Scarecrow

Families’ day was the second Saturday of every second month, and nobody had told me about it until the Thursday before.

”Because nobody thought you’d have anyone coming,” said Liam, cheerfully, at breakfast, and then saw my face, and went red to the ears, and said, ”That came out wrong. I meant because your family’s on the sixtieth floor and doesn’t come down to caves. I meant—” He stopped. ”Sera, help.”

”He meant he’s an idiot,” said Seraphina, without looking up from her porridge.

”I meant I’m an idiot,” said Liam.

It turned out the twins were coming. Okafor told me herself, in the corridor outside the armory, with her hands behind her back. Supervised. Two hours. With Miss Pell. No further than the mess, field one, and the barracks, and back to the ramp.

”Your mother’s not coming,” she said.

”I know.” I’d known since Sunday. Dr. Halloway had said no. The cave was cold and damp, and the air down here was full of dust from the fields, and Mother’s lungs weren’t ready for it. Maybe in the spring. Maybe never. She hadn’t softened it.

Okafor looked at me for a moment.

”Your sister,” she said. ”The serious one. Genevieve.”

”Genny.”

”The terms say no assessments,” said Okafor. ”No tests. I’ve read them. Crane gave every instructor a copy.” She paused. ”I’m telling you now so you know. If she does anything on my fields, I’m not going to test it. I’m not going to write it down for him.” Another pause. ”But I’m going to see it. I can’t help that.”

”She won’t do anything.”

Sergeant Okafor looked at me with her dark still eyes, and the steel side of her face caught the lamp.

”She’s yours,” she said. ”And she’s nine. And she’s going to be in a cave full of people who’ve been calling her brother names for two months.” She turned away down the corridor. ”She’ll do something.”

They came down the ramp at ten in the morning, with Miss Pell between them.

I was standing at the bottom with the other cadets whose families were coming. About half of us. The rest were in the barracks, or on the fields, or pretending very hard not to care. Liam was beside me, because his whole family was coming, all nine of them, and Pip had already been seen at the top of the ramp trying to climb over the railing.

Toby was beside Liam. His mother was coming too. It was the first time. She’d never been able to get the pass before. He was holding his tuning fork in both hands and shaking.

And then Garnet saw me.

She was halfway down the ramp, holding Miss Pell’s hand, in a yellow dress I’d never seen and her hair in two plaits with blue ribbons, and she saw me at the bottom, and she let go of Miss Pell’s hand, and she ran.

Down the rest of the ramp. Through the families. Past two soldiers who tried to stop her and didn’t. Across ten meters of packed earth at the bottom.

And jumped.

I caught her. I’d always caught her. She hit me in the chest at full speed and wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my middle and held on, and she was shouting something into my ear, I don’t know what, all of it at once. I stood there holding her off the ground with forty people looking at us, and I didn’t care about any of them.

She smelled like bread. And flour. And the penthouse soap. And underneath it, faintly, like the field.

”You’re thinner,” she said finally, pulling back to look at my face from about two centimeters away. ”Okafor’s starving you. I’m going to tell her.”

”Please don’t.”

”I’m going to tell her politely,” said Garnet.

Behind her, walking, not running, at exactly the pace of someone who had decided in advance not to run and was going to stick to it, came Genny.

She stopped in front of me. She looked up.

She was wearing gray. Not a dress. Trousers, and a gray shirt, like a cadet’s. Her short dark hair was combed flat. She had notebook fourteen under her arm, Father’s, the one she’d carried out of the house in the ten minutes, and a sealed envelope in her other hand.

She looked at me for a long time without saying anything. The way she’d looked at Mother’s chart in the hospital. Reading every number.

”You’ve got a headache,” she said.

”I’m fine.”

”You’ve had it for weeks,” said Genny. ”You keep squinting at the left side. You didn’t do that before.” She held out the envelope. ”From Mother. She said not to open it until we’ve gone.”

I took it. It was heavy. Several pages.

Genny looked at me a moment longer. Then, very fast, she stepped forward and put her arms round my waist, the way she’d never done since she was five, and pressed her face into my shirt for about one second.

Then she stepped back, and her face was exactly the same as before.

”Show us everything,” she said. ”Garnet wants to see the fern.”

Garnet charmed the entire compound in ten minutes.

I timed it. I didn’t mean to, but there was a clock over the mess hall door, and I watched it.

Liam first. She looked up at him, at his red hair and his freckles and his enormous grin, and said, ”You’re Liam. You talk too much. Lucas says so every Sunday,” and Liam said, ”I talk exactly the right amount,” and Garnet said, ”That’s what people who talk too much always say,” and Liam laughed so hard he had to sit down, and from then on he followed her round like a large dog.

Pip found her within a minute. Two small girls, one in yellow and one with red curls sticking out in every direction, looked at each other for a long, silent moment across the packed earth, and then simply took hands and didn’t let go for the rest of the visit.

Toby. Garnet stopped in front of him, and looked at his face, and at his ears, and at the tuning fork in his hands. ”You’re the one who hums,” she said. ”The song. Lucas told us. You learned it from him.” She tilted her head. ”Do you want to hear the bit at the end? The bit Mother does? Nobody else knows it.” And she hummed four notes, very softly, that I’d never heard. That I’d never known were there. A tiny turn at the very end, after the last part, like a door closing gently. Toby stared at her. Then he tapped the fork on his knee, and hummed them back. Exactly. First time.

Garnet clapped.

Seraphina. Garnet looked up at her for a long time with her mouth slightly open. ”Your hair,” she said finally. ”It’s like a fire. Can I touch it?” And Seraphina Calder, who had set the training hall on fire for a word, crouched down on the packed earth without a word and let a nine-year-old put both hands in her red hair, and closed her eyes, and didn’t move until Garnet had finished.

Risa, at the edge of the mess, with her arms crossed, pretending she’d only come because she was passing. Garnet walked straight up to her. ”You’re Risa. You can hear people’s hearts.” She held out her wrist. ”What’s mine doing?”

Risa looked at the wrist. Then at Garnet. Then, very slowly, uncrossed her arms.

”Hundred and ten,” she said. ”Very fast.”

”That’s because I’m happy,” said Garnet.

”I know,” said Risa. ”I can tell.” And she smiled. A real one. The first one I’d ever seen on her that got anywhere near her eyes.

And then Luna.

Luna Windsor was sitting alone at the end of the long table in the mess. Her family hadn’t come. Nobody had expected them to. She was sitting very straight, with a cup of something in front of her, reading.

Garnet looked at her across the mess. Then at me. Then at her again.

Then she walked over and sat down on the bench beside her. Right beside her. Close enough to touch.

”You’re very cold,” said Garnet.

Luna looked down at her. For a moment, I thought she was going to get up and leave.

”Yes,” she said.

”I like it,” said Garnet. ”It’s like snow. Are you Lucas’s girlfriend?”

The whole mess hall went silent.

Liam made a noise like a kettle being stepped on.

Luna Windsor looked at my sister for a very long time with her pale, still face.

”No,” she said.

”You should be,” said Garnet. ”He’s very good at the moon.”

And Luna Windsor, in the middle of the mess hall, in front of everyone, put her hand over her mouth.

I didn’t see what her face did behind it. Nobody did. But her shoulders moved. Once. Twice. And the cup in front of her, which had been steaming, went white with frost all the way to the rim.

The clock over the mess hall door said ten minutes past ten.

Garnet met Fernando at half past ten.

She crouched in front of the clay pot in the corridor outside the observation room, in her yellow dress, with Pip crouched beside her, and looked at the fern for a long time. It had four green fronds now. Two old ones, lifted and greener than they’d been in years. Two new ones, bright and tall. And a third curl, just starting, down among the stems.

”Hello, Fernando,” said Garnet. ”I named you. I’m Garnet.”

”Pleased to meet you,” said Pip, on Fernando’s behalf.

Garnet reached out, and touched one of the new fronds. Very gently. With one finger, on the underside, the way you’d touch a sleeping animal.

And she went still.

I knew that stillness. I’d seen it at the table in the field, when she put her hands on a lump of sand and felt down into it before she turned it into bread. The way she’d go quiet, and her eyes would go somewhere else, and you could see her listening to something nobody else could hear.

”He’s happy,” she said, after a while. Very quietly. ”He was very thirsty for a long time. And hungry. And now he’s not.” She tilted her head, with her finger still on the frond. ”He wants to be bigger. He’s trying. It’s slow.”

”How do you know?” I said.

She looked up at me as if I’d asked how she knew the sky was up.

”I can feel it,” said Garnet. ”The way I feel the dough. When it wants to rise.” She looked back at the frond. ”Can I help him? Just a little bit? Like the yeast?”

I stood there in the corridor and didn’t say anything for a long moment.

I thought about the dead cell. Every brick in place, and nothing moving. I thought about don’t make the cell, give the cell what it needs. I thought about Mr. Dunmore saying that dough has risen in four minutes.

”A little bit,” I said. ”Very little. Be gentle.”

Garnet closed her eyes.

Nothing happened that I could see. Not at first. She just knelt there, with one finger on the underside of a fern frond, with her eyes closed, very still.

And then the little curl at the bottom of the pot, down among the old stems, the third one, just starting, moved.

It unrolled. Slowly. Not all the way. Just a little. The way a fist opens when someone’s falling asleep. A hand’s width of new green, opening out into the lamplight, in about the time it would take to sing the song once through.

Garnet took her finger away and opened her eyes.

”That’s all he wanted,” she said. ”I didn’t push. He did it. I just—” She frowned, looking for the word. ”Gave him the yeast.”

I looked at the fern.

And then, because I couldn’t help it, I looked into it. Into the new frond. Into the cells along it, the ones that had just unrolled.

They were alive. Every one of them. Humming. Not built. Not made. Grown. Grown faster than they should have, but grown, the way the fern would have grown them anyway, in a week, if it had had what it needed.

She hadn’t made the cells. She’d given them what they needed to make themselves. Faster.

The thing I’d been trying to understand for seven weeks, in a cold room, with three books and a cup of ice.

My nine-year-old sister had just done it, kneeling on a concrete floor, because a fern looked like it wanted to be bigger.

Okafor found us at eleven, on field one, by the steel splash.

Garnet had wanted to see it. She was walking round it, slowly, with Pip, touching every frozen droplet, one at a time. Genny was standing beside me with notebook fourteen under her arm, looking at the splash the way she looked at everything, reading it.

Okafor stopped beside us with her hands behind her back.

Garnet looked up. At the steel side of Okafor’s face. And her eyes went wide, and she let go of Pip’s hand, and walked straight up to the sergeant, and looked up at her jaw for a long, long time.

”Did my father make that?” she said.

Okafor looked down at her.

Nobody had told Garnet. I hadn’t. Not on any call. I’d never said anything about the photograph, or the river crossing, or the jaw.

”Yes,” said Sergeant Okafor.

Garnet reached up. Not to touch it. Just to hold her hand near it, the way she’d held it over the fern before she touched.

”It’s very good,” she said. ”It’s the best one. It’s better than the hinges Lucas made for the shed.” She took her hand down. ”He’d be pleased it’s still working.”

Sergeant Okafor didn’t say anything for a long moment.

Then she crouched down, all the way down, on the packed earth of field one, so her face was level with Garnet’s.

”It’s never once hurt,” she said quietly. ”You tell him that. If you ever get the chance.”

”He’s dead,” said Garnet.

”I know, child,” said Sergeant Okafor. ”Tell him anyway.”

It happened at the ramp, at twenty to twelve, when the families were starting to go.

Brock Haddon’s father had come. He was a big man, like Brock, with a heavy jaw and a red face, and he’d driven down. That was a thing you could do, if your family had a pass and a car. There was a vehicle bay at the bottom of the ramp, beside the barracks, where the families who came by car could leave them. His was a long black one, very polished, parked across two spaces.

He was standing beside it with Brock when we came past. Garnet in front, with Pip. Then Genny. Then me. Then Miss Pell, who had been walking a few steps behind us all morning, saying almost nothing, watching everything.

Brock saw me, and said something to his father.

His father looked at me. Then at Garnet, and Genny, and at Miss Pell. Then back at me.

”That’s him, is it?” he said. Not quietly. ”The Dask boy.” He looked me up and down. ”Thought he’d be bigger. They said he was a monster.” He laughed. ”Just a big scarecrow, isn’t he? Straight out of the dirt. Like the rest of them. Like his father.”

Garnet stopped walking.

”Dad,” said Brock. Uncomfortably. Quietly.

”What? It’s true.” Mr. Haddon looked at the twins. ”And these are the little scarecrows, are they? Living sixty floors up on Council money. In a penthouse. While decent people—”

I didn’t do anything.

I want that clear. I didn’t do anything. I stood there with my hands at my sides and my eyes down, the way I’d stood on the first morning in the mess hall with the eggs on my tray. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t look at the car. I didn’t look at anything. I’d made a promise to Crane and a promise to myself and a promise to a woman in a wheelchair sixty floors up, and I didn’t do anything at all.

Genny did.

She didn’t say a word. She didn’t move. She didn’t lift her hands. She just turned her head, very slowly, and looked at the long black car.

And it rose.

All of it. All at once. Straight up off the packed earth of the vehicle bay, smoothly, without a sound, as if somebody had pulled it on a string. Two meters. Five. Ten. Up past the soldiers at the bottom of the ramp, who stopped talking. Up past the families on the ramp, who stopped walking. Up past Mr. Haddon’s red face, which went white.

It turned gently in the air, the way a leaf turns on the surface of a pond. And then it drifted sideways. Over the vehicle bay. Over the edge of the barracks. And it came down, very slowly, very gently, as gently as Garnet had touched the fern, onto the flat roof of the barracks building, exactly in the middle, exactly square, without so much as a scratch.

And stayed there.

The whole cave was silent.

Genny turned her head back and looked at Mr. Haddon.

”His name is Lucas,” she said. ”He’s my brother.” She looked at Brock. ”And you can ask for it back when you’ve learned how to say it.”

Then she turned round, and walked on toward the ramp, at exactly the pace of somebody who had decided not to run, with notebook fourteen under her arm.

She was nine.

Nobody moved for a long time.

Then Sergeant Okafor came round the corner of the barracks with her hands behind her back.

She looked at the car on the roof. She looked at Mr. Haddon, who had his mouth open and was making a sound with it like a kettle that hadn’t decided anything yet. She looked at Brock, who had gone the color of the porridge. She looked at Genny, already halfway up the ramp, with Garnet and Pip running to catch up with her.

She looked at me last.

”Mr. Haddon,” she said.

”That child—”

”Your vehicle,” said Sergeant Okafor, in a perfectly ordinary voice, ”was parked across two spaces in a fire lane, Mr. Haddon. In violation of compound regulations. I’ve had it moved.” She looked up at the roof. ”You can collect it on families’ day after next. If you can work out how to get it down.” She paused. ”Without a scarecrow’s help.”

Mr. Haddon opened his mouth.

He looked at the steel side of her face.

He closed his mouth.

I saw Okafor afterward.

She was standing by the ramp, watching the twins go up it with Miss Pell. And she had a small black notebook in her hand. Her own. Not a slate. And she was writing something in it, with a pencil, in her square printing.

I could see the page. I couldn’t help it.

Dask, G. (Genevieve). Age 9.

I felt something go cold in my stomach. I looked past her, up at the glass of the observation room.

Crane was there. On his stool. Watching the ramp. Writing too.

”You said you wouldn’t,” I said. ”Write it down. For him.”

”It’s not for him,” said Sergeant Okafor. She didn’t look up from the notebook. ”It’s for me.”

”For what?”

She closed the notebook and put it in her pocket.

”You’re leaving on a ship in less than a year, forty-one,” she said. ”And that girl is going to be in this dome, on her own, without you. With a gift like that. Getting angrier. And one day somebody’s going to say the wrong word to her, and she’s going to lift something a lot bigger than a car, and she isn’t going to put it down gently.” She looked up at the glass. At Crane. ”Somebody’s going to have to teach her to hold it. Before he decides he’d like to.” She turned away. ”Better me than him.”

She walked off.

I stood at the bottom of the ramp, under the car on the roof, and watched my sisters go.

Garnet came back down.

Halfway up the ramp, she let go of Miss Pell’s hand, and ran back down, and found me at the bottom, and pulled at my sleeve until I crouched down. Then she put her mouth against my ear.

”I can feel Mother,” she whispered. ”When I hug her. Like the fern.” Her voice went very small. ”She’s tired inside, Lucas. Everywhere. All of her. Like she’s been carrying something heavy for a long time and her arms are shaking.” She pulled back and looked at me with her bright, serious eyes. ”Can you fix it?”

I looked at her.

”I’m learning,” I said.

Garnet nodded. Once. As if something had been settled.

”I’ll help,” she said. ”I’m good at yeast.”

Then she kissed me on the cheek, and ran back up the ramp, and didn’t look back.

I opened Mother’s letter that night, in the reading room, with Luna across the table pretending to read book 67.

It was four pages, in pencil, in her careful handwriting, which was shakier than it had been in the field. Most of it was about Maura. About the bread, and the four hours, and Ruth Halloway saying as I live and breathe. About Garnet and the dough. About Genny and the tutor, who had apparently resigned. About the city at night from the big glass windows, and how she’d never once, in nineteen years outside, let herself think she’d see it again.

And on the last page, at the bottom, three lines.

Ruth tells me you asked her about Ellen Marsh. And about all thirty-one.

Don’t carry them on your back, sweetheart. You’ll fall. Carry them in your hands, where you can see them.

And come home on Sundays. Even when you’ve nothing to tell me. Especially then.

I read it four times.

Then I opened notebook fifteen to the list, and under Freeze a cell fast enough and it doesn’t tear, I wrote:

Garnet can feel it. By touch. She felt the fern want to grow, and gave it what it needed, and it grew. She didn’t make anything. She helped.

She can feel Mother. She says: tired inside, everywhere. Arms shaking.

And then, smaller:

She says she’ll help.

Across the table, Luna Windsor had stopped pretending to read. She was looking at what I’d written, upside down.

”Your sister asked me if I was your girlfriend,” she said. ”In front of the whole mess.”

”I’m sorry.”

”Don’t be,” said Luna Windsor. She turned a page of book 67 without looking at it. ”She’s the first person who’s made me laugh in front of other people since I was eight.” A pause. ”I’m going to have to be very careful around her.”

She asked me her first question from the cell biology book.

I got it right.