Scarecrow

Holt crossed out the arrow I had drawn through the mountain.

It was a good arrow. Straight, mostly, and pointing in the right direction.

“What was wrong with that?” I asked.

“Where does it end?”

“Outside.”

“With fifty-one people, three kits, and an unknown number of Teeming standing outside a prison.”

I looked at it again.

He pushed the pencil back towards me.

“Try drawing the other end first.”

We were in the new schoolroom. The children had surrendered it on the condition that we put the benches back afterwards. Nessa had delivered that condition herself, with the seriousness of someone who had already discovered adults were unreliable about furniture.

Luna had the mountain drawings spread across two tables. Sera had brought the plans for our streets. Risa sat between them, eating a piece of bread while she compared the station’s power routes with the marks Aster had made.

There were people waiting beyond the doorway, but nobody crowded in.

We had learned that much from the last arrivals.

I turned the paper around and drew Scarecrow.

Not the tower. The streets, the kitchens, the medical building, the houses that were occupied and the rooms that were not.

The place where people would have to live after we opened their doors.

“That,” Holt said, “is a better beginning.”

We had room for the humans.

We did not yet have the right room for everyone else.

Our queen helped us understand the difference.

Dot set a recording hand beside the table, and the queen spoke through it while I listened to her directly. Her thoughts were clearer than the words sometimes. Not better. There were things I understood in a feeling that I could not have put into a sentence for the others.

There were other things Dot understood that I missed entirely.

“The chambers must not share a single entrance,” Dot said.

Sera paused over the plan.

“Because they’re different broods?”

“Yes.”

“Will they hurt one another?”

A short silence.

Then Dot turned its head towards her.

“The queen asks whether you would put all rescued humans in one room because they are human.”

Sera looked at the three holding sections on the mountain map.

“No.”

“Neither would she.”

We changed the drawing.

The new receiving space would run beside the broad passage to the queen’s chambers. Four sheltered courts, with walls between them and doors wide enough for the largest attendants. Openings above for air. Lower spaces where the young could settle without being exposed to every human who came to see what was happening.

A fifth space would be left empty.

“For anyone we haven’t counted,” I said.

Luna nodded.

Holt made a note beside it.

Our queen asked for a strip of bare earth through each court. Not all stone. She showed me the way a young Teeming rested its lower limbs against the ground, reading the movements of the adults around it.

A hard floor could be comfortable. A floor that carried every bootstep from the street could not.

I had been about to make one continuous foundation.

I separated them on the drawing instead.

Sera watched me do it.

“Still think you can build everything before breakfast?”

“I can build it.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

I looked at the four courts, then the fifth, then the route that would keep curious children out of them without making the young feel shut away again.

“No,” I said. “Apparently I need breakfast first.”

Priya appeared in the doorway with a pot.

“For once,” she said, “someone has noticed.”

The captive queen spoke to us while we ate.

I asked first. She had gone quiet during the night, and I had left her alone.

Her answer came slowly, carrying the impression of a great weight held in place.

*I am here.*

I told her we were preparing somewhere for the young.

For a moment she said nothing.

Then she showed me a chamber.

Not a clear picture, exactly. Positions. Living bodies. The shapes of the walls as she knew them through the silver that had been forced into them. A cluster beneath the warmth of an attendant’s limbs. Another against a feeding shelf.

I set down my bowl.

“Dot. We need another page.”

There were four nursery groups.

Thirty-one belonged to her own brood. Twenty-four to a queen beyond the eastern broken ground. Eighteen to another whose territory she described with a long descending sensation I could not turn into a place on our map. Thirteen to a queen she had not heard freely for years.

Eighty-six young.

Nineteen adults cared for them.

Some of those adults were injured. All had been kept with the young because the young would not feed properly without familiar attendants.

I repeated the numbers twice while Dot checked the translation with our queen.

Nobody at the table went back to eating.

“Do their mothers know they’re alive?” Risa asked.

I passed the question on.

*They are made to know enough to obey.*

Risa lowered her bread.

Luna drew a line beneath the four numbers.

“Then we tell them the rest.”

Our queen was already listening. With the captive’s agreement, she began asking along the connections the neighbouring queens had chosen to share with her.

Not an order sent through the ground.

A question passed from one mind to another.

Did any of them know the mother whose young had been taken from the descending country?

Did anyone know the queen who had last been heard beyond the eastern stone?

There were no immediate answers.

I thought about the letters we had sent home.

Then I picked up the pencil again.

Keir arrived carrying something that looked like a broken chair.

Aster came behind him with a much smaller piece of metal.

They put both on the table.

“Which one am I supposed to be impressed by?” I asked.

“Neither,” Keir said. “Yet.”

The chair was part of a passenger frame. It folded against a wall, locked down flat, and could hold either a seated person or a stretcher.

He showed me the locking pins.

“I want these visible.”

“I could make the catches inside the frame.”

“And then the person using them has to trust they’re in.”

He pulled one through its hole. The red mark beneath it disappeared.

“This way they look.”

I liked it immediately.

Aster set its piece beside the frame. A control switch, large enough to be used with a hand or one of its smaller limbs.

“Two different grips,” it said.

“For the aircraft?”

“For the doors.”

I looked up.

Aster touched the switch once.

“When someone is inside, they should not need to ask a human to let them out.”

We added those to the plan too.

Keir had worked out the transport by volume, weight, balance, and what would happen if everyone tried to stand at once. He had also worked out what would happen if frightened passengers refused to sit where they were told.

“You’ve done that before,” Luna said.

“People are very reliable about being unpredictable.”

His aircraft could carry a useful group. It could not carry everyone in the mountain in one trip.

Mine could, if I built it for that purpose.

He had drawn a long, broad craft with separate compartments and two wide side openings. The human seating ran along the central section. The nursery compartments occupied the rear and lower spaces, each divided from the next, each with its own opening onto an internal passage.

There was space for the kits wherever they chose to travel.

There were also ordinary engines, controls, and enough independent power to bring it down safely if I was elsewhere.

Keir tapped that part of the drawing.

“This won’t fly like the smaller one.”

“How will it fly?”

“Slowly, if anyone has sense.”

Liam, who had come to the doorway with a message from the watch, stopped smiling.

Keir looked at him.

“Especially if anyone has sense.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Liam said.

“You were thinking loudly.”

We built the transport on the open ground beyond the workshops.

People came to watch. They always did when something large was becoming something else.

I had stopped being embarrassed by that.

Mostly.

The material rose from the prepared stacks in broad sections. I could see the structure all the way through it now. Where it needed to bend, where it needed to hold, where a joint should release under an impact instead of driving a broken edge into someone sitting behind it.

Keir walked beside me with the drawings.

“Not yet,” he said when I started closing the outer skin.

I stopped.

He climbed into the unfinished frame and followed a cable route with one hand.

“We need to be able to reach this.”

A panel appeared beneath his fingers.

“And this.”

Another panel.

He looked at me.

“You’re enjoying that.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Make the hinges ordinary.”

I did.

There was something satisfying about building a thing that people could understand after I walked away.

The engines were more complicated. Keir knew what the controls needed to do. Aster knew how to make the separate systems speak to one another without one failure silencing everything. I could make the materials they needed and understand what those materials would do when the engines ran.

Between us, the drawings became a machine.

Not a finished one. Not yet.

Keir would not let anyone call it finished until he had checked it.

The nursery floors were separate from the human deck, held on mounts that softened the vibration of footsteps. Our queen sent two attendants to inspect the compartments.

One stopped beneath an opening I thought was generous and refused to go farther.

I waited.

It moved its forelimb sideways.

I widened the opening.

It went through, turned around, and came back.

Keir put a mark on his drawing.

“Useful inspector,” he said.

The attendant tapped the edge again.

I lowered it as well.

“Very useful,” I said.

Risa found me inside the forward compartment after midday.

I was making the water containers easier to remove.

She stood in the doorway, one hand resting above her waist.

I looked at her hand, then at her face.

She caught me doing it.

“I still have a stomach, Lucas.”

“I know.”

“It still gets annoyed with me for eating too quickly.”

“I know that too.”

She came inside and sat on the edge of a folded seat.

For a little while she watched the containers settle into their brackets.

Then she said, “Luna asked me which position I wanted.”

“For the rescue?”

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“The control chamber. With you until the power routes are separated, then with Dot at the internal doors.”

I nodded.

She waited.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re being very careful.”

“I am trying.”

“I can tell.”

I sat beside her.

Outside, someone dropped a tool. Keir said something I could not hear. Liam answered loudly enough for both of them.

Risa leaned against my shoulder.

“I don’t want us to start pretending nothing has changed,” she said.

“We aren’t.”

“And I don’t want every decision I make to become a decision you make for me.”

I looked at our hands on the seat between us.

“I don’t want either of those things.”

“I know.”

That made it easier to say the rest.

“I want you somewhere safe. I want Sera somewhere safe. I want Luna somewhere safe. When I think about the mountain, I keep finding ways to put everyone I love behind me.”

“And then?”

“Then I remember there are three different doors, and you all know how to do things I don’t.”

She took my hand.

“I want you safe too.”

“I know.”

“No. Properly. Not because the silver makes you difficult to hurt. Because you’re you.”

I turned towards her.

She kissed me, softly at first, then with one hand against my cheek.

When she drew back, she was smiling.

“Now show me the place where I’m supposed to sit. If Keir has made the belt uncomfortable, I’m telling him.”

“He made me make it.”

“Then I’ll tell both of you.”

The difficult part of the plan was not the mountain’s doors.

I could open those.

It was all the doors we could not see.

Dot put the copied relay diagram on the schoolroom wall that afternoon. Aster laid the control records beneath it, in the order they had actually been sent rather than the order the station had chosen to file them.

There was a difference.

A large one.

“Here,” Dot said.

The ridge device had continued its last pattern when the relay stopped speaking to it. The command remained inside its own controls. Silence from the mountain would not necessarily mean silence on a distant ridge.

Some devices would stop.

Some would wait.

Some would keep doing exactly what they had been doing before.

The captive queen knew the difference because she had felt them.

*They built waiting into the small mouths,* she told me. *So that resting would not free us.*

I repeated it.

Luna stood very still beside the wall.

“Then we close the small mouths first.”

Aster moved one record away from the others.

“This was used when an output assembly was replaced.”

The record was ordinary maintenance. A device had been taken out of service, its local output disabled, and its replacement tested before the new connection was permitted.

No pain command had been required to stop it.

There was a separate control path for the machinery itself.

Dot had found it in the local copies. Aster had found the matching confirmation in the relay records. The captive queen remembered the brief quiet when it had happened.

For the first time that afternoon, Luna sat down.

“Can we use that?”

“Yes,” Dot said.

“Can we prove it before we do?”

Dot turned towards me.

That was how I ended up making a machine whose only purpose was to show us whether another machine had really stopped.

We did not put living silver into the test device.

There was no need.

The control parts were ordinary enough once I could see their structure. I made the same receiver, the same local storage, the same switches that joined power to the output. Where the stolen silver would have been, Aster asked for a harmless load and a light.

When the device was being ordered to speak, the light shone.

When it was quiet, the light went out.

We connected it by cable.

Dot sent the last recorded instruction from the ridge device into the controller.

The light came on.

Aster removed the cable.

The light stayed on.

Nobody said anything.

I knew what it meant. So did everyone else.

Dot connected the cable again and sent the maintenance instruction.

The light went out.

Aster disconnected it.

Darkness.

Then it shut off the power, waited, and restored it.

The light stayed dark.

“Again,” Luna said.

We tried a return to the old command. We tried a broken connection halfway through the instruction. We tried the acknowledgement arriving without the switch actually moving.

That last one made Aster stop us.

“The confirmation alone is insufficient.”

It showed us the difference between a device saying it had received an order and its output actually losing power.

We needed both readings.

I changed the test housing so we could see them separately.

Holt watched from the end of the table.

“This is why you don’t ask the man holding the lock whether the door is open,” he said.

Dot turned one small light towards him.

“A reasonable comparison.”

Holt looked pleased with that.

We finished with a list of devices whose controls matched the test, a second list that needed a different sequence, and a third list that did not report enough for us to trust them from a distance.

The third list had two entries.

Luna circled them.

“We don’t leave those to chance.”

Our queen found one of the mothers before evening.

The message came while I was putting the roof over the receiving courts.

I stopped with a broad panel hanging above the walls.

Below me, Sera looked up.

“Lucas?”

“She found her.”

Sera put down her measuring line.

I lowered the panel into place before saying anything else.

The eastern queen had twenty-four young in the mountain.

She had believed three of them dead.

The captive queen knew they were alive. She had felt the adults move them away from a damaged feeding space months before, but the people who kept the records had continued sending the older count.

Our queen carried the correction through the willing queens between them.

The answer that returned was too large for the few words I knew.

I stood with one hand against the new wall while it passed through me.

Sera came close.

I told her what I could.

She laid her hand over mine.

For a while we did not work.

Then the eastern queen asked where her young would be taken.

I showed our queen the courts, the transport, the routes on Luna’s map. She passed on what she could, and Dot helped us put the rest into something the mother would recognise.

Scarecrow was shelter if she wanted it.

It did not have to be their home.

She wanted them returned to the boundary of her own country, with their attendants, once they were well enough to travel.

We changed the transport plan again.

Luna did not complain about the extra distance.

Keir asked about landing ground.

The mother knew a place.

The two uncertain devices were not near the mountain.

One stood in the eastern queen’s territory.

The other was farther south, where our maps ended in guesses.

The eastern queen could reach hers. She knew the ordinary power housing and could place adults beside it without drawing the attention of the human crews who visited only when it failed.

The southern device took longer.

By nightfall, a neighbouring queen had agreed to send a small group to look. She had not agreed to anything beyond that, and our queen did not pretend she had.

We waited for what they found.

That waiting felt different from the helpless kind.

There were things to do inside it.

Sera finished checking the courts. Priya and Dov measured shelves in the new kitchen annex. Toby organised the medical rooms with clean water, privacy screens, and places for people who did not want to be touched yet.

Wren brought him a stack of blank pages.

“For names?” he asked.

“For anything they want us to know.”

He looked at her, then moved the pages away from the examination tables and onto a small desk by the door.

She smiled.

Later, I saw them carrying a bench into the quiet courtyard together, arguing about which way it should face.

They settled it by sitting on it.

I left them there.

Dane asked to speak at the evening meeting.

Keir had been checking the loading times. His pencil stopped moving.

Dane noticed. He kept his eyes on the map.

“There’ll be a count before the transport shift,” he said. “At the receiving station, they did it before the supply doors opened.”

“Did you see a count here?” Luna asked.

“No.”

“Then we mark it as a possibility.”

He nodded.

There was a little colour in his face, but he did not argue.

“They kept the room list on a board outside each section. Names were sometimes wrong. Numbers weren’t.”

Aster moved one of the copied images towards him.

“Like this?”

“Yes.”

We had seen the boards without understanding all their uses. Dane pointed out the small sliding markers beside the names.

Inside. At work. Under examination.

Keir put down his pencil.

“What did they put beside mine?”

Dane swallowed.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ask?”

“Yes.”

Keir watched him.

“They said you had been reassigned. I should have kept asking.”

Nobody hurried to make the silence easier.

After a while Keir picked up his pencil again.

“Tell us which doors they used for the count.”

Dane leaned over the drawing.

It was useful information.

It did not repair everything between them.

I was beginning to understand that both things could be true at once.

The captive queen asked about her own chamber after everyone else had gone.

I was with our queen, sitting on the broad stone ledge near the place where her damaged plate had been.

The repaired surface was smooth now. Beneath it, the new living silver had settled into paths she had chosen herself.

She moved a shallow stone bowl closer to me.

It had a slightly uneven rim.

*I made that without your help.*

“I can see.”

*You are looking at the uneven part.*

“I like the uneven part.”

She considered that.

Then the older queen spoke through the connection she had permitted between us.

*Do not carry me beneath a sky I have not chosen.*

I sat straighter.

“I wasn’t going to.”

A pause.

“I was thinking about how,” I admitted.

Our queen shifted beside me. I felt amusement, gentle and unmistakable.

The captive showed us the chamber around her body. The mountain had not always been a prison. Parts of it were much older than the machines. Water moved through deep stone. There were spaces beyond the excavated walls where her brood had once rested before the Sorn found her.

She had lived there freely.

They had built the prison around her.

“You want to stay?” I asked.

*I want to decide when I can move without them deciding for me.*

I thought of Aster testing its door.

“Yes,” I said. “We can do that.”

The restraints that pierced her plates would need to come away. So would the structures drawing silver out of her living tissue. Some of the surrounding machinery now did work her damaged body had once done for itself.

I could distinguish the injuries from the supports. She could tell me how her body had felt before either existed.

Together, we began working through what I would repair first.

Breathing spaces. The movements that carried nourishment. The damaged living pathways around the places where metal had entered her.

Then the restraints.

Then an opening large enough for her to leave if she chose.

Our queen listened carefully.

After a time, the captive turned her attention towards the new branches inside her.

*You have begun to grow.*

*Yes,* our queen answered.

*Show me the place where you held the new paths apart.*

I felt our queen’s hesitation. Not fear. The uncertainty of offering unfinished work to someone who understood it.

Then she showed her.

For several minutes, neither spoke in anything I could call words.

I felt paths compared, possibilities offered, questions answered. The older queen did not seize the new growth or push it where she wanted it to go.

She waited while our queen tried a small change for herself.

Beside me, the stone bowl widened by the thickness of a finger.

Its rim became level.

Our queen held it still.

Then, very deliberately, she made one side uneven again.

I laughed before I could stop myself.

The captive queen asked what had amused me.

It took longer to explain than it should have.

I was glad of the time.

The next morning, Keir made us load the new transport with people who had absolutely no reason to obey him.

It was a good test.

Nessa wanted to sit beside a window. Ellis wanted to know where to put his walking bag. Liam tried to help three people at once and blocked the passage. Old Son stood in a space we had thought large enough and proved that it wasn’t when someone needed to get past carrying a stretcher.

I widened it.

Keir made me write the change onto his drawing before we continued.

“You can remember it,” he said. “The next person fixing it might not be you.”

Sera went through one side door with a stretcher team. Toby came through the other.

They met in the middle and could not turn.

We moved a partition.

We tried again.

The attendants came aboard with bundles shaped and weighted like the young. One refused the floor fastening we had made and used its own limbs to hold the bundle instead.

Our queen explained why.

A frightened young one needed to feel a familiar body around it. Holding the bundle still was not the same as making it feel held.

We changed the supports so they steadied the attendants without separating them from the young.

By midday, the craft looked less tidy than Keir’s first drawing.

It worked better.

He seemed pleased about that.

The first flight was empty except for Keir, Aster, and me.

I lifted us while he watched the balance and the movement of the suspended floors.

Then he took the controls.

I let the engines carry our weight.

The sound changed. The hull trembled very slightly, then settled.

Keir made a slow circuit over the prepared ground.

Aster watched the separate power readings.

I watched Keir.

He did not grin. He did not announce that he had done it. He made a second turn, checked the response, and brought us down where he had said he would.

Only after the engines stopped did his shoulders loosen.

“Well?” I asked.

“It flies.”

“I noticed.”

“Now we find out how it flies full.”

We used secured weights before we used passengers.

By the time he was satisfied, the sun had moved past the tower.

The larger craft could travel without me. It would use more time and careful flying than the smaller one, but it could bring everyone aboard home if I stayed with the captive queen.

Keir ran his hand over the control housing.

“That’s the part I wanted,” he said quietly.

“So did I.”

He looked at the silver markings along my wrist.

“You could probably carry the whole mountain now.”

“The people inside would complain.”

“Quite rightly.”

Aster opened the passenger doors from its own control.

We went outside.

The southern queen’s answer reached us during the final rehearsal.

Her adults had found the device.

They could reach its power housing.

They wanted to know whether breaking the ordinary connections would hurt the living silver inside.

I asked Dot to bring the section drawing.

Then I showed our queen precisely which parts could be separated without touching the captive fragment. She passed that understanding on. The southern queen asked two more questions before she agreed to help.

Nobody called her slow.

That left us with a plan we could actually carry out.

Two distant power housings would be isolated by the broods living beside them, at an agreed signal carried through willing queens. The other devices would receive their own maintenance stop through the station’s existing machinery. Dot and Aster would check both the received instruction and the loss of output power.

No new high-powered broadcast.

No demand that every queen listen to us at once.

If any output failed to stop, we would know which one before we removed the central controls.

The captive queen would be able to feel the difference too.

Luna walked us through it until nobody had to guess what happened next.

I would enter through the southern service chamber with her, Risa, and Dot. The route was known. The local alarms and internal weapons would be isolated before the holding sections opened.

Sera, Toby, Corr, and Ilse would bring the first teams through the sheltered approach once the doors were safe. Sera would take the human section nearest the nursery passage. Toby would establish the medical point where both groups could reach him.

Keir and Aster would hold the transport ready, with Liam helping the loading teams. Our queen would send attendants who had already inspected the compartments, including one familiar with the eastern mother’s brood patterns.

Sigmund and Holt would stay at Scarecrow, with the watch and the people preparing the receiving spaces. Wren would keep the names and movements straight. Anja would organise the arriving groups with Priya.

There were people who looked disappointed not to be going.

There were people relieved to be staying.

Luna gave both the same careful attention.

When she finished, Holt tapped the map.

“And when someone does something we haven’t put on this page?”

“We make sure the people are safe,” Luna said. “Then we change the page.”

He nodded.

That seemed to be the answer he had wanted.

Sera found a flaw during the last walk through the receiving courts.

It was not in the walls or the entrances.

It was in us.

“We’ve told everyone where to go,” she said. “We haven’t told anyone what happens if they don’t want to.”

I looked at the human rooms beyond the courtyard.

“They can leave.”

“Of course they can. Do they know that?”

I thought of the board outside the mountain holding sections. Inside. At work. Under examination.

“We’ll tell them.”

“Before they board.”

“Yes.”

“And if someone wants another settlement?”

“We find out where it is.”

“And if one of the kits wants to stay in the mountain after we’ve freed it?”

“Then it stays.”

She nodded.

“I want that said by someone who isn’t holding a weapon.”

I looked down at my empty hands.

Then at the silver patterns running over them.

Sera followed my eyes.

“You can say it too,” she said. “Just leave enough room for them to believe you.”

We stood beneath the new roof while the afternoon breeze moved through the open upper wall.

I put an arm around her.

She leaned into me, warm and steady.

A few weeks earlier I would have been listening for a tremor in her breathing, measuring the time since her last dose, wondering whether I had made enough for the morning.

Now she was thinking about frightened strangers and the words that might help them trust a doorway.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“That’s an awful smile for nothing.”

“I like having you here.”

She tipped her face up towards mine.

“Then keep up.”

We ate at Liam and Anja’s house that evening.

There were not enough chairs, so Liam brought two from outside and Anja sat on the low wall beside the open door until Sera made room for her.

The old pot was on its shelf.

It looked ridiculous there. Battered, blackened underneath, carefully cleaned everywhere else.

Liam caught me looking at it.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking loudly.”

Keir had ruined that phrase for him.

Anja laughed and passed the food.

For a while we talked about things that had nothing to do with the mountain. A leaking bucket that no longer leaked. Whether the square needed another tree. The children wanting a place where they could make a mess without somebody describing it as a problem with the new city.

“A workshop,” Sera said.

“A small disaster,” Liam said.

“Same thing, depending on who’s using it,” Anja told him.

Luna laughed with her mouth full and had to put down her cup.

I watched the lamplight on her face.

Risa’s knee rested against mine beneath the table. Sera was leaning back with one arm over the empty chair beside her. Liam kept looking at Anja when he thought nobody would notice.

I noticed.

I did not say anything.

There were some things a person deserved to keep until they were ready to share them.

Afterwards, Anja walked us to the gate.

“Bring him back with the aircraft in one piece,” she told Luna.

“The aircraft or Liam?”

“Both would be ideal.”

Liam objected from inside.

Nobody paid him any attention.

At home, Luna checked the final list once more.

Sera took it from her when she reached the bottom.

“You’ve read it.”

“I know.”

“So have we.”

“I know.”

Risa put a hand over the place on the table where Luna had been about to reach for it again.

Luna looked at the three of us.

Then she let out a breath and sat back.

I pulled my chair closer.

“We have the transport,” I said.

“Yes.”

“We have room here.”

“Yes.”

“The queens know what we’re doing. The captive is helping us. Everyone has a way out.”

Her gaze moved to mine.

“That’s the part I keep checking.”

I took her hand.

“So do I.”

There was no clever answer to it. I did not try to find one.

Later, when the lamps were out and the house had settled around us, the captive queen asked whether we were still there.

I answered quietly in the place where she could hear me.

*We are.*

She showed me the nursery nearest her chamber. One of the smallest young had moved from beneath an attendant and settled against the inner wall, near the path through which she could feel it.

*They do not know yet,* she said.

“Can you tell them?”

*I can tell the attendants.*

“Tell them there will be familiar people coming. Tell them nobody has to leave a young one behind.”

A long silence followed.

Then she asked one more thing.

*When the doors open, will the small ones be permitted to make noise?*

I lay still beside the people I loved.

Outside our window, someone laughed on the covered street. A door closed. Farther away, a child called for someone to wait.

“Yes,” I told her.

“As much as they want.”

Day 578–579. Plan.

Nursery count confirmed by the captive queen: eighty-six young and nineteen adult attendants across four broods. Thirty-one young belong to her. Other groups number twenty-four, eighteen, and thirteen. Eastern mother contacted through willing queens. Her young are all alive, including three she believed lost. She wants them returned to her country after rescue and assessment. Other family contacts continuing.

Receiving courts built with separate entrances, quiet floors, earth strips, and room for familiar attendants. Human accommodation ready. Destination choices to be explained before anyone boards. Scarecrow is offered shelter, not another assignment.

Keir and Aster completed the large transport’s controls and independent flight tests, including secured loads. Compartment layouts revised after loading rehearsals. Can bring the rescue party and captives home while I remain to repair the planetary queen’s injuries if needed.

Remote coercion devices must stop before central restraints are removed. Maintenance control tested against copied local circuitry without living silver. Receipt and actual output isolation checked separately. Two devices lack reliable remote confirmation. Local queens have agreed to isolate their ordinary power connections at the coordinated signal. No tower broadcast.

Captive queen wants freedom to decide where she lives. Mountain was her home before it was her prison. Plan includes restoring her damaged body, removing restraints, and opening a route large enough for her to leave. She has begun helping our queen understand the new growth.

All teams assigned. Sigmund and Holt keeping Scarecrow ready. Departure after the final reports from the two distant devices.

Still one hundred and seventeen here.

Room made for more.