Scarecrow

Dr. Halloway came out at a quarter past eleven.

I knew the time because there was a clock on the wall at the end of the corridor, white and round, and I’d watched every minute of the last six hours go round on it. Garnet was asleep across two chairs with her head on my leg. Genny was sitting very straight, with the notebooks in her lap, watching the doors.

The doors opened, and the doctor came through, pulling a cap off her gray hair. She looked tired. She looked older than she had in the field. But she was walking slowly, not fast. I’d learned in the last six hours that doctors only walked fast when it was bad.

She sat down on the bench beside me. She didn’t ask if she could.

”She’s stable,” she said. ”She’s asleep. She’ll be asleep for a while yet. But she’s breathing on her own, and her heart’s steady, and the numbers are going the right way.” She looked at me. ”She’s going to live, Lucas.”

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t. Something had happened in my chest when she said it, and it took all of me to hold it there.

Genny said it for me. ”For how long?”

Dr. Halloway turned her head and looked at her. Properly. The way she’d looked at Garnet in the front room, at dawn, when she said that’s the most useful thing in this room.

”That’s the right question,” she said. ”Do you want the real answer, or the kind one?”

”The real one,” said Genny.

”Good. I’m bad at the kind one.”

She told it the way Father used to explain a problem. Plainly. In order. Not leaving anything out because it was hard.

”What your mother has isn’t a disease,” she said. ”Not exactly. You know what was done to her, I think. In the program.”

”We’ve read the file,” I said.

Something went across her face. It was gone fast.

”Then you know. The material they put into her has spent twenty-four years slowly being rejected by her body. And her body has been fighting it, and losing, a little more every year. The stabilizer doesn’t stop that. Nothing stops that. Not yet.” She held up her hands, a little apart. ”What it does is slow it down. A great deal. It tells the body to stop fighting so hard. It buys time.”

”How much time?”

”For someone at your mother’s stage? I don’t know. I’ve never given it to anyone as far along as she was this morning. Nobody has.” She was quiet a moment. ”A year. Five. Perhaps more. The damage that’s already done is done. Her lungs. Her heart. She’ll be weak. She may walk again, with help. She’ll need care.”

”And the stabilizer.”

”Every week,” said Dr. Halloway. ”For the rest of her life. Without it, she’d be back where she was this morning in about a month.”

Every week.

I’d known. I’d worked it out on the bench, hours ago. But hearing it said out loud, plainly, by a doctor with tired eyes, made it something solid. Something you could put your hand on.

”Can I make it?” I said.

She looked at me.

”The stabilizer. If I understood it. If I knew what it was made of, all the way down. Could I make it?”

Dr. Halloway looked at me for a long moment. I could see her thinking about the crater. Everyone in the dome had seen the crater.

”Perhaps,” she said slowly. ”If you understood it. It took eleven of us nine years to understand it, and we still don’t, entirely. It’s built from the same material they put in her. It’s alive, a little. It changes.” She paused. ”And its formulation is classified at a level I’m not permitted to discuss. Even with you. Even here.”

”Whose level?”

She didn’t answer.

She didn’t need to.

She let us see Mother at midnight.

One at a time, she said, and only for a few minutes. Then she looked at the three of us standing in a row at the doors with the round windows, and sighed, and said, ”All right. All three. Five minutes. And if anyone touches a machine, I’ll have you thrown out by a man much bigger than me.”

Garnet looked at her very seriously. ”Nobody’s bigger than Lucas.”

”Then I’ll have to do it myself,” said Dr. Halloway. ”And I’ll be very cross.”

The room was dim and quiet and full of machines that blinked in the dark. Mother lay in a white bed in the middle of it, with tubes in her arms and a clear mask over her face. She looked very small. Smaller than she’d looked in the bed by the stove.

But she was breathing.

I watched it. Her chest under the white blanket, rising. Falling. Rising. Not careful. Not walking on ice. Just breathing, the way people did, without having to think about it.

Garnet went to the side of the bed and stood there, very still, with her hands clasped behind her back so she wouldn’t touch any machines. She looked at Mother’s face for a long time.

”She looks better,” she whispered.

She did. There was color in her face. Not much. A little.

Genny didn’t go to the bed. She went to the end of it, where there was a chart on a board, hanging from a hook. She took it down and read it. All of it. Her lips moving over the long words.

I waited for Dr. Halloway to stop her. She didn’t. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded, watching Genny read.

When Genny had finished, she hung the chart back on its hook and turned to the doctor.

”Her oxygen’s still low,” she said.

”It is.”

”It’s higher than this morning.”

”Much higher.”

”And this number—” Genny pointed. ”That’s her blood?”

”That’s the marker we watch for the rejection,” said Dr. Halloway. ”When the stabilizer’s working, it comes down. It’s coming down.”

Genny looked at the number for a long moment. Then she nodded once, as though something had been settled.

Dr. Halloway was looking at her with an odd expression.

”How old are you?” she asked.

”Nine,” said Genny.

”Nine,” Dr. Halloway repeated. She shook her head slowly. ”Your mother was like that. In the program. She used to read her own charts when the matrons weren’t looking.”

Genny’s head came up.

The doctor had said it without thinking. I saw her realize it. Something closed over her face.

”You knew her,” I said.

Dr. Halloway didn’t answer straight away. She looked past me, at the bed.

”I was the youngest doctor in Program Cinder,” she said finally. ”Twenty-three. I took blood. I wrote numbers on charts. I sat with the ones who didn’t wake up.” She was quiet a moment. ”I was in the room when she did.”

Genny was staring at her.

”Five minutes,” said Dr. Halloway, in a different voice. ”I said five minutes. That was seven.”

The room down the hall had three beds in it, and a window, and a table with food on it that somebody had brought while we weren’t looking. Bread, and soup in a covered pot, and fruit I couldn’t name.

None of us touched it at first.

Then a nurse came in. A young one, with red cheeks and her hair in a net, carrying a little tray. She stopped in the doorway when she saw me, the way they all did. Then she saw Garnet, sitting cross-legged on the end of a bed with the hairbrush in her lap, and her face changed.

”I brought pudding,” she said. ”For the little ones. If they want it. It’s chocolate.”

Garnet looked at the tray. Then at the nurse.

”What’s chocolate?” she said.

The nurse stared at her. Then she came all the way into the room and sat down on the end of the bed, beside Garnet, without looking at me at all, and took the lid off the little dish and handed her a spoon.

I watched Garnet taste chocolate for the first time in her life.

She didn’t say anything. She closed her eyes. She sat very still on the end of the hospital bed with the spoon in her mouth and her eyes closed, as though she were listening to something very far away.

The nurse watched her with her hand over her mouth.

”Oh, love,” she said softly. ”Oh, you poor love. Where have they had you?”

Garnet opened her eyes.

”In a field,” she said. ”With a scarecrow. Can I have another one?”

The nurse’s name was Maddy. She brought four more puddings over the course of the night, and a blanket with ducks on it, and a book with pictures. She sat with Garnet for an hour after her shift ended and taught her a clapping game. She never once looked at me directly. But she stopped flinching when I moved.

Genny ate a little soup. I ate nothing.

Around two in the morning, Dr. Halloway put her head round the door to check on us. She saw Genny sitting up on her bed, wide awake, with Father’s notebook fourteen open on her knees, and me at the window.

She came in and stood beside me.

The window looked out over the city. I’d never seen so many lights. Thousands of them, in every tower, along every curving street. And above them, the dome, faintly gold, catching the glow and throwing it back down. You couldn’t see the stars through it. Just the glow, flat and even, like the inside of a lamp.

”You should sleep,” said Dr. Halloway.

”I don’t sleep much.”

”Neither did your father.”

I turned my head.

”He used to sit up in the infirmary at night,” she said. ”In the program. After the treatments. He’d go from bed to bed and sit with the ones who hadn’t woken up yet. Talk to them. Nobody asked him to. He just did it.” She looked out at the city. ”He sat with your mother for three days.”

I hadn’t known that.

Mother had said Crane was sitting by the bed when she woke. Crane, holding her hand, crying. She’d never said that Father had been there first, for three days, before she opened her eyes.

Maybe she didn’t know.

”How many families do you treat?” I asked. ”With the stabilizer.”

Dr. Halloway went very still beside me.

”You said nobody had been as far along as she was,” I said. ”Which means you’ve given it to other people. People who weren’t as far along. Lots of them, if you know what’s normal.” I looked at her. ”Who?”

She didn’t answer for a long time.

”That’s not mine to tell you,” she said finally. Very quietly. ”I’m sorry, Lucas. It isn’t. Ask the Director.” She paused. ”And when he tells you, remember that I told you to ask.”

She went out.

I stood at the window for the rest of the night and filed it away.

I woke at five.

I hadn’t meant to sleep. I was in a chair by the window. Somebody had put a blanket over me. Maddy, probably. The room was gray, and quiet.

Too quiet.

I lay there with my eyes open, listening, before I understood what was wrong.

There was no hum. No sound under the floor. No catching, no climbing, no settling. The air came out of a vent in the ceiling, clean and warm and perfectly silent, and nothing woke at five.

For the first time in my life, nothing woke at five.

I got up and went down the corridor to the doors with the round windows.

Dr. Halloway let me in. She’d been there all night. She didn’t say anything. She just pulled a chair up beside the bed for me and went to the other side of the room and pretended to read a chart.

I sat down and took Mother’s hand.

It was warm.

That was the first thing. Not cold, the way it had been at four in the morning in the front room. Warm. A person’s hand.

I sat holding it while the light came up gray and then gold through the window, over the towers of a city she’d been thrown out of nineteen years ago.

At about six, her fingers moved.

Just once. Very slightly. They closed around mine, and held on, and squeezed.

Then they relaxed again, and she went on sleeping.

I sat very still. I didn’t move my hand. I didn’t say anything. I sat there and held it, for as long as they’d let me, and didn’t think about the stabilizer, or the classified formulation, or the families nobody would tell me about, or the man with the cane who was waiting somewhere in the building for her to wake up so we could talk.

I just held her hand.

It was warm.