Chapter 288 Ash

It took us twenty years.

I didn't know that then. Nobody did. Okafor said every collar on the porch the night Garnet drew the queens, and I think every one of us heard it the way you hear a thing that's too big to look at straight. As a direction. Not a distance.

If anyone had told me, that autumn, with the keel lying on the plain and the youngest queen sitting where her perch would go, that I'd be nearly forty before the last Hand opened, I don't know what I'd have said.

I think I'd have said: then we'd better start.

So I'll set down what happened next the way it happened. Not knowing. One day at a time.

Edda came to the house on the second morning after the keel.

She didn't knock. Edda never knocked. She came in with her green book under her arm and her reader in her hand and her mouth set in the line it went into when something had surprised her and she didn't like being surprised.

"Seraphina," she said. "Sit down."

Sera was already sitting down. She'd been sitting down a great deal that week. She was thirty weeks by the calendar and she said she felt like a hundred, and she'd stopped going to the forge because she couldn't reach the anvil round her stomach, and she was in a temper about it that could have heated the whole house.

"I am sitting down," said Sera.

"Then lie down," said Edda.

Sera looked at her.

Edda put the reader against Sera's stomach. Looked at it. Took it away. Put it back. Looked at it again.

Then she sat down herself, on the end of the bed, and opened her green book, and wrote something in it, and crossed it out, and wrote something else.

"What?" said Sera.

"Thirty weeks," said Edda. "By the calendar."

"I know that."

"By size," said Edda, "she's forty."

Nobody said anything.

Risa had come to the door with Dory on her hip. Luna had come up behind her with a cup of tea in each hand. I was already there. I'd been there since dawn, because Sera had woken in the night and said something's different and then gone back to sleep, and I hadn't.

"Forty," said Sera.

"Forty," said Edda. "Near enough. Ready."

"She was slow," said Sera. Her voice had gone very level. "You said. At the start. You said it wasn't like Risa's. You said slower. More normal. You said not to count on anything."

"I did," said Edda. "And she was. Until about a fortnight ago." She looked at her book. "She's done ten weeks' growing in two."

"Why?"

Edda didn't answer straight away. She looked at me.

So I looked. The way I'd looked the first time, the night Sera put my hand on her stomach and said then look, I'm asking.

She was whole.

She'd always been whole. A thread of silver right through the middle of her from the very first spark, already finished, the way Dory's had been. But she'd been quiet. Growing slowly. Carefully. The way Sera did things she was afraid of getting wrong.

She wasn't quiet now.

She was humming. Toby's note, the way she always had. And under it the three that had come on our wedding night, the warm one and the bright one and the cold one. And under those, all of them. Every queen who'd sung at the wedding. Every one who'd said brood mothers.

And every one of them had been giving her something.

Not much. A little each. The way they'd given the youngest queen in the hollow, and the Hesk queen on the plain, and the gardener's queen in Genny's hands. Remembering for her the parts she hadn't grown yet. Every dawn, when the hello went past, every one of them had stopped for a moment at Sera's stomach, and checked, the way Dory checked, and given.

There you are.

"It's the queens," I said.

Sera stared at me.

"Every morning," I said. "Since the wedding. Every queen on Avalon. They've been singing to her. Helping her grow." I took my hand away. "She's ready, Sera. She's been ready for a few days. She's been waiting for you."

Sera didn't say anything for a long time.

"Of course she has," she said at last. Very quietly. "She's a Calder. She'd wait for the right moment to make an entrance."

"Is that going to happen every time?" said Luna.

She was still in the doorway with the two cups of tea. She hadn't put them down. She'd forgotten she was holding them.

Edda looked at her. Then at Dory, on Risa's hip, who was looking back at Edda with great interest and her silver turned all the way out.

"Dory walked at a hundred and fifty-one days," said Edda. "I looked it up. In every book I've got. Babies don't do that. She's not eight months old and she talks in sentences." She closed her green book. "Risa's took twenty-one weeks of growing in twelve. This one's taken forty in thirty. I don't think it's going to be the same every time. I think it's going to be faster every time."

"Faster how?"

"Shorter," said Edda. "Carrying. And after." She looked at Dory again. "They grow. Your children. Faster than ours. I don't know how fast. I don't know where it stops." She stood up. "I've stopped writing impossible. I'm going to have to start a new page for of course."

At the door she stopped.

"Seraphina. Tonight or tomorrow. Don't go anywhere."

"Where would I go?"

"You're a Calder," said Edda. "I don't know. That's the point."

The queens said it too.

That evening, at the garden wall, with Sera lying on a mattress Liam had dragged out onto the grass because she said she wanted to see the sky, and the wall, and the queen, and not a ceiling.

Yes, said our queen. Faster. All of them. All of yours.

"Why?" said Sera.

Because they are whole from the first spark, said the queen. And because they have three mothers who are whole. And a father who is nearest to us of anyone. And because they are ours too. A pause. A young one of the great ones grows fast. Very fast. It must. A brood cannot wait for its young to be slow.

Yours are not ours. They are yours first. But they are a little ours.

So they will be a little fast.

"How fast is a little?" said Risa.

The queen considered this for a long time.

Faster than you, she said. Slower than us.

"That's not an answer," said Risa.

No, the queen agreed. It is the only one I have.

Garnet was sitting on the end of Sera's mattress.

She'd been there since supper. She'd brought her drawing board and hadn't drawn anything. She'd just sat, with her chin on her knees, watching Sera's stomach as if something might come out of it at any moment, which it might.

"Does that mean," she said slowly, "ours will too?"

Everyone looked at her.

"Not now," said Garnet. Going pink. "I'm twelve. I mean later. When we're old. Genny's and mine." She looked at the queen. "We've got what Lucas has got. You said. The framework. You made it. So when we're old and have children. Will they be fast too?"

The queen lowered her head until it was level with Garnet's.

Yes, she said. When you are old. Yours, and your sister's. A little fast. And a little ours. A pause. We will sing to them too.

Garnet thought about this with enormous seriousness.

"Good," she said. "I'd like them to be quick. Genny's slow at everything."

From the stone bench, without looking up from the stone she was holding, Genny said: "I'm careful."

"Same thing," said Garnet.

Ash was born at dawn.

Of course she was. Sera said afterward she'd planned it that way, and nobody believed her, and Sera said that was their problem.

The hello was going up. The four of us on the red glass, the way we always were, with the queens round us in their ring. And halfway through it, Sera put her hand on my arm and said, quite calmly, "Lucas. Now," and then said a word I'd never heard a Calder say in front of their mother, and Maura, who'd come out to watch the dawn because she always did now, said Seraphina in a voice that could have stopped the Hesk.

Then everyone moved at once.

I won't tell all of it. Sera wouldn't want me to. She said so, very clearly, the next day, and threatened to set the notebook on fire if I tried.

So I'll tell what she said I could.

It was quick. Edda said it was the quickest she'd ever seen, and she'd seen Dory's. It happened in the quiet room, with the walls that didn't carry sound, because Sera said if she was going to shout she didn't want the whole of Scarecrow to hear it. Edda was there. Risa and Luna, one on each side. Maura at her head, with her warm hands on Sera's face. And me, at the end, holding her feet, because that was where Edda put me and I didn't argue.

And the heat.

Sera's fire came out of her. She couldn't help it. Not a flame. Not a firestorm. Just heat, pouring off her, the way it poured off the forge when it was running hot. The walls of the quiet room went warm. Then hot. Edda's reader started to smoke.

Luna put her hand on the wall.

And the cold came out of Luna. The way it had come out of her father in the Nivi hold. Not much. Just enough. Meeting Sera's heat halfway, all round the room, so that the walls stayed warm but not hot, and Edda's reader stopped smoking, and nobody got burned.

Risa didn't do anything with her storm. She held Sera's hand. That was all. And when Sera squeezed so hard that Risa's knuckles cracked, Risa didn't make a sound.

"Fire, and cold," said Maura afterward. Very quietly. "And somebody to hold on to. That's how it should be done."

She was small.

Smaller than Dory had been. Red-faced and furious and covered in black hair, a great shock of it, sticking up in every direction the way Garnet's always had. And her eyes, when she opened them, which was almost at once, were ringed with silver. Bright. Very bright. Like Sera's. Like mine.

She didn't cry.

She looked round the quiet room. At Edda. At Maura. At Risa and Luna. At me. At her mother, flushed and soaked and laughing, which Sera never did, with tears running down into her hair.

And she reached out.

Not with her hands. With her silver. The way Dory did. Out past the walls of the quiet room, which didn't stop silver, only sound. Out across the garden, and the red glass, and the plain.

To the queens.

All of them. One after another. Our queen. The old one. The first and second. The spine-queen. The youngest of the Kethri. The Hesk, very far east on the ranges. The Ulu. The Karst. The Sef on the rim, who sent her beam through the window of the quiet room, warm, onto the baby's face, so that she blinked. The Nivi on her mountain. The gardener's queen, very small, in the corner of the garden.

She touched every one of them. Checking.

And every one of them answered.

There you are.

Then she found Dory.

Dory was outside the quiet room door with Mother. She'd been there the whole time. Mother said she'd stood there with her hand flat on the wood, not saying anything, not moving, for an hour, which Dory had never done for anything in her life.

When the baby reached for her, Dory pushed the door open. Walked in. Across the floor of the quiet room on her own two feet, steady, not falling once, the way Edda said babies her age didn't. Up to the bed.

And put her hand on her sister's head.

There you are, said Dory. Out loud. In words.

The baby looked at her.

And for the first time, she made a sound. Not a cry. A note. Very small. Very high. Toby's note, the one she'd been humming since she was smaller than my thumb.

Dory laughed.

"What's her name?" said Mother.

She'd come in behind Dory. She was standing at the end of the bed beside me, very still, in the blue silk dressing gown, with Father's ring on her hand. She hadn't been asked to come in. She'd come anyway. Nobody had stopped her.

Sera looked at Risa. Then at Luna.

They'd decided weeks ago. The three of them. At the kitchen table, at night, with Luna's notebook open. They hadn't told me. They'd said I'd know when it was time.

"Ash," said Sera.

Mother went very still.

"I know," said Sera. "It's what the world was. The bombs. The dust. All of it." She looked down at her daughter. "But it's your name too. Isn't it. The only one you had. The hall gave it to you."

"Yes," said Mother. Very quietly.

"Nobody gave you a family," said Sera. "Not one. You came out of the halls with nothing but that name. And you married Lucas's father in front of a clerk with a cold, and you had him and the twins, and you held on." Her voice cracked, just a little. "So we'd like her to have it. Your name. So she's the first person who ever got it from family."

Mother didn't say anything.

She stood at the end of the bed for a long time. Perfectly still. The way she held things she couldn't trust herself to hold any other way.

Then she sat down on the edge of the bed. And held out her arms.

And Sera put Ash in them.

The ship was finished on the tenth day after.

I say finished. Keir wouldn't say it. Keir said it was ready to be checked, which in Keir's language was further than finished and much less certain. He'd been checking it for three days, with Aster and Dot and Vell, and Gareth following behind telling him the seats were too close together.

They weren't, any more. Gareth had moved every one of them. Himself. With a spanner. Over three nights.

"Why didn't you just ask Lucas?" said Keir, on the fourth morning, finding him asleep against a bulkhead with the spanner in his hand.

"Because I wanted to do it," said Gareth, without opening his eyes. "And because if I asked Lucas, you'd have checked it, and if I did it, you'd have to check it with me."

Keir looked at him for a long time.

Then he sat down on the deck beside him. Close. Closer than the seats had ever been.

"You could just say," said Keir.

"I'm saying," said Gareth. "With a spanner. It's how I say things."

Aster, rolling past on her narrow limbs with a coil of cable, stopped. Her lamps went from pale green to a colour I'd never seen. A warm, faint pink.

"This unit," said Aster, "will check the forward compartment. For a long time. On its own."

And rolled away.

It wasn't only them.

That's what I remember about those weeks. It was as if the wedding had opened something. Or the quiet had. Or just the knowing that nobody was coming. Not yet. That there was time, for the first time any of us could remember, to look up from the next thing and see who was standing beside you.

People looked.

Juno and Lena first.

Nobody was surprised. Lena hadn't let Juno out of her sight since the day I gave her back her eyes, a long time ago, when the first thing she ever saw was Old Son on the tower flashing thirty-one. She'd followed Juno everywhere since. To the dawn line. To the porch. To the schoolroom roof, where Juno sat and felt the city.

Juno had let her.

Then one evening in the square, under the tree, Juno turned round and looked at her. Properly. With her eyes open, which Juno almost never did, because she felt more with them shut.

"You're always there," said Juno.

"Yes," said Lena.

"Why?"

Lena thought about it for a long time.

"Because the first thing I saw was a light," she said. "And the second thing was you." She shrugged. "I liked it. I'd like to keep seeing it."

Juno didn't say anything. She shut her eyes.

Then she held out her hand. Without looking. Exactly where Lena's was.

Wren wrote it in the back of her book.

Ilse Brandt and Maeve Senn.

They'd been on the same squad since Okafor made the squads. Ilse, with the old burn on her hand and the mirror she'd once dragged up on a sledge. Maeve, who'd come out from under a ridge half-starved, and asked about her companions every day until we found them. They stood together on the glass every morning. Okafor had put them side by side because whatever their silver did, it did it better that way.

One morning, at the end of the drill, Ilse put her burned hand on Maeve's face.

Maeve didn't move. She leaned into it.

Rory saw. He said so to Maura, very loudly, at supper. Maura said Rory Calder, you leave those girls alone, and he said I'm not doing anything, I'm happy for them, and Maura said be happy quieter.

Wren wrote it in the back of her book.

Liam and Anja didn't say anything at all.

Not for a while. Not till the end of the second week, at the Calder table, with Ash asleep in Sera's arms and Dory under the table playing with Pip and Rory telling a story about the northern line that nobody believed.

Anja put her hand on the table. Flat. And Liam put his on top of it.

Maura looked at their hands. Then at Anja's face.

And didn't say anything either. She just got up. And came round the table. And took Anja's face in both her hands. With flour on them, because there was always flour on them.

"When?" said Maura.

"Edda says the spring," said Anja. "Or before. Liam's—" She glanced at him. "Liam's whole too. Now. Lucas finished him. Edda says it might be quicker than she thinks. She's started saying might about everything."

Rory stopped telling his story.

He looked at his son for a long time. Then he reached across the table and put his big hand on Liam's head.

"Steady," said Rory.

Liam's face did something I'd never seen it do.

The ship's name was Garnet's.

She'd said she'd think, and she'd thought. For three weeks. She'd drawn it every evening on the plain, from every side, and she'd asked everyone what they thought and then ignored all of them. She'd asked the youngest queen, who didn't have the words. She'd asked Keir, who'd said something that's not a Hand. She'd asked Aster, who'd said this unit does not name things, and then, after a long pause, it would like to be told the name first.

On the morning Keir said it was ready to be checked, Garnet came out onto the plain with her drawing board and a pot of gold paint and a brush.

She went to the front of the ship. The narrow end. The point. And she painted, very carefully, with her tongue between her teeth, in the best curling letters she could manage, the same letters she'd used for Thorne's sign:

OPEN HAND

Then she stood back and looked at it.

"It's not a Hand," she said to Keir. "You said. A Hand's closed. It holds on. It doesn't let go." She pointed at the letters. "This one's open. It's a hand you hold out. Like Rory did to the Hesk, on the ridge. Like Mother did to the last one, in the hold." She looked up at him. "It's the other kind."

Keir looked at the letters for a long time.

"Open Hand," said Aster, very quietly, beside him. Testing it. "This unit has been told the name first." A pause. "This unit likes it."

The youngest queen went aboard that evening.

On her own. Hopping up the ramp, past the painted letters, down the long grey passage to the round room at the heart of the middle deck. To her perch. Facing forward, toward the window. Toward the dark.

She pressed the plate on the inside of the door with her beak.

It closed.

She pressed it again.

It opened.

She did it eleven times, Aster said, who'd been watching from the corridor. Open. Shut. Open. Shut. Very carefully. Very precisely. As if she were making sure.

Then she left it open, and settled on her perch, and went to sleep.

Voss called in the third week.

Not on a radio. Not on a slate. Through the seed.

The sliver on the chain round her neck, that Crane had given her a long time ago, from the Overseer, as a token of the Accord. The sliver of a dead queen that she'd worn for years and thought was jewellery. She'd put it back on in Okafor's flat on Earth and never taken it off since. And the queens could feel it. Eleven light-years away. A small grey spark of silver in a city under glass.

She'd found out she could talk through it.

Not well. Not like the hello. She didn't have silver of her own. But if she held the seed in her hand and thought very hard, the queens could hear the shape of it, and Juno could put it into words.

Okafor took it at our kitchen table, with Juno beside her.

"Chancellor," said Okafor.

Major. Very faint. Very careful. Like somebody talking down a very long pipe. I'm told I'm a fault.

"So am I," said Okafor.

I've been told by the Overseer's replacement, said Voss. There is one. It came down out of the sky a fortnight ago, in something small. Polite. It told the Senate the edge world was a failure of old equipment and need not concern us. It said Earth's tithe stands. It said nothing has changed. A pause. It hasn't looked very closely.

"Good," said Okafor.

Not good, said Voss. There are people here. A great many. Who know it isn't true. Who've seen the Hand over the dome. Who've seen the files from Central Allocation. Who've read the names. Another pause, longer. Teachers. Nurses. Soldiers who were in the first war and never wanted to sign anything. The families of the cadets on the forty and after. Children who've drawn scarecrows on the inside of the dome glass. Your Miss Pell's people, Major. She had more than she told you.

Okafor looked across the table at Pell.

Pell, in the corner by the stove, with her hands folded, didn't look back.

They're asking me, said Voss, how to get to you.

Okafor didn't say anything for a long time.

"How many?" she said at last.

I don't know, said Voss. Thousands. More, if they thought it was possible. A pause. They don't want to live under a tithe. Not now they know what it is. They'd rather be a fault.

Okafor looked out of the window. At the plain. At the long grey ship lying on it, narrow at the front, broad at the back, with gold letters on its point that you could just see in the dusk.

"Tell them," said Okafor, "to be patient."

How patient?

"A few weeks," said Okafor. "Then a ship that isn't a Hand will come quietly over the dome, at night, when nobody's looking closely." She tapped the table. "And it'll keep coming. As long as there are people who'd rather be a fault."

That was how Avalon filled up.

Not all at once. Not that autumn. Over years. I'll tell it as it comes. But I want to set down the shape of it here, because it was here that I first saw it. On the red glass, at dawn, at the end of that third week, with Ash in the sling against my chest and Dory holding my hand.

The hello going up.

And everyone there.

Not just us. Not just Scarecrow. Everyone. The broods of the queens of Avalon, in their thousands, along the rim. The Kethri, all winged, in their ring with one place left open. The Tharn and the Mirri on the plain. The light-benders at the edge of the air. The Ulu in their pool, lights moving. The Karst at the mouth of the second Hand. The Sef on their sand under the beam. The Nivi on their mountain, ringing. The last gardener, curled round its queen in the corner of our garden, with the green spread half the length of the wall now and small white flowers all through it.

And the humans. Three hundred and six from Earth, and all of Scarecrow, and the third wave, and whoever came next.

All of them on the red glass. All of them listening.

And all of it coming through me.

I hadn't noticed it before.

I'd been too busy. Too tired. Too much in the middle of whatever was next. But that morning, with nothing next, I felt it.

The queens talked to each other. They always had. But their broods didn't. A Kethri couldn't talk to a Nivi. A Sef couldn't talk to a Karst. A Tharn couldn't talk to a human. Their queens could, a little, along the silver. But the young, the held, the people, they couldn't.

Except through me.

Every one of them, at dawn, reached for the hello. And the hello went through me. Out of me. Back into me. I was the place where all their threads crossed. A Kethri reached and a Nivi answered, and the answer went through me on the way. A human child laughed and a Karst in the dark turned toward the sound, and the sound went through me first.

I was the knot.

Not the strongest thing. Not the one holding it all up. The queens did that. Just the place where it all tied together. The place where everything that was different met everything else, and found it could speak.

Ash, in the sling, was humming.

Dory, holding my hand, was checking. Every one of them. One after another. Her silver turned all the way out, the way it always was in a crowd. Only this crowd was a world.

There you are. There you are. There you are.

And I felt it.

Not yet. Not for a long time. But I felt where it was going. The threads, going through me, and then going through her. Through Dory. The way they went through me. Only wider. Woven. Every path joined to every other.

A net.

Mother was standing beside me. She'd felt it too. She was looking down at Dory, very still.

"You're the knot," she said quietly. "Aren't you, love. For all of them."

"Yes."

Mother put her hand on Dory's head.

"And after you," she said, "her."

Days 857–878. Ash.

It took us twenty years. I didn't know that then. Okafor said every collar and we heard it as a direction, not a distance. If anyone had told me that autumn I'd be nearly forty before the last Hand opened, I think I'd have said: then we'd better start.

Edda didn't knock. Thirty weeks by the calendar; by size, forty. Ready. You said slower, more normal. I did, and she was, until a fortnight ago; ten weeks' growing in two. I looked: still Toby's note, still the three from our wedding night, and under them every queen who said brood mothers, every dawn stopping at Sera to check and give a little, remembering for her what she hadn't grown yet. She's been ready a few days, waiting for you. She's a Calder; she'd wait for an entrance. Luna, still holding two cups: every time? Edda: Dory walked at a hundred and fifty-one days and talks in sentences at under eight months; Risa's did twenty-one weeks in twelve; this one forty in thirty. Faster every time, carrying and after; they grow faster than ours, I don't know where it stops. A new page for of course. Tonight or tomorrow. Don't go anywhere. You're a Calder; I don't know, that's the point.

The queen at the wall: faster, all of yours. Whole from the first spark, three whole mothers, a father nearest to us, and a little ours; a young one of the great ones must grow fast; a brood can't wait. How fast is a little? Faster than you, slower than us. That's not an answer. It is the only one I have. Garnet on the mattress, pink: not now, I'm twelve, I mean later, when we're old; ours too? The framework. When you are old, yours and your sister's, a little fast, a little ours; we will sing to them too. Good; Genny's slow at everything. I'm careful. Same thing.

Ash at dawn mid-hello: Lucas, now, and a word Maura stopped like the Hesk. Sera says I may tell only this. Quick, the quickest Edda has seen. The quiet room so the city wouldn't hear her shout. Maura at her head, Risa and Luna either side, me at her feet where Edda put me. Sera's heat poured off her and Edda's reader smoked; Luna's hand on the wall met it halfway. Risa just held her hand and didn't make a sound when her knuckles cracked. Maura: fire, and cold, and somebody to hold on to.

Small, furious, a shock of black hair like Garnet's, silver-ringed eyes at once. She didn't cry. She reached out with her silver past the walls to every queen, the Sef sending her beam through the window onto her face, and every one answered: there you are. Dory had stood at the door with her hand on the wood an hour; she walked in steady and put her hand on her sister's head: there you are, out loud. Ash made her first sound, a note, Toby's. Dory laughed.

Mother came in unasked. Ash. Sera: what the world was, the bombs and dust, but your name too, the only one you had, the hall gave it you. Nobody gave you a family; you married in front of a clerk with a cold and held on. We'd like her to have your name so she's the first person who ever got it from family. Mother sat on the bed and held out her arms.

The ship, ready to be checked. Gareth had moved every seat himself with a spanner over three nights. Why not ask Lucas? Because then you'd have to check it with me. Keir sat beside him, closer than the seats ever were. You could just say. I'm saying, with a spanner. Aster's lamps went faint warm pink: this unit will check the forward compartment, for a long time, on its own.

As if the wedding or the quiet had opened something; time to look up and see who was beside you. Juno and Lena: Lena hasn't let her out of sight since I gave her eyes and the first thing she saw was Old Son flashing thirty-one. You're always there. The first thing I saw was a light and the second was you; I'd like to keep seeing it. Juno shut her eyes and held out her hand exactly where Lena's was. Ilse Brandt and Maeve Senn, same squad, better side by side; Ilse's burned hand on Maeve's face after drill and Maeve leaned into it. Rory told Maura loudly; be happy quieter. Liam and Anja's hands on the Calder table; Maura took Anja's face with flour on. Edda says spring or before; Liam's whole too; she's started saying might about everything. Rory's hand on Liam's head: steady. Wren wrote them all in the back of her book.

Garnet thought three weeks, asked everyone, ignored them all. Aster: this unit does not name things; it would like to be told the name first. Gold paint on the point in Thorne-sign letters: OPEN HAND. A Hand's closed; it holds on. This one you hold out, like Rory to the Hesk on the ridge, like Mother to the last one. The other kind. Aster: told first; this unit likes it. The youngest queen went aboard alone and pressed her door plate eleven times, open, shut, making sure, then left it open and slept.

Voss through the seed on her chain, faint as a voice down a long pipe, Juno putting it into words. I'm told I'm a fault. So am I. The Overseer's replacement came down out of the sky in something small: polite; told the Senate the edge world was failed old equipment; Earth's tithe stands; nothing has changed. It hasn't looked closely. Good. Not good: thousands who've seen the Hand over the dome and read the names. Teachers, nurses, first-war soldiers who never wanted to sign, families of the forty and after, children drawing scarecrows inside the dome glass, Pell's people; she had more than she told you. Pell didn't look up. They'd rather be a fault. Tell them to be patient: a few weeks, then a ship that isn't a Hand will come quietly over the dome at night, and keep coming.

That was how Avalon filled up, over years. At dawn, Ash in the sling, Dory's hand in mine: every brood and every people on the glass, the Kethri ring, Tharn and Mirri, light-benders, Ulu, Karst, Sef, Nivi, the last gardener with the green half the wall now, three hundred and six from Earth and all Scarecrow. Their queens can talk along the silver; their young can't, not to each other. Except through me. Every thread crossing in me on the way. I'm the knot: not the strongest, not holding it up, just where everything different meets and finds it can speak. Dory checking a crowd that was a world. And I felt where it was going: through me, then through her, wider, woven, every path joined. A net. Mother, hand on Dory's head: you're the knot, love, for all of them. And after you, her.