Scarecrow

I didn’t leave the glass.

Okafor had said stay on the glass, and I stayed. I sat down on the red at the edge of the plain where we stood every dawn, with my legs crossed and my hands flat in front of me, and Risa sat down behind me with Dory in her lap, so close that her knees were against my back.

Dory was awake. Very bright. Every path of her woven silver turned outward, holding.

Holding everyone.

I could feel the net. I could always feel it, at dawn. But it had never been like this. Never so wide, never so far. It ran from the glass under my hands, up through the ring of queens and the spine-queen, out across eleven light-years to the first queen in the sky over a dome on a dying world, and through her to everyone. Mother at the top of an ice stair. Okafor at her table. Thirty people round it. Three hundred and six in the dark of the first finger. Luna, and her father, and Liam, and Toby with his eyes shut, carrying. Hana. Sigmund. Marlo and Jessa. Sesh and the Kethri. The youngest queen on Sesh’s back.

Two thousand light-benders in the second finger.

All of it in Dory. All of it held.

Sera sat down on my left. She took my hand. Hers was very warm.

Genny sat down on my right. She didn’t take my hand. She put hers flat on the glass beside mine, and I felt her listen.

Behind us, the others. Holt, standing, with his arms folded. Wren with her book. Brock, leaning on nothing now, standing on his own. Pell with Garnet, who wasn’t floating, for once, because Pell had her by the shoulder. Crane, a little way off, on his knees, with the band on his collar dark and his hands flat on the glass like mine.

And our queen, at the edge of the canyon, at her full height. The third time in her life she’d left her wall.

I cannot go, she said. I can hold.

That’s enough.

It is not enough, she said. But I will hold until it is.

I felt the second Hand open.

Through Mother. Through the net. She was standing at the top of Luna’s stair in the palm of our Hand, looking east, over the old battlefield, toward the place where the second one had come down out of the daylight sky. Lower now. Lower than ours. Its shadow lay across the black ash and the rail tunnel mouth and the edge of the dome itself.

Its palm turned over.

And they came out.

Not the way the handlers had come out of the knuckle on our plain, pouring, all at once. Slower. Worse. Like something being unloaded.

Handlers first. Tall and thin and blank-faced, dropping out of seams in the grey onto the ash. Hundreds. More. I stopped counting. Dot didn’t. Dot sat on the glass beside Holt with every hand still and said numbers under her breath that I didn’t want to hear.

And behind the handlers, the others.

I’d never seen them. Nobody on Avalon had. They came out of the second Hand in long dark ranks, so many that the ash under them went black, and they were wrong. Not the way the Sorn were wrong. The way something is wrong when it’s been made to stand in a shape it was never meant to stand in.

Six limbs. Low to the ground. Shells on their backs, dark and ridged like the shell of a beetle, and heads that were mostly jaw. Big. Bigger than a Teeming. Moving all together, in step, every one of them, the way the Kethri had walked three steps behind their handler. And round every neck, under the edge of every shell, a grey band.

Collars.

What are they? I asked. Through the net. To anyone.

It was Marlo who answered. From the second finger of our Hand, where he sat with Jessa among two thousand light-benders.

The watchers know them, he said. Very quietly. They watched their world too. They call them Hesk. A pause. They say the Hesk were builders. On their world. They built cities out of the shells of their dead, so the dead would always be part of something. His voice dropped. They say the Sorn use them to break things now.

The Hesk were screaming.

Not out loud. I couldn’t hear them out loud; I was on Avalon, eleven light-years away, sitting on red glass with my daughter holding the world together behind me. But I could hear them through the net. Through Mother. Through every piece of silver on the old battlefield.

Every Hesk, screaming. The way Sesh had heard the youngest queen crying under the voice, all her life. The way Crane had said the two hundred and eleven in Halden screamed while they opened the doors.

They didn’t want to.

They were coming anyway.

Toward the dome.

All units, said Okafor.

Through Mother. In her own words. Plain. No decoration.

They want the glass. If they reach the glass, four million people. Keep them off the glass.

A pause.

Tarrow. Ground.

I felt Ines Tarrow come down Luna’s stair.

She came slowly. She was old. She’d been on the hello every morning for a year and never said a word until the morning I finished her and she said there it is, the ground, I’d forgotten it was there. She walked down the stair onto the black ash of the old battlefield with Rory Calder on one side of her and Kwame Osei on the other, and she stopped, and she put both feet flat on the ash.

And she settled.

The way her silver settled. Slow and heavy and deep, like water soaking down after rain. Down through her feet. Into the ash. Into the ground under the ash. Into the old battlefield, where the bombardments had fused the earth to glass and the glass had cracked and the cracks had filled with ash for thirty years.

The ground rose.

Not fast. Ines Tarrow didn’t do anything fast. A long low swell, like a wave coming in on a shallow beach, rolling out from under her feet toward the east. Then higher. Higher. The black ash sliding off it. The fused glass under the ash cracking and lifting and standing up, in a ridge, between the dome and the Hesk.

A wall. Of the ground itself. A mile long. Higher than a house.

Ines Tarrow stood at the foot of it with her feet flat on the ash and her eyes shut.

There, she said. Very low. Like gravel shifting. There it is.

Windsor. On top.

The General didn’t come down the stair. He came down off the edge of the palm. All at once. Twenty feet, onto the top of Ines Tarrow’s ridge, and landed on his feet, the way Luna landed when she came off a wall.

And the cold came out of him.

I’d felt his frost on our porch. I’d felt his wall go up round the ring on our plain, slowly, hour after hour, like the first frost of winter coming in across the canyon. This wasn’t that. This was all of it at once. Every brick I’d opened in him, every path folded shut for thirty years and opened in an evening at our kitchen table. All of it, out of his bare hands, onto the top of the ridge.

Ice.

A second wall, on top of the first. Clear and white and thirty feet high. Running the length of Ines Tarrow’s ridge in both directions as fast as a man could run. Faster.

And on top of it, very straight, with his coat off and his hands bare and frost to the elbow, the General.

Looking east.

At the Hesk.

That’ll do, Windsor, said Okafor.

Osei. The river.

There hadn’t been a river on the old battlefield for thirty years. There’d been one once. Before the bombardments. A wide slow river that came down out of the hills to the east and ran past the place where they’d later build the dome. The bombardments had boiled it. The ground had fused over it. The water had gone underground, into the dark, into the cracks.

Kwame Osei found it.

He stood at the foot of Ines Tarrow’s ridge with Hana beside him, and he lifted his hands, the way he’d lifted them in the first finger to gather every breath into one turning river overhead.

And the old river came up.

Out of the cracks. Out of the dark. Out of thirty years underground. Not a trickle. A river. Wide and black and fast, coming up out of the ground on the east side of the ridge, between the wall and the Hesk, and spreading. Across the ash. Under the ranks.

The Hesk were heavy. Six legs and a shell and a jaw.

The ash under them turned to mud.

Then deeper mud.

Then something worse than mud. Something that took a leg and didn’t give it back.

The front ranks slowed. Stumbled. Sank to the shell.

And Hana, beside her father, lifted her own hands, and the water that Kwame had brought up out of the dark rose off the mud in long bright ropes and wrapped round the legs of the Hesk that were still moving, and held them.

Little fish, said Kwame Osei. Proud. Through the net.

Papa, said Hana. Concentrate.

Calder. Fire. Handlers only.

That was the order. Handlers only. Okafor said it twice. The Hesk didn’t want to be there. The Hesk were screaming. Nobody was to touch a Hesk with fire.

Rory Calder went up onto the ridge.

He didn’t climb it. Ines Tarrow lifted him. A column of ground rising under his feet like a step, and then another, until he was standing on top of the ice beside the General. With Liam on his other side. And Maura behind them, very straight, with her hands out in front of her.

The handlers were coming over the mud.

Not the Hesk. The Hesk were stuck. The handlers were light and long and fast and they came over the mud like insects over water, blades out, toward the ridge.

Rory opened his hands.

I’d felt his fire come back to him in a small warm room eleven light-years away, the morning I grew the last of his arms. I’d felt it come out of him all at once, like the door of a heat plant, and then go back in, because he could hold it.

He didn’t hold it now.

It came out of him the way the heat plant must have come out of the ground the night they built it. A wall of it. White and gold and roaring. Off the top of the ridge, down onto the mud, onto the handlers coming over it. Not one at a time. A wall. A hundred yards wide.

And beside him, Liam. Throwing. Aimed. White at the core. Every handler that got past his father’s wall, Liam took. Laughing. Of course he was laughing.

Dad, he shouted. Dad, look—

I see you, said Rory. Keep your elbow up.

And behind them both, Maura.

She didn’t throw anything. She didn’t make a wall. She stood very straight with her hands out in front of her and the oven-door warmth of her coming off her palms, and every bit of heat her husband and her son threw over the ridge, she held. Kept it pointed. Kept it from spreading back over the ice. Kept it off the mud where the Hesk were.

Mine was small, she’d said, on the hello. But it was mine.

It wasn’t small now. It was exactly the size it needed to be.

Friese. Sky.

Sigmund didn’t wait for the rest of the order. He was already on the ridge.

He couldn’t make a storm the size of ten without Risa. Risa was on Avalon, with Dory in her lap, behind me. But he could make one the size of five. And he did. The sky over the old battlefield went dark under the second Hand, and the lightning came down out of it in long white sheets round the handlers on the mud, and every one it touched unfolded.

That’s for Brock, Sigmund said. Through the net. To nobody. To everybody.

On the glass behind me, Brock made a sound.

Windsor, L. Mist.

Luna came off the edge of the palm onto the ridge beside her father.

She’d built a mile of stair in eleven seconds on our plain. She’d frozen the mist round four hundred handlers’ legs. She did both. A stair from the palm to the ridge, for anyone who needed it. And then mist. All the water in the air over the old battlefield, and all the water Kwame had brought up out of the dark, rising off the mud in a fine grey breath that came up to the handlers’ knees.

Then their waists.

Then their heads.

They couldn’t see. They read heat and movement, the General had said. Mist eats both.

And then, when the mist was everywhere, Luna froze it.

Not round their legs, this time. Round their blades. Every blade, on every handler, in the mist, all at once. Frozen solid. So that when the handlers tried to swing, the ice swung with them, heavy and clumsy and wrong, and they fell.

The General, beside her on the ridge, didn’t say anything.

But I felt it through the net. Through Luna. His hand, very briefly, on the back of her neck. Cold. The way his frost had run into her hair on the plain, like a hand stroking it.

And I reached through my mother.

Okafor had said I would have to, and I did. I sat on the red glass on Avalon with my hands flat in front of me and Risa’s knees against my back and Dory holding the net, and I reached. Through the hello. Through the spine-queen and the first queen. Through Dory’s woven silver, every path joined to every other.

Through Mother.

She was at the top of Luna’s stair, in the palm of our Hand. Looking down at the old battlefield. At the ridge, and the ice, and the fire, and the mud, and the mist.

At the handlers.

Lucas, she said.

I’m here.

They’re getting past, she said. On the north end. Where the ridge is lowest.

I felt it. Through her. A knot of handlers, fifty or sixty, going round the end of the ridge where Ines Tarrow hadn’t been able to raise it as high. Fast. Toward the glass of the dome.

I’ll hold them, said Mother. You open them.

And she did.

She reached out of the palm of our Hand, across the whole of the old battlefield, and took hold of every blade on every handler at the north end of the ridge. All at once. Exactly. The width of a hair. The way she’d held three bowls and the flour and the eggs.

And I reached through her, and found the shells.

And opened them.

Every one. All at once. Like opening a fist. Fifty or sixty flat grey sheets, falling slowly onto the black ash at the north end of the ridge, a hundred yards from the dome.

I’d never done it from so far.

It didn’t feel far. It felt like reaching across a table. Mother’s hands were holding them. All I had to do was open.

Good, said Mother. Very quietly. Again.

It went on for a long time.

I don’t know how long. I’ve tried to work it out, afterward, and I can’t. Luna can’t either. She says she tried to keep a note and looked down at her notebook later and found she’d written the same word over and over, down three pages, in smaller and smaller letters. Again. Again. Again.

Because they kept coming.

The second Hand kept opening. More handlers. More Hesk. Rank after rank, out of the palm, onto the ash. Ines Tarrow raised the ridge higher. The General built the ice higher on top of it. Kwame Osei’s river ran deeper and the mud got worse and Hana’s ropes held more and more of the Hesk still. Rory’s wall of fire never stopped. Maura never stopped holding it. Liam never stopped throwing. Sigmund’s storm never stopped.

And Mother and I, through the net, opened handlers. Again. Again. Again.

It wasn’t enough.

I knew it wasn’t. Everyone knew. The Hesk kept coming, and screaming, and every one that sank in the mud, two more came over it. Climbing on each other’s shells. Not because they wanted to. Because the voice told them to.

And the voice was coming from the second Hand.

From the queen at the bottom of it.

She’s carrying it, said the first queen. From our Hand, overhead. Very slowly. Every word right. The way I carried it. For longer than I can count. A pause. She cannot stop.

You stopped.

I stopped because a child asked me a question, said the first queen. And because nobody was holding my young behind a door.

I went very still.

The door, said the General.

On top of his ice, on top of Ines Tarrow’s ridge, with frost to his elbows and handlers coming over the mud toward him. Through the net. Through Luna, beside him.

Find the door.

I didn’t understand. Nobody did. Not at first.

Then Luna did.

Father, she said. The queen. On Avalon. In the meeting chamber. The first time you met her.

The General didn’t answer.

But I felt him remember. Through the net. Through Luna. Our queen, at the bottom of the meeting passage, so large he’d had to look all the way up. Asking him what he’d do if someone held Luna behind a door and let him hear her cry every day.

Burn the world, he’d said.

Yes, the queen had said. That is what they counted on.

And then: When they tell you something must be done for the sake of the young, ask whose young, and whose door, and who holds the lock.

She’s not carrying it because she wants to, said the General. Very quietly. On top of the ice. She’s carrying it because they’ve got her young. Somewhere in that Hand. Behind a door. Crying.

He turned his head. Not toward the Hesk. Toward the second Hand, overhead.

Find the door, he said again. And open it.

Quint, said Okafor.

Ma’am, said Marlo.

Your watchers. Have they been in the second Hand?

A pause. I felt Marlo ask. I felt two thousand light-benders, in the second finger of our Hand, all turn at once, the way a field of wheat turns in the wind.

Yes, said Marlo. They’ve been in every Hand. They say all Hands are built the same. Another pause. They say there’s a place in every Hand where the young are kept. In the wrist. Below the palm. Where the queen can always hear them.

Can they get there?

They say nobody can see them, said Marlo. They say that’s what they’re for. His voice changed. They say they’ve watched that door on every world. Every Hand. Every queen. Standing outside it. Watching the young cry. Because the collar made them.

And now?

Marlo was quiet for a long moment.

Now they’d like to open it, he said.

They went.

Not all two thousand. Okafor wouldn’t have it. Twenty, she said. Twenty watchers, and Quint, because they talk to Quint, and Quint, because she’ll go anyway.

And Sesh.

Sesh carried them. Marlo and Jessa on her back, with the youngest queen between them. And the six other Kethri with wings, carrying nothing, flying round her, because Sesh had said through Dot the tall ones do not leave the tall ones.

And twenty light-benders, flying with them. I didn’t know they could fly. Nobody had known. They’d never been asked. They went up out of the second finger of our Hand like heat haze rising off a summer road, and across the sky, and into the shadow of the second Hand, and nobody saw them go.

Nobody but Garnet.

On the glass on Avalon, eleven light-years away, with Pell’s hand on her shoulder, Garnet sat up very straight.

”There,” she said. Pointing at nothing. At the air. At the place in the net where twenty light-benders were. ”There they go. I can see the outside of them.”

I went with them.

Not my body. Me. Through the net. Through Mother, who was holding handlers’ blades at the north end of the ridge and couldn’t come. Through Jessa, on Sesh’s back, who could feel up, further than anyone, and who’d felt her brother on the Hand for a year before anyone believed her.

Through Jessa, I went into the second Hand.

It was the same. Folds and folds and folds, each one turned a little away from every other. But it was worse. It was loud. The voice was everywhere in it. Pushing. Pushing. Down through the folds, out through the palm, into every collar on every Hesk on the old battlefield.

And under the voice, crying.

Not the Hesk. Something else. Higher. Smaller. Further down. In the dark. Where the wrist was.

The young.

The light-benders went straight to it. They’d watched this door on every world. They knew exactly where it was. They went through the folds the way the Overseer had gone through ours, knowing every latch, and Sesh went after them, with Marlo and Jessa and the youngest queen on her back, and her six with their copper-tipped wings round her.

And at the bottom of the wrist, behind a door that was folded tighter than anything I’d ever seen, tighter than the knuckle, tighter than the handlers’ shells:

The young.

I could see them. Through Jessa. Through the door.

Not many. A hundred, maybe. Small. Pale. Curled on shelves in silver wrappings, the way our queen’s young slept in the hollow. But not sleeping. Crying. Every one of them. A thin high endless sound, going up through the door, through the folds, up and up and up to the queen at the bottom of the Hand.

So she’d hear.

So she’d never forget.

So she’d carry the voice.

And in front of the door, a ring of handlers. Twelve. The way there’d been twelve at the bottom of our Hand, round the first queen. Bigger. Darker. Blank-faced. With blades.

Waiting.

They couldn’t see the light-benders.

They could see Sesh.

What happened next happened very fast.

The handlers turned toward Sesh, and the seven Kethri with copper-tipped wings, and Marlo and Jessa and the youngest queen on Sesh’s back.

And the light-benders showed them something.

I don’t know what. Marlo said afterward it was another Kethri. Lots of them. A hundred Kethri, filling the fold, all flying, all coming. Made of nothing but bent light.

The handlers went for the light.

And Sesh went for the door.

She didn’t open it. She couldn’t. Nobody could open a fold that tight, except me.

So I did.

Through Jessa. Through the net. I reached past Sesh’s copper-tipped wings and put my hands, that weren’t my hands, on the door at the bottom of the wrist of the second Hand.

It was the hardest thing I’d ever opened.

Harder than the knuckle. Harder than the first queen’s ten thousand folds. It wasn’t folded to keep something out. It was folded to keep something in. Every fold turned inward, toward the young. Like the cup the Overseer had made on the east wall of our hollow.

The second kind of door.

Only made by something that didn’t know there was a first kind.

I listened first.

I don’t know how long. Long enough that I felt one of the twelve handlers turn away from the bent light and back toward Sesh. Long enough that I felt one of the six Kethri with copper-tipped wings go between it and Sesh.

I heard her die.

Through the net. Through Jessa. A Kethri I’d grown wings for, on the red glass on our plain, in the afternoon, while the other nine stood round the edge with their necks touching. She didn’t make a sound. She went between the blade and Sesh, and the blade went into her, and she fell.

Sesh called. The high long call she’d made in the hollow the morning her collar came off.

And I opened the door.

The young stopped crying.

Not all at once. One by one. As the door opened, and the folds came away, and something came through it into the dark that wasn’t a handler.

The youngest queen.

She hopped down off Sesh’s back. Small and pale and feathered, the size of a cat, with copper at the tips of her wings. She hopped across the floor of the fold, two small steps at a time, to the nearest shelf.

And she sang.

The note. Her note. The one she’d sung to the hatchlings on her world every evening before the Hand came. The one Toby had played in our hollow to sing her back. The one every queen on Avalon had sung to three hundred slivers on our plain.

A hatchling’s lullaby.

The young turned toward her. On their shelves. In their silver wrappings. The way our queen’s young had turned toward the slivers in the cups on the east wall.

And hummed.

There you are.

And far above them, at the bottom of the second Hand, the queen heard.

I felt her hear it. Through the net. Through everything. A queen like the first queen, so old she was like the bottom of the sea. Who’d been carrying the voice for longer than she could count because her young were behind a door, crying, so she’d never forget.

Her young had stopped crying.

Something was singing to them.

She stopped.

Not the way the first queen had stopped in our square, slowly, because a baby asked her a question. All at once. The way you’d drop something very heavy that you’d been holding for so long you’d forgotten your hands were tired.

The voice stopped.

On the old battlefield, ten thousand Hesk stopped screaming.

All at once. The way the handlers had stopped on our plain when the slivers sang. Every Hesk, in the mud, on the ash, climbing on each other’s shells. Stopped.

The collars went quiet.

And then, slowly, all over the old battlefield, the Hesk lay down.

Not fell. Lay down. On the mud. On the ash. Folding their six legs under them and lowering their shells and their heads until their jaws rested on the ground. Ten thousand of them. All at once.

The way you lie down when you’ve been made to stand for a very long time.

And the handlers who were left, on the mud, in the mist, with their blades frozen in Luna’s ice, had nothing left to push through.

The General looked down at them from the top of his wall.

Colonel, said Okafor.

Ma’am.

Finish it.

He did.

I came back to the glass.

Slowly. Through the net. Out of the second Hand, out of Jessa, out of Mother. Back across eleven light-years. Back into my own body, sitting cross-legged on the red glass at the edge of the plain on Avalon, with my hands flat in front of me and Risa’s knees against my back and Sera’s hand in mine and Genny’s hand flat on the glass beside me.

I opened my eyes.

The sun had moved. A long way. Further than I’d thought.

Everyone was still there. Nobody had moved. Holt, standing, with his arms folded. Wren with her book. Brock, standing on his own. Pell, with her hand on Garnet’s shoulder. Crane on his knees.

Dory, in Risa’s lap, very bright. Still holding.

”All names,” said Dot, very quietly. Then she stopped.

”Not all,” she said.

She was the third Kethri I’d given wings.

I didn’t know her name. None of us did. The Kethri didn’t tell their names to anyone but each other. She’d been the one who stood at the back of the ten on the first day, when they came down the ramp three steps behind their handler. The one with the darker feathers. The one who’d asked me, through Dot, the afternoon I grew Sesh’s wings, if hers could be grey all the way to the tips, without the copper. I would like to look like my mother, she’d said.

I’d done it. Grey all the way.

She’d gone between a blade and Sesh at the bottom of the wrist of the second Hand, and the blade had gone into her, and she’d fallen.

Sesh brought her out.

Through the net, I felt Sesh carry her out of the second Hand, in her three-fingered hands, against her chest. Down through the folds. Out through the palm. Across the sky. Down onto the top of Ines Tarrow’s ridge, where the General was standing on his ice, and where he went down on one knee as Sesh landed, and didn’t get up.

The other Kethri came down round her. Necks touching.

The youngest queen came down off Sesh’s back, and hopped across the ice, and pressed her head against the fallen one’s beak.

And sang.

Not the lullaby. Something else. Something I’d never heard. Low and slow and very old.

Dot didn’t translate.

She didn’t need to.

Day 808. The door.

Okafor said stay on the glass. I sat cross-legged with my hands flat and Risa’s knees against my back, Dory in her lap holding the net wider and further than ever: the glass, the queens, the spine-queen, eleven light-years, the first queen, Mother on the stair, Okafor’s table, three hundred and six in the first finger, Luna and her father and Liam and Toby carrying, Hana, Sigmund, Marlo and Jessa, Sesh and the Kethri and the youngest queen, two thousand light-benders. Sera’s warm hand. Genny’s palm on the glass, listening. Behind us Holt, Wren, Brock on his own feet, Pell holding Garnet’s shoulder, Crane on his knees with his hands flat like mine. Our queen at the canyon edge, the third time she has left her wall: I cannot go; I can hold.

Through Mother at the top of the stair, the second Hand lower than ours, its shadow on the ash and the edge of the dome. Its palm turned and they were unloaded: handlers, hundreds and more; Dot counted under her breath. Then ranks of something new. Six limbs, low, beetle shells, heads mostly jaw, bigger than Teeming, all in step, collared under the shell. Marlo: the watchers know them; Hesk. Builders, who made cities from the shells of their dead so the dead would always be part of something. The Sorn use them to break things. Every one screaming through the net, not wanting to, coming toward the dome anyway.

Okafor: if they reach the glass, four million. Tarrow, ground. Ines put both feet flat on the ash and settled, and the old battlefield rose like a wave on a shallow beach and stood up, a ridge a mile long higher than a house. ”There. There it is.” Windsor, on top: he came off the palm onto the ridge and all of it came out at once, ice thirty feet high along the ridge as fast as a man can run. That’ll do, Windsor.

Osei, the river. The one the bombardments boiled and fused over, gone into the cracks. Kwame brought it up out of the dark between the wall and the Hesk, and the ash went to mud that takes a leg and doesn’t give it back. Hana’s ropes held the ones still moving. Little fish. Papa, concentrate.

Calder: fire, handlers only, said twice; nobody touches a Hesk. Ines lifted Rory onto the ice on columns of ground. A wall of fire a hundred yards wide. Liam taking whatever got past, laughing: Dad, look. I see you. Keep your elbow up. Maura behind them holding all the heat pointed, off the ice, off the Hesk. Mine was small, she said once. It was exactly the size it needed to be.

Sigmund made a storm the size of five without Risa. That’s for Brock. Brock made a sound behind me. Luna: a stair from palm to ridge, then mist to their knees, waists, heads, then froze every blade in it so the ice swung with them and they fell. Her father’s cold hand on the back of her neck.

I reached through Mother. Fifty or sixty round the low north end of the ridge toward the dome. I’ll hold them; you open them. She held every blade to a hair across the battlefield and I opened every shell, a hundred yards from the glass. It felt like reaching across a table. Good. Again.

It went on a long time. Luna’s notebook afterward: again, again, again, three pages, smaller and smaller. More kept coming, Hesk climbing each other’s shells. The first queen: she’s carrying it, as I did; she cannot stop. You stopped. Because a child asked me a question, and nobody held my young behind a door.

The General on his ice: find the door. Luna remembered for him: our queen in the meeting chamber the first time. If someone held Luna behind a door and let you hear her cry? Burn the world. That is what they counted on. Ask whose young, whose door, who holds the lock. She’s carrying it because they’ve got her young somewhere in that Hand, crying. Find the door and open it.

Marlo: all Hands are built the same; the young are kept in the wrist below the palm where the queen can always hear them. The watchers have stood outside that door on every world, watching the young cry, because the collar made them. Now they’d like to open it. Okafor: twenty watchers, and Quint, and Quint. Sesh carrying Marlo and Jessa and the youngest queen; the six winged Kethri round her: the tall ones do not leave the tall ones. Twenty light-benders flying, which nobody knew they could, like heat haze rising. Garnet, pointing at nothing: there they go; I can see the outside of them.

I went through Jessa, who can feel up. The second Hand was the same folds but loud, the voice everywhere, and under it crying, higher, smaller, in the wrist. About a hundred young on shelves, not sleeping, crying up through the door so their queen would never forget. Twelve handlers in front of it. They couldn’t see the watchers. They could see Sesh. The watchers showed them a hundred Kethri made of bent light, and the handlers went for the light, and Sesh went for the door.

The hardest I have ever opened. Folded inward, toward the young, to keep something in. The second kind of door, made by something that didn’t know there was a first kind. I listened first, long enough for a handler to turn back toward Sesh, long enough for a Kethri to go between. I heard her die. Sesh called. I opened the door.

The youngest queen hopped down and sang her note to the young, and they turned on their shelves and hummed there you are. Far above, their queen heard her young stop crying and someone singing to them, and dropped the voice all at once, like something carried so long she’d forgotten her hands were tired. Ten thousand Hesk stopped screaming. The collars went quiet. They lay down, legs folded under, jaws on the ground, the way you lie down when you’ve been made to stand a very long time. The handlers had nothing to push through. Colonel. Ma’am. Finish it. He did.

Back on the glass the sun had moved further than I thought. Nobody had moved. Dot: all names. Then: not all.

The third Kethri I gave wings. We never knew her name; they tell their names only to each other. The one at the back of the ten on the first day, darker feathers, who asked for grey all the way to the tips because she wanted to look like her mother. Sesh carried her out against her chest and down onto the ridge, where the General went down on one knee and didn’t get up. The Kethri round her, necks touching. The youngest queen pressed her head to the fallen one’s beak and sang something low and slow and very old. Dot didn’t translate. She didn’t need to.