Scarecrow

“No,” I said.

Toby put another roll of clean cloth into his bag.

He didn’t look up. He tucked it beside the little metal case from the lander, checked that the case couldn’t knock against the bottle underneath it, and pulled the flap over both.

“You’ve started early,” he said.

It was the afternoon of Day 425. We’d come back from the gully with the picture of the pale thing still behind our eyes, and Luna had given everyone an hour to eat before we talked about going down.

I’d used mine badly.

Toby sat on the edge of the bed beside Matthias’s, with his bag open and his tuning fork laid on the blanket. He had a list under one knee. His own handwriting. Small, careful, getting smaller toward the bottom because he’d run out of room.

“You don’t even know what I’m saying no to,” I said.

He looked at me then.

We both knew that wasn’t true.

“It’s full of silver,” I said. “The walls. The threads. Whatever that thing is. You heard the spine from the ground and your heart—”

“I know what my heart did.”

His voice wasn’t sharp. That made it worse.

“Forty-one minutes,” I said.

“I know.”

I stood with my hand round the top of my stick, looking at the fork on the blanket. A little piece of metal. I’d watched it hang motionless in a pod for weeks and thought the stillness belonged to him.

Now he was right in front of me, packing a bag to go somewhere I couldn’t see him from outside.

“We can take the bag,” I said.

Toby rested both hands on it.

“Who reads the labels if you can’t?”

I didn’t answer quickly enough.

“Who notices Holt’s too tired before he says he is? Who knows which of us has eaten? Who checks Risa’s hand if she puts too much through it? If Sera’s hot because she’s using the fire, or because she’s ill?”

“Luna.”

“Luna’s watching the way out. And the ground. And all of us. She can do a great many things. She can’t do them all at once.”

He closed the bag.

“Neither can you.”

From the other bed, Matthias cleared his throat.

We both turned.

“If you’re going to argue over which one of you is indispensable,” he said, “could one of you be indispensable somewhere I can sleep?”

Toby went red.

I picked up my stick properly.

We went outside.

Luna found us before we found somewhere else to argue.

She had the map under one arm and two cups in her other hand. She gave one to me and one to Toby, then waited until we’d taken them before she spoke.

“Marsh comes.”

“Luna—”

“With his wall. After the dawn count. We test the first stretch before anyone goes farther. If he can’t keep it, we all turn back.”

Toby opened his mouth.

“All,” she said, looking at him now. “Nobody stays behind a bend holding something while the rest of us go on.”

He shut it again.

I looked down at the cup. Water. Cold. She’d put it in my hand so I’d have something to do with it besides point.

“You didn’t see him fall,” I said.

Luna’s face changed.

Only a little.

Enough.

I’d said it before I thought.

She’d been there.

Of course she’d been there. Her hands against Toby’s head. Her voice counting while I squeezed his heart because his own body had forgotten the pace a boy needed.

I’d remembered it as something that had happened to me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Luna looked at me for another moment.

Then she nodded.

“He’s part of the squad, Lucas. He’s also the medic. Both things are true.”

Toby held the cup between his hands.

“I’m frightened,” he said. “In case that helps. I’m not doing this because I think nothing can happen.”

It didn’t help.

It helped a little.

We had the argument properly at the table, with everyone there.

Not whether I wanted Toby safe. Nobody needed to discuss that. Whether the seven of us could go down, look at the failing supports, and come back with something useful before the passages changed around us.

Seven. Squad Eight, Risa, Holt.

Dot would stay above with the camp. We needed her hands on the surface, watching the braces and moving things if the ground went again. We needed her at the entrance too, keeping the wire clear and listening to the little box we would carry down with us.

“Two places,” said Liam.

“This unit has many hands.”

“I meant it’s a lot.”

Dot’s grille turned toward him.

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

Liam looked at the table.

“We’ll come back quickly.”

“Accurately, please,” said Dot.

He swallowed.

“We’ll try.”

We weren’t going to kill a queen.

Luna said that before anything else.

We weren’t going to cut silver threads because they looked like ropes. We weren’t going to turn the roof into glass because glass was familiar. We were going to look at where the water went, where the weight went, and whether the pale thing beneath us could be helped out of the place that was breaking.

If we couldn’t, we came back and moved the camp.

“And if it comes at us?” asked Tamsin.

Luna looked at Sera. At Liam. At me.

“Then we get everyone out.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It is the first answer.”

Tamsin watched her for a moment. Then nodded.

She’d be with Ilse on the surface. Wren would keep the tower. Corr would help with the wire and the supplies. The others would keep the camp ready to move.

No one was left with nothing to do except wait.

I thought that was probably the kindest part of the plan.

Holt tested the slope again before supper.

I went beside him this time. Down to the first bend. Back up. No farther.

His repaired knee held. His breathing wasn’t as good, and he stopped halfway up with one hand on the rope, pretending to look at a piece of stone.

I waited beside him.

“It’s a very interesting piece of stone,” I said.

“Aye.”

“Would you like me to tell you what it’s made of?”

“I’d like you to fall in a small hole.”

We stood there until he could breathe again.

At the top, he told Luna where he’d stopped without making her ask.

She marked it on the map.

“We rest there on the way back. Before you need to.”

“Fine.”

He said it with a dignity that would have been more convincing if Toby hadn’t already been holding out a cup.

The mirrors needed handles.

That was how I spent the last of the afternoon. Not making something enormous. Making two small mirrors that a person could carry in a wet tunnel without putting a thumb on the silver.

Sera worked beside me, shaping the covers. Dot checked the glass. I made the frames light enough that Holt could hold one, if he had to, and strong enough that Liam could drop one, which he probably would.

“Why am I the measurement?” Liam asked.

“Experience,” said Sera.

He picked up a covered mirror. Turned it over.

“This is very good.”

“Don’t—”

It slipped. Hit the bench. Bounced once.

The cover held.

Sera looked at me.

“There. Tested.”

We packed lamps as well.

Sera’s fire could show me a place quickly. It also used air, and we didn’t know what the air would be like farther down. Batteries didn’t solve everything, but they didn’t get tired or cross because Liam had made a joke about their hair.

The little wire box had a grille and a button. Dot had made another for the entrance. Voices through copper. Simple enough that I could see how every part of it worked.

We tried it from opposite ends of the canyon.

“Can you hear me?” said Liam.

“Yes,” said Dot.

“What about now?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

Dot paused.

“Unfortunately.”

We kept the boxes.

I went to see Matthias before bed.

Toby had shown Priya what to watch while we were gone. Lena knew where everything was by touch. Matthias knew he wasn’t to prove anything by getting out of bed because the person telling him not to had gone underground.

“He told me that four times,” Matthias said.

“He’ll tell you again in the morning.”

“I know.”

Lena sat beside him, rolling a length of cloth into a neat cylinder.

“You’ll come back before he has time to grow difficult,” she said.

“He’s already difficult.”

“Then quickly.”

I smiled.

She finished the roll and held it out toward my voice.

“For your nose. Toby said you’d forget.”

I took it.

Matthias looked at me for a long time.

“If you have to leave the rooms,” he said, “leave the rooms. I spent eighteen months on one hill. I can spend a week on another.”

“I know.”

“Know it down there too.”

I didn’t sleep very well.

But I slept.

That was new enough that I wrote it down before the lamps went low. Then I put the notebook beside my blanket, under my coat, with Garnet’s scarf folded inside where it wouldn’t catch on anything.

Sera’s scarf went round my neck in the morning.

She saw me doing it and came over to tuck the end down the front of the coat.

“Loose things catch,” she said.

“I know.”

Her fingers stayed at my collar for a moment after the end was tucked away.

Then she stepped back.

“Eat something.”

It was becoming a very small language, the things we said before doing something frightening.

Eat. Sleep. Come back.

All of them meant more than they sounded like.

At dawn on Day 426, Crane sent A.

Dot drew it after the count. Wren put her own page beside it, and the short and long spaces matched.

Then Dot drew another pattern.

Wren stopped moving.

“B,” she said.

Toby leaned forward, out of his wall now, with his fork in his fist.

“He sent the next one?”

“If he’s using the table.”

“Which he is.”

Wren looked at the two pages.

“I think he is.”

Holt let out a breath through his nose.

“Hal,” he said. Not fondly. Not quite anything I could name.

We’d been teaching a man how to hear us, one dawn at a time, and now he’d taken the pencil from our hands and added something we hadn’t sent.

I looked at the letter B until Luna touched my shoulder.

“We’ll be here for the next one,” she said.

It wasn’t a promise about what the world would do.

It was an instruction about what we were going to try.

Old Son waited at the entrance with the first coil of wire.

It had already made its dawn flash. Wren was back at the tower, watching for the western bases. Dot stood in the gully with her legs spread over the uneven ground and her little hands passing things forward.

The air coming out of the hole felt warmer than it had the day before.

Risa put her palm against the marker.

“Still moving. Mostly away from this passage.”

“Mostly,” said Luna.

Risa pointed at the word already written across the slate.

Luna nodded.

Then she counted us.

“Liam. Seraphina. Toby. Lucas. Risa. Holt.”

Her finger moved to the last name.

“Luna.”

Seven.

We went down in a different order.

Luna first, with the lamp. Risa close behind, following the wet seams with her fingers without sending anything into them until we stopped. Sera next, then me. Toby in the middle of the rest, with the faint shimmer of his wall round him. Holt behind him. Liam last, carrying the second lamp and the wire box.

I had the mirrors across my back and my stick in one hand. The rope ran along the wall within reach of the other.

For twelve meters, I could still see the daylight behind us.

Then Luna went round the bend.

Risa. Sera.

I followed.

The daylight became a pale patch on stone. Then it was gone.

It wasn’t black.

That was almost worse.

The lamps lit more than enough to show where we were putting our feet. Water shone along the walls. Roots moved in the draft. The rope lay straight ahead, fixed to anchors I’d put in during the test, leading to a place I knew.

Everything should have felt ordinary.

But the other sight wouldn’t spread.

It ran into the walls on both sides and filled with too many small things. Stone laid against stone. Water passing through sand. Threads I couldn’t take hold of. Little spaces behind larger spaces, all of them pressing together until trying to see farther was like trying to read seven pages held on top of one another.

I stopped.

Sera turned at once.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just—”

I swallowed.

“It’s smaller in here than I expected.”

She looked at the walls, then at me.

“Stay behind the lamp.”

I did.

At the first stopping place, Toby opened a little gap in his wall.

Not toward the rock. Toward us. Enough for his voice to come through without making us shout.

“I’m all right.”

Risa touched his wrist. Waited.

“Fast,” she said. “His fast. Not the other.”

“I’m in a tunnel full of enormous insects,” said Toby. “I’d be worried if it wasn’t.”

From the back, Liam said, “I’m having a lovely time.”

Nobody believed him.

Luna checked the little air gauge Dot had made us carry, then held the lamp toward the next stretch. I looked where the beam went. Ordinary air. Damp. Less fresh than outside, but moving.

“We go to the fork,” she said. “Then stop again.”

The first Teeming came round the corner while we were stopped.

It carried nothing. Its front legs found the ground ahead of it, then went still.

Behind me, Holt took a sharp breath.

I felt my own hand tighten on the stick. The familiar thing behind my eyes reached for the black plates before I’d decided to reach.

I stopped it.

Sera’s fingers lit, very faintly.

Luna lifted her free hand. Not toward the creature. Toward us.

“Room,” she said quietly.

There wasn’t much.

We pressed against the wall on the inside of the bend. Risa pulled the wire away from the middle. Liam brought the lamp close to his chest.

The Teeming stood looking at us.

Then it lowered its body and came past.

It smelled of wet stone.

That was what I noticed. Not rot. Not anything from the stories in the training cave. Wet stone, and the sharp green smell from the fronds after rain.

One joint passed so close to my knee I could have touched it.

I didn’t.

Its head turned toward Toby’s wall. Paused. The front leg lifted a little, as if it had found something it couldn’t see.

Toby stayed still.

The leg went down somewhere else.

Then it was past us, climbing toward the daylight, stepping over the rope one foot at a time.

We listened until we couldn’t hear it anymore.

“Seven,” said Luna softly.

Then we went on.

At the fork, we found the cracked rock beneath my column.

It was worse in person.

On the screen it had been a dark line. Here I could see the grains pulling apart along it, the fine edges grinding against one another when weight moved somewhere above. My new support was sound. The old rock beneath it wasn’t.

I’d made a good leg and stood it on a broken foot.

“Can you fix it?” Luna asked.

“This part. If we spread the weight first.”

“How long?”

I looked again. Properly. At the floor beside it. At the wall. At what I could reach without guessing what lay on the other side.

“Twenty minutes. Maybe more.”

She looked at Holt.

He was already lowering himself onto a dry stone.

“Best plan you’ve had all morning,” he said.

I built two props.

Not underneath the same narrow patch. Beside it, where the passage floor thickened against the wall. Broad at the bottom. Angled up. I took the material from loose rubble where I could see all of it, and Sera held the lamp while I persuaded it into place.

The first prop touched the ceiling.

A little dust fell.

I waited.

The second touched.

I waited again.

Then I let the props take a little of what the column had been holding, and watched the crack stop moving.

Only then did I ask the broken edges to meet.

The rock came together slowly, grain finding grain. Water squeezed out along the seam and ran down into the dirt beside my boot.

Behind me, Toby was talking to Holt about his breathing.

Risa watched the side passage. Luna watched all of us.

For twenty-seven minutes, nothing fell.

When I finished, my nose was bleeding.

Not badly. Enough that Toby came over with the cloth Lena had given me and made a face when I told him I already had one.

“Then use yours.”

I did.

Liam pressed the button on the box.

“First support repaired. Seven. All breathing. Dask’s face is doing the thing.”

A hiss.

Then Dot, very faintly: “The operator is to sit down.”

“He is sitting down.”

“For longer.”

Liam looked delighted.

“She knows you through a wire.”

I rested my head against the wall and closed my eyes.

I could hear everybody. That helped.

We nearly turned back there.

Luna asked the question plainly. We had useful information. We’d repaired one support. We could go up, rest, and come again.

Holt said he could manage the return. Risa said the route below still matched what she’d found from above, as far as the wet seams went. Toby’s heart was steady. Sera had barely used her fire.

Then water began running out of the lower passage.

Not much. A shallow sheet over the stone, carrying pale grit.

Risa bent and touched it.

“That’s new.”

From below came a noise like a door being dragged across a floor.

Long. Heavy. Followed by several smaller cracks.

We all looked at Luna.

She took one breath.

“To the ledge. We look from there. We don’t climb down.”

The passage narrowed before it opened.

We had to turn sideways in one place. Toby drew his wall closer, until the air barely shimmered beyond his coat. I watched him do it and had to stop myself telling him not to spend anything.

That was what his practice had been for.

Holt went through before me, moving his stick across his body so it wouldn’t catch. Liam passed the spare lamp forward. Sera held it high, and the rock ahead shone with threads that weren’t reflected light.

My teeth began to ache.

Not pain. A pressure. The same faint awareness I’d felt above the deep, stronger now because there was less between us and it.

Toby looked at my face.

I looked at his.

He shook his head.

“Not in here,” he said, from inside the wall.

Risa checked his wrist again anyway.

The ledge was smaller than the camera had made it seem.

There was room for three of us abreast if none of us minded very much about living. Luna put us in a line instead. She went to the edge on one knee, with the rope round an anchor I’d made in the solid wall behind her.

Sera passed her the lamp.

Luna looked down.

For a long time she didn’t speak.

Then she moved back just far enough for me to see.

The pale thing filled the bottom of the chamber.

I couldn’t see its whole length. One end lay under a low arch, where thick strands disappeared into the rock. The other rested beside a shallow pool, its plates lifting very slowly, one after another, with something like breathing.

It was alive.

Not because it moved. I’d known machines that moved. Because under the plates there were layers I recognized as the work of a body, even though I didn’t understand the body they belonged to. Fluids. Membranes. Small chambers opening and closing. Silver threaded through all of it.

I looked away before the silver drew me deeper than I meant to go.

Along the far wall, the shelves were half empty.

Teeming carried the remaining bundles toward an opening on the right. A line of them waited beneath the low arch. Others stood around the pale body, touching it with their front limbs, then moving away.

One of the thick strands trembled.

Dust came down from the ceiling.

“There,” said Risa.

She was behind my shoulder, pointing with two fingers because there wasn’t room to lift her whole arm.

I followed the line.

A dark rib of stone crossed the chamber above the pale thing. Broken almost through near the middle. Below the break, a bundle of thick silver strands ran up from the body and spread into the rock on both sides.

The strands tightened.

The broken rib lifted a fraction.

The pale plates below it drew together.

I watched it happen twice before I understood what I was seeing.

“It’s holding it,” I said.

Luna leaned closer.

“The roof?”

“I think so.”

I watched again.

The body moved. The strands pulled. The loose stone stopped settling for a moment, while three Teeming passed beneath it carrying their bundles.

Then it sank again.

The thing we’d thought might be trapped was choosing not to let go.

Or both. It could have been both. I didn’t know enough to choose one and write it down as true.

“Can you reach the break?” Luna asked.

“Not all of it. The far side’s hidden.”

“Mirror?”

I looked at the angle. At the ledge. At the ceiling above us, which would let me look down but not back under the rib.

“From lower.”

She said nothing.

We’d agreed we weren’t going lower.

Below us, a Teeming climbed onto the pale body’s back. It touched the plates beside the thickest strand. Waited there, very still, while another line of small bundles went under the broken rock.

I gripped the mirror handle.

Didn’t move.

Something tapped the ledge beside Luna.

All of us went still.

A black claw had come up over the edge.

Then a head. Then the jointed body of a Teeming climbing a narrow route I hadn’t seen along the wall. It stopped below us, with only its front half above the lip, and turned toward the passage we’d come through.

Behind us, Liam shifted the lamp.

The creature lifted one leg.

Pointed it, if that was what it was doing, toward the light.

Then down.

Toward the break in the roof.

It did it again.

“Nobody move,” said Luna.

Risa closed her eyes.

“Hello,” she whispered. “Still hello.”

The Teeming waited.

I looked at the lamp. At the mirror in my hand. At the thing below us holding the weight of the place where its small ones lived.

For the first time since we’d gone round the bend, I understood exactly how little we had in common that we knew how to say.

And how much there was to do anyway.

Day 425–426.

Toby packed the bag. I said no. He asked who would read the labels if I couldn’t.

Luna: he comes. Wall. Tests. Everyone turns back together.

I said she hadn’t seen him fall. She had. I apologized.

Seven below. Twelve above. Dot stays with the camp and the wire. Old Son keeps the flashes.

Two mirrors. Covers. Handles. Liam tested one by dropping it.

Matthias: if we have to leave the rooms, leave them.

Day 426. Crane sent A. Then B. He added something we hadn’t sent.

The first Teeming passed us. We made room. It stepped over the wire.

My column stood on broken rock. Two props. Spread the weight. Then closed the crack. Twenty-seven minutes. Nothing fell.

Toby’s heart stayed his. Risa checked.

Water from below. We went to the ledge. No lower.

The pale thing is alive. The threads pull when it moves. The broken roof lifts while they carry the small ones under it.

Holding it. Perhaps trapped too.

I can’t see the far side of the break.

One climbed up to us. Looked at the lamp. Then down at the roof.

It is still waiting.