Scarecrow

Lio woke on the third morning.

In the long ward, in the bed by the window, with Sefa on one side of her and Dory on the other and Hana at the foot, breathing for her, very gently, the way Hana breathed for her the whole two days she slept.

She didn’t open her eyes at first. Her fingers moved first. At her side, against the blanket. Twisting.

Sefa put her hand on Lio’s head. On the side. And twisted too. Nothing, into a knot. The way she has every hour since the red glass.

And Lio opened her eyes.

They were brown.

That’s the first thing I want written. Not grey. Not empty. Brown, like the Marrah’s are, very dark, very wet, and looking straight up at the old woman leaning over her with her hand on her head.

Lio looked at her for a long time.

Then she said a word. Very hoarse. Very small. The first thing anyone had ever heard her say in her own voice.

Dot didn’t need to translate it. We’d all heard it once before. On the terraces, from Tey’s grandson, with his hand at the side of his head.

Ready.

Sefa made the sound again. The one I won’t write.

Then she sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled Lio into her lap, all of her, very carefully, the way you’d lift something that’s been broken and mended and you’re not sure where the mend is. And held her. And Lio let her. With her face in her grandmother’s loose grey hair.

Dory stood up. And went out of the ward. And sat on the step outside with her hands over her face.

She had Dusk on. She’s worn them since the red glass. Father’s glasses, dark, with the soot in the lenses, so the light stays out. I went and sat beside her.

”She’s back,” said Dory. Behind her hands.

”Yes.”

”She’s really back.”

”Yes.”

Dory took her hands away from her face. Behind the dark lenses I couldn’t see her eyes. I didn’t need to.

”Not all of her,” she said.

That’s the part I have to write next. Because it’s true.

We couldn’t take all of it out.

The collar’s gone. The black at her throat went to sand on the dying world, and Lio’s in there now, all of her, the Marrah girl from the top terrace who can’t do her own knot yet. Halloway’s sure. The Aldri doctor’s sure. Sefa’s sure, and Sefa’s sure of nothing she hasn’t twisted her own hair over first.

But they put silver in her before the collar. A great deal. Finished. All the way through. And they taught it to do what mine does, and Dory’s. To reach into the atoms of things and change them.

That’s still there.

I tried. I want to write that I tried. The second week, when she was strong enough to sit up, I sat on the edge of her bed with Halloway counting and Sefa watching and Dory beside me, and put my hand on Lio’s back, very gently, and asked her silver if it would like to go back to how it was. Before. When she was a girl on the terraces with a little bit of Sorn silver in her for the tithe, like everyone on her world.

It didn’t want to.

Not because it was told not to. Nothing’s telling it anything now. It just didn’t. It was what it was. Finished. Hers. The way mine is mine and Dory’s is Dory’s.

You can ask atoms to be something else. You can’t ask them to be something they’ve never been. And Lio’s silver has never been anything but this. Not really. Not since they made it.

I told Sefa. With Dot.

Sefa listened. All of it. With Lio asleep across her knees.

Then she said something.

”She says,” said Dot, ”can she still do her knot?”

I looked at Halloway. Halloway looked at me.

”Yes,” I said. ”Her hands are fine.”

Sefa nodded. As if that was the only part that mattered.

”She says,” said Dot, ”then she’s still her.”

Sefa moved up the hill in the autumn.

From the Marrah city on the slope, with its open doors and its terraces. She didn’t want to leave it; she’d lived on terraces all her life and the Marrah city’s the nearest thing on Avalon. But Lio wouldn’t sleep anywhere but the heap.

That’s the thing nobody planned. On her first night out of the long ward, Dory carried her up the hill to the house, because it was closer than the Marrah city and Lio was tired. And put her down in the children’s room. Meaning to take her to Sefa in the morning.

In the morning Lio was in the heap.

Between Kesh and Oona. With Kesh’s arm over her, and Oona’s hand on her arm, and Pebble across all three of their feet. Asleep. The first time since the red glass Halloway had seen her sleep without her fingers moving.

Nobody had the heart to move her.

So Sefa moved instead.

I made her a house. Small. At the garden wall, by the gardener’s queen’s old corner, where the bud the last gardener left is a bush now that smells of rain. On terraces. Three of them, very small, one above the other, with a door on each, open. And a step on the top one, wide enough for two.

Sefa walked up all three terraces the first morning. Very slowly. She stood on the top one and looked over the garden wall at the house on the rise. At the courtyard, and the porch, and the window of the children’s room.

Then she sat down on the step. And twisted her hair.

Lio comes down every morning. Out of the heap, across the courtyard, past the queen at the garden wall, who lifts her head for her the way she lifts it for her own young, up the three little terraces to her grandmother’s step.

And sits in front of her. So Sefa can do her knot.

Then she goes back to the house for breakfast.

She’s ours now. That’s the only way I can put it.

Not on paper. Konrad hasn’t written her on the front of the sheet; she has a grandmother, and Sefa’s name is beside hers on Still out, crossed through now, with Home written after it in Ingrid’s hand. She’s Lio. Sefa’s. Marrah.

But she sleeps in the heap. She eats at the long table. She says there you are in the mornings, because Dory does, and love, because Oona does, and ready when her knot’s done, because that’s hers. Mother pours her a cup. Kyria put a practice blade in her hand on the second week, and Lio looked at it for a long time and gave it back, very politely, and Kyria said that was the right answer and gave her a tie of grey Hyrrani wool for her knot instead.

Rory made her a drawer.

Dory takes care of her.

Mostly. Sefa does the knot and the mornings. Mother does the cups. The heap does the nights. But everything else, Dory.

I didn’t decide that. Nobody did. Dory just did it.

She’s nearly seventeen. She looks older. She’s been taller than me for a year and wears Father’s glasses and has my eyes behind them, and she carried Lio across the red glass and up the hill on her first night and has been carrying her, one way or another, every day since.

She sits with her at breakfast. She walks her down to Sefa’s step and back. She takes her to Miss Pell’s in the mornings, to the circle under the tree, and sits at the edge while Tiri sits next to Lio, the way Tiri said she would. She lets her sit on the edge of the ground when Dory builds with me.

And she teaches her.

That was Dory’s idea too.

I’d been afraid of it. I’ll be honest. A child with silver that reaches into atoms and changes them, who was taught to do it by being told. Who broke a moon. Who nearly broke a world.

I thought we’d have to teach her not to.

Dory said no.

”She doesn’t know how to not,” said Dory. On the porch. In the first week of the autumn. With Lio asleep across her lap. ”That’s what they did. They didn’t teach her the gift. They taught her to be told what to do with it.” She looked down at Lio. ”If we tell her not to, we’re just telling her. Like they did. Only the other way.”

”Then what?”

Dory thought about it for a long time.

”I’m going to ask her,” she said. ”What she’d like to do with it.” She put her hand on Lio’s hair, very short now, starting to grow. ”Nobody’s ever asked her. Corin said.”

So she asked.

I watched the first time. From the porch. Dory and Lio in the courtyard, in the morning, after the knot. Dory sitting on the stones with her legs crossed. Lio sitting in front of her, very small, very solemn, with her new short hair tied up at the side.

Dory put a pebble on the stones between them.

”What is it?” said Dory.

Lio looked at it.

”A stone,” she said. In our words. Dot was in the kitchen. Tiri’s been teaching her, and Ione.

”What’s it made of?”

Lio looked at it.

Then she put her hand out. Flat. Over it. The way she put it out on Tiel’s moon, and the dying world.

I went very still on the porch.

Dory didn’t.

”Don’t tell it anything,” said Dory. Very gently. ”Just look. Just see what’s there. Like looking into water.”

Lio’s hand stayed out. Flat. Not moving.

Then her face changed.

”It’s full,” she said. Very quietly. ”It’s full of little things. Holding hands.”

”Yes,” said Dory.

”Lots of them.”

”Yes.”

”They’re all holding on,” said Lio. ”Very tight. To each other.” She looked up at Dory. ”I always told them to let go. I didn’t know they were holding hands.”

Dory didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she said: ”Would you like to ask one of them something?”

Lio looked at the pebble.

”What?”

”Anything,” said Dory. ”Ask it if it would like to be warm.”

Lio put her hand out again. Over the pebble. Very slowly.

And asked.

I felt it. From the porch. Very small. A child’s hand over a pebble, asking. Not telling. The first time.

The pebble went warm.

Just warm. A little. The way a stone goes warm in the sun.

Lio picked it up. And held it in both hands. And looked at it.

And then she started to cry.

Dory held her for a long time. In the courtyard. On the stones. With the warm pebble between them.

Sefa saw it from her step over the garden wall. She didn’t come down. She sat on her top terrace and twisted her hair and watched.

Mother saw it from the kitchen window. She didn’t come out. She put the kettle on.

I sat on the porch step and didn’t move.

Lio sleeps with the pebble now. In the heap. In her hand. It’s still a little warm. Every night. She asks it to be.

The three of them found out what they could do together the week after. By accident. In the courtyard. Which is permanently damp now and always will be.

Kesh made it rain. Of course she did. Very gently, out of her little cloud, on all three of them, because she was bored.

Oona lifted the rain. Every drop. A finger’s width over their heads, hanging in the air, the way she always does, so nobody got wet.

And Lio looked up at it. All of it. Thousands of drops, hanging. And put her hand out, flat, very carefully. And asked.

Every drop went warm.

Not hot. Warm. Like bathwater. Hanging in the air over the courtyard in the morning sun, steaming very slightly.

Then Oona let it go.

Warm rain. On all three of them. In the courtyard, in the cold of the autumn, with the queen’s head lifting over the garden wall to see.

Kesh stopped frowning. Oona said love. Lio laughed, out loud, the first time anyone had heard her laugh, and put her face up into it with her eyes shut.

Mother came out of the kitchen with the teapot and stood in the doorway and didn’t say anything at all.

They do it every morning now. The three of them. Halloway says the courtyard’s the warmest place on Avalon before breakfast. Sefa comes down off her terraces to stand in it.

Mother added her to the names that night.

Not her name; she’s here. Mother doesn’t say the names of the ones who are here. She says the ones who aren’t. Father’s first. Then everyone’s. Then Ferrin’s. The nine Marrah. Oona’s three.

And at the end, two more. Very quietly. In Marrah, as close as she could get it; Sefa taught her on the step.

Lio’s mother. Lio’s father. Both taken in with everyone under fifty, the day the Sorn came to the terraces. Still out. Still in.

Lio was in the heap. Asleep, with the pebble. But Sefa was on her top terrace over the garden wall, in the dark, and heard. And said them back.

Oona, on the step beside Mother, in her coat, said: ”Goodnight, love.” To all of them.

That was what gave me the idea.

Watching Dory and Lio in the courtyard. It’s full of little things. Holding hands. I didn’t know they were holding hands.

Lio broke a moon and nearly a world, and nobody had ever shown her what was in a pebble.

And I thought: Father showed me.

I was four. I put water on the moon.

I don’t remember it well. I remember the moon was very white and very dry, and I was on the roof of the forge on our street in the dome, at night, looking at it through the glass, and I thought it looked thirsty. So I asked. And some of it, very far away, a long thin line of it at the edge of the dark side, was water when I’d finished.

Nobody on Earth ever knew why. There are still people who argue about it, Mother says, in what’s left of the archives.

Father knew.

He came up on the roof and found me asleep there, very cold, with my nose bleeding. He carried me down. And the next day, when I’d slept, he sat me down at the kitchen table, very seriously, the way Corin sits down to mend something, and put his hand on the back of his neck, and looked at me for a long time.

”If you’re going to do big things like that,” said Father, ”you’d better know what you’re doing them to.”

He painted the kitchen wall.

That week. All of it. The whole wall behind the stove, from the floor to the ceiling. Squares, in rows, every square with a letter or two in it and a number. From the lightest to the heaviest. In forge paint, black and red, with soot for the shading. Mother says he didn’t sleep for four nights.

The periodic table.

He taught me every square. At the kitchen table, every evening, after the forge, with his hand on the back of his neck and the two notes under his breath. What each one was. What it was called. Why some were heavy and some light, why some held on and some let go, why some burned and some didn’t. He’d put something on the table made of it, a nail, a coin, a bit of coal, a cup of water, and make me put my hand on it and tell him what I felt.

He kept notebooks. All of it. Everything he knew about the little things, and everything he’d felt in his own hands at the forge, and everything he’d watched me do. Pages and pages, in very small writing.

He gave them to me before he died. In a box. Mother still has the box.

I learned them. All of them. I’ve had them by heart since I was a boy.

And I never taught mine.

That’s what I thought, watching Dory and Lio in the courtyard. I’ve had Father’s wall in my head my whole life. Every square. I’ve asked atoms to be things for nearly twenty years knowing exactly what they were, because a man with soot on his hands sat me down at a kitchen table and made sure.

And my children can do it too. All of them, some of it. Dory most. Corin, mending birds. Thessaly, holding doors. Ash, opening machines to see how they know. Small Sigmund, lifting what he shouldn’t be able to lift. And now Lio.

And I’ve never once sat any of them down at a table and shown them what they’re doing it to.

I asked Mother for the box.

She went and got it without saying anything. From the cupboard under the stairs, behind the good plates. Old, wooden, with a forge mark burned into the lid. She put it on the long table in front of me.

Then she stood there with her hand on it for a long time.

”He’d have done it sooner,” said Mother. ”He’d have had the wall up the week Dory was born.”

”I know.”

”You were busy,” said Mother. ”There was a war.” She took her hand off the box. ”There’s still a war. Do it anyway.”

So I painted the kitchen wall.

The house on the rise. The wall behind the stove, the way his was. From the floor to the ceiling. I didn’t ask it; I painted it. With a brush, in forge paint from Odra, black and red, with soot from her deepest forge for the shading. It took me four nights. Mother says I hummed the whole time and didn’t know I was doing it.

Two notes.

Doctor Bell came up the hill on the fifth morning and stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at it for a long time.

She’s very old now. She still does the sums for the park. She’s the one who asked me once, years ago, if I’d ever split an atom, and I knew every square on that wall and had never once thought of breaking one of them in half.

”Every square,” said Bell. ”From memory.”

”From my father’s wall,” I said.

Bell put her hand on it. On hydrogen. The first square.

”I’ll teach the bits you weren’t told,” she said. ”The breaking and the joining. Earth knew a few things your father didn’t.” She looked at me over her glasses. ”And you’ll teach them the rest. What it feels like. That’s not in any book.”

The Aldri came and looked at it and added nine more squares at the end, for things they’ve made that Earth never had. In silver paint. Very small and neat beside Father’s black and red. Bell argued with them for a week and then let them stay.

Halvane stood in front of it when it was finished, very still, the way the Aldri stand for important things.

”We have this,” he said. ”In our oldest books. Exactly this.” He looked at me. ”Who taught you?”

”My father,” I said. ”On a kitchen wall. When I was four.”

Halvane looked at the wall for a long time. At the soot in the shading.

”Then I’d very much like to have met him,” said Halvane.

I open Father’s notebooks at the start of every lesson. On the long table. At the page for whatever square we’re on. So the children can see his writing.

I teach them in the afternoons. At the long table, after Miss Pell’s. All of them who want to come.

I teach it the way he taught me. I point at a square on the wall and say what it is, and put something on the table that’s made of it, and they all put their hands out, and look, and tell me what they feel. Bell sits beside me and fills in what Father didn’t know.

Hydrogen first. Bell said that’s where everyone starts. The smallest. The lightest. One little thing, alone. Hana came in and sat at the end of the table for that one and smiled the whole time, because Hana’s power is the little things, hydrogen and oxygen, the ones that make water and air. Abena and Efua and Kwame sat next to her. They’d never been told what their mother does.

Then carbon. Then iron, with Odra’s first tongs on the table, the ones she gave Ossel at the forge gate. Ossel came from Hyrran to sit in, very quiet, and put his hand on them and felt them the way Dory showed Lio.

Then silver.

That was the one that made Dory go still.

I pointed at the square. Ag. Forty-seven. Father had shaded it with more soot than any of the others; I never knew why until that afternoon. And I put a piece of Hearth’s silver on the table, a strand Isolde gave me, and everyone put their hands out.

And Dory, behind Dusk, very quietly, said: ”That’s not what’s in us.”

Bell looked at her.

”It’s not,” said Dory. ”Look. Look at this, and then look at your own hand.”

Everyone did.

She was right. I’d never noticed. I’d never had a name for the ordinary kind to compare it to. The silver in Isolde’s strand was silver. Forty-seven. The square on the wall.

The silver in us wasn’t. Not quite. It was close. It looked like it. But down at the very bottom, past where anyone but Dory and me can see, it was something else. Something with no square on Bell’s wall. Something that sang back when the queens sang.

Bell looked at the wall. At all of Father’s squares, black and red, and the nine the Aldri added in silver.

Then she picked up the chalk and drew one more square. At the very end. After the Aldri’s nine. Empty.

”That one’s yours,” she said. To Dory. ”When you know what it is, you can write it in.”

Dory and I talk about it at night. The eyes. After the names, on the porch, when everyone’s gone in.

She takes Dusk off. Just for that. So I can see her, and she can see me, the way only the two of us can now.

”Does it stop?” she said, the first night. ”Seeing all the way down. Everything. All the time.”

”No,” I said.

She was quiet.

”It gets quieter,” I said. ”You learn where to look. And where not to. Like a room you’ve lived in for years; you stop seeing every crack in the wall unless you need to.” I looked at her. ”Father made Dusk for me because the light was too much. All of it, all the way down, every atom, at once. The glasses don’t stop you seeing. They just make it dim enough to bear.”

”He made them,” said Dory. ”Grandad.”

”Out of another pair of glasses,” I said. ”And soot. From the forge, I think.” I looked at them in her hands. ”Okafor gave them to me the week mine went. I’ve never asked her how she came to have them. I’ve never wanted to know, in case the answer was sad.”

Dory turned Dusk over in her hands.

”He made them for someone,” she said. ”Somebody whose eyes went.”

”Yes.”

”He didn’t know it’d be both.”

”No,” I said. ”He’d have made two pairs.”

Dory laughed. Very quietly. The first time since the dying world.

Then she put them back on.

The lessons grew.

By the third week it wasn’t only mine. Tiri came, because Corin came. Ithel came, and sat very straight at the end of the long table with Bahamut in his lap, and when we got to the heavy ones at the bottom of the wall Ithel put his hand up and said, very seriously, that the black buildings on the stock worlds were made of three of them, and pointed to which, and Bell went white and wrote it down.

Ione came and sat with Ingrid and didn’t say anything, and at the end of the second week she put her hand flat on the table over a piece of glass, the way Lio does, and said, very quietly, that it was mostly sand that had been made to forget it was sand. Nobody had told her that. She has no silver to speak of. She just looked.

Bell gave her a square of her own to colour in. Silicon. Ione chose grey.

Kesh asked every lesson whether clouds were on the wall. Bell said yes, mostly hydrogen and oxygen, like Hana. Kesh looked at Hana for a long time after that, very suspicious, as if Hana had been keeping it from her.

And the Aldri children came. Nine of them, from Miss Pell’s circle. They knew most of the wall already, from their oldest books. But they’d never seen anyone put a hand on a thing and feel what it was. They sat at the far end of the long table with their silver boxes and watched the Dask children’s hands. All lesson. Very quietly.

Teva and Tovi among them.

On a different note, since this is a notebook and things that happen go in it:

Trevor and small Sigmund have fallen in love.

I should say what I mean, because Luna will read this and so will Risa.

They’re fourteen and thirteen. They look older. They’re boys. And there are two Aldri girls in Miss Pell’s circle under the tree, twins, the daughters of one of Halvane’s engineers, who came down through the arch from Ister at the start of the autumn. Teva and Tovi. Very tall, the way the Aldri are. Very thin. Grey hair, short, like Tiri’s. Shimmering.

Trevor sat next to Teva on the first morning because there was nowhere else to sit.

Small Sigmund sat next to Tovi because Trevor was sitting next to Teva.

Miss Pell says neither of them has heard a word she’s said since.

Trevor told me. On the porch. Which surprised me; Trevor doesn’t tell anyone anything. He’s the quiet one. He sits up with the General at night with his hands behind his back and says nothing for hours.

He came out on the porch on the fourth evening of the autumn and stood at the rail. Not looking at me. Looking down the hill toward the town, where the lights were coming on, two notes on our street.

”Dad,” said Trevor.

”Mm.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time.

”She’s beautiful,” said Trevor.

I didn’t laugh. I want that written. I wanted to; not unkindly. But he said it so seriously, with his hands on the rail and his face very red, the way Corin said he’d marry Tiri, that I didn’t.

”Who is?” I said. Though I knew.

”Teva,” said Trevor. ”The one on the left. Usually. They swap.” He swallowed. ”She shimmers when she laughs. And she laughs at the things I say. Even the stupid ones.” He looked at his hands. ”I didn’t know anyone would.”

”What did you say?”

Trevor went redder.

”I said the oxygen in the room liked her,” he said. ”From Grandad’s wall. Because there was a lot of it round her and it was all moving.” He put his face in his hands. ”Dad. I said the oxygen liked her.”

”And she laughed.”

”She said,” said Trevor, through his hands, ”the oxygen had very good taste.”

Luna came out then. She’d heard. Everyone hears everything.

She didn’t say anything. She came and stood at the rail beside her son, who’s as tall as her now, and put her hand on his back.

”Your grandfather,” said Luna, ”told me once that your grandmother laughed at the first thing he ever said to her. And he never found out why. And he spent forty years trying to say it again.” She was smiling. ”He hums her song to Elin every night.”

Trevor took his hands away from his face.

”Really?”

”Really,” said Luna. ”Be kind to her. Listen to her more than you talk. And don’t tell her the oxygen likes her again; save something for later.”

Small Sigmund didn’t tell anyone. Risa found out because small Sigmund, who lifts anything without asking, lifted the whole tree in the middle of Miss Pell’s circle on the fifth morning, very gently, a hand’s width off the ground, with Tovi sitting under it, so that the light came through the roots onto her face.

Miss Pell made him put it back.

Tovi laughed so hard her shimmer lit the whole circle.

Risa says she’s never been prouder of anything in her life, and that if he ever does it again she’ll put him in the sky by his ankles. Ingrid says Risa did something very like it at fourteen, with a cloud, for a boy at the dome school, and Risa says that’s a lie, and Konrad says it isn’t.

Small Sigmund went to Dory. Not me. Not Risa. Dory.

On the courtyard step, after the lesson, with Lio asleep against Dory’s side and the warm pebble in her hand. He sat down on the step below and didn’t say anything for a while, which isn’t like him. He’s the loud one. He lifts things and laughs.

”How do you know,” said small Sigmund, ”if somebody likes you back?”

Dory looked at him over Dusk.

”You could look,” said small Sigmund. ”You can see all the way down into anything now. You could look at her heart and see.”

”I could,” said Dory.

”Will you?”

”No,” said Dory.

Small Sigmund looked at her.

”It’s not mine,” said Dory. ”Dad never looks at anyone’s heart unless they let him. Not even Mum’s. Not even mine.” She put her free hand on his hair. ”If you want to know, you ask her. With your mouth. Like a person.”

”What if she says no?”

”Then she says no,” said Dory. ”And you’re sad for a bit. And then you’re still her friend, if she wants you to be, and you don’t lift any more trees.” She smiled. ”But she laughed so hard she lit the whole circle, Sig. I didn’t need to look to see that.”

Small Sigmund went very red.

Then he got up and went to find Tovi, who was waiting at the arch with her sister and Trevor, very politely, pretending not to wait.

I walked down to the arch myself, later. To fetch Corin back from it; he’d gone to see Tiri’s great-grandfather off.

Trevor and Teva were sitting on the low wall by the arch. Not close. A hand’s width apart. Not touching. Teva was shimmering, very softly, in the dusk, and Trevor was talking. Quietly. I couldn’t hear what. He had his hands out between them, flat, the way the children do now at the long table, and Teva had hers out too, beside his. And between their hands, on the wall, a little pile of sand.

He was showing her. What it was made of. The little things, holding hands.

And she was watching his hands, the way the Aldri watch. Very carefully. With her whole face.

I didn’t go any closer. I took Corin and went back up the hill.

Luna was on the porch. She’d seen too.

”Fourteen,” said Luna. Very quietly.

”I know.”

”He told me today,” said Luna, ”that she’s the first person who ever asked him what he could see. Instead of what he could do.” She looked down the hill toward the arch. ”He said that’s how he knew.”

Mother says it’s just the start. She says once one goes, they all go. She says she’ll need a bigger teapot.

Halvane came up the hill the week after, very tall, with his little silver box, and stood at the bottom of the porch steps looking at Trevor and small Sigmund on the rail. Very solemnly.

”The engineer’s daughters,” said Halvane. To Mother.

”Yes,” said Mother.

Halvane looked at her.

”I won’t say anything about treaties,” he said.

”Good,” said Mother.

”I’ll wait,” said Halvane. ”I’m very old.” He looked at Trevor, who’d gone very red again. ”But I’m going to enjoy watching.”

At the end of the table lesson that week, the last day of the autumn, Lio stayed behind.

Everyone else had gone. Trevor to walk Teva to the arch. Small Sigmund pretending he wasn’t following. Corin and Tiri to the porch rail for the lights. Oona to Mother. Kesh to make it rain on Oona.

Lio sat at the long table on her own, with her warm pebble in both hands. Looking at the wall behind the stove. At Grandad’s table. All the squares.

At the empty one at the end.

Dory sat down beside her.

”What are you looking at?” said Dory.

Lio pointed. At the empty square.

”What’s that one?”

”Nobody knows yet,” said Dory. ”It’s what’s in us. In you and me and Dad. The bit that sings back.”

Lio looked at the empty square.

”They put it in me,” she said. ”The houses. To make me tell.”

”Yes.”

”But it sings back,” said Lio. ”When the queens sing. I hear it. At night. In the heap.” She looked at Dory. ”It doesn’t sing to them. It sings to the queens.”

Dory didn’t say anything.

”So it’s not theirs,” said Lio. Very slowly. Working it out. ”Even if they put it in. It’s not theirs.”

”No,” said Dory. ”It’s yours.”

Lio looked at the pebble in her hands. Warm.

Then she got down from the table and went and found the chalk, which Bell leaves on the sill. And reached up, as high as she could, which wasn’t very high. Not high enough for the square.

Dory picked her up.

And Lio, very carefully, in the empty square at the end of Grandad’s wall, drew a knot.

Days 6705–6799. The Table.

Lio woke on the third morning with brown eyes and said ready. Not all of her came back: the silver they finished in her stays; you can’t ask atoms to be what they’ve never been. Sefa: can she still do her knot? Then she’s still her. Mother added Lio’s mother and father to the names. Lio fell asleep in the heap between Kesh and Oona and nobody moved her; I made Sefa three little terraces by the garden wall. She’s Lio, Sefa’s, Marrah, and ours. Dory, nearly seventeen, in Dusk, takes care of her, and asked her what she’d like to do with it. It’s full of little things holding hands; I didn’t know. The pebble went warm and she cried. Father showed me: I put water on the moon at four and he painted our kitchen wall into the periodic table and gave me his notebooks before he died. I never taught mine. I painted the kitchen wall behind the stove from memory, four nights, humming. Bell: I’ll teach the bits you weren’t told. Halvane: I’d very much like to have met him. Hydrogen with Hana; iron with Odra’s tongs and Ossel; silver, and Dory: that’s not what’s in us. Bell drew one empty square: when you know, write it in. Trevor at the rail: she’s beautiful. Teva; the oxygen liked her; it had very good taste. Luna: save something for later. Small Sigmund lifted the tree for Tovi; Dory wouldn’t look at Tovi’s heart for him: ask her with your mouth, like a person. Trevor showing Teva the sand on the wall by the arch. Halvane: I won’t say anything about treaties; I’m going to enjoy watching. Lio drew a knot in the empty square at the end of Grandad’s wall.