Chapter 217 A Question for a Father

I went to the dawn count.

I hadn't been in a while. When there were rescues to plan and walls to build and a queen to help grow, I'd started letting Dot count without me, and Luna would read me the numbers over breakfast.

On Day 602 I couldn't sleep past the fourth hour. So I got up, dressed without waking anyone, and walked down through the quiet streets to the old canyon floor, where the red glass still lay under the tower and the deep still breathed beneath it.

Holt was already there.

He was sitting on the low wall at the edge of the glass, where he sat every morning now, with his hands folded over the head of the stick he didn't need anymore and carried anyway. He looked up when I came, then looked back at the glass.

"Couldn't sleep?"

"No."

"Me neither."

I sat down beside him.

Dot was in the middle of the glass, lowered on her legs, her arms spread in the wheat Teo kept growing there for her. Old Son was on the tower. Juno was on the tower too, which was new. She'd started coming up with Wren to flash the dawn line, and Wren had let her, and nobody had said anything about it.

The sky over the eastern rim went from black to grey.

Then pale.

Then the deep breathed.

I felt it the way I always did. Not a sound, exactly. A pressure, under the glass and under the stone and under everything, like a very large animal sighing in its sleep. The spine woke far above us in the Meridian. The hello came down. Up, and a long way up, and hold, and down.

Dot began to count.

"Thirty-one," she said. "And a gap."

I held my breath.

"And one."

Crane.

Still there. Still saying hello every morning into a stone that had finally answered him once.

I'd known he would be. Dot had told me every day. But this was the first morning since the letters, since the General's word priority, since I'd learned that Crane had read my handwriting before my mother had.

He'd read Risa is pregnant.

He'd read the pain from using my ability has gone.

And then, this morning, he'd woken in New Halcyon at whatever hour dawn on Avalon fell for him, and said hello anyway.

"All names," Dot said, and lowered her arms.

Holt let out a long breath beside me.

"Still asking," he said.

"Still asking."

"Stupid clever boy."

We sat while the light came.

After a while I said, "Did you know? About Father. That he was asked to sign, and walked out."

Holt didn't answer straight away.

"No," he said at last. "I knew he'd been asked something. Before the end. He came back from the capital in a temper I'd never seen on him. Wouldn't say what about. He was quiet for a week. Then he started trying to bring his soldiers home. Two years later, he put in his discharge papers, and a month later he was outside the dome with your mother." He shook his head slowly. "I asked him once. He told me it wasn't worth carrying."

"Why wouldn't he tell you?"

"Because it would've looked like showing off." Holt almost smiled. "Your father couldn't stand being thanked for anything. You'd hand him a cup of tea and he'd look at it like you'd accused him of something."

I laughed. It surprised me.

Holt looked at me sideways.

"You're going to ask the General about it."

"Today. I think."

"Good." He stood, slowly, and leaned on the stick he didn't need. "Ask him in the field. Not in a room. Your father always said a man tells more of the truth with dirt under his boots."

"Did he really say that?"

"No," Holt said. "But he'd have liked it."

The queen asked for the General at the third hour.

She'd asked through Dot, formally, the way she asked for things she thought humans might prefer to refuse. Would the father of one of her brood come to the meeting shelf. She had a question for him.

Luna carried the message.

She told me afterward that her father had looked at her for a long time when she said one of her brood, and then said, "She means you."

"She means all of us," Luna had said.

"But she means you."

"Yes."

He'd put down his cup, Luna said, and stood up, and asked what he should wear.

"She doesn't care what you wear," Luna had told him.

He'd changed his shirt anyway.

We went down together. The General, Luna, Dot and me.

The broad passage from the upper city to the meeting shelf was one we'd built together with the queen's workers, wide and smooth and lit with lamps at knee height. Children used it now. The neighbouring brood's young used it. Toby played music at the bottom of it on some evenings, and both broods came to listen.

The General walked it like a man walking into an enemy trench.

Not afraid, exactly. He didn't flinch. But his shoulders were set and his steps were deliberate, and every time a worker crossed the passage ahead of us with its load, I saw his right hand move toward where his sidearm had been and stop.

He noticed himself doing it.

The third time, he put both hands behind his back and clasped them there.

Luna saw that too. She didn't say anything.

At the bottom of the passage, the stone opened into the meeting chamber, and the General stopped.

The queen was there.

She had come to the very edge of the shelf, closer than she usually came. She'd grown since the General's records said she'd been captured and studied, since he'd last been told what Teeming were. Her plates were broad and pale and edged with the bright new silver she'd chosen. The light from her own body lit the water channel and the curved walls and the small living tap beside her pool.

She was very large.

I'd stopped noticing that.

The General hadn't.

He stood at the bottom of the passage with his hands behind his back and looked up at her. All the way up. And I watched thirty-two years of being told what she was move through his face, and stop, and stay.

Father of Luna, the queen said.

Dot translated aloud.

"Yes," the General said. His voice was steadier than his face. "I'm Alaric Windsor."

I know your name. Your daughter says it at night sometimes, when she cannot sleep. She says it to the ceiling.

Luna went very red.

Dot, after a pause, translated that too.

The General looked at his daughter.

Luna stared at the far wall.

"I didn't know," he said quietly.

"You weren't meant to," Luna said.

The queen didn't ask her question straight away.

She asked about him first. Small things. How far he had come. Whether the crossing had hurt. Whether he had young besides Luna.

"No," he said. "Only her. Her mother died when she was nine."

The queen considered that.

I have had many young, she said. I have lost some. To the flood. To sickness. To the ones who took them away. A pause. How did you bear losing their mother?

The General was quiet for a long moment.

"Badly," he said.

That is honest.

"She was the only person I'd ever told the truth to about anything. And I didn't tell her the most important thing." He looked at the floor. "I let her die believing we'd won. I thought I was protecting her."

From what?

"From knowing what I'd done."

The queen let that stay in the chamber for a while.

Then she lowered herself, slowly, until her head was nearer the shelf. Nearer the General. Close enough that he could have reached out and touched her plates, if he'd wanted to.

He didn't move.

I have a question, she said. You may refuse it.

"Ask."

If someone held Luna behind a door, the queen said, and you could hear her through it. And they told you that if you did not go and hurt someone else's young, they would hurt yours. And they let you hear her cry, every day, so that you would not forget.

Dot translated it word by word.

Her voice was very flat. She'd learned to make it flat for things she thought were hard to hear.

What would you do?

The General didn't answer for a long time.

I watched him. I think he was trying to find a better answer than the true one. A briefing answer. Something about tactics and duty and the greater good.

He didn't find one.

"Burn the world," he said.

The queen didn't move.

Yes, she said. That is what they counted on.

She showed him.

Not the way she showed me, with images and memories pressed gently into the edges of my mind. She asked me to help, and Dot, and between us we found the words.

Every queen the Sorn had caught had young.

Every queen had been made to hear them.

And every queen, eventually, had burned the world.

Not because she wanted to. Not because she hated whoever stood on the other side of the door. Because the door was there, and the crying was there, and the only way to make the crying stop was to do what the hand on the lock told her.

The broods that came to your cities, the queen said, on Earth, in the first war. That was us. Our sisters. Our mothers. Held by the ones who held your Accord. Sent to burn your world so that their young would not burn.

She paused.

You were told we were monsters. We were told you were the ones who had taken our children.

The General had gone very still.

Neither of us looked at the door, the queen said. We only looked at each other.

The General's hands had come out from behind his back.

They hung at his sides. Open. Not reaching for anything.

"I fought them," he said. "Your sisters. On the northern front. For three years. I've killed" He stopped. "I don't know how many. I used to keep a count."

I know.

"You know?"

Luna told us. Your soldiers were very good. Your daughter is proud of that and ashamed of it, at once. The queen's attention turned briefly toward Luna, and I felt a warmth in it, the warmth she always had for her brood. She carries both. She has not learned to put either down.

Luna's jaw was set very hard.

The General looked at her. Then back at the queen.

"Do you want me to ask your forgiveness?" he said.

The queen considered the question.

It is not mine to give, she said. I was not on the northern front. My sisters were. Most of them are dead. You cannot ask them.

"Then what do you want from me?"

I want you to see the door, the queen said. That is all. When you go home. When they tell you something must be done for the sake of the young. I want you to ask whose young, and whose door, and who holds the lock.

The General stood there for a long time.

Then he did something I hadn't expected.

He bowed.

Not the stiff military bow I'd seen him give to the Chancellor in the old footage, or the nod he'd given the cadets at the briefing. A slow deep bow, from the waist, the kind people made in old paintings before kings or graves.

He held it for a long moment.

Then he straightened.

"I'll ask," he said.

The neighbouring mother asked to speak to him too.

I hadn't expected that.

She came up the brood's own passage from beyond the outer ridge, the one we'd agreed with her when she settled, and stopped at the edge of the chamber. She was smaller than our queen. Thinner, still, from the months she'd spent flooded and harvested beneath the old receiving place. Her damaged plate had healed, but the new silver beneath it hadn't grown as bright as our queen's yet.

She didn't come close.

She stayed at the edge of the chamber, near her own passage, and asked through Dot whether the man in the uniform had known about the old receiving place.

The General turned toward her.

"No," he said. "I didn't know about any of them."

Your name was on the room, the mother said. The room above me. Where they left the two humans locked in to feed me.

"Yes."

My young were taken there. Thirteen. Taken from beneath me to the mountain so I would obey. For many seasons.

"I didn't know," the General said again. "I'm not saying that to excuse it. I'm saying it because it's true."

The mother was silent.

Then she asked, If you had looked. Would you have stopped it?

The General opened his mouth.

Closed it.

I watched him not say yes. I watched him want to. I could see it in the set of his shoulders, the way he leaned slightly forward, as if the answer was right there and he only had to reach for it.

He didn't reach.

"I don't know," he said. "I'd like to think so. But I signed everything else I was given for thirty years without looking. I don't know what I'd have done if I'd looked at that one."

The mother considered him for a long time.

Then look now, she said.

And she turned, and went back down her passage, and was gone.

The General stood in the chamber for a while after that, looking at the empty mouth of her tunnel.

Luna came and stood beside him.

She didn't touch him.

She stood close enough that their shoulders were almost touching, and looked at the same place he was looking, and didn't say anything.

After a while, he said, without turning, "Do they always do that? Ask the question you can't answer?"

"Yes," Luna said. "Usually."

"How do you bear it?"

Luna was quiet.

"You stop trying to answer it right," she said. "You just try to answer it true."

I asked him in the field.

Holt was right. It was better in the field.

Not the scarecrow field below the city, with its name boards and its new memorial stones. Teo's wheat field, on the upper terrace, where the Earth grain grew straight up beside Avalon's silver-threaded green and nobody had built anything except a low wall and a gate and a bench at one end.

I asked the General if he'd walk there with me after the midday meal.

He said yes.

He didn't ask why.

We walked along the edge of the wheat for a while without speaking. Teo was at the far end, kneeling between the rows, and raised a hand to us and then went back to whatever he was doing to the soil. A couple of the mountain children were chasing something small between the stalks. One of the neighbouring brood's young was watching them from the edge of the agreed path, very carefully not chasing it too.

Finally I stopped walking.

The General stopped with me.

"Tell me about my father," I said. "Not what you told Luna. What happened in the room."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he looked at the wheat.

"He was twenty-two," he said. "Younger than I was. That surprised me, at the time. He'd done so much on the front that everyone assumed he was older. He'd held the line at the Varran pass for nine days with forty men. Turned the hillside under the Sorn landing into glass so they couldn't get footing." He paused. "You probably know that."

I didn't.

Father had never told me. He'd told me about chemistry. About soil. About how to coax a field out of dead earth with patience and the right minerals in the right order. He'd never told me about the front.

"I didn't know," I said.

The General looked surprised.

Then not.

"No," he said. "He wouldn't have told you."

He turned and leaned on the low wall.

"They brought him in last," he said. "The tenth. They'd tried not to. Crane hadn't wanted him in the room at all. He was a modified, after all, and the Accord was about the modified. But the Chancellor insisted. Trevor Dask was a name people knew. If he signed, it would make it easier."

"But he didn't."

"No." The General's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "He read it. All of it. Every article. He read faster than any of us, and he didn't skip anything. When he reached Fourteen, he stopped."

"And?"

"And he looked at Crane." The General's eyes were on the wheat, but I could see him seeing something else. "He held up the page and said, What's this for? Crane said it was a provision for the future. A formality. Trevor said, You're selling our children before they're born."

I stopped breathing.

"Crane said that wasn't the intent," the General went on. "Trevor said the intent didn't matter, only the words. And then he put the page down on the table, very carefully, square with the edge, and said, I'm not selling. And he walked out."

The wheat moved in the wind.

"Nobody stopped him," the General said. "Nobody said anything. We just sat there. Then Crane picked up the pen and said, Shall we continue? And we did."

He told me the rest without my asking.

Trevor had come to the General's quarters that night. Late. The General had been sitting alone with a bottle he wasn't drinking from. Trevor knocked once and came in without waiting.

"He asked me to refuse with him," the General said. "Publicly. He said if two officers refused, and one of them was a name like his, the Chancellor might have to renegotiate. He said there was still time to change the words."

"What did you say?"

"I said no." The General didn't look away from the wheat. "I said I had men to bring home. That if we didn't sign, the bombardments would start again, and I'd lose more of them. I said I couldn't gamble four hundred lives on whether a Chancellor would blink."

"What did he say?"

"He said, Then bring them home, Alaric. And stop sending more."

The General was quiet for a long time.

"I didn't understand it then," he said. "I thought he meant the front. That I should stop sending my men into the line. I didn't understand until I read Article Fourteen again, years later, when I was made head of Avalon Command and they started telling me about cadet waves. He meant the children. He meant you."

I sat down on the wall.

I didn't decide to. My legs did.

The General sat beside me, after a moment, leaving a careful space between us.

"Two years later," he said, "he resigned. A month after that, he and your mother left the dome. I heard about it in a briefing. They said he'd been offered Retention and refused, and that he'd taken your mother outside to die rather than register their child with the Project."

Register me as an asset.

That was what Mother had told me, in the box. In the files. That Father had walked to the dome and had her name struck off the Retention list, because the price of her place was registering me at birth.

I'd thought it was pride. Stubbornness. The same thing that made him look at a cup of tea like you'd accused him of something.

It wasn't pride.

It was Article Fourteen.

He'd known. He'd read the words in that room, by descent, and he'd known that any child of his might be what Crane was looking for. And he'd taken my mother outside the dome, into the poison and the dead fields, and built a filter and a house and a scarecrow, so that I would never be registered. Never be reported. Never be assessed.

So that nobody would ever hold me in trust.

And then, when I was six, Crane had come to the house anyway.

And Father had turned his bodyguard to vapour in the doorway.

I put my hands over my face.

The General didn't say anything.

He sat beside me on the wall in Teo's wheat field and waited, the way Holt waited, the way Luna had learned to wait, for as long as it took.

When I could speak again, I asked, "Why did you deny the commendation?"

He'd told Luna part of it. Because Trevor had been right, and he couldn't stand to sign a paper that said Trevor was brave.

I wanted the rest.

"It came across my desk," the General said. "Two years after the Accord. A posthumous review of the northern front. Trevor's name was on it for the Varran pass. The board recommended the highest award there is."

"And you said no."

"I wrote denied across the top. In my own hand." He looked at his hand now, as if it might still be holding the pen. "I told the board it was because he'd resigned under a cloud. That he'd refused a lawful order from the Chancellor. That honouring him would encourage others to refuse."

"Was that true?"

"It was true that I said it." He turned his hand over. "The real reason was that I'd have had to stand in front of the whole command and read out what he'd done. Nine days at the Varran pass. Forty men. All of them home. I'd have had to say that to a hall full of officers who'd signed the Accord. And I'd have had to look at the empty chair where he wasn't, because he'd said no and we'd all said yes." He stopped. "I couldn't do it. So I made sure nobody would."

I looked at him.

For a long time I'd imagined this conversation. In the program. On the Meridian. In the pod falling toward the red glass. I'd imagined saying something that would make him understand what he'd done.

Now he understood.

He'd understood for years.

That didn't make me want to say it less.

"He'd have hated the commendation anyway," I said.

The General looked at me.

"He would," I said. "He hated being thanked. Holt told me. You'd hand him a cup of tea and he'd look at it like you'd accused him of something."

The General's mouth twitched.

"That's true," he said. "I'd forgotten that."

"But that's not why you denied it."

"No."

"You denied it because he was right and you weren't."

"Yes."

"Did you ever tell him? That you were sorry?"

"No." The General shook his head slowly. "I meant to. For years. I kept thinking there'd be a better time. Then I heard he'd died." He paused. "I'm telling you. I know it's not the same."

"It's not."

"No."

I looked out over the wheat.

Teo had finished at the far end and was walking back between the rows. One of the mountain children had caught whatever they'd been chasing. It turned out to be a beetle the size of a fist. The child was holding it up for the brood's young to see, and the young one had crept two whole steps over the line of the agreed path to look, and its attendant was calling it back.

"He would have said thank you for telling me," I said.

The General turned his head.

"Father," I said. "If you'd told him. He'd have said thank you. And then he'd have said do better."

The General was quiet for a long time.

"I'm trying," he said at last.

"I know."

"I'm not very good at it yet."

"No," I said. "But you sent the guards."

He looked at me.

I stood up.

"Your people," I said. "On Mother. On the twins. Not Crane's."

"Yes."

"Father would've said that was a start."

I left him on the wall in the wheat.

I didn't look back. I didn't think he'd want me to. And I needed to go and find Risa, and Sera, and Luna, and sit somewhere with all three of them and not explain anything for a while.

Risa was in the little room.

She was sitting in the chair Gareth had made for the corner, a low wide one with arms, because she'd stopped fitting in the chairs at the table two days ago. Her feet were on a stool. Her hands were on her stomach.

Sera was on the floor beside her, sewing something small. Luna was in the doorway, back from the meeting shelf, with her shoulder against the frame.

They all looked up when I came in.

None of them asked.

I sat down on the floor next to Sera and leaned my head back against Risa's knee.

After a while Risa's hand came down and rested in my hair.

"Was it bad?" she said.

"It was true," I said. "I don't think it was bad. I think it was just true."

"Do you want to tell us?"

"Later. Not yet."

"All right."

The baby kicked.

I felt it through Risa's knee, through her chair, through the floor. And with it, the small bright noticing of her silver turning toward me. Finding me. The way it had every time I'd been near her since that first night.

This time it stayed.

I didn't look. I didn't need to. I just felt it there, like a hand resting lightly on my shoulder, while I sat on the floor of the little room with my head against Risa's knee.

"She's found you," Risa said quietly.

"She always does."

"She stays longer now."

"Yes."

Luna pushed away from the doorframe and came in and sat on my other side, on the floor, which she never did. She drew her knees up and rested her chin on them.

"My father bowed to the queen," she said.

Sera stopped sewing.

"He bowed?"

"All the way down. Like in the old paintings." Luna stared at the cradle under the window. "I've never seen him bow to anyone. Not even the Chancellor. He used to say a Windsor nods."

"What did the queen do?" Risa asked.

"She asked him to look at the door." Luna's voice was very quiet. "Whose young, whose door, who holds the lock. Every time someone tells him something has to be done for the sake of the children."

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Sera said, "Good."

That word again.

I was starting to think it might be the most important word any of us knew.

Toby measured Risa before supper.

Twenty-seven weeks.

"She's still speeding up," he said, and wrote it in the book under all the other numbers. "Not much. But a little every day."

"How long?" Risa asked.

Toby looked at me.

I looked at the baby. Carefully. Her silver was bright and quick and everywhere now, threaded through a body that looked, to my sight, nearly finished. Lungs folding and unfolding in practice. Fat laid down under the skin in neat thin layers. A brain I couldn't begin to understand, lit up and busy and full of small sparks going back and forth.

"Six weeks," I said. "Maybe five."

Risa breathed out.

"That's before the rains," Sera said.

"It's well before the rains," I said.

Luna was doing arithmetic again. I watched her.

"Day 640," she said. "Give or take."

"Give or take," I agreed.

Toby closed the book.

"I'm going to need help," he said. "When she comes. I've never delivered a baby. Nobody here has delivered a baby who builds herself. I've read everything in the lander three times."

"You'll have help," I said.

"From who? You?" Toby gave me a look. "You're going to be useless. You're going to be standing in the corner looking at her bones."

That was fair.

"Halloway delivered half the dome," Risa said. "She's on Earth."

"Priya's mother was a midwife," Sera said. "Priya helped. She told me once."

"Edda Saye," Luna said. "Edda delivered three babies in the second wave before her base fell. She told Holt."

Toby looked at all three of them.

Then he opened the book again, turned to a clean page, and wrote Priya. Edda. at the top.

Then, under that, after a pause: Lucas (corner).

Risa laughed so hard she had to hold her stomach.

The baby kicked in protest.

Or in agreement.

It was getting harder to tell the difference.

The General came to the door after supper.

He didn't come in. He stood on the porch, as he had the night before, and waited until I came out.

I'd thought he might want to say more about Father. About the Varran pass. About the room. I didn't know if I wanted to hear more yet.

He didn't say any of that.

"Luna tells me you're taking me to the mountain tomorrow," he said.

"If you still want to go."

"I want to go." He looked out at the dark city. The lamps along the covered walk. The silhouette of the tower. "I want to stand where she was chained. I want to see the room my name was on."

"It's not a room anymore. She's made it back into her home."

"Then I want to see that too."

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, "Thank you. For today. For asking me in the field."

"Holt said a man tells more of the truth with dirt under his boots."

The General's mouth moved.

"Your father used to say that."

I stared at him.

"Holt said he didn't."

"He did. On the front. Every time an officer came out from headquarters in polished boots to tell us what was happening on the line. Get some dirt on them first, sir. Then we'll listen." The General almost smiled. "Holt probably forgot. It was a long time ago."

He said goodnight.

He went down the steps.

I stood on the porch for a while after he'd gone, thinking about Holt sitting on the low wall at the edge of the red glass that morning, saying no, but he'd have liked it, with his face turned away so I couldn't see it.

I didn't think Holt had forgotten.

I thought he'd wanted me to hear it from someone who'd stood on the line.

Day 602. A question for a father.

Dawn count: thirty-one, a gap, and one. Crane is still saying hello every morning, after reading my letters.

The queen asked the General to the meeting shelf. She asked him what he would do if someone held Luna behind a door and let him hear her cry. He said: burn the world. She said that is what the Sorn counted on. Every queen they caught had young. Every queen burned the world for them, eventually. The broods that came to Earth's cities in the first war were held queens' broods.

She doesn't want his forgiveness to give. She wants him to see the door. Whose young, whose door, who holds the lock. He bowed to her, all the way down. Luna says he has never bowed to anyone.

The neighbouring mother asked whether he would have stopped it if he had looked. He said he didn't know. She said: then look now.

I asked him about Father in Teo's wheat field. Father was twenty-two, the tenth man asked. He read the whole Accord, stopped at Fourteen, and said: you're selling our children before they're born. He put the page down square with the edge of the table and walked out.

That night he asked the General to refuse with him. The General said no, he had men to bring home. Father said: then bring them home, Alaric, and stop sending more. He meant us.

Father took Mother outside the dome so I would never be registered under Article Fourteen. That was what "asset at birth" meant. Not pride. Not stubbornness. Me.

Father held the Varran pass for nine days with forty men and brought them all home. He never told me. The General denied his commendation because Father had been right and he hadn't.

He never told Father he was sorry. He told me. It isn't the same. I told him Father would have said thank you, then do better. He says he's trying.

Baby: twenty-seven weeks by size. Lungs practising. Expected around Day 640. Toby's delivery list: Priya, Edda, Lucas (corner).

Her silver found me this afternoon and stayed. It's starting to feel like a hand on my shoulder.

"Get some dirt on them first. Then we'll listen." Father said that. Holt pretended he didn't remember.

Tomorrow: the mountain.