Scarecrow

“Luna,” I said.

The first stone fell.

Not the slab. A piece from its edge, no bigger than my fist. It struck something above Toby’s head and stopped in the air.

“Sera.”

The air went gray.

I could see it spreading from him. Up the wall. Across the roof. A thin shimmering curve, like the inside of a soap bubble, except the stone stayed where it was and the dust settled on it instead of passing through.

“Risa.”

Toby had one hand against the rock beside him. His mouth was open. A low note came out, too low to be much of a sound, something I felt through the soles of my boots.

“Holt. Liam.”

The slab moved.

The gray curve bowed.

Toby bent his knees.

“Toby,” I said. “Lucas. Seven.”

He looked at me.

Nodded once.

Then the rest of the roof came down onto the thing he was holding.

It didn’t stop with a crash.

That was the part that frightened me most. It slowed. Stone sank into the gray curve as though the air had become thick water, pushing it down, pressing it wider against the walls.

Toby’s head went forward.

The note changed.

And the falling stopped.

Behind him, in the narrow passage, the Teeming crowded together with their bundles clutched close. One had both front limbs over a small wrapped shape. Another stood half turned, caught between the others and the wall.

All of them under the same roof.

All of them inside the curve.

“Forward,” said Luna. “Past the next shoulder. Liam, take Holt.”

Liam moved.

Holt tried to turn toward Toby.

“Now,” said Luna.

He went.

I stayed where I was.

So did Risa.

Sera put her flame higher, turning her wrist so the light ran along the underside of the slab. Luna waited until Liam had Holt beyond the shoulder of rock ahead, then came back three steps and put her hand on my arm.

“What can you see?”

I looked up.

The slab’s whole underside. Clean stone, newly exposed where it had torn away. A broken edge on the left. A long shallow hollow on the right. Above it, weight I still couldn’t follow through the confusion.

But the part in front of me had stopped moving.

Toby had given me something I hadn’t had a moment ago.

Time to look.

“I need to carry this part,” I said. “Then we can work on the loose stuff behind it.”

“Where?”

I looked at the floor.

Mud. Thin. Under it, a sloping bed of dark rock. The left side thickened into the wall. The right dropped toward a drainage groove full of brown water.

“Left. Broad foot. Then a beam across.”

“Can you?”

“If I can see the top of the left wall.”

She looked up. At the corner hidden behind Toby’s gray curve and the lowered edge of the slab.

“Mirror.”

Dot’s hand was beyond the shoulder with Liam.

Luna called it back. It came toward her voice with the lamp underneath it and the mirror still folded along its body, its little feet finding the dry places between our boots.

She crouched and touched the mirror frame.

“Here. Up here.”

The hand lifted it.

Too low.

She guided the frame with both hands, turning it until I could see the strip of stone above my left shoulder.

“There.”

It held.

I looked into the silver.

One bend. A small part of the world. The only part I needed, if I didn’t start trying to hold everything else at once.

“Good rock,” I said. “There. There.”

I wasn’t talking to anybody anymore.

I took material from the loose blocks at our feet.

Not from the wall. Not from the floor beneath Toby. I didn’t want to take a handful out of something and find it had been the handful holding us up.

The first block became a foot, wide and low against the solid left side. The next stretched upward from it, thickening where the load would turn.

Stone into stone. Same things. Better placed.

It should have been easy.

My eyes were already tired. The reflected corner wavered each time water struck the mirror’s edge. My bad leg shook under me, and a hot line ran from my nose into my mouth.

Sera moved closer.

Her free hand went under my elbow.

She didn’t say anything about it.

Risa had two fingers against Toby’s neck.

I couldn’t hear what she said to him over the note. I could see her mouth moving. Slow words. The same few, repeated.

His own wall still enclosed him. Close to his skin now, shimmering against his shoulders, while the larger curve spread overhead.

Two things held at once.

I hadn’t known he could do that.

Neither had he, perhaps, before there were seven people and a tunnel full of frightened creatures underneath a falling roof.

I looked away from him.

At the stone. The part that was mine to do.

The prop reached the underside of the slab.

Touched.

I let it stand there for a breath without taking anything.

Then I thickened the contact. Spread it along a shallow seam, giving it more than one little point to press against.

The prop shortened a fraction as it took weight.

Held.

Toby made a small sound inside the note.

Risa looked up.

“Some,” she said. “That took some.”

I couldn’t stop to be pleased.

One prop on one side wasn’t a roof. It was a way to tip a roof over if you were careless about what came next.

I needed the other foot.

The place where the water ran.

“Luna. The groove. I need to see underneath.”

She knelt beside it.

Put her hand near the water, not in it.

A white line spread across the flow upstream of the little hollow, a lip of ice curving toward the center of the passage. The water bent around it and went past our feet instead.

The hollow began to empty.

“Briefly,” she said.

“That’s enough.”

I looked into the wet dark patch she had given me.

The floor wasn’t thick there.

But farther back, under the right wall, it was. A narrow shelf of solid rock, almost hidden beneath sediment. I drew the sediment aside and made the second foot reach it.

Wider than I’d meant to. More material. A longer angle up to the slab.

More time.

Toby’s note went rough at the edge.

From behind us came a hard scrape.

One of the Teeming had lowered the bundle it carried into another’s arms. It moved forward beneath the gray curve, slowly, with its head turned away from Sera’s fire.

I saw its claw lift.

For a moment, every thought I had went blank except the old one.

Stop it.

Then the claw closed around a block of loose stone.

It pushed the block toward me.

The stone stopped against my boot.

I looked at it. Then at the creature.

It stayed crouched under the failing roof, waiting, with its front limbs flat on the ground.

“Use it,” said Sera.

I did.

Silicon. Oxygen. Iron in small dark grains. Ordinary rock. Nothing asleep in the middle of it that I didn’t understand.

I put it into the second prop.

The Teeming went back for another.

When the second prop touched, the slab stopped trying to lean.

I could feel it in the shapes. Not the weight itself. The little changes where stone pressed on stone, the grain along one side crushing a little more slowly as the other side began to carry its share.

I made a broad connecting piece across the top, below the slab, joining the two supports.

A doorway.

Not a beautiful one. Crooked. Thick. Made in a wet tunnel by a boy who was having trouble keeping his hands still.

But there was room under it.

“A little,” I told Toby. “Let it come onto this. Just a little.”

He looked at me.

I nodded.

The gray curve lowered.

The doorway creaked.

Held.

My knees nearly went.

Sera caught my elbow harder.

“Still here,” she said.

“I know.”

“Then stay.”

I stayed.

Above the doorway, a few pebbles slid and stopped. Behind it, the rest of the roof still hung on Toby’s sound, sagging lower over the Teeming farther down the passage.

Luna looked through the opening we’d made.

“Liam. Take them through. The ones carrying. Keep Holt clear of the mouth.”

Liam stared at the dark bodies waiting behind us.

“How?”

Luna moved out of the way.

“Show them.”

He went under the doorway first.

Turned. Held out both hands, palms open, the way he’d once coaxed Biscuit away from a plate he wasn’t supposed to be licking.

“This way,” he said.

One Teeming moved.

Not because it understood the words, I thought. Because there was a space where there hadn’t been one. Because the light was there, and the way behind it was filling with stone.

It ducked under the crosspiece with its bundle tucked close.

Another followed.

Then another.

I watched the prop, not their faces. One joint brushed it. A little grit fell from the top.

It held.

“Six,” said Liam, from the other side.

He wasn’t counting us.

I looked up.

He stood beyond the doorway, one hand on Holt’s shoulder, watching the Teeming carry their wrapped shapes into the wider patch of passage ahead.

“Seven.”

Toby heard him.

I saw it in his face. A little movement at the corner of his mouth, impossible while he was holding that note, but there anyway.

“Eight.”

I hadn’t told Liam to count them.

Nobody had.

The stone-bringer stayed behind.

It pushed one more block beside my foot, then backed toward the crowded passage. Touched another creature with its front limb. Waited while that one turned and went beneath the doorway.

Risa took her fingers away from Toby’s neck long enough to wipe his face with her sleeve.

“His heart?” I asked.

“Fast. Tired. His.”

The words were clipped.

“How long?” asked Luna.

Risa shook her head.

“Don’t make me guess.”

Luna didn’t.

She put the lamp where it lit the last stretch of unsupported roof and looked at me.

“What remains?”

Loose stone behind the main slab.

A lot of it.

The gray curve held it like a sheet held underneath a broken shelf. Some pieces had stopped against each other. Some would move if the air beneath them thinned by the width of a finger.

I couldn’t rebuild the ceiling from here.

I didn’t need to.

I needed a way for Toby to stop holding it without dropping it on himself.

“A screen behind the doorway,” I said. “Not to hold it all up. To keep it from coming through when it falls.”

Luna looked at the narrow place. At Toby standing just inside it.

“He comes through first.”

“Yes.”

I made the lower part from the rubble the Teeming had brought.

A low bank across the passage, behind the doorway. Sloped toward the falling material. Enough to catch the small pieces and turn them down, away from the opening.

Not a wall. Not yet. There were still people on both sides.

Toby had to move.

The last Teeming had to move.

I had to stop thinking of the gray curve as something solid and start remembering there was a boy holding it with a breath he couldn’t keep forever.

“Ready,” I said.

Risa bent close to Toby.

“One step. Toward me.”

He moved his foot.

The note faltered.

Every bit of dust above us stirred.

He stopped.

Risa stopped with him.

Sera’s hand tightened on my arm so hard it hurt.

Toby’s eyes went wide, then narrowed. He changed something. Not louder. Lower, perhaps. The gray curve thickened near the wall where he’d first put his hand, and the dust settled again.

I remembered the cave behind the frozen waterfall.

The wall in the stones. Holding while he slept.

He’d learned this before we’d come for him.

“The wall,” I said. “You don’t have to carry where it starts. Leave it there.”

He looked at me with enormous irritation.

He knew.

Of course he knew.

I shut up.

The stone-bringer turned toward a gap behind it.

Bent low.

For a moment I couldn’t see what it was doing. Then another bundle slid out from beneath a trapped leg, and I saw the creature farther back, pinned against the wall by a piece that had fallen before Toby’s curve reached it.

Alive.

Moving.

The stone-bringer took the bundle, pushed it under the doorway, and went back.

“One more,” said Liam.

Toby heard that too.

His foot stopped halfway through its next step.

“Where?” said Luna.

I pointed.

The trapped one was behind the left edge of the curve. I could see its front half. Two limbs pressed against the stone across it. One limb bent wrong beneath it.

The rock holding it was separate from the slab. A wedge fallen sideways into a narrow space.

I looked at the top.

At what rested on it.

Nothing I could see. But the far side was hidden.

“Mirror,” I said.

Luna was already moving it.

Dot’s hand climbed the wall beside the doorway and reached out as far as its little clamp would go.

The reflection caught the far side of the wedge.

Water. Empty space. A root running behind it.

Nothing standing on top.

I didn’t try to move the whole block. I took a strip from its lower edge, the part holding the body against the wall, and made it crumble into small dry grains.

The Teeming jerked.

The stone-bringer caught it.

One limb dragged. The others found the floor.

Together they came forward beneath the curve.

I went back to the bank before they reached me.

Didn’t count the breaths.

I didn’t want to know how many I’d spent.

They passed through.

The injured one stumbled at the low bank. Liam reached out, then stopped, not knowing where to put his hands.

The stone-bringer found a place for its front limbs under the other’s plates and pulled it over.

They were gone.

“Clear,” said Liam.

Luna looked behind Toby. All the way back to where the fallen stone hid the bend.

“Clear that we can see.”

Risa shook her head once.

“Nobody close behind it. Nothing I can feel.”

That was all we had.

“Toby,” said Luna. “Now.”

He came through one foot at a time.

Risa walked backward in front of him, hands on his forearms, giving him somewhere to go. Sera moved the flame with them. The curve above the rubble stayed where it was, but its edges shivered against the stone.

I stepped over the bank after Toby.

Dot’s hand scuttled through beside my boot.

Luna came last.

On the other side, Holt had both hands ready. He couldn’t stand properly on the bad knee. He stayed seated and took Toby’s bag from Liam instead, holding it tight against his chest.

Seven.

All on this side.

Toby was still holding.

I raised the screen.

From the low bank. From loose stone beside it. A sloping face behind the doorway, thick at the bottom, leaving the drainage groove open where Luna pointed.

It wasn’t going to support the mountain.

It only had to keep the first rush of pieces from coming into the space where we stood.

I looked at the two props. The crosspiece. The slab they carried.

No movement.

I looked again.

“Ready,” I said.

Toby didn’t stop.

Risa leaned closer.

“You can put it down.”

His eyes moved toward the screen.

“It’s there,” I said. “I’ve got that part. The loose stuff can fall behind it.”

The note went thin.

Then stopped.

The noise filled the passage.

Stone struck stone. Hit the sloping screen. Ground against the props. A cloud of dust came over the top and turned Sera’s little fire into a blurred orange star.

I watched the doorway through it.

The left prop moved a fraction.

Stopped.

The right stayed where I’d put it.

The crosspiece held.

Pebbles rattled through the drainage gap and settled around my boots.

Then there was only falling dust.

And Toby breathing.

Very fast.

Very much his own.

He sat down before anyone could tell him to.

His little wall was still there, close round his shoulders. He hadn’t dropped that part. Risa crouched beside him, one hand at his wrist, the other on the back of his neck.

I knelt on his other side.

“Can you hear me?”

He looked at me.

Made an expression I’d never seen him make at a patient.

“Unfortunately,” he whispered.

Liam laughed.

It came out as one sharp, broken sound. Then he sat down against the wall and put both hands over his face.

Toby’s voice had gone rough.

His hands shook. His pulse ran too fast, but it ran in the ordinary frightened, exhausted way, not the deep’s slow impossible rhythm. I looked at what I knew how to look at, and left the things I didn’t alone.

Risa counted quietly.

Luna brought water. Small sips. Sera kept the fire low and steady beside us. Holt set the bag within Toby’s reach, although Toby didn’t reach for it.

For a long time, none of us said anything useful.

It was the best we could do.

“Did they all get through?” Toby asked at last.

Liam took his hands away from his face.

“The ones we saw.”

Toby nodded.

“The trapped one?”

“Walking,” I said. “Badly. But walking.”

He closed his eyes.

“Good.”

I wanted to tell him he’d frightened me. That he’d nearly done the thing I couldn’t bear. That he’d stood under a roof with all that weight on his voice and expected me to keep moving because he’d said count.

He already knew.

And none of it was what he needed to carry now.

“You gave me time to see,” I said instead.

He opened his eyes again.

“I know.”

The Teeming waited farther up the passage.

We didn’t notice immediately. There were bodies in the dark beyond Dot’s lamp, but there had been bodies behind us for so long that I thought they were simply still moving.

Then the stone-bringer came back.

It stopped short of Toby’s wall.

Lowered itself until its head was below his.

Toby watched it without moving.

The creature put its front limbs flat against the ground. Stayed that way for three breaths. Then lifted one and touched the stone beside him.

Risa’s mouth tightened.

“Hello,” she said.

“Again?” said Liam.

She nodded.

“Slower.”

Toby lifted his hand.

Not through the wall. Just toward it, where it could see.

“Hello,” he whispered.

No song. No deep note. Just the ordinary word, scratched out of a sore throat by a boy sitting in mud.

The Teeming stayed another moment.

Then it turned and went back to the others.

I didn’t know whether it understood.

I didn’t need to write that it did.

He’d said it anyway.

We rested until Toby could stand without the passage tipping under him.

Luna didn’t let me decide when that was. She asked Risa, and Toby, and then waited a little longer than either of them wanted.

Dot’s hand stayed beside us with the lamp raised.

“If you’re listening,” I told it, “seven. Toby’s tired. We’re resting. The roof behind us is down, but the props held.”

The lamp moved.

Up. Down.

Holt watched it.

“She’ll be wearing a track in the ground.”

“She’s got six feet,” said Liam.

“Six tracks, then.”

Toby almost smiled.

I checked the wall before we moved.

The props were carrying the slab. The loose material behind the screen had settled. A narrow trickle of brown water found the drainage gap and ran away beneath our feet.

It would need watching.

It would need more than watching before anyone tried to make it a passage again.

But it wasn’t coming down on us now.

I scratched an arrow into the wall with the edge of a small stone. Toward the way we were going. Under it, seven short lines.

Then the day.

Not because I thought somebody would never find us.

Because Okafor had told us to leave more than we’d been left.

I was finally beginning to understand how often you had to do that.

We changed the order.

Luna and Risa ahead. Dot’s hand between them, lighting the floor. Holt next, with Liam carrying the bags and giving him an arm where he needed it. Toby behind them. Sera and me at the back, close enough that I could see the shimmer round his shoulders.

No one was going to hold anything alone behind us.

The Teeming moved when we moved.

Some went ahead with the bundles. Some stayed behind. The stone-bringer kept to the side, waiting when we had to stop, never quite close enough that I could have touched it without reaching.

I wondered whether it was keeping us out of the way.

I wondered whether it was keeping watch.

Both seemed possible.

The passage rose for another twenty meters.

Then divided.

The left branch smelled of moving air. The right was warmer, with silver threads along its ceiling and a light at the far end that didn’t come from one of our lamps.

Luna stopped at the fork.

Risa touched the wet seam. Waited. Moved her hand to another place.

“Left keeps rising. I can’t tell how far.”

“Then left.”

The stone-bringer stepped into the right-hand passage.

Turned back toward us.

Lifted one limb.

Luna shook her head.

“We need to get him out.”

It wouldn’t understand that either.

But she said it clearly.

We went left.

The stone-bringer didn’t stop us.

For a little while I let myself hope that was the end of deciding anything. Follow the air. Follow the slope. Get Toby into daylight. Get Holt somewhere he could sit without rock moving above his head.

Then Dot’s hand stopped.

Its lamp found water.

Not a trickle. Not a shallow flow. A still dark surface filling the passage from wall to wall, rising until it met the low roof farther ahead.

There was air above the first part. Beyond it, none that we could see.

Cool air came from a crack high on the left, too narrow for a hand.

The slope was right.

The air was right.

Neither meant a person could get through.

Luna looked at me.

I looked into the water.

The first few feet were clear. After that, mud and depth hid the floor. I couldn’t tell whether the roof rose again beyond the low place, or whether the whole branch stayed drowned for half a kilometer.

I could have started changing what I could reach.

There were seven of us standing in the way of whatever that released.

“Not safely,” I said.

This time I didn’t have to fight the words.

Luna nodded.

We turned round together.

The stone-bringer was still at the fork.

Waiting.

When we came back, it moved a short way down the right-hand passage and stopped again.

“I hate that it’s been right twice,” said Liam.

“We don’t know it’s right,” said Luna.

“I hate that too.”

She looked at Toby.

He had one hand against the wall. His eyes were open. His color was better than it had been beside the doorway, though that wasn’t saying very much.

“I can walk,” he said.

“To the light,” said Luna. “We look. We stop there.”

He nodded.

The light belonged to the chamber.

The same chamber we’d been trying to leave.

But we came out higher on the far side, on a broad shelf behind the broken rib, where the walls curved inward and the thick silver strands passed beneath our feet before spreading into the stone.

I knew it from the pool below. From the empty ledges. From the pale body lying along the floor, plates lifting and lowering with the effort of keeping something above it where it belonged.

We’d gone around it.

Through darkness, falling stone, and a flooded way out, and arrived at the one angle I hadn’t been able to see.

Luna held us back from the edge.

I looked anyway.

The far support was broken.

Not cracked. Broken. A whole shoulder of rock had washed out beneath the end of the rib, leaving it resting on the spread of silver threads instead of stone.

The pale thing wasn’t merely holding loose pieces out of the way.

It had become the missing support.

Each time it moved, the threads pulled tight against the broken end, keeping the rib from sliding inward. Each time it rested, the whole length sank a little.

There was room on this side to build.

Solid rock under the shelf. A path for a broad prop. An angle from which I could see where the weight needed to go.

And farther beyond it, near the top of the opposite wall, a pale rectangle of light.

Daylight.

Blocked from us by the rib the creature was holding.

I sat down beside Toby.

He looked at my face.

“You can see it now.”

“Yes.”

He nodded very slowly.

I looked back at the place we’d come from. At the stone-bringer waiting at the mouth of the passage. At Luna already measuring the shelf with her eyes, and Sera lowering her fire because the silver gave us enough light to rest by.

“You don’t hold anything else,” I told Toby.

His fingers tightened on the fork.

“I don’t want to.”

It was the first time he’d said it.

I put my hand against the shimmer beside his shoulder.

“Good,” I said. “Then we start there.”

Day 426. Toby’s wall.

Seven counted. The roof fell onto the curve. He kept his own wall too.

He made it stay still long enough for me to look.

Two props. Spread the load. A crosspiece. Luna turned the water so I could see the second foot.

A Teeming brought me stone.

Liam counted the ones carrying the small ones. Nobody told him to.

One pinned behind us. Mirror. Separate wedge. Took the edge away. The other one helped it through.

Toby left the curve in the rock and moved. Risa walked him out. Seven on our side. Still holding.

Screen behind the doorway. Let the loose stuff fall. The props held.

Toby breathed. His heart stayed his.

“Did they all get through?” The ones we saw.

The stone-bringer said hello. Toby answered with the ordinary word.

Dot heard seven through the hand.

Left branch rises. Flooded to the roof. Air comes through a crack too small for us. Turned back.

Right brought us to the far side of the chamber.

The missing support. The threads are holding its place.

I can see where to build now. Beyond the rib: daylight.

Toby doesn’t want to hold anything else.

He doesn’t have to want to.