Chapter 224 Goodbye, Father

The General was up before the dawn count.

I knew because I was up too. I usually was. Sera slept on her side with one arm flung over my pillow as if she were keeping my place, and Luna slept in the next room with the door open a hand's width the way she always left it, and I lay in the dark and listened to the city the way other people listen to rain.

At a little after four, the guest house door opened.

I felt him come out onto the step. Stand there. Look up.

The Meridian wasn't overhead. It had passed an hour before, on the night track, and wouldn't come round again until the afternoon, when it would send a shuttle down to the landing field and take him up.

He wasn't looking for the station.

He was looking at the stars.

I got up quietly, put on my boots and my coat, and went out.

He didn't seem surprised to see me.

"Dask," he said.

"Sir."

He'd stopped telling me not to call him that. I think he'd realised it wasn't respect. It was habit, the way Holt called me Dask and Liam called me Scarecrow and Nessa called me Mr. Lucas when she wanted something from the kitchens.

We walked.

Not anywhere. Down the street toward the north wall, where the names were. Past the meeting passage, where Toby's music evenings had left a scatter of empty mugs on the bench. Past the schoolroom with its window full of drawings, a great many of them of Teeming young, some of them with a small bright dot drawn in the middle of a round shape that I eventually realised was meant to be Risa.

"Your daughter's in a lot of those," the General said.

"Not yet."

"Already." He looked at the drawings for a long time. "When Luna was small, she drew the armory. Over and over. The armory and the gallery and the stair. I thought it meant she wanted to be a soldier." He paused. "I think now it was the only thing she'd been allowed to see."

I didn't say anything.

We walked on.

At the north wall he stopped and read the names. All of them, slowly, his lips moving very slightly, the way Luna's moved when she read the arrivals list. Seventy-two names now. Hal Dask near the top, carved by Holt with a borrowed chisel. Halloway further down. The thirteen hatchlings who hadn't come home from the mountain, which Nessa had insisted on, and which Holt had carved as thirteen small marks because nobody knew their names.

"You keep all of them," the General said.

"Wren does. I just carve."

"Holt carves."

"Holt carves the ones he knew."

The General nodded.

He put his hand on the wall, beside my father's name. He didn't say anything. He just left it there for a while. Then he took it away and put it in his pocket, and I heard the maintenance plate from the mountain click against his letter and the station's reply.

"I've decided," he said.

We went back to the house.

Luna was awake. Of course she was. She was sitting at the kitchen table in her coat with two mugs of tea already poured and a third beside them going cold, as if she'd known exactly how long we'd be.

"You walked to the wall," she said.

"Yes," said the General.

"You read all of them."

"Yes."

She pushed a mug toward him.

He sat down. I sat down. Sera came out of the bedroom a minute later with her hair everywhere and her boots in her hand, took one look at the three of us and said, "Oh, it's a talk," and sat down too.

Risa didn't come up from the quiet room. She'd been sleeping there. But I felt her wake when I came in, and I felt her turn toward the house, listening, the way she listened to weather.

And beneath her, brighter, the baby turned too.

The General put his hands flat on the table.

"I'm going back," he said. "That was always the case. But I wanted you to know why, and what I mean to do, so that you're not guessing when you don't hear from me."

Luna didn't move.

"Someone has been using my authority," the General said. "For years. My signature on the transfer orders. My name on the munitions inventory. My command over Avalon, when I've never once been told the truth about what Avalon was for." He looked at the table. "I signed things I didn't read. I've told Holt so. That's mine to carry. But some of what carries my name I never signed at all."

"Crane," Sera said.

"Some of it. Not all. Crane can't forge an Accord signature on his own. Someone in my own office has been handing him my seal." His mouth tightened. "I mean to find out who."

"And then?" Luna said.

"And then I mean to take it back."

He took a folded sheet out of his inside pocket and put it in front of Luna.

It wasn't the station's reply. It was a page of numbers. Columns of them, in his own hand, very small and very neat.

"A code channel," he said. "Through my own office. Not Avalon Command. Not the Project. My office. The courier dock on the Meridian handles diplomatic packets for the General Staff, sealed, unread. There are four people alive with the authority to open one. I'm one of them." He tapped the page. "Anything you send this way comes to my desk and no one else's."

Luna looked down at the numbers.

"What's the key?"

The General hesitated.

It was the first time I'd ever seen him hesitate over anything.

"The date," he said. "And the hour. You'll know which."

Luna's hand stopped on the page.

I didn't understand. Neither did Sera. But Luna did. I watched her understand. Watched her face do something it almost never did, which was to stop being composed.

"The gallery," she said quietly. "The window. When I was eight."

The General didn't answer.

"You remembered the date," Luna said.

"I remembered the date," the General said. "And the hour." He looked at his hands. "I told you Windsors don't gape. And then I went home and wrote down when you'd done it. I don't know why. I've never known why. I've had that piece of paper in my desk for twelve years."

Nobody said anything at all.

Luna folded the page of numbers. Very carefully. Into quarters. And put it inside her coat, against her chest, where she kept the arrivals list.

"All right," she said.

That was all.

But her voice wasn't quite steady.

Then he turned to me.

"I have to ask you something," he said. "And you're not going to like it."

"The Meridian," I said.

"The Meridian."

I'd known it was coming. I'd known since the night Holt drew the station on the map-room table, the crew ring and the cargo spine and the spine chamber at the centre behind three sealed doors. Since the dawn I'd followed the hello up into the sky and found the queen pinned in her housings. Asleep. Tired. Her silver drawn through narrow channels to run the air and the power and the jump.

Since the General had said, very quietly, the fourth room is the Overseer's.

"Leave it alone," the General said. "For now."

I didn't answer.

"There are six hundred people on that station," he said. "Most of them have no idea what's at the centre of it. They're clerks and cooks and dock crews and engineers. They have families on Earth. If you free that queen, the air stops. The power stops. The jump stops." He held my eyes. "And there's a Sorn Overseer in the room next to her who's been there eight years and doesn't come out. I don't know what it does if it feels her wake. Neither do you."

"No," I said.

"And there's Earth." He didn't look away. "Your mother. The twins. Kept in a house with guards on the door. Maura Calder. The families of every completed person in this city. Everything Crane holds that you can't reach from here." He paused. "The moment you move against that station, every one of them becomes the price."

I sat very still.

I could feel the station. Not now, not this minute. It was on the far side of the world. But I could always feel where it would be, the way Juno could feel north. The way you know where a wound is even when you're not touching it.

"She's in pain," I said.

"I know."

"She's been in pain for eight years. Since before I was born, some of it. Since Father was on the salvage."

"I know."

"She's a queen. She's somebody's mother."

"I know," the General said. "I didn't, a month ago. I do now." His voice was very level. "And I'm still asking."

Sera's hand found mine under the table.

Luna didn't move.

Down in the quiet room, I felt Risa listening. Felt her hand go to her stomach. Felt the baby's silver turn, slow and bright, toward me, and then past me, up, out, through the gap in the wall shaped like Risa's voice, toward the place on the far side of the world where the station would be.

Toward the queen.

She'd been sending threads up the hello every dawn for a week. Small ones. Hello. Hello. I'm here.

The queen in the station had answered once. Only once.

"How long?" I said.

"I don't know," the General said. "Until I've found who's been using my seal. Until there's someone in my office I trust to stand between Crane and your mother's door. Until we have a plan for the six hundred." He hesitated. "Until we know what the Overseer is."

"That's not a time."

"No. It isn't. I'm sorry."

I looked at the table. At the mug of tea I hadn't touched. At Sera's hand on mine.

Then I said, "For now."

The General let out a breath.

"For now," I said again. "Not forever. If they hurt her. If they start draining her harder. If Crane does whatever acknowledged, no further action means and it touches anyone here." I looked up. "Then I'm not asking you."

"I'd expect nothing else," the General said.

"And if anything happens to Mother."

"Then I'll have failed," he said simply. "And you'll do what you do. And I won't blame you for any of it."

There was one more thing.

He'd saved it. I think he'd been saving it since the day he arrived, and he gave it to Sera.

"The north gate," he said.

Sera's hand went very still in mine.

"I said I'd find him," the General said. "The commander who signed the order that night. The one who had your squad held outside the gate while the Teeming came over the ridge."

Sera didn't say anything.

"I found the name," the General said. "Before I came down. I didn't tell you, because I didn't know what I'd do with it, and I didn't want to give you a name and nothing else." He paused. "His name is Garrick Vale. He was promoted the month after. He's on the General Staff now. He has an office two floors below mine."

Sera's face did nothing at all.

That was how I knew.

"I'm not going to do anything to him," the General said, "until I know whether he gave that order himself or carried someone else's. If he carried it, he's the thread I follow to the person who uses my seal. If he gave it" He stopped. "Then he'll answer for it. In a room, with witnesses, under the Articles. Not in a corridor."

Sera looked at him for a long time.

"You'll tell me," she said. "Which."

"I'll tell you."

"Through Luna's numbers."

"Through Luna's numbers."

Sera nodded once.

Then she let go of my hand and stood up and went out onto the porch, and I heard her sit down on the top step in the cold, and I didn't follow her, because she hadn't asked me to.

After a while Luna got up and went out too.

The General and I sat at the table.

"Was that the wrong thing?" he said quietly.

"No," I said. "It was the right thing. It's just heavy."

He nodded.

"Most of the right things are," he said.

The dawn count came, and the hello came down, and the thirty-one answered for eleven seconds, and the General stood on the red glass beside Holt and listened to it all.

He didn't hear it the way we did. He didn't have the silver. But he watched Toby close his eyes and smile when his mother sang his name back up the thread, the way she'd done every morning for a week now. He watched Juno turn her head, slowly, all the way around, feeling every brood on Avalon at once. He watched Holt hold his hands open on his knees.

When Dot said All names, the General said it with her.

Quietly. Under his breath. But I heard.

So did Holt.

Holt didn't look at him. He just said, "You're learning."

"Slowly," said the General.

"Slow's fine," Holt said. "Slow's how the old ones do it."

He went to see Risa after the count.

He asked first. He came to the top of the steps down to the quiet room and stopped there, the way he'd stopped outside the medical building for Holt, and asked whether he could come down.

Risa said yes.

I went down with him. Not because he needed me. Because I didn't think either of them should have to do it alone.

The quiet room was the way it always was. Faceted dark. The walls the queens had grown, each plane turned a little away from every other, so that the world's noise slid off them like rain off a roof. The bench. The blanket. Risa on it, propped up on cushions, with Pebble's nursery stone on the shelf by her head and her hands folded on the enormous curve of her stomach.

Thirty-six and a half weeks by size, Edda had said that morning. Any day.

The General stopped at the bottom of the steps.

I don't think he'd ever been in a room the Teeming had made. I watched him look at the walls. At the way the light lay on them. At the gap high in one corner, narrow and curved, the one shaped like Risa's voice.

"It's beautiful," he said.

"The queens made it," Risa said. "For her."

"I know. Luna told me." He came closer. He didn't sit. "I wanted to say goodbye. And I wanted to say" He stopped.

Risa waited.

"Your father drafted the Accord's language," the General said. "Senator Friese. I told Sigmund. I don't know if he told you how I said it."

"He told me," Risa said.

"Then you know I didn't stop him."

"I know."

"And you know what he wrote." The General's voice was very low. "By descent. He wrote her into it. Before she existed. Before you'd met Dask. He wrote a clause that would make his own granddaughter the property of the Project." He looked at the curve of her stomach. "I'm sorry. That isn't mine to apologise for, but I was in the room, and nobody else who was in the room is going to say it to you."

Risa was quiet for a long moment.

Then she said, "Do you want to say hello to her?"

The General blinked.

"I don't have the" He gestured vaguely at his own eyes. At the place where the silver would have been. "I can't hear her."

"She can hear you," Risa said. "She hears everyone. She counted the whole city last night."

The General looked at me.

I nodded.

Slowly, the General came forward. He knelt down by the bench, stiffly, the way men his age kneel on stone. And Risa took his hand, the big square hand that had signed things it hadn't read, and put it flat on the side of her stomach.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then the baby moved.

Not a kick. A turn. Slow and deliberate, the whole shape of her shifting under Risa's skin, toward the hand. I felt her silver come round with it. Bright. Curious. Considering.

She had never felt him before. Not like this. She'd felt him at a distance, the shape of a man in the receiving room, at the table, on the red glass. Never this close.

She pressed against his palm.

And held there.

The General went absolutely still.

"She's," he said.

"Yes," said Risa.

"That's her. Pressing."

"That's her."

He didn't take his hand away. He knelt there on the stone, very still, with his hand on Risa's stomach and the baby pressed against it, and I watched his face, and I didn't look away, because I think somebody should have seen it.

Then the baby's silver did something I'd never felt it do.

It reached up through Risa's gap. Up through the faceted dark. Not far. Not to the city or the courts or the queen. Just up to the garden, where Dot stood in the grey dawn by the steps, on watch the way she was always on watch.

And pulsed a pattern at her.

Short. Rising. Repeated twice.

Dot's lamps flickered.

"Dask," she said, from the top of the steps. "She is asking this unit a question."

"What question?"

"She is asking," Dot said slowly, "for the word for the one who is going away and coming back."

The General looked up.

"Is there one?" I said.

"In the brood-speech," Dot said, "there is. It is the word the queen uses for a forager. One who leaves the hollow and returns with something for the brood." Her lamps steadied. "This unit has sent it to her."

The baby's silver turned back down. Back through the gap. Back to the hand on Risa's stomach.

And pressed against it, one more time, in a pattern I could feel even without understanding.

Short. Long. Short.

"Forager," Dot said quietly. "She has called him forager."

The General bowed his head.

He stayed like that for a long time. Then he took his hand away, very carefully, as if the baby might fall if he moved too fast, and stood up.

"Thank you," he said to Risa.

"Come back," Risa said.

"I will."

"She's expecting you to bring something."

The General laughed. It was the second time I'd ever heard him do it. It came out of him unsteady, as if it had been stored somewhere damp for a long time.

"Oranges," he said. "I promised Nessa oranges."

The shuttle came down at two in the afternoon.

We heard it before we saw it. A thin high whine over the eastern ridge, and then the glint of it, and then the long slow curve down toward the landing field outside the south gate, where Gareth had laid the flat red-glass apron that Dot said was better than anything the domes had.

Half the city came out.

I hadn't expected that. I don't think the General had either. He'd been in Scarecrow for six weeks, and for the first of those most people had crossed the street when they saw him. He'd brought the man who'd ordered the assault on the mountain. He'd brought the fear that came down with every shuttle.

But somewhere in those six weeks, something had changed.

He'd read the names on the wall. He'd sat outside the medical building for an hour. He'd said sorry to Holt's face. He'd laughed at the kitchen table with Nessa about the oranges. He'd knelt on the stone floor of the quiet room.

People had seen.

So they came out. Not cheering. Nobody in Scarecrow cheered for officers. But they lined the road from the south gate to the apron, quietly, the way they lined it for the dawn count, and they watched him walk.

Nessa was at the front, holding a list.

"Twelve oranges," she said as he passed. "Not eleven. Not about twelve. Twelve."

"Twelve," the General agreed.

"And a lemon if you can get one."

"I'll try."

"Don't try," Nessa said. "Get one."

Holt was on the edge of the apron with his stick that he didn't need. He didn't come forward. He didn't salute. He just watched the General walk toward him, and when the General stopped in front of him, Holt said, "Alaric."

"Ezra."

"Don't do anything stupid."

"I'm going to do several stupid things," the General said. "In a careful order."

Holt's mouth twitched.

"Hal would've said that," he said.

"I know," the General said. "I think I learned it from him."

They didn't shake hands. Holt reached out and gripped the General's shoulder once, hard, the way soldiers do, and let go. That was all.

Sigmund stood further back with his arms folded and his jaw set. When the General looked at him, Sigmund nodded. Once. Stiff. It was more than he'd given anyone who'd ever known his father.

The General nodded back.

Sera was by the shuttle ramp.

She didn't say anything about the north gate. She didn't say anything about Garrick Vale. She just held out her hand, and the General shook it, and she held on for a moment longer than she needed to.

"Through Luna's numbers," she said.

"Through Luna's numbers," the General said.

She let go.

Luna was the last.

She stood at the foot of the ramp with the arrivals list against her chest, the way she'd stood at the foot of every ramp since the first wave came down. The pilot was waiting at the top. The aide had already gone aboard with the cases.

"Count," the General said.

Luna looked at him.

"You count everyone on and off," he said. "Every shuttle. Every wave. Wren told me. You've never missed one." He paused. "Count me."

Luna's mouth went very thin.

She looked down at the list.

There was nothing to count. One man. One ramp. She knew the number before she started. She'd known it for three days.

She did it anyway.

"Windsor, Alaric," she said. "General. Avalon Command."

Her voice was perfectly steady.

"Departing. One."

She made a mark on the list.

Then she looked up.

The General was standing very close. Closer than I'd ever seen him stand to her. Close enough that she had to tip her head back a little to look at him, the way she must have done on the stair behind the armory, when she was eight, and the window in the gallery had shown her the sky.

"Windsors don't cry," Luna said.

Her voice was still perfectly steady.

Her eyes weren't.

The General looked down at his daughter for a long moment.

"I know," he said.

And he did.

Not much. Not loudly. He didn't make a sound. He stood at the foot of the shuttle ramp on the red glass apron in front of half of Scarecrow, with his uniform buttoned to the collar and the maintenance plate in his breast pocket, and tears ran down his face, and he didn't wipe them away.

Luna stared at him.

Then she dropped the arrivals list.

I'd never seen her drop it. Not once. Not when the third wave came down screaming, not when the Teeming came over the canyon rim, not when I came back from the mountain with silver running out of my eyes. She held onto that list the way other people held onto railings.

She dropped it on the red glass.

And put her arms around her father.

He held her. Hard. One hand on the back of her head, the way you hold a child, the way he probably hadn't held her since before the stair, before the gallery, before Windsors don't gape. And he said something into her hair that nobody else heard, not even me, and I didn't try.

Nessa picked up the list.

She held it very carefully against her own chest, and didn't read it, and waited.

When they let go, Luna's face was wet.

She didn't wipe it either.

She took the list back from Nessa without looking, and found her pen, and wrote something on it. Then she held it up so the General could see.

I was close enough to read it.

Under Departing. One, in her small exact hand, she'd written:

Expected back.

The General looked at it for a long time.

Then he nodded, once, and turned, and walked up the ramp.

He stopped at the top. Looked back. Not at Luna. Past her. Past all of us. Toward the city. Toward our house. Toward the garden, and the room under it, where something small and bright had called him forager.

I felt her.

She'd been watching. All of it. Through Risa's gap and through me and through Juno and Holt and every bright new thread in the city. She'd felt the shuttle come down. She'd felt the people line the road. She'd felt Luna drop the list.

And now, as the General stood at the top of the ramp, her silver reached up. Out. As far as it could.

Short. Long. Short.

Forager.

He couldn't hear it.

But he stood there, very still, with his hand on the edge of the hatch, as if something had touched his sleeve.

Then the hatch closed.

The shuttle went up into a clear sky.

We watched it go. All of us. Long after it was too small to see, people stayed on the road, looking east, the way they stayed on the red glass after the dawn count.

Then, a few at a time, they went home.

Luna didn't move.

I stood beside her. Sera came and stood on her other side. Neither of us said anything. Luna held the list against her chest with both hands and looked at the place in the sky where the shuttle had been.

"He cried," she said at last.

"Yes."

"In front of everyone."

"Yes."

"Windsors don't."

"I know," I said.

Luna turned her head and looked at me. Her eyes were red and her face was blotched and she looked, for the first time since I'd known her, exactly her age.

"I'm glad," she said. "I'm glad he did."

"So am I."

"I'm going to tell him so," Luna said. "Through the numbers. First message." She looked down at the list. At Expected back. "That's going to be the first thing I send. Not anything about Crane, or the station, or Garrick Vale. Just that." She swallowed. "That I'm glad."

Sera put her arm around Luna's shoulders.

Luna let her.

We walked home.

That evening Risa came up from the quiet room for supper.

She did most evenings, slowly, with one hand on the wall and the other on her stomach, and Liam hovering two steps behind her as if he could catch her if she fell, which, as Sera pointed out every single time, he could not.

She sat at the table with us. Me and Sera and Luna. Liam had gone back to his own house with Toby; they'd been invited, but Liam had looked at Luna's face when we came in from the field and said, quite gently for Liam, "Another night."

The four of us.

Luna had the page of numbers out on the table. She'd been working on the first message all afternoon. It was very short. She'd shown it to me. Five words, once you decoded them.

I'm glad you did. Come back.

"That's six," I'd said.

"Come back counts as one," Luna had said. "In the brood-speech."

Now Risa reached across the table and put her hand over Luna's.

"She's still thinking about him," Risa said.

"The baby?"

"She keeps reaching up. Toward where the station goes. She's been doing it since the shuttle left." Risa's thumb moved over the back of Luna's hand. "Not to the queen. I can feel the difference. She's reaching for the shuttle. For him."

Luna went very still.

"She called him forager," Risa said. "She's waiting for him to come home with something."

"Oranges," said Sera.

"Twelve oranges," I said. "Not eleven."

"And a lemon," Sera said.

Luna laughed.

It cracked in the middle. But it was a laugh.

Late that night, I went down to the quiet room.

Risa was asleep on the bench. The nursery stone was by her head. The blanket was half off her, and I put it back, carefully, the way Luna folded the page of numbers.

The baby was awake.

I could always tell. Her silver had a particular brightness when she was awake, like a lamp turned up. She felt me come down the steps and turned toward me. Glad. Quick. The way she always did.

Then, for the first time, she asked me a question.

Not in brood-speech. Not through Dot. Directly. Silver to silver. The way the queen spoke to me, and the way I spoke to the young, and the way I'd never quite believed I'd be able to speak to my own child before she was born.

It wasn't words. Not exactly. It was a shape. A feeling with a direction in it.

Up. Away. Toward the place where the station would be. Toward the shuttle, on the far side of the world now, docking.

Forager, she said. And then something rising, uncertain, at the end.

Comes back?

I sat down on the stone floor beside the bench.

I thought about the General's face at the foot of the ramp. About the page of numbers. About Expected back in Luna's exact hand. About Garrick Vale two floors down, and someone in an office handing Crane a seal, and acknowledged, no further action, and six hundred people on a station built around a sleeping queen.

I didn't know.

But she was a baby, and she was mine, and she'd asked.

Yes, I told her. He comes back.

She thought about that.

Then her silver settled, slow and warm, the way the young settled against their mother's plates when they were tired.

And she slept.

I stayed on the floor a long time. Long after she was asleep. Long after Risa had turned over and murmured something and gone back under.

I'd made a promise to my daughter.

I meant to keep it.

Day 616. Goodbye, Father.

The General walked to the north wall before dawn and read every name. Then he told us at the kitchen table what he's going back to do. Someone has been using his authority and his seal. He means to find out who, and take it back.

He gave Luna a code channel through his own office: diplomatic packets on the Meridian's courier dock, sealed, four people alive who can open one. The key is the date and hour Luna smiled at the gallery window when she was eight. He wrote it down that night. He's kept it in his desk for twelve years.

He asked me to leave the Meridian alone for now, for the six hundred aboard, and the Overseer in the next room, and Mother, the twins, Maura and every family Crane can reach. I said for now. Not forever. If they hurt the queen, or touch anyone here, I'm not asking.

He gave Sera the name from the north gate: Garrick Vale. General Staff now, two floors below him. He'll find out whether Vale gave the order or carried it, and tell her through Luna's numbers.

He knelt in the quiet room and put his hand on Risa's stomach. The baby turned and pressed against his palm. She asked Dot for the word for one who goes away and comes back. It's the queen's word for a forager. She called him that.

Half the city lined the road to the shuttle. Nessa: twelve oranges, not eleven, and a lemon. Don't try, get one. Holt: "Don't do anything stupid." The General: "Several stupid things. In a careful order."

He asked Luna to count him on. "Departing. One." "Windsors don't cry." "I know," he said, and he did, in front of everyone, and didn't wipe it away. Luna dropped the list. I have never seen her drop it. Nessa held it until she was ready.

Under "Departing. One" she wrote: "Expected back."

From the top of the ramp he looked back toward the garden. The baby reached as far as she could. Forager. He couldn't hear it. He stood still as though something had touched his sleeve.

Luna's first message through the numbers: I'm glad you did. Come back.

Tonight, for the first time, the baby asked me a question directly. Silver to silver. Forager, comes back?

I told her yes.

Now I have to make it true.