Chapter 104 The Teeming

They came in from every side at once.

That's the first thing I want to get right, because when I've told it since, people always picture them coming from one direction. Over the rim, like a wave. One front. Something you could turn and face.

It wasn't like that.

It was a ring. Three hundred and eighty of them, three point one kilometers out, all the way round. And when the sun touched them, all of them moved at the same moment, inward, at the same speed, so that the ring didn't break. It just got smaller.

Like a hand closing.

"Three thousand meters," said Dot, beside me on the wall. "All returns. Closing."

I stood on the top of the north wall, by the iron gates, with my hands flat on the warm sandstone facing, and looked north.

The green was moving.

Not rippling. Moving. A long line of fronds bending inward, toward the red glass, all along the edge, as far as I could see east and west. And under the fronds, low, something dark, coming through them. Not pushing them aside. Going under them, the way water goes under a door.

"Two thousand nine hundred."

They came out of the green onto the red glass.

And crossed my line.

I saw them.

All at once. The way I saw everything inside the line. Not their shapes, the way you see with your eyes. Their insides. Every one of them that came out of the green within the curve of what I could see, north of the canyon. Forty of them. Sixty. The front of the ring.

Chitin.

That was the first thing. Plates. Overlapping, like a beetle's back, but bigger, the size of my hand, each one, and dark red, almost black, the color of old blood, so that against the red glass they were almost invisible. Low to the ground. Long. Each one as long as I was tall, and as wide as a table, and no higher than my knee.

Legs.

Too many. I counted, because I count everything. Fourteen. Seven a side. Jointed in three places, the joints thick and the ends thin and hooked, so that they didn't walk across the glass so much as pour across it, every leg moving a little after the one in front, a long ripple from front to back.

No eyes. No mouth I could see. At the front, where a head should have been, a blunt wedge of thicker plate, and under it, folded tight against the belly, two long arms that ended in something like a blade and something like a hand at the same time.

And inside them.

I'd thought, I think, that they'd be fog.

I'd half hoped it. Fog would have made sense. Fog would have meant they were made of the same thing as the spine, and the core, and the silver in Mother's vial. Fog would have meant I can't see into this, and I'd have known where I stood.

They weren't fog.

They were a page. Every one of them. Clear, the way the plants had been clear. Muscle, and a long gut running from front to back, and something like a heart, three of them actually, spaced along the body. Nerves.

And on the nerves, silver.

Grains. The same grains. Lined up along the threads like beads on a string. Awake. Busy. The way they'd been in the fronds at the edge of the green, passing warmth from one leaf to the next.

But in the fronds, the grains had passed things along the inside of one plant.

In these, they were passing things out.

I could see it. A flicker of something, running along the nerve threads, from the back of each one to the front, to the wedge of plate where the head should have been. And then out. Through the plate. Into the air. To the next one, fourteen point two meters away. Which took it, and passed it on. And the next. All the way along the line. All the way round the ring.

They weren't three hundred and eighty animals.

They were one.

"Two thousand meters," said Dot.

"They're talking," I said.

"Query."

"The silver. In their nerves. It's passing something from one to the next. The whole ring. They're all one thing." My voice sounded strange. Very calm. "Like the hands. The hands do what you think."

The little rivers ran.

"This unit's hands have no silver in them," said Dot.

"No. But it's the same idea."

"Fifteen hundred meters."

I had to decide.

I'd known since four in the morning that I'd have to. Since the ring closed. I'd stood on the wall in the dark for two hours, waiting for the sun, and I'd known.

I'd never killed anything.

Not anything that mattered. Not anything that looked at you. I'd taken apart a hill once, when I was very angry. I'd turned a fuel cloud into nothing in the exercise and nearly torn my own head in half doing it. I'd stood in the locker room in the cave, beaten bloody, with Liam's burning wrists in my hands, and told him why I'd closed my eyes and let them. Something small. Something nobody would even see. In their chest.

I'd never done it. I'd shut my eyes so I wouldn't.

And now there were three hundred and eighty of something, coming across the glass toward my town, toward seventy-four little round windows with lamps in them in case, and Dot, and Dot's hands, and the five beds she'd counted.

And I could see inside every one of them that crossed my line.

And everything I could see, I could change.

"One thousand meters," said Dot.

They were close enough now to see the ordinary way. A long dark line coming across the red glass, low, rippling, every leg moving a little after the one in front. Silent. That was the worst of it. No sound at all. Not a click, not a scrape. Three hundred and eighty of them, and the only thing I could hear was the wind along the rim and the purr of the air plants in the walls behind me.

"Eight hundred."

I thought about Okafor. On her step. If an order would make the count smaller, don't follow it. The mission is the people standing on the land.

I thought about Mother. I want you to do the right thing anyway.

I thought about what the right thing was, with something you didn't understand coming toward everyone you were meant to keep alive, and no time left to understand it.

"Six hundred."

The front of the line lifted.

All of them. All at once. The wedges of plate where the heads should have been came up off the glass, a hand's width, and the two long arms unfolded from under each belly, slowly, the blades catching the sun.

And they began to run.

I turned them to salt.

I don't want to describe it the way it felt. I'll describe it the way it was.

A body is mostly water, and the rest is a long list of other things. Carbon, a great deal of it. Nitrogen. Calcium, in the chitin. Phosphorus. Iron, in whatever they had for blood. Sodium and chlorine already, in small amounts, in every cell, the way there's salt in us.

Salt is simple. Sodium and chlorine. Eleven protons and seventeen. Two numbers. You can hold it in your head all at once, the whole shape of it, a little cube of a crystal, the same all the way down.

I held it in my head.

And I looked at the front of the line, the sixty of them inside my curve, running, with their blades out and their wedges up, and I asked every part of them to be that.

They stopped.

All sixty. Mid-stride. Not falling. Stopping, the way a sentence stops when the person saying it has been interrupted. Every leg still in the place it had been. Every blade still raised.

White.

From the front backward. The dark red plates going pale, then white, then gray-white, the color of the salt pans out past the highway at home, where nothing grew. Crystals. Little cubes, catching the sun, all the way down. All the way through. Every nerve. Every grain of silver on every nerve.

For one moment they stood there. Sixty white shapes on the red glass, in the morning light, perfect, every plate and joint and hooked foot exactly as it had been.

Then the wind came along the rim.

And they fell apart.

Not broke. Fell. The way a sandcastle falls when the tide reaches it. All at once, and softly, into long white heaps on the red glass, and the wind took the tops of the heaps and blew them north, back toward the green, in thin pale streamers, like smoke.

I felt the weight come down behind my eyes.

Not the needles. Not the tearing. Just weight. A great flat hand pressing on the front of my head from the inside, harder than it ever had. My nose was bleeding. I hadn't felt it start. My knees had gone.

I was on them, on the top of the wall, with my hands still flat on the sandstone, holding myself up.

"Sixty-one returns ceased," said Dot. Her voice was very quiet. "Three hundred and nineteen remaining."

The rest of the ring stopped.

All of it. At once. Everywhere. North and east and south and west. Three hundred and nineteen of them, in a ring round the town, eight hundred meters out, stopped dead on the red glass in the same instant, the way the sixty had stopped. But not white. Still red. Still alive.

Still.

Listening, I thought.

The silver in the ones I could see, inside my curve, east and west of the white heaps, was busy. Very busy. The flicker running from back to front, faster than before, out through the wedge plates, to the next, and the next. All the way round.

Telling each other.

"Query," said Dot. "The operator is bleeding."

"I know."

"The operator's heart rate is one hundred and fifty-eight."

"I know."

"Query. Is the operator able to do that again?"

I knelt on the wall and looked at the white heaps. At the salt streaming north in the wind.

"Yes," I said.

I didn't know if it was true.

They didn't run again.

When they moved, it was slowly. All of them. The three hundred and nineteen. And not inward.

Outward.

Not all the way. Not back to three kilometers. Just a little. And sideways. Spreading. The ring getting wider, but thinner. The fourteen point two meters between them getting longer. Twenty meters. Thirty. Fifty.

"Returns redistributing," said Dot. "Spacing increasing. Ring radius, nine hundred meters. Spacing, sixty meters." A pause. "Seventy."

I watched them do it. Inside my curve, to the north, the ones I could see, moving apart. Further and further, until there were only a dozen of them in the whole stretch of glass that had held sixty. And then fewer.

I understood what they were doing about three seconds before Dot said it.

"Query," said Dot. "Is the operator able to see the whole ring at once?"

I wasn't.

I'd never thought about it. I'd never had to. Everything I'd ever needed to look at had been in front of me. A cup. A wall. Hana's head, on a table. I looked the way you look with your eyes: at something. In a direction. And everything in that direction, inside my curve, was a page.

But the curve was in front of me. Not all round me.

I could turn. I could look north, and then east, and then south. But I couldn't look north and south at the same time, any more than you can. And it was a long way round a ring nine hundred meters across.

They'd stopped at the moment I'd turned the sixty to salt. And they'd watched. Three hundred and nineteen of them, passing it round, back to front, back to front. There. That one. He did it there. In front of him. Only there.

And now they were spreading out so that wherever I looked, there'd only be a few.

And all the rest of them would be behind me.

"South," said Dot. "Returns closing. South group. Twenty returns. Five hundred meters."

I turned. On my knees on the wall, I turned, and looked south, across the canyon, over the terraces and the seventy-four little round windows, to the far rim.

They were coming down the south wall.

Not running. Climbing. Twenty of them, spread wide, fifty meters apart, coming down the face of the canyon wall above the top terrace the way Dot had climbed the north wall. Hooked feet finding every ledge. Blades folded tight.

Inside my curve.

I held the salt in my head and asked them.

White.

Twenty white shapes on the red rock, above the top terrace. And then the wind, and the white streaming off the canyon wall like snow off a roof.

"North," said Dot. "Thirty returns. Four hundred meters."

I turned back.

I don't know how long it went on.

Dot said, afterward, forty-one minutes. It felt like a day. It felt like a minute. North, and then east, and then south again, and then west, where the tower was, where three of them had got right up to the north leg and were pulling at the iron with their hooked feet before I saw them. And every time I turned, there were a few. Spread wide. Coming in. And every time I looked at them, they stopped, and went white, and fell.

And every time, while I was looking, the ones behind me came closer.

They didn't charge. They never charged again, after the first time. They came in slowly, from wherever I wasn't looking. And when I turned, the ones I'd turned away from stopped coming. Just stopped. Waited. As if they knew I'd be back.

They were learning how fast I could turn.

One of them reached the wall.

East side. While I was looking west, at the tower. Dot said "east" and I turned, and it was already there. Up on the wall, ten meters from me, on top of the sandstone facing, its fourteen legs gripping the edge and its wedge plate lifted and its two long arms unfolded, blades out.

And one of Dot's hands was in front of it.

A small one. One of the first six. The size of a dog. Six legs, two arms, no voice. Standing on the top of the wall between me and the thing, the way it had stood in a row on the red glass the first morning, waiting to be told what to do.

The thing's blade came down.

I turned it to salt before the blade finished falling.

But not before it reached the hand.

The hand came apart. Not cleanly. The blade went through the middle of it, where its little core was, a hard gray nub of fused metal the size of a walnut, and the hand fell in two pieces onto the top of the wall and lay there, its six legs still moving, very slightly. And then not moving.

And then the salt fell on it, white, in a soft heap, and the wind took the top of the heap and blew it out over the canyon.

"Hand four," said Dot.

That was all. Hand four. In her clear level voice. Not-quite-anybody's.

But the little rivers in her had stopped. All of them. I could see it, across the canyon, where she stood at the foot of the north wall with her twenty hands, nineteen now, round her. Everything inside her that was always moving, always running back to the core and out and back. Stopped.

For three seconds.

Then started again.

"Query," said Dot. "North. Eleven returns."

I turned north.

At six thirty-two in the morning, they went.

All of them. All that were left. The same way they'd done everything: at once. As if somebody had said a word. They stopped where they were, wherever they were, east and west and north and south, and then they turned, and went outward, in a ring, at the same speed, so that the ring didn't break. It just got bigger.

Like a hand opening.

Past nine hundred meters. Past two kilometers. Past my line. Past three point one, where they'd sat in the dark for two nights, measuring me.

Past four. Past the end of Dot's sensors.

Gone.

I knelt on the wall for a long time.

The sun was well up. The canyon was full of light. The tower caught it at the top, the copper mast, the way it did every morning. The terraces caught it. Seventy-four little round windows.

And all round the town, in a great ragged ring on the red glass, and on the canyon walls, and against the north leg of the tower, and on the top of the wall ten meters from me, the salt.

Long white heaps. Dozens of them. The wind taking the tops off them, very gently, and blowing them north, toward the green, in thin pale streamers.

I counted.

I didn't mean to. I count everything.

"Query," said Dot.

She'd come up the wall. I hadn't heard her. She stood beside me on the top of it, on her six legs, with her grille turned toward me and her fifth arm a little forward of the others. Nineteen hands on the wall behind her, very still.

"The operator's nose is still bleeding."

"I know."

"The operator's heart rate is one hundred and twelve."

"I know."

"The operator is making a sound."

I put my hand over my face.

"I'm not laughing," I said.

"No," said Dot. "This unit did not think so."

She didn't ask anything else for a long time. She just stood there, beside me, on the wall, in the sun, with the salt blowing past us both.

Then she said, very quietly: "Hand four was not a number."

I took my hand away from my face.

"This unit assigned it a number," said Dot. "For counting. Hands one through twenty." A pause. "This unit did not assign it a designation. This unit did not think it needed one. It did what this unit thought. It did not think itself."

The little rivers ran back to the core and out and back.

"This unit finds it would have liked to have given it one," said Dot. "Query. Is that a reading the operator recognizes?"

I looked at the heap of salt on the top of the wall, ten meters away. At the two pieces of gray metal under it, and the six small legs, very still.

"Yes," I said. "I recognize it."

"Logged," said Dot.

"Designation required," said Dot, a little later. "For logging. The returns. This unit has been calling them returns." A pause. "That is a number. Not a designation."

I looked out at the red glass, at the salt. At the green beyond it, two miles off, where they'd gone. Rippling, very faintly, against the wind.

I thought about the way they'd come. Not one front. Everywhere. All at once. The whole ring moving like one body, every leg a little after the one in front, three hundred and eighty of them passing one thought round and round between them until it was one thought. Spreading out to learn me. Coming in from behind.

I thought about Mother. At the kitchen table at home, a long time ago, telling Genny and Garnet about the war, with the cards in her hands. They didn't come at you. They came at everything. All at once. You couldn't count them. That was the worst of it. They teemed.

"The Teeming," I said.

"The Teeming," said Dot. "Logged."

The message came at the next pass.

I'd known one would. Dot had reported it. She'd had to. Operator converted approximately twelve thousand kilograms of organic material to sodium chloride. Output. Accurate.

I was sitting in the doorway of the dome, with a wet cloth on my face, when she read it.

"To Unit four-oh-one-dash-P-one," said Dot. "Operator's engagement noted. Command commends operator's defense of site." A pause. "Operator is requested to retain an intact specimen at the next engagement. Specimen should be preserved without conversion. Report."

I took the cloth off my face.

"Requested," I said.

"That is the word."

"Not what are they. Not are you hurt. Not how many." I looked at the grille. "Retain a specimen."

"Yes."

"At the next engagement."

"Yes," said Dot. A pause. "Query. Did Command know there would be a next engagement?"

I didn't answer.

I didn't need to. She'd asked it the way she asked everything. Because it seemed better to know.

That night I counted from the rim, the way I always did.

Luna. North. A hundred and thirty miles. Walking north.

Seraphina. East. Sixty. Still. Eleven days.

Liam. North-northeast. Fifty. Still. Five days.

Toby. North. High. Still. Fifteen days.

Mother. Genny. Garnet. Miss Pell. Biscuit. Okafor.

Dot.

And then, because I'd started, and because I count everything, I counted the salt. All the heaps. On the glass, on the walls, at the foot of the tower.

Three hundred and eight.

At nine o'clock, I went into the hut at the foot of the tower and sat down in front of Father's radio and put my hand on the dial.

I sat like that for a long time.

Like a lighthouse.

They'd come because of it. I knew that. I'd known since the afternoon before. They'd come because I'd stood on a rock and shouted at the dark every hour, here I am, here I am, and the dark had heard.

And they'd come back. At the next engagement. Command knew it. Command wanted a specimen.

And Liam had been lying still, fifty miles north-northeast, for five days.

I keyed the transmitter.

"Squad Eight," I said. "This is Scarecrow."

Hiss.

Day 312.

Three hundred and eighty. A ring. They closed like a hand.

Fourteen legs. Chitin. Blades. No eyes. Three hearts.

Silver on their nerves. Awake. Passing something from one to the next. They're one thing.

I turned sixty to salt. My first.

Then they spread out. I can only look one way. They learned it in a minute. They came from behind.

41 minutes.

One reached the wall. Hand four.

Dot: "Hand four was not a number. This unit would have liked to have given it one."

The Teeming. Mother's word.

Three hundred and eight heaps of salt.

Command: "Retain an intact specimen at the next engagement."

They knew.

Squad Eight, this is Scarecrow.

I'm not going dark.