Chapter 271 The Knuckle

The Hand had never moved on its own.

That was the first thing I thought, standing on the plain in the grey before the light, with every brood on Avalon in a ring round me and the General's wall at my back. Four hundred years and longer, and every time a finger of the Hand had bent, a handler had bent it. Every time it turned over to show its palm, a voice had turned it. The queen at the bottom of ten thousand folds had carried everything and moved nothing.

This morning she was going to move.

Are you ready? I asked her. Through Dory, on Risa's hip, a little way behind me. Through the thread, which hung from the palm all the way down to the plain now, every hour of the day, the way the queen at the garden wall lay along her stones.

No, said the first queen.

Slowly. Every word right.

But I would like to try.

Holt had put us all where we'd be best. The way the General had, on the kitchen table, for the palm. Only this time it wasn't a stair a mile into the sky. It was the plain. Our ground.

The ring was the Teeming.

Every brood that could reach the plain, and more had come in the night. I couldn't count them. Dot could. Dot said eleven thousand four hundred, and then stopped saying numbers, because the numbers didn't mean anything when the ground was pale plates as far as you could see in every direction. They stood in a circle a mile across. Facing in. Toward the place under the Hand where the knuckle would come down.

Our queen stood at the north of the ring. At her full height. The second time in her life she'd left her wall.

Behind the ring, the wall. The General's. White and clear and thirty feet high, the length of the whole ring, all the way round. He'd built it in the night. I'd felt him do it from the porch, a long slow cold coming in across the canyon like the first frost of winter, hour after hour. When I came out at dawn he was standing at the north gate of it with frost to his elbows and his face perfectly calm, and he'd said, Good morning, Dask, as if he'd done nothing more than open a window.

Inside the ring, us.

Not all of us. Holt had been very clear. Wren was behind the wall, with Anja and Pell and the twins and Edda and everyone who couldn't fight and everyone who could fight but had a reason not to. Wren had argued. Wren was ten weeks, and Wren argued. Holt had said, Mara, you count. I need somebody behind the wall who counts. And Wren had looked at him for a long time, and then gone behind the wall with her book.

Inside, the rest.

Sera was at the centre of the ring.

Holt had put her there. Not in front. At the centre. Where everything would come toward her and nothing could come from behind. She stood very straight with her feet planted on the glass and her hand on her stomach, twenty weeks, and Toby stood beside her with his fiddle and his other hand already lifting.

"If anything gets within thirty feet of her," Holt had said, "Toby."

"It won't," said Toby.

Liam was with them. Not standing still. Liam couldn't stand still before a fight, any more than he could stand still before supper. He was walking up and down in front of his sister in a short line, three steps one way and three steps back, flexing his hands. Fire came off his fingers every time he turned. Small. Just a flicker.

"Stop that," said Sera, without opening her eyes.

"I'm warming up."

"You're making me hot."

"You're always hot."

"Liam."

He stopped. For about four seconds.

Luna was at the east of the centre. Hana at the west. Between them, the air was already heavy. Wet. Cold. Luna had been pulling water out of the dawn since before I came down from the porch, and Hana had been holding it, and the whole space inside the ring was full of a fine grey mist that came up to my knees and moved like breath.

Risa and Sigmund were just south of the centre, inside Toby's thirty feet. Facing out, not in. Their job was the sky.

Juno was beside me. Eyes shut.

Jessa was beside Juno, with Marlo.

Marlo had argued too. Marlo had been out of the housing for fifteen days and still couldn't walk more than a hundred steps without sitting down, and Edda had said absolutely not in a voice that Edda had never used before. Marlo had said: They talk to me. They won't talk to anyone else. If they're going to help, someone has to be there for them to talk to. And Edda had looked at him for a long time and then gone and got a chair.

So Marlo sat on a chair in the middle of the plain, inside a ring of eleven thousand Teeming, with his terrible hair tied back in Jessa's string and a blanket over his knees, looking at three places in the mist where the air wavered.

The light-benders.

They'd asked to come. Through Marlo. All three. They'd said: We stood at the knuckle door. We watched it shut. We know the handlers inside. We know what they expect to see when they come out.

And what do they expect?

A city, said the light-benders. They expect a city. And us, at the door, to tell them where it is.

Dot was beside Marlo's chair. Every one of her hands still. Her wings folded tight. Counting.

The Overseer was beside Dot.

It had come up out of the hollow at first light with its bread. The bread with the small neat hole in it. It had stood at the edge of the ring and looked at the place under the Hand where the knuckle would come down, and said, in the voice that went into the air and into me at once:

"It knows them."

"The handlers in the knuckle?"

"It was in the vat with them," said the Overseer. "Before Avalon. They were made harder. It was made softer. It knows what they will do." A pause. "They will come out looking for it."

"For you?"

"It was the unit," said the Overseer. "On Avalon. It was supposed to report to them. It was supposed to open the knuckle when the city did not obey. It has not reported." Another pause. "They will want to know why."

"Will you tell them?"

The Overseer was quiet for a long time.

"It will hold up the bread," it said.

And over all of it, a little way back from the centre, on the glass, with her feet planted and her face very calm, Risa.

With Dory on her hip.

Holt had argued about that one himself. He'd argued with Risa for an hour on the porch, and lost. She holds the net, Risa had said. She holds Lucas so he can reach. She holds his mother so his mother can reach. If she's not there, none of it works. And then, more quietly: And I'm not leaving her behind a wall with the Sorn on the other side of it. I've done that. I was behind a wall in Father's house for seventeen years. She's going to see what we do.

Holt had looked at her for a long time.

Then he'd said: Toby. Thirty feet. Both of them.

And Toby had said: Yes.

The hello went up.

I felt it go. Every name. Every base. Every brood. Up through the ring of queens to the spine-queen, far overhead in the Meridian. Down to the Hand, to the first queen at the bottom of it.

She caught it.

Dory woke on Risa's hip and checked us. All of us. And put the net round us. And reached.

Out, along the thread from the day of the call. Eleven light-years. To a small warm room.

There you are.

There you are, said Mother.

And this time, she said something else.

Lucas. Okafor's here. And Maura, and Rory, and Ines, and all of them. A pause. They're all holding hands. Round the table. They want to be in it too.

I didn't understand at first.

Then I felt it. Through Mother. Through the net. Not just Mother, eleven light-years away. All of them. Maura's warmth, like an oven door. Rory's fire, held in. Ines Tarrow's slow heavy stone. Adaeze Marsh's bell-note. Kwame Osei's river. Thirty people round Okafor's table, holding hands, with my mother in the middle of them and the hello running through all of them at once.

Into Dory's net.

Into us.

Okafor says, said Mother, you open it when you're ready. She says she's got thirty people here who'd like to watch.

The first queen moved.

I felt her decide. The way I'd felt our queen decide to let the Overseer come down the passage. A long slow gathering, deep at the bottom of the Hand, like a breath drawn in by something the size of a mountain.

Then the Hand tilted.

Slowly. Slower than anything that big should move. The whole of it. Three fingers and a palm, a mile out over the plain, tipping. The palm turning down and over. The third finger, on the right, coming lower. And lower. Its shadow swinging across the plain like the shadow of a cloud. Across the ring. Across the Teeming, who didn't move.

Across us.

The base of the third finger came down. The knuckle, where it joined the palm. Folded tight. Sealed. Every fold turned away from every other so that nobody could see in. Not even the queen. A great dark knot of grey the size of the schoolroom, coming down out of the sky toward the plain.

It touched.

Not hard. Gently. The way you'd set down something you were afraid of dropping. The red glass of the plain under it didn't even crack.

I did it, said the first queen. Very softly. Surprised.

You did it, I said.

I have never moved a finger, said the first queen. Not once. Not since they built the Hand round me. A pause. It is very heavy.

I know.

I would like to do it again.

Later, I said. Hold it there.

I am holding it, said the first queen. Open it, Lucas.

I walked up to the knuckle.

Alone. That was the plan. Holt had said: They're expecting a city. They're expecting the unit at the door. They're expecting the watchers. The last thing they expect is one boy on his own on a plain. Give them that. Give them the thing they don't expect. Let them come out and look at it and not understand.

So I walked up to the knuckle on my own, across the red glass, through Luna's mist, with every brood on Avalon behind me in a ring and the General's wall behind them.

I put my hands on it.

I could see in. I always could. I'd opened ten thousand folds of this Hand and found its queen at the bottom of them. The knuckle was the same. Folded and folded and folded, tighter than any of the rest. But a shape. And anything I could read, I could change.

Inside it, four hundred handlers.

I could see them. Standing in rows in the dark. Very still. Tall, thin, blank-faced, their hands already folded to blades so fine they hummed. Not asleep. Waiting. The way the Overseer had waited at the passage mouth for eight days. The way the slivers in the collars had waited, before the first queen told them they could stop.

Four hundred.

And round every one of their necks, a band.

A sliver. The same as Crane's. The same as Voss's seed. A piece of a dead queen in every band, so that the handlers could push their own small voices through it now that the first queen wouldn't carry theirs.

I hadn't known that.

I'd thought the handlers were just hard. I hadn't known that every one of them was wearing a queen.

I opened the knuckle.

They came out fast.

Not dropping, the way they'd dropped from the palm on the morning of the stair. Pouring. Out of the open knuckle in a dark rush, four hundred blank faces and four hundred pairs of blades, onto the red glass of the plain, into Luna's mist.

And stopped.

All of them. At once.

Because the city was there.

Right there. Where it should have been. Not a mile back across the plain behind a ring of Teeming and a wall of ice. There. In front of the knuckle. The canyon and the terraces and the red glass houses and the square and the forge and the schoolroom and the garden wall. Every street. Every window. Exactly as it was, exactly where the handlers had been told it would be, the day the knuckle shut.

It wasn't real.

It was the light-benders.

Three of them, standing in the mist beside Marlo's chair, where nobody could see them. Bending the light. Not hiding themselves this time. Making something. A whole city, out of nothing but light bent round the place where it wasn't, the way a heat haze on a summer road makes water out of nothing.

The handlers looked at it.

Four hundred blank faces, turned toward a city of light.

And then they moved toward it.

"Now," said Holt.

He didn't shout it. He said it into the band on Crane's collar, at the north gate of the General's wall, beside the General. Crane had offered. The band's grey, he'd said. The handlers can hear grey. If you speak into it, they'll hear you. Let them. And Holt had looked at him for a long time and said, All right, Hal.

So when Holt said now, four hundred handlers heard it.

And turned round.

Away from the city of light. Back toward the knuckle. Toward the sound. Toward a boy standing on his own on the red glass in the mist, with his hands at his sides.

They'd never seen anyone stand still in front of them before.

And in that moment, while four hundred blank faces were turned toward me and not toward the sky, Risa and Sigmund brought the sky down.

It wasn't a storm.

I'd seen her storms. I'd seen the black sky and the sheets of lightning on the morning of the stair. This was something else. This was the two of them, back to back, Risa with Dory on her hip and Sigmund with his arms spread wide, pulling everything. Every charge in the air over the whole plain. Every spark in the mist Luna had made. Every bit of lightning that had ever been in either of them since they were small in their father's house and Risa took her brother's lightning into her own silver and earthed it.

All of it.

They didn't throw it down.

They put it in a ring.

Round the outside of the handlers. A circle of lightning, white and blue and so bright I couldn't look at it, standing straight up off the red glass like a fence. Fifty feet high. Humming. Every handler inside it. Nothing able to get out.

And the handlers who touched it came apart.

Not burned. Unfolded. The lightning went into the grey and found every fold and opened it, the way I opened folds, only all at once and not gently, and where a handler had been there was a flat grey sheet falling slowly to the glass.

Sigmund was laughing.

I'd never heard Sigmund laugh. Not once. Not in the dome. Not on Avalon. Not even at the wedding in the square.

He was laughing now. Arms spread wide, with his sister's back against his and his niece on her hip and four hundred handlers inside a fence of their lightning.

"That's for Pim," he shouted. "That's for Lise. That's for the Quints."

Risa didn't laugh.

But her face, with Dory on her hip and the lightning pouring out of her into the ring, was the face I'd seen once before. The day Dory was born. The day she held her up and said mine.

The handlers turned on me.

There was nothing else they could do. The ring of lightning was round them. The city of light was gone; the light-benders had let it go the moment Holt said now. And in the middle of the ring, standing on his own in the mist, the only thing left to go for.

Me.

Four hundred, less the ones who'd touched the lightning. Three hundred and some. Coming at me across the glass in a dark rush with their blades out.

I didn't move.

Holt had said: Let them come. Let them come all the way. Let them think they've got you.

So I let them.

They were twenty feet away.

Fifteen.

Ten.

And the ground swallowed them.

I hadn't known the Tharn could move that fast.

Nobody had. Marlo had said they thought the way stone thinks. A whole day for one thought. They'd been on the plain for nearly two weeks, four hundred and twelve small hills feeling the sun on their plates, thinking about whether to go north to the deep country under the mountains.

They'd decided something else.

They'd decided it thirteen days ago. When the first one opened its eyes in the hold and looked at Genny and Dory and Marlo. Slowly. The way stone decides. One thought, over and over, for thirteen days, until it was so solid in them that there was no room for anything else.

These ones took our collars off.

We will not let anything take theirs.

They'd come in the night. Under the plain. Not walking. Through. The way the Tharn went through stone, slowly, in the dark, the way they'd gone through stone on their own world before the Sorn came. Four hundred and twelve of them, in a ring under the red glass, under the place where the knuckle would come down. Waiting. Not sleeping. Thinking one thought.

When the handlers came at me, the Tharn moved.

The glass opened under the front rank. Not cracking. Opening. Like a mouth. And the handlers went into it, blades and all, down into the dark under the plain where the Tharn were waiting, and the glass closed over them again.

Twenty of them. Thirty. Gone.

The rest stopped. Skidded. Turned.

And the ground opened under them.

Then everyone moved at once.

I can't tell it in order. Nobody could. I've tried. Luna tried, that night, in her notebook, and gave up after three pages and wrote at the bottom: Everyone. All at once. Exactly where Holt said.

But I'll try.

Luna froze the mist.

All of it. Every drop of the fine grey breath she'd been pulling out of the dawn since before I came down from the porch. It had come up to my knees. Now it came up to the handlers' knees too. And when she froze it, it froze round them. Round their legs. Round their long grey limbs. Locking them to the glass in a sheet of ice clear as a window. Dozens of them. Stuck.

Hana pulled the water back out of the air.

Everything Luna hadn't frozen. Everything that had melted off Risa's lightning. She pulled it up off the glass and out of the air in long bright ropes and threw them, the way I'd seen her throw water spheres in the cistern when we were cadets. Only these weren't spheres. They were whips. Ropes of water that wrapped round a handler's blades and pulled, and the moment they'd wrapped, Luna froze them. So the blades were locked in ice too. Pinned to the handlers' own sides.

"Left," said Juno. Eyes shut. Beside Marlo's chair. "Three going left. Toward the knuckle. Trying to get back in."

Sesh came down out of the sky.

With her copper-tipped wings spread twenty feet across. And six more behind her, because seven of the Kethri had wings now, all of them grey and copper, all of them coming down out of the dawn like hawks onto three handlers trying to run back into the knuckle. They didn't use their beaks. They didn't need to. They took the handlers in their three-fingered hands and lifted, and flew them straight up, a hundred feet, two hundred, and let go.

Over the Tharn.

The ground opened.

And through all of it, at the centre, Sera burned.

She hadn't moved. She'd said she wouldn't, and she hadn't. She stood with her feet planted on the glass and her hand on her stomach and her eyes shut, and she burned like a sun. White and gold. So hot that the ice of Luna's mist went to steam in a circle round her, thirty feet across. Exactly thirty. Exactly where Toby's wall was.

And every handler that came toward her hit Toby's wall.

Not slid off, this time. Toby had learned something since the stair. I didn't know what until afterward, when he told me. He'd been listening to the handlers' blades. The hum of them. The note grey makes when it's folded so fine it sings.

And he'd found the note that unmade it.

The counter-note. The opposite. The same way he'd found the note in the storm that pushed the column's pulling away from Lise. He played it into his wall, and every blade that hit the wall shattered. Into dust. Into grey ash that drifted down onto the steaming glass round Sera's feet.

And every handler that lost its blades and stood there, at the edge of Toby's wall, staring at its empty hands, Sera opened her eyes and looked at.

Just looked.

And it went.

Liam was everywhere.

That's the only way I can say it. He'd been walking up and down in front of his sister in a short line, three steps one way and three steps back. Now he was everywhere. Across the ring. Round the edge of the lightning fence. Over the ice. Throwing fire. White at the core. Aimed.

And laughing.

He'd laughed on the stair. He laughed louder now. He laughed every time a handler came apart in his fire, and every time one dodged and he caught it anyway, and every time he slipped on Luna's ice and caught himself and kept going.

One of them caught him.

I saw it. Across the ring. A handler on the ice with one blade still free, the one Hana's rope hadn't reached, swinging round behind Liam as he turned.

The blade went across his arm.

Not deep. I saw it go in and come out, and the blood come up, bright, on his sleeve.

And Liam stopped laughing.

For about one second.

Then he looked at the handler. Then at his arm. Then back at the handler.

"That," he said, "was my good arm."

And the fire that came out of his other hand was the biggest I'd ever seen him make.

And through it all, the hello.

Thirty people round a table eleven light-years away. Holding hands. Watching. Through Mother. Through Dory's net.

I felt them watch. I felt Maura gasp when Liam's arm was cut. I felt Rory go very still when Liam turned round and set the plain on fire. I felt Adaeze Marsh hear Toby's wall shatter a handler's blade, and recognise the note he'd found. I felt Kwame Osei watch his daughter throw water like rope.

And I felt Mother.

Not holding blades this time. Not reaching through my hands. Watching. Very still. The way she'd watched me come in from the field when I was small. Taking inventory.

Once, only once, she moved.

A handler on the far side of the ring. One the ice hadn't caught and the fire hadn't reached and the Tharn hadn't swallowed. It didn't come at me. It didn't come at Sera. It stopped at the edge of the lightning fence, very still, and lifted one blade.

And threw it.

Not at any of us. Over us. Over the fence. Over the ring of Teeming. Over the General's wall. Toward the place behind the wall where Wren was, with Anja and Pell and the twins and everyone who couldn't fight. A long grey shape, turning end over end, singing.

It stopped.

In the air. Halfway to the wall. Exactly. The width of a hair.

Not there, said Mother. Very quietly. Not today.

And the blade turned round in the air, slowly, and went back the way it had come, and stopped in front of the handler that had thrown it.

And held.

The handler looked at its own blade, hanging in the air in front of it, pointing at it.

It didn't move again.

And then the slivers sang.

I hadn't planned it. Nobody had. Holt hadn't drawn it on the back of Wren's dawn-line sheet. The General hadn't written it on the kitchen table.

The youngest queen did it.

She'd come with Sesh. Riding on Sesh's back, between the copper-tipped wings, small and pale and feathered, the size of a cat. When Sesh came down out of the sky onto the handlers at the knuckle, the youngest queen had stayed on her back. And when Sesh lifted the handlers and flew them over the Tharn, the youngest queen was close enough to hear what they were wearing.

The bands.

The slivers in them. A piece of a dead queen round every handler's neck. Some of them, she knew. Because some of them were her sisters.

She sang.

The note she'd sung to the hatchlings every evening before the Hand came. The note Toby had played in the hollow to sing her back. Thin and high and clear as a feather.

And every sliver on the plain heard it.

I felt it go through them.

Through every band round every handler's neck. Every sliver. Every piece of a dead queen. They'd been pushed and pushed and pushed by the handlers since the first queen stopped carrying the voice. Made to be hooks. Made to pull.

And now a queen was singing to them.

Not a voice. A queen.

The first queen took the note. At the bottom of the Hand, holding the knuckle on the plain. She took it and sang it, low, the way she'd sung it in the hollow when we brought the youngest back. And our queen at the north of the ring took it, and the old one on the mountain took it, and every queen in the ring of fourteen took it, and the note went out across the plain louder and louder, every queen on Avalon singing a hatchling's lullaby to three hundred pieces of dead queens round the necks of the things that had cut them.

And the slivers let go.

Not of the handlers. Of the pushing. They stopped being hooks. They stopped pulling. They went quiet, the way the slivers in the Kethri collars had gone quiet, the way the slivers in the first finger had drawn back their threads.

And the handlers, who had been pushing their small hard voices through those slivers since the first queen stopped carrying them, had nothing left to push through.

They stopped.

All of them. At once. Every handler still standing on the plain. Blades up, mid-swing, mid-step. Frozen. Not by Luna's ice. Not by Mother's exactness. By silence. The way a man stops in the middle of a sentence when he realises nobody can hear him.

The plain went very quiet.

Even Liam stopped throwing fire.

The Overseer walked into the middle of them.

Slowly. Through the ice. Past Sera's circle of steam. Into the ring of lightning, which Risa opened for it without being asked, a gap in the fence just wide enough for something long and grey to walk through.

It stood in the middle of the handlers. Not close. Holding its bread.

The one with the small neat hole in it.

And it held it up.

The handlers looked at it. Every blank face. Every one that was left. A hundred, maybe. Maybe less. Standing frozen on the plain with their blades up and their slivers silent.

"It was the unit," said the Overseer. Its own voice. In the air, and in every piece of grey on the plain at once. "On Avalon. It was to report. It did not report."

Silence.

"It sat at a door," said the Overseer. "For four hundred and eleven years. It kept it shut. It was told. It did not know it could do anything else." A pause. "It knows now."

It lifted the bread a little higher.

"This was given to it by a juvenile. Every morning. She did not want anything. She did not ask anything." Another pause. "It has been eaten. By a queen. A queen the Sorn cut. A queen that has come back."

The handlers didn't move.

"You were made harder," said the Overseer. "So you would not stop. So you would not ask what bread is for." It lowered the bread. "It was made softer. It asked."

Nobody on the plain made a sound.

"It does not know if you can learn," said the Overseer. "It does not think so. It thinks you were made too hard." A long pause. "But it was told, once, by the old one under the mountain, that it must not keep any door shut. Ever again."

It turned. Toward me.

"So it is asking," it said. "Lucas. Is there a door for them?"

I didn't answer straight away.

I looked at the handlers. A hundred, maybe. Frozen. Silent. The slivers round their necks quiet now, listening to the queens sing. Their blades up. Their blank faces turned toward the Overseer and its bread.

I looked inside them.

The small hard dark things. Clenched. Fused. Like a knot pulled so tight it had become solid. I'd seen it in the handler I'd put in the box, and in the twelve at the bottom of the Hand.

I looked for a long time.

For something soft. Something that might ask. Something that might, if somebody left bread on a stone every morning for a hundred years, one day pick it up and wonder what it was for.

I didn't find it.

Not in any of them.

"No," I said. Very quietly. "I'm sorry. There isn't."

The Overseer was still for a long moment.

Then it said: "It thought not."

And it walked back out through the gap in Risa's fence, holding its bread, and didn't look back.

I took the slivers first.

All of them. Every band round every neck. I unfolded each one, gently, the way I'd unfolded Sesh's collar, and took the sliver out of it, and held them. A hundred small grey pieces of dead queens, in my two cupped hands, quiet. Listening to the youngest queen sing.

Genny came through the wall to take them.

Holt let her. She walked across the plain, through the ring of Teeming, through Risa's gap in the fence, very straight, with her chin up, and held out her hands, and I put the slivers in them.

She looked at them for a long time.

"They want to go home," she said. "All of them. Back to where they were cut from." She looked up at the Hand. "Some of them are from the first queen's world. Some of them are hers."

"Then we'll take them to her."

"Yes," said Genny.

Then she turned round, with a hundred pieces of dead queens in her cupped hands, and walked back through the fence, and didn't look at the handlers at all.

Then I unfolded them.

All of them. Every shell. The way I'd unfolded the twelve at the bottom of the Hand. And this time I didn't put them in boxes, and Mother didn't reach through my hands.

Sera did.

She opened her eyes, at the centre of the ring, and looked at the small hard dark things in the middle of a hundred flat grey sheets drifting down onto the plain.

And opened her hand.

It was over by noon.

Dot counted. Every name. Every one of us. All the way round, twice, out loud, the way she'd counted on the morning of the stair.

None quiet.

Liam's arm, stitched by Edda on the glass with her tongue between her teeth and her green book open on her knee, where she wrote eleven stitches and then underlined it and then wrote will not stop talking underneath. Two of the Kethri with torn feathers that I mended before the stitching was done. Forty-one Teeming hurt, none dead, every one of them already being sung to by their own queens. One of the Tharn with a crack in its plates where a blade had gone in before the ground closed. I closed it. It looked at me for an hour afterward without blinking, and Marlo said it was thinking thank you, very slowly, and would be finished by tomorrow.

Four hundred handlers.

None left.

The knuckle was empty. Open. A great dark cave in the base of the third finger, sitting on the red glass of the plain with nothing in it.

Is it done? said the first queen.

It's done, I said.

She was quiet for a long time.

Then, very slowly, she lifted the knuckle off the plain. Back up. The Hand tilting the other way, the third finger rising, the palm turning back, the whole of it settling into the sky a mile out over the plain the way it had hung there for twenty-seven days.

I moved it twice, she said.

You did.

I would like to move it further. A pause. Every word right. I would like to go to your mother's world now, Lucas. My fingers are not empty. But the one that was full of the held is empty, and the one that was full of the cutters is empty, and the one that is full of the watchers—

She stopped.

I felt her turn her attention. Toward the second finger. Where two thousand light-benders, all there were anywhere, were waiting in the dark with collars round their necks.

Toward Marlo, on his chair, with three wavering places in the air beside him.

The watchers say they will come, said the first queen. To your mother's world. In my second finger. They say they have watched every world I went to and never once been able to help. A pause. They say this time they would like to.

That night Luna packed.

Not much. Luna never had much. Her notebook, and a second notebook, and three pens. The coat she'd worn on the roof in the dome. A scarf that Sera had made her, badly, with the stitches going in two directions, that Luna wore anyway every time it was cold.

I sat on the end of the bed and watched her.

Sera and Risa came in. Risa with Dory asleep. They sat down on the bed beside me, and nobody said anything, and Luna kept packing.

When she'd finished, she closed the bag and stood there with her hand on it.

"Two days," she said.

"Two days," I said.

"Eleven light-years there. The queen says she doesn't know how long. She's never gone anywhere she wanted to go." Luna's hand was very still on the bag. "Then the families. Three hundred and four. Then back."

"Then back."

She turned round.

She looked at the three of us on the end of the bed. At Dory, asleep in Risa's arms. At Sera's hand on her stomach.

"I'll miss it," she said. "When she's born. If it's while I'm gone." Her voice was very level. "I'll miss it."

"You won't," said Sera.

"You can't know that."

"I can," said Sera. "Because I'm not having her until you're back." She lifted her chin. "I've decided. She can wait. Calders are stubborn."

Luna looked at her.

Then she laughed. Not the way she laughed at the cheese. The other way. The way that was half crying.

"That's not how it works," she said.

"It is now," said Sera.

Day 798. The knuckle.

The Hand had never moved on its own. Are you ready? No. But I would like to try. Dot counted eleven thousand four hundred Teeming in a ring a mile across, facing in; our queen at the north, the second time she has left her wall. The General's wall all the way round, built in the night with frost to his elbows: "Good morning, Dask." Wren behind it with her book; Holt: Mara, I need somebody behind the wall who counts. Sera at the centre, twenty weeks, Toby beside her: if anything gets within thirty feet, Toby. Liam pacing three steps and back, fire off his fingers. Luna and Hana filling the ring with mist to the knees. Risa and Sigmund on the sky. Juno, Jessa, Marlo in a chair Edda fetched with a blanket on his knees, beside three places where the air wavered. They stood at the knuckle door and know what the handlers expect: a city, and the watchers to tell them where. The Overseer: it was in the vat with them; they will come looking for the unit that didn't report. It will hold up the bread. Risa with Dory: she holds the net; I was behind a wall in Father's house seventeen years; she's going to see what we do.

The hello. Dory's net. Mother, and this time all of them round Okafor's table holding hands, Maura's oven-door warmth, Rory's held fire, Ines's stone, Adaeze's bell, Kwame's river, into the net. Thirty people who'd like to watch.

The first queen tilted the whole Hand like a breath drawn by a mountain; the shadow swung over us; the knuckle came down the size of the schoolroom and touched the glass so gently it didn't crack. I did it. It is very heavy. I would like to do it again. Later. Hold it.

I walked up alone; give them the thing they don't expect. Inside: four hundred in rows, blades folded fine, waiting. And round every neck a band with a sliver of a dead queen, so they could push their own voices now the first queen won't carry them. I hadn't known every handler wore a queen. I opened it.

They poured out and stopped: the city was right there, every street and window, where they'd been told. The light-benders made it out of bent light. They went toward it. Holt said "now" into Crane's band, Crane's idea, so all four hundred heard and turned to the boy standing still. Risa and Sigmund, back to back, pulled every charge on the plain and stood it up in a ring fifty feet high round them. Whatever touched it unfolded. Sigmund laughing for the first time I've ever heard: that's for Pim, for Lise, for the Quints.

They came at me. Twenty feet, fifteen, ten, and the ground swallowed them. The Tharn decided thirteen days ago in the hold, one thought until it was solid: these ones took our collars off; we will not let anything take theirs. They came under the plain in the night. The glass opened like a mouth and closed.

Everyone at once. Luna froze the mist round their legs. Hana threw water like rope round their blades, and Luna froze the ropes. Juno: three going left, back to the knuckle. Seven Kethri with wings now came down like hawks, flew them two hundred feet up and let go over the Tharn. Sera burned like a sun, steam in a circle exactly thirty feet across. Toby has found the counter-note to the hum of a folded blade; every blade that hit his wall shattered to ash, and Sera opened her eyes and looked at whatever stood there with empty hands. Liam everywhere, laughing; a blade across his arm; "That was my good arm," and the biggest fire I've seen him make.

Round Okafor's table they watched. Maura gasped. Rory went still. Adaeze knew Toby's note. Kwame watched Hana. Mother only took inventory, and moved once: a blade thrown over the fence and the wall toward Wren and Anja and the twins stopped halfway, exactly. "Not there. Not today." It turned round and hung in front of the handler that threw it.

Then the youngest queen, riding Sesh, heard the bands. Some of those slivers are her sisters. She sang her hatchling note. The first queen took it, then ours, the old one, all fourteen: a lullaby to three hundred pieces of dead queens round the necks of the things that cut them. The slivers stopped pushing. The handlers had nothing to push through and stopped mid-swing, like a man realising nobody can hear him.

The Overseer walked through a gap Risa opened in the fence and held up the bread with the small neat hole in it. It was the unit; it did not report; it sat at a door four hundred and eleven years; it was made softer; it asked. You were made harder so you would not ask what bread is for. It does not think you can learn. But it must not keep any door shut. "Lucas. Is there a door for them?" I looked inside every one for something soft that might one day pick up the bread. I didn't find it. "No. I'm sorry." "It thought not." It walked out and didn't look back.

I took the slivers first, a hundred, in cupped hands. Genny came through the wall for them: they want to go home, some to the first queen's world, some are hers. She didn't look at the handlers. Then I unfolded them, and Sera opened her eyes and her hand.

Noon. Dot counted twice. None quiet. Liam's arm, eleven stitches; Edda wrote "will not stop talking." Two Kethri feathers mended. Forty-one Teeming hurt, none dead. A Tharn's cracked plate closed; it has looked at me an hour without blinking, thinking thank you, finished by tomorrow. Four hundred handlers. None left. The knuckle empty.

She lifted it back: I moved it twice; I would like to move it further. To your mother's world, now. One finger was full of the held, one full of the cutters, both empty. The second holds the watchers, two thousand, all there are. They say they'll come. They've watched every world she went to and never once helped. This time they'd like to.

Luna packed: two notebooks, three pens, the roof coat, Sera's badly knitted scarf. Two days. She doesn't know how long the crossing is; the queen has never gone anywhere she wanted to. "I'll miss it when she's born." Sera: you won't; I'm not having her until you're back; Calders are stubborn. "That's not how it works." "It is now."