Scarecrow

Miss Pell came up the hill road on a wet morning with Maura on one side of her and Ingrid on the other, and a satchel under her arm that was much too heavy for her.

Miss Pell doesn’t come up the hill road. Not any more. She’s Mother’s age, near enough, and it’s a steep road. She ran the schools on Avalon with no walls. She told me my houses were too perfect and made people uncomfortable. And before any of that, Mother says, she slept in the bed next to Mother’s in Orphan Hall Three, on the forty-first floor, from the time they were six. And she was the one who got up at night, when the matron had gone, and went round the beds with a stub of lamp to make sure everybody was still breathing.

She has a stick now. Maura was carrying her other bag. Ingrid had her arm.

Mother saw them from the porch. She put her cup down and came down the steps very fast.

“Harriet,” she said.

Nobody calls Miss Pell Harriet. Nobody but Mother.

“Dorothy,” said Miss Pell. She was out of breath. “Can I come in? I’ve brought something you’re not going to like.”

Mother sat her at the long table, in the big chair by the stove, the one Rue sleeps in sometimes. Rue was on Mother’s hip. She looked at Miss Pell for a long time. Miss Pell looked back.

“Who’s this?” said Miss Pell.

“Rue,” said Mother. “She’s staying.”

Miss Pell nodded slowly. As if Mother had said exactly what she’d expected.

Then she opened the satchel. And took out a sheet.

Not one. Many. Ingrid helped her. A thick pile of them, very neat, in Miss Pell’s small square schoolteacher’s hand, with columns. She put them down on the long table in front of Mother, one on top of the other, and kept going until the pile was as high as a teapot.

“Every child,” said Miss Pell. “Every child in the Hedge, on every world, who’s lost both parents since the war began. Since Brannock. Since the first white ship came down.” She put her hand flat on the top sheet. “Ingrid helped. And Vesk, with the Herald. And every post, every Lake House, every hollow.” She looked at Mother. “I’ve been counting since Fell. I thought somebody ought to.”

Mother didn’t say anything. She looked at the pile.

“How many?” I said.

Miss Pell didn’t look at me. She was looking at Mother.

“Nineteen thousand,” she said. “And four hundred. And eleven.”

The kitchen went very quiet.

“Most of them are with somebody,” said Miss Pell. “An aunt. A grandmother. A neighbour. A post. The Lake Houses have taken six hundred.” She turned over the top sheet. “But two thousand and nine have nobody. Nobody at all. They’re in the hollows, and the posts, and the ward, and the back rooms of people who’ve already got too many. Sleeping on floors.”

Mother put her hand on Rue’s back. Rue had gone very still.

“Fell,” said Miss Pell. “Brannock. Ammet, the east-dune town. Callow, from the halls. The made, from Isselt, who don’t remember their parents. Carrow, from the squares.” She stopped. “Harl. The children of the people in the street who couldn’t move.”

“Harriet,” said Mother.

“I know,” said Miss Pell. “I know what you’re going to say.”

“What am I going to say?”

Miss Pell looked at her for a long time. Very old. Very tired. With her stick against the table.

“You’re going to say they’re not going to have what we had,” she said. “The forty-first floor. Hall Three. Twenty to a room and only a girl with a stub of lamp to come round.” She put her hand on Mother’s. “You’ve said it every time you’ve ever spoken about the halls. Since we were nine.”

Mother didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then she put Rue down. Very carefully. On the bench beside her. For the first time since Callow. Rue held the apron.

And Mother stood up.

“They’re not going to have what we had,” she said. “Not one of them. Not ever.”

Maura sat down on the bench. So did Ingrid.

“We’ve been talking,” said Maura. “The three of us. On the way up.”

“All the way up,” said Ingrid. “Harriet’s very slow.”

“I’m old,” said Miss Pell. “I’m entitled to be slow.”

“We want a house,” said Maura. “Here. On the hill. Not a hall. A house. Where they can live. And grow up. And have somebody come round with a lamp.” She looked at Mother. “With us. All four of us. Every day.”

Mother looked at the three of them. Maura, who set fire to the sky in a trench. Ingrid, the Hush. Harriet Pell, who came round with a lamp on the forty-first floor.

“Where?” she said.

Ingrid pointed. Out of the kitchen window. At the long slope of grass that runs down from the house on the rise to the west, past the garden wall, to the plane tree where Queenie gets the leaves.

“Next door,” she said.

Genny and Garnet came that afternoon.

They’d heard. Everybody hears things on the hill. They came up the path together, the way they always do, the two of them, side by side, with small Holt and Pell behind them. Genny with her white flower in her hair. Garnet with her sleeves rolled up.

They stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the pile of sheets on the long table.

“Mum,” said Genny. “We’d like to help.”

“Both of us,” said Garnet.

“We had you,” said Genny. “Always. Whatever else there wasn’t. We always had you.” She looked at the pile. “None of these have anybody.”

Mother looked at them for a long time. Her girls. My little sisters, the twins. Who learned to fly from me, and became the Scarecrow queen’s sisters, and had children of their own.

“Then come in, loves,” said Mother. “There’s a lot to do.”

Six of them. Mother and Miss Pell and Maura and Ingrid. Genny and Garnet.

They sat at the long table until midnight. With the sheets. Going through every name.

I built the house.

They asked me. Mother did. She came out onto the porch at midnight when the others had gone and sat down on the step below me.

“Lucas,” she said. “I’d like you to build them a house.”

“Of course.”

“Not like you build things,” said Mother. “Not perfect. Harriet was right about that, years ago. Perfect houses make people frightened to touch anything.” She looked at the slope. “I want them to be able to touch everything. Climb on everything. Break things. Draw on the walls.” She stopped. “We weren’t allowed to touch anything in the halls. There were rules about the walls. You’d get the strap for a mark on the wall.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Make it a place they’d want to be,” said Mother. “If they had any choice at all. Make it the place they’d choose.”

So I asked the children.

Not ours. Not first. The ones on the sheets. Miss Pell and Ingrid went round the posts and the hollows and the Lake Houses with a slate each, and they asked every child with nobody one question.

If you could have anything in a house, what would it be?

Two thousand and nine answers.

I read every one. On the porch. Over nine nights. Dory read them with me. Some of them made us laugh. Some of them we had to stop and go for a walk.

A door that locks from the inside.

A window I can see the sky from in bed.

My own cup.

A room where nobody shouts.

Somewhere to put my mum’s things.

A dog.

A room you can jump in without anyone telling you to stop.

That one came up nine hundred times.

I built it in a month. On the slope west of the garden wall. With Rory and Trevor and Kwame and the Ground, and every child on the hill who wanted to help, which was all of them.

It isn’t one house. It’s nine. Nine long low houses round a green, the way Thera’s built, with covered walks between them so you can go from one to another in the rain without getting wet. Each with a kitchen. Each with a long table. Each with a grandmother.

Every bedroom has a window you can see the sky from in bed. I made sure. I lay down in every bed myself and looked.

Every door locks from the inside. And has a little window at the bottom where somebody can slide a cup of tea through without opening it.

Every child has their own cup. Kiln made them. Two thousand and nine, every one different, every one with a name painted on the bottom.

There’s a room in every house where nobody shouts. Toby made them. Lined with Orsk wool, like the wool room at the Lake House. Very warm. Very quiet. With a window and a seat.

There’s a cupboard in every bedroom with a lock. For your mum’s things. Only you have the key.

There are four dogs. Ferro Hale found them. From a litter on Kiln. They belong to everybody and sleep wherever they like. There are rules about that, which the dogs ignore.

And in the middle, on the green, the thing nine hundred of them asked for.

It’s a room you can jump in.

I made the whole floor out of something that wants to send you back up. Asked it. Very carefully, so it would be gentle with the little ones and very enthusiastic with the big ones. Wall to wall. And then I made the walls do it too, the lower half, so if you go sideways you come back. And the ceiling’s very high, and painted with the sky, and there’s a net at the top that Hana holds from wherever she is so nobody goes through.

There’s no rule in the jumping room. Not one. Miss Pell wanted one. She said children need rules. Mother said not in that room. They argued for an hour. Mother won.

And outside, round it, a playground. Climbing frames made of Hyrrani ridge-wood that Kyria’s people sent. Swings that go higher than they should, that Risa’s people asked the air under. A slide that goes down into the little river Kwame brought through, so you land in water. Rope bridges between the trees that the Kasrai tied. A wall at the end of the green that’s for drawing on, with chalk, every colour, and the drawings stay until it rains, and then you do new ones.

Wren painted a sign for the gate. Mother asked her to. She thought about it for a week.

It says, in her careful hand:

Next Door.

They came on the first morning of the cold season. Two thousand and nine. Through the Arch Hall, in a long line, holding hands, with bags and soft ones and nothing.

Mother was at the gate. With Rue on her hip. Miss Pell next to her, very straight, with her stick. Maura and Ingrid and Genny and Garnet. And a grandmother at every one of the nine doors.

The children came up the hill road in their line. Slowly. Looking at everything.

Then they got to the gate. And saw the green. And the houses. And the swings, and the slide into the river, and the drawing wall.

And the jumping room, in the middle, with its doors open.

Nobody moved.

Then a very small boy at the front of the line, from Fell, about five, let go of the hand he was holding. And walked through the gate. On his own. Across the green. Into the jumping room.

He stood in the middle of the floor. It moved very slightly under him.

He bent his knees.

And jumped.

Mother says it was the loudest sound she’s ever heard a crowd of children make. Louder than the Hazy Field. Two thousand of them, all at once, through the gate, across the green, into the jumping room, shrieking.

Miss Pell stood at the gate with her stick and watched them go. She’d gone very white.

“They’re running,” she said. “Dorothy. They’re running. On the grass.”

“Yes, Harriet.”

“Nobody told them they could.”

“No,” said Mother. “Nobody had to.”

Miss Pell sat down on the bench by the gate very suddenly. Like Maelis Orr in the film. And put her hand over her mouth.

She sat there all morning. Watching them run.

Rue watched too. From Mother’s hip. At the gate. She didn’t go in. But at about noon she held out the stone horse, at arm’s length, towards the jumping room. Up. So it could see. And kept it there until her arm got tired.

Mother says it’s the first time she’s ever seen Rue show the horse something that wasn’t a person.

They’re everybody’s now. That’s the thing about Next Door. It’s not separate. It never was.

The Next Door children come to the long table. Not all of them. There isn’t room. But a different nine every night, Mother decides who, and they sit on the benches with my children and eat Mother’s bread and argue. They go to Miss Pell’s school with everybody else. They come to the north-field school on Rory’s long bench, the ones who’ve started to do things, and learn the periodic table with my children.

They go to Maura and Rory’s, where Rory has made each of them a drawer, every one, two thousand and nine drawers, labelled, in the long shed behind the house. It took him a season. He planed every one. Maura feeds whoever turns up, which is a lot of them, and burns the fried things, and nobody minds.

They go to Ingrid and Konrad’s. Konrad has made a sheet. Of course he has. Two thousand and nine names, with birthdays. He sends round a card to every one. Ingrid takes the ones who can fly up very high above the north field at dusk and shows them the stars.

They go to the Lake House when they need to. Some of them do things. A great many of them, one in forty. The fire children go to Rory. The sound children go to Toby. Isla, from the fire room, has started bringing three Next Door girls to the fire room on Tuesdays. Rory, the younger one, helps them put it out.

Imre and Quenby helped find families.

Not for all of them. Some of them want to stay at Next Door. Some of them have found their families already, a grandmother at the end of a house they’ve decided is theirs. But some of them want a home. A real one. With their own door.

Imre printed their names in the Herald. Not all at once. Nine a day, on the back, next to her drawing, with one thing each child wanted Imre to say about them. Quenby ran a page every month. Next Door: Who’d Like to Come Home?

The letters came. Thousands. From every world in the Hedge. From the edge worlds of the Reach, under the rabbits. From Thrane, where Saelle read the page on the band.

Mother and Miss Pell read every letter. At the long table. With Genny and Garnet. Every one. They went to every house that wrote. In person. With the pot.

Nine hundred children have gone home since the first morning. To Kiln and Hyrran and Ister and Kessry and Caul. To Brannock, where Hesper Daine took two. To Ammet, even with the Soon coming, where Saffa Rennick took three and said they’d go wherever Ammet went.

They come back for Sunday. Most of them. To jump.

There’s a little boy at Next Door called Ennis.

He’s six. From Varrel, from the hall, where Trevor sat with fifty-two people. His mother was one of the fifty-two. He was in the next room, Dory thinks, on a blanket, not rooted yet, and the Standing found him when they came down the stairs.

He doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t jump. He watches the jumping room from the doorway with his hands behind his back.

And on the second week, Okafor came to Next Door.

She came to see the sheet. Miss Pell’s sheet. Every name. She stood at the gate with her own slate under her arm, in her plain grey coat, very straight, with her hands behind her back, and looked at the green for a long time.

Ennis saw her.

He follows her now.

Every time she comes. Which is more and more often. He stands a little way behind her. Very straight. With his hands behind his back. Exactly like her. He doesn’t say anything. He just stands there.

Rory made him a slate. A small one. With a piece of chalk on a string. Ennis carries it everywhere. Under his arm. Like hers.

Miss Pell says he writes one word on it every morning. Very carefully. And then rubs it out at night.

Nobody knows what the words are. He won’t show anybody.

Except Okafor.

I was at the gate the day she found out. She’d been at Next Door all afternoon with Miss Pell, going through the sheet, and Ennis had been standing behind her the whole time, very straight, hands behind his back, slate under his arm.

When she turned to go, he held the slate up.

Not out. Up. So she could see it. The way Rue holds up the horse.

Okafor looked at it.

She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she took her own slate out from under her arm. And turned it round. So he could see that.

I couldn’t see either of them. I didn’t try.

Ennis looked at Okafor’s slate for a long time.

Then he nodded. Once. Very seriously.

And Okafor nodded back. And went down the hill road.

I asked her that night. At the board. I shouldn’t have.

“What did his say?”

Okafor didn’t look up.

“Mine,” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“He’s been writing it every morning,” said Okafor. “Since he came. He doesn’t know what it means. He just saw it on my slate the first day. Under Varrel.” She put the chalk down. “He’s six. He thinks it’s what you write when something’s yours to look after.”

“What did yours say?”

Okafor looked at me for a long time.

“Ennis,” she said.

Gilgamesh and Hesper Daine have started spending their free time together.

Nobody knows how it started. Gilgamesh doesn’t say. Hesper Daine doesn’t say anything about anything. But they sit together on the glass above Fell in the evenings, when he’s teaching at the Wall, on the rock where she sat next to him the morning after Brannock while Halloway set his arm. They don’t talk, Varra says. They sit. He gives her bread. She doesn’t eat it. She keeps it.

And when he deploys, she goes.

The first time, Okafor didn’t know until they were already through the door. A Hungry swarm on a moon off Kiln. The Standing went. Gilgamesh at the front. And behind him, in a coat with no rank on it, with her cable over her shoulder, Hesper Daine.

Okafor stood at the board and watched the post’s lights and said nothing.

When they came back, Gilgamesh had a long cut across his back. Hesper Daine had green all down one side and her cable wrapped round her fist. She’d swung a mining charge on the end of it into the mouth of a Hungry that had Gilgamesh pinned. The same thing she did to the white ship on Brannock.

Okafor looked at her for a long time.

“You’re not in the Standing,” she said.

“No,” said Hesper Daine.

“Do you want to be?”

Hesper Daine looked at Gilgamesh. He was sitting on the bench having his back stitched by Abena, very still, with his face perfectly calm. He didn’t look at her. But his hand moved, very slightly, on his knee.

“No,” said Hesper Daine. “I just want to go where he goes.”

Okafor wrote something on her slate. She didn’t show anybody. But the next time the Standing deployed, there was a coat at the arch with Hesper Daine’s name on it. No rank. Just her name. And a pocket on the side the right size for a cable.

And the Drenn queen.

They’re afraid of her now. The Refined. The made. The grey ones, if grey ones can be afraid. Every Collective soldier on every world. Ferro Hale says the Collective’s soldiers have a name for her on their bands. Dot heard it. It doesn’t translate well.

It means the one who was asked.

She was hurt two months ago. On a world called Tolley’s Mere, on the second arm, where the Refined came for a queen in a lake. A small queen, young, very quiet. The marsh queen’s cousin. The Drenn queen heard her call and came through Elin’s door with her young before Okafor could say anything. The way she always does now.

There were gifted Refined there. Three of them. With stolen gifts. One of them could cut. Not with a blade. With a look.

The Drenn queen stood between him and the small queen in the lake.

He cut her. Across the middle. Deep. Through the bark of her. Dory felt it from Avalon.

The Drenn queen didn’t move. She stood in front of the small queen in the lake with the cut across her, and took the next one too, and the one after that. And her young went through the three Refined from nine sides at once and took their collars and their gifts, and the small queen in the lake was safe.

And then the Drenn queen walked into the forest at the edge of Tolley’s Mere. On her own. Very slowly. Leaving a trail of something that wasn’t blood and wasn’t silver.

And disappeared.

Nobody could find her. Not Dory. Not Dot. Not her young. Her young came home through Elin’s door without her and stood in the garden in rows among the beans for three days and three nights, very still, and wouldn’t move, and nobody could get them to.

The Scarecrow queen hummed under the garden the whole time. Very low. Without stopping.

On the third night, Dory sat up in bed.

“She’s coming back,” she said.

She came up the hill road at dawn.

Not the way she went. Different.

She was bigger. Not much. But taller, and longer, and darker, the bark gone almost black, very smooth, catching the light. The four arms with their blades. And then, as she came up the hill road, two more. Unfolding from her sides. Then folding away again, so you weren’t sure you’d seen them.

And a tail. She’d never had a tail. Long, and thin, and jointed, going down behind her on the road, and along the whole length of it, very fine, very sharp, a row of blades.

She stopped at the end of the garden. Her young came out of the beans and went to her. All nine hundred. And then stopped. And stood very still. Looking at her.

She looked down at Mother on the step.

I molted, she said. Her voice was the same. High and clear. Wind across the top of a bottle. In the forest. On Tolley’s Mere. The cut opened me. And I let it.

Mother looked at her for a long time.

“Are you all right, love?”

Yes, said the Drenn queen. I’m better.

She moved. I didn’t see her do it. Nobody did. One moment she was at the end of the garden and the next she was by the plane tree by the wall, forty yards off, and then back. Without a sound. The beans didn’t move.

And then she wasn’t there.

Not gone. There. Exactly where she’d been. But you couldn’t see her. You could feel her, the way you feel somebody standing next to you in the dark. But your eyes went straight through her to the north field.

Then she was there again.

The Sorn made me a keeper, she said. With their voice in me. They taught me where things come apart. I kept it. I never cut anything I wasn’t asked to. She looked at her young. But I was only ever what they’d made. I never chose a shape.

She folded her arms. All six. The tail curled round behind her.

This one I chose, she said.

Her young changed too. Over the next month. One at a time. They went into the north field in the evenings, nine at a time, into the long grass, and came out in the morning darker and longer and quicker. Their two blades became four. They learned to go unseen, a little, the way she does. Not for long. But long enough.

And they learned something else. Something she hadn’t. Something that’s theirs.

They can carry.

Not lift. Carry. A young can pick up a child, or an old woman, or a wounded Kasrai in a dissolving suit, and go through a battle with them, unseen, faster than anything can follow, and put them down on the far side of a door before anyone knows they’re gone.

They went into the Hungry swarm on Kiln’s moon behind the Standing, nine hundred of them, unseen. They came out with two hundred and eleven people. Miners. Children. The ones at the edges, the ones the Standing couldn’t reach.

They didn’t kill anything. They didn’t have to. They just took people away from where the teeth were.

Halloway says they’re the best rescue squad in the Hedge. She says she’s never seen anything like it. She says a Drenn young can get a child out of a burning hollow faster than Corin can open a door to it.

Okafor went to the garden. With her slate.

She stood in front of the Drenn queen among the beans. Very small. Very straight. The queen bent her head down. Down and down.

“You’ve never had a rank,” said Okafor.

No.

“You’ve never asked for one.”

No.

“I’m giving you one anyway,” said Okafor. “It makes people listen faster.” She turned the slate round. “Holder.”

The Drenn queen looked at the word for a long time.

There are six Holders, she said.

“There are seven now,” said Okafor. “Gilgamesh holds the Standing. Alexander the Line. Caesar the Wall. Aramaeis is my second. Arcturus the Wings. Dinraal the edges.” She looked up. “You hold the ones who need carrying.”

Then she turned to the young. Nine of them, at the front, the oldest, who’d stood in the garden for three days and three nights without moving.

“And you,” she said. “Watch.”

The nine young went very still. Then all nine hundred did.

The Drenn queen bent her head lower.

They have never been given anything, she said. By anyone. Not even names.

“Then they’d better choose some,” said Okafor. “I’ll need to write them down.”

She went back down the hill road.

The Drenn queen stood in the garden for a long time. The Scarecrow queen hummed under her. Mother came out with a cup and put it on the garden wall, for nobody, and went back in.

She’s not the only one.

The queens stopped being gentle. I wrote that down after Hask. It’s truer now.

The heavy queen broke a mountain on a world called Oster in the first arm. Under a white ship. The whole mountain. She asked it to stop being one, and it did, and the ship went down with it. The wind queen of Skara Reach has been to four worlds, Ingrid says, in the weather, and on every one the Refined’s ships came down upside down on the nearest high place. The queen of Hask sends her ground with the Drenn young, a little in each, so wherever they put somebody down the earth goes soft under them.

And two others have come.

The Kethri came back first.

I remember the Kethri. A queen with feathers, because the silver on their world grew into feathers to match the cold high air. When we found them, under the Sorn, there were very few of them left.

There are a great many now. Their queen has been singing for twenty years. Halloway says they’ve had more children in twenty years than in the four hundred before. The silver likes the song.

They came through the arch on the red glass in the spring. Nine thousand of them. Tall and feathered and very quiet, with their long spears and their wings folded. Their First stood in front of the Table.

“We are not asking for anything,” she said. “We are offering.” She looked round the rings. “You came for us when there were nine hundred of us left. There are ninety thousand now.”

The Caddi grandmother said yes before she’d finished offering.

And the light-benders.

I remember them too. From a long time ago. A people who can take light and bend it round themselves, so you see them in one place when they’re in another. When the Sorn had them there were very few, and they’d nearly forgotten how.

They went home, after. To their own world, which has two suns. They’ve been bending the light of two suns ever since.

They came through the arch in the summer. Nobody saw them come. That’s the thing about the light-benders. You see them about three breaths after they’ve arrived. They were standing in the Arch Hall in a long line, very still, in coats that weren’t quite any colour, smiling.

Ten thousand of them.

Okafor looked at them for a long time.

“Can you teach the Standing?” she said. “To be seen where they’re not?”

The light-benders’ First, a small woman who was standing slightly to the left of where she seemed to be, tilted her head.

“We can try,” she said. “But it’s very hard. You have to want to be somewhere else.” She looked at Okafor. “Most people don’t.”

Okafor almost smiled.

“Most of mine,” she said, “don’t want to be anywhere else at all.”

The leagues, because Toby will ask:

The Hill lost. To Caul’s Haze. In the eleventh inning. Sigmund threw a hundred and four times and the Haze’s last batter climbed the fourth stile on the hundred and fifth, and Sigmund sat down on the mound and put his face in his hands, and Tovi came down out of the stand and sat down on the mound next to him and ate an apple. The Hill are second now. They’ll play the Haze again before the cold.

In Ring, the Commonhold Gales have a new player. A girl from Next Door. Eleven. From the east-dune town on Ammet. She can’t do anything. No gift at all. She’s just very fast and very angry, and Kesh says she’s the best passer she’s ever played with.

In Ridge, Kyrie’s team lost three in a row. Kyrie says it doesn’t matter. Kyria says it does. Okafor asked for the scores. All three.

In the Long Way, the Kethri have entered a team. They don’t use a ship. They fly. The Senate’s subcommittee is still deciding whether that’s allowed. Toby says the crowd breathed in when they went over, so he’s inclined to say yes.

And in the Run, Liam’s racer is finished. He took it out on the eastern plain at dawn for the first time last week. It went very fast. It caught fire at the second tower. Liam put it out.

Anya says the baby’s going to win.

The stars said Not yet this morning. Nine hundred and eighty-four. One of them, Wren says, from a world with two suns, said it twice, slightly to the left of where it should have been.

Ammet’s said Soon.

Wren wrote the count. And under it:

Next Door: two thousand and nine. (Nine hundred home.)

Ennis: Mine.

Holder: seven.

Days 12491–12688. Next Door.

Miss Pell brought Mother the count of the war’s orphans, and Mother vowed they’d never have what the two of them had in the halls; with Maura, Ingrid, Genny and Garnet she founded Next Door, nine houses and a jumping room I built from the children’s own wishes, and Imre and Quenby helped find homes. Ennis followed Okafor with his own slate. Hesper Daine went where Gilgamesh went, and the Drenn queen came back from her molt in a shape she chose, and Okafor made her the seventh Holder. The Kethri and the light-benders came to fight beside us.