Scarecrow

”You can’t climb a rope,” said Risa.

It was the Thursday after the sim. We were at the fern, at lunch, the way we always were. Toby was at the infirmary. Liam was in the mess, loudly. Fernando had five green fronds now, and a sixth just starting, and Risa had taken to sitting with her shoulder against the clay pot as if it were a friend she’d known for years.

”I can climb a rope,” I said.

”You can climb a rope badly,” said Risa. ”I’ve watched you. Every morning. You go up like a sack of wet flour, and you come down like a sack of wet flour that’s been dropped.” She ate a forkful of something gray. ”You can’t crawl under the wire without catching your shirt. You can’t do the balance beam without wobbling at the end. You’re slow on the bars. You’re the slowest person in the cave on the course.”

”I’m not the slowest.”

”Pieter Vance was the slowest,” said Risa. ”He went home.” She chewed. ”You’re the slowest who stayed.”

I didn’t say anything. She wasn’t wrong.

”I bet,” said Risa, ”that I can beat you through the course. Start to finish. No powers. Just us.”

I looked at her.

She was looking at the fern, not at me. Her face was perfectly ordinary. But her fork had stopped moving.

”Why?” I said.

”Because I can,” said Risa. ”And because it’ll be funny.” She glanced at me sideways, with her light gray eyes. ”And because if I win, you carry my bag. For a week. Everywhere. To the field. To the mess. To the showers. Like a pack mule.”

”And if I win?”

Risa thought about it.

”If you win,” she said, ”I’ll stop telling you your heart rate.”

”You’d never manage that.”

”No,” said Risa. ”I wouldn’t. So you’d better not win.” She went back to her tray. ”Saturday. After drills. Field three. Bring water.”

By Saturday, everybody knew.

I don’t know how. I hadn’t told anyone. Risa said she hadn’t told anyone either, and I believed her, because Risa didn’t tell anyone anything if she could help it. But by Friday morning, Liam was taking bets at breakfast. On a piece of paper. With columns.

”Friese is the favorite,” he told me, very seriously, at the beam. ”Three to one. Toby put his whole dessert on you, because he’s loyal and he can’t count. Bree put hers on Friese. Roan won’t bet because he says it’s unfair to exploit a friend’s weakness.” He grinned. ”I’ve put mine on Friese.”

”You’re supposed to be my friend.”

”I am your friend,” said Liam. ”That’s why I’ve seen you on the ropes.”

Field three was the obstacle course.

It ran in a long loop round the edge of the cave, from one end of the field to the other and back. Okafor had built it on the first day and never changed it, and every morning, after laps and before the beam, every one of us ran it. Ropes, first. Four meters straight up, to a bell on a crossbar, and down the other side. Then a wall, two and a half meters, smooth boards, nothing to hold on to. Then the wire, a long low tangle of it, barely a hand’s width off the packed earth, that you had to crawl under on your elbows. Then the balance beam, narrow and long and high enough off the ground to hurt. Then the bars, a ladder of them, hand over hand, with your feet dangling. Then a straight sprint, fifty meters, to the white line where you’d started.

I was bad at all of it except the wall.

The wall I could do. I was tall. I could jump, catch the top, and pull myself over in one go. Everyone else had to run at it and scramble. It was the only part of the course where I was faster than anyone.

Everything else, I was slow at. Not because I wasn’t strong. I was stronger than nearly anyone in the cave. Because I’d never done any of it. Not once, before I came here. In the field, there was nothing to climb but the filter shed and the ridge. No ropes. No beams. No bars. Just dirt, and wheat, and a lot of walking, and lifting rocks.

Risa had been doing it since she was eight. Sigmund made her, she said. In the yard behind their flat on the upper floors, every morning, before school, for ten years.

There were about thirty people at the edge of field three when we got there.

Most of Squad Eight. Most of Squad Two. Half of Five, and some of Six and Seven. Liam with his piece of paper. Toby with his tuning fork, because Liam had decided Toby would start the race, because Toby had the only thing in the cave that made a clean enough sound.

Seraphina was standing at the back with her arms crossed, pretending she’d come for some other reason.

Luna Windsor was standing beside her, also with her arms crossed, also pretending.

They weren’t standing far apart.

And at the far end, by the bars, on his own, Sigmund Friese. Watching. His narrow face perfectly blank.

Risa walked up to the white line in her training clothes, with her dark hair pulled back so tight it looked like a punishment, and shook out her hands, and rolled her neck. She didn’t look at me.

I walked up beside her.

”Last chance,” she said, without turning her head. ”You could just give me the bag now. Save yourself.”

”No.”

”Your heart’s at ninety,” said Risa. ”You’re nervous.”

”You said you’d stop doing that.”

”Only if you win,” said Risa. ”Toby. When you’re ready.”

Toby stepped up to the side of the line with the tuning fork held up in one hand like a starting pistol. He was white to the ears. He looked at Risa. He looked at me. He looked at Liam, who nodded at him encouragingly.

He tapped the fork on his knee.

It rang.

Risa was gone before the note had finished.

I mean that. She was standing beside me, and then the fork rang, and then she wasn’t. She’d gone off the line like a spark off a wire, and by the time I’d got my legs moving, she was three meters ahead and at the ropes.

She went up the rope like it was a staircase.

Hand, hand, foot, hand, hand, and she was at the top, and the bell rang, ding, clear and bright across the cave. And then she was coming down the other side, sliding, her hands loose on the rope, her feet crossed. Down. On the ground. Gone.

I was halfway up.

I wasn’t climbing like a sack of wet flour. I’d been practicing. Every morning for two months. I went up hand over hand, pulling, using my arms because I didn’t trust my feet, and it was slow, and it was ugly, and I could hear Liam groaning from the edge of the field. But I got to the top. I rang the bell. Ding. I came down.

She was at the wall.

Running at it. Scrambling. Her boots kicking against the boards, her hands reaching for the top edge and missing it, reaching again. Catching it. Hauling herself up. It took her four seconds.

I came off the rope and ran at the wall and jumped.

I caught the top on the first try. One pull. I was over.

She was at the wire. Down on her elbows. Crawling. Fast. Like something born underneath it. I came down off the wall right behind her, a meter back, maybe less, and dropped onto my elbows on the packed earth and went under the wire after her.

I caught my shirt.

Of course I did. Halfway along. A barb went through the back of it and held, and I had to stop, and reach back, and tear it free. I heard it rip. I heard Liam shouting something. I heard, very faintly, Seraphina laughing.

Risa was out from under the wire and at the beam.

She went along the balance beam like it was the floor.

Arms out, a little. Eyes on the end. Fast, light steps, not looking at her feet at all. I came out from under the wire with my shirt torn and dirt down my front and got up onto the beam behind her.

And I wobbled.

At the start, this time, not the end. Because I was going too fast. Because I could see her ahead of me, and I wanted to catch her, and I wasn’t looking at the end of the beam, I was looking at her. My left foot came down half off the edge. I swung my arms. Somebody at the edge of the field went ooh.

I didn’t fall.

I stood there for one second, very still, with my arms out, on one foot, getting my balance back. Then I went on. Slower. Eyes on the end. Not on her.

When I came off the end of the beam, she was halfway along the bars.

Hand over hand. Swinging. Her whole body moving with each reach, like a pendulum, using the swing to carry her forward. Quick and easy and rhythmic, the way Toby sang. I came to the bars and jumped and caught the first one.

And this was the place. The place where I could catch her.

Because the bars weren’t about knowing how. Not really. They were about arms. And my arms were bigger than anybody’s in the cave. I went along the bars without swinging at all. Just reaching. Hand. Hand. Hand. Pulling myself forward on each one, the whole weight of me, as if I were pulling a beam out of the ground.

I gained on her. I could hear it in the crowd. They’d gone quiet. Then louder. Liam’s voice, over everything, shouting GO.

She dropped off the last bar, onto the packed earth, two meters ahead of me.

I dropped off a second later. One meter behind.

Fifty meters of straight packed earth to the white line.

I’d never run so fast in my life.

Not on the laps. Not under pressure, when Okafor pushed the air down on top of us. Not ever. My legs were long, and I was strong, and I’d been running on the laps every morning for two months. And I could see the back of her head, her dark hair, pulled tight, getting closer. Getting closer.

And there was a moment.

I want to be honest about this, because nobody else knows it, and I’ve never told Risa. Thirty meters from the line. Twenty. She was one meter ahead. Less. I could see the soles of her boots. I could see the packed earth under them. And I thought, I could.

Not much. Nothing anyone would see. A little bit of the earth under her next step, a little softer than the rest. A tiny bit. She’d slow by a tenth of a second. Nobody would ever know.

No powers, she’d said. Just us.

I didn’t.

I ran.

She crossed the white line a meter ahead of me.

The edge of field three went up like a firework.

Half of them cheering. The other half groaning. Liam, in the middle of it, holding his piece of paper over his head and shouting that he’d told everyone, he’d said, three to one, while Toby beside him looked at the ground with the face of somebody who had just lost a whole dessert for loyalty.

I bent over with my hands on my knees, breathing.

Risa was standing a meter past the line, with her back to me, also breathing. Her shoulders were going up and down. Then she turned round, and put her hands on her hips, and looked at me.

”One meter,” she said.

”One meter.”

”You were catching me,” said Risa. ”On the bars. And on the sprint. I could feel you coming.” She was still breathing hard. ”Another twenty meters and you’d have had me.”

”There weren’t another twenty meters.”

”No,” said Risa. ”There weren’t.” She looked at me for a long moment with her light gray eyes. ”Your heart’s at a hundred and sixty.”

”You said—”

”You lost,” said Risa. ”So I get to keep saying it.” And she smiled. Not the sharp one. The other one. The one Garnet had got out of her on families’ day, that went all the way up into her eyes. ”Bag. Monday. Six o’clock. Don’t be late.”

She walked off the field.

At the far end, by the bars, Sigmund was still standing on his own. He was looking at his sister walking away. Then at me. Then at the white line, where she’d beaten me by a meter.

He didn’t say anything.

But I saw, very faintly, at the corner of his narrow mouth, something that might have been the beginning of a smile. On anyone else, I’d have called it pride.

Her bag was heavier than it should have been.

I noticed on the Monday, when I picked it up from the end of her bunk at six in the morning and slung it over my shoulder. A canvas training bag, gray, with a strap. Her gear was in it. Pads, and her mask, and her headset, and a water bottle. All of that I expected.

It still weighed about twice what it should have.

I didn’t say anything. I carried it. To the field. To the beam. To the mess at breakfast, where I put it on the bench beside her and she said careful, there are delicate things in there, and Liam nearly choked on his toast. To the field again. To lunch. To the showers, where I stood outside the girls’ end of the barracks holding it while she went in, and four girls from Squad Five went past and looked at me and laughed so hard they had to hold each other up.

I carried it everywhere. For a week.

And Risa talked.

That was the part I hadn’t expected.

Risa didn’t talk. That was the whole thing about Risa. At the fern, at lunch, every day for two months, she’d said maybe ten words at a time, most of them about my heart rate, and the rest of them sharp. She sat. She ate. She watched the fern. She went away.

For a week, walking beside me while I carried her bag, she didn’t stop.

She talked about everything. About the yard behind their flat on the upper floors, where Sigmund had made her run the bars every morning before school since she was eight, and how she’d hated him for it, and how she’d beaten him on the course for the first time when she was thirteen, and he hadn’t spoken to her for a week. About her mother, who never said anything at dinner, and grew orchids in the window of their flat under a lamp, and talked to them in a whisper when she thought nobody was listening. About her grandmother’s kitchen on the lower floors, before the Council seat, before the upper floors, where there’d been a radio that only played one station, and her grandmother used to turn it up loud and dance with Risa on her feet.

About music. She liked music. Any kind. She said every song had a heartbeat, a real one, under the drums, under everything, and if you listened hard enough you could feel it, the way she felt people. She said the old song, Toby’s song, Mother’s song, had the slowest heartbeat of any song she’d ever felt. Like somebody asleep.

About lightning.

That was on the Wednesday. Walking back from the beam, with her bag on my shoulder.

”What does it do?” she said. ”To the air. When I make it.”

I looked at her.

”I’ve been making it since I was nine,” said Risa. ”I can put it anywhere I want. I can make it any size. I can do it in the dark, upside down, with my eyes shut.” She kicked at the packed earth. ”And I don’t know what it is. Nobody ever told me. Father wouldn’t let anyone teach us anything about it. Because it’s the stain.” She looked sideways at me. ”You’d know. You know what everything is.”

So I told her.

I told her what lightning did to air. How it tore the little pairs of oxygen apart, and the little pairs of nitrogen too, in the heat of the bolt, hotter than the surface of the sun for a moment, and how when they came back together, some of them came back together wrong. How some of the oxygen made threes instead of twos, and that was the sharp clean smell after every bolt she’d ever thrown, the smell she’d smelled since she was nine. How some of the nitrogen grabbed the oxygen and made something new, and that when that came down in the rain, it fed the ground. How every storm in the history of the world had been feeding the fields, a little, without anybody asking it to.

Risa stopped walking.

She stood in the middle of the corridor outside the armory, with people going past on either side of us, and looked at me.

”It feeds things,” she said.

”A little. Yes.”

”Lightning,” said Risa. ”The stain. The thing we don’t do in this house.” Her voice was very strange. ”It feeds things.”

”It feeds fields,” I said. ”Father used to wait for storms. When I was little. In the first years, before the filter. He used to stand on the porch and watch them go over the ridge and say there’s the nitrogen.”

Risa didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she started walking again. Faster. Not looking at me.

But she didn’t stop talking for the rest of the day, and every other sentence was a question. What else did it do. What did it do to water. What did it do to metal. What did it do to people. How hot. How fast. Why that color.

I answered all of them.

By Friday, she knew more about her own lightning than anyone in the cave, probably including her father. She told me so. She said it like she was telling me the weather. But she was smiling.

On the Friday, at lunch, at the fern, I put her bag down on the floor beside the clay pot for the last time, and sat down across from her, and said:

”There are rocks in it.”

Risa looked up from her tray.

”In the bottom,” I said. ”Under the pads. Four of them. About two kilos each. River stones. Gray. From the stable yard, I think.” I looked at her. ”They’ve been there since Monday.”

”Took you long enough,” said Risa.

”I saw them on Monday.”

She stopped chewing.

”I saw them the first time I picked it up,” I said. ”I can see what things are made of, Risa. I know what’s in every bag in this cave. I could tell you what Liam’s got in his locker. You don’t want to know.”

”Then why didn’t you say?”

I looked at the fern. At the sixth frond, just starting to unroll.

”Because you wanted me to carry them,” I said. ”And I didn’t know why. So I carried them.”

Risa put her fork down.

She looked at me for a long time. Her light gray eyes. Measuring. The way you’d measure a jump.

”Your heart,” she said finally. Quietly. ”Every night since the sim. When you come back from the reading room. When you lie down. I can feel it from the girls’ end. Through the wall.” She picked at a thread on her sleeve. ”A hundred and forty. Every night. Lying in bed. Like you were still in there, in the red, breathing for five people.”

I didn’t say anything.

”You didn’t laugh,” said Risa. ”Not once. For a week. Not at Liam. Not at anything. You just went to the reading room and came back and lay there at a hundred and forty.” She shrugged. ”So I thought, he needs to lose at something. Something stupid. Something that doesn’t matter. Something where nobody’s breathing on him, and he’s not breathing for anybody, and it’s just a race, and he loses, and it’s funny.” She looked at the bag. ”And then he needs to carry something heavy and stupid for a week that isn’t anybody’s life.”

The lamp over the fern hummed.

”It’s sixty-two,” said Risa. ”Right now. Your heart.” She picked her fork up again. ”It’s been under seventy since Tuesday. You laughed four times on Wednesday. At the bit about the orchids. And at Liam, twice. And at me, once, when I asked if lightning could make soup.” She ate a forkful of something gray. ”So.”

”So,” I said.

”So I win,” said Risa. ”Twice.”

I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything. I just sat there, across from her, on the floor of the corridor, with the fern between us, and my heart going at sixty-two, apparently, and looked at her.

She didn’t look back. She looked at the fern.

But her ears had gone faintly red.

She stopped me as I was getting up.

”One more thing,” she said. ”And then I’m going to go, and we’re not going to talk about it.”

”All right.”

”Behind your eyes,” said Risa.

I went still.

”I can feel your nerves,” she said. ”All of them. Your heart, and your nerves, and your brain, a bit, the way I feel everyone’s. They’re normal. They’re like everyone’s.” She was looking at me now. Very steadily. ”Except behind your eyes.”

”What’s behind my eyes?”

”Something that hums,” said Risa. ”Not like nerves. Nerves crackle. This doesn’t. This hums. Low. Steady. All the time. Since I first met you, but louder now. Much louder. Since the sim.” She frowned, looking for the word. ”It feels like the fern did. On families’ day. When your sister touched it and it grew.”

The corridor was very quiet.

”Like something growing,” said Risa.

I stood there with her empty bag in my hand.

Your father had headaches, near the end of the program. Pressure behind the eyes. I wrote them down. His eyes changed color a month later.

”Have you told anyone?” I said.

”No.”

”Don’t.”

Risa looked at me for a long moment.

”I’m not going to,” she said. ”I don’t tell anyone anything.” She picked up her tray. ”But you should. Someone who knows what it means.” A pause. ”Because I don’t. And I don’t like not knowing what something is.” She almost smiled. ”You taught me that. This week.”

She walked away down the corridor.

I wrote it down that night, in notebook fifteen, at the bottom of the list. Under Day 64, and the sim, and the breathing holes.

Day 70. Lost to Risa by a meter. Carried four river stones for a week. Didn’t mind.

Heart under seventy since Tuesday. Risa says.

And then, under that, smaller. After a long time.

Risa feels something behind my eyes. Not nerves. Humming. Growing. Louder since the sim.

Like Father, near the end of the program.

Tell Dr. Halloway on Sunday.

I looked at that last line for a long time. Then I put the notebook back on the shelf over my bed, beside the mended mug and the yellow socks and Mother’s photograph, and lay down in the dark between Liam and Toby, and didn’t sleep for a long time.

At the girls’ end of the barracks, through the wall, somebody was awake too. I knew it the way you know someone’s looking at you in a dark room.

I didn’t know what my heart was doing. But I knew she did.