Scarecrow

Maura Calder went up on the Wednesday.

I found out on Sunday, from Garnet, who told me before I’d even sat down on the stool in the booth that didn’t quite close. She told me with her whole face pressed so close to the screen that all I could see was one eye and a lot of freckles.

”A lady came,” she said. ”With red hair and a loaf. And she knocked on the door, and Miss Pell opened it, and the lady said is Dot in, and Mother heard her from the big room and said Maura? in a voice I never heard before, and then they both cried, and then they both laughed, and then they cried again, and Mr. Dunmore had to make tea three times.” She drew a breath. ”They talked for four hours. Mother laughed so much she had to have her oxygen. Dr. Halloway came and said what on earth, and the lady said hello, Ruth, and Dr. Halloway said Maura Calder, as I live and breathe, and then they all laughed.”

”Is Mother all right?”

”She’s happy,” said Garnet, as if I were being very slow. ”She’s been happy for four days. She keeps smiling at nothing. Genny says it’s suspicious.”

Genny pushed her out of the frame.

”It’s not suspicious,” said Genny. ”It’s statistically unusual.” She looked at me. ”Her marker went down a point. Dr. Halloway says it’s probably nothing. She says people do better when they’re happy, but she can’t prove it, so she won’t write it down.”

”Can I talk to her?”

”She’s asleep,” said Genny. ”She stayed up late. The lady came back on Friday. And Saturday. She’s coming again on Tuesday.” A pause. ”She brought a stone. A warm one. Mother sleeps with it.”

I put my hand in my pocket, where the hearthstone was. It had gone cool the day before, the way Liam said it would after a week.

”Tell her I’m glad,” I said.

”I’ll tell her,” said Genny. ”She’ll know already. She always knows.” She looked at me through the screen with her serious face. ”Lucas. Who was she? The lady?”

”Someone from before,” I said. ”Someone who knew her when she was just Dot.”

Genny thought about that for a long time.

”Good,” she said finally. And then, very fast, before Garnet could come back: ”I miss you. Don’t tell Garnet I said that. She’ll tell everybody.”

Squad Two had an evaluation that Thursday.

Every squad had one. A full run of the Town, rebuilt, which had taken the instructors a week this time and which Okafor had told me, privately and without expression, that I was not under any circumstances to look at too hard. Each squad ran it once, with the observers behind the glass of the observation room taking notes. Points for time. Points for how many came back. Points taken away for anything Okafor didn’t like.

Squad Two went third.

And the man with the gold chain was behind the glass.

I saw him from the edge of field two, where the rest of us were waiting. Senator Konrad Friese, in his dark suit, standing at the glass with his hands behind his back. Tall, and narrow, and very still. Beside him, an aide with a slate. Beside the aide, Crane, on his stool, with his cane across his knees.

I looked at Sigmund.

He was standing at the start line with his squad. Brock, and Risa, and the two boys from the Frieses’ end of the hall. He wasn’t looking at his squad. He wasn’t looking at the Town. He was looking up at the glass. At his father.

His father was talking to Crane. He wasn’t looking down.

”Go,” said Okafor.

Squad Two ran the Town in five minutes and fifty-one seconds.

It was the fastest anyone had ever run it. Faster than their first time by nearly a minute. And it was Sigmund who did it. I watched the whole thing from the edge of the field, and I’d never seen anybody move like that. Not Seraphina at the front of the beam. Not Luna, going down the right-hand street alone. He went through the Town like the lightning he made, straight and fast and never stopping, and every padded arm that came out of every doorway met a white bolt from his hand before it got halfway down its rail. He didn’t wait for Brock to smash the walls. He didn’t wait for Risa to light the streets ahead. He just went. And they followed him, because they had to, because he wasn’t stopping for anyone.

He came out the far end with the red flag in his fist.

Five fifty-one. The corporal with the timer said it out loud, and you could hear the line of waiting cadets breathe in.

Sigmund didn’t look at the line. He didn’t look at Okafor. He turned round, with the flag in his hand, and his narrow chest going up and down, and sweat running into his eyes, and looked up at the glass.

The observation room was empty.

The Senator had gone. So had his aide. Crane was still there, on his stool, writing something. But the place at the glass where Konrad Friese had been standing was empty.

I don’t know when he left. Nobody did. Sometime in the middle of the run. Sometime while his son was going through the Town faster than anyone ever had.

Sigmund stood at the end of the course with the flag in his hand and looked at the empty glass for a long time.

Then he dropped the flag on the ground and walked off the field.

Risa watched him go. Her face didn’t change at all.

I found him that night by accident.

I’d come out of the reading room at eleven, after Luna. I was going the long way back to the barracks, past the training hall, because the long way went past the fern, and I’d started checking on Fernando at night as well as in the morning. Liam said I was getting strange about it. Liam was right.

The training hall door was open a crack. There was a light on inside. And a sound. A dull, steady, heavy sound, over and over, like someone beating a carpet.

I looked in.

Sigmund was alone in the middle of the hall, under the black rafters that still hadn’t been replaced, hitting one of the canvas bags.

Not the way Okafor taught us. Not with any form. Just hitting it. Over and over. Left. Right. Left. His knuckles were split. I could see it from the door. There was blood on the canvas, in smears. And every time he hit it, the air round his fists cracked white, little sparks jumping off his skin, off his split knuckles, crawling up the chain the bag hung from, so the whole thing was flickering.

He didn’t see me. He wasn’t seeing anything.

I stood in the doorway.

And I felt it happen. The thing I’d learned to feel coming at the Calders’ table. My eyes going to his hands, and the blood on them, and starting to go in. Down past the skin. To the cells. To see the damage. The split skin, the bruised bone underneath, the—

When not to look.

I stopped.

It was harder than I’d thought. It was like stopping your own breath. My eyes wanted to go in. They’d been going in for thirteen years. But I held them on the outside. On the surface of things. On a boy hitting a bag in a burned room at eleven at night, with blood on his knuckles, because his father had walked out halfway through the best thing he’d ever done.

That was all I let myself see.

I stepped back from the door. Quietly. On the sides of my boots, the way I’d learned in the reading room, so nothing crunched.

He never knew I was there.

Risa came to the fern the next day at lunch, the way she always did.

She sat down with her back against the metal stand. She didn’t eat. She sat with her tray on her knees and looked at Fernando’s new frond, which had grown another hand’s length in a week and was starting to uncurl a second one beside it.

”You were at the hall last night,” she said.

I looked at her.

”I felt you,” said Risa. ”In the doorway. Your heart’s very slow. It’s like a big clock. I’d know it anywhere.” She moved her fork round her tray. ”He didn’t. He wasn’t feeling anything. He never does when he’s like that.”

”I didn’t go in.”

”I know. That’s why I’m telling you this.” She put the fork down. ”Not because I want to help you with him. I don’t. I said I wouldn’t, and I won’t.” She was quiet for a moment. ”But you didn’t go in. And you didn’t tell anyone. And you could have. Half the cave would have paid to hear it.”

Toby was at the infirmary, rolling bandages. Liam was in the mess, loudly. It was just the two of us and the fern.

”Our father came back in the first winter,” said Risa. ”Like the Calders. Like everybody. He was in the war. Did you know that? He was good. Better than Sigmund. Better than me, probably. They used to call him the Storm, on the eastern front. He brought down one of their ships, by himself, with lightning. There’s a report about it somewhere. Windsor’s probably read it.”

”I didn’t know.”

”Nobody does. He made sure.” She looked at the fern. ”When they threw everyone out, he went. With Mother. And when the Act came, he came back. With Mother, and Sigmund, who was a baby. And when they got to the gate, he didn’t kneel. He didn’t beg.” Her voice was very flat. ”He made a deal.”

”What kind of deal?”

”The kind where you stand up in front of the Council, and say that what was done to you was a mistake. That it should never have been done. That the modified are a danger, and a stain, and a regret, and that you’ll spend the rest of your life making sure nothing like it ever happens again.” Risa picked at a thread on her sleeve. ”And then you never use it again. Not once. Not to light a lamp. Not to warm your hands. Not to save your own life. You stand up in front of them and make yourself into the proof that a modified man can be trusted, because he hates what he is more than they do.”

The lamp over the fern hummed.

”He’s voted for every directive since,” said Risa. ”Every one that’s ever kept a Retention family below the fortieth floor. Every one that’s kept the stabilizer list short. Every one that’s ever made it harder for someone like Toby’s mother to get a doctor.” She looked at me. ”That’s how he got his seat. That’s how he kept it. Nineteen years. The good Friese. The one who’s sorry.”

”And Sigmund.”

Risa was quiet for a long time.

”Sigmund was born outside,” she said. ”Like you. He was two when the lightning came. He made the lamp in our kitchen explode. Father picked him up off the floor and carried him into the bathroom and held his hands under cold water until he stopped crying, and then he said—” She stopped.

I waited.

”He said, we don’t do that in this house.” Her voice didn’t change at all. ”And then he said, you’re not a freak, Sigmund. Don’t make me think you’re a freak.”

I sat very still.

”He was two,” said Risa. ”He’s been trying to prove he’s not one ever since. Every day. Every drill. Every test. Every time he walks into a room. Look at me, Father. Look how good I am. Look how well I can do the thing you hate. Look how useful it is. Look how controlled.” She turned her fork over in her fingers. ”And then the program came, and Father put us both in it, because the Council wanted a Friese in AVALON and a Friese in AVALON looks very good on a senator. And Sigmund thought, finally. Finally, here’s the place where being good at it is what Father wants.”

”And then he walked out.”

”He always walks out,” said Risa. ”He’s walked out of every single thing Sigmund’s ever done. Every test. Every award. He walked out yesterday because Crane told him your squad was running fourth, and he wanted to talk to Crane about you instead.” She looked at me, steadily, with her light gray eyes. ”Do you know what Sigmund calls you?”

”Freak.”

”Do you know where he learned it?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

”Don’t feel sorry for him,” said Risa. ”He’d hate it. He’d hate it more than anything. He’d rather you hit him.” She picked up her fork again. ”I’m not telling you so you’ll be kind to him. I’m telling you so you’ll understand. When he looks at you, he doesn’t see you. He sees the only thing in this cave his father’s ever looked at longer than five seconds.”

We sat for a while without saying anything.

”What about you?” I said finally.

”What about me?”

”Your father. Does he look at you?”

Risa smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. It was very small, and very sharp, and it didn’t get anywhere near her eyes.

”I stopped wanting him to when I was eleven,” she said. ”The day Grandmother’s heart stopped. I was in the next room. I felt it go. Fast, and then slow, and then nothing. And I ran to the study to get him, and he was on a call with the Council, and he looked at me in the doorway, and he held up one finger.” She held up one finger. ”One minute, Risa.”

She put the finger down.

”He came out forty minutes later,” she said. ”She’d been gone for thirty-nine of them.” She ate a piece of something gray. ”So, no. He doesn’t look at me. And I don’t care. Sigmund cares enough for both of us.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then I said, ”Can I ask you something? Not about him.”

She looked at me suspiciously. ”What?”

”Maura Calder’s hand shakes,” I said. ”Liam’s mum. In the mornings. The nerves to her fingers. Something in them isn’t firing properly.” I looked at her. ”You can feel hearts. Can you feel nerves too? Can you feel it when they’re wrong?”

Risa looked at me for a long moment.

”You’re a very strange person,” she said. ”I tell you the worst thing about my whole family, and you ask me about nerves.”

”Sorry.”

”No,” said Risa. ”Don’t be. It’s better.” She thought about it. ”Yes. I can feel nerves. They’re quieter than hearts. Like the fern’s quieter than Brock. But I can feel them.” A pause. ”Mrs. Calder came to the compound gate once, to bring Liam something. I felt her hands from across the yard. They don’t hum. They stutter. Like a lamp with a loose wire.”

”A loose wire,” I said slowly.

”That’s what it feels like.” Risa shrugged. ”I don’t know what it is.”

I didn’t either. But I wrote it down, that night, in notebook fifteen, under Maura Calder. Right hand.

Risa says: stutters. Like a loose wire.

”I’m going to ask you something,” said Risa, at the end of lunch, getting up. ”And then I’m going to go, and we’re not going to talk about this again.”

”All right.”

”Don’t make me regret it,” she said. ”Telling you. Don’t use it. Not on him. Not ever. Not even when he deserves it. And he will deserve it. He’s going to do something one day that makes you want to say it to his face, in front of everyone, the worst thing you know.” She looked down at me. ”Don’t.”

”I won’t.”

She looked at me a moment longer, with her light gray eyes. Measuring.

”Your heart didn’t change,” she said. ”When you said that. Not even a beat.” She picked up her tray. ”Huh.”

She walked away down the corridor.

That night, in the reading room, Luna Windsor was on book 58.

She didn’t say anything about Squad Two. She’d been at the edge of the field. She’d seen the empty glass. She asked me her questions from the cell biology book, and I got eight of them right, which was the most yet, and she wrote the number in the margin of her own notebook in small precise figures, the way she did every night.

At the end, before the soldier came, she turned book 58 round on the table and pushed it across to me, open, with one finger at the top of a page.

EASTERN FRONT. YEAR NINE. AFTER-ACTION.

Enemy vessel brought down by Subject 0089 (FRIESE, K.), acting alone. Commendation awarded.

And in the margin, very small, in her precise handwriting, in pencil:

He was one of them. He was a hero. And then he stood up and said he was sorry he’d ever been anything.

I looked up at her.

”I notice everything,” said Luna Windsor quietly, and took the book back.

The barracks were dark when I got back.

I lay down between Liam and Toby. Toby was already asleep, with his tuning fork in his hand on top of the blanket. Liam was talking to the ceiling about pudding.

At the far end of the row, by the door, where Squad Two slept, it was very quiet.

Then, into the dark, a cool, careful voice said:

”Freak.”

It was quieter than it used to be. It didn’t go out into the long room and settle like dust. It just stopped, in the air, by the door, and hung there.

I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling.

I thought about a two-year-old in a kitchen, with his hands held under cold water. I thought about a man holding up one finger in a doorway. I thought about the glass of the observation room, empty, and a red flag lying on the ground at the end of the Town.

I’d promised Risa. I wasn’t going to say any of it. Not ever.

But I could say something.

”Goodnight, Sigmund,” I said.

Not loud. Just loud enough to reach the door.

The barracks were very quiet. Somebody, somewhere along the row, held their breath. Liam had stopped talking to the ceiling.

Nobody said anything back.

But the word didn’t come again. Not that night. And the next night, it didn’t come at all.