Chapter 258 Is It Time

Garnet found the queen before breakfast.

Nobody took her. Nobody told her where to go. I came down the porch steps at first light, with my head still full of seventy-three seconds and Mother's hands going still, and there was my little sister at the bottom of the garden, sitting cross-legged on the stones with her drawing board on her knees, about four feet from the largest living thing in Scarecrow.

The queen was lying along the wall the way she always did in the mornings. Pale plates. The long low curve of her, like a hill somebody had decided to keep in the garden. One great eye open, and turned, very slightly, toward the small person drawing her.

Garnet didn't look up.

"Don't come any closer," she said. "You'll put her off."

"I don't think I'll put her off."

"You'll put me off, then." She rubbed something out with the side of her thumb. "She keeps moving her eye. Every time I get it right, she moves it."

I sat down on the bottom step.

Pebble was already there. Of course he was. He'd come up out of the hollow in the dark and arranged himself beside the step like a dog that has decided a particular stair is his, and he was watching Garnet with the same expression he used for Dory. Which, as far as I could tell, was an expression that meant mine, probably, but I'll wait and see.

She came out before the light, the queen said, into me. Very soft. The voice she used for the young. She sat down. She did not ask me anything. She began to make marks.

She's drawing you.

I know what drawing is. A pause, with something in it that in a person I'd have called amusement. The one called Nessa draws me every week. I have never had one draw me so carefully. She keeps looking at my eye. As if it might go somewhere.

It keeps going somewhere. She says you keep moving it.

I am looking at her.

That's the problem.

The queen considered this.

Then, very slowly, the great eye stopped moving. It settled on a point somewhere over Garnet's left shoulder and stayed there. The plates along her flank went still. Even the faint hum that always came off her in the mornings, the one I felt more than heard, went down and down until it was almost nothing.

Garnet looked up.

Then down at her board. Then up again.

"Oh," she said. "Thank you."

She drew very fast for about four minutes, with her tongue between her teeth, the way she'd drawn the horizon on the call. Then she sat back, and looked at it, and turned the board round, and held it up toward the queen's head. Not toward me. Toward the queen.

"There," she said. "That's you."

I couldn't see it properly from the step. I could see enough. Long pale curves, and the wall, and the faceted shadows the plates threw on the stones, and one eye, very large and very dark and looking just past the edge of the paper.

The queen looked at it for a long time.

Lucas, she said. Ask her if she will let me speak to her. Not through you. To her. She must choose it.

I asked.

Garnet lowered the board. She looked at the queen's head, which was larger than our kitchen table, and then at me.

"Will it hurt?"

"No."

"Will she be able to hear what I'm thinking?"

"Only what you say to her. Only if you want."

Garnet thought about it. For Garnet, that meant about a second and a half.

"All right," she said. And then, to the queen, very politely, the way Miss Pell had taught her to speak to visitors at the penthouse door: "Yes, please."

I felt it happen. A small thread, going out from the queen. Very fine. The finest thread I'd ever felt her make. Not to Garnet's head. To Garnet's hands, on the edge of the drawing board, where the silver in her ran closest to the skin.

Garnet's eyes went wide.

Then she laughed. Out loud. The way she'd laughed at the pebble turning into a strawberry.

"She says it's very good," Garnet told me. "She says nobody's ever drawn her eye before because nobody ever wanted to look at it that long." She turned back to the queen. "Do you want to keep it?"

A pause.

"She says she doesn't have anywhere to keep things," Garnet reported. "Except the hollow. And it'll get wet in the hollow." She frowned at the wall, and the stones, and the long pale body lying against them. Then she brightened. "I'll keep it for you. In my room. And when you want to look at it, I'll bring it down."

Another pause. Longer.

Garnet's face changed. Not a lot. Just enough that I saw Mother in it, all at once, the way you see a familiar room through a door you didn't know was there.

"She says that's what the young do," she said, more quietly. "Keep things for her. Bring them back when she wants them." She looked at me. "Am I one of her young, now?"

No, said the queen, into both of us. She is her mother's. But I would like her to come in the mornings.

I didn't have to translate that one. Garnet had heard it.

"I'll come every morning," she said. "I'll bring breakfast."

And she did.

The second dawn came eleven minutes after that.

We'd gone back out onto the red glass at the edge of the city. All of us who'd been there the day before. Dot, to count. Toby with his fiddle, to carry. Juno and Jessa, to reach and to feel. Risa, with Dory asleep against her chest. Sera and Luna. Holt in his chair. Genny, in her coat, with her hands in her pockets and her chin up, standing exactly where she'd knelt the morning before as if she'd decided that was her place now.

Crane came again too, unasked. He sat on the glass a little way off, with his hands on his knees and the band on his collar dark.

The Overseer was still at the mouth of the meeting passage. Crouched. Mirror tilted up toward the sky.

It hadn't moved all night. Pebble had gone and sat beside it for an hour around midnight, Wren said, and then come back to the garden step, and the Overseer hadn't moved for that either.

The hello went up.

I felt it go. The names, one after another, the way Dot sent them. Every base. Every brood. Every name we'd ever counted. And then up, to the spine-queen, catching it. Not tied now. Not tired the way she'd been the day before. Still weak, still a long way off, still pouring herself out of a body that had been held in a housing for longer than anybody on Avalon had been alive. But there. Free. Catching it and passing it on, down, out, eleven light-years, to thirty-one people in a dome on a dying world.

Dory woke.

She always woke for it now. She lifted her head from Risa's collar and her silver turned, the way it turned toward her name, and checked. Risa. Me. Sera and Luna. The queen behind us at the garden wall. Dot.

Then further.

Along the thread from the day of the call. Out.

There you are, she said, to someone eleven light-years away.

And I went with her.

Mother was brighter.

That was the first thing. The day before she'd been faint, like a lamp turned down low. Now she was brighter. Not much. But the path I'd opened near her heart was still open, and the fragment at the root of it had been drinking for a whole day, and you could feel it. Like the warmth that comes into a room an hour after someone lights the stove.

I didn't waste it.

I found the next narrow place. There were dozens. Forty years of them, Retention's work, small neat cuts where her silver had been stopped short so that it could never reach the fragment by itself, so that she'd always need the spoon. I'd seen them the day before. I'd seen how to undo every single one. I'd had seventy-three seconds and I'd used them on the one closest to her heart.

Now I took the one next to it.

I felt the spine-queen holding the thread. I felt our queen behind her, and the mountain queen behind that, and all fourteen in the ring giving a little each. I felt Toby's note under all of it, low and steady, carrying everything unchanged. I felt Dory's net round me, every path joined to every other, so that I could reach.

I opened it.

Her silver ran forward. A little further than yesterday. Into the roots.

Somewhere eleven light-years away, my mother breathed in.

And then she spoke.

Not a word. Words. Faint, and slow, and in a voice I knew better than my own, coming back down the hello the way the spine-queen's thank you had come.

Lucas. Okafor's here.

I nearly lost the thread.

Dory's net held it. Dory's net held everything.

She's sitting with me, Mother said. She's been sitting up with us at this hour every night since the first one. All of us. In her flat. Maura and Rory and Toby's mother and Hana's father. She found us. A pause. Breath. She says to tell you, is it time.

I didn't think about it.

I didn't need to. I'd folded her line into my pocket on the porch, with Father's letter, and I hadn't answered, because the answer had always been the same, and she'd always known it.

Yes, I said.

And felt Mother, eleven light-years away, smile.

Ninety-one seconds, Dot said afterward, on the glass, very quietly, while I sat with my hands flat on the red and Risa's hand on the back of my neck. "Fragment thirty. Longer than yesterday." A pause. "And fragment thirty said a new word. This unit has added it to the count."

"What word?" said Genny.

"Okafor," said Dot.

Genny found the queen that afternoon.

She didn't sit down the way Garnet had. She stood at the bottom of the garden with her hands folded behind her back and looked at the queen for a long time, the way she looked at a page of chemistry before she started on it. As if the queen were a problem and she'd decided she was going to understand it.

Then she said, out loud, without looking round at me:

"Lucas. How does she grow the walls?"

I was on the porch. I'd been watching. I'd been going to go down, and then I'd seen her stop at the bottom of the garden, and I'd stayed where I was.

"Ask her," I said.

Genny's chin came up a little.

"I don't know how."

"Garnet did it this morning."

"Garnet," said Genny, with enormous dignity, "says yes please to everyone."

But she turned back to the queen. And after a moment, very stiffly, like someone stepping into cold water, she said:

"May I speak with you?"

The queen's eye came round.

Yes, she said, to me, and I knew the thread was going out. If she chooses.

"She says yes," I said. "If you choose."

Genny unfolded her hands from behind her back. She held one out. Palm down. Toward the queen. Not touching. The way you hold your hand out to a horse you haven't been introduced to, which she'd have read in one of Hana's horse books on the transport.

The thread found her.

I saw her flinch. Not from pain. From surprise. The way you flinch when someone you didn't know was behind you says your name.

Then she went very still.

For a long time, nobody said anything. Genny stood there with her hand out and her eyes on the queen's eye. The queen lay along the wall with her plates still. I sat on the porch and didn't move.

Then Genny said, quietly, "Oh."

And knelt.

Not the way she'd knelt on the glass. Carefully. On purpose. She knelt on the stones at the foot of the wall, and the queen, very slowly, lowered one of her forward limbs until the tip of it rested on the ground beside Genny's knee.

On the paving stone beside Genny's knee, the stone began to change.

Not fast. Not the way I changed things. The queen didn't climb, and she didn't fold, not the way I folded. She did something else. Something I'd watched a thousand times and never once understood properly, because I'd always been watching for the change, and never for what came before it.

She listened first.

I felt it. Through the thread. A long slow listening, into the stone. Every grain. Every crack. Where the water had been, and where it wanted to go. What the stone had been before it was stone. What it was trying to become, very slowly, over a very long time.

And then, when she knew all of that, she helped it.

A little. Just a little. In the direction it had already been going.

The paving stone grew up into a cup.

Small. Faceted. Twelve faces, each one turned a little away from every other, like the walls of the quiet room. Sitting on the paving beside Genny's knee, the colour of the red glass, with a faint grey sheen.

Genny looked at it.

Then she looked at her own hand.

"Father did it the other way," she said. Not to me. To the queen. "He climbed. He went up, and up, and then he came down where he wanted. Every element. Every time." Her voice was very careful. "That's what Lucas did. Before."

A pause. The queen was answering.

"She says that's because nobody showed him," Genny said. "She says climbing is what you do when you don't know the way." She swallowed. "She says the stone always knows the way. You just have to ask it first."

The queen lifted her limb.

Genny reached out, very slowly, with Father's hands, and touched the next paving stone along.

And listened.

I watched her do it. I watched her face go still and far away, the way it went over a page of numbers. One minute. Two. Five. Garnet came out onto the porch with a piece of bread in her hand, and stopped beside me, and watched too, and for once in her life didn't say anything.

At eleven minutes, the paving stone under Genny's hand grew up into a cup.

Smaller than the queen's. Rougher. Seven faces instead of twelve, and one of them lopsided.

But a cup.

Genny looked at it for a long moment.

Then she put her face in her hands and laughed. Not crying. Laughing, with her shoulders shaking, the way I'd never heard her laugh in her whole life, not even at Garnet, not even before Father died.

"I didn't climb," she said, through her fingers. "Lucas. I didn't climb at all."

"I know," I said.

"Garnet. I didn't climb."

"I saw," said Garnet, with her mouth full. "It's wonky."

"It's mine," said Genny.

The queen hummed. Low and long. The sound I'd felt in the porch boards on the day Dory was born, and the day Dory first called her by the brood-word.

Tell her, the queen said to me, she may come in the afternoons. Her sister may have the mornings.

But Genny had already heard. I could see it on her face.

That night we sat on the porch, the four of us, with Dory asleep on Risa's chest and Sera's feet in Luna's lap and the lamps turned low, and Luna wrote it all down.

Not just what had happened. What it meant.

"Okafor's been sitting up with them," she said. "Every night. Since the first hello." She tapped the page. "That's two nights. And the first night was the night after the terms were voided. The night the stabilizer provision was suspended." She looked up. "She knew. Before any of us told her anything. She knew it was going to happen and she knew where to be."

"She always knew where to be," I said.

"She's not stupid," said Sera. She had her eyes shut. Her hand was on her stomach, the way it was most evenings now, very lightly, not quite on purpose. "She trained forty of us. She knew what every one of us was going to do before we did it. She's had twenty years to watch Retention. She'll have known about the hello for longer than Dot has."

"How?" said Risa.

Sera opened her eyes.

"Mum," she said. "Mum hears it. Every morning. She wrote it in her last letter, the one that came down with the supply drop in the spring. She said she'd started waking at the same time every day, in the dark, as if someone had called her, and then she couldn't get back to sleep." She looked at the ceiling of the porch. "I thought it was the stabilizer. I thought it was just one more thing it did to her."

Nobody said anything.

Luna reached over and put her hand on Sera's ankle.

"It was the hello," Luna said quietly.

"It was the hello," Sera agreed. "Every morning for a year. And Mum would have told Okafor. Mum tells Okafor everything. They've been in each other's kitchens since before I was born."

"She sat up with them," Risa said. She was looking at Dory, asleep. "In her flat. In the middle of the night. Waiting for something she couldn't hear." She stroked Dory's back. "That's the bravest thing I've ever heard."

"That's Okafor," I said.

And then, because it was late, and the lamp was low, and Sera's feet were in Luna's lap and Luna's hand was on Sera's ankle and Risa had leaned her head on my shoulder, I told them what I hadn't said on the glass.

"I said yes."

They all looked at me.

"She asked. Through Mother. Is it time. And I said yes." I looked at my hands. "I didn't ask any of you. I didn't ask Holt. I didn't think about it. I just said it."

Luna put down her pen.

"Lucas," she said. "If you'd said anything else, I'd have pushed you off the porch."

Risa laughed into my shoulder.

Sera leaned forward and kissed Luna, quick and absent, the way you'd pat someone's hand to say yes, that. Then she held her other hand out to me, behind her, without looking, the way she did.

I took it.

Miss Pell found the queen at midnight.

I wasn't supposed to see. I'd gone down to the kitchen for water, and the kitchen window looks out over the bottom of the garden, and there was a lamp at the wall.

Pell's lamp. The small square one she'd brought from the penthouse, in the bottom of her bag, with the horse books. She'd set it on the paving beside Genny's lopsided cup and she was sitting on an upturned crate beside it, very straight, with her coat buttoned to the neck and her hands folded in her lap.

Talking.

I couldn't hear what she was saying. I didn't try. I stood at the kitchen window with my glass of water and watched Harriet Pell, who'd been an orphan in the program dormitories and a matron at a school and a guardian on the sixtieth floor, sit up in the dark talking to a queen.

The queen was listening.

I could see it in the way she lay. Not along the wall, the way she lay in the mornings. Turned. Her great head brought round and down, until it was level with the crate, and her eye a few feet from Pell's face.

After a while, Pell stopped talking.

The queen said something.

And Pell put her hand up to her mouth.

I went back up to bed. I didn't ask. It wasn't mine to ask.

But in the morning, when I came down, the queen said to me, before I'd even reached the bottom step:

The one called Pell asked me how many young I have.

What did you tell her?

All of them. A pause. Then she asked me how I keep them all in my head. Which ones are hungry. Which ones are frightened. Which ones have gone somewhere they should not.

And?

I told her I do not. Not all of them. Not always. Her plates shifted on the stones. I told her that some days, when the brood is large and the young are many and the voice in the sky is loud, I lose one. Only for an hour. Only in my head. And I do not know it is lost until it comes back.

I didn't say anything.

She said she has had that, the queen said. In a dormitory, with forty young in it, and a door that locked from the outside. She said every matron has that. She said the ones who say they have never lost one are lying, and the ones who stop counting are the ones you should be afraid of.

She said that?

She said that you never stop counting, said the queen. She said that is the whole of it.

She was quiet for a while.

She asked if she might help with the young of eighteen, the queen said. The ones whose mother is still a long way off. The ones Toby sings to. She said she has been watching them in the courts and that two of them are not eating as much as the others and nobody has noticed. A pause. She is right. Nobody had noticed. I had not noticed.

What did you say?

I said yes.

The great eye came round to me.

Nobody notices a matron, the queen said. She told me that. She said it is the only magic she has.

Another pause.

I notice.

Pell was in the courts by nine.

I don't know how she did it. She didn't speak brood. She didn't have a thread. She had Dot's hand, which she'd asked for at breakfast in a tone that made Dot hand it over without discussion, and she had Toby, who she'd collected from the forge by simply standing in the doorway until he noticed her, and she had a notebook.

A real notebook. Ruled. The kind she'd used on the sixtieth floor to write her weekly reports for Crane. Uneventful.

By noon she'd been round every court on the east side. By two she'd been round the west. By three she'd found the two young of eighteen who weren't eating, and two more nobody had mentioned, one of Pebble's cousins with a cracked plate on its left foreleg that it had been hiding, and a whole hollow on the north side where the attendants were taking turns staying up at night because one of the young kept trying to climb out.

She wrote it all down.

Then she came up to the porch, and sat down on the top step, and handed the notebook to Luna.

"I've put it in order," she said. "Most urgent first. The two who aren't eating need warmer water; the attendants keep it cool because the queen's young like it cool, but those two are from somewhere warmer, and nobody told the attendants. Toby has explained it to them. The cracked plate needs Lucas. The north hollow needs a lid."

Luna read the first page.

Then the second.

Then she looked up at Pell with an expression I'd only seen on her face once before, the day the General recited the Accord at our table.

"Miss Pell," she said. "How long have you been doing this?"

Pell considered the question.

"Thirty-eight years," she said. "Not with these. With ours." She folded her hands. "They're not so very different. The young don't care what shape they are. They care if somebody's counting."

Juno was on the schoolroom roof. She'd been there all day. I don't think she was meant to be watching, any more than I'd been meant to be watching the night before. But when Pell went back down the garden toward the courts, with Dot's hand rolling along beside her and her notebook under her arm, Juno came down off the roof.

She didn't catch her up. She didn't say anything.

She just walked a little way behind her. To the courts. And stayed.

The third dawn, I opened two paths in Mother, and one in Maura Calder.

I hadn't meant to reach Maura. She found me.

That was the only way I could describe it afterward. I was in Mother's silver, with Dory's net round me and the ring holding the thread, opening the third narrow place, and something came along the hello beside me. Warm. Like an oven door opening. The way Dot had described her, months ago, before any of us knew what the hello was.

Is that you, love?

Sera, on the glass beside me, made a sound.

I didn't look round. I couldn't. But I felt her hand come down on my shoulder, hard enough to hurt, and stay there.

Maura, I said.

Well. Her voice was very faint. Fainter than Mother's. She was further down, the way Mother had been on the first morning. But it was her. The burr in it. The flat vowels. Dot says you've been opening doors. Dot's sitting right next to me looking very pleased with herself. A pause. Your mum, I mean. Not the robot.

I know.

She lifted the table last night, said Maura.

I stopped.

In Okafor's flat, said Maura. Just a little. Just the corner. She didn't mean to. Okafor put a cup down too hard and Dot flinched, and the corner of the table came up an inch off the floor and stayed there. A breath. First time in twenty-four years. She sat there looking at it with her mouth open. Okafor didn't say anything. Okafor got up and put the kettle on.

I couldn't speak.

Dory's net held the thread for me.

Rory's here, Maura said. He says to tell Liam the heat plant's in good hands, which means he's let the new foreman have it, which means he's going to be impossible all week. Something that might have been a laugh. And he says to tell you, if you're handing out doors, he'd like his back. He says they took his at the gate. The same winter.

Took what?

His fire, said Maura. Didn't Seraphina ever tell you? Where do you think she got it?

Sera's hand on my shoulder went still.

It was the price, said Maura. For letting us in. For Liam's medicine. They took his and left mine because mine was small. He's tended that heat plant by hand for twenty years, love. By hand. A man who used to hold a fire the size of a house on the northern line. A breath. He'd like it back. And so would I, if it's going. Mine wasn't much. But it was mine.

I found her narrowest place. The one nearest her heart, where they'd cut her short.

And I opened it.

Oh, said Maura Calder, eleven light-years away. Very softly. Surprised.

Then the thread thinned, and the spine-queen let it go, and the hello was over.

Sera didn't say anything for a long time.

She sat on the red glass with her hand still on my shoulder and her other hand on her stomach and her eyes on the sky, toward the place where the Meridian had gone over the horizon. Liam came and sat on her other side. He'd been at the back with Toby. He'd heard all of it, or enough.

"He never told us," Liam said. "Dad. Not once."

"Calders don't," said Sera.

"Mum told us about the gate. Mum told us about kneeling. She told everyone." Liam's voice cracked. "She never said he had to give anything up."

"Because he made her promise," said Sera. "I bet you anything. I bet you he made her promise." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "So we'd never feel like we'd cost him something."

"We did, though."

"I know, Liam."

He put his arm round her. She let him.

After a while, Sera turned to me.

"Can you?" she said. "From here? Through the hello?"

"Not all at once," I said. "A door a morning. Maybe two, as she gets stronger." I looked at the sky. "Rory's will be different. They didn't cut his short. They took it out. I'll have to look."

"But you can."

"Yes," I said. "I can."

Sera nodded once. The way Wren nodded when a number came in.

Then she said, very quietly, "Mum said if it's going." She shut her eyes. "As if she'd be the one taking too much."

We held the council that night.

Not in the map room. Luna said the map room was where the Overseer had wanted us, and she didn't want to be where the Overseer had wanted us any more. We held it in our kitchen. The four of us. Holt. Toby and Liam, because it was their parents too. Wren with her book, because Wren wrote everything down. Juno, from the doorway, because Pell was in the courts and Juno didn't want to be far from her. Crane, on the bench by the stove, because he'd followed us in and nobody had told him to go.

And the General.

He came last. He'd been at the guest house all day, with Friese, who hadn't come out of his room since the terms were voided. He came in very straight, in his coat, and stood by the door the way he'd stood by the door the first time he came to our table, as if he wasn't sure he'd been asked.

Luna looked at him.

"Sit down, Father," she said.

He sat.

Holt laid it out. He was good at laying things out. He'd been a captain in the first wave, and before that in the war, and he did it the way Okafor would have, in short plain sentences with no decoration.

The terms were void. The Overseer had been recalled to the Hand and hadn't gone; it was sitting at the passage mouth, waiting. The handler was in the guest wing with the Kethri. The Hand was overhead. Whatever the Hand decided, it would decide soon, and it would not decide in our favour.

The spine-queen was free. The Meridian's crew were Ruan's. The station was ours, more or less, as long as the Sorn tender at the dock didn't wake up.

And on Earth, thirty-one people with fragments of the spine-queen's bone in them were being reached every dawn. One of them had lifted a table.

"So the question," said Holt, "is what Earth does."

Nobody answered.

"Not the Project," said Holt. "Not the Senate. Not Central Allocation. Earth." He looked at me. "The people under the dome who aren't on the two unlisted floors. The ones who were in the program and signed the Act and came back. The ones who renounced. The Retention families." He looked at Toby and Liam. "Your mothers. Your fathers." He looked at me. "Yours."

"They can't fight," said Crane, from the bench. Very quietly. "Not the way they are. Not on the stabilizer."

"They're not on it," I said. "Not Mother. Not since the provision was suspended. She's on the hello."

"And the others?"

"A door a morning," I said. "Maybe two."

Crane looked at his hands. Steady, on his knees.

"Thirty-one people," he said. "A door a morning. Twenty years and more of narrow places each." He did the sum. I watched him do it. He'd been doing sums about these people for twenty years. "That's a long time, Dask."

"Then we'll need somebody on Earth who can wait," I said. "And who knows when to stop waiting."

And I told them about Okafor.

The General didn't say anything while I told it.

He sat very straight, with his hands flat on our kitchen table, and listened to all of it. The line in Hana's letter. Is it time. Mother on the hello. She's sitting with me. The flat. The table coming up an inch off the floor, and Okafor getting up to put the kettle on.

When I'd finished, he was quiet for a long time.

Then he said, "Sergeant Okafor."

"Major," said Luna. "She was made Major. Before we left."

"She'll always be Sergeant to me." The General looked at his hands. "On the northern front, I gave the orders. I was the colonel. I had the rank and the name and the Council behind me." He paused. "Okafor decided which of my orders we'd survive."

Nobody said anything.

"I'd send a line forward," the General said. "And Okafor would look at it, and look at the ground, and look at the sky. And then she'd send half of it. And keep the other half back, behind the ridge, where nobody had told her to keep it. And when the line broke, which it always did, the half she'd kept back would be exactly where it needed to be." He almost smiled. "I court-martialled her twice. Both times the board looked at the casualty figures and gave her a commendation instead."

"She never said," I said.

"No. She wouldn't." The General looked up. At me. At Luna. "If she's sitting up at night with thirty-one Retention families in her flat, waiting for a voice she can't hear, then she's been planning this since before you were born. She's been keeping half the line back. Behind the ridge. Where nobody told her to." He put his hand flat on the table. "Then she decides. Not me. Not the Senate. Not you, Lucas. Okafor."

Luna was very still.

"Father," she said. "You're the senior officer of the—"

"I'm the senior officer of an army that was sent here to hand you to the Sorn," said the General. "Okafor was the only one in that dome who ever told you the truth." He looked at Holt. "Captain. You'd agree."

Holt looked at him for a long time.

"I'd agree," he said.

"Then that's settled." The General turned to me. "You'll ask her. Through your mother. Every dawn. What she wants. And she'll tell you. And you'll do it."

"What if she tells me to wait?"

"Then you'll wait," said the General. "That's what she's for."

Okafor's answer came at the fourth dawn.

Mother said it. Slowly, a few words at a time, between the doors I was opening, in the voice that had read me Miss Pell's weekly report over the line, word for word, back in the dome, when I still didn't know what anything meant.

She says: understood.

A door. Mother's silver running forward.

She says: nobody moves on Earth until everybody's whole. Not one of us goes out that door half done.

Another door.

She says: Dot first. Then Maura. Then Rory. Then the rest in the order she gives you. She'll give you the order tomorrow. A pause, and something in it that might have been a laugh, if laughing were easy that far away. She's written it on a list. Of course she has.

The thread was thinning. I could feel the spine-queen tiring. But Mother went on.

She says: the General's to do what she tells him. She says to tell him that, in exactly those words. She says he'll know why.

Behind me, on the glass, I heard Luna make a sound that was very nearly a laugh too.

And she says—

The thread almost went.

Dory caught it. Dory's net, every path joined to every other, held the end of it for one more second.

She says to tell you, Lucas: well done. And that she'll say it again when you've earned it.

Then the hello was over.

I sat on the red glass with my hands flat in front of me and didn't move for a long time.

Risa put Dory into my arms. Dory was awake. She looked up at me with her woven silver very bright, and reached up with one hand, and put it flat against my face, the way Garnet had told me she'd done to her.

Checking.

"Two hundred and four seconds," Dot said. Very quietly. "Fragment thirty. And fragment eleven, who is Maura Calder. And fragment twenty-six, who is Rory Calder, who this unit has not counted before."

I looked up.

"Rory?"

"He was not in the hello," said Dot. "He has never been in it. Not once, in all the mornings this unit has counted. This morning he was." A pause. "He is very faint. But he said one word. This unit has added it to the count."

"What word?" said Liam.

His voice wasn't steady at all.

"Liam," said Dot.

The General came to the porch that evening.

Alone. Not for the council. He came up the steps and stood at the top of them, in the last of the light, and looked at the garden, where Garnet was sitting with the queen, reading her a story out of one of Hana's horse books, and Genny was at the wall with her hand on a paving stone, listening, and Miss Pell was coming up from the courts with her notebook under her arm and Juno a few steps behind her.

He watched them for a while.

Then he said, without looking at me, "Can I ask you something?"

"Yes."

"Friese wasn't the only one who renounced."

I put down the cup I was holding.

Luna, in the doorway behind me, went completely still.

"It was the price," the General said. "For command. The officers' track. The safe version, the one the orphans died testing. We volunteered. We got it. We used it, at the front." He was looking at the garden, at Genny with her hand on the stone. "And afterward, when the war was over and the Accord was signed and they wanted officers to run the Project, they said: no modified in command. Not one. You can have the rank or you can have the gift." He paused. "Friese chose the Council. I chose Avalon Command."

"Father," said Luna.

He didn't turn round.

"You froze the cook's hand when you were six," he said. "In the kitchen. Albert. And I stood in the doorway and said, now you know what you are." His voice was very level. "I knew exactly what I was looking at. I'd done the same thing at seven, to a boy at school, and my father had stood in a doorway and said the same words to me." He paused. "I told you what you were. I never told you where it came from. Windsors don't."

Luna came out onto the porch.

She stood beside him. She didn't touch him. She looked at him, the way she looked at a set of numbers she'd got wrong and was about to get right.

"You're cold," she said. "That's what you're telling me. You were cold."

"I held the northern pass for six days in the second winter," said the General. "With a wall of ice a mile long. Okafor kept the line behind it. That was the battle they gave me the rank for." He looked down at his hands. "Then they took it out. A procedure. Very neat. Very clean. Done by a man in a white coat who's since been promoted to the Medical Directorate."

"Can I look?" I said.

He turned round, then.

He looked at me for a long time. At the silver round my eyes. At Luna, beside him. At Dory, in the doorway, in Risa's arms, with her silver turned toward him because she was checking him too.

"Please," said General Alaric Windsor.

I looked.

It was there. Of course it was there. The silver went all the way through him, the way it went through Luna, but in him it was shut. Not cut short, the way Mother's was. Not dulled, the way the stabilizer dulled it. Closed. Every path folded back on itself and sealed, very neatly, at the places where it would have opened out into his hands. Like doors bricked up in a house, with the wallpaper hung over them so you'd never know.

Twenty years and more of it.

Neat work. Very clean.

I could see how to undo every single seal.

"Luna," I said. "Hold his hand."

She looked at me.

Then she took her father's hand. Her left, his right. The way Sera held mine.

"Ready?" I said to him.

The General's jaw tightened.

"Windsors don't ask that," he said. "Windsors just do it."

"Dasks ask," I said.

And I opened one.

The nearest. The one at the base of his right hand, where his palm met his wrist. One small brick, out of a whole bricked-up wall.

Frost came out of his fingers.

Not much. A breath of it. White and fine and glittering in the last of the light. It ran down his fingers and onto Luna's, and across her knuckles, and up the porch rail beside them in a thin bright line, and stopped there, at the top of the rail, in a single perfect six-sided flake the size of my palm.

The General looked at it.

His face didn't do anything. Windsors don't.

But his hand, in Luna's, tightened until her knuckles went white.

"Twenty-two years," he said.

"I know," said Luna.

"I'd forgotten," said the General, "what it felt like."

Luna didn't say anything.

She put her other hand over his. And the frost on the porch rail, which had started to melt, stopped melting, and grew, and branched, and spread along the rail in both directions, his and hers together, until the whole front of the porch was white and glittering and very, very cold.

Down in the garden, Garnet looked up from her horse book.

"Lucas," she shouted. "The porch is snowing!"

The queen lifted her head from the wall.

Yes, she said, to me. And then, after a moment, in the voice she used for the young: It is beautiful.

Days 761–764. Is it time.

Garnet found the queen before breakfast and drew her, cross-legged, four feet from her head. The queen kept moving her eye. I told her that was the problem; she held still. Garnet held up the drawing: "That's you." The queen asked to speak to her directly; Garnet: "Yes, please." Nobody ever drew her eye before because nobody wanted to look at it that long. Garnet will keep the drawing in her room and bring it down when the queen wants it. That is what the young do. Not one of hers. "But I would like her to come in the mornings." She brings breakfast.

Second dawn. Mother brighter, like a room an hour after the stove is lit. I opened the next door. Then words: "Okafor's here. She's been sitting up with us at this hour every night. All of us, in her flat. She says, is it time." Yes. Ninety-one seconds. Dot added a word to the count: Okafor.

Genny asked the queen how she grows the walls. Hand out palm down, like a horse from Hana's books. The queen grew a twelve-faced cup from a paving stone, and Genny felt it: she listens first. Every grain, where the water's been, what the stone is trying to become, and then helps it a little in the direction it was already going. "Climbing is what you do when you don't know the way. The stone always knows. Ask it first." Eleven minutes. Seven faces, one lopsided. "I didn't climb." Garnet: "It's wonky." "It's mine." Garnet has the mornings. Genny has the afternoons.

Porch, late. Sera: Maura wrote in the spring that she'd started waking at the same hour in the dark every morning, as if someone called her. She thought it was the stabilizer. It was the hello. Okafor knew before any of us. I told them I'd said yes without asking anyone. Luna: if I'd said anything else she'd have pushed me off the porch.

Midnight. Miss Pell at the wall with her square lamp, on a crate, talking to the queen. I didn't listen. In the morning the queen told me: Pell asked how she keeps all her young in her head. She doesn't, not always. Some days she loses one, only for an hour. Pell: every matron has; the ones who say they haven't are lying; the ones who stop counting are the ones to fear. Nobody notices a matron, Pell said. The queen: "I notice."

By three, Pell had been round every court with Dot's hand and Toby and a ruled notebook. Two of the eighteen not eating, because they're from somewhere warmer and the water's kept cool. A cracked plate. A hollow that needs a lid. Thirty-eight years. "The young don't care what shape they are. They care if somebody's counting." Juno came down off the roof and followed her, a little way behind.

Third dawn. Maura found me on the hello: "Is that you, love?" Mother lifted the corner of Okafor's table an inch last night when a cup went down too hard. First time in twenty-four years. Okafor put the kettle on. Rory would like his fire back: they took it at the gate, the price for Liam's medicine. A man who held a fire the size of a house on the northern line, tending a heat plant by hand for twenty years. Maura's was small, they left it. "If it's going." I opened her nearest door. "Oh." Liam: "He never told us." Sera: "Because he made her promise."

Council in our kitchen, not the map room. Holt laid it out. Crane did the sum: thirty-one people, a door a morning. A long time. Then we need someone on Earth who can wait and knows when to stop. The General: on the northern front he gave the orders; Okafor decided which ones they'd survive. He court-martialled her twice; twice the board gave her a commendation. She's been keeping half the line back, behind the ridge, since before we were born. "Then she decides. Not me. Not you, Lucas. Okafor."

Fourth dawn. Okafor, through Mother: understood. Nobody moves on Earth until everybody's whole. Mother first, then Maura, then Rory, then the rest in the order on her list; of course there's a list. The General's to do what she tells him, in exactly those words. And: well done, she'll say it again when I've earned it. Two hundred and four seconds. Fragment twenty-six, Rory Calder, in the hello for the first time ever. One word: Liam.

Evening. The General on the porch: Friese wasn't the only one who renounced. Officers' track, the safe version. No modified in command: the rank or the gift. He chose Avalon Command. He froze a boy at school at seven; his father said now you know what you are. He said it to Luna over Albert's hand at six, and never told her where it came from. He held the northern pass six days with a mile of ice, Okafor behind it. Then a neat clean procedure. Every path sealed where it would open into his hands, like bricked-up doors with wallpaper over them. Luna held his hand. "Windsors don't ask." "Dasks ask." I opened one brick.

Frost down his fingers, over Luna's knuckles, up the rail, one six-sided flake the size of my palm. "I'd forgotten what it felt like." Then both of them, and the whole porch white. Garnet: "The porch is snowing!" The queen: it is beautiful.

Is it time. Yes.