Scarecrow

I remembered a noise.

That was all, for years. Just the noise. I’d have told you, if you’d asked me, that it was the earliest thing I could remember clearly, and I’d have been wrong, because I remembered the moon going white and that was two years before. But the moon was a story now. I’d told it so many times it had worn smooth.

The noise hadn’t. It sat in the back of my head exactly as it had happened, sharp-edged, and I’d never told it to anyone because I didn’t know what it was.

I was six. It was autumn. I was in the front room, on the floor by the stove, building something out of Father’s wooden blocks. A tower. I remember the tower very clearly, for some reason. It was nearly as tall as I was.

There was a sound outside. A low hum, very deep, like the filter but bigger. The windows rattled in their frames. Mother came in from the kitchen fast, wiping her hands, and looked out of the front window, and her face changed.

She said, Lucas, go to your room.

I said, But my tower.

She said, Now. And she didn’t wait for me to go. She picked me up off the floor without touching me, with her mind, the way she used to move the teapot, and carried me up the stairs through the air and set me down on my bed and shut the door.

I sat on the bed. I could hear voices outside. Father’s, very low. Another man’s, smooth and quiet. I couldn’t hear the words.

Then the noise.

It wasn’t loud, exactly. That’s what I could never explain. It wasn’t a bang, or a crash, or a scream. It was more like a sound with the inside taken out. A huge, soft whump, like someone dropping a wet sheet from a great height, and at the same moment a pressure in my ears, and the window in my room bowed outward and then sprang back.

And a smell. Coming up through the floor. Like rain on hot stone. Like pennies.

Then nothing at all.

I sat on the bed for a long time. Nobody came. I heard the deep hum again, outside, rising and fading away. Then the front door. Then water running, for a long time, out on the porch.

When Mother finally came up, it was dark, and her eyes were red. She sat on the bed and held me and didn’t say anything. I asked what the noise was. She said it was nothing, love. She said Father had broken something.

Father didn’t let me go out on the porch for a week. He scrubbed the boards every day. When I was finally allowed out, there was a pale patch near the door where the wood had been scrubbed almost white, and it stayed that way for years, until he replaced those boards.

My tower was still on the floor by the stove. Nobody had knocked it down. Father had built a little fence of books around it, so it would be safe while I was upstairs.

I’d forgotten that until right now.

”I’m going to tell you about the noise,” Mother said.

It was the next morning. The folder was on the bed beside her, open, and Genny was sitting in Father’s chair by the window with her knees pulled up to her chest. Mother had let her stay. Garnet was out in the field. I could see her through the window, sitting at the scarecrow’s feet in the wheat, braiding three stalks together and talking to it nonstop.

”You remember the noise,” said Mother.

It wasn’t a question. I nodded.

”I always knew you did. You’d go quiet sometimes, near the porch door. Your father noticed too. He said you’d ask when you were ready.” She looked at me. ”You never asked.”

”I didn’t know what to ask.”

”No.” She reached for the folder, and her hand shook too much, and Genny got up without a word and lifted it onto her lap for her. Mother turned through it, slowly, to a page near the back. A single sheet, thin gray paper, much older than the rest. She held it out to me.

OBSERVATORY LOG. New Halcyon Astronomical Station. Lunar surface anomaly.

Under that, a date. Thirteen years ago this summer.

Then a photograph, grainy and gray. The moon, close up. And on it, a little left of center, a small bright patch, very white, with a hard clean edge, as though someone had pressed a coin into the dust.

New high-albedo feature, approximately 2.1 km diameter, appeared between consecutive observations (interval: 4 minutes). No impact flash recorded. Spectral analysis consistent with water ice. Origin unknown.

And under that, in a careful, small hand, a scientist’s hand, a note in blue ink:

Not natural. Not invader. Assess as probable unregistered Cinder activity, Class unbounded. Locate. — H.C.

I stared at it.

”They saw it,” I said.

”Everyone saw it,” said Mother. ”There was a big new white spot on the moon. The radio in the domes said it was a meteor. Your father and I listened to them say it, and we looked at each other, and we knew.” She watched my face. ”Your father always said nobody in the war could have done what you did that night. He was right. Halvard knew it too. There’d only ever been one man alive who could do anything close to it. And that man couldn’t have reached the moon.”

I looked at the note. Locate.

”It took them two years,” Mother said, ”to find us.”

”It was a government craft,” Mother said. ”The kind with no wings, that hangs in the air on a hum. We’d never seen one out here before. It came down at the edge of the field, right on top of the wheat, and flattened a whole corner of it.”

She was looking out the window as she spoke, at the corner of the field by the dry creek. I’d always wondered why the wheat there grew a little differently. Shorter. As though the soil had been made twice.

”Three people got out. Two soldiers. Big men, in gray, with rifles. They wore masks. The good kind, from the dome, with the little lights on the side.” She paused. ”And Halvard. He didn’t wear a mask. He just walked out into the air as if it were his. He’d got older. Grayer. He still wore the same glasses. He walked up the path through the wheat with his hands in his coat pockets, as though he were coming round for tea.”

”Father was on the porch,” I said. I didn’t know how I knew.

”Your father was on the porch. He went out the moment he heard the craft. He told me to take you upstairs. And I did, and I came back down and stood in the doorway behind him. And Halvard walked up to the bottom of the steps and looked up at your father and smiled.”

She was quiet for a moment.

”He said, Hello, Trevor. It’s very good to see you. And he meant it. That’s the thing. He meant it.”

She told it all.

Crane had stood at the foot of the porch steps and talked for nearly half an hour. Father hadn’t said a word the whole time. Hadn’t moved. Mother said he’d just stood at the top of the steps with his arms at his sides, looking down at the man, with his black eyes giving away nothing.

Crane had apologized. That was how he’d started. He’d said that Directive Nine had been a mistake. A political necessity, at the time, under pressure from the Council, but a mistake. He’d said he’d argued against it. (Mother said he was lying, and I had his signature, first, to prove it.) He said he thought about them every day.

Then he’d told them about the future.

Humanity couldn’t live in the domes forever, he’d said. The world outside was poisoned, and it would stay poisoned for a thousand years. There was a plan. A great plan, the greatest humanity had ever attempted. A new world. A place to begin again. He didn’t say where, or how. He said he couldn’t, not yet. But it would need people like Trevor to make it possible. It would need gods again.

”And then he said,” Mother said, very quietly, ”We can help you now.”

I looked at her.

”He said they’d been working on it. Treatment. For the rejection. For what was happening to us. He said they’d made progress. He said if your father came back, if he joined the program, they’d treat him. Both of us. He said we could have years. He said we could have decades.”

Genny’s head came up.

”Was it true?” she asked.

”I don’t know,” said Mother. ”I’ve wondered every day for eleven years. I still don’t know.”

”What did Father say?”

”Nothing,” said Mother. ”Not then. He didn’t say anything until the end.”

She closed her eyes.

”Halvard stopped talking, eventually. He’d said everything he’d come to say. And your father still didn’t answer. And Halvard looked past him, at the door, at me. And then he looked up. At the window. Your window.”

I felt something go cold in my stomach.

”He said, Trevor, we know about the boy.”

The room was very still.

”He said, We saw the moon. Everyone saw the moon. He said, Do you understand what he is? Do you understand what he could do for us? With the right training, the right resources? You can’t give him that out here. He said, The boy would come too, of course. He’d be looked after. He’d have everything.”

Mother opened her eyes and looked at me.

”And one of the soldiers moved,” she said. ”Toward the door. Toward me. Toward the stairs. I don’t think he was going to do anything. I think he just shifted his feet. I think he was tired of standing.”

She stopped.

”And your father looked at him,” she said.

Nobody spoke for a long time.

Out in the field, Garnet had finished her braid. She was standing on tiptoe, tying it around the scarecrow’s wrist like a bracelet. Her voice drifted faintly through the window, singing.

”The noise,” I said finally.

”The noise.”

”He—”

”Your father turned him into air,” said Mother. ”All of him. The man, and his rifle, and his mask, and his boots. In the time it takes to blink. Water, and gas, and a little mist that hung there for a moment in the doorway, and then the wind took it.” Her voice didn’t change. It was very level and very tired. ”That was the noise. That was the smell. The man’s whole body, all at once, becoming something else.”

Genny had her arms wrapped around her knees. She was perfectly still.

”Halvard was standing three feet away,” Mother said. ”It went all over him. All down his coat. His face. His glasses.” She shook her head slightly. ”He didn’t move. He didn’t scream. The other soldier did. Halvard just stood there, at the bottom of the steps, and took off his glasses, and wiped them on his sleeve, and put them back on.”

”And Father?”

”Your father spoke, then. For the first time.” She looked at the pale boards by the porch door, through the window. ”He said, You will never come here again. If you come within sight of my son, I’ll do that to you. And then I’ll go to New Halcyon and do it to everyone who signed your order.”

She was quiet a moment.

”It was the only time in his life,” she said, ”he ever said anything like that about the dome. And I believe he meant every word.”

”What did Crane say?” asked Genny.

She hadn’t spoken in a long time. Her voice came out rough.

Mother turned her head on the pillow to look at her. For a moment, I thought she wouldn’t answer. That it would be another tomorrow.

”He looked up at your father,” Mother said, ”with that man’s… with all of it on his face. On his glasses. And he wasn’t angry. That was the worst of it. He wasn’t frightened, either. He looked at your father the way he used to look at the test results, in the program, when something came out better than he expected.”

She took a breath.

”He said, I understand. He said, I won’t come back, Trevor. Not while you’re alive.”

The words sat in the room.

Not while you’re alive.

He’d known. Of course he’d known. He’d written the memo. Fifteen to twenty-five years. He’d stood at the bottom of our porch steps with a dead man on his coat and done the arithmetic, and found that he could afford to wait.

”Then he turned around,” Mother said, ”and walked back down the path through the wheat to his craft, with the other soldier stumbling after him. He didn’t hurry. He didn’t look back once. And the craft lifted, and went away toward the dome, and your father stood on the porch watching it until it was gone. Then he went and got a bucket.”

”The water,” I said. ”I heard water running.”

”He scrubbed those boards until his hands bled. He wouldn’t let me help. He wouldn’t let me change it for him, either. He said he had to do it the slow way.” She paused. ”Then he came upstairs, and he looked in on you, and you were asleep. And he sat on the floor of your room, the way he had the night of the moon, and he didn’t come to bed at all.”

I thought of the fence of books around my tower.

He’d come back inside, after. After what he’d done. Covered in whatever was left of that man. And before he’d gone for the bucket, before anything, he’d stopped by the stove and built a little wall around my blocks, so they’d be safe until I came down.

”How do you know he’s still alive?” I asked.

It was yesterday’s question. Mother had known I’d ask it again.

She nodded at the bundle of letters, the ones tied in string. Genny passed it to me. I untied it.

I’d thought, when I first saw them, that they were all from the government. Some were. But at the bottom of the bundle there was a second stack, tied separately with a thin blue ribbon. Envelopes, cream-colored, good paper, all addressed in the same small careful hand. No stamps. No postmarks. Just a name on the front of each one.

Lucas.

There were eleven of them.

”One every year,” said Mother. ”On your birthday. A little canister on the ridge, by the intake, dropped from the sky in the night. Your father found the first one the autumn after Halvard came. He opened it and read it and came back down the ridge and was sick in the field.”

”What’s in them?”

”Nothing,” said Mother. ”That’s the horror of it, love. Nothing at all. Happy birthday, Lucas. I hope you’re well. I hope you’re studying. I think of you often.” Her voice was flat. ”Eleven years. He never missed one. Not even the year your father died.”

I opened the last one. The newest. The paper was still crisp.

She was right. It was nothing. A few lines, in that careful hand.

Dear Lucas,

Seventeen. I find that hard to believe. I hope the year has been kind to you.

I was sorry, as I am every year, to learn your mother’s health continues to decline. Please tell her I think of her. When the time comes, I want you to know that you and your sisters will not be alone. I will see to it personally.

With warm regards,

H.C.

I read it twice.

Then I looked up at the ridge through the window. At the place where the intake sat, among the rocks. Where a canister came down out of the sky every year, in the dark, while we were all asleep.

I was sorry to learn.

He was watching. He’d always been watching. Every year, from somewhere up there, he’d been counting.

”He knows,” I said.

”He knows.”

”He knows you’re—”

”Yes,” said Mother, before I could say it. ”He knows exactly how long I have. Probably to the week. He’s better at that kind of arithmetic than anyone alive.” She reached out, slowly, and took the letter from my hand, and folded it, and put it back in its envelope with the others. ”He’s waiting, Lucas. He’s been waiting for eleven years. That’s what I wanted you to understand before tomorrow.”

I looked at Genny. Genny looked at me. Neither of us said anything.

Out in the field, Garnet had finished her singing. She was sitting cross-legged at the scarecrow’s feet, with the wheat bracelet tied around its wrist, chatting to it about something with her hands moving in the air.

She looked so small out there.

That night, I went out to the porch and stood by the door.

The pale boards were long gone. Father had pulled them up the summer before he died and laid new ones, and the new ones had weathered to the same gray as the rest. You’d never know.

I stood on the spot anyway.

I thought about the noise. I’d carried it eleven years without knowing what it was. A sound with the inside taken out.

I’d thought, for a while today, that it was the sound of a man dying. It was. But it was something else too. I understood that now, standing where Father had stood, looking out at the dark field and the ridge beyond it and the faint smudge of the dome on the horizon.

It was the sound of my father saying no.

The only time in his life he’d ever had to say it like that. And he’d said it for me.

The wind came down the valley. Out in the wheat, the scarecrow’s coat pulled crooked, and the little bracelet Garnet had made swung on its wrist.

I went down the steps to fix it.