Scarecrow

Halloway let me out on the fourth day.

She did it the way she did everything. Quickly. With the silver case open on the bed and a light in my eyes that didn’t hurt anymore, and a little hammer on my knees, and a list of questions she read off her slate without looking up.

”Headache?”

”No.”

”Nausea?”

”No.”

”Double vision? Blurring? Any loss of field?”

”No,” I said. ”The opposite.”

She looked up then. Just for a second. Over the top of her slate. At my eyes.

She didn’t flinch. I’ll give her that. Halloway had been a medic in the war. She’d seen worse than me, and she’d seen it bleeding. But her heart did the little thing anyway. The skip. The foot missing the stair.

”The opposite,” she said.

”I can see more. Not less.”

Halloway wrote something down. She wrote for quite a long time.

”Back to light duties,” she said. ”Training from Monday. If anything changes, anything at all, you come straight here. Not to Okafor. Not to the Director.” She closed the case. ”Here. Understood?”

”Yes, Doctor.”

She stood up. And at the door, with her hand on it, she stopped.

”Your father,” she said, without turning round, ”used to say thank you after every examination. Every one. Even the bad ones.” She paused. ”Nobody else ever did.”

”Thank you, Doctor Halloway.”

”Hmph,” said Halloway, and went out.

I put the dusk on in the corridor.

I’d thought about it all night. What Mother said. Wear them for anybody who can’t manage. And I didn’t know, yet, who could manage. I didn’t know anything. I’d seen three faces since I woke up, and one of them had pushed a tray at me with her fingertips.

So I put them on. Scratch and all. And walked back to the barracks on my own, through the long gray corridors under the mountain, past the training halls and the mess and the fern.

The fern looked fine. Ten fronds. The tenth one dark and big and curling. Somebody had watered it. The soil was wet.

I didn’t stop. I’d come back at five.

Liam and Toby were waiting at the door of the barracks.

Not inside. At the door. In the corridor. Liam was leaning on the wall with his arms folded, trying to look as though he’d just happened to be there, and Toby was sitting on the floor with his back against the opposite wall and his knees up, not trying to look like anything at all.

Liam straightened up when he saw me.

”Right,” he said. ”There he is.”

”Here I am.”

”Three days,” said Liam. ”And then another one. Halloway wouldn’t let us in. We tried. Toby tried twice. She said if he came back a third time she’d give him something that would make him sleep through Christmas.” He looked at the dusk. At the scratch. ”You’ve got them on.”

”Yes.”

”Indoors.”

”Yes.”

”Right,” said Liam. He unfolded his arms. ”Go on, then.”

I looked at him.

”Take them off,” said Liam. ”Let’s have a look. We’ve been waiting four days. Toby’s been unbearable.”

On the floor, Toby didn’t say anything. But he didn’t disagree either.

Take them off for the people who love you.

I took them off.

Liam looked.

He came right up close, the way Garnet had to the screen. He bent down a little, because he was shorter than me, and peered into my eyes, one and then the other, with his red eyebrows pulled down in concentration and his mouth slightly open. I could see myself in his eyes. And him in mine. Small and pink and frowning.

I could see his heart, too. I couldn’t help it. It was going a bit fast. Not a skip. Not a hare. Just fast. The way it went before a run.

”Huh,” said Liam.

He straightened up.

”You look like a beetle,” he said.

”Thanks.”

”A big one. The shiny black ones. We used to get them in the Block, in the summer, under the laundry.” He considered it. ”It’s not bad. It’s a bit much at breakfast, probably. But it’s not bad.” He frowned. ”Can you see through my clothes?”

”Liam.”

”I’m just asking. It’s a reasonable question. If you can see through steel—”

”I can see through everything,” I said. ”I always could. I just don’t look.”

”Right,” said Liam. ”Good. Well. Don’t.” He thought about it. ”Mostly not on laundry day.”

Toby got up off the floor.

He came over, slowly, the way he did everything. And he stood in front of me and looked into my eyes for a long time. Not close, like Liam. Just looking. The way he looked at a wall before he made one.

His heart didn’t jump. I watched it. It didn’t go fast. It didn’t skip. It went on the way it always went, slow and low and steady, like a bell nobody’s rung for a while.

Then he held out his hand.

I didn’t understand, for a second. Then I did. I reached into my pocket, and took out the tuning fork, and put it in his palm.

Toby looked at it. Then he closed my fingers back round it, with his big hands, very carefully. And let go.

”Keep it a bit,” he said.

That was all he said. He went back inside.

Liam watched him go.

”He sat outside the infirmary,” said Liam quietly. ”Both nights. After Halloway threw him out. On the floor, like that. Tapping that thing. Very quiet. Halloway let him in the end. She said it was that or put him in a bed of his own.” He looked at me. ”Come on. It’s nearly lunch. They’re doing the meat pie. The real one, not the gray one. I asked.”

The mess hall was full.

It always was, at lunch. Two hundred cadets. Long tables. Steam coming off the counters. The noise of it, which I’d stopped hearing after the first month, the way you stop hearing the filter. Spoons and trays and boots and two hundred people all talking at once.

I walked in behind Liam, with the dusk off and in my pocket. Because I’d decided. On the way down the corridor. That I wasn’t going to wear them in the mess. Not for this. Not for people I’d eaten next to every day for six months.

That was a mistake.

Or maybe it wasn’t. I still don’t know.

It started at the table nearest the door. A girl from Squad Five, with her spoon halfway to her mouth, who looked up as we came in. Looked at Liam. Looked at me. And stopped. Spoon in the air.

The boy next to her saw her stop, and looked where she was looking. And stopped too.

And then the next one. And the next.

It went across the room like wind going across the wheat at home. Except backwards. In the field, when the wind came, everything moved. Here everything stopped. Table by table. Face by face. Two hundred people, all talking at once, and then a hundred and fifty, and then fifty, and then nobody.

It took about four seconds.

At the end of it, the mess hall was so quiet I could hear the steam coming off the counters.

And everyone was looking at me.

No. That’s not true.

That’s how it felt. But I could see. All of it. Everything. All at once. And it wasn’t true that everyone was looking at me. Most of them were looking at me for one second, and then looking very hard at something else. At their trays. At their spoons. At the table. At the wall. At anything. The way the nurse had looked at the chart.

And their hearts.

I didn’t want to see their hearts. I tried not to. But it was a page now, and the page was open, and I couldn’t not read it. Two hundred hearts in the mess hall, and nearly all of them doing the same thing. The skip. The jump. The hare in the field.

It wasn’t hate. I want to be fair. I’d felt hate, in Brock, at the beginning. This wasn’t that.

It was the thing in the Senator’s heart, in the little side room. The bird’s heart. Fast and small and frightened.

They’d been frightened of me before. A bit. Since the beach. Since the steel ball. But they’d been frightened the way you’re frightened of a big dog. A bit careful. A bit wary.

Now they were frightened the way you’re frightened of the dark.

”Pie,” said Liam loudly, into the silence. ”Come on.”

He walked to the counter. Right down the middle of the hall, between the tables, as if nothing was happening. As if two hundred people hadn’t just stopped breathing. He picked up two trays and handed me one and said to the cook behind the counter, very cheerfully, ”Two of the real pie, please, Mrs. Gant, he’s been in the infirmary, he needs building up.”

Mrs. Gant was the cook. She was old, and big, and slow, with forearms like hams and a burn scar across the back of one hand from a Calder boy who’d sneezed at her counter twenty years ago. She’d seen everything there was to see in twenty years of feeding the program.

She looked at me.

Her heart did the skip. I saw it.

And then she picked up the big spoon, and gave me two pieces of pie instead of one, and a great deal of gravy.

”Eat that,” said Mrs. Gant. ”All of it. You look like a fence post.”

That was the second time somebody had told me that in two days. I decided I probably did.

We sat at the end of the long table, where Squad Eight always sat.

Seraphina was already there.

She was sitting very straight, with her tray untouched in front of her and her hands flat on the table either side of it. And the table, under her hands, was smoking. Just faintly. Just a thin gray thread curling up from each palm, where the wood was starting to scorch.

She didn’t look at me when I sat down. She was looking at the room.

”Sera,” said Liam carefully.

”Forty-one,” said Seraphina.

”Sera—”

”Forty-one. That’s how many looked away. At that end. I counted.” Her voice was very flat. Very quiet. ”Twenty-six at the window end. The Squad Five table by the door, all of them, that’s the girl with the spoon. Haddon looked away and then pretended he was looking for the salt.” The smoke under her hands thickened. ”He’s had the salt in his hand the whole time.”

She’d been counting. Of course she had. She’d sat here with her tray going cold and watched the whole mess hall go quiet, table by table, and counted every face that turned away.

”Sera,” I said. ”It’s fine.”

”It’s not fine.” She still didn’t look at me. ”Sixty-one people. In that hall. Every one of them alive. Not a blister. Because of you. Some of them are in this room. That girl by the door was on the floor that day, running water for the medics. She was standing six feet from a burner.” The wood under her palms crackled. ”And now she can’t look at you. She can’t even eat.”

”She’s frightened.”

”I know she’s frightened. I can see she’s frightened. I can see all of them.” Seraphina turned her head, finally, and looked at me. Straight at my eyes. Her heart didn’t jump. It was going fast, very fast, but it had been going fast before I sat down. It was going fast at them. ”That’s what makes me so angry.”

She didn’t eat her pie.

She sat through the whole of lunch with her hands flat on the table, and two black handprints slowly sinking into the wood under them. And every time somebody at another table looked over, and looked away again, very fast, I saw her hands press down a little harder.

Liam ate his pie. And then some of Seraphina’s. And talked the whole time, loudly, cheerfully, about nothing. About the beetles under the laundry at Hearth Block. About the time their dad had tried to fix the boiler himself. About whether you could make a pie hotter than a Calder could stand, and whether Mrs. Gant would let him try.

Toby ate his pie very slowly, and didn’t say anything, and every time the mess hall got too quiet, tapped his spoon very lightly on the edge of his tray. Once. A small clear note. And the quiet broke a little.

I ate all of my pie. Both pieces. And the gravy.

Mrs. Gant watched from behind the counter, with her arms folded over her apron, to make sure.

Training started on Monday.

I’d thought the instructors would be different. They were soldiers. Most of them had been in the war. Some of them had served under Father, or next to him, or near enough to have seen his eyes across a camp.

Some of them were different.

Sergeant Mallory, on the range, made me stand at the end of the line. Not in my place, in the middle, with Squad Eight. At the end. Two yards past the last cadet. He didn’t say why. He just pointed, with the end of his pencil, without looking, and said there, Dask, and I went there.

When I walked past him, he took a step back.

One step. Small. You’d only have seen it if you were looking. I was looking at everything now.

He knew I’d seen it. I could see that too. His face went red, slowly, from the collar up, and he looked down at his slate, and didn’t look up again for the rest of the session.

Pryce dropped her slate.

Not much. Not on purpose. I came into the kit room on Tuesday to collect my suit, and she was at the long bench, and she looked up and said ah, Dask, good, I’ve got your—and saw my eyes, and the slate slid out of her hand and clattered on the bench. She picked it up again at once. She said sorry, butterfingers. She was perfectly polite. She was perfectly polite all morning.

She stood on the other side of the bench the whole time.

The comms instructor, a thin man called Rusk who’d never once looked up from his dials in six months, looked up from his dials. At me. For quite a long time. And then made a note.

I didn’t want to know what the note said.

Odell didn’t.

He was at his bench in the suit shop, with his leather apron on and his burned hands in a housing, swearing at a valve, when I came in on Wednesday. He didn’t look up.

”Dask,” he said, to the valve.

”Mr. Odell.”

”Suit’s on the rack. Third one. I’ve done the visor. Scratched to hell. Concrete.” He fitted something into something else and swore at it. ”And I’ve done the left knee, where you went down. And I’ve put a new seal on the collar because the old one had blood in it, and blood’s no good for seals. Rots them.”

”Thank you.”

”Don’t thank me. Thank the seal.” He put down the housing. And looked up. At me.

At my eyes.

I watched his heart. It didn’t do anything. Not a skip. Not a flicker. It went on, slow and tired and sixty years old, the way it always went.

”Hm,” said Odell. ”Thought so.”

”Thought what?”

”Your father’s.” He picked up the housing again. ”Saw them on him. Field Unit, in the war. Came to me with a rifle that wouldn’t fire straight. He’d looked at it. Looked right inside the barrel. Told me there was a hair crack in it, inside, where nobody could see it. Two thousandths of an inch.” He snorted. ”I said how the hell would you know that, and he took his spectacles off. And there they were.” He went back to his valve. ”There was a hair crack. Two thousandths. I measured it.”

He didn’t say anything else for a while.

Then, still to the valve:

”You’ll want to keep an eye on the north wall. In the training hall. When it opens again.” His voice didn’t change. ”Couplings. Very particular, couplings.”

I didn’t say anything.

”That’s all,” said Odell. ”Third rack. Go on.”

Risa was at the fern at five.

She was always at the fern at five. She wasn’t allowed to be. Her father had forbidden it, in writing, and the Senator had told me himself, in the little side room, that he heard about it at dinner. She came anyway. Every morning. She sat with her back against the wall and her knees up and her hands round a cup of tea from the mess, and waited.

She was there on the first morning I came back.

She looked up when I came round the corner.

I had the dusk off. I’d decided. Not for her. Not at five in the morning, in the fern corridor, with the one lamp swinging on its chain.

Risa looked at my eyes.

Her heart did a thing. I saw it. Not a skip. A jump. A big one. Up, and then down again, fast, the way her lightning went. And then it settled. All the way. To where it always was, at five in the morning, at the fern.

”Sixty,” said Risa. ”Yours. You’re very calm for a freak.” A pause. ”You’re late.”

”I was in the infirmary.”

”I know. Four days. I counted.” She shifted along the wall to make room. ”Sit down. You’ve missed four lessons. And the tenth frond’s got a sister.”

I sat down.

She was right. At the base of the tenth frond, low down, half hidden, there was a new one. Small. Pale green. Still curled up tight at the top, like a fist, like a fiddle-head. The eleventh.

”Watch the spark,” said Risa. ”Not the hand.”

And she held up her hand, and let a little thread of lightning go between her finger and her thumb. Blue-white. Crackling. The way she had every morning since the gym.

I watched the spark.

And I saw it. All of it. All at once. Not the way I used to, slowly, going down into it one layer at a time. The whole of it, all the way to the bottom, the instant it jumped. The air coming apart. The little bright points flying. The new things they made as they came back together. The nitrogen. The stuff the fern ate.

I saw all of it. In the time it took to jump.

Risa watched my face.

”Oh,” she said. Quietly. ”You can see it now. All of it.”

”Yes.”

”In one go.”

”Yes.”

Risa looked at her hand for a long moment. At the thread of lightning, still crackling between her finger and thumb.

”Then you don’t need me anymore,” she said. ”For this.”

”I need you for the fern,” I said.

Risa looked at me sideways. Then she looked at the fern. Then she let the lightning go, and it jumped from her hand to the soil at the base of the eleventh frond, very small, very bright, and was gone.

”Fine,” said Risa Friese. ”For the fern.”

She didn’t look at my eyes again that morning. But not because she couldn’t. Because she’d already looked. And it was done. And there was a fern to watch.

It happened on Thursday.

After laps. In the long corridor outside the gym, where all the squads came out together, sweating and tired and pushing each other, two hundred cadets in a corridor built for fifty.

They made room for me.

That was the thing. They always made room for me now. Wherever I went. In the mess. In the corridor. In the showers, where the steam went quiet when I came in. A little space. A yard. Two yards. Like water round a stone. People didn’t push into me anymore, the way they pushed into each other. They didn’t knock my shoulder by accident. They went round.

That Thursday, a boy from Squad Five went round me too close to the wall, and caught his shoulder on the doorframe, and swore.

And then he said it. Not to me. To the boy next to him. Very low. He didn’t know I could hear. Or he didn’t think about it.

”Don’t let it look at you,” he said. ”Halloway says it can see your blood.”

It.

I didn’t do anything. I want that on the record. I didn’t do anything at all. I kept walking.

Seraphina did.

The corridor got hot.

Not warm. Hot. All at once. The way a room gets hot when you open an oven door. The air went thick and wavy and smelled of scorched dust. Somebody’s sweat started steaming off their arms. The boy from Squad Five stopped, and looked down, and the sleeve of his shirt was smoking. Just at the cuff. A little gray curl, coming up off the cotton.

He yelled. And slapped at it. And it kept smoking.

Seraphina was standing in the middle of the corridor, very still, with her fists clenched at her sides and her red hair lifting off her shoulders in the heat, as if there was a wind. There wasn’t a wind. There was just her.

”Say it again,” said Seraphina.

The boy from Squad Five stared at her. At his sleeve. At her.

”Say it again,” said Seraphina. Very quietly. ”I’d like to hear you say it again. About him. About the person who stood in the middle of a hall full of fuel and turned it into dust so you wouldn’t burn to death in front of your mates. I’d like you to call him it once more. To my face.” The heat went up. Somebody behind me said Sera in a frightened voice. ”Go on.”

The boy’s other sleeve started to smoke.

And I said the thing. It came out of my mouth before I knew it was there. In Luna’s voice. In the voice from the training hall, on the comms, with the mist roaring.

”Ember,” I said. ”Cold. Now.”

Seraphina went still.

”Pull it all in,” I said. ”Don’t let a single degree out.”

For one second, nothing happened.

Then she breathed in. Long and slow. And the heat came out of the corridor. All at once. Back into her. Into her hands, which went red, and then white. And the air stopped shaking. And the boy’s sleeves stopped smoking. And everybody in the corridor breathed again, two hundred of them, in one great ragged breath.

Seraphina turned round and walked away down the corridor without looking at anybody.

They made room for her too.

I found her in the drain.

Not the same drain. The one under the gym, where the overflow went, where the pipes ran close to the floor and it was always a bit warm. She was sitting in the dark with her knees up and her back against a pipe, the way we’d sat in the wild zone, the night the rain came early.

I didn’t say anything. I just sat down on the other side of the pipe.

After a while, she said:

”I set my bed on fire when I was eleven.”

I waited.

”The first time it came out. Properly. In my sleep. A nightmare. I don’t even remember what about.” She was looking at the wall. ”Woke up and the whole bed was going. And the curtains. And Liam’s bed, across the room. He was ten. Mum got him out. Dad got me out. Nobody was hurt.” She was quiet. ”And then for a year, nobody in Hearth Block would come near our door.”

”Sera.”

”Not nobody. People were nice. People brought food. People said poor Maura. But they came to the door and they put it down and they went.” She pressed her hands flat on the floor. They weren’t smoking now. Just warm. ”Old Mrs. Tavey from across the landing. She used to give me sweets. Every Saturday. Since I was a baby. And after the fire she’d see me on the stairs and she’d go back inside. She’d go back inside and wait until I’d gone past. I could feel her through the door. Hot and tight and still, the way people go when they’re frightened.” Seraphina breathed out. ”It. That’s what the boys in the Block called me. For a year. Don’t let it near you, it’ll burn your house down.”

I didn’t say anything.

”So I know,” said Seraphina Calder. ”That’s all. I know what it’s like when they make room for you. I know what it sounds like.” She turned her head and looked at me, in the dark. At my eyes. Straight on. ”And I’m not going to stand in a corridor and let anybody say it about you. Not ever. I don’t care what Okafor does to me. I don’t care if I run the beam till I’m forty.”

”You nearly set a boy on fire.”

”I know.” She put her head back against the pipe. ”I know. Thank you for stopping me.” A pause. ”You sounded exactly like her. It was horrible.”

”I know.”

”Don’t do it again.”

”I won’t.”

”Ever.”

”Ever.”

We sat there in the dark for a long time, with the pipes ticking round us.

”Liam says you look like a beetle,” said Seraphina eventually.

”He told me.”

”You don’t,” she said. ”You look like you. With your father’s eyes.” She was quiet. ”That’s what Mum would say. She’d want me to tell you. She’d say, you tell that boy he looks like his father, and his father was the best man I ever saw walk into a room.”

She got up. She dusted off her knees.

”I’m still angry,” she said. ”At all of them. I’m going to be angry for ages.”

”I know.”

”Good,” said Seraphina, and went out.

I wrote it down that night. In my real notebook, number fifteen, which Toby had brought me from under my pillow, wrapped in a shirt so nobody would see.

Day 186. How they look at me.

And then I made a list. Because Father always made lists, when he couldn’t sleep.

Liam. Toby. Risa. Sera. Okafor. Odell. Mrs. Gant (two pieces).

Seven.

Mother says Father started with one.

I looked at it for a long time. And then I added, at the bottom, in smaller writing, because I didn’t know yet:

Luna?

She hadn’t been back. Not since the hall. She’d been called up to the General’s office the morning I woke, Liam said, and she’d been up there all week, on the hundred-and-fortieth floor, with her father.

I didn’t know if she’d seen them yet. My eyes.

I didn’t know what her heart would do.

I put the notebook under my pillow, and lay in the dark, and listened to Toby breathing in the next bed, slow and low and steady, like a bell. And for the first time since I woke up, I wished I couldn’t see so much.

Just for one person.

Just in case.