Chapter 252 Father's House

I started the house on Day 751.

Nine days before the transport. I'd been thinking about it since the call. Since Garnet held up her drawing of the field, with the wheat and the scarecrow and the house at the edge of it, and the horizon that wasn't a line.

So Dory can see where you're from.

I wanted them to see it too.

Not a copy of the penthouse. Not a room in our house, or a spare bed in the guest compound, or anywhere the mirror or the handler or the Kethri could stand outside and watch. Something theirs. Something they'd know the moment they saw it.

So I built them Father's house.

I picked the spot carefully.

On the eastern edge of the city. Past the schoolroom and the last of the third-wave houses, where the red glass gave way to the scrubland that ran up toward the canyon rim. Inside the city wall, but only just. Close enough to our house that Dory's check could reach it, if the queens widened the hollow a little. Far enough from the guest compound that nobody there could see in.

Gareth came with me the first morning. And Dov, still grinning from the wedding, with his tools on his back. And Toby, because Toby came to everything now.

I stood on the bare red glass and closed my eyes and remembered.

It wasn't a big house.

That was the first thing I had to remember. Everything in Scarecrow was big now. The city had grown round me for two years, and I'd built so much of it that my hands had forgotten what small felt like.

Father's house was small.

Four rooms and a kitchen. One storey. Low and wide, so the wind couldn't get a grip on it, with walls a meter thick, because Father had built it out of the wasteland itself. Dead earth and broken concrete and old highway, turned to stone in his hands and shaped into something you could live in.

A porch on the south side. With a bench.

A filter-machine on the roof, big and ugly and humming, which Father had built out of salvage the year before I was born and which had kept the air in the house clean every day of my life. The twins called it Mr. Grumble.

A door that stuck in wet weather.

A window in the kitchen with a crack across one corner that Father had always meant to fix and never had.

And behind the house, the field.

I did it in a day.

Not because I was rushing. Because I'd been building it in my head every night for a month, and by the time I put my hands on the red glass, I knew every stone.

I changed the glass into wasteland stone first. Grey and rough and pitted, the way the old highway had been. I wanted it to look like it had always been there. I wanted it to look old.

Then the walls. A meter thick. Low and wide.

Then the rooms. Mother and Father's, at the back, facing east, so the light came in at dawn. Mine, small, beside the kitchen, because I'd always been the one who got up first. The twins', at the other end, with two beds and a round window Father had cut because Garnet said she wanted to see the moon.

Then the kitchen.

I stood in the kitchen for a long time.

The table was in the middle. Big. Scarred. Father had made it from a slab of the old highway, and it had a dip worn into one end where Mother always put her cup down, because the tea was easier to drink without spilling if the cup sat lower.

I made the dip.

Then I made the crack in the window.

Toby watched me do it.

He stood in the kitchen doorway with his fiddle case on his back and watched me make a crack in a perfectly good window, very carefully, from the top corner diagonally down, exactly the length of my hand.

"Why?" he said.

"Because it was there."

"It was a crack."

"Father always meant to fix it," I said. "He never did. Every winter, he'd stand in front of it with a tube of sealant and say, next week. And then he wouldn't." I touched the crack. "Garnet used to trace it with her finger. She said it looked like a river on a map."

Toby didn't say anything.

Then he came in and stood beside me and looked at the crack.

"It does," he said.

The filter-machine took the longest.

Not because it was hard. I could have made a better one in an hour. Silent, efficient, a tenth the size. The ones I'd built for the city were better than anything in the dome.

But it wouldn't have been Mr. Grumble.

So I made Mr. Grumble. Out of salvage. Out of the third wave's broken cargo and a dead air plant Gareth had been meaning to strip for parts. Big and ugly and humming, with a rattle in the fan housing and a panel that never quite closed. I put it on the roof.

When I turned it on, it grumbled.

Exactly the right grumble.

Dov, on the roof beside me, burst out laughing.

"It's awful," he said.

"It's perfect," I said.

Then the field.

Behind the house. Not big. The size of the one in the wasteland, which had been the size of a kitchen garden, because that was all the dead earth Father had been able to bring back to life.

I turned the red glass to soil. Real soil. Dark and rich and full of things that would grow. I'd been doing it for two years, for the canyon gardens; I knew how.

Then Gareth brought the wheat.

Earth wheat. The last of the seed the first wave had brought down, nine years ago, that Holt had been keeping in a sealed tin in his map room since before I landed. For something worth it, he'd said, when I asked him for it. He hadn't asked what.

I didn't plant it. I wanted the twins to.

But I made the rows ready. Straight lines, in the soil, the way Father had always made them.

And in the middle of the field, I built the scarecrow.

I'd thought about it a long time.

Not the scarecrow. I knew the scarecrow. I'd built them all over the field of names, at the edge of the valley, since the first year. Arms out. Coat flapping. A name on the chest.

I'd thought about the scarf.

There wasn't one. Mother's blue scarf was on the real scarecrow, eleven light-years away, in a field in the wasteland. Miss Pell had gone and looked. Still there.

I could have made one. I could have made a blue scarf out of anything, in a minute, exactly the right blue.

I didn't.

I built the scarecrow with its arms out and Father's old coat on it, the one I remembered, brown and patched at the elbows. And I left its neck bare.

"No scarf?" said Gareth.

"Garnet will want to do that herself," I said.

Holt came to see it at dusk.

He walked the whole way from the map room with his stick, slowly, the way he walked everywhere. He stood at the edge of the field and looked at the house, and the porch with its bench, and Mr. Grumble on the roof, grumbling.

He didn't say anything for a long time.

Then he walked into the kitchen.

He stood there, the way I had. Looking at the table. At the dip worn into one end of it.

He put his hand in the dip.

"He made this," Holt said. "Didn't he. The table."

"Out of the old highway."

"I sat at this table," said Holt quietly. "Once. Before the Project. Before you were born. Before he built the house round it. He had the slab in the middle of a field of nothing, with no walls and no roof, and he said this is going to be the kitchen." He looked at the dip. "He'd already made that. For your mother's cup. Before there was a house."

I didn't say anything.

Holt took his hand out of the dip.

"They'll know," he said. "The twins. The moment they walk in."

"I hope so."

"They'll know," said Holt again. He turned and walked out onto the porch, and sat down on the bench, and looked at the field and the scarecrow with no scarf.

He stayed there until it was dark.

Then we built the shield.

It was Sera's idea. She'd been sitting at the drawing table every night since the wedding, drawing circles and lines and routes, Avalon to Earth, eleven light-years, the way to get her mother. And somewhere in the middle of it she'd stopped and drawn something else.

A dome. Over the city.

"If the Hand wants to stop us," she said, "it doesn't have to send anyone down. It can just drop something." She tapped the dome. "From orbit. On the city. On the house. On Dory." Her jaw tightened. "On the twins, the day they land. We'd never even see it coming."

"I can't stop something from orbit," I said.

"Not with stone," said Sera. "Not with iron." She looked at me. "With the grey."

I could make the grey.

I'd been able to since the ice outpost. Since the night the queen knelt in the snow and gave me her silver, and the first metal I'd ever met that I couldn't change became a page I could read like any other.

I'd never made any.

Not one grain. In five months. It was what the Sorn built their shells from, and their collars, and the discs behind Orrin Tal's ear, and the column in the east that had pulled three people's silver out through their skulls for two years. I'd looked at it every day and read every fold of it and never once wanted it in my hands.

That night, sitting on the edge of the bed while Sera slept beside me and Luna slept on the far side and Risa and Dory slept in the quiet room below, I held out my palm and made a seed of it.

Small. Grey. Smooth and seamless and so dense it was almost too heavy to hold.

It took no time at all.

I sat and looked at it for an hour.

Substrate S-1.

Not available, Luna had written, on every delivery manifest since the first.

It wasn't available to them.

We built it over four nights.

Not me alone. The grey came as fast as I asked for it. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that a dome a mile across, thinner than a soap bubble, had to be one thing, not a thousand sheets laid edge to edge, or the first strike would find the seams. And one person can't hold a mile of anything still while it sets.

Sera held the heat. The grey sets better hot; the old one said so, and my hands agreed. Sera stood beside me on the canyon rim each night with her palms out and the red light coming up round her silver, and held the air round my hands so hot it shimmered.

Risa held the lightning. Not to strike. To bind. She'd discovered it by accident on the second night, when a stray spark from her fingers had jumped to a sheet of fresh grey and the grey had gone rigid, all at once, like glass cooling. So she stood on the rim with her hands on the edges of every sheet I made and ran a thread of lightning along the seams, and the seams locked.

Sigmund helped her. He didn't say much. He'd stood beside her on the red glass for three storms and three hours, the night of the relays, and he stood beside her now. Feeding her current when hers ran low. Taking the excess when it ran too high. The two of them, brother and sister, working the lightning back and forth between them like a saw between two carpenters.

And between the four of us, sheet by sheet, the shield went up.

You couldn't see it.

That was the point. I made it thin. Thinner than paper. Thinner than a soap bubble. A dome of the grey, a mile across, over the whole of Scarecrow, so fine that the light went straight through it and the rain fell through it and the young in the courts could look up and see the sky.

But it was the grey.

And the grey didn't let things through that it didn't want to.

"Will it hold?" said Sera, on the fourth night, when the last sheet was locked and Risa had sat down on the rim with her head between her knees.

I didn't know.

"One strike," I said. "Maybe. From orbit. If it's not too big." I looked up at it. Invisible. A mile across. "Maybe two."

"Maybe two," said Sera.

She sat down beside Risa and put her arm round her, and Risa leaned into her shoulder, and Sera kissed the top of her head, and the two of them sat there on the rim of the canyon under a shield nobody could see.

Sigmund stood a little way off. Looking up.

"Father's coming," he said.

Nobody answered.

"In four days," said Sigmund. "Under this." He looked at the shield. "He's going to stand on our apron, with the delegation, and look up at the sky. And he won't see it." His jaw moved. "He won't see any of it."

Risa lifted her head from Sera's shoulder.

"Then we'll show him," she said quietly. "Everything. The way Holt says." She looked at her brother. "And he'll have to decide what he's looking at."

The Overseer saw the shield.

Of course it did. It watched everything. It would have seen the four of us on the rim every night, with Sera's heat shimmering and Risa's lightning running along the seams. It would have seen the grey go up, sheet by sheet.

It didn't say anything.

Not at the dawn count. Not through the band. Not to Crane. Not at all.

But on the morning of Day 756, when the shield was finished, the handler came out of the guest compound.

The smaller Sorn. The one that had come down with the Kethri. It walked out into the middle of the street, alone, with no Kethri behind it, and stood there in the early light.

And turned its mirror up. Toward the sky.

Toward the shield.

It stood there for a long time. Looking at something it shouldn't have been able to see. Something thinner than a soap bubble, a mile across, made of the same grey as its own shell.

Then it turned its mirror toward our house.

Toward me, on the porch.

And then it went back inside. Very fast. Faster than I'd ever seen either of them move.

Ten minutes later, Dot reported a transmission. From the guest compound. Up. Not through the band on Crane's collar. Through something else. Something the handler carried.

To the Hand.

"It is reporting," said Dot. "Not the Overseer. The other one."

"Reporting what?"

Dot's lamps flickered.

"This unit cannot read it," she said. "But it is very long."

The message from Okafor came that night.

Not on a courier case. Through Hana. In the last letter Hana sent before the transport, folded into the bottom of a page about which horse books she'd packed. One line, in pencil, in a different hand from Hana's. Square and blunt and pressed hard into the paper, the way someone writes who's used to writing on clipboards in the rain.

Dask. I've retired. I hear things. Is it time?

— O.

I read it on the porch.

Then I read it again.

Major Okafor. Who'd trained us in the dome. Who'd told me about the war, and Father, and the medal and the door. Who'd taught us how to keep a squad alive when command stopped answering. Who'd said it twice and made me repeat it back.

Who'd sealed our pods herself, on launch day.

Is it time?

I didn't write back.

Luna looked at me over the top of her notebook. "You're not answering?"

"No."

"Why?"

I folded the line and put it in my pocket, with Father's letter, the one from his boot, with Come home on it.

"Because she'll know," I said. "From the silence. She always did."

The queens opened the refuges on Day 754.

Not the refuge routes. Those had been there since before the delegation landed, the tunnels from every street to the deep courts where the brood could close the passages behind the children. These were different.

These were deeper.

Our queen made them. With the mountain queen's teaching, the way she'd made the quiet room. Not tunnels. Hollows. Great round chambers far below the courts, below the deep, below anywhere I'd ever been, grown out of the living rock with walls that curved like the inside of an egg.

Enough for everyone.

Every human in Scarecrow. Every young in the courts. Every attendant. Room for all of them, if the shield failed. If something came down from orbit that the grey couldn't stop.

The young of the city are my young, the queen said, when Luna asked her how many. All of them. Human and brood. I will not count them separately.

So everybody drilled.

Twice a day, for three days. Wren at the top of every passage with her list, counting. Dot at the bottom of the deepest one, with her lamps turned up, so everyone could see where they were going. The children first, then the old ones, then everyone else. Down through the courts and the deep and the long curving tunnels into the egg-shaped dark, where the queen's hum was so close you could feel it in your teeth.

The young went with them. Not in front. Not behind. Among. A young beside every child, the way Pebble had stood at the last turning of the refuge route and hummed them through. So that nobody went down alone.

On the third day, Ada Fen went down holding Pebble's foreplate with one hand and Nessa's sleeve with the other, and didn't cry once.

Wren counted her in.

All names.

Sigmund sparred with Sesh on Day 755.

Nobody arranged it. Nobody would have dared. But Sigmund had taken to the practice ground every morning since the wedding, the way he had since his father's name came through the General's letter, holding his lightning in a scorched circle so it went nowhere it shouldn't.

And the practice ground was at the edge of the perimeter.

Sesh had started stopping there on her way to the square. Standing at the edge of the line, watching him. The way she watched the young. Her head tilted. One eye on him. One eye on the lightning running up and down his arms.

On the fourth morning, Sigmund stopped.

He looked at her across the scorched circle.

Then he did something I'd never seen him do in two years on Avalon. He held out his hand, palm up, with the lightning pooled in it like water.

And bent his head. Just slightly.

An invitation.

Sesh looked at the lightning for a long time.

Then she stepped over the line.

The collar pulled. I saw it from the porch. The thread from the sliver going taut in her spine. Back. Three steps behind. She stepped through it anyway.

They didn't fight. Not really. Sigmund threw lightning, slow, so she could see it coming, and Sesh moved. Fast. Faster than anything that size should have been able to move. Her long legs bending backward, her neck swinging, her three-fingered hands coming up to turn the sparks aside with her claws as if she were brushing off rain.

She never struck back.

Not once. Every time Sigmund left an opening, and he left them deliberately, more and more, she saw it. I watched her see it. Her eye swivelling. Her claws lifting. And then the collar pulling, and her hand coming down, and the opening closing.

They stopped after an hour.

Sigmund stood in the middle of the scorched circle, breathing hard. Sesh stood at the edge of it, her feathers lifted along her neck in a ruff, her beak half open.

Neither of them said anything about the collar.

Sigmund bent his head again. Slightly.

Sesh bent hers. Further. All the way down. The way she'd bent it for Pebble.

Then she stepped back over the line, and went to the square, and stood at the edge watching the young.

"She could have had me," Sigmund said, at breakfast. "Six times. Seven." He didn't look up from his porridge. "She saw every opening."

"I know," said Risa.

"She didn't take one."

"I know."

Sigmund was quiet for a long time.

"Same time tomorrow," he said.

The night the shield was finished, I sat on the porch of Father's house.

On Father's bench. In the dark. With Mr. Grumble grumbling on the roof above me and the field in front of me, its rows ready, its scarecrow with its arms out and its neck bare.

Sera found me there.

She sat down beside me without saying anything. She'd been drawing all evening at the table in our kitchen, the route to Earth, her mother's name at the end of it. She had pencil on her fingers and a smudge on her cheek.

After a long time, she said, "It's exactly right."

"You've never seen the real one."

"I don't need to," said Sera. "I can see it in your face." She leaned her head on my shoulder. "They'll walk in here and they'll know. Both of them. Before they've taken their shoes off."

"Holt said that."

"Holt's right." She was quiet for a moment. "Four days."

"Four days."

"And then the twins. And Hana. And Pell. And Luna's father." Her voice went very flat. "And Senator Friese."

"And not your mother."

Sera didn't answer.

She sat with her head on my shoulder and looked at the scarecrow in the dark. At its arms out. At its bare neck.

"Next time," she said at last. "Dad'll bring her. Rory Calder carried her up four flights of stairs every day for eight years when the lift in Block Nine broke. He'll carry her across eleven light-years if he has to." Her voice cracked, very slightly. "We'll make him a bench. Like this one. So he can sit down when he gets here."

"We'll make him a bench," I said.

Sera took my hand and put it on her stomach.

Twelve weeks. Humming. One low note, steady. Toby's note.

"Listen," she said.

I listened.

And above us, Mr. Grumble grumbled, and the shield nobody could see stretched a mile across the sky, and in four days my sisters would walk up the path to this porch.

Days 751–756. Father's house.

I built it in a day on the eastern edge of the city, inside the wall but only just, far from the guest compound and close enough that Dory's check could reach if the queens widen the hollow. I'd been building it in my head every night for a month.

Small. Everything in Scarecrow is big now; I had to remember small. Four rooms and a kitchen, one storey, walls a meter thick, wasteland stone made to look old. A south porch with a bench. Mother and Father's room facing east. Mine beside the kitchen. The twins', two beds, the round window Father cut because Garnet wanted to see the moon. The table, from a slab of the old highway, with a dip worn where Mother put her cup so the tea was easier to drink without spilling.

The crack in the kitchen window, top corner, diagonal, a hand long. Father always meant to fix it: next week. Garnet traced it and said it looked like a river on a map. Toby: "It does."

Mr. Grumble on the roof. I could have made a better filter in an hour. It wouldn't have been Mr. Grumble. Rattle in the fan, a panel that never quite closes, exactly the right grumble. Dov: "It's awful." It's perfect.

The field behind, the size of a kitchen garden. Real soil. Holt's tin of Earth wheat from the first wave, kept nine years "for something worth it." Rows ready, not planted; the twins will plant. Father's brown coat, patched at the elbows, on the scarecrow. No scarf. Garnet will want to do that herself.

Holt at dusk put his hand in the dip. He sat at that slab once, before the house, in a field of nothing. Father had already worn the dip for Mother's cup before there were walls. "They'll know. The moment they walk in." He sat on the bench until dark.

Sera's idea: a shield. The Hand doesn't need to send anyone; it can drop something from orbit, on Dory, on the twins the day they land. Not stone. The grey. I've been able to make it since the ice outpost and in five months I never had, not one grain. That night I held out my palm and made a seed of it. No time at all. S-1. Not available. Not to them.

Four nights on the rim. Making the grey is nothing; making a mile of it one piece, with no seams for a strike to find, takes four of us. Sera held the heat; it sets better hot. Risa found that a thread of lightning along the seams locks the grey rigid. Sigmund fed her current and took the excess, like a saw between two carpenters. A dome thinner than a soap bubble, a mile across. Light and rain go through. One strike from orbit, maybe. Maybe two.

Sigmund: Father's coming in four days, under this, and won't see it. Risa: then we show him everything, and he'll have to decide what he's looking at.

The Overseer said nothing. The handler came out on Day 756, alone, and turned its mirror up at a shield it shouldn't be able to see. Then at me. Then went inside very fast. Dot: it's reporting to the Hand. Not through Crane. The other one. Very long.

Okafor, through Hana's last letter, square blunt pencil pressed hard: "Dask. I've retired. I hear things. Is it time? — O." I didn't answer. She'll know from the silence. She always did. I folded it in with Father's Come home.

Day 754, the queens opened the refuges: great egg-shaped chambers below the deep, enough for every human and every young. "The young of the city are my young, human and brood. I will not count them separately." Drills twice a day for three days, a young beside every child so nobody goes down alone. Ada Fen went down holding Pebble's foreplate and Nessa's sleeve and didn't cry. All names.

Day 755, Sigmund held out lightning pooled in his palm and bent his head. Sesh stepped over the line against the collar. She turned his sparks aside with her claws like rain. She saw every opening he left her, six times, seven, and the collar pulled her hand down every time. Neither of them mentioned it. She bowed all the way down, the way she did for Pebble. Sigmund: "Same time tomorrow."

The night the shield was done, on Father's bench. Sera, with pencil on her fingers: it's exactly right; she can see it in my face. Four days: the twins, Hana, Pell, the General, and Senator Friese. And not her mother. "Next time. Rory Calder carried her up four flights every day for eight years when the lift broke. He'll carry her eleven light-years if he has to. We'll make him a bench." Twelve weeks, humming Toby's note.

Mr. Grumble grumbled. Four days.