Scarecrow

Sera wanted to see it without the screen.

She said so after lunch, while I was putting Anja’s support back around her ankle. We’d spent the morning looking at the old injury, then working on one small part of it until Anja said she’d had enough.

I stopped when she said it.

Matthias watched from the next bed with an expression that suggested he’d be mentioning this the next time I told him something was nearly finished.

“Not the whole way down,” Sera added.

I looked up.

“The upper shelf. Where we came out.”

“Why?”

She considered the question.

“Because I keep thinking I understand when I’m watching the picture.”

“And you don’t?”

“I don’t know what my hands will do when it’s in front of me.”

Anja looked at her.

Then at the clean cloth wrapped round Sera’s hand.

“I know that feeling,” she said.

Luna came with us.

Dot went as far as the opening and sent a hand ahead. Risa stayed at camp with Toby. She’d offered to come, but there was no reason to ask her to listen through more rock when we already knew the path.

We took two lamps.

I left the mirrors folded. I wanted to see what was there, but I didn’t need to carry every possible way of looking at it into the chamber on our first visit since the collapse.

Sera walked beside me with her hands empty.

Luna had told us the same thing twice.

“If either of you needs to come back, say it. Nobody finishes an introduction because they’re embarrassed to leave.”

“I heard you,” Sera said.

“I was telling him the second time.”

I kept walking.

The opening looked smaller from outside.

Two slabs leaning together. A pale tuft of growth catching the light. Beyond it, the first shallow steps went down into darkness.

I remembered coming through with my arm across Sera’s shoulders and discovering that the sky was still there.

Now I was looking the other way.

Sera stopped beside me.

“Still want to?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She nodded.

“So do I.”

Dot lowered her grille toward us.

“This unit will remain here.”

“Keep the way lit,” Luna said.

“This unit intends to.”

We went slowly.

The hand ahead of us carried one lamp. Luna carried the other. I kept one hand against the wall and the stick where I could see its end.

The air became warmer. Damp stone. The quiet sound of water farther down.

No falling dust.

No weight moving behind the walls.

I noticed every absence, which wasn’t the same as being certain none of it would happen again.

At the shelf, Luna stopped us.

The arch stood beyond the broken rib, thick red glass with the lamp catching its inner curve. I could see it directly now. The left shoulder. Both feet. The contact where the stone rested above it.

I looked for the pale line I’d seen when the weight came down.

It hadn’t returned.

For a moment, I wanted to touch the support simply because it was still there.

I stayed beside Sera instead.

The queen lay nearer the pools than before.

That was what we’d begun calling it, even with the question still beside the word on our slates. It was easier than saying the pale thing every time. I hoped we would learn something better to call it before we forgot that the first name was ours.

Silver moved along the plates of its back.

Not a single pulse. Several. One section brightened while another dimmed. Some strands went toward the little pools. Others disappeared into the wall beyond our view.

There were more Teeming below than I’d expected.

Or perhaps they were simply easier to see now that I wasn’t holding up part of their ceiling.

One lifted a bundle from a hollow. Another stood beside the water with its front limbs resting in it. Farther away, a small dark shape climbed over the back of a larger one and slipped, and was caught before it reached the floor.

Sera watched that.

Her hands stayed empty.

The familiar strand lifted toward the glass.

Light moved along the arch.

Dot’s hand lowered the lamp and raised it again.

The strand withdrew.

Luna crouched, keeping herself back from the cracked outer edge.

“We’re here,” she said quietly.

Not as though the words would be understood. As though they belonged in the record of what we’d chosen to do.

The nearest Teeming turned toward us.

Then another.

Below, the queen moved one plate a little way and settled again.

I felt Sera’s sleeve brush my wrist.

She hadn’t moved closer.

Her hand had begun to shake.

“Room,” she said.

I stepped away from her.

Luna moved too, leaving the way to the stairs open. Sera took one pace back. Then another.

A faint orange line appeared between two of her fingers.

She closed her hand.

The light went out.

Nobody below rushed toward us.

That helped.

Or it helped me. I didn’t know yet what it was doing to her.

Luna kept her voice level.

“Up?”

Sera shook her head.

“Wait.”

So we did.

The Teeming at the bottom of the track began to climb.

It came three steps and stopped.

Sera’s shoulders tightened.

I had time to remember the ridge where I’d found her. The climbers coming over the wall when her fire failed. Her hands burned by the thing she’d used to keep them alive.

Then I was looking at the one in front of us, and it was climbing another step.

Luna lifted her forearm across the way.

Not a strike. Not ice.

The same shape we’d watched on the recording.

The creature stopped.

For several breaths, nothing moved.

Luna kept her arm where it was.

The Teeming lowered its body slightly. Turned its head. Behind it, a carrier passed along the lower ledge with one of the pale bundles.

Then it moved back one step.

Luna lowered her arm.

It stayed where it was.

I heard Sera breathe out.

A long breath. Shaking at the end.

“It stopped,” she said.

“Yes,” I answered.

The creature put one limb against the step beneath it and waited.

I didn’t know whether it had understood her fear or Luna’s arm or only that the path was occupied.

It had stopped.

That was enough to matter.

Sera came forward again.

Only to where she’d been standing before. She didn’t make herself close the space all at once.

The creature remained below us.

She lifted her hand, palm empty, fingers apart.

I watched the place where the orange light had been.

Nothing.

The Teeming raised one front limb.

Held it still.

Sera’s mouth moved, but no sound came out.

Then she lowered her hand.

It lowered its limb.

Beside us, Dot’s lamp made a small circle on the rock.

The queen’s strand brightened against the arch again.

I wished I knew which part of any of it was an answer.

I wished I could keep all of it anyway.

Dot could.

That was something.

We didn’t stay long.

Luna said it was time before any of us began inventing another thing we ought to try. The Teeming moved farther down the track while we turned toward the stairs.

I stopped once to look at the arch.

The strand was still resting against it.

I lifted my hand, not quite knowing whether I meant goodbye or thank you.

The light in the glass changed.

Perhaps because my shadow crossed it.

Perhaps for some other reason.

I left the question unanswered and climbed after Sera.

Outside, she sat down beside Dot.

Both hands flat on her knees.

Luna gave her water. She drank without looking up.

I sat on the other side and waited until she turned toward me.

“I nearly did it.”

“Nearly,” I said.

“That isn’t the same as not wanting to.”

“No.”

She watched the opening.

“Would you have stopped me?”

I thought about the orange line between her fingers. About how fast a flame could grow in a narrow place.

“I don’t know whether I could have.”

She nodded slowly.

It was a dreadful answer.

It was the only honest one I had.

Luna sat with us for a while before speaking.

“You told us what you needed. We made room. It made room too.”

Sera looked at her.

“That’s what happened,” Luna said. “Put that beside the part you’re frightened of.”

Dot’s rivers moved beneath her shell.

“This unit has recorded both.”

Sera gave a small, unsteady laugh.

“Of course you have.”

“This unit would not like either to be omitted.”

Neither would I.

When we went back to camp, Sera walked beside Dot with one hand resting on her shell. She didn’t ask to see the recording.

Not that afternoon.

Wren had the western route laid out when we returned.

Twenty had answered at dawn. Still one. Enough water for now. The ridge description matched the marks she’d kept from the earlier messages.

We could leave the next morning.

Liam had put fresh cloth in the bag and replenished what we’d used for Anja. The skiff stood where we’d left it, dry beneath the vessels, blankets folded on the seat.

Sera looked at the preparations.

“I’d like to stay tomorrow.”

I turned toward her.

She kept her eyes on the skiff.

“With Dot. Try again. If we’re going to keep going there, I need it to become something besides the place I nearly set on fire.”

Luna nodded.

“I’ll go west.”

“Who stays with the camp?”

“Ilse. Risa. Everyone who already lives here.”

She looked at me when she said the last part.

I decided not to ask anything else.

We checked the load before supper.

Less water this time. Enough to leave supplies if the person at twenty wasn’t ready to come, but not so much that we forgot the weight of a fifth passenger.

Anja watched from her bed while Liam counted the blankets.

“Take the softer one,” she said.

He held up two.

“That one. The fold in the other digs into your leg.”

Liam changed them.

It was the first thing she’d offered to the next journey.

I saw Wren notice it too.

Neither of us said anything that might make Anja wish she hadn’t.

That evening, Teo came back from the marked path with mud on his boots and news about the wheat.

“Some of the water’s going past the lowest bed,” he said. “Not into it. Past it.”

“New break?” Luna asked.

“Old one opened wider, I think. I didn’t step off the path.”

He showed us on the slate.

Near the place where I’d written ASK between our channels and the chamber below.

Risa leaned over the drawing, then sat back.

“I can look when I’m rested. From the surface.”

“Tomorrow,” said Ilse.

Nobody reached for a lamp to go and do it immediately.

That felt like progress too.

We put the slate away and ate while the food was warm.

I couldn’t sleep.

I’d expected to dream about the chamber. Instead, every time I closed my eyes, I saw the Teeming stop on the step.

One limb lifted. Luna’s arm across the path. Sera’s fingers lit orange.

Nothing had happened.

That was what kept bringing me back to it. All the things that could have happened, and the narrow piece of time in which none of them had.

I got up quietly and took the notebook to the edge of the firelight.

The camp settled around me. A cough from one shelter. The sound of someone turning over. Dot’s feet on the path beyond the blankets.

I wrote the day.

Then I sat looking at it.

Sera found me there.

She had a blanket round her shoulders and another over one arm. She put the second one across my knees before sitting down.

“You’re flying tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“Knowing seems very popular here.”

I closed the notebook.

She leaned against the supply chest and stretched her legs toward the coals.

For a while, neither of us spoke.

The fire was low enough that the shadows had edges again. I could see the fold of the blanket where it lay over her hand. The little loose thread on her sleeve. Ordinary things, close enough to look at without trying to change them.

“Did I wake you?” I asked.

“No.”

I looked at her.

“I was awake.”

“Thinking about the step?”

She nodded.

“I keep thinking about its foot.”

I hadn’t expected that.

“What about it?”

“It had lifted it. It was already moving. Then Luna put her arm out, and it put the foot back where it had been.”

She made the movement with one hand over the blanket.

Forward. Back.

“It chose the same step again.”

I looked into the coals.

“I saw that.”

“I know you did.”

She pulled the blanket higher on her shoulders.

“I needed to say it.”

After a while, she turned her hands palm upward.

The old damage wasn’t as obvious as it had been when I’d brought her down from the ridge. There were still places I recognized. The skin had healed, but I’d looked at those hands too often when they were burned to forget where.

“I can remember the smell,” she said.

I stayed still.

“Of the ridge. The glass when it was hot. Smoke in my hair. Every time I thought they were going to stop coming, another one would climb.”

“I remember.”

“You remember the end.”

She wasn’t accusing me.

I nodded.

“Yes.”

She looked at her palms.

“There was a lot before the end.”

She told me some of it.

Not in order. A place on the wall where the heat always escaped. The way her left arm began shaking before her right. A climber that kept retreating to the same fold in the rock, then coming up again when the fire thinned.

How she stopped thinking of morning as morning and began thinking of it as the light that showed her how many were still below.

How difficult it was to eat with her hands hurting.

I listened.

Once, I almost said she didn’t have to tell me.

Then I thought about how long she might have spent not telling anyone and kept quiet.

She could stop when she wanted.

I could stay.

“I burned what came toward me,” she said.

“I know.”

“And you changed them when you got there.”

“Yes.”

“What if one of those little ones belongs to one of them?”

I looked up.

She was watching the fire, not me.

“What if we go down there and stand beside a pool and somebody remembers us?”

I had thought about whether we could learn to stop being afraid of them.

I hadn’t spent enough time on what we might look like from below the step.

“They might,” I said.

Sera nodded.

“And we won’t know.”

“Not yet.”

The coals shifted.

She put one small piece of wood on them. Waited for it to catch without touching it with her power.

“I don’t know how to be sorry for surviving,” she said.

“I don’t think that’s what you need to be sorry for.”

“Then what?”

I opened my mouth.

Nothing good came to it.

She looked at me and gave a tired little smile.

“You don’t have to find the sentence.”

“I want one.”

“So do I.”

We watched the wood catch along one edge.

There wasn’t a sentence in it.

There was warmth, which was something we could use.

“I don’t want to do it again,” she said at last.

“Neither do I.”

“I still might. If one came at Liam. Or Toby. Or you.”

“I know.”

Her hand tightened in the blanket.

“I need you to know that before we start pretending I’m good at peace because I managed not to burn one step.”

I looked at her until she looked back.

“I don’t think being frightened makes today untrue.”

She waited.

“You made room. It stopped. You showed it an empty hand. We can start with what happened.”

“And the other things?”

“We don’t erase them.”

It wasn’t the sentence either of us wanted.

She rested her head against the chest anyway.

I told her about Anja asking whether the radio worked.

About the promises I’d almost made beside the skiff. About watching her close the box when I said not yet.

“I wanted to give her more than a place to sleep.”

“You did.”

“Water.”

“And people.”

I looked toward the shelters.

“You keep counting them like the number is all you’ve made,” Sera said. “She asked Juno where the water would be tonight. She didn’t have to work out how to get it down a cliff. That’s a different life.”

I let that sit for a while.

Beyond us, someone laughed softly in their sleep, then fell quiet.

I wondered whether Anja had heard it.

“I’m still afraid we’ll be late for twenty,” I said.

“I know.”

“Then eight.”

“I know.”

“And the water under the field. And whatever Crane is trying to tell us. And Mother.”

Sera moved closer.

“Which one are you doing tomorrow?”

“Twenty.”

“Then I can take the step.”

I looked at her.

“Dot will have the lamp. Luna showed me what to do. If I need to come back, I’ll come back. Ilse knows the surface marks. Risa can look at the water when she’s ready.”

“You don’t have to do it because I’m leaving.”

“I told you I wanted to stay before you started looking guilty about it.”

That was true.

I laughed, a little.

She looked pleased to have managed it.

Dot came along the path while we were still sitting there.

She stopped outside the brightest part of the firelight.

“Query,” she said. “Are both operators intending to remain awake?”

“No,” Sera answered.

Dot waited.

“Not for much longer.”

The rivers in her shell moved.

“This unit has heard that interval before.”

I put a hand over my face.

Sera laughed.

A proper laugh this time, quiet enough not to wake the shelters but enough to loosen something in her shoulders.

Dot came closer.

“Would either operator like the record preserved separately?”

“The chamber?” I asked.

“The raised arm. The retreat. The empty hand.”

Sera stopped smiling.

Then nodded.

“Yes. Please.”

Dot stayed while we watched it once.

Not the whole visit. Just those few breaths on the step.

On the little screen, Sera moved back. Luna raised her arm. The Teeming stopped and put its lifted foot down behind it.

Then Sera came forward again.

Her hand rose, empty.

The creature lifted its limb.

I watched Sera watching herself.

She didn’t look proud.

She looked surprised that she was allowed to remember this part too.

“Keep that,” she whispered.

“This unit will.”

Dot turned the screen dark.

We didn’t ask to see it again that night.

Sera helped me up from the ground.

I gathered the notebook and the blanket. The fire had enough in it to last until the next watch came through.

At the shelter, she stopped beside her bedding.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “when you’re looking for the flash, don’t look for mine as well.”

I knew what she meant.

Her clasp. The habit of counting every person I loved by the things I’d made them, as though knowing where they were could keep anything from happening there.

“I’ll try.”

She tipped her head.

“That sounded suspiciously honest.”

“It was all I had.”

She reached out and held my hand for a moment.

“Bring them home,” she said.

Then she let me go to bed.

I slept until the morning watch woke us.

Not well enough to forget the step. Well enough that my hands were steady when I folded the blankets in the skiff.

Day 431.

Wren went to the high path. Liam checked the bag. Luna spoke to Ilse, then came over with her own blanket under one arm.

Sera stood beside Dot with the two lamps.

She’d changed the cloth on her hand. The fingers were bare.

Toby brought the last cup of water and handed it to Luna instead of trying to carry it aboard for her.

Anja lifted her hand from beside the shelter.

I lifted mine back.

Twenty people at home when we left, including us in the count.

One more waiting in the west.

Before I raised the hull, Sera came to the rim.

“What will you say?” I asked.

“To the queen?”

I nodded.

She looked down at her hands, then back at me.

“Probably nothing it understands.”

“And then?”

“Wait. See what it does. Try to leave enough room.”

I nodded.

That was a better plan than some of the ones we’d survived.

Wren pointed west.

I lifted the skiff, slowly, with all of us watching the space beneath it until there was enough room to go.

Day 430–431. Seraphina stays up.

Anja’s ankle. One small part. Stopped when she asked.

Went to the upper shelf. Luna, Sera, me. Dot at the opening. Lamps.

The arch is whole. The pale line hasn’t returned.

Sera asked for room. We moved. A Teeming came up the track.

Luna held her arm across the way. It stopped. Put its foot back.

Sera raised an empty hand. It raised a limb.

Keep the record.

Water going past the lowest wheat bed. Risa and Ilse will look from the surface.

Sera told me about the ridge. More than the end I saw.

We don’t know what they remember about us either.

She doesn’t want to burn them. That doesn’t mean she isn’t afraid.

Sat together. Dot made us go to bed, eventually.

Day 431. West again. Wren, Luna, Liam, me. A place left open.

Sera has the lamps.

She’ll take the step.