Scarecrow

Chapter 113 Holt's Story

Holt told it that night, in the broken dome, with a fire in the middle of the floor and his bad leg out straight and his back against the empty kit.

He didn't tell it the way I'd have told it. In order. From the outside in. He told it the way old soldiers tell things, Mother said once, about Father: sideways, starting in the middle, going back for the bits he'd skipped, stopping for a long time when he got to a name.

I'll write it down the way he told it. As near as I can.

"Okafor trained us," said Holt. "You know that. Six months, in the cave. No sim, then. Just the fields and the dark and her. Thirty-four of us. Twenty first-generation, like me, old soldiers, the ones the Ministry had decided were going to wear out anyway. Fourteen of the young ones. Second generation, the first batch. Not tested. Not finished." He nodded at Wren. "Her lot."

"We were finished," said Wren.

"You were sixteen."

"I was seventeen."

"You were sixteen and you lied on the form," said Holt, "and Okafor knew, and let you, because you were the fastest thing she'd ever seen on the field." He looked at me. "She was. You should've seen her. She could cross the long field before you'd finished deciding to."

Wren didn't say anything. But she didn't argue either.

"They dropped us one at a time," said Holt. "You know that too. Thirty-four zones. Spread out. For maximum coverage." He said it in a voice that wasn't his. Crane's voice, or someone like Crane. "I came down in the north. Foothills. Under the white mountains. F-four. Good rock, good water. My kit built a wall in a week and a plant in two and I sat on the wall in the evening with my boots off and thought, Ezra, you old fool, you've landed on your feet for once."

He laughed. Not much.

"They came on the thirtieth day."

He didn't tell us about the thirtieth day. Not then. He went sideways. He told us about the call-ins instead.

"Every nine days, you sit down in front of your kit and you say still here. And the relay says thank you. And for the first month, that's all it is. Then the Teeming come. And you report it. And the relay says thank you, maintain call-in schedule. And you think, that's odd, but they're far away, they'll send something."

"They didn't," I said.

"They sent you," said Holt.

The fire cracked.

"That's what they send," he said. "That's all they've ever sent. Not help. Not weapons. Not a ship to take us off. More of us. Better suits. Better kits. More cadets." He looked round the dome. At me, at Liam on his frame, at Dot in the gap with her grille turned in. "We're not settlers, boy. We never were. We're how they learn."

Liam said, very quietly, "Sera said that."

"Who's Sera?"

"Seraphina Calder. My sister." Liam's hands were dark on his knees. "She worked it out. From the map. Forty of us, each one next to one of your bases. She said they don't know what happened to you. Or they do and they want to know more. So they put us next to you and see what happens to us."

Holt looked at him for a long time.

"Then your sister's cleverer than the whole Ministry," he said. "And I'd like to meet her."

"She's in a forest," said Liam. "Sulking. A hundred miles east."

"Then I'd like to meet her when she's done sulking."

"The kits fall," said Holt.

He said it plainly. Not to hurt anyone. But Dot was standing in the gap of the south wall, and I saw the little rivers behind her grille stop.

"Not straight away. The first wave of them, you can hold off. A wall's a wall. A kit can make a lot of wall. But they keep coming. And they learn. And sooner or later one of them gets a leg through the grille." He nodded at the empty shell he was leaning on. "That's what they want. Not us, so much. Not at first. The silver. They go for the silver in the kits the way a dog goes for a bone. I've seen them walk straight past a man to get at a kit's core."

"Query," said Dot.

Holt looked up at her. I think he'd forgotten she could talk.

"How long?" said Dot. "Before a kit falls. On average. This unit would like an accurate figure."

Holt was quiet. Then he answered her. Accurately. I'll give him that.

"A year," he said. "Most of them. Mine lasted eleven months. Hers, eight." A pause. "I'm sorry."

The little rivers ran very slowly behind Dot's grille.

"Logged," she said.

I got up. I went over to the gap in the south wall, and stood beside her, and put my hand flat on her gray shell, just under the grille, the way I'd done on the first day when she was a box in the sand.

"Dot," I said. "Those kits had a wall. And a plant. And an operator who could see as far as anybody can see, which isn't very far. And they had Command, saying maintain call-in schedule."

"Yes."

"You've got me," I said. "And Liam. And now you've got Wren and Holt. And you've got a granite cave I know about and a tower I built and four wings and a forge on five meters of iron. And you've got a name." I kept my hand where it was. "You're not falling, Dot. Not in a year. Not ever, if I can help it. I'm telling you that accurately."

The little rivers ran.

"Query," said Dot, very quietly. "Is that a promise?"

I thought about Genny. Witnessed. G. Dask.

"Yes," I said.

"Logged," said Dot. "Witnessed."

Holt watched all of that without saying anything. When I sat down again, he was looking at me in a different way.

"Trevor talked to his rifle," he said. "Did you know that? In the war. Not like a madman. Like a friend. Come on, old girl. One more. Steady now." He shook his head. "We used to laugh at him."

"Did it help?"

"He was the only one of us who never had a jam," said Holt. "So you tell me."

He told the rest of it slowly.

The thirtieth day. Eleven months of wall, and fire, and the kit's hands going one by one. The day the kit went quiet, and he took what he could carry and went up into the rocks, because the rocks were the only place they couldn't follow. Walking south along the ridges, because south was where the others were, according to the map in his head. Living on what the kit had left him and then on what he could find. Flashing every dawn with a scrap of the kit's shell he'd polished on a stone until it shone.

Nobody answered for two months.

"And then one morning," said Holt, "there's a spark. Way off. South. And it's flashing F-eleven, and I sit down on the rock where I am and I cry like a baby. And I'm so busy crying I don't look where I'm putting my feet when I stand up, and I go off the edge of the ridge." He touched his knee. "Forty feet. Onto scree."

"I found him four days later," said Wren. "He'd been flashing F-four, F-four, F-four from the bottom of a gully the whole time. Flat on his back. With his mirror."

"I didn't know what else to say."

"You said it a lot," said Wren. But she was looking at the fire, not at him, and her voice had gone very soft.

"And the others?" I said. "The ones on the line. Why didn't you all come together? Why stay apart?"

Holt and Wren looked at each other.

"Because it's a long way," said Wren simply. "Ridges don't go where you want. Between them, it's the green, and the green's where they are. Tamsin's two hundred kilometers north of here. Corr's further. Ade and Benedikt tried to come south once, in the first summer. They got halfway and lost Benedikt's leg below the knee, and they turned back." She shrugged. "And where would we come to? A cleft with a dead kit at the bottom of it? There's nowhere to come to. There's nowhere that holds."

"There is now," I said.

They both looked at me.

"Seventy-four rooms," I said. "A wall. A granite cave I can find again in my sleep, which is the only place on this planet where nothing can come from behind me. A kit that isn't going to fall." I looked at Holt. "And a boy with Trevor Dask's eyes who can see them coming."

I did his knee the next morning.

He asked me to. Not in so many words. He just sat down against the empty kit after the dawn line, with the sun coming up gold over the wheat, and stretched the bad leg out in front of him, and looked at me.

"Well," he said. "You said I am."

"I did."

"Then be," said Ezra Holt.

Liam gave him the flask first. What was left in it. He held it out across the floor of the dome without a word, and Holt took it and smelled it and looked at Liam over the top of it.

"What in God's name is that?"

"Rule," said Liam. "Something to drink. All five of us. You're not one of the five, but you're close enough, and you're about to need it."

Holt drank.

He made a face. A very big face, on a very big man. Wren, sitting cross-legged by the fire with her knife on her knees, actually laughed. Out loud. Once. Then she put her hand over her mouth as if it had got out without asking.

"Tastes like a pear died in a sock," said Holt.

"That is exactly what I said," said Liam.

I started with the nerve, the way I had with Liam.

The long one, down the back of the knee. I found it in Father's book first, the drawing I knew by heart now, and then I found it in Holt. Under the skin, under the muscle, behind the ruined joint. The long gray cable, running down to the foot.

I looked into it, to ask it to be quieter.

And I stopped.

It wasn't gray.

Not the way Liam's had been. Not the way nerves look, the way I'd learned them in Halloway's ward, plain and pale and wrapped in their soft white sheaths. Holt's nerve was wrapped in silver.

Threaded through the sheath. Fine as hair. All along it, from the knee down to the ankle and up again into the thigh, and when I followed it up, further, into his back, into his spine, it was there too. Everywhere. Every nerve in his body, threaded with silver.

Like Maura's hands.

Like Mother's.

Except that it wasn't.

In Maura, the silver was fog. I'd seen it in her shaking hands, and in Mother, in her chair on the sixtieth floor, a hundred times. Packed into the sheaths of the nerves like wet sand. Dull. Still. Asleep. And all round it, the body fighting. Swelling, and heat, and the nerves misfiring, and the hands shaking so hard they couldn't hold a cup. Every day. Every hour. A war that never stopped, against a guest that never left.

In Holt, the silver was awake.

Bright. Fine. Threaded, not packed. Lying along the nerves the way the silver lay along the stems of the green plants in the canyon, the way it lay in Dot's core, the way it lay in the cables behind my own eyes. Humming. Very faintly. And round it, nothing. No swelling. No heat. No fight.

His body wasn't fighting it.

Yours isn't fighting. Halloway, in the ward, looking at the scans of my optic nerves. Inconclusive.

"Boy," said Holt. "You've gone a funny color."

I sat back on my heels on the floor of the dome.

"Mr. Holt," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. "Did you take the stabilizer? Before you came. The silver. In a spoon, on the first of the month."

The dome went very quiet.

Holt looked at me for a long time.

"Twenty-eight years," he said. "Every first-generation man and woman took it. From the end of the war. They said it'd keep the fire down. Keep us from burning out." He was very still. "How do you know about that?"

"My mother takes it. And Liam's. And thirty-one families." I swallowed. "Her hands shake. Liam's mother's hands shake so hard she can't eat on her own. Mine can't stand up for more than a minute. Is yours—"

I stopped.

Holt held up his hands.

Big hands. Scarred. Brown from the sun, with the knuckles swollen from two years of rock and cold.

Perfectly still.

"They shook," he said quietly. "For twenty years. Not as bad as some. But they shook. In the war you couldn't tell, everyone's hands shook, but after. Holding a cup. Signing my name." He looked at them. "And then I came here. And there wasn't any more of the stuff. Nobody thought to send it down with us. Or nobody bothered. I don't know which."

"What happened?"

"I thought I was dying," said Holt simply. "The first six months. Fevers. Couldn't sleep. Hands like leaves in a gale. Some days I couldn't hold the mirror for the dawn line. I thought, well, Ezra, this is how it goes. They've taken the leash off and the dog's going to die of it." He turned his hands over. "And then, one morning, about the time the kit fell, I woke up and they were still. And they've been still ever since. Steadiest they've been since I was twenty."

"About the time the kit fell," I said slowly. "When you went up into the rocks."

"Yes."

"Through the green. The silver green. The plants that turn."

"Lived in it for nearly a year, before I fell," said Holt. "Slept in it. Ate it, some of it, when I had to. Why?"

I didn't answer him straight away. I couldn't.

I was thinking about the spoon. About flying north to Liam over the green, with the fronds turning toward me the whole way, all of them, mile after mile, the silver in them awake and humming and reaching. Not fighting. Saying hello.

I was thinking about the line I'd written at the tor, in very bad handwriting, with my hands shaking from the hold.

The silver here knows the silver in me. If I could make Mother's hear it too—

Holt's had heard it.

Nobody had made it. Nobody had known to try. A man with sleeping silver in every nerve in his body had walked out of his dead base into a world full of awake silver, and lived in it, and slept in it, and been sick for six months while his body fought the old fight with nothing new to fight it with. And then, somewhere in that year, something in the green had said hello to the silver in his nerves, again and again, every day, every night, the way the fronds had said hello to me.

And it had woken up.

And once it was awake, his body had stopped fighting it. Because there wasn't anything to fight. It wasn't a guest that wouldn't leave anymore. It was just part of him. The way mine was part of me.

"Lucas," said Liam.

He'd sat up on the frame. He was looking at my face. His hands were very still on his knees.

"Lucas. What is it."

I looked at him.

"Your mum," I said. "Maura. And mine. And Toby's. All thirty-one families." I could hardly get the words out. "It's not poison. It was never poison. It's asleep. That's all. It's asleep, and their bodies are fighting it because it's asleep and it won't say what it is. And here—" I put my hand flat on the floor of the dome, on the red rock, as if I could feel the whole green country through it. "Here, it wakes up."

Liam didn't say anything.

"Holt's woke up," I said. "Eighteen months. On Avalon. It woke up and his hands stopped shaking."

Liam put his face in his hands.

He stayed like that for a long time. Wren looked at him, and then at me, and then at Holt, and didn't say anything. Holt was looking at his own hands as if he'd never seen them before.

"Not can't," said Liam, through his fingers. His voice was wrecked.

"Not can't."

"But not yet."

"Not yet," I said. "I can't bring the green home. I can't bring your mum here. Not eleven light-years, not with the Teeming, not with Command." I looked at Holt's still hands. "But now I know what it is. Now I know it can wake. Now I know what waking looks like. I just have to find out how to say hello to it from far away."

"Underline it," said Liam.

"I'm going to underline it so hard I go through the page."

I fixed his knee.

I want to put that down properly, because it took three hours and I nearly didn't finish, and because it was the best work I'd ever done.

I asked the nerve to be quiet, and it was, the awake silver in it humming very softly as if it were listening. I looked into the new break, eighteen months of wrong, and asked it to let go, the way Halloway had written. I looked into the old break under it, thirty years old, and left that alone, because it was Father's, and it was right.

Then I held his foot, the way Mother holds a spoon, and pulled.

Holt didn't make a sound. Not one. He sat with his back against the dead kit and his big still hands flat on the floor and his eyes shut, and the only thing that moved was his jaw.

When it was done, the ends of the big bone sat edge to edge on top of my father's work. Two repairs, one on the other, thirty years apart. Like two people's handwriting on the same page.

"Done," I said.

Holt opened his eyes.

"Will it hold?"

"Thirty years," I said. "At least. It's a family thing."

On the morning of Day 339, the dawn line answered.

Wren went up with her mirror and I went with her in the spoon, and we watched it come in from the high places, ridge after ridge, the way it had the morning before. But this time it wasn't just numbers.

F. 3. T. A. M. S. I. N. C. O. M. I. N. G.

F. 1. 7. C. O. R. R. C. O. M. I. N. G. W. I. T. H. T. A. M. S. I. N.

F. 3. 0. A. D. E. B. E. N. E. D. I. K. T. C. A. N. T. W. A. L. K. F. A. R. C. A. N. Y. O. U. C. O. M. E.

F. 2. 6. O. N. E. H. U. R. T. B. A. D. L. Y. P. L. E. A. S. E.

And from the far north, on the very edge of the white line, slow and broken and very faint:

F. 5. W. H. E. R. E. I. S. H. E.

Wren lowered the mirror and looked at me.

"Well?" she said. "Scarecrow. They're asking you. Not me. You."

I looked at the line of sparks across the gray hills. At the mountains. At the long distances in between, full of the green, full of the Teeming, full of nothing.

I thought about Okafor in the cave. Count all of them. Especially the ones who've gone quiet.

I thought about Luna, on the roof. Lighthouses don't walk.

And I thought: no. They don't. But they can send their light a very long way.

"Give me the mirror," I said.

I sent it slowly. So every ridge could read it. So it would go all the way to the coast and the mountains and wherever else the line went.

T. A. M. S. I. N. C. O. R. R. W. A. L. K. T. O. F. 1. 1. R. I. D. G. E. W. E. W. I. L. L. M. E. E. T. Y. O. U.

F. 3. 0. F. 2. 6. H. O. L. D. I. C. O. M. E. T. O. Y. O. U.

F. 5. I. A. M. C. O. M. I. N. G. N. O. R. T. H.

And then, last, to all of them, because Okafor had said it to us, and because somebody should have said it to them two years ago:

C. O. U. N. T. E. V. E. R. Y. D. A. W. N. S. O. I. K. N. O. W.

Day 337–339.

Holt's story. Okafor trained 34: 20 first-generation, 14 second. Wren lied on the form. She was 16.

Dropped one at a time. F-4, north. Teeming on Day 30. "They sent you. That's what they send. Not help. More of us." "We're how they learn." (Sera said that.)

Kits fall in about a year. They go for the silver. Dot asked for an accurate figure. Holt gave it.

I promised Dot she won't fall. "Witnessed."

Holt walked south on the ridges. Two months, nobody. Then Wren's spark. He cried, stood up, fell forty feet. Flashed F-4 from a gully for four days.

Holt took the stabilizer 28 years. Hands shook 20.

On Avalon, no doses. Six months of fever. Then: still. Steadiest since he was twenty.

I looked into his nerves. Silver. Threaded, everywhere. AWAKE. Not fog. His body isn't fighting it.

He lived in the green for a year. The green said hello. Every day. And it woke up.

It's not poison. It's asleep.

Here, it wakes.

Mother. Maura. Toby's mum. Thirty-one families.

Not can't. Not yet. Now I know what waking looks like.

Underlined through the page.

Holt's knee: Father's repair underneath, mine on top. Two handwritings, one page.

Day 339 dawn line: Tamsin and Corr coming. F-30 and F-26 can't walk. F-5: WHERE IS HE.

I sent: I AM COMING NORTH.

COUNT EVERY DAWN SO I KNOW.