Scarecrow

She screamed the first night when Luna tried to take her shoes off.

Not crying. I’d heard her do it once already, on the plateau, when Halloway put out a hand. I’d thought then it was fright. Being somewhere new. A long white room and then a door and then a red plateau full of strangers.

It wasn’t fright. Or not only.

Luna knelt down at the bottom of the stairs, very gently, the way she kneels to all the small ones, and reached for the strap of Rue’s shoe. Her fingers touched the girl’s ankle.

And Rue screamed.

High and thin and all at once, like a kettle, with her eyes wide open and her whole body gone stiff, and her hands, both of them, holding Mother’s skirt so tight her knuckles went white. She didn’t stop when Luna let go. She didn’t stop when Luna stood up and backed away to the kitchen door. She screamed until Mother bent down and picked her up, and put her face against her shoulder, and then she stopped. All at once. The way she’d started.

The whole house had come to the kitchen door. Nobody said anything.

Luna stood in the doorway with her hands held a little away from her, as if they’d done something wrong.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, love. I didn’t—”

“It’s not you,” said Mother. Very quietly. Into Rue’s hair. “It’s not anybody here.”

Dory went up to her end room and sat on the bed with the door open and her glasses off. I knew what she was doing. I didn’t go up.

She came down an hour later. Mother was in the big chair by the stove with Rue asleep against her, finally, sitting up, still holding the skirt.

Dory sat on the floor by the chair. Not touching. A little way off.

“It’s the doorway,” she said.

Mother looked at her.

“In her,” said Dory. “When anybody touches her. She goes back to the doorway. Her mother and her father, standing in it. In the night. And the white robes coming.” She looked at her hands. “They touched her. The Refined. To take her. They pulled her out from between her mother and her father. And her mother and father were holding on to her when—”

She stopped.

“She thinks every hand is that hand,” said Dory. “Except yours. She doesn’t know why yours isn’t. She just knows it isn’t.”

Mother didn’t say anything for a long time. She put her hand on the back of Rue’s head. Very lightly.

“I know why,” she said.

Mother didn’t sleep in her own bed that night. She slept in the big chair by the stove, sitting up, with Rue against her, because every time she tried to stand up Rue woke and held on tighter.

At about midnight Oona came down.

Oona’s nearly grown now. She’s tall, taller than Mother, and very quiet, and she has Mother’s way of standing and Mother’s gift, the lifting, so much of it that Mother says Oona will be able to lift the house on her own by the time she’s twenty. She’s had the room next to Mother’s for years. When she was small, when she first came, she slept at the foot of Mother’s bed. On the floor. On a blanket. Every night, for a year, because she wouldn’t sleep anywhere else.

She came down in her nightdress and stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at Mother in the chair with the small girl asleep against her.

Then she went and got her blanket. The old one. From the bottom of her chest, where she keeps it.

And she lay down on the floor in front of the stove. At Mother’s feet. Not touching. Just there.

Mother looked down at her.

“You don’t have to, love.”

“I know,” said Oona. “I want to.” She pulled the blanket up. “It’s what you did. For me. The first night. You didn’t make me go anywhere. You just stayed where I was.”

Mother didn’t say anything.

“She’ll wake up,” said Oona. “In the night. And she won’t know where she is. And she’ll look down and see somebody on the floor.” She closed her eyes. “It helps. Seeing somebody on the floor. It means they’re not going anywhere.”

Rue woke at about three.

I know because I was awake too. On the stairs. I hadn’t gone to bed either.

She woke all at once, the way she does everything. Sat up in Mother’s lap with her eyes wide open, looking round the dark kitchen. The stove. The long table. The window with the stars in it. Not knowing.

Then she looked down.

Oona was on the floor in front of the stove. Asleep. With the old blanket pulled up to her chin, and one arm out, and her face turned towards the chair.

Rue looked at her for a long time.

Then she lay back down against Mother. Slowly. And put her thumb in her mouth. And went to sleep again.

She follows Mother everywhere.

Holding her apron. Not her hand. The apron. The edge of it, in her fist, so she can feel where Mother is without having to look. Mother walks with her a little behind, at her left side, all day. To the stove and the long table and the garden and the step. Up the hill road. Down to the river.

Mother says it’s like having a very small shadow that holds on.

Halloway can’t examine her. She came up the hill road the second morning with her bag and stood in the kitchen doorway and Rue saw the bag and went stiff and white and held the apron so tight Mother’s knot came undone.

Halloway didn’t come any further.

“All right,” she said. “All right, love. I’ll stay here.” She put the bag down in the doorway. Then she sat down. On the floor. In the doorway. “I’ll just look. From here. I’m very good at looking.”

She sat in the kitchen doorway for an hour and looked. Rue looked back. Neither of them moved.

At the end of the hour Halloway said, “She’s thin. She hasn’t eaten properly for a while. There’s a healed cut on her left arm. Her eyes are good. Her breathing is good. She’s very frightened and she’s very strong.” She stood up. “That’s all I need to know for now. Feed her, Dot. The rest can wait.”

“I am feeding her,” said Mother.

“Feed her more,” said Halloway.

Abena tried breathing for her once. From across the room. Very gently. Just a little warm air, the way she does for queens. Rue didn’t scream. But she turned her head and looked at Abena across the kitchen, very hard, for a long time, and Abena stopped.

“She knew,” Abena said afterwards. “She felt it. And she didn’t like it.” She almost smiled. “She’s like Queenie. She notices everything.”

The children tried.

Everybody’s children try. That’s what they’re like. Kesh came in from the yard on the third day and saw her, very small, at the long table in Mother’s lap, and was so pleased there was somebody new that she ran straight across the kitchen and put her arms round her.

Rue screamed.

Kesh let go as if she’d been burned. She stood in the middle of the kitchen with her arms held out and her face going white, and then red, and then her whole face crumpled and she ran out of the back door. Outside, very suddenly, it started to rain. Just over the yard. Very hard.

Risa went after her. It rained over the yard for an hour.

Mother sat at the long table with Rue in her lap until the screaming stopped. Then she said, to the open back door, loud enough for the yard:

“Kesh. Love. Come back when you’re ready. It wasn’t you.”

The rain stopped.

Kesh came back at supper. She sat at the far end of the long table. She didn’t look at Rue once. But she put her best bread roll, the one with the crust, very carefully on the table halfway between them, and left it there.

Rue looked at it for a long time.

Then she reached out, without letting go of the apron, and took it.

Queenie didn’t try to touch her.

Queenie never touches anybody she hasn’t looked at first. All the way down. She stood at the end of the long table on the fourth morning, very small, with her black eyes, and looked at Rue for a long time. Rue looked back.

Then Queenie went out into the garden. And came back with a leaf.

A big one. From the plane tree by the wall. She held it out, at arm’s length, very straight, the way you’d hold something out to a bird.

“Leaf,” she said.

Rue looked at it. Then she took it. By the stem. Without touching Queenie’s hand. Queenie made sure. She held it right at the very end.

Rue’s had the leaf ever since. In her other fist. The one that isn’t holding the apron. It’s brown now, and crumpled, and Mother’s had to sew a little bag for it so it doesn’t fall apart. She takes it everywhere.

Queenie brings her a new one every morning. She doesn’t take the old ones away. Mother’s bag is full of them.

Kyrie offered her the stick.

Rue didn’t take it. But she watched Kyrie do the forms in the yard every morning after that, from the step, in Mother’s lap. All four forms. With the soft Andraste propped against the water butt.

On the ninth morning, Kyrie finished the fourth form, and turned round, and bowed to the step.

Not to the soft Andraste. To Rue.

Rue didn’t do anything. But she didn’t look away either.

She doesn’t talk.

Not much. She said her name on the plateau, into Mother’s coat. She says no, sometimes, very quietly, when somebody comes too close. She said Gran on the sixth night, in the dark, when Mother was putting her to bed and thought she was asleep.

Mother stood still in the doorway of her own room for a long time after that. Then she went and sat on the end of the bed.

“Yes, love,” she said. “I’m here.”

She sleeps in Mother’s bed. She has since the second night, when Mother finally got her out of the chair. In the middle. With the leaf.

And Oona sleeps there too.

Not on the floor. Not after the third night. On the third night Rue woke at three, and sat up, and looked down at the floor for Oona. Oona was there. On her blanket.

And Rue looked at her for a long time. And then she let go of the apron, which she’s never done, not once, not even in her sleep.

And she reached down. Off the edge of the bed. Towards the floor.

She didn’t touch Oona. She stopped a little way off. With her hand out. In the air.

Oona woke up. She saw the hand.

She didn’t take it. She didn’t move. She lay very still on the floor and looked at the small hand held out over the edge of the bed in the dark, and didn’t do anything at all.

Then, very slowly, Rue patted the bed. Next to her. On the side that wasn’t Mother’s.

Twice.

Oona got up. Very slowly. And got into the bed. On the other side. Not touching. With the old blanket.

And Rue lay down between them. With the leaf. With her back against Mother and her face towards Oona. Not touching either of them, quite.

And went to sleep.

I looked in, on my way past, in the morning. Before the stars. I wasn’t going to. I did.

The three of them were asleep in Mother’s bed. Mother on her side by the window. Oona on the other side, with her old blanket. And in the middle, very small, curled up, Rue. With her fist in the edge of Mother’s nightdress. And her other hand, the one with the leaf, lying open on the sheet between her and Oona.

And Oona’s hand lying open next to it. A little way off.

Not touching.

Not far.

Mother came down to breakfast very late that morning. With Rue holding the apron.

I poured her a cup. She sat down at the long table. She looked very tired. And very something else.

“She’s staying,” she said.

“I know.”

“I’m too old for this,” said Mother. “I had you in a shelter on a ridge. I had Oona at an age most women are having grandchildren. And now this.” She put her hand on Rue’s head. Rue let her. “I’m too old.”

“You’re not,” I said. “You’re the youngest person I know.”

Mother looked at me over her cup.

“That’s your fault,” she said. “Yours and the children’s. Halloway told me. Whatever it is you all do to us without knowing.” She drank her tea. “I suppose I’d better make use of it.”

She watches me.

I don’t go near her. I decided that the first night, on the stairs. I’m a man, and I’m tall, and I come through doors very fast because I’ve been coming through doors very fast all my life, and every one of those things is the doorway. So I don’t go near her. I sit at the far end of the long table. I go round the other side of the kitchen to get to the stove. I wait on the porch until Mother has her settled before I come in.

And she watches me. All the time. From Mother’s lap, from behind the apron, from the step. Wherever I am, she knows. Dory says she keeps a sort of map of me in her head. Where I am. Which way I’m facing. How far.

On the seventh evening I was on the porch. Mother was on the step below me with Rue in her lap. The stars were coming out.

I had a stone in my hand. I usually do. I pick them up off the path and turn them over while I think. This one was grey, from the river.

I asked it to be something else.

Not a bird. That’s Sigmund’s. I asked it to be a horse. A very small one. The size of my thumb. With a painted saddle, badly painted, in very bright colours, the way somebody’s child painted the one on the carousel that Corvan rides. It took a while to get the paint right. I wanted it bad enough.

When it was done I leaned forward, very slowly, and put it on the step. On the far end. As far from Mother’s lap as the step goes.

Then I leaned back. And looked at the north field. And didn’t look at the step again.

I heard her look at it. You can hear a child look at something, when it’s quiet enough. Then I heard Mother shift, very slightly, on the step. Then nothing for a long time.

When I went in to bed the horse was gone.

Mother says it’s in the bag with the leaves. She says Rue takes it out at night, in bed, and holds it up against the window, and looks at the paint.

She still watches me. But Dory says the map’s changed. She says I’m on it now as something that leaves things on steps and goes away.

Dory says that’s a start.

Lio came up the hill road on the eighth day and sat on the kitchen floor.

Not near the chair. By the stove. With her back against the warm bricks and her knees up, the way she sits on Sefa’s terrace. She didn’t look at Rue. She looked at the fire.

“They took me when I was small too,” she said. To the fire. “Not from a doorway. From a hall. On One. I was littler than you. I don’t remember my mother at all. I remember a white room.”

Rue, in Mother’s lap, went still.

“They put things in me,” said Lio. “That weren’t mine. And then Lucas came and took most of them out, but he couldn’t take all of them, so I’m still a bit what they made.” She turned her hands over in front of the fire. “For a long time I didn’t let anybody touch me either. Not anybody. Not Sefa. Not Dory.”

She didn’t say anything else for a long time.

“It goes,” she said at last. “Not all the way. But it goes. You’ll know when.” She stood up. “And it’s all right not to know yet.”

She went out to the terrace.

Rue watched the door she’d gone out of for a long time.

The next morning, Mother says, when Lio came up the hill road for breakfast, Rue was on the step. In Mother’s lap. With the leaf and the horse. And when Lio came past, Rue held up the horse. Not out. Just up. So Lio could see it.

Lio stopped. She looked at the horse for a long time.

“That’s a very good horse,” she said.

Rue put it away again.

Okafor came on the tenth day.

She doesn’t come up to the kitchen often. She stood in the doorway in her plain grey coat with her slate under her arm, the way Halloway stood there with her bag. Rue saw her. Saw the steel side of her face, catching the lamp.

She didn’t scream.

She looked at Okafor for a long time. At the steel. Very hard. The way Queenie looks at things.

Okafor didn’t come in. She sat down. In the doorway. On the floor. The way Halloway did. She put the slate down beside her.

“Somebody shot me in the face,” she said. To Rue. Not to anybody else. “In the war. When I was seventeen. And a man I didn’t know put my face back together with his hands. And then, afterwards, they put us both out of a door. Me and three hundred and ten others. Out through the locks. Into the snow.” She touched the steel. “This is what he made. When he’d finished, I was frightened of him for a whole year. Of everybody. Of every hand.”

Rue didn’t say anything. She was looking at the steel.

“His name was Trevor,” said Okafor. “He was her husband.” She nodded at Mother. “She’s the one who taught me it was all right. Not him. Her. She sat on the floor of the shelter on the ridge with me every night for a year and didn’t touch me once.” She picked up the slate. “I’ve been grateful every day since. Even the days I haven’t said so.”

She stood up. She went out.

Mother sat very still at the long table for a long time.

“I’d forgotten that,” she said. “The floor. I’d forgotten.”

“She hadn’t,” I said.

On the Sunday, Mother took her to the park.

She didn’t want to. Mother, I mean. She said it was too soon. She said there’d be crowds and noise and people who’d want to touch her. But it was Sunday, and on Sunday Mother and Oona and small Holt lift the carousel, and they’ve lifted it every Sunday since the park opened, and Mother said she wasn’t stopping now.

So Rue came. In Mother’s arms. With the apron in one fist and the bag of leaves and the horse in the other.

They went early. Before the crowds. Mother stood underneath the carousel with Rue on her hip and put her free hand up, and Oona stood on the other side and put both hers up, and small Holt at the back, and they lifted.

The whole carousel went up into the air. Slowly. Turning. With its lights and its painted animals and its music.

Rue looked up at it.

She’d gone very still. Mother felt her go still. Not the frightened still. The other kind.

And in the middle of the carousel, going round above them, very high, on the badly painted horse, holding the pole with one hand, there was Corvan.

He’d come early too. He comes every Sunday. Dory was on the deepback in front of him.

He saw Rue. Going round, above her, he saw her looking up.

And he took his other hand off the pole.

Both hands. Off. In the air. Going round, high up, above the park, on a painted horse, with no hands. He held them out at his sides. Like somebody flying.

Dory says his face was terrified. She says he went white. She says she could feel how frightened he was, all the way down, and how he did it anyway.

Rue watched him go round. Once. Twice. Three times.

On the fourth time round, she held up the horse. The little one. The one I made. Up in the air. So he could see it.

Corvan saw it. Going round. He looked down at the tiny painted horse in the small girl’s hand, and then at the big painted horse he was riding, and his face did something Dory says she’s never seen it do.

Then he laughed. Out loud. Going round. With no hands.

Mother says Rue didn’t laugh. But she held the horse up for the whole of the ride. Every time he came round.

Afterwards Corvan came and stood a long way off from the bench where Mother was sitting with Rue. He knew. Lio had told him.

He didn’t come any closer. He stood with his hands in his pockets.

“She’s very good,” he said, to Mother. “At holding things up.”

“So are you, love,” said Mother. “Now.”

Corvan looked at the carousel for a long time.

“I was so frightened,” he said.

“I know.”

“She was watching,” he said. “So I had to.”

He went home. Mother sat on the bench with Rue for a long time after.

Rue was holding the horse up still. At nothing. At the carousel, going round empty above them, with Oona and small Holt underneath it, holding it in the air.

Sigmund and Tovi were married on the twelfth day after the halls.

Not on the plateau. Not at dawn. In the orchard. At the bottom, under the apple trees, where he made her cross and turned a stone into a bird. In the afternoon. Because that’s when it happened, Tovi said, the first time, and she wanted it to be the same time of day.

The keepers came. All nine. With the book. It’s the second time they’ve ever left the hall for a wedding. They brought it on a stone, the way they did for Trevor and Teva, and set it down in the long grass among the windfalls.

Aurelius asked the questions again. Three. In the Chancellor’s coat. He says he’s going to have to have the coat let out if this keeps happening.

“Do you know what you’re asking her for?” he said to Sigmund.

Sigmund looked at Tovi. In the orchard. With nine small brown birds in the apple trees above them, all looking very slightly surprised.

“Another go,” he said. “Every time I get it wrong.”

Aurelius looked at Tovi.

“Do you know what you’re giving him?”

“Another go,” said Tovi. “Every time he gets it wrong.” She thought about it. “Which is quite often.”

Everybody laughed. Risa laughed so hard Kesh had to hold her up.

“Do you both understand,” said Aurelius, “that you can’t know whether you’ll get it right?”

“Yes,” they said. Together.

And then the word.

Teva and Trevor had Good morning. On Ister, Teva’s grandmother says, every marriage has one word, the one you’re going to say to each other for the rest of your lives. The keepers write it in the long record. It’s the whole wedding.

Sigmund and Tovi looked at each other for a long time.

Then Sigmund put his hand up. And the first bird, the old one, came down out of the apple tree. And landed on his finger.

He held it out to Tovi.

“Sorry,” he said.

Tovi looked at the bird. Then at him.

“Sorry,” she said back.

And the eldest keeper wrote it in the book, very carefully, with its meaning, in the old Aldri script, and then she said it aloud, in our language, the way she did for Trevor and Teva.

“MARRIED.”

And then she read out the meaning. The keepers had decided it in the hall, the night before. Teva’s father says it took them until dawn.

Sorry: the bird you made when you were cross. The thing you say first. And then you both stay.

Mother was on the bench at the edge of the orchard. With Rue in her lap. Rue had the leaf. She’d watched the whole thing without moving. Without making a sound.

When the old bird flew back up into the tree, it went past the bench. Low. Very close.

And Rue let go of the apron.

She held her hand out. The empty one. Flat. Into the air. The way she’d held it out to Oona over the edge of the bed.

The bird stopped. In the air. And looked at her.

Sigmund, in the middle of the orchard, with Tovi’s hand in his, went very still. He’d felt it. Dory says he made that bird, so a little of him is always in it, and he felt it see the hand.

He didn’t ask it anything. He told me afterwards. He didn’t ask it to do anything at all.

The bird came down onto Rue’s hand.

It sat there. Small and brown and very slightly surprised. On her palm.

Rue didn’t scream.

She sat very still on Mother’s lap with the bird on her hand, and looked at it, and it looked at her. For as long as it takes to say good morning. Then it flew back up into the apple tree with the others.

Rue looked at her empty hand for a long time.

Then she put it back on the apron. And leaned against Mother. And closed her eyes.

Nobody in the orchard said anything. Not one person. Ninety people at a wedding in an orchard, and nobody said anything, for a long time.

Then Tovi said, very quietly, to Sigmund: “That was a very good bird.”

And Sigmund said: “I know. I made it when I was cross with you.”

Breakfast was on three long tables, in the evening, in the orchard. Teva’s mother poured from the passing pot, and then passed it, handle turned, to Mother, and Mother poured for Teva’s mother, and then for Tovi’s grandmother, and then for everyone.

Rue sat in Mother’s lap and ate four bread rolls. Halloway counted.

“More,” she said to Mother, across the table.

“I am,” said Mother.

That night the Refined came through.

Not through a door. That’s the thing.

On Kessry, in the new cold sun, in the quarry town where Vesk used to walk to look at the cutting every morning, nine Refined in white were standing in the square at dawn.

Nobody saw them come. Elin didn’t feel a door open. Goldie didn’t. Corin didn’t. Thessaly didn’t. Dory didn’t hear anything in the net. The batteries on Kessry’s moons saw nothing in the sky. Dinraal’s listeners heard nothing.

They were just there. Nine of them. In a row. In white. With their hands folded in their sleeves.

They didn’t do anything. They didn’t take anyone. They stood in the square for as long as it takes to drink a cup of tea, looking round at the white stone and the quarrymen coming out of their doors and the old women stopping on the steps.

Then they were gone.

Not through a door either. Just gone. The way they came.

Okafor was at the board in the Arch Hall when the Kessry post called it in. She stood very still for a long time.

Then she turned to Dot. Dot was in her corner. She’d come in with me.

“Did you hear it?” said Okafor.

Dot’s colours were very low.

“Affirmative,” she said. “On the grey band. For a breath. Before and after.” A pause. “Like a door. But not a door. Like the whole of the space between here and there, folding.”

“The Prime’s device,” said Okafor. “What he gave the houses. What he traded for the research.”

“This one cannot say,” said Dot. “This one can only say it is not ours, and it is not the houses’ old way, and it was used last night on Kessry, nine times, and nothing in the Hedge heard it but this one.”

Okafor wrote on her slate.

Through.

Then, underneath, smaller:

Anywhere.

We sat at the long table until very late that night. All of us who sit there when it’s like this. Okafor and the General. Halvane, on his bench. Bell with a slate of her own. Dinraal. Elin and Goldie and Corin and Thessaly, who make doors, and who hadn’t felt a thing.

“We moved worlds for eleven thousand years,” said Halvane. “From one place to another. We never once found a way to be somewhere without going there first.” He looked at his hands. “Every Aldri engineer who ever lived tried. Every one. It’s the first thing we try when we’re young. It doesn’t work. The space between won’t fold. It’s too big. It won’t agree.”

“It agreed last night,” said Bell.

“Yes,” said Halvane. “Somebody asked it. Or told it.”

Dot was in her corner. “Told,” she said. “This one heard it. It did not agree. It was made to.”

Nobody said anything for a while.

“How long,” said Okafor, “before they do more than stand in a square?”

“They were testing,” said the General. “Nine of them. Dawn. A quiet world, a long way from anything. To see if anyone would notice.” He put his cup down. “We didn’t. Not one of our ears. Not one battery.”

“Dot did,” said Dory.

Everybody looked at the corner.

“Then,” said Okafor, “we need more Dots.”

So that’s what we’re doing.

Dot’s teaching the listeners. Dinraal’s and Asha’s, the ones in every house and every post and every battery in the Hedge. How to hear the grey band. The old one. The one she was built for. How to hear the fold before it happens, the breath before and after.

She can’t teach them all. She’s only one kit. But the kits on Crane’s board, the ones we moved out of the grey into Hearth silver, hundreds of them, can learn it too, she says. They were all built to hear the grey, once. They’ve just forgotten.

So Crane’s kits are going out. To every post. One each. To sit in a corner by the battery, very quietly, and listen.

Asha says it’s the first time since Hearth that she’s been taught something by a machine. She says she doesn’t mind. She says Dot’s very patient. She says Dot only had to tell her nine times.

The Prime spoke on the band the next night. Only once. Only a little.

“The Collective is everywhere,” he said. “It always has been. Now it can go everywhere too.”

That was all.

Corvan turned the band off at Konrad’s table and sat looking at it.

“That’s not even trying to sound like him,” he said.

I went home late. The house was dark.

I looked in, on my way past. I always do now.

Mother on her side by the window. Oona on the other side, with her old blanket. And Rue in the middle. With the leaf. With her fist in Mother’s nightdress, and her other hand open on the sheet, and Oona’s hand open next to it.

A little closer than last night.

Not touching.

Nearly.

Mother says it’s like the sound a kettle makes just before it boils. Not yet. But you can hear it coming.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Eight hundred and ninety-three. Kessry’s said it very sharp, like a chisel, and then said it again, as if it wanted to be sure.

Wren wrote the count. And under it:

Rue: staying.

Sigmund and Tovi: Sorry. (Married.)

Kessry: nine. Through.

Days 12161–12204. Rue.

Rue, orphaned when the Refined took her from between her parents, screams at every hand but Mother’s; Oona slept on the floor as she once had, until Rue patted the bed and the three of them slept together. Sigmund and Tovi married in the orchard with the word Sorry, and Rue let the bird land on her hand. Then nine Refined stood in Kessry’s square at dawn without any door, and Dot alone heard the space fold.