Scarecrow

Luna was dressed before the light came.

I woke because the bed moved when she got up, and then because I could hear her in the other room, not doing anything. Just standing.

I found her at the table.

She had her page of questions in front of her. The neat copy. She’d written it out three times now, each one smaller and straighter than the last, as if handwriting could make the answers come out tidier too.

She wasn’t reading it.

She was looking at the cup of tea beside it, which she had made and not drunk, and which had gone cold.

”You could warm it,” I said.

”Sera’s asleep.”

”I meant you could ask me.”

Luna looked up.

For a second she looked very young. Then the look went away, the way it always did, and she was Luna again: straight-backed, composed, ready.

”It’s fine cold,” she said.

I sat down opposite her.

I didn’t touch the page. I didn’t ask to read the questions. I’d seen the first one upside down, the night before, and that was enough.

”How long have you been up?”

”Since the third hour.”

”Luna.”

”I know.” She turned the cup in a slow circle on the table. ”I kept thinking of new questions. Then I kept crossing them out. If I ask everything, he’ll answer everything and none of it will mean anything. If I only ask some, I’ll go back over the others for the rest of my life.”

”How many are left?”

”Five.”

”That’s not many.”

”No.” She smiled very slightly. ”It’s taken me thirty-two years to get down to five.”

She wasn’t thirty-two. She was twenty. She meant the Accord.

I reached across and put my hand over hers on the cup. It was cold. She let me.

Behind us, the bedroom door opened, and Risa came out in one of my shirts because none of her own fitted any more, with her hair everywhere and a hand pressed to the side of her stomach.

”She’s awake,” Risa said. ”She’s been awake for an hour. She’s very angry about something.”

”About what?” I said.

”I don’t know. Maybe she can tell Luna’s up.” Risa yawned, came to the table, and lowered herself into a chair with the care of someone who had recently discovered she had a centre of gravity. ”She’s been kicking toward the door.”

Luna looked at her.

Then at the door. Then back.

”That’s ridiculous,” Luna said.

”Put your hand here.”

Luna hesitated.

Then she reached across and put her palm flat on the side of Risa’s stomach.

For a moment, nothing.

Then the baby kicked, hard, right under Luna’s hand.

Luna jerked back as if she’d touched a stove.

Risa laughed.

”See?”

”That was a coincidence.”

”Do it again.”

Luna put her hand back. Slower this time.

The baby kicked again. Same place. Then, after a pause, again. Then a fourth time, softer, as if she’d made her point and was now just checking Luna was still there.

Luna’s face did something I’d only seen it do a handful of times.

It came undone.

”She’s counting,” Luna said, very quietly.

Risa stopped laughing.

”What?”

”One. Two. Three. Four.” Luna’s hand hadn’t moved. ”Like at the ramp. Like the skiff.”

Risa looked at me. I didn’t know what to say. It could have been a coincidence. Four kicks was not a very large number.

But the baby’s silver had gone toward Luna’s hand the way it went toward mine. A bright small noticing. And it had stayed there.

”I don’t think she can count yet,” I said carefully. ”She’s very new.”

”I know,” Luna said.

She didn’t take her hand away.

”I’m going to pretend she can,” she said. ”Just this morning. If that’s all right.”

Risa put her own hand over Luna’s.

”That’s all right,” she said.

Luna chose the receiving room.

I’d thought she might choose the house, or the porch, or the mountain, or the bench outside the schoolroom where she’d spent so many evenings planning. Somewhere that was hers.

She chose the room with three chairs.

”He gave them that room,” she said on the walk over. ”Toren. Eren and Tavia. Reed. Dane. He sat in the same chair for all of them. I don’t want anything better than they had.”

”It’s not about better,” Sera said.

”I know. I don’t want anything different either.”

So there were the three chairs in a loose triangle, as there had been the day before. And Gareth, who had heard about it from Priya, who had heard from Wren, had quietly brought three more and set them beside the speaker’s chair without being asked.

Luna sat in the speaker’s chair.

Sera sat on one side of her. Risa on the other, carefully, with a cushion Priya had put on the seat. I sat beside Risa.

The General came in at the second hour exactly.

He looked at the arrangement of chairs. At his daughter in the one his witnesses had sat in. At the three of us around her.

He didn’t comment.

He took the chair opposite her and sat down. He’d brought the paper with his notes, folded small, and his pencil. He put them both on his knee and then, after a moment, put them in his pocket.

Adela sat to one side with her recorder.

Luna looked at it.

”I’d thought,” she said, ”that I didn’t want this recorded.”

Adela reached to turn it off.

”Leave it,” Luna said. ”I’ve changed my mind. I want it kept.”

Adela left it.

The door stood open.

Out on the bench, I could see the back of Holt’s head. He had said he wouldn’t come in. He’d said he didn’t trust himself not to say something unhelpful. But he’d come, and he’d sat down, and he had his arms folded and his chin up, the way he sat at the dawn count when he was listening very hard to something he didn’t want to miss.

Luna unfolded her page.

She didn’t look at it.

”Did you know?” she said.

The General didn’t answer straight away.

I’d thought he might have an answer ready. He’d had two days, and six hours of reading, and a whole afternoon of other people’s questions. A man like him, I’d thought, would have composed his answer the way he composed a briefing: every word set down exactly where it was meant to go, like laying bricks.

He didn’t.

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, ”Know what? I’m going to need you to tell me the edges of the question. Otherwise I’ll answer the part I can bear, and you’ll have to come back for the rest.”

Luna’s hands tightened on the page.

”Did you know,” she said, ”that humanity surrendered to the Sorn.”

”Yes.”

It came out of him at once. No hesitation at all.

”I was in the room,” he said. ”I was twenty-eight. A colonel on the northern front. Three months after the second bombardment failed. The Chancellor’s predecessor sent for nine of us. The senior surviving officers who could still stand up. Senator Friese was there, younger than you’d think. Crane was there, younger still. He held the pen.”

He paused.

”I signed it,” he said. ”Seventh of nine. My hand was steadier than Crane’s.”

Luna didn’t move.

”Did you know what it was for?” she said.

”I knew what I was told it was for. And I knew what it said, which was not the same thing.” He folded his hands. ”I was told it was a ceasefire with conditions. That the Sorn would stop firing on the cities if we supplied them with soldiers for another war, far away, against an enemy they called the swarm. That the soldiers would be our modified. That the domes would be built with Sorn help, and the poisoned land outside left to them as a buffer.”

”And what did it say?”

”It said we surrendered.”

He said the word plainly, the way you set down something heavy you’ve carried a long way and are tired of pretending is light.

”It said the human species accepted Sorn patronage, in perpetuity, in exchange for continued existence. It said we would provide soldiers, refined material, and” He stopped. ”Several other things. I’ll tell you every clause I remember, if you want. I’ve had thirty-two years to memorise it.”

”Later,” Luna said. ”Not that yet.”

”Later,” he agreed.

”So you knew,” Luna said. ”When I was small. When you came home from the front and brought oranges and stood me on the jetty and taught me to count everyone. When the parades went past the window. When they gave you the medal in the square. You knew we’d lost.”

”Yes.”

”Did Mother know?”

The General closed his eyes, very briefly.

”No,” he said. ”I never told her. She died believing we’d won.”

Luna sat with that for a long time.

I didn’t move. Neither did Sera. Risa’s hand had found Luna’s on the arm of the chair, and Luna let it stay there.

”Next question,” Luna said at last.

”The facilities,” she said. ”The lake. The relay. The mountain. The old receiving place. Did you know what they were for?”

”No.”

”You signed the directive.”

”I signed an authority,” the General said. ”Not the directive. Let me tell you exactly what I signed, and you can decide whether that distinction is worth anything. I suspect it isn’t.”

Luna nodded once.

”Eight years ago,” he said, ”when Avalon Command was formed, I was made its head. A title. The actual work was split between three offices. Mine, which handled security for the station and the cadet program. Crane’s, which handled the Project. And a third, which was called Central Allocation.”

”Who ran Central Allocation?”

”I didn’t ask.”

The words sat in the room.

”I was told it handled allied logistics,” he went on. ”The material shipments. The movement of Sorn personnel and equipment between their sites and ours. I was told it needed a standing security authority so it wouldn’t have to come to my desk for every crate and shuttle. I was told it was a formality.”

”So you signed it.”

”So I signed it.” He looked at his hands. ”Blank. A standing authority, delegated in full, for ’allied logistics movements on the Avalon front.’ I didn’t read what they wrote under it. I didn’t ask to see the orders they issued with my name at the top. I told myself the Sorn’s business was the Sorn’s business, and mine was getting cadets home alive.”

”Did you get them home alive?”

The General looked at her.

It was a cruel question. I knew Luna knew it was cruel. She’d written it down anyway, three times, each time smaller.

”No,” the General said. ”Not most of them. You know the numbers better than I do.”

Luna looked down at her page for the first time.

Then up again.

”Eleven people locked in a room at the lake,” she said. ”Fifty-one in the mountain. Eren and Tavia left behind to feed a queen. Toren’s arm. Keir with his shoulder broken in a relay. A kit clamped to a floor. Did you know about any of them?”

”No.”

”Did you know about the queen?”

”No.” He hesitated, and I saw him decide not to soften what came next. ”I knew there were Teeming sites. I was told they were captured enemy installations, being studied. I was told the Teeming were the Sorn’s enemy’s soldiers, and that they had been made into weapons against us. I believed it. It was convenient to believe it.”

”Did you know the Sorn harvest the queens?”

”No.”

”Did you know they hold the young as hostages?”

”No.”

”Did you know my father’s” She stopped. Restarted. ”Did you know Lucas’s father refused to sign?”

The General went very still.

I hadn’t expected that question. I didn’t think it was on her page. I saw Sera glance at the paper, then at Luna, and I knew it wasn’t.

”Yes,” the General said. ”I knew. Trevor Dask was the tenth man they asked. He came to the room. He read it. He said it was a sale, not a ceasefire, and he wasn’t selling. Then he walked out.”

He turned to me.

”That was why I denied his commendation,” he said. ”Two years later. Not because of anything he did on the front. Because he’d been right and I’d signed it anyway, and I couldn’t stand to put my name on a paper that said he was brave.”

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t.

Father had never told me. Mother had never told me. Holt hadn’t known, or hadn’t said.

Out on the bench, I saw Holt’s head turn, very slightly, toward the open door.

Luna put her hand flat on her page.

”We’ll come back to that,” she said. ”That’s Lucas’s question. Not mine. He can ask it himself when he’s ready.”

She looked at me.

I nodded.

She turned back to her father.

”So,” Luna said. ”You knew we surrendered. You knew the modified were the price. You didn’t know about the facilities, or the queen, or the kits. You signed your name blank and didn’t look at what was written under it.”

”Yes.”

”Is that everything?”

The General thought.

”No,” he said. ”I also knew I didn’t want to look. That’s the part I’d like you to have, if you’re keeping a record. I wasn’t deceived. I was offered the chance not to know, and I took it every time it was offered. Eight years. Every time a report crossed my desk with Central Allocation in the header, I signed for it and didn’t open it.”

Luna was quiet.

Then she said it.

”Then you knew enough.”

The General looked at her for a long moment.

”Yes,” he said. ”I did.”

He didn’t argue. He didn’t explain. He didn’t say anything about the war, or the domes, or the children who would have died if the bombing had gone on. He didn’t say he’d done it for her.

He just agreed.

I watched Luna’s face, and I saw the moment she understood that he wasn’t going to fight her about it.

I’d thought she would feel relief.

She didn’t look relieved.

She looked like someone who had braced against a door with her whole weight, and the door had swung open, and she had nowhere to fall.

There were two questions left on her page.

I knew because I could see the bottom half from where I sat. Two short lines in her careful handwriting.

She didn’t ask the fourth one.

She folded the page so that the last two lines were hidden, and held it in her lap.

”One more,” she said. ”Then I’m going to go outside.”

”All right.”

”When I left,” Luna said. ”On the Meridian. In the first wave of cadets. You came to the cave the day before the launch, to look at me in my suit. You didn’t say anything. You just looked.”

”I remember.”

”Did you know what you were sending me to?”

The General was silent for a very long time.

Out in the square, a cart rolled past. Someone laughed. A child shouted a name.

”I knew Avalon was a Sorn front,” he said at last. ”I knew the cadets were being sent to take it for them. I’d been told you’d be protected. That the cadets were assets, and assets weren’t wasted. That the landings were controlled. That reception sites would be waiting.”

”There weren’t any reception sites.”

”No.”

”We landed alone. Forty of us, in forty different places. Some of us died alone.”

”I know that now.”

”Did you know it then?”

He held her gaze.

”I didn’t ask,” he said. ”I came to the cave and looked at you in your suit and didn’t ask, because if I’d asked and they’d told me, I’d have had to choose between you and everything I’d signed for thirty years. So I didn’t ask. I looked at you instead. I thought that if I looked hard enough I’d remember you if you didn’t come back.”

Luna’s hand closed on the folded page so tightly the paper crumpled.

She stood up.

”Thank you,” she said. Her voice was perfectly level. ”That’s enough for today.”

She walked out.

Not fast. Not running. She walked through the open door past Holt on the bench, and down the step, and across the square toward the outer gate, with her back very straight and her braid moving between her shoulders.

Nobody followed her.

I wanted to. Every part of me wanted to.

Risa caught my wrist.

”Give her ten minutes,” she said quietly. ”Then go.”

I sat back down.

The General was still in his chair. He was looking at the open door where his daughter had gone.

He didn’t look like a general.

He looked like a man who had just watched someone walk away from him in a straight line, and knew he’d taught her how.

Ten minutes later, it started raining over the practice ground.

Not over the city. Not over the fields or the growing beds or the washing line in the square. Just over the bare practice ground beyond the outer wall, where we’d tested the firestorms and the lightning.

A single grey cloud, low and heavy, sitting over that one patch of earth like a held breath.

And it was raining hard.

Sera stood up and looked out the window at it.

”That’s her,” she said.

”I know.”

”She doesn’t usually make clouds when she’s upset. She usually makes ice.”

”I know.”

Sera turned and looked at me.

”Go,” she said.

I went.

Luna was standing in the middle of the practice ground in the rain.

She wasn’t doing anything with it. She’d made the cloud, and now she was just standing under it, soaked to the skin, her braid dark and heavy, her face turned up.

The rain fell around her. Not on her, exactly. On her, but gently, the way rain falls in a dream. She’d taken the force out of it before it reached her and left only the water.

I stopped at the edge of the cloud’s shadow.

”Can I come in?” I asked.

She didn’t look down.

”It’s wet.”

”I know.”

”You’ll get wet.”

”I’ve been wet before.”

A long pause.

”Yes,” she said.

I stepped under the cloud.

The rain was warm. I hadn’t expected that. Luna had made it warm, without thinking about it. Or Sera had, from somewhere back in the city, warming the air around the practice ground the way she warmed our house in the night without asking.

I stood beside Luna and didn’t say anything.

After a while, she said, ”He agreed with me.”

”Yes.”

”I wanted him to argue. I wanted him to tell me I didn’t understand. That there was a reason. That if I’d been in that room at twenty-eight with the cities burning I’d have signed it too.”

”Would you have?”

She was quiet.

”I don’t know,” she said. ”That’s what’s so terrible. I don’t know. I think I might have.”

Rain ran down her face. I didn’t know which part of it was rain.

”He told the truth,” she said. ”Every question. He didn’t make it smaller. He didn’t make it bigger. He just told me.”

”Yes.”

”I’ve waited so long for him to tell me the truth.” Her voice broke on the last word. ”And now he has, and I don’t know what to do with it.”

I turned to her.

She was crying.

Not the way she had the night we came home from the lake, when she’d bent forward over the table and the three of us had held her up. Quietly. Standing straight. Letting it come and go with the rain.

I put my arms around her.

She leaned into me and kept crying, and the rain kept falling, warm and soft, and somewhere behind us in the city a door opened and closed, and I heard footsteps on the path.

Sera.

And slower, behind her, Risa, with one hand on her stomach and the other on Sigmund’s arm, because Sigmund had come to see what the weather was doing over the practice ground and found his sister walking out into it.

They came under the cloud.

None of them said anything either.

Sera put her arms around both of us from one side. Risa from the other, carefully, her stomach between us like a small warm wall.

The baby kicked.

Luna felt it. I felt her feel it. She went still against my chest, and then she laughed, a small cracked laugh, wet and surprised.

”She’s still counting,” Luna said.

”She’s still awake,” Risa said. ”She’s been kicking at the door all morning. I think she wanted to come.”

Sigmund stood at the edge of the cloud, not quite under it, looking embarrassed and soaked.

”Is this a family thing?” he said. ”Should I go?”

Luna lifted her head from my shoulder and looked at him.

”Get in,” she said. ”You’re making the rain feel awkward.”

Sigmund got in.

The General went to the workshop in the afternoon.

I didn’t know he was going to. Nobody did. Gareth told me afterward, because Gareth had been there, and so had Toren, and Gareth said he had never in his life seen anything so uncomfortable and wouldn’t have missed it for a hundred chairs.

Toren was at his bench, filing a hinge.

The General came in alone. No aide. He stood in the doorway until Toren noticed him, and then he waited until Toren put the file down.

”You asked me a question yesterday,” the General said. ”I said I’d answer my daughter first. I have. Now I’ll answer you.”

Toren didn’t say anything.

”I signed a standing authority, blank, eight years ago. I never read what was done under it. The directive with my name on it was written by Central Allocation. It was issued under my authority. I didn’t see it until two days ago. I didn’t know about the clamp. I didn’t know about the mountain. I didn’t ask.”

Toren looked at him for a long time.

”So it wasn’t you,” he said.

”It was my name,” the General said. ”On the door you couldn’t open. I put it there by not looking. I’m not going to tell you it wasn’t me.”

Gareth said that Toren picked up the file again then, and turned it over in his restored hand, and looked at the half-finished hinge on the bench.

”Then read them now,” Toren said. ”All of them. Everything Central Allocation ever put your name on.”

”I have been,” the General said. ”Since I landed.”

”And then do something about it.”

”Yes.”

Toren nodded.

He went back to filing the hinge.

The General stood in the doorway a little longer, Gareth said. Then he turned to go. At the door, he stopped.

”That’s a good hinge,” he said.

Toren didn’t look up.

”I know,” he said.

Toby measured Risa again before supper.

Twenty-four weeks, by size.

Three days ago it had been twenty-one.

”She’s not slowing down,” Toby said. He sounded more amazed than worried. ”She’s speeding up, if anything. Look at the bones. Look at how dense they are.”

I looked. With permission. The baby’s silver had laid down bone so precisely it almost glittered, every crystal in its place, the inside of each small long bone already beginning to hollow out the way bones do when they’re getting ready to carry weight.

”She’s building herself to walk,” I said.

”She’s not even born,” Sera said.

”She’s not in a hurry to walk. She’s just getting it ready.”

Risa laughed, then winced, then laughed again.

”Of course she is,” she said. ”She’s yours.”

”She’s yours too.”

”I’m not the one who builds walls before breakfast.”

Toby wrote the number in the book. Then he crossed out the chart on the opposite page, very neatly, with one straight line, and wrote beside it in small letters: Not applicable.

Wren, reading over his shoulder, laughed out loud.

The General came to supper.

Luna had invited him. I hadn’t known she was going to. She’d come back from the practice ground, changed into dry clothes, sat at the table for an hour with her folded page, and then walked to the guest house by the gate and knocked on the door.

She didn’t tell us what she said.

She just came back and said, ”He’s coming to supper. Priya’s making the bread.”

So he came.

He sat at the end of our table, in the chair nearest the door, because Luna had put him there. He was very polite to Sera, and very polite to Risa, and very careful not to look at Risa’s stomach, which meant he looked at it about every thirty seconds.

He ate everything Priya put in front of him.

He didn’t talk about the Accord or the facilities or the queen. Luna had asked him not to, and he didn’t.

He talked about oranges.

How he’d gotten them. A trader in the outer ring of New Halcyon, before the war, who’d kept three trees alive in a greenhouse under a lamp the size of a dining table. How the trader had died, and his daughter had kept the trees going, and how every time he came home from the front he’d walked to her greenhouse first, before going home, and bought as many as she’d sell him.

”I didn’t know that,” Luna said.

”I never told you.”

”Why not?”

The General thought about it.

”I wanted you to think they just appeared,” he said. ”Like the parades. Like the dome. I wanted something in your life that came from nowhere and was only good.”

Luna looked at him for a long time.

”Things don’t come from nowhere,” she said.

”No.”

”I know that now.”

”Yes.” He looked down at his plate. ”I’m sorry you had to learn it here.”

”I’m not,” Luna said. ”I’m sorry I had to learn it at all. I’m not sorry I learned it here.”

The General didn’t answer.

Under the table, I felt Luna’s foot find mine and press against it.

He stood to leave when the lamps had burned down halfway.

At the door, he stopped, the way he seemed to stop at every door, as if leaving a room was a thing that required a moment of decision.

He looked back at Risa.

At her hand on her stomach. At Sera beside her. At Luna and me.

”Forgive me,” he said. ”May I ask something? Not about the Accord.”

Risa nodded.

”How far along?”

Risa glanced at me. I nodded.

”Twelve weeks,” she said. ”By date. Twenty-four by size. She’s growing fast. Her silver’s whole. The queen says she’s building herself.”

The General didn’t move.

I saw his face change. Not dramatically. Just a slight stillness, a stopping, like a man who has heard a word in a conversation that he recognises from somewhere else, somewhere he’d rather forget.

”Whole,” he said.

”Yes.”

”From birth? Not repaired?”

”Never broken,” I said.

He looked at me. Then at Risa. Then at the curve under her hand.

”There’s a clause in the Accord,” he said slowly. ”Near the end. About exceptional lineages. I never understood it. Crane wrote it. I asked him once what it meant, and he said it was a provision for the future, and I never asked again.”

The room had gone very quiet.

”What does it say?” Luna asked.

The General held the doorframe.

”I’ll tell you tomorrow,” he said. ”Word for word. I’d like to get it exactly right. And I think” He stopped. Looked at Risa again. ”I think you’ll all want to be sitting down.”

He said goodnight.

He went out into the dark.

Luna stood very still at the table with her folded page in her hand. Sera got up and closed the door behind him, and then stood with her back against it.

Risa had both hands on her stomach now.

The baby wasn’t kicking.

She was quiet. Her small bright silver had turned, very slightly, the way it turned toward my hand, or Luna’s, or the queen’s.

Toward the door the General had gone through.

Listening.

Day 600. Did you know?

Luna asked her father her questions in the receiving room, in the same chair his witnesses had used. Sera, Risa and I beside her. Holt on the bench outside. Recorded at her request.

He knew humanity surrendered. He signed the Accord himself, seventh of nine, at twenty-eight. Senator Friese and Crane were in the room. Crane held the pen. Luna’s mother never knew.

He didn’t know about the facilities, the kits, the holding rooms, or the queen. He signed a standing authority for Central Allocation blank, eight years ago, and never read what was issued under it. He says he wasn’t deceived. He was offered the chance not to know and took it every time.

Luna: ”Then you knew enough.” He agreed. He didn’t argue.

Father was the tenth man asked to sign. He read the Accord, called it a sale, and walked out. That was why the General denied his commendation: because Father had been right. I haven’t decided what to do with that yet. Luna says it’s my question to ask him, when I’m ready.

Luna’s last question was whether he knew what he was sending her to. He didn’t ask. He looked at her in her suit instead, so he’d remember her if she didn’t come back.

She made a warm cloud over the practice ground and stood in it. We all ended up under it, Sigmund included.

The General went to Toren’s bench himself and gave him the same answer. Toren told him to read everything Central Allocation ever put his name on. He said he already was.

Supper. Oranges came from a greenhouse in the outer ring that he walked to before he went home, every time, for years. He wanted her to think they came from nowhere.

Risa: twenty-four weeks by size, three days after twenty-one. Bones dense and ready to bear weight. Toby has crossed out the chart and written ”not applicable.”

The baby kicked four times under Luna’s hand this morning. Luna says she was counting.

At the door tonight, the General asked whether the baby’s silver was whole. Then he told us there is a clause in the Accord about exceptional lineages. Crane wrote it. He’ll tell us the words tomorrow. He said we’d want to be sitting down.

After he left, the baby went quiet and turned toward the door.

I don’t like the word lineages.