Chapter 284 The Last Collar

Okafor made a list.

Of course she did. She made it on the morning after the porch, at our kitchen table, with her slate and a cup of Priya's tea going cold at her elbow and the second queen's holds drawn out on the back of one of Garnet's spare sheets by Luna, who'd walked every fold of the second Hand twice in the night with Dot's hand rolling along beside her.

"How many holds?" said Okafor.

"Four fingers," said Luna. "The first is the Ulu and the Karst and the Sef. We've done the Ulu and the Karst. The Sef are still in their sand." She put her finger on the drawing. "The second finger's sealed. Cold. Something in it is very cold, and getting less cold. The third finger's half empty. That's where the Hesk were. The fourth—" She stopped.

"The fourth?"

"The fourth's very small," said Luna. "At the tip. The second queen says there's only one in it."

"One what?"

"She doesn't know," said Luna. "She says it was put in a long time ago. Before she was in the Hand. She says it's been in the dark longer than she has, and it's never once made a sound."

Okafor looked at the drawing for a long time.

"And the knuckle?" said Holt. He was standing by the window with his arms folded. He'd stood by windows since I fixed his legs. He said he'd sat down for long enough.

"Empty," said Luna. "The second queen says it opened over the old battlefield. On Earth. That's where the ranks of handlers came from, before the Hesk. There's nobody in it now. I walked it. Twice."

Holt nodded slowly. "Good."

"Then it's three holds," said Okafor. "And then the wedding." She looked at me over the top of her slate. "Dask. How long?"

"I don't know," I said. "It depends what's in them."

"It always does," said Okafor, and wrote something down.

The Sef first.

Because Okafor said you started with the ones you'd already seen. And because the Sef had been lying in their sand in the dark for longer than the second queen knew, and when Dot's hand rolled into the first finger that morning ahead of us, their edges had caught the light from it, every one of them, all at once.

And turned toward it.

"They want the light," said Marlo.

He'd come with us again, on Toby's back. He'd stopped asking if he could. He just climbed on, and Toby just let him, and the light-benders in the second finger of our Hand passed him what the watchers knew, the way you'd pass a cup down a table.

"The watchers say the Sef world had a sun that never set," said Marlo. "Not ever. The Sef lie in it. They don't eat. They don't need to. They drink the light." He looked at the dark of the hold, at the rows and rows of glassy angular shapes half buried in sand, turned toward the little lamp on Dot's hand like flowers. "They've been in the dark since the Sorn took them. The watchers don't know how long. Long enough that most of them stopped moving."

"Are they dying?" said Garnet.

Marlo was quiet.

"Some of them," he said. "Slowly. The watchers say the Sef do everything slowly."

Garnet looked at me.

Then at the hold. All of it. The sand, and the dark, and the thousands of glassy shapes in it, half buried, turned toward one small lamp.

"Can you lift it?" she said. "All of it. The sand. With them in it. Out into the sun."

I thought about it.

A month ago I couldn't have. A month ago I could lift a person, if I was careful, and a cart, if I wasn't. Not a whole hold. Not a hold the size of a field, sand and all, with thousands of living things lying in it who'd break if they were jolted.

But a month ago the queens hadn't made me stronger.

Exactly, said Mother. Not out loud. On the thread. She was on the red glass outside, with Dory, where she'd said she'd be. Not strong. Exact. Every grain. The way you hold bowls.

"Yes," I said.

So I did.

I didn't lift the Sef.

I lifted the sand. Every grain of it, the whole floor of the hold, all at once, a hand's depth down, so that the Sef lying in it didn't move against it at all. Didn't shift. Didn't feel it go. They lay in their sand exactly as they'd lain in the dark, and the sand lay round them exactly as it had, and I held all of it the way Mother held three bowls and the flour and the eggs.

And carried it out.

Through the open finger of the second Hand. Down the long folded passage. Out into the morning.

It came out over the red glass like a field. A field of pale gold sand, a hand deep and as wide as the square, floating a man's height off the ground, with thousands of glassy shapes lying in it. The people of Scarecrow came out of their houses to look. The Hesk on the plain lifted their heads. The Hesk queen turned her great woven crest toward it.

And the sun hit them.

I'll never forget it.

Not the Sef. Not exactly. I couldn't see the Sef very well. The light was too bright.

That was the point.

Every one of them caught it. Every glassy edge, every angled face, every one of those thousands of half-buried shapes. They caught the morning sun and broke it and threw it back. All at once. In every colour there was. Across the red glass, across the houses, across the whole of the plain, so that for a moment Scarecrow was standing inside a rainbow that had been smashed into ten thousand pieces and scattered.

People put their hands up to their eyes.

Then took them down again. Because they didn't want to miss it.

"Oh," said Garnet, beside me. Very quietly. "Oh."

I set the sand down on the red glass at the edge of the plain. Gently. Grain by grain. Where the sun would be on it all day, from the rim at dawn to the rim at dusk.

And the Sef, very slowly, began to turn.

Their queen came back in the sun.

Of course she did. The slivers in their collars, when Dory waited with them and they drew back their threads, all wanted the same thing. Not together, like the Hesk. Not wet, like the Ulu. Not dark, like the Karst.

Up, said Genny. Listening. Her hands out flat over the sand. They want to be up. Where it's brightest. Where nothing's between them and the sun.

So Garnet pointed.

At the top of the rim. The highest point on the canyon's edge above Scarecrow, where the dawn came first and the dusk went last. A bare red shelf of rock that nothing had ever grown on, because nothing could. Too much sun.

"There," said Garnet. "Nothing's ever between that and the sun."

So the queens sang her back there.

And I listened. To every piece of her. To what she'd been, on a world where the sun never set, before the Sorn came. And I grew her.

She was glass.

Not like the red glass of the plain. Clear. Clear as water, clear as the Ulu queen's bell, but hard, and faceted, and tall. A spire. Taller than the tree in the square. Taller than our house. Rising off the bare red shelf at the top of the rim like a crystal growing out of rock, all angles and edges and flat bright faces, every one of them turned a little differently toward the sky.

And inside her, light.

Not her own. The sun's. She caught it the way her young did. Caught it, and held it, and bent it down through herself, face to face to face, until it came out at her base as one single steady beam. Down the side of the rim. Across the plain. Onto the field of sand where her young lay.

A thread of light, from her to them. Like the thread on the hello. Only you could see it.

Her world had a sun that never set, said the old one. Slowly. From the mountain. Nothing grew that could not live in it. The silver listened, and grew her to drink it, and to share it.

She is giving it to them, said our queen. Now. All of it. She has been in the dark so long. She will not keep any.

On the sand at the edge of the plain, the Sef were turning toward the beam. One by one. All of them. The ones that hadn't moved in longer than the second queen could remember.

Slowly.

The Sef do everything slowly.

Rory sat with them that night.

Nobody asked him to. He came out after supper and walked down to the edge of the sand and sat down on the red glass beside it, with his coat over his knees, and held out his hands.

"Desert," he said, when Maura came down to find him. "Cold at night, deserts. Even with a sun that never sets, I'd bet. Somewhere on the far side of it." He looked at the Sef, very still in the dark, their glass edges gone dull without the beam. "They've had enough cold."

He didn't make a fire. He didn't need to. He just held the heat. Out over the sand, low and even, the way he'd held the heat plant on Hearth Block by hand for longer than Sera had been alive. Not a flame. A warmth. Like an oven door left open.

Maura sat down beside him.

She held the edges. The way she'd held the edges on the ridge on Earth, at the battle. Kept the heat where he put it, so it didn't spread, so it didn't waste.

They sat there all night. In the morning, when the beam came down off the rim again, the sand was still warm.

And one of the Sef had moved. Very slowly. All the way across the sand, through the night, a whole foot. Until it was lying against Rory's boot.

"Well," said Rory, looking down at it. "Hello."

"You," said Maura, "have adopted ten thousand beetles and now a piece of glass."

"Apparently," said Rory.

The second finger was cold.

Luna had said so, and she was right. I felt it before the fold opened. Cold coming through the grey the way it came off the General's hands. Not ordinary cold. The deep kind. The kind that has been cold so long it's forgotten anything else.

And getting less cold.

"The Sorn kept them frozen," said Luna. She had her hand flat on the grey beside the fold, the way she put her hand on water to feel where it wanted to go. "There's a machine in the walls. A cold one. It's been running down since the crossing." She took her hand away. "It's nearly stopped."

"What happens when it stops?" said Okafor. She'd come this time. She'd said the cold ones would want a soldier, and she was one, and that was the end of it.

"They thaw," said Luna.

"Is that bad?"

Luna didn't answer straight away. She looked at her father.

The General had his hand on the grey too. His bare right hand, with the frost coming off it in a fine white breath that ran across the fold and stopped.

"They're not made to thaw," he said. "Whatever they are." His voice was very quiet. "I can feel it. They're made to be cold. All the way through. And they're getting warm, a degree a day, in the dark, and they can't stop it, and they can't get out." He took his hand away. "They're dying, Okafor. Slowly. The way you'd die in a room where somebody kept turning the stove up."

The General went in first.

He didn't ask. He walked through the fold when I opened it with his coat buttoned to the neck and his hands bare, and the cold came out of him before he was two steps inside. All of it. The way it had come out of him on the ridge on Earth, the first time, when every brick I'd opened in him came down at once.

The hold was a cave of ice.

Not the General's ice. The Sorn's. Old and grey and rotten with meltwater, dripping from the roof, pooling on the floor. And set into it, in long rows going back into the dark, things.

White things. Tall and thin and branched, like frost on a window, like the ferns of ice that grow on glass in the coldest part of a winter night. Every one of them taller than a man. Every one of them standing very still in its niche of rotten ice, with a collar of grey round the place where its branches came together.

And every one of them dripping.

"Oh," said Luna. Very softly. "Oh, they're melting."

The General stopped in the middle of the hold.

He put his hands out. Both of them. Palms down. Toward the floor.

And the hold froze.

Not all at once. In a wave. From his hands outward, along the floor, up the walls, across the roof. The meltwater stopped dripping. The pools went hard. The rotten grey ice of the Sorn went white, and clean, and new, the way the first frost of winter comes in across the canyon in a single night.

And kept going.

Colder. Colder than our winter. Colder than anything on Avalon. Colder than the General had ever made, on the ridge or the plain or the knuckle, because those had been walls and this was a world. I could feel him reaching for it. For the deep cold. For the cold at the bottom of everything, that stars sit in.

Luna went to him.

She didn't say anything. She just put her hand on his back. And her cold went into his, the way her water went into everything, finding the places where it wanted to go and helping it get there. Not more cold. Finer. Every crystal of the frost on the walls, every one, set right. The way Mother held bowls.

The white things in their niches stopped dripping.

And one by one, all down the long dark hold, their branches began to unfold.

They sang.

That was what I hadn't expected. Not with voices. With their branches. Every white fern of them, every fine spine, unfolding in the cold and touching the air and ringing, very high and very faint, like a finger run round the rim of a glass. Thousands of them. All down the hold.

The sound of a world where it was always winter.

"Nivi," said Marlo, very quietly, from Toby's back. He had his hand pressed to his mouth. "The watchers say they're called Nivi. They say the wind on their world never stops. They say the Nivi stand in it and let it play them." He swallowed. "They say they haven't heard them sing since the Sorn took them. They thought they'd forgotten how."

The General didn't say anything.

He stood in the middle of the hold with his hands out and his daughter's hand on his back and the frost on his eyelashes, and the Nivi rang round him like bells, and his face didn't do anything at all.

Windsors don't.

But Luna had her forehead against his shoulder. And I don't think it was the cold that made her shake.

The Nivi queen came back in ice.

The slivers wanted cold. Only cold. Nowhere on the plain was cold enough, and nowhere in the city, and even the hold, with the General holding it, was only cold enough for now. So the General made a place.

Not a wall. Not a stair. A mountain. Out on the plain, beyond the Hands, beyond the Sef in their sand, he built it out of the air. All the water in the sky over the plain, everything Luna could pull out of it and pass to him, frozen as it came. White, and blue at the heart, and taller than the rim, with a wind that came off the top of it that he'd made himself, by making the top so cold the air fell off it like water off a roof.

It took him all day.

He didn't stop. He didn't sit down. When the light went, Liam brought him a cup of Priya's tea and it froze in the cup before he could drink it, and he looked at it and handed it back and said, very politely, "Thank you, Calder. Perhaps later."

At dusk he said, "That will do."

And the queens sang her back on the top of it.

She was a forest of frost.

Not one shape. A hundred. A thousand. A great branching white crown on the top of the General's mountain, spreading out across the ice, every branch splitting into finer branches and finer and finer, until at the edges she was like the frost on a window, so thin you could see the stars through her. Blue at the heart, where the old one said she kept her silver. White everywhere else.

And when the wind came off the top of the mountain, she sang.

All of her. Every branch. The same high ringing as her young in the hold, but a thousand times bigger, so that it came down off the mountain across the plain and into Scarecrow and you could hear it in your bones. Not loud. Never loud. Just there. The way the hum of the filter had been there in the house in the dead field, under everything.

Her world is winter, said the old one. Always. Wind and ice and stars. The silver listened, and grew her to let the wind play her. So her young could hear her from anywhere on the ice. So nobody was ever lost.

Up on the mountain, very faint, from the hold where I'd left the fold open, the Nivi heard her.

And started walking.

The General stayed out on the plain until they were all on the mountain.

All night. Standing at the foot of it, very straight, in his coat, with his hands bare. Keeping it cold. And the Nivi came past him one by one out of the second Hand, tall and white and branched, moving the way frost moves across a window when you watch it very closely, and every one of them, as it passed him, rang.

Just once. Just one note. A different note for each.

"They're thanking him," said Juno. She was sitting on the porch rail beside me, with her eyes half shut, feeling them. "Every one. They're saying his name."

"They don't know his name."

"They know what he is," said Juno. "To them. They've got a word for it." She opened her eyes. "It's the word for the cold that comes back after a thaw. When you thought it wasn't going to."

In the morning, Luna went out with a blanket and found him still standing there, with frost all down the front of his coat and the last of the Nivi going up the mountain past him, and put the blanket round his shoulders.

He let her.

"Father," she said. "You should sit down."

"I'm a General," said the General. "We don't sit down."

"Okafor sits down."

"Okafor," said the General, "is a Major. It's different."

And then he sat down. On the red glass, at the foot of the mountain, with the blanket round him and his daughter beside him. And didn't get up again until Okafor herself came out at noon with a chair and put it behind him and told him to get in it.

The fourth finger was very small.

Luna had said so. It was smaller than I'd thought. Not a hold at all. A pocket. At the very tip of the second Hand's smallest finger, where the grey was oldest and thickest and folded in on itself so many times that even I had to look twice to see the shape of it.

And inside it, one.

I'd felt it from the plain. Very faint. The faintest thing I'd ever felt in a Hand. Fainter than the young one behind the moon, alone in the cold. Fainter than the Tharn in the deep hold of the first queen's finger, who'd been turning its mother's sliver over for a lifetime.

Just a flicker. Just enough to say: here. Still here.

"Who comes?" said Okafor.

She'd asked it every time. Every hold. And every time somebody had said me, before she finished. Garnet. Rory. The General. Toby. Hana and her father.

This time nobody said anything.

Because nobody knew what it was. And because the second queen, through the first, had said again what she'd said at the start: It was put in a long time ago. Before I was in the Hand. It has never once made a sound.

"I'll go," I said.

"Not alone," said Mother.

She'd come up the porch steps with Dory on her hip. She didn't usually come to the lists. She said Okafor made lists and she made bread, and it was better for everyone if the two didn't mix. But she'd come today.

"It's been alone long enough," said Mother. "Whatever it is. It shouldn't have to meet anyone else alone."

Okafor looked at her for a moment.

"Dask, then," she said. "Both of them. And the small one." She wrote it down. "And Genny, to ask."

Garnet opened her mouth.

"And Garnet," said Okafor, without looking up, "to see."

The fold at the tip of the finger took me an hour.

Not because it was hard. Because it was old. So old the grey had forgotten it was a door. It had been folded so long it thought it was a wall. I had to listen for a long time before it remembered, and then I had to ask it very gently, the way you'd ask an old man to stand up, and wait while it did.

It opened.

The pocket was very small. Smaller than our kitchen. And dark, and dry, and smelling of nothing at all. Not dust. Not rot. Nothing. Like the inside of a box that had been shut so long even the air had given up.

Dot's hand rolled in ahead of us with its lamp.

And there, in the corner, curled up very small against the grey, was the one.

It was green.

That was the first thing. After all the grey and the white and the glass, it was green. A deep soft green, like moss on a stone after rain. Covering the whole of it. It was about the size of a large dog, curled up on itself, with no shape I could make out under the green. No legs. No head. Just a soft curled mound, very still, like a stone in a stream that the moss has grown over.

And a collar.

Grey round the middle of it. Tight. Sunk in. The moss had grown over the edges of it, a long time ago, and then died back, and grown again, and died again, so that the collar sat in a sort of trench, brown at the edges, with the green coming up to it on both sides and stopping.

Genny knelt down in front of it.

She didn't touch it. She held out her hands, flat, a little way off. The way she held them out over stone.

"It's asleep," she said. Very quietly. "It's been asleep for a long time. On purpose. It decided." She tilted her head. "It's waiting for something."

"For what?"

Genny was quiet for a long time.

"It doesn't know any more," she said. "It forgot. It's been waiting so long it forgot what for." She swallowed. "It just knows it's not supposed to stop."

Dory reached out.

On Mother's hip, with her silver very bright in the light of Dot's lamp. Out past Genny, down, to the green thing curled in the corner. And touched it.

There you are.

The green thing didn't move.

But the collar did. The sliver in it. I felt it wake. Very faint. Very far down. Like someone calling from the bottom of a well. And the thread it had been holding round the green thing's heart for longer than anyone could remember drew back.

Just a little.

And the green thing, very slowly, uncurled.

It had a face.

Of a sort. Under the moss, at one end, two dark eyes opened, wet and very old. They looked at Dory. Then at Mother. Then at Genny, kneeling in front of it with her hands out. Then at me.

And Dot, at the door with her lamp, said very quietly: "Operator. It's asking a question."

"What question?"

"I don't have the words," said Dot. "Juno would. But I can feel the shape of it." A pause. "It's asking if anyone else is here."

I didn't understand.

Then I did.

"Genny," I said. "Ask the queen. Ask the sliver. Where are the others?"

Genny put her hands out over the collar. And listened. For a long time. Her face changed while she did, very slowly, the way the light changes in autumn.

"There aren't any," she said.

Nobody said anything.

"The Sorn came to their world," said Genny. Very quietly. Listening, and saying it as it came. "A long time ago. Before the first queen was in her Hand. They took the queen and they made her carry the voice and the young turned on everything, the way it always happens, and when it was done the Sorn cut the queen into collars and put the young in the Hand." She stopped. "Only there weren't many young. It was a small world. A wet one. Green. They weren't fighters. They were—" She listened. "Gardeners. They made things grow. The Sorn didn't have much use for them."

"What happened to them?"

"They used them up," said Genny. "One world after another. A few at a time. Not fighting. The Sorn put them in the fields on the worlds they took, to make things grow for the broods. And they died there." Her voice was very small. "Until there was only this one. And they didn't need it any more. So they put it in the smallest hold and shut the door."

"And forgot it," said Garnet. Very quietly.

"And forgot it," said Genny.

The green thing looked at her with its old wet eyes.

"It's the last one," said Genny. "And this is the last piece of their queen. There were others. In other collars. On the other ones. But they're all gone now. With the others. On the worlds where they died." She looked down at the collar. "This is all that's left. Of the whole world. Her. And it."

Mother set Dory down.

She'd never done that. Not since the palm. Dory went from her hip to Risa's or mine or Luna's, sometimes, but never to the floor, not in a strange place, not ever.

Mother set her down on the floor of the pocket, on the dry grey, and Dory sat there quite happily and looked at the green thing with interest.

Then Mother knelt down beside Genny.

In front of the last one.

She didn't say anything for a long time. She looked at it. At the collar sunk in its trench of dead moss. At its old wet eyes.

"I know," she said at last. Very quietly. "What it is to be the last of something. To have them all go, one at a time, and you not." She didn't look at me. "There were a lot of us in the halls, once. The program used us up the same way. A few at a time." She put out her hand. Very slowly. Palm up. Not touching. "And I know what it is to be put in a room and left there, because you weren't any more use. Not so long as you. But long enough."

The green thing looked at her hand.

"Somebody came," said Mother. "In the end. Somebody opened the door." She glanced at me. Then back. "I'd like to be somebody, for you. If you'll let me."

And the last one, very slowly, put out something from under its moss. Not a hand. A thread. Soft and green and fine as hair. And laid it across my mother's palm.

I took the collar off.

Gently. The way I'd taken off Sesh's. Not like opening a fist. Like opening a hand that's held something small for so long it's forgotten how to let go.

The grey came away from the trench in the moss in one long piece. The sliver in it was very small. Smaller than any I'd seen. Worn almost to nothing.

Genny held out her hands.

It came to her. One small grey spark, rising out of the collar, settling in her cupped palms like a seed.

"Where does she want to go?" I said.

Genny listened.

"With it," she said. "She doesn't want to be anywhere else. She says she's been round its middle for so long she doesn't know how to be anywhere it isn't." She looked at the last one. "She says please don't make her be a mountain or a spire or a forest. She was never big. She was a gardener's queen. She'd just like to be near it."

So I didn't grow her big.

The queens sang. All of them. Every one who sang at dawn, and all the new ones. The Hesk queen on the plain, and the Ulu in Hana's pool, and the Karst in the dark, and the Sef on her bare red shelf at the top of the rim with the sun going through her, and the Nivi on the General's mountain with the wind playing her. More queens than had ever sung together in one place on Avalon. More than on any world, our queen said afterward. Ever.

And they gave. A little each. To the smallest piece of the smallest queen of the smallest world.

And I listened. To what she'd been. On a wet green world, before the Sorn came. A gardener's queen. A small one.

And grew her in Genny's hands.

She was a flower.

That's the only way to say it. About the size of Genny's two hands cupped together. Soft, and green, and folded in on herself like a bud. And then, as the queens' song went into her and the sliver remembered, she opened. Petal by petal. Pale green on the outside and white on the inside, and at the very heart of her, silver, very small, very bright, the way the heart of a flower is gold.

She smelled of rain.

That was the thing I remembered after. In that dry dead pocket, where even the air had given up, she smelled of rain on a garden. Of the field outside the house in the dead field after Father had finished it, and the first water came up through the dirt.

Genny didn't move.

She held her very carefully, the way you'd carry water, and turned, and knelt down beside the last one, and held out her hands.

The last one looked at its queen.

For a very long time.

And then the soft green thread that was lying across my mother's palm lifted. Very slowly. And went to the flower in Genny's hands. And touched her.

And the last one sang.

Not like the Nivi. Not like the Karst or the queens. A very small sound, very low, very old. Like water running under moss. Like a garden at night.

The first sound it had made since the Sorn shut the door.

We carried them out together.

Genny with the queen in her cupped hands. Mother with the last one in her arms, curled up very small against her chest, the way she held Dory. Garnet with Dory. Me last, with my hand on the fold, letting it close behind us. Gently. So it could go back to being a wall, if it wanted to.

Out into the afternoon.

Everybody was there.

They'd heard. The whole city. Dory had told them, or the queens had, or Juno had felt it, or Dot had. I don't know. But everyone in Scarecrow was standing on the red glass at the edge of the plain when we came out of the palm of the second Hand. And the Hesk, ten thousand of them, behind. And the Sef on their sand. And the Kethri, all winged now, in a ring round Sesh and the youngest queen. And the Tharn and the Mirri, and the light-benders, very faint at the edge of everything.

All very quiet.

Mother walked out into the middle of them with the last one in her arms.

And stopped.

"Where?" she said. To me. "Where should they go?"

I didn't know.

But Garnet did.

"Our garden," said Garnet.

Everyone looked at her.

"The house in the dead field," said Garnet. "Father's field. The first thing he ever changed. Out of ash and glass." She looked at the last one in Mother's arms. "That's where things grow. That's where you go if you're a gardener. That's where Father would have put them."

The house in the dead field was on Earth. Eleven light-years away.

But Garnet wasn't finished.

"Lucas made us a garden," she said. "Here. Behind our house. Where the queen's wall is. Where Genny talks to the stone and Mother sits in the mornings." She looked at me. "You made it the way Father made his. The soil first. Then water. Then the rest." She looked back at Mother. "So it's the same. Isn't it. It's the same garden. Just on a different world."

Mother didn't say anything.

She turned. And walked, with the last one in her arms, across the red glass and up the street and through the gate into our garden. To the queen's wall. Where our queen lay with her great head on the stones and her eye open, watching. And knelt down on the grass at the foot of the wall, in the corner where the sun came in the mornings, where Genny's stone bench was.

And put the last one down.

Genny knelt beside her and put the queen down too. In the grass. Right beside it.

The last one curled round her. The way it had curled round the collar for longer than anyone remembered. Only this time round something living. Something that smelled of rain.

And the green of it, very slowly, began to spread out into the grass.

Okafor came to the gate at dusk.

She stood there with her slate, looking at the corner of our garden. At the patch of green by the wall, which had spread out a yard in every direction by then and was still going, very slowly, and was starting to have small white flowers in it that hadn't been there at noon.

"That's the last collar," she said. "In the second Hand."

"Yes, ma'am."

Okafor looked at the green a while longer.

Then she wrote something on her slate. One line. And put it under her arm.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Under the tree. Noon." She looked at me. "Tell them."

I didn't have to. They were on the porch behind me. All three. They'd heard.

Okafor turned to go. Then turned back.

"Dask."

"Ma'am."

"Your mother," said Okafor. "In that hold. What she said." She looked at the green in the corner of the garden. "About being the last. I knew the numbers from the halls. Everyone in the army knew the numbers. I didn't know she'd counted them."

"She never told us," I said.

Okafor nodded. Once.

"She'll want to be at the front tomorrow," she said. "Make sure she is."

Days 831–834. The last collar.

Okafor's list at our table. Luna had walked the second Hand twice in the night. Four fingers: the first, Ulu and Karst done, Sef still in their sand; the second sealed and very cold and getting less cold; the third half empty where the Hesk were; the fourth tiny, at the tip, with only one in it, put there before the second queen was in the Hand and never once making a sound. The knuckle opened over the old battlefield on Earth; empty; Luna walked it twice. Three holds, then the wedding.

The Sef. Their sun never set; they lie in it and drink the light; in the dark since the Sorn took them, most stopped moving; some dying, slowly, because the Sef do everything slowly. Garnet: can you lift it, all of it, out into the sun? A month ago, no. Mother on the thread: not strong, exact, every grain. I lifted the sand a hand deep under them so not one shifted, and carried the whole floor of the hold out like a field and set it on the glass. The sun hit them and Scarecrow stood inside a rainbow smashed into ten thousand pieces. People covered their eyes and uncovered them so as not to miss it.

The slivers wanted up, where nothing is between them and the sun. Garnet pointed at the highest bare shelf on the rim where dawn comes first and dusk goes last. I grew her there: a clear faceted glass spire taller than the tree, catching the sun face to face and bending it down through herself into one beam onto her young. A thread you can see. The silver grew her to drink it and share it; she won't keep any. The Sef turned toward it, slowly. Rory sat with them all night holding heat low over the sand like an oven door; Maura held the edges. By morning one had crossed a foot of sand to lie against his boot. Ten thousand beetles and now a piece of glass. Apparently.

The second finger: a Sorn cold machine running down since the crossing. They thaw a degree a day in the dark and can't stop it; the General: dying, like a room where somebody keeps turning the stove up. He walked in first, bare hands. Rotten grey ice, meltwater, and in long rows tall white branched things like frost ferns on a window, collared, dripping. Luna: oh, they're melting. He froze the hold in a wave, colder than he's ever made, reaching for the cold stars sit in; Luna's hand on his back made it finer, every crystal set right. The branches unfolded and rang like a finger round a glass. Marlo: Nivi; a world where the wind never stops and plays them; the watchers hadn't heard them sing since. His face did nothing. Luna's forehead on his shoulder.

Nothing on Avalon was cold enough. The General built a mountain out of the plain's sky, everything Luna could pull from the air, white and blue at the heart, a wind falling off the top. Liam's tea froze in the cup: thank you, Calder, perhaps later. At dusk, that will do. The Nivi queen on the top: a forest of frost, a great white crown branching finer and finer until you see stars through her edges, blue at the heart, singing whenever the wind comes so her young can hear her anywhere on the ice and nobody is ever lost. The Nivi walked out past him one by one, each ringing one note. Juno: their word for him is the cold that comes back after a thaw when you thought it wouldn't. He stood all night. Luna brought a blanket. Generals don't sit; Okafor sits; Okafor is a Major, it's different. Then he sat, until Okafor brought a chair at noon and told him to get in it.

The fourth: a pocket at the tip, grey folded so long it thought it was a wall; an hour asking it to remember. Okafor: who comes? Nobody said me. I'll go. Mother: not alone; it's been alone long enough. Dask, both of them, the small one, Genny to ask, and Garnet to see. Inside, air that had given up. In the corner, green: moss over a curled mound the size of a large dog, a collar sunk in a trench of dead moss. Genny: asleep on purpose, waiting, forgot what for, only knows it isn't supposed to stop. Dory: there you are. The sliver woke and let go a little and it uncurled: two old wet eyes. Dot: it's asking if anyone else is here.

Genny, listening: there aren't any. A small wet green world of gardeners. The Sorn used them up on world after world in the fields growing food for broods, a few at a time, until only this one, put in the smallest hold and forgotten. This is the last of their queen and the last of them. Mother set Dory down on the floor, which she never does, and knelt. I know what it is to be the last of something; the program used up the halls a few at a time; and to be put in a room and left because you weren't any use. Somebody came and opened the door. I'd like to be somebody, for you. It laid a green thread like hair across her palm.

The collar came off in one piece. The sliver worn almost to nothing came to Genny's hands like a seed: she wants to be with it; please don't make her a mountain or a spire or a forest; she was a gardener's queen. Every queen sang, more together than on any world ever, and gave to the smallest piece of the smallest queen. I grew her in Genny's hands: a flower, green outside, white inside, silver at the heart where a flower is gold. She smelled of rain on a garden, of Father's field when the first water came up. The thread went from Mother's palm to her; it sang, low, like water under moss. The first sound since the Sorn shut the door.

Everyone was on the glass, the Hesk, the Sef, the Kethri, the Tharn and Mirri and light-benders. Where? Garnet: our garden. Father's field was where things grow; you made this one the way he made his, soil then water then the rest; it's the same garden on a different world. Mother carried it through the gate to the corner by the queen's wall where the morning sun comes and Genny's bench is, and set it down, and Genny set the queen beside it. It curled round her, round something living this time. The green began to spread into the grass.

Okafor at the gate at dusk; a yard of green and small white flowers that weren't there at noon. That's the last collar in the second Hand. One line on her slate. Tomorrow, under the tree, noon. Tell them; they'd heard. Your mother, in that hold, about being the last: I knew the numbers from the halls; I didn't know she'd counted them. She never told us. She'll want to be at the front tomorrow. Make sure she is.