Scarecrow

The wild zone was the only part of the dome nobody had finished.

It was on the eastern edge, where the curve of the gold glass came down to meet the ground. Forty years ago, Okafor said, the engineers had meant it to be a park. They’d brought in soil, and seed, and water, and planted it, and then the war had ended and the money had gone somewhere else, and nobody had come back to tend it. So it had grown on its own. For forty years. Under the glass. In the warm wet air that came off the city.

It was a jungle now. Not like the sim. Not red. Green, and gray, and black. Trees that had grown too tall too fast and fallen over and grown again out of their own trunks. Vines like ropes. A floor of leaf rot so deep your boot went in to the ankle. And under all of it, running everywhere, the old drains the engineers had cut to carry off the water, half-collapsed, overgrown, full of roots.

”Night exercise,” said Okafor, at the edge of it, at nine o’clock at night, with the forty of us in our suits in a line behind her. ”Every squad goes in from a different point. Somewhere in there, there’s a beacon. First squad to reach it and bring it out wins. No sim. No constructs. No safety limits. Just the dark, and the ground, and each other.” She looked down the line. ”And the rain cycle starts at midnight. So I’d be quick.”

Somebody in Squad Five groaned.

”Windsor,” said Okafor.

”Sergeant.”

”Your squad goes in at the drains. North side. You’ve got the worst ground in the zone.” A pause. ”I thought you’d like that.”

Luna didn’t say anything. But through the dark window of her helmet, I thought I saw her smile.

I liked the dark.

That was the strange thing. The first thing I noticed, the moment we went in under the trees and the lamps of the city fell away behind us. It was dark. Properly dark. Dark the way the field had been dark, at night, before the filter, when there was nothing for a hundred miles in any direction but ash and stars.

And the needles were gone.

I’d been wearing Father’s dusk for a week now. Everywhere. Field, mess, sim, reading room. Under the helmet, too, which had taken Odell an hour to fit, grumbling. And they’d helped. They’d turned every lamp in the cave soft and brown. But the needles had still been there, a little, at the back. Waiting.

In the dark, there was nothing for them to come through.

And I could see.

Not with my eyes. With the other thing. The thing that didn’t need light. I’d always been able to see into things, whether there was light or not. But I’d never noticed before how much the light got in the way. How it sat on top of everything, bright and loud, and you had to look through it to get to what was underneath.

In the dark, there was only what was underneath.

The trees, from the inside. The long wet channels of water running up through their trunks. The roots under the leaf rot, threading through the ground like veins. The old drains under the roots, stone and concrete gone soft and green with forty years of water. Every stone in them. Every crack.

I could see it all. Clearly. Easily. Without any falling. Without any needles.

The only time of day he’d ever been able to see properly anyway.

”Scarecrow,” said Luna, in my ear. ”Report.”

”Clear,” I said. ”All of it. Drains run north-east, under us, two meters down. Mostly collapsed. One good one, big, a hundred meters ahead, running toward the middle of the zone.” I paused. ”And Keep. It’s easier. In the dark. I can see further.”

There was a short silence in the comms.

”Then lead,” said Luna. ”I’ll tell you when to stop.”

We found the beacon at eleven-forty.

I led them to it. Through the trees, over the fallen trunks, round the places where the leaf rot went down three meters into nothing and would have swallowed somebody whole. Luna behind me, saying stop and left and wait when I went too fast. Toby’s wall up low at the back. Liam in the middle, using his flame, very small, cupped in his hand, so the others could see where to put their feet. Seraphina at the side, quiet, watchful, with the heat coming off her suit faintly in the cold air.

The beacon was in a clearing, on a stump. A little gray box with a red light blinking on top. Luna picked it up.

”Eleven-forty,” she said. ”We’re the first. I can’t hear anyone else.” She looked up through the trees. Through the broken canopy, very high, you could see the gold glass of the dome, dark now, with the city lights reflected in it. ”Twenty minutes to rain. Back the way we came. Fast.”

We were halfway back when the rain came early.

It didn’t start gently, the way it had on the gallery. It started all at once. One moment, dark and still and warm. The next, a roar. The jets along the struts of the dome opening wide, far above, and the water coming down through the canopy in a solid white sheet, crashing through the leaves, battering the suits, so loud I couldn’t hear the comms.

”—early—” Luna’s voice, broken up, in my ear. ”—somebody’s changed the—”

And the ground went.

That was what the drains were for. To carry off the rain. And forty years of roots and rot had blocked most of them, and the water had nowhere to go. It came down through the canopy and hit the leaf rot and ran, all of it, all at once, downhill, toward the few drains that were still open.

And Seraphina and I were standing on top of one.

I saw it go. Too late. I saw it the way I’d seen the arm in the Town. The leaf rot under our feet, heavy with water, sliding. The old roof of the drain underneath it, stone gone soft, cracking. One crack. Then another. Then the whole thing giving way.

We went down.

Into the dark. Into the roar. Into the water.

It wasn’t deep. That was the first thing. I came up on my knees in water to my waist, in a stone channel just wider than my shoulders, with the rain coming down through the hole we’d made in a solid white column and the water rushing past me in the dark, fast, pulling at my legs.

Seraphina came up beside me, coughing.

”Calder,” I said. ”Are you—”

”Fine. Fine.” She was holding on to the wall. ”Where are the others?”

I looked up. Through the hole. Through the rain. Through the roots and the leaf rot and the stone.

I could see them. Three of them. Up on the surface, ten meters back, standing round the edge of the hole, which was getting bigger as the ground kept falling into it. Luna on her knees at the edge with her hand flat on the mud, trying to freeze it. Too much water. It wouldn’t hold.

”—Scarecrow—” In my ear. Broken. ”—can’t—stay—”

And then the edge of the hole went, all at once, a whole wall of mud and roots and leaf rot sliding down into the drain on top of us, and I grabbed Seraphina’s arm and pulled, and we went backward, down the channel, in the dark, with the water pushing us, and the roof came down behind us with a sound like a door slamming shut.

And it was quiet.

Not silent. The water was still rushing past our legs. The rain was still roaring somewhere far above. But muffled now. Behind tons of mud and stone.

We were in the drain. In the dark. On our own.

And the way back was gone.

I could have got us out.

I want to say that, because it matters. I could have turned the mud behind us to sand and let it wash away. I could have turned the roof over our heads into glass and stepped up through it. I could have done a dozen things.

I didn’t, because I could see what was above us.

Ten meters of wet, moving, sliding ground, full of roots and stones and water, all of it shifting, all at once. Fog. Like the mud in the sim. I couldn’t see into it properly. And if I changed the wrong part of it, the rest would come down. On us. On the three people standing on top of it, trying to dig us out.

So I didn’t.

I found us a dry place instead. Fifty meters down the drain, where it went up a step and turned, there was a side chamber, old and square, a junction box the engineers had cut forty years ago, with a floor half a meter above the water. Dry. Stone. Room for two people to sit with their backs against the wall and their knees up.

We sat.

The water roared past below us. The comms in my helmet hissed, and crackled, and every few minutes a piece of somebody’s voice came through. ”—holding—Fork’s got the—don’t move—” and then nothing.

”Don’t move,” I said.

”I heard,” said Seraphina.

We took our helmets off. The air in the junction box was cold, and wet, and smelled of stone and roots and old rain. Pitch dark. I couldn’t see her face. I didn’t need to.

”Three hours,” I said. ”The rain cycle’s three hours. When it stops, the water’ll go down, and the ground’ll stop moving, and they can dig. Or I can.”

”Three hours,” said Seraphina.

”Maybe four.”

She didn’t say anything.

And then, in the dark, very faintly, the air around her began to get warm.

I felt it before I saw it. A softness, a heat, coming off her side, like standing next to a stove. And then her hands, which she’d been holding in her lap, began very faintly to glow. Orange. Like coals in a grate. Enough to see by.

Enough to see her face. Wet hair, red-black in the glow, plastered to her forehead. Her jaw set. Her eyes on her own hands.

”It’s cold,” she said. ”I’m keeping us warm.”

”I know.”

”Don’t look at me like that.”

”I’m not looking at you like anything.”

”You’ve got Okafor’s face on. The one she gets when Toby’s on the beam.” The glow in her hands brightened, a little. ”I’m fine, Dask. I’ve got Odell’s coolant. I’m not going to—” She stopped.

She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to.

He burned for nine days.

I looked. Not deep. Just a little. The way Risa had taught me. Loosely, at the wires. And at the heat.

It was fine. For now. The little furnaces in her cells were burning steady and even, not too hot, the way they did when she kept the pool warm. And Odell’s silver coolant was moving in its channels in her suit, slowly, carrying the extra away.

But it would be four hours. In the cold. In the wet. With nothing to burn but her.

And no damper.

I took my gloves off.

I put my hands flat on the stone wall of the junction box, behind us. On the floor. On the low stone roof over our heads. And I looked.

Old stone. Concrete, really. Gravel and sand and lime, poured forty years ago and gone soft and porous with water, full of tiny holes. Cold all the way through. It drank the heat out of anything that touched it. That was why it was so cold in here. The walls were taking the warmth off Seraphina as fast as she could make it.

I didn’t change it much.

I didn’t need to. I just went into the stone, round us, a little way. A hand’s depth. All round the junction box. Walls and floor and roof. And I closed the little holes. Not all of them. Odell had taught me that. Some flaws are the point. But most of them. Enough. And I put something into the stone that hadn’t been there. A little iron. Packed tight. The way a hearthstone’s packed. The way the stones round Father’s stove had been.

The stone went dark. A little. And dense. And warm to the touch.

Not hot. Just not cold anymore.

Seraphina stopped glowing.

She looked at the wall. Then at the floor. Then at me.

”What did you do?”

”A hearthstone,” I said. ”Like round a stove. It holds heat instead of taking it.” I put my hand back in my lap. ”You don’t have to keep burning. The stone’ll keep what you’ve already made.”

Seraphina was quiet for a long time.

Then, very slowly, she let her hands go dark.

And the junction box stayed warm.

We talked for four hours.

I didn’t plan it. Neither did she. It just happened, the way things happen in the dark when there’s nothing else to do and nobody else to hear. Seraphina Calder, who’d barely said ten words to me in five months that weren’t an order or an insult. Sitting with her back against a hearthstone in a drain under the wild zone with the rain roaring overhead.

She talked about the fever.

Not the way she had on field two, the night with the pool, fast and furious and frightened. Slowly. In pieces. About the winter she was nine and got it for the first time, and Maura sat up with her for six nights with her hands in a bowl of snow. About Cormac. Not his dying. His living. The way he’d laughed. The way he’d taught her to light a candle from across a room when she was six, and then got in trouble for it, and then done it again. About how she’d been angry with him for dying, for years, as if he’d done it on purpose.

”I still am,” she said. ”A bit. Is that stupid?”

”No.”

”I’m angry with the stabilizer. And the doctors. And the program. And whoever decided Calders should be furnaces in the first place.” She pulled her knees up. ”And I’m angry with me. Every time I light anything. Every time I keep the pool warm. Every time I’m the one who has to do it, because I’m the one who can. Because I can feel it, the fever, waiting. Every time. Like a dog at the end of a chain.”

”I know.”

”You don’t know.”

”I’ve got one too,” I said.

She turned her head toward me in the dark. I couldn’t see her face. I didn’t need to.

”The hot thing,” I said. ”Under the boards. That’s what I call it. It’s been there since I was little. It wakes up when I’m frightened, or angry, or hurt. And it wants things. Bigger things. More.” I looked at my hands. ”It made the crater. When I found out about Avalon. A whole hill. And the line of glass toward the dome.” I swallowed. ”I didn’t mean any of it. It just—went. And I couldn’t stop it till Genny came and sat down next to me.”

Seraphina didn’t say anything for a long time.

”I saw the line,” she said finally. ”From the roof. The day after. Everyone did.”

”I know.”

”Liam said it looked like somebody’d drawn on the world with a ruler.”

”It did.”

She was quiet again. Then she said, very quietly:

”Is that what you were scared of? In the locker room? When you closed your eyes?”

”Yes.”

”Not them. It.”

”Yes.”

”Huh,” said Seraphina Calder. And sat back against the hearthstone, and looked at the dark for a while.

And then she asked about Father.

I don’t know why she did. Nobody had. Not Liam, who’d decided on the first day not to. Not Toby. Not Luna, who knew more about him from the after-action reports than I did. Not Okafor, who knew everything and said one piece at a time. In five months, nobody had asked me the simplest thing.

”How did he die?” said Seraphina.

So I told her.

The cough. When I was nine. How it started small, a dry little thing in the mornings, and Father said it was the ash. How it got bigger. How he went to the collapsed clinic in the old suburbs, the year before, and brought home eleven medical books, and read them at the kitchen table at night with his pencil, because he was trying to find out what it was. How he’d written, on the inside cover of the thickest one, Dot — find out first. Because he knew Mother had it too. Or would.

How he’d given me notebook one on my tenth birthday. Water. And told me it was mine now.

How he died five weeks later. In the bed by the stove. In the morning. With Mother holding his hand and the twins asleep upstairs and me in the doorway.

How I’d made the stone myself, the week after. Under the one tree he’d grown, at the edge of the field. With his name on it. Trevor Dask. How I hadn’t known how to do letters properly, and they leaned, and the k at the end was bigger than the rest because I’d been crying and pushed too hard.

How I’d thought about fixing it a hundred times.

And never had.

”Why not?” said Seraphina.

I didn’t answer for a long time.

”Because I could,” I said finally. ”It’d take a second. I could make it perfect. Every letter. Straight.” I looked at the dark. ”And then it’d look like somebody else made it. Not me. Not ten. Not that week.”

Seraphina didn’t say anything.

”And then Mother,” I said. ”Three years after. The same cough. Worse. Faster. And this year, at the end, she stopped breathing, in the same bed, and I was in the doorway again, and I couldn’t—” I stopped. ”And Crane walked in. With a doctor. He’d been watching. He knew exactly when. Five minutes.”

”And she’s alive.”

”She’s alive. She walked to the lift and back three times on Saturday.” I breathed out. ”Because of him. Everything I am in this cave, I’m here because of that. He saved her. And he keeps saving her. Every day. With a vial. Three times a day. Delivered on Mondays.”

Seraphina was very quiet.

”So you study,” she said. ”Every night. With Windsor. The cell book.”

”Yes.”

”So one day you don’t need the vial.”

”So one day I don’t need him,” I said.

Somewhere in the fourth hour, the roar overhead stopped.

All at once. The way it had started. The jets closing, high up on the struts of the dome. And then just the water, rushing past below us in the drain, slower now. And slower. And then, very far off, through ten meters of mud and stone, a voice in my helmet, which was sitting on the floor beside me, tinny and small and clear.

”Scarecrow. Keep. Report.”

I picked it up.

”Keep,” I said. ”We’re here. Junction box. Fifty meters north of the hole. Both fine.”

A silence. A very short one.

”Both fine,” said Luna. Her voice didn’t change. But I heard something let go in it. Like a breath. ”The ground’s stopped. Fork’s holding the top. Hearth’s lighting it. Tell me what you see.”

I told her what I saw.

And then, for the first time all night, I looked up through the ground, properly, with the rain stopped and the mud gone still. And it wasn’t fog anymore. It was settling. Each grain finding its place. And I could see through it. Every root and stone. And at the top, three bright shapes, kneeling, waiting.

”Tell me which way,” I said. ”I’ll make you a stair.”

We came up at five in the morning, out of a neat glass stair through the mud, into a gray dawn under the gold glass of the dome, soaked to the skin.

Liam grabbed his sister and held on to her so hard she hit him. Toby sat down in the leaf rot and didn’t get up for a while. Luna looked at me, for a long time, through the dark window of her helmet, and then turned and walked off toward the edge of the zone with the beacon under her arm, very straight.

We were last back. Every other squad had been out for three hours. Okafor wrote our time on the board without a word.

Then she looked at the beacon under Luna’s arm.

Then she rubbed the time out, and wrote 1st.

At breakfast, Seraphina sat down across from me at the Calders’ table, the way she always did.

She didn’t say anything about the drain. She didn’t say anything about the four hours. She ate her porridge, and glared at Liam when he talked too much, and said fine when Toby asked if she’d slept.

But when she got up to go, she stopped beside me. And put her hand down on the table, flat, next to my bowl. Just for a second.

It was warm. Not hot. Just warm.

Like a hearthstone.

Then she went.

Liam watched her go. Then he looked at me. For a long time. With his mouth very slightly open, and his eyebrows going slowly up toward his red hair.

”Huh,” said Liam Calder.

Day 149. The wild zone. The rain came early. The drain.

Four hours. A hearthstone, so she didn’t have to burn.

She asked how he died. Nobody’s ever asked.

I told her about the k.