Scarecrow

I told Squad Eight on the gallery.

Up the three hundred and eleven steps, after lights out, the way we’d gone the night they gave us the launch date. Under the moon window. The five of us in a row on the cold stone with our backs to the wall, and Seraphina at one end keeping the warm going down the line.

I told them all of it. Wren’s numbers. The loop. Okafor’s two reasons.

Nobody said anything for a while.

”So she might be alive,” said Liam finally.

”She might.”

”On her own. For a year and a half.” Liam was quiet. ”On a world with those things in the sim on it.”

”Yes.”

Seraphina’s warmth had stopped moving down the row. It was just sitting there, in her, very hot, the way it did when she was angry and trying not to be.

Toby didn’t say anything. He took out his tuning fork, and looked at it, and put it back.

Luna was looking at the moon. At the white spot on it, through the window, where the water was. She’d been looking at it the whole time I talked.

”Then we find her,” said Luna.

She said it the way she’d said Hearth, out in the training hall. Not a question. Not a hope. An order she was giving to the five of us and to herself at the same time.

”We don’t know where her base is,” I said. ”We don’t know where we’re landing. We don’t know anything.”

”We know her callsign. We know she’s fast at deciding. We know she wrote back for the wheat on the back of a locker.” Luna turned from the moon and looked down the row at all of us. ”And we know who’s lying about her. That’s more than anybody else on that ship is going to know.”

Liam let out a long breath.

”Squad Eight,” he said. ”Finding people who aren’t supposed to be found.”

”It’s a good thing to be,” said Toby.

It was the most he’d said all week.

I told Risa at the fern, the next morning.

She listened with her knees up and her tea going cold, and didn’t say anything until I’d finished. Then she looked at the eleventh frond for a long time.

”I won’t tell Sigmund,” she said.

”I didn’t ask you not to.”

”I know. I’m telling you I won’t.” She turned her cup round in her hands. ”He’d go straight to Father with it. Not to hurt you. Because he’d think it was the right thing. The Council should know.” She almost smiled. ”He’s getting better. He’s not that much better.”

I nodded.

She was quiet for a while. Then she said, not really to me:

”My roommate bled on her pillow again last night.”

I didn’t ask who her roommate was.

I should have. I’ve thought about that a lot. I’ve thought about it more than almost anything else in this whole story.

But it was five in the morning, and I was full of Wren, and the bridge, and four thousand rounds, and fog. And Risa said it the way you’d say it rained in the night, and then she held up her hand and said watch the spark, and I watched the spark. And the lamp swung on its chain. And the eleventh frond uncurled a tiny bit more, the way it did every morning.

And I didn’t ask.

I found out on Thursday. In the suit bay.

Thursdays were link days. Every squad, in turn, in the long bay with Odell’s racks down both walls. You stood in your suit with the helmet sealed, and the coin at the back of your skull ticked, and the test instance talked to you, and the engineers watched the numbers on their slates. An hour. Getting used to the feeling. Most cadets find the first link unpleasant.

I didn’t find it unpleasant anymore. The test instance and I had got used to each other. It said hello again, Lucas every week, and told me my heart rate, and I thought hello back. Once it had asked me, very politely, whether I knew why the microvoids had been eliminated in my first suit. I’d said yes. It had said thank you, that has been troubling me.

Squad Three went before us on Thursdays.

I was waiting by the door of the bay with Liam, in my suit, with my helmet under my arm. The dusk on. And I wasn’t looking at anything. I’d got better at that. At holding my eyes on the outside of things, the way I had with Luna in the corridor. It was still like holding my breath. But I could hold it longer now.

And then Squad Three came out.

Five of them. Helmets off. Talking. Tired. A big boy called Orrin, and two girls I knew a bit from the range, and a boy who’d asked Crane in the lecture whether you could see the stars from Avalon.

And at the back, on her own, a small girl with her helmet still on.

She was walking very carefully. The way you walk on ice. One hand on the wall of the corridor. Her helmet sealed, and her visor dark, so you couldn’t see her face.

She walked past me.

And I looked. I didn’t mean to. My breath went. The page opened.

And I saw the blood.

It was inside her helmet.

A thin line of it. From her left nostril, down over her lip, down her chin. Not much. A thread. The kind you’d get from dry air, or from scratching. She’d kept the helmet on so nobody would see.

But that wasn’t what stopped me.

What stopped me was the coin.

The link coin. At the base of her skull, under the suit collar, the little disc of metal that every one of us had, that ticked when the test instance talked to you. I’d looked at mine a hundred times. At Liam’s. At Toby’s. They were all the same. Small and neat and quiet, a little steel disc with a hair-thin wire going in through the bone, and the tissue round it settled and calm, the way skin settles round an earring.

Hers wasn’t calm.

The tissue round hers was angry. All of it. Swollen and hot and dark, in a ring, as wide as my palm, going out from the coin into the back of her head. And the little wires that went in from the coin, into her—into the place where the thinking was, the part I’d never once looked at properly because I didn’t know what any of it was—they were—

I didn’t know what they were doing.

That was the thing. That was the thing I kept coming back to, after. I could see it. All of it. Every cell. Every little bright point. I could see the coin and the wire and the swelling and the tiny blood vessels behind her eyes that were leaking, very slowly, one drop at a time, into places blood shouldn’t go.

I could see all of it.

And I didn’t understand any of it.

It was like Genny’s notebook thirteen. Pages and pages of drawings, smaller and smaller, perfect and exact. And no words. Nothing to tell you what they meant.

”Mate,” said Liam. ”You’re doing the face.”

”What face?”

”The face you did in the mess. When you saw the girl with the spoon.” He looked where I was looking. Down the corridor. At the small girl with the helmet on, walking with one hand on the wall. ”Who’s that?”

”I don’t know.”

”That’s Osei,” said Liam. ”Squad Three. Hana. She’s the water one. She does the thing with the spheres.” He frowned. ”She’s all right. She’s quiet. Why?”

I didn’t say anything.

At the end of the corridor, the small girl stopped. She put both hands on the wall. She stood there for a moment, very still, with her head down.

Then she straightened up and turned the corner and was gone.

”Squad Eight,” said Odell’s voice from inside the bay. ”In. Now. I haven’t got all day and neither have you.”

I didn’t hear anything the test instance said to me that hour.

It said hello again, Lucas. I know that because it always did. It told me my heart rate, which was high, and said this is unusual for you, is something wrong, and I thought no, clearly, in words, which was a lie. And I stood in the bay in my suit with the coin ticking at the back of my skull and thought about the ring of angry tissue round hers.

Most cadets find the first link unpleasant.

That was what they said. The first link. Not the hundredth.

I’d been linked thirteen times. I’d never once had a nosebleed from it.

None of us had.

At the end of the hour, I asked Odell.

He was at his bench, with his burned hands inside somebody’s helmet, fixing a seal. He didn’t look up.

”Mr. Odell. Does the link ever make people bleed?”

His hands stopped.

Just for a second. Then they started again.

”Why?” he said.

”I’m asking.”

”Some people don’t take to it,” said Odell, to the helmet. ”Rare. One in a few hundred. The body doesn’t like the wire. Same as some people can’t wear a steel ring without coming up in a rash.” He fitted the seal. ”If it’s bad, they’re medically withdrawn. Off the program.”

”What happens to them?”

Odell looked up then. At me. At the dusk.

”They go home,” he said. ”Back to their families. With a little card that says unfit.”

”And the stipend?”

Odell didn’t answer straight away.

”The stipend’s for service,” he said finally. ”No service, no stipend.” He went back to the helmet. ”Don’t ask me any more questions about that, Dask. I make things. I don’t make the rules about what happens to the people who wear them.”

I found her that night.

I didn’t have to look very hard. I just went where water would go.

There was a cistern under the east end of the cave, below the laundry, where the condensation from the whole mountain ran down the rock and collected in a long, dark, still pool. Nobody went there. It was cold and it dripped and it smelled of stone. I’d found it in the first month, looking for somewhere quiet to sit that wasn’t the fern.

She was sitting on the edge of the pool with her boots off and her feet in the water.

And above the pool, in the dark, there were spheres.

Water. Floating. Perfectly round. Dozens of them. Some as big as a fist, some as small as a pea, hanging in the air over the black surface of the cistern and turning, very slowly, round and round each other, like a sky full of small wet moons. The one lamp at the top of the steps caught them and slid along them and made them shine.

I stopped on the steps.

I’d seen her do it before. On the range. In drills. She does the thing with the spheres. I’d never seen it like this. Not for a drill. Not for anybody.

Just for herself. In the dark. To have something to look at that wasn’t the inside of her own head.

She heard me on the steps.

The spheres all fell at once.

It made a sound like rain. Like the first big drops of the rain cycle, on the gallery, before the rest comes. A hundred small splashes on the black water. And then the ripples going out, and out, and the lamp swinging on them.

She was on her feet. Turned round. Small and thin and very still. Her hair was black and cut short, and her face was a dark heart shape, very young, younger than me, though she couldn’t have been. There was a dark smear under her nose that she’d wiped and not quite got.

She looked at me.

At my eyes. I didn’t have the dusk on. I’d left them in my pocket. I don’t know why.

Her heart jumped. Of course it did. The hare in the field.

And then she did something nobody else had done. Not the nurse, not the girl with the spoon, not Pryce.

She didn’t look away.

She stood on the edge of the cistern, barefoot, with her heart going like a hare’s and the water still rocking behind her, and she kept looking at my eyes. And her chin came up. Just a little. The way Garnet’s did when somebody told her she couldn’t have a second biscuit.

”You saw,” said Hana Osei. ”In the corridor. Didn’t you.”

”Yes,” I said.

She closed her eyes.

Just for a second. Then she opened them again.

”How much?”

”All of it.”

”What does all of it mean?” Her voice was very quiet. Very level. Not cold like Luna’s. Just held. Like a cup filled right to the top that you’re carrying across a room. ”I’ve never known what you mean. Any of you. Liam Calder says you can see through walls. Somebody in Squad Five says you can see people’s blood. I don’t know what all of it means.”

So I told her.

I told her about the coin. The wire. The ring of angry tissue, as wide as my palm. The little blood vessels behind her eyes, leaking, one drop at a time.

I told her I didn’t know what any of it meant.

She listened. She didn’t move. When I’d finished, she sat down again, very slowly, on the edge of the cistern, with her feet back in the black water. As if her legs had decided for her.

”Seven weeks,” she said.

”Since what?”

”Since it started. Bleeding.” She looked at the water. ”Week three of the link, it was headaches. Everyone gets headaches. They said so. Week five it was my nose. Just a bit. In the night. I thought it was the air. The air’s very dry in the girls’ barracks. Risa’s nose bleeds too, sometimes. I thought—” She stopped. ”And then week nine, I started hearing it wrong.”

”Hearing what wrong?”

”The test instance.” She put her hand up, without thinking, to the back of her neck. To the coin. ”It says my name wrong. Not wrong like a mistake. Wrong like—” She stopped again. ”Like it’s coming from further and further away. Like a voice down a well. And it says it slower every week. Ha. Na. And when it talks, there’s a—” She pressed her fingers against the coin. ”A pressure. Here. Like somebody pushing on the inside of a door.”

I didn’t say anything.

”And I can’t sleep,” said Hana, ”because when I sleep, I bleed. And Risa wakes up and sees the pillow. And I tell her it’s the air.” She looked up at me. ”She doesn’t believe me. She’s too polite to say.”

”You have to go to Halloway,” I said.

”No.”

”Hana—”

”No.” It came out much louder than anything else she’d said. It went round the cistern and came back off the wet rock. She heard it and flinched and went quiet again. ”No,” she said again, small. ”You don’t understand.”

”Then tell me.”

She looked at the water for a long time.

”My father’s a Retention man,” she said. ”Signed the Act. The first winter. He’s water, like me, only bigger. He used to bring rain to the outer domes in the war. He held the reservoir at Kessel for a month on his own when the pumps went.” She was very still. ”He’s got the shake now. In his hands. Like all of them. He can’t work. Not properly. Not the way they want. He’s on half-service. Half-stipend.”

”I’m sorry.”

”There’s my mother. And my grandmother, who doesn’t know where she is. And four of us younger than me.” She didn’t look at me. ”Six people. In two rooms. On the forty-fourth floor of the Harbor Block. On half a stipend.”

I thought about the sixtieth floor. The pool on the roof. Garnet’s lemon tree in the bath.

”When I got into the program,” said Hana, ”the stipend went to full. For the family. For as long as I’m in service.” Her voice didn’t change at all. ”My mother cried. In the kitchen. I’d never seen her cry. Not when the shake started. Not when Gran stopped knowing her. Not once. And she stood at the sink when the letter came and cried for ten minutes, and then she dried her face, and went out, and bought meat. Real meat. For the first time in two years.”

The water rocked against the stone.

”If I go to Halloway,” said Hana Osei, ”she’ll see. She’ll see in about one second. She’s not stupid. And then I’m medically withdrawn.” She said the words the way Odell had. The way you’d say the name of an illness. ”And I go home. With a card. And the stipend goes back to half.”

”Your family would want you safe.”

”My family would want me alive,” said Hana. ”And they’d want the little ones fed. And they can’t have both. So I chose.” She looked up at me. ”I chose. It’s mine to choose. It’s not yours.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

The lamp at the top of the steps swung, very slightly, on its chain. A drop of water fell somewhere in the dark and hit the pool with a sound like a clock.

”Twelve weeks,” said Hana. ”That’s all. Twelve weeks and then we’re on the Meridian, and then we’re down, and the base plants, and the link goes to the base’s intelligence instead of the test instance.” She was talking faster now. As if she’d said it to herself so many times that it had worn a path. ”Odell said. It’s a different system. A real one. Bigger. Better. Maybe it won’t—maybe it’ll be different. Maybe it’s just the test instance. Maybe it’s just this one.”

”You don’t know that.”

”No,” said Hana. ”I don’t. And neither do you.” She looked at me. Straight at my eyes. Her chin was up again. ”You said it yourself. You can see all of it. And you don’t know what any of it means.”

That landed. I felt it land. Somewhere in the middle of my chest, where I’d been carrying it since the corridor.

I can see all of it. And I don’t understand any of it.

”So you can’t tell me it’s going to kill me,” said Hana. ”Because you don’t know. Nobody knows. Not you. Not Halloway. Not Crane. Nobody.” Her voice broke, just slightly, on the last word, and she held it, and it came back. ”All anybody knows for certain is that if you tell, my mother stops buying meat.”

She got up.

She picked up her boots. She stood on the edge of the cistern, barefoot, holding them against her chest, very small and very straight.

”Please,” said Hana Osei.

That was all. Just the one word. She didn’t cry. She didn’t plead. She didn’t say anything about her mother again, or the little ones, or the forty-fourth floor of the Harbor Block. She just stood there with her boots against her chest and the smear of blood under her nose, and looked at me with my father’s eyes looking back at her, and said please.

”Please don’t tell,” she said. ”Twelve weeks. That’s all I need. Please.”

I didn’t answer.

She waited. For a long time. Longer than Luna had held my face in the corridor.

Then she nodded, very slightly, as if I’d said something. As if not answering was an answer.

”Thank you,” she said.

And she went up the steps past me, barefoot, with her boots against her chest. She didn’t look back.

I sat on the edge of the cistern for a long time after she’d gone.

I put my hand in the water. It was very cold. It was full of the little bright points, the way everything was. I could see every one. I could have turned the whole pool into anything I liked. Ice. Steam. Gold. Wine. I could have filled it with wheat.

I couldn’t have told you what was happening behind Hana Osei’s eyes.

I took out notebook fifteen. I wrote it down. The way Father would have. All of it. Everything I’d seen. The coin. The wire. The ring of tissue, as wide as my palm. The blood vessels behind her eyes.

And then, at the bottom, because it was true:

I don’t know what I’m looking at.

And then I turned to the back. To the list. The one I’d started after the first call home, after Halloway said nobody understood a body well enough to fix it. To learn.

The last thing on it was still Slowly.

I looked at it for a long time. In the dark. With the water dripping.

Then I crossed it out.

And underneath, I wrote:

Brains.

Now.