Scarecrow

I didn’t stop.

That was the only thing I decided, at the foot of the ramp, with the voice of the houses coming out of a grey mouth behind me. Not to turn round. Not to answer. Not to let my breath change.

Head down. Shoulders forward. Feet flat.

Hana’s breath, wide, all round me.

Fifth step. Sixth.

”Walk on,” said the voice.

Behind me. Very even. Not loud. It didn’t need to be loud. Every grey one on the ramp above us, standing at the turns, had turned its head.

”Walk on, world-breaker,” said the voice. ”We have been expecting you since the hall. We left the doors open.”

Holt was four places ahead of me on the ramp. He didn’t look back. But I saw his hand, at his side, open and close once.

Keep walking.

So I did.

They let us up.

All of us. All the way. Up the ramp and round the first turn and up the second, in the line, with the stock around us not lifting their heads, and the grey ones at every turn turning to watch us pass and then turning back.

Nobody stopped us.

That was worse than if they had.

”They want you inside,” said Crane. Under his breath. Not looking round. Between it’s just iron and it’s just iron. ”The terms. They asked for you. Give us the world-breaker.” His voice was very steady. ”We’ve just walked you up to their door.”

”I know.”

”It’s a trap,” said Crane.

”Everything the houses leave open is a trap,” said Holt. Ahead of us. Very quietly. ”That’s what they’re for.” A pause. ”Keep walking, Hal.”

Ione was awake.

I know because Dot told me. Through the silver, very faint, the furthest Dot’s ever reached, past the edge of everything, under the note coming out of every wall.

She says she can hear you, said Dot. She says you’re very loud. She says the building is louder. A pause. She says: when you get to the top, don’t go in with the line. Go left.

The roof was a field.

Black. Flat. Huge. Under the grey sky, so close overhead now you could almost touch it. With the doors set into it in rows, square, open, going down into the dark of the building, and the lines going into them one after another. Heads down. Breathing tired.

And at every door, two grey ones.

And across the whole of the roof, between the doors, standing very still, more.

”Left,” I said. Very quietly. To Holt.

He didn’t answer. He stepped out of the line. To the left. Between two doors.

And we went with him.

The grey ones didn’t move.

Not one. Hundreds of them on the black roof, and nine strangers in collars stepping out of the line onto the open field between the doors, and they stood exactly where they were and watched us go.

”Of course,” said Crane. Breathing very fast now. Not tired. ”Of course they don’t stop us. They want to see where we’re going.”

”Then let’s show them,” said Andraste.

And held out her hand to Dinraal.

He gave her Holdfast.

His silver let go of it. All at once. Out of his folded arm, back into his armour, like water into sand. And Holdfast was in Andraste’s hand on the roof of the building on One.

And it hummed.

Every grey one on the roof turned toward it.

Not slowly. All at once. The sound went out across the black field and into every door and down into the building, and I felt the building flinch. The whole of it. Under my feet. Every black wall in it, going down and down into the dark, hearing the blade Vessa taught.

And Andraste took off her collar.

Teel’s collar. Kiln iron. She unclasped it the way Crane showed us, the other way, and held it out to Teel, and Teel took it.

”Thank you,” said Andraste. ”It was very well made. I hated every step.”

Then she stopped breathing tired.

”Down,” said Dot. Very faint. She says there’s a door on the left that isn’t a door. Low. Square. By itself. She says the boxes went up and down it when she was carried.

Crane was already looking for it.

He found it in a breath. A square in the black of the roof, very low, with no grey ones at it. Set apart from the rest. Flush with the roof, like a hatch. Like the walls in the bows at Halcro, with no seam.

He knelt down beside it. Spanner already in his hand.

”Same seal,” he said. ”Same as the bows. Same as my collar.” He didn’t look up. ”Give me a minute.”

”You don’t have a minute,” said Holt.

Because the grey ones were coming.

All of them. All at once. The way they do everything. From every door across the roof, leaving the lines, coming toward the hum.

Toward Andraste.

She stood in front of the hatch with Holdfast in her hand and her collar gone and her breath her own, and watched them come.

”Dinraal,” she said.

He didn’t think of a gun.

He thought of a wall.

His silver came off him in a sheet. Out of his armour. Up. Round. A curve of silver, very thin, very bright, going up off the black roof on three sides of us and over, a half-dome, the way Aurelius makes them, except Dinraal has never made one before, and it was thinner, and it shook.

The first grey one hit it.

It held.

The second. The tenth. A hundred. Coming at Dinraal’s wall from every side, putting their hands on it, the way they put their hands up to catch a blade.

And pushing.

”Crane,” said Holt.

”Nearly,” said Crane.

The wall bent.

Inward. Toward us. Dinraal was on his knees with his hands flat on the roof and his silver going up into it, and it was bending under the weight of the grey ones on the other side, slowly, like ice on a pond with too many people on it.

Andraste looked at it.

Then she looked at Holt.

”Captain,” she said. ”First in?”

Holt looked at the hatch. At Crane, kneeling. At the wall.

”Go,” said Holt.

Andraste went through the wall.

Out. Into them. The way she went over the wall on Isca and up the wall on Hyrran and down the terraces on Kiln. With Holdfast humming so loud the silver of Dinraal’s wall rang with it.

And the grey ones on the far side of the wall turned. Away from Dinraal. Toward her.

All of them.

I don’t know how long she was out there. Hana says eleven minutes. Andraste says she doesn’t know; she says there’s no time when you’re doing that, there’s only the next one. I could hear her. Through the wall. Holdfast humming and humming, and the sound of grey ones not getting up.

And Dinraal’s wall stopped bending.

”Open,” said Crane.

The hatch went down. Not up. Down, into the roof, on some kind of track. And under it, stairs. Black. Narrow. Going straight down into the dark.

Cold came up out of them. Not the cold of the plain. Older.

Long, said Dot. Very faint. From Ione, asleep, in her bed with the lamp on. Long and cold. Down. She says that’s it. She says go down.

”Andraste,” said Holt. Through the wall. Not shouting.

She came back.

Through the wall, the way she’d gone out. With Holdfast in her hand and the iron on her shoulders black and a cut over one eye she hadn’t noticed. And stopped beside the hatch.

”Down,” said Holt. ”All of you. I’ll hold the top.”

”No,” said Andraste.

”First in, last out,” said Holt.

”Then you’ll be last out,” said Andraste. ”From the room. Not from here.” She looked at the stairs. ”I’ll hold the top. You go down with them. You’re the captain. They’ll need the captain down there.”

Holt looked at her for a long time.

”First Blade,” he said.

”Captain,” said Andraste.

He went down.

I was last but one. Hana behind me.

At the top of the stairs I looked back.

Andraste was standing at the hatch with her back to it, with Holdfast. Dinraal beside her, on his feet now, letting his wall come down, very slowly, so it would fall outward onto what was behind it. And beyond the wall, as it came down, the black roof of the building on One, with every grey one on it turning toward the sound of a blade that wouldn’t stop humming.

”Go,” said Andraste. Without turning round. ”I’ll know where you are.”

The long cold place is a stair.

That’s all. A stair, going down. Very long. Very straight. Black on both sides, close enough to touch with your elbows, and the note coming out of the walls so loud I could feel it in the collar at my throat, and in my teeth, and in the place behind my eyes where I see atoms.

And cold.

We went down it for a long time.

Ione told Dot the turns. There weren’t many. Once a landing, with three ways off it, and she said the middle one, and the middle one was right. Once a place where the stair split and she said not the wider one, and Crane said of course not the wider one, and we went down the narrow one.

Tavvan went first after the landing. He stopped at the bottom of a flight and put his long hand flat on the wall. And then went on.

”Halfway,” he said. Through Dot. ”There’s always a halfway.”

The room is at the bottom.

I knew before we got there. Before the last turn. Because the note stopped.

Not stopped. Changed. Under it, through the black, through every wall, very faint at first and then not faint at all, something else.

Singing.

Not singing. Holding. Two hundred and twelve high thin voices, each holding one sound, the way you’d hold a door open with your back if your arms were full. All at once. Not together. Not in time. Each one its own note. Each one a door, to one place.

Hana stopped on the last stair.

She put her hand on the wall.

”Oh,” she said.

Holt went in first.

Through the last door. Into the room.

And stopped.

And didn’t say anything.

It’s long. Low. Black. Lit by nothing; I don’t know how we could see. Rows of shelves down both walls, floor to ceiling, black iron, and on every shelf, in a row, a box.

The size of a child’s coffin.

Black. Closed. With wire coming out of each one, very fine, going into the wall behind. Two hundred and thirteen.

And out of two hundred and twelve of them, holding.

Teel walked to the nearest shelf.

She didn’t say anything. She stood in front of the first box and looked at it. At the lid. At the seal. At the hinge, which is on the side, very small, almost invisible.

She put her hand on it.

Then she turned round. And looked at Ossel. And said something in their language. Very quietly.

Ossel’s breath caught. Not on the eleventh. On the first.

”She says,” said Dot. Very faint. ”We made these.”

Kiln makes the houses’ iron. Hulls. Rails. Housings. Collars.

Boxes.

Teel’s family made the hinges. Three short and one long. She put her thumb on the hinge of the first box on the first shelf of the room under the building on One and felt the rhythm her father struck into it, and her mother, and her grandmother before them, on the ninth terrace, under a red sky, in a collar.

She didn’t cry. Not then.

”Then you know how they open,” said Holt. Very gently.

Teel nodded.

”Crane,” said Holt. ”The wire.”

Crane was already at the wall. Following the wire from the first box back into the black. The way he followed it in the bow at Halcro.

”It’s not a seal on the box,” he said. ”It’s the same as the ships. The wire goes into the building. Into the making.” He looked up. ”The boxes aren’t just holding doors for the ships. They’re holding the building up.”

Nobody said anything.

”Every door the keys hold,” said Crane. ”Every place they’ve been. The building goes there through them. That’s how the stock comes in. That’s how the new ones go out.” He put his hand on the black wall. ”Pull the wire and the building doesn’t know where anything is.”

”Will it fall?” said Hana.

”No,” said Crane. ”It’ll just be lost.”

”Lucas,” said Holt.

I put my hands on the shelves.

Both of them. Flat. On the black iron, between the boxes. And felt every collar in the room.

Two hundred and thirteen. One in every box. Black. Close. With a stone in the front of each, and in each stone a piece of queen, singing the note into a child’s throat so the child would stay still and hold.

And under each collar, a child.

Holding a door.

I’d done a terrace on Kiln at once. Two hundred collars. With my hands on the stone.

I did the room.

Sand.

All at once. Two hundred and thirteen. Every collar in every box on every shelf. Kiln iron, some of it, that Teel’s family had forged; I felt it go, and felt Teel feel it go, three short and one long, falling into dust in the dark.

And the pieces of queen came out of the stones.

Into my hands. All of them. Two hundred and thirteen small grey sparks, rising out of the boxes through the lids, through the black, into my palms.

And stopped singing.

The holding stopped.

All at once. Two hundred and twelve high thin voices, holding a door, each one, for as long as anyone could remember. In the middle of the note. Stopped.

And the room was silent.

And then, from every box on every shelf, very faint, through the lids, two hundred and twelve children breathed in.

Ossel and Teel opened the boxes.

Every one. One at a time. Teel’s thumb on the hinge. Ossel’s hands on the lid. With Crane behind them, pulling the wire out of the wall, so the building wouldn’t know.

And in every box, a child.

All kinds. Some with fur. Some with soft grey skin and long hands like Ossel’s. Some so small. Some with feathers, bound. Lying very still on their backs in their boxes with their eyes open and their mouths open, where the sound had been coming out. Breathing in.

And then their eyes moved.

The first one said it.

A boy. Small. With fur the colour of ash. He looked up out of his box at Teel, bending over him, and his mouth moved.

Hana had come to stand beside her.

Hana heard it first. She told me afterward she heard it before he said it, the way you hear someone draw breath to speak.

”Which way?” said the boy. In a language none of us had.

And then the next box. And the next. All down the room. From every box, as the lids came up. Two hundred and twelve children who’d been holding one door each since before they could remember, waking up with the collar gone and a stranger’s face over them.

Which way?

Which way?

Which way?

Hana answered.

She doesn’t usually. She breathes. That’s what she does. She doesn’t talk much, and when she does it’s to me, or to Halloway, or to the long ward at night when she thinks nobody’s listening.

She stood in the middle of the room under the building on One with two hundred and twelve children asking which way in every language there is.

And said the word Ingrid said.

In the bow of the first ship on Halcro. Over Ione’s box.

”Nowhere.”

And Dot gave it to every one of them. In every language. At once. From a world away, through the faintest thread she’s ever held, from a porch where she sits at night beside the window of a little room at the top of the stairs where a girl was asleep with the lamp on.

Nowhere. You don’t have to go anywhere. Nobody’s going to ask you again.

The two hundred and thirteenth box was at the end of the room.

On the bottom shelf. On its own.

Silent.

I went to it.

Hana came with me. She’d heard it from the stair. The one that wasn’t holding. The one Ione screamed for.

Teel opened it. Very slowly. Her thumb on the hinge.

A girl.

Small. Smaller than Ione. With skin like dark water.

I knew her. Not her; her people. The woman on the spoke, with the child walking beside her holding her hand. The same people. The same colour.

She was lying very still on her back in the box with her eyes open and her mouth closed.

And not breathing.

”Hana,” I said.

Hana was already kneeling.

I’ve written Hana breathing for people so many times I’ve stopped saying how. On the long ward. On Isca, for the whole fifth terrace. On the spoke, for Andraste and a stranger’s child and me. She takes hold of the air and moves it in and out of someone until they remember how.

She knelt by the last box on the bottom shelf of the room under the building on One and put both hands flat on the chest of a girl who’d been holding a door until she couldn’t any more.

And breathed.

Nothing.

Hana breathed again.

Nothing.

Ione, a world away, asleep, made a sound. Dot said so. Afterward. A very small sound in her sleep, in her bed with the lamp on, that made Ingrid get up out of the chair.

Hana breathed again.

I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t. I could put air in her lungs; I can’t ask a girl to want to breath.

I knelt down on Hana’s other side and put my hand on her back.

That’s all.

”Come on,” said Hana. Very quietly. To the girl. ”Come on, love. It’s all right. You can stop holding now. You stopped. That’s allowed.”

She breathed.

”But you have to start this,” said Hana. ”This one’s yours. Nobody’s going to hold it for you. I’ll just help.”

The girl breathed in.

On her own. Very small. Under Hana’s hands. In.

And out.

And in.

Hana didn’t move. She stayed with her hands flat on the girl’s chest for a long time, breathing with her, not for her. Matching.

Then she looked up at me. And her face was wet.

”The one Ione heard,” said Hana. ”She stopped holding because she couldn’t any more.” She looked down at the girl. ”She wasn’t gone. She was just very tired.”

”Dinraal,” said Holt. ”Frame.”

He’d come down the stair. I hadn’t heard him. Andraste had sent him; she said afterward she could hold the top on her own, and that he’d be more use making a door than standing beside her watching her not need him.

He knelt in the middle of the room. On the black floor between the shelves. And put his silver hands down.

And the silver went into the black.

And stopped.

”It won’t,” said Dinraal. In our language. Very quietly. With his hands flat and his face very white. ”It won’t go up. The black’s too thick. It’s eating the silver as fast as I send it.”

Nobody said anything.

”It’s the note,” said Crane. ”In the walls. Even with the boxes stopped. The whole building’s made of it.”

Ione woke up.

Dot told us. Very faint. Through the thread. She said Ione sat up in her bed at the top of the stairs with the lamp on and her hand at her throat. And said one thing, very clearly, to Ingrid in the chair.

They’re awake.

And down the stairs, in the children’s room, in the middle of the heap, the four were sitting up.

They’re not doing anything, said Dot. Very fast. Your mother’s there. She says: nobody asks them. Nobody touches them. They’re just sitting up. She says they’re looking at the wall.

A pause.

She says they’re looking at it the way Dory looks at someone before she checks them.

And in the room under the building on One, I felt it.

The thread. The one from the children’s room. The long way. Thinner than anything. That had been reaching, every night since Ione screamed, toward something cold and long and very far down.

It touched the room.

Not open. Not a door. Nothing anyone could put a hand through.

Just there. Touching. The way Dory touches. There you are.

And Dinraal’s silver went up.

Through the black. Out of his hands. Two strands, very bright, going up off the floor of the room on either side of him, very fast, the way they went up the walls of the crevasse. As if the black had stopped eating them. As if something were holding the black still, just for a moment, just long enough, the way you’d hold a door with your back.

And met over his head.

A frame.

And on the other side of it, at the other end of the long way, Kyria’s cutters cut toward it from the courtyard. And every queen on Avalon sang it.

And Risa held it.

It opened.

The red glass.

Morning, on Avalon. The real kind. Gold.

And Risa, standing in the middle of the frame on the other side. In her flying leathers. First. Exactly as she said.

And behind her, second, with bread, Maura.

Risa didn’t come through as lightning.

She walked. Into the room under the building on One. And stopped. And looked at the shelves. At the open boxes. At two hundred and thirteen children lying in them with their eyes open, breathing in.

At Hana, kneeling at the end of the room by the bottom shelf, with her hands on the chest of a small girl with skin like dark water.

Risa didn’t say anything.

She went to the nearest box. And bent down. And picked up the boy with fur the colour of ash, who’d said which way first.

And carried him through the frame onto the red glass.

And came back for the next one.

It took an hour.

Everyone came through. The Mom Squad, eleven of them. Halloway, with her bag and her spectacles, who went straight to Hana and the girl at the end and knelt down and didn’t say anything for a long time. Maura with bread for every one of them, even the ones who couldn’t eat yet. Every grandmother on Avalon, waiting on the red glass to take them.

Two hundred and thirteen.

Through the frame.

Home.

Andraste came down the stair at the end.

When the last child was through. When Holt had put his hand on every one of them, the way he did in the hall, and said the word. When the room was empty except for the shelves and the open boxes and the wire hanging out of the wall where Crane had pulled it.

She came down the stair with Holdfast. Black to the shoulders. With the cut over her eye.

”They stopped coming,” she said. ”At the top. Ten minutes ago. All at once.”

”Crane pulled the wire,” said Holt.

Andraste looked at the wall. At the wire.

”They didn’t know where they were,” she said. ”They stood on the roof. All of them. Looking at each other.” She was quiet. ”They didn’t know which way.”

Holt went through last.

He stood in the empty room for a moment first. With his collar still on; he hadn’t taken it off; he said he’d wait until the red glass. Looking at the shelves.

Then he turned to Crane, beside him.

”Hal,” he said.

”Beside you,” said Crane.

They went through together.

And Dinraal let go of the frame.

Ione was on the red glass.

She’d come down. Out of her bed, past Ingrid in the chair and Konrad on the step, down the stairs and out of the house and across the garden and through the town and onto the red glass. In her nightdress. Barefoot. Holding Konrad’s hand, because he’d got up off the step and followed her, with the sheets still in his other hand.

She walked out into the middle of the two hundred and thirteen.

They were lying on blankets on the red glass in the sun. With grandmothers kneeling by every one. Blinking. Breathing.

She went from one to the next. The way Dory checks everyone. The way Tavvan listened in the hall. Bending down. Looking.

Counting.

At the end, she stopped.

By the girl with skin like dark water. On a blanket. With Hana sitting beside her, and Halloway, and Maura.

Ione knelt down.

The girl looked at her.

They didn’t say anything. They didn’t have a language between them. But Ione put her hand at her own throat, where the collar was. And then took it away.

And the girl, very slowly, put her own small hand at her throat.

And then took it away.

Hana didn’t leave her.

Not that day. Not that night. She sat on the blanket on the red glass and then on the long ward, in the chair by the window, with the girl’s small hand in hers. Breathing with her. Not for her.

At midnight, when the ward was quiet, she said it. To me. In the doorway.

”Her mother’s in the line.”

I didn’t say anything.

”The woman on the spoke,” said Hana. ”With the child. Same people. Same skin.” She didn’t look up from the bed. ”The child I breathed for wasn’t her; she was in a box when I was walking past. But it was her people. Her mother, or her aunt, or someone who’d know her name.” Her voice didn’t change. ”Walking up a ramp into the making. While I was breathing for her.”

”We don’t know that.”

”No,” said Hana. ”We don’t.” She looked at the girl. ”That’s the worst part.”

She was quiet for a long time.

Then she let go of the girl’s hand, very gently, and got up, and went out of the long ward and up the hill to the house on the rise, and into the kitchen, where the slate is.

And under The lines. We come back., in Holt’s hand, she wrote, very small, in her own:

Her people first.

I took my collar off on the porch.

Last of the nine. Everyone else had theirs off on the red glass, the moment they came through the frame. Holt last of them, very slowly, standing on the red glass with his back to everyone; and then he gave it to Crane, and Crane put both of them in his pocket with his spanner and didn’t say anything.

I’d forgotten mine.

That’s the truth. I’d walked up a spoke and a ramp and across a roof and down a stair and into a room with it on, Kiln iron saying I’ll hold at my throat the whole way, and not turned it to sand, and then I’d come home and forgotten it was there.

Mother noticed. On the porch. With the teapot.

She looked at my throat for a long time.

”Take it off, love,” she said.

So I did. The way Crane showed us. The other way.

And held it.

Teel’s iron. Her family’s work. Very light.

I didn’t turn it to sand.

I gave it to Mother. And she put it on the nail by the kitchen door, beside the slate, where Garnet’s drawings are. Father. Dinraal at his window. The gardener’s queen closing. And now a collar, black, empty, with a dull stone in the front, that a girl made who was grey a month before, so that two hundred and thirteen children could come home.

Mother says that’s where it stays. She says when anyone in the house on the rise forgets what the houses are, they can go and look at it.

And when anyone forgets what Kiln is, they can look at it too.

Andraste got Vessa back from Dory at the frame.

She came through last but two, with Holdfast, with her iron black to the shoulders and the cut over her eye. And Dory was standing at the foot of the frame on the red glass with Vessa on her chest, where she’d been standing for nine hours and then an hour more.

Andraste stopped.

Vessa turned.

Not toward anything nobody could hear. Toward her mother. Toward Holdfast, which had stopped humming at last, very quietly, the moment it came onto the red glass.

And held out her arms.

Andraste took her.

And sat down. On the red glass. In the middle of the interceptor field, in front of everyone. A First Blade, sitting down in the middle of a field. With her daughter on her chest and her blade across her knees.

Nobody said anything about it.

Kyria, at the edge of the field, looked at her daughter sitting on the red glass for a long time. Then she sat down too.

And then, one after another, all down the edge of the field, forty thousand Hyrrani.

Konrad was standing behind Ione with the sheets.

He turned the first one over. To the back. To the very bottom. To And the room, underlined twice. To the column under it, 212, 212, 212, every morning since the scream.

He took out his pen.

And crossed out And the room.

And wrote, under the column, where the next number would have gone:

213. Home.

Ione went back to bed at noon. Because she’d been awake all night, listening, and Ingrid said so.

She climbed the stairs to the little room at the top with the window. And lay down. And Ingrid sat in the chair.

And Ione reached up, without being asked, and turned the lamp down.

All the way.

Ingrid didn’t say anything. She sat in the chair in the dark at noon with the curtains drawn and listened to her daughter breathe. Not catching. Not holding.

Just breathing, the way children do when they’re asleep and there’s nothing in the dark at all.

Days 4835–4836. The Room.

World-breaker: walk on; we left the doors open. They let us up. Ione through Dot: go left. Andraste took off her collar: very well made; I hated every step. Dinraal’s first wall; Andraste went through it; Crane opened the hatch. First Blade; Captain. The long cold place is a stair; Tavvan found the halfway. Two hundred and twelve holding; Teel: we made these; her family’s hinges. Crane: the boxes hold the building’s doors. I did the room at once. Which way, in every language. Hana: nowhere. The two hundred and thirteenth wasn’t gone; she was very tired; Hana: this one’s yours, I’ll just help. The black ate the frame until the four sat up in the heap and checked the room, and nobody asked them. Risa first; Maura second. The grey ones on the roof didn’t know which way. Holt and Crane together. Ione counted them all. Konrad crossed it out. 213. Home. Hana wrote under Holt’s line: her people first. I gave my collar to Mother; it hangs by the door. Andraste sat down in the middle of the field. Ione turned the lamp off.