Scarecrow

I’ve tried to write this chapter four times.

Every time, I get to the bottom of the garden stairs and stop, because I don’t know how to put it down so that it’s true. Everything I write is either too small or too large. Too small, because it was only a birth, and people are born every day in every dome on Earth, and nobody writes a chapter about them. Too large, because it wasn’t only a birth, and every queen on Avalon was awake for it.

Sera says to stop trying to get it right and just write what happened.

So this is what happened.

Risa was sitting up when I came down.

She’d pushed herself off the cushions and was sitting on the edge of the bench with her feet flat on the stone floor and both hands braced either side of her. She was breathing slowly. In through her nose. Out through her mouth. Exactly the way Edda had taught her.

”Hello,” she said.

”Hello.”

”I’m fine.”

”I know.”

”I’m actually fine. It doesn’t hurt. Well.” She stopped. Her face went inward. Her hands tightened on the edge of the bench, and I felt it, through her silver, a long slow wave moving down through her body, like the tide pulling out. She breathed through it. When it was gone, she let out a long breath. ”It hurts a bit.”

I knelt down in front of her.

”How long?”

”Since about three. They were small. I didn’t want to wake anyone in case it was nothing.” She smiled, shakily. ”It isn’t nothing.”

”No.”

”She’s moving.”

I could feel it. I’d felt it from the top of the stairs. The baby’s silver, all of it, drawn in and down, gathered tight, the way the queen had said. Not frightened. Not reaching. Just turning, slowly and with great purpose, like a key in a lock.

”She’s helping,” I said.

Risa laughed. ”Of course she is.”

Another wave came. Closer than the last. I put my hands over Risa’s on the edge of the bench and didn’t say anything, and she breathed, and squeezed until my knuckles went white, and then it passed.

”Don’t look at her bones,” Risa said, when she could.

”I’m not.”

”You are. I can see you doing it. Your eyes go silver.”

”I’m only checking.”

”Check later,” Risa said. ”Hold my hands now.”

So I held her hands.

Edda came down the stairs four minutes later with her bag in one hand and her sleeves already rolled up. Priya behind her, with the sparrow ring on her finger and an armful of clean linen. Toby last, with his hair standing on end and his coat on over his nightshirt.

Edda took one look at Risa and nodded.

”Right,” she said. ”Good. Lucas, corner.”

”I’m holding her hands.”

”You can hold her hands from the corner. Toby, hands. Priya, water.”

I went to the corner.

It wasn’t really a corner. The quiet room didn’t have proper corners. The queens had grown every wall at an angle to every other, so that sound slid off and nothing came back. But there was a place by the steps where two of the planes met in a sort of fold, and I sat down there on the stone floor with my back against the cool faceted wall, and Toby knelt beside Risa and took her hands.

He didn’t hold them the way I had. He held her wrists. Two fingers each, lightly, on the inside, where the pulse was.

”Your heart,” he said to Risa. ”And hers. I’ve got them both.”

”How are they?”

”Loud,” Toby said. ”And fast. And absolutely fine.”

Risa laughed. It turned into a gasp halfway through as the next wave came.

I’d asked the queens, weeks ago, what the world would feel like to her when she came out.

Not the air or the light. The silver. The noise. Every thread on Avalon, every brood and every queen and every completed person, all of it at once. The deep under the canyon. The spine on the station. The Sorn ships somewhere far beyond the edge of the sky. Things I’d learned to shut out over years, slowly, painfully, the way you learn to sleep through a storm.

She’d have none of that. She’d have no walls at all.

It would be like opening your eyes for the first time, the mountain queen had said, and finding that you are looking at the sun.

That was why they’d made the quiet room.

And that was why, at four in the morning on Day 622, every queen on the world had woken.

I could feel them. All of them. Our queen at the garden wall, her great head on the stones. The mountain queen on her terrace. Lantern, Hollow, First Garden, the Spire. Further. Queens I’d only met through other queens. Queens in the south, whose names I didn’t know, whose broods I’d never seen.

Every one of them was doing the same thing.

They were drawing in.

It’s hard to describe. I’d never felt anything like it. It was as if the whole world had been talking, all my life, a low constant murmur of silver under everything, and now, one by one, every voice was going quiet. Not silent. Just softer. Further away. Like a crowd in a great hall that’s been asked to hush because someone is about to speak.

The deep under the canyon settled.

The broods went still in their hollows. Even the young. Even Pebble, in the lower court, who had been awake and anxious since the queen surfaced, curled up against an attendant and stopped humming.

Across Scarecrow, the completed ones felt it. I felt Juno wake and turn her head, slowly, all the way round, and then go very still. I felt Holt sit up in his bed with his hands open. I felt Kellan’s fire bank itself down to embers.

The whole world was holding its breath.

For her.

It went fast.

Edda said afterward it was the fastest first labour she’d ever seen, and she’d seen a great many. She said it was as though the baby had planned the whole thing and was simply following her own instructions.

I believe it.

I could feel her. Even from the corner. Even without looking at her bones, which I didn’t, because Risa had told me not to. I could feel her silver turning, step by step, each movement exactly where it needed to be. Not rushing. Not stopping. Just going on, steady as a clock, toward the door.

Risa was magnificent.

I don’t know a better word. She didn’t scream. She didn’t swear, though Sera told me afterward that she’d expected Risa to swear more than anyone in the history of the world. She breathed. She held Toby’s wrists. When Edda told her to move, she moved. When Edda told her to wait, she waited, with her teeth clenched and her eyes squeezed shut and her whole body shaking with the effort of not doing the thing it wanted to do.

Once, between waves, she opened her eyes and looked at me in my corner.

”You’re looking at her bones,” she said.

”I’m not.”

”Liar.”

I was.

I couldn’t help it. I’d tried. But she was so bright, so close, and I’d spent eight months feeling her grow, and now she was nearly here, and my sight went to her the way your hand goes to a burn.

She was whole.

I’d known she was whole. I’d known since the first week. The queen had said it, the day Risa told me. She is building herself whole. Every path of silver, every branch, every thread, laid down complete from the very first day, without a single narrow place, without a single stop.

But I hadn’t seen it like this before. Not this close. Not with the world gone quiet around her, so that there was nothing in the way.

She wasn’t like me.

My silver was whole now. I’d finished it myself, on the mountain, in the dark, with the queen’s voice in my head. It branched like a tree. Like the others I’d completed. Like Juno’s maps and Holt’s roots and Luna’s careful lines.

Hers didn’t branch.

It was woven.

Every path crossed every other path, somewhere, and joined, and went on. Not a tree. A net. A lattice so fine and so dense that I couldn’t follow any single thread through it, because every thread was every other thread. It ran through every part of her. Her bones, her blood, her tiny folded hands. Her heart. Her eyes, which weren’t open yet, and which were already ringed with silver so bright it hurt to look at.

I’d never seen anything like it.

Not in any of us. Not in the queens. Not even in the spine.

Do you see? our queen said, very softly, from the garden wall.

Yes, I said.

We told you she might be stronger.

Yes.

She is not stronger, the queen said. She is something else. Strength is the wrong word for it. A tree is strong. A net holds.

The sky above the canyon had started to grey when Edda said, ”Now.”

Risa’s eyes snapped open.

”Now?”

”Now. Next one. Push.”

Risa looked at me.

Just for a moment. Across the quiet room, past Toby and Priya and Edda, past the linen and the lamp and the faceted walls. She looked at me in my corner, and her eyes were wide and frightened and furious and full of something enormous, and I looked back at her and didn’t look away.

Then the next wave came, and she pushed.

Outside, at the top of the garden stairs, Sera and Luna were sitting together on the step.

I couldn’t see them. But I could feel them. Sera with her arms round her knees and her jaw set. Luna with the arrivals list flat on her lap and her pen in her hand. Liam a little further back, by the gate, with Sigmund. Both silent. Liam silent, for once in his life.

And past them, at the garden wall, the queen with her head on the stones.

And past her, the whole city.

They’d come out. I don’t know who told them. Maybe nobody did. Maybe Juno had felt it, and told Nell, and Nell told Wren, and Wren went from door to door with her list. Or maybe they just knew. The way you know when a storm’s coming.

They were standing in the street. Hundreds of them. On the porches. In the doorways. At the gate. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. They just stood in the grey early light with their faces turned toward our house, toward the garden, toward the room under it, and waited.

It was almost time for the dawn count.

She was born at dawn.

At the exact moment. I know, because I felt it come. The hello, the way it came every morning: up from the deep under the canyon, up through the rock, up through the sky to the station on the far side of the world, and the spine-queen waking in her housings, and the answer coming back down. And the thirty-one, on Earth, eleven light-years away, waking for eleven seconds and singing back.

I felt it come.

And at the very moment it reached us, Risa pushed one last time, and Edda said ”There,” and our daughter came into the world.

She didn’t cry.

Not at first. Edda caught her, and turned her, and wiped her face with a corner of the linen, and for one long, terrible moment there was no sound in the quiet room at all.

Then her eyes opened.

They were silver. Ringed with it, the way mine were. But not like mine. Not like anyone’s. The rings weren’t rings. They were the lattice, the net, the woven thing I’d seen inside her, coming to the surface around her eyes like frost on a window.

She looked up at Edda.

Then she turned her head.

Not the way newborns turn their heads. Not wobbling, searching, blind. She turned it slowly and with purpose, the way Juno had turned hers in the medical building. The way you turn your head when you know exactly what you’re looking for.

She turned toward Risa.

And her silver opened.

I don’t know how to describe what happened next.

Toby says it was like a door being opened in a dark house, and all the light coming out at once. Juno says it was like every compass needle on Avalon swinging, all at once, to point at the same place. Holt says it was like hearing the bone on the salvage, except the bone was laughing.

For me, it was like this.

Every queen on the world had drawn in, gone quiet, made a silence for her to be born into.

And the moment she opened her eyes, she reached into that silence.

Not to fill it. Not to break it. She reached into it the way you reach into still water. Gently. Curious. And it rippled. Out from the quiet room, through the faceted walls, through the gap shaped like Risa’s voice. Through Toby, kneeling by the bench. Through me, in my corner. Through the garden, and the queen at the wall, and the city standing silent in the street.

Out. Further. Through the queen to the mountain, and Lantern, and Hollow, and First Garden, and the Spire. Through every queen on Avalon, every one of them, one after another, as fast as thought.

And every one of them answered.

Not with words. Not with the brood-speech. With something older. The shape a queen makes when a new hatchling climbs out of the hollow for the first time and opens its eyes. A shape I’d felt once before, faintly, months ago, when the thirteen came home from the mountain.

Welcome.

Every queen on the world. All at once.

Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.

Then she cried.

A proper cry. A newborn’s cry, loud and furious and absolutely human, the kind that every mother in every dome on Earth has heard. It filled the quiet room. It bounced off the faceted walls, which were supposed to let nothing come back, and came back anyway.

Edda laughed.

I’d never heard Edda laugh. I don’t think anyone had.

”Well,” she said. ”There you are.”

She put the baby on Risa’s chest.

Risa’s arms came round her at once. Both arms. Holding her. And Risa looked down at her, at the tiny furious face and the silver-ringed eyes and the small clenched fists, and her face did something I’d never seen it do in all the time I’d known her.

It came completely undone.

”Hello,” Risa whispered. ”Hello. Hello. Oh, hello. There you are.”

The baby stopped crying.

Just like that. Mid-breath. She went quiet against Risa’s chest, and turned her head, and pressed her face to Risa’s skin, and her silver settled.

Not drawn in. Not reaching. Just settling. The way the young settled against their mother’s plates. Warm and slow and utterly content.

She’d found what she was looking for.

I didn’t get up.

I couldn’t. I sat in my corner with my back against the wall and my hands flat on the stone floor, and I didn’t move. I don’t think I’d have been able to stand.

Toby looked round at me.

”Lucas,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

”Lucas. Come here.”

I couldn’t.

Risa lifted her head from the baby and looked at me across the room.

”Lucas Dask,” she said. ”Get out of that corner and come and meet your daughter.”

So I did.

I knelt by the bench.

She was so small.

I’d known she would be. Edda had told me. I’d felt her through Risa’s skin every day for months. But I hadn’t understood, not really, until she was there. Until she was lying on Risa’s chest with her face turned to one side and her tiny hand curled on Risa’s collarbone, so small that her whole fist would have fitted inside one of my fingers.

Her hair was dark. Like Risa’s. Damp and curling.

Her eyes were closed now. But the silver around them was still there, faint and bright, like frost.

I reached out.

I didn’t mean to. My hand just moved. And I touched her, with one finger, very lightly, on the back of her curled hand.

Her eyes opened.

She looked at me.

Not past me. Not at the light behind my head, the way Edda said newborns do. At me. Straight at me. With her silver-ringed eyes, and her silver reaching out, slow and bright, the way it had reached for me every time I’d come down the stairs for eight months.

It found me.

And it said, quite clearly, in a shape I knew better than any shape in the world:

There you are.

I don’t remember crying.

Risa says I did. Toby says I did. Edda says she’s delivered a great many babies and I’m the first father she’s ever seen cry silver.

I didn’t know that could happen.

Apparently it can.

When Sera and Luna came down the stairs, I was still kneeling by the bench.

Sera stopped at the bottom. She looked at Risa, and at the baby, and at me. And then she came across the room very fast and knelt down beside me and put her arms round all three of us at once, and pressed her face against Risa’s shoulder, and didn’t say anything at all.

Luna came more slowly.

She stood at the foot of the bench with the arrivals list against her chest. She looked at the baby for a long time.

Then she found her pen.

And on the list, under all the other names, under Windsor, Alaric. Departing. One. Expected back, she wrote something.

She held it out so I could see.

Arrived. One.

And beside it, nothing. A space, where the name should be.

”She hasn’t told us yet,” Luna said quietly.

She told us that afternoon.

The city had gone home by then. Slowly, a few at a time, after Wren came out to the gate and said in her flat, careful voice that the baby was born and Risa was well and they could all stop standing in the street now. Some of them cried. Nessa cried so hard that Priya had to take her to the kitchens and give her bread.

The queen stayed at the wall.

She didn’t move all day. Her great head on the stones, her plates rising and falling, slowly. Listening.

At midday, Risa asked to go up.

Edda said no. Risa said yes. Edda said not for long. Risa said she’d only be on the porch. Edda said that was what they all said.

In the end, Liam carried her.

He carried her up the garden stairs, very slowly, with the baby in her arms, and set her down in Gareth’s chair on the porch. In the sun. With a blanket over her knees and the baby wrapped in the linen Priya had brought and the nursery stone, Pebble’s stone, tucked into the fold beside her.

Then he stood back.

And looked.

”She’s tiny,” Liam said.

”She’s normal-sized,” Edda said, from the doorway. ”She’s a perfectly normal-sized baby.”

”She’s tiny,” Liam said. ”Look at her hands.”

Sigmund came up the steps behind him. He stopped. He looked down at his sister, and at his niece in her arms, for a long time. Then, very carefully, he reached out and touched the baby’s cheek with one finger.

A small spark jumped between them.

Sigmund snatched his hand back.

The baby opened her eyes.

She looked at Sigmund. And her silver reached out, curious, and touched his, the way his finger had touched her cheek. And something passed between them, so fast and so bright that I barely caught it.

Sigmund went white.

Then red.

Then he laughed. A startled, unsteady sound, as if it had been surprised out of him.

”She just did that back,” he said. ”The spark. She copied it.”

”Of course she did,” said Risa.

Dot came up the street at two o’clock.

She’d been on watch at the garden wall all morning, beside the queen. She hadn’t come down to the quiet room. She’d said it wasn’t her place. She’d said she’d wait.

Now she came to the bottom of the porch steps and stopped.

Her lamps were very low. The way they went when she was uncertain.

”Dask,” she said. ”This unit has the dawn record.”

I looked at her.

”This unit records the hello every morning,” Dot said. ”The time it leaves the deep. The time the spine answers. The time the thirty-one answer, and for how long. Eleven seconds. Every morning, for every one of them, eleven seconds.” Her lamps flickered. ”This morning, at the moment she was born, the hello reached the thirty-one as usual. Thirty answered for eleven seconds.”

”And the other one?”

”Fragment nineteen,” Dot said, ”answered for forty-one.”

I didn’t need her to tell me who fragment nineteen was.

I’d followed the threads up from the deep, the morning Toby held my wrist. Up to the spine-queen, and out along her threads, eleven light-years, to thirty-one sleeping fragments of bone in thirty-one people who’d been kept alive on the stabilizer. I’d felt every one of them. I’d known one of them before I reached her.

You always know your mother’s heartbeat. Even when it’s shaking.

”She touched her,” Risa said. She was looking down at Dory, very still. ”When she was born. She reached into the hello and she touched her.”

”This unit believes so,” said Dot.

Dory was awake.

She was looking at me.

And her silver came out, slow and bright, and showed me something. Not a word. A shape. A small trembling warmth, very far away, at the end of a very long thread. Thin. Tired. Shaking, the way Mother’s hands shook when she held a cup. And underneath the shaking, something that had gone very still for forty-one seconds, eleven light-years away, and listened.

Who? Dory asked me.

My throat closed.

I’d held my mother’s hands every evening in the dome while they shook. I’d made her tea with the cup only half full so it wouldn’t spill. I’d left her behind with guards on the door, because Crane held her, because the medicine kept her alive, because I couldn’t reach her from here.

And my daughter had reached her in the first second of her life.

”That’s your grandmother,” I said aloud. My voice didn’t work properly. ”My mother. She’s on Earth, a long way away. She’s ill. She shakes.” I swallowed. ”Her name is Dorothy.”

Dory’s silver flared.

Not at me. Not at any of us. Inward. Bright. As though she’d heard something she’d been waiting to hear.

And then she said it.

Not in words. In a shape. Her own shape, the one she’d shown Risa in the quiet room: bright and quick and very sure. And wrapped around it, the way a hand wraps around a stone, her grandmother’s name.

Dorothy.

”She has taken it,” Dot said. Her lamps were trembling. ”She has taken the name. She says it fits.”

Nobody said anything for a very long time.

Sera had her hand over her mouth. Luna’s pen had stopped on the list. Risa bent her head until her cheek touched the top of Dory’s damp dark hair, and stayed there.

”She’s going to meet her,” Risa said quietly. ”Isn’t she. Your mother. One day.”

”Yes,” I said.

It was the second promise I’d made my daughter. She’d been alive for eight hours.

There was a problem, of course.

Liam found it first. He usually did.

”You can’t call her Dorothy,” he said. ”If you call her Dorothy and you call Dot Dot, then every time you shout Dot! across the courts, they’ll both look round.”

”Nobody shouts at Dot,” Luna said.

”Nessa shouts at Dot.”

That was true.

Risa looked down at the baby.

The baby looked back.

”Dory,” Risa said.

The baby blinked.

”Dory,” Risa said again. ”So Dot doesn’t get confused.”

”This unit would not get confused,” Dot said, with dignity.

”So Nessa doesn’t get confused, then.”

The baby’s silver turned. Slowly. Toward the name. Considering it. Turning it over, the way Priya had turned the sparrow ring in the window.

Then it settled.

Bright. Quick. Very sure.

Yes.

Luna wrote it on the list.

Arrived. One. Dorothy Dask. Called Dory.

Then, after a moment, in smaller letters underneath:

Her decision.

The queen lifted her head from the wall that evening.

It was the first time she’d moved all day. She rose up slowly, her plates grinding against the stones, until her great head was level with the porch. Then she lowered it again, very carefully, until it was right beside Gareth’s chair.

Beside Risa.

Beside Dory.

Dory was awake. She’d been awake most of the afternoon, which Edda said was unusual and Risa said was typical. She looked at the queen’s head, which was larger than the whole chair, and larger than Risa, and larger than the porch.

She wasn’t frightened.

Her silver reached out. Touched the queen. And the queen’s voice came, very soft, very warm, the way it came to the young in the hollow.

Little one, she said. Welcome to the world. Welcome to the brood.

And Dory answered.

Mother, she said.

Not to the queen. To Risa. She turned her head toward Risa as she said it, and pressed against her, and her silver curled round Risa’s like a hand.

Then she turned back to the queen.

And said a different word. A brood-word. One I’d heard the young use, in the courts, when they meant a queen who wasn’t their own mother but who was still theirs. An aunt. A grandmother. Someone of the brood, who held you, who wasn’t the one who bore you.

The queen went very still.

Then she hummed. Low and deep and long, so that I felt it in the porch boards and in the stones of the wall and in the soles of my feet. The sound the queens made, Dot said afterward, when a hatchling recognised its brood for the first time.

Yes, the queen said. That is right. That is exactly right.

She looked at me.

She knows whose she is, the queen said. First, and last. Yours. And then ours.

Yes, I said.

That is the right order, said the queen. We would not want it any other way.

Pebble came at dusk.

Of course he did. He’d been waiting all day in the lower court, with an attendant beside him, and the moment the queen lifted her head from the wall he’d known he could come.

He came up the agreed path at a run. Up the porch steps. And stopped at the top, very suddenly, the way a child stops at the door of a room where something important is happening.

Dory turned her head.

She saw him.

And her silver reached out and touched him, and said his name. Not Pebble. His brood-pattern. The one only the queens used, and the attendants, and now her.

Pebble went very still.

Then he came across the porch, slowly, carefully, and put his flat head against Risa’s knee, right beside the blanket. Close enough to Dory that she could have touched him if her arms had been longer.

He hummed.

And Dory, twelve hours old, on her mother’s lap on a porch in Scarecrow, with a queen’s head beside her chair and a robot at the foot of the steps and half the city watching from the street, hummed back.

Day 622. Dory.

Labour started about three. Risa didn’t wake anyone in case it was nothing. Edda: fastest first labour she has ever seen. As though the baby was following her own instructions.

Every queen on Avalon drew in and went quiet, so she would be born into silence instead of the sun. Even the broods. Even Pebble.

I looked at her bones. Risa caught me. Her silver doesn’t branch like mine. It’s woven, a net, every thread joined to every other. The queen: she isn’t stronger. Strength is the wrong word. A tree is strong. A net holds.

Born at dawn, at the exact moment the hello came down.

She didn’t cry at first. She opened her eyes, silver like frost on a window, and turned her head to Risa on purpose. She reached into the silence the queens had made, gently, like a hand into still water, and every queen on the world answered at once: welcome.

Then she cried properly. Edda laughed. Risa came completely undone. ”There you are.”

She looked straight at me. ”There you are.” I cried silver. Apparently that can happen.

Luna wrote ”Arrived. One,” and left the name blank.

Sigmund touched her cheek and a spark jumped. She copied it back. He laughed.

Dot has the dawn record. At the moment Dory was born, thirty of the thirty-one answered the hello for eleven seconds. Fragment nineteen answered for forty-one. Mother. Dory reached into the hello in her first second and touched her grandmother, eleven light-years away. She asked me who. I told her: my mother, on Earth, ill, she shakes. Her name is Dorothy. Dory took it. She says it fits.

Risa: she’s going to meet her, one day. I said yes. Second promise. Eight hours old.

Liam: you can’t have two Dots. Risa: Dory. So nobody gets confused. Dory considered it and said yes.

Dorothy Dask. Called Dory. Her decision.

The queen brought her head to the porch. Welcome to the brood. Dory called Risa mother. Then she called the queen by the brood-word the young use for a queen who is theirs but did not bear them. The queen hummed. ”She knows whose she is. First, and last. Yours. And then ours. That is the right order.”

Pebble came at dusk. She said his brood-name. He hummed. She hummed back.

Twelve hours old.

All names.