Scarecrow

”Instruction four,” said Dot, the morning after.

I was sitting on the floor of the dome with my back against the curved wall. I hadn’t slept. I’d lain on one of the five beds for most of the night with my eyes open, and at four I’d given up and come out here, where the air plant purred loudest, and sat.

”Go on.”

”Command has asked a question that is not output,” said Dot. ”This unit is informing the operator before answering.” A pause. ”Query from orbital Command: has the operator secured a specimen.”

”No.”

”This unit’s answer would be: no.”

”Then say no.”

”Query,” said Dot. ”Will the operator secure a specimen at the next engagement?”

I looked at the grille.

”Is that them asking, or you?”

The little rivers ran.

”This unit,” said Dot.

I thought about it for a long time. About the sixty, standing white in the morning sun for one moment before the wind came. About hand four, in two pieces on the top of the wall. About Command, eleven light-years away, writing retain an intact specimen the way you’d write bring milk.

”No,” I said. ”If they come again, I’ll stop them. That’s all. I’m not keeping one in a box for Crane.”

”Logged,” said Dot. And then, after a moment: ”This unit will not report that. It is not output.”

Day 313.

Command asked if I’ve got a specimen. No.

Dot asked if I’ll get one. No.

She said she won’t report that. ”It is not output.”

They didn’t come that night.

Or the next.

Dot’s sensors watched the whole four kilometers all round, every tenth of a degree, all night, both nights. Nothing. No twelve in a line. No grid. No ring. The green rippled the way it always did, north, with the wind.

I broadcast every hour. Squad Eight, this is Scarecrow. Hiss.

I counted every night. Liam, still. Seraphina, still. Toby, still. Luna, north, a hundred and forty miles now. Walking.

I didn’t sleep much.

”Query,” said Dot, on the second evening, at the gate. ”Is the operator relieved?”

”No.”

”The returns have not returned. Two nights.”

”I know.”

”Query. Why is the operator not relieved?”

I stood at the iron gate and looked north at the green, darkening in the dusk.

”Because they learned,” I said. ”In forty-one minutes, they learned I can only look one way. They learned how fast I turn. They learned everything they needed to learn from three hundred and eight of them turning to salt.” I put my hand on the cold iron. ”Something that learns that fast doesn’t give up after one try. It goes away and thinks.”

The little rivers ran.

”And then?”

”And then it tries something else.”

So I tried to think what it would try.

I sat on the wall with my notebook on my knees, and drew. The canyon. The town. The wall. The tower. The ring they’d made, nine hundred meters out. The way they’d come in, spread wide, from wherever I wasn’t looking.

Wherever I wasn’t looking.

I drew a circle, with me in the middle. And a wedge, going out from me, north. Where I was looking. Inside the wedge, I could see. Outside it, I couldn’t. Behind me. To the sides. They’d learned that.

What else couldn’t I see?

I stared at the drawing for a long time.

Then I turned the page over and drew it again. From the side, this time. The canyon floor. The red glass. Me, standing on it. The wedge going out from my eyes. North. Level. Along the ground.

And under the ground.

Nothing. A blank page. Rock. I’d never drawn anything there, because I’d never looked there, because there’d never been any reason to look down.

I looked down.

Rock. Sandstone, under the glass. Then ironstone. Then the dark glittering band, the stuff Dot kept setting aside, very carefully. Then more sandstone. Layers. Pages. Fifty meters down. Eighty. A hundred, and the old water in the cracks, the cistern’s water, running slow and cold.

Nothing else.

I looked down for a long time, turning slowly, all the way round, the way I’d turned on the wall.

Nothing.

”Query,” said Dot. ”The operator has been looking at the ground for nine minutes.”

”I know.”

”Is there something in the ground?”

”No,” I said. ”Not here.”

I didn’t think to look further.

That’s what I’ve thought about, since. Not that I didn’t know. That I looked, and saw nothing under my own feet, and thought not here, and stopped. I didn’t walk to the other end of the town. I didn’t look under the terraces, or under the tower, or under the forge. I looked under me.

I’d been looking under me my whole life.

Day 314.

Two nights. Nothing.

Drew it from above. A wedge. They come from where the wedge isn’t.

Drew it from the side. Looked down for the first time. Rock. Nothing.

Not here.

On the third day, I went into the forge.

I’d asked Dot to roof it, the morning after the Teeming. Before, it had been three furnaces in a row against the canyon wall, under the sky. Now it was a long low room of fused sandstone built round them, with iron doors at each end, so I could work in it when it rained, if it ever rained, and so that if anything came over the wall while I was working, there’d be a door between it and me.

I’d thought that was clever.

I went in at noon. With a drawing.

The drawing was of a hand.

Not my hand. Dot’s. One of the small ones. Six legs, two arms, a body the size of a dog. I’d drawn it from the others, from all nineteen of them, looking into them one by one while Dot stood very still and let me. Every joint. Every motor. The little core in the middle, the hard gray nub of fused metal the size of a walnut, where Dot’s thinking went in and the hand’s moving came out.

I was going to make a new one.

I hadn’t told her. I wanted to make it myself. Not feed her iron and let her make it, the way she made everything. With my own hands, at the forge, the way Father had made things at the bench in the cellar at home. And then give it to her.

Hand four had been a number. This one wouldn’t be.

I worked all afternoon.

The forge was loud. All three furnaces going, white at the center, and the long low room full of the roar of them, and the heat coming off them so thick it made the air shake. I’d stripped to my undershirt. The scarf was on a hook by the door. Sweat ran into my eyes, and I wiped it away with the back of my wrist, and kept going.

And I looked.

That’s how I make things. Not the way Father did, with a hammer and his eyes and a lifetime of knowing how metal moves when you hit it. I look into it. All the way. And then I ask it.

I looked into the first leg, a rod of iron on the anvil, white-hot, and asked it to be steel. Not all at once. Grain by grain. The carbon going in, just so, the way Odell did it, in folds, so that it would bend before it broke. It took an hour. I didn’t notice the hour.

That’s the thing about looking that far into something. You go down. Past the shape of it. Past the grains. Down to the little bright pieces it’s made of, and further, and the whole world goes away, and there’s nothing in it but the piece of iron and you and the question you’re asking it.

The way the falling used to be, before the infirmary. Before my eyes went black. Except now I didn’t fall. I went.

And everything outside the iron stopped being a page.

Dot was at the far end of the town, with eleven of her hands, building a second wall inside the first. I could hear her, very faintly, under the roar of the furnaces, if I’d been listening.

I wasn’t listening.

The thermal sensors in the roof of the forge were reading the furnaces. Eleven hundred degrees. Twelve hundred. They’d been reading the furnaces all afternoon. Everything in that room was hot. Everything in that room was moving, shaking, roaring.

Dot told me afterward that her sensors had recorded a vibration under the forge at two forty-one.

She told me they’d recorded vibration under the forge every minute since I’d lit the furnaces at noon. The roar. The hammering, when I hammered. The floor shook all the time. There was no way to tell one shake from another.

At three ten, I finished the second leg.

I held it up in the tongs, glowing, and looked at it, all the way down, every grain in its place, folded the way Odell would have folded it, and thought: that’s good. That’s right.

I was smiling.

The floor opened under the third furnace.

It didn’t break. It lifted.

The whole floor round the third furnace, a circle of fused sandstone three meters across, rose up a hand’s width on one side, like a lid. And the furnace on top of it tipped. Slowly, at first. Then all at once.

It went over with a sound like a bell being dropped. White coals and slag poured out of its mouth across the floor in a long burning tongue, and the room filled with smoke, and the roar of the other two furnaces doubled as the air rushed in to feed the fire.

And out of the hole under it came the first one.

Wedge plate first. Dark red. Rising out of the dark into the white light of the coals, blades unfolding from under its belly. Then the legs. Fourteen of them, pouring up over the lip of the hole, hooked feet finding the edge.

I looked at it.

I didn’t decide to. I turned my head and looked, the way I’d looked at the sixty, and it went white, and stopped, half out of the hole, and stood there for one moment in the smoke.

Then the heat from the spilled coals reached it, and the salt cracked, and fell.

Behind it, out of the dark, came the second.

I salted the second. And the third. They came up out of the hole one after another, fast, pouring, and I looked at each one and it stopped and went white. The weight came down behind my eyes. My nose started to bleed.

The fourth.

The fifth.

And then the floor behind me lifted.

I heard it. I didn’t see it. That was the whole point.

I was facing the third furnace, the hole, the smoke, the white shapes cracking in the heat. Looking. All of me pointed that way. And behind me, at the other end of the room, by the door I’d come in through, by the hook where the scarf was hanging, the floor came up with a long grinding sound like a millstone turning.

I started to turn.

I wasn’t fast enough.

It was like being kicked by a horse. That’s what I thought, at the time. A horse, very hard, on the back of my left leg, just above the knee. I didn’t feel the blade. I felt the blow, and then my leg wasn’t holding me anymore, and I was on the floor, on my side, in the smoke, with my cheek against the hot sandstone.

And then I felt the blade.

I looked at it. I couldn’t help it. Before I looked at the thing that had done it, I looked at what it had done.

The back of my left thigh. Open. Deep. Through the muscle, all the way in, to the long bone. And beside the bone, where I knew it would be because I’d drawn it a hundred times in the reading room with Luna turning the book round, the vessel. The big one. The one that carries the blood down the leg.

Cut.

Not all the way. Half. A long ragged gash in the wall of it. And the blood coming out, bright, fast, with every beat of my heart. I could feel it running under my leg, hot, across the floor.

I knew how long I had. I’d read it. In the reading room, at two in the morning, with the cold coffee. Femoral. Partial transection. Without pressure: minutes.

Minutes.

Yourself first, Cadet. You’re no use to anyone bleeding into the floor.

Halloway. In my head. Calm. Dry.

Seam the vessel.

But the thing was behind me. Over me. I could hear its legs on the floor, fourteen of them, the hooked feet clicking on the sandstone, the first sound I’d ever heard one make. Coming round. And the hole under the third furnace was still open, and the smoke was full of movement, and if I looked down at my own leg, at the vessel, if I went all the way down into it the way I’d have to, to seam it, then I wouldn’t be looking at anything else.

Not at the hole.

Not at the thing over me.

The enemy goes where your eyes don’t.

I had to choose where my eyes went.

I chose the vessel.

I don’t know if it was right. I’ve thought about it a great many times. I think, if Dot hadn’t come, it would have been the last thing I chose.

I went down into my own leg. All the way. Past the skin and the torn muscle and the blood, to the wall of the vessel, the long ragged edge of it, the two sides gaping. And I asked them, the way I’d asked the edges of the vessel in Hana’s head, with Halloway’s voice in my ear, to come together. Not to heal. Not yet. Just to hold. Cell to cell, along the edge. A seam. The way you’d draw two pieces of cloth together with a thread.

Not too tight. You’ll narrow it. Just enough to hold.

It held.

The bright fast pulse of blood slowed. Stopped. My leg went cold and heavy and very far away.

And I came back up out of it, and opened my eyes, and the thing was standing over me with both blades raised.

The door at the near end of the forge came in.

Not opened. Came in. Both iron doors, thick as my arm, on hinges the size of my head, torn off their pins and thrown into the room end over end in a shower of sparks. And through the gap where they’d been, filling it, filling the whole doorway, came Dot.

All of her. The car-sized gray shell of her, on six legs, too big for the door, pushing through it anyway, the sandstone of the frame cracking round her shoulders. All five arms out. The four big ones with their hands like shovels, and the fifth, the fine one, out in front.

The four big arms took the thing over me.

I don’t know how else to say it. They took it. One at each end, and one round the middle, and one round the blades. And lifted it off the floor, all fourteen legs going, and threw it into the hole it had come out of.

The fifth arm reached past my head to the hook by the door, and took the scarf off it, and wrapped it round my neck.

Then two of her hands, small ones, the size of a dog, came running in under her legs, and took hold of my collar, and pulled.

I came out of the forge on my back, on the red glass, in the afternoon sun.

I was looking up at the sky. Green. Very pale. And the tip of the tower, very far up, catching the light.

Behind me, I heard Dot back out of the door.

Then I heard her say, in her clear level voice, louder than I’d ever heard it: ”Sealing.”

I turned my head.

She’d backed out of the forge and stood in front of the broken doorway, and her four big arms were pressed against the frame on either side, and the sandstone under her hands was going soft. Glowing. Running. The frame of the door flowing inward, closing, the way the edges of the vessel had closed, until there wasn’t a door anymore. Just wall.

Then she went along the forge to the far door and did it again.

And then she stood in front of the sealed forge, with all five arms against its wall, very still.

And I saw, if I looked, which I did, the little rivers inside her running down her arms, through the walls, into the three furnaces. Two still standing, one fallen. All of them going from white to whiter. To something past white. Fed from her core. Full.

The forge became a kiln.

Inside it, the smoke turned to nothing.

I watched, lying on the red glass. I couldn’t do anything else. The long low room, sealed at both ends, going from twelve hundred degrees to fifteen hundred to two thousand. Everything in it. The coals. The slag. The iron on the anvil, the two legs I’d made, glowing, then running. The things that had come up out of the floor.

There were eleven of them. I counted. I’d only seen five.

They didn’t go white. They went black. Then they went to nothing at all.

”Query,” said Dot. She hadn’t moved. Her arms were still against the forge wall. ”Is the operator alive?”

”Yes.”

”The operator’s heart rate is one hundred and sixty-four. The operator’s blood loss is estimated at one point four liters.”

”I know.”

”The operator is lying on the ground.”

”I know.”

”Query,” said Dot. Her voice was very quiet. ”Is the operator going to stop being alive?”

I lay on the red glass and looked at the sky.

”No,” I said. ”Not now. I seamed it.”

”Logged,” said Dot. And then: ”This unit would prefer that.”

But it wasn’t finished.

I knew it wasn’t. I lay on the glass with my leg cold and far away and my head ringing and the scarf round my neck, and I knew.

The floor of the forge. Two holes. One at each end. They’d known where I’d be. They’d known I’d be facing the furnaces. They’d known the forge was loud, and hot, and that Dot’s sensors couldn’t hear them in it. They’d known I’d be looking at the iron.

They’d known all of it. And they’d come up under it.

And they’d had three days.

I turned my head and looked down.

Not under me. That was what I’d done before. Not here. This time I looked everywhere. All of it. Slowly, turning my head on the red glass, from the forge, along the canyon floor, under the dome, under the terraces, under the tower. Down. All the way down. Forty meters. Fifty.

Tunnels.

Everywhere.

A web of them. Under the whole town. Round, narrow, smooth-sided, the width of one of them and no more. Branching and joining and branching again, fifty meters down, in the layer of soft sandstone under the ironstone, where the digging was easy and nothing was close enough to the surface to make the glass above shake. Hundreds of meters of them. Thousands.

And every one of them, every branch, ended in the same place.

Just under the floor of somewhere a person would stand.

Under the forge. Under the dome, under the five beds. Under the cistern. Under the hut at the foot of the tower, where I sat every hour and said Squad Eight, this is Scarecrow. Under the terraces, under every one of the seventy-four little round rooms with lamps in them in case.

And in the tunnels, waiting.

I counted. I count everything.

Sixty-three.

I closed them.

I don’t remember deciding to. I remember lying on my back on the red glass and looking down into the ground with everything I had left, and asking the sandstone, all of it, every layer of it, under the whole town, to stop being hollow.

It’s not hard, to ask rock to fill a hole. Rock wants to be whole. It’s been waiting, all that time, for somebody to ask.

The tunnels closed. All of them. At once. The soft sandstone flowing in from the sides, the way the door frame had flowed under Dot’s hands, filling every branch and every joint and every waiting end, from the forge to the tower to the terraces.

With whatever was in them.

I felt the weight come down behind my eyes.

Not a hand, this time. A wall. Something very big and very flat, pressing on the inside of my head from every side at once, and a sound, high and thin, like a wire stretched too tight, that I hadn’t heard since the needles. Since before my eyes went black.

And then nothing.

I woke in the dome.

On one of the five beds. The middle one. With the purr in the walls, and the lamp on, low. My leg was wrapped in something. My head felt like somebody had taken it apart and put it back together and lost some of the pieces.

Dot was in the doorway. Too big to come in. She’d made the doorway bigger, I noticed. Some time while I was asleep. Wide enough for her front half. She stood with it through the door, and her grille turned toward the bed, and her fifth arm resting on the floor beside me, very still.

”Query,” said Dot. ”Is the operator awake?”

”Yes.”

”The operator has been not awake for nineteen hours.”

I lay there.

”The operator’s leg,” said Dot, ”was seamed by the operator. This unit has observed the seam every hour. It is holding. This unit does not know how to do what the operator did. This unit wrapped it.” A pause. ”This unit hopes that was correct.”

”It was correct.”

”Logged.”

”Dot,” I said, after a while. ”The doors. In the forge. You came in.”

”Yes.”

”You weren’t instructed to.”

”No.”

”You came through the door. It was too small for you. You broke it.”

”Yes.”

”Why?”

The little rivers ran for a long time.

”The operator was on the floor,” said Dot at last. ”The operator’s heart rate was one hundred and eighty. The operator was bleeding. A return was standing over the operator.” A pause. ”This unit did not consider instructions. This unit did not consider anything. This unit was in the forge.”

I looked at her grille.

”Query,” said Dot, very quietly. ”Is that a reading the operator recognizes?”

”Yes,” I said. ”That one, I recognize.”

She told me the rest while I lay there.

That I’d closed every tunnel under the town. That her vibration sensors had recorded movement in all of them as they closed, and then none. That she’d sent her hands into the ground at the edges of the town, digging, and found where the tunnels had come in from, from the north, from under the green, three long shafts, and that she’d filled those too, with iron, the way I’d shown her.

That the forge had cooled. That she’d opened it again, carefully, in the night. That there was nothing in it but glass and slag and the two legs I’d made, melted into the floor.

”Query,” said Dot. ”What was the operator making?”

I told her.

The little rivers stopped. All of them. For longer than three seconds.

Then started again.

”Then the operator should make it again,” said Dot. ”When the operator’s leg is healed.” A pause. ”In a forge with a floor this unit has looked under.”

Day 315–316.

Two nights, nothing. Three days, they dug. Fifty meters down. Under everything.

They came up under the forge. Where it was loud. Where it was hot. Where Dot couldn’t hear them. Where I was looking at the iron.

Eleven in the forge. I saw five.

Left thigh. Femoral. Half cut. I seamed it myself. I had to choose where to look. I chose the vessel.

Dot came through a door too small for her. She wasn’t instructed. ”This unit did not consider anything. This unit was in the forge.”

She took the scarf off the hook first.

She sealed the forge and made it a kiln.

I looked down. Everywhere. Tunnels under the whole town. Under the beds. Under the hut. Under every room.

Sixty-three, waiting.

I closed them.

Nineteen hours.

The first rule of Avalon: the enemy goes where my eyes don’t.

Not behind me. Not beside me. Under me. Inside the noise. Inside the work. Wherever I’m looking so hard at one thing that everything else stops being a page.

I’d been looking under me my whole life. I never once looked under everyone else.