Scarecrow

She waited four days.

I didn’t ask. I’d said I wouldn’t, and I didn’t. But I knew she was waiting, and she knew I knew, and it sat between us at every meal like an extra chair.

On the fifth morning, she sent the twins to the ridge.

”The intake screens,” she said at breakfast. ”Lucas cleaned them last week, but the wind’s been up. Someone should check.”

”I’ll go,” I said.

”Genny and Garnet will go.”

Genny looked up from her eggs. Her eyes went from Mother to me and back again, and I watched her understand. She didn’t say anything. She just put down her fork.

”Can I bring the gold weight?” Garnet asked.

”Why would you need the gold weight?”

”In case there’s fish.”

”On the ridge?”

”You never know,” said Garnet.

”Bring the weight,” said Mother. ”Take your masks. Take the long way, past the dry creek, and tell me if the willows are budding. Take your time.”

Genny stood up, and took Garnet’s hand, and walked her out of the door without another word. At the bottom of the porch steps she looked back at me once, over her shoulder. Then they were gone into the wheat.

Mother watched them through the window until they crossed the ridge.

Then she reached up, slowly, and pulled the thin chain out from under the collar of her nightgown. There was a key on it. Small, brass, worn smooth.

She held it out to me.

”Bring it here,” she said.

The bottom drawer opened without a sound. Father had kept the runners oiled, even on a drawer nobody opened.

Inside was a box.

It was steel, plain and gray, about the size of a loaf of bread, with no lock and no hinges I could see. When I lifted it out, it was much heavier than it should have been. Father had made it. I could tell by the seams, or rather by the lack of them. The whole thing was a single piece of metal, folded and sealed, with a lid that only came away if you knew where to press.

I carried it into the front room and set it on the bed beside her.

She put her hand on the lid. For a moment she just left it there, flat, the way Genny put her hand on the soil before she changed it.

”Your father made this the week you were born,” she said. ”He said it was for keeping the truth in, until you were old enough to carry it. He used to say that. Old enough to carry it. As if it were heavy.” She almost smiled. ”I suppose it is.”

She pressed one corner of the lid. It came away in her hand.

I looked inside.

The first thing I saw was a photograph.

It was on top, face up, as though someone had looked at it last before closing the box. Real paper, glossy, the colors faded to blues and yellows. I’d never seen it before.

Two people stood on a balcony.

They were young, barely older than I was. A tall man with dark hair and a broad, easy smile, in a gray dress uniform with a long row of medals across the chest. A slight young woman beside him, her arm through his, in the same uniform, laughing at something off to the side. Behind them, a sky full of streamers and flags. Below them, out of focus, a crowd. Not a crowd. A sea. Thousands and thousands of faces turned up toward the balcony, mouths open, hands raised.

The man’s eyes were completely black.

I knew those eyes. I’d grown up looking into them across the kitchen table, under the wall. Pure black, edge to edge, no white, no iris, nothing but a faint gleam of light on the surface like a pool at night. Strangers would have found them frightening. To me, they’d only ever been Father’s.

But I’d never seen him smile like that. Not once. Not even on his best day.

And I’d never seen Mother laugh like that either. With her whole head thrown back. With nothing at all to be afraid of.

”Victory Day,” Mother said quietly. ”New Halcyon. Nineteen years ago this autumn. The day they told everyone the war was over.”

I couldn’t stop looking at the crowd.

”They loved you,” I said.

”They loved us,” she agreed. ”They threw flowers. Do you know how hard it was to get flowers, inside a dome, in a war? They grew them in the hydroponics labs for weeks, special, just to throw them at us. Your father got hit in the eye with a lily.” Something like a laugh. ”He said it was the most dangerous thing that happened to him all year.”

I set the photograph down on the blanket, very carefully, and looked at what was underneath.

Two medals, in a little velvet bag gone thin with age. Heavy gold crosses on blue ribbons, the same ones from the photograph. On the back of each, engraved: For the Deliverance of Humanity. And a name. T. Dask.D. Dask.

Two cards, plastic, the size of my palm, each with a photograph of a young face and a long number. NEW HALCYON CITIZEN RESIDENCY. Across both of them, at an angle, a red stamp that had bitten so hard into the plastic it had cracked it: REVOKED.

A bundle of letters, tied with string. Some on official paper, with a seal at the top. Some on plain paper, handwritten.

Under those, a thick folder. Gray card, bound with tape, stamped all over the front with words like RESTRICTED and MINISTRY OF DEFENSE and DO NOT REMOVE. It was two inches thick and smelled of dust and old paper.

And at the very bottom of the box, folded into a square of white cloth, a pair of socks.

Baby socks. Pale yellow, knitted, small enough to fit on two of my fingers. One of them had a dropped stitch near the toe that someone had tried to fix and made worse.

I picked them up.

”Those are mine,” said Mother. ”I made them. Well. I made one and a half, and your father finished the other half by changing the wool into the right shape, which I said was cheating.” She looked at them in my hand. ”I knitted the first one in our apartment in New Halcyon. Forty-first floor, with a window over the gardens. I finished it the night before they made us leave.”

I looked up.

She met my eyes and held them.

”I was pregnant with you,” she said, ”when they put us out.”

She told it the way she’d asked me to tell the moon story. All of it.

She told it slowly, with long stops to breathe, and her voice was so quiet in places that I had to lean close to the bed to hear. But she didn’t skip anything. I think she’d been practicing for years, in her head, how she would say it.

”You know there was a war,” she said. ”You know what they did to us. To make us able to fight it. But I’ve never told you how old we were.”

”No.”

”Fifteen.” She watched my face. ”Your father was sixteen. I was fifteen. They came to the orphan halls first, because there was nobody to argue. They said the invaders’ machines could be studied, and the things inside them could be put inside us. They said it would make us strong enough to save everyone. They said it would hurt, and it did, and half the children in my hall didn’t wake up from it.”

She was quiet a moment.

”And the ones who woke up were gods,” she said. ”That’s what they called us. On the radio. In the newspapers. The Living Weapons. Humanity’s gods. I could lift a tank at fifteen. Your father could turn a squadron of their ships into rain. We fought for five years. Every day. We were children and we fought, and we won. We were told we won.”

”Victory Day,” I said.

”Victory Day. They gave us those.” She looked at the medals. ”They gave us an apartment on the forty-first floor. People stopped us in the street to touch our hands. Your father and I were married on the steps of the Ministry and the whole city came. It was the happiest year of my life, Lucas. I want you to know that. Before the rest of it. It was real, and we were happy.”

She stopped to breathe. I waited. I put the socks down on the blanket, very gently, next to the photograph.

”Then we started getting sick.”

It started with small things, she said. Nosebleeds. Headaches. Your father’s cough, the first winter after the war. They went to the military doctors, the same doctors who’d made them, who’d been in and out of their hospital rooms for five years with clipboards and smiles.

The doctors were very kind. They ran tests. They said they’d look into it.

Then the appointments started getting cancelled.

Then the letters started. Mother touched the official ones in the bundle as she talked, one after the other. Regret to inform.Program funding redirected.Modified personnel no longer a strategic priority.Unable to accommodate.

Then people stopped touching their hands in the street. They started crossing to the other side.

”The war was over,” Mother said. ”Nobody needed gods anymore. And a god who’s sick, who’s frightened, who can turn the air in your lungs to poison if he loses his temper…” She shook her head slightly on the pillow. ”They were afraid of us. They’d always been afraid of us. They’d only been able to forget it while the invaders were worse.”

She picked up one of the residency cards. Hers. Turned it over in her thin fingers.

”The order came on a Tuesday,” she said. ”All modified personnel and their dependents were to vacate dome residence within seventy-two hours. For public safety. We could take what we could carry. There would be a settlement provided outside.” She almost laughed. ”There was no settlement. There never was.”

”Seventy-two hours.”

”I’d found out I was pregnant that same week. The Friday before.” She set the card down. ”I went to the Ministry. I stood in the lobby with my medal on and asked to see someone, anyone. I said I was carrying a child. I said the child wasn’t modified. I said the child was a citizen. I said please.”

She was quiet for a long time.

”A man came down to the lobby eventually,” she said. ”He was very polite. He said the order covered dependents, born and unborn. He said he was sorry. Then he said that if the child had our gifts, the dome couldn’t risk it either.”

The filter hummed in the walls. Out of the window, the wheat moved.

I found I’d closed my hand around Father’s knife on my belt. I didn’t remember doing it.

”Who was he?” I asked.

”That’s in the folder,” said Mother. ”Not today.”

”We left through the east locks,” Mother said.

Her voice had gone thin. I poured her water and held the cup for her, and she drank a little, and went on.

”Six in the morning. They’d moved us out at night, so nobody would see. But the locks didn’t open until six, so we had to wait in the street with our bags. Fifty of us, maybe. Modified, and our husbands and wives, and two children who’d been born in the war. Soldiers on either side of us with their rifles held across their chests. Not pointed. Just held. So we’d know.”

She looked toward the window.

”And the bakery opened,” she said. ”The one on the ring street. The old man came out and put the loaves in the window, the way he always did, at six. The steam came up on the glass. And the whole street smelled of it.”

I remembered Garnet’s sand bread. It looked exactly like yours. I hadn’t understood, three days ago, why Mother’s voice had gone the way it did.

”He saw us,” Mother said. ”The old man. He stood in his doorway with his apron on and looked at us. All of us standing there in the street with our bags and the soldiers. He knew who we were. Everyone knew who we were.”

”What did he do?”

”He went back inside,” she said. ”And he closed the door.”

She didn’t say anything else for a while.

”Then the locks opened,” she said finally, ”and we walked out. Into all of that.” Her eyes moved to the ridge, and the gray beyond it. ”No masks. No filter. No settlement. Your father made the masks that first night, out of his own coat. He made the first filter from the scrap of a burned-out truck. Some of the others went west, looking for the settlement they’d been promised. We never saw them again. We went east. We walked for nine days. And on the ninth day we came over a ridge and found a valley nobody had any reason to look at.”

”And he stood at the edge of it for three days.”

”And he stood at the edge of it for three days,” she agreed. ”And then he went in and changed it. And four months later, you were born, in a tent, at the ridge settlement, with Old Sal holding my hand and your father outside holding a whole sky’s worth of rain off the tent so it wouldn’t leak.”

She reached out, slowly, and touched the yellow socks on the blanket.

”You wore these home,” she said. ”Into the valley. Into a house your father made out of nothing. A citizen of New Halcyon, born in the dirt, in socks I knitted on the forty-first floor.”

I looked at the socks.

I didn’t trust my voice. I didn’t say anything at all.

What I felt wasn’t sadness. Not exactly. It was something lower than that, and quieter, and much hotter, and it was spreading slowly outward from the center of my chest like a fire under ash. I thought of the man in the Ministry lobby. Born and unborn. I thought of the soldiers holding their rifles across their chests. So we’d know. I thought of an old man closing his door.

I thought of the crowd in the photograph, all those faces turned up, all those hands raised.

And I thought, very clearly, the way you think a fact: I could take that dome apart from the top of the ridge.

I could. I could see it from up there. And anything I could see—

”Lucas.”

Mother’s hand was on my wrist. She couldn’t have held it if I’d pulled. She didn’t need to.

”I know,” she said. ”I know what you’re thinking. I’ve watched your father think it a thousand times. And I’m going to tell you what I told him, every time.” Her fingers tightened, just slightly. ”There were children in that city. There are children in that city now. And an old man who makes bread, who was frightened, and closed his door. That’s all he did. He closed a door.”

”He watched.”

”Yes. Most people do.” She held my eyes. ”Your father never once lifted his hand against that dome. Not once, in all the years we lived out here. Do you understand why?”

I didn’t. I didn’t want to.

”Because the moment he did,” Mother said, ”he’d have been exactly what they said he was.”

The twins came back over the ridge an hour later.

I saw them from the window. Genny walking in front, very straight. Garnet behind her, running ahead and back again, holding something up in the light. The gold weight, I thought. Then, as they got closer: a twig. A green twig, with something pale on the end of it.

Mother saw it too.

”The willows are budding,” she said softly.

She let go of my wrist.

She was very tired. I could see it in every line of her. She’d spent everything she had on telling it, and now there was nothing left, and she lay against the pillows with her eyes half closed and her hand resting on the yellow socks.

”The folder,” she said. ”Read it tomorrow. In the morning. When I’m awake to answer what you ask.” Her eyes closed the rest of the way. ”Promise me. Not tonight, alone.”

”I promise.”

”Put the photograph on the windowsill,” she said. ”Facing out. I’d like him to see the field.”

I put the photograph on the windowsill, facing out. The young man on the balcony smiled at the wheat with his black eyes.

Then I put everything else back into the box, one thing at a time. The medals in their velvet bag. The cracked cards. The letters in their string. The folder, unopened. The socks, in their square of white cloth, on the very top.

I pressed the corner of the lid. It sealed without a seam.

I carried it back to Father’s study and set it in the drawer and locked the drawer again, and hung the key on its chain over the corner of the desk where I’d see it in the morning.

The box was heavier than when I’d taken it out.

Father had been right about that.