Scarecrow

Dory is twelve and a half.

I want to write that down plainly, because nobody who meets her believes it. She’s as tall as Risa. Taller than Mother. She looks sixteen, Halloway says, give or take, which is the most Halloway will ever say about anything without a chart. Mother lets her hems down every few weeks and has stopped pretending it’s the last time.

She still checks everyone in a room when she comes into it. She still says there you are under her breath when she finds them. She still sleeps on the outside of the heap with her hand out, though her feet go off the end of the rug now and Pebble has to lie across them.

She’s twelve and a half.

I have to keep reminding myself.

Risa says people always talk to a tall girl as if she’s older than she is. She says the girl lets them, because it’s easier than explaining, and then one day she finds she’s carrying things nobody would have handed a child.

”Don’t let them,” Risa told me. On the roof. The night Dory’s boots stopped fitting for the third time that season. ”Don’t let anyone talk to her like she’s sixteen. Not even her. Especially not her.”

I said I wouldn’t.

I didn’t know yet how hard that was going to be.

She went to the Standing on the fourth morning after the muster.

I didn’t know. Nobody did. She got up before the dawn count and put on her boots and the Kasrai knife and walked down the north field and stood in the line.

Not at the front. In the line. Where it went past the interceptors, behind a family of Aun and in front of two Kett from the station. For most of the morning.

Holt told me afterward. He was at the table under the awning with the slate, the way he is every morning, and he saw her coming a long way off, because she’s very hard not to see.

He didn’t say anything. He waited till she got to him.

”Name,” said Holt.

”You know my name,” said Dory.

”I ask everyone.”

”Dory Dask.”

Holt wrote it down. He doesn’t hurry. He hasn’t hurried since the ramps.

”Age.”

Dory didn’t answer straight away. Holt says she looked at the slate, and then at the line behind her, and then at him, and he could see her deciding.

”Twelve and a half,” she said.

Holt put the chalk down.

”You know the rule,” he said.

”Sixteen,” said Dory. ”It’s on the slate in the kitchen.” She didn’t look away. ”I could have said sixteen. Everyone would have believed me. The Kett behind me did.”

”Why didn’t you?”

”Because it isn’t,” said Dory.

Holt says he sat there with the chalk in his hand for a while, and the whole line behind her waited, and nobody pushed.

”Then why are you in my line, love?”

”Because I want to know,” said Dory, ”if the rule’s about how old you are. Or what you can do.”

Holt sent her up the hill to Okafor. He came with her. He left the General on the table, which he’s never done.

Okafor was at the long table with Ilka and a slate. They both looked up when Dory came in. Then at Holt behind her. Then at Dory again, at the knife on her belt, and at her boots, which still had north-field mud on them.

”She was in the line,” said Holt.

Okafor didn’t say anything for a while.

”Sit down,” she said.

I came in from the porch then, because I’d felt Holt’s heart come up the hill too fast for a man who doesn’t hurry, and I thought something was wrong.

Dory was sitting at the long table across from Okafor with her hands flat on the wood. The way Mother sits when she’s about to say something nobody wants to hear and is going to say anyway.

”I’m not asking to be in the Standing,” Dory was saying. ”I know I can’t. I’m asking you to know what I can do. So when you need it you don’t pretend it isn’t there because I’m twelve.”

Okafor looked at her.

”What can you do?” she said.

Dory looked at Ilka.

”Tell her,” said Dory.

Ilka didn’t say anything at first. She looked at me, in the doorway. Then she looked at her slate.

”She’s been hearing them,” said Ilka.

”Hearing who?”

”The calls,” said Ilka. ”Not on the radio. The ones on the thread. Through the silver. The ones from queens in pieces, and from people with silver in them, who haven’t got a set and can only call by reaching.” She put the slate down. ”Most of us can’t hear those. I can’t. The stations can’t. Ruan hears some, when she’s out on the rope.”

She looked at Dory.

”Dory hears all of them,” said Ilka. ”She’s been sending them to me. At night. For three weeks. Through Dot.”

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t.

”I check,” said Dory. To me, not to Okafor. She’d seen my face. ”That’s all. At night. In the heap. I always check. Everyone in the room, and then everyone in the house, and then the town. I’ve done it since I was small. You know I have.” She looked at her hands. ”And since the Standing, since everyone’s been calling, it goes further. It goes out. It doesn’t stop at the town.”

”How far?”

Dory looked at me.

”I don’t know,” she said. ”I haven’t found the end.”

Mother was in the kitchen doorway behind me with the teapot. I don’t know how long she’d been there either. Long enough.

She came in and put a cup in front of Dory. Then one in front of Okafor. Then she put her hand on Dory’s hair, the way she has since Dory was born, and kept it there.

”You’re tired,” said Mother. ”I’ve seen it for three weeks. I thought it was the growing.”

”Some of it is,” said Dory.

”And the rest?”

Dory didn’t answer for a while.

”Some of them stop,” she said. ”While I’m listening. I find them, and I say there you are, and I pass them to Ilka. And some of them are too far, and by the time anyone gets there—”

She stopped.

Mother didn’t take her hand away.

Okafor sat back.

She looked at Dory. Then at me. Then at Ilka’s slate.

”All right,” she said.

That was all she said that morning. But she went into the map room after and didn’t come out till dark, and the next day there was a new line on the kitchen slate, under STANDING, in her hand.

Sixteen.

And under that:

Dory is Dory.

Nobody knew what it meant yet. I don’t think Okafor did either.

We found out nine days later.

Dory found it in the night.

She woke in the heap and sat up, and Pebble lifted his head off her feet, and Trevor woke because she’d moved and Trevor always wakes. She didn’t say anything. She got up and stepped over Corin, who didn’t wake, and went out to the porch, where I was, because I don’t sleep much when I’ve been building.

”There’s a world,” she said. ”Burning.”

Ostry.

That’s its name. I didn’t know it then. Nobody on Avalon did. It wasn’t on Konrad’s sheet or Ingrid’s. It wasn’t one of Ithel’s points. It was a small world a long way out past the edge of the Watch, toward where the Hungry’s arm had gone after Hearth, with no queen anyone had ever heard of and nobody on it with a radio that reached.

But it had silver.

Not much. A little, in everyone. The Sorn had put it there years ago, for the tithe, the way they put it into everyone on every world they kept. And four million people on Ostry, with a little silver each, had all reached at the same time. Out. Toward anything.

Dory had heard them.

”They’re very frightened,” she said. On the porch. In the dark. ”The Hands are over them. The Hands are burning the towns from the edges in. They’ve all gone to the middle. To the hills.” She put her hand flat on her chest. ”They’re reaching. All of them. At once. It’s very loud.”

”Why are the Hands burning them?”

Dory looked at me.

”Because something’s coming,” she said. ”Behind them. I can feel that too. Not people. Not reaching.” She swallowed. ”Eating.”

I woke Okafor. She was in the chair in the map room already. She’s always in the chair.

She looked at Dory in the doorway in her nightshirt with her boots in her hand, and didn’t ask anything. She stood up.

”How long?”

”Two days,” said Dory. ”Maybe. Before the Hands are at the hills.” She paused. ”Less, before the other thing.”

”How far?”

Dory told her. Okafor’s mouth went into its line.

”Ruan can’t sing the rope that far with anything big,” she said. ”Not in two days.” She looked at the map on the wall. ”Arches. Kyria can cut to anywhere someone’s been, or anywhere the silver knows.” She looked at Dory. ”Nobody’s been.”

”I have,” said Dory.

I knew what she meant before she said it.

So did Okafor.

”I’ve been there all night,” said Dory. ”Checking. I know where every one of them is. I could find the hills with my eyes shut.” She held out her arm. The silver net came up it, bright, the way it does when she’s about to check someone new, and went round her wrist and up to her elbow and stayed. ”Kyria’s cutters can cut to me. If I’m holding the other end.”

”How many arches?”

”As many as she can cut,” said Dory. ”I held ten. At Tarrow’s Reach.”

Nobody said anything after that. Tarrow’s Reach is a thing nobody in the house says out loud.

Dory said it. She said it straight to Okafor, with her arm out and the net on it.

”I held ten,” said Dory. ”And one of them closed in my hands. And two hundred people were on the other side.” She didn’t look away. ”I’ve thought about it every night. I know what it feels like now. I’ll know sooner.”

Okafor didn’t decide.

She looked at me.

I’d like to say I knew what to say. I didn’t.

I went and woke them. Luna and Sera and Risa. All three. Because Dory’s theirs, all three of them, the way all the children are, and I wasn’t going to decide it alone in a doorway in the middle of the night.

We sat in the kitchen. All of us. Dory in the middle, in her nightshirt, with her boots on now. Risa on one side of her. Luna on the other. Sera across the table, very warm, because she gets warm when she’s frightened and can’t help it.

Nobody said much.

”Tarrow’s Reach,” said Luna, in the end.

”I know,” said Dory.

”You were ten.”

”I was ten and a half,” said Dory. ”And I’m twelve and a half now, and I look sixteen, and I can hear four million people in the hills of a world nobody’s heard of.” She looked at all three of them. ”If I don’t go, nobody can.”

Risa had her hand on Dory’s back. She didn’t take it away.

”If you go,” said Risa, ”I’m on the other end of every arch. With the wing. Not in the air. On the ground. At your back.”

”Yes.”

”And your grandmother,” said Sera.

”And Halloway,” said Luna. ”With her hand on your wrist. Counting. And when she says stop, you stop.”

”Yes.”

”And your father,” said Risa. She looked at me. ”On the ground on Ostry. Under every arch. So if one starts to go, it’s got somewhere to stand.”

I looked at Hana, in the doorway. She’d come down too. Everyone hears everything in that house.

Hana didn’t say no. She came in and put her hand on my back, and kept it there.

”Then yes,” I said.

Dory looked at me. And then she did something she hasn’t done in a long time. She came round the table and put her arms round me, very hard, the way she did when she was small and her storm had gone out.

She’s taller than me now, nearly. It’s very strange.

”Thank you,” she said. Into my shoulder. ”For asking them.”

We went at dawn.

I’ll write it the way it went, not the way I’d like.

Kyria cut the first arch on the red glass with Dory standing in front of it with her arm out.

It’s not how Kyria cuts. She cuts to a place. She stood with her first blade raised and her eyes shut and said she’d never cut to a person before, and Dory said I’m not a person, I’m a net, cut to the net, and Kyria opened her eyes and looked at her grandchildren’s sister, who’s no blood of hers and is anyway, and cut.

The arch opened.

On the other side: smoke. And a hill. And a great many people on it, all turning round at once to look.

Dory walked through first.

I didn’t stop her. I’d said yes. I went right behind her, and Risa, and Mother, and Halloway with her hand already on Dory’s wrist.

And behind us, the Standing.

That was Okafor’s. She’d decided it in the map room in the night, while we were in the kitchen. The Standing’s first muster had been nine days ago, and she’d said ready before it’s time, and it was time.

So the first through behind us were Kasrai. Two thousand of them, in what was left of their armour, with Varra at the front. They came through the arch at a run, the way they’d come off a wall, and spread out across the top of the hill in a ring, facing out, and stood.

The people on the hill looked at them.

Varra looked back. And put her hand on her chest, and then held it out, palm up, the way the Aun had taught everyone on Avalon by then without meaning to.

You’re in it.

Then Dory held out her other arm.

And Kyria’s cutters, on the red glass, cut the second arch. To her. And the third.

There were twelve hills on Ostry. Dory had counted them in the night. Four million people, on twelve hills, in the middle of a small green world, with the Hands coming in from every edge.

She stood on the first hill. The highest. And held twelve arches.

Not here. That’s the thing I didn’t understand until I saw it. She didn’t need the arches beside her. She held them where the people were. One on every hill. With the net running out from her across the whole middle of Ostry, under the ground, through the little silver in everyone, bright enough that I could see it in the soil under my feet, like roots.

Kyria cut to the net. Twelve cutters, on the red glass, one after another. And twelve arches opened on twelve hills, and the people on them, who’d been reaching for anything all night, saw a door.

And Dory, very quietly, in the voice she uses for checking, so that everyone on Ostry heard it in the silver at the same time:

”There you are.”

They went through.

I went into the ground.

Under every arch, the way Risa said. I put my hands flat on the top of the first hill and went down, and out, through Ostry’s stone, to every hill, and made the ground under every arch hold. If the Hands burned the slope, the top would stay. If the hill cracked, the arch would have something to stand on.

It’s easy. It’s only holding. I could do it all day.

What I couldn’t do was everything else.

The Hands came in at noon.

From the edges. The way Dory said. Five of them, enormous, low over the burning towns, and under them the correctors in their tides, and in front of the correctors the grey ones, walking.

The Kasrai on the first hill saw them come and didn’t move.

Neither did the Standing on the other eleven. Okafor had sent them through every arch behind the Kasrai, as soon as each one opened. Hearth’s people. Earth’s. Aun. Kett. Tithe-world people with the marks on their throats, who’d joined the line at the river because they knew what was coming for anyone left behind. Not powers, most of them. Rifles. Hearth silver. Shields Odra had made.

They stood in rings on twelve hills with the people going through the arches behind them, and they held.

Risa held the sky.

Not over all twelve. Over the first, and the two beside it, with the wing in the air above, and she sent the rest of the wing to the others and held their threads, the way she held forty on One. Andraste came through on the third hill with Holdfast and the Hyrrani and I felt every grey one on that slope stop getting up.

Mother lifted.

She doesn’t like writing about this, so I’ll put it short. There was a tide of correctors coming up the fifth hill toward the arch, and the people on the fifth hill were old, mostly, and slow. And Mother stood at the top of it and put her hands out and lifted the slope. The whole side of it. With the correctors on it.

And turned it over.

She sat down after. Halloway let go of Dory’s wrist for one moment, the only moment, and looked at her.

”I’m fine,” said Mother. ”Go back to the child.”

Dory didn’t look away from the arches once.

Twelve of them. Halloway counting at her wrist. Pebble at her heels, very low, humming the way the young hum when their brood is afraid. The net running out from her through the whole of Ostry, bright.

I could feel her heart. I didn’t look at it. It wasn’t mine. But I could feel it anyway. It was very fast. It didn’t slow.

In the third hour, the Ashen came.

They came round the side of the world in one long dark ship, very low, and the wave came off the front of it toward the ninth hill.

I felt it go. Everyone did. The cold before it, the way the air goes thin.

And Dory felt it in the net. Before any of us. I saw her go very still.

Then she did something nobody had ever done.

She moved the arch.

Not closed it. Moved it. The far end. The one on the ninth hill, with ten thousand people still going through it and the Ashen wave coming up the slope at them. She reached out along the net to the ninth hill and took hold of the arch there, and scattered it.

The way I scatter myself. Into pieces. Every piece knowing what it was.

And put it back together a mile east. On the far slope. Behind the hill. Where the wave couldn’t see it.

With the ten thousand people on the ninth hill falling sideways through it, still walking, out onto the red glass on Avalon, without ever knowing it had moved.

The wave hit the top of the ninth hill a breath after.

There was nobody there.

Halloway said a word I won’t write.

Dory didn’t hear her. She was already on the next one.

She did it four more times that afternoon. Every time the Ashen turned toward an arch. Every time a slope began to go. Scattered it and put it somewhere safer and kept it open the whole time, with people walking through it.

I couldn’t have done it. I want that written. I can scatter myself. I can’t scatter a door with someone else’s silver holding it open from a world away and put it back while people are inside it.

Dory can.

She’s twelve and a half.

She couldn’t do it every time.

The twelfth hill was the furthest. The smallest. Dory had told me in the night: the furthest out, toward where the Hands came in, with the oldest town on its side and the people who wouldn’t leave the town until the last.

The Hands got there first.

Not the Ashen. The Hands. One of them came down very low over the twelfth hill before the arch had been open an hour. And under it the black. Not a wave. The black, the way it came down on the north dome on Earth. Coming over the hill like a cloth.

Dory felt it. I felt her feel it.

She reached for the arch to move it.

And there wasn’t anywhere to move it to. The black was on every side. The whole twelfth hill, and the valley round it, and the town.

She held it open.

Halloway’s hand on her wrist. Counting out loud now. Mother on her feet again, beside her, with her hand on Dory’s back. Me in the ground under the twelfth hill, holding the top of it up while the black came down over the slopes.

People were still coming through.

Fewer. Then fewer.

”Dory,” said Halloway.

Dory didn’t answer.

”Dory. Your heart.”

”I know,” said Dory. ”There’s more.”

”There’s nobody else coming,” said Halloway. Very quietly. ”Love. Look.”

Dory looked.

Not with her eyes. With the net. Along it, out to the twelfth hill, where the arch was, under the black.

She looked for a long time.

Then she said it. Very quietly. To nobody on Ostry. To the hill.

”There you are.”

And let go.

The arch closed in her hands.

Not like a door slamming. Not like Tarrow’s Reach. She closed it. Slowly. On purpose. When there was nobody left on the other side who could still walk to it.

Then she sat down. On the top of the first hill. In the grass. The way Amu sat down on the red glass. As if her legs had decided.

Mother sat down with her.

The other eleven arches stayed open till the last of the people on them were through, and the Standing after them, ring by ring, the Kasrai last, Varra last of all, walking backward through the first arch with her blade out and her rope tied up round her waist.

Then I picked Dory up and carried her through. She let me. She hasn’t let me since she was eight.

Wren counted them on the red glass.

All night. Through all twelve. The way she counted the forty frames on One. She didn’t stop for anything.

At dawn she said the number.

”Three million, eight hundred and six thousand, four hundred,” said Wren. ”Of four million, give or take.”

A pause.

”And two thousand and eleven of the Standing,” said Wren. ”Of two thousand and forty.”

They came off the red glass all night. Into the long ward, and the town hall, and the tents Tiamat still keeps folded in the stores under the interceptor field for exactly this. The people of Ostry are small and pale, with very dark eyes, and they hold each other’s sleeves when they walk, in lines, so nobody gets left. They’d learned to do it on the hills.

Their oldest came through the first arch near the end. A grandmother called Eska, very bent, with a line of nine children holding her sleeve, and none of them hers. She’d gathered them on the fifth hill when their families didn’t reach it.

She didn’t go to Wren. She didn’t go to Okafor or to me.

She walked across the red glass, with the nine still holding on, to where Dory was sitting in the grass with Mother. And stood in front of her, and looked at her, for a while, the way old people look at someone they’ve heard in their head all night and never seen.

”She says,” said Dot. ”You’re very young.”

”Yes,” said Dory.

”She says she thought you’d be old,” said Dot. ”She says on the hill, in the night, when you said there you are, it sounded like her own grandmother.” A pause. ”She says thank you for finding her. She says she’d stopped thinking anyone could.”

Eska put out her hand. Dory took it.

The nine children looked at Dory, and at her knife, and at the silver net still faintly on her arm, very solemnly, the way children look at someone who’s been called something on a train.

Then the smallest of them let go of Eska’s sleeve. And took hold of Dory’s.

The twelfth hill was a hundred and ninety thousand people.

I’ve done the sum. So has Dory. She knows exactly how many came through before she closed it, and exactly how many didn’t, because she checked every one of them.

She doesn’t say the second number. I don’t either.

Twenty-nine of the Standing didn’t come home. Fourteen of them Kasrai, on the ninth hill, before Dory moved it, where the wave touched the ring. Seven from Earth. Four Aun. Two Kett. Two from Hearth.

Varra tied twenty-nine knots in her rope the next morning. Not for her. For them. She does it for every one, Andraste says. That’s why the old ones’ ropes go to the ground.

Dory slept for two days.

In the heap. On the outside, with her feet off the end of the rug. Pebble across them. Trevor awake beside her the whole first night, because Trevor always wakes. Mother in the chair by the door, which she hasn’t slept in since Dory was a baby.

And the rest of them came.

I should write this down, because I didn’t notice it happen, and I think it happened a long time ago.

All of them. Every grandparent in the house on the rise, and the ones who live down the long road and come up through Bell’s arch because the hill’s too much now. They came one at a time, over the two days, and nobody arranged it. Nobody had to.

Ingrid sat on the rug at the edge of the heap with Ione asleep against her, and her hand on Dory’s ankle. Konrad sat on the step outside the door with the sheet on his knees and didn’t read any of it.

Maura and Rory came up from the Calders’ house in the afternoon with a pot of something, the way Maura comes when anyone’s ill, and Rory sat on the floor by the wall and fixed the hinge on the children’s-room door that nobody had asked him to fix, very quietly, so as to be doing something in the room.

The General came at dusk in his old uniform and stood in the passage outside the door all night, very straight, with his hands behind his back. He didn’t come in. He said a man in boots has no business in a room full of sleeping children. He stood there till morning anyway, and when Elin woke and came out to him, he hummed Luna’s mother’s song to her until she went back to the heap.

Abena Osei came through the arch on the long road with a basket and her mother. Old Efua sat in the corner and watched Dory breathe and every so often said something sharp in her own language to the window, as if there were a bird on the sill, which there wasn’t. Abena put her hand on Dory’s forehead the way she puts it on Abena’s, and Efua’s, and Kwame’s. Kwame Osei came after, from the river, with mud still on his boots, and sat with Trevor.

Kyria came through from Hyrran with her first blade and sat on the floor at the foot of the heap with it across her knees. All night. Not sharpening it. Just there.

Halloway came in on the second evening to look at Dory, and stopped in the doorway, and looked at the room.

At Ingrid and Konrad, and Maura and Rory, and the General in the passage, and Abena with her basket and Efua in the corner and Kwame with Trevor, and Kyria at the foot of the heap, and Mother in the chair. Ten grandparents, counting Efua, who’s a great-grandmother and says that counts double, round a girl who is blood to only a few of them.

”Which of you is she actually related to?” said Halloway. ”For the chart.”

Nobody answered for a moment.

Then Abena Osei said, without looking up from Dory’s forehead, ”All of us.”

And nobody argued.

It’s been true for years. I just never heard anyone say it.

Kyria has taught every one of them to hold a blade, not just Corin and Thessaly and Vessa. Ingrid takes them all up into the sky, one at a time, by turns, not only Risa’s. Rory has a drawer in his workshop with a name on it for every child in the heap, and Kesh’s is the newest. The General hums Luna’s mother’s song to whoever’s crying, and he doesn’t check whose they are first. Abena brings a basket with enough in it for all of them, every time, and she has never once in all these years brought enough for only her own.

None of them says my grandchild and means one. They say it and mean the heap.

Mother started it. I’m fairly sure. She grew up an orphan, with no family at all, and she decided a long time ago that every child who came into the house on the rise was hers to say the names over. The others just saw her do it and did it too.

Mother says that’s how families mostly get made. Not by deciding. By somebody sitting in the chair and nobody telling them to get up.

On the third morning Dory woke up and came out to the porch and climbed into Mother’s lap.

She doesn’t fit. She’s taller than Mother. Her legs went over the arm of the chair and her boots hung down to the boards. She did it anyway, and Mother put both arms round her, and they sat there like that, and nobody said anything about it at all.

”I closed it,” said Dory. In the end.

”I know,” said Mother.

”On purpose.”

”I know.”

Dory was quiet.

”At Tarrow’s Reach it closed on me,” she said. ”And I didn’t know. I didn’t know who was on the other side till afterward, and I thought about them every night because I never got to look.” She swallowed. ”On Ostry I looked. Every one. Before I let go.”

Mother didn’t say anything.

”Is that better?” said Dory. ”Or worse?”

Mother thought about it for a long time. She doesn’t answer things like that quickly. She never has.

”It’s harder,” said Mother. ”And it’s yours.”

She put her hand on Dory’s hair.

”Your grandfather used to say a thing you choose weighs more than a thing that happens to you,” said Mother. ”But you can carry it. You can’t carry the other kind. It just sits on you.” She was quiet. ”You looked. That’s what he’d have wanted. He’d have been very proud of you, love. He’d have hated it. He’d have been proud.”

Varra came up the hill that afternoon.

Slowly. On her own. With her rope tied up round her waist and twenty-nine new knots in it, and her great-granddaughter behind her carrying something wrapped in a cloth.

She stood at the bottom of the porch steps and looked up at Dory, still in Mother’s lap, with her boots hanging down.

And said something.

”She says,” said Dot. ”Show me the knife.”

Dory got up. Slowly. And went down the steps. And took the Kasrai knife out of her belt, in its grey-gold sheath, with the one knot on the end of the strap that the great-granddaughter had tied when she gave it, for being given it.

Varra took it. Turned it over in her two-thumbed hands.

Then she tied a second knot. Below the first. Very tight. With her teeth, at the end, the way the Kasrai do.

And gave it back.

”She says,” said Dot, ”that’s for the twelfth hill.”

Dory looked at the knot.

”She says the Kasrai don’t count knots for winning,” said Dot. ”She says your father’s got one for coming down off the wall. She says you’ve got one for staying on it.” A pause. ”She says that one’s harder. She says she’s got nine of them, in two hundred years of her people. She says most of the old ones have none.”

Dory didn’t say anything.

She put the knife back in her belt. And put her hand flat on her chest, and then held it out, palm up. To Varra.

Varra looked at the open hand.

Then she did the same.

That night Ingrid took Dory up.

Not far. Over the house on the rise, and the town, and the north field where the line was already forming again for the morning, longer than before, because word had gone round Avalon about the twelve hills. Into the sky. Holding her hand. The way she did years ago, when Dory was small and everyone else was in the air with someone, and Ingrid saw that nobody ever held her.

Nobody else can keep up with Dory in the sky any more. Except Risa. And Ingrid.

They stayed up a long time. I watched them from the porch. Two small lights, very high, very still, not going anywhere.

Okafor rubbed out the line on the kitchen slate the next morning.

Not Sixteen. That stayed. The one under it.

She stood at the slate with the chalk until the tea went cold. Then she wrote something else in its place. Smaller.

Dory: the net. When she says.

She didn’t explain it. Nobody asked her to.

I’m not going to write that Dory’s grown up.

She’s twelve and a half. She still sleeps on the outside of the heap with her hand out. She still checks everyone at breakfast and says there you are under her breath when she finds them, every one of them, every morning, Kesh last because Kesh is smallest. She still lets Trevor sit up with her when she can’t sleep, and she still can’t, some nights, now.

But I watched her stand on a hill on a world nobody had heard of and hold twelve doors open for four million people, and move them when they’d have been eaten, and close the last one herself when she’d looked at everyone she could.

I know what it is. I just didn’t want to write it.

She’s my equal.

I’ve thought about that a lot since Ostry, and I don’t think it’s a father being proud. I’ve felt every atom on a world. I’ve scattered myself across the dark and put myself back. And I stood in the ground under the first hill and felt her do a thing with doors I couldn’t begin to do, with a world’s worth of other people’s silver, without once losing hold of anyone.

Maybe more than my equal. I don’t know. Neither does the queen at the garden wall; I asked her. She said the young always go further than the ones who made them, and that’s the point of making them.

I’m not frightened of it. I thought I would be. I’m not.

I’m frightened of how young she is while she’s doing it.

Mother says it’s what it looks like when the child you raised turns round one day and is standing in front of you.

Mother says you don’t get to choose when.

Dory heard another one last night.

She woke and sat up in the heap and Pebble lifted his head. And she didn’t get up this time. She lay back down. And passed it to Ilka through Dot, and Ilka passed it to the Meridian, and Ruan went out on the rope before dawn and brought back two thousand people from a station with a broken engine, close enough to reach in a morning.

At the dawn count Wren said the number.

Dory was on the step beside Konrad, with her knife on her belt and two knots on the strap, checking everyone on the red glass as they came in.

There you are.

There you are.

There you are.

Days 5192–5214. The Net.

Dory is twelve and a half and looks sixteen. She stood in Holt’s line and told him the truth. Ilka: she’s been hearing the calls on the thread, all of them; she hasn’t found the end. Okafor: Sixteen. Dory is Dory. Ostry: four million on twelve hills, the Hands burning in from the edges and something eating behind. Her mothers said yes, with conditions; Hana’s hand on my back. Kyria cut to the net. Dory held twelve arches and moved five when the Ashen turned; nobody had ever done it. The black came over the twelfth hill and there was nowhere to move it. She looked at every one, said there you are, and closed it herself. 3,806,400 of four million. Twenty-nine of the Standing. Varra tied twenty-nine knots in her own rope and a second on Dory’s strap: for staying on the wall. Every grandparent came and sat; Halloway asked which one Dory was related to; Abena: all of us. Mother: it’s harder, and it’s yours. Ingrid took her up. Okafor: Dory, the net, when she says. She’s my equal. More, maybe.