Scarecrow

Wren counted everything.

She always had. Since the forty. Since the dome, and the training hall, and the pods, and the first morning on Avalon when she’d stood on the north wall of a camp that wasn’t Scarecrow yet and faced north, the way she’d faced north every morning since, and counted. The living. The dead. The ones who came in from the plain. The ones who didn’t.

She’d counted her baby too.

Every day. In her book. In very small figures down the margin of a page near the back, where nobody looked but her. Weeks. Days. The day Edda said a heartbeat. The day Toby said it’s humming my note. The day the baby kicked for the first time, which she’d written down as one, and then the second time, which she’d written as two, and then she’d stopped, she told me afterward, because the baby wouldn’t stop kicking and she’d have filled the book.

So when it started, she knew before anyone.

She knew to the minute.

It was night. Late. The middle of the third week after Agnes finished her house.

I was on the porch, which was where I was most nights now, after the hello and the drills and the park and the city, with Ash asleep on my chest and the plain going dark in front of me and the Nivi ringing faintly on their mountain. There were lights on the plain now. Hundreds of them. In the new streets north of the Hands. Every one in a window somebody had put in themselves, crooked or straight, at whatever height they’d wanted.

I was counting them. I’d caught it from Wren.

Then Toby came up the street.

Not running. Toby never ran. But walking very fast, with his fiddle case in one hand and nothing in the other, and his face doing something I’d never seen it do. Not frightened. Something past frightened, where it had gone quiet again on the other side.

”Lucas,” he said. ”She says it’s time. She says it started forty-one minutes ago and she didn’t want to say anything until she was sure.” He swallowed. ”She’s sure.”

Wren wouldn’t go to the quiet room.

She said so very clearly to Edda, who’d come at once with her green book and her reader and her mouth in its line. She said she’d thought about it for a long time and she’d decided. She wanted to be on the north wall.

”It’s the middle of the night,” said Edda.

”I know.”

”It’s cold.”

”I know.”

”You’re about to have a baby, Wren.”

”I know,” said Wren. ”I’ve counted.” She looked at Edda very steadily. ”I’ve faced north every morning since the forty. I’ve counted everyone who came and everyone who didn’t. I’d like to count this one there too.” A pause. ”It’s the only thing I’ve ever asked for.”

Edda looked at her for a long time.

Then she closed her green book.

”Somebody bring blankets,” she said. ”And somebody bring Seraphina. I’m not having anyone freeze.”

So it was on the north wall.

On the old part of it, the low stone at the north end of Scarecrow, where the city had started, before the rim wall and the new streets and the park. Where Wren had stood every morning for as long as anyone could remember.

Sera came with Ash in a sling and sat on the wall and held her hands out, and the air round them went warm. Not hot. Just warm, the way the quiet room had gone warm, the way an oven does when the door’s been open a while. Luna sat on the other side of her and kept it from getting too warm. Risa stayed at the house with Dory, because Dory was asleep and Risa said if Dory woke she’d want to check everyone and she’d keep Wren up all night saying there you are.

Edda knelt at Wren’s feet.

Toby sat behind her, with his back against the wall and Wren leaning back against his chest, and his arms round her.

And Pell sat beside her. Very straight. In her grey. Holding her hand.

Wren had asked for Pell. Not her mother, who Wren never talked about, not once. Not her aunt, who was eleven light-years away under glass with a dead queen on a chain round her neck. Pell. Who’d made lemon cakes for families’ day for the cadets nobody came to see, and walked her down the square under the tree, and been asked will you walk with me and said I’d be honoured, Mara.

”Count with me,” said Wren.

”I’m not very good at counting,” said Pell.

”You count the children,” said Wren. ”Every morning. Down the shelter stair and back.”

”That’s different.”

”It isn’t,” said Wren. ”Count with me.”

So Pell counted.

Toby’s mother came at midnight.

Adaeze Marsh, very small, in a coat over her nightdress, up the street from her house on the edge of the square. She didn’t say anything. She just came and sat down on the wall at Wren’s other side, beside Pell, and took Wren’s free hand.

And sang.

Very quietly. The song she’d sung up the hello the first time, a long time ago, for a baby in a ward where nobody was allowed to wake. Four notes. Up and down.

Toby, behind Wren, with his arms round her, started to hum it with her.

And the baby, inside Wren, hummed back.

Toby’s note. The one the baby had hummed since she was smaller than my thumb. The counter-note, the one he played to carry. Under his mother’s four. Very faint. Very steady.

Wren laughed. Between counts. Breathless.

”She’s singing,” she said. ”Toby. She’s singing with your mum.”

”I know,” said Toby, into her hair. His voice wasn’t steady at all. ”I can hear her.”

It took until dawn.

Longer than Ash. Longer than Dory. Edda said afterward it was exactly as long as it should have been, not a minute more or less, which in her experience almost never happened. She said Wren had counted it into shape.

Wren said that was nonsense.

Then she said she’d like it written down anyway.

She was born at first light.

Facing north. On the old wall at the north end of Scarecrow, with the sun coming up over the rim to the east and catching the Sef spire first, and the beam coming down off the rim, and the Nivi mountain going pink, and the hello starting to go up from the red glass in the square behind us, all of the queens at once.

She came into the world in the middle of it.

And she didn’t cry either.

She opened her mouth, very wide. And sang. One note. High and thin and absolutely clear, like the first note of the old song at dawn.

Toby’s note.

Toby didn’t say anything.

He couldn’t. He sat with his back against the north wall with Wren against his chest and his daughter in Wren’s arms, and he cried without making any sound at all. Adaeze, beside him, had both hands over her mouth.

Wren looked down at the baby for a long time.

Then she reached into the pocket of her coat. With one hand. Without looking. And took out her book. And opened it to the back page, where the forty were, and everyone after.

And handed the pencil to Pell.

”You write it,” said Wren. ”Please.”

Pell took the pencil. Her hand, I saw, was not quite steady.

”What do I write?” she said.

Wren looked at her.

”Marsh,” said Wren. ”Harriet.”

Pell didn’t write anything for a long time.

She sat on the north wall with the pencil in her hand and the book open on her knee and looked at Wren. Then at the baby. Then back at Wren.

”You don’t have to,” said Pell. Very quietly.

”I know,” said Wren. ”I counted that too.” She shifted the baby a little in her arms, so Pell could see her face. ”You made lemon cakes for the ones nobody came to see. You walked me under the tree. You counted me down the shelter stair every afternoon for a month, even though I’m on the rolls and I know where I’m going.” A pause. ”You counted me. Every time. Like I was one of yours.”

Pell’s mouth moved. Nothing came out.

”So I’d like her to have your name,” said Wren. ”So she’s yours too. A bit.” She looked down. ”I’d like her to know somebody counted her mother, when there was nobody else.”

Pell wrote it.

Marsh, Harriet.

Under Dask, Lucas. Calder, Seraphina. Friese, Risa. Windsor, Luna. Under everyone. In a careful, upright hand, very small, the way she wrote everything.

Then she closed the book. And gave it back. And put both her hands flat on her knees.

And Harriet Pell, who’d been an orphan in the program dormitories, and a matron at a school, and a guardian on the sixtieth floor, and the head of everyone on Avalon who wasn’t fighting, sat on the north wall at dawn and cried in front of everyone.

She didn’t put her hands over her face. She didn’t look away. She sat very straight and let it happen.

Juno, who’d come up the street at some point in the night without anyone seeing, sat down on the wall beside her. Lena behind Juno. Juno didn’t say anything. She just put her head on Pell’s shoulder.

Pell let her.

Wren asked Juno for one more thing.

When the hello had gone down, and the sun was up, and Harriet was asleep on her chest with the black down on her head sticking up exactly like Toby’s.

”Can you reach the seed?” said Wren.

Juno looked at her.

”Aunt Renata’s,” said Wren. ”On the chain. Can the queens reach it? Can you tell her?”

Juno closed her eyes. Listened. For a long time.

”She’s awake,” said Juno at last. ”It’s night on Earth. She’s in her office. She’s sitting at her desk, holding it.” A pause. ”She does that, the queens say. Every night. She sits and holds it in her hand and doesn’t think anything. She just holds it.”

”Tell her,” said Wren.

”What do I tell her?”

Wren looked down at her daughter.

”Tell her Mara had a girl,” she said. ”Tell her she’s well. Tell her she sang when she was born. Tell her her name.” A pause. ”And tell her she’s the first.”

”First what?”

”First news,” said Wren, ”that Aunt Renata ever got to hear before anyone else.” She closed her eyes. ”She’s been reading names off lists her whole life. Other people’s. Dead ones. Tell her this one’s alive, and it’s hers, and she’s the first one who knows.”

Juno told her.

It took a long time. The seed was very small, and Voss had no silver of her own, and the queens could only hear the shape of what she thought, not the words.

But Juno felt it come back.

She opened her eyes. They were wet.

”She put it down,” said Juno. ”The seed. On the desk. She put it down and put both her hands over her face.” A pause. ”And then she picked it up again. And held it. And said something. Out loud. In the office. To nobody.”

”What?” said Wren.

”Harriet,” said Juno. ”She said, Harriet. And then she said, Mara had a girl. Over and over. As if she was learning it.” Juno swallowed. ”And then she laughed. The queens say they’ve never heard her laugh. Not once. Not since she put the seed on.”

Wren didn’t say anything.

She held her daughter and looked north for a very long time.

The Open Hand went further that week.

Not to Earth. Earth went on every third night now, quietly, with Pell’s people and Voss’s locks and the light-benders folding the light. The new city north of the Hands had nearly sixteen thousand people in it, and the youngest queen could do the crossing in five minutes, and Keir had taught three people besides himself how to fly the ship, and none of them was me.

That was the point. Okafor had said so.

But that week, for the first time, the Open Hand didn’t go to Earth.

It went to the Kethri world.

The youngest queen asked.

Every morning, since the night she sat on the keel, she’d been listening. Out, along the silver, past north, past anywhere Juno had ever felt. To a world of high forests where the wind always moved. To the Kethri who were still there. Still collared. Still fighting for somebody who never asked.

She could feel them.

Very faint. Very far. Further than Earth. Much further. But there. A few thousand, she said. Not many. The Sorn had taken most of them away a long time ago, to other worlds, to fight. Sesh had been one of those. The ones left were the ones too old to be useful, or too young, or kept back to hatch more.

And in their collars, the rest of her sisters.

Six queens. Cut into pieces. A piece in every collar. The way a piece of the youngest had been in a collar round a Kethri’s neck on Avalon, until I took it off and the queens sang her back.

”She wants to go and look,” said Juno. ”Just look. Not fight. She says she knows we can’t fight yet. She says she wants to see them. And she wants them to know she’s coming.”

Okafor looked at the youngest queen for a long time.

”Look,” she said. ”Only look. And come back.”

They went at dusk.

Keir flying. Aster beside him. Gareth with his spanner. Juno, for the queens. Sesh, for the Kethri, with three of the oldest winged Kethri behind her, who’d been there when the Sorn came and remembered the high forests from before. Marlo, and the three light-benders, to fold the light.

Not me.

I stood on the red glass with Ash in the sling and Dory holding my hand and watched them go. The Open Hand lifting slowly off the plain on Keir’s ordinary engines. Hanging a hundred feet over the new city, where sixteen thousand people had come out onto their crooked porches to watch.

Then the youngest queen sang.

And the queens of Avalon came up under her.

And the Open Hand went into the dark between.

I felt it through Dory.

Dory held the thread. The way she’d held it for Toby when he carried the hello to Earth. Her small hand in mine, and her silver turned all the way out, and through her, the thread running out from the red glass into the dark, very long, very thin, much longer than the thread to Earth. To the Open Hand. To the youngest queen on her perch, singing.

And past her, at the very end, very faint, a spark.

Lots of sparks.

A few thousand. In a forest. In collars.

It took forty minutes.

Aster counted. Forty-one minutes and eight seconds. Further than Earth, she said, by more than she had a number for. She’d have to make one up.

They came out of the dark over the Kethri world at night.

I saw it through Dory, through Juno, through the hello. Not with my eyes. With the shape of it.

A world like a forest. All of it. One great forest, from pole to pole, so tall that the tops of the trees were in the clouds. Pale, silver-green, like the trees the last gardener had grown in our park. With wind moving through them always, so that the whole world seemed to sway.

And over it, very low, a Hand.

Old. Older than either of ours. Grey and pitted and worn, the way the wardens had been worn, like stone in a river. Three fingers and a palm, folded. Hanging over the forest like a cloud that never moved.

”It’s asleep,” said Aster. Very quietly. Through the hello. ”Mostly. The queen inside it is very tired. She has been carrying the voice into the forest for a very long time.”

”Is she one of the seven?” I said. To the thread. To Juno.

A pause.

”No,” said Juno. ”She’s from somewhere else. Somewhere the Kethri never knew. She’s just the one they sent. She’s been here since before Sesh hatched.” Another pause. ”She’s very old, Lucas. She’s older than the first queen. And nobody’s ever asked her anything.”

The light-benders folded the light.

The Open Hand went down under the old Hand, into the tops of the trees, like heat over a stove. Nobody saw. Nobody was looking. The Hand was asleep, and the handlers in it, if there were handlers, were asleep too, or bored, or had stopped looking a very long time ago at a world that had stopped fighting back.

And there, in the tops of the trees, were the Kethri.

I’ll never forget it.

Not because of what I saw. Because of Sesh.

They were in the branches. A few thousand. Small and quick and grey, the way Sesh had been when she came down the ramp three steps behind her handler the first time. Not winged. Not yet. With grey bands round their necks, and their heads down, and their eyes half shut, perched along the branches in long silent rows, swaying in the wind.

Not singing.

The Kethri sang. Sesh had told us that. Broods small and quick with feathers, who sang. The high forests had been full of it, once. Every branch. Every morning.

Not one of them was singing now.

Sesh went to the door of the Open Hand. Aster’s door. On the inside. She pressed the plate with one of her long fingers, and it opened, and the wind of the Kethri world came in, cold and full of the smell of leaves.

And she stood in the doorway, with her wings folded, and looked out at her people in the trees.

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she made a sound.

Not the long falling sound that meant quiet. Not the click. Not the whistle. A sound I’d never heard a Kethri make. Not even on Avalon, not even when the youngest queen came back.

Rising.

Up and up. Like wind going up a tree. Like something climbing out of a deep place into the light.

And in the branches, very slowly, one grey head lifted.

Then another.

Then a hundred.

The collars held them. I could feel the collars holding them, through the thread, even from eleven light-years and forty minutes away. Every collar with a piece of a queen in it, pulling. Telling them to keep their heads down. Telling them there was nothing to listen to.

But they lifted their heads anyway.

Because Sesh was in a doorway in the tops of their trees, with wings, singing the rising sound. And on her shoulder, very small, pale, with copper at the tips of her feathers, was something they hadn’t seen since before any of them hatched.

A queen.

One of theirs.

The youngest queen didn’t sing to them.

Okafor had said look. Only look. And the youngest queen had said yes.

So she didn’t sing. She didn’t pull. She didn’t call them, or the pieces of her sisters in their collars, or anything at all.

She just sat on Sesh’s shoulder in the doorway of the Open Hand in the tops of the trees of her own world, where the wind always moved. And let them see her.

For a long time.

And then the light-benders folded the light again, and the doorway closed, and the Open Hand went back up out of the trees, past the old asleep Hand, into the dark between.

And behind it, in the forest, a few thousand grey heads stayed lifted. Watching the place in the air where it had been.

They came home at dawn.

Thirty-eight minutes. Lighter coming home. The queens said it always was.

Sesh came down the ramp first. With the youngest queen on her shoulder, and the three old winged Kethri behind her. She walked across the red glass to the place where the Kethri of Avalon stood in their ring, with the one place in it always left open.

And stood in front of it.

The empty place. The one they’d left open since Earth, for the one who’d fallen. Who’d asked to have her wings grey all the way to the tips, like her mother’s.

Sesh looked at it for a long time.

Then she made the rising sound again. Quietly. Just once. To the empty place.

And the Kethri of Avalon, every one of them, answered.

Okafor was waiting at the foot of the ramp.

She didn’t say anything until Keir came down. Then she looked at him.

”Well?”

”An old Hand,” said Keir. ”Older than ours. Three fingers. Asleep, mostly. A queen in it from somewhere else, very tired, been carrying the voice into the forest since before Sesh hatched.” He rubbed his face. ”A few thousand Kethri in the trees. Collared. Not winged. Heads down.” A pause. ”They lifted them. When they saw her.”

”Handlers?”

”Some,” said Aster. ”This unit counted forty-one. In the palm. Asleep or not paying attention. The Hand has not been tested in a very long time. Nothing on that world has fought back since before Sesh was taken.”

Okafor looked at the youngest queen on Sesh’s shoulder. Then out at the plain. At the Hands. At the new city, waking up, sixteen thousand people coming out onto their crooked porches. At the park, and the Kethri’s tall silver-green trees at the far edge of it, swaying in the morning wind exactly the way the trees of the Kethri world swayed.

”Right,” said Okafor.

She took out her slate.

That evening she called everyone to the red glass.

Every squad. Every queen. Every person on the rolls. Sixteen thousand from the new city, standing at the back, not in squads yet, because there hadn’t been time, but there, because they’d heard.

”We’ve been taking queens out of Hands for a year,” said Okafor. ”Ours. The ones that came to us. The ones that came down over our plain and our moon and our dome and asked to be let go.”

She looked out at all of them.

”We’ve never gone to one,” she said. ”We’ve never gone out and knocked.”

Nobody said anything.

”The Kethri world,” said Okafor. ”One old Hand, asleep. Forty-one handlers. A tired queen nobody’s ever asked anything. A few thousand Kethri in collars, in the trees. And six queens, cut into pieces, who’d like to be sung back.” She tapped the slate. ”It’s small. It’s quiet. It’s at the edge. When it’s done, the Sorn will look at it, if they look at all, and see another old Hand that failed. Another fault.”

She looked at Sesh. At the youngest queen.

”And the Kethri will be home,” said Okafor. ”Every one of them. Whoever wants to be.”

She turned to the squads.

”We go in a week,” she said. ”Dask goes this time. So do the rest of you who need to.” A pause. ”Get ready.”

Days 971–1004. Harriet.

Wren counted the baby every day in tiny figures in the margin: weeks, days, a heartbeat, it’s humming my note, the first kick (one), the second (two), then she stopped because she’d have filled the book. Night, three weeks after Agnes’s house; I was counting the crooked lit windows in the new streets, a habit I caught from her. Toby came up the street fast and quiet past frightened: it started forty-one minutes ago and she didn’t want to say till she was sure.

Not the quiet room. The north wall, where she’s faced north every morning since the forty: I’d like to count this one there too; it’s the only thing I’ve ever asked for. Edda closed her book: blankets, and Seraphina; I’m not having anyone freeze. Sera warm, Luna keeping it from getting too warm, Risa home so Dory wouldn’t keep Wren up saying there you are. Edda at her feet, Toby behind with his arms round her, and Pell holding her hand, asked for, not her mother, whom she never talks about, not her aunt under glass. Count with me. I count the children down the shelter stair. It isn’t different. So Pell counted. Adaeze at midnight in a coat over her nightdress, singing the four notes for a ward where nobody may wake; Toby humming it; the baby humming back his counter-note. She’s singing with your mum. I can hear her.

Dawn, exactly as long as it should have been; Edda says Wren counted it into shape; Wren says nonsense, write it down. Born facing north as the Sef caught the sun and the hello went up, and she didn’t cry: she sang one high clear note, Toby’s. He cried without a sound. Wren handed Pell her book and pencil: you write it. Marsh, Harriet. You don’t have to. I counted that too. You made lemon cakes for the ones nobody came to see, walked me under the tree, counted me down the stair every afternoon though I know where I’m going. I’d like her to know somebody counted her mother when there was nobody else. Pell wrote it small and upright under everyone and cried sitting very straight in front of everyone and didn’t look away. Juno’s head on her shoulder; she let her.

Can you reach Aunt Renata’s seed? Juno: night on Earth, she’s at her desk holding it; she does every night and thinks nothing, just holds it. Tell her Mara had a girl, she’s well, she sang, her name; and she’s the first news Aunt Renata ever got to hear before anyone else; she’s read other people’s dead names her whole life; this one’s alive and hers. Voss put the seed down and her hands over her face, then picked it up and said out loud to nobody, Harriet, Mara had a girl, over and over as if learning it. Then she laughed; the queens have never heard her laugh since she put it on.

Earth every third night now; nearly sixteen thousand in the new city; five-minute crossings; Keir has taught three to fly her and none of them is me. That’s the point. This week, the Kethri world. The youngest queen has listened every dawn since the keel: a few thousand left, too old or young or kept to hatch; and in their collars the six other queens. Just look, she says; she wants them to know she’s coming. Okafor: look, only look, and come back. Keir, Aster, Gareth, Juno, Sesh with three old winged Kethri who remember before, Marlo and three light-benders. Not me. Sixteen thousand on crooked porches watching her lift.

Dory held the thread, much longer than Earth’s, to a spark and then thousands of sparks in a forest. Forty-one minutes eight seconds; further than Earth by more than Aster has a number for. A world that is one forest pole to pole, tops in the clouds, pale silver-green like the gardener’s trees, the whole world swaying. Over it, low, an old Hand, pitted and worn like the wardens, three fingers folded, a cloud that never moves. Asleep mostly. Its queen from somewhere the Kethri never knew, older than the first queen, carrying the voice into the forest since before Sesh hatched; nobody’s ever asked her anything.

Down into the treetops like heat over a stove. A few thousand grey unwinged Kethri in silent rows on the branches, collared, heads down, swaying. The Kethri sang once, every branch every morning. None now. Sesh opened Aster’s door from inside; cold wind and the smell of leaves. A sound I’d never heard a Kethri make: rising, like wind going up a tree, like climbing out of a deep place into light. One grey head lifted, then a hundred, against the pull of every collar. Sesh with wings in a doorway, and on her shoulder a queen, one of theirs. The youngest didn’t sing or pull or call; she only let them see her. Then gone, and a few thousand heads stayed lifted, watching the air where it had been.

Home at dawn in thirty-eight minutes. Sesh walked to the Kethri ring and stood before the place they’ve kept open since Earth for the one who fell, and made the rising sound to it once. Every Kethri on Avalon answered. Keir to Okafor: old Hand, asleep, a tired queen, a few thousand in the trees, they lifted their heads. Aster: forty-one handlers in the palm, asleep or not looking; nothing on that world has fought back since before Sesh was taken.

Evening, everyone on the glass, sixteen thousand at the back not yet in squads. A year of taking queens out of Hands that came to us. We’ve never gone out and knocked. One old Hand asleep, forty-one handlers, a tired queen nobody’s asked, a few thousand collared Kethri, six queens in pieces who’d like to be sung back. Small, quiet, at the edge; they’ll see another old Hand that failed. And the Kethri will be home, whoever wants to be. We go in a week. Dask goes this time. Get ready.