Chapter 297 Both

Dory made it snow in the park on the first morning of the new year.

Nobody asked her to. Nobody knew she could. She was walking from one end of the park to the other the way she did every morning, checking, with Pebble a step behind and Ash a step behind Pebble, and she stopped at the cold grassy hill beside the Nivi mountain, where the furred young huddled.

It was summer on Avalon. The hill was warm. The furred young were lying on it with their great grey-brown haystack bodies flat out on the grass, panting, the way dogs pant in the heat. They'd come from a world with snow half the year. They'd been on Avalon since spring, and they'd never once been cool enough.

Dory looked at them for a long time.

Then she looked up.

I wasn't there. Risa was. She told me about it afterward, at the kitchen table, very slowly, the way you tell something you've had to say to yourself several times to believe.

"She looked at the sky," said Risa. "The way I do. The way I did on the plains world, before I asked it to come down. I know that look, Lucas. I've seen it in the mirror." She turned her cup round in her hands. "And the sky came. Clouds. Out of nothing. Right over the hill. Just a small one. Just big enough."

"And then it rained."

"And then it started to rain," said Risa. "I felt it start. And then she did something else."

She stopped.

"What?" said Sera.

"She changed it," said Risa. Very quietly. "On the way down. Every drop. Halfway between the cloud and the hill." She looked at me. "She didn't make it colder, Lucas. She didn't freeze it. Luna would have frozen it. She changed it. The way you change things. She looked at what it was and asked it to be something else. Every drop. All at once."

"Snow," said Luna.

"Snow," said Risa. "On one hill. In summer. Falling very slowly onto a few hundred furred young who'd never been cool enough since they came."

She put her cup down.

"They rolled in it," she said. "Like dogs. Like Biscuit. And Dory stood at the bottom of the hill with Pebble and Ash and laughed so hard she fell over."

Nobody said anything for a long time.

"Storm," said Sera at last. "That's yours. That's Risa's."

"Yes."

"And change," said Sera. "That's his." She looked at me. "Both."

"Both," said Risa. "At once. At two." She put her face in her hands. "Lucas, I couldn't make a cloud until I was nearly grown. Until you finished me. I couldn't do it until after Dory was born. And she's two, and she just made one out of nothing and changed every drop in it on the way down because the furred ones looked hot."

"She looks five," said Luna.

"She's two," said Risa.

Ash set fire to the tree in the square a week later.

Not the whole tree. A branch. A small one, low down, that she'd been reaching for all morning from Sera's hip because there was a bird in it. Sera put her down, and she reached for it again, and couldn't reach, and her face did the thing Sera's face did when a hinge wouldn't sit straight.

And the branch caught.

Sera was already moving. She had her hand out to put it back the way she'd learned to, the way Liam had in the forest, before the first flame had finished curling up off the bark.

She didn't need to.

Because the fire was already gone.

Not out. Gone. Not put back, the way Sera put it back, the way Liam put it back, into her hands, into her. Changed. Every flame on the branch, all at once, into something else.

Glass.

Small curling flames of clear glass, all along the branch, catching the light. Exactly the shape the fire had been. Frozen in the middle of burning.

The bird sat on the end of the branch and looked at them.

Ash looked at the bird.

Then she held up her hands to Sera. Not pick me up. Look.

"Pretty," said Ash. Sera said afterward she'd been expecting hot. Or no. Or something to do with fire. Not pretty. Ash had a great many words by then, and very firm opinions about all of them, and she'd chosen that one.

"Pretty," said Ash again. Very firmly. And pointed at the glass flames.

Sera brought her to me in the forge.

She didn't say anything. She put Ash down on the anvil, where Ash sat looking delighted with herself, and stood back with her arms folded and looked at me.

"Fire," she said. "That's mine."

"Yes."

"And she changed it. Like you. Into glass. Exactly the shape it was." She looked at her daughter. "I've been making fire since before I could walk, Lucas. I've been putting it back since the forge, since you, since my silver was finished. I've never once changed it." Her jaw went tight. "She's one."

"She looks three."

"Don't," said Sera. "Don't do what Luna does."

I looked at Ash.

Through her. All the way. The way I'd looked the first time, the morning she was born, when she reached out with her silver past the walls of the quiet room and touched every queen on Avalon.

Fire. All through her. Sera's fire, branching through every path of her the way it branched through Sera's, the way the silver markings branched on Sera's arms.

And under it, woven through it, round every branch of it like the roots of a tree round a stone:

Mine.

I hadn't seen it before.

I hadn't looked. Not properly. Not for this. I'd looked at Ash and Dory every morning since they were born, the way Dory looked at everyone, checking. Are they well. Are they whole. They always were.

I'd never looked to see what they were.

Dory was woven. I'd known that since the night she was born. A net. Every path joined to every other. The queen had said a tree was strong but a net held.

But I'd never looked at what the net was made of.

That night I went into the room where she slept, with Pebble curled at the foot of her bed the way he did now, and Ash asleep beside her because Ash wouldn't sleep anywhere else any more. And I sat on the floor between them in the dark. And I looked.

Dory's net was two things.

Risa's storm, every thread of it, charge and wind and the weight of a whole sky. And woven through it, joined to it at every crossing, every knot of the net:

Mine.

The thing I could do that nobody else could. The thing that saw through grey and stone and iron and asked it to be something else. In Dory, it wasn't in one place. It was everywhere. At every point where one thread of her net crossed another.

And Ash's fire was the same. Sera's branches, all through her. And mine, wrapped round every one.

And both of them, both, were more.

Not more than me. Not yet. They were small. But more than Risa had been at their age, or Sera. More than anything their mothers had been able to do before I finished them. More, already, at one and two, than Risa or Sera had been able to do at all until they were grown.

I sat on the floor between my daughters in the dark for a long time.

Then I went and woke Edda.

Edda didn't mind being woken.

She said she hadn't slept properly since Dory walked at a hundred and fifty-one days, and she didn't expect to start now. She came to our kitchen in her coat over her nightgown, with her green book under her arm, and sat at the table while I told her.

When I'd finished, she opened her green book.

To the back. Not the page headed things I'm no longer surprised by. Past it. To a page I'd never seen, with a list on it in her small upright hand.

Names.

"I've been keeping this," said Edda. "Since Dory. Every child born on Avalon to a parent with finished silver." She turned the book round so I could see it. "Every one."

I read it.

Dask, Dory.

Dask, Ash.

Marsh, Harriet.

Calder, Rory (the second).

And under them, more. Names I knew from the rolls and the squads and the crooked streets of the new city. Children of the third wave, born that year. Children of people from Earth, who'd come through the east locks and walked into a room with Edda and held out their hands and gone out with silver round their eyes. Twelve. Fifteen. Twenty.

And beside every name, in Edda's small upright hand, a note.

Dask, Dory. Storm, as Risa. Change, as L. Both. Stronger than either at the same age. Woven.

Dask, Ash. Fire, as Seraphina. Change, as L. Both. Stronger.

Marsh, Harriet. Sound, as Toby. One side only; Wren isn't finished. Still stronger than Toby at the same age. Much.

Calder, Rory (2). Fire, as Liam. Anja's strength and toughness, as Anja: bent Maura's iron spoon at six months; his own fire doesn't mark him. Puts his own back at seven months. Liam couldn't till he was grown. Both. Stronger.

And under that, and under that, all the way down the page:

Both.

Both.

Stronger.

Both.

"Every one?" I said.

"Every one," said Edda. "Every child with a finished parent comes out stronger than that parent was. And every child born to two parents who are both finished"—she tapped the page—"gets both. Whatever the mother has. Whatever the father has. Both of them. All of it. And more." She looked at me over her glasses. "And they're marked."

"Marked?"

"Look at them," said Edda. "Properly. In the morning. In the light."

So I did.

In the morning. In the light. On the red glass, after the hello, with every child on Avalon who'd been born that year or the year before in the park at the school with no walls, where Dory went every morning to check everyone.

I'd seen them every day. I'd never looked.

Their eyes. Every one of them. Ringed with silver, the way mine were, the way their parents' were since I finished them. Only not the same. Each different. Dory's rings weren't rings, they never had been, they were the lattice of her net, coming up to the surface round her eyes like frost on a window. Ash's were branches. Harriet's were very fine, very many, close together, like the lines of a song written down. Rory the second's were flickering. You could see them move, the way you can see heat move over a stove.

And their arms.

I'd thought it was dirt, on Ash. Ash was always dirty. Ash had been dirty since the morning she was born. And on Dory I'd thought it was the way the light came through the trees in the park.

It wasn't.

Markings.

Silver. Running up from their wrists. The way they'd come up my arms the night the old one finished me on the ice, and up Sera's and Risa's and Luna's the day I finished theirs, and up the twins' in the hollow, and up Mother's when I finished her through the hello.

Only nobody had finished these children.

They'd been born whole.

And the markings had come up on their own. Slowly. A little more every week. So slowly that nobody had noticed, the way you don't notice a child growing until you look at a mark on the doorframe.

Dory's was a net. Fine silver lines, crossing and joining, up both arms to the shoulder and round the back of her neck.

Ash's were branches, like Sera's. Only at the end of every branch, very small, a shape. A flame. Made of glass.

Harriet's were lines. Close together. Five of them, running up her arms side by side, with small marks on them here and there.

Toby saw them that morning. He stood at the edge of the school with no walls and looked at his daughter's arms for a long time, and then put both hands over his face.

"Lucas," he said through his fingers. "That's a stave. It's music. It's written down."

The queens weren't surprised.

I asked them. At dusk, at the garden wall, with Dory and Ash on my lap and Edda's green book open on the stone beside me.

No, said our queen. We are not surprised.

"Why not?"

The queen lowered her great head until it was level with mine. Level with Dory's. Her eye very close.

The silver listens, she said. You know this. It listens to the world first, and then it grows a queen who fits. It listened to your sister, and grew her lines like a page. It listened to your mother, and grew her bowls and flour and eggs.

In your children, it listened to two.

To the mother. To the father. Both whole. Both open. Nothing cut. Nothing narrowed. Nothing in the way. A pause. It listened to both, from the first spark. And it grew a child who fits both.

"And stronger?"

You were cut, said the queen. Very gently. All of you. Your mothers and fathers. Your silver was narrowed before you were born, by the ones who made the program, so you would be useful and not too much. You grew up narrow. And then you were opened. Finished. Late. A pause. They were never narrow. Not for one day. They have never had to be opened.

Of course they are stronger.

I sat at the garden wall with my daughters on my lap for a long time after that.

Dory was asleep. Ash was nearly asleep, with her hand curled in the front of my shirt and her small branching silver arm lying across my wrist, the glass flames at the ends of the branches catching the last of the light.

And I understood something.

Something I should have understood a long time ago. On the red glass in the square, the day Luna said Article Fourteen out loud for the first time, to the whole of Scarecrow, with Dory in a sling against Risa's chest.

Complete integration, whether arising naturally, through treatment, or by descent, is the property of the Project under the Accord.

Or by descent.

She's the thing the clause was written for.

I went to the Overseer.

At the passage mouth. Where it always was, at dusk, with its bread. Garnet still brought it a piece every evening. Thorne's rye, now. It held it in both of its long grey hands, very carefully, the way it held every piece she'd ever given it.

I didn't sit down. I stood in front of it with Dory asleep on my shoulder and Ash asleep against my chest.

"Article Fourteen," I said.

The Overseer was very still.

"The children of the modified," I said. "Sold before they were born. Thirty years ago, in a room on Earth, with the army signing so the soldiers couldn't rise later." I looked at it. "The Sorn asked for that. Specifically. Didn't they."

"Yes," said the Overseer.

"Why?"

The Overseer looked at the bread in its hands for a long time.

Then it looked at Dory. Asleep on my shoulder. With her net coming up round her eyes like frost and running down her arms in fine silver lines, crossing and joining.

"Because they knew," it said.

"Knew what?"

"What the children would be," said the Overseer. "They did not know about you. They did not know your mother could tear a Hand. They did not know about the queens, or the finishing, or the hello." It turned the bread over. "But they knew the modified had silver. Narrowed. Cut. Useful. And they knew that silver, in a child, is not narrowed. Not if both sides are open."

"How did they know?"

"Because they have seen it before," said the Overseer. "On other worlds. Other kinds. Whenever a world has silver in its people, and the people have children, and the children are born whole." A pause. "The children are always more."

"More what?"

"More useful," said the Overseer. Very quietly. "To them."

I didn't say anything.

I stood in front of the Overseer at the passage mouth in the dusk with my two daughters asleep on me, and I didn't say anything for a very long time.

"That is why they asked for them," said the Overseer. "Before they were born. Not the modified. The modified were cut. The modified were not worth very much." It looked at Dory. "Their children. Born whole. Born with both. That is what the Accord was for. That was the price."

"And the program," I said. "The cutting. The narrowing. The stabilizer."

"Was so the parents would never be finished," said the Overseer. "So they would never be whole. So that when the children came, there would be nobody strong enough to stand between them and the ones who came to collect."

It turned its blank grey face toward me.

"They did not know about you," it said again. "Nobody knew about you."

I told Okafor that night.

At our kitchen table, with Holt and the General and Mother, and the three of them. Sera and Risa and Luna, with her hand on her stomach, where the cold clear hum was getting stronger every day.

Nobody said anything when I'd finished.

Mother had Dory on her lap. She'd taken her off my shoulder when I came in, without asking, the way she always did. She was looking down at her. At the net round her eyes. At the fine silver lines running up her arms and round the back of her neck.

"They were going to come for her," said Mother. Very quietly. "Weren't they. One day. For all of them. That's what it was all for. The halls. The posters. The medals. The cutting. The stabilizer. All those years in the chair." Her hands were perfectly still on Dory's back. "So that one day someone would come for my granddaughter. And there'd be nobody left who could stop them."

"Yes," I said.

Mother didn't say anything else.

But the cups on the table rose. All of them. An inch. And hung there. Perfectly still. The width of a hair.

And then, very slowly, came back down.

Okafor looked at Edda's green book. At the list in the back. Twenty names. Every one with both beside it.

"How many more?" she said.

"This year?" said Edda. "Forty. Fifty. Everyone I've finished is having children, Major. Everyone who came off the palm. Everyone who came through the east locks and sat on my bed and held out their hands." She shook her head. "Every one of them is going to be born whole. And every one of them is going to be both."

Okafor didn't say anything for a long time.

"The far queens," she said at last. "Last night of the year. They're turning their heads."

"Yes," said Holt.

"And when they turn them all the way," said Okafor, "and look at us, properly, for the first time, they won't see a fault." She put her hand flat on the green book. "They'll see this. Twenty children. Then fifty. Then a hundred. A whole world of them. Born whole. Born both." She looked up. "Everything they ever wanted from Article Fourteen. All in one place."

Nobody said anything.

"They'll come for them," said Okafor. "Not for us. Not for the queens. Not even for Dask." She looked at Dory, asleep on Mother's lap. "For them."

The General stood up.

He didn't say anything. He went to the window and looked out at the plain. At the Hands, and the two ships, and the city, and the park in the dusk. The tall silver-green trees of the Kethri. The Nivi mountain, white, ringing very faintly. The children's wheel, still and dark against the sky.

"Then they'll find us standing in front of them," he said.

Luna, at the table, with her hand on her stomach, looked at her father's back.

"Yes," she said.

Okafor took out her slate.

Not to write a number. She'd written 8 on it, at the end of the year. She didn't add a 9.

She turned it over. To the blank side.

And wrote, in her plain upright hand, at the top:

The children.

And underneath it, after a long moment:

Every one.

Then she put it under her arm. And stood up. And looked round the table at all of us.

"The shelters," she said. "Deeper. Bigger. Room for every child on Avalon, and every child that's coming, and every one after that. Holt."

"Ma'am."

"The squads. Every one. Every person on the rolls. They train every morning from now on. Not to stand. To hold." She looked at Mother. "Mrs. Dask."

"Major."

"You said you'd fight in the next one. If it comes." Okafor's voice was very plain. "It's coming."

Mother looked down at Dory on her lap. At the net round her eyes.

"I know," she said. "I'll teach them to hold more than bowls."

Days 1476–1531. Both.

New year's first morning, summer on Avalon, the furred young flat and panting on their hill, never cool enough since spring. Dory looked up the way Risa looks up: I know that look, I've seen it in the mirror. A small cloud out of nothing, and rain starting, and halfway down she changed every drop, not froze it, changed it, the way I do. Snow on one hill in summer. They rolled in it like Biscuit and she laughed till she fell over. Sera: storm is Risa's; change is his; both. Risa: I couldn't make a cloud till you finished me, after she was born; she's two.

A week later Ash, reaching from Sera's hip for a bird on a low branch of the tree in the square, made her hinge face, and the branch caught. Sera was already moving to put it back. She didn't need to. The fire wasn't put back; it was changed, every flame into clear curling glass the exact shape it had been. The bird looked at them. Ash held up her hands not for pick me up but look. Pretty. Sera expected hot, or no; Ash has a great many words and chose that one. Sera on the anvil: fire is mine; she changed it into glass; I've never once changed it; she's one. Don't do what Luna does. I looked properly: Sera's branching fire, and wrapped round every branch like roots round a stone, mine.

That night on the floor between their beds, Pebble at Dory's feet, Ash beside her because she won't sleep anywhere else. Dory's net is two things: Risa's storm in every thread, and mine at every crossing. Ash: Sera's branches and mine round each. Both, and more. Not more than me yet; more than their mothers were at their age, more already than their mothers could do at all until grown. I woke Edda. She hasn't slept properly since Dory walked.

At the back of her green book, past things I'm no longer surprised by, a list: every child born on Avalon to a finished parent. Dask, Dory: storm as Risa, change as L, both, stronger, woven. Dask, Ash: fire as Seraphina, change as L, both, stronger. Marsh, Harriet: sound as Toby, one side only, Wren isn't finished, still much stronger than Toby was. Calder, Rory (2): fire as Liam, and Anja's strength and toughness, bent Maura's iron spoon at six months, his own fire doesn't mark him, puts his own back at seven months; both, stronger. Then twenty names, children of the third wave and the east locks, and beside each: both, both, stronger, both. And they're marked. Look in the morning, in the light.

At the school with no walls I looked properly for the first time. Every child's eyes ringed, each differently: Dory's the lattice like frost, Ash's branches, Harriet's very fine and close like the lines of a song, Rory's flickering like heat over a stove. And silver markings up their arms I'd taken for dirt on Ash and light through leaves on Dory. Nobody finished them; born whole, the markings came up on their own a little each week like marks on a doorframe. Dory's a net to the shoulder and round her neck. Ash's branches with a tiny glass flame at each tip. Harriet's five lines side by side with small marks on them. Toby, hands over his face: that's a stave; it's music, written down.

The queen at dusk, not surprised. The silver listens; it grew your sister lines like a page and your mother bowls and flour and eggs; in your children it listened to two, both whole, both open, nothing cut, from the first spark, and grew a child who fits both. Stronger? You were cut, all of you, narrowed before birth to be useful and not too much, grew up narrow, opened late. They were never narrow one day and never had to be opened. Of course they are stronger.

And I understood the square, the day Luna said it aloud: or by descent; she's the thing the clause was written for. The Overseer at the passage with Thorne's rye: the Sorn asked for Article Fourteen specifically? Yes. Because they knew. Not about you, the queens, the finishing. But that the modified had silver, cut, and that silver in a child with both sides open is not cut. They've seen it on other worlds: the children are always more. More useful, to them. The modified were not worth much. Their children, born whole, born both: that's what the Accord was for, the price. And the program, the narrowing, the stabilizer, so the parents would never be finished, so when the children came there'd be nobody strong enough to stand between them and the ones who came to collect. Nobody knew about you.

Our table that night, Luna's hand on the cold clear hum getting stronger. Mother with Dory on her lap looking at the frost round her eyes: they were going to come for her. The halls, the posters, the medals, the cutting, the stabilizer, all those years in the chair, so that one day someone would come for my granddaughter and nobody would be left to stop them. Yes. Every cup on the table rose an inch, held to the width of a hair, and came slowly back down.

Edda: forty or fifty this year; everyone I've finished is having children, born whole, every one both. Okafor: when they turn their heads all the way they won't see a fault; they'll see this; everything they wanted from Article Fourteen in one place. They'll come for them. Not us, not the queens, not even Dask. The General at the window, the park dark, the wheel still against the sky: then they'll find us standing in front of them. Luna, hand on her stomach: yes. Okafor didn't write 9. She turned the slate over and wrote at the top: The children. Then: Every one. Shelters deeper, bigger, room for every child on Avalon and every one coming. Squads every morning from now, not to stand; to hold. Mrs. Dask, you said you'd fight in the next one. It's coming. I know. I'll teach them to hold more than bowls.