Scarecrow

Brock walked on the third day.

Edda let him. She stood at the bottom of the passage with her green book open and her arms folded and watched him come up it, one hand on the faceted wall, very slowly, the way Pim had walked in the spring and Marlo had walked before the Hand. When he got to the top, into the square, into the light, he stopped.

And looked.

At the red glass. At the houses the queens had grown and the houses I’d made. At the forge and the schoolroom and the tree in the square where Dov and Priya had been married. At Teeming going past along the street with baskets on their backs, and children running between them, and a small pale feathered thing that wasn’t there any more, because the youngest queen had gone to Earth on Sesh’s back.

At the Tharn on the plain, beyond the canyon rim, like small grey hills.

He didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then he said, ”Dask. Did you build all this?”

”Some of it.”

”The queens built the rest,” said Genny, who was beside him, because Genny had been beside him since the riverbank and showed no sign of stopping. ”And the Teeming. And everyone.” She paused. ”Lucas mostly built the walls. And the plumbing.”

Brock looked at me.

”The plumbing,” he said.

”Somebody had to.”

Brock started to laugh. It still hurt him. He laughed anyway, leaning on the faceted wall at the top of the passage, with Genny frowning at him as if she couldn’t see what was funny and Edda at the bottom writing something in her green book.

”I held a ford,” he said, ”for an hour. And you did the plumbing.”

He asked me to finish him that evening.

On the porch. He’d come up the street with Genny on one side and Risa on the other, very slowly, and sat down on the top step, and looked at the four of us. Three of us. Sera with her feet up on a chair and her hand on her stomach, twenty-two weeks now. Risa with Dory, who had decided Brock was interesting and kept reaching for his ear. Me.

Luna’s chair was empty. Nobody sat in it.

”Risa says you can do it,” said Brock. ”Finish people. She says you did her. And Friese. And Calder, and Marsh.” He looked at Risa’s eyes. At the silver rings round them. ”She says it doesn’t hurt.”

”It doesn’t.”

”And I’d be—” He stopped. ”What would I be?”

I looked at him. With permission; he’d nodded before I asked.

His silver was ragged. Not from the river. From before the river. From the program, the way all of ours had been. Paths cut short. Paths that went a little way and stopped. And a year and a half of holding iron round his own shape had worn the ones that were there thin, the way water wears stone.

”More iron,” I said. ”If you want it. Any metal. Not just yourself. And faster. You won’t get stuck.” I paused. ”And you’ll be able to come back. Every time. Without anyone putting lightning in your chest.”

Brock looked at Risa.

Risa looked back at him.

”I’d do it again,” she said.

”I know,” said Brock. ”That’s the problem.”

He looked at me.

”Yes,” he said. ”Please.”

I did it on the porch.

It took eleven minutes. Less than Risa’s had. His silver knew what it was supposed to be. It had been trying to be it for a year and a half, at the bottom of a river, holding his shape. All I did was open the doors.

The rings came up round his eyes. Not silver. Iron-grey. Dark and dull and solid, like a cast-iron pan. The markings ran down his arms the same way. Not lines, not branches, not curves. Rivets. Small round marks in neat rows, the way the plates are fixed on the hull of a ship.

Brock looked at them for a long time.

Then he put his hand on the porch rail. The iron one I’d made in the first year, when there wasn’t anything else to make rails out of.

And the rail flowed up his arm.

Not all of it. Just a little. A ribbon of iron, peeling off the top of the rail like bark, and running up over his wrist and his forearm, the way water runs up a wick. It stopped at his elbow. Wrapped round it. A sleeve.

Brock looked at the sleeve.

Then he looked at me.

Then, very carefully, he let it go. And it ran back down his arm and onto the rail and settled into it, exactly where it had been.

”Huh,” said Brock.

The Hand reached Earth on Day 808.

I knew before anyone told me. I woke in the dark an hour before the dawn with my heart going and my hands flat on the blanket and Risa sitting up beside me, because she’d felt me wake, and Dory in her basket at the end of the bed, awake, very bright, with her silver turned all the way up.

Not toward the sky over Avalon.

Further.

”She’s checking,” said Risa. Very quietly. ”Lucas. She’s checking a long way.”

I could feel it too.

The first queen. Eight days out. Further than she’d ever been from us. She’d gone so far into the crossing that for three mornings I hadn’t been able to feel her in the hello at all, only the spine-queen and the ring and the deep, and Mother at the other end, thin as a thread.

And now, all at once, she was there again.

Not far. Not near. There. On the other side of the thread. Eleven light-years away, the way Mother was eleven light-years away.

At the same end.

”She’s arrived,” I said.

The hello went up at dawn, and the door was wide.

Wider than it had been since the morning the first queen held it open from a mile out over our plain. Wider than I’d ever felt it. Because she wasn’t holding it from our end now. She was holding it from theirs. And the spine-queen and the ring were holding it from ours. And in between, the whole of the thread, eleven light-years, was suddenly as wide as a road.

Dory put her net round us.

And reached.

There you are, she said.

Not just to Mother.

To everyone.

I felt it. Felt her find them, one after another, all at once, the way she checked us every morning. Mother, in a room with a kettle. Maura, warm as an oven door. Rory, holding his fire. Ines Tarrow’s stone. Kwame Osei’s river. Adaeze Marsh’s bell. All thirty of them round Okafor’s table.

And then, past them, in the first finger of a Hand hanging over a dome on a dying world:

Luna.

There you are, said Dory.

And Luna, eleven light-years away, said: ”Dory?”

Out loud. I heard it. Through the net. Through the hello. Luna’s voice, very surprised, very close, the way it sounded across the kitchen table in the mornings.

Sera, on the glass beside me, made a sound and grabbed my arm so hard it hurt.

Then Dory found the General. And Liam. And Toby, carrying the hello the way he’d carried it the whole crossing. And Hana. And Sigmund. And Marlo and Jessa. And Sesh, and the Kethri, and the youngest queen on Sesh’s back, and two thousand light-benders in the second finger.

Everyone.

Every path joined to every other. Across eleven light-years.

There you are, said Dory. There you are. There you are.

I saw it through Mother.

Not with eyes. The hello isn’t eyes. But Mother was standing at Okafor’s window, twenty-three floors up, and she was looking out, and I could feel what she felt.

The dome. Grey glass, the way it always was. The towers inside it. The lights. And beyond the glass, the sky over the old battlefield east of the dome, where the launch site was, where forty cadets had gone down a sealed rail tunnel in suits at three in the morning a year and a half ago.

The Hand was in the sky.

Low. Lower than it had hung over our plain. Three fingers and a palm, grey as the inside of a mountain, so big that from Okafor’s window it filled the whole east. Its shadow lay across the dome. The whole dome. Four million people under glass, and the light gone out of the morning over all of them.

They’re frightened, said Mother. Very quietly. All of them. I can hear it. The whole dome.

Of course they are.

They’ve been told about Hands for twenty-two years, said Mother. In school. In the briefings. On the screens. The Sorn came in a Hand and burned the old cities and that’s why we’re under glass. A pause. And now there’s one in the sky.

What’s Voss doing?

Voss, said Mother, is on every screen in the dome.

I didn’t hear the whole speech. Mother only caught pieces of it, on the screen in Okafor’s flat, while she watched the Hand.

But I heard enough.

Voss stood in front of the Senate Annex in a plain grey coat. No white dress. No silver seed on a chain. Okafor had asked her to take the seed off, and she had, and Okafor was keeping it in a box in her flat, because Okafor said it had listened to enough.

Voss didn’t make a speech.

She told them.

Not all of it. Not Halden. Not yet. But that the Hand in the sky wasn’t the Sorn. That it had been the Sorn’s, once, and wasn’t now. That there was something inside it that had been held there against its will for longer than anyone could count, and that it had been set free by a boy from a dead field and a baby and a city on another world. That it had come to take some people away. Three hundred and four. Who’d asked to go. Whose names were on a list.

And that nobody else need be afraid.

She didn’t say it well, said Mother. She’s never said anything well. She’s always said everything carefully. A pause. She said this badly. Her voice kept breaking.

Did they believe her?

Mother was quiet for a long time.

I don’t know, she said. I think some of them did. Because she said it badly.

Okafor did the rest.

She’d had a list for twenty years. Now she had a Hand.

I felt it through Mother, all morning. Okafor in her flat, at her table, with thirty people round it and a slate in one hand and her other hand behind her back. Giving orders. Not loudly. The way she’d given orders in the mess hall in the dome, when we were cadets and she wanted the room quiet and it went quiet without her asking.

The Windsor to the Annex.

The General went to Central Allocation.

I felt it through Luna, who was with him as far as the door. He walked into the Senate Annex in his uniform, with his right hand bare, and up the stairs to the second floor. The two unlisted floors. Where his own aides had been reporting on him for years. Where Crane and Friese had signed every route sheet with a person line on it.

He opened the door.

Every man in the room stood up.

Luna said afterward that she didn’t know whether they stood up because he was the General, or because the air in the doorway had gone so cold that the windows frosted over from the outside in. She said it might have been both.

The General didn’t say anything.

He walked to the nearest desk. Picked up the top file. Read the name on it.

Then he put it down. Square with the edge of the desk.

”Open them,” he said. ”All of them. Every file on this floor. By noon.” He looked round the room. ”The families first.”

And walked out.

The Calders to the launch site.

Liam was there when they arrived.

He’d come down out of the first finger on a stair Luna built, the way he’d gone up one on Avalon. He was standing at the bottom of it on the black ash of the old battlefield when the transport came out of the rail tunnel from the dome, and the doors opened, and the first person off it was a big man with a broad face and arms that were new.

Rory Calder.

He stopped on the ash.

He looked at his son for a long time. At the sling, which Liam was still wearing, because Edda had made him promise. At the silver round his eyes. At the scar down his arm where the handler’s blade had gone in, eleven stitches.

Then he held out his hand.

Palm up.

And let his fire out.

Not all of it. A little. A great slow roll of it, like the door of the heat plant opening on the coldest night of the year, rising off his palm into the grey morning under the Hand.

Liam looked at it.

Then he held out his own hand. Palm up. Beside his father’s.

And let his out too.

Two fires, side by side, on the black ash of the battlefield. One a river in a wide valley. One the same shape, wider, slower. Rising together.

Maura came off the transport behind them. And stopped. And put her hands over her mouth. And Pip came off behind her and ran straight past both of them, past the fires, to Liam, and grabbed him round the middle so hard his sling came off.

”Dad’s going to be so jealous,” said Liam, into the top of Pip’s head, crying. ”I told you.”

”I’m not jealous,” said Rory Calder. His voice was very rough. ”I’m proud.”

The Marshes to the stair.

Toby didn’t come down.

He couldn’t. He was carrying the hello. He’d carried it the whole crossing, eight days and eight nights, sitting in the first finger of the Hand with his fiddle across his knees and his eyes shut, so that every name could be counted the whole way. Okafor had said he wasn’t to stop until the families were aboard. So he didn’t stop.

His mother came up the stair to him.

Adaeze Marsh. Small. Very small. Smaller than I’d imagined. She came up Luna’s stair one step at a time, slowly, with Hana on one side of her and Jessa on the other, into the first finger of a Hand that had carried collared people to other worlds for longer than anyone could count.

She found him in the dark.

I felt it through Toby. Through the hello he was carrying. Through Dory’s net. His mother’s small hand on his face. In the dark. The way Maura had held Voss’s face, and mine, with flour on.

Toby didn’t stop carrying.

He didn’t open his eyes.

But he started to play. One-handed. The other hand still on the fiddle’s neck, keeping the hello. Four notes. Going up, and then down.

And his mother sang.

The Osei family to the stair.

Kwame Osei came up it with the shake gone from his hands and his wife on his arm and his mother leaning on his other side and two children behind him. Hana met him at the top. She didn’t say anything. She held out her hands, palms up, and a sphere of water came up off them, and then sixteen, in a slow ring.

Her father looked at the ring for a long time.

Then he lifted one hand, and the water in the air of the whole finger of the Hand, every drop of it, all the breath of three hundred people waiting in the dark, came together over their heads in one great slow turning river.

Little fish, he said.

Friese. The launch site.

Sigmund stood at the bottom of Luna’s stair.

That was all. That was his whole order. Stand at the bottom of the stair. And he stood there, very straight, with his arms folded and his lightning held so tight it was still, while three hundred and four people walked past him onto the stair.

The Senators came at eleven.

Okafor had said they would. Not all of them. Nine. The ones who’d signed the Accord and never stopped signing. They came out of the rail tunnel in a group, with their aides and their papers, and walked across the black ash toward the stair.

Sigmund didn’t move.

”Cadet Friese,” said the one at the front. Old. Grey. A face I’d seen at the garden party in the dome, two years ago, smiling at the cadets. ”You’ll stand aside. This is an unlawful removal of Retention subjects in breach of the Accord. We have a Senate order.”

He held out a paper.

Sigmund looked at it.

He didn’t take it.

”Two signatures,” he said. ”Whose?”

The Senator’s face changed.

”That’s not—”

”Whose?” said Sigmund.

Nobody answered.

”My father’s,” said Sigmund. ”First. It’s always first.” He unfolded his arms. ”My father’s in a guest house on Avalon. He hasn’t signed anything in seven weeks. He couldn’t have signed that.”

”The Senate acts in his absence—”

”Then the Senate,” said Sigmund, ”can come and tell him so.”

He held out his hand. Palm up.

The lightning came up off it. Not a storm. Not a ring. A single white thread, very thin, standing straight up off his palm into the grey air under the Hand. Humming.

The paper in the Senator’s hand caught fire.

Not burned. Caught. A small clean flame at one corner, the way Sigmund used to light the candles at Squad Two’s birthdays, once, before his father’s letter. It ran across the paper and took it, and the Senator dropped it, and it lay on the black ash and burned to nothing.

”I’m a Friese,” said Sigmund. ”And I don’t sign first.”

He folded his arms again.

The Senators looked at him for a long time.

Then they looked up. At the Hand. At three fingers and a palm filling the sky over the old battlefield. At the stair going up into it, and three hundred people climbing.

They went back into the tunnel.

Haddon. The Annex.

That one Okafor did herself.

She went down twenty-three floors, in the lift that Voss had made someone fix, and across the dome to the lower floors, to a door she’d knocked on twice before. The first time it hadn’t opened. The second time it had.

This time it was open before she got there.

A man was standing in the doorway. Thin. Grey. With a face like Brock’s, only older, and harder, and very tired. He’d seen the Hand in the sky. He’d seen Voss on the screen. He’d been standing in his doorway since dawn.

Okafor told him.

I don’t know what she said. Mother wasn’t there. Mother only knew what Okafor told her afterward, back in the flat, at the table.

She says she told him his son held a ford for an hour so his squad could cross, said Mother. She says she told him his son was in the river for a year and a half, and came out, and said ”Copy, Scarecrow.” A pause. She says she told him his son had asked about him. That the first thing he said, after ”did they cross,” was ”is my dad on the list.”

Brock, on the red glass beside me, wrapped in Priya’s blanket, leaning on Genny, went very still.

She says, said Mother, that Mr. Haddon didn’t say anything for a long time. And then he went back inside. And came out again with a box.

What was in it?

Every letter he ever wrote to his son, said Mother. Copies. He kept copies. Every one. Including the one that said ”fix it.” Her voice was very quiet. Okafor says he gave her the box and said: ”Tell him I’m sorry I wrote them.” And then he went to get his coat.

Brock put his face in his hands.

Genny put her arm round him. Very stiffly. The way Genny did everything. But she didn’t take it away.

By noon, the first finger was full.

Three hundred and four people. Every name on Okafor’s list. Dot counted them. Not on the red glass on Avalon. There. Through the hello. Through Dory’s net. Through Toby, carrying it. Every name, as each one stepped off Luna’s stair into the dark of the first finger.

Calder, Rory. Calder, Maura. Calder, Pip.

Marsh, Adaeze.

Osei, Kwame. Osei, Abena. Osei, Efua. Osei, Kofi. Osei, Esi.

Tarrow, Ines.

Haddon, Dennis. Haddon, Marian. Haddon, Clare.

On and on. Three hundred and four.

And then two more.

They weren’t on the list. Not Okafor’s. They were on Mother’s.

She’d asked at dawn. Through the hello, when the door was wide and Okafor was giving her orders round the table. I’d felt her ask, very quietly, the way she asked for things she didn’t expect to get.

Maris. Thorne’s bakery.

I know it, Okafor had said.

He has a daughter. They make the bread. A pause. Ask them if they’d like to come.

Okafor hadn’t said anything for a moment.

Dot, she’d said. That’s the door that shut on you.

I know which door it is, said Mother.

I hadn’t known. I’d never known. She’d never told me. All I knew was what I felt through the hello, then, at dawn, in the small warm room: a winter, a long time ago. A young woman with shaking hands and nowhere to go, standing at the back door of a bakery that smelled of warm bread, asking. And the door closing. Not slammed. Just closed. Quietly. By a man who was frightened of what she was.

They’ll be frightened of what’s in the sky, Mother had said. The same way he was frightened of me. Nobody should be frightened alone. A pause. Ask them.

So Okafor had asked.

I don’t know what Thorne said, when a retired Major knocked on the back door of his bakery on the morning a Hand came over the dome and told him who’d sent her. Mother didn’t hear it. Okafor only told her afterward.

He’d said yes.

His daughter had said yes before he finished.

They came up the stair at a quarter to twelve. A big grey man with flour still in the creases of his knuckles, and a young woman beside him carrying a sack of starter in her arms like a baby, because she said you didn’t leave the starter behind, whatever else you left.

Mother was waiting at the top.

I felt Thorne see her. Felt him stop on the last step. Felt him know her. All those years, and he knew her.

He didn’t say anything.

Mother didn’t either.

She stepped aside, at the top of the stair, to let him in.

”Thorne,” said Dot, counting. And then, as the young woman stepped past her father into the dark of the first finger, holding the starter: ”And Thorne.”

Three hundred and six.

And last, because Okafor had said she’d be last:

Okafor, Maris.

Dot said it out loud on the red glass. ”Okafor, Maris.”

Garnet, floating beside Pell at the back of the glass, turned right round in the air.

”Maris,” she said. ”Lucas. Like the spoon.”

”Like the spoon,” I said.

I’d named it for her. The titanium sled, the one Dot had told me to make so I’d have something to look at while I lifted myself across a dead country, a year and a half ago. I’d needed a name for it. I’d given it hers.

Eleven light-years away, carrying the hello with his eyes shut, Toby laughed out loud.

Okafor says, said Mother, she heard about the spoon. A pause. She says she was going to be cross about it. She says she’s decided not to be.

And then, last of all, my mother.

Not on the list. She’d never been on the list. Okafor had said she’d come last of all, after everyone, after Okafor herself.

Mother came up the stair alone.

I felt every step.

Through the hello. Through Dory’s net. Through Luna, who was standing at the top of the stair with her notebook and her father beside her, watching my mother come up out of the grey morning over the old battlefield.

She didn’t use the rail.

She didn’t need it. Her hands were steady. Her legs were steady. Her silver was whole, every path open, running out to the ends of everything, and she came up a mile of ice stair on her own two feet in the blue silk dressing gown she’d worn on every call home, with her mother’s ring on her hand and her grey streak bright in the light.

At the top she stopped.

She looked at Luna.

”Hello, Luna,” she said.

”Mrs. Dask,” said Luna. Very straight. Then her face did the thing it did. ”Dot.”

”Dot,” Mother agreed.

And then she turned round, at the top of the stair, in the palm of the Hand, and looked down.

At the dome. At the old battlefield. At four million people under glass, looking up.

Lucas, she said. Through the hello. Through Dory. Is it always this high?

Higher, I said. Sometimes.

Good, said my mother. I’d like to see.

They didn’t leave at noon.

That was the plan. Okafor’s plan. Load the first finger by noon. Leave by one. Go behind the moon, to the finger the first queen’s youngest was in, the one Mother had torn open twenty-two years ago, and the Project station cutting it. Take her. Take the cutters off her. Bring her home with everyone else.

They didn’t leave at noon because the first queen stopped.

I felt her stop. In the middle of the hello. In the middle of holding the door as wide as a road. She went very still, the way the queens went still when something they’d been afraid of for a long time finally happened.

Lucas, she said.

Slowly. Every word right.

The young one. Behind the moon.

Yes?

She is not alone.

I went cold.

She has been alone, said the first queen. For twenty-two years. In the cold. With the cutters. I have felt her since we arrived. Alone. A pause. She is not alone now.

What’s with her?

The first queen was quiet for a long time.

Another Hand, she said.

It came out from behind the moon at a quarter past twelve.

Mother saw it from the top of the stair. Luna saw it. The General, on his way back from the Annex, saw it from the rail tunnel mouth and stopped dead. Four million people under glass saw it, because it came round the edge of the moon in the daytime sky, grey on blue, and kept coming.

Three fingers and a palm.

Bigger than ours.

It heard, said the first queen. Very quietly. When I came. When I held the hello so wide. It heard the names going through me. It heard me carry them. A pause. It came to see who was singing.

Is there a queen in it?

Yes, said the first queen.

Is she like you?

The first queen was quiet for a very long time.

She is like I was, she said.

Okafor gave the order at twenty past twelve.

Through Mother. Through the hello. Through Dory’s net, which held everyone, on both worlds, every path joined to every other.

I heard it on the red glass on Avalon, with my family round me and the queens behind me and Brock leaning on Genny and Sera holding my arm so hard it hurt.

All units, said Okafor. In Mother’s voice. In her own words. Plain. No decoration. The way she’d read our names off a slate in the mess hall on the first day.

The families stay in the first finger. The first finger stays sealed. The Hand stays over the dome.

Everyone else, to me.

A pause.

Dask.

Yes, ma’am.

You said your mother could reach through you. From eleven light-years.

Yes.

Then you can reach through her, said Okafor. Stay on the glass. Keep your daughter holding. Another pause. I’m going to need you.

Days 806–808. Over the dome.

Brock walked up the passage on the third day, Edda at the bottom with her arms folded. He stood at the top and looked: the glass, the houses, the tree, Teeming with baskets, the Tharn beyond the rim. Did you build all this? Some. Genny: the queens and the Teeming and everyone; Lucas mostly did the walls and the plumbing. ”I held a ford for an hour. And you did the plumbing.”

He asked on the porch. Luna’s chair empty; nobody sits in it. Risa says it doesn’t hurt. What would I be? Ragged from the program, worn thin from a year and a half holding iron round himself. More iron, any metal, faster, never stuck, able to come back every time without lightning in his chest. Risa: I’d do it again. ”That’s the problem.” Eleven minutes. Iron-grey rings like a cast-iron pan. Rivets down his arms in rows like a ship’s hull. The porch rail I made in the first year flowed up his arm to the elbow like water up a wick, and he let it run back exactly. ”Huh.”

Day 808, an hour before dawn: Dory awake, checking a long way. The first queen, gone so far for three mornings I couldn’t feel her, suddenly there again, at the other end. She’s arrived. At dawn the door was wide as a road, held from both ends. Dory’s net found everyone round Okafor’s table, and past them, in the first finger: ”Dory?” Luna, out loud, as close as across the kitchen table. Sera grabbed my arm. Then the General, Liam, Toby carrying, Hana, Sigmund, Marlo and Jessa, Sesh and the Kethri and the youngest queen, two thousand light-benders. There you are, there you are.

Through Mother at Okafor’s window: the Hand low over the old battlefield east of the dome, filling the whole east, its shadow over four million people. Twenty-two years of being taught the Sorn came in a Hand and burned the old cities. Voss on every screen, plain grey coat, no seed; Okafor keeps it in a box because it has listened enough. Not a speech: the Hand isn’t the Sorn’s any more; something held in it was freed by a boy, a baby and a city; it’s come for three hundred and four who asked to go; nobody else need be afraid. She said it badly, her voice breaking. Some believed her because she said it badly.

Okafor at her table, slate in one hand, the other behind her back. The Windsor to the Annex: every man on the second floor stood up, the windows frosted from outside in. He picked up a file, read the name, set it square with the desk. Open them. All of them. By noon. The families first.

The Calders to the launch site: Rory off the transport on the black ash, new arms, looking at the sling and the stitches and the silver rings. Palm up; fire like the heat plant door. Liam’s palm beside it. Two fires, a river in a wide valley and the same shape wider. Pip ran straight past both and knocked his sling off. ”Dad’s going to be so jealous. I told you.” ”I’m not jealous. I’m proud.”

Toby couldn’t come down; Okafor said carry until the families are aboard. His mother came up the stair to him, very small, Hana and Jessa either side, and found him in the dark and put her hand on his face. Eyes shut, still carrying, he played four notes one-handed, and she sang. Kwame Osei came up with no shake, his wife, his mother and two children with him; Hana made sixteen spheres; he gathered every drop of breath in the finger into one turning river overhead. Little fish.

Sigmund’s whole order: stand at the bottom of the stair. Nine Senators at eleven with a Senate order. Two signatures, whose? My father’s, first, always first. He’s in a guest house on Avalon and hasn’t signed anything in seven weeks. Then the Senate can go and tell him so. One white thread off his palm, and the paper caught at the corner like Squad Two birthday candles, once, and burned on the ash. I’m a Friese and I don’t sign first. They looked up at the Hand and went back in the tunnel.

Okafor went to the Haddons herself, the third time. The door was open before she got there; he’d stood there since dawn. She told him: the ford, the river, Copy Scarecrow, and that after ”did they cross” the first thing Brock asked was whether his dad was on the list. He went inside and came out with a box: copies of every letter he wrote his son, including fix it. Tell him I’m sorry I wrote them. Then he got his coat. Brock put his face in his hands; Genny put her arm round him, stiffly, and left it there.

By noon three hundred and four, counted by Dot through the hello as each stepped off the stair. Calder, Rory, Maura, Pip. Marsh, Adaeze. Osei, five of them. Tarrow, Ines. Haddon, Dennis, Marian, Clare. Then two more, on Mother’s list, not Okafor’s: Thorne’s bakery. Okafor: that’s the door that shut on you. I know which door it is. Through the hello I felt it, a winter long ago: a young woman with shaking hands at the back door of a bakery, and the door closing quietly on her by a man frightened of what she was. They’ll be frightened of what’s in the sky; nobody should be frightened alone. Ask them. He said yes; his daughter said yes before he finished. Flour in his knuckles, the starter in her arms like a baby. Thorne stopped on the last step and knew her after all those years. Neither spoke. She stepped aside to let him in. Dot: Thorne. And Thorne. Three hundred and six. And last: Okafor, Maris. Garnet: like the spoon. I named the sled for her. Okafor heard about the spoon; she was going to be cross; she’s decided not to be.

Then Mother, last of all, not on the list, up a mile of ice stair alone without the rail, in the blue silk dressing gown, Grandmother’s ring, the grey streak bright. Hello, Luna. Mrs. Dask. Then: Dot. She turned at the top and looked down at four million under glass. Is it always this high? Higher, sometimes. Good. I’d like to see.

They didn’t leave at noon. The first queen stopped mid-hello: the young one behind the moon has been alone twenty-two years in the cold with the cutters. She is not alone now. Another Hand. It came round the moon at a quarter past twelve, grey on blue in the daylight sky, bigger than ours. It heard the names going through her and came to see who was singing. Is she like you? She is like I was.

Twenty past twelve, Okafor, in Mother’s voice, plain as reading names off a slate: the families stay in the first finger, sealed; the Hand stays over the dome; everyone else to me. Dask: you said your mother could reach through you from eleven light-years. Then you can reach through her. Stay on the glass. Keep your daughter holding. I’m going to need you.