Scarecrow

Dot came home on the morning after Lio read us Rhun’s column.

Not Mother. The other one. The kit.

I should put down where she’s been. I haven’t, for a long time, and that’s not fair to her.

After the kits nearly failed, after Enna’s idea, after every person on Hearth gave a handful of silver and I moved Dot root by root out of the grey and into something that copies itself and doesn’t need anything listening at the bottom, she was different. Five colours instead of four. The fifth is the colour of Isolde’s leaves. She was quiet for a long time after. She sat in the corner of the kitchen in the evenings and Mother sat with her, and they didn’t say much.

And then one morning she asked to go up.

To the Meridian. Over Root. Where Major Ruan commands and the spine-queen lies along the ship’s middle and Ilka’s ears listen to everything.

“Query,” she said, at the long table. “Is there anything on Avalon this unit is needed for that another unit cannot do?”

Nobody said anything for a while.

“No, love,” said Mother, at last. “But that’s not the same as not being wanted.”

“Logged,” said Dot. A pause. “This one would like to go up anyway. There is a great deal of listening on the Meridian. Most of it is in bands nobody on the ship was built to hear.” Another pause. “This one was built to hear them. By the people who built the grey. This one would like it to be useful for something.”

So she went up.

She’s been up there ever since. Years. Ilka says she’s the best listener the Meridian has ever had. She hears the grey bands, the old ones, the houses’ ones, the ones the Sorn used to talk to their ships and their kits and their collars. She hears the thin bands the Refined use. She hears things the Collective doesn’t know it’s saying.

Most of what Senna’s had in Rory’s box with Dory’s shape-lock on it, the half-sheets and the river world and the nineteen Directed, came down to the long table through Ilka. And Ilka says half of what came to Ilka came through Dot first.

She sends the dawn count up from the Meridian every morning. Wren’s number. She’s never missed a morning. Not once. Wren keeps her messages. Every one says the same thing. The number, and then:

This one heard it too.

And she’s heard other things.

Ilka told me, the night Dot came down, on the porch, after everybody else had gone to bed. Ilka doesn’t come to the porch. She’s always at her board. But she came that night and stood at the bottom of the steps with her old radio box under her arm and her stick, and asked if she could sit down.

“She’s been hearing him,” Ilka said. “The Prime. On the band. Every night, when he speaks.”

“Everybody hears him,” I said.

“Not like she does.” Ilka put the radio box on her knees. “She hears the grey band under him. The thin one. The one the houses use. When he speaks, there’s something on it. Very faint. Under his voice. Saying the same words a little before he does.”

I didn’t say anything.

“She logged it,” said Ilka. “Every night. For a year. She didn’t tell anybody. She said it wasn’t output.” Ilka almost smiled. “She said nobody had asked.”

“And now?”

“Now she says it’s not a little before him any more,” said Ilka. “She says it’s at the same time. Exactly. Every word.” She stood up with her stick. “She says there’s no gap left. She says that’s why she came down.”

She came down on the red glass in the Meridian’s small boat, just after dawn, with Ilka beside her. Mother was on the porch with the first cup.

Mother put the cup down. She came down the steps and down the path and across the yard, very fast for her, and stopped in front of Dot at the gate.

They looked at each other for a long time.

“There you are,” said Mother.

“Query,” said Dot. “Has the kettle been on?”

“It’s always on, love.”

“Logged,” said Dot. And then, after a pause: “This one has missed the kitchen.”

Mother didn’t say anything. She put her hand on Dot’s shell. On the five colours. Very gently. The way she puts her hand on my face.

“Two of us,” she said. “It’s been very confusing without you.”

At breakfast Dot sat at the corner of the long table where she always used to sit, next to the bread. The children who were old enough to remember her climbed all over the bench to touch her shell. The ones who weren’t stared.

Queenie walked straight up to her. Queenie’s the only one of my children born with black eyes. She looked at Dot for a long time, the way she looks at everything, all the way down.

“You’re full of leaves,” Queenie said.

“Affirmative,” said Dot. “Isolde’s.”

Queenie thought about it.

“Leaf,” she said. Approvingly. And went back to her porridge.

Then Dot told us why she’d come.

“Rhun’s column,” she said. “Senn and Orl. The Refined with gifts.” A pause. “This one read it on the Meridian at the same time as Lio.”

“You know what they are,” said Dory.

“Affirmative.” A long pause. Longer than Dot usually takes. “They are kits.”

Nobody said anything.

“Not like this one,” said Dot. “Not built for the same work. But built the same way. This one was a house of grey with something living in it. That’s what Bell said. The knot listened to the middle. When the middle was gone, the grey started to die.”

“Yes,” I said.

“The new Refined are the same,” said Dot. “A person. A Refined. With grey grown into him. And in the grey, a thing living that isn’t his.” A pause. “The thing living is the gift. Taken from someone else. Cut out of them the way the queens are cut. And grown in him, in grey, the way this one was grown.”

Lio was at the end of the long table. She’d gone very white.

“That’s what they did to me,” she said.

“No,” said Dot. “What they did to you was harder. They put things into you that were yours, made wrong. This is simpler. And worse.” A pause. “This is taking. All the way.”

“Where are the people?” said Mother. “The ones the gifts came from.”

“This one does not know,” said Dot. “But a gift cut out and grown in grey has to listen to something. The way this one listened to the middle. Or it dies.” She turned her colours towards Dory. “Dory said: the woman on Senn is asleep, very far down, dreaming about a door.”

“Yes,” said Dory.

“Then she’s still alive,” said Dot. “Somewhere. And the gift in the Refined is still listening to her. That’s why Dory can hear her inside him.” A pause. “The gift isn’t her. It’s a root of her. Grown long. And at the other end of the root, she’s still asleep.”

Okafor was in the doorway. I hadn’t heard her come in. She had her slate.

“Can you follow it?” she said. “The root. To the other end.”

Dot was quiet for a long time.

“This one can hear it,” she said. “Dory can follow it. Lucas can move it.” A pause. “This one was moved root by root out of a dying house into a living one. Lucas did it. One root at a time. It took nine nights.”

“Could you do that for her?” said Okafor. “Move her gift out of him? Back to her?”

“Query,” said Dot. “Is the operator asking?”

She was looking at me.

I hadn’t heard her call me that in thirty years. Not since the first summer. Not since the canyon, and the wall, and the field of plants I laughed at for six hours that she didn’t report.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m asking.”

“Logged,” said Dot.

Okafor drew it on nine sheets, the way she does.

Senn’s a Collective world on the second arm. Old, and built over, with towers. The Refined have a hall there now, Ilka says. A big one, white, at the edge of the oldest city, with no windows. The wall-walker comes and goes from it. That’s where the scientists are.

Dot said that’s where the woman would be.

Not a raid. Okafor said that the first night and kept saying it. The scientists can take a world apart along lines from the sky, and Senn has nine billion people on it, and the Prime would like nothing better than for us to start something on a Collective world that he could put on the band.

Quiet coats. Three of us. Me and Dory. And Dot.

“She doesn’t fit in a coat,” said Okafor.

“This one has never fitted in anything,” said Dot. “This one will go in the operator’s pack. As in the first year.”

I don’t remember her ever going in my pack in the first year. I didn’t say so.

Mother says she did. Mother says I carried her up the canyon wall on my back every morning for a month because she wanted to see the top, and I’ve forgotten, and she hasn’t.

But before we went, Sigmund asked Tovi.

I’m putting it here, in the middle, because that’s where it happened. Life doesn’t wait for anything to be over. Mother says that’s the only way any of us ever gets married.

He came to me on the porch the night before Senn. He’s tall now. Taller than me. He hates being called small. He sat on the step below me where Dory sits, which he never does, and didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Dad,” he said. “How did you ask?”

“Which one?”

He looked at me.

“Your mothers,” I said, “say I never asked any of them. Not properly. They say they all had to do it for me.” I thought about it. “I think they’re right, Sigmund. I don’t think I’ve ever actually asked anyone.”

Sigmund put his face in his hands.

“That’s no help at all,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Sorry.”

He went to Mother. Of course he did. Everybody does.

Mother was at the long table shelling beans. She listened to all of it without stopping, the way she does. Then she put a pod in his hand.

“Thumb along the seam,” she said.

Sigmund looked at the pod.

“Gran,” he said. “I’m trying to ask you something.”

“I know, love,” said Mother. “Thumb along the seam. Go on.”

He opened it. The beans fell into the bowl.

“There,” said Mother. “It wants to open. You just have to find where. Don’t go at it with your fingernail.” She took the empty pod back. “Now. Where did you first make her cross?”

Sigmund went very red.

“The orchard,” he said.

When Sigmund first came into his gift, he was angry. At Tovi. I don’t know what about. Neither of them will say. He was standing at the bottom of the orchard and she said something and he picked up a stone, and he was so cross, the way you are when you’re that age and somebody you like has said something you can’t answer, that the stone turned into a bird in his hand.

A real one. Small and brown and very surprised. It flew out of his hand into the nearest apple tree and sat there looking at him.

It still lives in the orchard. It’s had young. There are nine of them now, small and brown, in the apple trees at the bottom of the orchard, and every one of them looks very slightly surprised.

Tovi named the first one. She called it Sorry.

He asked her there. In the orchard. At the bottom, under the apple trees, in the evening, with the nine small brown birds in the branches.

He didn’t make a speech. Dory was at the kitchen window. She couldn’t help hearing. She says he said, “Tovi,” and then nothing, for a long time.

And then the first bird, the old one, Sorry, came down out of the tree. And landed on his shoulder. And Sigmund put his hand up, very slowly, and the bird stepped onto his finger, and he held it out to her.

There was something in its beak. A ring. Small and grey, like a stone. He’d made it from a pebble out of the orchard wall, Dory says. He’d made it into something that wasn’t a stone and wasn’t quite silver either. He’d been making it for a month.

He’d taught the bird to carry it. Asked it. For a month. Every evening. It had taken that long for it to say yes.

Tovi looked at the bird for a long time. Then at the ring. Then at Sigmund.

“Is that Sorry?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Is it?”

Sigmund looked at her.

“No,” he said. “Not any more.”

And Tovi laughed. And took the ring out of the bird’s beak. And put it on herself, because Sigmund’s hands were shaking too much. And the bird flew back up into the apple tree and sat there with the other eight, looking surprised.

Teva’s father had a slate in the kitchen by the next morning. Seven pages. Teva’s mother had the passing pot out before breakfast.

Mother cried into the tea towel.

“That’s two,” she said.

Teva came up the hill road with Trevor at breakfast and found Sigmund at the long table eating porridge as if nothing had happened. She stood behind him and put both her hands on his shoulders.

“You made Sorry into a yes,” she said.

Sigmund went red to the ears. Trevor laughed so hard he had to sit down on the bottom step. And Tovi came in behind them with the grey ring on her finger, and sat down next to Sigmund, and took his spoon out of his hand, and ate his porridge.

That, Teva’s grandmother said afterwards, is how the Aldri know it’s settled. When she eats out of his bowl.

Nobody had told Tovi that. She just did it.

We went to Senn the night after.

Dory found the thread. The way she does. She sat on the end of her bed in the dark with her Dusk glasses off and opened the net and went out along it, past the Watch, past the third arm, down into the second, to Senn, to the white hall at the edge of the old city, to the woman asleep very far down, dreaming about a door.

And I scattered after her. Along it. The way we do now.

Dot in my pack. Five colours, very quiet.

Senn at night is towers. Very old. Stone, and then glass, and then something white that the Collective builds with now, all on top of each other in layers, going up into a sky full of lights. Nine billion people. You can feel them all. It’s like standing in a river.

The white hall was at the edge of the oldest part, where the towers stopped. Long and low and windowless, and humming.

We came down in the quiet coats in the shadow of a tower across the street. Dory faint as a lamp under a cloth. Me beside her.

“She’s under it,” said Dory. “Very far down.”

“Query,” said Dot, from my pack. “How many others?”

Dory closed her eyes.

She didn’t answer for a long time.

“Forty-one,” she said at last. “Asleep. All of them. In rows.” She opened her eyes. “Some of them are very faint.”

We went in through the floor. I asked it. It was white stuff, the same as the Refined’s ships, from Marrach’s yards, and it had never been asked anything and it was so surprised it let us through without even noticing.

Under the hall there was a long room.

I’ve seen rooms like it. On One. In the halls on Velle. White. Very clean. Very quiet. Rows of long low beds. And on each bed, a person, asleep, with a thin grey line going out of the back of their neck and up into the ceiling, into the dark, like a root.

Forty-one beds.

The woman from Carrow was the ninth in the second row. I knew her before Dory pointed. She was dreaming about a door. You could see it on her face.

“Query,” said Dot. “Lucas. Put this one down. Next to her.”

I put the pack down by the bed. Dot’s five colours came up, very slowly, out of the dark of the pack. She was quiet for a long time.

“The root goes up,” she said. “Through the ceiling. Through the hall. Out. A long way. To him.” A pause. “He’s in the city. Three towers away. Asleep. With her gift grown in him like grey.”

“Can you tell it to come home?” said Dory.

“No,” said Dot. “This one cannot tell it anything. That would be telling.” Her colours turned to me. “But this one can show Lucas where each root is. And Lucas can ask.”

It took all night.

Dot showed me. Root by root. The way I did it for her, on all those nights after Hearth, with Mother asleep against her. Only backwards. She’d say There, very quietly, and I’d feel it, a thread of something that wasn’t grey and wasn’t silver either, going out of the back of the woman’s neck and up into the dark. And I’d ask it.

You’re hers. She’s here. Would you like to come back?

And every one, after a while, said yes.

They came back down the line one at a time, out of the Refined three towers away, out of the grey, back into her. I felt each one arrive. Like a door closing very softly somewhere in a house.

And three towers away, Dot said, the Refined who walked through walls woke up in his bed, and couldn’t remember why he was frightened.

At about the ninetieth root, the woman opened her eyes.

She looked at me. At Dory. At the five colours of Dot, glowing in the dark beside her bed.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t do anything. She lay there very still for a long time.

“Is this the door?” she said.

“Yes, love,” said Dory.

Her name is Corra Fenn. She mends nets, on Carrow, for the boats on the river below the old quarter. She’s forty-four. She’s walked through walls when she’s frightened since she was six, and nobody on Carrow ever minded, because she only ever did it when she was frightened, and then she said sorry to the wall.

They took her out of the square on the fifth morning.

She doesn’t remember anything after that. Only the door. A long white door, she says, at the end of a long white room, that she kept trying to walk through, every night, in her sleep. And couldn’t, because she wasn’t frightened. She said it was the strangest thing. She said she’d never once in her life wanted to be frightened before.

There were forty other beds.

Dory went down every row. Very slowly. With her hand on every head. Dot came behind her, in my arms, listening to every root.

Thirty-four of them we could bring back. Their roots were still strong. Still listening. They’d been asleep a few weeks. A few months. Some of them were from Carrow. Some from Senn. Some from worlds Dory had never heard of. A man from Orl, whose gift was lifting. A girl from somewhere on the third arm who could stop sound.

We didn’t have time for all their roots. Not that night. So I asked the grey lines in the back of their necks, very gently, to let go of the far end. And they did. And on Senn and Orl and the third world, three Refined and thirty others woke up in the night and found the thing in them was gone. Just a hole. And their gifts, the stolen ones, came home very slowly afterwards, over weeks, across the Hedge, the way water finds its way downhill.

Six of them we couldn’t bring back.

Their roots were too thin. They’d been asleep too long. A year. More. The first ones the scientists ever took. Dot listened to each one for a long time, and each time she was quiet, and then she said:

This one is listening to nothing now.

Dory sat by each of the six. Held their hands. Said their names, the ones she could hear, very quietly. They didn’t wake up.

One of them was an old man. Very thin. From Carrow. Dory says he was the third one they took. The old man nobody knew anything special about at all.

Dot listened to his root for a long time. Longer than the others.

“Query,” she said, very quietly. “What was his gift?”

Dory listened.

“He made people laugh,” she said. “At the market. On Carrow. He sold onions. And everybody who bought onions from him laughed. All day. Every day. For forty years.” She put her hand on his head. “It wasn’t silver. It wasn’t anything. He was just like that.”

“Then why did they take it?” I said.

Dory didn’t say anything for a long time.

“I think they wanted to know what it was,” she said. “I think they couldn’t work it out.”

We sat with the six until the light came grey in the corners of the long white room. Halloway says that’s the rule. You sit with the ones who don’t wake up.

Then Corin opened a door. Small. In the floor. And we brought thirty-five of them out, through the floor, onto the plateau, at dawn, in their nightclothes, blinking.

The six we left on their beds. With their hands folded. Dory folded them.

Dot asked if she could stay a moment. Before the door shut. She said she wanted to log it.

“Logged,” she said, to the room. Very quietly. “Six. Names to follow.”

Mother was on the plateau with the pot. She’d been there since midnight. She poured thirty-five cups.

Corra Fenn took hers and looked at it for a long time. Then she looked up at Mother.

“You’re the one from the soup,” she said. “In the Herald. The old woman reads it out every morning, in the square. About the woman who pours.” She held the cup in both hands. “I always wanted to see if you were real.”

“I’m real, love,” said Mother.

Corra Fenn drank her tea.

Then she put the cup down on the red glass and stood up and walked, very carefully, a few steps away, and put her hand flat on the air in front of her.

Nothing happened.

She stood there a long time.

“I’m not frightened,” she said. “I can’t do it. I’m not frightened at all.”

And she started to laugh.

Corvan came up the hill road that afternoon. Lio went down and told him. He came up very fast and stopped at the edge of the plateau, where Corra Fenn was sitting on a bench in the sun with a blanket round her shoulders and a second cup.

She knew him. Of course she did. Everybody on Carrow knows his face.

He didn’t come any closer. He stood at the edge of the plateau with his hands at his sides.

“You were in the square,” he said. “When they took you. On the fifth morning.”

“Yes.”

“That was because of me,” said Corvan. “All of it. The sisters’ houses. Bess. The forty. They’re doing it because I—”

“No,” said Corra Fenn.

He stopped.

“They were choosing before you left,” she said. “They’d have chosen anyway. They chose the onion man.” She pulled the blanket round her. “They’re doing it because they want to know what we are. That’s all. They want to cut it out and look at it.”

Corvan didn’t say anything.

“Bess hid you in her back room for nine nights,” said Corra Fenn. “She told me. She said you shelled beans very badly and said thank you every time she put a plate down. She said it was the first time she’d ever heard a Prime’s son say thank you.” She looked at him. “She’d want you to sit down. She’d say you look terrible.”

Corvan sat down. On the red glass. A little way off from her bench. With his knees up.

They didn’t say anything else. They sat there in the sun all afternoon.

Lio came to find Dot that evening. In the kitchen, before supper, in the corner by the stove.

She sat down on the floor in front of her. Cross-legged. With a length of grey Hyrrani wool in her hands, the tie Kyria gave her, turning it over and over. Sefa does her knot every morning, up on the terraces by the garden wall. Lio’s been trying to do it herself for years.

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

“Affirmative.”

Lio turned the knot over. “When they moved you. Out of the grey. Into the leaves.” She didn’t look up. “Did you stay you? All the way through? Or was there a bit in the middle where you were two things?”

Dot was quiet for a long time.

“There was a bit in the middle,” she said. “On the fourth night. Half the roots were in the grey and half in the leaves.” A pause. “This one did not know which half to listen to.”

“What did you do?”

“This one listened to the kitchen,” said Dot. “Your grandmother was asleep against this one’s shell. The kettle was on. Somebody was laughing on the porch.” Her colours came up a little. “This one decided that whichever half could hear the kettle was the half that was this one.”

Lio didn’t say anything for a long time.

“I’m two things,” she said. “All the time. What I was and what they made. Lucas couldn’t put me all the way back.” She tried the knot in the wool. It came undone. “I keep waiting to find out which one’s me.”

“Query,” said Dot. “Can you hear the kettle?”

Lio looked at the stove. The kettle was on. It always is.

“Yes.”

“Then that’s the half,” said Dot. “Logged.”

Lio sat on the kitchen floor for a long time after that, with her knot. Then she got up and went down the hill road to Corvan’s narrow house, where Sefa was waiting, and they read the Herald and argued about it until midnight.

The next morning she didn’t come up to Sefa’s terrace for her knot. She’d done it herself, in the dark, before anybody was up. Sefa says it was crooked. Sefa says she’s tied that girl’s hair every morning since she was six, and it was the best knot she’s ever seen.

Lio didn’t tell anyone. Sefa told everyone.

Okafor came up to the plateau at dusk. She sat down on the bench next to Dot, which nobody had ever seen her do, and put her slate on her knee.

“Forty-one beds,” she said. “In one hall. On one world.”

“Affirmative.”

“How many halls?”

Dot was quiet for a long time. Her colours went very low, the way they do when she’s listening a long way off.

“This one can hear the roots,” she said at last. “Now that this one knows what they sound like. All of them. Across the Collective. Every gift grown in grey, still listening to someone asleep.” A pause. “Nine halls. Not counting Senn’s.”

Okafor wrote it down. Halls: nine.

“And Carrow’s forty?” she said. “The women from the sisters’ houses?”

Dot didn’t answer straight away.

“Velle,” she said. “In the rock. Under the houses. This one hears them. Forty roots. Thin. Very far down.” A pause. “Bess is the ninth. She is asleep. She is dreaming about shoes.”

Okafor didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she drew a line under Forty, on her slate. And under the line, she wrote one word.

Alive.

She showed it to Dot. Dot’s colours came up, very slowly, all five.

“Logged,” said Dot.

That night Dot sat with Mother in the kitchen. In the corner, by the stove. The way they used to.

Mother had her mending. Dot had her colours turned down low.

“Query,” said Dot, after a long time. “May this one stay?”

Mother didn’t look up from her mending.

“You never had to ask, love.”

“This one knows,” said Dot. “This one is asking anyway.” A pause. “It’s what we do here.”

Mother put the mending down. She reached out and put her hand on Dot’s shell.

“Yes,” she said. “Stay.”

“Logged,” said Dot.

And then, after a long time, very quietly, when she thought Mother had fallen asleep, which Mother had:

“This one has missed being called the wrong one.”

She goes up to the Meridian in the mornings now, through the arch Crane put in, and comes down at night. Ilka says it’s the best of both. Ruan says the spine-queen hums when Dot comes aboard and goes quiet when she leaves.

On her first free afternoon, Mother took her to the museum.

The Avalon one, on the western cliffs past New Hearth, in the curve where every world has its own. Rory’s copy of the long table is there, with the oatmeal stain. And at the end of the room, under glass, there’s a shell. Old and grey and dented, with four dull colours on it and a bit of canyon dust still in the seams that the museum people were told not to clean off.

The first kit. Unit 401-P1. Designation changed by operator to DOT.

There were children round it. There always are. Wren says it’s the thing in the whole curve of museums that children look at longest.

Dot looked at it for a long time from the doorway. Then she came across the room, through the children, and stopped in front of the glass.

The children went very quiet. They looked at her. At the five colours. Then at the shell. Then back.

A small girl, very small, with a soft Dot under her arm, the old one, with four colours, looked up.

“Is that you?” she said.

“Affirmative,” said Dot. “This one used to live in it.”

“Did it hurt? Moving out?”

Dot thought about it.

“Yes,” she said. “A little. But somebody held this one the whole time.” A pause. “And the new house has leaves.”

The small girl considered that. Then she held up her soft Dot, the old four-coloured one, so Dot could see it.

“Mine hasn’t got leaves,” she said.

“That’s all right,” said Dot. “Neither did this one. For a long time.”

Mother stood in the doorway with her hat in her hand and didn’t come in. Ingrid says she was crying. Mother says it was the dust.

The Herald ran Corra Fenn’s story the next morning. Tamsin wrote it herself. It took up the whole front page, and the back, and Imre’s drawing in the corner was a door.

Underneath, in a box, Vesk wrote six names. The ones Dot logged. And under the last one, seller of onions, Carrow, she wrote: He made people laugh.

Imre made a soft Dot that month. Not the old one in the museum. The new one, with five colours. The fifth is green, the colour of Isolde’s leaves. It says Logged when you squeeze it.

Isolde bought nine.

On Ister, that month, two babies went into the long record under the name Dot. The keepers wrote beside both, in very small letters, that they weren’t named for Mother. They were named for the other one. The keepers said they’d checked with the families twice, because it had never come up before, and the families had been very firm.

Mother says that’s only fair. She’s had the name all to herself on Ister for long enough.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Eight hundred and forty-nine. Dot sent it down from the Meridian, the way she always does.

Wren wrote it at the top of the slate. And under it:

Senn: thirty-five home. Six logged.

Velle: forty. Alive.

Tovi: yes.

Dot: home.

Days 12068–12101. Query.

Dot came down from the Meridian and said the new Refined were built like kits, with stolen gifts grown in grey and still rooted in their sleeping owners. On Senn she showed me each root while I asked it home: Corra Fenn and thirty-four others woke, six were too far gone, and Dot logged them. Dot heard nine more halls, and Carrow’s forty alive under Velle. Sigmund asked Tovi in the orchard with the bird named Sorry, and Dot asked if she could stay.