Scarecrow

Toby dropped the cup just after midnight.

It wasn’t loud. Tin against stone, a little water spilling into the dust. I woke because I’d been listening for him even in my sleep.

He was sitting on the edge of his bedding with one hand held out where the cup had been. The small wall shimmered round him. Beyond it, the cookfire had gone to coals.

I pushed myself up.

My leg objected. I ignored it.

“Toby?”

He looked at the cup.

“Just dropped it.”

I was already reaching for my stick.

“Lucas.”

I stopped.

He bent down, picked up the cup, and set it beside his blanket.

“Just dropped it,” he said again.

I sat back.

The north camp was quiet around us. People slept in the shelters we’d put up when the canyon floor started breaking. Blankets hung between some of the beds. A pot lid clicked softly as the last heat went out of it.

Beyond the shelters, a watch lamp moved along the path.

Toby rubbed his hands together.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“My throat.”

“Your hands?”

He looked at them as though he hadn’t considered the possibility.

“Tired.”

I nodded.

He waited.

I could feel how hard I was looking at him. At his chest, his color, the little movement in his neck. Things I’d learned to see because once I hadn’t been able to stop watching them for forty-one minutes.

“You can look away,” he said.

I couldn’t think of an answer that wasn’t a lie.

He took pity on me.

“Get me some water, then.”

I got up too quickly. Had to stop with both hands on the stick until the ground settled.

Toby watched me.

Neither of us said anything.

By the time I reached the water jar, I understood how ridiculous that was. We were both supposed to be resting, and each of us was apparently willing to make himself worse rather than let the other notice.

I filled two cups.

When I came back, I sat on the ground outside his wall. He opened a little place to take his through, then closed it again.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

I drank mine.

For a while, that was all we did.

“Can’t sleep?” I asked.

“I did.”

“Then?”

He turned the cup between his palms.

“Then I woke up.”

I waited.

The watch lamp passed behind a hanging blanket. Whoever carried it paused, saw us, and moved on.

“I thought I still had it,” Toby said.

“The wall?”

He nodded.

“The big one. I woke up and couldn’t remember letting it go.”

His fingers tightened round the cup.

“I could feel where the stone was. Here.” He touched the back of his neck. “And I thought if I moved, it would come down.”

“It came down,” I said. “On the props. We saw them hold.”

“I know.”

I knew that voice. I’d used it often enough when knowing something hadn’t helped.

So I didn’t tell him again.

Risa appeared from behind the next blanket with her hair flattened on one side and an expression that suggested she’d been hoping we would become sensible without her.

“Is something wrong?”

“No,” Toby said.

I said nothing.

She looked between us, then at the cups, then sat on the other side of him. He let her through the small wall. She waited until he’d closed it before taking his wrist.

“Fast,” she said after a while. “Yours.”

“I know.”

“I wasn’t telling you. I was telling him.”

I looked down at my cup.

She wasn’t wrong.

Toby leaned back against his rolled blanket.

Risa didn’t ask him to describe the roof. She didn’t ask him to sing or listen for anything. She sat with one hand loose round his wrist until his shoulders lowered a little.

I watched the coals.

There was a piece of wood shaped like the broken rib, black along one edge and red within. I turned it with the end of my stick so it stopped looking like that.

Toby noticed.

“You too?”

“A bit.”

He nodded.

I felt less ashamed of sitting there after that.

“I was angry,” I told him.

“When?”

“When you put the bag down. Before the wall.”

He looked at me steadily.

“I know.”

“I thought you were going to stay behind.”

“I thought I could hold it.”

“That wasn’t what I thought.”

“No.” His voice was very quiet. “It wasn’t.”

Risa kept her eyes on the coals. She could have left. She didn’t.

I put my cup down carefully.

“I wanted to carry you out whether you wanted it or not.”

“You couldn’t have.”

“I would have tried.”

“And who would have built the props?”

I didn’t answer.

He wasn’t asking to win.

That made the question harder.

“I didn’t want to die under it,” he said.

The words were almost lost in the little space between us.

I looked at him.

“I know.”

“Do you?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it.

Toby watched his thumb move over the rim of the cup.

“I wasn’t thinking about being brave. I saw it falling. I knew the shape I needed. And you were there.”

He glanced up.

“I thought you’d do something.”

My throat closed so suddenly I couldn’t speak.

“I didn’t know what,” he said. “That’s usually your bit.”

Risa’s mouth moved.

Almost a smile.

I tried to make one too and couldn’t quite manage it.

“You did,” he said.

“I nearly couldn’t.”

“But you did.”

I looked beyond him at the ordinary ground under our blankets.

He’d been frightened. Of course he had. I’d seen his face. But somewhere between the falling stone and the sound holding it, I’d turned him into something in my head that only existed for me to save.

He’d been doing his part and waiting for mine.

“I shouldn’t have talked as though you meant to leave us,” I said.

He nodded once.

That was all.

It was enough that I knew he’d needed to hear it.

After a while, Toby lay down.

Risa stayed until his breathing became slow and ordinary. The close shimmer remained, faint in the coal light, the way it had on the nights before we’d gone below. His tuning fork lay beside his hand.

I went back to my bedding.

Sera was awake.

She lifted one edge of my blanket without saying anything, and I sat beside her because there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

“He’s all right,” I whispered.

“For now,” she said.

I looked at her.

“So are you.”

She put her hand over mine. The cut across its back had been cleaned, but it looked sore.

I turned it gently to see.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

I let it rest.

Day 427 began with somebody dropping a spoon.

Toby startled upright.

So did I.

Liam looked at us from beside the pot, spoon at his feet.

“Sorry.”

Nobody told him it was nothing.

He picked it up, washed it, and put it down on a folded cloth instead of the stone.

Then he brought breakfast.

Luna had made a list.

I knew because she was holding it in the way she held lists that nobody was going to like.

“All seven of us stay here today,” she said.

Holt grunted.

“Wasn’t planning a stroll.”

“No climbing. No going below. No working on the supports. No flying.”

I took a mouthful of broth so she couldn’t immediately ask me whether I’d heard.

She waited until I swallowed.

“Lucas.”

“I heard.”

“Good.”

Risa sat with her bowl between her knees.

“Does that include you?”

Luna looked at her.

“Yes.”

There was a small silence.

Liam leaned toward Sera.

“Write down the day.”

“I already did,” I said.

Ilse took the list from Luna.

Not to argue with it. To see what still needed doing.

“Corr and I can check the surface marks. From the path. Dot can send the little ones where we can’t go.”

“Hands,” Dot said.

Ilse glanced at her.

“Your hands.”

“This unit would prefer that they also remain outside the collapsed passage.”

“They can look from the open end,” I said. “Where we came out. Nobody needs to go through the fall.”

Dot turned toward me.

“This unit agrees.”

There was something careful in the way she said it.

I wondered how many times she’d listened to our broken reports yesterday and wanted somebody to agree to that sooner.

Wren came before the dawn line with her mirror wrapped in cloth.

“I’m going up with Corr. We can send from the high path. You can watch from here.”

I looked toward the tower.

The sun hadn’t reached it yet.

“And the other window?” I asked.

“Dot’s ready.”

Dot stood beside the shelter with the recording apparatus and a slate. The letters we’d already tried were written on it, larger than they needed to be. A. B. The gaps marked beside them.

Yesterday morning seemed impossibly far away.

We had heard B before we went underground.

Then there had been water, stone, darkness, and Toby’s voice under the roof. Somewhere beyond all that, Mother had gone through another day I knew nothing about.

“Same one,” I said.

Dot tipped her grille.

“The received pattern?”

“B. Let him know we heard.”

No new word. No question we didn’t yet know how to ask.

Just the next small piece.

Toby watched from his bedding, inside his wall.

I nearly asked whether he needed anything added to it.

He caught my eye before I spoke.

I swallowed the question.

Risa sat close enough to see him, but she had breakfast in her hands instead of his wrist. When the familiar change passed through the morning, she put the bowl down and watched quietly.

Dot recorded.

Eleven seconds.

Names moving through a place I couldn’t follow them. Mother among them. Maura. The gap. Crane.

I waited for the little pattern after the names.

It came.

Dot marked it.

Then the morning was only morning again.

“B,” she said.

“Again?”

“The same intervals, within the variation of the previous exchanges.”

Liam exhaled beside me.

“Could be a receipt,” he said.

“Could be all he managed,” Sera answered.

I nodded.

Both were possible.

I wanted to tell him about the chamber. About the thing wired into the rock, the nursery, the arch of glass. About Toby sitting alive beside us after he’d tried to send a lander to take him away.

We had a letter.

I looked at the slate until I could be grateful for it without pretending it was enough.

“Keep it,” I told Dot.

“This unit has.”

Wren returned with numbers.

F-twenty-two had water for six days if the weather stayed dry. Food for longer. The other two had answered, both still alone, both still waiting. F-twenty’s message had included a description of the ridge where a craft might land.

She put the slate in my lap.

Six days.

I read it twice.

“Day four hundred and twenty-nine,” I said.

Luna looked up.

“If the skiff’s sound. If I can lift it without this.” I held out my hand. It was steadier than last night. Not steady enough. “We take water first. We don’t wait until we can bring everyone at once.”

Wren crouched beside me.

“We can tell them we’re preparing. Don’t give them a day you might not make.”

I looked at the number again.

“Preparing water. Next message at dawn.”

She nodded.

“We can promise that.”

Toby moved as though to get up.

Luna looked at him.

He stopped.

“I was going to check the bag.”

“Liam can check the bag.”

Liam, halfway through his breakfast, looked surprised by this discovery.

Toby shook his head.

“He doesn’t know where—”

“Then tell him.”

Nobody spoke for a moment.

Toby looked toward the little case beside his bedding. The bag had dried stiff with mud around its bottom. One strap was frayed where something underground had caught it.

He reached for it.

Liam set his bowl down and brought it to him instead.

“Start with the things that explode,” he said.

“None of it explodes.”

“That’s disappointing.”

Toby gave him a look I recognized from before the tunnels.

I went back to my broth.

They spread a clean cloth between them.

Toby stayed seated. Liam took each item out and put it where he was told. Rolls of cloth. The little case. A bottle wrapped so it wouldn’t strike the metal beside it. Things we’d carried out in a hurry and things Toby had insisted on packing before we went in.

Some of the cloth was wet.

Toby touched it, frowned, and put it aside.

“Wash and dry it again. Not with the clean rolls.”

Liam nodded.

“And this stays upright.”

Another nod.

He was listening properly now.

It was strange, how little it took to turn the bag from Toby’s possession into something the rest of us could understand. Nothing inside it changed. He just told someone where things went and why.

After a while, Juno came over with more clean cloth.

“Can I listen?”

Toby looked up.

“Yes.”

He sounded surprised.

I wished he hadn’t.

Matthias watched from his chair.

It had taken two people to help him into it that morning. His face had gone pale with the effort, but he had stayed sitting while he ate, one hand resting carefully on his thigh.

“Am I allowed to be useful?” he asked.

Toby turned.

“Without standing.”

“Cruel limitation.”

Liam handed him the empty cloth rolls.

Matthias examined one.

“I was imagining something grander.”

“You can make them very straight,” Liam said.

Lena, sitting beside him, held out her hands.

“Give me the other end.”

Between them, they rolled the clean strips and laid them in a row. Lena found a twisted edge by touch and made Matthias undo half of one to put it right.

He complained.

She ignored him.

Toby sat back against his blanket and watched the bag being put in order without his hands doing all of it.

Later, I found him crying.

Quietly. Head down, one hand over his eyes. The others had gone to fetch water, and I had been pretending not to watch him while Dot showed me what her hand could see from the upper opening.

I put the screen down.

“Pain?”

He shook his head.

I waited.

“I’m tired.”

“I know.”

“No. I mean—”

He stopped. Took a breath that caught halfway in.

I moved my seat closer, slowly enough that he could have told me not to.

He didn’t.

“I know where everybody’s things are,” he said at last.

I looked at the bag.

“Who needs which blanket. Who won’t say they’re cold. Who says they’ve eaten when they’ve just carried the bowls.”

I looked away.

He gave a wet little laugh.

“Yes. You.”

“I ate.”

“Today.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that.

He wiped his face on his sleeve.

“Yesterday, when the roof stopped, I thought I could keep it there if everybody moved quickly enough. Then nobody was moving quickly. There were the little ones, and Holt, and the one that was trapped.”

His hand closed against the blanket.

“And I wanted them to hurry. I wanted somebody else to decide who was next. Just once.”

“Luna did.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t have to count everyone after the first seven.”

“I still was.”

I looked at the bag again, all its contents laid neatly in the right places.

There were kinds of weight I couldn’t see at all.

“I don’t know how to stop doing that,” he said.

“You don’t have to stop all at once.”

It sounded like something he would have told me. I almost apologized for borrowing it.

He breathed out.

“I don’t want to go with the water.”

I nodded.

“Then don’t.”

“Even if—”

“Tell Liam what he needs. Tell whoever goes. Stay here.”

His mouth trembled again.

I kept quiet until it stopped.

“I still want to help,” he said.

“I know.”

“Later.”

“All right.”

“Don’t decide I can’t go anywhere now.”

I thought of the lander’s straps. Of how angry I’d been that somebody thought care could look like a bed you hadn’t asked to be in.

“I won’t.”

He looked at me carefully.

I made myself say the rest.

“I’ll ask you.”

That was the promise I could make.

It was going to be harder to keep than I wanted it to be.

Dot’s picture showed the arch still standing.

Her hand had come down only far enough from the upper opening to see it. No one went below. The image was dim, but the lamp found the red curve and the broad feet, and the water moving through the space we’d left beside them.

The pale creature was farther from the shelf.

Only a little. Enough that part of the floor it had covered was visible now. The heavy strands lay slack along the wall.

I called Holt over.

He looked for a long time.

“Moved,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Dot held the picture steady.

“Can we call the canyon safe?” Ilse asked.

I shook my head.

“That support’s still there. That’s all we know.”

She nodded and took the answer back to Corr.

We kept the beds on the north path.

Nobody complained about carrying water uphill that afternoon. At least, nobody complained where I could hear.

I asked Dot to leave the picture on.

The pale body filled the lower part of it. Beyond the glass, Teeming moved along the old tracks with their bundles. One stopped at a pool and lowered something carefully toward the water.

“We need to talk to it,” I said.

Holt looked at me.

“The queen?”

“If that’s what it is.”

“You’ve talked to the deep.”

“We still don’t know how much of one belongs to the other.” I looked at the threads in the picture. “And saying hello isn’t the same as knowing how to live beside somebody.”

Luna came over and sat on the other side of the screen.

“What do you want to say?”

“That we’re staying. That we want them to be able to stay too.”

She watched the small shapes moving below the arch.

“Start smaller.”

Dot’s hand couldn’t speak.

It could hear us. It had a lamp. It could move.

That was what we had to begin with.

“No sound through the rock,” I said. “Nothing we learned from the deep. We don’t know what we’d be asking.”

Toby was still asleep. I was glad I didn’t have to see him wonder whether we needed him again.

“Just the lamp,” Luna agreed.

Dot moved the hand to the inner side of the upper shelf. It stayed well back from the edge. Then it lowered the lamp toward the glass, held it there, and raised it again.

Light passed over the arch.

The creature didn’t move.

We waited.

I was beginning to wonder whether it could even see the lamp when a thin strand lifted from the wall beside the new support.

It touched the glass.

A soft brightness moved through the red curve, as it had before we left.

Then faded.

Nobody said anything.

Dot lowered the lamp again.

Raised it.

This time the strand brightened before it touched.

Holt leaned forward.

“Did it answer?”

“Maybe,” I said.

I wanted it to be yes so badly I had to be careful with the word.

We tried once more.

A slow sweep of light over the thing we’d built together. Then stillness.

The brightness returned along the strand.

It wasn’t a word. It might only have been reacting to movement, or light, or the little machine on its shelf. But it had happened three times, and each time we had waited for it instead of filling the silence ourselves.

Dot kept the recording.

“That’s enough,” Luna said.

I nodded.

“Same place tomorrow. Same movement. We see whether it does it again.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Holt asked.

“Then we try to understand why.”

He sat back.

For a while, he watched the picture without speaking.

“I told you to think of it as a thing giving orders,” he said.

“You told me what you thought.”

“Aye.”

He rubbed his palms against his knees.

“I’d like to know what it thinks.”

“So would I.”

Luna drew the slate toward her.

“First we find out whether it knows we’re trying to speak. Then where each of us can walk without frightening the other. Water. Tunnels. The fields.”

“No hunting them away from the gully,” I said. “Not for being there.”

“And nobody goes into a crowd assuming they’re welcome,” she said.

I nodded.

We could make rules for our own people. We couldn’t call them an agreement until the other side had a way to answer.

On the screen, the strand withdrew from the glass.

The pale body settled again.

I thought about the first time I’d seen a Teeming and how little there had been in my head except finding a way to make it stop moving.

There were reasons for that. Names. Places I could still see when I closed my eyes.

I wanted something after them.

“Peace,” I said.

Holt looked at me.

“That’s what we’re trying for. Not just getting through one day without either of us being frightened enough to kill the other.”

He looked back at the chamber.

“Then we’d better learn to talk.”

Dot drew her hand back toward the daylight, slowly enough that the lamp’s last pass crossed the whole arch.

We watched until the picture showed the sky.

Toby slept after lunch.

Properly, this time. Long enough that Liam could take the bag away to mend its strap, bring it back, and put it beside him without waking him.

I sat with Sera in the shade and let her change the cloth on her hand herself.

The cut was shallow. I could see that much. It would have been easy to keep looking until I found a reason to do something more.

She tied the cloth and nudged my knee with hers.

“You’re staring.”

“I’ve been told.”

“At least you’re practicing on everyone.”

I leaned my head against the shelter pole.

Below us, the canyon looked almost as it had before the ground opened. That was the worst of it. From here, sunlight and distance made the broken places seem small.

“I thought fixing it would feel different,” I said.

“The roof?”

“All of it.”

She followed my gaze.

“You fixed a roof.”

I nodded.

She rested her unhurt hand on my arm.

“That was quite a lot for yesterday.”

When Toby woke, he asked for paper.

I found some in my pack and brought it over with the pencil. He was sitting beside Lena, who had been listening while Juno described the view from the high path.

“Enough?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Writing down the bag?”

“No.”

I waited a moment too long.

“A letter,” he said.

“To your mother?”

“Yes.”

I looked at the blank sheet.

We had no way to send it. Not words like these. Not a whole page in his own hand, with whatever he needed to put on it. The eleven seconds had carried a letter of the alphabet. That was all.

He knew.

I didn’t tell him.

“Keep the pencil,” I said.

He wrote very slowly.

Not because his hands shook as much as they had in the night. Because he kept stopping to think.

I went away before I could read anything over his shoulder.

Near the cookfire, Wren and Corr were marking the route toward F-twenty-two. Water vessels stood beside them, empty for now, lids checked and tied to their handles so they couldn’t be lost.

Liam sat cross-legged with Toby’s bag and a piece of cord, working the repaired strap through his hands.

“This is uglier than it was,” he told me.

“Stronger?”

“I think so.”

“Ask him.”

He glanced toward Toby, bent over the paper.

“Later.”

I sat down beside him.

We checked the lids together.

At supper, Toby came to the fire.

He brought his blanket, his fork, and the folded sheet. He chose a place with his back to a supply box instead of the rock wall, and nobody asked why.

Priya handed him a bowl.

He took it in both hands.

Dov was carving something small on the other side of the fire. Teo was telling Ade how much of the lower wheat he’d been able to inspect from the marked path. Matthias had gone back to his bedding before his strength ran out, and Lena and Juno took their bowls over to sit with him.

All the ordinary things we’d nearly missed.

Liam put the bag beside Toby.

“Does this count as mended?”

Toby examined the strap.

Pulled it once.

Then again, harder.

“Yes.”

Liam looked pleased.

“It’s ugly,” Toby added.

“That’s a separate service.”

Somebody laughed.

Then somebody else.

Toby’s laugh came out rough and broke into a cough. I moved before I could help it.

He lifted one hand.

I stopped.

He took a drink. Waited. Breathed.

Then he looked at me over the cup.

“All right.”

I sat back down.

Sera’s knee touched mine beneath the blanket.

No one made anything of it.

The letter stayed beside Toby’s bowl until supper was over.

Then he folded it once more and held it out to Dot.

“Can you keep this?”

“This unit can.”

“Not read it out.”

“This unit understands.”

He didn’t let go immediately.

“I might want to change it.”

“This unit will return it when asked.”

That seemed to be what he needed.

He released the paper.

Dot put it away as carefully as I’d ever seen her handle anything. Then she stayed beside him while the fire burned lower, with one arm resting near his shoulder and the colors moving slowly in her shell.

When he went to bed, he took the cup himself.

I watched him carry it across the few paces between the fire and the shelter. Watched him set it on the flat stone beside his blanket.

He looked back at me.

I looked away.

Not very far. Not for very long.

But enough that when he lay down, I didn’t see whether he needed a second try.

Day 427. Toby.

Woke in the night thinking he still had the roof. I woke thinking I had to watch his heart.

Risa sat with us.

He thought I’d build something. He was waiting for me to do my part.

I told him I was sorry.

Seven resting. Luna too. Ilse and Corr on the surface marks. No one below.

Sent B back. Received B. Kept it. Don’t know more yet.

F-twenty-two: six days of water. The others answered. Preparing supplies. Tell them again at dawn.

Liam learned the bag. Juno listened. Matthias and Lena rolled the cloth.

Toby doesn’t want to go with the water. He’ll tell us what to take.

The arch still stands. The pale thing has moved away from it. That doesn’t make the rest of the canyon safe.

Three slow passes of the lamp. Three lights in the glass. Perhaps an answer. Try again tomorrow.

We want peace. We have to learn enough to ask for it.

Toby slept.

Wrote a letter. Dot will keep it and give it back when he asks.

He brought his own cup to bed.

I let him.