Scarecrow

We came out of the rope over Earth at the hour before dawn, their time, and the black was already coming down.

I felt it before I saw it. Before the Scarecrow was all the way out of the dark between worlds. Before the brown sky of Earth came up in the forward window with the domes under it, New Halcyon in the middle, grey and enormous, and the north dome beside it, and the old east block, and the farm domes strung along the ridge like beads.

A weight. Very large. Very cold. Pressing down.

Not waiting any more.

”It heard,” said Selwyn. Behind me. Very quietly. ”The warning. We sent it on the Council band. They heard it.”

Nobody answered him. Nobody had to.

The houses didn’t sing. They didn’t listen. They didn’t ask. But they watched what we did. They’d watched on the fire world and on the second black world, and they’d changed what they did each time.

They’d watched us tell nine hundred and forty thousand people to go down to the lowest levels and wait.

So they’d stopped waiting.

It was lower than Ilka had said.

Much lower. It had been over the north dome at midnight, high, against the brown sky. Now it was nearly on it. A shape your eye slid off. Black past black. Taking the colour out of the air, so that round its edges the morning had gone grey, and then darker than grey, and the top of the north dome under it, where the observation decks were, where the shift lights should have been, had no lights at all.

The black was on the glass.

Spreading. Down the curve of the dome. Slowly. The way it had spread across the fire world. Taking the light out of every pane it touched.

”Ilka,” I said. Into the relay.

Nothing.

”Ilka—”

”I’m here.” Very faint. Very fast. ”I’m here, I’m on Thirty-one, I went down, I told everyone, I went to every door on Forty—” A sound like someone running. ”Some of them didn’t come. Some of them didn’t believe me. Some of them locked their doors.” A pause. Breathing. ”It’s on the top levels now. I can hear it. On the glass. Like rain that doesn’t stop.”

”How many on the top levels?”

”I don’t know.” Her voice broke. ”I don’t know. I went to every door.”

We were late.

Not as late as the fire world. Not as late as the reed world. Late enough.

The heavy queen didn’t wait for anyone to tell her.

The Ground came out of the rope behind us, enormous and dark with her name in gold on her side, and she didn’t slow down. She went straight down. At the north dome. At the black, coming down on top of it. Faster than I’d ever seen the Ground go. Faster than anything that heavy should have been able to go.

And she went under it.

Between the black and the dome.

The Ground went down into the narrow space between the top of the north dome and the underside of the black, and stopped there. Wedged. Her iron hull against the glass below and the black above.

And the heavy queen, in the heart of her, hummed.

I felt it. Every grain of it. Through the Ground’s iron, up into the black. The hum of a world so heavy nothing could stand on it. Weight. Pure weight. Pushing up.

The black came down on the Ground.

It took the light off her hull. The gold of her name went dark, letter by letter. It took the heat out of her iron, so the frost came up on her plates. It reached into her for silver and found the heavy queen.

And couldn’t take her.

Because she was weight. And the black doesn’t take weight.

It stopped.

The whole of the black. Over the north dome. Pressing down. And under it, the Ground, with the heavy queen humming in her heart, pressing up.

Holding it.

”Go,” said Okafor. On the band. From the map room on Avalon, with Ruan relaying from the Meridian. Very calm. ”All of you. Now. She can’t hold it for ever.”

The heavy queen’s hum came up through the band. Low. Steady.

She says she held a world for ten thousand years, said Dot. She says do not insult her.

I’m going to write down what we did that day in order. Because Genny says so. Because it’s the only way I can.

The north dome first.

Four hundred thousand people. Gone down, Ilka said, as far as they could. To the lowest levels. Below the water plant. Below the old Program floors. Into the service tunnels under the dome, where the pumps were. Waiting.

The Harness went down to the east locks of the north dome, where the ash came right up to the doors. Neve was on her ramp, with her hands lit, and Halloway beside her with the ring scanner I’d made, and twelve from the ward behind them in their coats.

The Long Legs went to the west locks.

The Pool to the south.

And I went in.

Through the glass. The way I’d gone in to the Program floors, the first time, a long time ago. Except I didn’t fold the glass. I scattered. Through it. Into the dome. Thin. Silver. Everywhere at once.

And felt.

Every level. Every corridor. Every room. Every person in every room.

Four hundred thousand hearts.

Most of them were down. Ilka had done it. She’d gone to every door on Forty and told them, and they’d told the levels below, and the levels below had told the ones below that, and the whole dome had gone down like water going down a drain. Into the service tunnels. Packed. Standing. Holding each other’s hands in the dark with the pumps going.

Waiting.

Not still. Waiting.

Not all of them.

The top levels.

Forty-one to forty-six. Where the observation decks were, and the Council offices, and the good rooms, with the windows. Where the black was on the glass, coming down the curve of the dome, taking the light out of every pane.

There were people up there.

I felt them. Behind locked doors. Some of them in their beds, still asleep, because nobody had come to their door, or because they hadn’t answered. Some of them awake and standing at the windows. Watching it come.

Some of them in a room at the top of the north dome, behind a door with a crest on it, sitting round a long table.

Waiting for something else.

I went up.

Through the dome. Scattered. Faster than I’d ever gone. Up through the floors to Forty-one. Forty-two. And the black was on the glass above me, coming down, and where it touched the glass the cold came through into the rooms behind.

I came together in a corridor on Forty-two.

And started opening doors.

I’m not going to write down all of them.

I opened a door on Forty-two and there was an old man in a chair by the window with a cat in his lap. He looked at me. He said, ”Is it time?” I said yes. He got up. He picked up the cat. He came.

I opened a door on Forty-three and there were two children asleep in one bed and their mother asleep in a chair beside them. I woke her. She didn’t scream. She picked up both children at once, one under each arm, and ran.

I opened a door on Forty-four and there was nobody. Just a room. A bed. A plant on the windowsill, a small green thing in a pot, turning toward the grey light.

I took the plant.

I don’t know why. I took it.

I couldn’t get them all.

There were too many doors. The black was on the glass and coming down, and every room it reached went cold, and I could feel the hearts in those rooms going cold with it, and I was one person opening doors one at a time.

So I stopped being one person.

I scattered.

In the corridor on Forty-four. All of me. Thin. Silver. Down every corridor on the top six levels at once. Under every door. Into every room.

And I felt every lock. Every grain of the metal in it. And I let them go.

All of them. At once. Every lock on the top six levels of the north dome.

Every door swung open.

”Down!”

I don’t know how I shouted. I didn’t have a mouth. I was spread through six levels of corridors as thin as breath. But I shouted, and they heard it, every one, in every room, through the silver in the walls and the floors and the air.

”Down! Now! Go down!”

And they went.

Most of them.

The room with the crest on the door didn’t go.

I felt them. Eleven. Round the long table. The new Council. The ones who’d heard the Chancellor’s broadcast and heard something other than what she meant. Who’d opened the stores on Level Sixty-two and put thirty years of tithe silver into people in rows. Who’d made the registry. Who’d paired people like stock.

The door was open. I’d opened it.

They didn’t get up.

I came together in the doorway.

They looked at me. Eleven faces round a long table. Grey with fear. And something else. Something I’d seen on Selwyn’s face, the first night, on the Council band, in the Chancellor’s chair.

”You’re Dask,” said the one at the head of the table. A woman. Very thin. With the crest at her collar.

”Yes.”

”They said you’d come.” She was very steady. ”The houses. They said.”

I didn’t say anything.

”There was a message,” said the woman. ”Two days ago. Before your warning. On the old Accord band. The tokens.” She put her hand flat on the table. In front of her there was a small grey thing. A piece of a queen. Lit, very faintly. ”They said a fault would come. They said if we held the fault here, in this room, until they arrived, the human world would not be corrected.” She looked at me. ”They said we would be safe.”

The black was on the window behind her.

All the way across. Taking the light. The cold was coming into the room. Frost on the long table, spreading from the window.

”They lied,” I said.

”You don’t know that.”

”I’ve seen what they do,” I said. ”Be still and you’ll be safe. They said it to every queen on every world for longer than anyone remembers.” I looked at the piece of queen on the table in front of her. ”They never meant it. Not once.”

The woman looked at the black on the window.

”We signed the paper,” she said. ”We’re the ones who signed it. We’ll be the ones who keep it.”

”Then come and keep it on Avalon.”

She didn’t answer.

The man beside her stood up. Very quickly. Knocking his chair over. And came round the table toward me, toward the door, and the woman said ”Sit down,” and he didn’t. He came past me into the corridor and ran.

Then another. Then two more.

Seven stayed.

I could have taken them.

I want to write that down. I could have. I could feel every grain of them. I could have lifted them out of their chairs and carried them down forty floors whether they liked it or not.

I stood in the doorway and thought about it.

And I thought about the keeper on the twelfth world, who stood up when the voice told it to, because it thought that would make it safe. And the houses took it anyway.

And I thought about Tally, in a chair, a long time ago, not knowing she was allowed to have a name.

And I thought about everything I’d ever said, on every world, at the foot of every tower. Would you like it to stop?

I didn’t carry them.

”Last time,” I said. ”Will you come?”

The woman at the head of the table looked at me.

”No,” she said.

I closed the door.

I don’t know why. It was open and I closed it. Gently. The way you close the door on someone’s room when they’ve asked to be left alone.

And I went down.

The black came through the window of the Council room at the eighth minute after dawn.

I felt it. From six floors down. Seven hearts. All at once.

And then not.

Six thousand, one hundred and twelve people on the top levels of the north dome.

Six thousand and forty went down.

Seventy-two didn’t. The seven in the Council room. And sixty-five more. In rooms where the black had already reached the window before I opened the door. In beds, where they hadn’t woken. At windows, where they’d been standing, watching it come, and hadn’t turned round when the door opened.

Seventy-two.

I’m writing it down. In my own hand.

By the time I got to the bottom, the Harness was full.

The service tunnels under the north dome went out to the locks. All four. East, west, north, south. The people came out of them into the grey morning, onto the ash, toward the ships.

Not running. Ilka had told them. Not running. Walking. Holding hands.

And they weren’t empty-handed.

Nobody had told them to bring anything. I’d said bring nothing but each other. And they had. They’d brought each other. Old people on the backs of young ones. Children on shoulders. Babies in sacks.

And they’d brought everything else.

A man with a crate of chickens. A girl with a goat on a rope. A woman with a cat in each arm and a third on her shoulder. Dogs. Dozens of dogs. Hundreds. Running between everyone’s feet, barking, the way the old brown dog had never once barked on Avalon.

Seed trays. Pots. Cuttings in jars. A tree. An actual tree, a small one, in a barrel, being rolled across the ash by four people in work clothes from the farm levels, who stopped at the foot of the Harness’s ramp and looked up at Neve and said, ”Is there room?”

Neve looked at the tree. At the four of them. At the line behind them.

”There will be,” she said.

That was when Okafor changed the plan.

”Everything,” she said.

On the band. From Avalon. While the Harness lifted off the ash at the east locks with eleven thousand people in her hold and a tree in a barrel lashed to the ramp.

”Not just people. Everything. Every animal they can carry. Every seed. Every plant. Every book in every archive. Every machine that still works.” A pause. ”The houses said return. Or be corrected.” Her voice was very flat. ”There’s nothing on Earth we’re going to leave for them to correct.”

Nobody said anything.

”Selwyn,” said Okafor.

”Here.” He was beside me. On the ash. At the north locks, with the Scarecrow above us, her arms out.

”The archives. The seed vault. The Program equipment. The fabricators. The water plant cores. The reactor housings, if they’ll come out.” A pause. ”You know where everything is.”

Selwyn looked at the north dome. At the black on top of it. At the Ground wedged under the black, holding it up, with frost all over her iron and her name gone dark.

”Yes,” he said. ”I do.”

It took all day.

The heavy queen held the black over the north dome all day.

I could feel her. From everywhere I went. The hum. Under it. Pushing up. It didn’t change. It didn’t get weaker. It didn’t get stronger. It was the same hum at noon as it had been at dawn. The same as it had been for ten thousand years.

The black pressed down on her and couldn’t take her and couldn’t move her and pressed down harder.

She didn’t move.

The correctors came at the third hour.

Not from the black over the north dome. From the sky. From nowhere. Dropping out of the brown air in a long dark line over the old east block. A hundred. Two hundred. Tall and wide and faceless. Landing on the ash. Walking.

Toward the east block locks. Where the Long Legs was loading.

The Drenn met them.

I’ll write down how. I want to. Because nobody on Earth had ever seen the Drenn before. And they stood at the locks of the old east block with their children in their arms and their dogs at their feet and watched the Drenn brood come down the Long Legs’ ramp onto the ash.

Grown. Tall. With their blades out. For the first time since the collars came off, for something that wasn’t the Teeming.

And the Drenn queen behind them. Singing.

The correctors walked into them. The way they walked into everything.

The Drenn didn’t try to stop them walking. They let them come. And when they came close, every Drenn blade went in at the same place. Under the collar. Where the dead silver was. Where the Drenn queen had said they’d cut. Exactly there.

And the correctors came apart.

Not all of them. Not easily. A Drenn went cold. Then another. Then six. The black came off the correctors where they walked and reached the Drenn’s feet and went up their blades, and Drenn blades come away at the joint like a tooth when they’re hurt, and the soft place underneath goes bad very fast.

The Drenn queen sang to every one that went down. One at a time.

Twenty Drenn didn’t get up.

The Drenn held the east block locks until the Long Legs was full.

Luna and Risa went to the farm domes.

Along the ridge. Where the correctors were dropping too. I felt them go. Luna on a path of ice, a white line across the brown sky from the north dome to the ridge, so fast she was there before I’d finished feeling her leave. Risa as lightning. Gone and there.

I didn’t see what they did. I was in the archives.

Luna told me after.

”I laid ice between them and the farm dome locks,” she said. ”And let it go to frost. Over and over. And Risa broke them.” A pause. ”And then the farmers came out of the locks with their cows.”

”Cows?”

”Cows,” said Luna. ”Two hundred. And sheep. And pigs. And a horse.” She looked at her hands. ”I had to lay a path of ice from the locks to the Pool so the cows could walk on it. They wouldn’t walk on the ash. They didn’t like the black.” She was quiet. ”Risa held a storm over the whole thing so the correctors couldn’t see where the path went. For three hours.”

”Did they make it? The cows?”

”Every one,” said Luna. ”And the horse.” She almost smiled. ”The horse didn’t like the ice either. Risa had to carry it. As lightning.” A pause. ”It’s in Halloway’s ward now. Being looked at. It’s very angry.”

Sera went to Level Sixty-two.

With Selwyn. Into the pharmaceutical works under New Halcyon, where the vials had been made every Monday for twenty years. Where the tithe stores were. Thirty years of silver. And the slivers. Pieces of queens, broken up and given to the Council as tokens, in rows of grey boxes on shelves that went back further than the light.

Sera stood at the door of the stores and looked at the shelves for a long time.

”How many?” she said.

Selwyn didn’t answer.

”How many pieces of queens are in this room?” said Sera.

”I don’t know,” said Selwyn. ”Nobody ever counted. They were just—” He stopped. ”Tokens.”

Sera went in.

She didn’t burn anything. She didn’t touch the vials. She went along the shelves, one at a time, and picked up every grey box, and opened it, and looked at what was inside, and closed it again, very gently, and put it in a sack.

Every one.

It took her four hours.

”Genny will want to sing to them,” she said, when Selwyn asked. ”Like the eleven. Like Tally’s queen.” She tied the last sack shut. ”Somebody’s going to have to put them back together. They’re not leaving them here.”

Selwyn found the other thing on Level Sixty-two.

Not in the stores. In the ledgers. On a shelf by the door, in the room where the clerks had sat, every Monday for twenty years, signing for the vials. He’d gone to it while Sera filled her sacks, because he said there was a book he needed to see before he left Earth for good. A book with his own name in it.

He came out of the clerks’ room very white.

”Calder,” he said. To Sera. ”Where’s Friese?”

”Risa? At the farm domes. With Luna.”

”No,” said Selwyn. ”The other one. Sigmund.”

”On the Harness. With Halloway. Why?”

Selwyn held out the ledger. Open. His finger on a line near the bottom of a page that had been written a very long time ago, in a clerk’s small careful hand.

Ward Nine. East block, sublevel four. Retention, non-compliant, indefinite. Friese, I. Signed: Friese, K. Countersigned: Selwyn, H.

Sera looked at it for a long time.

”Who’s I?” she said.

Selwyn didn’t answer at once.

”Ingrid,” he said. ”His wife.”

I felt Risa hear it.

From the archives, three floors under New Halcyon, with my eyes shut and every book in every room in my head. Sera sent it to her through Dot. Dot sent it to her through the wood of the Pool’s ramp, on the ridge, where Risa was holding a storm over two hundred cows.

The storm stopped.

All at once. The rain fell straight down for a moment, with nothing holding it. And then there was a line of white across the brown sky, from the ridge to the old east block, so bright that every Drenn on the east block locks looked up.

And Risa was gone.

Sigmund got there first.

He’d been on the Harness’s ramp at the east locks with Halloway, taking pulses, when Dot told him. He didn’t say anything. Halloway told me after. He put down the man’s wrist he was holding, very carefully, and said excuse me, and walked down the ramp into the east block, past the Drenn, past the correctors coming apart under their blades, without looking at any of it. Walking. Not running. With his hands at his sides and lightning standing very still all over him in a fence.

Risa came out of the sky beside him at the door to sublevel four.

They looked at each other.

”Did you know?” said Risa.

”No,” said Sigmund. ”He told us she left. When we were small. He said she didn’t want us.”

”He told me she was dead.”

They stood there. At the door. The two of them. With the black coming down on the north dome a mile away and the Drenn singing at the locks behind them.

Then Risa put her hand on the door.

And it went.

Ward Nine was very small.

Eleven rooms. Ten empty. Not empty the way the top levels of the north dome were empty, with beds still warm. Empty for years. Dust on the floors. Old names on the doors, painted over.

The eleventh had a light on.

She was sitting on the edge of a narrow bed in a grey shift with her hands in her lap.

Grey-haired. Very thin. With a band round her neck, old and dull, the kind they’d put on the Retention families before the Accord was broken, the kind that kept silver quiet. With a window in the wall that looked at nothing but more wall.

She’d heard the door go. She’d heard them come down the corridor.

She didn’t look up.

”Is it time?” she said. The way the old man on Forty-two had said it. As if she’d been asking it, every morning, for a very long time.

Risa didn’t say anything. She couldn’t.

Sigmund did.

”Mother,” he said.

She looked up.

Storm-grey eyes. Risa’s eyes. The ones that had looked at me across a great many tables, telling me exactly what she thought.

Ingrid Friese looked at her son. And at her daughter. Grown. Standing in the door of the room where she’d been for longer than they’d been grown, with lightning all over them.

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she said, very quietly:

”You’re so tall.”

Risa took the band off her neck.

Not with lightning. With her hands. She knelt down on the dusty floor in front of the narrow bed and put both hands on the old dull band, very gently, and it came apart, the way the collars came apart when Garnet asked them. Because Risa wasn’t going to let it do anything else.

And under it, the silver came up.

I felt it from three floors under New Halcyon. Like a lamp being lit in a room that’s been dark for years. Faint. Then less faint.

And then not faint at all.

Storm.

The same storm I’d felt in Risa every day since the dome. The same lattice I’d seen round small Sigmund’s eyes the night he was born. Older. Deeper. Held so still for so long that it had gone quiet as a held breath.

Risa felt it too. I saw her face change.

The correctors came at the door of the east block as they were bringing her out.

Thirty of them. Through the Drenn. The way they always came, walking, faceless, the black coming off them where they stepped. Toward the three Frieses in the corridor.

Risa’s hands came up. Sigmund’s fence went white.

And Ingrid Friese, who hadn’t stood on her own in years, who had Sigmund’s arm under hers and Risa’s shawl round her shoulders and a grey shift on, put out one thin hand.

Flat.

And every corrector in the corridor stopped.

Not frozen. Not held, the way Mother held. Stopped. The way a clock stops when you take the spring out. Every one. Mid-step.

I felt it. From three floors under. It didn’t make sense. The correctors had nothing in them for anything to stop. No silver that lived. No heart. No charge.

Except they walked.

And something walking has to have something moving it.

Ingrid Friese took it out.

All of it. The charge. The pull. Whatever the houses put in them that made them go. She’d spent her whole life knowing where charge was, in anything, and how to call it. She reached into thirty correctors at once with one thin hand and called it out of them. Into her palm. And they stood there in the corridor of the old east block, very still, with nothing in them at all.

Then she gave it back.

Not to them. Through them. All at once. As lightning. A white flash that filled the corridor from wall to wall and came out of her one thin hand and went through thirty correctors in the time it took to blink.

They came apart.

The Drenn behind them stopped, with their blades raised, and looked at the thin grey woman in the corridor. And lowered them.

Risa stared at her mother.

”What was that?”

Ingrid looked at her hand. Turning it over. As if she wasn’t sure it was hers.

”I used to be good at that,” she said. ”A long time ago.” She swallowed. ”I didn’t know if I still could.”

”You never told us.”

”You were so small,” said Ingrid. ”And then I wasn’t allowed to tell you anything.”

The archives.

That was me. With Toby, who could hear the old machines humming in the walls, which ones still worked, which ones were dead. And Anja, who could carry a reactor housing on her back if she had to, and did, twice.

Every book. Every file. Every disk and drive and slate in the Council archives under New Halcyon. The medical records from the Program floors. Halloway’s notes, from before she came to Avalon, that she’d left in a locked drawer because she couldn’t carry them. The engineering plans for every dome. The water plant. The pumps. The seed vault, three floors down, cold, with eleven thousand kinds of seed in it in small sealed jars, every kind of plant that had ever grown on Earth before the brown sky.

I couldn’t carry it all. Nobody could.

So I didn’t carry it.

I felt it.

All of it. Every grain. Every book and every page and every word on every page. Every jar in the seed vault and every seed in every jar. Every machine in the fabrication halls. Every coil and wire and bolt.

And I asked it to come.

Not lifted it. Not folded it. Scattered it. The way I scattered myself. All of it, the whole of the archives and the seed vault and the fabrication halls, into silver and dust and breath. Up through the dome. Through the glass. Out over the ash to the Scarecrow, hanging over New Halcyon with her arms out.

And into her hold.

And put it back.

Every grain. Every page. Every word. Every seed in every jar.

Exactly where it had been.

I don’t remember doing it.

Toby says I stood in the middle of the archive floor with my eyes shut for nine minutes without moving. And then the archive was empty. Every shelf. Every drawer. Every room for three floors. Empty. Down to the dust. And the Scarecrow’s hold was full.

He says I fell down after.

He says Anja caught me.

He says I said something, when she did. He wouldn’t tell me what. He said it wasn’t for him to say.

Anja told me later. On the porch. When everyone else had gone to bed.

”You said I’m sorry,” she said. ”Over and over. And then you said Father, I took the plant.”

The black over the north dome let go at dusk.

Not because the heavy queen pushed it off. Not because anyone folded it.

The forest queen went into it.

She’d been on the Pool all day. With the coral queen. Helping. When the coral queen asked the old water under the rock to come up, very deep, very old, more water than anyone on Earth had known was there, the forest queen sang the rock round it so it would come up in the right place. A wall. A great clear wall of water, standing up out of the ash round the north dome and New Halcyon and the east block, between the domes and the correctors dropping out of the sky. And Hana, on the Pool’s ramp, with her hands out and her face set, telling every molecule of it what shape to be.

The correctors walked into the water wall.

It wasn’t fire. It wasn’t light. It wasn’t silver. The black took the warmth out of it, and the water froze, and kept standing. Ice. A wall of it. And the correctors walked into the ice and couldn’t walk through it, because ice isn’t anything the black can take, it’s only water that’s already cold.

Hana held it all day.

At dusk, when the last ship but the Scarecrow had lifted, the forest queen left the Pool.

And went up.

I felt her go.

Up the side of the north dome, uncoiling, long and green and brown, moving the way water moves over moss. Over the top of the dome. To the Ground, wedged under the black, with the heavy queen in her heart humming and frost all over her iron.

And past the Ground.

Into the black.

”No,” said Okafor. On the band.

Too late.

I was already going after her.

I scattered.

Up. Through the dome. Past the Ground. Into the black.

It reached for me.

I felt it. Every grain of it, reaching. For silver. For warmth. For anything. And there was nothing to reach. I wasn’t anywhere. I was spread out through it as thin as breath, every atom of me apart, not touching anything, not holding still long enough for it to take hold.

It was like swimming through ink.

It was like being inside a held breath.

And at the middle of it, curled very tight, very far in, very cold, I felt the forest queen.

And I felt what she’d found.

There was a queen in the black.

Not a piece. A whole one. Curled at the very centre of it. Very small. Very cold. Not dark green and brown like the forest queen. Grey. Like ash. Like the inside of a stove the morning after.

Every grain of the black came out of her.

She was what it was taught in.

They took her, said the forest queen. Very quietly. Through the silver. Through me. A long time ago. From a world they corrected. A pause. They did not waste her. They taught her. Every day. Stay empty. Take, and stay empty. Until she was nothing but the teaching.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

And then they put her over a world, said the forest queen. And let the teaching out.

I knew.

I knew before the forest queen said it. Grey like ash. From a world they corrected. A long time ago.

There was a keeper on Avalon. Lying against the heavy queen’s side on the red glass. With a red scarf closed in one long grey hand. That had knelt at the foot of a tower on a world of ash and heard the shape where its mother had been.

Queens are not wasted, it had said. The houses take them. I do not know where.

”Sing it,” I said.

To the forest queen. Through the silver. Inside the black.

”Her shape. What she was. Before they taught her.” I felt the queen at the centre. Every grain of her. Grey. Cold. Curled. ”Her bone remembers. It always does. Genny says.”

I do not know her shape, said the forest queen. I never knew her.

”I do,” I said.

I didn’t. Not really.

But I knew a keeper. Long and grey and thin. Lying curled against the heavy queen’s side, in the shape of the hollow it had heard under its tower. In the shape of where its mother had been.

I’d felt that shape. On the red glass. Every night. For weeks.

The keeper had been lying in it the whole time.

I sang it.

I can’t sing. Everyone knows that. Toby says I can’t hold a note in a bucket.

But I could feel the shape. Every grain of it. The hollow the keeper lay in. The curve of its long grey back. The way its head turned in. Toward where she’d been.

And the forest queen sang it with me.

The queen at the centre of the black went very still.

Then, very slowly, a grain at a time, at the very middle of her, something that wasn’t black.

Grey. Pale. Ash.

Like the inside of a stove the morning after. When you open the door and there’s nothing left but ash.

And under the ash, if you blow on it, very faintly, still warm.

The black let go of the north dome.

Not all at once. From the middle. Where she was. Where the teaching had come from. It came loose there first, the way a knot comes loose when you find the end, and then it came loose everywhere. Off the Ground. Off the glass. Off the top six levels. Off the sky.

It didn’t fall. There wasn’t anything to fall. It just stopped being taught. And when it stopped being taught, it stopped.

And the brown sky came back.

And in the middle of it, where the black had been, a queen. Grey as ash. Very small. Falling.

The heavy queen caught her.

The Ground came up from the top of the north dome with her iron white with frost and her name dark on her side and her ramp opening, and the ash-grey queen fell into her hold the way a leaf falls into a hand.

And the heavy queen, in the Ground’s heart, stopped humming.

For the first time all day.

And curled round her.

The last ship lifted off Earth an hour after dark.

The Scarecrow. With me on her ramp. And Selwyn beside me. And Ilka Marrow, who’d come up out of the service tunnels with the last of the north dome, and found the Scarecrow on the ash at the north locks, and walked up the ramp, and stopped at the top, and looked back.

At the domes.

Empty. All of them. New Halcyon. The north dome. The old east block. The farm domes strung along the ridge. Their lights out. Their locks open. Not a person in them. Not a dog. Not a seed.

Not a book.

”Is that everyone?” said Ilka.

I shut my eyes. And felt.

Every level. Every corridor. Every room. Every dome.

Nine hundred and forty thousand hearts. Give or take. On every ship we had, going home.

And on Earth, nothing. Nobody. Not a heart. Except seventy-two that weren’t anything any more, on the top levels of the north dome, and seven in a room with a crest on the door.

”That’s everyone,” I said.

Ilka looked at the domes for a long time.

”I was born on Thirty-one,” she said. ”My mother was born on Thirty-one. Her mother came in on the first transports, when they sealed the domes.” She looked at her hands. ”I used to go up to the observation deck at shift change. To look at the sky. It’s brown. It’s always been brown.” A pause. ”My mother said before the domes it was blue.”

”It’s blue on Avalon,” I said.

Ilka looked at me.

”Is it?”

”Mostly,” I said. ”Risa makes it rain sometimes.”

She didn’t say anything for a while.

Then she held out her hand. Toward me. Flat. Not knowing what it meant. Just doing it, because she’d seen every child off every bench do it, on every crossing, for two years.

I put my hand against it.

And we went home.

Ingrid Friese came down the Scarecrow’s ramp onto the red glass an hour after dark.

On Sigmund’s arm. With Risa on her other side. Slowly. In the grey shift with Risa’s shawl over it. And she stopped at the bottom of the ramp the way everyone stopped, and looked up, at a sky with stars in it, at the queens on the glass, at the lights of the town going up the hill.

”Oh,” she said.

That was all.

Dory was at the foot of the ramp.

She always was. She’d been told to go to bed and she hadn’t. She stood on the red glass in her nightgown with Pebble beside her and looked at the thin grey-haired woman on her mother’s arm for a long time.

Checking.

Ingrid felt it. I saw her feel it. Her thin hand tightened on Sigmund’s arm.

Then Dory put out her hand. Flat.

”You’re Mama’s mama,” she said. ”You were in a room.” She considered this. ”You’re all right now. You’re very tired. You’re very quiet inside.” A pause. ”I’m Dory. I’m Holding.”

Ingrid looked down at her.

She didn’t say anything. She let go of Sigmund’s arm, very slowly, and knelt down on the red glass, which she shouldn’t have, Halloway said after, with her knees the way they were. And put her hand against Dory’s.

”Hello, Dory,” she said.

Behind Risa, small Sigmund, who’d come down with Hana and was standing very straight with a spark running round his ear, said, ”I’m Sigmund. Like Uncle. I’m the loud one.”

Ingrid looked at him. At the lattice round his eyes, with lightning in every thread.

And laughed.

Very small. Very hoarse. Like something that hadn’t been used in years.

”Yes,” she said. ”I can see that.”

Then she looked up at me.

I was standing beside Risa. I didn’t know what to do. I’d been in the archives all day and I had ash in my hair and Anja’s hand on the back of my coat because Anja wasn’t letting go of it until I’d sat down.

”You’re Dask,” said Ingrid.

”Yes.”

She looked at me for a long time. At the silver round my eyes. At my hands. At Risa’s hand, which had come into mine without either of us noticing.

”Trevor’s boy,” she said.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

”I knew your father,” said Ingrid. ”On the northern front. He held a pass for nine days and brought forty men home and never once told anyone.” A pause. ”You have his face. When he was deciding whether something was worth saying.” She looked at Risa. ”Is he worth it?”

”Most days,” said Risa.

”Good,” said Ingrid. ”Your father wasn’t. Most days.”

Mother came down the long road from the house at a run.

I’d never seen her run. Not on Avalon. Not in the dome. She came down the road in her dark coat with Father’s ring and her hair coming loose, and she stopped at the edge of the red glass and looked at the thin grey woman kneeling beside Dory.

”Ingrid,” she said.

Ingrid looked up.

Her face did something I didn’t have a word for.

”Dot,” she said.

Nobody had called Mother that in my whole life.

Dot was the unit in Scarecrow. Dot was the voice in the wood. Dot was who called me Operator. Mother was Mother, or Mrs. Dask, or Dorothy, once, to the General, when they named Trevor.

Never Dot.

Mother stood very still at the edge of the red glass.

”Nobody’s called me that since the war,” she said.

”Nobody else was there,” said Ingrid. And held out her hand. ”Help me up. My knees are terrible. I’m thirty years older than the last time you saw me and I’ve been sitting on a bed for most of them.”

Mother crossed the glass. And took her hand. And pulled her up.

And didn’t let go.

They sat on the porch until dawn.

The two of them. In Father’s chair and the one beside it. With a blanket over their knees and the teapot between them, and nobody else, because Mother sent everyone to bed and for once everyone went.

I didn’t. I was on Father’s roof. I didn’t mean to listen.

I listened.

They’d been in the same line. On the northern front. Before the Accord. Before anyone was cut. When the modified fought, and nobody had a word for what they were yet except useful.

Mother held. She’d always held. She held the ground under the line so the Sorn landings couldn’t take it.

Ingrid stopped things.

”You were the most frightening person I ever met,” said Mother. Very quietly. On the porch. With the teapot. ”Do you remember the landing at the Kesh ford? The handlers came up out of the river in a line. Three hundred. And you walked out in front of them. In your boots. With your hair tied up in that terrible green scarf.” A pause. ”And put your hand out. And they stopped. All of them. Mid-stride. In the water. And you called every spark out of them into your hand, and then you lit them up like candles. Three hundred. In one breath.”

”Konrad got the medal,” said Ingrid.

”Konrad always got the medal.” Mother poured the tea. ”Konrad was standing behind you with a slate, writing the report. He never had a spark in him in his life.” She put the pot down. ”And his name went on the report. And the report went to the Council. And by the end of the month the whole of the northern front was calling him the Storm.”

Ingrid didn’t say anything for a long time.

”I let them,” she said at last. ”He wanted it so badly. And I didn’t care what they called anyone. I only cared that the line held.” She looked at her hands. ”The men knew. The ones who were there. They had their own name for me. Behind my back. Because everything went quiet, just before.” A pause. ”Here comes the Hush.”

”I know,” said Mother. ”I started it.”

Ingrid laughed. Properly. For the first time.

Risa came out at dawn.

She’d heard them. She’d been on the stairs half the night. She came out onto the porch in her nightgown with her arms folded and her hair on end and stood at the end of the rail, looking at her mother.

”Three hundred,” she said. ”At the Kesh ford. Mid-stride.”

Ingrid looked at her.

”Sigmund’s on the step,” said Risa. ”He heard too.” She swallowed. ”He told me in the hall. He said, she lit three hundred handlers with one hand and they gave Father the medal.” Her voice cracked. ”We grew up thinking we got it from him. The storm. Everything. The Storm’s children. That’s what everyone in the dome called us.” She swallowed. ”He never once told us it wasn’t his.”

”It was never his,” said Ingrid. She held out her hand. And a very small spark ran across her palm, blue, and went out. ”Not one spark. He couldn’t have lit a candle.” A pause. ”It’s mine. Every bit of it. And the part of you that knows when to stop. The part that holds it in your hand and doesn’t let it go until it’s the right time.” She looked at Sigmund, in the doorway now, very straight, with his fence so tight it didn’t spark. ”That’s mine too. That’s what I was best at.”

Sigmund didn’t say anything.

He came out onto the porch. And sat down on the boards at his mother’s feet. The way small Sigmund sat at Risa’s.

And put his head against her knee.

I said it that night. Very late. On the porch.

To everyone. In order. With the ash in my hair still. With a plant in a pot on the rail beside me, a small green thing, turning toward the lamp. With Anja on the step below, who’d caught me. With Hana asleep against Luna’s shoulder, because she’d held a wall of water for fourteen hours. With Sera’s sacks in the forge, every one, full of pieces of queens, waiting for Genny. With Mother and Ingrid Friese in the two chairs at the end of the porch, under one blanket, not saying anything, because they’d already said everything once and were going to say it all again when everyone had gone to bed.

And with the Ground on the red glass. And the heavy queen beside her. And curled against the heavy queen, very small, grey as ash, a queen who’d been taught to be nothing.

And curled against her, with its long grey arms out and its face pressed into her and a red scarf closed in one hand.

The keeper.

It hadn’t moved since she came down the ramp.

Konrad came at noon.

Up the long road from the guest house, where he’d lived since the terms were voided. Slowly. With the cane he didn’t need. In his dark coat, narrow and grey and perfectly composed, the way he’d walked up the road the evening he asked to see his granddaughter and Risa told him he was seeing her.

He’d heard. Everyone had heard. The whole of Avalon knew by breakfast.

He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.

Ingrid was in the chair beside Father’s, with the blanket over her knees and Mother beside her. Risa on the rail. Sigmund on the top step, with his arms folded, the way he’d sat the evening his father first came up the road.

Nobody said anything.

Konrad looked at his wife.

He didn’t say her name.

He stood at the bottom of the steps with his hand on the cane, and he looked at her for a very long time, and his face, which had stayed perfectly composed in front of the Senate and the Council and Okafor and the Overseer and the long table, did something.

Then he put the cane down.

On the steps. Very carefully. The way Okafor put her pencil down.

And he knelt.

On the bottom step. In his dark coat. With his hands at his sides.

”I signed it,” he said.

Ingrid didn’t move.

”Ward Nine,” said Konrad. ”I signed it first. The night after the Act. They said: the Storm renounces, or the seat goes to someone who will.” He looked at the step. ”I couldn’t renounce anything. I never had anything. It was always you. So they said: then your wife renounces, in your name, or everyone finds out who the Storm really was. And she wouldn’t.” His voice was very steady. ”She said she’d rather be in a room than be told she was nothing. And I said, then go into the room. And signed.” A pause. ”And I told the children she left. And I told Risa she’d died, when Risa wouldn’t stop asking. And I sat in the Senate year after year and voted for every directive against the modified, so nobody would ever look too closely at the Storm. Or ask where his wife had gone.”

Nobody on the porch said anything.

”I’m not asking you to forgive me,” said Konrad. ”I wouldn’t. I’ve had a long time in that guest house to think about what I’d do if I were you, and I wouldn’t.” He looked up at her. ”I’m sorry. That’s all. I’m sorry for every day. I wanted you to hear me say it with my own mouth, before anyone else said it for me.”

He looked at Risa. At Sigmund.

”And you,” he said. ”I’m sorry. You grew up thinking your mother didn’t want you. She wanted you more than anything. It was me who didn’t want anyone to know what you were.”

Ingrid looked at him for a very long time.

Then she said, ”Get up, Konrad. Your knees are worse than mine.”

He didn’t move.

”I’m not going to forgive you,” said Ingrid. ”Not today. Perhaps not ever. I don’t know yet. I haven’t had time to find out.” She pulled the blanket tighter. ”But I’m not going to sit on this porch and watch you kneel either. I’ve had years of watching a wall. I’d like to watch something else.”

Konrad stayed where he was for a moment.

Then he got up. Slowly. And picked up his cane.

”May I come again?” he said.

Ingrid looked at Risa. At Sigmund. At the children on the steps, small Sigmund with his spark, Dory with Pebble, watching everything.

”Ask them,” she said. ”Not me. They’re the ones you lied to longest.”

Konrad looked at his son.

Sigmund didn’t say anything for a long time.

”Once a week,” he said at last. ”You can come to supper once a week.” A pause. ”You bring the bread.”

”I don’t know how to make bread.”

”Then learn,” said Sigmund.

Days 2778–2780. Everything.

We were late: the black was coming down on the north dome. The heavy queen drove the Ground under it and held it up all day, because the black doesn’t take weight. I opened every lock on the top six levels at once; six thousand and forty went down; seventy-two didn’t, seven of them Council, who said the houses had promised them safety, and stayed. Okafor: everything. People came out with chickens, goats, cats, a tree in a barrel; Luna laid ice for two hundred cows; Risa carried a horse as lightning. The Drenn held the east block; twenty didn’t get up. Hana held a wall of old water fourteen hours. Sera sacked every piece of queen in the tithe stores. I scattered the archives, the seed vault and the fabricators into the Scarecrow and put them back, and said Father, I took the plant. The forest queen went into the black and found a queen at its centre, taught to be nothing: the ash keeper’s mother. I sang its shape. She came loose, and fell, and the heavy queen caught her. In a sealed ward under the east block, Selwyn found his own countersignature: Ingrid Friese, Risa and Sigmund’s mother, years in a room. Risa came as lightning; Sigmund walked. She called the charge out of thirty correctors and lit them; the lightning was always hers, never Konrad’s. Dory checked her; small Sigmund said he was the loud one; she knew Father. Mother ran down the road, and Ingrid called her Dot, which nobody has since the war: the Hush and the holder, the Kesh ford. Konrad knelt on the bottom step and said sorry; not forgiven; supper once a week, and he brings the bread. Earth is empty. Everyone’s home.