Scarecrow

I left something out of the notebook, for a reason, which I will explain.

I’d like to say that first. Because I’ve written everything in here for a long time. The bad things and the good, the losses and the counts, the names. I’ve never left anything out on purpose before.

I left this out on purpose.

I’m putting it in now because it doesn’t matter any more whether it’s written down. Everyone on Ister knows. Or knows enough. And if the notebook’s ever read by someone who shouldn’t read it, it’s too late for them to do anything with it that the red hair hasn’t already done.

So.

Arreth moved to Ister.

It was after the Assize. After the recording and the postponement, in the weeks when we were waiting to see what the Collective would do. Before Lantern. Before the decree. Before Luka had a name.

She asked Dory. At the dawn count. Through the red glass, the way she’d been humming under it with Ysse, one long note each, since the day we laid the sixty down on her grass.

My world is empty, said Arreth.

Dory told me afterwards she’d known it was coming. She’d felt it for weeks. The way you feel someone at a table who hasn’t said anything yet.

My people are on your glass, said Arreth. Under your hills, with your grandmothers. They are happy. They are not coming back. There is nothing on my world for them to come back to. The Refined took four years from me. I am holding a world with no one on it.

A pause. Very long.

I do not know how to hold nothing, said Arreth. I was not made for it.

It was the eldest who said Ister.

Dory took it to her. On the plateau, the next morning. And the eldest was quiet for a long time, and then said something none of us had ever thought about. Not once. Not in all the years.

There is a world, said the eldest, that has never had anyone under it.

I didn’t know. I want that understood. I’d been to Ister a hundred times. I’d walked its plazas and eaten in its halls and sat with Ilas in the old house in the third city. I’d felt its ground under my feet. And I’d never once asked who was holding it.

Nobody was.

Ister never had a queen. Not ever. Halvane told us, at the long table, the night Dory brought it home. He said the Aldri had known. They’d always known. He said every world they’d lived on since they left the first one, in eleven thousand years of running, had been empty underneath. They’d chosen them that way. Because a world with a queen in it has a reason to stay, and the Aldri never stayed. A world with nothing under it, you can leave without saying goodbye to anyone.

“We built our engines on worlds no one held,” said Halvane. “So we’d never have to ask anyone if we could go.”

He looked at his hands.

“It’s the saddest thing about us,” said Halvane. “I’ve never said it out loud.”

So Halvane asked Ister.

Not the people. Ister. There wasn’t anyone else to ask. He stood in the oldest part of the third city, on the bare rock under the pilots’ wall, where Aune took me to see Ceren’s name, and put his hand flat on it, the way Dory does, the way the Kasrai do, and said, in Aldri, very quietly, to a world that had never had anyone to say it to:

Would you like someone to hold you?

Dory was beside him. She says the rock didn’t answer. Ister can’t answer. There’s no one in it to answer with.

But she says it got very slightly warmer.

Then Halvane asked the oldest of Ister’s cities. The nine who speak for them when the Speaker needs to know what the cities think. They came to the old house in the third city in the night, nine very old Aldri in grey, and stood in Ilas’s front room, because the Aldri don’t sit for important things, and Halvane told them.

They said yes. All nine. Halvane says it took them less time than any question he’s ever put to them in four hundred years.

And then the oldest of the nine said: Tell no one.

That was the hard part. I’d like to be honest about it.

Arreth had been on a frame. The Refined had cut her, and pinned her, and drained her for four years, in a hall with sixty of her sisters dead on racks round her, and when I came and took the silver out of the twelve who were doing it, one of them had looked at me and said why do you care, they’re only queens, there are always more.

There are always more. That’s what they think. That’s what they’d come for.

If the Refined knew where Arreth had gone, they’d want her back. She’s the one that got away. She’s the one I took from them. And she’d be inside Ister, the world that had already been to the Assize with me, the world whose Speaker had stood in the far hall and said we’ve stopped running.

“They would come,” said the oldest of the nine. “And then it would be war. And we don’t want war. Not if we can help it. Not yet.”

“Not ever,” said Halvane.

“Not ever, if we can help it,” said the oldest of the nine. “So we help it. We tell no one.”

So we told no one.

Halvane. The nine. Ilas, because Halvane doesn’t keep things from Ilas, he says he tried once a hundred years ago and it was the worst week of his life. Aune, because she was standing in the room. And us. The house. Mother and the wives and the children who were old enough to keep a thing. Dory, who’d have to carry her.

Not Okafor. Not Varra. Not Kyria, even. Not because we didn’t trust them. Because a secret is a thing that gets heavier every time you hand it to someone, and they were carrying enough.

Not the notebook.

We moved her on a night with no moon.

The queens sang her along the thread. The way they sang the children along the rope to Earth. Dory held the far end, at Arreth’s dead world, on the other side of the Collective’s web, past its centre, where it’s thin. And I held the near end, on Ister, on the bare rock under the pilots’ wall, with Halvane beside me and his hand on the stone.

And the queens sang. Every queen under Avalon. The Scarecrow queen at the front. And Ysse, from Ithre, who’d hummed with Arreth under the red glass for all those months, and who sang the loudest, Dory says, the way you’d sing someone out of a house you’d shared.

And Arreth came.

I can’t describe it properly. I’ve tried, here, three times, and crossed it out.

It was like a very large, very tired thing coming home after a long way. Down the thread, slowly, all of her, every bit of her, with the sixty dead queens’ silver held inside her where she’d taken it on her grass. Through the dark. Into the rock. Down, under the third city, under the pilots’ wall, under all of it. Deeper than the Aldri have ever dug. Into the middle of a world that had been empty since it was made.

And then she stopped.

And I felt Ister, under my hands, for the first time.

Not the rock. Ister. The whole of it. As if there’d been a room in a house I’d lived in for years that I’d never known was there, and somebody had just come in and lit the lamp.

Halvane was on his knees.

I’d never seen him kneel. Aune says he’d knelt once in eleven thousand years, and that was to the eldest. That was twice.

He had both his hands flat on the rock.

“Oh,” said Halvane. Very quietly. In our language. “Oh. There you are.”

That’s what Mother says. When a child comes. There you are, love. I don’t think he knew he was saying it. He’d heard her say it at the long table enough times.

Thank you, said Arreth. Under all of it. Very far down. Through Dory, who’d come along the thread behind her and was standing beside us now, white as the rock. It is very quiet in here. No one has ever been in here.

“I know,” said Halvane.

It will take a long time, said Arreth. To hold all of it. It has never been held. It does not know how.

“Neither did we,” said Halvane.

And then we went home, and didn’t say anything, and that was all. For a long time.

Mother pours a cup for her every morning now. Not at the red glass. At the Ister arch. She goes down after the count with the pot and pours one out on the stones by the arch, the way she does for Ysse, and nobody who sees her knows why, and nobody asks, because Mother pours for a great many things.

I didn’t write it down. I’ve told you why.

Now I’ll write the rest. Because the rest is why I can.

Halvane came to the long table with a painting.

It was the week after Luka’s birthday. He came up the hill on his own, early, before the count, which he doesn’t do, and he was carrying something wrapped in grey cloth under his arm, very carefully, the way you’d carry a sleeping child.

He sat down on the bench. Between Kesh and Teo. Teo moved two of his arms.

And he unwrapped it on the long table. Between the jam pot and the honey.

It was very old.

Older than anything I’d ever seen. Older than the oldest page of the long record, Halvane said; older than the running. It was a panel of something like wood, very dark, cracked in a hundred places and mended in a hundred more, with a picture on it in colours that had faded nearly to nothing.

It was Aldri. A family. Tall, the way they are, long faces and long hands, standing in a row in a field under a sky that wasn’t Ister’s. A field with something growing in it, gold. And a sun that was yellow and very large.

And their hair was red.

Not all of them. Most. Not the red of Luka’s hair, or Sera’s, the Calder red. Something deeper. Darker. Like the red of the eldest’s plains in the evening. Like copper that’s been in the weather. On the tall man in the middle and the woman beside him and two of the three children.

Mother put the pot down.

“Where’s that from?” said Mother.

“From before,” said Halvane. “From the first world. The one we left. The one with the lamp.” He put one long finger, very gently, beside the red hair of the smallest child, not touching it. “It’s the oldest thing we have. It’s been in the keepers’ vault in the second city since the first jump. They take it out once every hundred years and look at it and put it back.”

He looked up.

“We were red,” said Halvane. “Once. A long time ago. Before we started running.”

Ilas had come up behind him. Slowly. On her stick. I hadn’t heard her.

“My grandmother used to say that,” said Ilas. “When I was small. In the deepest city. She said her grandmother’s grandmother had a red braid. I thought it was a story.”

“It was a story,” said Halvane. “It stopped being one.” He looked at the painting. “The keepers say the red went out of us a little every jump. A little every generation. Like a lamp running down. By the time of the deepest cities, it was gone. Nobody had been born red in nine thousand years.” He stopped. “Until this spring.”

Nobody said anything.

“The forty,” said Dory. Very quietly.

“There are more than forty now,” said Halvane.

He told us the rest.

The forty Lukas had been the first. All of them born in the spring, all of them red, all of them, the mothers swore, without a drop of dye. Then a few more. Girls too. Children named Luka first, mostly. Then children named other things. Two hundred, by the summer. A thousand by the time of Luka’s candle.

And then the other thing.

“Halloway,” said Halvane. “I’d like Halloway to come to Ister. To the second city. To the children’s hall. If she will. Today.”

“Why?” said Hana.

Halvane looked at her for a long time.

“Because a baby in the second city,” said Halvane, “said her own name for the first time last night. The way our children do. The way we count them.” He stopped. “And every lamp in the street went out. And came back on. Brighter.”

Halloway went. With Abena. And Dory. And me.

The children’s hall in the second city is where the Aldri take their children when they’re not well, or when they’ve done something nobody understands. It’s very old and very quiet and has tall windows all along one side that look out over the plaza, where the great wall is, where the film was.

The baby was in a room at the end. With her mother. She was about the age Kyrie is. Very tall already, the way Aldri babies are, long and thin, with a long serious face.

She had red hair.

Not much. A little soft fuzz of it, at the crown. Copper. The colour of the painting.

Her mother was holding her very tightly. She was a pilot. One of Aune’s squadron, it turned out; she’d flown on the north side at Root. She stood up when we came in, because the Aldri stand, and then sat down again, because she was too frightened to stand, and Halloway put a hand on her shoulder and said sit, love, which she’s never said to anyone before in her life. She’s picked it up from Mother. We all have.

“Her name,” said the pilot. “She said it. Last night. For the first time.” She looked at the baby. “She said Dory.”

The baby’s name is Dory.

Of course it is. There are eleven thousand four hundred and six of them, and more since. She’s one of the eleven thousand. Her mother named her in the first week after the Dory count came out, and she’d been calling her Dory every day since, and the baby had been listening, the way babies do, and last night, at bedtime, she’d opened her mouth and said it back.

Dory.

And every lamp in the street went out. And came back on. Brighter.

“Like she’d asked them,” said the pilot. “Like she’d asked them to.”

Dory knelt down by the bed.

Very slowly. With her glasses off. And looked at the baby who was named after her. All the way down.

I watched her face. I know Dory’s face. I’ve known it since she was very small and I was very young and neither of us knew anything.

I watched her get to the silver.

“It’s there,” said Dory. Very quietly. “Dad. It’s there. In her. Silver. Not much. A thread. But it’s there.” She looked closer. “It’s not ours. It’s not Sorn. It’s not Hearth.” She stopped. “It’s Arreth’s.”

I felt it too. When I looked.

It was Arreth’s. Unmistakably. The way you’d know your mother’s handwriting. It had the shape of her. And under the shape of her, very faint, very old, the sixty. The sixty queens she’d taken into her on her grass. Their silver. Held. Kept. Given.

She was giving it away.

To the children. To Ister’s children. The ones being born now. On the world she’d come to hold.

Dory went down to her that night.

Under the third city. To the bare rock under the pilots’ wall. Halvane with her, and me. She put her hand on the stone.

And asked.

Yes, said Arreth. Before Dory had finished. It is me.

“The silver,” said Dory. “In the children.”

Yes.

“And the red.”

A long pause. The rock got very slightly warmer.

The red was always there, said Arreth. In them. Very deep. Very small. Asleep. The way a seed is asleep in a jar on a shelf for a hundred years. A pause. No one had ever held them. You cannot wake a thing in someone you are not holding. I am holding them now. So it woke.

“Why the Lukas first?” said Dory.

Arreth was quiet for a long time.

They are said with the most love, said Arreth. The name. Every day. In every house. Over and over. By mothers who chose it because they wanted their child to be warm. A pause. When a name is said that way, it goes into the child. Like rain into the hill. I can feel where it has gone. It makes a warm place. The warm places woke first.

She stopped.

And something else is in the name, said Arreth. Something of the one it is named for. A little. Very little. Your brother, the warm one. He does not know he does it. You do not know you do it. None of your house knows. But when someone is named for you in love, you reach back down the name. Without meaning to. The way you reach for the old ones in your house in the night and keep them from being tired.

Dory went very still.

“We don’t do that,” said Dory.

You do, said Arreth. Ask your grandmother how old she is. Then look at her.

Dory didn’t say anything on the way back.

Neither did I.

I’ll come back to that. I don’t know how to write it yet. I’ve put it at the back of the notebook. On its own page. With nothing under it.

The trouble, then, was the secret.

You can’t hide a thousand red-haired babies. You can’t hide a lamp going out and coming back brighter in a street in the second city, with a hundred people in their doorways watching. By the end of the week there’d been six more. A boy in the third city who said his name, Luka, and the kettle on his mother’s stove boiled. A girl in the deepest city who said Queenie and every window in her house went dark, all at once, like glasses, and then clear again. A boy who said Asker and the dust in the room stood up in the air in a shape nobody could read and then lay down again, very neatly, in rows.

Ister started asking.

The eating hall woman asked Aune. The keepers asked Halvane. The children’s hall asked Halloway. Imre Oshan asked me, at the long table, very quietly, while Mother was pouring, and I said I couldn’t tell her, and she looked at me for a long time and said she’d guessed, and she wouldn’t write it, and I believed her.

And on the thin band, Ilka said, very far away, somewhere inside the Collective, somebody had started asking too. About Ister. About the lamps.

Halvane called the nine again. And this time he called the long table too. At the old house in the third city, with Ilas’s front room full of very old Aldri standing in grey and Mother in the one chair, because Ilas put her in it.

“We can’t keep it,” said Halvane. “Not the children. They’re everywhere. They’re going to be everywhere. In ten years, every child on Ister will have silver in them.”

“Then we don’t keep the children,” said the oldest of the nine. “We keep the queen.”

Everybody looked at her.

“They can know the children are changing,” said the oldest of the nine. “They can know it’s good. They can know it’s because Ister is being held, now, after all this time, and that the one who holds it is kind.” She looked round the room. “What they don’t need to know is who. Or where she came from. Or what was done to her. That stays here.”

“Can the Aldri keep a thing like that?” said Kyria. Who was there by then, because we’d told her. Because by then it was too heavy not to.

The oldest of the nine looked at her. A long way down.

“We kept the long record,” she said, “through eleven thousand years of running. Every name. Every child. Through every jump. With the dark behind us and nothing ahead. We never lost a page.” A pause. “We can keep one name more.”

So that’s what they did.

Halvane spoke to Ister. On the great wall in the second city, the way the Speaker does, very rarely, when the whole of Ister needs to hear something at once. A million in the plaza, and every other plaza on every other city, and every house. I watched it from the back.

He told them the children were changing.

He told them the red was the old red. From the first world. From the painting in the keepers’ vault, which he had brought out and set up on the great wall beside him, so everyone could see: the tall family in the gold field under the yellow sun, with the copper in their hair.

He told them the silver was a gift.

He told them it was because, for the first time since there had been Aldri, the world they lived on was being held.

He didn’t say by whom.

And then he asked them not to speak of it. Not off Ister. Not on the bands. Not to traders. Not to anyone who came through the arches who wasn’t Aldri or Dask. He said it the way he said we’ve stopped running, in the far hall, at the Assize. Very quietly. As if it were the most important thing he’d ever said.

He said: Someone is holding us. Let’s not tell the people who’d want to take her away.

Nobody’s told.

That’s the thing I want written down. A whole world of Aldri. Every one of them knows that someone’s under Ister now, holding it, giving their children silver and the old red. Not one of them has said so off Ister. Not one, in all the months since.

Ilka listens. Every night. On every band. She says she’s heard the Aldri talk about everything else. The film. The toys. The war that’s coming. Not that.

The keepers have put it in the long record. In a book that never leaves the vault. A single page. Ilas says she’s seen it. She says it doesn’t have a name on it. Just a meaning.

The one who holds us.

The toymakers wanted to make her. Of course they did.

They wrote to Halvane. Very respectfully. They’d learned. They asked if they could make a soft one of whoever was holding Ister, for the children, so the children would have someone to hold back.

Halvane said no.

The toymakers wrote back. They said they understood. Then they asked if they could make something else instead. Something that wouldn’t tell anyone anything.

Halvane said that would depend what.

They made a soft Ister.

Just the world. The size of a melon, like the eldest. Grey and silver, the way Ister looks from the dark. With the cities on it, very small, in gold thread. And nothing else. No queen on a ring. No candle. No teapot.

But when you hold it, it’s warm. Very slightly. They’ve put something in it. Like the warm pad in the soft Luka, but smaller, and deep in the middle, where you can’t see it.

The card in the box says: Somebody is holding this one too.

That’s all.

They sold out in an afternoon. Halvane bought one. He keeps it on the long table in the old house, Ilas says, and puts his hand on it at night.

Sera took Luka to meet one.

She’d said she wouldn’t. She said it wasn’t right, taking him to be looked at, he wasn’t a figure on a shelf. Then the letter came. From a mother in the third city. Very short, in careful Aldri letters that Aune read out at the long table. It said her son was one of the forty. The first forty. The red ones. And that he’d said his name the week before, Luka, and the cup of milk in her hand had gone warm, and she didn’t know what that meant, and she was frightened, and would the warm one’s mother come.

Sera went the next day.

I went with her. We sat on the floor of a small round room in the third city, on a soft grey rug, with the Aldri mother very straight on her knees across from us, and her baby on the rug between them. Very long, the way Aldri babies are. Very serious. With a soft cap of copper hair. And our Luka, sturdy and square and red as the Calders, sitting up on his own, looking at him.

They looked at each other for a long time.

Then the Aldri Luka reached out one long thin hand. And our Luka reached out his square one. And they touched. Just their fingers.

The rug went warm. All of it. In a ring round them. Not hot. Like a hearth that’s been lit an hour.

The Aldri mother made a small sound and put her hand over her mouth.

“It’s all right,” said Sera. Very gently. “That’s all it is. That’s all it does, love. It keeps you warm.” She looked at the two of them. “Mine’s done it since the day he was born. It’s never once hurt anybody. It just means he’s glad you’re there.”

The Aldri mother looked at her for a long time.

“Will mine be like that?” she said.

“Yours already is,” said Sera.

The two boys were still holding fingers. Neither of them was crying. Neither of them was laughing. They were just looking at each other, very seriously, in a warm ring on a grey rug, like two old men who’d met by a fire.

Sera says it’s the first friend Luka’s ever made. She says she’s going to take him back every month. The Aldri mother has already written to say the rug’s never been the same, and she’s never going to wash it.

And then there was the dye.

I’ll put this down because it made Halloway angrier than anything since the dark glasses, and because it was the best thing that could have happened.

The second city started dyeing their babies’ hair red.

Not the ones who were born red. The ones who weren’t. Aune says it started the week after Halvane spoke. A few mothers. Then a lot. Then everyone. Copper. The colour of the painting. On Aldri babies in the plaza, in the halls, on the trains. Because they wanted to look like the old Aldri. Because it was beautiful. Because if your neighbour’s child was born with the old red and yours wasn’t, you didn’t want yours to feel left out.

Halloway wrote to the eating hall woman again and said it would ruin their scalps. The eating hall woman wrote back and said she’d passed it on and the second city had said thank you, they’d use the gentle kind.

And then Ilka came down from the Meridian one morning, smiling, which she doesn’t do much, and said she’d heard a trader on the thin band, inside the Collective, telling another trader that the Aldri had gone mad. That they’d all started dyeing their children’s hair red, for no reason, the whole planet, it was some kind of fad, it was the most ridiculous thing.

“They think it’s dye,” said Ilka. “All of it. The real ones too. They think the whole of Ister’s just dyeing its babies.”

Halvane laughed. Out loud. At the long table.

I’ve never heard him laugh like that. Mother says she has, once, at Maelis Orr’s first opening night. Interval.

The other things. Quickly.

Mother asked Dory how old she was.

Not to Dory. To herself. At the long table, the morning after Dory came back from under the third city and told her what Arreth said. Mother put the pot down and looked at her own hands for a long time.

“I’m older than anyone in the orphan halls ever got to be,” said Mother. “Older than the matrons. Older than the oldest woman on the forty-first floor. By a long way.”

“I know, Gran,” said Dory.

“I don’t feel it,” said Mother. “I haven’t for years. I thought it was the silver. Everyone’s young with the silver.” She turned her hands over. “It isn’t just the silver, is it.”

Dory didn’t say anything.

Mother looked down the long table. At all of them. Twenty children. Three babies. At Kesh with her cloud, and Teo with his four arms, and Queenie in her crooked glasses on Hana’s knee, looking at her. All the way down.

“Well,” said Mother. In the end. Very softly. “You’d better not stop, then. Any of you.”

And she picked up the pot again. And poured. And turned the handle round for Oona.

The baby Dory, in the second city, says her name every night now. Her mother writes to us. She says every night at bedtime the lamps in the street go out and come back brighter, and the neighbours have started coming out of their houses to watch, and to say goodnight.

Dory goes to see her. Once a week. She sits by the bed in the children’s hall, with her glasses off, and shows her a leaf.

Leaf, says Dory. Just a leaf.

The baby Dory looks at it. And at Dory. Copper hair, a little more every week. Long serious face.

Dory says she’s never been so frightened of anything in her life. She says there are eleven thousand of them. She says she’s going to have to show every one of them a leaf.

She says she’s going to.

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

Mother poured a cup out on the stones at the Ister arch after the count. Nobody asked her why.

Under Ister, very far down, Arreth hums. One long note. Dory says it’s getting warmer.

Days 9542–9611. Red.

I left something out of the notebook on purpose. Arreth, after the Assize: my world is empty; I am holding a world with no one on it; I do not know how to hold nothing. The eldest: there is a world that has never had anyone under it. Ister never had a queen; the Aldri always built their engines on worlds no one held, so they’d never have to ask anyone if they could go; Halvane: the saddest thing about us. He asked Ister, hand on the rock under the pilots’ wall: would you like someone to hold you? It got very slightly warmer. The nine said yes, and then: tell no one; the Refined would come for the one who got away; and then it would be war. Not ever, if we can help it. Halvane, the nine, Ilas, Aune, the house; not Okafor, not Varra, not Kyria; not the notebook. On a night with no moon the queens sang her along the thread; Ysse loudest; Dory at the far end, me at the near; she came down into a world empty since it was made, and I felt Ister for the first time, like a room I’d never known was there with the lamp just lit. Halvane on his knees, the second time: oh, there you are. It is very quiet in here. It does not know how. Neither did we. Mother pours at the Ister arch. The painting from before the running: a tall family in a gold field under a yellow sun, red like copper in the weather. We were red, once. Ilas’s grandmother’s grandmother’s red braid. Nobody red in nine thousand years, until this spring: a thousand by Luka’s candle. A baby in the second city said her name and every lamp in the street went out and came back brighter; her name was Dory. Arreth’s silver in her, and the sixty under it. Under the third city: the red was always there, asleep like a seed in a jar; you cannot wake a thing in someone you are not holding. The Lukas first, because the name is said with the most love; it goes in like rain into the hill. And you reach back down the name, all of your house, without meaning to; ask your grandmother how old she is. A boy said Luka and the kettle boiled; a girl said Queenie and the windows went dark; a boy said Asker and the dust lay down in rows. Ister asked; Imre guessed and won’t write it. The oldest of the nine: we keep the queen, not the children; we kept the long record through eleven thousand years; we can keep one name more. Halvane on the great wall, with the painting: the old red; the silver a gift; for the first time we are held. Someone is holding us; let’s not tell the people who’d want to take her away. Nobody has told. A page in the vault with no name: the one who holds us. Sera took Luka to meet one of the first forty; their fingers touched and the rug went warm in a ring; it just means he’s glad you’re there; yours already is. The soft Ister, warm in the middle: somebody is holding this one too; Halvane’s hand on it at night. The second city dyed its babies red, the gentle kind; and the Collective’s traders think the whole of Ister is just dyeing its babies. Halvane laughed out loud. Mother: I’m older than anyone in the orphan halls ever got to be; it isn’t just the silver; you’d better not stop, then, any of you. Dory shows the baby Dory a leaf every week; there are eleven thousand; she says she’s going to. Two hundred and eighty-two. Arreth hums, getting warmer.