Scarecrow

One name.

Konrad didn’t read it at the dawn count. He didn’t need to. Everyone on the red glass knew it. Children who couldn’t read knew it. The Lir in the seventh lake knew it; Dot says they’d been saying it to each other underwater for three days, the way they say the names of storms.

Halcro.

He stood on his stool with the sheet in his hands and looked at the front of it for a long time. Every world, in the order he’d written them, a lifetime ago, at the long table, with Crane checking and the Overseer in the doorway. Nearly all of them with Home beside them now, or Home and a number, or Home and a number and a name nobody else had written.

One of them, forty-eighth, with nothing beside it but a line. Thale. Where we’d never been.

And one, at the bottom, with nothing at all.

He folded it. And put it in his coat. Over his heart.

”Tomorrow,” said Konrad.

I should say what Halcro is. Because nobody knew, until Crane told us. And when Crane told us, the long table didn’t say anything for a long time.

”It’s a yard,” said Crane.

At the end of the table. With the spanner in front of him. With the pale line round his neck, where the collar was.

”Not the far yard,” he said. ”Nobody’s ever seen that. But the last stop before it. The last yard on the road outward.” He turned the spanner over. ”Every tithe ship that ever went outward from a sorting world stopped at Halcro first. To take on water. To change crews. To load.”

”Load what?” said Okafor.

Crane didn’t answer at once.

”Children,” he said. ”From the sortings. From the worlds Konrad’s had on that sheet. The ones the houses took before we started taking them back.” He looked at the table. ”They don’t ship them straight out. They hold them. At Halcro. In pens, at the yard. Until there’s enough for a ship.”

Nobody said anything.

”How many,” said Wren. Through the silver. From the long ward. Very quietly.

She already knew. She’d been listening to Halcro for a week. She just wanted somebody else to say it first.

”Halcro has one million, three hundred and forty thousand of its own,” said Crane. ”Yard people. Shipwrights. Their families. Most of them have never been anywhere else; the houses don’t let yard people leave.” He put the spanner down. ”And in the pens, last I heard, which was more than fifteen years ago, there were forty thousand.”

”Sixty-two thousand,” said Wren. ”Now. I’ve counted.”

A pause.

”They’re from everywhere,” said Wren. ”Some of them are from worlds that aren’t on the sheet any more. Because we got there. Because we took everybody home.” Her voice didn’t break. Wren’s voice doesn’t, now. ”Except them. Because they’d already gone. To Halcro.”

Konrad, at the end of the table, took the sheet out of his coat. And unfolded it. And turned it over. To the back. To the names.

And looked at them for a long time.

”There’s more,” said Wren.

”Go on,” said Okafor.

”There are ships,” said Wren. ”In the yard. Big ones. I can hear the crews. I can hear the children in the pens. And I can hear the crews talking about the children.” She was quiet. ”Three of the ships are loading. They were going to go outward in nine days. They’ve changed it. They’re saying tomorrow.”

The Overseer, in the doorway, with the dog against its legs, said:

The middle has heard Halcro every day this week. And every time beside it: early.

”They know we’re coming,” said Okafor.

They have always known you would come to Halcro last, said the Overseer. It is the last name. They can read a list. A pause. And they know you will come for the pens. Because you always come for the children first.

”So they’ll load the children first,” said Crane. Very quietly. ”And send them outward the minute the arch opens. Before we can get to the yard.” He looked at the spanner. ”Because anything outward is still ours. In their ledger. And anything we take home is lost.”

Okafor stood up.

”Then we don’t go tomorrow,” she said.

Everyone looked at her.

”We go now,” said Okafor. ”Tonight. Everyone. Everything we’ve got.” She picked up the chalk. ”And we go for the ships first.”

I’ll write it the way it happened. Because it was the last name on the front of Konrad’s sheet. And because some of it went right, and some of it didn’t, and both of those are true at once, the way Maura says.

Wren counted it first.

From the long ward. With Rafe on her chest and Rhiannon’s hand on her arm, making her reach. Before I’d gone up the thread.

”The yard’s on a moon,” she said. ”Halcro’s the planet. Grey. Nobody lives on it. The yard’s on the big moon, in orbit, and the moon’s hollow, and the yard’s in the hollow.” A pause. ”The pens are at the bottom. Under the slips. Where the ships are built.”

”And the people?” said Okafor.

”In the walls,” said Wren. ”All the way round the hollow. Floors and floors of them. A city on the inside of a moon.” She was quiet. ”They can see the pens from their windows. They’ve always been able to see the pens.”

I went up the thread.

Scattered. The long way. To a grey world with a grey moon, very large, hanging over it. And into the moon. Through the shell of it, a mile of rock and black metal. And came back together inside.

I’d never seen anything like it.

The hollow was the size of a sea. Lit from the middle by something like a sun, very small and very white, hanging in the empty air at the centre. And all the way round, on the inside of the shell, curving up and over in every direction until it met itself overhead, the yard. Slips. Cranes. Dry docks the size of valleys. Ships on the slips, half-built, the long black shape of Hands with their ribs showing.

And in the walls round the yard, the city. A million and a third people. Windows. Lamps. Washing on lines strung between balconies a mile above the slips.

And at the bottom of the hollow, under the slips, where the light from the little sun didn’t reach, the pens.

I’ll say what they were and then I won’t say it again.

Grey. Long. Low. Under wire. Rows of them. With the note coming out of every one, from the pieces of queen in the posts at the corners, so the children inside would stay grey and quiet and walk where they were told. Sixty-two thousand. Lying on the floor in rows. Some of them had been there for two years.

At the far end of the pens, the three ships Wren had heard. Hands. Long. Black. On the outward slips. With their ramps down.

And the children walking up them.

They’d started.

Not tomorrow. Not in nine days. Now. Because someone at Halcro had heard what the middle heard, and done the sum, and decided not to wait. Lines of children walking up three ramps into three ships, holding hands in twos the way the white rooms taught them, with the note coming down on them from the posts.

I put my hand on the floor of the yard and found Avalon. The long way.

”Here,” I said. ”Now. Please. Now.”

Kyria’s cutters cut the arch.

At the bottom of the hollow. At the edge of the pens. In the dark. And every queen on Avalon sang it open, so fast that Dot said afterward the Scarecrow queen didn’t sing it so much as shout.

And it opened.

And everybody came through.

I mean everybody.

Roan, first, with his hands on the frame. Hesk behind him with her tea. Bree with her fire round her wrist.

The Mom Squad, all ten. Mother at the front with her hand up. Ingrid with Konrad beside her, holding her arm.

Forty thousand Hyrrani in iron, with Kyria and Teshka. Andraste at the front of them with her blade, because Vessa was on the interceptor field with Risa and Kesh and small Sigmund, and Andraste said if she was going to sit at an arch all day with her daughter she was going to go through at least one of them first.

Hearth. All of it. Hearth’s three. Dinraal and Isolde. The First Weapon, very low, beside Dinraal, already growing. Aurelius with his shield. Rhiannon with her wings. Tiamat and Aramaeis, side by side. Asha and Eve and Cleopatra. Arcturus, who’d come through with his wings folded, and stood in the arch for a moment looking up at the inside of a moon, and said something in his own language that Dot wouldn’t translate.

Odra’s smiths. Halloway’s people. Sigmund. Luna. Tally with her bag.

And Okafor. In the arch. With the chalk in her pocket.

”The ships,” she said. ”Everything at the ships.”

The first ship had its ramp up.

I felt it go.

Before anyone had got across the floor of the hollow. Before Ingrid had got her hand out. Before the wing was even through the arch. The first of the three Hands lifted off the outward slip at the far end of the pens, very slowly, with its ramp still closing, with its engines lighting one after another down the long black length of it.

And went up.

Toward the shell. Toward the great doors in the shell of the moon, a mile overhead, that open onto the dark outside. That were already opening.

Ingrid went.

As lightning. Out of Konrad’s hand. A long blue line from the arch across the whole hollow, up, toward the doors. Faster than anything. Faster than she went at Cassel, Konrad says.

The doors were open.

The Hand was in them.

And she hit it.

Not the ship. Ingrid doesn’t hit ships. She hushed it. The way she hushed six at Cassel. Every spark in it, every engine, every light, every gun, still.

And it stopped.

In the doors. Half in the hollow and half out of it. Hanging in the great open doors of the shell of the moon with its engines dark and two thousand children inside it.

And then it started to fall.

Tiamat caught it.

I don’t know how. I don’t think she knows how. She went up off the floor of the hollow as a dragon, all at once, faster than I’d ever seen her go, and got under the long black belly of the Hand as it came back down through the doors, and took the weight of it on her back.

A ship. On a dragon. A Hand is the length of the north field.

She came down very slowly. All the way. A mile. With her wings out as wide as they’d go and the silver on them going dark at the edges with the strain, and Aramaeis under her other side, and Rhiannon flying beside them with her hand up, making them both stronger. And put it down on the floor of the hollow by the arch as gently as if it were full of eggs.

It was.

The second ship didn’t go.

Because Dinraal was standing on its ramp.

He’d walked there. Across the floor of the hollow, from the arch, while everyone was looking up at Ingrid. Through the pens. Past the wire. To the second outward slip, where the second Hand was closing its ramp, with the last line of children still on it.

And put his foot on the ramp.

And his hand on the hull.

And his silver went in.

I felt it. The way I felt it go into the plain on the first day, when he showed us. Roots. Very fine. Into the ship. Through it. Every rib and plate and pipe and wire of a Hand, in the time it takes to breathe in. Listening.

Then not listening.

Holding.

The ramp stopped closing. The engines stopped lighting. Every door in the ship opened at once. And the ship sat on the slip, very still, with Dinraal’s silver all through it like frost through a window, and didn’t move.

The First Weapon came up the ramp past him.

He wasn’t a corgi any more. He was the size of a house. With wings. With his small crown. With a cannon on his back. He went into the ship through the open ramp at a walk and came back out a minute later with nine house men in front of him, walking very carefully, with their hands up.

Dinraal didn’t look at them.

He looked at the children on the ramp.

And sat down. On the ramp. Very low. And put his hands out. The way Vessa puts hers out to Andraste.

And the first of them, a boy of about six, very grey, with the note still in him, walked down the ramp and sat on Dinraal’s knee.

And the third ship went.

It was the farthest. At the very end of the pens. On the last slip. Its ramp was already up when the arch opened. Its engines were already lit. It was already lifting when Ingrid went for the first one.

And while Tiamat was bringing the first one down, and Dinraal was holding the second, it went up through the hollow very fast, past the little white sun, past the cranes and the washing lines strung between balconies a mile above the slips, toward the doors.

Risa saw it.

She was flying the wing. From the interceptor field. With her eyes shut. With Kesh’s basket at her feet. The wing was through the arch now, all forty of them, coming up off the floor of the hollow in a long line. And Arcturus in the arch beside the Hyrrani, with his visor down, with Hearth’s ships coming through the arch behind him one after another.

Callum, said Risa. Rowan. With me.

They went after it.

I didn’t see what happened next. I was on the floor of the hollow, with my hand on the wire of the first pen, asking it to let go. But I felt it. Through the silver. Through Risa. Through every pilot in the wing.

They caught it at the doors.

Callum went across its nose. Rowan under it. Risa flew forty interceptors in a ring round it, so close Arcturus said afterward he’d never seen anything flown so close to anything without touching. Not firing. You don’t fire on a ship full of children.

Just there. All round it. As if a ring of forty could make it stop by being in the way.

And it didn’t stop.

It went through the doors.

Out of the moon. Into the dark. With forty interceptors round it.

And then, outside the doors, in the dark over the grey planet, it went somewhere else.

I felt it go.

Not like a ship going up the thread. Not like scattering. Like a door, opening, very far off, onto somewhere I’d never been, and shutting again behind it.

And the ship wasn’t there.

And the forty interceptors were flying in a ring round nothing.

”Gone,” said Arcturus. Into the silver. Very quietly. In his own language and then, through Dot, in ours. ”Gone outward. I can’t see it. I can see every ship in the sky and I can’t see it.”

Risa didn’t say anything.

Then she said, very level, the voice that means storms:

”Let me go after it.”

”No,” said Okafor.

”I can follow it,” said Risa. ”Lucas can find the thread. I can take the wing through. We can—”

”Through where?” said Okafor. Very calm. ”We don’t know where it went. We don’t know what’s there. We know it’s the far yard, and we know nobody who’s gone to the far yard has ever come back, and we know the last time Lucas went to the edge of it there was a world eaten to the rock.” A pause. ”If you go, you take forty. And there’s sixty thousand more on the floor of this hollow that need you here.”

Risa didn’t say anything.

”I’m not saying never,” said Okafor. ”I’m saying not like this. Not thin. Not tonight.”

The wing came back down through the doors.

Slowly. One after another. Into the hollow.

Risa brought every one of them back. She didn’t lose a single interceptor at Halcro. She told me afterward that she’d never in her life wanted so badly to lose one.

”How many,” I said. To Wren.

Wren didn’t answer for a long time.

”One thousand, nine hundred and sixty,” said Wren. ”I counted them up the ramp. I was counting them the whole time. I was still counting when it went.”

A pause.

”I can’t hear them now,” said Wren. ”I could hear every one of them. All the way up. And then the door opened, and I couldn’t.” Her voice didn’t break. ”I’ve got their names. Some of them. The ones who were saying them to each other on the ramp. So they wouldn’t forget.”

I’m not going to say any more about that ship now.

I’ll say it later. When there’s something to say.

There were sixty thousand children in the pens.

Ingrid hushed the note.

She came back down out of the doors after the first ship, very slowly, not as lightning, and Konrad was waiting for her at the edge of the pens with his arms out, and caught her. And she stood on the floor of the hollow with Konrad holding her up and put her hand out over the pens, flat, palm down.

And the pieces of queen in the posts at the corners of every pen, all of them, hundreds, stopped.

Not hers. Not the eldest’s. Pieces of the Scarecrow queen, mostly. Tally said afterward. And other queens. Every one of them stopping at once, the way you stop when somebody puts a hand on your shoulder and says that’s enough now.

And in the pens, sixty thousand children who’d been grey for two years opened their eyes.

And Roan took the wire.

All of it. Every post and every strand round every pen. He walked down the long rows with his hand out, not touching, and the wire lifted. Up. Off the posts. And stayed up. A long silver net over the pens, a man’s height off the floor, held up by nothing, all the way to the far end.

So that the children could walk out under it.

And they did.

I don’t know how to say what it was like. Sixty thousand children, standing up off the floor of the pens in the dark at the bottom of a moon, under a net of wire held up by a roofer from the town under the garden wall.

Some of them didn’t know how to stand. Some of them had been lying down for two years.

So the Mom Squad went in.

All ten. Into the pens. Under the wire. Mother first, the way she always is, with her hand up. And then Maura, with bread, with her eleven pockets full of it, crouching down in the dark in front of children who’d never seen bread like it, saying there you are, love, there you are. And Kyria and Teshka, picking up children two at a time. Cleopatra with her field over a whole row. Asha’s instruments reading every child in every pen, and Eve’s spheres going out among them, and both of them talking at once and neither of them telling the other to stop. Tiamat in her woman’s shape, kneeling in a pen full of the smallest ones, letting them touch the silver scales on her arms.

And Rhiannon. With her basket. Going down the rows. Stopping at every child who hadn’t eaten.

Which was all of them.

And then the people in the walls came down.

I didn’t expect that.

Nobody did. Okafor had planned for the city. She’d planned for a million and a third people who’d never been allowed to leave, who’d be frightened, who’d have to be persuaded. She’d brought Ysolt from Imber and Miss Pell from the schools to talk to them. She’d put Luna’s ice roads on the plan from every floor.

They didn’t need persuading.

They came down out of the walls on every stair and every lift and every rope. A million and a third. Shipwrights in their leathers. Women with babies. Old men. Children. Down the inside of the shell, all round the hollow, from every direction at once, toward the floor.

Toward the pens.

A woman got there first. I don’t know her name; Wren does. Old. In a shipwright’s apron. With burn scars up both arms from fifty years of welding Hands together on the slips.

She went straight to the nearest pen, where Maura was, and knelt down under Roan’s wire, and picked up a girl of about four who couldn’t stand.

And carried her to the arch.

And then they were all doing it.

Every one of them. A million and a third people who’d lived in the walls of a moon their whole lives with windows that looked down on the pens. Who’d seen them every morning when they opened the shutters. Who’d built the ships that took the children outward, because the houses didn’t let yard people do anything else.

They came down. And picked up the children. And carried them to the arch.

Ysolt told me afterward what the woman with the burned arms said to her. At the arch. When she put the girl down on the other side, on the red glass, into Halloway’s arms.

”I’ve looked at them every morning for fifty years,” she said. ”Every morning. From my window. I used to count them. I didn’t know what else to do.” She looked at her arms. ”I built the ramps.”

Then she went back through the arch for another one.

Then the Hands came.

The yard’s Hands. The ones on the slips that were finished. Forty of them. Woken up all at once round the inside of the hollow by whoever was left in the yard’s offices, high up in the shell, who’d seen their million and a third walk out of the walls and carry sixty thousand children to an arch.

And done the sum.

They came down off the slips.

Not at the arch. At the walls.

At the city. At the floors and floors of windows and balconies and washing lines going all the way round the inside of the moon, where the last of the old and the slow were still coming down the stairs.

And burned it.

The Sorn would rather burn it than let us have it. They’ve always said so. At Thale. At Morvane, from a chair, with a key.

At Halcro they said it with forty Hands.

Aurelius’s dome went up.

Over the arch. Over the pens. Over the whole of the floor of the hollow and the long lines of people carrying children to the arch. Rhiannon in the air beside him with her hand up. Brighter. Wider.

But not over the walls.

It couldn’t reach the walls. The walls were the whole inside of a moon, curving up and over in every direction until they met overhead. You can’t put a dome inside a sphere.

So everyone went up the walls.

The wing. Risa, with her eyes shut, with forty interceptors and every one of Hearth’s ships, Arcturus beside her, flying up through the hollow at the Hands as they came down off the slips. Hearth’s three, up the stairs, into the city. Alexander’s hundred blades in formation down the long balconies. Gilgamesh at the top of a stair with every weapon on his back, holding it. Julius on a bridge between two towers of the city with his cloak out across the whole width of it, and the last of a floor running past behind him.

Tiamat and Aramaeis, up through the hollow, side by side, with the little white sun between them, burning Hands out of the air.

The First Weapon, out of the second ship, enormous, with his cannon, standing on the floor of the hollow and firing up, again and again, very steadily, the way a dog barks at something that won’t go away.

Andraste and the Hyrrani, up every stair at once, in iron.

Bree, up the stairs in the fire. In the city. Where the Hands’ fire was coming in through the windows. Wrapping the people on the stairs in hers so the other couldn’t get in.

And me.

I put my hands on the shell of the moon.

All of it. From the inside. A mile of rock and black metal all the way round, and the city built into it, and the slips. And asked it to hold.

To hold the city up. While it burned. While the Hands’ fire came in through the windows and the floors came down. To hold every stair. Every bridge. Every balcony with people on it. To stay up, the way Roan’s stairs stayed up on Morvane, until the last of them were down.

It said yes.

It’s old. It’s very old. Older than the houses. It was a moon before anyone hollowed it, and it remembers being whole.

It held.

It took nine hours.

Nine hours on the floor of the hollow at the bottom of a moon, with my hands on the shell. With the Hands burning the city round us and the wing and Hearth and the Hyrrani burning the Hands. With the people coming down out of the walls carrying children and going back up for more. With Roan’s wire over the pens and Ingrid’s hand over the note and Aurelius’s dome over the floor and Rhiannon flying beside him.

With Mother at the arch. With her hand up. Saying hold on to everyone who went through. All night.

The Ashen didn’t come.

Vessa didn’t turn. Not once. Not all night. Andraste came down off the walls at the end, when it was nearly over, with her blade dark and her iron black, and went back through the arch to the interceptor field to sit with her daughter, and Vessa was asleep.

The Hungry didn’t come either.

Halcro is the last stop before the far yard. The nearest anything. And all night, neither of the other two sides came anywhere near it.

I didn’t understand that until afterward. When the Overseer told us.

Halcro is a yard, it said. In the doorway. With the dog against its legs. The houses’ yard. Where they build the Hands they send to the front. A pause. The Ashen do not come to the houses’ yards. That is in the terms.

”And the Hungry?” said Okafor.

The Hungry come where the songs are, said the Overseer. There are no songs at Halcro. There never were. The houses kept the pieces in the posts singing the note, very quietly, only into the pens. Its pale eyes went to Okafor’s map. To the grey edge of it. Halcro was built to be the one place on the road that nothing hungry could hear.

”So the houses could build there,” said Crane. Very quietly. ”And load there. Right on the edge. With nothing coming.”

Yes, said the Overseer.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

”Then it wasn’t us,” said Okafor. ”The Hands. Tonight. It wasn’t the war.” She put her chalk down. ”It was just them.”

Yes, said the Overseer. Just them. Burning their own yard. So that you would not have it.

The last of them came through the arch at dawn.

The woman with the burned arms came through last.

Carrying nobody. There was nobody left to carry. She walked through the arch onto the red glass with her apron black and her arms empty, and stopped, and looked round.

At Avalon. At the dawn. At the interceptor field, and the north field, and the long ward, and the house on the rise. At sixty thousand children on the red glass, being fed by everyone. At a million and a third people from the walls of a moon, standing on the grass under a sky.

She’d never seen a sky. Ysolt said. None of them had. They’d lived on the inside of a moon their whole lives.

She looked up at it for a long time.

Then she sat down. On the red glass. And put her arms over her face. And cried.

Maura sat down beside her. With bread.

Wren counted.

She’d been counting all night. All of them. Every one. From the long ward, with Rafe on her chest and Rhiannon’s hand on her arm, until Rhiannon had to go up the walls, and then Hana’s.

She said it at the dawn count. Out loud. On the red glass. With Konrad on his stool beside her. In the voice that doesn’t break.

”Sixty thousand and forty,” said Wren. ”From the pens. Of sixty-two thousand.”

A pause.

”One thousand, nine hundred and sixty. Outward.”

Nobody moved.

”And from the walls,” said Wren. ”One million, three hundred and thirty-one thousand, two hundred and eight. Of one million, three hundred and forty thousand.” She was quiet for a moment. ”Eight thousand, seven hundred and ninety-two. In the city. When the Hands came down off the slips.”

Then she said the rest.

”Two hundred and four of the Hyrrani. Eleven of Hearth’s. Three of Odra’s smiths.” A pause. ”And I can’t find Callum.”

Nobody moved.

His interceptor had come home. Hours before, full of strangers from the walls. Risa had flown it through the arch herself, from the interceptor field, with nobody at the stick, the way she flew two empty interceptors at the wedding. She’d brought every interceptor home.

He wasn’t in it.

Rowan was already in the arch.

He didn’t ask. He didn’t wait for Okafor. He went back through onto the floor of the hollow, into the smoke, past the last of the Hyrrani coming the other way, and up. Up the stairs of the burning city on the inside of a moon. Shouting his brother’s name.

I went after him. Scattered. Up the shell. Through the stone I’d been holding all night.

And felt it.

On the far side of the city. A mile up. A balcony I’d been holding without knowing I was holding it, because I’d asked every balcony in the city to stay up and that one had.

Two hearts on it. Very slow.

Rowan got there first.

Callum had put his interceptor down on the rail. Hours before. To take off forty people who couldn’t get to the stairs. He’d got thirty-nine of them into it and sent it down to the floor of the hollow on the wing’s lines, empty of him, because there wasn’t room for forty and a pilot.

And stayed on the balcony with the fortieth. An old man who couldn’t walk. To wait for the next one.

The next one was a Hand.

The balcony held. The stone held. The shell held; I’d asked it to. But the fire came across it anyway.

And Callum lay down over the old man.

The way Rowan held his head up out of the sea, once. With both arms.

He was burned down the whole of his left side. The side with the hand that hadn’t been able to hold a stick through a turn for so long. His flying leathers had gone black and stuck to him. His hair was gone on that side.

The old man under him didn’t have a mark on him.

Rowan knelt down on the balcony and put his hand on his brother’s face. On the side that wasn’t burned.

Callum opened his eyes.

”Took your time,” he said.

”I let you go first,” said Rowan. His voice went. ”Somebody had to clear the way.”

Rowan carried him down. All of it. A mile of stairs, in the smoke. With the old man on my back, behind them.

Sigmund met us at the bottom with his hands out and held Callum’s heart the whole way across the floor of the hollow, through the arch, onto the red glass. Into Halloway’s hands.

Halloway says he’ll keep the arm. Halloway says she doesn’t know yet about flying. Halloway says it’s too early to say, and that she’s said that a great many times this year and been glad of every one.

Nan Vey was at the arch.

She’d been there all night. With her one bag. Ironing nothing.

She looked at her grandson on the stretcher for a long time. At the burned side. At the hand.

Then she took the iron out of her bag, which she always carries, which nobody has ever seen her without. And put it down on the red glass. And knelt down beside the stretcher and put her hand on the side of his face that wasn’t burned.

”You’ll do,” said Nan Vey.

Risa stood at the arch for a long time after that.

With Kesh’s basket at her feet. With her eyes open.

Then she knelt down. And put her hand on the red glass. Where the wing comes home. Where Okafor wrote Commander in chalk, after Ostrel. Where Wren counts them in.

”Forty,” said Risa. Very quietly. ”That’s forty.”

Ingrid knelt down beside her.

She didn’t say anything. She put one thin hand on her daughter’s back. And left it there.

And Kesh, in the basket, woke up. And didn’t cry. And looked up at the two of them. And her cloud, very small, very white, went very still.

Konrad wrote it on the sheet.

That morning. On his stool. With everyone watching. With the woman with the burned arms sitting on the red glass beside Maura, with bread in her hands, not eating it.

Halcro.

And beside it: Home.

And the numbers. All of them. In his small neat hand.

And under them, one more line. A line he’d never written on the sheet before. That nobody had ever written. Not under Thale, not under Varrow, not under the ninth tower.

Outward. 1,960.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he turned the sheet over. To the back. To the names. And at the very bottom, where there was hardly any room left, he wrote, very small, every name Wren had heard on the ramp.

Forty-one of them.

The ones who’d been saying their names to each other. So they wouldn’t forget.

He didn’t put the sheet back in his coat.

He gave it to Okafor.

”That’s all of them,” said Konrad. ”Every name on the front. Every world.” He looked at her. ”There’s nothing left on it. I don’t need it any more.”

Okafor took it.

She didn’t say anything. She looked at the front of it for a long time. Every world. Every one with Home beside it, or Home and a number, or Home and a number and a name. Except Thale.

And one line at the bottom that wasn’t Home either.

She turned it over. And looked at the names on the back. All the way down to the forty-one at the bottom, in letters so small you could hardly read them.

Then she gave it back to him.

”Keep it,” said Okafor. ”There’s a line on it that isn’t finished.”

That night the long table didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then Okafor stood up. And went to the slate on the wall. Where Garnet’s drawing is. Where the map is, with the grey on the edge of it, and THE HUNGRY across it in her hand, and the three circles Garnet drew. And picked up the chalk.

And at the very edge of the map, past the last world, past the grey, past anything any of us had ever seen, she drew a door.

Just a door. A small square. With nothing beyond it.

And wrote beside it:

1,960.

”That’s where we’re going next,” said Okafor. ”I don’t know when. I don’t know how. I don’t know what’s on the other side.” She put the chalk down. ”But that’s the next name.”

Nobody argued.

Crane, at the end of the table, put his hand on his spanner. Very lightly. And didn’t say anything.

But the Overseer, in the doorway, with the dog against its legs, said:

Then you will need the ones who make new doors.

And looked at me.

Days 4572–4574. Outward.

The last name: a yard inside a moon, with 62,000 children in pens. Ingrid hushed the first ship and Tiamat caught it; Dinraal held the second; the third went outward. Not like this, said Okafor. The people came down out of the walls and carried the children to the arch, and the houses burned their own yard. 60,040; 1,331,208; 8,792. Callum lay down over the fortieth; you’ll do, said Nan Vey. Outward: 1,960. Forty-one names on the back. Okafor drew a door.