Scarecrow

Dory found it on a Tuesday. In the night. By accident.

She wasn’t looking for it. She was looking for bells. She does that now, most nights, with Dot. Sits on the end of her bed in the end room with her glasses off and Pebble across her feet and goes out along the net, all of it, every well and hollow and dark place under every world, listening for the scream.

She didn’t find a bell.

She found Trevor.

She came down to the kitchen at three in the morning. I was there. I’m always there at three now, more than I used to be. Mother says it’s age. I don’t think it is.

Dory stood in the kitchen doorway in her nightdress. She was white.

“Where’s Trevor?” she said.

“In bed. On Ister. With Teva.”

“Are you sure?”

I looked at her.

“I can feel him,” said Dory. “In bed. On Ister. With Teva. Asleep.” She put her hand on the doorframe. “And I can feel him somewhere else too.”

She sat down at the long table. I put the kettle on. Mother came down. She always does, when the kettle goes on at three. Then Dot, from her corner, colours coming up.

“It’s not him,” said Dory. “Not all of him. Bits. Pieces of him. A long way off. Past the second arm.” She closed her eyes. “It feels like him the way a reflection feels like you. The same, and backwards, and not there.”

“How many pieces?” said Mother.

Dory was quiet a long time.

“Nine,” she said. “In nine people. And one more.” She opened her eyes. “The one more is very small. And very far down. And it feels the most like him of any of them.”

Dot said, from the corner:

“Query. Did anyone collect what was on the floor at Varrel?”

Nobody said anything.

I knew what she meant. I’d heard Elin tell it. The long white room under Varrel’s hall. Eighty beds. Trevor going down the rows asking every root to slow down, asking so hard his nose bled and then his ears. Blood on the white floor between the beds. On the edge of the nearest bed. On the sleeve of a woman who didn’t wake up.

And in the room above, the small pale scientist with his slate, watching. Who pressed something and snapped eighty roots home at once. And went out through his own door.

And came back, perhaps. After. When the Standing had gone and the fifty-two were taken home to be buried and the long room was empty.

“Blood,” said Mother. Very quietly.

“Affirmative,” said Dot. “Trevor’s blood. From a time when his gift was open all the way. When his eyes were going black.” A pause. “This one has heard the scientists on the grey band. For a long time. They have one word they say more than any other.”

“What word?”

“Dask,” said Dot.

Corvan knew his name.

He came up the hill road at dawn, because Lio woke him, and stood in the kitchen with his coat on over his nightclothes and listened to Dory tell it again. Then he sat down on the bench very suddenly.

“Ostrander Pale,” he said.

We looked at him.

“The chief of the rooms,” said Corvan. “In the white hall. He reported to my father every ninth day. Small. Pale. Thin. Always a slate. He never sat down. Father hated him.” He put his hands flat on the table. “Father hated everybody. But he was frightened of Pale. I saw it. Once. When Pale said something about the Hedge and Father went white.”

“What did he say?”

Corvan was quiet for a long time.

“He said, give me one of the children,” said Corvan. “Just one. Any one. And I’ll give you a hundred like it.”

Trevor came through the Ister arch at noon. With Teva. He’d been told.

He stood in the kitchen doorway in the dusk-coloured glasses he made himself after Varrel, out of a piece of Ister glass. He hasn’t taken them off much since. He says the black’s too much for people. He says they look at him differently.

He took them off.

His eyes are black. All the way. Like mine. Like Dory’s. Like Kwame’s, since Ammet. Like Queenie’s, who was born that way, and like Father’s, Mother says, from the first time his went. He stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at all of us.

“My blood,” he said.

“Yes, love,” said Mother.

“From Varrel. From the floor. While I was sitting with them.”

“Yes.”

Trevor didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then he said, “I was holding a woman’s hand. The one on the end of the third row. She didn’t wake up. My nose was bleeding on her sleeve.” His voice was very steady. “I didn’t even think about it. I didn’t think about anything except her.”

“That’s right,” said Mother. “That’s exactly what you should have thought about.”

“And now somebody’s using it.”

“Yes.”

Teva put her hand on his arm. He didn’t move.

“What are they doing with it?” he said.

Dory showed him.

Not in words. In the net. She took his hand, his and Teva’s, and opened it, and took them out along it to the nine.

Teva can’t do anything. She has no gift at all. But she can feel the net when Dory holds her in it, the way everyone can, the way the whole of Ammet did. She told me afterwards it was like looking at Trevor in a broken mirror. Nine times.

Nine Refined. In white. On a world past the second arm. Each one with something of Trevor’s grown into them in grey, the way the stolen gifts were grown. Not a gift. Not a whole one. Pale couldn’t do that. He didn’t have a sleeper to root it to. He just had blood. So he’d grown what he could out of the blood, and put it into nine Refined, and it was broken.

They could tell glass.

Not ask. Tell. That was the thing that made Trevor’s hand go tight in Dory’s. Trevor asks glass. He asks it to be a cup, or a window, or a lens, or to let the light through just so. And the glass is glad to.

These nine told it. And the glass did what it was told. Badly. Crying, Dory says, if glass can cry. It broke in the wrong places. It cut.

And every time they did it, they bled. From the nose. From the ears. Because what was in them wasn’t theirs, and didn’t know how to be, and was tearing them apart a little every time.

“They’re dying,” said Trevor. Very quietly. “All nine. Slowly. Every time they use it.”

“Yes,” said Dory.

“He knows.”

“Yes.”

“He doesn’t care.”

“No,” said Dory. “He’s writing it down.”

“And the tenth,” said Teva. “The small one. Very far down.”

Dory didn’t take them there. Not that night. She said she wasn’t sure enough. She said she wanted to be sure before she showed anybody.

She went on her own. The next night. With Dot. Scattered up the thread, very quietly, the way she does.

She came back at dawn and sat on the porch step and didn’t come in for a long time. I went out. I sat down above her.

“It’s a child,” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“A real one,” said Dory. “Not a Refined with a piece in it. A child. Grown. From the blood. In a tank. In the dark. Under a white building on a world called Sable, past everything.” She had her glasses in her lap. “She’s about a year old. I think. He’s grown her in months. The way our children grow. Faster. Because she’s grown from us.” She stopped. “She’s asleep. She’s been asleep the whole time. She’s never been awake.”

“Her eyes?”

Dory looked at the north field.

“Black,” she said. “Like his. Like Trevor’s. Like all of ours.”

We told Trevor together. Me and Dory. On the porch, that night. With Teva.

He didn’t say anything at all. He sat on the step with his glasses in his hands and listened. When Dory said black, he closed his eyes.

Teva didn’t let go of his hand once.

At the end of it he opened his eyes and looked at the north field for a long time.

“She’s mine,” he said.

“Trevor—”

“She’s mine,” he said again. Not loudly. “Not his. Not Pale’s. He took my blood off a floor where I was sitting with dying people and grew a child out of it in the dark so he could cut her open and find out how I work.” He turned the glasses over. “She’s made of me. She’s mine.” He looked at Teva. “She’s ours. If you want.”

Teva didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she said, very simply, “Good morning.”

It’s their word. It’s what they say. The one the keepers wrote down.

Trevor put his face in his hands.

Okafor drew it on nine sheets.

She drew it at the long table that night, not at the board. She said she wanted to draw it where the kettle was.

Sable is past everything. Past the second arm, past the worlds that asked for boxes, past where the Collective’s ships go. A grey world with no queen and no people. Pale chose it for that, Corvan thinks. Nobody to ask. Nobody to sit in a square.

Under one long white building, a hall. The nine Refined, when they’re not being used. The tank. And Pale. Dot can hear him on the grey band. He talks to himself, she says. All the time. Numbers. Readings. Dask.

“Nine Refined,” said Okafor. “Broken. Dying. Every one of them with a piece of you.” She looked at Trevor. “They’ll fight. They’ll tell glass to do terrible things. There’s a great deal of glass on Sable. The whole building’s made of it.”

“Then I’ll go,” said Trevor.

“Yes,” said Okafor. “You’ll go. You’re the only one who can ask the glass faster than they can tell it.” She turned the sheet. “Dory goes. For the child. Lucas holds the building. Elin holds the door. And Ash. For the nine.”

“Ash?”

“Ash undoes things,” said Okafor. “Collars. Grey. Whatever’s holding. She can undo what Pale grew in them, if anyone can. Then they stop dying.” She looked at the sheet. “Maybe.”

“And Pale?” said Corvan.

Okafor didn’t look up.

“If he’s there,” she said, “Gilgamesh goes too.”

We went on the ninth night. Through Elin’s door.

Sable is grey. All of it. Grey rock, grey sky, a grey sun very small and far away. No wind. No sound. No queen. Dory said it was the quietest world she’d ever been on. She said it felt like a held breath that would never be let out.

The building stood on a grey plain. Long and low and white, the way the halls are. But not stone. Glass. All of it. Walls and roof and floor, white glass, very thick, so you could see shapes moving inside but not what they were.

Trevor stood at the door with his glasses off. He put his hand on the wall.

“It’s frightened,” he said. “All of it. It’s been told things for a year. Terrible things.” He closed his eyes. “It doesn’t remember being asked.”

“Then ask it,” I said.

He asked the building to open.

Not to break. To open. Very politely. The way you’d ask a door that had been slammed too often if it would mind very much being a door again.

The glass thought about it for a long time.

Then the whole long wall of the building went clear. All at once. Like a window when the frost goes. And we could see in.

The nine were in the long room. Standing. In a row. In white. Waiting for orders. With blood dried on their lips and down their necks from the last time.

They saw us through the clear wall.

And they told the glass.

I’ve never seen anything like it. I hope I never do again.

The whole building screamed. That’s the only word. The glass screamed. Nine people telling it, at once, with something of Trevor in them, broken, backwards. Telling it to break. To cut. To come out of the walls in shards and go at the people outside.

The wall in front of us burst outward. Into a million pieces. Very sharp. Very fast.

Trevor put his hand up.

He didn’t stop it. You can’t stop a million pieces of glass. He asked it.

Every piece. All at once. The way I asked Ammet’s eastern edge. The way Dory holds nine hundred million people. Every single shard of white glass coming at us through the grey air, he asked it, very gently, very fast, faster than nine people could tell it anything:

Would you like to stop?

And the glass stopped.

In the air. All of it. A million pieces of white glass, hanging in the grey air of Sable between us and the building, perfectly still, catching the light of the small grey sun. Like snow that had decided not to fall.

Trevor stood with his hand up. His nose was bleeding. His ears. His eyes were black and very wide.

“Thank you,” he said. To the glass.

And very slowly, all the pieces settled to the ground. Like snow after all.

The nine came out of the building through the hole.

They were shaking. Bleeding. Telling the glass again. Telling it and telling it. It wouldn’t listen. It had been asked. It was lying on the grey ground very quietly, and it didn’t want to be told anything any more.

The first of the nine stopped at the edge of the hole. Looked at Trevor. At his black eyes.

He had black eyes too. Dory saw it. All nine did. Not all the way. In patches. As if they’d been painted on badly.

“You,” he said. To Trevor. “You’re what’s in us.”

“Yes,” said Trevor.

The man looked at him for a long time. Blood running out of his nose. His hands shaking.

“It hurts,” he said. “All the time. It hurts all the time.”

Trevor didn’t say anything.

Ash walked past him. Past Trevor. Past me. Straight up to the nine. Very small, compared to them. Sera’s Ash, who undoes collars.

She put her hand on the first man’s chest.

It took her nine minutes. One minute each. The way she did the sixty made on Isselt.

She found what Pale had grown in each of them. The broken piece of Trevor in the grey. And she undid it. Not out. Undid it. The way you undo a knot that’s been pulled too tight, very carefully, one strand at a time, until it isn’t a knot any more, just a piece of string.

Each one of them, when she’d finished, sat down on the grey ground. Like a puppet with the strings cut. Like the Refined on Harl.

The bleeding stopped.

The first man sat on the grey ground of Sable and touched his face. His nose. The blood had stopped. He looked at his hand.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he said.

Ash sat down next to him. She looked very tired.

“No,” she said. “It won’t now.”

Dory was already inside.

She went in through the hole while the glass was still settling and Ash was on the third man. Down. Through the long room, through a door at the end, down a long glass stair into the dark. To the very bottom. Where the small one was.

I went after her. Gilgamesh came behind me with his axe. There was nobody on the stair. Nobody in the dark at the bottom. Just one room, very small, round, with glass walls, and a light, and in the middle of it a tank.

And a slate. On a stand. By the tank. Covered in numbers, in very small neat writing.

And at the top of the slate, in the same writing, one word.

Dask.

Pale wasn’t there.

Dot heard him go. On the grey band, the moment Trevor’s glass stopped in the air. A fold. Very fast. Taking himself away. Dot says she heard him say one thing, on the band, just before he went. To nobody. Very calm.

Glass. Of course.

And then he was gone.

He left the slate. Dory thinks on purpose. She thinks he wanted us to see the numbers. She thinks he wanted us to know how much he knew.

He took the blood. All of it. Every sample. Dot says there were nine hundred vials, once. On a shelf in the round room. The shelf’s empty.

The tank was clear glass. Full of something pale and warm. And in it, curled up very small, with her knees to her chest and her fists by her face, asleep, a child.

About a year old. Dark hair floating. Very thin.

Dory stood in front of the tank with her hand on the glass.

“She’s never been awake,” she said. “Not once. She doesn’t know what awake is.”

Trevor came down the stair behind us. With his nose still bleeding and his glasses in his hand.

He stopped at the bottom.

He looked at the tank for a very long time.

Then he went across the round room and put his hand on the glass next to Dory’s. And asked it.

He asked the tank to open. Gently. The glass came apart round the child the way water opens. The pale warm stuff ran out over the floor. And she lay on the bottom of the tank, curled up, wet, very small, in the cold air of Sable, for the first time in her life.

She opened her eyes.

They were black. All the way. Like his.

She didn’t cry. She didn’t make any sound. She lay there and looked up at Trevor with her black eyes, the way Queenie looks at things, all the way down.

Trevor knelt down. On the wet glass floor. And picked her up. Very carefully. The way you’d pick up something that had never been picked up before. And held her against his chest, inside his coat, where it was warm.

She looked up at him.

And then, very slowly, she put out one small wet hand. And touched his face. Where the blood was. From his nose.

Trevor made a sound I’ve never heard him make.

“Hello,” he said. “Hello. Hello, love. I’m here. It’s all right. I’m here.”

Gilgamesh stood at the bottom of the stair with his axe and didn’t say anything. He turned round. He faced the stair. So nobody could come down it.

He stood there until we were ready to go.

Elin’s door opened onto the plateau. Mother was there. With the pot. And Teva.

Teva had been standing on the red glass since we left. She hadn’t sat down. She hadn’t had any tea. She’d been standing exactly where the door would open, with her hands together in front of her, for nine hours.

Trevor came through first. With his coat closed round something small.

He stopped in front of Teva.

He opened the coat.

Teva looked down at the child for a long time. The black eyes looked up at her.

“Good morning,” said Teva. Very quietly. To the child.

And the child, who had never been awake before today, who had never heard anybody say anything, looked up at her and opened her mouth.

And made a sound. Not a word. Just a sound. The first one.

Teva took her. Very carefully. Out of Trevor’s coat. Into her own arms. And held her.

Mother came across the red glass with the pot. She stopped in front of the three of them. She looked at the child for a long time. At the black eyes. At the dark hair. At Trevor, with blood on his face, and his black eyes, and his hands shaking.

“There you are, love,” said Mother. To the child. “You’ll want feeding.”

They named her on the third day. On Ister. The keepers came to the narrow grey house by Ilas’s old house and wrote it in the long record with its meaning.

Glass, in Aldri. Which also means the thing the light comes through.

Trevor and Teva call her Lumi. Which is a short way of saying it. Everybody on the hill calls her Lumi now.

Halloway came to the narrow grey house on the fourth day. With her bag. Teva let her in.

She sat on the floor of the front room, the way she sat in Mother’s kitchen doorway for Rue. She looked at Lumi in Teva’s arms for an hour. Then she asked if she could hold her. Teva let her.

Lumi didn’t cry. She looked up at Halloway with her black eyes, all the way down, the way she looks at everyone.

“She’s a year old,” said Halloway at last. “Near enough. Her bones are a year old. Her lungs. Her heart.” She turned Lumi’s small hand over in hers. “She was grown in nine months. From blood off a floor. She should be a sack of cells. She should be dead.” She looked up at Trevor. “She’s perfect. Every part of her. Everything’s exactly where it should be.”

“How?” said Trevor.

Halloway looked at the child for a long time.

“I think she did it herself,” she said. “I think whatever’s in you, whatever’s in all of you, was in that blood. And it did what it does. It mended. It rebuilt. In the dark. In the tank. With nobody to ask it anything.” She gave Lumi back to Teva. “Pale grew a body. She made herself into a person.”

Nobody said anything.

Dory brought the slate home. Pale’s slate. From the round room. She gave it to Bell, who read it all night, and came up the hill road in the morning very grey.

“He knows things,” she said. “About all of us. Things I don’t know.”

She put her finger on a column near the bottom. Very small numbers. Very neat.

At the top of the column, a heading. In Pale’s hand.

Ascendants of Dask: rate of decline.

And under it, a list of names. Mother’s. Ingrid’s. Konrad’s. Maura’s and Rory’s. The General’s. Kwame Osei’s and Abena Osei’s. Halvane’s. Ilas’s.

And beside every name, the same number.

0.

Bell looked at me for a long time.

“He’s been watching the grandparents,” she said. “For years. Measuring them. On the band, in the Herald, in pictures. How they walk. How they look.” She put the slate down. “He thinks they’ve stopped getting older.”

“Have they?”

Bell didn’t answer.

Halloway, at the end of the table, put her cup down very carefully.

“I’ve been keeping a list too,” she said. “Since Holt walked again. I didn’t want to say.”

Nobody said anything for a very long time.

Then Mother, at the stove, without turning round, said, “Well, I could have told you that. I haven’t needed my glasses in ten years.”

Rue met Lumi on the ninth day.

Teva brought her up the hill road, the way everybody brings everything up the hill road. Rue was in Mother’s lap at the long table, with the apron and the bag of leaves and the horse and Maura’s small grey round thing.

Teva sat down on the bench. Not too close. She held Lumi on her knee.

The two of them looked at each other. Rue and Lumi. Across the table. For a long time.

Rue’s never seen a baby up close. Not since. Not since the doorway. Dory thinks there was a baby in the house next door, on Rue’s world. She thinks Rue heard it crying the night they came.

Lumi looked at Rue with her black eyes.

And then, very slowly, the way babies do, she reached out. Across the table. Towards Rue. Her small hand open.

Rue went stiff. Mother felt it.

Lumi’s hand stayed there. Open. In the air. Not touching. She didn’t know how far away Rue was. She’d only been awake nine days.

Rue looked at the hand for a long time.

Then she let go of the apron.

And put out one finger. Very slowly. And put it in Lumi’s hand.

Lumi closed her fist round it.

Rue didn’t scream.

She sat in Mother’s lap with her finger in the baby’s fist and looked at it. Lumi looked at her. Neither of them made a sound.

Teva says it was nearly a minute.

Then Rue took her finger back. And took the apron again. And put her face into Mother’s side.

Mother didn’t say anything. Nobody did. Queenie, at the end of the long table, who’d watched the whole thing, very small, with her own black eyes, said, very quietly, to nobody:

“She’s like me.”

“Who is, love?” said Mother.

“The baby,” said Queenie. “She was born seeing.” She went back to her porridge. “She’ll need leaves.”

The next morning there were two leaves on the long table. One by Rue’s place. One by Teva’s. Held by the very end of the stem.

Imre came up the hill road a month later. She’d heard. Everybody had. The Herald printed it, with Trevor’s leave: the blood, the nine, the tank on Sable, the child.

She came to the narrow grey house. She didn’t bring her notebook.

“People are asking,” she said. “For a soft one. Of her. Thousands of letters.” She looked at Lumi asleep in Teva’s arms. “I said I’d ask.”

Trevor didn’t say anything for a long time.

“No,” he said. “Not her. Not ever.” He looked at Imre. “He made her to be a thing. Something to look at and write down. She’s not going to be a thing for anybody. Not even a soft one.”

Imre nodded. Slowly.

“That’s what I hoped you’d say,” she said.

She made a soft one of the glass instead. A soft round thing, white and clear, with tiny threads of silver through it, that catches the light. It’s called the Stop. Because of the glass on Sable that stopped in the air.

Children throw it. And it stops. Imre won’t say how.

The nine are at the Lake House. In the wool room. With Toby and Aurin Vell and the man from Thrane who listened at the concert. The wool room’s getting full. Toby says he doesn’t mind. Toby says it’s the best silence he’s ever been part of.

The first man, the one who said it hurts, asked to see Trevor. A month later. Trevor went.

They sat in the wool room together for an hour. Neither of them said anything.

At the end of the hour the man said, “I’m sorry.”

And Trevor said, “So am I.”

And then they had a cup of tea.

Trevor came up the hill road on his own one evening. Without Teva. Without Lumi. He sat down on the porch step below me. Where Dory sits. He’s never sat there.

He had his glasses in his hand. The dusk-coloured ones.

“How long did you wear yours?” he said.

“Dusk?” I said. “A few weeks. Okafor gave them to me. After the gas. Your grandfather made them, out of somebody else’s glasses and soot. She’d kept them for years.” I looked at the north field. “I gave them back.”

“Why?”

I thought about it.

“Because people looked at me differently with them on,” I said. “They kept wondering what I was hiding.”

Trevor turned his glasses over in his hands.

“Lumi touched my face,” he said. “In the round room. With her hand. Where the blood was.” He was quiet for a while. “She was looking at my eyes. Right at them. She wasn’t frightened. She’s got the same ones.”

“Yes.”

“If I wear these,” said Trevor, “she’ll grow up thinking you have to hide them.”

He didn’t say anything else. He sat on the step for a long time. Then he stood up, and put the glasses in my hand, and went back down the hill road to the Ister arch.

I’ve still got them. On the windowsill. Next to Mother’s bells.

He hasn’t worn glasses since. Not once. Not on Ister, not on Avalon, not in the Arch Hall where everybody passes through. He walks round the third city on Ister with his black eyes open, and the Aldri stare, and he lets them. At the Hill’s games he sits in the stand with Lumi on his knee, and her eyes are black and so are his, and when people look, he looks back.

Mother says Father did exactly the same thing. On the ridge. After his went. She says he never once covered them.

Corvan read Pale’s slate too. All of it. At Konrad’s table, on the Sunday, with Lio and Sefa and the Assessors.

When he got to the bottom of it he put it down and sat very still.

“My father hated him,” he said. “I told you that. And was frightened of him.” He looked at the slate. “I think I know why now.”

“Why?” said Lio.

“Because Pale doesn’t want anything,” said Corvan. “Not power. Not worlds. Not to be the Prime. Father understood people who wanted things.” He put his hand on the slate. “Pale just wants to know. Everything. How it all works. All the way down.” He looked at Lio. “And he doesn’t care what it costs. Not even a little. Not even once.”

Lio didn’t say anything for a long time.

“That’s what the rooms were like,” she said. “When I was small. Nobody in them wanted anything. They just wanted to know.”

Okafor wrote on her slate. Under everything.

Pale.

And under it, smaller:

Nine hundred vials.

She showed it to me at the board. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

He’s got Trevor’s blood. Nine hundred vials of it. From the time his eyes were going black. And now he knows that Trevor can ask glass faster than nine people can tell it, and that Ash can undo what he grows, and that Dory will find anything made of us, anywhere, in the dark.

He wrote it all down.

He’ll try again.

The leagues, because life goes on, and Toby insists:

In Stile, the Haze are still unbeaten. The Hill beat Onsey’s first team, nine to four. Sigmund threw. Lumi was in the stand, three weeks old, in Teva’s arms, and when the last ball went past the batter, the whole stand breathed in, and Lumi did too. Teva felt her do it. Toby heard it. He came down out of the stand afterwards and stood in front of Teva and looked at the baby for a long time and said, “She breathed in,” and went away again with his eyes very wet.

In Ring, the Gales lost to the Wanderers again. By two. The tiny Next Door boy got in the way of nine shots. Kesh says next time.

In Ridge, the Ridge-Ends won two in a row. Kyrie scored in both. Kyria went to both. Okafor went to one.

In the Long Way, Halvane’s new ship is finished. It’s called the Lumi. He named it after the baby the day she came home. It’s gold, and very fast, and it’ll race the Kethri at the Fours.

In the Run, Liam finished seventh. Aoife was in Anya’s arms at the finish line and set fire to the flag.

And the Fours: Caul has finished the stands. Six million seats on the Hazy Field. Hanne Brisk says she’ll need more.

Toby’s subcommittee added a fifth event for the Fours, for this time only, as a trial. The Caddi game in the dark with the small stones. Toby says when he went back to listen on Caddoc, the whole hollow breathed in so hard the lamps went out. The Caddi grandmother says nobody outside Caddoc will understand it. Toby says that’s all right. He says nobody understood Stile once either.

The stars said Not yet this morning. A thousand and twenty-two.

Wren wrote it. And under it:

Nine: undone.

Lumi: awake.

Pale: nine hundred vials.

Days 12932–13018. Blood.

Dory felt pieces of Trevor in nine Refined and one child: Ostrander Pale, chief of the rooms, had taken Trevor’s blood from Varrel’s floor and grown it. On Sable Trevor asked a million shards of glass to stop in the air, Ash undid the broken gift in the nine, and Pale folded away with nine hundred vials. Trevor and Teva brought home the child grown in the tank, and named her Lumi.