Scarecrow

Tavvan drew it in the ice with Holt’s stick.

At the bottom of the crevasse. At dawn, or what passes for dawn on One, which is the grey getting very slightly less grey for an hour and then giving up. With everyone round him. Okafor on her knees beside him with her chalk, copying it onto her slate. Crane on his other side, with his spanner, nodding. Holt standing over all of them in Mother’s shawl.

He drew the building first. A square. Very big. Then the spokes going out from it, the lines of light. Then, under the square, a long thin shape. Going down. And down. And at the bottom of it, a long room.

The hall.

”He says the stock comes in on the spokes,” said Dot. Through the arch. From the red glass. ”And goes up into the building. From the top. Through doors in the roof.” A pause. ”He says the children don’t. The children go down.”

Tavvan drew another line. From the edge of the hall, sideways. Through the ice. Very long.

”He says this is how the sweepers went,” said Dot. ”A tunnel. Through the ice. From the sweepers’ pens, out on the edge of the yards, to the hall. So the sweepers never came through the yards.” A pause. ”He says the grey ones don’t like to see them.”

”How long?” said Okafor.

Tavvan said something.

”He says a night,” said Dot. ”To walk it. When he was young.”

”Where does it start?” said Holt.

Tavvan looked up at him. Then he put the end of Holt’s stick on the ice at the far end of his drawing. A long way from the building. At the edge of the yards.

Then he moved it. Further. Out onto the plain.

Then further.

And stopped. And looked up at the walls of the crevasse round us. And said something.

Dot was quiet for a long time.

”He says,” said Dot. ”Here.”

That’s why he came down into this crevasse. Out of all the ice on One. He told us afterward. Not to find us. He didn’t know we were here. He came down because it’s where the sweepers’ tunnel starts. Where he used to start every night, for forty years, walking down to the hall to sweep the floor while the children slept.

He came here to sit down once, at the start of it.

And found Holt.

The tunnel was blocked.

We found it at the far end of the crevasse, where Tavvan showed us. A low round opening in the ice, very old, the edges worn smooth by forty years of sweepers going in and out. And twenty yards in, ice. Solid. From floor to ceiling.

”They closed it,” said Crane. Very quietly. With his hand on it. ”When the sweepers got too old.” He looked at Tavvan. ”They don’t need sweepers for the last of the line. The hall’s emptying.”

Nobody said anything.

I put my hand on the ice.

And asked.

It took two hours.

Forty miles. Not making a tunnel; the tunnel was there, under all of it. Just asking the ice that had been poured back into it to remember it had been a tunnel once. To go back. Quietly. So that nothing on the surface would feel it.

Hana walked beside me the whole way. With her hand on my back. Watching my nose.

It didn’t bleed.

We went down it in the dark.

Holt first, with Crane beside him. Not in front. Beside. Then Tavvan, in Holt’s coat, with Holt’s stick, because he said nobody else knew where the turns were and he was going to walk it one more time whatever anyone said. Then the rest of us. In a line. In the dark. Forty miles under the ice of One.

Okafor had planned all night. Nobody argued with it. Small, first, down the tunnel. To the hall. Dinraal to make a frame, Kyria’s cutters to cut toward it from Avalon, so the children could go through from the hall itself. Not back up the tunnel. Not forty miles. Straight from the floor of the hall to the red glass.

And everyone else on the other side of the arch on Avalon, ready, in case.

So: Holt and Crane and Tavvan. Me, and Hana, and Dinraal. The Mom Squad, all eleven, because Mother said so and Okafor didn’t argue. Andraste, and Teshka, and Kyria, and two hundred Hyrrani. Hearth’s three. Bree and Roan. Brock and Saska. Luna and Sera.

Okafor.

And at the arch in the crevasse, holding it, Risa. With her hands out.

Holt found Okafor before we went in.

At the mouth of the tunnel. In the dark. While everyone else was lining up behind Tavvan. He stood beside her with his hands in his pockets, without his coat, in Mother’s shawl, and looked up the crevasse at the strip of grey sky, where the front was moving.

”The lines,” he said. ”On the spokes. Going in.”

”I know,” said Okafor.

”Millions, the boy says.” Holt didn’t look at her. ”Every kind. All walking in.”

”I know, Ezra.”

”I said I wasn’t closing anything,” said Holt. ”On anyone. I said it to him.” He nodded down the tunnel. At Tavvan, at the front of the line, in Holt’s coat. ”I meant it.”

Okafor didn’t say anything for a long time.

”I can’t take millions,” she said. In the end. Very quietly. ”Not today. Not through a frame in a crevasse. Not with the building forty miles off and the front over our heads and the grey ones on every spoke.” She put her chalk in her pocket. ”If we go up there, onto the yards, we don’t come back. Any of us. And the children in the hall don’t either.”

Holt didn’t say anything.

”I can take the hall,” said Okafor. ”Everyone in the hall. Every child. Every one Tavvan knows by breathing.” She looked at him. ”And then I can come back. With more. With everything. With Ithel’s map, and a way in, and a reason.” Her voice didn’t change. ”That’s not closing the ramps, Ezra. That’s coming back for the rest.”

Holt looked at the grey sky for a long time.

”You came back for mine,” he said. ”On the steppe. Nineteen.”

”Nineteen,” said Okafor.

”It took a year.”

”I know.”

Holt took his hands out of his pockets.

”Then I want it written,” he said. ”On the slate. Today. Before we go down.” He looked at her. ”Not when. Just that we will.”

Okafor took the chalk back out of her pocket.

And on the back of her slate, under the plan, in front of him, she wrote it.

The lines. We come back.

Holt read it. Twice.

Then he nodded. And went to the front, to stand beside Crane.

I’m not going to write the walk. It was long and dark and cold and nobody said anything.

I’ll write one thing.

Halfway down, Tavvan stopped. In the dark. And put his long hand on the wall of the tunnel. On the ice. On a place that looked like every other place.

And said something. Very quietly. In his own language.

Dot heard it. Through the silver. Through Risa at the arch. A long way behind us now.

”He says,” said Dot. ”This is where he used to rest. Every night. When he was old. Halfway.” A pause. ”He says he’s never not rested here.”

Holt stopped.

And turned round. And came back down the line, past Crane, to Tavvan. And stood beside him. In the dark. With his hand on the ice next to Tavvan’s.

And waited.

Until Tavvan had rested.

Then they went on.

The hall was cold.

Colder than the tunnel. Colder than the crevasse. The kind of cold that doesn’t come from anywhere because it’s always been there.

Long. Very long. Cut out of the ice, a long way down under the building, so that the ceiling was ice and the walls were ice and the floor was ice with something laid over it, thin, grey, like felt. Lit very dimly from somewhere I couldn’t see. Grey light. The colour of the sky.

And on the floor, in rows, the children.

More than I’d felt through Dinraal’s silver.

Rows and rows. All the way down the hall, further than I could see in the dim. Lying on the grey felt. In grey shifts. Very still. Very small. All kinds. Children with fur and children with feathers and children with long many-jointed fingers like Tavvan’s, and children so small they could have fitted in my hand, and children bigger than I was, curled up on the felt like sleeping dogs.

And collars. Every one.

And at the corners of the hall, posts. Tall. Black. With stones in them.

Singing.

Ingrid put her hand out.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. She stepped out of the tunnel mouth into the hall and put her thin hand out flat, palm down, over all of them.

And the posts stopped.

Nothing happened for a long time.

Then, very slowly, all down the hall, in the grey light, the children began to breathe.

Not the way they’d been breathing. The note had been breathing for them, Halloway says; that’s what it does. Slow. Even. Like a clock. Like the grey ones. Now they breathed on their own. All of them. Ragged. Uneven. Children breathing the way children breathe when they’re asleep and having a dream.

And Tavvan, at the mouth of the tunnel, made a sound.

He walked down the first row.

With Holt’s stick. Very slowly. Past the children lying on the felt. And stopped at each one. And bent down. Listening.

And said something.

To each of them. A word. A different word for each child, very soft, in his own language and in others. Dot couldn’t keep up. Dot said afterward there were nine languages in the first row alone.

”Their names,” said Dot. Very quietly. ”He’s saying their names. The ones he gave them. Sweeping. Every night.” A pause. ”He says he never knew their real ones. So he gave them names. By the way they breathe.”

Wren counted.

From the long ward. Through the arch in the crevasse. Through forty miles of ice. With Rafe on her chest and Rhiannon’s hand on her arm, and Rhiannon’s other hand on Dory’s, and Dory’s on the frame.

It was the furthest she’s ever reached. She says it hurt. She says she didn’t stop.

”Forty-three thousand, one hundred and sixty-five,” said Wren. In the voice that doesn’t break. ”Children.”

A pause.

”One thousand, nine hundred and sixty of them ours.”

”Dinraal,” said Okafor.

He was already kneeling. In the middle of the hall. With his hands flat on the grey felt.

And the silver went down. Through the felt. Into the ice. And came up again on either side of him, two strands, very bright, going up into the dim light, and meeting over his head. A frame.

Isolde knelt beside him with her hand on his back.

And on the other side of the frame, very far off, at the other end of the long way, Kyria’s cutters cut toward it. And every queen on Avalon sang it. And Dory held it.

And Risa, at the arch in the crevasse forty miles away, with her hands out, held the place.

It opened.

The red glass. The interceptor field. Dawn on Avalon, the real kind, gold and pink.

And Maura, on the other side of the arch, with bread.

And Halloway, with her bag.

And every grandmother on Avalon.

So the children went home.

I’m not going to write it the way I wrote Imber, or Orrin, or Halcro. I’ve written it enough times. Children lying on a floor in the dark with collars on. Then the note stopping, and the collars coming off, and the children getting up, slowly, and somebody holding out their hand.

But I’ll write some of it.

Because some of it was different.

They couldn’t stand.

Most of them. They’d been lying on that felt for a long time. Some of them for two years. Some of them longer; Tavvan knew. Their legs didn’t know how any more.

So the Mom Squad carried them.

Not two at a time. One at a time. The way you carry a child who’s asleep. All eleven of them, down the rows and back to the frame and through, onto the red glass, into the arms of whoever was waiting, and back.

And the Hyrrani. Two hundred of them, in iron, silent, carrying children of every kind in the world against their breastplates.

And Hearth’s three. Gilgamesh with a child on each arm and one on his back and a crate of bread he’d thought of from nowhere hanging off his shoulder.

And Brock. Who picked up a child bigger than him, curled up on the felt like a dog, very carefully, iron, and carried it to the frame and through.

And Bree, with her ribbon of fire round the smallest ones. Not to burn anything. To keep them warm.

And Holt.

Holt didn’t carry anyone.

He couldn’t, Halloway said afterward. Not with his back. He’s sixty-one and he’s been carrying things that weren’t his to carry for longer than most people have been alive.

So he did the other thing.

He stood at the frame. On the felt. Beside Dinraal, kneeling. And every single child that went through, every one of forty-three thousand, he put his hand on.

On the head. On the shoulder. On whatever part of them he could reach, as they went past him in someone’s arms.

And said one word.

Home.

He said it forty-three thousand times.

I counted. Not on purpose. I just did. Standing beside him. With my hand on the ice of the hall, asking it to stay quiet, to stay still, to let nothing on the surface feel what was going on underneath.

Forty-three thousand times. In the same voice. Home.

He never once said it differently.

Danel was in the fourth row.

I knew him because Tavvan knew him.

Tavvan stopped at the fourth row, at a boy of eight, very thin, very grey, with dark hair and a scar across one hand. A boy from Vantle. And bent down. And listened. And said a word.

And then said something else. To Dot. Very quietly.

”He says this one talked,” said Dot. ”Every night. In his sleep. He said the same thing over and over, so he wouldn’t forget.” A pause. ”Tavvan says he never knew what it meant. So he learned it. So that if the boy ever forgot, he could tell him.”

Tavvan bent down again. To the boy. And said it.

In our language. Very badly. With a voice like water over stones.

”Danel. Of Vantle. Eight.”

The boy opened his eyes.

His mother was on the red glass.

She’d been there since the arch opened in the crevasse. She hadn’t moved. She’d stood at the foot of the arch on the interceptor field with her scarred hand on Konrad’s stool, with Konrad standing beside her, for a day and a night.

Andraste carried him through.

The First Blade of Hyrran. With her blade on her back and a boy of eight in her arms. Through the frame. Onto the red glass.

And stopped.

And looked round.

And Danel’s mother was already there.

I didn’t see it. I was in the hall. But Konrad told me. On his stool, the next morning.

He said she didn’t make a sound. He said Andraste knelt down on the red glass and put the boy in her arms and she didn’t make a sound at all. She just held him. On her knees. With her scarred hand on the back of his head.

And then she looked up. At Konrad. Standing beside her.

And said: ”You didn’t write lost.”

”No,” said Konrad.

Then the grey ones came.

I’d known they would. I’d been holding the ice for hours. Very quiet. Very still. But you can’t take forty-three thousand children out from under a building without the building knowing, eventually. Not even the long way down.

It was the hall doors.

Not the tunnel. The tunnel was ours. The hall had doors at the far end, the end under the building, big ones, black. Where the children went up, when it was their turn. Into the building.

They opened.

Twelve of them.

That’s all. Twelve. Coming through the black doors at the far end of the hall, very fast, into the grey light. Not running. Walking. Very fast. All in step.

Tall. Taller than Brock. Grey. All the same. The same face. The same hands. The same way of moving, very smooth, very even, as if they’d been made all at once out of one piece of something.

No collars.

No weapons.

Twelve.

Andraste was back through the frame before I’d finished turning round.

She’d felt them. Of course she had. She came back through onto the felt of the hall with her blade already out and went down the hall toward the black doors, past the last rows of children, fast, faster than anything, the way she went over the wall on Isca.

Teshka behind her. Kyria behind Teshka. Two hundred Hyrrani in iron.

And Hearth’s three, putting down children very carefully on the felt and turning round.

Andraste reached the first one.

I’ve seen her fight a great many things. The Hungry, on Isca, two hundred yards into the swarm. Everything on Vantle. Teshka and Kyria on the north field in drill, so fast you can’t see the edges.

I’ve never seen anything stop her.

The grey one stopped her.

Not with a weapon. With its hand. Her blade came round at it so fast it was a sheet of light, and it put up one grey hand and caught it. The blade. Bare-handed. And held it.

And Andraste didn’t let go.

And it didn’t let go.

And they stood there. In the middle of the hall. First Blade of Hyrran and something that had been someone else, once, before the building. Holding the same blade. Not moving.

Even.

Almost even.

Then Andraste did something I’d never seen her do.

She let go.

Of the blade. All at once. And the grey one, holding the edge of it with all the strength it had, lost its balance. For half a breath. Because there was nothing pulling back any more.

And Andraste hit it.

With her hand. Open. The way Teshka hit things on the steps on Isca with an old man under her arm.

And it went back. Ten yards. Into the ice wall of the hall.

And got up.

That was the thing about the grey ones. They got up.

I’m not going to write all of it. It was eleven minutes. Twelve grey ones and everything we had. The Hyrrani. Hearth’s three, every weapon Gilgamesh could think of and some he couldn’t. Teshka and Kyria back to back. Brock, iron, standing in front of the last rows of children, with Saska half a step ahead.

Okafor made them heavy. They kept walking.

Ingrid put her hand out at them. Nothing happened. They don’t sing. There’s nothing in them to hush.

Luna froze the floor under them. They walked on it.

Sera let go, a little, the way she did in the valley. One of them walked through it. Burning. And kept walking.

Fourteen of the Hyrrani.

In eleven minutes. Against twelve.

I want to write that. Because it’s the first time anything has ever done that to the Hyrrani. On Vantle, on Isca, against the Hungry, against the Hands. Fourteen in eleven minutes, against twelve.

Almost even.

And then I stopped holding the ice quiet.

I’d been holding it for hours. So nothing on the surface would feel us. So the building wouldn’t know.

The building knew.

So I let go of quiet.

And asked the ceiling of the hall, over the far end, over the black doors and the twelve grey ones and everything behind them, to come down.

It came down.

All of it. The far end of the hall. A thousand feet of ice, all at once, onto the black doors. Onto the twelve. Onto whatever was coming down the long way from the building behind them.

And then I asked it to stay down. To hold. To be solid all the way through, floor to ceiling, from here to the building, for a very long time.

It said yes.

Ice is patient. It’s very good at staying where it’s put.

The hall went very quiet.

The front end of it. Our end. With the frame, and Dinraal kneeling, and the last rows of children on the felt. And the far end of it gone. A wall of ice where the black doors had been.

And on our side of the wall, the Hyrrani standing very still in their iron. With their First Blade in front of them, with no blade, because it was under a thousand feet of ice in a grey hand.

Andraste didn’t turn round.

She stood in front of the new wall of ice for a long time. Breathing hard. With her hands open at her sides.

Then she put one hand flat on the ice. Where the grey one had been.

And said something in Hyrrani. Very quietly.

Kyria told me afterward what it was.

You were somebody. Before.

The last of the children went through an hour later.

All of them. Forty-three thousand, one hundred and sixty-five. Every one. Wren counted them all. Through the frame onto the red glass, into the arms of whoever was waiting.

And Holt put his hand on every one.

Home.

Then Dinraal let the frame in the hall go, and stood up, and Isolde held him up, and we turned round and went back up the long way, to the crevasse, on foot. Because that’s the way the sweepers went.

Then the sweepers.

I hadn’t known there’d be sweepers.

Tavvan hadn’t said. He’d said the sweepers were too old, that the tunnel was closed, that they didn’t need sweepers for the last of the line. He hadn’t said where the sweepers went, when they were too old.

They went into the tunnel.

We found them on the way back. In the dark. In the side passages off the sweepers’ tunnel, the ones Tavvan said were for resting. Old. Very old. Lying on the ice in the dark with collars on, the way the children had been lying on the felt.

Waiting for their turn to go into the building.

Three hundred and twelve of them.

Tavvan knew every one.

Holt didn’t say anything.

He walked into the first side passage. With his back. With Mother’s shawl. And knelt down. On the ice. In the dark. Beside the first old sweeper.

And put his hand on its head.

Home, said Holt.

And then looked up at me.

So I took the collars off. Three hundred and twelve. In the dark. One at a time. With Holt kneeling beside every one, and Tavvan saying their names, and Mother and Maura and Rhiannon behind us with bread.

And the Hyrrani carried them.

All the way back. Forty miles. Up the sweepers’ tunnel. To the crevasse. To the arch, where Risa had been standing with her hands out for a day and a night and a day.

Holt came through last.

He’d said he would. First in. At the long table. I’m never going to be anywhere but first again. And then, in the crevasse, at the end, when the last of the sweepers were through and Crane was standing beside him at the arch with his spanner:

”Last out,” said Holt.

”Ezra—” said Okafor.

”First in, last out,” said Holt. ”That’s what a captain is, Maris. That’s all it’s ever been.” He looked at the arch. At the red glass on the other side. ”I forgot it once. On the grass. With the ramps.”

He looked at Crane.

”Hal,” he said. ”You go.”

”Beside you,” said Crane. ”You said beside.”

Holt looked at him for a long time.

Then he nodded.

They went through together.

Side by side. Not behind. Not in front. Captain Ezra Holt, sixty-one, in Mother’s shawl, with no stick. And Hal Crane, who was nineteen with a clipboard once, on One, and proud.

And Risa put her hands down.

And Dinraal, on the red glass, let go of the frame. And a long way off, at the bottom of a crevasse on One, the silver went back down into the ice, very quietly, and was gone.

Tavvan was on the red glass.

In Holt’s coat. With Holt’s stick. Standing very still. Looking up.

At a sky that wasn’t grey. At a sun coming up over the north field, gold and pink. At the town under the garden wall and the house on the rise and Thera on the long road and the river.

He’d never seen a sky that wasn’t grey, Dot says. He was born on One. In the sweepers’ pens. He’d never been anywhere else.

Holt came and stood beside him.

They didn’t say anything.

Then Tavvan held out the stick.

Holt looked at it.

”Keep it,” said Holt.

Tavvan looked at him for a long time.

Then he sat down. On the red glass. Very slowly. The way he sat down at the bottom of the crevasse, at the start of the sweepers’ tunnel, to sit once before the building.

And Holt sat down beside him.

And they sat there. On the red glass. In the sun. With the stick across Tavvan’s knees, and Mother’s shawl round Holt’s shoulders, while forty-three thousand children were carried past them up the hill to the town under the garden wall, and every grandmother on Avalon came down to meet them.

Nobody else sat down. Nobody had time.

But nobody asked them to get up.

Ione came down the hill at noon.

With Ingrid. Holding her hand. She doesn’t hold the edge of the bench any more when she’s outside. She holds Ingrid’s hand, and looks at the path, and sometimes, for a moment, at the sky.

She’d heard. Everyone on Avalon had heard. Forty-three thousand children, from the long cold place. From the hall under the building. From down.

She walked down the hill past them. The ones the grandmothers were carrying up. Children with fur and feathers and too many joints in their fingers. Grey still, most of them. Blinking at the sun.

And she looked at every one.

At the bottom of the hill, on the red glass, she stopped. In front of me.

”The hall,” she said. In our language. She has more of it now. ”The long cold place. Down.”

”Yes.”

”All of them?”

”All of them,” I said. ”Every one in the hall.”

She looked at me for a long time. With her hand at her throat, where the collar was. She does that less now. She did it then.

”The room,” said Ione.

I didn’t say anything.

She waited. She’s good at waiting. She learned it in a box.

”Not yet,” I said.

She looked at me for a long time.

Then she nodded. Once. The way Risa nods.

”They’re still singing,” she said. ”I asked. When you were gone. I asked Kesh.”

I looked at her.

”Kesh can’t talk,” I said.

”No,” said Ione. ”But she frowned.” She looked up at the sky over the north field. Just for a moment. ”She frowns at the map room door. Every night. She’s not frowning at the door.” She looked back at me. ”She’s frowning past it.”

Then she let go of Ingrid’s hand.

And walked across the red glass. To Holt and Tavvan, sitting on it in the sun. And sat down on Tavvan’s other side.

Tavvan looked at her for a long time.

Then he bent down, very slowly, with his long many-jointed fingers on the stick, and listened.

And said a word.

Dot gave it to us. Very quietly.

”He says,” said Dot, ”he never swept the room. Only the hall. But he heard her. Through the floor. Every night, when they brought her back. Holding.” A pause. ”He says he gave her a name too. By the way she held.”

Ione looked at him.

”What was it?” she said.

Tavvan told her.

Dot didn’t translate it. Ione asked her not to. She said it was hers.

But Ingrid says that night, in the little room at the top of the stairs, with the lamp on, Ione slept without her hand at her throat. For the first time.

Wren counted it at the next dawn. On the red glass. With Konrad on his stool.

”Forty-three thousand, one hundred and sixty-five,” said Wren. ”Children. Of forty-three thousand, one hundred and sixty-five.”

”Three hundred and twelve sweepers. And Tavvan.”

”Fourteen of the Hyrrani.”

A pause.

”One thousand, nine hundred and sixty,” said Wren. ”Ours. Of one thousand, nine hundred and sixty.”

Konrad wrote it.

On the front of the first sheet. At the bottom. Under Halcro. Under Ione Friese.

He crossed out Outward.

And wrote, beside 1,960, in his small neat hand:

Home.

And then he turned the sheet over.

To the back. To the very bottom. Under Yet, and And the room.

And looked at And the room for a long time.

He didn’t cross it out.

Crane came to the porch that night.

He doesn’t, usually. He sits on his bench by the wall in the map room, the way he always has, with the spanner. He came up the steps of the house on the rise very slowly and stood at the top of them for a long time.

Holt was in the chair by the rail. With Mother’s shawl still round him, because she wouldn’t take it back.

Crane didn’t sit down.

”I was proud,” he said. In the end. ”At nineteen. On the landing field. Looking at the building.”

”I know,” said Holt.

”I went down the long way today,” said Crane. ”The way they showed us. To the hall. I knew where every door was.” He looked at his hands. ”Because they showed me. Because I was proud.”

Holt didn’t say anything.

”I’m not proud of that,” said Crane. ”I’ll never be proud of that.” He was quiet. ”But I was glad. Today. That I knew.”

Holt looked at him for a long time.

Then he moved his feet. So there was room on the step beside the chair.

Crane sat down.

They didn’t say anything else. They sat on the porch of the house on the rise until very late, the captain and the boy with the clipboard, with the lamps going out one by one in the town under the garden wall, where forty-three thousand children were asleep for the first time under a sky.

And on the slate on its nail by the kitchen door, under the eleven names and HONORY, somebody had written, very small, in a hand nobody recognised until Okafor said it was Holt’s:

The lines. We come back.

Days 4701–4703. The Long Way Down.

Tavvan drew it in the ice with Holt’s stick: the sweepers’ tunnel starts in our crevasse; that’s why he came down. I asked the ice to remember it had been a tunnel. Holt waited while Tavvan rested halfway. Ingrid stopped the posts and the children breathed on their own. Tavvan said the names he’d given them, by their breathing. 43,165; 1,960 ours. Dinraal’s frame, straight to the red glass. Holt put his hand on every one: home, forty-three thousand times, the same. Danel’s mother: you didn’t write lost. Then twelve grey ones; one caught Andraste’s blade bare-handed. They don’t sing; they got up. Fourteen Hyrrani in eleven minutes. I brought the ceiling down. Andraste: you were somebody, before. 312 sweepers in the side passages. First in, last out; Holt and Crane together. Tavvan saw a sky. Okafor wrote it on the slate first: the lines, we come back. Konrad crossed out Outward and wrote Home. He didn’t cross out And the room. Ione: Kesh is frowning past the door.