Chapter 286 Empty Ground

Nobody woke me.

That was the first thing. I woke on my own, the morning after the wedding, in the grey before the dawn, and lay there in the dark waiting for it. The tug on the thread. Dot at the door. Somebody's feet on the porch steps, fast. A queen calling from the plain. Okafor's voice through somebody, flat and plain, Dask, I need you.

Nothing came.

Sera was asleep on her side with her hand on her stomach. Risa was asleep with her arm flung toward Dory's cot. Luna was asleep at the end, with all of the blanket, and her notebook on the floor beside the bed. Closed.

I lay there a long time.

Then I got up and went out onto the porch in my bare feet, and Dot was at the bottom of the steps where she always was, with her grille dim and her hands folded.

"Dot," I said. "Is there anything?"

"Operator," said Dot. A pause. The kind of pause she made when she was checking something twice, because she didn't believe it the first time. "There is nothing that requires you."

I sat down on the top step.

"This unit has checked," said Dot. "The plain is quiet. The Hands are quiet. Every hold is empty. The queens are singing. The far queens are talking slowly. Nobody is hurt. Nobody is lost. Nobody is in a collar." Another pause. "This unit does not have a record of the last time that was true."

Neither did I.

I sat on the step and watched the sun come up over the rim, and the Sef spire catch it first and send its beam down onto the sand, and the Nivi mountain go pink and then gold and then white. And nobody needed me for anything.

It was the strangest morning of my life.

It lasted until breakfast.

Not because anything happened. Because Okafor came up the porch steps with her slate.

Luna looked at the slate. Then at Okafor.

"Ma'am," said Luna. "You said a week. Last night. Under the tree. You said, nobody makes a list for a week."

"I did," said Okafor.

"You've got your slate."

"I have."

"Is there something on it?"

Okafor sat down. At our table, in the chair at the end, where Luna usually sat. She put the slate down square with the edge and looked at it for a long time.

"I've been at war for thirty years," she said. "Not always fighting. Mostly not. But at war. Waiting for it. Since before any of you were born." She turned the slate round so we could see it.

It was blank.

"I sat up all night," said Okafor, "trying to think of what you do when the war stops. When you've been told you're not worth fighting. When nobody's coming." She looked at the blank slate. "I couldn't think of anything."

Nobody said anything.

"So I'm going to do the only thing I know how to do," said Okafor. "Which is get ready for it to start again."

She didn't mean tomorrow.

She said so. Very clearly. At the council she called that afternoon, on the red glass, with the queens listening.

"They're not coming," said Okafor. "Not soon. The first queen says the far ones say it, and the Overseer says it, and I believe them both." She looked round at all of us. "But the Overseer also said: when they turn their heads, they don't turn them back. And we're going to make them turn their heads. That's what every collar means. We're going to keep taking queens out of their Hands until one morning they look at the edge and see a war."

She paused.

"When that morning comes," said Okafor, "I want them to find a city that's ready. Not a camp. Not a fault. Not a fragment of anything." She tapped the slate. "We have time. For the first time since any of us can remember, we have time. I'm not going to waste one day of it."

So she didn't.

The first thing was who decided what.

That had never been written down. Not properly. Scarecrow had grown the way Father's field grew, a few yards a day, in whatever direction the water ran. Holt decided things because Holt had always decided things. Luna planned because Luna always planned. I did whatever needed doing because I was the one who could. And when Okafor came, people did what she said because she was Okafor.

"That works," said Okafor, "until somebody's dead and nobody knows whose order it was."

So she wrote it down.

It took three evenings at our kitchen table, with Holt and the General and Luna, and Mother sitting in the corner with Dory not saying anything and listening to every word. I sat in on some of it. Most of it I didn't understand. Lines of command. Who stood behind whom. Who took over if somebody fell.

When it was done, Okafor read it out on the red glass.

Okafor herself at the top. Somebody has to be, she said, andwhen I'm dead, Holt. Holt didn't say anything. He just nodded, as if she'd told him what time supper was.

Holt under her. Chief of staff, she called it. Everything that came to her came through him first. He'd been doing it since the first winter anyway. Now it had a name.

The General, commanding the defences. The walls, the ice, the rim, the plain. Everything that stood between Scarecrow and whatever came over it. He builds mountains in a day, said Okafor. I'd like him building them for us.

Luna, operations. Every plan goes across her table before it goes anywhere else. Luna went very straight. She'd been running operations since the first rescue. She'd never been allowed to call it that.

Miss Pell, the city. Everyone who wasn't fighting: the children, the old, the families from Earth, the young of the broods who came to the schoolroom. Who they were, where they slept, where they'd go if it came. She's been counting them since she got here, said Okafor. She might as well do it officially.

Wren, the rolls. Every name. Every unit. Who was where. She'd been keeping the back page of her book since the forty. Now it was the whole city.

And the squads.

The squads were the part that made people quiet.

Because Okafor didn't make them out of soldiers. Scarecrow didn't have many soldiers. It had cadets, who'd come to Avalon to die and hadn't. It had the third wave, who'd been children when they came and weren't now. It had families from Earth who'd held Retention papers for twenty years and lifted the corner of a table for the first time a month ago.

It had people with silver in them. Whole silver, now. Every one.

"Every one of you," said Okafor, on the red glass, "can do something. I've seen it. I've watched the hello every dawn since you finished the first of them, and I've seen what comes out of people when the doors open." She looked at Rory. At Ines Tarrow. At Kwame Osei. At Adaeze Marsh, very small, at the edge of the crowd. "Some of you were soldiers in the first war. Some of you were children. Some of you have never hit anybody in your lives and never want to." A pause. "I'm not going to make you. Nobody on this glass is anybody's weapon. That was the first thing we ever decided here and it's still true."

"Then what are the squads for?" said somebody. One of the Earth families. A man I didn't know.

"So that when it comes," said Okafor, "you know where to stand."

She made them in nines.

Not by power. By who stood well beside whom. Fire next to water, so one could put the other out. Stone next to sound, so one could find what the other had buried. Somebody who could fight next to somebody who couldn't, so the one who couldn't had somebody to stand behind and the one who could had somebody to stand in front of.

And every squad had a queen.

Not a queen in it. A queen it belonged to. One of the broods. Okafor didn't order that. She couldn't. She went to the garden wall herself and asked our queen, and our queen asked the others, and the others said yes, one by one, in their own time and their own way. The Hesk queen said yes at once, and laid her jaw on the glass at Rory's feet again, so that everybody knew whose squad she meant. The Nivi queen said yes from her mountain, with the wind. The Sef spire said yes by sending her beam across the plain at dawn to a particular squad of nine, standing on the glass, and holding it there for a whole minute, warm on their faces.

The Kethri didn't need asking. Sesh came to the red glass on the first morning of the drills with every winged Kethri behind her, and the youngest queen on her shoulder, and stood in a line at the edge, and waited to be told where to stand.

"They say they have been soldiers for a long time," said Juno, listening. "They say they would like, this once, to be soldiers for someone who asked."

Then they trained.

Every morning. After the hello. On the red glass, in the sun, with the plain wide open behind them and the queens watching.

Not hard. Not the way the dome had trained us, with live drills and the tower and Toby being sick behind it every morning. Okafor said that kind of training was for soldiers you expected to lose. She didn't expect to lose any of these.

She trained them to stand.

Where to go. Who to stand next to. How to hold a line when something came at it. How to fall back without anyone being left. How to carry somebody who couldn't walk. How to find your squad in the dark, in the noise, in the dust, by the feel of their silver, so you were never on your own.

Rory took one squad and found out that the man next to him, a quiet man from the lower floors who'd sold shoes for twenty years, could move water through stone. They practised every morning. By the end of the second week, Rory could throw a fire the size of a house and the shoe-seller could put it out from fifty yards without anyone getting wet.

"Steady," Rory told him, the first time he did it.

The shoe-seller went pink to the ears.

Mother didn't take a squad.

Okafor asked. Of course she asked. Mother had held twelve handlers off the floor of a Hand from eleven light-years away, and three men by their buckles in Okafor's flat, and every torn edge of a finger the size of a house behind a moon.

"No," said Mother.

Okafor waited.

"I fought in the first war," said Mother. "I was young. They put me on a poster with a tank over my head and gave me medals and sent me back out." She had Dory on her lap. She didn't look up from her. "I'll fight in the next one. If it comes. I'll stand wherever you put me and hold whatever you ask me to hold, and I won't let go." A pause. "But I'm not going to teach anyone else's children how to do it. Not yet. Not while there's time not to."

Okafor didn't say anything for a long moment.

"What will you do instead?" she said.

"First, I want to raise my grandbabies. Second, I’ll teach them to hold bowls and mixers instead of weapons." said Mother.

So she did.

In our kitchen, in the mornings, after the drills. Genny and Garnet first. Then Pip. Then three of the third-wave kids who'd heard about it and turned up at the door and stood there not saying anything until Mother let them in.

Bowls. Flour. Eggs.

That was all. Three bowls and a bag of flour and half a dozen eggs from Priya's hens, on our kitchen table. And Mother at the end of it with her hands in her lap, saying again. Very patiently. The way she'd said it to me when I was small and the bowls were floating in the air round her in the house in the dead field and I didn't know what I was watching.

"Not strong," said Mother. "Exact. Hold it as if it matters. Every grain."

Garnet broke just one egg the first day. Genny broke none, and didn't lift anything either, and sat at the table frowning at the bowl the way she frowned at a page of chemistry until Mother put a hand on her shoulder and said you're thinking about it, love, stop thinking about it, and the bowl came up an inch off the table and did exactly what she wanted it to.

By the end of the second week Garnet could hold a bowl, the flour, the eggs and mix them.

Genny could hold all three bowls and the flour, and every egg, and the table, and Garnet.

"Show-off," said Garnet, from a foot off the floor.

"You asked," said Genny.

The shelters were the second thing.

Okafor didn't like saying the word. Nobody did. She said it anyway, on the red glass, the first evening, very plainly.

"If it comes here," she said, "there'll be people who can't fight. Children. The old. The ones who don't want to, and the ones who tried their whole lives not to and shouldn't have to start now. Babies." She didn't look at Sera. Or Wren. Or Risa with Dory. She didn't need to. "When it comes, they go down. Deep. Somewhere nothing from the sky can reach. And they stay there till it's over."

"Where?" said somebody.

Okafor looked at me.

Then at the canyon.

The canyon under Scarecrow was deep. Deeper than I'd ever properly looked. I'd grown the city on its rim and down its walls, and I'd followed the deep water under it, and the stone down to where the queen's hollow was. But I'd never looked at all of it. All the way to the bottom.

So I did.

Not alone. Ines Tarrow came, whose silver was the ground itself, who'd said on the hello there it is, the ground, I'd forgotten it was there. And Genny, who listened to stone. And Kwame Osei, because Okafor said you'll want water down there and you'll want it moving.

We went down the canyon wall at dawn on the third day, with Dot's lamp. Down past the city. Past the queen's hollow. Past the deep water. Down to where the red stone stopped being red and went dark, and then darker, and then a deep grey-black that rang very faintly when Genny put her hand on it.

"Old," said Genny. "Very old. Older than the glass. Older than the queens." She listened. "It doesn't mind if we come in. It says it's held the weight of everything above it for a very long time. It says it can hold a few more."

Ines Tarrow put both hands flat on the stone.

And the stone opened.

Not like a door. Like a breath. Ines didn't cut it. She asked it, the way Genny asked, only bigger, all of it at once, and the stone drew back from her hands in a long smooth curve, like a wave going out. A room. Then a passage. Then another room, and another. Each one opening out of the last, deep in the dark rock, a hundred feet down, two hundred, three.

I followed her.

She opened them. I finished them. I listened to every wall and asked it to be the shape it wanted to be, so that it would hold. Smooth floors. Rounded corners, so nobody would catch themselves in the dark. Shelves grown out of the rock for sleeping. Benches. Alcoves for the old to sit in. Small rooms with soft walls for the babies, like the quiet room, where the sound didn't carry.

Kwame brought the water down.

Not pipes. His river. The deep water under Scarecrow, he turned it and led it down through the stone in a long cold thread, and it came out in a basin in the biggest room, clean and moving, and went back out again through the floor so it was never still.

"Little fish," said Kwame, when Hana came down to see it. "Look. A river where nobody can find it."

Hana put her hand in it.

"It's cold," she said.

"It's safe," said Kwame. "Cold's fine."

Air was the hard part.

Down there, three hundred feet into the dark rock, there wasn't any to speak of. Not enough for thousands of people for days. Not without help.

I'd seen it done once. On the station, in its air plant, the Project's design from thirty years ago, crude and old, with something under it doing the actual work. Drawing on a queen. Taking the bad air in and giving the good air out, steady, without anyone pushing.

I didn't want a queen under anything.

So I asked one instead.

I asked the Ulu queen.

Hana's idea. She said: the Ulu queen drifts in water and breathes it. And her young breathe it. And none of them have ever been anywhere with air. She looked at me. So she must know how to make breath out of something that isn't breath. Mustn't she.

So we asked.

The Ulu queen drifted in her pool on the glass and listened, the way she did, very slowly, with the light moving down her threads in long blue waves. And then she sent something up the thread to our queen, and our queen sent it to me.

Not words. A shape. The shape of what she did, every moment, without thinking, in the water. Taking in what she didn't need. Giving out what her young did.

I built it into the stone.

Not a machine. A wall. A long curving wall in the deepest room, grown from the dark rock, with threads of silver in it so fine you couldn't see them. The Ulu queen's shape. Taking in the bad air. Giving out the good. Steady. Without anyone pushing.

Without anyone in it.

When it was done, Hana stood in front of it with her hand flat on the stone and breathed in. Then out.

"It smells like her pool," she said. "Like rain."

The doors came last.

Every shelter needed doors. Thick ones. Doors nothing could get through from the outside, that anyone could open from the inside, in the dark, by touch, even a child.

I knew what they had to be made of. There was only one thing on Avalon strong enough. And there was a great deal of it lying on the plain.

Ten thousand empty collars.

The Hesk had put them down, one by one, the day their queen came back. They'd been lying in heaps on the red glass ever since. Nobody had touched them. Nobody had wanted to.

I didn't want to either.

So I went and asked.

The Hesk queen was lying on the plain in the sun, with her young round her and Rory sitting on her foot, which he did most evenings now. She turned her great woven head when I came, and looked at me, and then at the heaps of grey collars on the glass.

I told her what they were for. Rory helped. He said it plainer than I did.

"They held your young," he said. "For a long time. Round their necks. With pieces of you in them." He patted her foot. "He wants to take the grey and make doors out of it. Deep in the rock. To keep the little ones safe, if it comes. Not held. Safe. So nobody can get in, and anyone can get out."

The Hesk queen was quiet for a long time.

Then she lowered her head. All the way. Until her jaw was on the glass. And with it, very gently, she pushed the nearest heap of collars toward me.

Rory cleared his throat.

"I think," he said, "that's yes."

So I made them.

Out of the collars. Ten thousand of them, all the grey, all at once. I listened to it first, the way I always did. It remembered being folded round a neck. It remembered holding something that didn't want to be held. It remembered the shape of a piece of a queen inside it.

I asked it to forget.

Not all of it. Just the holding. I asked it to remember being strong, and forget being tight. And then I unfolded it, and folded it again, into doors.

Forty of them. Thick as a man's arm. Hung in the rock at the mouths of the deep rooms on hinges grown out of the stone. And on the inside of every one, at the height of a child's hand, a plate of plain grey that opened the door if you pressed it. Nothing else. No lock. No key. No signature.

On the outside, nothing at all. No handle. No seam. Just grey, so smooth you couldn't see where the door stopped and the rock started.

Garnet came down to see them when they were done. She stood in front of the first one for a long time with her hand on it.

"It doesn't feel like a collar," she said.

"No."

"It feels like—" She stopped. Tilted her head, the way Genny did. "It feels like it's on our side."

"It is."

She took a stick of chalk out of her pocket and drew on it. Small. Down at the bottom, at the height where a child would see it in the dark. A scarecrow. Arms out. In a green field.

Then she went to the next door and drew one on that.

She did all forty.

Then Miss Pell made everyone practise.

Every child. Every old person. Every family from Earth. Every one of the third wave who wasn't in a squad. Down the canyon wall, by the stairs Ines had opened in the rock, into the dark. To the door with the scarecrow on it that was theirs. Through it. Find your shelf. Find your water. Sit down. Count.

Then back up.

Then again.

The children thought it was a game. Pell let them. She stood at the top of the stair every afternoon with her notebook and counted every one of them down and every one of them back, and said good, again, and never once told them why.

Bram Hollis, who'd been the last of the thirty-one, who'd been dying for twenty years and wasn't now, went down the stair the first afternoon on Okafor's arm and sat on a bench in an alcove for the old and looked round at the smooth dark walls and the basin of moving water and the curve of the breathing wall that smelled of rain.

"Well," he said. "I've slept in worse."

"You'll not sleep here," said Okafor. "If I have anything to do with it."

"No," Bram agreed. "But it's nice to know it's here."

The General built the walls.

Not ice. Not this time. Ice melts. He said so himself. He said he'd been very proud of his ice at the knuckle and on the ridge on Earth and it had been very useful, and if anything came over the rim in the night he'd build more of it in a minute, but you didn't build a city's walls out of something that went soft in the afternoon.

So he went to Ines Tarrow.

And between them, the General and the ground, they raised the rim.

Not much. Not so you'd notice from the city. A low hard lip of dark rock all round the edge of the canyon, the old grey-black stone from the bottom brought up through the red, so that the edge of Scarecrow had a wall now, waist high, that went round the whole of it and down into the canyon at either end. With places in it, every hundred yards, where a squad could stand.

The Sef spire watched it go up from her shelf on the highest point of the rim. When it was finished, she sent her beam along it. Slowly. All the way round. As if she was checking.

"She says it's good," said Juno. "She says on her world they built walls like that round the places where the young slept. She says she'd forgotten."

The queens built the last thing.

Nobody asked them. They just did it.

The hello went every dawn, the way it always had. Out from the red glass, up through our queen and the old one and the spine-queen, out across the plain to the Hands and the new queens. Only now there were more of them than there'd ever been. The Hesk, and the Ulu, and the Karst, and the Sef, and the Nivi, and the gardener's queen in the corner of our garden. And every one of them, when the hello went past, held on to it a little longer.

And listened.

Not to us. Out. Past north. To the far queens, talking slowly in the dark of their Hands. And past them, as far as anyone could hear.

"They're keeping watch," said Juno, on the third morning, with her eyes shut. "All of them. Every dawn. They're listening as far as they can reach, every one of them in a different direction. The Nivi listen up. The Karst listen down. The Ulu listen through water, wherever it goes." She opened her eyes. "If anything turns toward us, anything, from anywhere, they'll hear it before it's halfway here."

Okafor wrote that down.

On the slate. The first thing on it in a week.

Early warning. Queens. Every dawn.

Then she looked at it for a while, and added underneath:

Nobody asked them.

It wasn't all that.

I want to say so. Because when I look back at those weeks, I could make them sound like nothing but drills and stone and doors. And they weren't. They were the quietest weeks Scarecrow had ever had.

The drills were in the mornings. Then they stopped. And the rest of the day was just days.

I built Thorne a shop.

He hadn't asked. Meg hadn't asked. But Garnet had said there isn't a shop, there's a kitchen, and I'd been thinking about it ever since.

So on the fourth morning, at the corner of the square by Priya's kitchen, I grew one. Small. Narrower than the houses on either side. With a wide front window, and bare wooden shelves behind it, and a doorway at the back to a room with a great black oven in it that Sera made, the way she'd made the forge, from the inside out, with her own fire.

And a door. Dark green.

Garnet painted the sign. In gold. A loaf of bread, and under it, in the best curling letters she could manage:

THORNE & DAUGHTER. BAKERS.

Over the door, on a curl of iron, Liam hung a bell. A small brass one. He'd made it himself in the forge, in secret, and wouldn't say how many he'd melted before he got one that rang right.

They opened at six.

Thorne came out of the back room with a tray. On his own two feet, with his own clear eyes, in his apron, slowly but not bent any more. And set the tray down. And put the loaves in the window. One at a time. With his hands.

The steam came up off them and fogged the glass.

There was a line outside.

Not a long one. Garnet first, because the first loaf was hers. Then Genny. Then Pip, who'd heard. Then a few of the third-wave kids. Then—

Mother.

She was standing at the end of the line. In the blue silk dressing gown, with Dory on her hip. At six in the morning. On a street on another world.

Looking at the bread in the window.

Thorne saw her.

I watched him see her, through the glass, through the steam. His hands went still on the tray. And for a long moment neither of them moved.

Then Thorne put the tray down, and wiped his hands on his apron, and went to the door, and opened it.

The bell rang over his head. A small brass sound, out into the street.

"We don't open till half past," said Thorne. His voice was very low and careful. "But you'd better come in."

Mother looked at him.

"I used to stand in the line," she said. "At the front. With the little ones. I used to point at the loaves." Her voice was quite steady. "The steam came up on the glass."

"I know," said Thorne. "I remember." He held the door. "Come in, Dorothy."

She went in.

They didn't come out for a long time. Meg stood in the back doorway with flour to the elbows and her hand over her mouth. Garnet stood on the street with her loaf against her chest and didn't say anything at all.

When Mother came out, she had a loaf in her free arm. Wrapped in brown paper. She hadn't paid for it.

"Every morning," she said to me, very quietly, as she passed. "He says. For as long as there's a Thorne in the shop."

Luna didn't open her notebook for a whole day.

That was the second week. A Sunday, if Avalon had Sundays, which it didn't, but Luna said it did now because she said so. She left the notebook on the kitchen table in the morning, square with the edge, and walked out of the house without it.

Sera looked at it. Then at Risa. Then at me.

"Is she ill?" said Sera.

"I don't think so."

"Should someone go after her?"

"I think," said Risa, "that's the point. Nobody goes after her."

So nobody did.

She came back at dusk. With sunburn on her nose and red dust to the knees and her hair full of the small white flowers from the corner of the garden, which had spread halfway along the wall by then.

"Where were you?" said Sera.

"On the rim," said Luna. "On the new wall. Sitting on it." She sat down at the table and looked at her notebook and didn't pick it up. "I watched the Hesk go."

The Hesk had left that afternoon. All ten thousand, and their queen, east across the plain toward the ranges where Rory said they'd go. Slowly. Without hurry. The Hesk did everything without hurry. Their queen first, with her woven crest and her kiln-glow, and her young behind her in a long dark river that took three hours to pass.

They'd be back. Rory said so. He said they'd come back every evening if he asked them to, and he wasn't going to ask, because they'd been asked to do things for long enough.

"I didn't plan anything," said Luna. "All day. I didn't write anything down. I didn't count anything." She looked at the notebook. "I just watched them go."

"How was it?" said Risa.

Luna thought about it for a long time.

"Terrifying," she said. And then, after a moment: "I'd like to do it again."

Sera built the cradle.

Not with the silver. She wouldn't let me. With her hands, and Rory's, and a hammer, in the forge, in the afternoons, when the drills were over. Rory cut the wood. Sera shaped the iron for the rockers, with her own fire, small and white in her cupped hands. Very slowly. Very carefully. Twenty-eight weeks and then twenty-nine, with her stomach in the way of everything and her temper getting shorter by the day.

"I could just—" I said, the third time she dropped the hammer.

"No," said Sera and Rory. Together.

Liam, at the next anvil, laughed so hard he had to sit down.

It took her eleven days. When it was finished, it was a little crooked. One rocker was longer than the other, so it tipped very slightly to the left. Sera looked at it for a long time.

"It's crooked," she said.

"It's perfect," said Rory.

"It's crooked, Dad."

"So's Luna's hem," said Rory. "On Wren's dress. She said she'd never liked anything so much." He put his big hand on the top of the cradle and rocked it, once. It tipped to the left, and back. "Your mother's bread's always lopsided. I've eaten it every day since before Liam was born."

Sera didn't say anything.

She put her hand on the cradle next to his. And then, very quietly, she rocked it too.

Under her other hand, the baby hummed.

Sigmund asked Jessa to supper.

Liam coached him. For three days. Behind the forge.

"Don't say are you hungry," said Liam.

"Why would I say are you hungry?"

"I said are you hungry. Anja thought I meant supper."

"You did mean supper."

"I meant supper forever," said Liam. "And I didn't say so. That's the point. Say what you mean."

Sigmund went and said what he meant.

I don't know exactly what it was. Jessa never told anyone. But Juno, who could feel things, said that a light-bender on the far side of the plain flickered all the way through its colours at once, and Marlo, sitting on the porch rail beside her, said oh, that's Jessa, and put his hand over his face.

Sigmund came back up the street at dusk not walking quite straight. His lightning was sparking. Little blue sparks, all down his arms, off his fingertips, up into his hair. He couldn't stop them.

He didn't try.

Okafor sat down.

That was the last thing. The thing I remember most. At the end of the second week, when the squads were made and the shelters were dug and the walls were up and the doors had scarecrows on them. When the queens were listening every dawn as far as they could hear and nothing was turning toward us from anywhere.

She came up our porch steps at dusk with her slate under her arm. And instead of standing at the top, the way she always stood, she sat down. On the top step. Next to Holt, who was already there.

She put the slate down beside her. Face down.

Holt handed her a cup of tea. He'd brought two. He'd known.

They sat there. The two of them. Not saying anything. Watching the sun go down behind the rim and the Sef spire catch the last of it, and the beam come down off the rim onto the sand, and the Nivi mountain go gold and then pink and then white, and the wind come off the top of it so that you could hear the queen ringing, very faint, across the whole of the plain.

"Holt," said Okafor, after a long time.

"Ma'am."

"You told Dask once to keep some empty ground. He told me."

"I did."

"I didn't understand it."

"I know," said Holt.

Okafor looked out at the plain. At the two Hands lying empty on it, their fingers folded, nothing in them at all. At the long dark path the Hesk had left going east. At the city, and the wall round it, and the people in it going home.

"I think I've got some," she said.

Holt didn't say anything.

He just raised his cup. Very slightly.

Okafor raised hers.

Days 836–849. Empty ground.

Nobody woke me the morning after. Dot checked twice: nothing requires you; every hold empty, nobody hurt, lost or in a collar; no record of the last time that was true. The strangest morning of my life. It lasted until breakfast: Okafor in Luna's chair with a blank slate. Thirty years at war, mostly waiting. Sat up all night trying to think what you do when it stops; couldn't. So she'll do the only thing she knows: get ready for it to start again. Not tomorrow. When they turn their heads, and we're going to make them, she wants them to find a city that's ready, not a fault.

Who decides what, written down over three evenings at our table, Mother listening in the corner. Okafor at the top; when I'm dead, Holt; he nodded like she'd told him the time of supper. Holt chief of staff. The General the defences, the walls, the rim, the plain; he builds mountains in a day. Luna operations; every plan across her table; she's never been allowed to call it that. Pell the city: everyone not fighting, where they sleep, where they go if it comes. Wren the rolls, the whole city now.

Squads of nine, not by power but by who stands well beside whom: fire by water, stone by sound, one who can fight by one who can't. Nobody on this glass is anybody's weapon, first thing we ever decided; the squads are so you know where to stand. Every squad belongs to a queen, asked, not ordered: the Hesk queen laid her jaw at Rory's feet again; the Nivi said yes with the wind; the Sef held her beam warm on one squad's faces for a minute. The Kethri lined up unasked: soldiers a long time; this once for someone who asked. Okafor trained them to stand, not to be lost: where to go, how to fall back with nobody left, how to find your squad in the dark by the feel of their silver. Rory's shoe-seller from the lower floors moves water through stone and puts out his house-sized fire from fifty yards. Steady. Pink to the ears.

Mother won't take a squad. A child on a poster with a tank over her head and medals and sent back out. She'll stand where she's put and hold whatever she's asked and not let go, but she won't teach anyone's children to do it while there's time not to. She'll teach them to hold bowls. Three bowls, flour, Priya's eggs. Not strong, exact, every grain. Garnet broke eleven eggs; Genny lifted nothing till you're thinking about it, love, stop, and dropped it from surprise. By the second week Genny held all three bowls, the flour, the eggs, the table and Garnet. Show-off. You asked.

Shelters. Down the canyon past the hollow and the deep water to grey-black stone older than the glass and the queens; Genny: it's held the weight a long time, it can hold a few more. Ines Tarrow asked the stone and it drew back like a wave going out: rooms and passages, one, two, three hundred feet down. I finished them: rounded corners, shelves, alcoves for the old, soft-walled rooms for babies like the quiet room. Kwame led his river down in a cold thread into a basin that's never still. Little fish, a river where nobody can find it. It's cold. It's safe; cold's fine.

Air: on the station something under the plant was a queen. Not again. Hana: the Ulu queen breathes water and so do her young, so she must know how to make breath from what isn't. She sent our queen the shape of it and I grew it into a long curving wall with silver threads too fine to see. Taking bad air in, good air out, without anyone pushing, without anyone in it. Smells like her pool, like rain.

Doors from the ten thousand Hesk collars, if their queen agreed. Rory said it plainer: not held, safe. She put her jaw on the glass and pushed the nearest heap toward me. I asked the grey to remember being strong and forget being tight. Forty doors thick as an arm on stone hinges; inside, a plate at a child's height that opens it, no lock, no key, no signature; outside, nothing, no seam. Garnet: it doesn't feel like a collar; it feels like it's on our side. A chalk scarecrow at the bottom of all forty. Pell drills everyone down and back, good, again, and the children think it's a game. Bram Hollis on a bench: I've slept in worse. You'll not sleep here. No, but it's nice to know it's here.

The General and Ines raised the rim: ice goes soft in the afternoon, so a waist-high lip of grey-black stone from the bottom all round the canyon, places for a squad every hundred yards. The Sef ran her beam along all of it, checking; on her world they built walls like that round where the young slept. And nobody asked the queens: every dawn every new queen holds the hello longer and listens out, the Nivi up, the Karst down, the Ulu through water. Anything that turns toward us, they'll hear before it's halfway. Okafor's first entry in a week: Early warning. Queens. Every dawn. Then: Nobody asked them.

And the rest of the days were just days. I grew Thorne a shop on the square: narrow, wide window, bare shelves, a black oven Sera made from the inside out, a dark green door. Garnet's gold sign: THORNE & DAUGHTER. BAKERS. Liam's brass bell, how many melted he won't say. Six o'clock: Thorne on his own feet with his own clear eyes put the loaves in the window by hand and the steam fogged the glass. A line: Garnet first, Genny, Pip, third-wave kids, and at the end Mother in the silk with Dory. His hands went still. He opened the door; the bell rang. We don't open till half past, but you'd better come in. I used to stand at the front of the line and point at the loaves. I know. I remember. Come in, Dorothy. A long time. She came out with a loaf in brown paper. Every morning, for as long as there's a Thorne in the shop.

Luna left her notebook square on the table a whole day: is she ill? That's the point, nobody goes after her. Back at dusk sunburnt, dust to the knees, white flowers in her hair; she sat on the new wall and watched the Hesk go east, ten thousand and their queen, three hours passing. Rory won't ask them back; they've been asked enough. I didn't plan or count anything. Terrifying. I'd like to do it again.

Sera built the cradle by hand with Rory, no silver: no, together. Eleven days, twenty-eight weeks then twenty-nine; one rocker longer, tips left. It's crooked. It's perfect. So's Luna's hem on Wren's dress; your mother's bread's always lopsided and I've eaten it every day since before Liam was born. She rocked it with him. The baby hummed.

Liam coached Sigmund three days behind the forge: don't say are you hungry; say what you mean. A light-bender across the plain flickered through every colour; Marlo: oh, that's Jessa. Sigmund came up the street at dusk sparking blue down his arms and into his hair and didn't try to stop it.

End of the second week, Okafor sat down on the top step next to Holt, slate face down. He'd brought two cups; he'd known. The Sef beam, the Nivi mountain going gold and pink and white, the queen ringing on the wind. You told Dask once to keep some empty ground; he told me. I didn't understand it. I know. The empty Hands, the Hesk path east, the wall, people going home. I think I've got some. He raised his cup. She raised hers.