Scarecrow

Liam came up the hill road on a Tuesday evening with a bottle under his arm and sat down on the porch step without being asked, which is how I knew something was going on.

He’s been sitting on that step since we were cadets. He sits on it when he’s pleased and when he’s worried and when Maura’s thrown him out of the kitchen for touching the fried things. He’s never once brought a bottle.

He opened it. Hearth sparkling. The good kind. He poured two cups and handed me one and drank his in one go and poured another.

“Cormac’s taller than Anya,” he said.

I waited.

“He came in from the Wall last week,” said Liam. “On leave. Walked in the door and bent down to kiss his mother. Bent down.” He looked at his cup. “And Rory’s set fire to nothing for a whole month. Not a single thing. Maura’s worried about him.”

“They’re getting big,” I said.

“They’re getting big,” said Liam. “And the house is getting very quiet.” He drank. “And Anya said, at supper, out of nowhere, with Rory there, that she’d been thinking.”

“About what?”

Liam put the cup down on the step.

“About another one,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. I’ve learned that much in all these years. When Liam comes up the hill road with a bottle, you don’t say anything. You let him get there.

“I’m not young,” he said. “Neither is she. Not really. Not the way we were.” He looked at his hands. Fire in them, still, after everything. Fire that his father made the air burn with in a trench in a war. “But nobody’s young any more, are they. Not the way they were. Your mother’s going to the beach in a hat. My dad sleeps in the afternoons. Halloway says everybody on Avalon’s going to live to two hundred and thirty.”

“About that,” I said.

“So I’m not old,” said Liam. “I’m about a fifth of the way. That’s what Anya said. She said, Liam, we’re a fifth of the way through, and the boys are nearly grown, and I’d like to do it again.” He stopped. “She said she’d like to do it without a war on, this time. And then she laughed, because there’s always a war on.”

“And you?”

Liam was quiet for a long time.

“Rory came in from the yard when she said it,” he said. “He was eating an apple. He stood in the door and looked at us both. And he said, Can it be a girl? I’d like someone to set fire to things with.”

He laughed. It went on for a while.

“I said yes,” he said. “Not to the girl. You can’t promise that. To Anya.” He poured me some more. “I came up to tell you. Before Mum finds out. Because when Mum finds out she’ll drop the fried things and cry and then she’ll tell the whole Hedge, and I wanted one person to know first who wouldn’t do any of that.”

“I’m honoured,” I said.

“You should be,” said Liam. “Drink your wine.”

Maura found out the next morning. She dropped the fried things. She cried. She told the whole Hedge.

Rory planed the porch door.

Okafor came the morning after that, with her slate and with Dot.

They’d been up all night, the two of them. In the Arch Hall, at the board. Dot listening and Okafor drawing. Dot tells Okafor where the roots go. Okafor draws the halls.

Nine of them. On nine Collective worlds. Long and white and windowless, every one the same, every one with a long room underneath it full of beds, and on every bed somebody asleep with a grey root going out of the back of their neck and up into the dark, into some Refined, somewhere, carrying their gift.

“Four hundred and thirty-two,” said Okafor. She put the slate on the long table. “Dot’s counted every root.”

“Affirmative,” said Dot, from her corner by the bread. “Four hundred and thirty-two. Not counting the forty on Velle. Those are different. Those are deeper.”

“And every night,” said Okafor, “the scientists take more. One a morning on Carrow. And on every world where there’s a hall, one a morning there too.” She put her hand flat on the slate. “Senn told them we can do it. That we can find the roots. They’ll be moving the halls. Hiding them. Putting things in the way.”

“So we do all nine,” said Dory.

“All nine,” said Okafor. “Same night. Same moment. Before they can move anyone.”

Nine halls needed nine teams. Okafor drew them.

Every team needed somebody to open the floor. Somebody to find the sleepers. Somebody to ask the roots. Somebody to make a door home. And somebody to stand in front of all of them in case anything came down the stairs.

“There’s only one Lucas,” said Okafor. “And only one Dory. And only one Dot.”

“There are more of us now,” said Dory.

That’s true. That’s the thing I keep forgetting. I spent so long being the only one that I still think of it that way, and it isn’t true. It hasn’t been true for years.

My children can ask atoms. All of them. Not all as well. Not all the same. But all of them.

Trevor can ask glass and stone and the white stuff the Refined use. Sigmund turns things into other things, stones into birds, when he’s cross enough. Ash can undo any collar there is, for good. Kwame can find anyone under anything; the ground tells him. Elin and Goldie and Corin and Thessaly make doors. Kesh can ask the air. Abena can breathe for anyone. And Dory can do everything.

And the roots.

“This one cannot be in nine places,” said Dot. “But this one can teach.”

She taught them in the kitchen. Three nights. At the long table, with the lamps low.

How a root sounds. How to find the end of it in the back of a sleeper’s neck. How to hear it going out, up, away. How to ask it, very gently, to let go of the far end. Not to come home. That’s the long work, the one I did for Corra Fenn all night, root by root. This was the quick work. Just let go. So the gift could find its own way back to its sleeper over the weeks after, the way water finds its way downhill.

“Not telling,” said Dot, every time somebody got it wrong. “Asking.”

Trevor got it on the first night. Sigmund on the second. Kwame couldn’t hear it at all for two nights, and then on the third he put his hand on the long table and said, “Oh. It’s like a spring that’s lost its way,” and got it immediately.

Queenie got it by watching. She’s not going. She’s far too young. She sat on the bottom step on the second night and watched Dot teach, and on the third night she came to the long table and put her hand on Dot’s shell and said, “Let go,” very kindly, to nothing in particular.

Dot’s colours went all the way up.

“Query,” she said. “Who taught her that?”

“Nobody,” said Hana.

“Logged,” said Dot. Very quietly.

Nine teams.

Me and Dot, on the hall on Senn’s sister world, Ammeral, where the biggest hall is. Dory on her own, because Dory doesn’t need anybody, on a world called Callow that nobody had ever heard of until Dot heard a hundred roots coming out of it. Trevor with Elin, on Orl. Sigmund with Goldie. Ash with Corin. Kwame with Thessaly. And three more, with the Standing for the stairs, Gilgamesh’s best, in quiet coats, and Lio with them, because Lio can feel what was done to people, and Lio asked.

Okafor at the board in the Arch Hall, with Dot’s voice in her ear from my pack, counting down.

And Halloway and Abena on the plateau, with every doctor she’s trained, nine thousand of them, in rows, with blankets.

Mother with the pot.

I’m going to put down what happened at each one. Not all of it. Enough.

Ammeral.

The hall was bigger than Senn’s. Three long rooms, one under the other, going down into the rock. Ninety-one beds. Dot found every root before we’d finished coming through the floor.

It took me an hour. The quick way. Let go, let go, let go, down every row, with Dot in my arms saying There and There and There. Ninety-one grey roots, letting go of their far ends, all across the Collective, ninety-one Refined waking up in the dark somewhere with a hole in them where a gift had been.

Ninety-one sleepers starting to wake.

Nobody came down the stairs. Dot says the Refined who watch the halls were all looking at the band, where Ilka had put something very loud and very confusing on every Collective frequency at once. Ilka won’t say what. Wren says it was the dawn count, read backwards, by Toby, at nine times the usual volume.

Ninety-one through the door. Onto the plateau. Into blankets.

Callow.

Dory doesn’t tell it much. She was on her own. A hundred and four beds. She did them all in forty minutes. She says the roots there were very young. The sleepers had only been asleep a few days. She says some of them were children.

She came home through her own door, last of all, carrying a girl of about six who wouldn’t let go of her. She carried her all the way across the plateau to Mother and put her down in Mother’s lap and sat down on the red glass and didn’t get up for a long time.

Orl. Trevor and Elin. Thirty-eight beds. All home. Trevor came through the door with his glass cup in one hand and a sleeper over his shoulder and said, “She’s the lifter’s sister. The cart on Orl. They took both of them.”

Sigmund and Goldie, on a world with three moons. Forty-four beds. All home.

Ash and Corin. Fifty-one. All home. Ash undid every collar in the place while she was there, sixty, on the made who were standing in a row at the end of the long room, waiting for orders that never came. She did all sixty in nine minutes. Corin brought them through too. They came out onto the plateau in a line, holding hands, and stood there in the dawn not knowing what to do, and Abena went down the line breathing for every one.

Kwame and Thessaly. Twenty-two. The hall had been dug very deep. Kwame went down through the ground to it. All home.

The three Standing teams. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Seventeen. Lio’s team was the seventeen. She stood at the end of the long room while Gilgamesh’s people did the roots, and she put her hand on every sleeper’s forehead, one at a time, and said something to them none of them could hear.

She won’t say what. Sefa says she thinks it was I know.

The ninth hall was on a world called Varrel.

That was mine. Not to go to. To decide. Okafor asked me, at the board, before we went. Nine teams, nine halls. And one of the teams had to be ours. The children’s.

“Varrel’s the oldest hall,” she said. “Dot says the roots there are the longest. The sleepers have been asleep the longest. It’s the hardest.” She looked at me. “It wants somebody very good with roots, very fast.”

Trevor was standing next to me. He’s very good with roots. Better than me now. And faster.

“I’ll go,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. I should have. I should have said, No, I’ll go, send Trevor to Ammeral. And I didn’t. Because he was right. He was the best one. And because he’s grown, and married, and he’s never once asked me for anything, and he was asking.

So he went to Varrel. With Elin, after Orl. A second hall in one night. Thirty-eight, and then eighty.

The scientists were there.

Not in the hall. That was the thing. Not in the long room. In a room above it. Watching. Dot says they must have known, after Senn, that we’d come. They didn’t stop us. They didn’t move the sleepers. They waited.

Trevor and Elin came up through the floor into the long room. Eighty beds. Trevor started on the first root.

And in the room above, a small pale scientist with a slate pressed something.

Every root in the room went taut. All eighty at once. Trevor felt it. He says it was like every string on an instrument being pulled tight at the same moment, until it sang.

And then they cut.

Not the roots. The far ends. The scientists had done it from above. Every Refined across the Collective who was carrying a gift from Varrel lost it at the same moment, Dot says. It just went. Snapped back, all at once, eighty roots, down the long line into the long room, into the sleepers.

All of it. All at once. A gift that had been grown long and strong for a year in somebody else’s grey, coming back home in one breath into a body that had been asleep for a year.

Trevor did everything. Elin told me. He went down the rows faster than anybody’s ever gone down rows. He asked every root to go slowly. To come home gently. To wait. He asked so fast and so hard that his nose bled, and then his ears, and he kept going.

Some of them waited.

Fifty-two didn’t.

Elin says they didn’t make any sound. The sleepers. They just went very still. All along the rows. One after another. The gift came home all at once and the body couldn’t hold it, after a year asleep, and they stopped.

Trevor saved twenty-eight. Twenty-eight roots that listened when he asked them to slow down. Twenty-eight sleepers who woke up, very slowly, and opened their eyes.

The other fifty-two he sat with.

He wouldn’t leave. Elin says she told him the door was open, Okafor was calling them back, the Standing were coming up the stairs and the scientists had gone, they’d just gone, through a door of their own, the job was done. He said no. He said Halloway’s rule. He said you sit with the ones who don’t wake up.

So Elin sent the twenty-eight home through the door, and sat down on the floor of the long room next to her brother, and they sat with fifty-two people until the Standing came down the stairs and found them there.

Halloway was the one who went to get him.

She went through Elin’s door herself. She’s never done that. She went down into the long room on Varrel with her bag and she knelt down next to Trevor on the floor, between the beds, and put her hand on the back of his neck.

“That’s enough, love,” she said. “You’ve sat with them. That’s the rule. That’s all of it.”

“Fifty-two,” said Trevor.

“I know.”

“I should have been faster.”

“No,” said Halloway. “They should have been kinder. That’s not the same thing. It’s never been the same thing.” She took his face in her hands, the way Mother does. “I sat with forty-one in one week, in the dome, when I was twenty-three. I thought it was my fault. It took me twenty years to understand it wasn’t.” She wiped the blood off his lip with her thumb. “I’m not letting you take twenty years. Come home.”

He came home.

The plateau at dawn was full of people waking up.

Three hundred and eighty of them, in blankets, in rows, on the red glass, with Halloway’s nine thousand going between them, very quietly, with cups and bandages and their hands on people’s foreheads. Some of the sleepers woke the moment they came through the door. Some took all morning. Some of them woke up and didn’t know where they were and screamed, and the doctors held them until they stopped. Some woke up and didn’t make any sound at all, just lay there looking at the sky.

Corra Fenn was there. She’d asked to be. She went down the rows with a pot of her own, a small one, that Mother had given her, and poured, and said to every one of them the same thing.

“I was asleep too. It’s all right. You’re out.”

Some of them were from Carrow. They knew her. A man from the river boats sat up when he saw her and grabbed her hand and wouldn’t let go, and she sat down on the red glass next to him with the pot in her lap and stayed there until he slept again. Properly, this time.

The girl Dory carried home from Callow wouldn’t leave Mother’s lap. Not all morning. When Halloway came to look at her, and put out a hand, she screamed. Not crying. Screaming. High and thin and all at once, the way a kettle goes, until Halloway took her hand back. She sat in Mother’s lap on the bench at the edge of the plateau with her face in Mother’s coat and her fist holding on to the edge of it, very tight, and Mother poured with her other hand and didn’t move her once.

At midday she said her name. Very quietly. Into the coat.

“Rue.”

“There you are, Rue,” said Mother. “You’ll want feeding.”

She’s from a world on the third arm nobody had heard of. Rhun printed her name on the front of the Herald with on Avalon, with the woman who pours underneath it, so somebody would come.

Nobody came. A letter came instead, nine days later, from a man who’d lived next door. The Refined had come for Rue in the night. Her mother and father had stood in the doorway. That was all the letter said about it.

Mother read it at the long table, with Rue asleep against her. Then she folded it up very small and put it in her apron pocket, and she hasn’t taken it out since.

Three hundred and eighty home. Out of four hundred and thirty-two.

Okafor wrote both numbers on her slate. And then, underneath, the fifty-two. She asked Dot for their names. Dot had them. All of them. She’d heard every root.

Vesk printed them in the Herald the next morning, in a box on the front, in the smallest type the press would do. It still took half the page.

Teva sat with Trevor for three days. In their house, with the curtains closed.

On the fourth day he came up the hill road to the long table. He sat down at the end. Mother poured him a cup.

He held it up to the light from the window. His glass cup. The one he always carries. The light came through it onto the table.

“Good morning,” he said. To nobody.

Teva, next to him, said it back.

Then he drank his tea.

Okafor came in while he was drinking it. She’d been waiting at the gate, Holt says. For an hour. She’d let him have the cup first.

She didn’t sit down. She stood at the end of the long table in her plain grey coat with her slate under her arm, and Trevor looked up at her, and she looked at him.

“Varrel was my sheet,” she said. “I drew it. I sent you. I knew it was the hardest one and I sent the best one, because that’s what you do.” She put the slate down on the table in front of him. “It’s mine. Not yours. It goes on my slate.”

Trevor looked at the slate. Under Halls, under the three hundred and eighty, under the fifty-two, in her square hand, there was one more word.

Mine.

“I’ve got a lot of those,” said Okafor. “On a lot of slates. Since I was seventeen.” She picked it up again. “You don’t get to have one yet. You’re too young. I’ll tell you when.”

She went out.

Trevor sat looking at the door for a long time. Then he laughed. Just once. The way Corvan laughed on the carousel. As if it had got out by accident.

“She’s terrifying,” he said.

“Yes, love,” said Mother. “Drink your tea.”

The Refined answered in a week.

Dory heard it. Of course she did. In the night, in the net, a long way off. A queen. Screaming.

She was on the porch before I was out of bed. She had her glasses off.

“Harl,” she said. “Second arm. Past Senn. They’ve got her on a frame.” She was already scattering. “Dad, it’s one of them. One of the new ones. With a gift. A stolen one.”

“Whose?”

Dory stopped. For a breath. Just long enough.

“Ingrid’s,” she said.

Not Ingrid’s. Not really. Ingrid’s are Ingrid’s. But the same kind. The Hush. The very old thing that makes everything still before it strikes, so it only strikes what it means to. Somebody on some world had been born with it, the way one child in forty is born with something now, and the scientists had taken it out of them on some morning in some square and grown it in grey in a Refined.

And the Refined had gone to Harl. And made the whole of Harl still.

So nobody could stop him taking the queen.

We scattered up the thread. Dory first. Me behind.

Harl’s a small dry world of red hills. The queen’s under the biggest one. They’d cut down to her in the night. A shaft, square, very neat. The frame was standing up over it.

And everything was still.

Not quiet. Still. The air didn’t move. The dust didn’t move. The people of the town at the foot of the hill were standing in the street where they’d come out of their doors, in their nightclothes, with their mouths open, perfectly still, like a picture. A woman with a lamp. A boy with his hand out. An old man halfway through a step.

They weren’t dead. Dory could hear them. All of them. Awake. Inside the stillness. Unable to move.

And in the middle of it, on the hill, by the shaft, there was a Refined. Tall. In white. With his hands folded in his sleeves. And something in him that wasn’t his, very old, very quiet, holding everything.

The stillness took me when I came down.

I’ve never felt anything like it. I’ve been held before. By the houses. By the Hungry. Never like that. It wasn’t a hand. It was the whole world agreeing with itself that nothing should move. Every atom in me, every one, being told, very gently, very firmly, not now.

And I couldn’t ask them anything. Because they were already being asked. By something older than me.

Dory came down beside me. And stopped too.

We stood on the red hill of Harl, the two of us, perfectly still, while the Refined in white turned his head very slowly to look at us. And smiled.

“World-breaker,” he said. “And the daughter. How kind of you to come.”

Behind him the chains went taut. The queen was coming up.

I couldn’t move. Dory couldn’t move. Nothing on Harl could move.

Except one thing.

She’d come in my pack. Dot. She always comes in my pack now. I didn’t even think about it.

The stillness didn’t take Dot. I don’t know why. Dot says the Hush asks everything that sings to be still, and in all her years she has never once sung. She logs. She says the stillness went past her the way a wind goes past a post.

I heard her move. In the pack. On my back. The only thing on Harl that moved.

“Query,” she said, very quietly. Not to me. To the Refined. On the grey band. The old one. The one she was built to hear and speak, by the people who built the grey. “Query. Whose is that?”

The Refined turned his head.

“The gift,” said Dot. “In you. Whose is it?”

He didn’t answer. But the gift heard her.

That’s the thing about a root. Dot says. It listens. It has to listen to something, or it dies. And it had been listening to its sleeper, far away, asleep in a hall we hadn’t found yet. And now something was speaking to it on the band it was grown in. Asking it a question.

Nobody had asked it anything. Not once. Since it was cut.

Whose are you?

And very far off, in some hall, on some world, a sleeper turned over in her sleep. And the root went towards her. Just a little. Just to check.

And the stillness on Harl moved. Just a little. Just for a breath.

That was enough.

Dory was through it before I was. She’s faster. She went up the hill in one movement, through the moving dust, and put her hand on the Refined’s chest, and asked the root to go home.

Not slowly. Not root by root. All at once. The way the scientists had done it on Varrel. Back down the line, all of it, to its sleeper.

Dory says she’d felt the sleeper. In that breath. Awake, inside the stillness of her own dream. Strong. Not a year asleep. A week. Strong enough to hold it. She says she’d never have done it otherwise. She says she’d never do it otherwise.

The gift went home.

The Refined sat down very suddenly on the red hill. Like a puppet with the strings cut.

And Harl moved.

All of it at once. The dust blew. The air came in like a breath. The woman with the lamp dropped it. The boy put his hand down. The old man finished his step and fell over and sat in the road shouting. The whole town, all at once, started screaming.

And I went down the shaft.

She was halfway up. On the chains. Cut. They’d cut her heart the way they do, and she was bleeding silver into the dark. Not as much as Brannock’s. They’d only had her an hour.

I held her. Dory came down and held her too. And Corin opened a door, a small one, from the ridge on Hyrran, straight into the shaft, and Abena came through it with her hands already out, and put them on the cut, and breathed.

And this time it was enough.

The queen of Harl went back down into her red hill. Slowly. Very tired. Singing, very faintly, the way a person hums when they’ve had a shock and are trying to remember they’re all right.

Abena sat at the bottom of the shaft afterwards with her hands in her lap, shaking. I sat with her. She didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Brannock,” she said. “I couldn’t. Not Brannock.”

“I know.”

“This time I could.”

“Yes.”

She put her head on my shoulder. She hasn’t done that since she was very small.

The Refined who’d held Harl was still sitting on the hill when we came up. He hadn’t moved. He was looking at his hands.

Dory stood in front of him. He looked up at her. Very pale. Very confused. Whatever he’d been before the gift, he wasn’t that any more, and he wasn’t what the gift had made him either.

“It was so quiet,” he said. “Inside. With it in me. It was the quietest I’ve ever been.” He looked at his hands again. “Now it’s very loud.”

Dory didn’t say anything.

“Will you take me?” he said. “Anywhere. I don’t want to go back.”

Dory looked at him for a long time. Then she held out her hand.

His name is Aurin Vell. He was a clerk in the white hall before he was a Refined. He volunteered. He says he was told he’d be given something that would make him feel calm. He says he’d never felt calm once in his life before that.

He’s at the Lake House. In the wool room. Toby sits with him. They don’t say anything.

The sleeper, the one the gift went home to, is in a hall on a world called Brenmoor. Dot found it the next morning by the root. Kwame and Thessaly went and got her. A girl of nineteen from a farming world on the third arm. She woke up on the plateau with the stillness in her, all of it, home. She stood up and made the whole plateau still for a breath without meaning to, and then said sorry, and burst into tears, and Ingrid went across the red glass to her and took both her hands.

“I know, love,” said Ingrid. “I know. I’ll show you.”

She’s teaching her. Every morning. On the high stone of Skara Reach, where the wind queen lives, who’s very good.

Teshka went up the ridge with Theron. The week after.

She came back three days later. She didn’t say much. She sat at the long table with her tea and Kyria glared at her and Saska glared at her and she ignored them both.

At the end of the meal she said, to nobody in particular, “It’s a very good stone. Forty years. You can see exactly where he stood.”

“And?” said Kyria.

Teshka drank her tea.

“And now there are two places,” she said.

The Prime spoke on the band that night. About the halls. About the coward’s children going into Collective worlds in the night and murdering innocent sleepers. Fifty-two of them. He read the names. Dot’s names. Vesk’s names. The ones from the Herald.

He read them as if we’d done it.

Corvan listened at Konrad’s table, with Lio and Sefa and the Assessors. He didn’t say anything until the end.

Then he said, very quietly: “He’s never once read a list of names. Not in his whole life. He doesn’t think anybody’s name is worth reading.”

Dot was in the corner by the stove. Listening. On the grey band, under the Prime’s voice.

“Query,” said Lio. “Is it still both of them? Him and the other one?”

Dot’s colours went very low.

“Negative,” she said. “There is only one voice now.”

Nobody asked which.

The Overseer was at the table too. He’d come up from his small house by the river with his ledger, the way he does on Herald nights. He put his cup down when Dot said it. Very carefully. The way he did the night the Assize fell.

“Then there is nothing left of the man,” he said. “Only the coat.”

He didn’t pick the cup up again all evening.

Liam and Anya came up the hill road the next Sunday with Cormac and Rory, and sat at the long table, and Anya told Mother properly. Maura had already told her. Mother pretended she hadn’t.

Mother cried into the tea towel.

Later, at the sink, Anya stood next to Mother with a tea towel. The royal one. Mother washes and whoever’s nearest dries; that’s the rule.

“Am I mad?” said Anya. “At my age? With everything?”

Mother handed her a cup.

“I had Lucas in a shelter on a ridge,” she said, “with gas coming over the wall every night and Halvard’s canisters falling in the snow and no idea if either of us would see the spring.” She washed another cup. “Nobody’s ever had a baby at a good time, love. There isn’t one. There’s only the time you’ve got.”

Anya dried the cup very slowly.

“Liam cried,” she said. “When I said. At supper. He pretended it was the onions.”

“There weren’t any onions,” said Mother.

“No,” said Anya. “There weren’t.”

Rory set fire to a napkin. On purpose. To celebrate. It was the first thing he’d set fire to in a month.

Maura was very relieved.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Eight hundred and seventy-one. One of them, Wren says, from a small dry world of red hills, said it very tired. But it said it.

Wren wrote the count. And under it:

Halls: three hundred and eighty home. Fifty-two sat with.

Harl: held.

Calder: one more. (Probably.)

Days 12102–12160. Nine Halls.

Liam and Anya decided on another. Dot taught the children the roots, and nine teams emptied nine halls in one night, bringing three hundred and eighty home, but on Varrel the scientists cut the roots and fifty-two died while Trevor sat with them. On Harl a Refined with a stolen Hush froze the world, until Dot asked the gift whose it was, Dory sent it home, and Abena saved the queen. Dot heard only one voice in the Prime now.