Scarecrow

We didn’t follow them in the dark.

I wanted to. I stood at the top of the wheat terraces with the light going and the footprints running away up the slope in front of me, two sets, the quick light ones and the dragging ones, and every part of me wanted to go after them. But the hills above F-eleven were gray and broken and full of shadow, and the shadows were all in front of me, and I didn’t know what was in them. And Liam was standing beside me on a crutch with a leg ten days mended.

Don’t be a coward about it. Don’t be a butcher about it either.

”Morning,” I said.

”They might be gone by morning,” said Liam.

”They came back for the wheat for eleven months,” I said. ”They’re not going anywhere.”

We camped in the broken dome. Dot stood in the gap where the south wall had been, with her grille turned outward, and her hands round her in a ring, and the four wings up over the valley, looking. Liam slept on the frame. I didn’t sleep. I sat with my back against the empty kit and kept the in front, which was the hills.

Nothing came.

At about three, Dot spoke very quietly from the gap.

”Query. Is the operator awake?”

”Yes.”

”This unit has a question that is not about output.”

”Go on.”

The little rivers ran.

”If this unit’s core were empty,” said Dot, ”would the operator still say that this unit was here? To Command. Every nine days.”

I didn’t answer for a long time.

”No,” I said. ”I’d tell them the truth. I’d tell them you were gone. And then I’d tell them your name.”

”Logged,” said Dot, after a while. And then: ”Thank you.”

The light came at a quarter to six.

Not the dawn. The dawn was coming too, green over the eastern hills behind us. This was something else. A spark. High up on the ridge to the north, above the wheat, where the gray rock broke out of the slope in a long jagged crest. A point of white light, very small, very bright, there and gone.

And again.

Short. Short. Long.

I was on my feet before I knew it.

”Liam,” I said. ”Liam. Wake up. Look.”

He sat up on the frame. His hands lit before his eyes were open.

”Up?”

”No. There. On the ridge. Watch it.”

The spark came again. Short, long. Short, short. A pause. Short, long, long.

It was the same thing. The same as the clicks in the hiss, the night Liam had found me. Okafor, in the cave, tapping it out on the mess tables with our spoons. When the link goes down. When there’s nothing else. You’ll have a stick and a rock and something to bang it on.

Or a mirror. And the sun.

”W,” I said, very slowly, reading it. ”H. O.”

WHO.

The mirror was on my wrist.

Dot’s mirror. The one she’d made me in eleven minutes, the night I learned the other thing could bend. Flat glass, a few atoms of silver, the size of my hand, in a thin iron frame. I’d been wearing it every day since. For behind.

I’d never once thought of using it for this.

I unstrapped it. I found the sun, just coming up over the eastern hills, green and gold. I tilted the mirror until the bright spot it threw landed on the rock at my feet. Then I raised it, slowly, until I thought it was on the ridge.

I didn’t know if I’d got it right. I didn’t know how to aim a thing like that. I just held it there, and covered it with my hand, and uncovered it, short and long, the way you’d tap on a table.

S. C. A. R. E. C. R. O. W.

And then, because I didn’t know what else they’d understand:

S. Q. 8. 2. N. D. W. A. V. E.

Nothing happened for a long time.

The spark on the ridge was gone. The sun came up. Liam sat on the frame beside me with his hands lit, staring at the ridge, not breathing. Dot stood in the gap with her grille turned up, the little rivers very still.

Then:

Short, short, short. Long. Long, short. Long, long, long. Short.

COME.

A pause. And then, very quick, very sharp, a different kind of flash, like somebody who’d decided something:

ALONE.

”No,” said Liam.

”Liam—”

”No. Absolutely not. You don’t know who that is. You don’t know what they want. They could be—” He stopped. ”They could be anybody.”

”They’re two people,” I said. ”One of them drags a foot. They’ve been hiding in those hills for eleven months, watering wheat at night, with the Teeming walking past them. And the first thing they did when they saw us was ask who we were.” I looked at the ridge. ”Not shoot. Ask.”

”Okafor said—”

”Okafor said she’ll have decided something,” I said. ”And it won’t have been to lie down.”

Liam looked at me for a long time.

”I hate it when you quote people at me,” he said. ”I hate it.”

”I know.”

”Take the spoon,” said Liam. ”Take the mirror. Take—” He looked at his hands. ”If you’re not back by noon, I’m coming up there on one leg and I’m setting fire to the whole hill.”

”This unit will carry him,” said Dot.

I went up in the spoon.

Not high. Five meters. Over the wheat, and the cut edge of it, and the gray fronds with no silver in them, and the broken slope above, looking in front, always in front, at every shadow, every rock, every crack in the hill that something could be waiting in. Up toward the ridge where the spark had been.

Nothing was waiting.

Nothing but a cleft in the rock, near the top. Narrow. Deep. Hidden from below by an overhang of gray stone, so that you’d never see it from the valley, or from the wheat, or from anywhere except exactly where I was, five meters up in a spoon, looking straight into it.

And standing in the mouth of it, with a mirror in one hand and a knife in the other, a girl.

She was older than me. Not by much. Twenty, maybe. Thin, in a way that wasn’t the way people are thin, but the way rope is. Her hair was cut very short, with something that wasn’t scissors. Her face was brown from the sun and there was a long pale scar down the side of her neck, over the place where we all had the tag. Her suit was a first-wave suit, older than ours, plainer, patched at the knees and elbows with something gray and woven.

She was looking at the spoon.

She was looking at me, sitting in the spoon, five meters off the ground, with my leg out straight and my scarf round my neck and my nose, as usual, starting to bleed.

”You’re in a spoon,” she said.

Her voice was rough, the way a voice goes when it hasn’t been used much. But there was something in it. Something quick and dry and very nearly amused.

”Yes,” I said.

”A flying spoon.”

”It’s efficient,” I said. ”The shape.”

She looked at me for a very long moment.

Then she put the knife away.

”Mara Voss,” she said. ”Wren.” And then, almost as if she couldn’t help it: ”Eleven of thirty-four.”

”I know,” I said. ”I read it on the back of a locker.”

Her face did something. I don’t know how to describe it. It went very still, all at once, the way a pond goes still. And then she turned round and went into the cleft, quickly, without saying anything, and I didn’t know if I was meant to follow.

I came down out of the spoon onto the rock with my stick, and went in after her.

The cleft went back into the hill about twenty meters, narrow and crooked, and at the end of it, wedged in, lay the wreck.

A pod. A first-wave pod, older and plainer than mine, gray, scorched along one side, jammed nose-down into the end of the cleft where it had come down two years ago and never moved again. Its hatch was open. Its padding was gone, stripped out and used for something else. Round it, in the narrow space between the pod and the rock, somebody had made a home.

Sheaves of wheat, drying on strings, hanging from the rock. A hearth, very small, very carefully built so the smoke went up a crack in the stone and came out somewhere else. A cistern cut into the floor. Bowls made of gray fronds, woven. A pile of black Teeming plates, stacked neatly, sharpened at the edges into blades and scrapers and hooks.

And on the far side of the hearth, sitting against the curve of the pod with his leg out straight, a man.

He was big. Or he had been. The frame of him was big, the shoulders and the hands, but there wasn’t much on it anymore. His beard was gray and long and his hair was gray and long and his face was lined like old leather. His left leg was out straight in front of him, and I didn’t need to look into it to know that the knee was wrong. I could see it from the door. The way it bent, slightly, in a way knees don’t.

He looked up when I came in.

At my face. At my eyes.

And then Ezra Holt started to laugh.

Not a nice laugh. Not a cruel one either. A long, cracked, helpless laugh, with his head back against the pod and his hands on his knees and his whole big ruined frame shaking with it, until it turned into coughing, and the coughing turned into something else, and he put one of his big hands over his face and kept it there.

Wren stood by the hearth with her arms folded and didn’t say anything.

I stood in the door and didn’t either.

At last he took his hand away. His eyes were wet.

”Trevor Dask,” said Ezra Holt. ”Trevor Dask’s eyes. In a boy’s face.” He shook his head slowly. ”Of course. Of course it was going to be you. Who else would they send?”

”You knew my father,” I said.

”Knew him.” Holt laughed again, shorter. ”Boy, I was at the river.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

I knew about the river. Mother had told me, in pieces, over years, never all at once. The twenty who’d gone into it and not come out. Harrow. Pim. The list Father had written, every name, and the commendation he’d asked for every one of them, and the medal he’d left on a cushion with the list beside it. I’ll take that when you give them theirs.

”I was one of the survivors,” said Holt. ”The one that came out. Your father went in after me with that rope round his middle and no light, because he didn’t need a light, did he. He could see me down there in the black water with my leg pinned under a girder. He could see the girder. He could see the bolts in the girder.” He touched his bad knee, very lightly. ”He put this back together on the bank. With a bootlace and a stick and those eyes. Looked into it, the way you’re looking into it now, don’t think I can’t tell. Told me which bits to hold still while he pulled. Held thirty years.” He shrugged. ”Then I fell off a cliff on this godforsaken rock eighteen months ago and undid all his good work in one afternoon.”

I sat down.

Not because anyone asked me. Because my legs went. I sat down on the stone floor of the cleft by the little hearth, across from the man my father had pulled out of a river before I was born, and I looked at his knee.

I couldn’t help it. I looked all the way in.

It was a mess. The old break, thirty years healed, and round it the marks of where it had been set. Neat. Careful. The ends lined up edge to edge, like the two halves of a plate. I knew that work. I’d done that work, eleven days ago, in a granite cave, on Liam.

And then, on top of it, the new damage. Eighteen months old. Knit wrong, all of it, the kneecap off to one side and the ends of the big bone grinding.

”He’d be ashamed of me,” said Holt, watching my face. ”Wouldn’t he. Letting his work go to ruin.”

”No,” I said. ”He’d fix it.”

”He’s not here, boy.”

”No,” I said. ”I am.”

Holt looked at me for a long time.

Then he looked at Wren. Wren looked back at him. Something went between them, the way things go between people who’ve been the only two people for a year and a half, without any words at all.

”Later,” said Wren. ”Not today. Today, he talks.”

”Who?”

”You,” said Wren. She sat down by the hearth, cross-legged, with her knife across her knees, and looked at me with her quick dry eyes. ”You flashed second wave. Second wave of what? Who sent you? How many? Where are you? Why is there a kit standing in my dome?” A pause. ”Why are you in a spoon?”

So I told them.

I told them all of it. The forty. The Meridian. Halvard Crane on the stage. The map the General showed us, with the forty blue and the thirty-four gray, and Sera’s voice in the dark, working it out. The drop. The south wind. Scarecrow. Dot. The tower, and the Teeming coming to it like a lighthouse, and the ring of three hundred and eighty, and the forge.

I told them about Liam’s clicks, and the spoon, and the granite cave.

And then I told them what was on the half-kit’s records. Adaeze Okon, at F-nine. The same breath, a hundred and nine times. Maintain call-in schedule. Substitute operator’s last nominal call-in.

And Crane on the stage. Nine of them are still with us. Some of their numbers are remarkable.

When I said Adaeze’s name, Wren closed her eyes.

When I said nine, Holt laughed again. Very quietly. Not like before.

”Nine,” he said. ”That’s good. That’s very good. Do you know how many I think there are, boy? I’ll tell you. I’ve been counting. Every dawn, for a year.” He looked at Wren. ”Seven.”

”Six,” said Wren. ”F-twenty went dark last week.”

”We don’t know that.”

”It didn’t answer, Ezra.”

”It’s not answered before. Twice. And then it did.” He looked at me. ”Seven. Six. One of the two.” He rubbed his face. ”Out of thirty-four.”

”Answer what?” I said. ”Counting how?”

Wren held up the mirror.

”Radio brings them,” she said. ”You’ve worked that out. Took me a month and most of my wall. The kits call up, to the relay, every ninety-one minutes. Narrow. Upward. That doesn’t bring them, much. But the minute you shout along the ground—” She shook her head. ”So the ones who lived went quiet. Left their bases. Went up into the rock, where they can’t dig. And stopped talking.”

”But you can’t not talk,” said Holt. ”Not for two years. Not on your own. You’d go mad. I nearly did, before she found me.”

”So we talk with the sun,” said Wren. ”At dawn. Every dawn. From the high places. Ridge to ridge. The line goes north and west and south. You flash your number. You flash here. Whoever can see you flashes theirs and passes yours on. And by the time the sun’s a hand above the hills, everybody on the line knows who’s still breathing.” She turned the mirror over in her fingers. ”The dawn line.”

I thought about the varying signal. In the north, under the white mountains. Somebody’s still breathing between the words.

”How many answered,” I said, ”the first time?”

”Nine,” said Holt. ”The first winter. Nine on the line, and us.” He looked at the fire. ”And then fewer.”

I sat by the hearth in the wreck in the cleft in the gray hills and thought about it for a long time.

Nine, the first winter. Then seven. Then six. Every dawn, a little light on a ridge going out.

”Can I see it?” I said. ”Tomorrow. The line.”

Wren looked at Holt. Holt looked at his knee.

”You’ll have to carry me up,” he said. ”It’s the top of the ridge. I haven’t been up since the spring. She goes up and flashes and comes down and tells me the number.” He looked at me. ”I’d like to see it. Once more. If you’ve got a spoon that’ll take me.”

”It won’t,” I said. ”But I’ve got a Dot.”

We brought them down to the dome that afternoon.

Liam was sitting on the frame in the gap of the south wall, exactly where I’d left him, with Dot beside him and his hands lit, and when he saw me coming down through the wheat in the spoon, with Wren walking beside me with her knife and Holt behind her on two of Dot’s hands, he put his face in his hands and didn’t take it out for a while.

”It’s noon,” he said, through his fingers. ”It’s exactly noon. I was getting up. I had one leg on the ground.”

”I know.”

”I was going to set fire to the hill, Lucas.”

Wren looked at him. At his hands. At the fire curling up off his knuckles.

”Calder,” she said.

Liam lifted his face.

”You’ve got the Calder hands,” said Wren. ”There was a Calder at the cave the week before we launched. Fixing the furnaces. Big man. Burned his own eyebrows off showing us how hot he could go.” Her mouth moved, very slightly, at one corner. It was the first time I’d seen it. ”Yours?”

”My dad,” said Liam.

”Thought so,” said Wren. ”He made the same face as you, when the eyebrows went.”

Dot asked about Holt’s knee that night. I told her to log it as later. She logged it.

Holt sat against the empty kit in the broken dome and looked at Dot for a very long time.

”That’s a kit,” he said.

”That’s Dot.”

”Kits don’t have names.”

”This unit has a name,” said Dot. ”The operator gave it. A number is for counting. A designation is for calling.”

Holt looked at her. Then at me. Then back.

”Trevor used to say that,” he said quietly. ”About us. In the war. When they gave us numbers.” He leaned his head back against the dead kit’s shell and shut his eyes. ”A number is for counting. Every time. Every new man.”

I hadn’t known that. I’d thought I made it up.

Maybe I had. Maybe you can make up something your father said, if you have enough of him in you.

We went up the ridge in the dark, before dawn on Day 337. All of us. Wren in front, quick and sure on the rock, with her mirror. Me in the spoon, just above her, looking in front. Dot behind, carrying Holt in two of her big hands like a chair, very steady, very careful on the broken stone. And Liam on the frame, behind Dot, with four hands carrying him and his crutch across his knees and his eyes on the sky. Up.

At the top, the ridge was a long bare crest of gray rock, with the whole country spread out below it to the north and west and south. Hills, and more hills, and valleys between them full of the gray green with no silver. And in the far distance, northward, a faint white line along the edge of the world.

The mountains. Where Toby was. Where we were meant to land.

”Sit down,” said Wren. ”Face north. Don’t talk. Watch the high places.”

We sat. Holt in Dot’s hands, Liam on his frame, me on the rock with my stick. Wren stood at the very end of the crest with the mirror in her hand and her face toward the east, waiting for the sun.

It came up green and then gold.

Wren caught it.

She flashed, quick and sharp and sure, toward the north. F. 1. 1. H. E. R. E. And then something longer, that I had to work hard to read. 2. N. D. W. A. V. E. F. O. U. N. D. C. O. U. N. T.

Then she lowered the mirror and stood very still.

The first answer came from the northwest. A ridge so far away I couldn’t see the ridge, only the spark on it. Short and long and long.

”F-three,” said Wren. ”Tamsin.”

The second, from due north, very faint. ”F-seventeen. Corr.”

Then west. ”F-twenty-two.” Then north again, further. ”F-thirty. That’s two of them, at F-thirty, Ade and Benedikt, they found each other in the first month.”

Holt was counting on his fingers. Moving his lips.

Then a long gap. Wren didn’t move. The sun came a little higher.

A spark in the southwest. ”F-eight.”

Another. ”F-twenty.”

Holt made a sound.

”F-twenty,” said Wren. Her voice wasn’t quite steady. ”It came back.”

”I told you,” said Holt. ”I told you. It’s not answered before. Twice.”

That was seven. Seven, and the two of them. Nine. The same as the first winter.

Wren was looking at the north with the mirror half raised. She’d stopped counting. I think she’d thought that was it. I think she was about to send thank you and come down.

And then, from the far north, from the very edge of the white line, so faint that only somebody with eyes like mine could have seen it at all, a spark.

I stood up.

”There,” I said. ”Wren. North. Right on the mountains. Something’s flashing.”

She looked. She couldn’t see it.

”Read it to me,” she said.

I read it. Slowly. It was faint and broken and the hands that were making it were not fast.

F. 5. A. L. I. V. E. 1.

And then, very slowly, as if the person on the far mountain had to think about every letter:

H. E. A. R. D. S. C. A. R. E. C. R. O. W. O. N. R. A. D. I. O.

S. T. O. P. P. E. D.

W. H. E. R. E. I. S. H. E.

Nobody said anything.

Then Liam started to laugh. Very quietly. With his face in his hands.

”Every hour,” he said. ”Every hour for fourteen days. Squad Eight, this is Scarecrow. And it wasn’t just me. Somebody up in the mountains heard you too, Lucas.”

It didn’t stop there.

Once Wren knew to look, and once I could tell her where, there were more. Further out than her line had ever reached, because her line only reached as far as a mirror could carry from one ridge to the next, and there were ridges beyond her ridges, and high places beyond them, where somebody alone had been flashing every dawn for a year into the empty air with nobody close enough to see.

A spark in the far southwest. F. 2. 6. A. L. I. V. E. 2.

Two.

A spark in the far west, on the coast, so faint it was barely a spark at all. F. 3. 1. And then nothing else. Just the number, over and over, as if the person making it had forgotten how to say anything else.

Wren had stopped flashing. She was standing at the end of the ridge with the mirror hanging from her hand and tears running down her face, and she didn’t wipe them.

”Count,” she said. ”Lucas. Count them. I can’t.”

So I counted.

Holt and Wren. Two.

Tamsin at F-three. Corr at F-seventeen. F-twenty-two. Ade and Benedikt at F-thirty. F-eight. F-twenty, which had come back. Seven more.

F-five, on the mountain, who’d heard me on the radio. One.

F-twenty-six. Two.

F-thirty-one. One, at least.

”Thirteen,” I said.

Holt put his face in his big ruined hands.

”Thirteen,” I said again. ”Of thirty-four. And one more in the north, on the half-kit’s records, whose call-in varies.” I looked at the white line of the mountains. ”Maybe fourteen.”

”Not six,” said Liam.

”No,” I said. ”Not six.”

”Not nine. Not Crane’s nine.” His voice was rough. ”More than Crane’s nine. More than they said. More than they knew.” He looked at me. ”They don’t know, do they. They put recordings on the ones that died and they never even noticed the ones that didn’t.”

”No,” I said. ”They only listen upward.”

Wren raised the mirror one more time.

She sent it slowly, so that everyone on the line could read it, so that it would be passed from ridge to ridge all the way to the coast and the mountains and wherever else it went.

S. C. A. R. E. C. R. O. W. I. S. A. P. L. A. C. E.

4. 1. K. M. E. A. S. T. O. F. F. 1. 1.

7. 4. R. O. O. M. S.

She lowered the mirror and looked at me.

”Is that right?” she said. ”Seventy-four?”

”Seventy-four,” I said. ”I built them for people who’d gone quiet.”

Day 336–337.

Dawn. A mirror on the ridge. WHO. I answered with Dot’s mirror. COME. ALONE.

Wren. Mara Voss. 11/34. ”You’re in a spoon.” ”It’s efficient.”

Her pod, wedged in a cleft. Wheat drying on strings. Teeming plates made into knives.

Ezra Holt. First generation. Laughed at my eyes. ”Trevor Dask’s eyes. In a boy’s face.”

He was the twenty-first, at the river. The one who came out. Father set his knee with a bootlace. It held thirty years.

”A number is for counting.” Father said it in the war. I thought I made it up.

Radio brings them. So the ones who lived went quiet. Up into the rock. The dawn line: mirrors, ridge to ridge, every morning.

Holt counted seven. Wren counted six.

Day 337, on the ridge: F-3, F-17, F-22, F-30 (two), F-8, F-20 (came back).

Then further than Wren’s line reached. F-5, on the mountain: ”Heard Scarecrow on radio. Stopped. Where is he.” F-26: two. F-31: one, flashing only the number.

Thirteen. Of thirty-four. Maybe fourteen.

Not six. Not Crane’s nine. More than they knew.

They only listen upward.

Seventy-four rooms.