I said. ”They’ve been told.”

Genny nodded. She didn’t open her eyes.

And she sang.

Not loud. Never loud. Not the lullaby. Not names. She didn’t know any names from that world. Tally’s line. The only song the children without queens knew.

Will you come with me? You don’t have to.

Under her, our queen. Just our queen. Not forty. One.

I listened.

Along the thread. Into the tower. Pushing swim. Pushing take them.

And then, under it, very faint, Genny.

Will you come with me?

The tower didn’t stop. It kept pushing. It was a tower. It didn’t know how to stop.

But under the water, among the young going round and round in their collars, one of them stopped swimming.

Just one. Very small. It hung in the water. Still. With its collar on. With the tower pushing swim into it, over and over.

And didn’t swim.

It just hung there. Listening. To something it had never heard. Very faint. Very far. From the other side of the dark.

You don’t have to.

I opened my eyes.

Genny was looking at me. She’d felt it too. I could see it on her face.

”One,” she said. Very quietly.

”One.”

Genny put both hands over her face.

Garnet, at the door with a plate of food, put the plate down on the floor very carefully and came and sat down beside her sister and didn’t say anything at all.

I told Okafor at the foot of the steps that evening.

She listened to all of it. The water world. The one tower. Swim. The small young that stopped swimming and hung in the water with its collar on, listening.

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she took out her slate. And turned it over. Past Selwyn, past Now, past A keeper said no, past Everyone.

And under Everyone, very small, she made a mark.

One line. Down.

The way Tally made them.

”One,” said Okafor.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she put the slate back under her arm.

”Tell Genny,” she said, ”I’d like her to sleep tonight. All night. Without singing to anything.” She turned to go up the steps. Then stopped. ”And tell her I counted it.”

Dory came and found me that night.

On the porch. After everyone was asleep. She came out in her nightdress with Pebble behind her and sat down on the top step, below my chair, and put her hand flat on the wood.

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

”It’s going to be very big,” she said at last.

”Yes.”

”Bigger than the ash. Bigger than the halls. Bigger than holding two worlds at once.” She looked at her hand. At the frost-lattice of silver up her wrist. ”Every queen. Every child. Every person on Avalon who’s listening. All singing. Along every thread. To every world.” She swallowed. ”And all of it through me.”

”Not all of it.”

”Most of it,” said Dory. ”I’m the knot. Okafor said. Grandma said.” She looked up at me. ”Papa. I don’t know if I can hold that much.”

I got out of Father’s chair.

And sat down on the step beside her. And put my hand flat on the wood next to hers.

”Do you know what I’ve been hearing?” I said. ”For a month? Every night?”

Dory shook her head.

”Everything,” I said. ”Every queen. Every child. Every silver on Avalon, listening.” I looked at her hand on the wood. ”And you. Every night. Under all of it. Holding.”

”I’m always holding.”

”I know,” I said. ”But do you know what else I hear?”

Dory looked at me.

”Everyone holding you,” I said.

She went very still.

”Every child with their hand on the ground,” I said. ”Every time. Grandma. The porch. Ash and Pebble and the babies. Fifty-eight thousand children who came home and found out what holding is. Three and a half million people whose silver’s started listening.” I put my hand over hers on the wood. ”You’re the knot, Dory. But a knot’s not holding the rope by itself. The rope’s holding it too.”

Dory didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she leaned her head against my arm.

”Will you be there?” she said. ”When it’s very big?”

”Yes.”

”Not I will,” said Dory. Very sleepily. ”You said yes.”

”I said yes.”

”Good,” said Dory. And fell asleep on the step, with her hand still flat on the wood under mine, and Pebble’s head on her feet.

Days 2691–2722. Everything at once.

I couldn’t sleep: every queen, every child, every listening silver on Avalon, and grey further out. Sera felt me running hot. Mother said she’d woken unable to stand for the weight of every object she could hold, and held one spoon and let the rest wait; listen to one thing. I listened to Kwame and slept. Genny brought back four more queens from the wall: wind like a glass kite, salt water poured into the coral pool, a pale fungus in the dark grove, and one that was only a sound, which Toby said is what music’s made of. Seven circles on Garnet’s map now. Then, listening for the heavy queen’s son, I heard past him to the end of the ninth line: grey so large the halls are a pebble, thousands of keepers repeating a keeper said no, and one voice at the middle: then take them, every world we hold, every child born whole, now, before they learn to stop. Genny showed the map room the number of towers she can hear. Okafor: we can’t be on every world. But the hello goes along the silver, already on both sides. If they can send one note along it, we can send all of them. Okafor wrote: Everyone. And that dawn the hello reached further than it ever had. The long table said yes, every seat; Tally sat in the chair for the ones without queens and showed them the only song they know: will you come with me? The queens said yes. Dory asked if she could hold that much; I told her everyone is holding her too.