Scarecrow

The queens woke the night we came home.

All of them. At once. I felt it in the silver, lying in the dark in the big bed in the house on the rise with Sera asleep on my arm and Risa asleep across my feet and Luna’s cold hand on my chest. A long, low pull, starting under the house and going out. Like a bell rung under water.

Our queen. Under the house. Then the Scarecrow queen in the hold of her ship on the red glass. Then the heavy queen, on her shelf in the Steady. The Drenn queen, behind her open door. The moss queen. The reed queen, no bigger than a lamp. And out past them, through the arches, further than I could follow, every queen on every world we’d ever brought home.

Not singing.

I’ve heard the queens sing every song they have. The slow song. The war song. Not still. The thank-you song on Ammaru, with the whole forest in it. The one they sing to the young when they go out of the nest for the first time.

This wasn’t a song.

I got up. Carefully. Nobody woke, except Luna, who opened one eye and saw my face and got up too.

We went down through the dark house. Past the children’s room, where eleven of them were asleep in a heap with the young of the Scarecrow queen in a ring round them, and every one of the young was awake, and lifted their heads when we went by, and didn’t make a sound.

Down the back stairs. Out to the garden wall.

Our queen was there.

She doesn’t come up often any more. She’s very old. Older than the house. She lies under it most of the time, round the roots, with her great head on the floor of the cellar, and sleeps, and sometimes hums, and the floors are warm.

She’d come up.

All of her. Out of the ground beside the garden wall, in the dark, so big the wall looked like a step. With her great head down on the grass and her eye open, very close to me, the way it was the night she told me about Dory’s markings.

The eye wasn’t gentle.

You went, she said.

”Yes.”

Through the arch. To the world that was eaten. Her voice was very low. So low the grass shook. You wore the mountain’s silver. The one under the ridge sang through it. So we heard. A pause. All of us. Everything you heard. Everything you felt with your hand on the rock.

I didn’t say anything.

Show me, she said. Again. The towers.

So I did.

I put my hand on her great face, and I showed her. The way I show the queens things, with the silver, without words.

The Sorn iron eaten through. The tower on its side, half of it gone into holes. The corrector hollowed out, with the teeth marks along the edge of the opening.

And the thing I hadn’t let myself look at properly. On the plain. In the moment I put my hand on the rock and felt for anything alive and found nothing.

The towers had queens in them.

Every Sorn tower does. That’s what a tower is. A queen, cut into pieces, held in a housing, singing the voice whether she wants to or not. I’ve been inside a hundred of them. I’ve asked a tower full of queens in pieces what she was, and she remembered moss.

The towers on that plain had been eaten through.

And there was nothing in them.

Not a piece. Not a sliver. Not a note. Not the faintest, saddest hum of a queen in pieces who doesn’t know where the rest of her is. I’d have felt it. I can feel a sliver of silver in a man’s back across a hall.

There was nothing.

Our queen lifted her head off the grass.

And made a sound I’d never heard a queen make.

I don’t know how to write it down. Genny tried, the next morning, and gave up. Toby tried, because Toby can carry any sound, and he said he couldn’t carry that one, it was too heavy, and sat down on the porch step with his hands over his ears.

It wasn’t loud. It went down. Into the ground. Into the roots. Into the cellar and the foundations and the bedrock under the house and the red glass under the landing field. Every window on the rise rattled in its frame. Every cup on every shelf in the town under the garden wall walked a quarter of an inch toward the edge.

And every queen on Avalon made it with her.

And every queen through every arch.

Luna had her hand in mine. Very tight. Ice up to the wrist.

”What is it?” she said.

I knew. I’d felt it come up through my hand.

”Anger,” I said.

They cut us, said our queen.

When it was over. When the windows had stopped. With her great head very close to mine again. Her voice was quieter now. It was worse, quieter.

The houses. For a thousand thousand years. They came to our worlds and found the ones who were whole, and they cut us. Into pieces. Small. Smaller. And put the pieces in towers and in housings and in the backs of men and in the hearts of correctors, and made us sing for them. The voice. The note. Ten thousand pieces of one queen, on ten thousand worlds, singing the thing that greys the children. Her eye didn’t move from mine. It is the vilest thing that has ever been done to us. We will not forgive it. Not ever. Not one of us.

”I know.”

You do not know, said our queen. But you have been close. You have held the pieces. You have carried them home. She breathed out, and the grass flattened for twenty yards. And here is the thing you must know, Lucas, who asks.

A piece can be found.

Tally found eleven, said our queen. On the floor of the long room. Eleven pieces of a queen, in eleven housings, out of eleven backs. And they hummed toward each other. And they knew. Because a piece of a queen is still the queen. However small. However far. However long. She is cut, and she is lost, and she is singing a song that is not hers.

But she is there.

She can be found. She can be carried home. She can be put on a floor beside the rest of her and remember moss.

A long silence.

What you touched on that world, said our queen, was not cut.

It was eaten.

I understood then. I think I’d understood on the plain, with my hand on the rock, and not let myself.

The Sorn cut the queens to use them.

The Hungry didn’t use anything.

They ate the towers. The iron, with acid. And inside the towers, the queens in pieces. And the silver went into the heap with everything else and came out as more of them. And the rest went up as warmth into the sky. Away. To the hive.

Not cut. Not lost. Not hidden. Not waiting.

Gone.

A whole world, said our queen. More than one. Every piece of every queen the houses ever put in a tower on that world. Every queen that world ever grew, before the houses came. All of it. Her voice dropped again, and the ground shook. And nobody will ever find them. Nobody will ever carry them home. There is no floor in any long room where they can lie down beside the rest of themselves. There is no rest of themselves.

The houses made us sing.

These make us nothing.

Luna knelt down on the grass.

I don’t know why. I don’t think she knew either. She knelt down in her nightdress in the wet grass in front of the first queen we met on Avalon, with ice on her hands, and put her forehead against the great face.

”I’m sorry,” she said.

Our queen was very still.

You are the one who makes the paths, she said, after a while. Very quietly. Ice. To walk on. To bring the young home. She breathed out, very gently this time, and Luna’s hair moved. Make more.

They didn’t stop being angry.

Not that night. Not the next day. Not the next. It went on, under everything, the way the hum goes on under the house. The children felt it. Elin and Goldie had a fight over nothing, which they never do, and the weather over the lake went wrong for an afternoon, hail in sunshine. Efua shouted at the birds and old Efua shouted at her for shouting and then shouted at the birds herself. Kwame didn’t sleep. Abena didn’t cry, which was worse.

Corin sat at the top of the cellar stairs for two days. With his hand flat on the floor. Listening to the queen under the house.

When Mother asked him what she was saying, he said: ”She’s counting.”

”Counting what, love?”

”Everybody,” said Corin. ”Everybody she’s ever met. Every queen. Every piece.” He didn’t take his hand off the floor. ”So she knows exactly how many she’d be angry for. If it happened.”

And Tally came down from the long ward on the third morning with her notebook. The one with THE FIRST NOTE in it. And HIS in the back, with all the marks.

She’d started a new page.

At the top of it, very small, she’d written: EATEN.

Under it there was nothing. No marks.

”I cannot count them,” she said. Standing on the porch steps, very straight. ”I count everything. Every piece. Every housing. Every crossing. But I cannot count these. There is nothing to count.” She looked at the empty page. ”So I will leave it empty. So that it is there. So somebody remembers that there was something to count.”

She put the notebook under her arm.

”The queens are right,” she said. ”I was cut. I know what it is. It is the worst thing.” She looked out over the plain, past the lake, to where the sky goes on. ”It is not the worst thing.”

Okafor called the meeting on the fourth day.

Not the long table. Not yet. She said the long table would come after. First she wanted a smaller room.

So it was the map room on Avalon. The big one, with the long window and Garnet’s drawing of the houses’ ring on the wall, and beside it the map Okafor had written on the morning after I came back. With the grey on the far side. And THE HUNGRY in small square letters across the top of it.

She’d asked for me. And Keir, and every engineer we had.

They came.

Keir, in his coat with the pockets full of chalk. Aster beside him, very still, her lights very low, which Keir says means she’s listening harder than she’s ever listened. Gareth with his spanner, which he brings to every meeting whether there’s anything to fix or not. Doctor Bell, with both pairs of spectacles, and Sera beside her, because Sera runs the forges now, and Odra had come through the arch from Hyrran with her scarred arms folded and her leather apron on and stood at the back and didn’t sit down. Odell, who built the relay. Ilka, from the Meridian, who listens past the ring. Ruan, from the bridge.

And three who weren’t engineers.

Crane was on his bench. By the wall. With the grey band on his collar, dark, the way it always is. With his hands in his lap.

I’d hardly heard him speak in a year. He sits at the dawn count. He sits at the back of the long table. He listens. Sometimes, very rarely, he says something, very quietly, and everyone stops.

He’d run Project AVALON. He’d sent the forty. He’d wanted me in the ring with a helmet on my head and a needle in my eye.

Okafor had asked him to come. Specially.

And Voss. By the door. Fully dressed. With her pen, which she put on the table in front of her very carefully, square to the edge.

And in the doorway itself, not in the room and not out of it, the way it always stands, the Overseer. Tall and grey and long-faced. With its long grey hands folded and its pale eyes on the map. And the dog against its legs.

It used to stand in doorways because it didn’t know whether it was allowed in. Now I think it stands there because it likes to see both ways at once.

”I want to tell you what I’ve worked out,” said Okafor. ”And then I want you to tell me I’m wrong.”

She didn’t sit down.

She went to Garnet’s drawing of the ring. And put her finger on the far side of it. Where the towers went out, one at a time, from the edge in.

”Eighteen years ago,” she said, ”the tithe sped up. Konrad saw it on the sheets. Every six years became every four, then every two. As if the houses had stopped thinking about next time.” She moved her finger. ”We thought it was greed. We thought they’d got hungry.” She stopped. ”Wrong word.”

Nobody said anything.

”They take the children with silver,” said Okafor. ”The ones born whole. Because silver in a child with both sides open is never cut. It’s always more. Stronger. We knew that. Lucas worked it out at the garden wall years ago.” She turned round. ”What we never asked is: more for what?”

She went to the table. And put her hand flat on the slate.

”The terms,” she said. ”The day Abena was nine days old. The houses came into the voice and they offered us everything. No tithe. No sorting. No towers. No note. Forever.” She looked at me. ”For you. And for four small ones who make doors.”

I didn’t say anything.

”I’ve thought about that every day since,” said Okafor. ”Why those five. Out of everyone. Not Andraste, who’s the best blade they’ve ever met. Not Luna, who can freeze a sea. Not me.” She tapped the slate. ”Him. And the ones who make doors.”

She looked at me.

”I understand it now,” she said.

”You’re a weapon,” said Okafor.

She said it very plainly. The way she says everything she’s worked out.

”Not the way the papers on Earth used to say it. Not the scarecrow on a poster. I mean it exactly.” She held up one finger. ”You can feel every atom of anything. You can change what it’s made of. You can turn a living thing to salt. You can turn a blade to sand. You can scatter, and nothing can hold you.” Another finger. ”You made a second sun out of an ice moon. You went down to the heart of a world and asked it to burn, and it did, and you stepped out of the light before it reached you.” She put her hand down. ”There is nothing in the houses’ ring, or Earth, or Hyrran, or any world we’ve ever touched, that can do what you can do. There never has been.”

”I don’t—”

”I know you don’t,” said Okafor. ”That’s not the point. The point is that the houses have seen what you can do. Every bit of it. On every world. For years.” She looked at the grey on the map. ”And they’re losing a war.”

Nobody in the room breathed.

”Against something that eats their towers,” said Okafor. ”Something their black doesn’t touch. Something their correctors can’t walk into, because there’s nothing in it to make cold. Something that can’t be bargained with, because it has nothing to bargain with. Something that can’t be signed with, because there’s nobody there to pick up the pen.” She looked at the map. ”The houses have one weapon. One. The same one they’ve used on every world for a thousand thousand years. The note. The black. The correction.” Very quietly. ”It doesn’t work on these.”

She turned round.

”So they need a new weapon.”

”And they saw me,” I said.

”They saw you take apart a Hand,” said Okafor. ”They saw you turn sixty-one Teeming to salt on the first dawn. They saw a second sun come up over Caddoc.” She held my eye. ”You’re the most effective weapon anyone could ever hope to have. Against anything. And they’ve spent years watching you, and trying to correct you, and failing. And then they offered us everything they had for you.”

”To point at the Hungry.”

”Yes.”

”And the doors?” said Keir.

He’d gone very still. Holding a piece of chalk without writing anything.

”The doors are the other half,” said Okafor. ”Think about it. What is the one thing the houses can’t do?” She didn’t wait. ”They can’t step. They have the thread. They have Hands, and ships, and they go from world to world the long way, days up the thread, the way we used to. They can’t open an arch on a ridge and walk through it into a courtyard on a world a thousand thousand miles away.” She looked at the slate. ”Kyria’s people can. Because their First Blades cut them. Where they stand. For a thousand years.” A pause. ”And the four small ones can hold them. Open them. Ask them to stay.”

”Escape,” said Keir. Very slowly.

”Yes,” said Okafor. ”If you’re losing a war, and the thing you’re losing to eats everything it touches, the first thing you need is a way out. A door. That opens anywhere. That you can close behind you.”

”And the second thing,” said Keir.

”Is a door that opens somewhere they don’t expect.” Okafor put her finger on the far side of the ring. ”Behind them. In the middle of them. In the valley Lucas walked into.” She looked at me. ”With a world-breaker standing in it.”

It was very quiet in the map room.

”So they weren’t going to hurt them,” said Sera. Very low. ”The children. They were going to use them.”

”Yes.”

”For ever.”

”Yes.”

Sera’s hand went flat on the table. The wood under it went brown, then black, very slowly, in the shape of her palm.

”That’s worse,” she said.

Doctor Bell put a damp cloth over her hand without looking up from her notes.

Then Crane spoke.

He didn’t stand up. He didn’t need to. Everyone turned anyway.

”She’s right,” he said.

His voice is thin now. Thinner than it was. Like someone reading out a list of things he can never put down.

”I wanted you in the ring,” he said. To me. Not looking at me. Looking at his hands. ”A full map. Six hours. A needle. I told the Ministry it was for science. I told myself it was for the program. To understand what Trevor gave you, what having silver from both parents looked like.” He was quiet. ”It wasn’t.”

”What was it for?”

”The Overseer asked,” said Crane. ”Through the relay. Not in so many words. The houses never use so many words. But every report I sent home about you came back with a question on it. How far. How fast. How much. Never how is he. Never is he well.” He turned his hands over in his lap. ”I thought they were afraid of you. I sent them everything. Every number. Every count.” He looked up, finally. At the map. At THE HUNGRY. ”They weren’t afraid of you. They were measuring you. The way you measure a tool you mean to buy.”

Voss picked up her pen.

Put it down again. Square to the edge.

”Halden,” she said.

Everybody looked at her.

”Halden was where the Sorn took two hundred and eleven people with silver in them,” said Voss, ”and made them open every door in the dome.” She didn’t look at Crane. She didn’t look at anyone. ”Every door. Every lock. Every pump hatch. Every lift. Every seal. Screaming the whole time, because they knew what they were doing and couldn’t stop.” She swallowed. ”My brother was in Halden. Teodor. He fixed the pumps and the lifts and anything with wheels.”

Nobody said anything.

”We always asked why,” said Voss. ”In the Senate. For years. Why Halden. Why that dome, when there were eight. Why make them open doors, when the Sorn could have just broken them.” She looked at the map. ”They were practising. Weren’t they. On us. With people who had silver in them. Seeing if they could make someone with silver open a door.”

Crane closed his eyes.

”Yes,” he said. ”I think they were.”

They were, said the Overseer.

From the doorway. Its voice was very quiet. It isn’t flat any more, the way it used to be. It hasn’t been flat since it sang the teachers the children’s song with the third part wrong.

Everyone turned.

I asked the questions, it said. How far. How fast. How much. I put them on the reports and sent them down the relay to the man on the bench. It looked at Crane. Crane didn’t look back. Because the houses put them on the reports and sent them down the thread to me. I did not know why. Things made at the middle are not told why. Its long grey hands moved, very slightly. But things made at the middle hear. The houses never sing. But they talk to each other, the way the voice talks, and the middle is where it passes.

”What did you hear?” said Okafor.

The Overseer was quiet for a long time. The dog looked up at it.

The far yard, it said. That was the word. For a long time. Towers in the far yard going quiet. Ships to the far yard that did not report. More tithe, faster, for the far yard. A pause. I thought it was a place. A long way off. Where the houses kept things. It looked at the grey on Okafor’s map. At THE HUNGRY. It was not a place. It was a front.

”And Halden?”

Halden was before I was the Overseer, it said. But the one before me sent the report up the thread. Its pale eyes went to Voss. The report said: the ones with silver can be made to open doors. All doors. Even against their will. A long pause. And under it, in the houses’ hand: not well enough. The doors they opened only went where the dome went. Find the ones who make new doors.

Voss didn’t move.

Then she wrote something on the paper in front of her. Very small. I couldn’t see what. She folded it in half and put it in her coat, over her heart, where she used to keep the seed.

Voss picked up her pen again.

This time she didn’t put it down.

”Then I’d like to stop them practising,” she said.

”Here’s what I want,” said Okafor.

She went to the wall. And took down Garnet’s drawing of the ring, very carefully, and gave it to Gareth to hold. And underneath it, on the bare wall, she wrote with Keir’s chalk, in big square letters:

THEY ARE FIGHTING TOO.

She stepped back.

”The houses are cruel,” she said. ”They’re the cruellest thing I’ve ever met. They cut queens. They grey children. They take the ones born whole and use them. I will never stop fighting them and I will never sign anything they offer.” She looked at the words on the wall. ”But they’re not the only thing out there. And they’re not winning. And when they lose—” She stopped. ”When they lose, whatever’s eating them is going to keep coming. And the next thing on the map is us.”

She turned round.

”So we stop going out,” said Okafor. ”For a while. We stop taking the fight to the ring. We stop going through arches to see. Lucas has seen.” She looked at me. ”We bring everyone home who wants to come home. And then we build the strongest wall anyone has ever built round every world we’ve got.”

”How many worlds?” said Keir.

”Forty-one at the long table,” said Okafor. ”Plus Hyrran. Plus the four lost ones. Plus Ammaru.”

”And Earth?” said Keir.

Nobody answered for a moment.

Then Voss said: ”There’s nobody on Earth.”

She said it the way she says everything. Square to the edge.

”We brought the last of them on the last crossing,” she said. ”The archive floors. The pharmaceutical works. The pumps at Carver. The old man from Halden, who was a hundred and one and wanted to see a bicycle again before he died.” She looked at the map. ”The domes are empty. All eight. The lights are on a timer. The pumps run themselves. There’s nobody under the glass but the dust.”

”Then there’s nothing for them to eat,” said Keir.

”No,” said Voss. ”There never was very much.” She picked up her pen. ”Earth was eaten a long time ago. By us. Before the domes closed.” She turned the pen over. ”Let it be empty.”

”Planetary defence,” said Doctor Bell.

She’d taken off her outer spectacles and was looking at the wall through her inner ones, which she says are for long distances and hard problems.

”Every world,” she said. ”Not ships. Not fleets. Not walls round a city.” She put the spectacles back on. ”The whole sphere. Air to rock. And every world different, because every world has different things on it to defend with.” She looked round the room. ”That’s the problem. Not building one wall. Building fifty different ones that all fit together.”

”Then we’d better start,” said Okafor. ”Lucas. You first. What did you learn?”

I told them.

Everything. In order. The way I tell things on the porch.

That they could feel warmth. Life. From miles off. That one had looked up at us from the valley floor and then all of them had, because a warm thing on a dead world is the loudest thing there is.

That they flew. That they came in clouds so thick they put out the sun.

That they spat acid that went through Sorn iron like wet paper, and some of them spat fire.

That they ate everything. Ice. Rock, almost. Each other’s dead. The iron of a tower. The queens inside it.

That the black did nothing to them.

That there was nobody to talk to.

And that when the world went white, something very far away had heard it go.

”Then that’s where we start,” said Keir.

He’d started writing. On the wall. Under Okafor’s words. Very fast, the way he does, with chalk dust on his sleeves.

”One,” he said. ”They feel us coming. So we need to feel them first. Further out than they can feel us.” He looked at Ilka. ”You listen past the ring.”

”Every day,” said Ilka. ”I hear breathing. I can’t tell you where.”

”Then we’ll build you something that can,” said Keir. ”Bigger ears. On every world. All listening the same way. All tied to the relay.” He looked at Odell. ”Can it take it?”

”It can take anything,” said Odell. ”I built it for Earth to talk to the houses. It’s bored.”

”And Andraste’s daughter,” I said. Quietly. ”The one who listens. She’ll hear them first. Before anything we build.”

Keir looked at me for a long moment.

Then wrote, very small, beside ONE: and the one at the wall.

”Two,” said Keir. ”The doors.”

”Every arch gets a keystone,” said Odra. From the back. Through Dot. She hadn’t moved. ”Like Vessa’s. Packed. With what’s under the mountain. And a smith beside every one, day and night, with a hammer.” She folded her scarred arms. ”If something comes through that shouldn’t, the door comes down. No asking. No waiting.”

”That’s hundreds of arches,” said Keir.

Then I’ll train hundreds of smiths, said Odra. I’ve got forty. I’ll have four hundred by spring.

”And the doors that only we can open,” said Okafor. ”The ones the four small ones hold. They’re the most valuable thing we have. They’re the one thing the houses wanted more than anything.” She looked at me. ”Nobody gets them. Not the houses. Not the Hungry. Nobody.”

”Nobody,” I said.

”Three,” said Keir. ”The sky.”

He looked at Sera. At the scorched hand-shape on the table.

”They spit acid,” he said. ”Fire. They eat iron. So the ships can’t be iron. Not the outside.”

”Odra’s stone,” said Sera at once. ”From under the mountain. The black stuff. Ingrid’s armour.” She was leaning forward now, with her hands flat. ”Acid ran off it. Didn’t burn. Didn’t melt. Went faintly blue at the seams and nothing else.”

There’s not enough of it for a fleet, said Odra.

”Then we make more,” said Sera.

You can’t make stone.

Everyone in the room looked at me.

I held out my hand. And Odra, after a moment, took a piece of the black stone out of her apron pocket and put it in my palm.

I felt it.

Every atom. The way they were laid. Not iron. Not silver. Something the mountain had made, very slowly, very deep, over a very long time, out of very ordinary things pressed together in a pattern I’d never seen.

I could see the pattern.

I could make the pattern.

”Not enough for a fleet,” I said. ”Not by myself.” I looked at Bell. ”But if you can tell me how it’s laid, and Sera can heat it, and Keir can draw it—”

”Then you can teach the grey,” said Keir. Very quietly. ”The ships. They grow. They listen to what they’re told they are.” He looked at Aster. ”Can they grow it?”

Aster’s lights came up. Just a little.

”This unit does not know,” she said. ”No one has asked them.” A pause. ”This unit would like to be the one who asks.”

”Four,” said Keir. ”The ground.”

Bell answered that one.

”They feel warmth,” she said. ”Life. So you hide it.” She tapped her notes. ”The Hathri hollows. Under the steppe. Forty thousand hearts in eleven of them, and the correctors walked right over them for years and never knew.” She looked at Okafor. ”Every world gets hollows. Deep. Cool. Quiet. Big enough for everyone. Places to go, when the sky goes dark.”

”Hana,” I said. ”She can make the air in them last.”

”And Maura can warm them,” said Sera. ”Without the warmth getting out.” She stopped. ”Can she?”

”Ask her,” said Okafor. ”She’ll say of course, love, and then work out how.”

”Five,” said Keir.

He stopped. With the chalk on the wall.

”Five’s the hard one,” he said.

”What’s five?” said Voss.

Keir didn’t answer. He looked at Okafor.

So did everyone.

”Five is Lucas,” said Okafor.

I knew it was coming. I’d known since the porch. Since Kyria’s arch. Since the white went up through the cracks in the grey and the sun went out in it.

”No,” said Okafor.

Before I could say anything. Before anyone could.

”I want everyone in this room to hear me say it,” she said. ”Five is not Lucas.” She took the chalk from Keir. And under FIVE, she wrote, very large: NOT ONE PERSON.

She turned round.

”I’ve seen what the houses wanted,” she said. ”A weapon. One. That they could point. That would go wherever it was sent and do whatever it was asked and never be able to say no.” She looked at me. ”That’s not a plan. That’s a tithe.”

”Okafor—”

”If the defence of fifty worlds ends with one man walking through a door and making a world go white,” said Okafor, ”then the defence of fifty worlds is one man. And one man gets tired. And one man gets sick. And one man has eleven children and a twelfth coming and five wives and a mother who’ll walk through any door he walks through.” She put the chalk down. ”And one day one man doesn’t come back.”

Nobody spoke.

”You’re the last line,” said Okafor. ”If it comes to that. If everything else has failed. If the hollows are full and the arches are down and the sky is dark.” She looked at me very steadily. ”Not the first. Not the second. Not the fourth. The last. And I’m going to spend every day I have left making sure it never, ever comes to that.”

Crane said, very quietly, from his bench: ”That’s the first thing anyone’s ever said in a room about him that I’d have liked to have said myself.”

Nobody answered that.

But Okafor nodded at him. Once.

I got up.

I don’t think I’d decided to. I just found I was standing, and walking down the side of the map room, past Bell and her notes and Odra with her arms folded, to the bench by the wall.

Crane looked up at me.

He’s old now. Older than he should be. Thin. With his hair gone white at the sides and his hands very still in his lap, the way hands go when they’ve decided there’s nothing left for them to do. And on his collar, dark against the grey of his coat, the band.

I’d looked at it for years. At the dawn count. At the long table. On the bench by the wall. I’d never once asked about it.

”Who put that on you?” I said.

Crane didn’t answer straight away.

”I did,” he said. ”The day the Accord broke. I asked Halloway for one. The kind they put on the finished in the rooms. The kind Mrs. Friese wore for longer than her children have been grown.” He didn’t touch it. ”It doesn’t do anything to me. I haven’t any silver to stop. I never had.” He looked at his hands. ”I wanted everyone who looked at me to know what I’d done. So I wouldn’t ever have to say it.”

I looked at it for a long time.

At the dark grey. At the place where it sat against his throat. At the thin line of old red skin above and below it, where it had sat for years.

”You’ve said it,” I said. ”Today. In front of everyone.”

Crane didn’t say anything.

”You told us they were measuring me. You told us you sent them everything. You sat on that bench and said it with your face.” I crouched down, so I was level with him. The way Andraste knelt to me on the porch step. ”You don’t need anyone to look at your collar any more. They can look at you.”

”Lucas—”

”Hold still,” I said.

I put two fingers on the band.

I felt it. Every atom. Grey metal and something under the metal that was meant to listen for silver and find none and close. It had been listening for years. It had never found anything. It had never closed.

I asked it to stop.

It went to sand.

Very fine. Grey. It ran down the front of Crane’s coat like water, onto his knees, onto the floor of the map room, and lay there in a little heap by his shoe.

Crane didn’t move.

Then he put his hand up. Slowly. To his throat. And touched the place where it had been.

The skin there was very pale. Pale as paper. A band of it, all the way round, where the light hadn’t reached in years.

He kept his hand there for a long time.

Nobody in the room said anything. Odra uncrossed her arms. Voss put her pen down, very carefully, square to the edge. In the doorway, the Overseer bowed its long grey head, the way it does when the children sing.

”I don’t know what to do with my hands,” said Crane. Very quietly.

”Write it down,” said Okafor. From the head of the table. ”Everything you sent them. Every question they sent back. Every word you remember.” She pushed a slate down the table toward him. ”You’re not on the bench any more, Director. You’re at the table.”

Crane looked at the slate for a long time.

Then he got up off the bench. For the first time I could remember. And came to the table. And sat down in the empty chair between Keir and Doctor Bell.

And picked up the pen.

”So what is five?” said Voss.

Okafor looked at the wall for a long time.

Then she said: ”Everyone else.”

She explained it at the long table. Two days later. Through every arch. Forty-one worlds, and Hyrran, and the four lost ones, and Ammaru. With Voss at the end of it, where Earth would have sat if anyone were left there, and her pen square to the edge.

She stood at the head of the table with Garnet’s drawing of the ring back up on the wall behind her, and the new map beside it, with THE HUNGRY across the top. And she told them all of it. What I’d seen. What the queens said. What the houses wanted, and why.

And then she told them five.

”Every world defends itself,” she said. ”With what it has. The Sheln sing. The Hathri dig. The Hyrrani fight. The Lir swim deeper than anything can follow. The Caddi know every tunnel in a salt plain the size of a continent.” She looked round the table. ”The children of the finished, born whole, every one of them more than their parents. We’ve got thousands now. On every world. Born after the halls.” She put her hand flat on the slate. ”We don’t build one weapon. We build fifty worlds that are each too hard to eat.”

She looked at Kyria, at the table, with her first blade across her knees. She’d taken it back that morning.

”Like Hyrran,” said Okafor. ”The houses came to Hyrran for a thousand years. They never once took the queen under the mountain. Not because Hyrran had a world-breaker.” She looked at Andraste. ”Because every woman on it was a wall.”

Kyria didn’t say anything.

But she stood up. Slowly. At the long table.

And then Teshka stood up. And Wenna, from Tiel, with a shirt in her lap. And the Sheln speaker, from Ammaru, with Oya beside her and Rain’s sisters behind her. And the Hathri, and the Lir, and the Caddi, and Holt.

And Voss, at the end, in Earth’s chair. With her pen.

And Crane beside her. With his hand on his throat.

Forty-one worlds. Standing.

The way they stood for the terms. The day they said no.

Our queen stopped humming, that night.

Not the anger. That didn’t stop. I don’t think it’ll ever stop. It’s under everything now, the way the cold is under the ice.

But the low sound. The one that went down into the bedrock and walked the cups toward the edges of the shelves. That stopped.

I went out to the garden wall at dusk. She was there. Half out of the ground. Her great head on the grass.

”You heard,” I said.

We heard, she said. Everything. At the long table. Through every queen on every world. She was quiet. The woman who makes things heavy.

”Okafor.”

She said not one person. A long breath. The grass bent. The houses never said that. Not once. In a thousand thousand years. They only ever wanted one. One queen, cut into ten thousand pieces. One boy, to point. Her eye was very close to mine. She wants everyone.

”Yes.”

Then we will help, said our queen. All of us. Every queen on every world. A pause. We grow things. Forests. Ships. Young. We can grow walls.

She put her great head down beside my hand on the grass.

And Lucas, who asks, she said.

”Yes?”

When they come, said our queen. Very low. And they will come. If the walls do not hold. If the hollows are found.

Do not let them eat us.

Cut us, if you must. Scatter us. Hide us in the backs of men and the hearts of stones, the way the houses did. We will forgive you, because you will come back for us. She closed her eye. But do not let them eat us.

Promise.

I put my hand on her face.

”I promise,” I said.

She hummed. Very faintly. The song they sing to the young when they go out of the nest for the first time.

So they’ll know the way home.

Days 4286–4301. The Hedge.

The queens woke the night we came home, every queen on every world, because the mountain’s silver sang through mine and they’d felt it all. Our queen came up out of the ground at the garden wall: show me the towers. They’d been eaten through, and there was nothing in them; not a piece, not a note. Then a sound that went down into the bedrock and walked every cup toward the edge: anger. The houses cut us; vile; we will never forgive it. But a piece can be found; Tally found eleven. These weren’t cut. They were eaten. A whole world’s silver, gone, no rest of them to lie down beside. The houses made us sing. These make us nothing. Luna knelt; make more paths. Corin at the cellar stairs: she’s counting everyone she’d be angry for. Tally’s new page: EATEN, empty. Okafor’s map room: Keir, Aster, Gareth, Bell, Sera, Odra, Odell, Ilka, Ruan; Crane, Voss, and the Overseer in the doorway with the dog. Why me and the four who make doors: a weapon, and a way out, and a way in behind. Crane: they were measuring you. Voss: Halden was practice. The Overseer: I asked the questions, because the houses asked me; the far yard was never a place, it was a front; find the ones who make new doors. On the wall: THEY ARE FIGHTING TOO. Earth’s empty; the domes run on timers with nobody under the glass. We stop going out; we build. One, ears, and the one at the wall. Two, keystones on every arch; Odra will have four hundred smiths by spring. Three, the sky, in Odra’s black stone, if the grey will grow it; Aster will ask. Four, hollows, Hana’s air, Maura’s warm. Five: NOT ONE PERSON. Crane put his own band on, the day the Accord broke, so he’d never have to say it. He’d said it. I turned it to sand. He came to the table and picked up the pen. Five: everyone else. Forty-one worlds stood. Our queen: we can grow walls. Do not let them eat us. I promised.