Chapter 267 The Palm

The General wrote it on our kitchen table.

Not in a notebook. On the table. He asked Luna for a pen, and when she gave him one, he pushed the plates to the end and the bread to the other end and drew straight onto the wood. Holt sat beside him with his arms folded and said things, and the General drew them. Neither of them looked up for three hours.

When they'd finished, the whole table was the Hand.

Three fingers and a palm. The knuckles where the fingers joined. The holds inside the fingers, marked with crosses, because the queen in the Hand had shown Juno where the thousands were and Juno had shown Luna and Luna had told the General. The palm, marked with a ring, where the handlers were. And at the bottom, in the centre, past a long spiral of lines that was meant to be ten thousand folds, a small circle.

Her.

"Every name," said the General. "She said every name."

So every name went on.

I'd thought there'd be arguing.

There wasn't. Not much. Holt said it was because Okafor had already said every name, and there's no arguing with a list that has everybody on it. You can only argue about where you are on it. And nobody argued about that either, because the General had put everyone exactly where they were best, and everyone could see it.

He did it the way Okafor would have. Plain. No speeches. He went round the table with his pen, pointing at the drawing, and said what each of us would do and why.

"Dask," he said. "You go down."

He tapped the spiral.

"Ten thousand folds. You're the only one who can open them. You go in through the palm, straight down, and you don't stop for anything until you reach her. You don't fight. You don't stop to free anyone. You don't look back." He looked at me. "You open folds. That's all."

"How long?"

"You tell me."

I thought about the Hand. About the way I'd seen into it from the square, folds going down forever. About the handler's shell, which I'd opened all at once like a fist. Ten thousand of those.

"An hour," I said. "If nobody's in the way."

"Somebody will be in the way," said Holt.

"Then that's everyone else's job," said the General. "Keeping the way clear behind him so he doesn't have to look back."

He moved the pen.

"Windsor," he said. To Luna. Not Luna. On the table, she was a name on a list. "Ice. The approach. We're going up a mile in the air and the Hand is a mile out over the plain. Everyone who can't fly needs something to stand on. You build it."

Luna didn't blink.

"A stair," she said.

"A stair. And when we're inside, a floor where there isn't one, and a wall where there should be one." He looked at her. "And mist. As much as you can make. Their sensors read heat and movement. Mist eats both."

"Yes, sir."

He moved the pen.

"Calder. Both of you." Sera and Liam. "The palm. The ring of handlers round the place where Dask goes in. They'll come at him the moment he starts. You stop them. Fire. As much as you've got." He paused. "Seraphina. You're—"

"Eighteen weeks," said Sera. "I know."

The General looked at her.

"I can hold heat without moving," said Sera. "I've done it since I was nine. I'll stand in one place and burn. Liam moves. I hold." She put her hand on her stomach. "And if anything gets close enough to touch me, Toby's wall goes up before it does."

The General looked at Toby.

Toby nodded.

"Then that's the plan," said the General, and moved the pen.

It went round the table like that.

Toby: walls. Round Sera first, always. Then round the holds, when we reached them, so that whatever was in them couldn't be turned on us. And carrying: the hello, at dawn, the way he carried it every morning.

Risa: storm. Over the whole of the Hand. Lightning on the outside of the fingers, so that the handlers in the knuckles would look out and not in. Sigmund beside her. Two of you can make a storm that looks like ten, said the General. I've seen your father's. And Sigmund, who had never once in his life taken an order from anyone without looking at it first, looked at the General and nodded.

Hana: water. Everything Luna made, Hana could move. Everything Luna couldn't freeze fast enough, Hana could hold in the air until she did.

Juno: north. Inside the Hand, every way would look the same. Every fold, every corridor. Juno could feel where everything was. Juno would be the one who said left and down and not that one.

Jessa: up.

She'd felt it four days after I finished her. In the medical building, sitting up in bed. She'd gone very still, with her hand pressed flat against her chest, and said, very quietly: Marlo. And then: He's up. In the grey. In the Hand. She'd been able to feel him every hour since. Faint. Far up. Not answering.

"You find your brother," said the General.

Jessa didn't say anything. She didn't need to.

Sesh and the three Kethri who had wings: carrying. Anyone who fell off Luna's stair, they caught. Anyone who needed to get somewhere fast, they took. The other six Kethri, the ones who'd asked me to wait on their wings until after, said they'd come anyway, on the ground, and stand with the Teeming under the Hand in case anything came down.

Dot: counting. Every name. Every one of us. Out loud, all the time, so that if anyone went quiet, everyone would know.

The Overseer.

The General stopped at that one.

The Overseer was in the doorway. It had come up from the hollow at dusk with its bread and stood there, the way it stood now, in doorways, not close. It had listened to the whole three hours without moving.

"You know the inside," said the General.

"Yes," said the Overseer.

"Every door."

"Yes."

"Every one of them shut."

The Overseer's mirror tilted.

"It was made to keep them shut," it said. "The old one says it must not keep any door shut. Ever again." A pause. "It thinks perhaps the old one meant this."

The General looked at it for a long moment.

Then he wrote, on the table, next to a small circle at the edge of the palm: Opens doors.

Holt was on the list.

"Ground," said the General. "With me. Command. The Teeming under the Hand, the Kethri without wings, every brood that comes. If anything falls, we catch it. If anything comes down, we stop it."

Holt didn't argue. He hadn't argued all evening. He sat with his arms folded and watched the pen go round the table.

Then the General came to himself.

"Windsor, A.," he said. And wrote it, on the ground, beside Holt. "Ice. A wall. The length of the plain under the Hand."

"You've only got one brick out," I said.

The General looked at me.

"Okafor said bring your hand," I said. "That's what she meant. Isn't it."

He didn't say anything.

"Give me your hand," I said.

He gave it to me. Across the table. Across the drawing of the Hand. His right, the one I'd opened the first brick in, the night the porch snowed.

I looked.

All the rest of the bricks were still there. Twenty-two years of neat clean sealing. Every path folded back and shut 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.

I didn't do them one at a time.

I did them the way I'd done Mother. All at once. Listening first.

The frost came out of him so fast that the whole of the General's drawing of the Hand went white. Every line. Every fold of the spiral. Every cross in the holds. The ink froze in the grain of the wood and stood up off the table in a fine white fur, so that the whole plan was suddenly there in three dimensions, in ice, on our kitchen table.

Nobody said anything.

The General looked at his hand.

Then he closed it. And the frost stopped. Exactly. Not melting. Stopped, mid-air, every crystal of it, the way Mother had stopped three men's buckles.

"Windsors," said Luna, very quietly, "don't show off."

"No," said her father. "We don't."

But he left the plan in ice on the table all night.

The last name on the list was Mother's.

The General didn't write it. He looked at me.

"She said she's coming," he said.

"I know."

"She's eleven light-years away."

"I know."

"Then how?"

I looked at Dory.

She was asleep in her basket by the stove. A hundred and sixty-one days old. She could walk. She could say Mama. And every morning, at dawn, she put a net round everyone she loved, every path joined to every other, and through it I could reach eleven light-years and open my mother's silver door by door.

"The same way I reach her," I said. "Through the hello. Through Dory." I looked at the plan in ice. "If I can reach in and open doors, she can reach out and hold things."

"Across eleven light-years."

"She held three men in the air by every buckle," I said. "From the other side of a room. Without hurting them. Without touching them." I looked at the General. "Distance isn't the hard part for her. Exactness is. And she's the most exact thing I've ever felt."

The General looked at me for a long time.

Then he picked up the pen, and wrote, at the very top of the plan, above the palm, above all of it, in the frost:

Dask, D. Holds.

We went at dawn.

It had to be dawn. The hello was the only way Mother could reach us, and the only time the queen in the Hand could hold the door open wide enough. She'd held it every morning since she came, and yesterday morning she'd held it even with the handlers cutting her. I'd felt her do it. Felt the effort. A door held against a wind.

This morning I was going to go through the door.

We gathered on the red glass at the edge of the plain an hour before light. All of us. Not just the ones on the list. Everyone came. Priya and Dov and Nessa and Gareth and Edda, who said she was coming in case anyone needed stitching and dared anyone to argue. Pell, with Genny and Garnet, who weren't going and knew it and were furious. Crane, on the glass a little way off, with his hands on his knees.

And under the Hand, on the plain, every brood that could get there.

Thousands. More than the day it came down. They'd been coming in all night. Pale plates and dark plates and the ones from the south with the red stripes. Standing on the black glass in the Hand's shadow, facing up.

Our queen was at the edge of the canyon. Up at her full height. The first time I'd ever seen her leave the wall.

I cannot go up, she said. I can stand under.

That's enough.

It is not enough, said the queen. But it is what I have.

Luna built the stair at first light.

I'd seen her make ice for two years. I'd seen her freeze a river and build a wall across a pass and make snow fall over the Eastgate parks for four minutes, when we were cadets, the first time she ever let herself. I'd seen her make an outpost of ice in the north that held off the largest swarm of the season.

I'd never seen her do this.

She walked out onto the plain, under the Hand's shadow, with her coat off and her sleeves rolled up and the silver round her eyes so bright it lit the glass. She stopped. She looked up, at the palm, a mile overhead.

And she lifted her hands.

The air froze.

Not the ground. The air. The water in it, all the water there was, pulled out of the dawn and locked solid in one long sweep. A step. Clear as glass. Then another above it. Then another. Not built. Grown, the way frost grows on a window, all at once, step after step after step, curving up out of the plain in a great spiral, round and round and up, toward the palm of the Hand.

It took eleven seconds.

A mile of stair. Wide enough for three people abreast. Every step ridged so nobody would slip. A rail on the outside, waist high, that caught the first light coming over the rim and threw it back in a thousand colours.

At the top it touched the palm of the Hand. Not quite. Just short. The width of a hair.

Luna lowered her hands.

She was breathing hard. Not tired. I'd finished her silver; she didn't tire. Breathing the way you breathe when you've done something you didn't know you could do, and want to do it again.

"Windsor," said the General, behind her, very quietly.

Luna didn't turn round.

"Sir."

"That'll do."

She didn't say anything. But I saw her shoulders go down, just slightly. The way they did when someone she loved said well done without saying it.

The hello went up.

I felt it go. Every name. Every base. Every brood. Up through the ring of queens to the spine-queen in the Meridian, far overhead. And from the spine-queen, down. Not to Earth this time. Not first. Down to the Hand. To the bottom of it. To her.

She caught it.

I felt her catch it. Weak. Weaker than I'd ever felt her. Two nights of cutting. Two nights of handlers in the palm and the knuckles taking slivers off her, slow, careful, so as not to kill her. So many slivers now that I could feel the holes in her, the way you'd feel the gaps in a fence.

But she caught it.

And she held the door open.

And Dory, on Risa's hip, on the bottom step of Luna's stair, woke, and checked us. All of us. Every one. And put the net round us. Every path joined to every other.

And then reached. Up. Through the palm. Down ten thousand folds. To the queen at the bottom.

There you are.

And then out. Along the thread from the day of the call. Eleven light-years. To a small warm room with a kettle in it.

There you are, said Dory.

There you are, said Mother.

And I felt her come through.

Not her body. Her. Her silver, whole now, every path open, running out to the ends of everything. Through the hello. Through the Hand's queen. Through Dory's net. Into all of us at once, the way Dory was in all of us.

Ready.

Lucas, said Mother. Go.

We went up the stair at a run.

All of us who were going. Me in front. Luna beside me, making each step solid ahead of us in case one cracked. Sera and Liam behind. Toby, Risa with Dory, Sigmund, Hana, Juno, Jessa. Dot rolling up the stair on her wheels with her wings folded and every hand ready. The Overseer, all its long grey limbs, moving faster than I'd ever seen it move. And over our heads, four great grey shapes with copper-tipped wings, circling.

A mile of stair.

We were halfway up when the handlers saw us.

They came out of the palm like wasps out of a nest.

Not walking. Dropping. Out of seams in the grey that I hadn't seen open, dark tall shapes with blank smooth faces where a mirror should be. Dozens. Then more. Long grey limbs and hands that weren't hands, that ended in blades. Not metal blades. Grey. Sorn grey, folded to an edge so fine it hummed.

The blades they'd been cutting her with.

They dropped onto the stair above us. Onto the steps. Onto the rail. Coming down at us, fast, the way the handler had gone down the meeting passage. No sound. No voice. They didn't need one. They'd had the queen's voice for four hundred years. They'd never had to shout.

Risa's storm came down on them.

I'd heard her make thunder before. I'd seen her bring lightning out of a clear sky over the canyon, the day I finished her. I'd felt her take Sigmund's lightning into her own silver and earth it, every time he lost hold of it, since they were small.

I'd never seen her and Sigmund do it together.

The sky over the Hand went black. Not grey. Black, the way the Hand was black, only alive. And out of it came lightning. Not bolts. Sheets. Great white curtains of it, ripping down out of the cloud on either side of the stair, round the fingers of the Hand, round the knuckles, round the palm. Again. Again. So bright I couldn't see. So loud the stair shook.

And the handlers coming down the stair stopped.

Turned. Their blank faces swinging round toward the lightning. Toward the outside. Toward the fingers and the knuckles, where the light was, where the noise was.

The way the General had said.

Look out, not in.

"Calder!" shouted the General, a mile below.

Sera stopped on the stair.

She planted her feet. One hand on the rail. One on her stomach. And she burned.

Not like a fire. Like a sun. All at once, out of nothing, white and gold, so hot that the ice of the stair under her feet should have gone to steam in an instant. It didn't. Because Luna, beside me, without looking, without stopping, put her hand back and touched the step Sera stood on, and it stayed ice. Stayed solid. Under a girl burning like a star.

The handlers on the stair above us came apart in the light.

Not burned. Unmade. The grey they were made of folding in on itself, edges first, the way paper folds in a fire, until there was nothing left of them but a smell like hot iron and a fine grey ash drifting down off the stair onto the plain.

Liam went past her.

Up the stair. Fast. Faster than I'd known he could move. Not burning like Sera. Throwing. Fire out of his hands in long arcs, white at the core, aimed. Every handler that came down out of the palm toward the stair, Liam took before it touched a step. One. Two. Five. Twelve. Not stopping. Not slowing. Laughing.

He was laughing.

"Dad's going to be so jealous," he shouted over his shoulder.

Sera, burning like a sun on the stair with her hand on her stomach and her eyes shut, laughed too.

We reached the palm.

The top step of Luna's stair, the width of a hair below the grey. The palm of the Hand over us like a sky. Dark. Smooth. Folded.

Toby put up a wall.

Round all of us. Round the top of the stair. I couldn't see it. Nobody could. But I could feel it. A curve in the air, humming, the way the walls of the quiet room hummed. And every handler that came out of the palm toward us hit it, and stopped, and slid off, the way the world's noise slid off the walls of the quiet room.

"Go," said Toby. Through his teeth. Holding it.

I put my hands on the palm.

And opened it.

The first fold went like the handler's shell had gone. All at once. Like opening a fist. A hole in the palm of the Hand, round, the width of a door, and beyond it, darkness, and another fold.

I opened that one.

And the next.

And the next.

I didn't stop to look. The General had said: You open folds. That's all. So that's what I did. I went down into the Hand the way you'd go down a well that had no bottom, one fold at a time, and each one I opened, I stepped through, and opened the next.

Behind me, I could hear everything.

I could hear Juno. Left. No, down. Down. Not that one. That one. Steady and quiet and certain, the way she'd been certain about north her whole life. Every fold looked the same. Every fold was turned a little away from every other, so that nothing that went in came back out. Juno knew which way was down anyway. Juno always knew.

I could hear Dot. Counting. Dask. Windsor. Calder. Calder. Marsh. Friese. Friese. Osei. Pell. Quint. Over and over. Every name. Every few seconds. So that if one went quiet, everyone would know.

None went quiet.

I could hear the Overseer. It was right behind me. I hadn't asked it to be. It had come through the first fold on my heels, and every time I opened a fold and stepped through, it was there, and every time we came to a place where the fold was locked, where something had been done to the grey to hold it shut, the Overseer put out one long grey hand and touched it.

And it opened.

It didn't fold it. It didn't unfold it. It just knew it. The way you'd know a door in a house you'd lived in for four hundred years. Where the latch was. Which way it swung.

"It kept this one shut," it said, at the fifth locked fold. Very quietly. "Before Avalon. In the vat."

It opened it.

"And this one."

It opened that too.

"It does not keep doors shut," it said. "Any more."

At the four thousandth fold, the handlers came from inside.

Not from the palm. From the folds themselves. From the dark spaces between them, where nobody would ever go, where the Hand kept the things it didn't want seen. Dozens. Hundreds. Grey and blank and fast, with blades for hands. Coming at us from the sides. From above. From below.

Toby's wall held.

It held for a long time. I could feel it, behind me, humming. Every handler that hit it slid off. But there were so many. And the folds were close, and twisting, and Toby couldn't make a wall that curved round every corner at once.

One got through.

I felt it. The way you feel a draught. Something long and grey coming round the edge of Toby's wall, low, fast, toward Risa.

Toward Dory.

I turned.

I didn't need to.

The blade stopped.

In the air. An inch from Risa's shoulder. Not the handler. The blade. The grey folded to an edge so fine it hummed. It stopped dead, mid-swing, and held. Exactly. The width of a hair from Risa's coat.

And then every other blade in the fold stopped too.

Every one. On every handler. All at once. Hundreds of grey edges, mid-swing, mid-cut, in the dark of the four thousandth fold of the Hand, stopped dead and held. Not crushed. Not snapped. Held. To the width of a hair. The way you'd hold a full cup without spilling a drop.

The way she'd held three bowls and the flour and the eggs, every morning, in the house in the dead field.

The handlers hung there, attached to their own blades, unable to move them.

Go on, love, said Mother. Eleven light-years away. Very calm. I've got these.

I'll never forget what happened next.

Not because it was the most frightening thing I saw in the Hand. It wasn't. Because of the way it looked. Hundreds of handlers in the dark of the folds, held by their own blades, by a woman they couldn't see, from a room with a kettle in it eleven light-years away.

And then Sera came through the fold behind us.

Still burning. Like a sun. With Luna's ice under every step she took. She'd come down after us, the whole way, holding heat without moving, the way she'd promised.

She looked at the handlers.

All of them. Held.

She didn't say anything.

She just opened her hand.

And the dark of the four thousandth fold of the Hand went white, and gold, and then nothing at all.

At the seven thousandth fold, Jessa stopped.

"Here," she said.

We all stopped. Even me. I had my hands on the next fold and I stopped, because Jessa's voice had changed.

"He's here." She had her hand pressed flat against her chest. "Marlo. He's here. Not down. Sideways." She turned. Toward the wall of the fold. Toward the grey. "Through there."

"The holds," said Juno. Very quietly. "Through there's the first finger. The holds."

I looked at the General's plan in my head. The plan in ice on our kitchen table. You don't stop to free anyone. You don't look back.

"I can't," I said. "I have to keep going down. She's—"

"I know," said Jessa.

She didn't argue. She looked at the wall. Then at the Overseer.

"Can you open it?" she said.

The Overseer looked at the wall for a long time.

Then it put out one long grey hand.

And touched it.

The hold was full.

I saw it through the door the Overseer opened. Just for a second. I couldn't stop longer. A long dark space, curving away into the finger of the Hand, further than I could see, and all along it, on both sides, in rows, in shelves, in housings like the ones the Quints had been in, people.

Not humans. Not Kethri. Everything.

Great slow things with plates like stone, folded up in the dark like sleeping hills. Tiny things, hundreds of them, packed together in clusters that moved all at once, like a single animal breathing. Tall thin things that I couldn't see properly, because the light bent round them, so that looking at them was like looking at a heat haze on a summer road.

All of them with collars.

All of them still. Waiting. In the dark. To be put down somewhere and told what to do.

And there, in the nearest housing, just inside the door, with his eyes shut and his face grey and his hair grown down past his shoulders, the way Jessa's had been when I found her—

"Marlo," said Jessa.

She went through the door.

Toby went after her. He didn't ask. He didn't look at me. He put a wall up round the both of them, the way the General had said, and went.

"Go," Toby said to me, over his shoulder. "We've got him."

I went.

At the ten thousandth fold, I found her.

I don't know how to describe it. I've tried. I tried in my notebook that night and I tried again the next day for Luna and I've never got it right.

The last fold opened, and there was a space.

Not dark. Not light either. Warm. Like the inside of the quiet room. Every wall of it turned a little away from every other, so that nothing from outside could get in.

And in the middle of it, her.

She was bigger than our queen. Bigger than the mountain queen. Bigger than the spine-queen, the way I'd seen her in the Meridian, laid along the spine of the station like a long pale root. This was something else. Something so old that she didn't look like a queen at all. She looked like the bottom of the sea. Pale and vast and folded in on herself, layer under layer, like rock that's been pressed for a million years.

And everywhere, all over her, the holes.

Small. Neat. Precise. Where the slivers had been cut out. Hundreds of them. Two nights of cutting, slow and careful, so as not to kill her. Some still bleeding silver, slow and bright, onto the floor of the space.

And round her, a ring of handlers.

Not dozens. Not hundreds. Twelve. Standing round her in a perfect circle, with their blades out, very still. Bigger than the others. Darker. Their blank faces turned toward me.

Waiting.

They'd known I was coming. They'd felt every fold open. They'd waited here, at the bottom of everything, round her, for me to come to them.

On their ground.

Never fight on the ground they choose.

One of them lifted its blade.

Not toward me.

Toward her.

I didn't think about it.

I'd opened ten thousand folds in fifty-one minutes. I'd felt Mother hold hundreds of blades from eleven light-years away. I'd felt Sera burn like a sun and Luna build a mile of stair in eleven seconds and Risa and Sigmund make a storm that looked like ten. I'd felt Toby hold a wall round all of us until his teeth ached and then go through a door to save a boy he'd never met.

I'd spent two years learning to listen first.

I didn't listen.

I unfolded them.

All twelve. At once. Every fold of every shell. Not into boxes. Not carefully. Just open. The way you'd open your hand and let go of something hot.

They came apart.

Flat grey sheets. Hanging. Twelve of them, in a ring, round the queen at the bottom of the Hand. And in the middle of each one, small and hard and dark and clenched, the thing inside. Exposed. Still pulling. Still trying to lift a blade that wasn't there any more.

And then Mother reached through me.

I felt her do it. Through Dory's net. Through the hello. Through me, because I was the one standing there. Her silver, whole and open and exact, came down my arms and out of my hands, and took hold of the twelve small hard dark things inside the twelve flat grey sheets.

And held them.

Not in a box this time, love, said Mother. Very quietly. These ones cut her.

She closed her hand.

It was very quiet after that.

I stood in the warm space at the bottom of the Hand, with twelve flat grey sheets drifting down round me like leaves, and nothing in the middle of any of them any more.

And I looked at her.

She was looking at me.

I don't know how I knew. She didn't have an eye, not that I could see. She didn't have a face. But I felt her look. The way you feel a mountain look at you, if you stand at the bottom of it long enough.

There you are, said Dory.

From behind me. From Risa's arms. Risa had come down the last folds after me. Of course she had. With Dory on her hip and her face white and her silver crackling.

Dory reached out.

Not to me. To her.

And the queen at the bottom of the Hand, the first queen, older than north, with two nights of holes in her and silver bleeding slow and bright onto the floor, reached back.

I closed the holes.

All of them. It took a long time. Not because it was hard. Because I listened first. I wasn't going to make her wait for me to change her the way I wanted. I listened to every hole. To where the silver had been, and where it wanted to go, and what it had been trying to become, very slowly, for longer than I could imagine.

And I helped it. A little. In the direction it was already going.

When I'd finished, the bleeding had stopped.

She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. I felt her settle. The way the young settle in the hollow when their queen comes close. The way Dory settles on Risa's chest. A great slow sigh, all through her, like rock settling after an earthquake.

And then she spoke.

Not through Juno. Not through Dory. Not in the old tongue that I could only understand one word in five of.

To me. In words I knew.

She'd been listening to the hello for twelve days. Every name. Every morning. She'd learned.

Thank you, she said.

We came up out of the Hand at noon.

Marlo Quint came up in Toby's arms. Grey and thin and breathing, with his hair down past his shoulders and Jessa holding his hand the whole way, and his eyes open. Not much. A slit. But open. Looking at his sister.

Sesh carried Dot. All the way down from the palm to the plain. Dot had asked. This unit would like to know what flying is. Sesh had picked her up in her three-fingered hands and opened her copper-tipped wings and gone off the top of Luna's stair, and Dot hadn't said a single word the whole way down. When Sesh set her on the plain, Dot sat very still for a long moment.

Then she said: "This unit would like to do that again."

The General was waiting at the bottom of the stair.

He'd built his wall. A mile long. The length of the plain under the Hand. White and clear and thirty feet high. I saw it as we came down. Nothing had come over it. Nothing had needed to; nothing had fallen out of the Hand that the Kethri hadn't caught and nothing had come down that the Teeming hadn't stood under. But it was there. Every inch of it. Exactly where he'd said it would be.

He didn't say anything when he saw Luna.

He put his hand on her shoulder. His right hand. Bare.

And a fine white frost ran down from his fingers onto her coat, and across her shoulder, and up into her hair. Very lightly. Like a hand stroking it.

Luna put her face against her father's chest.

Windsors don't.

That night I sat on the porch steps and couldn't stop shaking.

Not my hands. My hands had been steady since the ice. The rest of me. The way Crane shook. All over. Sitting on the step with my arms round my knees and Risa on one side and Sera on the other and Luna behind me with her hands on my shoulders.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then I said, "She killed them."

"Yes," said Luna.

"Mother. The twelve. At the bottom." I stared at the street. "Through me. With my hands."

"Yes."

"I've never—" I stopped. "I don't unmake things. I told the Overseer. I put the other one in a box."

"You didn't unmake them," said Sera. "She did."

"Through me."

"Through you," Sera agreed. She took my hand. Hers was very warm. "Because they were cutting a queen to pieces to make a voice to put in a thousand people in collars to drop on our children." Her voice was very level. "And she's your mother. And she's been watching the Sorn do things like that since before you were born. And she decided." She held on. "That's not you, Lucas. That was her choice."

"It was the right one," said Risa. Very quietly. "I'd have done it. If I could have."

I didn't say anything.

Then Luna, behind me, said: "Lucas. What did she say? Afterwards. When you were closing the holes."

I thought about it.

I'd been so busy listening to the queen that I'd almost not heard.

"She said they'll come," I said. "Mother. Afterwards. Very quietly. She said: They'll come for us now, love. Here. When they find out what happened to this one." I looked up at the sky. At the Hand, a mile out over the plain, still there, fingers folded, its queen asleep at the bottom of it for the first time in longer than she could count. "She said: Every Hand will hear about this. And the first thing they'll do is go to the place where the woman who did it lives."

Nobody said anything.

"Earth," said Luna.

"Earth," I said. "And the moon. And the station on the far side, where the Project's been cutting grey off the one Father went into. And Okafor's flat. And Hearth Block, and Harbor Block 44, and the penthouse on the sixtieth floor." I swallowed. "Every one of the thirty-one. Every family."

Sera's hand had gone very still in mine.

"They were safer before," I said. "When they were Retention. When they were leashed. When they were useful." I looked at my hands. "Now they're the ones who fought back. Now Mother's the one who killed twelve handlers from eleven light-years away. Now Rory's got his fire and Maura's got her heat and Ines Tarrow's got the ground." I closed my eyes. "And they're under glass. On a world with no queens. With a Senate that signed the Accord and a Chancellor who's only been on our side for a week."

"Okafor said home first," said Luna slowly.

"I know," I said.

I opened my eyes.

I looked at the street. At the porch. At the garden wall at the bottom of it, where our queen lay along the stones with Sesh beside her. At the city. At the canyon. At the Hand, out over the plain, with its queen asleep and its holds full of thousands of people in collars waiting for us to come back.

At Dory, asleep in her basket by the door.

"Okafor's wrong about one thing," I said.

They all looked at me.

"Home," I said. "She keeps saying home first. Earth first. Get the thirty-one whole and then the Project and then the Senate and then the dome." I shook my head. "That's not home any more. Not for them. Not for any of us."

I looked at the garden wall.

"This is," I said. "Here. Under the queens. With every brood on the world on one side and everyone we love on the other." I swallowed. "We have to bring them here. All of them. Mother. Maura and Rory. The thirty-one, and their families, and Okafor, and anyone else who wants to come. Before the Hands come for them."

Nobody spoke.

Then Risa, beside me, very quietly, said: "How?"

I looked up.

At the Hand.

A mile out over the plain. Three fingers and a palm. A queen at the bottom of it, older than north, who'd come here on no lane anyone had ever heard of.

Who could go anywhere.

"I'll ask her," I said.

Days 782–783. The palm.

The General drew the Hand on our kitchen table in ink and Holt talked for three hours. Every name. Dask: down, ten thousand folds, don't stop, don't look back. An hour if nobody's in the way. Windsor: ice, a stair, a floor, a wall, mist to eat heat and movement. Calder and Calder: fire in the palm. Sera, eighteen weeks: I'll stand in one place and burn; Liam moves, I hold; Toby's wall goes up before anything touches me. Toby: walls round Sera first, then the holds. Risa and Sigmund: a storm that looks like ten, on the outside, so the knuckles look out not in. Hana: water. Juno: north, inside where every way looks the same. Jessa: up; she's felt Marlo in the Hand since I finished her. Sesh and three winged Kethri: carrying. Dot: counting aloud. The Overseer: "It thinks perhaps the old one meant this." Opens doors.

Holt and the General on the ground. Okafor said bring his hand. I opened every brick at once. Frost stood the whole drawing up off the table in ice, then he stopped it exactly. Luna: Windsors don't show off. "No. We don't." He left it there all night. Top of the plan: Dask, D. Holds.

Dawn. Everyone came. Thousands of broods under the Hand. Our queen left the wall for the first time and stood at the canyon edge: I cannot go up; I can stand under.

Luna froze the air, not the ground. A mile of spiral stair in eleven seconds, three abreast, ridged, a rail throwing the light in a thousand colours, stopping a hair below the palm. The General: "That'll do." Her shoulders went down.

The hello went up to the spine-queen and down into the Hand to her, two nights of holes in her like gaps in a fence, holding the door anyway. Dory's net round all of us, up, down, and out eleven light-years. There you are. There you are. Mother came through, whole, into all of us. "Lucas. Go."

Handlers dropped from the palm like wasps, blank faces, blades folded so fine they hum: the blades they cut her with. Risa and Sigmund turned the sky black and brought down sheets of lightning round the fingers. The handlers turned to look out. Sera planted her feet and burned like a sun, and Luna held the step under her as ice without looking. Handlers came apart like paper in fire. Liam went up the stair throwing fire, laughing: "Dad's going to be so jealous."

Toby's wall at the top. I opened the palm like a fist, and the next fold, and the next. Juno: left, down, not that one. Dot counting every name, none quiet. The Overseer touched every locked fold and it opened: "It kept this one shut. In the vat. It does not keep doors shut any more."

Fold four thousand: hundreds came from between the folds. One got past Toby's wall toward Dory, and the blade stopped an inch from Risa's coat. Then every blade on every handler stopped mid-swing and held, to the width of a hair. "Go on, love. I've got these." Sera came through behind us still burning, looked at them held, and opened her hand.

Fold seven thousand: Jessa. He's here, sideways. The Overseer opened the wall into the first finger's hold: rows of housings, stone-plated sleeping hills, hundreds of tiny ones breathing as one, tall ones the light bends round. All collared. Marlo in the nearest, hair past his shoulders, the way Jessa's was. Toby put a wall round them and went. "Go. We've got him."

Fold ten thousand, fifty-one minutes. A warm space, every wall turned from every other. Her: like the bottom of the sea, rock pressed a million years. Hundreds of neat holes still bleeding silver. Twelve handlers in a ring, bigger, darker, waiting on their ground. One lifted its blade toward her. I didn't listen first. I unfolded all twelve at once. Mother reached through my hands and took the hard dark things inside. "Not in a box this time, love. These ones cut her." She closed her hand.

Dory: there you are. She reached back. I closed every hole, listening first. The bleeding stopped and she settled like rock after an earthquake. Twelve days of the hello and she has learned our words: thank you.

Noon. Marlo up in Toby's arms, eyes open a slit, looking at his sister. Sesh flew Dot down: "This unit would like to do that again." The General's wall, a mile long, thirty feet high, exactly where he said. Nothing came over it. His bare hand on Luna's shoulder, frost into her hair like a hand stroking it. Windsors don't.

Night, the porch steps, shaking. She killed them, through my hands. Sera: she did, not you, because they were cutting a queen to make a voice to drop collared people on our children. Her choice. Risa: the right one; I'd have done it.

What Mother said after: they'll come for us now. Every Hand will hear, and the first place they go is where the woman who did it lives. Earth. The moon. Okafor's flat, Hearth Block, Harbor Block 44, the penthouse. Safer when leashed and useful; now they're the ones who fought back, under glass, on a world with no queens.

Okafor's wrong about one thing. Home isn't Earth any more. It's here, under the queens. We have to bring them here, all of them, before the Hands come. How? The queen at the bottom of the Hand came here on no lane anyone knows. She can go anywhere.

I'll ask her.