Scarecrow

The message from the northern saddle arrived while I was making Sera’s treatment.

Luna read it beside the table.

She did not interrupt me.

That frightened me more than if she had.

I finished, put the cup in Sera’s hands, and waited until she had taken the first mouthful.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The shuttle is gone.”

I looked at the page.

“And Dane?”

“No answer from the base. Corr can see the landing ground from the rise. No people moving.”

Risa sat up on the bed.

“Did anyone come to the saddle?”

“No.”

There was another line beneath the first two.

The gate was open.

I read it twice, as if the words might become more useful if I gave them another chance.

Sera lowered the cup.

“Go and find out,” she said.

We ate before leaving.

I had begun to hate how often an important day started with someone making certain I finished a bowl.

I had also begun to understand why they did it.

My leg was steady that morning. There was no headache. Yesterday’s flight had tired me, but it had not emptied me in the way the overflow work had.

Toby checked that before agreeing with the plan.

Luna and I would take the hull to the saddle. Corr would meet us there. Dot’s hand would come with us to record what we found, while the rest of her remained at Scarecrow with the queen’s messages and the people who needed her.

No splitting up inside the base.

No following a trail beyond the route we could check.

No deciding that a silent building was safe because we wanted someone alive to be waiting in it.

Holt listened from the other side of the table.

Then he said, “Count the doors before you go through one.”

Luna nodded.

Risa stood beside my chair with the list of Dane’s twelve in her hand.

Wren had copied it from the names sent through the mirrors weeks before.

“They have names,” Risa said.

“I know.”

“Take them.”

I folded the page and put it inside my coat.

The morning was clear enough to make the journey feel wrong.

Sunlight lay along the wet ridges. Mist lifted from the lower ground. In one place, a narrow stream crossed a slope that had been dry when we’d first learned this route.

Nothing in the air warned us that a gate had opened and twelve people might have gone through it without ever reaching somewhere safe.

Luna sat beside me, watching the land.

We stopped at the same clear place as yesterday.

I drank. She checked the route page. Neither of us pretended the pause was wasted time.

When we reached the saddle, Corr was waiting beside the shelter.

“No movement,” Corr said. “No reply. We’ve watched the paths we can see. Nobody came up ours during the night.”

“Could they have left another way?” Luna asked.

“Yes.”

It was not a comforting answer.

It was an honest one.

We left the hull where the watch could see it and went towards the base on foot.

The gate stood against its stop.

It had not been torn off.

One of the lower fastenings had caught in the wet grit, leaving the frame open at an angle that made the entrance look narrower than it was.

I stopped where we’d spoken to Dane yesterday.

“Dane?” Luna called.

Her voice carried between the buildings.

No answer.

“Keir?”

A loose strip of the carrier’s shade screen moved in the breeze.

The carrier itself was gone.

I looked again.

The temporary support we’d seen beneath it yesterday remained on the ground. So did a small wedge beside one of its feet.

There was no craft above them.

Luna followed my gaze.

“Record that.”

Dot’s hand turned towards the empty space.

Then towards the landing ground.

We waited and listened before crossing the gate.

I could hear water somewhere behind the storage building.

Nothing else.

There were three doors we could see from the entrance.

The main building. The store. The covered work area, which had a proper closing panel at the back I hadn’t noticed during the earlier visit.

Luna pointed them out quietly.

Then she looked towards the far side of the landing ground.

“No fresh ground that looks wrong?”

“Not from here.”

I studied the surfaces I could actually see.

Ordinary stone. Mud. The fitted gate frame. A shallow crack beside the damaged retaining edge that had already been there yesterday.

I could not look into a sealed box we had not found yet.

I could not tell Luna there was nothing dangerous behind a wall simply because the wall itself made sense to me.

I said that.

She nodded.

“We stay together.”

We entered the yard.

The main door was unlatched.

Luna called again before opening it.

No answer came from within.

Corr stayed where the yard and the doorway were both visible. I stood beside Luna while Dot’s hand moved far enough inside to look around the first corner.

No people.

No movement.

Two exits from the first room.

We went in slowly.

The room smelled of damp cloth and something faintly scorched.

Bedding had been rolled or removed. Most of the hooks along the wall were empty. One still held a short piece of cord, cut rather than untied.

A cup lay on its side beneath a bench.

I looked at it longer than it deserved.

Then I realized why.

It was the first thing in the room that looked accidentally left behind.

Everything else had the ordered absence of a place someone had prepared to leave.

That did not tell us whether everyone had agreed to go.

It only told us someone had packed.

We checked the other rooms.

Slowly.

Calling before each doorway.

There were no bodies.

No injured person hidden beneath a covering, waiting for us to find them.

No one who had slept through the departure.

I had thought not finding bodies would feel better than it did.

Instead, the empty places kept asking where the people had gone.

At the back of the main building, Luna found the table where someone had laid out the bags we’d seen from the gate.

The surface bore pale rectangles where objects had protected it from dust.

One packing strap remained beneath a leg of the table, trapped there tightly enough that someone had cut the free end away.

Luna crouched to look without moving it.

“Fast,” she said.

“Or not worth lifting the table,” Corr replied.

She nodded.

We kept both possibilities.

I was getting tired of possibilities.

They were still better than an answer we invented because we couldn’t stand the room being empty.

The store had been cleared more thoroughly.

Shelves remained. Containers did not.

The low rack beside the wall held marks where sealed cases had sat, with one broken corner of a label caught behind the rear support.

Dot photographed it before Luna eased it free.

Only part of the receiving code remained.

Enough that I recognized the pattern of letters and figures from the trial consignment we’d sent months before.

I took out the copy Holt had made us carry.

We compared the surviving section.

It matched.

“It was here before,” I said.

Luna looked at me.

“On the container, when we borrowed the carrier. I told the others.”

“Yes.”

“So it isn’t proof of last night.”

“No.”

She put the fragment in a clean folded sheet and wrote where she’d found it.

“It is proof we didn’t misremember the code.”

That was smaller than the answer I wanted.

We kept it anyway.

The kit was gone.

Its work area was easy to recognize.

The floor had shallow contact marks where its legs had stood repeatedly beside the loading rack. A charging or service connection, ordinary enough in its outer fittings for me to understand, hung loose against the wall.

No kit.

No remaining limbs.

No damaged core left behind.

Dot’s hand remained still for a long time.

I remembered the kit turning towards us when we first landed here, then returning to its work.

I had raised a hand.

I had not asked its name.

“What should we record?” Luna asked softly.

Dot answered through the hand.

“Kit absent. Identity not established. Do not count it as a crate.”

Luna wrote that down.

Exactly.

I stared at the empty contact marks until my eyes began trying to make a body from the spaces between them.

Then I looked away.

Behind the store, the water tanks were still standing.

The damaged one was empty, as Dane had told us. The sound one had been closed properly. A length of hose lay coiled beside it, with the end tied above the wet ground.

Someone had taken care over that.

I wondered who.

Keir, perhaps.

Or someone else whose name was on the page in my coat and whose face I would never have picked out from a distance.

Luna checked the path beyond the tanks.

Footprints overlapped in the mud near the buildings. Farther out, the recent rain and runoff had blurred the ground.

We could not tell whether one person had left on foot among the older traffic.

We could not tell whether twelve had walked to the shuttle.

I wrote down that the tracks did not answer the question.

It felt almost offensive to put so many words around something we didn’t know.

Holt would have made me do it anyway.

The work area held the carrier’s removed support pin.

It lay beside a tool tray that had been emptied except for a cracked spacer.

I crouched with difficulty, then accepted Luna’s hand before my leg could make the decision for me.

Keir had been securing the carrier yesterday.

Perhaps he had finished repairing it.

Perhaps the shuttle had carried it out as cargo.

Perhaps someone had flown it away separately.

We had seen none of those things.

The missing craft did not give us a direction to follow.

On the wall above the tray, a pencilled list recorded ordinary maintenance.

Tank support.

Landing pin.

Strap wear.

Nothing about a destination.

Nothing written for us to find.

I found that harder to accept than I would have expected.

Some part of me had wanted Keir to leave a message because we had left him an offer.

But he had not been living inside our story.

He had been trying to decide what to do with his own life.

We didn’t know how much time he’d had to decide it.

The landing ground was the last place we examined.

From the gate, it had looked like darkened stone and flattened dirt.

Close up, the marks were stranger.

Four broad landing impressions lay around a central area where the surface had changed colour. The pattern wasn’t the wide, dirty blast I’d expected beneath an ordinary engine.

There were narrow dark bands.

Short curves.

Places where the stone had gone glassy along an edge and remained dull beside it.

I stopped outside the nearest mark.

The stone itself was readable.

Ordinary material, altered by heat or something that had behaved enough like heat to leave a familiar result.

The shuttle’s opaque substance had not been left for me to study.

“Can you change it?” Luna asked.

“Yes.”

“Don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

Dot moved around the boundary of the marks, taking views from several angles.

Corr kept watch beyond the gate.

I stayed still while the shapes began to arrange themselves in my memory.

The first one was a hook with a short return beneath it.

I had seen it on the side of the shuttle yesterday.

The second had the same paired strokes as the copy in my coat.

The third was complete here.

Not identical in size to the mark on the hull.

Identical enough in its relationships that I knew it before I put the paper beside it.

Luna lowered herself to one knee without stepping on the darkened surface.

“All three?”

“Yes.”

Dot compared them with the stored images.

“The forms correspond,” she said. “Orientation differs. I cannot infer their meaning from that.”

“Could part of the craft have touched the ground?” Luna asked.

“Possibly. A projected pattern, an arrangement of components, or a contact surface could produce a repeated form. We did not see the underside clearly.”

I looked at the marks again.

They were not a sentence I could read.

They were not a confession.

They were a connection between the craft that had landed here and the material we had followed through too many other places.

For once, the connection was on ground we could touch.

We made copies without changing the marks.

Dot recorded them. Luna measured their positions against the landing impressions. I drew the shapes on paper, including the broken edges where the surface had flaked.

When I finished, I wanted to keep looking.

As though another minute might make the marks turn into words.

Luna stood beside me.

“Lucas.”

“I know.”

“We’ve checked the buildings.”

“Yes.”

“The yard. The visible paths. The tank space.”

“Yes.”

“We can come back with more people to search farther. We don’t make this a different journey because the answer is bad.”

I looked towards the open gate.

Yesterday, I had hated it for being closed.

Today, I hated how little opening it had changed.

I put the drawing away.

Before we left, we put a notice inside the gate where someone returning on foot would see it.

SCARECROW CAN RECEIVE YOU.

NORTHERN SADDLE SHELTER OPEN.

WATER AND DIRECTIONS THERE.

Then the date.

Then our names.

Luna checked that the notice would remain sheltered from the rain. Corr placed a smaller direction marker at the safe turn, away from the damaged outer path.

We did not take food or equipment from the base.

There was little left to take, and none of it would answer the question we had come for.

At the threshold, I called once more.

“Keir.”

No answer.

I waited until waiting became something I was doing only for myself.

Then I followed the others out.

At the saddle, we gave the watch what we knew.

No one found in the buildings or yard.

Shuttle gone.

Carrier gone.

Kit gone.

Most portable supplies removed.

No bodies found in the area searched.

No confirmed destination.

The words sounded colder when spoken together.

We kept the shelter open and asked the watch to record any movement rather than approaching an arriving craft.

A search of the safe overland approaches would continue with fresh people. The damaged slopes remained out of bounds until checked.

Corr stayed to help organize it.

Luna and I rested before returning to the hull.

I sat with the list of twelve on my knee.

Beside it, I added one line.

Kit. Name unknown.

Luna saw me write it.

She did not suggest putting it somewhere else.

We reached Scarecrow while the new room’s roof was being finished.

A cheer rose from the work area as the last outer panel settled into place.

Then someone noticed us.

The cheer faded awkwardly, as if being pleased about a roof might have become inappropriate while we were away.

I shook my head before anyone apologized.

“Is it dry?” I called.

Gareth looked up from the doorway.

“We intend to find out without another flood, if that’s acceptable.”

“Very.”

He nodded.

The work resumed.

Luna put a hand against my back as we went towards the common shelter.

We had brought something frightening home.

It did not need to take the roof away too.

Risa was waiting beside Holt’s table.

Sera stood on the other side with a cloth still looped through her belt from the building work. Sigmund came in behind them, saw our faces, and stopped asking whatever question had brought him there.

I put the list on the table.

“We didn’t find anyone.”

Risa looked at the names.

“Bodies?”

“No.”

“Any sign of a fight?”

“Nothing that lets us say there was one. Nothing that tells us everyone went willingly either.”

She nodded once.

Then she sat down.

I gave the report in the order Luna and I had agreed while resting at the saddle.

Buildings.

Supplies.

Carrier.

Kit.

Marks.

Holt stopped us only to ask where we had stood when we saw something, or whether an answer came from yesterday or today.

By the end, I understood why he did it.

The frightening parts wanted to pull everything else into one certainty.

He kept them separate long enough for us to see what was actually there.

Sigmund looked at the copied marks.

“What are they?”

“We don’t know the words,” I said.

“But you’ve seen them.”

“Yes.”

He glanced towards Dot.

“You said they belonged to the people taking silver.”

“Associated with their equipment and claims of possession,” Dot said. “That is what the queen has taught us so far. It does not mean every appearance can be translated as the same instruction.”

Sigmund studied the page.

“Does the station know?”

“We haven’t received an answer to that question,” Luna said.

“Then ask it.”

“We will.”

Holt moved the old material receipt beside the fragment from Dane’s store.

The surviving section of code matched.

The forms on the landing ground matched our older copies.

Those were two separate chains.

Neither told us where Keir had gone.

Together, they made it harder to accept anyone calling the disappearance ordinary without explaining it.

We prepared a station query that afternoon.

Not a broadcast from the tower.

A written report ready for the next brief, established local contact or physical handover, with a copy kept at the northern saddle if a known supply pilot appeared there first.

Twelve named people absent from Dane’s base following the arrival of a grey shuttle.

Departure not witnessed.

Destination unknown.

Carrier and kit also absent.

Request confirmation of authorizing office, receiving location, passenger list, and safe arrival.

Luna read it aloud.

Risa added one sentence.

REQUEST DIRECT CONTACT WITH A PERSON FROM THE GROUP.

We kept it.

A receipt could tell us a page had reached a desk.

We had learned not to mistake that for a person reaching safety.

The queen asked to see the marks.

Dot brought the request while I was still at the table.

I looked at Luna.

She looked at Toby, who had been checking the way I held my leg whenever he passed.

He sighed.

“The upper meeting place. Sit down when you reach it. No work.”

“I was going to ask—”

“I know.”

Risa stood.

“I’m coming.”

So was Sera, though she waited until her hands were warm again before taking her coat.

Luna stayed to finish the watch arrangements, then joined us at the entrance.

The four of us went down together with Dot carrying the copies.

For once, nobody was waiting beneath a falling roof.

I wished that made it a pleasant visit.

The queen remained in the higher chamber.

We reached the broad shelf overlooking its near edge without going through any of the flooded passages. A worker guided us around a section of damp ground and waited until we were settled before withdrawing.

The queen’s damaged plate was visible from where I sat.

A pale covering lay along one edge. Several smaller workers attended the area beneath it.

I looked only as long as I needed to understand that she was being cared for.

Then I looked at her face.

Dot laid the drawings where she could see them.

The queen studied the copied shapes.

The silver beneath her plates moved in a slow sequence that made Dot go very still.

I felt the change without understanding it.

Risa’s hand closed around mine.

“What did she say?” Luna asked.

Dot took time before answering.

“She recognizes the association. She does not know which captors used this particular craft.”

The queen indicated one of the forms.

Then her own body.

Then the dark beyond the chamber.

Dot asked a question.

The queen answered at greater length.

I waited until the waiting began to hurt.

“The marks were placed on things the captors claimed,” Dot said at last. “On housings around taken silver. On transports. On restraints. This is remembered history shared among broods, and some is her own experience. She is separating those for me.”

I looked at the copied hook.

“Can she read it?”

“Not as a human reads a written word. She knows what accompanied it.”

That was different.

It was also enough to explain the way the chamber had changed around her.

The workers had not stopped tending her plate.

They had moved closer to her body.

Risa leaned forward.

“Tell her we’re not asking her to relive something for us.”

Dot passed that on.

The queen answered quickly.

“She knows. She chooses to tell us.”

Risa nodded.

We stayed quiet.

The queen showed us a place beneath the edge of an older plate.

Not the fresh damage from the flood.

This was a healed narrowing where silver passed around a scarred space instead of through it.

I did not reach towards it.

I did not try to read the grey substance as though enough effort would turn it into ordinary tissue.

I looked at what she chose to show.

Dot’s voice was low when she translated.

“Taken here. Before she came to these chambers.”

Sera made a small sound beside me.

The queen covered the place again.

The gesture was deliberate.

The showing was finished.

I realized my hands were clenched and made them open.

“What happened to the people at Dane’s base?” I asked.

Dot asked her.

The queen did not pretend to know.

She knew what such craft had carried before. She knew that captors could offer movement before confinement, food before separation, return before silence.

She did not know whether these twelve had been taken that way.

She could not promise they would come back.

I was grateful for the honesty and furious that honesty had so little comfort in it.

Luna asked whether the queen could follow the craft’s pattern.

The answer came in several exchanges.

Not through the sky.

Not across any distance simply because she wished to.

Nearby broods had felt it arrive. Some had felt it leave during the dark. Their reports could indicate a direction at the limits of their own reach, but the pattern had faded beyond them.

Other queens might have heard something farther on.

They would have to be asked.

Some might not answer.

“Will she ask?” Risa said.

Dot didn’t need to finish translating before the queen began her reply.

“Yes.”

The single word came so quickly that I looked up.

Dot’s lights warmed.

“She had already begun.”

The queen lowered one forelimb to the stone near our shelf.

“She understands that there are more missing now.”

I took out the list.

Twelve names.

One kit whose name we had failed to learn.

Dot began giving the queen the sounds, one at a time.

We did not leave with a route.

We left with someone else searching.

There was a difference between those things. I knew it. I wrote it down later.

But when the guide walked with us towards the upper passage, I found I could breathe more easily than when we’d entered.

Not because I had decided Keir was safe.

Because his disappearance had become a question more than one mind was trying to answer.

At the stopping place, Sera touched Dot’s frame.

“Are you all right?”

Dot waited before answering.

“No.”

We stopped with her.

“The kit at Dane’s base may have gone willingly,” she said. “It may have been ordered to pack itself. I do not know which. I did not ask who it was when we met.”

“Neither did I,” I said.

Dot’s hand closed gently around the edge of the paper tray.

“I would like to ask if we find it.”

“We will,” Risa said.

Not that we would find it.

That we would ask.

It was a promise we could keep.

Old Son was waiting near the common shelter when we returned.

Dot went to him before taking the drawings to the records box.

Their lights moved in patterns I didn’t understand.

I did not ask Dot to translate a private conversation simply because I was standing near it.

After a while, Old Son moved one of his hands against hers.

They stayed that way.

I went to help Sera put the papers away.

The new room’s doorway had a hanging screen now. Inside, the first bedding places lay raised clear of the floor. Gareth was showing Tali where she could put a bag without blocking anyone’s feet.

Across the path, Neri watched Aven carry a folded blanket into the room.

Her supported leg was beside her chair. Pella sat nearby with a cup in both hands, looking more awake than she had a few days earlier.

“Who’s moving?” I asked.

“Tali, Cass, and Edan,” Sera said. “Nara, Emmet, and Lea are taking the other side. They agreed to it. That gives us some room under the common roof.”

“Six.”

“Six people who won’t hear every spoon we wash after they go to sleep.”

I looked into the room.

It was not grand.

It was theirs.

We carried the last small things in before supper.

I took cups.

Someone else took the heavy bedding.

The arrangement offended my pride less than it had a week ago.

Edan stood in the doorway after his bag was inside and ran his uninjured hand along the frame.

“Does this latch?”

“From inside,” Gareth said. “If you want it to. Screen’s temporary. Proper door when the hinges are ready.”

Edan nodded.

After a moment, he said, “Good.”

He didn’t explain why the choice mattered.

Nobody asked him to.

I thought of Dane’s gate, opening for a shuttle and closing while we watched.

Then I watched Edan hold his own doorway open for Cass.

I wanted to keep the difference clear in my mind.

At supper, we told the camp what had happened.

Only what we knew.

There was fear. There were questions we could not answer. One of the newest people wanted to know whether every station craft should be considered hostile now.

“No,” Luna said. “We record which craft we see, who speaks, and what they ask. We don’t turn every unknown person into the same enemy.”

“And if they offer us transport?” someone asked.

“We ask where, how the choice is made, and how to contact people who’ve already arrived,” Risa said. “And nobody here is required to board because someone else agreed for them.”

Sigmund looked at the list of twelve beside Holt’s elbow.

“People get to say no?”

“Yes,” Luna said.

He nodded.

The question had sounded simple.

I knew it wasn’t.

We kept the spaces for Dane’s people on the sleeping plan.

Not twelve empty beds in a camp that could barely fit everyone it already held.

Twelve names beside arrangements we could make if they arrived. A note about additional cover. A route from the saddle. Food that could be sent ahead with a guide.

Beside them, Dot wrote that space and power would also be needed for a kit of unknown condition.

Holt read the addition.

Then he moved another line on the page to make room for it.

No comment.

I liked him very much for that.

Later, Risa found me outside our room, looking towards the northern ridge.

It was too dark to see the saddle.

I knew that.

She leaned beside me against the sheltered wall.

“Any new report?”

“No.”

“The searchers?”

“No one on the checked paths. They’ll continue with light.”

Risa folded her arms against the cold.

“I hated not knowing where Sigmund was.”

“I remember.”

“I still hate it for other people.”

I turned towards her.

She looked tired, but not as she had before his voice came through the receiver. There was somewhere for her fear to go now. A brother asleep under our roof. Something real she could check with her own eyes.

Keir had no one here who could do that for him.

“Then we keep asking,” I said.

“Yes.”

She took my hand.

“And we eat. And sleep. And build the next room.”

“Yes.”

“So there’s somewhere to bring them.”

I put my arm around her, and we went inside.

Luna was writing the final report at our table.

Sera sat beside her, drawing the next wash shelter on the back of a rejected wall plan.

The little bird stood on its shelf above the bed.

Risa checked that its uneven feet were secure, then left it alone.

I sat where my leg could stretch out and opened the diary.

For a while, I couldn’t decide how to begin.

There were thirteen people to write about if the kit was counted as it should be.

There were two empty buildings and a cleared work area.

There were marks on stone that connected things without explaining them.

There was a room at home with six people settling into it for the first time.

I wrote the date.

Then I started with what we had seen.

Day 557. What came out.

Returned to Dane’s base with Luna, Corr, and Dot’s hand. Gate open. No people found in the buildings, yard, tank area, or other visible spaces searched. No bodies found. That is not a conclusion about what happened beyond the search.

Shuttle gone. Carrier gone. Kit gone. Most portable supplies and bedding removed. Packing evident. No clear evidence establishing whether everyone left willingly. Departure not witnessed. Destination unknown.

Partial receiving-code label recovered from behind store rack. Matches surviving section of trial consignment code already seen there before. Landing marks contain three forms matching our copies. Ordinary ground altered; no readable sample of the shuttle’s material left behind. Images, measurements, and drawings retained.

Notice left inside gate. Northern saddle shelter open. Fresh search of safe approaches continuing. Station query prepared: authorization, destination, passenger list, confirmation of arrival, direct contact with a person from the group.

Queen recognizes the marks’ association with captivity. Showed an old place where silver was taken from her. Does not know what happened to these people. Asking other queens about the departing pattern. No confirmed route yet.

Twelve human names remain missing. Kit’s name unknown. It belongs on the list too.

First additional sleeping room occupied by Tali, Cass, Edan, Nara, Emmet, and Lea. More space beneath common roof. Next wash shelter drawn. Leg steady with rests. Daily treatment for Sera continued.

One hundred and four people home.

Thirteen more to ask about.