Scarecrow

The letters came on Wednesdays.

A soldier brought them down the ramp in a canvas sack and tipped them out onto the long table at the end of the mess, after breakfast, and everyone crowded round and pushed and called out names. Most weeks I didn’t bother. Mother wrote on Sundays, through the screen, and Genny didn’t believe in letters, and Garnet’s came every other week in an envelope covered in drawings, and Liam always grabbed it for me and held it over his head until I took it off him.

That Wednesday, Brock Haddon got a letter.

I saw it happen. I was standing behind Liam, waiting for him to finish fighting Bree for a parcel from Hearth Block. Brock was at the other end of the table, on his own, the way he always was now. A soldier handed him a thick cream envelope with a stamp on the back. A real stamp. Red wax. The kind they used on the upper floors.

He opened it. He read it.

And his face went white.

Not red. Brock went red when he was angry, red to the ears, red all the way down his thick neck. I’d seen it a hundred times. This was the other thing. The color going out of him all at once, as though someone had pulled a plug. He read the letter twice. Then he folded it, very carefully, into a small square. Then he crushed the square in his fist until his knuckles went iron-gray and the paper inside crackled.

Then he walked out of the mess without eating.

”What was that?” I said.

Liam had won the parcel. He was holding it against his chest with both arms. He looked at the door Brock had gone through.

”His dad,” he said. Quietly, for once. ”It’s all over the upper floors. Mum said in her letter last week.” He hesitated. ”The car.”

”What about the car?”

”He had to get it down,” said Liam. ”Off the roof. Families’ day was ages away and he wasn’t going to leave it there for two months with everybody in the dome laughing at him. So he hired a crane. A big one. From the Ministry works. And he had to bring it down the ramp into the compound, because there was no other way, and it took all day, and they had to take a section of the barracks roof off to get the cables round it.” Liam winced. ”And somebody took pictures.”

”Of the car.”

”Of the car,” said Liam. ”Hanging off a crane in the middle of a cave, with Mr. Haddon standing underneath it shouting. And the Retention kids’ barracks behind it with a hole in the roof.” He looked at me sideways. ”It’s on walls now. On the upper floors. In offices. People laugh at it at parties.” He paused. ”Like the other one.”

Like the Kneeling Calder.

”Mum says he lost his job,” said Liam. ”On the Ministry procurement board. Nobody’d sit in a meeting with him. They kept making crane noises.” He shifted the parcel in his arms. ”And it was a nine-year-old girl who put it up there. And everybody knows whose sister she is.”

I looked at the door Brock had gone through.

”I didn’t do anything,” I said. ”On the ramp. I stood there.”

”I know,” said Liam. ”Everybody knows.” He was quiet for a moment. ”That’s the problem, isn’t it? For him. If you’d done it, it’d be a fight. You did nothing, and a nine-year-old did it, and his dad’s a joke.” He started walking. ”Come on. Mum sent biscuits. I’m not sharing them with Bree.”

I didn’t think about it again until it happened.

That’s the truth. I should have. Liam said so afterward, and Seraphina said so, and Luna said so with her face, which was worse. I should have seen it coming from the moment Brock crushed that letter in his iron fist.

But I didn’t. I went to the reading room at ten, the way I always did, and Luna asked me questions about the furnaces in the cell and how they made heat, and I got nine right, and she wrote the number in her margin. At eleven, the soldier came to the door and said time. Luna went out first. I waited my minute. Then I went to the showers.

I always went last. After the reading room. When the barracks was dark and everyone else had already washed and gone to bed. It was the only time the showers were empty, and I liked them empty. Long and tiled and echoing, with the lamps turned down to their night setting, dim and yellow. Two rows of lockers down the middle, gray steel, dented. Benches between them. The drip of a tap somebody hadn’t turned off properly.

I’d showered. I was standing at my locker in my trousers, with my shirt in my hand and my back to the room, when the lamp at the end of the row went out.

Then the next one.

Then the one over my head.

I turned round.

There were four of them.

Brock in front. Big, and broad, in his training clothes, with his hands at his sides. The two boys from Squad Six behind him, the ones who’d said the word in the corridor and laughed and walked away. And a boy from Squad Two I barely knew, called Fenn, who sat at the far end of the Frieses’ table and never said anything to anyone.

None of them said anything.

Brock looked at me. In the dim light from the one lamp still burning at the far end of the room, his face was very pale. Pale and set and strange, as though he’d made up his mind about something a long time ago and was just now walking through the door into it.

”Brock,” I said.

He didn’t answer.

His skin went gray.

It started at his hands and went up his arms. The way it had on the assessment field, the way it had in the training hall when the fire came down. Iron. All of him. His face. His neck. His bare forearms. Gray, and dull, and hard. In the dim light, he looked like a statue someone had left standing in the middle of the locker room.

The two boys from Squad Six moved to either side of me. Fenn went round behind.

I could have done anything.

I need that understood. I could have done anything at all. There were four of them, and I could see every one. The iron in Brock’s skin. The bones in the Squad Six boys’ hands. The water in the air, and the steel of the lockers, and the tiles on the floor, and the air in their lungs.

I could have turned the iron in Brock’s skin to rust. To dust. To nothing. I could have made the floor under them into water. I could have changed the air they were breathing, the way I’d changed it inside two hundred and twelve fires.

I knew how long a brain lasted without it. I’d read it twice.

And something moved in me.

The hot thing. The one I’d felt on the field before the steel ball. The one that had come up in the crater, the day Mother told me everything, when I’d turned a hill to glass without meaning to and drawn a line across the flats toward the dome. Down under the boards of me. Stirring. Turning over. Waking up.

The pressure behind my eyes went from a weight to a fist.

And I was afraid.

Not of them. Of me.

Of what I’d do if I started. Of where I’d stop. Of whether I’d stop. Four boys in a dark room, and me, and the thing under the boards with its eyes opening, and nothing in the whole world between the four of them and whatever it wanted except the thin dark edge of my own sight.

Seeing is the on-switch, Father used to say. If you can’t see it, you can’t change it. Remember that, Lucas. When it matters. Close your eyes.

I closed my eyes.

Brock hit me.

I’m not going to tell all of it.

I don’t remember all of it, for one thing. And the parts I do remember aren’t worth telling. It isn’t a story. It was four people in a dark room, and me with my eyes shut, and it went on for a long time.

Brock’s fist was iron. That was the first thing. I’d seen it split a slab on the assessment field. It hit me under the ribs on the left side, and I felt something give, and the breath went out of me all at once, and I folded over and went down onto the wet tiles on my knees.

I kept my eyes shut.

That was all I did. The whole time. I kept my eyes shut, and I put my arms over my head, and I curled up on the floor between the lockers, and I let it happen.

Not because I couldn’t stop it. Because I could. Because the hot thing was awake now, all the way, roaring in the dark under the boards of me, and the only thing holding it back was the dark behind my eyelids. If I opened them, even for a second, even a crack, I’d see them. And if I saw them, I didn’t know what I’d do.

So I didn’t.

I heard them, instead. That was worse, in some ways. Their breathing. Their boots on the wet tiles. One of the Squad Six boys saying something, high and shaky, over and over, come on, come on, come on, like he was trying to make himself keep going. Fenn, behind me, not saying anything at all. The dull iron sound when Brock’s fists landed.

I counted. I don’t know why. Something to hold on to. Father used to make me count, when I was little and the power came up hot and I didn’t know how to put it down. Count, Lucas. Slowly. One thing at a time. Slow enough that you don’t get it wrong.

I got to forty-one before it stopped.

It stopped because Brock stopped it.

I didn’t see. I was on the floor with my eyes shut and my arms over my head. But I heard it. One of the Squad Six boys was still going. Kicking. At my back, where my shirt had come up. And then there was a sound like a door slamming, and a grunt, and something heavy hit the lockers on the other side of the row, and the kicking stopped.

”Enough,” said Brock.

His voice was strange. Thick. Not angry. Something else.

”He’s not—” One of the Squad Six boys, breathing hard. ”He’s not even fighting back. He’s just—”

”I know,” said Brock. ”I know what he’s doing.” A silence. ”Look at him. Look at his eyes.”

Nobody said anything.

”He’s got them shut,” said Brock. ”The whole time. He’s had them shut since the start.” His voice went lower. ”You know what that means? You know why he’s doing that?”

Silence.

”Because he can’t do anything if he can’t see,” said Brock. ”That’s how it works. That’s what his father said. Everybody knows.” A long breath. ”He shut his eyes so he wouldn’t. So he wouldn’t kill us.”

The locker room was very quiet. The tap was still dripping, somewhere at the end of the row. Drip. Drip.

”Get out,” said Brock. ”All of you. Now.”

They went. I heard them go. Fast. Not running, quite. Their boots on the wet tiles. The door at the end of the room. Then nothing.

Brock didn’t go.

I heard him standing there, a meter away. Breathing. Heavy, and uneven, the way you breathe when you’ve been crying and are trying very hard not to.

”My dad,” he said.

He stopped.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t open my eyes. I lay on the wet tiles with my arms round my head and waited.

”He said I had to fix it,” said Brock. Very low. ”In the letter. He said a Haddon doesn’t let a scarecrow and his little sister make a joke of the family on every wall in the dome. He said I had to fix it.” His voice cracked. ”He said if I didn’t, I wasn’t—”

He stopped again.

I heard his iron skin go soft. A small sound, like a sigh. The gray going out of him.

”I’m sorry,” said Brock Haddon.

Then his footsteps went away down the row, and the door opened, and closed, and I was alone.

I lay there for a long time.

I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t trust them. The hot thing was still awake, under the boards, pacing. I could feel it. The pressure behind my eyes wasn’t a fist anymore. It was something bigger. Something pressing outward. As though my eyes were the only two windows in a house full of fire, and the fire had found them.

I counted again. Slowly. To a hundred.

Then I opened them.

Just a crack.

The locker room was dim. One lamp, at the far end, yellow. Wet tiles. The two rows of lockers.

And the lockers were moving.

Not much. The nearest ones. The steel doors of the lockers on either side of me, where I was lying, at the edge of my sight. They were softening. Sagging. The way a candle sags near a flame. The straight edges going round. The dents spreading. The metal going dull and then bright and then dull again, the way the steel ball had gone silver before it went to water.

I wasn’t doing it.

I wasn’t looking at them. I wasn’t telling them anything. I was just lying there with my eyes open a crack, and the thing under the boards was looking out through them, and everything it saw was starting to change.

I shut my eyes.

Hard. As hard as I could. Squeezed them shut, so tight I saw colors.

I heard the steel creak, very faintly, as it stopped.

That was how Liam found me.

I don’t know how long it was. Long enough for the floor to have gone from wet to cold. Long enough for the hot thing to have gone quiet again, slowly, the way a fire goes down when you stop feeding it.

The door at the end of the room banged open.

”Lucas?” Liam’s voice, very loud, echoing off the tiles. ”Lucas, you didn’t come back, it’s nearly one, Toby woke me up and said your bed was—”

He stopped.

I heard his feet on the tiles. Running. Then stopping, right beside me. Then the sound he made, which wasn’t a word.

”Don’t,” I said. My mouth didn’t work very well. My lip was split. ”Don’t turn the lamps on.”

”What—”

”Don’t turn them on,” I said. ”Don’t. Please. I’ve got to keep my eyes shut for a bit. Just a bit.”

Liam didn’t turn the lamps on.

He knelt down on the cold wet tiles beside me. I felt his hand on my shoulder. It was shaking. I heard the wheel of his brass lighter spin, once, and the little hiss of a flame catching, and I felt the heat of it, near my face, and I knew he was looking at me by the light of it.

”Who,” said Liam.

His voice was very quiet. I’d never heard Liam’s voice go quiet like that. It was worse than shouting.

”It doesn’t matter.”

”Who,” said Liam. ”Who was it. Tell me who it was, Lucas, and I’ll—”

”No.”

”I’ll burn them,” said Liam. ”I swear to God. I’ll go down the row right now and I’ll find them in their beds and I’ll—”

”No.”

I reached up, with my eyes still shut, and found his wrist. The one holding the lighter. And held it.

”No,” I said again.

Liam was breathing hard. Fast. I could feel his pulse jumping under my fingers.

”You let them,” he said. ”Didn’t you. You let them. You could have turned them inside out. All of them. And you lay here on the floor with your eyes shut and you let them.”

”Yes.”

”Why?”

”Because I could have turned them inside out,” I said. ”All of them. And I wanted to.” I swallowed. It hurt. ”That’s why.”

Liam didn’t say anything for a long time.

The lighter went out.

He got me up. I don’t know how. I was a lot bigger than him. He got one of my arms over his shoulders and hauled, swearing, and I got my legs under me somehow, and we went down the corridor toward the infirmary with my eyes shut and his hand round my wrist, like a blind man and his dog.

He talked the whole way. Low. Furious. Not to me, exactly. To the corridor. To the dark.

”I’d have let you,” he said. ”That’s the thing. That’s the thing that makes me sick. If you’d opened your eyes and done it, I’d have let you. I’d have helped. And you lay there and let them kick you in the back so you wouldn’t, and I can’t—” He stopped. Breathed. ”I’m angrier than you are. I’m angrier than you are and it’s not even me. How is that fair?”

”It’s not.”

”No, it’s not,” said Liam. ”Nothing about you is fair. You’re the most unfair person I’ve ever met.”

The infirmary had a light on. One lamp, over a desk at the end. Somebody was sitting at the desk, rolling bandages.

Toby.

He looked up. He saw me, with my eyes shut and blood all down my chin and Liam holding me up. He went white to the ears.

And then, without a word, he got up, and pulled back the sheet on the nearest bed, and got the medic’s bag down off its hook, and washed his hands at the little basin in the corner, with his steady hands, the way the medic had taught him.

”Sit him down,” he said. ”Gently. Left side. Don’t let him lean on it.”

Liam stared at him.

”Now, Liam,” said Toby.

Liam sat me down.

Toby did all of it.

He didn’t wake the medic. He said he didn’t need to. He cleaned the cut on my lip and the cut over my eye with something that stung. He pressed his fingers, very gently, along my ribs on the left side, one at a time, until I made a sound, and then he stopped, and said ”There. That one. Cracked, not broken. I think.” He strapped it, tight, with a long bandage, round and round. He looked at my back, where the boots had been, and didn’t say anything, and his mouth went very thin.

He asked me to open my eyes, so he could check them.

I said no.

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded, as if that were a perfectly ordinary thing to say to a medic at one in the morning, and didn’t ask again.

When he’d finished, he sat down on the edge of the next bed with his hands in his lap. They were shaking now. They hadn’t been, while he worked.

”You should tell Okafor,” he said quietly.

”No.”

”Lucas—”

”No,” I said. ”If I tell Okafor, she’ll do something. And then everybody will know why. And then Brock’s father will know. And then—” I stopped. ”It’s done. It’s over. I don’t want it to be anything else.”

Toby and Liam looked at each other.

”Somebody’s going to tell,” said Liam. ”You know that. Four people walked out of that locker room. Somebody’s going to tell.”

”Not me,” I said.

When they’d gone, Liam back to the barracks to get me a clean shirt and Toby to wash the blood off his hands, I lay on the infirmary bed in the dark with my eyes shut and waited until the hot thing had gone all the way down.

Then I opened them.

Slowly. A crack. Then all the way.

The infirmary was dark. Quiet. Nothing moved. Nothing softened. The steel frame of the bed beside mine stayed steel. The lamp on the desk stayed a lamp.

I let my breath out.

And then, because I couldn’t help it, because it was my own body and nobody else’s, and nobody could tell me not to, I looked down at my left side. At the bandage. And through it. At the rib.

I could see the crack. A thin dark line, across the bone. Exactly where Toby had pressed.

And I could see something else.

Along the line of the crack, on both sides of it, there were cells. Bone cells. The kind the book had a chapter on, that I’d read twice. The ones that built new bone when something broke. They were supposed to take days to get started. Weeks to finish. The book said so.

They’d already started.

Hundreds of them. Thousands. Crowding into the crack from both sides. Working. Fast. Much faster than the book said. Laying down new bone in fine thin threads across the gap, like Garnet’s fern unrolling. And in among them, threaded through every one of them, the same thing that was threaded through Maura’s hand, and Seraphina’s.

The foreign thing.

Not fighting. Not being fought. Working. Helping. Pushing every one of those cells to go faster. To build. The way it pushed Seraphina’s furnaces to burn.

Your body isn’t treating it as something foreign. It’s using it.

I lay in the dark and watched my own rib knit itself back together, one thin thread at a time, much faster than it should have.

I didn’t know what it meant.

But I wrote it down in the morning, in notebook fifteen, under Except, maybe, me, and Luna’s And me.

Day 78. Locker room. Four of them. Eyes shut the whole time. Forty-one.

When I opened them after, the lockers started to bend. I wasn’t telling them to.

Cracked rib. Healing fast. Much faster than the book. The foreign thing is helping it. In me, it helps.

And then, under that, very small:

Brock said sorry.