Chapter 233 Before They Land

Nobody slept after the hole in the stars.

Not properly. People lay down. People closed their eyes. But all over Scarecrow, for the next two nights, I could feel them lying awake in the dark, the way you lie awake when there's a storm coming and you can't hear it yet. Holt in his chair under the map. Wren at her window with her telescope pointed straight up. Juno on the roof of the schoolroom with her arms round her knees and her head tipped back, turning, slowly, as if she could feel the thing in the sky by looking at the place where it wasn't.

"I can't," she told me, on the first night. "It's not silver. Or if it is, it's behind a wall. Like the three in the east." She swallowed. "It's just a place where nothing comes back."

Dot watched it with every lens she had.

It didn't move. It sat in high orbit, far above the station, in the same patch of dark, night after night. No lights. No signals. No shuttles going up or down. The station went round underneath it twice a day, the way it always had, with its lights on and its track right to the second.

But something had changed about the station too.

"Its transmissions are different," Dot said. "The scheduled channels are still active. The telemetry is still correct. But the voices are different. The same words. The same procedures. Different voices." Her lamps flickered. "This unit has heard the Meridian's dock control every day for nine months. This unit knows every controller by voice."

"And now?"

"And now this unit knows none of them."

On the third night, the pilot's channel woke.

It was two in the morning. Dot was in the listening room, the way she was every night now, with her instruments on the flat south wall. The station was coming up over the eastern horizon on its night pass.

And the channel the pilot had used, every day for nine months, before she stopped answering, clicked.

Once.

Then a voice.

Not the pilot's. A woman's, low and fast and very controlled, the way you talk when you're standing somewhere you shouldn't be and you know exactly how long you have.

Dot recorded every word.

She came and got me afterward. She didn't scrape the doorframes this time. She rolled through the house so carefully that Sera didn't wake, which had never happened before, and stopped by the bed, and said in the very lowest voice she had:

"Dask. Major Ruan."

We played it in the kitchen.

All of us. Me, Sera, Luna, Risa with Dory asleep against her chest. Holt, who'd come down the street in his nightshirt and coat. Toby, Liam, Sigmund. Wren with her book.

Dot put it through the speaker Gareth had built into the kitchen wall for the dawn count. The voice filled the room.

This is Ruan. Avalon Command, Meridian. I'm on the pilot's channel because it's the only one they haven't taken. I have about ninety seconds before the pass ends and the relay drops.

The station is no longer ours.

Eleven days ago a Sorn tender docked at the main ring. You'll have seen it. Grey. Long. Since then the Overseer has been out of its quarters. It's never been out of its quarters in eight years. It's taken the dock, the courier office, the long-range array, and the spine chamber. Our people still run the air and the power, but only because it lets them.

Luna Windsor. Your father's packets are being held at the courier dock. Unopened. On the Overseer's order. I don't know if he's still sending. I don't know where he is. I'm sorry.

The pilot's confined to quarters. She's not hurt. She told me where her channel key was. She told me you'd be listening.

A pause. A breath. Something in the background, very faint, that might have been a door.

There's a ship in high orbit. You'll have seen that too. It isn't ours. It isn't the Project's. It came in on no lane I've ever heard of. The Overseer calls it the Hand. I don't know what that means.

In five days a delegation is coming down to Scarecrow. Director Crane. The Overseer. An escort I haven't been told the size of. They're calling it an inspection.

It isn't.

Another pause. Longer.

Six hundred people on this station, and half of them still think the Sorn are our allies. I can't fight them. I can't warn Earth. I can't do anything except this.

Hide what you can't afford to lose.

Ruan out.

The speaker clicked.

Nobody said anything for a very long time.

"Five days," Luna said at last.

Her voice was perfectly steady. Her hands, flat on the table on either side of the page of numbers, were not. She was pressing down on the wood so hard her knuckles had gone white.

"Five days," said Holt.

"My father's packets." Luna looked at the page. "Unopened. Held at the dock." She swallowed. "He's still sending. She doesn't know that. But he is. He'd send nothing yet. He'd send it every other day until someone told him to stop, and then he'd send it anyway."

"Luna"

"I'm fine." She wasn't. "I'm fine. He's alive. He's in his office on Earth doing stupid things in a careful order. If they'd done anything to him, the Overseer would have told us. That's how they do it. They tell you." She pressed her hands harder into the table. "They haven't told us. So he's alive."

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

Luna let her.

"The Hand," said Sera. "What does that mean?"

Nobody knew.

"Hide what you can't afford to lose," said Toby quietly.

Everyone looked at Risa.

At the small warm shape against her chest, asleep, with the swift feather in her fist.

Risa didn't look up.

We met in the map room the next morning.

Not just us. Everyone who had a say. That was how Scarecrow had always done things, since the first council in the mess hall, when there were nineteen of us and a kit that called itself Dot. Now there were hundreds of people in the city, and the courts were full, and fourteen queens in the ring, and the map room was much too small.

So we met in the square.

Holt's map came down from the ceiling and went up on a frame Gareth built in an hour, beside Toby's bench at the mouth of the meeting passage. People stood. People sat on the paving. The young lined the shadow of the passage. Our queen lay with her great head on the garden wall at the far end, where she could see.

And the mountain queen was there.

Not in body. She was a thousand miles away on her terrace. But she spoke through our queen, and Dot put her voice through the dawn-count speaker so everyone could hear it, and for the first time, the whole of Scarecrow heard the queen that Crane's people had kept chained under a mountain for four hundred years.

Luna told them first.

All of it. Ruan's message. The station. The Overseer. The Hand in high orbit. The delegation in five days. She didn't soften any of it, and she didn't make it worse. She read Ruan's words aloud from her notebook, exactly as Dot had recorded them.

Hide what you can't afford to lose.

Then she closed the notebook and looked at the square.

"So," she said. "What do we hide?"

Nobody answered at once.

Then Holt said, from his chair beside the map, "Nothing."

People turned.

"Nothing," Holt said again. He didn't stand. He sat with his stick across his knees and his hands open on top of it. "We hide nothing. Not one thing."

"Holt," said Wren.

"I mean it." He looked round the square. "I've been on this planet longer than anyone here. I've watched Command hide things from us for years. The first wave's numbers. The kits that fell. What the Teeming were. What the spine was. Every time, they hid it because they thought we'd behave better if we didn't know." He leaned forward. "And every time, it was worse when we found out."

"That's different," someone said. Odile Marr, from Port Ash. She'd been in Scarecrow a week. "That's them hiding things from us. This is us hiding things from them."

"It's the same thing," said Holt. "It's hiding. And it doesn't work. Not against people who've got a station full of instruments and a ship ten times bigger than the station parked above it." He pointed up. "What are we going to hide? The city? They can see the city from orbit. The courts? Crane's been mapping the Teeming tunnels under this canyon since before Dask landed. The queens?" He looked at the garden wall, where our queen lay with her head on the stones. "You want to hide her?"

Nobody spoke.

"They know what we've got," Holt said. "Maybe not all of it. But most. They're not coming down to find out. They're coming down to see whether we'll lie to them about it." He sat back. "And the moment we lie, they've got us. Because then it's not us and them. It's us and our lie. And they know exactly where the lie is, because they're the ones who taught us how to tell it."

The mountain queen spoke next.

Her voice came through the speaker, slow and dry and very old, and the whole square went silent to hear it.

I was hidden, she said. For four hundred of your years. Under the mountain. In the dark. With plates on my head and channels in my body, and my young in cages where I could feel them and not reach them. I was hidden so well that the brood a day's walk away did not know I lived.

A pause.

The ones who hid me are coming. They are coming for me. The Project's man will call me property. The Sorn will call me an asset. They will ask for me to be returned.

Another pause.

I will not hide.

Nobody moved.

I will be on my terrace, said the mountain queen. Where I can see the sky. Where they can see me. If they want me, they will have to come and take me, in the light, in front of every queen in the ring. Her voice dropped. I have been in the dark long enough. I will not go back into it to make them comfortable.

Our queen lifted her head from the wall.

And I will be here, she said. At this wall. Where I have been since the little one was born. If they come into this city, they will come past me.

Then they argued about the children.

It was the only thing they argued about. Not whether to hide the queens, or the stones, or the map, or the courts. Everyone agreed, in the end, with Holt. Show everything. Lie about nothing. Let them see exactly what Scarecrow was, and dare them to say it wasn't what they'd seen.

But the children were different.

There were seventy of them now, with the sinkhole and Port Ash. Ada Fen, who was five. Nessa, who was eleven and insisted she didn't count. The little ones from the third wave. The two babies born in the city over the summer, before Dory.

And Dory.

"We're not hiding them," said Sera. "I'm not putting children in a hole because Crane's coming to look at us."

"Nobody's putting them in a hole," said Wren. "But they should know where to go. If something goes wrong."

"Refuge routes," said Holt. "We built them for the Teeming. Before the Accord. Tunnels from every street to the deep courts, where the brood can close the passages behind them." He looked at the queen. "Will they still close?"

They will close, said the queen. For any child of this city. Human or brood.

"Then every child walks them," said Holt. "Twice. Before the delegation lands. So they know the way in the dark."

Nobody argued with that.

Then Risa stood up.

She had Dory in the sling against her chest. Six and a half weeks old. Awake, now, with her silver turned outward, the way it always was in a crowd, touching everyone. Checking. There you are. There you are. There you are.

"And her?" Risa said.

The square went quiet.

"Article Fourteen," Luna said.

She said it to the whole square. She'd never said it in public before. She'd said it in the map room, at the kitchen table, in the quiet room. Never like this.

"Complete integration," she said, "whether arising naturally, through treatment, or by descent, is the property of the Project under the Accord. That's the law. My father signed it. Her grandfather wrote it." She looked at Risa. At Dory. "She's the only person on Avalon who's all three. Arising naturally. Through treatment, because her parents were finished. By descent. She's the thing the clause was written for."

Nobody moved.

"And the Overseer knows she's here," I said.

Everyone looked at me.

"It touched her," I said. "Through me. At the end of the hello, the morning the spine-queen stopped. It took hold of the rope and looked down it, and she felt it look. And when she reached for Juno's three in the east, it was waiting there too." I made myself keep going. "It knows. Maybe not what she is. But that she's here. That she's bright. That she can reach further than I can."

"Then she has to be hidden," said Odile Marr.

"No," said Risa.

Her voice wasn't loud. But it carried. It carried the way thunder carries.

"No," she said again. "Not hidden. Holt's right. You can't hide something from people who already know it's there. You can only make them look for it. And if they have to look, they'll look everywhere. They'll look in the courts and the houses and the schoolroom. They'll look in the hollows. They'll pull up every floor in this city looking for her." She put her hand on Dory's back. "I won't have them do that. Not to the courts. Not to the young. Not to the children walking the refuge routes in the dark."

"Then what?" said Sera.

Risa looked at the queen.

"The quiet room," she said. "Not hidden. Quiet. Where the queens made it, under the garden, where everyone knows it is. They can know she's there. They can stand at the top of the steps and look down. But they can't feel her. Not through those walls. Not with the queens holding the world still around her." She lifted her chin. "Let them see the door. Let them see me sitting in front of it. Let them ask."

Our queen hummed.

Low and long. The way she'd hummed when Dory first called her by the brood-word for a queen who was hers.

We held the world quiet for her once, she said. When she was born. Every queen on Avalon.

A pause.

We will do it again.

And then, through the stones, through the ring, one after another, I felt them answer. The mountain queen. Lantern. The Hollow. First Garden. The Spire. The Bowl Queen. The delta, the white mountains, the young frightened queen in the eastern jungle.

Fourteen.

We will do it again.

The children walked the refuge routes on Day 683.

Twice. Once in the morning, with the lamps lit and Wren at the front with her list, counting. Once at dusk, with the lamps out, feeling their way along the walls in the dark, with the young of the brood waiting at every turning to hum them through.

Pebble was at the last turning, by the deep courts.

He'd insisted. Dot said he'd argued with the attendants for an hour. When the children came down the last stretch in the dark, holding hands, with Nessa at the front and Ada Fen at the back clutching Bryn Tolley's sleeve, Pebble was there, humming the hollow-song. Correctly. Third note and all.

Ada Fen stopped in front of him.

She was five. She'd been in Scarecrow for four months. She'd never been this close to one of the young without a grown-up holding her hand.

She looked at Pebble.

Pebble looked at her.

Then Ada Fen reached out, very slowly, and put her small hand flat on his foreplate. Right over the pale scar.

"You're the one who sings to the baby," she said.

Pebble hummed.

"I know the song too," said Ada Fen. "The baby taught everyone." And she hummed it. Badly. The third note wrong.

Pebble hummed it back to her, right.

Ada Fen tried again.

She got it.

Behind her, all down the dark passage, seventy children heard her get it. And one by one, holding hands in a long line against the wall, they started humming it too. Some of them right. Most of them wrong. Nessa, at the front, loudest of all, and very nearly in tune.

Wren stood at the turning with her list and didn't count them through.

She didn't need to. She could hear every one of them.

When the last child came out into the lamplight of the deep courts, Wren closed the book and said, to nobody in particular, "Seventy. All names."

Pebble hummed the last note.

The children cheered.

Holt asked me to come to the map room after the children were in bed.

He was sitting under the map, which Gareth had hung back from the ceiling, with a lamp on the table and a glass of something Liam had made that Holt pretended not to like. He didn't look up when I came in.

"Sit down, Dask."

I sat.

He turned the glass in his hands for a while.

"When they land," he said, "I want to see him first."

I didn't need to ask who.

"Before you," Holt said. "Before Luna, before the Overseer, before any of it. Five minutes. On the apron, at the bottom of the ramp, before he's had time to put his face on." He looked up at the three black marks on the map. "He was nineteen, the day your father's eyes went. Holding a clipboard. He came to my bunk that night and asked me if he'd done something wrong. He was shaking." He set the glass down. "I told him he hadn't. I told him it wasn't his fault. I told him a lot of things, because he was a boy and he was frightened and I was the only one awake."

"Was it his fault?"

"Not that night," Holt said. "Everything since, maybe." He rubbed his face. "I don't know what he is now. I know what he was. I want to see which one gets off that shuttle before anyone else does. Because if it's the boy, there's a chance. And if it isn't" He stopped.

"Five minutes," I said.

"Five minutes."

Luna was in the doorway. I hadn't heard her come. She had her notebook under her arm, and a folded page in her hand.

"After Holt," she said. "I want ten."

Holt raised an eyebrow.

Luna held up the page.

It wasn't numbers this time. It was a list, in plain words, in her small exact hand. Nine names. Nine pod numbers. Nine dates. Arden, Pim. SQ 5. Pod 14. Day 300. All the way down. And at the bottom, underlined twice, the same three words she'd encoded for her father.

Who signed these?

"My father can't ask him," Luna said. "So I will. To his face. In front of the Overseer, if I have to." Her voice was perfectly steady. "Ruan said hide what you can't afford to lose. We can't afford to lose them. They're already lost. So I'm not hiding the question."

Holt looked at her for a long moment.

Then he picked up his glass again.

"Your father," he said, "would be terrified of you."

"I know," said Luna. "I'm counting on it."

Sera found me on the porch that night.

Dory was asleep in the quiet room with Risa. Luna was at Holt's table under the map, writing the delegation's arrival into her notebook in neat columns, the way she wrote everything, as if putting it in order might make it smaller. The queen was at the wall. The city was quiet.

Sera sat down beside me on the step.

She didn't say anything for a long time.

Then she said, "Edda came by."

I turned.

"This afternoon," Sera said. "While you were at the forge." She was looking straight ahead, at the dark garden, at the queen's great pale head on the stones. "I asked her to. I said I couldn't wait any more. Not with them coming. I said I needed to know before they landed."

"And?"

Sera didn't answer at once.

Then she reached over, without looking at me, and took my hand. And put it flat on her stomach. Low down. Just below her belt.

"I can't feel anything," I said. And then, because it was true: "I don't want to look. Not without asking."

"Then look," said Sera. "I'm asking."

So I looked.

Gently. The way I'd learned with Risa. Not reaching. Not searching. Just letting my sight go down, very softly, the way you'd look into a pool to see if there were fish.

And there, very small, very new, smaller than anything I'd ever seen with my own sight, a spark.

Not Dory's lattice. Not yet. Not anything yet. Just a few cells, folding into each other, and in the very middle of them, so faint I'd have missed it if I hadn't been looking, a single thread of silver.

Whole.

Already whole.

I took a breath. It shook.

"Edda says it's early," Sera said. Her voice was very steady. "Very early. She says it's not like Risa's was. Slower. More normal. She says I shouldn't count on anything for weeks." She was still looking at the garden. "But she says it's there."

"It's there," I said.

"You can see it?"

"I can see it."

Sera let out a breath. Her shoulders came down. And then, finally, she turned her head and looked at me, and her eyes were wet and her jaw was set and she was smiling, all at once, the way only Sera could.

"Five days," she said. "Crane and the Overseer and the Hand and everything. Five days." She laughed. It cracked. "And I've decided a thing and it's done. It's actually done. Before they land."

"Before they land," I said.

She leaned against me.

And from the garden wall, the queen lifted her head. Just slightly. Just enough.

Another, she said.

Another, I said.

Another of the brood, said the queen, very softly. Yours, and then ours.

And under the garden, in the quiet room, I felt Dory's check come round in her sleep. Me. Sera. Risa. Luna. The queen.

And then it stopped. On Sera. On the place where my hand was.

And stayed there.

There you are, said Dory.

Days 680–684. Before they land.

Two nights without real sleep. Juno can't feel the thing in high orbit. A place where nothing comes back. The station's channels still run, the telemetry is still right, but Dot knows none of the voices any more.

Day 682, 2 a.m., the pilot's channel clicked. Major Tess Ruan, ninety seconds before the relay dropped. "The station is no longer ours." A Sorn tender docked eleven days ago. The Overseer has come out of its quarters for the first time in eight years and taken the dock, the courier office, the array and the spine chamber. Our people run the air and power because it lets them. The General's packets are held unopened at the dock. The pilot is confined, unhurt, and told Ruan where her channel key was. The ship in high orbit came in on no lane Ruan knows. The Overseer calls it the Hand. In five days: Crane, the Overseer, and an escort, for an "inspection." "It isn't." Six hundred aboard, half still think the Sorn are allies. "Hide what you can't afford to lose."

Luna: he's alive. If they'd done anything, they would have told us. That's how they do it.

Council in the square, with the map on a frame, the young in the passage shadow, and the mountain queen through the dawn-count speaker. Holt: hide nothing. They aren't coming to find out what we have. They're coming to see whether we'll lie, and the moment we lie they've got us.

The mountain queen: "I was hidden for four hundred of your years. I will not hide." She'll be on her terrace in the light, in front of the whole ring. Ours: "If they come into this city, they will come past me."

Every child walks the refuge routes twice. The queen: the passages will close for any child of this city, human or brood.

Then Risa: and her? Luna said Article Fourteen aloud to the whole square for the first time. Dory is all three: naturally, through treatment, by descent. I told them the Overseer already knows she's here.

Risa: not hidden. If they have to look, they'll pull up every floor. The quiet room, where everyone knows it is. Let them see the door. Let them see me sitting in front of it. The queen: we held the world quiet for her once. All fourteen: we will do it again.

Holt wants five minutes with Crane at the bottom of the ramp, before he's had time to put his face on. He was nineteen, holding a clipboard, the day Father's eyes went, and came to Holt's bunk shaking. Holt wants to see which one gets off the shuttle. Luna wants ten minutes after him, with the nine names and "Who signed these?" Holt: your father would be terrified of you. Luna: I'm counting on it.

Day 683, the refuge routes. At the last turning in the dark, Pebble hummed the children through. Ada Fen put her hand on his scar: "You're the one who sings to the baby." She got the third note right on her second try.

That night, Sera: Edda came. She put my hand on her stomach. "Then look. I'm asking." A spark, smaller than anything I have ever seen. A few cells folding. In the middle, one thread of silver, already whole. Edda says early, slower than Risa, more normal, don't count on anything for weeks. But it's there. "I've decided a thing and it's done. Before they land."

The queen: another of the brood. Yours, and then ours.

Dory's check stopped on the place where my hand was, and stayed.

There you are.

Three days.