Scarecrow

On the third day, they made us show them.

It was what the whole class had been waiting for. I could tell from the way the barracks woke that morning: early, loud, everyone talking at once. Liam was out of bed before the lamp went white, pulling his gray shirt on backward and arguing with Roan about whether you were allowed to bring your own spark.

”Assessment,” he told me, when I came out of my corner. ”For the squads. They want to see what everyone can do, so they can put us together right. Five to a squad. Don’t worry, it’s not a test.”

I stopped buttoning my shirt.

Number two. No tests. No assessments.

That was for the twins. Not for me. I’d signed up for this. I’d known what it meant when I said yes on the floor of a hospital room. I’d known they’d want to see. I just hadn’t thought about it being in front of forty people.

Liam was watching my face.

”Or,” he said, ”you could just do a very small one. A little one. Turn a spoon into a slightly different spoon. Nobody’d mind.”

They held it in the biggest of the packed-earth fields, under the lamps.

There were targets set up across the far end of it. Things to break. Things to burn. Steel posts and slabs of stone and wooden frames dressed in old gray uniforms, like scarecrows. A wall of thick glass ran along one side, and behind the glass there were people. Instructors in gray. Men and women with slates. Doctors, I thought, from the white coats. And at the end, sitting on a stool with his cane across his knees, Crane.

We sat in rows on benches on the other side of the field and waited to be called.

They went one family at a time. That was how I saw what they all were.

The twins with gray skin went first. They walked out onto the field together and put their hands flat on the packed earth, and the ground in front of them rose up in a long wave, ten feet high, and rolled across the field and broke over a steel post and buried it. The class cheered. Liam whistled through his fingers.

Brock Haddon walked out and stood in front of a slab of stone the size of a door and hit it with his fist. His whole arm went iron-gray to the shoulder before it landed. The slab split in two. He turned round grinning, holding up his iron arm, and looked straight across the field at me.

I looked at the floor.

Toby Marsh went out alone, thin and white-faced, with his armband slipping. He stood very still in the middle of the field. Then he opened his mouth and sang one note, very high and clear. And in front of him, the air went hard. I saw it. A wall, shimmering faintly, like heat. One of the instructors threw a wooden frame at it, as hard as he could, and it bounced off the empty air and fell in the dirt.

Toby closed his mouth. The wall vanished. He walked back to the benches without looking at anyone and sat down at the end of my row, a long way away.

The Frieses were electricity. All five of them. They walked out together, the way they sat at meals, in a tight cluster, and the lamps over the field started flickering before they’d got halfway. Sigmund stood at the center. He lifted one hand, and lightning came out of the air above him with a crack that hurt my ears and hit a steel post at the far end of the field and left it glowing red.

Beside him, a girl with dark hair pulled back in a tail, a little shorter than him, did the same thing a second later. Her bolt hit the same post, in exactly the same place, and the red glow went white.

She didn’t look round to see if anyone was impressed. She looked at Sigmund. He didn’t look back at her.

”His sister,” said Liam, beside me. ”Risa. She’s better than he is. Everybody knows it except him.”

Then the Calders.

Liam spun the wheel on his brass lighter and threw the spark out in front of him, and it grew, and grew, until it was a sheet of fire the size of a house, rolling across the field, folding over the wooden scarecrows and lighting every one. He stood in the middle of it laughing.

Seraphina didn’t use a lighter.

She walked out to the middle of the field and stood with her arms crossed. Then she uncrossed them, and snapped her fingers, once. And there was a spark, out of nothing, at her fingertips. Liam drew in his breath beside me. I didn’t know why.

The spark went out in front of her and touched the burning scarecrows, and all the fire on the field, all of Liam’s great rolling sheet of it, went to her. Pulled in. Folded down. Into a single ball of white-hot light, hanging in the air in front of her, so bright I had to look away.

She let it go.

It went across the field in a straight line, not fast, and touched the steel post the Frieses had left glowing. The post didn’t burn. It didn’t melt. It was just gone. A little puff of vapor, a stump of steel at the bottom with the edges dripping.

The field was very quiet.

Seraphina walked back to the benches with her arms crossed and sat down at the far end of the row and didn’t look at anybody.

”She’s not supposed to be able to do that,” said Liam quietly, beside me. He wasn’t smiling. ”The spark. Out of nothing. None of us can. She’s been able to since she was ten.” He looked down the row at her. ”Dad says not to tell anyone.”

I didn’t ask why. I filed it away.

The Windsors were last before me.

There were only two of them. The white-blond girls. They sat at the end of the front bench, very straight, side by side, a little apart from everyone.

The instructor called a name, and one of them stood up. The one with the gray eyes. The one who’d run forty-five laps beside me and stopped at the white line like the end of a sentence.

She didn’t walk out onto the field.

She stood up from the bench, in front of us all, and turned slightly toward the girl still sitting beside her, and went on talking to her. Quietly. I couldn’t hear what about. Something ordinary. She was frowning a little, the way you frown when you’re explaining something to someone who isn’t getting it.

The instructor waited. The field waited.

She went on talking.

And at the far end of the field, forty meters away, one of the wooden scarecrows in its gray uniform, still smoking from Liam’s fire, went white.

All at once. From its feet to its head. A crackling sound came across the field, like ice on a pond in deep winter, and the whole thing was frozen solid, every inch of it, the smoke still hanging over it caught in the air like a white feather.

The girl didn’t look at it. She hadn’t looked at it once. She finished her sentence, and nodded at the girl on the bench, and sat back down.

The frozen scarecrow tilted, very slowly, and fell over, and shattered on the packed earth like a dropped plate.

Nobody cheered. It was too quiet for cheering.

I couldn’t stop looking at her.

She’d sat back down on the bench and folded her hands in her lap, and she was looking straight ahead, at nothing, with her pale face perfectly calm. Her hair was so pale it was almost silver under the lamps, cut straight at her jaw. The air around her was cold. I could feel it from three rows back.

She hadn’t even looked.

”Luna Windsor,” said Liam, beside me. ”General Windsor’s daughter. He commanded the northern front in the war. He’s on the Council now, and he’s going to command AVALON’s ground forces, everyone says, and she’s going to be—”

I didn’t hear the rest.

”Forty-one,” called the instructor. ”Dask.”

The field went quiet in a different way.

It had been quiet for Seraphina, and for Luna Windsor. That had been the quiet of people who’d just seen something. This was the quiet of people waiting to see something. Forty heads, turning down the benches, toward the end of the third row, where I was sitting with Liam.

On the front bench, Sigmund Friese had turned all the way round.

I stood up.

I didn’t know what I was going to do. I’d thought about it all morning, sitting on the bench, watching. A spoon into a slightly different spoon, Liam had said. A little one. But they’d see that for what it was. They’d seen the crater.

And I didn’t know if I could do a little one. Not out there. Not with forty people watching and Sigmund Friese turned round on his bench and Crane behind the glass with his cane across his knees. I didn’t know where the bottom was today. I’d felt it come up in the mess hall, over a tray of eggs. I didn’t know what would happen if I stood in the middle of that field and looked at something and let go, even a little.

I took a step toward the field.

Behind the glass, Crane stood up.

Slowly, both hands on the cane. Everyone saw him do it. The instructor on the field turned round and looked at him through the glass, and Crane said something, and the instructor nodded.

”Not today,” the instructor called. ”Mr. Dask will demonstrate separately. Sit down, forty-one.”

I sat down.

The murmur went round the benches. I heard it. I didn’t need to.

On the front bench, Sigmund didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to either. He just looked at me for a long moment, with his narrow face perfectly calm, and then turned round and faced the front again.

But Brock, beside him, said it loud enough for the whole bench. ”Scared.”

Nobody laughed. Not even Brock’s friends. It was too quiet for laughing.

I looked through the glass. Crane had sat back down on his stool. He was looking at me. Not smiling. Not anything.

He’d seen it. Whatever was in my face, when I stood up. He’d seen it and he’d stopped it, before forty people watched it happen.

I didn’t know whether to be grateful. I didn’t know what he wanted it saved for.

They let us go at noon.

The class went off toward the mess hall in a long loud gray stream, everyone talking about what they’d seen. The ground-wave. Brock’s arm. Toby’s wall. Seraphina’s spark from nothing, which they were all pretending not to talk about. And the frozen scarecrow, falling over, shattering like a plate.

Nobody talked about me. Or, they did, but in low voices, and stopped when I walked past.

I stayed on the bench. Liam stayed with me. He didn’t say anything for a while, which was so unusual that I noticed it.

The Windsor girls were the last to leave the front bench. They stood up together and walked along it toward the end, toward the path to the mess hall, which led right past our row.

The gray-eyed one was a step in front.

She walked past the end of my bench.

And she looked at me.

Just once. Just for a second, in passing. Not the way the others looked at me. Not afraid. Not curious. Not like a story walking through a door. She looked at me the way she’d looked at the scarecrow at the far end of the field. As if she didn’t need to look very hard to know exactly what I was.

The air went cold as she passed. I felt it on my face. Like an open door in winter.

Then she was past, and walking away up the path toward the mess hall, very straight, with her silver-pale hair swinging at her jaw, and the other girl a step behind her, and she didn’t look back.

I watched her go all the way to the mess hall door.

When I looked round, Liam was watching me. He had an expression on his long freckled face that I’d never seen there. It was a little bit horrified, and a little bit delighted, and mostly something like pity.

”You didn’t hear a single word I said,” he said. ”Back there. When I told you who she was.”

”I heard her name.”

”And then nothing.”

I thought about it.

”And then nothing,” I admitted.

Liam put both hands over his face and groaned into them, long and loud.

”Oh, no,” he said. ”Oh, Lucas. Oh, no. Of everyone in this whole cave.” He took his hands away and looked at me with genuine anguish. ”Her father commands the northern front. He signed half of the Retention Act. He doesn’t let her talk to me, and I’m a Calder, and we were at their house for dinner when I was six.” He paused. ”I set fire to a tablecloth. It’s possible that’s not related.”

I didn’t say anything.

”She froze a scarecrow without looking at it,” said Liam. ”While talking about something else. Do you know what that means? That means if she ever actually looks at you—”

”She did look at me,” I said.

Liam stopped.

He stared at me for a long time.

Then he lay down flat on his back on the bench, with his arms folded over his chest like a body in a coffin, and closed his eyes.

”Bury me under the tree,” he said. ”Next to your dad. Tell Sera I always loved her best.”

I almost laughed. It was the first time I’d almost laughed since the windows rattled.

I looked back up the path at the mess hall door, where she’d gone.

The air where she’d walked past was still cold. I could feel it. Like the memory of a door left open.