Scarecrow

Okafor said yes to the shallow seas on a Monday, and by the Wednesday she’d worked out what yes would cost.

”Eight interceptors,” she said. In the map room. With the slate. With Garnet’s eleven drawings still on the wall in a row, and the twelfth, the one of Konrad on the tower stairs, pinned up beside them where Ingrid had put it. ”A picket. In orbit over the platform, on rotation. The Steady stays on the water. Holt gives me forty of his people for the ground.” She looked up. ”And a medic. Halloway’s choosing.”

”And me,” said Konrad.

He was at the end of the long table. In his coat, which Nan Vey had ironed. With his cane he didn’t need.

Okafor looked at him.

”You’re not a young man, Konrad,” she said.

”No,” said Konrad. ”I’ve been told it’s very healthy here. Bell’s measuring everyone.” He put his hands flat on the table. ”I gave her back the pen. I asked her. The oldest one asked me if we’d come too, and I said I’d ask you.” A pause. ”I don’t think the man who asks gets to stay home when the answer’s yes.”

Okafor looked at him for a long time.

”You’re afraid of stairs,” she said.

”I’m afraid of a great many things,” said Konrad. ”I’ve decided to stop letting that be the deciding vote.”

Okafor wrote something on the slate.

”Konrad Friese,” she said. ”Liaison. The shallow seas.” She didn’t look up. ”Ingrid?”

”I wasn’t going to go,” said Ingrid. By the window. With her arms folded. ”I’ll just happen to be there.”

”Ingrid Friese,” said Okafor. ”Happening to be there.”

The rest of the slate went the way slates go.

Brock, because the oldest one had asked for him by name, Dot said. The one who let the iron go. Dennis Haddon, because the Steady would need moving and freight was freight. Dane, because the young one who received, Iselle, had come down to the ramp every evening that they’d been there and sat with him on the stone and asked him things.

And the picket.

Risa chose it. Eight interceptors. Four pairs. She put the Vey twins in the first rotation and then sat on the porch steps that night with her head in her hands.

”You put them first,” I said.

”They’re the best,” said Risa. ”They fly like one thing. If something comes down on that platform I want the ones who fly like one thing.” She looked at the dark field. ”And Garnet’s going back. For the maps. And Rowan asked.”

”Rowan asked to go first?”

”Rowan asked to go where Garnet was going,” said Risa. ”Callum asked to go where Rowan was going. That’s how it works with them.” She took her gloves off. ”I’m not sending them because they asked. I’m sending them because they’re the best. It happens to be both.”

”You’re going to happen to be there too,” I said.

”No,” said Risa. ”I’m Wing Commander. I’m going to be here. Where the whole wing is.” She looked at me. ”That’s the job.”

I put my arm round her.

She let me.

They left on the fourteenth day.

The whole porch went down to the red glass to see them off. Nobody organised it. That’s how it is now. Someone leaves and the porch goes with them.

Nan Vey had ironed both flight jackets so stiff they stood up by themselves. Rowan said he couldn’t bend his elbows. Nan Vey said that was the point; a boy who couldn’t bend his elbows couldn’t do anything stupid with them. Callum said that wasn’t how flying worked. Nan Vey said she’d been ironing for sixty years and she knew how everything worked.

Maura gave Pip’s iron basket to Garnet. Full. ”It keeps things warm,” she said. ”Rory made it. Pip says you can borrow it if you bring it back.” She looked at Garnet. ”Bring it back.”

”I will.”

”Bring you back,” said Maura. ”With it.”

Mother hugged Garnet for a long time. Then Genny, who wasn’t going, who was on the Harness rotation that week and would be eight minutes away, she said, if anything happened, eight minutes, Ruan said so. Then Mother hugged both Vey twins, one after the other, which neither of them had been expecting, and they stood there afterwards in their stiff jackets looking at each other.

”She does that,” said Garnet.

”Our Nan doesn’t,” said Rowan.

”I do,” said Nan Vey. ”I just do it with an iron.”

And Brock went up the Steady’s ramp last.

Genny was at the bottom.

She didn’t hug him. They don’t. She stood at the bottom of the ramp with volume twelve under her arm and looked up at him.

”Your seeds,” she said. ”In the window. At the top of the tower.”

”I know.”

”Write and tell me if they come up,” said Genny. ”Through Dot. I want to write it down.”

”In the brood book?”

”It’s a brood book,” said Genny. ”Your mother’s seeds are going to grow out of a queen’s tower. That’s brood.”

Brock considered this.

Then he took his hand out of his pocket. And went iron to the wrist. And held it out.

Genny looked at it.

Then she shook it. His iron hand. Once. Very firmly.

”That’s how Okafor does it,” she said.

”I know,” said Brock. ”I’ve seen.”

For eleven days nothing happened.

That’s how Garnet put it. In the first letter. Nothing happened, and I’ve drawn all of it.

The Lir — that was what they called themselves, Dot found out on the second day, it was the word for the ones who stand in water — came out to the platform from their islands every morning in long flat boats. Not just the council now. Families. Children. To look at the people from the Steady, and at the interceptors going over in pairs, and at the tower.

Because the tide queen was singing.

Very small. Very quiet. From the top of the tower, where she lay curled with the pen grown back into her side. Not to anyone. Not yet. Just singing. And the shallow sea had started, Garnet wrote, to be a different colour. Greener. In a ring round the platform. Getting wider every day.

Iselle says it’s never been that colour. Not in anyone’s memory. Ama says it was, once. In the stories. Ama was the oldest one. Ama says it’s the colour the sea was before the first signer.

Konrad was learning their language.

Badly. With Dot. In the evenings, on the stone, with his coat folded on his cane and a ring of Lir children round him correcting him every third word, which, Garnet said, they enjoyed very much.

He calls it fieldwork. Ingrid calls it showing off. He’s taught them to play noughts and crosses in the wet sand at low tide and they beat him every time. He says he’s never been so pleased to lose anything.

And Ingrid flew.

Every morning. Before the picket rotation. Out over the islands as a long blue line, very low, so the Lir children on the boats could see her, and then up, and round, and back. She said it was reconnaissance. Konrad said it was showing off. Garnet said they were both right.

The children call her the light that doesn’t burn. Dot says that’s the closest their language comes. Ingrid pretends she doesn’t like it.

Brock’s seeds came up on the ninth day.

Garnet drew it. Brock wrote it. Through Dot. To Genny. On a sheet of the Steady’s cargo paper, in his slow square hand, which Genny copied into volume twelve word for word.

They came up. Seven of them. Green. In the crack in the window with the sea-silt. The tide queen moved her head to look at them. She’s never moved her head for anything else. Konrad says she might be hungry for green. Ama says nothing green has ever grown on the tower. My mother will want to know they’re beans.

Under that, in Genny’s hand, in volume twelve:

Tide queen: first response to non-silver living thing. Beans. Marian Haddon’s. Told Marian. She cried. Then she said she’d send more seeds, and she has, and they’re in the next delivery, and Pip’s taking them.

On the twelfth day the houses came.

Not to the platform.

I’ve thought about that a great deal since. Why they didn’t come to the platform.

The platform had the Steady on the water and forty of Holt’s people on the stone and eight interceptors over it on rotation and the tide queen singing at the top of the tower. The platform had a man who’d signed for a planet and stopped, and a woman made of lightning, and a young man who could turn to iron. If they’d come to the platform there’d have been a fight.

So they didn’t come to the platform.

They came to the reef.

The reef was the far edge of the Lir world. Nine hundred miles south of the platform, where the shallow sea went out over a long curve of white coral and stopped, and the deep began. The Lir had villages on the reef. Stilt houses. Long flat boats. Eight villages, Dot said afterward. Two thousand people. Six hundred of them children.

The tithe always came from the reef.

Nobody had told us that. Nobody had known to ask. Ama said it later, on the platform, very quietly, with her long hands over her face. That the first signer signed on the platform, with the pen, every tithe. But the ones who came down the thread didn’t take the children from the platform. They took them from the reef. Because the reef was far. Because the reef was poor. Because nobody on the platform ever had to see.

Every tithe, said Ama. For longer than anyone remembers. We signed, and they went south.

Ruan heard it first. On the thread. The way he always does. A carrier coming down, not to the platform, far south of it, at the edge of the deep.

Then Callum.

Over the open channel. Through Dot. Into the map room and the Harness and the porch, all at once.

Picket one. We’ve got a carrier on the reef. South. Nine hundred miles. Going down now. Rowan’s with me.

I was in the map room.

I’m going to write what happened in the order it happened, the way Garnet would. Because she wasn’t there for most of it. She was on the platform, nine hundred miles north, with her drawing board and the old brown dog, which had come too, because nobody could stop it. And she drew it anyway. Afterwards. From what everyone told her. And it was the most careful thing she’s ever drawn.

One.

Two interceptors. Very close together. Going south over a green sea that went white at the edge, very fast, so low the wake came up behind them.

Rowan first. Callum last. The way they’ve always flown.

Two.

The reef. A long curve of white coral, very bright. Stilt houses. Boats.

And a carrier. Sorn. Grey. The size of a hill. Sitting on the reef, half in the deep, with its long ramps down onto the coral. And correctors on the ramps. Many. With burned-dead silver at their throats.

And on the coral round the ramps, black.

Two villages already black. Callum said. The houses and the boats and the reef. All black. Nothing moving.

Three.

The ramps. Full.

Children. Going up. Not running. Walking. In lines. Because the note was already on them. The correctors had sung it before the picket got there.

Rowan said they were very small. He said they were holding hands.

The Harness left the red glass eight minutes after Callum’s call. Ruan sang the rope. Halloway was on it, and Genny, and Okafor, and the Mom Squad, because Mother was in the map room with me when the call came, and Maura and Ingrid’s names were on the same task force, and Ingrid was already nine hundred miles away and going south.

And me.

Eight minutes is a very short time. It’s the shortest the Harness has ever been.

It was too long.

Four.

Ingrid. Coming down out of the north. A long blue line.

She got there first. Before the Harness. Before anyone. She came out of the north so fast the air behind her burned.

She didn’t hit the carrier. There were children on the ramps.

She hit the correctors at the bottom of the ramps. All at once. The way she did at the Kesh ford. Konrad says there’s no word for it. The Lir have one now.

Five.

The ramps. The children stopping.

Not because the note stopped. Because Ingrid hushed it. All of it. The whole reef. The way she and Risa hushed a continent on the Hathri world. The note was going out from the carrier and Ingrid stood on the coral at the bottom of the ramps and made it so there was no sound on the reef at all.

The children stopped walking.

They didn’t know what to do. Nobody had told them.

Six.

Callum’s interceptor. Coming in low over the ramp. With its canopy open.

He was shouting at them. Rowan says. Callum was shouting at them to run. In our language. They didn’t understand a word. But Ingrid’s hush took the note out and Callum’s voice was the only thing on the reef, and he was shouting, and they understood that.

Some of them ran.

Seven.

The carrier’s upper deck. And something coming up out of it.

A corrector. Not like the others. Bigger. With the silver at its throat burned so dead it was black, not grey. It looked at Callum’s interceptor coming in low with the canopy open.

It pointed.

I’m not going to write what Rowan said on the channel.

I’ll write that there was black on Callum’s interceptor, from the nose to the canopy. And that it went down. Not into the reef. Into the shallow water on the north side, where the coral ended and the sea was green and only waist-deep. On its side. With the canopy open. And Rowan came down beside it so close his wingtip went into the water, the way they’d always flown, so close, and climbed out onto the wing before his own engine was off.

And that the black was on Callum’s arm.

From the hand. Up.

The Harness came out of the rope over the reef.

I’d never been so angry.

I should be honest about that. I’ve been afraid a great many times. I’ve been sad. I’ve been tired in ways I didn’t know a person could be tired. But I’d never stood on the ramp of the Harness coming out of the rope over a reef with two villages already black and children on the ramps and a boy who’d written my name on a laundry wall in soap lying in waist-deep water with the black going up his arm, and felt what I felt.

I didn’t scatter. I wanted to. I could have been on that carrier deck before the Harness finished coming out of the rope.

Mother put her hand on my arm.

”Lucas,” she said.

That’s all. Just my name. The way she said it when I was small and about to do something I’d be sorry for.

And I didn’t scatter. I went down the ramp as myself.

Okafor went first.

She doesn’t usually. She’s Marshal now. She stands at the slate and decides. But she came down the Harness ramp onto the white coral beside me with her shoulders very square, and she looked at the carrier sitting half in the deep, and the ramps with the children on them, standing still in Ingrid’s silence, not knowing what to do.

”Lucas,” she said. ”The ramps. Can you hold them?”

”Yes.”

”Hold them. Down. On the coral. So they can’t pull them up.” She looked at the carrier. ”I’m going to make the carrier light.”

”Light?”

”It’s half in the deep,” said Okafor. ”On the edge. If I make it heavy it goes down into the deep with everything in it.” She didn’t look at me. ”If I make it light it can’t hold its ramps on the coral. It’ll lift. It’ll try to lift. And you’ll hold the ramps.” She looked at me then. ”And the ramps will hold the carrier. And it won’t be able to go up the thread with its doors open.”

I looked at the carrier.

”That’ll pull it apart,” I said.

”Yes,” said Okafor. ”Slowly. Hold the ramps.”

So I held the ramps.

I’ve said before what Sorn metal is like. It listens to me. It doesn’t want to; it was made by people who didn’t want it to. But it listens. And I put my hands flat on the coral at the bottom of the first ramp and felt for it, every atom of it, all the way up, and asked it to stay. Down. On the reef. And then the second ramp. And the third. And the fourth.

And Okafor, beside me, with one hand up, made the carrier light.

It lifted.

I felt it lift. Through the ramps. The whole hill-sized grey weight of it coming up off the deep, wanting to go, wanting the thread, the way the carriers always want the thread. And the ramps holding it. Because I was holding them.

It groaned.

The whole reef heard it.

And the children came down.

Because Mother was on the ramps. And Maura. Walking up them. Against the line. Very fast. The way Mother walks into a room where someone’s crying. Picking up the smallest ones. Two at a time. Turning round. Walking back down. And Halloway’s people at the bottom with blankets. And Genny.

Genny, with volume twelve shoved into the back of her coat, kneeling on the coral at the bottom of the first ramp, asking every child who came down: where does it hurt. In our language. Which none of them understood. And they understood it anyway.

And Brock.

I didn’t know Brock was there.

He’d come south on the Steady. With Dennis at the wheel and Konrad on the deck and Dane and forty of Holt’s people and Garnet, nine hundred miles in a little over an hour, Dennis said, because he’d been moving freight on time for thirty-one years and he’d never once been late. They came round the north curve of the reef into the shallow water just as the Harness came out of the rope.

And Brock went over the side.

Into the green water. Waist-deep. Walking. Iron to the shoulders. Toward Callum’s interceptor on its side in the water, and Rowan on the wing holding his brother’s head up out of the sea with both hands, and the black going up Callum’s arm.

Brock got there. And put his iron shoulder under the canopy. And lifted.

The whole interceptor. Up. Out of the water. Level.

And stood there. In the shallow sea. Holding it.

”Get him out,” he said to Rowan. ”I’ve got this. I’m good at standing in water.”

Eight.

That’s Garnet’s drawing. Brock in the shallow sea with an interceptor on his shoulder. Rowan on the wing. Callum’s arm.

He held it for forty minutes, Garnet wrote under it. He didn’t put it down until Maura came.

Maura came across the coral at a run.

She’d heard Rowan. Everyone had heard Rowan. She came down off the ramp with a child on her hip and gave the child to Halloway and ran across the reef to the edge where the coral went into the green and then into the green, waist-deep, in her apron, to the wing.

And put her hands on Callum’s arm.

On the black.

I’ve seen Maura do it ever since the night I opened the house beyond the kitchen. I’ve seen her put her hands on limbs the black had emptied and warm them back. Slowly. The way you warm bread dough that’s been left by an open window. As if there’s nothing in the world that can’t come back if you’re patient enough with it.

She was very patient with Callum.

He screamed. Rowan held him. Brock held the interceptor. Maura held his arm.

The black went back. From the shoulder. Down. To the elbow. To the wrist.

It stopped at the wrist.

”That’s all,” said Maura. Very quietly. Afterwards. With her hands still on him. ”That’s all I can do today. The hand’s gone too long.” She looked at Callum. ”Not for good. Not gone. Taught to be empty. I’ll come back for it. Every day. Until it learns again.” She looked at Rowan. ”Do you understand? Not gone.”

Rowan nodded.

He couldn’t say anything.

Callum, white to the lips, with his head on his brother’s knee, said: ”Is he here?”

”Who, love?”

”Him,” said Callum. ”Is he here.”

Maura looked up. Across the reef. At me. On my knees at the bottom of the ramps, holding them.

”He’s here,” she said. ”He’s holding the whole carrier down by himself.”

Callum closed his eyes.

”Copy,” he said.

The carrier came apart at the eleventh minute.

I felt it go. The whole grey hill of it, light as a leaf under Okafor’s hand, pulling up toward the thread, and the ramps holding it down to the reef, and the place where the ramps met the hull tearing. Slowly. The way Okafor said. One ramp first, then the next. The hull opening like a split loaf.

Okafor let go.

And it came down. Not heavy. Not light. Just itself again. Half on the reef and half in the deep, open from end to end. With its holds open to the sky.

And the holds were full.

I went in.

Through the metal. The way I go through doors. Asking. Into the first hold. Into the dark. Into the smell of it.

Children. Lir. Grey-green, with long hands. Sitting in rows on the floor of the hold. Very still. With the note on them. Not hushed. Ingrid’s silence didn’t reach in here.

Two hundred and eighteen.

I picked up the first one. She was very light.

”It’s all right,” I said. In our language. ”You can go home.”

She didn’t understand. Nobody had told her she was allowed.

So I sang it. Not the note. The other thing. The brood-word Dory taught me, the one the sorting queen sang on seven-three-K, the one that means everyone home.

The tide queen heard me.

Nine hundred miles north. At the top of her tower. With seven bean shoots in the window beside her. She lifted her head, Garnet said. And sang it back. Down the whole length of the shallow sea. Louder than she’s ever sung anything.

And two hundred and eighteen children in the first hold of a broken carrier on the edge of the deep looked up.

The second hold was empty.

I stood in the second hold for a long time.

It was the same as the first. Rows. On the floor. Marks on the floor where they’d sat. Still warm, some of them. The metal remembered them. I could feel it.

The second hold had gone first.

Not this carrier. Another one. Before. It had come down on the reef an hour before this one. Before Callum and Rowan saw anything. And filled its holds. And gone up the thread. And this carrier had come down after it, to finish. To take the rest.

Ruan found it after. On the thread. The trace of it. Going up. Going out. Gone.

Three hundred and eighty children.

From the two villages that were black.

I came out of the carrier.

Into the light. Onto the white coral. With the first girl still on my hip, because she wouldn’t let go, and I didn’t want her to.

Okafor was at the bottom of the ramp.

She looked at my face.

”How many,” she said.

I told her.

She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she put her hand on my shoulder. Very briefly. The way she does.

”We’ll find them,” she said. ”Ruan has the trace.”

”We were too late.”

”Yes,” said Okafor. ”We were.” She looked at the reef. At the black villages. At Callum’s interceptor on Brock’s shoulder in the shallow sea. At two hundred and eighteen children sitting on the coral in Halloway’s blankets. ”And we weren’t. Both.” She took her hand away. ”Write both down. Genny will.”

Genny did.

That night. On the Harness. With Father’s pen.

Two hundred and eighteen from the hold. A hundred and sixty-one from the ramps. Forty-three who ran when Callum shouted. Four hundred and twenty-two children.

Three hundred and eighty taken.

Two villages black. Eighty-one Lir dead on the reef. Their names, the ones Ama could give her, which was all of them. Ama knew all of them.

And one more line. In Genny’s small neat hand. At the bottom.

C. Vey. Left hand, taught empty. Maura says not gone.

They brought Callum to the long ward on Avalon the next morning.

Not the medical wing. The long ward. Where the trays are. Halloway said the trays hum better for the ones who’ve been touched by the black; she didn’t know why. Genny said she knew why. The broken queens remembered being taught empty. They knew what it was like. They hummed to him the way you’d hum to someone who’d been where you’d been.

Bell hummed loudest.

Nan Vey came at noon.

With her iron.

She didn’t say anything. She sat down on the stool beside Callum’s bed, small and square, and took his flight jacket, the stiff one, with the left sleeve cut off where Halloway’s people had cut it, and her iron, which she’d plugged into the wall by Bell’s tray. And she ironed it.

The whole jacket. Very slowly. Very carefully. All but the cut sleeve.

Callum watched her do it. With his left hand on the blanket, grey to the wrist, not moving.

”Nan,” he said.

”Hush,” said Nan Vey. ”I’m making something right.”

Rowan didn’t leave.

Not for two days. He sat on the floor of the long ward with his back to the wall beside Brock, who’d come straight from the Steady with sea-salt dried white on his coat and sat down beside Bell’s tray and hadn’t left either. Neither of them said anything. Brock read to the trays. Rowan listened.

On the second night, Rowan said: ”He held it up. The whole thing. Forty minutes.”

”It was fine,” said Brock. Not looking up from the book.

”It was an interceptor.”

”It was lighter than it looks,” said Brock. ”Okafor says everything is, if you stand under it right.” He turned a page. He read a line about whales. Stopped. ”You held his head out of the water. The whole time. With both hands. I saw.”

Rowan didn’t say anything.

”That was the hard part,” said Brock. ”Mine was just standing.”

Garnet came home on the third day.

With the old brown dog. With Pip’s iron basket, empty, and the bread all eaten, and a drawing board full of sheets she hadn’t sent through Dot.

She went straight to the long ward. Didn’t come to the porch first. Didn’t come to the kitchen. Went straight to the long ward, and to Callum’s bed, and to Rowan on the floor, and sat down beside him.

She didn’t say anything either.

She just put her drawing board on her knees. And started drawing.

Rowan watched her.

After a long time he leaned his head on her shoulder.

She kept drawing.

I went on the fourth day.

I’d been putting it off. I’m honest about that too. I’d been at the map room with Okafor and Ruan and the trace, going up, going out, toward a part of the map Garnet hadn’t drawn yet. I’d been in the town under the garden wall with the girl from the first hold, who’d named herself already, on the second morning, a Lir word that Dot said meant the one who was carried. I’d been everywhere except the long ward.

Because I didn’t know what to say to him.

He tried to sit up when I came in.

”Don’t,” I said.

He sat up anyway. Halfway. With his right hand. His left lay on the blanket, grey to the wrist.

Rowan stood up. From the floor. Beside Garnet.

”Sit down,” said Garnet and Genny. Genny from the next tray. Garnet from the floor. At once.

Rowan sat down.

I sat on the edge of the bed. Callum looked at me.

”I didn’t get there in time,” I said.

Callum looked at me for a long time.

”Two villages,” I said. ”Three hundred and eighty children. The first carrier was gone before you got there. I wasn’t—” I stopped. ”And your hand. I was eight minutes away and it was too long.”

”You were holding the carrier,” said Callum. ”Maura said. The whole thing. By yourself.”

”I should have been there before.”

”Nobody could have been there before,” said Callum. ”We didn’t know. Nobody knew it was the reef.” He looked at his hand on the blanket. ”Ama didn’t tell anyone. For as long as anyone remembers. That’s not on you.”

I didn’t say anything.

”When we were twelve,” said Callum. ”On Thirty-three. In the laundry. We watched you come through the window. And Nan said—” He stopped. Looked at Nan Vey, on the stool, with her iron in her lap. ”What did you say, Nan?”

”I said he’s very late,” said Nan Vey. ”The Senate’s been doing that to people for thirty years. And he’s only just come.”

”And then?”

Nan Vey looked at me.

”And then I said,” she said, ”but he came.”

Callum looked at me.

”That’s what we wrote on the wall,” he said. ”Not Copy Scarecrow. That was Rowan. I wrote the other bit. Under it. Smaller.” He swallowed. ”He came.”

Rowan, on the floor, with his head on Garnet’s shoulder, said, ”It got scrubbed off first. It was smaller.”

”I know,” said Nan Vey. ”I’m sorry.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then I put my hand on his. His left. On the grey.

I can feel atoms. I’ve said that before. Every one. And I could feel his hand. Not dead. Not gone. Just empty. Taught to be. Every atom of it waiting, very quietly, for someone to tell it that it was allowed to be a hand again.

I didn’t tell it. That was Maura’s. She’d said she’d come every day, and she would.

But I let it feel that I was there.

His thumb moved.

Very slightly. Once.

Genny, at the next tray, put down Father’s pen.

”Write that down,” said Callum. Very hoarse. ”Somebody.”

”I am,” said Genny. ”Give me a minute. I’m writing it twice.”

That evening Maura came. And put her hands on it. And the grey went back from the wrist to the base of the thumb.

”There,” she said. ”That’s today.”

The General took Rowan fishing on the fifth day.

Nobody asked him to. He came into the long ward at dawn with two rods and Trevor on his shoulders, and stood at the end of Callum’s bed, and looked at Rowan on the floor.

”Up,” he said.

Rowan looked up.

”I’ve been watching you sit on that floor for four days,” said the General. ”Your brother’s asleep. Maura’s coming at noon. Your grandmother’s here.” He nodded at Nan Vey, who nodded back, with her iron. ”And there are fish in the seventh lake that have never been caught by a pilot.” He held out a rod. ”I’d consider it a personal favour.”

Rowan looked at Callum, asleep.

Nan Vey said, ”Go on.”

He went.

He came back at noon with sunburn on the back of his neck and four fish and Trevor asleep on his shoulder instead of the General’s. He didn’t say much. He didn’t need to. Genny wrote the fish in volume twelve. Caught without freezing anything. By R. Vey. Who needed it.

And Konrad wrote to Ama.

Every day. Through Dot. Through the coral queen. In the Lir language, badly, with the children on the platform correcting it when it arrived. Garnet said he’d stopped asking Dot to check his grammar. He said a letter with mistakes in it was more honest.

On the seventh day Ama wrote back.

Dot read it out on the porch. Because Konrad asked her to. Because he said he’d stopped keeping letters to himself.

You came, Ama wrote. We asked if you would come too, and you came, and you were nine hundred miles away, and you were late. We have been late for as long as anyone remembers. We signed and they went south. You were late by one hour.

Eighty-one of ours are on the reef. Three hundred and eighty are up the thread. Four hundred and twenty-two are in our boats tonight, going home to the villages that are not black.

The tide queen is singing everyone home every night. She says some of them are still listening. Far away. Up the thread. She can hear them.

Tell the one who let the iron go that there are nine bean plants now. Tell the boy whose hand is empty that the children he shouted at have learned his word. They don’t know what it means. They shout it at each other on the boats.

Tell the Marshal that we will not sign again. Ever. And that we know what that means. And that when they come for us we would like you to come too. Again. And this time we will tell you everything.

Dot stopped.

”What’s the word?” said Rowan. On the rail. Beside Garnet. ”The one they shout.”

”Run,” said Dot. ”He shouted it on the reef. Over and over. They learned it.”

Callum wasn’t on the porch. He was in the long ward. But Rowan told him that night. And Genny said that when he heard it, his thumb moved again.

Okafor put the trace on Garnet’s map on the eighth day.

A thin red line. From the reef. Up the thread. Out. Toward the edge of the sheet. Where the paper ran out.

Garnet looked at it for a long time.

Then she took a new sheet. And laid it on the table beside the old one. And drew the red line onto it. Going on.

”I’ll need more paper,” she said.

”There’s more paper,” said Okafor.

”No,” said Garnet. ”I mean I’ll need to go and look. To draw it.” She didn’t look up. ”I can’t draw where it goes from here. Nobody’s been.”

Okafor looked at her.

Behind them, on the porch, I could hear Rowan Vey laughing first at something Pip said, and then nobody laughing last, because Callum was in the long ward.

”Not yet,” said Okafor. ”But yes.”

I said it that night.

On the porch. In order. To everyone.

When I got to the end of the rail, where Rowan was, I said it to him. And then I said it again, once more, quietly, for the one who wasn’t there.

Rowan said, ”I’ll tell him.”

”Tell him twice,” said Genny.

Days 3701–3730. Reef.

Okafor sent a garrison to the shallow seas: Konrad, liaison; Ingrid, happening to be there; Brock, Dennis, Dane, forty of Holt’s people, the Vey twins in the picket. The Lir; the tide queen singing, the sea going green. Brock’s beans came up. On the twelfth day the houses didn’t come to the platform; they came to the reef, nine hundred miles south, where the tithe was always taken. We were eight minutes away. Too long. Ingrid hushed the note; Callum shouted run; a corrector blacked his interceptor and his arm. Brock held it up out of the sea for forty minutes. Okafor made the carrier light; I held the ramps; it tore. 422 children home. 380 taken an hour before, up the thread. 81 Lir dead. Maura warmed Callum’s arm back to the wrist. He wrote ”he came” on the laundry wall, under Rowan’s. His thumb moved. Ama: we will not sign again, ever; come again. Garnet needs more paper.