Scarecrow

Imber asked on the ninth day after Orrin.

Through the relay. On the old band. Not encrypted. Not careful. A woman’s voice, very fast, in a language Dot had to work at, with a great many other voices behind it, and a sound under all of them like wind.

Ruan put it on the big screen in the map room.

There was no picture. Just the voice. And Dot’s words, a breath behind, very level.

This is the council of Imber. Thirty-second on the sheets. We pay every two years. We have paid for ninety years.

We heard about Orrin.

We are three million. Six hundred thousand children. We have no hollows. We have no Hands. We have nothing.

We heard there is a world that says no.

Please.

Okafor stood at the wall for a long time.

With her hand flat on the map, over HEDGE, over ORRIN. 400,000. LATE., over Not again.

Nobody said anything.

”We’re not ready,” she said eventually.

”No,” said Keir.

”The grey’s half grown. The hollows on Avalon are dug, and on the Hathri world, and Caddoc, and Tiel. Nowhere else.” She didn’t turn round. ”Odra has a hundred and sixty smiths. Not four hundred.”

”No,” said Keir.

”If we go out now, we go out thin.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Konrad stood up.

From the end of the table. In his coat that Nan Vey irons every Sunday. With the tithe sheet in his hand, folded.

”Thirty-two,” he said. ”Imber.” He didn’t unfold it. ”I signed for them. Every two years. For thirty years. Sixty thousand children, the last time.” He swallowed. ”I never once heard their voice. I didn’t know they had one.” He looked at Okafor. ”I know what the plan is. I know it’s right.” His hand was shaking. ”But I wrote Not again on this sheet nine days ago, under Orrin. And if we don’t go, I’ll have to write it again under Imber. And I don’t think I can.”

Okafor turned round.

She looked at Konrad for a long time.

Then she looked at me.

”Not one person,” she said.

”I know.”

”Not you at the front. Not you making it white.” She held my eye. ”You go to get them out. Through an arch. Into a hollow. That’s all.” She put the chalk down. ”Kyria.”

Kyria stood up. She’d been at the table with her first blade across her knees.

”Can you cut an arch on Imber?”

”Where they stand,” said Kyria. ”If someone stands there.”

”I’ll stand there,” I said.

So we went.

Not thin. Okafor made sure of that. Not the whole of Avalon, either. She was very careful about who.

Me, because I can scatter, and I’d get there first and stand where the arch would be. Kyria and twelve of her cutters, to cut it. Brock, to stand in front of it, iron, with Saska half a step ahead. Luna, for the paths. Risa, for the sky. Hana, for the air. Okafor herself, for weight.

And the Mom Squad. All five. Because Mother said so, and Okafor didn’t even write it down.

Not Sera. Sera had the forge on the red glass going day and night for the grey, and Okafor said if Avalon only had one thing burning, it had better be that. Sera said nothing. She kissed me at the courtyard arch and her mouth was very hot.

Not Andraste. Who stood at the courtyard arch with her hand on her middle and the wall Odra made over it, and didn’t say a word, because she’d said all of it to Okafor in private the night before, and lost.

”Come back,” she said. When I went past her. Not crooked. ”I’m holding this end.”

Dory had her hand on the stone already.

I went up the thread.

Not small. I didn’t go small. I went the way I go to a tower: scattered, a long thin line of me going up through the silver and out along it, faster than any ship, to the place on Konrad’s sheet that said Imber, 32.

It took a long time. I don’t know how long. It’s hard to tell, when you’re spread out.

And then I was there. And I came back together.

On a hill. Above a city.

Imber is a cold world. Grey sea, grey hills, low grey sky. Cities on the coasts, built of dark stone, with steep roofs against the wind. The people are tall and thin and pale-haired, like the Lir, and they stood in the streets of the city below me and looked up at the hill, where something had just come out of the air that wasn’t a Hand.

Not thousands. More than I could count. The city was full, every street of it, and past the city the hills were full too. Tents. Carts. Fires. People sitting on the grey grass in their coats with their children in their laps, as far as I could see.

They’d been waiting.

I put my hand flat on the ground.

And felt for Avalon. All the way back down the thread. The long way. To the courtyard of the house on the rise, and the red stone arch, and Dory’s hand on it, and Andraste’s beside her.

And found it.

And held it.

”Here,” I said. Out loud. To nobody. To Kyria. ”Cut it here.”

They came through the thread behind me. Kyria and twelve cutters. Not scattered; they can’t scatter. Through the long way, on the Open Hand, with Keir flying, which took longer. I held the place for them the whole time. My hand on the ground. On the hill. With the people of Imber coming up the slope toward me, very slowly, with their children, as if they couldn’t believe it.

A woman came first. Tall. Old. Pale-haired. In a grey coat.

She stopped a few yards off.

”You,” she said. In her own language. Dot gave it to me through the silver. ”You are the one who says no.”

”Yes.”

She looked at me for a long time.

”I am Ysolt,” she said. ”I speak for the council.” She looked down the hill. At the city. At the hills round it. ”After Orrin, we told everyone. Come to the capital. Walk if you must. Leave everything.” She looked at the tents. ”Nine days. From every coast. Almost all of us came.” A pause. ”Almost.” She looked back at me. ”We did not think anyone would come.”

The Open Hand came down on the hill an hour later.

Kyria’s cutters cut the arch.

I’d seen it done before. On the ring, and on Ammaru, and on Tiel. I’d never watched it properly. Twelve Hyrrani women with tools I’d never seen, round a place on the ground where a First Blade’s mother stood with her feet planted. And the stone came up. Out of the hill. Grey stone. Imber’s. And they worked it, and it rose, and became an arch, with the water pattern in it, in less than an hour.

Kyria put her hand on it.

And Dory, on Avalon, a long way down the thread, sang it.

And it opened.

Onto the red glass. At the foot of the steps of Scarecrow. Where Kwame Osei was standing with his stick and his hat and a slate. And the General with his watch. And Konrad on his stool. And behind them, the shaft. Going down. To the warm. To the bad soup.

”Children first,” said Okafor.

She’d come through on the Open Hand. She stood beside the arch. Very straight.

Ysolt looked at her.

”Children first,” Ysolt said. To the city. Very loud. In her own language. And the city heard her. And began to move.

I’ll write how it went, at first. Because it went well. For a long time.

They came up the hill. Six hundred thousand children first. Then their parents. Then everyone. With their bags.

And they went through the arch.

Not running. Walking. Fast. Holding on. Because Rory had said so, and the General had said so, and Mother had stood at the bottom of the hill and said so, very calmly, with her hand up, so that every child who came past her saw a woman with a dark coat and a dark blue ribbon who wasn’t frightened at all.

Maura gave out bread.

Ingrid stood at the top of the hill and hushed the city. All of it. So that nobody screamed and nobody pushed and three million people moved up a hill in a silence so complete you could hear their feet.

Teshka and Kyria walked the edges. Back to back. Watching the sky.

Hana breathed for everyone near the arch, where it was crowded, so nobody fainted in the press.

And Luna made paths. From every street of the city up to the hill. Ice. Wide and white. So that the old ones and the small ones and the ones who couldn’t walk could be slid up the hill on them, all the way to the arch, without anyone having to carry them.

Brock stood in front of the arch, iron, with Saska half a step ahead, and the children of Imber went past him on both sides. And some of them touched him, on the way, the way you’d touch a wall for luck.

For eight hours.

On Avalon, Kwame Osei counted them down the shaft.

Two hundred thousand. Three hundred thousand. Four.

The hollow filled. And Kwame Osei looked at it, and looked at his slate, and said, the second one, and the miners from Carver took the next lot down the next shaft, which he’d dug the week before because he said there was always a bit more.

And when the second one filled, the grown-ups stopped going down. Kwame Osei sent them out onto the plain instead. Onto the red glass, and the north field, and the long road to the town under the garden wall, where every grandmother on Avalon was already standing on the steps of every house with the door open. A million. Two. The plain was black with them by the seventh hour, under the lamps, in their grey coats, sitting down where they were told and not making a sound.

Konrad gave up on his stool and stood on it.

”More,” he said, to the General, looking at the arch. ”There’s more still coming.”

”There’s always more,” said the General. ”Keep counting.”

Taveth ran out of soup.

He started again.

Then Risa came down out of the sky.

She’d been up there the whole time. High. Over the city. Watching. As lightning, in short hops, from cloud to cloud, the way she does when she’s waiting for something and doesn’t want it to see her.

She came down onto the hill so fast she left a black mark on the stone.

”Hands,” she said.

”How many?” said Okafor.

Risa looked at her.

”All of them,” she said.

They came out of the low grey sky over Imber the way weather comes. All at once. Everywhere.

Not nine. Not twelve.

I stopped counting at forty.

They didn’t come for the hill.

That’s the thing I didn’t understand. Not at first. I stood at the top of the hill by the arch with my hand flat on the stone, ready, and I felt them come down, every one, and I waited for them to come for us. For the arch. For the line of children going through it. For me.

They didn’t.

They spread out.

Over the whole of Imber. Over the other cities, on the other coasts. Over the grey hills and the grey sea. Forty Hands. More. Spaced out across a world, very evenly, very carefully, the way you’d lay out tiles on a floor.

And opened.

I’ve seen Hand-light before. On Ammaru, over the forest, when the walking engines broke it. Over the Caddi mines. White. Thin. A line from the palm down to the ground, that greys whatever it touches.

This wasn’t grey.

It was fire.

Every Hand at once. Forty palms. Open. And out of every one, not a line. A sheet. Wide as a city. White and then yellow and then a colour I don’t have a word for. Coming down on Imber. On the other cities. On the hills, and the farms, and the forests, and the sea.

And where it touched, it didn’t grey.

It burned.

Stone ran. The sea went up as steam in a wall a mile high. The hills went black and then red and then white and then ran like wax down into the valleys.

And the people in the other cities—

I felt them.

I can’t not. I can feel a heartbeat across a hall. I can feel a city. And on the far coast of Imber, where there was a city of dark stone with steep roofs against the wind, there were still people. The ones who hadn’t walked to the capital. The old ones who couldn’t. The sick. The ones who’d stayed with them. Tens of thousands, in a city built for a million. Coming down to the shore, where someone had told them a ship might come—

They went out.

All at once.

Like lamps.

”No,” said Ysolt. Beside me. She’d felt it too. Not the way I did. But she knew. She was looking at the far horizon, where the sky had gone white. ”No. No. No.”

Okafor didn’t say anything.

She put her hands up.

Both of them. Flat. Over her head. At the nearest Hand, a mile out over the sea, with its palm opening toward the city below the hill.

And made it heavy.

I’ve seen Okafor make things heavy. I’ve seen her hold a ring of towers light so they’d fall slowly into a star. I’ve seen her break nine white rooms on Seven-three-K with weight until her fingers bled.

I’d never seen her do this.

The Hand stopped. In the air. With its palm half-open.

And went down.

Not fast. Slowly. As if the whole of the sky was pushing on it. Down and down, with its fingers curling, with its light going out, into the grey sea, which closed over it with a sound like a door slamming.

Okafor didn’t lower her hands.

”Next,” she said. Through her teeth.

The second Hand turned toward us.

That was when they noticed. I think. That something on the hill could put a Hand in the sea.

And they did come for us, then.

I’ll write the next part fast. Because it happened fast.

Three Hands. Turning. Opening.

Risa went up. As lightning. Straight up into the palm of the nearest one, the way she did on Ammaru, front to back, and the light in it came apart. The Hand shook. Folded. Fell.

Ingrid stopped hushing the city and hushed the second Hand instead. Every spark in it. All at once. Into her one thin hand. The way she did to eight correctors on the road outside the long ward. And it hung in the air with its palm open and nothing coming out.

Okafor made the third one heavy. And it went into the sea.

And more came.

”Faster,” said Mother. At the bottom of the hill. Not loud. ”Faster now, love. Faster.”

The children of Imber went faster.

Luna made the paths wider. Twice as wide. Three times. Great white roads of ice up the hill from every street in the city. And every child on them slid, very fast, all the way to the top, and Brock caught them at the top, iron, and put them through the arch. Two at a time. Four. Saska half a step ahead of him, pulling the ones who stumbled.

Hana breathed. For all of them. Faster.

Maura stopped giving out bread and started carrying. Two children under each arm.

Teshka and Kyria stopped walking the edges and started lifting.

I could have stopped them.

I want to write that down. Because I’ve thought about it every day since.

I could have gone up. I could have scattered into the nearest Hand and taken it apart, the way I took the first one apart, years ago. I could have gone into the next one, and the next. I could have done it to all forty.

I could have gone down.

To the heart of Imber. And asked it.

I didn’t.

Because Okafor had said not you at the front. Because if I let go of the arch, the arch would close. Because Kyria could cut it, and Dory could sing it, but I was the one holding the place, all the way down the thread, the long way, and if I let go, there was nobody else who could reach that far.

And there were still children on the hill.

So I stayed. With my hand on the stone. Holding the door.

And felt every city on Imber go out. One at a time. From the far coasts in. Like the towers on the ring. Every one with somebody still in it. The ones who couldn’t walk nine days, and the ones who wouldn’t leave them.

The fire came to the city below the hill in the ninth hour.

Not from a Hand. From all of them. They’d done everything else. The other cities, and the hills, and the sea. They’d left this for last. Because this was where we were.

It came across the grey water. A wall. White, then yellow, then the colour with no name. A mile high. Moving.

And there were still people in the streets.

”Lucas,” said Okafor.

I knew what she was going to say.

”Close it.”

I didn’t want to.

There were still people in the streets. Thousands. Coming up Luna’s paths. Old ones, and the last of the children, and the parents who’d sent their children up first and stayed to help the next street, and the next, and the next.

”Close it,” said Okafor. ”Or it comes through.”

Luna was still making paths.

She didn’t stop. I saw her. At the bottom of the hill. With ice up to her shoulders and her hair white with frost. Making paths. Wider. Faster. Into the streets nearest the shore. Where the fire was coming.

”Luna,” I said.

She didn’t hear me.

Mother did.

Mother went down the hill.

Not running. Mother doesn’t run. She walked. Very fast. Down Luna’s ice. Into the street nearest the shore, where the last of them were, and the fire was a quarter of a mile out over the water and coming.

And put her hands up.

She lifted the street.

All of it. Every person in it. Three hundred, maybe. Four. Old men and women and the last of the children and the ones who’d stayed to help. Off the ground. Into the air. Very gently. All at once. The way she lifted a tower off a ring round a star.

And carried them up the hill.

Through the air. Over the ice. Over Luna. Over Brock. And put them down, very carefully, all of them, on the far side of the arch. On the red glass. On Avalon. In front of Kwame Osei and his slate.

Then she turned round. And put her hand on Luna’s shoulder. And walked her up the hill.

”Now,” said Mother.

We went through.

Ysolt last but one. She stopped in the arch. And looked back. At Imber. At the white coming over the water.

”Ysolt,” said Okafor.

Ysolt went through.

Brock last. Iron. With Saska’s hand in his.

Then me. With my hand still on the stone. Letting go.

Hesk brought it down.

On Avalon. At the foot of the steps of Scarecrow. The smith on that arch was Hesk that night, because she’d asked, because Dory’s tea was there. She had her hammer up before I was all the way through, and when my foot touched the red glass, she swung.

The keystone came out. The arch came in.

And through the gap, for the last breath before it closed, I saw the white come over the top of the hill on Imber and fill the place where we’d been standing.

Kwame Osei had the count.

He gave it to Okafor on the red glass. In the dark. With the smoke from the arch still in the air.

Okafor took the slate. And looked at it. For a long time.

Then she gave it to me.

IMBER. 3,000,000.

Through: 2,704,316.

Every child who’d reached the hill. Nearly every one on Imber. And their parents, and their grandparents, and the four hundred people from the last street, carried up a hill through the air by my mother.

And nearly three hundred thousand who weren’t. In the other cities. In the farms. On the far coast. The old and the sick and the ones who stayed beside them.

Ysolt sat down on the red glass.

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she said: ”Why?”

Nobody answered.

Not that night. We didn’t know.

I went down into the hollow before dawn.

I don’t know why. I couldn’t sleep. Nobody on Avalon could. The town under the garden wall had every light on all night, and the grandmothers were on the steps of every house, and nobody told them to be.

Kwame Osei’s ladder goes down a long way. At the bottom it’s warm. The air moves, very gently, the way Hana taught it, so you feel it on your face like the breath of something asleep. And the smell of Taveth’s soup, which is very bad, comes up the shaft to meet you before you can see anything at all.

It was full.

Six hundred thousand children of Imber. Their parents were up on the plain, under the lamps. The children were down here, in the big hollow, and the second one, and the small rooms off them that the miners from Carver had made. Lying on blankets the grandmothers had carried down. In heaps, the way my children sleep. Tall and thin and pale-haired, most of them, with grey coats and bags they hadn’t let go of.

Most of them weren’t asleep.

They were looking at the ceiling. At the hard sheets of old rock, very far up, with the lamps on them. Not saying anything.

Taveth was at his pot.

Of course he was. He’d been there all night. Kyria was beside him, putting salt in it when he wasn’t looking, and Abena Osei was handing out cups, and old Efua was going up and down the rows with her stick, very slowly, looking at every child.

Not shouting. I’d never seen her not shouting.

She stopped at a girl near the soup. Small. Six, maybe. Holding a bag with both arms. Not crying. Staring at the lamps.

Old Efua lowered herself down onto the blanket beside her. Very slowly, because she’s very old.

She didn’t say anything. She doesn’t speak Imber. Nobody does but Dot.

She just took the girl’s hand. And held it. And after a while she started humming. Very badly. A song from Harbor Block Forty-four that Hana says her grandmother used to hum on the kitchen mat, every night, so the three of them in the bed would know she was still there.

The girl didn’t look away from the lamps.

But she held on.

Rain came down the ladder at dawn.

From the town under the garden wall. With her three sisters behind her. Dew and Brook and Puddle, who were waiting for her on Ammaru when the rain came, and have never once let go of each other’s hands since.

They didn’t say anything either.

They just went down the rows. One at a time. And sat beside the children of Imber who weren’t asleep. And held their hands.

And when one of them, a boy, older, very thin, looked at Rain and said something in Imber, very low, Rain didn’t need Dot.

”Yes,” she said. In Moon’s word, and her own, and the hello all at once. ”Me too. Me too. It gets better.”

He didn’t believe her.

But he held on.

Puddle, who’s very small, didn’t sit beside anyone. She went straight to the girl with the bag, the one old Efua was humming to, and climbed into her lap without asking, the way she ran at Rain on Ammaru without ever having met her. Because her sisters were sitting down, so she sat down too.

The girl looked at her.

Then, very slowly, she let go of the bag with one arm. And put it round Puddle instead.

Old Efua stopped humming. Just for a moment. Then she started again, a little louder, and very badly, and the girl from Imber shut her eyes.

The next morning Ilka came down off the Meridian very white.

”Thale,” she said.

Thale was forty-eighth on Konrad’s sheet. A long way out. Further than Imber. Further than Orrin. On the outward edge of the ring, where the towers had started going quiet.

Nobody had called from Thale. Nobody on Thale had heard of Orrin, or Avalon, or a world that says no. We’d never spoken to them. Konrad had never heard their voice either.

”The Hands burned it,” said Ilka. ”Last night. The same night as Imber. The same way.” She sat down. ”All of it.”

”Why?” said Okafor. ”We weren’t there. We’d never been there.”

Ilka didn’t answer.

So it was the long table that asked.

Two days later. Forty-one worlds. And Hyrran, and the four lost ones, and Ammaru. And Ysolt, at the end, in a chair someone found for her beside Voss, with the children of Imber in Kwame Osei’s hollows under the red glass and their parents in every spare room on Avalon.

And Okafor stood at the head of the table, and wrote two words on the slate, and turned it round so everyone could see.

IMBER. THALE.

”Tell me why,” she said.

”Spite,” said Sera.

At once. From her place by me. Her hands flat on the table and the wood under them going brown.

”They’d rather burn a world than let us have it. Than let one more world say no.” She was very hot. ”They saw us on Imber. They saw the arch. They saw the children going through. And they thought: if we can’t have them, nobody can.” Her voice cracked. ”That’s what they are. That’s all they’ve ever been.”

”And Thale?” said Okafor.

Sera didn’t answer.

”Biomass,” said Crane.

From the table. Where he sits now. With his spanner on the corner of his slate.

”Thale was on the edge,” he said. ”The outward edge. The far yard. Where the towers are going out.” He didn’t look up. ”If you know something is coming. Something that eats everything. Something that grows from what it eats.” He turned the pen over. ”And you can’t stop it. And you can’t move everything out of its way in time.” He looked up. ”Then you take away what it eats. Before it gets there.”

”You burn the field,” said Mother. Very quietly.

Everyone looked at her.

”Father told me,” she said. ”Trevor. At the Varran pass. In the war. When the Teeming came down faster than anyone could hold them.” She didn’t look at anyone. ”The line couldn’t hold. So the line fell back. And burned everything behind it. Every farm. Every store. Every barn. So there’d be nothing for them when they came.” Her hands were flat on the table. ”He said it was the worst thing he ever did. He said it saved everyone behind the pass.”

”A firebreak,” said Doctor Bell. ”The old Earth papers have it. When a forest burns, you burn a line ahead of it. On purpose. So when the fire gets there, there’s nothing left to burn, and it stops.”

”Except,” said Konrad. Very low. ”It’s not a forest. It’s Thale.” He had the sheet out. ”Forty-eighth. Four million people. They paid on time for ninety years.”

”So which?” said Okafor.

She looked down the table.

”Spite? Or biomass? Do they burn worlds because they’d rather nobody had them? Or because they’d rather the Hungry didn’t?”

Nobody answered.

The Overseer did.

From the doorway. Where it always stands. With the dog against its legs.

You are asking which line it goes on, it said.

Everyone turned.

In the ledger, said the Overseer. The houses keep one ledger. For everything. Every world. Every child. Every queen. Every tower. Its long grey hands moved, very slightly. There are two lines. What is ours. And what is lost.

Nobody spoke.

Imber went to you, said the Overseer. Nearly three million, through the arch. That is lost. Thale was going to the hungry. In a year, two, ten. That is lost. It looked at Okafor’s slate. On the ledger, it is the same line. It is written the same way. With the same word.

”So it’s both,” said Sera.

It is neither, said the Overseer. You are asking why, as if the houses feel something. Spite. Fear. Hope. Its pale eyes were very still. They do not feel. They correct. A world that is not theirs is a fault. A fault is corrected. If it cannot be corrected, it is removed. A long pause. They did not burn Imber because they hate you. They burned Imber because it had stopped being theirs. The same as Thale.

It looked at me.

You asked once what the houses are, it said. On the long ward. I could not tell you. I can tell you now. Its voice was very quiet. They are a ledger that has started losing. And a ledger that is losing does not care who it loses to.

Nobody said anything for a very long time.

Then Ysolt stood up.

At the end of the table. In her grey coat, with the ash of Imber still on the hem. Tall and pale and very old.

”Then it does not matter,” she said.

Dot gave it to the table. Very level.

”It does not matter why,” said Ysolt. ”Spite or hunger or a line in a book. My world is glass. Three hundred thousand of my people are glass. The ones who could not walk.” She looked down the long table. At forty-one worlds. ”And there are sixty-two more on Mr. Friese’s sheet. And every one of them is a line in their book.”

She looked at Okafor.

”I do not want to know why,” she said. ”I want to know how many you can bring home before they write the next one.”

Okafor looked at her for a long time.

Then she wiped the slate.

And wrote, very large, in her small square letters:

62.

And under it:

All of them. Before the Hands.

”That means going out,” said Keir. Quietly.

”Yes.”

”Before the Hedge is finished.”

”Yes,” said Okafor. ”The Hedge isn’t a wall any more. It’s a place. A place to bring them.” She turned round. ”Every hollow on every world. Every arch with a smith. Every slate of bad soup.” She looked at Kwame Osei. ”Dig more.”

”I always do,” said Kwame Osei.

”And we go out,” said Okafor. ”Not thin. Not one person. Not to fight.” She looked at me. ”To get there first. Before they decide. Every world on the sheet. As fast as Kyria can cut and Dory can sing and Lucas can stand.”

She put the chalk down.

”The houses are burning their own field,” she said. ”So we get the wheat out before the fire.”

Mother found me on the porch that night.

I was in Father’s chair. I don’t usually sit in it. It’s hers. But I was in it, and she came out and saw me there, and didn’t say anything, and sat down on the step below me instead. The way I sit on the step below her.

”You didn’t let go,” she said.

”No.”

”You wanted to.”

”Yes.”

”You could have stopped them,” said Mother. ”All forty. You could have made Imber white yourself. Before they did. Taken the Hands with it.”

”Yes.”

Mother was quiet for a long time.

”Your father burned the field,” she said. ”Behind the pass. With his own hands. Every farm.” She looked at the dark. ”He never told you. He told me. Once. The night you were born. He said he wanted one person to know what he’d done, in case you ever had to do it.” She put her hand on my knee. ”And he said: I hope he never has to. But if he does, I hope he does it to save something. And not to stop something.”

I didn’t say anything.

”You saved nearly three million,” said Mother. ”You held the door. You didn’t stop anything.” She squeezed my knee. ”He’d have been prouder of that than of anything you could have done to a Hand.”

Days 4379–4392. Firebreak.

Imber asked. Konrad couldn’t write Not again twice. I held the place; Kyria cut the arch; eight hours, children first, then everyone, up the hill on Luna’s ice. Then forty Hands, and fire, not grey; every city went out like lamps, with the ones who couldn’t walk still in them. Okafor put Hands in the sea. I didn’t let go. Mother lifted the last street over the arch. Hesk brought it down. 2,704,316 of three million. Thale burned the same night; we’d never been there. Spite or biomass? The Overseer: neither; there are two lines in the ledger, ours and lost. Ysolt: it doesn’t matter why. Okafor: 62. All of them. Before the Hands. Father burned the field once, to save something.