Chapter 229 The Southern Brood

The queen who answered had no name.

Not one we knew. Not one any of our queens knew. She'd been in the south a very long time, Lantern said, beyond the great river, where the forest gave way to red scrub and dry stone and long flat valleys that flooded once a year and baked for the rest. Lantern had heard of her, the way you hear of a great-aunt you've never met. The brood in the dry valleys. Old. Proud. Not interested in the north.

She'd never spoken to any of them.

She spoke to Dory.

It was the smallest thread I'd ever felt.

Thinner than the hello. Thinner than the gap shaped like Risa's voice. It ran from the quiet room, through our queen, through the mountain, through Lantern at the very edge of everything, and on, a thousand miles, past the river. So thin that I could only feel it when I held Dory, and even then only faintly, like a hair across the back of my hand.

But it held.

All through the night of Day 631, Dory checked along it. Every four minutes, the way she checked on all of us. There you are. And every time the station was on the far side of the world, and the voice in the sky went quiet, something at the far end of the thread answered.

Not in words. Not even in the brood-speech, at first. Just a pulse. Faint and tired and very old.

Here.

By morning, it had become more than that.

"She is trying to speak," Dot said. She'd rolled to the top of the garden stairs at dawn, after the count, and stopped there with her lamps very low. "This unit can hear her only through the little one. She is very far. She is very tired." A pause. "She is asking who is calling her."

Risa looked at me over Dory's head.

"Tell her," she said.

Who are you, I asked Dory. Silver to silver.

Dory thought about it.

Then she sent something down the thread, and I felt it go: her own bright shape, quick and sure, and wrapped round it the brood-word for the youngest in the hollow. And beside it, mine. And Risa's. And our queen's.

Small one. Of the brood. Of these.

There was a long silence.

Then the answer came back, and Dot translated it slowly, one word at a time, her lamps flickering.

"She says," Dot said, "that she did not know the north had young any more."

The station came round at noon.

I felt the voice begin before I felt the station. A pressure, from the south-east, coming up over the curve of the world. The way you feel a storm before you can see the clouds.

Then it reached the dry valleys.

And the thread went quiet.

Not broken. Dory was still checking along it, every four minutes. But nothing answered. The old queen couldn't hear her any more. All she could hear was the voice.

Move north. Move together.

Juno, sitting on the porch steps, turned her head sharply south.

"They're moving," she said. "The whole valley. All at once."

"Which way?"

Juno closed her eyes.

"North," she said. "But not straight. They're turning." She frowned. "East. A little east. Toward something."

Risa had gone very still in Gareth's chair.

"There's weather there," she said. "Small. In a hollow in the ground. Hot. Like a kitchen." She opened her eyes. "Lucas, there are people in it."

"On Wren's list?"

Wren was already at the gate with the list in her hand. She'd been there all morning, waiting.

She looked at it for a long time.

"No," she said. "There's nothing there. Nothing on any map. Nobody's ever sent a signal from there."

"There's someone there now," said Risa.

The queens confirmed it within the hour.

Lantern, straining south, listening past the voice. The mountain queen, listening through her. They couldn't see the people. Queens don't see, the way I see. But they could hear the brood. And the brood, driven north and east by the voice, could feel something ahead of it.

A sinkhole, Lantern said. In the dry stone. Deep and narrow, with water at the bottom, and caves in the walls. The old queen's brood had always known it. They didn't go there. It was too narrow for adults, too deep for young.

Now there were humans in it.

How many? I asked.

We cannot tell, said Lantern. More than ten. Fewer than a hundred. They have been there a long time. The brood can smell their fires.

And the brood's going toward them.

The voice is turning the brood toward them, Lantern said. We do not think it is chance.

Neither did I.

Holt laid it out on the map-room table that afternoon, with Luna beside him and Wren's list beside her.

He'd pinned a sheet of the third wave's survey paper over the big map of Avalon. Scarecrow at the top, in the canyon. The great river, a long blue line across the middle. Lantern's forest below it. And below that, a great deal of nothing. The survey teams had never gone that far.

Holt drew a small circle in the nothing.

"There," he said. "Near as Juno and the queens can put it. A thousand and forty miles."

"The transport can do it," said Keir.

He was standing by the door with his arms folded. He'd been quiet since Dane's gate, quieter than ever since Dane came home. But he'd built the transport with Aster, the two of them, over the summer, from nothing but parts I made, the third wave's salvage and Aster's drawings and a great deal of shouting. Independent engines. Rotor blades longer than our house. Locking pins you could see from the outside, so you'd always know they were set.

"How long?" I said.

"Seven hours. Eight, with headwinds. We'd need to refuel once on the way. There's a cache at the old survey camp on the river." Keir glanced at Aster.

The kit stood in the corner. She was smaller than Dot, all angles and narrow limbs, and her lamps were a pale green that Liam said made her look permanently unwell. She'd been found in a locked room at the relay basin with her power torn out, and she didn't talk much about that.

"The cache is intact," Aster said. "This unit checked it last month."

"Then seven hours," said Keir.

"The brood's moving twenty miles a day," Luna said. "When the voice is on. They stop when it stops." She looked at Risa's weather map, which Wren had drawn from Risa's descriptions in careful pencil. "How far are they from the sinkhole?"

Juno closed her eyes again.

"Forty miles," she said. "Maybe less."

"Two days."

"Two passes," said Holt. "If the voice comes round twice a day, and drives them ten miles each time."

"Then we have a day and a half," Luna said.

Nobody argued.

The hardest part was deciding who went.

Not because people didn't want to. Everyone did. Liam wanted to. Sigmund wanted to. Kellan, whose fire was steady now, came to the map room with his jaw set and said he'd walk if they wouldn't let him fly. Nell came, and stood at the back, and didn't say anything at all, which was strange for Nell.

I knew who I wanted.

Toby. Because whatever the voice was, it was a sound, of a kind, and Toby heard sounds better than anyone alive. Juno, because she could feel where the brood was and which way it was facing, and I couldn't, past the horizon. Sera, because if anything went wrong, I wanted Sera. Keir and Aster, because it was their transport.

And me.

Risa couldn't come. She was eleven days past the birth. Edda had said no in a voice that ended the conversation, and Risa hadn't argued, which told me how tired she really was.

Luna stayed, because someone had to hold the city and speak to the queens and watch the station and wait for a courier case that might never come.

And Dory stayed.

Of course she stayed.

I went down to the quiet room before we left.

Risa was there with her. On the bench, the way she'd been before the birth. Dory in her arms, awake, her silver turning on its check. Me. Risa. Sera, upstairs packing. Luna in the map room. The queen. Pebble.

The thread to the south.

"She's going to know," Risa said quietly. "When you go."

"I know."

"She's going to check on you, and you'll be a thousand miles away."

"I know."

"And she'll find you," Risa said. "She'll find you, because she found an old queen past the river who'd never heard of us. A thousand miles is nothing to her." She looked down at Dory. "I don't know if that's better or worse."

I sat on the floor by the bench and held out my hand.

Dory took my finger in her fist.

I have to go away, I told her. A long way. South. To the old queen. To the people in the hole in the ground.

Her silver went still.

Then it came back, small and rising. The shape she'd learned the night the General left.

Forager?

My throat closed.

Yes, I said. Forager.

She thought about it for a long time. Then her silver did something new. It reached up along my arm, into me, the way it did when she checked, but it didn't stop and move on. It settled. A small bright weight, somewhere behind my breastbone.

Like a stone in a pocket.

"What's she doing?" Risa said.

I didn't know.

But it was still there when I stood up. Still there when I climbed the stairs. Still there, warm and small, when the transport lifted off the red-glass apron with a roar that rattled every window in Scarecrow and turned south.

It was eight hours.

Keir flew the whole way, with Aster beside him running the engines, and the rest of us in the long hold with the cargo straps and the spare fuel cans and the smell of hot oil. Toby slept for the first three hours. I don't know how. Sera didn't sleep at all. She sat by the hold window with her rifle across her knees and watched Avalon go by underneath.

Juno sat on a crate in the middle of the hold with her eyes closed and her head turning, slowly, as we flew.

"Lantern," she said, at the river. And later, over the forest: "The Hollow, east. Far. Facing home."

And later still, after the refuelling stop, when the forest thinned out and the ground went red: "Them."

I felt it a moment after she did.

The brood. The old queen's brood. Spread out over the dry valleys below us like a stain. Thousands of them. More than I'd ever felt in one place, even in the deep under the canyon. Adults and young and attendants, all together, all moving, all facing north and east.

And above them, coming up over the edge of the sky, the voice.

I'd felt it from Scarecrow. Faint, from a thousand miles.

This was different.

This was standing under it.

It came down out of the sky like weight. Like the pressure in your ears when you dive too deep. It didn't have a sound, exactly, but it was in the shape of a sound, a long, low, grinding pulse that went on and on and on without a break. It pressed down through the hull of the transport and through my skin and into my silver and pushed.

Not at me. It wasn't meant for me.

But I felt it push anyway.

North, it said. Together. Move.

Sera grabbed the cargo strap beside her. Her knuckles went white.

"What is that," she said.

Juno had her hands pressed over her ears. It didn't help. It wasn't in her ears.

Toby was awake.

He was sitting bolt upright on the bench with his eyes wide open and his face completely still. Not frightened. Listening. The way he listened to the deep, the way he listened to the hello, the way he'd listened to his mother sing his name back up the thread from eleven light-years away.

"There's a note," he said.

"What?"

"Under it. There's a note." Toby's eyes had gone silver at the edges. "It's not just noise. It's built. It's got a carrier. One long note at the bottom, holding everything else up. Like a drone on a pipe." He tilted his head. "Everything else rides on it. All the move and north and together. If the carrier wasn't there, the rest would fall apart."

I stared at him.

"Can you hear it clearly?"

"I can hear it," Toby said, "perfectly."

Keir put us down on a ridge above the sinkhole, half an hour before the voice was due to reach full strength.

The sinkhole was exactly where the queens had said. A long narrow slot in the red stone, two hundred feet deep, with green at the bottom where the water was. Caves in the walls. And smoke. Thin and blue, from somewhere far down.

And three miles south, coming over the lip of the valley, the brood.

I'd never seen that many Teeming above ground. Not even the day they came over the canyon rim. They came in a long dark line from horizon to horizon, adults at the front, young in the middle, attendants all along the edges. Moving slowly. Steadily. Not running. Not charging.

Just moving. North and east. Toward the slot in the ground.

They'd fill it, Sera said afterward. They wouldn't mean to. They wouldn't attack anyone. They'd just keep coming, the way the voice told them to, together, and the ones at the front would be pushed over the edge by the ones behind, and the ones behind would follow, and there was nowhere in that slot for anyone to go.

"Lucas," Sera said.

"I know."

"Lucas, there are people down there."

I could see them now. With my own sight. Close enough at last. Bones. Thirty-four sets of them, in the caves halfway down the sinkhole wall. Adults, mostly. A few children. All of them very still, crowded at the back of the deepest cave, where the walls closed in.

And six of them had silver.

Third-wave silver. The newer modification. I knew it the way I knew my own.

I didn't have time to think about that.

The voice reached full strength.

It came down out of the sky like a hammer, and the brood surged forward. Not running. Just faster. Harder. Every adult at the front of the line lurching toward the sinkhole, a mile away now, less, their great plated bodies shoving each other, the young crying out, the attendants trying to keep them together and failing.

I reached for the old queen.

I couldn't find her. She was in there, somewhere in the middle of the line, I could feel her the way you feel a fire in the next room. But I couldn't reach her. The voice was too loud. It filled everything.

I reached for the brood.

I could have stopped them. I could have. I could have reached into the ground and opened a trench across the valley a mile wide, or raised a wall, or turned the stone under their feet to glass. I'd done it before, at the canyon, at the mountain.

And they'd have died. Hundreds of them. Pushed into the trench by the ones behind. Crushed against the wall. Driven on by the voice until there was nothing left to drive.

They weren't attacking anyone. They were being made to walk.

"Toby," I said.

He was already standing up. He had the fiddle.

I don't know why he'd brought it. He told me afterward he always did, now, everywhere, since the summer. It was in a case Dov had made, strapped to his back like a rifle. He took it out and tucked it under his chin and looked at me.

"The carrier," he said. "I can hear it. I can play against it."

"Against it?"

"The opposite. The exact opposite. Half a wave out." His hands were very steady on the bow. "If I play the carrier's note, but turned upside down, they'll cancel. Like two ripples that meet in a pond and go flat. The carrier stops. Everything that's riding on it falls off."

"Can a fiddle do that?"

"Not on its own," Toby said. "Not that loud. Not over a whole valley." He looked at me. "But you can make it louder."

I didn't know how.

I'd never done it before. I'd made things out of stone and metal and glass. I'd made bridges and walls and a whole city. I'd never made a sound.

But I'd watched the queens grow the quiet room.

Every wall at an angle. Every plane turned a little away from every other, so that sound slid off and nothing came back.

If you could make a room that swallowed sound, you could make one that carried it.

I knelt down on the ridge and put my hands flat on the red stone.

And I reached in.

Not to cut. Not to wall. To shape. I found the grain of the stone, the long layers laid down by a thousand years of floods, and I folded them. Gently. Into a curve. A long, deep, smooth curve, opening south, like the inside of a shell. Like the bowl of a hand cupped to call across a field.

I made it big.

The whole face of the ridge, from where we stood to the valley floor. A great curved bowl of red stone, three hundred feet across, polished smooth as glass on the inside.

Toby stood at the focus of it.

Exactly where I told him. On a small flat shelf I'd left at the very centre, where every curve of the bowl met.

He drew the bow.

I've heard Toby play a great many times.

At the meeting passage, in the evenings. On the porch, for Dory. In the square, the night the young came out and hummed with her.

I'd never heard him play like this.

It was one note. Only one. Low and long and steady, so low I felt it in my teeth more than heard it. The opposite of the carrier. The exact opposite. Every place the carrier pushed, Toby's note pulled. Every place it rose, Toby's note fell.

The bowl caught it.

And threw it.

Out across the valley. Down over the sinkhole and the caves and the thirty-four people crowded at the back of them. South over the red stone. Into the brood.

Into the voice.

They met somewhere over the valley floor.

I felt it happen. The carrier, coming down from the sky like a hammer. Toby's note, going up from the ridge like a hand.

They touched.

And went flat.

Not quiet. Flat. Like two ripples meeting in a pond. One moment the voice was everywhere, filling everything, pressing down through my silver like a weight. And the next moment, at the bottom, where the carrier had been, there was nothing.

Nothing holding it up.

And everything that rode on it, move and north and together, fell.

Like a tent when you pull the pole out.

The voice was still there, high above. Still pushing. But it had nothing to push with. It was all words and no throat. It slid off the brood the way the world's noise slid off the walls of the quiet room.

The front of the line stopped.

Half a mile from the sinkhole. Less. The great adults at the front stumbled and slowed and stood still, their heads swinging, their plates shuddering, the way someone stands when they wake up and don't know where they are. Behind them, the next line stopped. And the next. All the way back, across the valley, a long dark wave of stopping, rolling south, until the whole brood stood still on the red stone in the afternoon light.

Toby didn't stop playing.

He kept the note going. Steady. Endless. His arm moving the bow back and forth, back and forth, so smoothly you couldn't hear the change of direction. His eyes closed. His face completely calm.

I'd never seen anyone hold a note that long. I didn't know a person could.

Now, I thought. Now, while it's flat.

And I reached for the old queen.

She was there.

In the middle of the brood, where I'd felt her. Huge. Older than our queen, older than the mountain queen, older maybe than the Spire. Her plates were cracked and pale with age and her voice, when it came, was dry and slow like wind over a riverbed in summer.

She was frightened.

I'd never felt a queen frightened before. Not like this. She'd been walking for three days and she didn't know why. Her brood had been walking. She hadn't been able to stop them. She hadn't been able to stop herself. And now, suddenly, it had stopped, and she didn't know why that was either.

Who, she said. Who.

I didn't answer.

Somebody else did.

The small bright weight behind my breastbone. The one Dory had left there, in the quiet room, like a stone in a pocket.

It woke.

And reached out, through me, a thousand miles from home, to the old queen in the middle of the valley.

There you are.

The old queen went very still.

Small one, she said. The small one from the north. The one who called.

Of the brood, said Dory, through me. Of these.

And she showed the old queen me. And Toby on his shelf with his bow. And Sera on the ridge with her rifle across her knees and her face wet. And Juno and Keir and Aster. And then, behind all of us, far away, a thousand miles, the city. The courts. Our queen at the garden wall. Pebble in the lower court. Risa on the bench.

Everyone home, Dory said.

The old queen was silent for a very long time.

Then, very slowly, she lowered her great cracked head to the red stone.

And her brood, all across the valley, lowered theirs.

Toby played for forty minutes.

That was how long the station took to pass over. Forty minutes of the voice pressing down, and forty minutes of Toby's note holding it flat, until at last the station went over the edge of the sky and the voice went with it.

Then he stopped.

He lowered the bow. He lowered the fiddle. He stood on his shelf at the centre of the great stone bowl and swayed, and Sera caught him before he fell.

"Toby."

"I'm fine." His voice was a croak. "I'm fine. My arm's gone. I can't feel my arm."

"You held it for forty minutes."

"Was it forty?" He blinked. "It felt like about ten."

Sera laughed. It came out wet.

"Idiot," she said, and held him up.

The people in the sinkhole came out at dusk.

They didn't believe us at first. They'd watched the brood come over the valley for three days, from the lip of the slot, and then they'd gone down to the deepest cave and waited to die. When I called down to them, they didn't answer. When Sera called, they didn't answer. When Keir took the transport up and hovered over the slot with its lights on, so they could see it was human-made, they still didn't answer.

Then Juno climbed down.

Alone. On a rope Keir lowered, down the sheer red wall to the first of the caves. And she stood at the mouth of it, in the last of the light, and said in her clear, carrying voice:

"My name is Juno Pell. I'm from Scarecrow. The Teeming have stopped. You can come out now."

Nothing.

Then a voice, from very far back in the dark. Cracked. Disbelieving.

"Juno?"

Juno went still.

"Juno Pell? From the hill? The mirror girl?"

Juno's hand went to her mouth.

"Who's that?"

"It's Bryn," said the voice. "Bryn Tolley. Third wave. Nell's squad. We got separated on the walk to the canyon. The six of us. We went the wrong way at the river." A long pause. "We saw your mirror. Every morning. For months. Before the dust storm. We tried to get to you and we couldn't." The voice broke. "We thought you'd stopped. We thought everyone had stopped."

There were thirty-four of them.

Six from the third wave. Bryn Tolley, and five others from Nell's squad, who'd gone the wrong way at the river in the chaos of the walk and been lost for eleven months. Twenty-eight others. Survivors from a supply drop in the first year, the ones who'd landed so far south that no one had ever found them. They'd never had a radio. They'd never had a kit. They'd found the sinkhole and the water at the bottom and lived in the caves, and kept a fire burning, and waited.

Nobody had known they were there.

Not Wren, with her list. Not Dot, with her instruments. Not the queens. Not me.

They'd been waiting for nearly two years.

We flew home through the night.

Eight hours. Keir at the controls, grey with exhaustion, with Aster beside him and her pale green lamps very bright. Toby asleep on a cargo strap with his fiddle in his arms. Sera beside him, awake, watching him breathe. Juno on a crate with Bryn Tolley's head on her shoulder.

Thirty-four people in the hold who'd never seen a city.

I sat at the back, by the cargo door, and didn't sleep.

I was thinking about the bowl.

I'd left it there, on the ridge. A great curved shell of red stone, three hundred feet across, opening south. The old queen had asked me to. She'd said the brood would come to it. That when the voice came over again, they would gather in front of it, and wait.

But there'd be no one to play.

Toby couldn't stay. I couldn't stay. And the voice would come again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and every brood under it would be driven, and there weren't enough Tobys in the world to stand at the centre of every bowl.

Unless, I thought.

Unless the bowl could hold the note itself.

I closed my eyes and thought about stone. About how it rang, sometimes, when you struck it right. About the faceted walls of the quiet room, and the way they turned sound. About Toby's note, the exact shape of it, which I could still feel in my teeth.

About a stone that could carry that shape. And sing it. On its own.

Somewhere over the great river, the small bright weight behind my breastbone stirred.

There you are, it said, from a thousand miles away.

Here, I told it. Coming home.

We landed at Scarecrow an hour after dawn.

Nell was on the apron.

She'd been there all night, Wren told me later. Standing in the cold with her squad's arrival list in her hands. She'd kept it up to date for eleven months. Every name. Six of them with a line through, and missing, river written beside.

When the cargo door opened, she didn't move.

Bryn Tolley came down the ramp first.

She stopped at the bottom. She looked at Nell. She looked at the list in Nell's hands.

Nell looked back.

Then, very slowly, with a hand that was shaking so hard she could barely hold the pen, Nell took her list and found the first of the six names with a line through it.

Tolley, Bryn. Missing, river.

And beside it, in letters that went everywhere, she wrote:

Home.

Then she dropped the list and the pen and ran.

Days 633–634. The southern brood.

The old queen past the river has no name we know. She'd never spoken to the north. She spoke to Dory, along a thread thinner than a hair. "Who is calling?" Dory told her: small one, of the brood, of these. The old queen said she didn't know the north had young any more.

When the station came over, the voice drowned her out and turned her brood north and east, toward a sinkhole in the red stone. Risa felt the heat of fires in it. Not on Wren's list. Not on any map. The queens don't think the turn was chance.

A thousand and forty miles. Keir and Aster's transport, eight hours, refuel at the river. Toby, Juno, Sera, Keir, Aster and me. Risa eleven days past the birth; Edda said no. Luna held the city.

Before I left, Dory asked: forager? I said yes. She left something behind my breastbone. A small bright weight, like a stone in a pocket. It came with me.

Under the voice, standing in it: Toby heard a carrier, one long note holding all the rest up, like a drone on a pipe. He brought his fiddle. He always does now.

Thirty-four people in the caves. Six with third-wave silver.

The brood surged at full strength. I could have cut a trench, raised a wall. They'd have died. They weren't attacking. They were being made to walk.

Toby: play the carrier upside down, half a wave out, and they cancel. A fiddle can't do it over a valley. I folded the ridge into a bowl of red stone three hundred feet across, polished like glass, with a shelf at the focus. Toby played one note. The bowl threw it. They met over the valley and went flat. The words fell off the voice like a tent when you pull the pole. The brood stopped half a mile from the slot.

I reached for the old queen. She was frightened. She had walked for three days and couldn't stop herself. Dory's stone woke behind my breastbone and reached her through me: there you are. Everyone home. The old queen lowered her head. Then the whole brood did.

Toby held the note forty minutes, until the station went over the edge of the sky. "It felt like about ten." Sera: "Idiot."

Juno went down the rope alone. A voice from the dark: "Juno Pell? The mirror girl?" Bryn Tolley, Nell's squad. Six of them went the wrong way at the river. They saw her mirror every morning for months and couldn't reach her. Twenty-eight more from a first-year drop that landed too far south to be found. No radio. Two years by a fire in the caves.

I left the bowl. The old queen says the brood will gather in front of it. Nobody will be there to play. Unless the stone can hold the note on its own. I've been thinking about that all night.

Nell was on the apron all night with her squad's list. Six names with a line through and "missing, river." Bryn came down the ramp first. Nell wrote beside her name: Home.

Then she dropped the list and ran.