Scarecrow

Okafor’s list came on the fifth dawn.

Mother read it to me. One name at a time, between doors, in the slow careful voice of someone carrying a full cup up a flight of stairs. I wrote them down afterward on the red glass, in Luna’s notebook, with Luna’s pen, while Dot counted them back to me to make sure I’d got every one.

Thirty-one names.

Dask, Dorothy, at the top. Then Calder, Maura. Then Calder, Rory. Then a woman called Ines Tarrow, who Dot said was fragment four and had answered the hello every morning since it began, more than a year ago, and never once said a word. Then Toby’s mother. Then Hana’s father.

Then twenty-five more, in an order that made no sense to me at all.

”It’s not oldest first,” said Luna, reading over my shoulder. ”And it’s not sickest first. Dot, who’s sickest?”

”Fragment twelve,” said Dot. ”Bram Hollis. He is very faint.”

”And where’s he?”

”Twenty-second,” I said.

Luna frowned at the page.

Then she stopped frowning. She took the notebook out of my hands and went down the list again, slowly, with her finger, and her mouth moved the way it moved when she counted.

”Oh,” she said.

”What?”

”It’s a line.” She looked up. ”It’s not a medical list. It’s a line. The first three are the ones who can hit hardest. Your mother. Maura. Rory. Then Tarrow.” She tapped the fourth name. ”Dot, what was Ines Tarrow in the war?”

Dot was quiet for a moment, searching.

”This unit does not have that record,” she said.

”I’ll bet you anything she could move earth,” said Luna. ”Or something like it. Something you put in front of a wall.” She ran her finger down. ”And then Toby’s mother, who makes things quieter. And then Hana’s father.” She looked at me. ”Lucas. What can Hana do?”

”Water,” I said.

”And her father?”

I didn’t know.

Luna closed the notebook.

”She’s building a line,” she said again. ”On Earth. Under the dome. Front rank, second rank, the ones who hold, the ones who hide you, the ones who carry. And she’s keeping the sickest ones back. Behind the ridge.” She handed me the notebook. ”Where nobody told her to.”

”Bram Hollis is dying,” I said.

”Is he dying faster than the others?”

I thought about it. About the fragment in him, faint, and the stabilizer grains running low in all thirty-one of them now the Project had stopped sending it, and the hello feeding them every dawn instead.

”No,” I said. ”He’s dying slower. Since the hello.”

”Then she’s right,” said Luna. ”And you’ll do it in her order.”

I did.

Rory was the hard one.

I’d known he would be. Maura had told me on the third dawn: they hadn’t cut his short. They’d taken it out.

On the sixth dawn I went looking for what they’d taken.

I found Rory Calder’s silver the way I’d found Mother’s and Maura’s. Along the hello, through Dory’s net, with the spine-queen holding the far end of the thread and the ring holding her. Faint, the way Mother had been on the first morning. A big man’s silver, broad and slow, running through him the way a river runs through a wide valley.

And then, at the shoulders, nothing.

Not cut. Not sealed, the way the General’s had been. Gone. The paths that should have run down his arms and opened out into his hands had been taken away, all of them, from the shoulder down, and the places they’d been had healed over. Smooth. Like skin over an old burn. There wasn’t a door to open. There wasn’t even a wall.

I stayed there for a long time, looking at it.

Then I came back up, onto the red glass, and opened my eyes.

Sera was beside me. Of course she was. She’d been beside me every dawn, with her hand on my shoulder, and Liam on her other side.

”I can’t open it,” I said.

Her face didn’t change.

”Because there’s nothing to open,” I said. ”They took it out. All of it. Shoulders to hands.” I looked at my own hands, on the glass. ”I’d have to grow it back. From nothing. And I don’t know what it looked like.”

”You didn’t know what Dory looked like,” said Risa, behind me. ”She grew anyway.”

”Dory had a pattern. Dory had both of ours.”

Sera took her hand off my shoulder.

She held it out in front of me. Palm up. The silver markings on her wrist, the ones I’d opened in the spring when I finished her, bright in the early light.

”Then use mine,” she said.

I looked at her.

”Where do you think I got it?” said Sera. ”Mum said. You heard her.” Her voice wasn’t quite steady. ”It came from him. Liam’s came from him. It’s his shape.” She held her hand out further. ”Look at mine. Look at Liam’s. And grow him back the way he was.”

Liam held his hand out too.

Beside hers. Palm up. Bigger, broader, the way Rory’s would have been.

I looked at them both.

At Sera’s silver, fine and quick and running down into her palm in seven bright branches. At Liam’s, the same seven, but wider. Slower. A river in a wide valley.

I’d seen them a hundred times. I’d opened every one of those paths myself. I’d never looked at them and thought: this is somebody’s father.

”Tomorrow,” I said. ”Hold out your hands tomorrow. Both of you. At dawn.”

Hana asked me that afternoon.

Not straight away. Hana didn’t ask anything straight away. She’d come to find me in the forge, where I was making a lid for the north hollow out of red glass the way Pell had asked, and she’d sat down on the bench by the door with her hands folded in her lap and watched me for twenty minutes without saying anything.

When I’d finished, she said:

”You said you could fix me.”

I put the lid down.

”I said I could finish you,” I said. ”If you wanted.”

”It’s the same thing.”

”It isn’t. Not quite.” I sat down on the anvil. ”Fixing is taking out what’s wrong. Finishing is opening what was always meant to be there. With you it’d be both. The bleeds did damage. On one side. I can mend that. And then I can open the rest.”

Hana looked at me.

The left side of her face moved when she looked at me. The right side didn’t, quite. It had been like that since the medical wing. Since the seven weeks she’d hidden the nosebleeds, because her family needed the stipend, and the last one had been in her head instead of her nose.

She’d learned to talk again. She’d learned to walk again. She’d written me letters in a hand that got better every month, from I sayd Mama on Tusday to the one with Okafor’s line folded into the bottom of it. She’d come eleven light-years on a transport with Miss Pell and a bag of horse books.

She still spoke very carefully. Getting every word right.

”I want it,” she said. ”But not first.”

”Not first?”

”My father.” Every word, right. ”On the list. He’s sixth.” She looked at her hands. ”Can I go after him?”

I didn’t answer straight away.

Hana’s father. Fragment eight, Dot said. Kwame Osei. The shake in his hands since before Hana was born. Six people in two rooms on Harbor Block 44. He’d answered the hello every dawn for a year and never said a word either.

”He’s eleven light-years away,” I said. ”I can only reach him one door a morning. He’s sixth. It’ll be weeks before I get to him. Maybe longer.”

”I know.”

”You’re here. I could do you this afternoon.”

”I know,” said Hana.

She lifted her chin. The left side of her mouth set. The right side tried, and nearly managed.

”I hid the bleeds,” she said. ”For seven weeks. So he could have the stipend. So he could have the medicine. So he’d stop shaking for a bit.” She held my eyes. ”I’m not going first. Not over him.”

I looked at her for a long time.

Then I said, ”Okafor decides the order.”

”I know that too.” Hana reached into the pocket of her coat. She took out a folded piece of paper. Lined. From one of Pell’s notebooks. She held it out. ”So I wrote to her.”

I unfolded it.

Six lines. In Hana’s careful hand, the letters very square and very even, the way you write when you’ve had to learn writing twice.

Major Okafor.

It is Hana Osei. Squad Three.

Lucas can fix me now. Here.

I do not want to go before my father.

If you say I have to, I will.

But I am asking.

I read it twice.

Then I folded it up again and put it in my pocket, with Father’s letter and Okafor’s line from the bottom of Hana’s last one.

”I’ll give it to her,” I said. ”Through Mother. Tomorrow.”

”Thank you.”

”She’ll probably say no.”

”She probably will,” Hana agreed. ”But I asked.”

The seventh dawn, Sera and Liam held out their hands.

On the red glass, both of them, side by side, palms up, in the grey before the light. The silver in their wrists very bright. Liam’s jaw set so hard I could see the muscle in it. Sera’s eyes shut.

Dory’s net went round all four of us. I felt it go. Not just round me this time. Round Sera and Liam too, through their hands, joining their silver to mine every path to every other. So that when I went down the hello, I took their shape with me.

I found Rory.

His silver, broad and slow. The healed-over places at his shoulders. Smooth.

And I held Sera’s shape up against it. And Liam’s. The seven branches. The fine quick one and the wide slow one.

And under the healed-over skin, very faint, I saw it.

The ghost of a path. Not silver. Nothing that solid. A memory of silver. The place in his body where his body still knew a path had been. Like the way a field remembers where a hedge was, years after it’s grubbed out, in the way the wheat grows a little greener along the line.

It was the same shape as Liam’s.

Wider. Slower. A river in a wide valley.

I didn’t grow it all. I couldn’t, not in one dawn. I grew the first hand’s-breadth of it. From the shoulder down. Along the line his body remembered, in the shape his children had carried away from him without knowing.

Sera made a sound beside me.

Liam didn’t make any sound at all.

And eleven light-years away, in a flat that belonged to a retired Major, at whatever hour it was under the dome, Rory Calder said:

Oh.

Just that. Exactly the way Maura had said it.

Then:

That’s warm.

Mother gave Okafor Hana’s letter that morning.

I gave it to her first. Read it out, all six lines, down the hello, between doors. She didn’t say anything while I read it. But when I’d finished, I felt her go still in a particular way. The way she’d gone still at the kitchen table, years ago, when Genny said something at dinner that was cleverer than Genny knew.

Give me a moment, love, she said.

I gave her a moment.

The thread held. The spine-queen held it. She was stronger every morning. Two hundred and eighty seconds now, Dot said, and climbing.

Then Mother said:

Okafor says: request noted.

A pause.

She says: Osei, Kwame, is moved to fifth. Toby’s mother says she doesn’t mind going sixth. Toby’s mother says she’s been waiting twenty years, she can wait a week.

Another pause.

And Okafor says—and I felt Mother nearly laugh—Osei, Hana is to be finished today, on Avalon, in the presence of Edda and Risa Friese, and is to stop being so stubborn, because she’s no use to anyone half done. Okafor says she said the same thing to Hana’s father once, in the war, and he didn’t listen either.

I opened my eyes.

Hana was on the edge of the glass, with Risa. She hadn’t come to the dawn before. She’d come to this one.

I looked at her.

”You heard?”

”Some,” said Hana. Very carefully.

”She moved your father up. To fifth.”

The left side of Hana’s face did something. The right side tried.

”And you’re to be finished today,” I said. ”And stop being stubborn.”

Hana closed her eyes.

”She said that?”

”She said she said it to your father once. In the war. And he didn’t listen either.”

Hana’s eyes opened.

”He was in the war?”

I didn’t know. I’d never asked. Nobody had ever asked. Hana’s father was the man with the shake on the Retention list in Harbor Block 44, and nobody, as far as I knew, had ever asked him what he’d been before.

Risa put her arm round Hana.

”Well,” said Risa. ”We’ll ask him. When he’s fifth.” She squeezed. ”Come on. Edda’s got the kettle on. She always has the kettle on.”

Edda’s medical building was the third-wave hut at the end of the street, the one the queens had grown a second room onto in the spring. It smelled of the green soap Priya made and of whatever Edda had been boiling that week. That week it was bandages.

Hana lay on the bed by the window. Risa sat beside her, holding her hand. Edda sat on the other side with her green book open on her knee and her pen ready, the way she sat for everything now. Impossible was written in that book about forty times, mostly next to things Dory had done.

”Will I go to sleep?” Hana asked.

”No,” I said.

”Will it hurt?”

”No.”

”Will I be different?”

I thought about it. About Luna, and Sera, and Liam and Toby and Risa, the day I’d finished them. The way their silver had run out to the ends of everything. The rings round their eyes. The markings on their arms.

”Yes,” I said. ”But you’ll still be you.”

Hana nodded. Very carefully.

Then she said, ”Risa. Don’t let go.”

”I won’t,” said Risa. ”I never do.”

I looked.

The bleeds first. That was the order. You mend what’s broken before you open what’s closed, or the silver goes running into the broken places and makes them worse. I’d learned that with Jessa.

I found the place in her head where the last bleed had been. Seven weeks of hiding, and then the one that didn’t come out of her nose. It had healed, in the way bodies heal when nobody helps them: badly. Scar where there should have been paths. Paths that had found their way round the scar the long way, so that every word she said had to go round three corners before it reached her mouth. So that the right side of her face got its orders late, or not at all.

I didn’t take the scar out. You can’t take a scar out any more than you can pull a thread out of cloth. I went into it, the way I’d gone into Jessa’s silver to find the filament, and I read it. Every place it had pressed. Every path it had pushed aside. Every route her brain had built round it, slowly, over two years, on its own, because nobody was there to build it for her.

And I gave her the short way back.

Not all at once. A path at a time. The way the queen grew a cup. Listening first. Finding out where each path had been trying to go, all this time, and helping it a little in the direction it was already going.

Twenty minutes.

Edda didn’t write anything for twenty minutes. Risa didn’t move.

Then I came out of Hana’s head, and opened my eyes, and said:

”Say something.”

Hana looked at me.

Then she said, ”What do you want me to say?”

Fast. Easy. Without stopping. Without going round three corners. Without getting every word right, because every word was just right, on its own, the way words are supposed to be.

And both sides of her mouth moved.

Hana put her free hand up to her face.

She touched the right side. Her cheek. Her mouth. She pressed her fingers against her own lips and said, through them, ”Oh,” and then, ”Oh,” and then, all in one breath, not carefully at all, ”I can feel it. I can feel it move. Risa, I can feel it move, it’s been numb for two years, I’d forgotten it was there, Risa—”

Risa was crying.

Hana was crying.

Edda wrote something in her green book. I saw it upside down. It wasn’t impossible. It was both sides.

I finished her after that.

It was the easy part. It always was. Once the broken places were mended, the rest of Hana’s silver was just waiting. Like all of them. Like water behind a door.

I opened the door.

Her silver ran out. Down her arms. Into her hands. Out to the ends of everything. Bright rings came up round her eyes, the way they had for the others. Silver markings ran down her forearms in long slow curves, like currents. Not branches, like Sera’s. Not frost, like Luna’s. Curves. The shape water makes when it moves.

And the glass of water on Edda’s table, by the window, stood up.

Not spilled. Stood up. The whole column of it, out of the glass, a hand’s height above the rim, perfectly still, catching the light from the window. Then it folded itself into a sphere, the way Hana used to make spheres in the cistern in the dome, when she was fourteen and nobody knew yet that she was bleeding.

Then the sphere split into two.

Then four.

Then sixteen, small and bright and turning, in a slow ring round the bed, round Hana and Risa and Edda and me, like a necklace somebody had made out of the inside of a rainstorm.

Hana watched them.

Both sides of her face watched them.

”I used to be able to do one,” she said. ”One. In the cistern. And it gave me a nosebleed.” She lifted her hand. The ring of water turned with it. ”This doesn’t hurt at all.”

”It won’t,” I said. ”Not any more.”

She looked at me.

”Lucas,” she said. Not carefully. ”Thank you.”

”Thank Okafor,” I said. ”She made you go first.”

”I’ll thank Okafor when I see her.” Hana closed her hand. The sixteen spheres came together into one, and the one poured itself neatly back into Edda’s glass, without a drop on the table. ”And then I’m going to tell her she was wrong. And then I’m going to thank her again.”

Risa laughed through her tears.

”That’s the most words I’ve heard you say at once since the dome,” she said.

”I’ve been saving them up,” said Hana.

Senator Friese came out of the guest house that evening.

He hadn’t been out since the night the terms were voided. Not for meals. Not for the dawns. The General had taken him a tray twice a day and come back with it half eaten, and said nothing about it, and Luna hadn’t asked.

He came up the street at dusk. Slowly, with his cane that he didn’t need. In his dark coat, narrow and grey and perfectly composed. He walked past the forge and the schoolroom and the third-wave houses, and he stopped at the bottom of our porch steps, where the Overseer had stood a week before and said the terms are kept.

Risa was on the porch.

She had Dory on her lap. She was singing to her, something low and wordless that Toby had taught her, and she stopped when she saw him.

Sigmund was on the step below. He’d been there since supper, with his arms folded, the way he sat whenever he was waiting for something and didn’t want to say what.

He stood up.

The lightning in him didn’t spark. I was watching for it. He held it so tight it was still.

Friese looked at his son.

Then at his daughter.

Then at the baby on her lap.

Dory was awake. She’d turned her head when Risa stopped singing. She looked at the man at the bottom of the steps with her woven silver very bright, and her silver turned toward him, the way it turned toward everyone new.

Checking.

Friese felt it. I saw him feel it. His hand tightened on the cane.

”Risa,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

”I’d like,” said Senator Friese, very carefully, getting every word right, ”to see my granddaughter.”

Nobody said anything.

Sigmund didn’t move. Sera, in the doorway behind Risa, didn’t move. I was in Gareth’s chair at the end of the porch and I didn’t move either.

Risa looked at her father for a long time.

Then she said, ”You’re seeing her.”

”I meant—”

”I know what you meant.” Risa’s voice was very level. Very quiet. The voice that meant storms. ”You meant hold her. You meant come up the steps and have me put her in your arms and look at her silver. Woven. Every path joined to every other. You meant see what she is.”

Friese said nothing.

”The nine recovery orders for Day 300,” said Risa. ”Pim Arden. Lise Varga. The Quints. You signed first.” She held Dory a little closer. ”Every shipment from Avalon that went somewhere other than Earth. Every route sheet with a person line on it. Twenty years. You signed first.”

”I did,” said Friese.

He didn’t look away.

I’ll give him that. I’d seen men look away from less. He stood at the bottom of our steps with his cane and his composed grey face and looked straight back at his daughter while she listed what he’d done.

”I’m not going to say I’m sorry,” he said. ”You wouldn’t believe it. And you’d be right not to.” He paused. ”But I’d still like to see her.”

”No,” said Risa.

Just that.

Friese’s hand moved on his cane. Not much.

”Not today,” said Risa. ”Maybe not ever.” She looked down at Dory, and then back at him. ”Ask me again when you’ve stopped signing first.”

Friese stood there for a long moment.

Then he nodded. Once. A small, stiff, Senate nod, the kind he must have given ten thousand times across ten thousand tables.

He turned to go.

And Dory, on Risa’s lap, did something none of us expected.

She reached out.

Not with her hands. With her silver. Out past the edge of the porch, down the steps, across the space between them, the way she’d reached for Mother down the thread. And touched him. Just once. Just for a second.

There you are.

Friese stopped dead.

He didn’t turn round. He stood with his back to us at the bottom of the steps, with his hand white on the cane, and didn’t move for a very long time.

Then he walked away up the street, toward the guest house, very slowly. Not as straight as he’d come.

Risa watched him go.

Then she looked down at Dory.

”You weren’t supposed to do that,” she said.

Dory looked back at her, very bright, very sure.

”That’s not a decision for you,” said Risa. And then, more quietly, with her mouth not quite steady: ”Not yet.”

Sigmund sat down on the step again.

The lightning was still in him. Still held. But his hands, folded on his knees, were shaking.

Sera came out of the doorway and sat down beside him. She didn’t say anything. She just sat, close enough that her shoulder touched his.

After a while, Sigmund said, ”She checked him.”

”She checks everyone,” said Sera.

”She checked him.” Sigmund stared up the street. ”And he felt it. I saw his face.” His jaw worked. ”Twenty years of signing first. And a baby checks him once, and he can’t walk straight.”

”Yes,” said Sera.

”I don’t know what to do with that.”

”You don’t have to do anything with it,” said Sera. ”Not tonight.”

Garnet left bread for the Overseer.

I didn’t know about it until the next morning. She’d been doing it for three days, it turned out. Every morning after she took breakfast down to the queen, she took a second piece of bread, buttered, the way Pell buttered it, all the way to the edges, and carried it across the square to the mouth of the meeting passage, and left it on the stone in front of the Overseer.

”It doesn’t eat it,” she told me, when I asked. ”But it looks at it.”

”Garnet, it’s a Sorn.”

”I know it’s a Sorn. Nessa gave cake to the tall one.”

”Sesh is different.”

”Why?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

”It looks at it for ages,” said Garnet. ”And then when I come back the next day, the old one’s gone and I put a new one down.” She considered. ”I think Pebble eats it. Or one of the little ones.”

”Probably.”

”But it looks at it first,” said Garnet. ”Every time. Like it’s trying to work out what it’s for.”

I went down to the square that morning, after the dawn.

The Overseer was still at the passage mouth. Crouched. Still. Mirror tilted up toward the sky. It had been there eight days. It hadn’t moved for the dawns or the meals or the night Hana’s spheres turned in Edda’s window. Pebble still went and sat beside it for an hour around midnight, Wren said, every night.

On the stone in front of it was a piece of bread. Buttered to the edges.

I stood a little way off.

”She wants to know what you think it’s for,” I said.

The Overseer didn’t move.

Then, very slowly, the mirror came down. Off the sky. Toward me.

It had always shown me myself, the mirror. That was the point of it. You looked at the Overseer and saw your own face, and couldn’t read anything in it but you. But I could see into it. I’d always been able to, since the ice. Into the grey shell. To the small soft thing inside. Tight. Folded over and over, in a shape nobody had ever taught it.

It was folded tighter than it had been.

Not afraid. I’d seen it afraid, the day it found out I’d been reading its shell all along. This wasn’t that. This was something closing up very small, the way the young closed up in the hollow when the weather turned.

”It is food,” said the Overseer.

Its own voice. Not the band. Not Crane. Flat and level and very quiet.

”Yes.”

”It is not for it. It does not eat.”

”She knows.”

”Then it is not food.” The mirror tilted. Toward the bread. ”Then it is something else.”

I didn’t say anything.

”The juvenile brings it,” said the Overseer. ”Every day. After the queen.” A long pause. ”The juvenile does not want anything. It does not ask anything. It puts down the bread and goes away.”

”She’s twelve,” I said.

”Twelve,” said the Overseer, as if it were filing it.

Then:

”What is it for?”

I looked at it for a long time. The small soft thing, folded tight in its grey shell, in the mouth of a passage where it had been told to wait, by a Hand that hadn’t come.

”It’s for you,” I said.

The Overseer was very still.

”Not to eat,” I said. ”Just for you. So you know somebody thought about you this morning.” I paused. ”That’s all it’s for.”

The mirror stayed on me.

Then it went back to the bread.

And stayed there.

The Hand moved at noon.

Dot felt it first. She was in the kitchen, with Pell’s notebook, going through the list of courts that needed lids. She stopped in the middle of a sentence and her grille went silent, and every one of her hands went still at once.

”Operator,” she said.

I was already standing up.

”The three marks,” said Dot. ”Overhead. Where the stars stop.” A pause. ”They are not overhead.”

”Where are they?”

”Moving,” said Dot. ”Down. Toward the Meridian.”

Toward the station. Toward Ruan and six hundred crew and a queen who’d been free for nine days and was still too weak to do more than hold a thread at dawn.

Luna was already at the table with her notebook. Sera was in the doorway. Risa had Dory up out of her basket before I’d finished turning round.

”How long?” said Luna.

”Eleven hours,” said Dot. ”At this speed.” Another pause. ”They are not hurrying.”

”They don’t need to,” said Holt, from his chair by the stove.

Nobody said anything.

Then the band on Crane’s collar lit.

He was on the bench in the square. He’d been there all morning. I saw him through the window, sitting very straight, with his steady hands on his knees, and the band lit blue, and his face went still the way it always went still when something else was speaking through him.

His voice came out across the square. Flat and even. The handler’s, not the Overseer’s.

The Hand will review the station. The Hand will review the asset. The Hand will review the city.

A pause.

The Overseer will attend.

The band went dark.

I looked across the square.

At the mouth of the meeting passage, the Overseer had stood up. Its mirror was tilted down. Not toward the sky. Toward the stone in front of it.

Toward the bread.

It looked at the bread for a long time.

Then it bent. Slowly. All the way down, folding its long grey limbs, until its mirror was almost touching the stone.

And it picked the bread up.

It held it in one long grey hand, very carefully, buttered side up, the way you’d hold something you’d never held before and didn’t want to drop.

Then it turned and walked into the passage. Away from the square. Away from the sky.

Down. Toward the hollow.

Toward the queen.

Days 765–770. Water.

Fifth dawn. Okafor’s list, through Mother, thirty-one names. Not oldest first, not sickest first. Luna: it’s a line. Front rank, hold, hide, carry. Mother, Maura, Rory, then Ines Tarrow who has never said a word on the hello. The sickest, Bram Hollis, is twenty-second, behind the ridge. He’s dying slower since the hello. Her order.

Sixth dawn. Rory’s paths weren’t cut or sealed. They were taken out, shoulders to hands, healed over smooth. Nothing to open. Sera held out her palm: use mine. It’s his shape. Liam held out his. Seven branches, fine and quick; seven branches, a river in a wide valley.

Hana in the forge while I made the north hollow’s lid. She wants finishing, but not before her father, who is sixth. She hid the bleeds seven weeks so he’d have the stipend. Six lines to Okafor in Pell’s notebook paper. ”I am asking.”

Seventh dawn. Sera’s hand and Liam’s in Dory’s net. Under the healed skin at Rory’s shoulder, the ghost of a path, the way a field remembers a grubbed-out hedge. Liam’s shape. I grew a hand’s-breadth. ”Oh.” Then: ”That’s warm.”

Okafor, through Mother: request noted. Osei, Kwame, moved to fifth; Toby’s mother doesn’t mind sixth, she’s waited twenty years. Osei, Hana, to be finished today, in front of Edda and Risa, and to stop being stubborn. She said the same to Hana’s father once, in the war. Hana: ”He was in the war?” Nobody ever asked him.

Edda’s hut. Mend before you open, or the silver runs into the broken places; I learned that with Jessa. The scar from the last bleed, paths going round three corners. I read it and gave her the short way back, a path at a time, listening first, like the queen’s cup. ”What do you want me to say?” Both sides. Edda wrote: both sides.

Then finishing. Rings, and curves down her forearms, the shape water makes when it moves. Edda’s glass stood up, became a sphere, then sixteen round the bed. ”I used to do one, and it gave me a nosebleed.” Okafor made her go first. She’ll thank her, tell her she was wrong, and thank her again. Risa: most words since the dome. ”I’ve been saving them up.”

Friese at dusk at the bottom of our steps. ”Risa.” He’d like to see his granddaughter. ”You’re seeing her.” The nine orders; you signed first. ”I did.” Not sorry; you wouldn’t believe it. ”No. Ask me again when you’ve stopped signing first.” He turned to go and Dory reached past the porch and checked him once. There you are. He didn’t walk straight. ”You weren’t supposed to do that. That’s not a decision for you. Not yet.” Sigmund: a baby checks him once, and he can’t walk straight. Sera beside him. ”Not tonight.”

Garnet’s been leaving buttered bread for the Overseer for three days. ”It looks at it, like it’s trying to work out what it’s for.” I asked it. Folded tighter than I’ve ever seen, like the young in bad weather. ”It is not food. Then it is something else. The juvenile does not want anything.” She’s twelve. ”What is it for?” It’s for you, so you know somebody thought about you this morning.

Noon. Dot: Operator. The three marks are moving down toward the Meridian. Eleven hours. Not hurrying. Holt: they don’t need to. The band, the handler’s voice: the Hand will review the station, the asset, the city. The Overseer will attend.

It picked up the bread, buttered side up, very carefully, and walked into the passage. Down. Toward the queen.