Scarecrow

Mother took Vessa’s wall down one stone at a time.

She didn’t have to. She could have lifted the whole of it out of the arch at once, the way she lifted a tower off a ring round a star. But she took it a stone at a time, and handed each one to Kyria, and Kyria laid them in a row in the snow on the ridge, very carefully, in the order they came out, the way you’d lay out something you meant to put back.

It took most of the morning.

Nobody said anything while she did it.

Behind us, on the ridge, Odra had brought the smiths.

All forty. In their leather aprons, with their scarred arms, standing in the snow in a half-circle round the arch with hammers. Big ones. Bigger than any hammer I’d ever seen. The ones they use on the deep forges. And at the top of the arch, either side of the keystone, Odra had cut two holes in the ridge in the night and packed them with something from under the mountain that Kyria wouldn’t name.

”When the last of us is through,” Kyria told her. In front of everyone. ”Coming back. Or if anything that isn’t us comes through first.” She looked at the keystone. ”Bring it down.”

And if you’re not all back? said Odra.

Kyria didn’t answer straight away.

”Wait as long as you can,” she said. ”Then bring it down.”

Konrad was at the last cairn, where Kyria had told him he’d come far enough. He hadn’t moved since dawn. He had his hands in his pockets and his hat on and his eyes on Ingrid.

She went back to him once. Before the last stone. In her black armour with the faint blue at the seams.

I didn’t hear what she said. I don’t think anybody did. But when she came back to the arch, Konrad had his hat in his hands.

Mother lifted out the last stone.

And the arch was open.

I’ve been through a great many arches. Avalon to Ammaru. The courtyard to the ring. The Hyrrani ones, with their water patterns, that go to the ridge, and the little one between where Andraste’s feet had been. They all feel the same going through. A step. A cold you don’t notice until you’re out of it. A sound like a held breath let go.

Vessa’s arch didn’t feel like that.

Vessa’s arch felt like stepping off a stair you thought was there.

And then we were through.

And there was nothing.

I mean that exactly.

A plain. Grey. Flat to the edge of the sky in every direction, under a sky that was also grey, with a small hard white sun in it that gave light and no warmth at all. No grass. No moss. No trees. Not a stump of a tree. No soil, even. Just rock, scraped down, the way Kyria said her bare worlds were. As if something had come over the whole face of the world with a very fine file.

Behind us, the arch stood on its own. A black stone arch on a grey plain. With the snow of Hyrran through it, and Odra’s face, and the hammers.

Hana breathed in.

”There’s air,” she said. ”Thin. Old. Nothing’s breathed it for a long time.” She took a breath and gave it to all of us, quietly, the way she does, so you don’t notice it until you think about it and realise you’ve stopped being tired. ”It’ll do.”

I knelt down and put my hand flat on the rock.

And listened.

I’ve done this on every world we’ve ever come to. On Ammaru, the forest came up through my hand singing. On the moss world I felt the mountain breathing under me. On Tiel I felt the hollows full of people, and the shirts on the line.

Here, there was nothing.

Not quiet. Not sleeping. Nothing that had ever been alive was left in the rock for as far down as I could feel. Not a root. Not a seed. Not a bone. Every atom of carbon in the top of the world was gone. Taken. As if somebody had gone through the ground with a sieve and kept only the parts that weren’t any use to eat.

”It’s been eaten,” I said.

”Yes,” said Kyria. ”That’s what they look like. The ones my mother found. The ones my grandmother found.” She looked out at the grey. ”Always like this.”

”Which way?” said Andraste.

I didn’t know.

I stood up and turned round, slowly, with my hand out, feeling. All of it. As far as I could reach. Rock and rock and rock.

And then, very faint, very far—

Warm.

”That way,” I said.

We walked for a long time.

I don’t know how far. Luna said it was two miles and a bit, and Luna knows, because Luna made a path the whole way, very thin, very faint, a line of frost on the rock that we could follow back. She said if the arch went out of sight she wanted to know exactly where it was. Nobody argued with her.

The arch went out of sight after the first mile.

Nobody said anything about that either.

I’ll write down what we found on the way. Because it matters.

A corrector.

Lying on its side on the grey rock. The tall thin black thing the Sorn send down to walk into people and make them cold. I’ve fought hundreds. I’ve had my own fingers go black from one. I’ve watched Maura kneel on the long ward warming arms where they’d been.

This one was dead.

Not broken. Dead. It had been opened. Along one side, from the shoulder to the knee, as if something had peeled it, and the inside of it, all the cold black workings, was gone. Hollowed out. And round the edges of the opening, very clear, so clear Sera knelt down and didn’t say anything for a while, were marks.

Teeth.

Then another one.

Then eleven.

Then I stopped counting.

And then the iron.

Sorn iron. Not Hyrrani. The dark, smooth, seamless metal the houses build everything out of. I knew it before I reached it; I can feel it in every atom, the way I can feel the silver in me. A piece of hull. As big as the house on the rise. Lying on the plain where it had come down.

It had holes in it.

Not burned. Not blown. Eaten. Through. The edges soft, pitted, as if the metal had been dipped in something and had run like wax. Ingrid put out one finger toward the edge of one of the holes and Kyria caught her wrist.

”Don’t,” said Kyria.

I knelt down and felt it. Every atom. And they’d been pulled apart from each other, not by heat, not by force, but by something wet. Something that got in between them and took.

”Acid,” I said.

Mother looked at the hole. It was big enough to walk through.

”In Sorn iron,” she said.

”Yes.”

Mother didn’t say anything. But she moved half a step closer to Maura. And Maura moved half a step closer to her.

There was more of it, after that. Pieces of ship. A tower, or what had been one, lying on its side, half of it gone into holes. A barge, the black kind, the kind that rains on forests, broken across the middle with its black spilled out round it on the rock, and the black had soaked into nothing, because there was nothing left there to soak into.

This was where the Sorn had come. At least once. A long time ago, or not so long.

And this was where they’d stopped.

”They lost,” said Risa. Very quietly. Looking at the barge. ”Didn’t they. Here.”

Nobody answered her.

Nobody had to.

The warm got stronger.

We came up a long low rise of grey rock. At the top of it, Andraste put her arm out. Not looking back. She didn’t need to. Everyone stopped.

She was looking down.

I came up beside her.

And saw them.

I’m going to try to write this down properly. Because Okafor wanted a name for it, and Vessa only ever had three words, and I want the children to have more than three words.

There was a valley below the rise. Wide. Deep. Miles of it. And it was full.

Not of a city. Not of a forest. Of them.

They were the size of horses. Some of them. Others were the size of the long barn, and a few, very far down, near the bottom of the valley, were the size of the house on the rise. Insect. That’s the nearest word. Six legs, jointed, armoured, the colour of old bone. Wings, folded flat along their backs, long and thin and veined like glass. Heads that were mostly mouth. Mouths that opened four ways at once, like hands, with teeth inside them in rows that went a long way back. And at the front of them, two arms that ended in claws, curved, longer than Andraste’s blade.

Thousands of them.

Tens of thousands.

More than that. Moving. All of them. All the time. Over each other. Under each other. Never still, the way the Teeming are never still. But not like the Teeming. The Teeming are many people trying to be one. These weren’t people. These were one thing in a great many bodies, and the one thing wasn’t trying to be anything.

It was eating.

At the bottom of the valley there was something I didn’t understand at first.

A heap. Grey and wet and enormous, a mile across, rising and falling very slowly. And the great ones, the ones the size of the house, were going down into it, and coming back out, and every time one came out there were more small ones. Dozens. Hundreds. Climbing out of the heap wet and soft and pale and going hard and bone-coloured in the light while I watched.

And they turned round and went to the edge of the valley, where there was still something to eat. The last of something. Brown. It might once have been a forest. And they ate it. And came back. And went into the heap. And more came out.

That was all.

That was all they did.

”Biomass,” said Sera. Very quietly. Doctor Bell’s word. She’d learned it at the forge. ”They eat it. And make more of themselves out of it.” She was very white. ”And the rest goes—”

She stopped.

There was light coming up off the heap. Very faint. A warmth, a hum, like a forge with the bellows going. Going up. Out of the valley. Into the grey sky. Away.

”Somewhere else,” said Ingrid. ”The rest goes somewhere else.”

”To the hive,” said Kyria.

I listened.

I had to. Corin’s sister had said not to try to talk to it. She’d said it didn’t have anything to talk with. But I’m the boy who asks. I’ve asked the Teeming. I’ve asked a tower full of queens in pieces. I’ve asked the houses.

So I listened.

And there was something there. Under the eating. A sound. Not a voice. Not a song. Nothing like the queens. Like a very large engine turning over. One sound. From every one of them. The same sound. All the time.

More.

That was all it was. Not a word. A wanting. Without a person inside it to do the wanting.

I tried anyway. I said hello into it. The way I said hello to the voice.

Nothing came back. Not anger. Not interest. Nothing. It was like saying hello to hunger.

”Lucas,” said Hana. Very quietly. ”Look at them. At their backs.”

I looked.

They were spotted. Some of them. Not all. On the bone-coloured armour, between the folded wings. Black.

I knew that black.

Every one of us knew that black. It’s what the correctors leave in your arm. It’s what the barges rain on the forests. It’s the black Maura has spent years warming out of people, kneeling on the long ward with her hands flat.

It was on them.

And it wasn’t doing anything.

They didn’t go grey round it. They didn’t slow. They didn’t stiffen and go cold. They just carried it. Spots of it, on their backs, the way a cow carries mud.

”The Sorn tried,” said Mother. ”Didn’t they. With the black. Here.”

”Yes,” I said.

”And it didn’t work.”

”No.”

Mother looked at the black spots on the backs of ten thousand of them.

”The houses have one thing,” she said. Very quietly. ”One thing they do to everyone. To the Sheln. To the Hathri. To us.” She looked at the dead correctors behind us, on the rise. ”And it doesn’t work on these.”

That’s when one of them looked up.

I don’t know how it knew. I don’t think it saw us. I think it felt us. The way I feel atoms. Warm things, on a rise, on a world where nothing had been warm for a very long time.

One looked up. The size of a horse. At the edge of the valley. Its four-way mouth opening.

And then all of them did.

All at once. Tens of thousands. Every head turning. The same way. Up the slope. At us.

The sound changed.

Not more.

There.

”Back,” said Andraste.

Very calmly. The way she says everything on a ridge.

”Luna. The path.”

We ran.

I’ve thought about this part a great deal since. I’ve written it out four times. Andraste says that on Hyrran the First Blade’s husband writes down how his house came home from war, every one of them, so the children will know. So I’ll write all of them.

Luna.

Luna’s line of frost was still there. Faint, on the grey, the whole two miles back to the arch. She put her foot on it and it wasn’t a line any more.

It was a road.

Ice. Wide as a hallway. Smooth as glass. Rising up off the rock a foot, two feet, and leaning, very slightly, downhill, toward the arch, so that when we stepped onto it we were already going faster than we could have run. She’d made us a slide two miles long in the time it took to breathe.

And behind us, as we went, she let it go. Every yard of it, the moment the last of us was off it, she turned it. Up. Into a wall. Ice. Twenty feet. Thirty. With the iron frame Odra made under her ice holding her steady, so she could grow it back from something instead of from nothing.

The first of them hit the wall at a run.

It didn’t go round. It didn’t go over. It went through. Its claws went into the ice and its mouth went into the ice and it ate a hole in Luna’s wall the way it would have eaten a tree.

Luna made another wall.

And another.

And another. All the way back. Every hundred yards, a wall. Behind us. And every one of them, they ate.

But eating takes time.

Risa.

They flew.

Of course they flew. They had wings. The small ones, the horse-sized ones, opened them, long and thin and veined like glass, and came up off the valley floor in a cloud so thick it put out the white sun.

And came over Luna’s walls.

Risa went up to meet them.

As lightning. Straight up. Off the ice road, in her black stone armour, light as nothing, with the iron cloud on her shoulder. And at the top of it she stopped being lightning and became weather.

I’ve seen Risa make storms. Over Avalon. Over the Hathri steppe, where she threw and Ingrid hushed and the whole sky lit. I’d never seen this. She pulled every bit of damp out of that dead grey sky, every bit there was, which wasn’t much, and made it hers, and made it a cloud, black and low and turning, between us and them.

And lit it.

Every bolt in it. At once. Into the swarm.

They fell. Hundreds of them. Burned. Smoking. Out of the sky onto the grey rock.

More came.

Risa lit it again.

”Go!” she shouted down. From the top of her own storm. ”I’ve got the sky! Go!”

Sera.

The first ones on the ground came round the end of Luna’s wall. Not through it. Round. Six of them. Seven. Faster than horses. Bone-coloured. Low. With their four-way mouths open.

And the first one spat.

I saw it come. A long, yellow-green rope of something, out of the mouth, across twenty yards of air, at Hana.

Sera stepped in front of it.

And went up.

All of her. Living flame. White-gold. In a heartbeat. The way she went up at the forge with the smiths covering their eyes. And the acid hit her and didn’t reach her. It went to steam a foot from her skin, a hiss like a forge being quenched, and a smell so bad that Maura gagged.

The second one spat flame.

Not acid. Flame. Orange and black, from somewhere deep in it, out of the mouth, a long roaring tongue of it, the way the forges roar.

At Sera.

Sera laughed.

I’ve never heard her laugh like that. She opened her arms and the flame came into her, all of it, and she took it, and it was nothing, because Sera is as hot as a dying star and that thing’s fire was a candle, and then she gave it back.

Hotter.

The thing went white and then it went to ash. All of it. Bone and claws and mouth. On the grey rock. In a breath.

Sera turned round to the other five. Still burning. With her red ribbon gone to nothing round her wrist and Odra’s ring still on her finger, the only thing on her that wasn’t fire.

”Next,” she said.

Ingrid.

Ingrid went through them.

There’s no other way to say it. She went as lightning, the way she did in the forge, a long blue line, and the line went into the first of the five and out of it and into the second and out of it and into the third, and when the line came back to the ice road and was Ingrid again, three of them were lying on the rock with smoke coming out of every joint.

One spat at her. While she was still landing.

It hit her on the shoulder.

I heard Konrad’s name in my head. I don’t know why. I just did.

And the acid ran off.

Off the black stone. Off Odra’s armour, from the bottom of the mountain, that doesn’t burn and doesn’t melt and doesn’t do anything at all except go very faintly blue at the seams. It ran down Ingrid’s arm and off her wrist and onto the ice and ate a hole in the ice a foot deep.

And didn’t touch her.

Ingrid looked at her shoulder.

”Well,” she said. ”Odra.” And went as lightning again.

Teshka and Kyria.

They came at the road from the left. Not in a cloud. Not round the wall. Under it. Out of the rock. Up through cracks. The small ones. The ones that had only just come out of the heap. Soft still, not quite bone-coloured, the size of dogs.

Hundreds.

Teshka and Kyria went to meet them.

Two grandmothers. One in old iron, mended in three places. One in grey that was hers. Both with blades.

I’d seen Kyria fight before. On the salt. On the ridge. Watching her is like watching water go downhill; it doesn’t look like it’s trying.

I’d never seen Teshka fight properly. Not once. On the Barrow they stood in rows. On Ammaru she took the light for Saska and lay on the stone for eleven minutes while the Mom Squad brought her back.

She didn’t stand in a row now.

She was everywhere. Half a step ahead of all of them, the way Saska is half a step ahead of Brock. Before they jumped, she was where they were going to land. Before they bit, she was behind them. Her blade didn’t flash, the way blades do in stories. It just went where it needed to be, and stayed there for exactly as long as it needed to, and went somewhere else.

And Kyria beside her. Back to back. Without saying a word. As if they’d done it all their lives.

They hadn’t. They’d met on Ammaru. In the rain.

But they were the Mom Squad.

”Left,” said Teshka. In Vaeli.

”I know,” said Kyria. In Hyrrani.

Neither of them understood a word the other said. Neither of them needed to.

Hana.

They spat. All of them, by then. The ones on the road and the ones in the air, and the ones coming over Luna’s walls. Acid and flame, from every side.

And the acid smoked. Wherever it hit, on the rock, on the ice, on the corpses of their own, it smoked. Grey and yellow. Thick. Heavy. Sitting low on the road. Choking.

Maura went down on one knee, coughing.

Mother put her hand over her mouth.

And Hana breathed.

For everyone. All at once. The way she breathed for three thousand Sheln on Ammaru so they could keep singing. She stood in the middle of the ice road in her cardigan with Odra’s water-metal under it and her hand on her chest where Abena usually sleeps, and she took the air, all of it, and pulled the poison out of it. Pushed it away. Down. Into the rock. And gave us what was left. Clean. Cold. Enough.

And then she did something I didn’t know she could do.

She took it away from them.

The ones nearest the road. A ring of them. Ten yards out. She took the air out of the space round their heads. All of it. And held it.

They didn’t fall down. They didn’t need much. But they slowed. Every one. As if they were running through deep water.

”Go,” said Hana. Very quietly. Not looking at us. ”I’ve got the air. Go.”

Maura.

Maura got up off her knee.

There was a Hyrrani blade in her hand. I don’t know where from. She’d never held one in her life.

One came at her. A small one. Fast.

Maura hit it on the head with the flat of the blade. Very hard. The way you hit a pan on the stove that’s stuck. It stopped, and shook itself.

And then she put her other hand on it.

Flat. The way she puts it on an arm that’s gone black.

And warmed it.

Not the black. The thing itself. All of it. All at once. The way she warms the black out of a limb and back into flesh. Except she didn’t stop at warm.

It cooked.

Maura looked at her hand for a long time.

Then she wiped it on her apron.

”I’ll be telling Rory about that,” she said. ”He won’t believe me.”

Then she put her hand in one of her eleven pockets and gave Hana a piece of warm bread without being asked, and Hana ate it without stopping breathing for anyone.

Mother.

We were half a mile from the arch when the great one came.

The size of the long barn. Not one of the ones from the heap; one of the ones from the sky. It came down out of the grey over Risa’s storm with its wings out, glass-thin, veined, so wide they put the whole road in shadow. Burned, in places. Smoking, where Risa had lit it. It didn’t care.

It landed on the road in front of us.

Between us and the arch.

And opened its mouth four ways.

Mother was at the front. She was always at the front. Even here.

It went for her.

I saw it happen. I was thirty yards back. It went for her with both claws at once, the long curved ones, longer than Andraste’s blade, and I was too far, and I knew I was too far, and I thought about Father, for some reason. About his chair. About the dark blue ribbon.

The first claw hit her in the chest.

And stopped.

On the iron. Under the coat. Odra’s iron, worked so fine it moves like cloth, under Mother’s dark coat, where nobody could see it, with the pattern at the collar like water running.

The claw went through her coat. And stopped on the iron.

Mother looked down at it.

And then she looked up at the thing.

”I’ve had that coat,” said Mother, ”since before my son was born.”

And lifted it.

The whole thing. The size of the long barn. Off the road. Into the air. Its six legs kicking. Its wings beating, uselessly, because Mother wasn’t holding it by its wings. She was holding it by every atom of it, all at once, the way she held a tower off a ring round a star.

It spat at her. She turned the acid round in the air and gave it back.

It spat flame. She put the flame out by taking the air from round it.

And then she brought it down.

Very fast.

On the rest of them. On the road behind us. On the forty that were coming round the end of Luna’s last wall.

All of them.

Mother stood in the middle of the road with her coat torn open over Odra’s iron and Father’s ring on her finger.

”Lucas,” she said. Not loud. ”The arch.”

Andraste.

Andraste got there first.

Of course she did. She ran the whole two miles at the front, carrying, with the wall over her middle and the white ribbon on her blade, and she didn’t stop for anything, because I told her on the porch that I’d go alone, and she told me that I wasn’t going through any door she wasn’t standing in, and she was going to stand in it.

When I came off the end of Luna’s road, she was there.

In the arch. In the middle of it. With her feet planted on the grey and her back to the snow of Hyrran and her blade up. Holding it.

Eleven of them were between me and her.

She killed nine of them before I got there.

I’ve watched Andraste fight. On the salt, when she said fight me. On Ammaru. I’d never watched her fight for us. She wasn’t fast, the way Teshka was fast. She wasn’t water, the way Kyria was water.

She was a wall.

Nothing went past her. Nothing. One spat at her and she put her blade in the way of it and the Hyrrani iron smoked and held. One came at her middle, at the wall Odra made over the one who listens, with both claws, and she took the claw on her forearm, on the old dark iron, and turned, and took its head off.

The wall over her middle had a long white scratch across it.

The little figure on top of the wall, looking out, didn’t have a mark on her.

”Through,” said Andraste. Not looking at any of us. ”All of you. Now.”

They went.

Maura first. Andraste made her. Then Hana, breathing for all of them to the last step. Teshka and Kyria, back to back, still fighting, all the way into the arch and out of the other side into the snow. Ingrid as lightning, a long blue line, straight through, and I heard Konrad shout something from the cairn that I didn’t catch.

Luna, with ice on her face. Sera, still burning, so Odra had to throw snow on her.

Mother.

Mother stopped. In the arch. Beside Andraste.

”Lucas,” she said.

”I’m coming.”

”Lucas.”

”Mother. I have to do one thing.”

Risa came down out of her storm.

As lightning. Into the arch. And stopped. Beside Mother. Grey in the face. She’d spent every bolt she had.

She looked back up the road.

So did I.

They were coming.

Not the ones on the road. Not the ones in the sky. All of them. The whole valley. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. A tide of bone-coloured bodies coming over the rise two miles away and down the slope toward us, over Luna’s walls and through them and round them, filling the plain from one side of the sky to the other. Flying over it. A cloud so thick it was night.

There.

They’d felt the arch.

Through it. The warm on the other side. The snow, and the ridge, and the forests in the green valleys of Hyrran, and the queen under the mountain, and the walk home to the house on the rise.

More.

If we closed the arch, they’d still know it had been here.

And I’d seen the light going up off the heap. The warmth. The hum. Going away. Into the sky. Somewhere else.

To the hive. Whatever that was. Wherever it was. Telling it.

I remembered Okafor. In her room on the Meridian, with the grey on the map.

You don’t make a sun. You don’t turn anything to salt unless it has its hands round one of your mothers.

It had had its claw in my mother’s chest.

I knelt down on the grey rock.

Twenty yards from the arch. With the tide coming. With Kyria’s first blade across my knees and Odra’s silver on me with the field and the scarecrow on it. And put my hand flat on the rock.

And went down.

Not small. I didn’t go small. I’d promised Andraste on the porch and I’d promised her on the ridge and I wasn’t going to break it. I didn’t spread out. I didn’t go thin.

I went down.

Through the rock. Through the scraped grey top of the world, where nothing was. Through miles of it. Through stone and stone and stone. Hotter. Heavier. Down to where the world was soft, and red, and turning slowly round itself in the dark the way all worlds do. Down to the heart.

It was iron. Mostly. Like every world’s heart. Heavy iron, and heavier things in it. Old. Very old. Pressed together so hard they’d forgotten they were ever apart.

I found the heaviest of them.

The way Doctor Bell taught me. On the moon, with less than a match. On the porch, a sun the size of a seed, twelve times. The heavy heart, broken. The small ones, joined.

I didn’t break one.

I asked all of them.

I heard Andraste behind me.

Not with my ears. I was too far down for ears. I heard her in every atom of Odra’s silver.

I’m holding the door.

I let go.

And scattered.

I came back together on the other side of the arch.

In the snow. On my knees. On Hyrran. With Andraste’s hand on my collar, where she’d caught me the moment I came out of the air. And the first blade still across my knees, and Mother in front of me, and Kyria shouting at Odra in Hyrrani.

Through the arch, I saw the grey plain.

It was going white.

From underneath. From the inside. Every crack in the rock lit up at once, as if the whole world had been a lantern with the shutters closed and somebody had opened them all. And the tide of bone-coloured bodies, a hundred yards away and coming, went from bone to white to nothing. The sky went white. The sun went out in it.

And it was coming through.

The light. The heat. Up the road. Up the arch. I felt it on my face, through the arch, like opening a forge door, and the snow on the ridge in front of the arch went to water in a breath, and then to steam—

Now, said Odra.

They brought it down.

Forty smiths. Forty hammers. Swung at once. At the keystone. And Odra put her hand on the ridge and the holes she’d packed in the night went off with a sound I felt in my teeth.

The keystone came out.

The arch came in.

Black stone and grey stone and three hundred years of Vessa’s wall, and the ridge above it, all of it, in one long falling roar that went on for a long time.

The white went out.

It was very quiet on the ridge, after.

The snow came down. Ordinary snow. Hyrran’s. Onto the steam and the broken stone and the forty smiths with their hammers on their shoulders, breathing hard.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Mother sat down in the snow.

Just sat. With her coat torn open over the iron. And put her hand on the iron, over her heart, where the claw had stopped. And put the other hand over her face.

Maura sat down next to her.

Then Ingrid, as Konrad got to her from the cairn and didn’t say anything and put his hat on her head. Then Kyria. Then Teshka, very slowly, on her own two feet, onto the snow.

The Mom Squad. All five. Sitting in the snow on the ridge in a row, the way they sit on the porch.

Not one of them was hurt. Not really. Torn, and burned, and grey with acid smoke. Maura had a long red mark across one hand where she’d cooked something with it. Teshka had lost a piece of her new grey armour at the shoulder and was looking at the place where it had been with great interest.

But all five. In a row.

My wives didn’t sit.

Luna came and put her hands on my face. They were very cold. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me, and then looked at the fallen arch, and I felt the ice go out of her, all at once, and she started to shake.

Sera had stopped burning. Odra had thrown snow on her until she did. She was wearing Andraste’s cloak and Odra’s ring and nothing else, and she sat down next to me in the snow and leaned her whole weight on me and closed her eyes.

Risa came down out of the air like a leaf. Grey. Empty. She’d spent all of it. She lay on her back in the snow beside the arch and looked up at Hyrran’s sky and said, very quietly, ”I’ve got the sky,” and laughed, and then cried, and then laughed again.

Hana didn’t stop breathing for us until she was sure.

Then she did. And sat. And put her hand on her chest. And said, ”I want my daughter.” And Kyria said something in Hyrrani to Odra, and one of the smiths went running.

Andraste was still standing.

In front of the fallen arch. With her blade up. Looking at it. As if it might open again.

I got up.

I went and stood beside her.

She didn’t look at me. She put her free hand on her middle. On Odra’s wall, with the long white scratch across it. On the little figure on top of it, looking out.

”She’s quiet,” said Andraste.

”Asleep?”

”No.” Andraste was still looking at the stone. ”Listening.” She was very still. ”She’s listening outward. Past the ring. The way she always does.” She stopped. ”And she says the breathing is quieter.”

”Gone?”

”No,” said Andraste. ”Quieter.” She turned her head and looked at me, finally. Crooked. With the scar. ”Because something heard.”

I didn’t understand that until later.

The light going up off the heap. Before. Going away into the sky.

And the world going white. The whole world. A light so bright the sun went out in it.

Somewhere out past the ring, past the far towers going out one at a time, something very large had been listening to that world for a long time. And it had heard it go.

Kyria took her first blade back that night.

Then gave it back to me.

Then took it back.

Andraste says that means something, on Hyrran, when a First Blade’s mother does it three times in one night. She won’t tell me what. She says I’ll know when I’ve earned it.

Okafor got her name.

I gave it to her on the Meridian the next morning. In her room with the map. I told her all of it. The grey. The correctors with teeth marks in them. The Sorn iron eaten through. The valley, and the heap, and the light going up. The black on their backs, doing nothing.

I told her more.

She listened to all of it without saying anything. Then she went to the map on the wall and looked at the grey shading on the far side of the houses’ ring for a very long time.

”What do we call it?” she said.

I’d thought about it all night.

”Vessa called it hungry,” I said. ”That’s the only word anyone ever brought back.” I looked at the grey. ”I’d like to keep her word.”

Okafor picked up her pen.

And at the top of the grey, in small square letters, where the map had always just said far side, she wrote: THE HUNGRY.

And under it, smaller: The houses are losing.

Days 4283–4285. Biomass.

Mother took Vessa’s wall down a stone at a time. Odra packed the keystone: when the last of us is through, or anything that isn’t us, bring it down. Through the arch, nothing: a world scraped to the rock, every atom of carbon gone. Two miles on Luna’s frost. Correctors hollowed out with teeth marks. Sorn iron eaten through by acid. A barge with its black spilled into nothing. Then the valley: tens of thousands of them, bone-coloured, winged, mouths four ways, claws longer than Andraste’s blade; eating the last forest and going into the heap and coming out more, and the warm going up and away. Under it all, one sound: more. I said hello into it. Nothing. Black spots on their backs, doing nothing to them. One looked up; all looked up: there. Luna’s road and her walls; Risa took the sky; Sera ate their fire; Ingrid’s armour shed acid; Teshka and Kyria back to back; Hana took their air; Maura cooked one with her hand; the great one’s claw stopped on the iron under Mother’s coat and she lifted it and dropped it on forty more. Andraste held the arch. It had its claw in my mother’s chest, so I went down to the heart of the world and asked all of it, and scattered, and came back through into the snow. The smiths brought it down in time. All five in a row in the snow. The one at the wall says the breathing is quieter, because something heard. Okafor wrote on the map: THE HUNGRY. The houses are losing.