Chapter 289 A Fault in the Glass

Okafor made a list.

It was short, this time. She read it out on the red glass at dawn, after the hello, with the Open Hand lying long and grey on the plain behind her and the gold letters on its point catching the first of the sun.

"Keir," she said. "Flying. Aster with him. Gareth, because nobody else knows where he's moved the seats."

Gareth, at the back, looked very pleased with himself. Keir didn't look at him. Keir's ears went red.

"Pell. Because they're your people, and they'll come for you before they'll come for anyone else."

Miss Pell, in her grey, with her hands folded, nodded once.

"Juno. For the queens. Sigmund, because he knows the Senate Annex and the dome and every officer in it by their first names, and because if anyone in a uniform tries to stop us, I want a Friese telling them he doesn't sign first." She looked at the next name. "Rory's squad. Nine. In case."

Rory, in the second row, cracked his knuckles. The shoe-seller beside him went pink.

"Marlo. And whichever of the light-benders will come."

Marlo, on the porch rail at the edge of the glass, put his hand on his chest and said nothing. He didn't need to. Three patches of air beside him had gone very slightly wavy, the way the air over a stove does.

"And Dask," said Okafor.

I looked up.

"Once," said Okafor. "This once. The first time anything does anything, I want you on it." She looked at me over the top of her slate. "After this, it flies without you. Keir's rule."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Wheels up at dusk," said Okafor, which was a thing soldiers said that didn't mean anything on a ship with no wheels, and everybody knew it, and nobody laughed.

I went to say goodbye at noon.

Not that it was going to be long. Nobody knew how long it was going to be. The first queen had said perhaps a breath, and Keir had said perhaps was not a number, and Aster had said this unit has prepared for eight days and for one hour and for everything between, and had packed accordingly.

But I went anyway.

Sera was in the garden, on the bench by the wall, with Ash. Ash was three weeks old and looked six months. She sat up on her own in Sera's lap, with her shock of black hair sticking up in every direction, and looked at everything with her silver-ringed eyes as if it owed her an explanation.

"She's doing it again," said Sera.

"Doing what?"

"Looking at me like that." Sera turned her round. Ash looked at me exactly the way Sera looked at a hinge that wouldn't sit straight. "Like I've done something wrong and she's waiting for me to work out what."

"She looks like you."

"I know," said Sera. "That's the problem."

I sat down beside them. Ash reached for me. Not with her hands. With her silver, the way she reached for everyone. Checking.

There you are.

Then she hummed. Toby's note. And under it, very faint, the one she'd started humming the day after she was born. Mother's note. The one I'd heard every dawn on the hello, steady and still. Ash had found it on the first morning and hadn't let go of it since.

"She's going to miss you," said Sera.

"I'll be back tonight. Tomorrow. A week at most."

"I know." Sera looked at the ship on the plain. "That's not what I said."

Risa was in the map room with Luna. Neither of them looked up when I came in. They were bent over a chart of the dome that Sigmund had drawn from memory, arguing about the east locks.

"They've got two sets of doors," said Luna. "Inner and outer. With a chamber between. They'll have to open both."

"Voss said she'd see to it."

"Voss says a great many things."

"Voss," said Risa, "is wearing a dead queen on a chain round her neck so that a ship from another world can find her in the dark. I think she'll open a door."

Luna made a small noise that meant she conceded the point and didn't like it.

Then she looked up. At me.

"You're going," she said.

"At dusk."

"I know when." She looked back down at the chart. Then up again. "Come back."

"I will."

"No," said Luna. "Not I will. Not the voice you use when you don't know." She put her pencil down. "Come back. Say yes."

"Yes," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, the way Genny did when something was settled, and picked up her pencil again.

Risa came round the table and kissed me. Then went back round it and put her finger on the inner door of the east locks.

"This one," she said to Luna. "It sticks. Siggy says. Every winter."

"It's not winter."

"It's always winter on the inner door," said Risa.

Mother was at the bakery.

Of course she was. It was the middle of the day and Thorne had sold out at ten and was making the second batch, and Mother had taken to sitting in the corner of the shop on a stool Meg had found for her, with Dory on her lap, watching the bread rise.

She didn't say anything when I came in. She just held out her hand. I took it.

"Earth," she said.

"Yes."

"The east locks."

"Yes."

She was quiet for a long time. Dory, on her lap, had gone very still too, the way she did when Mother did.

"That's where they put us out," said Mother. "The fifty of us. With the soldiers. And this shop across the street with the light in the window."

"I know."

"And now you're going back to the same doors," said Mother, "to let people in." She looked at the bread in Thorne's window. "To let them in to somewhere they want to go." She squeezed my hand. "Your father would have liked that, love. He'd have liked it very much."

Thorne came out from the back with a tray.

He'd heard. He looked at me for a long moment. Then he went back into the back room, and came out again with something wrapped in brown paper. A small loaf. Still warm.

"For the window," he said. "On the ring street. If there's still a window." He held it out. "Meg's girl kept the shop. Her own daughter. Stayed when we came. Somebody had to. Somebody always has to." His clear eyes were very steady. "Put it in the window, would you. At six, if you can. So she knows."

I took it.

At dusk we went aboard.

Everyone came to watch. People always came to watch when something large was about to become something else. The families from Earth along the edge of the glass, very quiet, because some of them had people on the other end of this. The third wave on the schoolroom wall. Okafor and Holt and the General at the foot of the ramp, very straight.

The queens.

All of them. In their places. Our queen at the garden wall at her full height. The old one on her thread from the mountain. The first and second in their Hands on the plain. The spine-queen far overhead in the Meridian. The Sef on the rim, the last of the sun going through her. The Nivi on her mountain, ringing faintly in the evening wind. The Ulu in her pool. The Karst at the mouth of the second Hand. The Hesk queen, very far east, slow and warm.

And the gardener's queen in the corner of our garden, small and white, closing up for the night.

The youngest of the Kethri was already aboard. She'd gone at noon. Hop, hop, hop, up the ramp, down the long grey passage, into her round room. She was on her perch when I went past, facing the window, very still. Her door was open.

She didn't look round. She knew who it was.

Ready, she said. Not in words. In a shape. She had very few words yet. But the shape was very clear.

Keir sat in the front.

Not a throne. Not a chair in the middle of the floor like a Hand's handlers had. A seat, at the narrow point of the ship, behind the window, with controls under his hands that he'd built himself and could fix himself and had checked eleven times. Aster beside him on her narrow limbs, with her lamps turned down very low. Gareth behind them both, in a seat he'd moved himself, with a spanner in his lap.

"Engines," said Keir.

"Engines," said Aster.

The ship hummed. Ordinary engines. Keir's. They lifted us off the red glass, very slowly, the way Keir said things should go when anybody had sense, until we were hanging a hundred feet over the plain with the whole of Scarecrow underneath.

Then Keir took his hands off the controls.

He turned round. Not to me. To the passage behind him. To the round room at the heart of the ship, where the youngest queen sat on her perch.

"Ma'am," said Keir. Very quietly. "Whenever you like."

She sang.

I can't describe it properly. I've tried since, for Garnet, who wanted to draw it, and for Luna, who wanted to write it down, and for Ash, years later, when she asked me what it had been like. I've never got it right.

She sang a single note. Small. High. Very clear. Like the first note of the old song at dawn, if the old song had been sung by something the size of a hen with copper at the tips of its feathers.

She sang it toward.

Not out. Not up. Toward. Toward somewhere I couldn't see and couldn't feel, eleven light-years away, very small and very faint. A spark of silver on a chain round a woman's neck. A sliver of a dead queen, worn for years as jewellery, in a city under glass.

And it answered.

I felt it answer. Very faintly. Like a voice down a long pipe.

And then the hello came up underneath her.

All of them. Every queen on Avalon. Our queen and the old one and the first and the second and the spine-queen and the Sef and the Nivi and the Ulu and the Karst and the Hesk and the gardener's queen. Every one. Singing the same note. Under her. Holding her up. The way the ring had held me up on the red glass when the Hand came down the first time. The way the queens had held Toby when he carried the hello all the way to Earth.

She wasn't alone.

She was the smallest queen on Avalon, and every one of the others was carrying her.

The window went dark.

Not black. Not the dark of night over the plain. Something else. Something I'd never seen. A dark that wasn't the absence of light but the presence of something very large and very close, all round us, the way the inside of a Hand is close.

The dark between.

And through it, very faint, a thread.

I could see it. We all could. Keir made a sound. Pell, in the seat behind me, put her hand over her mouth. A single bright thread of silver, running out from the point of the ship into the dark, straight as a rope across a river. And at the far end of it, very small, very far, a spark.

The youngest queen pulled.

And we came to the other side.

It took nine minutes.

Aster counted. She said so afterward, very precisely. Nine minutes and fourteen seconds, from the first note to the light. Eleven light-years. Nine minutes.

I don't remember the minutes. I remember the thread. I remember the youngest queen's note going on and on, never wavering, small and high and clear, with every queen on Avalon singing under it. I remember Keir with his hands in his lap, not on the controls, because there was nothing for the controls to do. I remember Sigmund, across the passage, with his eyes shut and his lightning very still. I remember Juno, who'd gone white as paper, whispering oh, oh, oh, over and over, as if she were feeling something nobody else could.

And then the dark opened.

And there was the moon.

Not the moon from the plain. Not one of Avalon's two moons.

The moon. Earth's. Grey and pocked and very near, filling the whole of the window, with the bright small scar on its far side where the young queen's finger had lain for thirty years in the cold.

And beyond it, turning very slowly, brown and grey and sick under a long yellow haze, Earth.

Nobody said anything.

Pell had both hands over her mouth now. Rory, in the squad seats behind, had his eyes shut. The shoe-seller beside him was crying without making any sound at all.

Keir put his hands back on the controls.

"Engines," he said. His voice wasn't quite steady.

"Engines," said Aster. Hers was.

And Marlo, at the back, very quietly, said: "Now."

The light-benders folded the light round us.

I felt them do it. Three of them, in the third deck, standing very still in the dark of the hold with their long thin limbs and their faces that weren't quite faces. Bending. The way they bent light round themselves, so you couldn't see them, only the waver where they were. Only bigger. All round the ship. From the point to the broad back end.

"We are a fault in the glass," said Aster. "From outside. A small one. Like heat over a stove." A pause. "Nobody looks closely at heat over a stove."

"Nobody looks closely at anything," said Sigmund. He'd opened his eyes. He was looking at the dome, getting bigger in the window as Keir brought us down. "Not in there. Not ever."

We came down over the old battlefield east of the dome.

Low. Slow. In the dark. With the light-benders holding the light round us so that, from the dome, if anyone had been looking, there'd have been nothing to see but a wobble in the stars.

Nobody was looking.

The dome was a bubble of yellow light on the black ash. Four million people under glass. I'd lived there once, on the sixtieth floor, for a few weeks that felt like years. I'd walked the ring street at six in the morning with Garnet's hand in mine. I'd climbed up out of it in a pod with my squad and never thought I'd see it again.

The east locks were dark.

Enormous. As tall as ten houses, streaked with rust. The doors where fifty orphans had stood one morning with their bags and their soldiers, and been put out into the ash.

Keir brought the Open Hand down until her broad back end was nearly touching them. The bottom deck. Where the holds would be, on a Hand. Where whatever we found would go.

He turned round.

"Pell," he said. "They're your people."

Pell stood up.

She went down the passage, past me, past the squad seats, down the stair to the bottom deck. I went after her. So did Sigmund, and Juno. Nobody else. Rory's squad stayed at the top of the stair, very still, in case.

The back of the Open Hand opened. Aster's door. On the inside. A plate a child could press.

Pell pressed it.

And the night came in. Cold and grey and smelling of ash. The same air I'd breathed every day of my childhood, under the filter, in the house in the dead field. I'd forgotten. I'd forgotten Earth smelled like this.

In front of us, the east locks.

And as we watched, very slowly, with a groan of old metal that went right through the ground, the outer door began to open.

Voss had kept her word.

The outer door. Then the chamber, long and dark, with a strip of yellow light at the far end. Then the inner door.

It stuck.

It stuck halfway, with a screech like a cart wheel, and stopped. There were people behind it. I could feel them. Hundreds of them, in the dark of the ring street, pressed against the half-open inner door, not making a sound.

"Every winter," said Sigmund, under his breath. "Risa said."

"It isn't winter," I said.

"It's always winter on the inner door."

I put my hand on the ash at my feet. Listened. Down through it, into the old rock under the dome, and along, and up into the rusted metal of the east locks. The inner door. The bad hinge, with thirty years of rust and grit in it.

I asked it, very politely, to move.

It moved.

They came through.

Not running. They'd been told not to run. Pell's people had told them, and Pell's people had been told by Pell, in a message through Voss's seed, very carefully, word by word: don't run. Nobody will be left. Walk.

So they walked.

Teachers. I could tell the teachers. They came first, with children by the hand, counting them as they came, the way Pell counted at the top of the shelter stairs. Seven. Eight. Nine. Good. Walk. Nurses with bags. Old men in coats with medals on them, first war, who'd never signed anything they didn't have to. A woman carrying a sewing machine. A boy carrying a dog.

And families.

Families with faces I almost knew. Not their faces. Their children's, the ones I'd seen on the dawn line and the training hall and the back page of Wren's book. The families of the forty, and the second wave, and the third. The ones who'd lost somebody to the Project, and never been told where, and had read the names when Voss opened the files.

Pell stood at the back of the Open Hand with her hands folded.

She didn't say anything. She just stood there. And one by one, as they came out of the dark of the east locks into the grey night and saw her, they stopped.

The first one was a nurse.

Older than Pell. Much older. Small and bent, with a bag over her shoulder. She came out of the locks and saw Pell standing at the top of the ramp and stopped dead on the ash.

"Harriet," she said.

Pell's hands came apart.

"Agnes," said Pell. Very quietly.

"You didn't write," said the nurse. "You left the halls and went to that school and then to the sixtieth floor, and you never wrote. Not once. In all those years."

"No," said Pell.

"We kept the list," said the nurse. "All of us. The ones who got out of the halls. Every one that didn't. We kept it in the dispensary on the twelfth floor, behind the iodine, where nobody looked." She came up the ramp, very slowly, one step at a time. "When they read the names, last month. When Voss opened the files. We took the list out and read it next to them." She stopped in front of Pell. "Some of the names were the same."

Pell didn't say anything.

"Dorothy Ash," said the nurse. "She was on our list. Under didn't make it. We had her there for twenty years." Her old face crumpled. "And then they read her name. On the radio. Dask, Dorothy. Finished. Alive. On Avalon."

Pell put her arms round her.

I'd never seen Pell put her arms round anyone. Not even Garnet, who'd have let her. She did it very stiffly, the way Genny did, as if she'd read about it in a book and was trying to get it right.

She got it right.

They kept coming.

All night. Through the east locks, down the long dark chamber, out onto the ash, up the ramp into the Open Hand. Pell counted every one. Juno, beside her, felt for the ones who were frightened and sent them to Rory's squad, who stood at the top of the stair, very large and very calm, and said steady, which was the only thing Rory knew how to say to anything that needed calming.

It worked. It always worked.

The bottom deck filled. Then the middle. Then the squads gave up their seats on the top deck and sat on the floor, and that filled too.

Two thousand one hundred and six.

Aster counted them. She said that was the number. She said it twice, to be sure. Two thousand one hundred and six humans and one dog.

And then they stopped coming. Because the ring street was empty. Because that was everyone Pell's people had told, this first time. Because Voss's seed had said a few weeks and quietly and when nobody is looking closely, and there was only so much quiet you could carry through a door in one night.

"Next time," said Pell. To the empty locks. "Next time there'll be more."

I had one more thing to do.

I took the loaf in its brown paper. Thorne's loaf. Still faintly warm, somehow, after nine minutes and eleven light-years and a whole night. And I walked back down the ramp, and across the ash, and into the east locks. Through the outer door. Down the long dark chamber. Through the inner door, which didn't stick for me.

Into the ring street.

It was empty. The lamps were lit, gold, the way they'd been the morning I walked here with Garnet. The light lay in long pools on the pale stone. Overhead, the dome was going from black to grey, very slowly.

Across the street, there was a shop.

Narrower than the ones on either side. Dark green door. A wide front window with bare wooden shelves behind it. A painted sign over the door, the paint gone pale and cracked. A loaf of bread, in gold. And under it, in old curling letters:

THORNE & DAUGHTER. BAKERS.

There was a light on in the back.

I crossed the street.

It was five to six. I could see the clock on the wall through the glass. Somebody was moving in the back room. Back and forth. Past the doorway, where the heat came through.

I put the loaf on the step. Against the green door. Where she'd see it when she opened up.

Then I stood back.

At six o'clock exactly, a woman came out of the back room with a tray. Young. Round and solid, with flour to the elbows and her hair tied up in a cloth. She looked like Meg. Very like. She began to put the loaves in the window, one at a time, with her hands.

The steam came up off them and fogged the glass.

She saw the brown paper on the step.

She stopped. She came to the door. She opened it. The little brass bell rang over her head, out into the empty street.

She picked up the loaf. Unwrapped the paper. Looked at it.

It was rye. Thorne's rye. The one he'd made every day in Priya's kitchen on another world, that Mother had eaten with Dory on her hip under a tree.

She looked up and down the empty street.

I'd gone back across it by then, into the shadow of the east locks. She couldn't see me. Nobody looks closely at shadows on the ring street at six in the morning.

But she stood in the doorway of Thorne & Daughter with the loaf against her chest for a very long time.

And then she put it in the window. In the middle. With the others.

We crossed back in eight minutes.

Two thousand one hundred and six people, and a dog, and a squad, and three light-benders holding the light round us until the moon was behind us and there was nobody left to see.

The youngest queen sang the whole way. She didn't tire. She said afterward, through Juno, that she hadn't been carrying anything. She'd just been singing. Everyone else had been carrying.

When the dark opened, there was the plain. And the Hands. And the Nivi mountain, white in the dawn, and the Sef spire on the rim catching the first of the sun.

And the whole of Scarecrow on the red glass, waiting.

The Open Hand came down so gently the glass didn't crack.

Keir did that. With his own hands. Ordinary engines. Slowly, the way he said things should go when anybody had sense.

Aster opened the back door. On the inside.

And two thousand one hundred and six people came out onto Avalon, blinking, into a sky that was blue, and enormous, and nobody's ceiling.

Mother was at the front.

With Dory on her hip. With Ash in a sling against her chest, because Sera had handed her over at dawn and said you hold her, I'll cry otherwise. In the blue silk dressing gown. With Father's ring on her hand.

The old nurse came down the ramp on Pell's arm.

She saw Mother. She stopped.

"Dorothy Ash," said the nurse. Very quietly. "We had you on the list."

"I know," said Mother. "Pell told me. On the hello. An hour ago." She held out her free hand. "I'm sorry I was so late."

Okafor stood at the foot of the ramp and watched them come.

All of them. Every one. She didn't count. Pell had counted. Aster had counted. Dot was counting now, very quietly, on the red glass, every name as it stepped off the ramp, the way she'd counted the families off Luna's stair. She didn't need to count.

When the last one was off, she turned to Keir.

He'd come down the ramp last. With Aster beside him and Gareth behind, still holding his spanner.

"Nine minutes," said Okafor.

"Nine minutes and fourteen seconds," said Aster. "Out. Eight minutes and fifty-one seconds, back." A pause. "It was lighter coming back. The queens say it is always lighter coming home."

Okafor looked at the ship for a long time. At the gold letters on the point. At the open door on the inside.

"How soon can it go again?" she said.

Keir looked at Aster. Aster looked at the youngest queen, who'd hopped down the ramp onto Sesh's shoulder and was preening a copper feather very thoroughly, as if nothing had happened.

"She says," said Juno, listening, "tonight. If you like." A pause. "She says she'd like to go further, next time. She says she's been practising."

Okafor didn't smile. Okafor never smiled.

But she wrote something on her slate. And underlined it twice.

Days 879–881. A fault in the glass.

Okafor's short list at dawn: Keir flying, Aster, Gareth because nobody else knows where he moved the seats (Keir's ears went red). Pell, because they're her people. Juno for the queens. Sigmund, who knows the Annex and every officer by first name and doesn't sign first. Rory's squad, in case. Marlo and whichever light-benders would come; three patches of air went wavy beside him. And Dask, once; the first time anything does anything; after this it flies without you. Wheels up at dusk, on a ship with no wheels.

Noon goodbyes. Ash three weeks old and looking six months, sitting up, looking at Sera like a hinge that won't sit straight. She hums Toby's note and, since her second day, Mother's. She's going to miss you. Back tonight, or a week. That's not what I said. Map room: Luna and Risa on Sigmund's chart of the east locks, inner and outer doors. Voss says a great many things. Voss is wearing a dead queen on a chain so a ship can find her in the dark; she'll open a door. Luna: come back; not I will, not that voice. Say yes. Yes. Risa: the inner door sticks every winter; it's always winter on the inner door.

Mother in the corner of the bakery with Dory, watching bread rise. The east locks, where they put the fifty out with this shop across the street. Now you're going back to the same doors to let people in to somewhere they want to go; your father would have liked that. Thorne with a small warm loaf: Meg's girl, her own daughter, stayed and kept the shop; somebody always has to; put it in the window at six so she knows.

Dusk, everyone watching, every queen in place. The youngest already on her perch, door open: ready, in a shape. Keir at the point, not a throne, controls he built and checked eleven times; Aster; Gareth with his spanner. Engines, engines; a hundred feet over the plain. Hands off: ma'am, whenever you like. She sang one small clear note toward, toward a spark on a chain eleven light-years off, and it answered like a voice down a pipe. Then every queen on Avalon came up under her and held her. The smallest queen, and all the others carrying her.

The window went dark, the presence of something large and close: the dark between. A single bright thread straight out from the point like a rope across a river, a spark at the end. We all saw it. Pell's hand over her mouth; Juno white, oh, oh, oh. She pulled and we came to the other side. Nine minutes and fourteen seconds, Aster says. Earth's moon filling the window with the bright scar where the finger lay thirty years, and Earth beyond it, brown and grey and sick. The shoe-seller crying without sound. Marlo: now. The light-benders folded the light round the whole ship: a fault in the glass, heat over a stove; nobody looks closely. Sigmund: not in there, not ever.

Down over the old battlefield to the east locks, as tall as ten houses and rusted, where fifty orphans were put out. Pell, they're your people. Aster's door from inside. Earth's air came in, ash; I'd forgotten it smelled like this. Voss kept her word: outer door, chamber, inner door; it stuck halfway, screeching, hundreds silent behind it. It's always winter on the inner door. I asked the bad hinge politely through the rock and it moved.

They walked, as Pell's message said: don't run, nobody will be left. Teachers counting children, nurses with bags, old first-war men with medals who never signed what they didn't have to, a woman with a sewing machine, a boy with a dog. Families with faces I almost knew, from their children. The first was a nurse much older than Pell: Harriet. Agnes. You never wrote in all those years. We kept the list of the ones who got out of the halls and the ones who didn't, in the twelfth-floor dispensary behind the iodine. When Voss opened the files we read them side by side. Dorothy Ash under didn't make it for twenty years, and then on the radio: Dask, Dorothy, finished, alive, on Avalon. Pell put her arms round her, stiffly, like Genny, and got it right.

All night. Pell counted; Juno sent the frightened to Rory's squad and steady worked as it always does. Squads gave up seats and sat on the floor. Aster, twice: two thousand one hundred and six humans and one dog. Then the street was empty, everyone told this first time; only so much quiet goes through a door in a night. Next time there'll be more.

I took Thorne's loaf through the locks onto the empty ring street, lamps gold, the dome going grey. THORNE & DAUGHTER, a light in the back, five to six. I left it on the step and went back to the shadow. Six exactly: a young woman very like Meg, flour to the elbows, put the loaves in the window by hand and the steam fogged the glass. The bell rang. Rye. Thorne's. She looked up and down the street a long time with it against her chest, then put it in the middle of the window with the others.

Back in eight minutes fifty-one. She wasn't carrying anything, she said; just singing; everyone else carried. The plain, the Nivi white, the Sef catching first sun, all Scarecrow waiting. Keir set her down so gently the glass didn't crack. Two thousand one hundred and six came out under a sky that's nobody's ceiling. Mother at the front with Dory and Ash, Sera having said you hold her, I'll cry otherwise. Agnes on Pell's arm: Dorothy Ash, we had you on the list. I know; Pell told me on the hello. I'm sorry I was so late.

Okafor didn't count; Pell, Aster and Dot had. Nine minutes. Fourteen seconds out, fifty-one back; lighter coming home; the queens say it always is. How soon again? The youngest queen, preening a copper feather on Sesh's shoulder: tonight, if you like; she'd like to go further next time; she's been practising. Okafor didn't smile. She wrote something and underlined it twice.