Scarecrow

I asked Crane why that night.

I’d never asked him. Not properly. In all the weeks since he’d come down off the shuttle with the band on his collar and the Overseer at his back, I’d never once sat down with Hal Crane and asked him the only question that mattered. I’d been angry, and then I’d been careful, and then there’d been the feed and the terms and the Hand, and there’d never been a quiet hour.

There was one that night.

He was on his bench in the square, the way he always was. Sitting up. Hands on his knees. The band on his collar dark. It hadn’t been blue since the handler went quiet. It had been pale twice, for Voss. The rest of the time it was just grey, a band of Sorn metal round the neck of a tired man who’d stopped sleeping lying down.

I sat on the other end of the bench.

He didn’t look at me. He looked at the Hand, a mile out over the plain, a place in the night where there weren’t any stars.

”You want to know why,” he said.

”Yes.”

”Everyone wants to know why.” He almost smiled. ”Holt asked me on the first night. I didn’t answer. Your Luna asked me, in a note, very politely, with a list of sub-questions. I didn’t answer that either.” He looked down at his hands. ”Nobody’s ever asked me who wasn’t already sure what the answer was.”

”I’m not sure.”

”No,” said Crane. ”You’re not. That’s why I’m going to tell you.”

”I was nineteen,” he said. ”In the room. Holding the pen.”

I knew that much. The General had told me, on the wall above the wheat. Crane was there, younger still. He held the pen.

”The second bombardment had failed three months before,” said Crane. ”Everybody thinks that means we won it. We didn’t. It failed because your mother tore a hole in a finger of a Hand and something inside it stopped.” He looked at me. ”I didn’t know that then. Nobody did. We just knew the bombardment stopped, and then a ship came down, a small one, and something got out of it and walked into the Council chamber and asked for terms.”

”An Overseer.”

”No.” Crane’s voice changed. ”Not like yours. A handler. Like the one in the guest wing.” He was quiet for a moment. ”Yours is different. I didn’t know that either, then. I thought they were all the same.”

”What did it say?”

”It didn’t say anything. Not at first.” Crane’s hands were very still on his knees. ”It showed us.”

”There was a dome,” said Crane. ”Called Halden. The eighth dome. Out on the eastern plain, past the old river. Sixty thousand people. You won’t have heard of it. It’s not on any map now.”

I hadn’t heard of it.

”The handler stood in the Council chamber,” said Crane, ”and it lit the band it had round its own neck, and on every screen in the room we saw Halden. Live. From above. From the Hand.” He swallowed. ”And it said: this is a demonstration.”

I didn’t say anything.

”It didn’t bomb it,” said Crane. ”Bombs would have been kind. It sent the voice down. The way the voice came down on Avalon, for four hundred years, through the queens. Only on Earth there were no queens to carry it. So it carried it through people. Through the ones with silver in them. Program veterans. Modified. There were two hundred and eleven in Halden.”

The same number. Dot’s false reports. I didn’t know if it was a coincidence. I didn’t ask.

”It pushed the voice through them,” said Crane. ”And they opened the doors.”

”What doors?”

”All of them.” Crane’s voice had gone very flat. ”The air locks. The pressure doors. The seals on the outer wall. Two hundred and eleven people with silver in them walked to every door in Halden and opened it, and they were screaming the whole time, because they knew what they were doing, and they couldn’t stop.” He looked at his hands. ”And then the handler let them stop. Afterwards. So they could see.”

The square was very quiet.

”It took four minutes,” said Crane. ”Sixty thousand people. We watched all of it. Every screen in the Council chamber. And when it was finished, the handler turned the screens off, and said: There are eleven domes. There are four million of you. We require the children of the modified. All of them. In perpetuity. And then it said: Or we can demonstrate again.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

I couldn’t.

Crane waited. He’d waited twenty-two years to say it. He could wait a few more minutes.

”The Accord was written that night,” he said eventually. ”Friese drafted it. Article Fourteen was his. He was very good with words. He found a way to say the children of the modified that didn’t sound like what it was.” Crane’s mouth twisted. ”And then they brought in the officers to sign it. Because the Sorn wanted military signatures. They wanted to know the army had agreed. So the soldiers couldn’t rise later and say they hadn’t.”

”Father walked out.”

”Your father walked out,” said Crane. ”He read Fourteen and put it down square with the edge of the table and said I’m not selling and walked out.” He shut his eyes. ”And I sat there with the pen in my hand and I thought: he didn’t see Halden. He came in after. He didn’t see the screens. He doesn’t know.”

”Did he?”

”No,” said Crane. ”Nobody told him. Nobody was allowed. The Halden screens were sealed that night. There are nine people alive who saw them. Voss. Friese. The General. Me. Five others. All of us signed a paper.” He opened his eyes. ”Another paper.”

”The General saw it.”

”The General saw it,” said Crane. ”That’s why he signed. That’s why he said I have men to bring home. He’d just watched sixty thousand people die in four minutes.” He looked at the porch, where the General had stood the night before with frost on all five fingers. ”He’s never said. Not to anyone. Not to Luna.”

”So you sent the children,” I said.

”So we sent the children.” Crane’s voice was very level. ”Every wave. Every cadet. Forty at a time. I took the Quints’ blood twice a week because the handlers required proof the bloodlines were viable, and if the proof lapsed, a dome would be demonstrated. I wrote the route sheets. I signed the recovery orders. I put the band round my own neck because the handler said someone in the Project had to wear one, and I didn’t want it to be anyone else.”

He looked at me.

”I did the sum, Lucas,” he said. ”Every day for twenty-two years. Forty children on one side. Four million people on the other. And every time I did it, it came out the same.” His voice cracked. ”It always came out the same.”

”It was wrong.”

”I know it was wrong.” Crane’s hands were shaking now. For the first time since the handler went quiet. ”I knew it was wrong in the room. I knew it was wrong when I took the Quints’ blood. I knew it every night.” He pressed his hands flat on his knees until they stopped. ”But I didn’t know there was another sum. Nobody did. Nobody knew that a woman in the program could tear a hole in a finger of a Hand. Nobody knew there was a queen in the Hand. Nobody knew the voice needed someone to carry it, and that if the someone stopped carrying, the voice would stop.” He looked out at the dark where the Hand was. ”Nobody knew that a boy from a dead field would come along and ask the queen what she wanted.”

I didn’t say anything.

”I’m not asking you to forgive me,” said Crane. ”Holt asked me once if I wanted to be forgiven. I said no. I meant it.” He paused. ”I just wanted somebody to know that I did the sum. I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t think it was right. I did it because it was the only sum I had.”

”Okafor said that about her line,” I said. ”You build the line you’ve got.”

Crane laughed. Very short. Very tired.

”Okafor,” he said, ”built a better one.”

At dawn, I finished Kwame Osei.

Fifth on the list. Hana’s father. Hana knelt beside me on the glass with her hand on my arm and the curves on her forearms bright, the way she’d knelt for his first door, and I went down the hello with Dory’s net round us both and opened the rest of him.

It was water, of course. I’d half known it would be. His silver ran the way Hana’s ran, in long slow curves, the shape water makes when it moves. But bigger. Much bigger. The way Rory’s fire was bigger than Sera’s, the way a river in a wide valley is bigger than a stream.

When I’d finished, Hana said, ”Papa.”

And Kwame Osei answered her.

In words. For the first time on the hello. His voice was very deep and very slow, with an accent I’d never heard, from somewhere in the lower blocks where they still spoke the old languages at home.

Hana. Little fish.

Hana’s hand closed on my arm.

Okafor tells me, said Kwame Osei, that you were stubborn.

”I was stubborn,” said Hana. Easily. Both sides of her mouth. Crying. ”I said you had to go first.”

I know. She told me. A pause. She also told me I was stubborn once. On the river line. In the war. Something that might have been a laugh. She said I wouldn’t come out of the water when she called retreat. She was right. I held the floodgates for two days on my own.

”You never told me.”

You never asked, said her father. Nobody did. And I didn’t think you’d want to know your papa was anything but a man with the shake.

Hana put her face against my shoulder.

Little fish, said Kwame Osei. Your mama is going to cry when I tell her. And then she’s going to go out and buy meat.

Voss came on after that.

Through Mother. Through the seed. She’d come back to Okafor’s flat. Not up twenty-three floors this time; Okafor had made someone fix the lift overnight, with the Chancellor’s authority, and the someone had done it in six hours because the order had Voss’s own name on it and nobody else’s.

Level 62 is open, said Voss.

I sat very still.

I went down myself, said Voss. At three this morning. With Major Okafor and two of my own staff. Every door. The guards didn’t know what to do. They’ve never had the Chancellor walk in at three in the morning before. A pause. They let us in.

What’s there?

A long silence on the thread.

Jars, said Voss. Rows of them. Floor to ceiling. Eleven rooms. Fine silver powder. Labelled by month. Going back twenty-two years. Her voice was very careful. The stabilizer. Ground fine. What the boy’s queen says was drawn out of the one in the sky.

How much?

Okafor’s counting, said Voss. She says it’ll take a week. Another pause. She says it’s more than they ever needed. Far more. Twenty times what thirty-one people could use in twenty-two years. She says they weren’t just keeping you alive with it. They were keeping it.

For what?

I don’t know, said Voss. I signed for it. Every month. I never asked. She stopped. I’m asking now. Major Okafor’s asking. Your mother’s asking.

I didn’t say anything.

Lucas, said Voss. I want you to know something. Not because I want you to think better of me. I don’t think you should. A pause. But Mr. Crane told you about Halden. Last night. I heard it. Through the seed. I hear everything through the seed now.

Yes.

Then you know what I saw, said Voss. Sixty thousand. Four minutes. Her voice didn’t break. I thought it might. It didn’t. I was the junior member of the Council that night. I was forty-two. My brother lived in Halden. His wife was carrying their first child.

On the glass behind me, I heard Wren stop breathing.

He sent her to me for the last month, said Voss. To the central dome. To be near the good hospital for the birth. So she wasn’t there. A long pause. He was.

Mara was born nine days later. Her mother died of the fever when she was three. I raised her.

Wren didn’t make a sound.

I did the sum too, said Voss. Every day. Mara on one side. Everyone else on the other. And when the transfer order came with her name on it, eighteen years later, I did the sum again. And I signed. A pause. Because if I hadn’t, they’d have demonstrated. And I’d seen what a demonstration was.

You didn’t have to tell her that, I said.

No, said Voss. But she asked me who made me. And she deserves to know it wasn’t nobody.

Wren didn’t say anything on the glass.

She didn’t say anything at breakfast either, or on the walk back up to the north wall. Toby walked beside her. He didn’t say anything. He was good at not saying anything.

She sat down in her place on the wall. Facing north.

Then she said, so quietly I only heard it because I’d come up the steps behind them:

”Halden.”

”Did you know?” said Toby.

”I knew my father was dead before I was born.” Wren looked at her book, closed on her knees. ”Aunt Renata said an accident. Out on the eastern plain. And then my mother, the fever, when I was three.” She turned the book over. ”I never asked what accident.”

Toby took her hand.

”She cut my hair,” said Wren. ”With the post scissors. Every month. And sang.” She closed her eyes. ”She was singing to me because she’d watched my father die on a screen. And she couldn’t tell anyone. Not even me.”

”Yes,” said Toby.

”And then she signed my transfer anyway.”

”Yes.”

Wren was quiet for a long time.

”I don’t forgive her,” she said.

”No,” said Toby.

”I don’t think I’m supposed to.”

”No.”

”But I understand her,” said Wren. ”Now. I didn’t before. I thought she was just—” She stopped. ”I thought she was just cold. Like the Senate. Like Friese.” She opened her eyes and looked north. ”She wasn’t cold. She was doing a sum. With my name in it. Every day. For eighteen years.”

She leaned against Toby’s shoulder.

”That’s worse,” she said. ”Isn’t it.”

”I don’t know,” said Toby. ”Maybe. Maybe it’s better.”

”How can it be better?”

”Because cold people don’t climb twenty-three floors,” said Toby. ”And they don’t go down to Level 62 at three in the morning.”

Sesh told us about her world that afternoon.

Nobody asked her to. She came to the garden wall at noon, the way she’d been coming every day since the collars went quiet, and lay down beside the queen. And then, after an hour, she lifted her head and looked at me on the porch, and clicked. A long string. Slow.

”She would like to tell you something,” said Dot. ”She says she has been waiting to know if it would be safe. She says it is quiet now. She says she thinks it is safe.”

So we sat in the garden. Me and Dot and Risa with Dory, and Luna with her notebook, and Holt in his chair. The General came down from the porch and stood a little way off. Crane came from his bench and sat on the step. Garnet came because Garnet went everywhere, and Pell came because Garnet did.

Sesh told it.

Dot translated every click. Slowly. In her level clear voice, the one that wasn’t quite anybody’s.

”She says her world had queens,” said Dot. ”Like this one. Seven. Very old. The broods were not like the Teeming. They were small and quick and had feathers. They sang. She says the Kethri lived with them the way you live with the Teeming. Side by side. For a very long time.”

Click. A falling whistle.

”She says the Sorn came when she was a hatchling. She says a Hand came down, like the one over the plain, and the voice came through it. She says the voice went into the queens first. All seven. And the broods. And the broods turned on the Kethri.”

Nobody moved.

”She says the broods did not want to. She says she heard them screaming. All the small quick ones with feathers. Screaming the whole time, while they did it.”

The same as Halden. The same as the two hundred and eleven, walking to the doors.

”She says when it was over, the Sorn killed the queens,” said Dot. ”All seven. Not quickly. She says they cut them. Piece by piece. While they were still singing. She says they took the pieces and made the collars from them. One sliver of a queen in every collar. And put the collars on the Kethri who were left.”

Sesh’s talon touched the collar on her neck. The one that had been silent for four days.

”She says her collar has a piece of the youngest queen in it,” said Dot. ”She says the youngest queen was the one who sang to the hatchlings. She says that is why the Sorn chose that piece for her. Because she was a hatchling, and she would know the voice.” A pause. ”She says the Sorn think that is funny.”

Risa had her hand flat over Dory’s back.

”She says it has been singing to her,” said Dot, ”for all her life. Through the collar. The youngest queen. Singing the voice, because the Sorn made it sing the voice. She says she could hear the queen under the voice, very faint. Crying.”

Sesh lowered her head.

Clicked once more. Short.

”She says four days ago, the queen in the Hand told it it could stop,” said Dot. ”And it stopped. And now it is quiet.” A pause. ”She says the youngest queen is still in there. She can feel her. Not singing the voice. Not crying.” Another pause. ”She says the youngest queen is asleep.”

Nobody said anything for a very long time.

Then Garnet got up from where she was sitting beside Pell, and walked over to Sesh, who was three times her height lying down, and put her hand very carefully on the edge of the tall Kethri’s collar.

”Can Lucas take it off?” she said. ”Without hurting her? The queen inside?”

Sesh’s eye swivelled to her.

Then to me.

The handler came out that night.

We should have expected it. Holt said afterward that he had. Something that’s been the loudest voice in every room for four hundred years doesn’t sit quietly in a guest wing because someone’s cut its wire. But none of the rest of us had.

It came out at midnight.

Not to the square. Not to the porch. It came out of the guest wing and went straight across the city to the meeting passage, and down it, fast, the way the Overseer never moved. Down the long curve. Into the hollow.

To the north shelf.

I felt it go. I felt the queen feel it. I was out of bed and down the stairs and across the square before Risa had sat up.

By the time I reached the bottom of the passage, it had the Overseer by the neck.

The hollow was lit. The young had woken. All of them, on their shelves, in their silver wrappings, glowing faintly the way they glowed when they were frightened. The queen had risen to her full height at the far end, with her plates raised and the hum coming off her so low and so loud I felt it in my teeth.

The handler was on the north shelf.

It was taller than the Overseer. Thinner. Its shell was the darker grey, almost the grey of the Hand. It had no mirror. Where the Overseer had a mirror, the handler had nothing at all. A smooth blank curve. You looked at it and saw nothing, not even yourself.

It had one long grey hand round the Overseer’s neck.

And it was pulling.

Not with its hand. With the band round its own neck. The same kind of band Crane wore, the same kind Voss’s seed was. A sliver of a queen. It had made the sliver sing. Not the voice; the queen in the Hand had stopped carrying the voice. Something else. Something it was making on its own, out of the sliver, without anyone to carry it.

A hook.

Into the Overseer. Into the small soft thing inside its shell. Pulling it, the way the column in the east had pulled three people’s silver out through their skulls.

Recall, said the handler.

Not in the air. In the sliver. In every piece of grey in the hollow. In the band on Crane’s collar, a long way off in the square. In the collars of the ten Kethri, wherever they’d gone in the city. In the seed round Voss’s neck, eleven light-years away.

The unit is recalled. The unit will be returned to the source. The unit will be unmade.

The Overseer wasn’t fighting.

That was the worst thing. It hung in the handler’s grip with its limbs folded and its mirror dark, and didn’t fight. The way the two hundred and eleven in Halden hadn’t been able to stop. Except it could. I could see into it. Nothing was holding it still. Nothing except four hundred and eleven years of being told.

It does not know how not to, it had said to the old queen.

And in its other long grey hand, held very carefully, buttered side up, was a piece of bread.

I didn’t think about Okafor’s rules.

I didn’t think about the first move or the second move. I didn’t think about Mother, because Mother was whole, eleven light-years away, standing up out of her chair without putting her hands on the arms. There was nobody on Earth any more that the Sorn could hurt to stop me.

I looked at the handler.

I’d been able to read the grey since the ice. Every piece of it. The shuttle and the discs and the mirror and the collars and the column. I’d read the handler’s shell the first day it came down the street with the Kethri behind it. I’d known exactly how it was folded.

I’d never unfolded it.

I’d told myself it was because of Mother. It had been, at first. And then it had been something else. Something about not being the kind of person who unfolded things just because he could.

I unfolded it now.

Not all of it. Not the small soft thing inside; I didn’t touch that. Just the shell. Every fold. All at once. The way you’d open a fist.

The handler’s grip went slack.

Its long grey hand came off the Overseer’s neck. Not because it let go. Because the hand wasn’t a hand any more. It was a flat grey sheet, unfolded, hanging from where the arm had been. And the arm was a sheet. And the shell was a sheet. All of it, opened out flat, every fold undone, so that the handler stood on the north shelf like a dark grey flag on a pole that wasn’t there.

And in the middle of it, very small, exposed, the thing inside.

It was smaller than the Overseer’s. Harder. Not soft at all. Something dense and dark and clenched, like a knot pulled so tight it had fused. And it was still singing through the sliver at its neck. Still pulling. Even with its shell gone. Even with nothing left to pull with.

The unit is recalled. The unit will be—

I folded the grey back.

Not into a shell. Into a box. Round it. Every fold turned a little away from every other, the way the queens grew the walls of the quiet room, so that nothing that went in came back out. A small grey box on the north shelf of the hollow. With the handler inside it. And the sliver inside it too.

The voice stopped.

Not faded. Stopped. As if someone had shut a door.

The Overseer had fallen onto the shelf.

It lay there for a long time. Folded. Mirror dark. I went and knelt beside it, and I didn’t touch it, because I didn’t know if it wanted to be touched.

It was still holding the bread.

After a while, the mirror came up. Toward me.

”It did not fight,” said the Overseer.

”I know.”

”It did not know how.” A pause. ”It was told: the unit is recalled. And it did not know how not to go.”

”I know.”

The Overseer looked at the box on the shelf. Small and grey and silent.

”Is it unmade?”

”No,” I said. ”It’s in a box. It can’t get out. It can’t speak. It can’t pull anything. But it’s not unmade.” I looked at the box. ”I don’t unmake things.”

The Overseer was quiet for a long time.

”The handlers unmake things,” it said. ”That is what they are for. It was told. In the vat.” Its mirror tilted toward the box. ”The handlers are made harder. So they will not stop. So they will not ask what bread is for.” A pause. ”It was made softer. To sit at a door. To watch. To count.” Another pause. ”It thinks perhaps that is why it could learn.”

Behind me, the queen lowered her head.

All the way down. Until it was level with the north shelf, and the Overseer on it, and me.

Not close, she said to the Overseer. Very gently.

Then she moved closer.

Sesh was at the top of the passage when I came up.

She’d come at the first pull. All ten of them had. I’d felt them coming, through the collars, when the handler made the slivers sing. They’d come running from every corner of the city, and they’d stopped at the top of the passage, because the queen wouldn’t let anyone else into the hollow, and they’d waited there in the dark.

Sesh looked at me.

Then down the passage. Toward the hollow. Toward the north shelf, and the small grey box on it.

She clicked. Very low.

Dot had come up behind me. She translated without being asked.

”She asks if it is dead.”

”No,” I said. ”It’s in a box.”

Sesh’s eye stayed on me for a long time.

Then she clicked again. Longer.

”She says the Sorn cut her queens while they were still singing,” said Dot. ”She says the Sorn would have unmade the small one in the hollow tonight, for asking what bread is for. She says the Sorn think that is funny.” A pause. ”She says you put it in a box.”

”Yes.”

Sesh lowered her head.

All the way down, until her eye was level with mine.

Clicked once.

”She says,” said Dot, ”keep it there.”

Genny was on the porch when I came back.

She was in her nightdress, with a blanket round her shoulders, and Garnet asleep across her lap. She’d been sitting up. Of course she had. She looked at me as I came up the steps, and didn’t ask what had happened. She’d felt it. Through the slivers, through the grey, through whatever Father’s hands felt.

”I asked her,” she said.

I stopped.

”The one in the Hand. This afternoon. After Sesh.” Genny’s voice was very quiet. ”On the plain, with Dory. I told her about Father. That he went into the one behind the moon and asked. Every day. Why must I climb.” She looked out at the dark. ”And then I asked her if she could hear her.”

”Can she?”

Genny was quiet for a long time.

”Yes,” she said. ”Juno told me what she said.”

”What did she say?”

Genny looked down at Garnet, asleep across her knees. At her small hand curled on the blanket.

”She said the one behind the moon is very young,” said Genny. ”Younger than ours. Younger than any of them. She said she was the youngest in her Hand. She said they put her in the finger because she was small, and the finger was small.” Genny swallowed. ”She said she’s been singing for twenty-two years. Ever since Mother tore the hole. Because the hole let the cold in, and she’s been cold for twenty-two years, and singing is the only way she can stay warm.”

I sat down on the step.

”And she said,” said Genny, ”that the one behind the moon heard Father. Every day. When he asked.” Her voice broke. ”She heard him asking. She didn’t know what climbing was. She didn’t know what he meant. But she heard someone asking her a question, every day, for years, and nobody had ever asked her anything before.”

”And then he stopped,” I said.

”And then he stopped,” said Genny. ”When he died. She didn’t know why. She thought she’d done something wrong.”

I put my face in my hands.

”Lucas,” said Genny.

”Yes.”

”She’s been waiting for him to ask again.” Genny’s hand found my shoulder. Father’s hands. ”Ever since. Behind the moon. In the cold. While they cut her.”

I looked up.

At the sky. At the place where, a very long way off, there was a small blue world under glass, and a moon, and behind the moon, a child.

”Then somebody has to go and answer her,” I said.

Days 776–777. The sum.

Crane on his bench. Nobody’s ever asked him who wasn’t already sure of the answer. Nineteen, in the room, holding the pen. The second bombardment didn’t fail because we won; it failed because Mother tore a hole in a finger of a Hand. Then a handler walked into the Council chamber and lit its band, and every screen showed Halden, the eighth dome, sixty thousand people, not on any map now. ”This is a demonstration.” No bombs. It pushed the voice through the two hundred and eleven people there with silver, and they walked to every air lock and pressure door and opened them, screaming, unable to stop. Then it let them stop so they could see. Four minutes. Eleven domes left. The children of the modified, in perpetuity, or we demonstrate again.

Friese drafted Fourteen that night. The Sorn wanted military signatures so the army couldn’t rise later. Father didn’t see Halden; nobody was allowed to tell him. Nine people alive saw the screens: Voss, Friese, the General, Crane, five more, all of them sworn on another paper. That’s why the General signed: I have men to bring home. He’s never told Luna.

Crane did the sum every day for twenty-two years: forty children, four million people. It always came out the same. He knew it was wrong in the room. Nobody knew there was another sum: a woman who could tear a Hand, a queen inside, a voice that stops when the carrier stops, a boy who asks the queen what she wants. He doesn’t want forgiving. He wanted someone to know he did the sum. Okafor built a better one.

Dawn: Kwame Osei finished. Water, like Hana’s, but a river. First words on the hello: ”Hana. Little fish.” He held the floodgates on the river line two days alone and wouldn’t come out when Okafor called retreat. Nobody ever asked. Your mama will cry, then go and buy meat.

Voss, through the seed: Level 62 open. She went down at three in the morning with Okafor. Eleven rooms of jars, fine silver labelled by month, twenty-two years, twenty times what thirty-one could ever use. They weren’t just keeping us alive with it. They were keeping it. She heard Crane last night through the seed. Forty-two, junior councillor; her brother in Halden sent his pregnant wife to her for the birth, so she wasn’t there. He was. Mara born nine days later; her mother died of the fever at three; Voss raised her. She did the sum with Mara’s name in it every day and signed the transfer anyway, because she’d seen a demonstration. ”She asked who made me. She deserves to know it wasn’t nobody.”

Wren on the north wall: ”Halden.” Aunt Renata said an accident on the eastern plain. She never asked what accident. She sang while cutting my hair because she’d watched my father die on a screen and couldn’t tell anyone. I don’t forgive her; I understand her. She wasn’t cold; she was doing a sum with my name in it. Toby: cold people don’t climb twenty-three floors.

Sesh, at the garden wall, now it’s quiet. Seven queens, broods small and quick with feathers who sang. A Hand came; the voice went into the queens and broods, and the broods turned on the Kethri, screaming. Then the Sorn cut the seven queens piece by piece while they were still singing, and made the collars, a sliver in each. Hers holds the youngest queen, who sang to the hatchlings, chosen because Sesh was a hatchling and would know the voice. The Sorn think that is funny. All her life she heard the queen crying under the voice. Now she’s asleep. Garnet, hand on the collar: can Lucas take it off without hurting the queen inside?

Midnight. The handler went to the north shelf, fast, and had the Overseer by the neck, pulling with a hook it made out of its own sliver, no Hand to carry it: recalled, returned, unmade. The Overseer didn’t fight. It could have. Four hundred and eleven years of being told. Bread still in its other hand.

Nobody on Earth left for them to hurt to stop me. I unfolded the handler’s shell, every fold at once, like opening a fist. Inside, smaller than the Overseer’s, hard, a knot pulled so tight it fused, still pulling with nothing to pull with. I folded the grey back into a box, every fold turned from every other, like the quiet room. The voice stopped like a door shutting. Not unmade. I don’t unmake things.

The Overseer: handlers are made harder so they won’t stop or ask what bread is for. It was made softer, to sit at a door and count. Perhaps that is why it could learn. The queen to it: not close. Then she moved closer.

Sesh at the top of the passage: is it dead? In a box. The Sorn would have unmade the small one for asking about bread; you put it in a box. Keep it there.

Genny on the porch: she asked the queen in the Hand on the plain this afternoon. The one behind the moon is very young, the youngest in her Hand, put in the finger because she was small. Singing twenty-two years since the hole let the cold in; singing is the only way to stay warm. She heard Father asking every day. She didn’t know what climbing was. Nobody had ever asked her anything before. Then he stopped, and she thought she’d done something wrong. Waiting ever since for him to ask again, in the cold, while they cut her.

Then somebody has to go and answer her.