Scarecrow

The eldest wanted to answer.

Dory took the drawing to Root the morning after Lantern moved. She told me she’d thought about it all night. Whether to. She said the eldest had never had a letter, not in all the time there’s been, and she didn’t know what one would do to her. Whether it would be like the birthday, or like the planet, or like something else.

She took it anyway. She said she’d made a rule, a long time ago, about not deciding for the eldest what the eldest could bear.

She sat on the green ground at the top of the plateau, by the iron candle and the small round planet in its silver ring, and unrolled the drawing on the grass. A child’s drawing, on something that might be paper, very thin, very creased, from being folded small and sent out on the thinnest band there is. A round thing. Green on one side. Dark on the other. A ring of small shapes round it, in a careful line.

And one word, in the Collective’s script.

Ours?

The eldest didn’t say anything for a long time.

Dory says the grass leaned. All of it. Towards the drawing. The way it leaned towards the planet on the birthday.

A child made this, said the eldest.

“Yes,” said Dory.

Inside the Collective.

“Ilka thinks so. One of the big inner worlds. Near the front of the far hall.”

Where the man is who sent the ships.

“Yes.”

A long pause. The plateau got warmer. Very slightly.

What is the word, said the eldest.

Dory told her.

The eldest was quiet for so long that Dory thought she’d stopped listening. Dory says it’s happened before; the eldest goes very deep sometimes, down where the houses are, and you have to wait for her to come back up.

She came back up.

Tell the child yes, said the eldest.

That was the beginning of it. I’d like that written down. I think, later, when people ask where it started, someone will say Lantern, or the doorway, or the Assize, or the ban. But I think it was a child’s drawing on the grass on Root, and the eldest saying yes.

The trouble was how.

Ilka said she could send something back down the same band. She said it would be very hard and very slow and she couldn’t promise it would get there, because she didn’t know where there was. Somewhere inside the Collective, on one of a few thousand big worlds near the front. She said it was like putting a note in a bottle and hoping the sea took it back to the same beach.

“But it might,” said Ilka.

“Then we send it,” said Mother.

“Send what?” said Kesh.

Everyone looked at each other.

You can’t send a toy down a band. Asha explained that at some length. You can send words, and pictures, and sounds. That’s all. So it had to be a picture. A drawing, like the one that came.

And then there was the question of who should draw it.

Imre Oshan offered. She said she’d been drawing for three hundred years and she’d do it beautifully. The comic artists on Ister offered, all of them, at once, by letter, the day the long record put it in. Isar Thenn offered, from the filming, and said he couldn’t draw at all but he’d hold the pencil very well.

Mother said no to all of them.

“A child sent it,” said Mother. “A child answers it.”

So the children drew.

All of them. At the long table. In one long afternoon. With paper from Miss Pell’s school and the pencils Wren uses for the count. Mother said everyone could do one and then we’d choose, and nobody would mind which got chosen.

Everybody minded.

I’ll say what they drew, because I kept all of them. They’re in the drawer under the notebook. Kesh drew the eldest as a cake, with a candle, which Ash said was missing the point, and Kesh said she knew, but it was her point. Teo drew her with four arms coming out of the plateau, holding the queens’ ring, which nobody understood but Teo, and Teo didn’t explain. Elin drew her very carefully, with every queen on the ring labelled in her tiny writing, both scripts. Corin drew a lamp. Then rubbed it out. Then drew it again, very small, in the corner, where nobody would notice. Tiri noticed.

Linnet drew the eldest pink. All of her. The colour her frost-scales go when she’s happy. She said that was the colour the eldest felt like when she was being asked. Luna put that one on the wall of the north field barn and it’s still there.

Fen drew a teapot.

Just a teapot. Very carefully. With a chip in the spout. Hana asked him why, and he said because if he was a child inside the Collective and someone drew him the eldest he’d want to know who did the pouring.

Sorrel’s was the one.

Nobody chose it. It chose itself. She’d been very quiet all afternoon, which Sorrel isn’t, with her green ears going darker and darker, bent over her paper at the end of the table next to Dory, and she wouldn’t show anyone. And then at the end, when Mother said right, let’s see, she pushed it across the table, all the way, to the middle. And sat back. And waited.

It was the eldest. Round, the way the toy is. Green on one side, dark on the other, with the green coming over the dark at the edges. And the ring of queens round her. All of them. Sorrel had counted. The Scarecrow queen at the front, with thirty-one young, very tiny, in a dark green pencil that had nearly run out.

And underneath the eldest, holding her up with both hands, the way Dory held her up on the plateau on the birthday so she could see: a child.

Not any child. Not Sorrel. A child with no face. Just a shape. Just a small person, standing, arms up, holding the world.

And under that, in the Collective’s script, which Sorrel couldn’t write, so she’d asked Ilka on the way past that morning, and Ilka had written it on her hand, and Sorrel had copied it off her hand very carefully, one stroke at a time:

Yours.

Nobody said anything at the long table.

Then Mother picked it up. Very carefully. The way she picks up the pot.

“That one,” said Mother.

Nobody minded.

Ilka sent it that night.

From the Meridian, high over Avalon, with every Aldri ear turned the way the first drawing came. She says it took her four hours. She says she sent it slowly, in very small pieces, the way you’d lower something on a rope into a well you couldn’t see the bottom of. She says when it was gone, all of it, she sat back in the chair and didn’t feel anything for a long time, because there was nothing to feel. It had just gone. Into the dark. Towards a beach she didn’t know.

Eve made her tea. Asha sat with her. Nobody said it might not get there. Everyone knew.

Then we went back to waiting. We’re good at waiting, in this house. We’ve had practice.

The babies got bigger.

They do that. I’m told it’s the main thing they do. Halloway’s chart has a column for it, and the column goes up every week, and she shows it to me at the long table as if I’d done something wrong.

Luka can sit up on his own now, and crawl, slowly, very seriously, as if he’s measuring the floor. He’s still very warm. He reaches for everything, and the things he reaches for get warm, and Sera has had to move all the candles. He’s very quiet. He watches. Sera says he watches the way Rory planes doors, very slowly, over and over, until he’s got it right.

Kyrie can crawl. She rolled over at nine weeks, which Halloway says was too early, and crawled at four months, which Halloway says was worse, and the first place she ever crawled was off the edge of the blanket towards Holdfast, which was leaning against the end of her basket, and got one hand on the scabbard strap before Andraste caught her.

Andraste hasn’t moved Holdfast. She says if her daughter wants to crawl towards a sword, she can crawl towards a sword. Halloway says that’s how babies get hurt. Andraste says that’s how First Blades get made. Kyria, on her visits, sits in the chair with arms and watches Kyrie crawl towards the blade with an expression nobody has ever seen on her face before, which Taveth says is the expression of a grandmother trying very hard not to help.

And Queenie looks.

She looks at everything. All day. Behind her crooked glasses. She lies on her blanket in the sun on the porch and looks at the boards, and the rail, and the jam pot, and the cat that comes up from the town sometimes, and the sky. Dory sits with her most afternoons. Dory says she’s beginning to teach her. She says you can’t teach a baby anything, really. But you can show them.

So she shows her. She lies on the blanket next to Queenie, with her own glasses off and her own black eyes open, and looks at something. A leaf. A cup. Very hard. All the way down. Then she closes her eyes. And opens them. And looks at it again, softly, just at the outside. Just at the leaf.

“Leaf,” says Dory. Out loud. “Just a leaf.”

Queenie watches her do it. Every day.

Dory says one afternoon last week, Queenie looked at the jam pot, all the way down, the way she does. And then closed her eyes. And opened them. And looked at it again. And Dory says the second time, she didn’t go in.

Just the jam pot.

Dory came and found me on the north field to tell me. She was so pleased she couldn’t stand still.

“She did it,” said Dory. “Just once. Just for a second. But she did it.”

“You taught her.”

“I showed her,” said Dory. “She taught herself.” She looked back at the porch. “That’s what Mother says you did. When you were small. With the bread.”

The toymakers have made a jam pot.

I want to be clear that I’m not making this up. Imre Oshan wrote about the jam pot in a letter to her publisher, who told the toymakers, who made a very small soft jam pot, the size of a thumb, and sewed it into the hand of the soft Queenie. The new ones. The ones that came out this month.

Hana says it’s the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard. Hana also bought six.

The names, while I’m at it.

Halvane brought the record’s new count to the long table, the way he does now, sitting on the bench between Kesh and Teo, which he’s done every time since Maelis Orr, and which nobody mentions, because if anyone mentions it he might stop.

Queenie is still going in faster than anything. Over three thousand now. Kyrie and Kyria together are past a thousand. Luka is at two thousand and something. The keepers have stopped writing a boy who is warm in the meaning for Luka every time; Halvane says they’ve started writing see first entry, which he says is the first time in the history of the long record that the keepers have got tired of writing something.

And there have been nineteen Ebbs.

From Lantern’s people. On Avalon. On the eastern plain, in their Lenn-woven houses, with the lamp hooks by every door. They’ve started putting their names in the Aldri record too. Halvane says the keepers asked if that was allowed, since they’re not Aldri, and he said the record is for people who keep going, and Lantern kept going, and the keepers should open a new book.

The keepers have opened a new book.

Ebb is very embarrassed. His granddaughter says he’s been telling everyone he hasn’t done anything, he only poured a cup of tea out on the ground. And then she says everyone tells him that’s exactly why.

Then a ship came to the edge of the Hedge.

Not a white ship. I want that said first, because when the Aldri ears picked it up at the Watch, everyone on the hill went very still, and Andraste picked up Holdfast, and Risa went up on the roof, and Dory took her glasses off.

It wasn’t white. It was brown. Patched. Small. The kind of ship the small worlds use, that’s been flown by four generations and mended by all of them. It came in on the old band, the one the small worlds speak on, very slowly, very carefully, and it stopped at the very edge of the Hedge, past Tiel, in the empty dark where Lantern’s old sun used to be.

And it called.

Not to Avalon. Not to Ister. To nobody. The way you’d call into a house you weren’t sure anyone lived in.

Is anyone there, it said. In the Collective’s tongue. And then in the small worlds’ tongue. And then, very badly, in ours. I am a trader. I have come from inside. I would like to buy toys.

Okafor sent me. She said someone should go, and if it was a trap, I was the one it would hurt least.

I took Dory, because Dory can look at a ship all the way down and know what’s in it before it opens. And Aune, in her fighter, because Aune said a ship that comes to the edge in the dark gets a pilot on its wing whether it likes it or not.

We were beside it in a breath. In the dark. Where the red sun had been.

Dory looked.

“One,” said Dory. “One person. Old. Very tired.” She looked further. “And crates. Empty ones. Hundreds.” She looked further still. Then she put her glasses back on. “And a soft one of you. On the shelf above the controls. Very worn.”

His name is Mattick.

He’s from a world called Carrow, which is one of the big inner ones, a few hundred places from the front of the far hall. He’s very old for his people, who are short and broad and grey-brown, with heavy hands and very kind faces, the way a lot of the trading peoples have. He’s been a trader all his life. His father was. His grandmother was. He says the ship’s older than all three of them.

He opened the hatch before we’d asked. He stood in it, with his heavy hands open at his sides, and looked at me floating in the dark beside his hull. And at Dory. And at Aune’s fighter, very close, on his wing.

He didn’t say anything for a while.

Then he said: “It’s really you.”

“It’s really me,” I said.

He nodded. Slowly. Several times. Then he said: “I’ve brought crates.”

We brought him in. Through the Lantern arch, which is nearest, and up the hill. He walked. He said he’d sat in a ship for forty days coming out and he’d like to walk.

He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps. Everyone does.

Mother looked at him. The long table looked at him. He was the first person from inside the Collective to come up the hill who wasn’t a ship, a voice, a litigator, a seal or the Prime’s son. Just a man. With crates.

“You’ll want tea,” said Mother.

Mattick looked at her for a long time.

“You’re the woman with the pot,” said Mattick.

“I am.”

“My granddaughter has you,” said Mattick. “The soft one. With the chip.” His voice went odd. “She hides you under the floor. In a box. With the others. She takes you out at night and gives you tea from a cup that isn’t there.”

Mother didn’t say anything.

She came down the steps. And took his arm. And brought him up. And put him on the bench between Kesh and Teo, where Halvane had been, and Halvane moved over without being asked.

And poured.

He told us at the long table. All of it. Very slowly, because he was tired, and because he wasn’t used to the language, and because he kept stopping to look at things. At the bread. At the windowsill. At the small Scarecrow queen. At the three babies on the blanket on the porch.

He said the ban had done what bans do.

He said before, on Carrow, the toys from Ister were a thing a few children had. Traders’ children, mostly, whose parents went out to the edge and brought back strange things. A soft one here and there. A comic, read until it fell apart.

Then the voice came on every band and said they were forbidden.

“And then every child wanted one,” said Mattick. “Every child. On every world. Even the ones who’d never heard of you. Especially them.”

He said the Collective started checking. Homes. Schools. Ships coming in. He said they’d found a great many. He said they took them away.

“What did they do with them?” said Sorrel.

Mattick looked at her. At her green ears. For a long time.

“They burned them,” said Mattick. “In the squares. Where everyone could see.”

Sorrel’s ears went flat.

“So the children hid them,” said Mattick. “Under floors. In walls. In the roots of trees. My granddaughter hides hers under the floor of her room. She has five. You, and the woman with the pot, and the girl with the net, and the warm baby, and the one with the sword who shouts.” He looked at Andraste. “Yours.”

Andraste didn’t say anything.

“They burned her friend’s,” said Mattick. “Last month. In the square. The child had to watch. The child’s father was taken away for a while. He came back. But not the toy.”

He put his cup down.

“So I came,” said Mattick. “With crates. For the ones they burned.”

Nobody said anything for a long time.

The cruelty of it. I’d like to say I was surprised. I wasn’t. I’ve seen the Collective put a world on its list and send ships. I’ve seen the Refined keep queens on frames because it’s respectful. I know what they’re like. But a child in a square, made to watch, while her soft one burned.

I looked at Sorrel. Sorrel was holding her soft one of me against her chest so tight that the stitching on the coat had started to come apart.

“Is she all right?” said Sorrel. Very small. “The girl. Whose toy they burned.”

“I don’t know,” said Mattick. “I don’t know her. I only know her name.”

“What is it?”

Mattick told her.

Sorrel wrote it down. On her hand. The way she’d written Yours.

Halvane stood up. Off the bench. For the first time since he started sitting on it.

“Ister will fill your crates,” said Halvane. “Every one. Free. Not as a gift. As a debt we’ve owed the small worlds for eleven thousand years, for every time we ran past them.” He looked at Mattick. “And then we’ll fill them again. As many times as you can carry.”

“They’ll stop me,” said Mattick. “At the edge. Sooner or later.”

“Then someone else will come,” said Halvane. “Someone always does. That’s what the long record’s for.”

Okafor was less sure.

She talked to me about it that night. On the porch. With her slate. She’d written one word on it and rubbed it out and written it again.

“It’s a provocation,” said Okafor. “You know that. Ister’s toys, carried into member space, in the face of a ban, by a member world’s own trader. With your face on them. The Collective could call it an act of war.”

“It’s toys,” I said.

“It’s never just toys,” said Mother. From the kitchen door.

We both looked at her.

“When I was a girl,” said Mother, “on Earth, in the orphan halls on the forty-first floor, there was a man who came up the stairs from floor to floor with a bag. He sold buttons. And thread. And sometimes, for children, little wooden animals he’d carved.” She came out onto the porch and sat down. “They said he was a nuisance. Then they said he was dangerous. Then they said nobody was to buy from him. And everybody did. Every floor. Harriet Pell saved for a month and bought me a wooden hen, because nobody else was ever going to.”

“What happened to him?”

“He kept climbing,” said Mother. “They couldn’t stop him. You can’t stop a man with buttons. Everyone needs buttons.” She looked at Okafor. “And when it came to it, years later, when it was the floors against the people who’d said he was dangerous, every floor knew which side it was on. Because they’d all been buying his hens.”

Okafor looked at her slate for a long time.

Then she rubbed out the word she’d written and wrote a different one.

Buttons.

Sorrel didn’t sleep the night before he left.

Dory told me. She said she woke at the turn and the heap was warm and everyone was breathing in it except Sorrel, who was sitting up at the end, by the window, with her soft one of me in her lap, holding it by both hands, looking at it.

“They burned hers,” said Sorrel. When Dory came and sat beside her. “In the square. And she had to watch.”

“I know.”

“If they burned mine,” said Sorrel, “I’d still have you. And Mum. And the real Dad. And Gran.” Her ears went very flat. “She hasn’t got any of us. She’s only got the soft ones. And now she hasn’t even got that.”

Dory didn’t say anything. Dory says there wasn’t anything to say. She says she just sat with her, the way Mother sits with the grey ones.

Then Sorrel held the soft one out.

“Can it go in a crate?” said Sorrel.

Dory says she tried to say no. She says she said Ister was going to fill every crate, hundreds of them, with new ones. That nobody needed Sorrel’s. That Sorrel could keep hers.

“New ones aren’t the same,” said Sorrel. “This one’s been in the heap. It’s been on Root on the birthday. It’s been in your lap when you sang. It’s got all of us on it.” She looked at it. At the coat she’d nearly pulled the stitching out of, at the long table. “If it’s in a crate, then she gets one that’s been here. She gets one that’s real.”

Dory says she didn’t have an answer to that. She says nobody would.

So in the morning, at the red glass, before Mattick went, Sorrel walked up to his patched brown ship with her soft one of me under her arm and asked if she could put it in a crate herself.

Mattick knelt down. Very slowly, the way old people with heavy hands do.

“It’s yours,” he said. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” said Sorrel. “It’s for the girl. Whose they burned. Can you find her?”

“I can try,” said Mattick.

Sorrel put it in the crate. At the top. And then she wrote the girl’s name on a piece of paper, carefully, in the Collective’s script, copied off her own wrist, and pinned it to the soft one’s coat.

Then she went and stood next to Dory and held her hand very tight and didn’t cry.

Dory did, a bit. She says that’s allowed when you’re twenty-two and someone half your size has just been braver than you.

Then Fen came.

Nobody had asked him. He walked up to the crate with his soft one of me, the one that came for the smallest one who hums, and put it in beside Sorrel’s, and went back to Hana without a word, humming, very low.

Then Linnet, with hers. The one with the red glass sewn in its hand, from the Lantern child on the north fence. She said a Lantern child had given it to her, so it should go on to someone else, because that’s how it had come.

Then Kesh, with a comic, which she said she’d read so many times she knew it by heart and didn’t need it any more. Then Teo, with a small wooden Holdfast he’d carved himself, very roughly, with his two small hands, and which nobody had known he’d made. Then Corin, with nothing, and then, after a long moment, the comb from his pocket. The one from the long hall. The one Dory had carried in her fist.

Dory looked at it. And at him.

“It’s a good comb,” said Corin. Red to the ears. “Someone might need it.”

Mattick stood by his crate for a long time after the children had gone back up the red glass to their mothers.

Then he closed the lid. Very gently. The way Mother closes the oven.

“I’ll find her,” said Mattick. To me. Not to Sorrel. “The girl. I don’t know how yet. I’ll find her.”

Mattick told me one more thing. Before he went back.

At the red glass. By the Lantern arch. With his crates full and stacked in his patched brown ship at the edge of the Hedge, and Aune’s fighter waiting on his wing to take him as far as the Watch. He held me back, with one heavy hand on my arm.

“The Prime,” said Mattick. “You should know. People are saying.”

“Saying what?”

“He hasn’t been seen,” said Mattick. “Not in person. Not for a long time. Months. He used to walk in the square on Carrow on the first day of every year, with his son, so everyone could see the family. He didn’t come this year. Only the voice. On the bands.”

“It’s still his voice?”

Mattick thought about it.

“It’s his voice,” said Mattick. “It’s his words. It sounds like him.” He frowned. “But my granddaughter says it doesn’t. She says it sounds like him the way the soft one sounds like you. Right on the outside. Nothing on the inside.”

He let go of my arm.

“She’s seven,” said Mattick. “She’s probably wrong.”

Dory listened to the Prime’s last broadcast that night. Ilka had it on the Meridian. All of them, every one since Lantern. Dory sat in Ilka’s chair with the ears on and her glasses off and listened to every one, in order, for three hours.

She came down to the roof afterwards. Where I was.

“It’s him,” said Dory.

“Mattick’s granddaughter says it doesn’t sound like him.”

“It’s him,” said Dory again. Slowly. “It’s his voice. I’ve heard it. I sat in the white room and looked all the way down him. It’s him.” She sat down on the slates. “But there’s something under it.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” said Dory. “I can’t hear it. Not properly. It’s like a sound in another room, under the sound in this one. Like when Queenie’s asleep in the next room and you can’t hear her breathing but you know she is.” She pulled her knees up. “It’s very quiet. I only noticed because the seven-year-old told me to listen for it.”

She was quiet for a long time.

“It might be nothing,” said Dory.

She’d said that once already. About the thing past the Watch. On the red glass. The night Lantern moved.

Neither of us said so.

Ilka came down the next morning. Before the count. With a slate in her hand and her face very strange.

She’d been listening to the thin band all night. The one the drawing came on. The one Sorrel’s went down.

Something had come back.

Not a word. Not a picture. A sound.

Ilka played it for us at the long table. Through the Meridian’s ears, very small, very far. It took a moment to know what it was.

It was a child. Laughing.

Just that. About as long as it takes to say good morning. A child, very far away, inside the Collective, on a world near the front of the far hall, laughing. The way Sorrel laughs. The way you laugh when you’ve been very frightened for a long time, and then somebody sends you exactly the right thing.

Then it stopped.

Sorrel had her hands over her mouth.

“She got it,” said Sorrel. Through her fingers. “She got it. She got it.”

Nobody at the long table said anything for a long time.

Then Mother picked up the pot. And poured. And turned the handle round for Oona.

“Well,” said Mother. “That’s one.”

The other things. Quickly.

Mattick made it to the Watch, with the children’s crate on top. Aune took him that far and watched him go in, very slowly, his brown ship patched and heavy with Ister’s crates. She says he flashed his lights at her twice before he went out of range. She says that’s what the small worlds’ traders do, at the edge of a place they mean to come back to.

He’s coming back. He said so. Halvane says the crates will be waiting.

Sorrel has written the name of the girl whose toy they burned on the inside of her wrist, in ink, every morning. She says she’s going to keep writing it until somebody tells her the girl’s all right. Dory’s asked Ilka to listen for it. Ilka says she will.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Two hundred and eighty-two.

Bell’s still doing the sum. She says the hesitation’s real. She says she’s watched the recording of Lantern’s old sun forty times and every time the dark stops for exactly that long, at exactly the end. She says she doesn’t know why yet. She says she will.

The houses are still thinking.

Okafor’s slate says Buttons. She hasn’t rubbed it out.

Days 9442–9501. Ours.

Dory took the drawing to Root; a rule about not deciding what the eldest can bear. The grass leaned. A child made this, inside, where the man is who sent the ships. Tell the child yes. I think that was the beginning of it. Ilka: a note in a bottle to a beach I don’t know; Mother: then we send it; a child sent it, a child answers it. The children drew all afternoon and everyone minded: Kesh’s cake; Teo’s four arms; Elin’s labels; Corin’s lamp, rubbed out and drawn again small; Linnet’s pink eldest, on the barn wall; Fen’s teapot, because he’d want to know who did the pouring. Sorrel’s chose itself: the eldest held up by a child with no face; and under it, copied stroke by stroke off Ilka’s hand: Yours. Mother: that one. Ilka sent it in pieces down a well with no bottom. The babies got bigger: Luka warms what he reaches for; Kyrie crawled at four months, towards Holdfast; Kyria trying very hard not to help; Dory showing Queenie a leaf, just a leaf; and once, the jam pot, just the jam pot; she taught herself. A soft jam pot sewn into the new soft Queenie’s hand; Hana bought six. Halvane on the bench every time now; Queenie past three thousand; Luka: see first entry; nineteen Ebbs; the keepers opened a new book. A brown patched ship at the edge where the red sun was: I would like to buy toys. Mattick of Carrow: one man, old, tired, hundreds of empty crates, a worn soft me over the controls. It’s really you. You’re the woman with the pot; my granddaughter hides you under the floor. The ban made every child want one; they burned them in the squares; a friend made to watch; for the ones they burned. Sorrel wrote the girl’s name on her hand. Halvane: Ister will fill your crates, as a debt. Sorrel’s own soft one went in a crate, because new ones aren’t the same; then Fen’s, Linnet’s, Kesh’s comic, Teo’s wooden Holdfast, and Corin’s comb from the long hall; Mattick: I’ll find her. Okafor: a provocation; Mother: it’s never just toys; the button man and the wooden hen; you can’t stop a man with buttons. The slate: Buttons. Mattick: the Prime hasn’t been seen; only the voice; my granddaughter says it sounds like him the way the soft one sounds like you. Dory, after three hours: it’s him; but something’s under it, like a sound in another room. On the thin band, a child laughing, as long as it takes to say good morning. Sorrel: she got it. Mother: that’s one. Mattick flashed twice at the Watch. Sorrel writes the name on her wrist every morning. Bell: the hesitation is real. Two hundred and eighty-two, all saying not yet.