Scarecrow

The hello went up at dawn, and it didn’t stop.

That was the first thing. Every morning for eleven days it had been a thread. A long one, by the end, two hundred and eighty seconds, and stronger every time. But a thread. You went down it carefully. You did what you could before it thinned. You came back up onto the red glass with your hands flat and your heart going, and Dot told you how long it had lasted, and you were grateful for every second.

This morning it was a river.

It went up from the red glass the way it always did. Every name. Every base. Every brood. Up through the ring of queens to the spine-queen. She caught it, the way she always did.

And then the Hand caught it with her.

From a mile out over the plain. From under ten thousand folds. The queen at the bottom of the Hand took the hello the way you’d take the end of a heavy rope from someone who’d been carrying it alone. And lifted.

I felt it go out of me. Down the thread to the dome. Eleven light-years. Not thin. Not faint. Not a lamp turned down. Wide. Like a door opened all the way, with the light from the room behind it pouring out onto the step.

Dory woke on Risa’s chest and checked, and didn’t have to reach. The thread to Mother was right there. Right in front of us. As if Mother were in the next room.

There you are, said Dory.

There you are, said Mother.

And I went down.

I’d told myself, on the first morning, that it would take an hour to finish her. An hour, in the same room, with Toby’s hand on her heart and nothing in the way.

It took forty-one minutes.

I didn’t count them. Dot did. I didn’t count anything. I was in my mother’s silver, and the hello was holding the door open, and for the first time in my life I wasn’t in a hurry.

I’d opened nine of her narrow places by then. Eleven days, a door a morning, two on the good mornings. Nine, out of the hundreds Retention had cut in her all those years ago. Each one near the last. Working out from her heart the way I’d worked out from Jessa’s. So that the fragment of the spine-queen’s bone in her, the one she’d always need the spoon to feed, could drink a little more each morning from her own silver instead.

The nine I’d opened were bright. The rest were still cut.

I didn’t take them one at a time any more.

I didn’t have to. The door was open. I could see all of her. Every path, every cut, every place her silver had been stopped short. Laid out in front of me the way the map was laid out on the wall of the map room. All at once. And I could see how each one wanted to go. Which way it had been trying to grow, for twenty-four years, against the cut.

I did what the queen did with the stone.

I listened first. For a long time. I let her silver tell me where it had been going. And then I helped it. A little. In the direction it was already trying to go.

All of them.

Together.

Her silver ran out.

From her heart. Down her arms. Into her hands. The hands I’d watched shake my whole life. At the kitchen table in the house in the dead field. In the hospital bed in the dome. On the calls home, every Sunday, the edge of her fingers in the corner of the screen, trembling against the arm of the chair.

They didn’t shake.

Down her spine. Into her legs. Out to the ends of everything. Into the narrow places in her lungs that had made her too weak to come to families’ day. Into the places behind her eyes.

I felt the fragment take it.

The spine-queen’s bone, the small piece of it inside my mother that the Project had ground fine and fed her in a spoon for twenty-four years. It drank. Not starving now. Not a dish on the first of the month. Her. Her own silver, all of it, open, running into the roots of the fragment and through them and out again, the way it had always been meant to run. The way it ran in Father’s eyes at the end of the program. Like opening a window.

And somewhere eleven light-years away, in a small warm room with a kettle in it, my mother stood up.

I felt her do it. Through the thread. Through Dory’s net. Through everything.

She stood up out of her chair without putting her hands on the arms.

I came back up onto the red glass.

I didn’t open my eyes straight away. I couldn’t. I sat there with my hands flat on the glass and Risa’s hand on the back of my neck and Sera’s on my shoulder, and I didn’t move, and I didn’t say anything.

”Forty-one minutes,” said Dot. Very quietly. ”Fragment thirty.”

A pause.

”Fragment thirty is whole.”

Behind me, somebody made a sound.

Genny.

She’d been standing exactly where she’d stood every morning, with her chin up and her hands in her pockets. She wasn’t standing now. When I opened my eyes and turned round, she was on her knees on the glass, the way she’d been on the first morning, with her hands out in front of her.

Looking at them.

”I felt it,” she said. ”Through you. Through Dory.” Her voice was very small. ”Lucas. I felt her stand up.”

Garnet was beside her. Garnet hadn’t felt anything. Garnet didn’t have the kind of silver that felt things down threads; Garnet had the kind that turned pebbles into strawberries. But she’d seen Genny’s face. And she’d seen mine.

”Is Mother better?” she said.

I couldn’t answer.

Risa answered for me.

”Yes,” she said. ”Your mother’s better.”

Garnet looked at her. Then at me. Then at Genny on her knees.

Then she sat down on the glass, very suddenly, as if her legs had decided for her, and burst into tears.

She cried the way she did everything. All at once. Loudly. With her whole face. Miss Pell came and knelt beside her and put an arm round her and didn’t say anything, and Garnet put her face in Pell’s coat and went on crying, and between sobs, so muffled I could barely make it out, she said:

”She’s going to be so annoying about it.”

And Genny laughed.

Out loud. On her knees on the red glass, with tears running down her face and her hands still held out in front of her, Genny laughed until she couldn’t breathe.

The hello was still going.

That was the second thing. Forty-one minutes, and the door was still open. The Hand was still holding it. I could feel her, a mile out over the plain, under all those folds, not tired. Not even close to tired.

”Lucas,” said Luna. ”Maura.”

I went back down.

Maura was faint. Further down than Mother had been, on the first morning. I’d opened four doors in her in eleven days. But the hello was wide now, and I could see all of her the way I’d seen all of Mother, and I did the same thing.

Listened. Then helped.

It took nineteen minutes. Maura’s silver was simpler than Mother’s. Smaller. The way she’d said: mine wasn’t much. But it was hers. And when I’d finished, I felt her hands go still on whatever they’d been holding, eleven light-years away, and I felt her breathe in.

Then I felt the warmth.

The oven door opening. The way Dot had described her, months ago, before any of us knew what the hello was. Only now it wasn’t a feeling down a thread. It was heat. Real heat. Coming off her hands.

Oh, said Maura Calder. Oh, love. The kettle’s boiled.

A pause.

I didn’t put it on. I just picked it up.

Sera, beside me on the glass, put her face in her hands.

Rory took the rest of the hour.

Not because there was more of him. Because there was less. His arms were still mostly gone from the shoulders down, smooth healed-over places where his paths had been. I’d grown three hand’s-breadths in four mornings, with Sera’s palm and Liam’s held out beside me for the shape.

This morning I grew the rest.

Sera and Liam knelt on either side of me with their hands out, palms up, the silver bright in their wrists. Dory’s net went round all four of us. And I went down to Rory Calder and followed the ghost of the path his body remembered, the way a field remembers a hedge, in the shape his children had carried away from him without knowing.

All the way down. From the shoulder to the elbow. From the elbow to the wrist. Into the palm. Seven branches, wide and slow, a river in a wide valley.

Out to the fingertips.

I felt him feel it.

Not oh. Not that’s warm. Rory didn’t say anything at all. I felt him go very still, eleven light-years away, the way Liam went still when something mattered too much to talk about.

Then I felt the fire.

Not a breath of it, the way the General’s frost had come. Not a warmth, the way Maura’s had. Fire. All at once. A great slow roll of it, like the door of the heat plant opening on the coldest night of the year. Coming out of his hands for the first time in twenty years.

And then, just as fast, gone.

Held.

The way Sigmund held his lightning. Pulled back in. Not because he couldn’t hold it. Because he could.

Ah, said Rory Calder, very quietly.

Then:

Tell Liam I didn’t set fire to the Major’s curtains.

Liam laughed. On his knees on the glass, with his hands still held out and tears all down his face, he laughed so hard Sera had to hold him up.

Tell him, said Rory, I nearly did.

The hello lasted an hour and fifty-two minutes.

Dot counted every second. I finished Mother, and Maura, and Rory, and opened six doors in Ines Tarrow, and three in Hana’s father, who was fifth now. Hana knelt beside me for that, with her new silver curves bright on her forearms and her hand on my arm. When I opened the first door in Kwame Osei, she said, ”Papa,” out loud, without thinking, easily, both sides of her mouth moving, and I felt him hear her.

And then, at the very end, I asked Mother to put Okafor on.

Not Okafor herself. Okafor didn’t have the hello. Okafor wasn’t one of the thirty-one; she was on a different list. She had her own silver capped, only keeping a small amount of her ability. She was a sergeant who’d been made a major when she retired, sitting up every night in her own flat with thirty-one people who could hear something she couldn’t.

But Mother could carry her words.

And this morning, with the door open as wide as it was, Mother could carry them whole.

Okafor says, said Mother, first: tell the Colonel, apology accepted.

I glanced at the General. He was at the end of the row, as always. Very straight.

Once, said Mother. She says she’ll consider the second one.

The General’s face didn’t change. Windsors don’t.

But Luna, beside me, made a sound that was very nearly a laugh.

Second, said Mother. She says: the hello’s wider. She heard it. Not with silver. She says she heard it in all thirty-one of us at once, the way you hear a crowd breathe in. She says something’s changed up there and she’d like to know what.

So I told her.

All of it. In order. The way the General had said. The Hand coming down over the plain. The thread. The Overseer and the bread. Who sings. Toby’s note, and every brood on Avalon, and two hundred and thirty-two people singing in a hundred keys. Dory’s word. Mine. The handler’s voice going thin and then gone. Crane on his hands on the glass. Ten collars, quiet.

The queen at the bottom of the Hand, older than north.

It took a long time. The hello held for all of it.

When I’d finished, there was a pause on the other end. Long. Long enough that I wondered whether the thread had thinned at last.

Then Mother said:

Okafor says: say that again. The part about the queen.

I said it again.

Another pause.

Okafor says, said Mother slowly, that changes everything.

She says, Mother went on, that she’s been building a line for twenty years. On Earth. Under the dome. Thirty-one people and the old program families and everyone who ever came back under the Act. She says she knew it would never be enough. Not against the Project. Not against the Senate. And not against what was behind them.

She says she built it anyway. Because you build the line you’ve got.

She says—and Mother’s voice changed, very slightly, the way it changed when she was reading something aloud that she agreed with—that this morning, for the first time, she thinks it might be enough. Not because of the thirty-one. Because of what’s carrying their names.

I didn’t say anything.

She says: ask the queen in the Hand what she wants.

Not what she’ll do for us. What she wants. A pause. Okafor says you never ask an ally what they’ll do for you. You ask what they need. And then you see if you can give it.

She says: that’s the next order. Today. Before anything else.

And she says—

The thread wavered. Not thinning. Something else. As if Mother had turned round to look at something in the room.

Lucas, said Mother. Her own voice. Not Okafor’s words. There’s someone at the door.

I went very still.

Who?

I don’t know. A pause. Okafor’s gone to look.

I could feel the room through her. Faintly. The small warm room. The kettle, and the chairs, and thirty-one people who’d been sitting up every night in a retired Major’s flat. Maura, with her hands still warm. Rory, holding his fire in.

And Mother. Standing.

It’s three men, said Mother. In grey. Okafor knows one of them. A pause. She says he’s Central Allocation. Second floor. She says he signs things.

Nobody on the red glass moved.

She says they’ve been on the stairs for an hour, said Mother. Waiting. She says she heard them come up and she didn’t say anything because she didn’t want to stop the hello. A pause. She says that’s what she was going to tell you next. That they were on the stairs. And that you weren’t to worry.

Mother—

They want to come in, said Mother. They’ve got a paper. Okafor’s reading it through the door. Another pause. It’s a recovery order. For Retention subject Dask, Dorothy. And Calder, Maura. And Calder, Rory. To be returned to medical supervision on Level 62, pending review.

Pending review.

The same words the band had said, the night the stabilizer was suspended.

Two signatures, said Mother. Okafor says. Crane’s and Friese’s.

On the glass, Crane made a sound like someone had hit him.

”I didn’t—” he said. ”I’m here. I haven’t signed anything in—”

”They signed it for you,” said Holt quietly. ”They always could.”

Lucas, said Mother.

I’m here.

Okafor says she’s going to open the door now, said Mother. She says she’d like you to stay on the line. A pause, and I felt something in her I hadn’t felt since I was very small. Since before the program. Since before her hands shook. Something bright and quick and absolutely certain, like Garnet’s face lighting up.

And she says, said Mother, that I’m to stand behind her.

I didn’t see what happened.

I couldn’t. The hello isn’t eyes. It’s silver, and silver, and the thing that carries it. I could feel Mother. I could feel the room. I could feel Maura and Rory and Ines Tarrow and Hana’s father and twenty-six more people sitting very still in their chairs.

I felt the door open.

I felt three men in grey come in. Not through Mother. Through the floor of the room. Through the vibration of their boots, the way Toby feels a sound before it’s a sound. Their silver was nothing. They had none. They were ordinary men with a paper, from the second floor of the Senate Annex, who’d come up the stairs of a retired Major’s flat at whatever hour it was under the dome to take three Retention subjects back to Level 62.

I felt Okafor stand in front of them.

I couldn’t feel her silver, if she had any. But I felt her anyway, through Mother. The way you’d feel a wall.

I felt one of the men speak. I couldn’t hear the words.

I felt Okafor answer.

And then I felt the first man step forward. Past Okafor. Toward Mother.

And Mother lifted her hand.

That was all.

She lifted her hand. The one that didn’t shake any more. She didn’t touch him. She didn’t push. She lifted her hand, palm out, the way you’d hold it up to say stop to a child running toward a road.

And the man stopped.

All three of them stopped. Not because they’d decided to. Because every piece of metal they were carrying had stopped. The buckles on their belts. The badges on their coats. The nails in their boot heels. The small hard thing in the second man’s pocket that I didn’t have to see to know was a gun. All of it, at once, stopped dead in the air of that small warm room, and held.

With three men attached to it.

I’d seen a lot of things since the ice. I’d seen a queen grow a cup out of a paving stone. I’d seen a station learn to stand up by itself. I’d seen a thread come down from the bottom of the Hand and touch a piece of bread.

I’d never felt anything like that.

Not strength. I’d felt strength. Sigmund’s lightning. Rory’s fire. The Hand. This wasn’t strength.

This was exactness.

Every buckle. Every badge. Every nail. Held to the width of a hair. Not crushing. Not pulling. Holding. The way you’d hold a full cup without spilling a drop. The way she’d held three bowls and the flour and the eggs, every morning, in the kitchen of the house in the dead field, when I was too small to know what I was watching.

And once, in the war, she tore a hole in the side of a ship the size of a city.

I felt her hold them.

I felt her not hurt them.

I felt Okafor, in front of her, very slowly, take the paper out of the first man’s hand. Fold it. Once. Twice. And put it in her own pocket.

And I heard, very faint, through Mother, through the hello, through eleven light-years and ten thousand folds, Okafor’s voice for the first time since the day she sealed our pods.

”Thank you, Dot. You can put them down now.”

Mother put them down.

Gently. Feet first.

The hello ended at last at eight forty-three.

Not because the Hand let go. Because the sun came up over the dome, eleven light-years away, and the thirty-one were wide awake, and the room had three frightened men in it who needed to be walked back down the stairs, and Okafor, through Mother, said: That’ll do for today. We’ve work.

The last thing I felt was Mother.

Not words. Just her. Standing. Whole. Her hands perfectly still at her sides. Her silver running out to the ends of everything, bright and open and hers, the fragment at her heart drinking from it the way it was always meant to.

She was smiling.

Lucas, she said.

Yes.

Tell Genny and Garnet I’ll see them soon. A pause. Tell Risa she’s to bring the baby to me the day she can. And tell her she’s not to let you make her walk, because you’ll want to, and she’s not to listen.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

And tell your father—

She stopped.

Father was dead. In the field, in the dead country, with the scarecrow standing over him. She knew. I knew.

Tell the scarecrow, said Mother, that I came back.

And the hello went.

I sat on the red glass for a long time.

Everyone did. Nobody went in for breakfast. Nobody said much. Garnet had stopped crying and gone to sleep against Miss Pell, with her drawing board in her lap, and Pell didn’t move, and Juno came and sat down on Pell’s other side and didn’t say anything either.

Genny sat beside me.

Very straight. With her hands in her lap. Every so often she’d look down at them, and turn them over, and look at the palms.

”She held three men,” she said eventually. ”In the air.”

”By their buckles.”

”By everything.” Genny shook her head. ”Every buckle. Every nail. All at once. Without hurting them.” She turned her hands over again. ”I can lift a car. I lifted Brock Haddon’s car onto the roof when I was nine. But I grabbed it. All of it. I didn’t hold the—” She stopped. ”I didn’t hold every piece.”

”You could learn,” I said.

”From her?”

”From her. And from the queen.” I looked at the garden wall, at the far end of the city, where the queen lay along the stones in the morning light. ”The queen listens first. Mother holds every piece. Same thing, really.”

Genny thought about that for a long time.

Then she said, ”Lucas. She tore a hole in a ship.”

”I know.”

”The size of a city.”

”I know.”

Genny looked up. Past the city. Past the canyon. Out over the plain, a mile out, where the Hand hung in the morning light, fingers folded, shadow black on the glass.

”Do you think,” she said, very carefully, ”it was one of those?”

I looked at the Hand.

I hadn’t thought of that.

I’d never asked Mother which ship. Nobody had. She’d said it once, at the kitchen table, when I was small, and I’d believed her the way you believe the things your mother says at the kitchen table, and never asked.

The size of a city.

The Hand was the size of a city.

”I don’t know,” I said.

”We should ask her,” said Genny.

”Yes,” I said. ”We should.”

We went out to the plain that afternoon. Okafor’s order. Ask the queen in the Hand what she wants.

Not all of us. Me. Dory, because the queen in the Hand had answered Dory, and nobody else. Risa, because Dory went where Risa went. Toby, to carry. Juno, to feel. And the Overseer.

The Overseer asked to come.

It came up out of the hollow at noon, holding the bread, and stood at the edge of the square, and said, ”It would like to be there,” in the voice that went into the air and into me at once. And our queen, at the garden wall, said, Let it.

So it came.

We walked out across the plain. A mile. The red glass flat and bright under our feet, and then, as we got closer, not bright. Black. The Hand’s shadow. Cold, the way the shadow of a cliff is cold.

At the edge of the shadow, the Overseer stopped.

It looked up.

At the fingers folded above us, so big they filled the sky. At the palm, closed. At the place in the centre of it where the thread had come down.

Then it held up the bread.

And the thread came down again.

Slowly. The way it had before. Out of the palm, down through the air, until the tip of it hung in front of us. Level with the bread. Level with the Overseer’s dark mirror.

Level with Dory.

Dory reached out. Not with her hand. With her silver. And touched it.

There you are.

And the queen at the bottom of the Hand answered.

Not who sings. Not mine. Something longer. Much longer. In the brood-tongue, the old one, the one our queen used with the young. Slow and deep and so old that I could only understand one word in five.

Juno could understand more. Juno had her eyes shut and her head turned up, the way she’d stood in the square.

”She’s saying where she’s from,” said Juno. Very quietly. ”She’s saying it’s a long way. Further than north. Further than anything.” Juno’s voice wavered. ”She’s saying they took her when she was young. And built the Hand round her. And grew the small ones out of her. And used her to carry the voice.” Juno swallowed. ”For longer than she can count.”

”Ask her what she wants,” I said.

Juno didn’t ask. Dory did.

Not in words. Dory didn’t have the words. She just reached, the way she reached for Mother, and asked, the way a child asks with its whole body.

And the queen answered.

Juno listened for a long time.

Then she opened her eyes.

She looked at me. Then at Risa. Then at Dory. Then up, at the folded fingers of the Hand, filling the sky.

”She says she’s not the only one,” said Juno.

Nobody moved.

”She says there are others,” said Juno. ”Other Hands. Other housings. Other queens. Out there. Past north. She says she’s the first. But she’s not the only.” Juno’s voice broke, just slightly. ”She says she can hear them. Now. Since the hello went through her. She says she never could before. The voice was too loud. And now it’s quiet, and she can hear them.”

”How many?” I said.

Juno closed her eyes again. Listened.

”She doesn’t have a number,” said Juno. ”She says: more than broods on this world.” She opened her eyes. ”She says they’re all singing. Very quietly. Under everything. The way she was.” A pause. ”And she says what she wants.”

”What?”

Juno looked up at the Hand.

”She wants them to hear the hello too.”

Days 772–773. Whole.

Dawn. The Hand caught the hello with the spine-queen, like taking the end of a heavy rope from someone carrying it alone, and lifted. Not a thread now; a door opened all the way. Mother right there, as if in the next room. There you are, from Dory. There you are, from Mother.

Forty-one minutes. Nine doors open in eleven days, hundreds still cut. I didn’t take them one at a time. I could see all of her, every path and which way it had been trying to grow for twenty-four years. Listened first, like the queen with the stone, then helped all of them at once. Her silver ran out to the ends of everything; the fragment drank, not from a dish but from her. In a small warm room eleven light-years away, my mother stood up without putting her hands on the arms of the chair. Dot: fragment thirty is whole.

Genny on her knees: I felt her stand up. Garnet: is Mother better? Risa: yes. Garnet sat down hard and cried into Pell’s coat: ”She’s going to be so annoying about it.” Genny laughed until she couldn’t breathe.

Nineteen minutes for Maura. Her hands warm, real heat. ”The kettle’s boiled. I didn’t put it on. I just picked it up.” Sera put her face in her hands. Then Rory, Sera’s palm and Liam’s out beside me, shoulder to fingertips, seven wide slow branches. The fire came all at once like the heat plant door on the coldest night, and then he held it in, because he could. ”Tell Liam I didn’t set fire to the Major’s curtains. I nearly did.”

An hour and fifty-two minutes. Six doors in Ines Tarrow, three in Hana’s father. Hana said ”Papa” easily, both sides of her mouth, and he heard her.

Okafor, through Mother, whole now: tell the Colonel apology accepted. Once; she’ll consider the second. She heard the hello widen in all thirty-one at once. I told her everything in order. The queen in the Hand: say that again. That changes everything. Twenty years building a line she knew wasn’t enough. Today it might be, not because of the thirty-one but because of what’s carrying their names. Next order: ask the queen what she wants, not what she’ll do for us.

Then: someone at the door. Three men in grey, Central Allocation, on the stairs an hour; Okafor didn’t stop the hello for them. A recovery order for Dask, Dorothy, and both Calders, to Level 62, pending review. Crane’s signature and Friese’s. Crane: I’m here, I haven’t signed anything. Holt: they always could sign for you. Okafor opened the door. Mother was to stand behind her.

The first man stepped past Okafor toward Mother. Mother lifted her hand, palm out, like stopping a child at a road. Every buckle, badge, boot nail and the gun in a pocket stopped dead in the air and held, with three men attached. Not strength. Exactness. Every piece to the width of a hair, the way she held three bowls and the flour and the eggs. Okafor took the paper, folded it twice, pocketed it. Her voice, first time since she sealed our pods: ”Thank you, Dot. You can put them down now.” Gently. Feet first.

Eight forty-three: that’ll do for today, we’ve work. Mother standing, smiling. Tell Genny and Garnet soon. Tell Risa to bring the baby the day she can and not let me make her walk. Tell the scarecrow I came back.

Genny on the glass, turning her hands over. She grabbed Brock Haddon’s car; Mother held every piece. Learn from her and from the queen; listening first and holding every piece are the same thing. She tore a hole in a ship the size of a city. Genny looked at the Hand. Was it one of those? I never asked which ship. We should ask her.

Afternoon, the plain, Okafor’s order. Me, Dory, Risa, Toby, Juno, and the Overseer, which asked to come. Our queen: let it. At the shadow’s edge it held up the bread and the thread came down. Dory touched it. The queen answered in the old tongue, too slow and deep for me. Juno: she’s from further than north; they took her young, built the Hand round her, grew the small ones out of her, made her carry the voice longer than she can count. Dory asked with her whole body what she wants.

She’s not the only one. Other Hands, other housings, other queens, more than broods on this world, past north. She’s the first, not the only. Since the hello went through her and the voice went quiet, she can hear them, all singing very quietly under everything, the way she was.

What she wants: for them to hear the hello too.