Chapter 213 Counted Off

Risa couldn't fasten her trousers.

She stood in the middle of our bedroom with the button in one hand and the buttonhole in the other, and a gap between them about the width of two fingers.

She looked at the gap.

Then at me.

"Don't," she said.

"I haven't said anything."

"You were going to say they shrank."

"I was going to say good morning."

"Good morning," she said. "They shrank."

Sera was sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on her boots. She looked up, looked at the gap, and went very carefully back to her laces.

Luna was at the window with her hair half braided. She had been awake since before dawn. She had changed her shirt twice and then changed it back to the first one. I had decided not to mention that either.

Now she turned around.

"Those are the ones Gareth's sister made you."

"Yes."

"Two weeks ago."

"Yes, Luna. I remember. I was there."

Luna finished the braid without looking at it. Her eyes stayed on Risa's middle.

"That's a great deal of growing for two weeks."

Risa let go of the button and put both hands flat over her stomach, as if she could hide it by pressing.

She couldn't.

A month ago there had been nothing to see unless you already knew. Two weeks ago there had been a softness she could hide under a loose shirt. This morning there was a curve, round and definite, that pushed against the waistband like it had somewhere to be.

It was the morning of Day 598.

General Windsor's shuttle was due at the third hour.

And Risa looked about twice as pregnant as she had any right to be.

"It's Priya's bread," Risa said. "I've been eating a great deal of Priya's bread."

"You have," Sera agreed.

"You're supposed to be on my side."

"I am on your side. I'm also the one who watched you eat four rolls before breakfast yesterday."

Risa opened her mouth.

Closed it.

"They were small rolls," she said, with dignity.

I came and sat beside Sera on the bed so I wasn't standing over her. That had become a habit with all three of them, without anyone deciding it. If something was frightening, I sat down first.

"How long have you been hungry like this?"

Risa thought about it honestly. That was one of the things I loved about her. She could be sharp and sarcastic and impossible, and then the moment a real question arrived she put the sharpness down and answered it.

"Since the mountain," she said. "Since about the day we brought the queen's young home. I thought it was just everything. Flying. Not sleeping. Being frightened for a day and a half and then not being frightened."

"And tired?"

"Not tired. That's the odd part." She frowned. "I keep waiting to be tired. The book Toby gave me says I should be tired. I'm hungry and I'm warm and I'm" She stopped.

"What?" Sera asked.

Risa looked down at her hands on her stomach.

"Busy," she said. "It feels busy. Like there's a workshop in there and someone's left all the lamps on."

Nobody laughed.

Luna crossed the room and sat on Risa's other side. The bed was not designed for four people sitting on one edge of it. It held anyway. I'd built it.

"When did you last feel it move?" Luna asked.

Risa's mouth twitched.

"Twenty minutes ago."

I felt my heart do something uneven.

The book Toby had given her was the same one I'd read cover to cover in the lander, twice, after the reader confirmed what Risa had already known. It had a chart. I could see the chart in my head without trying. It said that a first pregnancy might begin to flutter at around four and a half months.

By my count, and Toby's, and Risa's own, she was a little under three.

"Can I look?" I asked.

Risa nodded before I'd finished the question.

"I was going to ask you," she said. "I was going to ask after the General. I thought one strange thing at a time."

"We can do it after."

"No." She caught my hand and put it over hers. "Now. I don't want to stand on the landing ground wondering."

I looked the way I always did with her, slowly and only where she'd said I could.

Her own body first. Heart steady. Blood moving well. Her own completed silver in its forked branching paths, quiet, resting. The faint field of her ability folded in on itself the way she'd learned to fold it, so it wouldn't spark in her sleep.

Then deeper.

The baby.

I had looked at this small life twice before. On the porch after the lake facility, when there had been a heartbeat and very little else. And in the queen's chamber a week ago, when there had been the beginnings of a shape.

It wasn't the beginnings of a shape now.

It was a person.

Small. Curled. Unfinished, the way every unborn thing is unfinished. But the structures I had expected to find as sketches were there in full. Bones laid down along their lines. A spine like a string of very small beads. Hands, with fingers.

And silver.

I had expected some. Risa carried it. I carried it. Whatever we'd made together was always going to have a share.

I hadn't expected this.

Every child of the modified that Halloway had ever scanned carried silver the way Mother did, the way Sera once had. Fog. Sleeping threads that the body didn't know what to do with, waiting for something that never arrived. That was what the stabilizer was for. That was what the shaking was. A body arguing with a guest it didn't understand.

This silver wasn't a guest.

It was whole.

It ran through the small body in patterns I recognised, because I had seen them in my own arms the morning after the queen. Broad, calm paths. No narrow places. No dead ends turning back on themselves. Nothing waiting to be finished, because it had never been unfinished in the first place.

And it was working.

That was the part I couldn't stop watching.

The silver wasn't simply sitting inside a growing body. It was taking part. I could see it reach along the cord into Risa's blood and take what it needed, iron and calcium and water and a hundred things I had names for and a few I had to think about. Then it carried them inward and laid them down in order. Here a finger bone, lengthening by the width of a hair while I watched. There the wall of a small heart, thickening. There the fine wiring of the brain, threads finding threads.

It wasn't waiting for the body to build itself the slow ordinary way.

It was building the body.

The way I built a wall. Knowing what each part was for before it went in.

I took my hand away.

I didn't mean to do it so quickly. Risa felt it and her fingers closed hard around mine.

"Lucas."

"It's all right," I said. "It's not wrong. I'm sorry. It's not wrong."

"Then why do you look like that?"

I didn't know how I looked. Sera told me later: like the first time I saw the green under Avalon's sky. Frightened of something because it was beautiful.

"The baby's silver is complete," I said.

The three of them went still.

"Complete like yours?" Luna asked. "Like ours, after?"

"Like mine after the queen. Maybe more than that. It was never broken. It's whole. And it isn't waiting." I tried to find the words. "It's building. The silver is taking what it needs from you and putting the baby together on purpose. Bone by bone. Faster than a body does it on its own."

"How much faster?" Sera said.

"I don't know. A lot."

Risa looked down at her stomach.

"Is it hurting me?"

That was the question I'd been checking for the whole time, under everything else.

"No," I said. "It's taking a lot. That's why you're hungry. Your stores are low. Iron, mostly, and some of the things your bones need. But it isn't taking anything you can't spare yet. It's careful." I heard myself say it and realised it was true. "It goes around the places that would cost you most. It's like it knows."

Risa let out a long breath.

"Then it's not wrong," she said. "It's just fast."

"Yes."

"Can you put back what it's taking?"

"If you want me to."

"I want you to." She almost smiled. "I'd like to be able to stand up at the landing ground without fainting into a general."

So I did.

Not much. Not all at once. I filled her iron stores and settled the minerals in her bones, the things the baby had borrowed. I left everything else alone.

When I finished, the baby's silver reached toward the place where mine had been working.

Not toward me, exactly.

Toward the change.

I felt it the way I felt the queen when she turned her attention on something. A small, bright noticing. Like a lamp being lifted to see what had moved.

Then it went back to its work.

I didn't say anything about that yet.

I wasn't sure what I would say.

Toby confirmed it with the reader in the medical building, half an hour before the shuttle.

He was very calm about it, in the way he'd learned to be calm when his hands wanted to shake. He held the reader against Risa's stomach, watched the numbers, moved it, watched them again.

Then he looked at the chart on the wall.

Then he looked at the chart in the book.

"Twenty-one weeks," he said. "By size."

"I'm twelve," Risa said.

"I know."

"Toby."

"I know, Risa." He put the reader down very gently, as if it might be blamed for the answer. "Everything's in the right proportion. Heart's strong. Size, bones, all of it matches. It just matches the wrong date."

Wren had come with him. She stood by the door with her slate, and I watched her write the date at the top of a clean page, and then a line underneath, and then nothing else, because nobody yet knew what belonged there.

Sera was leaning against the wall with her arms folded.

"So it's going to come early."

"I don't think 'early' is the right word," Toby said. "Early means before it's ready. If it keeps going like this, it'll be ready early."

Luna was doing arithmetic. I could see her doing it, lips not quite moving.

"If it's grown nine weeks in the last three," she said, "and it keeps that rate..."

"It won't necessarily keep that rate," Toby said.

"But if it does."

Toby looked at me.

I thought about the silver laying down bone while I watched.

"It might go faster," I said.

Luna closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them she had the expression she wore when the plan had changed and she was already building the new one.

"Then we need the little room finished this month," she said. "Not after the rains."

"The curtain's nearly done," Sera said.

"Not the curtain. The room."

"The curtain is part of the room."

Risa started laughing.

It came out of her suddenly, a little wild, the way it had sometimes come out of her on the training floor when everything was going wrong and the only alternative was to scream.

Sera unfolded her arms. Luna opened her eyes. Toby looked alarmed.

"I'm sorry," Risa said, still laughing. "I'm sorry. It's just. The General's coming. In twenty minutes. Luna's father is coming to answer for everything, and I've got a baby who's building herself out of my iron in a hurry, and you two are arguing about curtains."

"Herself?" I said.

Risa stopped laughing.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know why I said that."

"I didn't see," I said quickly. "I didn't look for that."

"I know you didn't."

She put her hand on her stomach and kept it there.

"It's just how it feels," she said. "Busy. Like her."

Nobody argued.

Sigmund found us on the way to the landing ground.

He'd been standing at the edge of the square with Holt, both of them watching the sky in the direction of the shuttle's approach. He turned as we came past, saw Risa, and stopped mid-word.

His eyes went to her middle.

Then to her face.

"What," he said. "Happened."

"Later," Risa said.

"Risa."

"Later, Siggy."

He hadn't let anyone call him that since they were children. She did it on purpose, and he knew she did it on purpose, and he shut his mouth.

He walked beside her the rest of the way. Close enough to catch her. Not so close that she'd have to tell him to move.

Holt fell in beside me.

He didn't ask. He looked at Risa's back, then at my face, then at the sky.

"Good news or bad news?" he said quietly.

"Fast news."

"Ah." He thought about it. "Your father was fast. Born three weeks before anyone expected him, his mother told me once. Came out shouting about it."

"That's not the same thing."

"No," Holt agreed. "But it's a Dask thing to be in a hurry. You'll forgive me for finding that comforting."

I found it comforting too.

I didn't tell him that.

We had chosen the landing ground at the outer gate, clear of the streets, where a shuttle could come down without anyone needing to move a cart or a child or a washing line.

The receiving room was ready behind us. Wren had laid out the records in the order that made them understandable: the relay, the lake facility, the mountain, the transfer lists, the directive with the General's name heading it. There was water on the table. There were enough chairs. The door was propped open.

Holt had insisted on that.

"Nobody gets questioned in a room they can't walk out of," he'd said. "Including him."

Dot stood a little apart from us, near the gate, where the shuttle's crew would see her first. She had dimmed her colours to something calm. Aster stood beside her. Old Son had stayed on the tower, flashing the noon count early because Wren had asked him to give the pilot something familiar to steer by.

The queen was listening.

I could feel her, at the edge of my attention, the way you can feel someone sitting quietly in the next room. She had asked to hear the General's first words. Not to judge them. Just to know what kind of human the father of one of her brood would be.

The neighbouring mother was listening too, more warily, from beyond the outer ridge.

At the third hour exactly, the shuttle called on the local channel.

Not the standard frequency it had asked for. The safe one, the one Luna had written in its place.

"Primary Base," the pilot said. "Requesting landing. Four aboard. One pilot, three passengers."

Luna was holding the receiver. She looked at it for a moment as though it might bite.

Then she answered.

"Shuttle, this is Scarecrow. You're cleared to the outer gate. Land clear of the marked line."

A short pause.

"Scarecrow," the pilot repeated. I thought I heard something like a smile in it. "Understood."

It came in low over the ridge.

The same ordinary shuttle that had brought medical cases and orders to hold position and a station delegation that wanted a queen back in chains. I knew its hull now. I knew the scrape along its left side where a cargo arm had caught it once, and the replacement panel near the nose that didn't quite match.

I looked through it anyway.

I couldn't help it.

Four people. Four heartbeats. One sidearm, holstered, on the aide's belt. Another, older, holstered on a fourth person's hip. No grey Sorn housings. Nothing hidden in the cargo space but a case of documents, two bags, and a crate of what turned out later to be oranges.

Real oranges. From Earth.

I didn't know that yet.

The shuttle settled. The engines wound down. The ramp lowered with a long hydraulic sigh.

Luna stepped forward.

She didn't go to the ramp. She stopped exactly at the marked line, where anyone coming down would have to walk to her.

The pilot came first. He nodded to us the way he always did, then stepped aside and stood at the foot of the ramp.

Luna said, "One."

Not loudly. Clearly. The way she had counted cadets off a dropship in training, and survivors off the skiff, and nineteen of us onto the red glass in the dusk.

The aide came next. A young man in a pressed uniform with a slate under his arm. He looked startled at the number, then at Luna, then at the silver rings around her eyes. He stopped walking.

"Two," Luna said.

Adela Marr came third, carrying her case. She had been here before. She looked around the landing ground at all of us and gave a small nod, as if confirming something to herself.

"Three."

And then General Alaric Windsor came down the ramp.

He was smaller than I remembered.

That was the first thing I thought, and it was unfair. He wasn't small. He was a tall man, straight-backed, grey at the temples, with the same pale eyes as his daughter. But in my memory he had stood at the end of the briefing hall with the Under-Secretary and Crane, and he had seemed like part of the building. Something load-bearing.

On our landing ground, in the late morning light, he was a man of about sixty who had flown a long way and wasn't sure of his welcome.

He came to the bottom of the ramp.

He stopped.

"Four," Luna said.

The General's face did something.

I don't know how to describe it except that it moved, very slightly, all over, and then went still again. Like a pond with a stone dropped in, settling.

He knew what she was doing.

Of course he knew. He had taught her. He had stood her on a jetty when she was small and made her count everyone off the boat, even when there were only four of them, even when it was only family.

He didn't say anything about it.

He walked forward to the line where she stood. Close enough to speak. Not close enough to touch.

He looked at her face for a long moment. At the silver around her eyes.

"Luna," he said.

"Father."

"Your eyes."

"Yes," she said. "I chose it."

Something else passed over his face then. I couldn't read it. I don't think he wanted it read.

He nodded once.

Then he unbuckled the belt with his sidearm on it, held it out sideways, and waited.

Nobody had asked him to.

Holt stepped forward and took it. He looked at it in his hands, then up at the General.

"You'll get it back when you leave," Holt said.

"Thank you, Ezra."

Holt went very still.

"You remember me."

"I remember everyone from the northern front," the General said. "I have a list."

Holt didn't answer. He turned and handed the sidearm to Corr, who carried it to the gatehouse, and then he stood with his arms folded and his jaw set in a way I'd only seen a few times before.

The aide, after a long uncertain moment, unbuckled his own weapon and held it out too.

Sigmund took that one.

The General turned to me.

I had wondered, for weeks, what I would feel when he did.

I had thought it might be anger. He had denied my father's commendation. His name was on the paper that had put eleven people behind a locked door. He had stood at the front of the hall while forty cadets were told what we were for.

What I actually felt was tired.

Not in my body. My body didn't get tired anymore.

Tired of waiting to find out.

"Cadet Dask," he said.

"Not a cadet anymore," I said. "Just Lucas."

He looked at my hair. At my eyes. At the markings on my forearms below the rolled sleeves.

"I'd heard," he said. "I didn't credit it."

"Most people don't."

He held my gaze for a moment longer.

Then he looked past me at the city.

The new walls. The roofs. The square, where the washing line still hung in the sun and someone had left a hoop leaning against the tree. A child's voice somewhere, calling someone to wait. Beyond the outer ridge, the faint shapes of the neighbouring brood's young at the edge of their agreed path, watching.

He was quiet for a long time.

"I want to read the records," he said at last, "before I speak to anyone about anything else."

He looked back at Luna.

"Including you. If you'll permit it."

Luna's hands were at her sides. I saw her fingers move, very slightly. Counting nothing.

"Yes," she said. "Sir."

Then she heard herself.

"Yes," she corrected.

He nodded as though that was exactly right.

He read for six hours.

I hadn't known a person could sit that still for that long.

He sat at the long table in the receiving room with the door open behind him, and he read every page Wren had laid out, in order, without skipping. When he finished a page he turned it face down to his left and squared its edge against the one beneath it. When he needed water he got up and poured it himself.

Adela sat beside him with her own copies and said almost nothing.

The aide sat by the door and fidgeted until Priya brought him a bowl of soup, and then he ate it and fell asleep against the frame, and nobody woke him.

Luna didn't sit in the room.

She sat on the bench outside the open door, where he could see her if he looked up and she could see him if she looked in. She didn't look in very often. She had brought a slate. She didn't write anything on it.

I sat with her for an hour, then went to check on Risa, then came back.

Sera came and went. Holt stayed away entirely. He said he didn't trust himself not to say something unhelpful.

Twice, the General asked a question.

The first time, it was about the relay. He held up the copied page showing the room Keir had been locked in and asked, "This internal handle. It was connected to nothing?"

"Nothing," Luna said from the bench. "Someone removed the linkage."

He looked at the page for another minute.

Then he wrote something on a sheet of his own paper, in pencil, and kept reading.

The second time was in the fifth hour.

He had reached the lake facility.

I knew which page he was on because I knew what it looked like from across a room: the heading in heavy type at the top, his own name and rank and the words AVALON COMMAND, then three paragraphs of standing directive about "the handling of modified personnel pending onward assignment."

He read it twice.

Then a third time.

Then he turned to Adela and asked, very quietly, for the authorisation identifier.

She read it to him from her copy.

He didn't write it down. He didn't need to. I watched him close his eyes, and I knew from the way his lips moved that he was matching it against something in his own memory.

When he opened his eyes, he put the page face down with the others.

He didn't look at Luna.

He didn't say anything.

But his hand stayed flat on that page for a long time after he had finished with it, the way Luna's had stayed on the slate the night she'd cried.

I didn't point that out to her.

I thought she had probably seen.

At the turn of the afternoon I took Risa down to the queen.

She'd been asking all day, in the small ways she asked for things she wanted and didn't want to make a fuss about. Wondering aloud whether the queen would have noticed. Mentioning that she hadn't been down for nearly a week. Saying that the curtain was finished and maybe the queen would like to hear about the curtain.

Sera came too. Luna stayed on her bench.

The queen was in her new chamber, the larger one we'd opened together, where the water ran in the channel she'd chosen and her living tap sat beside the shallow basin.

She knew before we reached the ledge.

I felt her attention turn toward us, then narrow, then sharpen. The feeling of someone looking up from their work because something has walked into the room that they were not expecting.

Not toward me.

Toward Risa.

Ah, the queen said.

Risa stopped at the bottom of the stair. She couldn't hear the queen the way I could, but she'd learned to read the room.

"She's noticed," Risa said.

"Yes."

"Is she worried?"

I listened.

"No," I said slowly. "She's surprised."

Risa sat down on the ledge Sera had designed, the one at the right height for a human to sit beside the water. Sera sat next to her. I stood close enough for the queen to see us all at once without having to turn.

May I look? the queen asked.

I asked Risa.

Risa nodded. Then, because she knew the queen preferred to be answered in her own way, she put her palm flat on the stone. Hand down. The first sign Sera had ever traded with the queen's strand, back when everything was new.

The queen lowered herself.

I felt her attention move over Risa the way mine did, gentle and asking. But she didn't see the way I saw. I saw structure. Atoms in their arrangements, bonds and forms, what a thing was made of and how it fitted together.

The queen saw relationships.

Where the silver touched what. What it was reaching for. What answered when it called.

She looked for a long time.

Then she withdrew her attention, very carefully, and settled back against her chamber wall.

The young one is building itself, she said.

"I know. I watched it this morning."

No. A ripple of something like patience. You watched the body grow. I am telling you what the silver is doing. It is not following the body. The body is following it.

I translated for the others. Risa's hand stayed on the stone.

"Is that bad?" Sera asked.

I asked.

The queen took a long time to answer. When she did, she showed me something rather than saying it.

A chamber, very old, very deep. Not hers. A memory handed down to her from somewhere else, the way she had shown me the growth of planetary queens. A great queen resting over a hollow. In the hollow, a young one. Small. Pale. Its silver already whole, already branching, already reaching into the stone around it and changing it. Shaping its own hollow. Warming its own water.

The young of the great queens, she said, had been born this way.

Before the war.

Before the Sorn took the silver from the mothers before it could finish growing.

They built themselves. Quickly. With the whole pattern already present from the first day, because their mothers carried it whole and gave it whole.

I have never seen it, she said. Only been told. The teaching said it happened only when the silver was complete in the parents and given without breaking.

I looked at Risa.

Her completed silver.

Mine.

"Is it going to be a queen?" Risa said, when I'd explained, and her voice had gone a little high.

No, the queen said, with what I can only describe as fond amusement. It is going to be one of yours. Human. But with the pattern whole.

I translated.

Risa let out a breath that was half a laugh.

"Good," she said. "I don't think I'd fit a queen."

Sera put her arm around her.

The queen was still watching. I could feel her turning the thought over, the way I'd seen her turn over the problem of the overflow channel, looking at it from underneath.

Then she said the thing I hadn't been ready for.

It may be stronger than you.

I didn't translate it straight away.

Risa noticed. She always noticed.

"What did she say?"

"She said." I stopped. Started again. "She said the baby might be stronger than me."

The chamber was very quiet.

Water ran in the channel. Somewhere along the outer passage, an attendant shifted its load. The tap the queen had made gave a single soft click as the flow adjusted itself.

"Stronger how?" Sera asked.

I asked.

You were made incomplete, the queen said. Then you were given what you lacked. It took hold well. But you still remember being broken. Your body still remembers. Your fear remembers.

She turned her attention toward Risa's middle again.

This one has never been broken. It will not have to learn what it is missing. It will only have to learn what it is.

I told them.

Sera's face had gone very still.

Risa's hand had moved from the stone to her stomach.

"So she'll be able to do what you do," Risa said. "From the start."

"I don't know."

"But maybe."

"Maybe."

"And more."

I looked at the queen.

Perhaps, she said. I do not know. Nobody alive has watched a whole-born human grow. I only know that the great queens' young were stronger than their mothers, often. That was how the great queens became great. Each one a little more than the last.

I said it out loud, word for word.

Then I sat down on the stone floor beside the ledge, because my legs had decided I should.

I'd thought, a hundred times since the lake facility, about what our child might inherit.

Risa's lightning. My hands. Sera's stubbornness, somehow, without any blood between them. Luna's habit of counting.

I'd been afraid, in a quiet steady way, that the child would inherit the Project's damage. The broken paths. The pain. The fog that made Mother shake.

I hadn't thought about this.

That the child might be the first of us who was never broken at all.

And that the Sorn, who wanted Dask blood so badly they'd built a clause into a surrender treaty for it, would want a whole-born Dask child more than anything in the world.

I didn't know that yet, either. Not properly. Not the clause or the scan or the word cultivation.

But I felt something cold at the bottom of my stomach anyway, as if some part of me already did.

Risa was watching my face.

"Lucas."

"I'm all right."

"You're not."

"I'm frightened," I admitted. "And I'm happy. And I don't know which one is louder."

She reached down and found my hand on the stone.

"Both," she said. "Both is allowed."

The queen leaned closer. Close enough that I felt the warmth her plates gave off, the faint hum of her new silver at work.

Strength does not decide who lives in a place, she said.

The same words she had said to me the day she gave me her silver. I'd written them in my notebook. I'd underlined them twice.

Your young one will be strong, she went on. That is not what will make it good. What will make it good is what made you good. People who ask before they reach. People who make room.

She settled back.

You have a great many of those, she said. I have counted them.

I laughed. I couldn't help it.

"What?" Sera said.

"She says the baby will be fine because we're all very annoying about asking permission."

Sera snorted.

Risa squeezed my hand, and didn't let go.

We stayed below until the light from the upper shaft went gold.

Before we left, Risa asked the queen how long.

The queen didn't count days the way we did. She counted in seasons, in rains, in the growth of her own young. She thought about it, then showed me the water channel. The level now. The level at the first heavy rain.

Before then, she said. If it keeps building as it builds now.

I worked it out.

Not much more than two months.

When I told Risa, she went quiet for a while.

Then she said, "The curtain's done, at least."

"Luna wants the whole room done this month."

"Luna's right."

"Don't tell her that."

"I'm going to tell her immediately," Risa said. "She'll be unbearable. It'll take her mind off her father."

The General was still reading when we came back up.

He had reached the mountain.

I could tell from the doorway, because the pages spread across his end of the table now were the images Dot had recorded in the queen's chamber. The restraints driven through living plate. The housings around her joints. The narrow channels where her silver had been drawn out of her and forced into patterns that could hurt other queens' children.

He wasn't reading those pages.

He was just looking at them.

Luna was still on the bench outside. She'd put the slate down. Her hands were in her lap, and she was watching him through the door.

I sat beside her.

Risa sat on her other side, carefully, and took her hand without being asked.

"He hasn't said anything," Luna said quietly. "Not since the lake page."

"He's still reading."

"He's not. He's been on that one picture for nearly half an hour."

I looked. It was the hollow. The one beneath the control platform, where the mountain queen's youngest had once rested before somebody filled it with rubble to make a level floor for their machines.

I'd told her that story. Dot had recorded it.

The General couldn't have known what it was without the caption.

He'd read the caption.

"He's going to ask to see her," Luna said. "The queen at the mountain. I know him. He won't believe it from pictures. He'll want to stand there."

"Would she let him?"

"I don't know." Luna looked down at her hands. "I don't know if I want her to."

Risa leaned her head against Luna's shoulder.

"You don't have to decide tonight."

"I know."

"And Lucas has something to tell you," Risa added. "About me. When you're ready for one more strange thing."

Luna turned and looked at her. Then down. Then at me.

"Something else happened."

"Not happened," I said. "Found out. Below."

Luna looked through the doorway at her father, still motionless over the picture of an empty hollow.

Then back at us.

"Tell me now," she said. "I would like something to think about that isn't him."

So I told her.

The whole-born silver. The great queens' young. The building. The two months.

And the last thing.

When I said it, stronger than you, Luna was quiet for a moment.

Then she did something I didn't expect.

She smiled.

Not the small controlled smile she used when she wanted someone to know she approved. A real one, sudden, almost startled out of her.

"Good," she said.

I stared at her.

"Good?"

"Good." She looked at Risa's stomach, then at me. "Lucas, you've spent your whole life being the strongest thing in every room and hating it. Being the one everybody needs to hold the roof up." She shook her head. "Now someone will be able to hold it up with you."

I didn't have an answer to that.

Risa was crying a little, quietly, the way she'd learned to cry since the baby. She said it was the baby's fault. Sera said it was entirely Risa's own.

Luna put her arm around her.

And through the open door, at the long table, General Windsor finally turned the picture of the empty hollow face down, squared it with the others, and put both his hands flat on the stack.

He didn't look up.

He sat like that while the light changed.

He stopped reading at dusk.

He asked Adela whether the people in the statements would be willing to speak to him in person, and Adela said that was their choice, and he said, "Yes. Of course. I'd like to ask them."

Then he stood, slowly, and looked out through the door.

Luna was still on the bench.

He looked at her for a long moment. I thought he would say something, and I think she thought so too. Her shoulders went straight.

He didn't.

He said, "Tomorrow, then," and it wasn't clear whether he meant the witnesses or her or both.

Luna said, "Tomorrow."

Wren had made up a room for him in the guest house near the gate. Not the best room and not the worst. Holt had chosen it. He said it had a sound roof and a door that opened from the inside, and that was more than the people in the reports had been given.

The aide woke up, mortified, and followed the General out.

Adela stayed behind to help Wren put the pages back in order.

At the door, the General stopped once more.

He looked down at the crate the pilot had unloaded beside the receiving room, the one I'd seen through the shuttle's hull and not understood.

"Those are for the children," he said. "If they'd like them. I was told there were children."

Then he went.

Priya opened the crate after he'd gone.

Oranges.

Real ones, round and bright and impossible, the skins only a little bruised from the crossing. I had last held one in the penthouse kitchen with Garnet, the week before I left.

The smell filled the receiving room.

Nessa, who had been lurking outside the door hoping to see a general, put her head in and stared.

"What are those?"

"Oranges," Priya said. "From Earth."

"Can you eat them?"

"You can eat them."

Nessa looked at the crate. Then at the door the General had left through.

"Did he bring them?"

"He did."

Nessa thought about this with great seriousness.

"Then he's probably not all bad," she decided, and took two.

That night I couldn't settle.

Not because of the General.

Because of the small busy thing that had been building itself all day inside Risa while the rest of us sat on benches and read records and waited for a man to speak.

Risa was asleep. She'd eaten three bowls of soup and half an orange and fallen asleep almost mid-sentence, her head on my shoulder. Sera was asleep on her other side. Luna was not.

Luna lay on her back with her eyes open, looking at the ceiling.

"He brought oranges," she said quietly, to nobody.

"He did."

"When I was small, when he came back from the front, he always brought oranges. There weren't any in the dome. I don't know where he got them. I never asked."

She was quiet for a while.

"I don't know what to do with a man who brings oranges and signs directives."

"You don't have to know yet."

"I know." She turned her head. "Is that what you're doing? Not knowing?"

"About the baby?"

"Yes."

I thought about it.

"I'm trying to work out what I'm supposed to be afraid of," I said. "And I can't find it. The queen says the baby's healthy. Toby says healthy. Risa says she feels well. Busy. Warm. Hungry." I stopped. "And I keep waiting for it to cost something."

Luna reached across Risa and found my hand.

"That's the old part of you," she said. "The part that remembers being broken. The queen said so."

"She did."

"Then let it be old."

She held on until she fell asleep. It took a while.

After that I lay still and let my hand rest lightly on Risa's stomach. I wasn't looking. Just there.

And after a while, the baby's silver noticed.

The same small bright attention I'd felt that morning. A lamp lifted to see what had moved.

It turned toward my hand.

Then, very faintly, it reached.

Not words. A baby doesn't have words, and certainly not a baby not yet born. Just a thread of silver finding mine through the skin and the warmth and the dark, and touching it, the way the queen's strand had once touched red glass and glowed.

There you are, I thought, without meaning to.

The queen's words, the first time she'd ever spoken in my head.

The thread held for a moment.

Then it let go and went back to its work.

I lay awake a long time after that, with my hand where it was.

I didn't feel weaker.

I felt like someone had just told me I wasn't going to have to hold the roof up by myself forever.

Day 598. Counted off.

General Windsor arrived on the safe channel with his pilot, an aide, and Adela Marr. Luna counted all four off the ramp aloud. He knew why. He didn't comment. He surrendered his sidearm without being asked. He remembered Holt's first name. He asked to read the records before speaking to anyone, including Luna.

He read for six hours. Asked two questions. Stopped longest on the lake directive with his name on it and on the empty hollow under the mountain's control platform. No statement yet. Witnesses tomorrow if they choose.

He brought a crate of oranges for the children. Nessa has concluded he is probably not all bad. Luna has not concluded anything.

Risa's pregnancy is moving much faster than normal. Twelve weeks by date, twenty-one by size. Healthy, by Toby's reader and by my own look. The baby's silver is complete. Not repaired: whole from the start. It is taking what it needs from Risa and building the body on purpose, faster than a body builds itself. Restored Risa's iron and mineral stores with her permission. She is hungry and warm and says she feels busy.

The queen says this is how the young of the great queens were born, before the Sorn broke the mothers. Whole silver in both parents, given unbroken. Expected birth: before the first heavy rain. Two months, perhaps less. Little room to be finished this month.

The queen says the baby may be stronger than me.

Luna said good.

Tonight the baby's silver found mine and touched it.

I think I'm going to have to learn to ask permission from someone very small.