Chapter 304 Crooked Rooms

Toby found the first one by accident.

He was walking home through the new city at dusk, the way he did most evenings now, with Harriet asleep in a sling against his chest and his fiddle case in his hand, along one of the crooked streets north of the Hands where the houses had been built by the people who lived in them. And somewhere off to his left, in a house with a blue door and a window much bigger on one side than the other, somebody was playing.

A flute. Very badly. The same four notes, over and over, and then a wrong one, and then the four notes again.

Toby stopped.

He told me about it afterward. He said he'd stood in the street for a long time. Not because it was good. Because it was the first music he'd heard on Avalon that wasn't his, or his mother's, or Harriet's, or the queens'.

He knocked on the blue door.

It was a boy. Eleven or twelve. One of the families from the third crossing, who'd come through the east locks with a flute in a cloth bag because it had been his grandfather's and nobody had ever taught him to play it. He'd been trying to teach himself. For a year. Under the dome, he said, you weren't allowed to make noise after eight, so he'd only ever practised under his blanket, very quietly, with his fingers.

On Avalon nobody had told him not to.

So he'd started playing out loud.

"I'm not very good," he said. To Toby. On his crooked doorstep, with the flute held against his chest.

"No," said Toby. Very honestly. "But you're not bad either. You're just new." He put his fiddle case down. "Play me the four notes."

The boy played them.

Toby took out his fiddle. Tucked it under his chin, very carefully, round the sling where Harriet was sleeping. And played them back.

And then a fifth.

The boy stared at him.

"Again," said Toby.

That was how it started.

By the end of the month there were eleven of them. By the end of the next, there were thirty.

People Toby found walking home through the crooked streets in the evenings, listening at doors. People who'd come through the east locks with an instrument in a bag, or a song in their heads, or both. A woman from the lower floors who played a squeezebox with half its keys stuck, until Gareth went round with a spanner. Two old men who'd played in a band in the first war, one on a drum and one on a trumpet, and hadn't played together in thirty years because one of them had moved floors and they'd lost each other. A girl who sang so low the windows hummed. A man who could play anything with strings and had brought nothing, because he'd had nothing, so Liam made him a guitar in the forge out of wood the gardener had grown and wire Garnet had drawn very carefully into exactly the right thickness.

And the singers. More of them than anyone. People who'd never had anything to play, so they'd sung. Under their breath. Under blankets. On the lower floors, where you weren't supposed to make noise after eight.

On Avalon, nobody told them not to.

They played on the green.

In the middle of the park, where every part met every other, round the sapling that wasn't much of a tree yet. Every seventh evening. Toby didn't call it anything. He just went and stood on the green at dusk with his fiddle, and the others came, and they played.

And everyone came to listen.

I'll never forget the first time.

Toby on the green with his fiddle. Adaeze beside him, very small, in her shell-coloured dress, singing. The boy with his grandfather's flute, getting about half the notes right, which Toby said was plenty. The two old men with the drum and the trumpet, who'd found each other again in the queue for Thorne's bread, and stood very close together, and didn't look at each other at all, and played as if no time had passed. The squeezebox. The low-voiced girl. The man with Liam's guitar.

And Harriet.

In her sling, against Toby's chest. Awake. Singing Toby's note, the counter-note, high and clear, under all of it. The way she'd sung it the morning she was born on the north wall. So that everything they played had something steady under it, holding it up.

And then everything else joined in.

The Nivi first. From the Singing Garden, on the slope of the mountain, where the wind went through the hollow glass pillars. The wind came off the mountain and through the pillars and down across the park, and the pillars rang, and the Nivi standing among them rang with them, a thousand branches. In tune. Exactly in tune. With Toby.

Then the Karst. From the caves under the park. They'd heard the music through the ground, and come up to the mouths of the caves, long and low and many-legged with their fine hairs turned every way. And sang back the notes they heard. Very faint. A beat behind, the way an echo is.

Then the Kethri. In the gardener's trees. The rising sound, all of them together, the way they'd sung it on the wind over their forest the night the new Hand came. Only not rising, this time. Going round. Going round and round with the music, the way their wings went round on the wind.

Then the Sef.

They didn't sing. The Sef couldn't. But their queen on the rim sent her beam down, across the plain, across the park, onto the green. Slowly. Moving. In time. So that the light went across the musicians and the crowd and the sapling in the middle in long slow sweeps, and every time it touched one of the Sef young lying on their terrace, it broke into colours and spilled across everything.

Toby stopped playing.

He stood on the green with his fiddle under his chin and his bow in the air and looked round at all of it. At the light sweeping. At the Nivi ringing, and the Karst echoing, and the Kethri going round and round in the trees.

At everyone.

Then he looked down at Harriet. Still singing. Still holding it up.

He started playing again.

He didn't stop until it was dark.

The young played together.

That was the other thing about those months. I want to set it down, because it was the thing I'd remember longest, when everything after had happened.

Not just on the green, on the music evenings. Everywhere. All the time. In the broods' ground, and the park, and the crooked streets of the new city, and the red glass at the edge of Scarecrow, and the school with no walls.

The Teeming young had learned to play the first morning Dory sat down in the shallow channel and splashed. They'd never stopped. And then the dogs had come, and run straight into the broods' ground, and the Teeming young had stared at them, and then they'd all run together.

And then everybody else's young had come.

The Kethri chicks, born that spring in the gardener's trees, small and grey and already winged, because their queens had sung their wings back before they hatched. They learned to fly by jumping off the top of the slide in the children's part of the park, which Garnet said was cheating and Edda said was the safest thing she'd ever seen anyone do on that slide.

The Drenn young. A few dozen of them, born on Avalon to the ones who stood round the school. Blue-black and glossy and thin, with four short arms and blunt soft nubs at the ends where the blades would grow. They didn't know how to play. Their world had never had room for it. They stood very still at the edge of the broods' ground with their arms folded, the way their parents stood, and watched.

Rory the second taught them.

He was nearly two by then. Walking. Setting fire to things and putting them back. And he toddled up to the nearest Drenn young, who was twice his height, and looked up at it very seriously.

And then he sat down in the shallow channel of water and splashed.

The Drenn young looked at him for a long time.

Then, very slowly, it unfolded its four short arms.

And sat down beside him.

Ash learned to fly that summer.

She was two, and looked five. She'd been watching the twins since she could watch anything. And one morning, on the red glass, she held up her arms to Garnet, the way she held them up to be picked up.

And went up anyway.

Garnet caught her about four feet off the ground. Out of pure reflex. Then looked at her.

"Ash," said Garnet. "You're not supposed to do that till you're big."

Ash looked at her very seriously from four feet up, with her branching silver bright on her arms and the little glass flames at the tips of every branch.

"I am big," she said.

And went up another foot, out of Garnet's hands, and hung there.

Garnet looked at me.

"She is, a bit," I said.

"Lucas."

"I know."

Dory didn't fly. Dory didn't want to. Dory said flying was for people who didn't have anything to do on the ground, and she had everyone to check.

But she checked everyone. Every morning. From one end of the park to the other. Every Teeming young and every Kethri chick and every dog and every Drenn young with its short soft arms, and the children from the new city, and the furred young on their cold hill, and the heron young in the marsh.

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

And somehow, after she'd been past, they played together a little better.

Edda said she had no idea how that worked. She'd written it down anyway. On the page headed things I'm no longer surprised by. It was eleven pages long now.

Hana and I went riding.

That was the first time. Two weeks after the kitchen table. Neither of us had said anything to each other in those two weeks. Not about that. We'd seen each other most days, at the dawn, at the drills, at the green on music nights. Hana had said good morning every time, very carefully, every word right, and gone pink to the ears, and I'd said good morning back, and probably gone pink too, because Sera said afterward I'd looked like a boiled beet for a fortnight.

Then, on the fifteenth morning, Hana came to the end of the red glass after the hello with Bess on a lead rope.

And another horse behind her. A big brown one, with white on her face and hair on her feet.

"This is Meg," said Hana.

"Meg?"

"The old woman named her. Before. For Meg Thorne." Hana went pinker. "Because she's very solid and doesn't panic." She held out the lead rope. "I asked the old woman if you could ride her. She said yes. She said you'd fall off."

"I probably will."

"I know," said Hana. "I'll pick you up."

I fell off three times.

Not because Meg did anything. Meg was very solid and didn't panic. She stood still every time, looking down at me on the grass with enormous patience, while Hana got off Bess and came and picked me up.

The third time, Hana was laughing so hard she couldn't help me. She sat down on the grass beside me instead. Right where I'd landed, at the edge of the seventh lake, under the cherry trees, which had finished blossoming and were starting to have small hard green fruit on them, the first fruit they'd ever grown under a sun that wasn't a lamp.

"You can lift a mountain," said Hana. When she could talk. "You can open a Hand. You can fly faster than anything on Avalon."

"Yes."

"And you can't stay on a horse."

"No."

Hana looked at me for a long time. With both sides of her face. With the water curves on her forearms bright in the sun.

"Good," she said. "There should be something."

After that, we went every few days.

Riding, when I'd learned to stay on. Swimming in the third lake, where Hana taught the children, with Ulu young drifting round us translucent and glowing. Walking up the slope of the Nivi mountain to the Singing Garden at dusk, to sit among the hollow glass pillars when the wind came off the top, and listen.

Once, at the Singing Garden, she said something I didn't expect.

"I used to think I'd die in a cistern," she said. "In the dome. In the pressure chamber. On the floor, with the water going out of me." She was looking at the pillars. "And then I didn't. And I thought I'd die in a bed in the medical wing, never saying the right word again." A pause. "And then I didn't. And then I thought I'd be a girl on the lower floors carrying letters in her head for the rest of her life, that nobody looked at."

She turned to me.

"I never thought there'd be this," she said. "Any of it. Horses. Lakes. Pillars that sing." She swallowed. "You."

I didn't say anything.

I took her hand.

The pillars rang.

She moved in at the end of the summer.

Not all at once. Nothing on Avalon happened all at once any more. Pell had seen to that. She came for supper, at first, most nights, the way she had the night of the kitchen table. Then she stayed late, on the porch, with the four of us and the children and Mother and whatever Dory had decided to bring home that day. Then one night it rained, a real rain, and she stayed. And then she just did.

The house was too small.

It had been too small for a long time. We'd drawn it on a scrap of paper on a wet wall, a long time ago, with one shared room and a small room for a baby. And then there'd been Dory, and Ash, and Trevor, and the crooked cradle, and Mother most mornings, and now Hana.

"Make it bigger," said Garnet. Who'd come round with the old brown dog to see Ash. "You can. You can do it in an afternoon."

"No," said Sera, Risa, Luna and Hana. All at once.

Garnet looked at them.

"Pell," said Luna. "Too perfect. Nobody can live in it."

"Then what?"

"Then we build it," said Hana. Very carefully. "Ourselves. With our hands." She looked at me. "You can do the floor. Nobody minds a warm floor."

So we built it.

All five of us. With Gareth, who came round with his spanner and said the doorways were too narrow, and was right. With Liam and Rory, who carried the heavy beams and argued about which way they went. With Keir, who checked every joint twice. With Thorne, who brought bread at noon and didn't say anything, and stayed to hold the end of a plank.

A new room on the side. For Hana. With a window that looked out at the park, toward the seventh lake and the barn where the horses were. The window went in crooked. Hana said she liked it crooked. She said it was hers.

And a bigger room for the children. With five beds in it, because Luna said we should plan ahead, and nobody argued.

And the shared room. Bigger. We knocked out a wall to do it. Sera did that, with her fire, very carefully, and then put it back, and the wall just wasn't there any more.

It took all autumn. It was the crookedest house in Scarecrow. Agnes came to look at it and said it was nearly as ugly as hers, and she meant it as a compliment.

We talked about children that winter.

At the kitchen table. At night, after the children were asleep in their new room with five beds in it, and Mother had gone home, and the old brown dog had gone home with Garnet. The five of us. With the lamp turned low.

Luna started it. Of course she did. She opened her notebook.

"Five beds," she said.

"You said plan ahead," said Risa.

"I did," said Luna. "So I'm planning." She looked round the table. "How many?"

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"How many what?" said Sera. Although she knew.

"Children," said Luna. "Each. How many do you want." She tapped the notebook. "I'd like to know. For the plan."

Sera went first.

"Four," she said. Without even thinking. "At least. Calders are loud. Calders come in lots." She looked at the ceiling. "I grew up with Liam setting fire to the curtains and Pip arriving when I was old enough to change her and Mum shouting at all of us. I want that. I want a house so full you can't hear yourself think."

"Four," said Luna. Writing it down.

"At least."

"At least four," said Luna. Writing it down.

Risa went second.

"Three," she said. "Dory and two more." She turned her cup round in her hands. "I grew up in a house with one brother and a father who signed things and never looked up. I want three. So none of them is ever the only one at the table." A pause. "And so Dory has someone to check besides everyone else in the world."

"Three," said Luna. Writing.

Hana went third.

She'd been very quiet. She was always quiet at the table, still. She was getting used to it. To being one of the people round it, not someone who came for supper.

"I grew up six in two rooms," she said. Very carefully. "On Harbor Block 44. My mother and father and my grandmother and the three of us. Six in two rooms. And we were happy. Mostly." She looked at her hands. "I don't know a number. I'd like—" She stopped. Went pink. "I'd like as many as the house will hold."

"The house holds five beds," said Luna.

"Then we'll build another room," said Hana.

Sera laughed. Out loud. Risa put her arm round Hana's shoulders.

Luna wrote down: As many as the house will hold. Then another room.

Then they all looked at Luna.

She looked at her notebook for a long time.

"Two," she said. "I'd thought two. Trevor and one more. I'd drafted it." She looked up. "I'd drafted it four times. Two, every time."

"And now?" said Risa.

Luna didn't answer straight away.

"Now I've written down four, and three, and as many as the house holds," she said. "And I'm looking at it. And I'm thinking that if every one of them is a brother or a sister to every other one, and every one of them has four mothers, then two of mine is two in a house of—" She did the sum. Her lips moved. "A great many."

"And?" said Sera.

"And I don't think two's enough," said Luna. Very quietly. "I think I'd like three."

She wrote it down. Under the others.

Then she crossed out two on the line above, where she'd drafted it four times.

Then they all looked at me.

I'd been sitting at the end of the table, listening. The whole time. Not saying anything.

"Well?" said Sera.

"Well what?"

"How many do you want?"

I looked at them. At the four of them round the kitchen table in the crooked house, with the lamp turned low, and the notebook open, and the list on it. At least four. Three. As many as the house will hold. Three.

I thought about Father. In the house in the dead field, with three of us. Genny and Garnet and me. And Mother, holding three bowls and the flour and the eggs, every morning, so steadily I didn't know what I was watching.

"As many as you all want," I said.

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

"It's the only one I've got."

Luna looked at me for a long time.

Then she wrote it down. At the bottom of the list. L: as many as we all want.

"That," said Luna, "is going to need a very big house."

The message came in the spring.

Through the seed. At night. Juno came up the street to our house in the dark and banged on the door so hard she woke Trevor, and Trevor frosted the whole of the children's room, and Ash woke up and changed the frost into glass, and Dory woke up and checked everyone and said Juno's frightened.

Juno was frightened.

She stood in the kitchen doorway with her eyes very wide and her hands shaking, and said: "It's Voss."

Okafor came. Holt. The General. Pell.

Juno sat at our table with her eyes shut and her hands flat on the wood, and put it into words. The seed was very small, and Voss had no silver, and the queens could only hear the shape of what she thought. But they'd heard it. And passed it to the first queen, and the first queen to Dory, and Dory to Juno.

Major.

Very faint. Very far. Like a voice down a very long pipe.

I've been removed.

The Senate met this morning. In closed session. Without me. A pause. The Overseer's replacement was there. The small polite one. It sat in my chair.

They've charged me. Another pause. Longer. Conspiring against the human race. Aiding a hostile power. Opening the locks. Every night. For two years.

They know about the animals. The orchards. The seed vault. Someone counted. The second agricultural level is empty. The orchard floors are empty. Somebody went down and counted.

I'm in my rooms at the Senate Residence. There are soldiers at the door. Not Okafor's. Friese's old aides. The ones he moved to his office, years ago. They came for me at noon.

Juno stopped. Her hands were very still on the table.

"There's more," she said.

"Say it," said Okafor.

Juno swallowed.

There's to be a trial, said Voss. In nine days. In the Senate Annex. In public.

They've already decided.

They're going to execute me.

Nobody said anything.

Okafor sat very still at the end of our table. Her hands flat on the wood.

"Is there more?" she said.

Juno nodded.

Tell Mara, said Voss. Tell her I'm not afraid. Tell her I still have the post scissors. Tell her I heard Harriet's name, and I said it out loud every night since, in the office, to nobody.

And Major.

There are people still here. Pell's people. People who heard the ships were taking everyone and didn't believe it, or did and were too frightened. People who were waiting for the next time.

There won't be a next time. Not after this. They'll seal the east locks. They'll watch the sky. They'll look closely, now.

Tell them.

Pell stood up.

She'd been in the corner by the stove, the way she always was at our table, very straight, in her grey, with her hands folded. She stood up now. And unfolded them.

"Juno," she said.

Juno looked at her mother.

"Can you reach my people? Through the seed. Through the Chancellor. Can you get a message to them?"

"I don't know," said Juno. "I can try."

"Try," said Pell.

She stood in the middle of our kitchen in the crooked house, with her hands at her sides and her face very still, and said it. And Juno, with her eyes shut and her hands flat on the table, sent it. Down the thread. Through Dory, asleep again on Mother's lap. Through the first queen. Through eleven light-years of dark. Into a small grey sliver of a dead queen on a chain round the neck of a woman under house arrest in the Senate Residence on Earth, who would have to remember it, and say it, and find a way to get it out.

"This is Harriet Pell," said Pell. "To everyone who's listened to me. To everyone who's carried a letter in their head. To everyone who's been waiting."

"The ships will come once more."

"This is the last time."

"If you want to come, be ready."

Days 1711–1840. Crooked rooms.

Toby, walking home at dusk with Harriet in her sling, heard a flute behind a blue door with a lopsided window: the same four notes, a wrong one, the four again. A boy of eleven or twelve from the third crossing with his grandfather's flute; under the dome no noise after eight, so he'd practised under his blanket with his fingers; on Avalon nobody told him not to. I'm not very good. No; but not bad either, just new. Play me the four. Toby played them back, and a fifth. Again. Eleven by the month's end, thirty by the next: a woman with a squeezebox with stuck keys till Gareth came with a spanner; two old men, drum and trumpet, a first-war band lost to each other thirty years when one moved floors, found again in Thorne's queue; a girl who sings so low the windows hum; a man who can play anything with strings and had nothing, so Liam made him a guitar from gardener wood and wire Garnet drew to the right thickness; and singers, the most of all, who'd only ever sung under their breath on the lower floors.

Every seventh evening on the green by the sapling. Toby, Adaeze in her shell dress, the boy getting half the notes, the old men standing close and not looking at each other playing as if no time had passed, and Harriet singing the counter-note under it all, holding it up. Then the Nivi pillars ringing exactly in tune with Toby; the Karst at the cave mouths echoing a beat behind; the Kethri's rising sound going round and round with the music like wings on wind; the Sef queen sweeping her beam across the green in time, spilling colour. Toby stopped, bow in the air, looked at all of it, at Harriet still singing. Played till dark.

The young played together everywhere. Kethri chicks born winged in the gardener's trees learned to fly off the top of the slide; Garnet says cheating, Edda says the safest thing anyone's done on it. Drenn young born on Avalon, blunt soft nubs where blades will grow, stood at the edge of the broods' ground arms folded like their parents, never having had room to play. Rory the second, nearly two, toddled up to one twice his height and sat in the channel and splashed; it unfolded four short arms and sat beside him. Ash, two and looking five, held her arms up to Garnet and went up anyway; caught at four feet: you're not supposed to till you're big. I am big. She is, a bit. Lucas. Dory won't fly; flying is for people with nothing to do on the ground. She checks the whole park, and they play together a little better after. Edda's things-I'm-no-longer-surprised-by page is eleven pages.

Two weeks of good morning and both of us pink; Sera says I looked like a boiled beet a fortnight. On the fifteenth morning Hana brought Bess and a big brown mare with a white face: Meg, named for Meg Thorne because she's solid and doesn't panic; the old woman says you'll fall off. I'll pick you up. I fell off three times; Meg stood still every time looking down with enormous patience. The third time Hana laughed too hard to help and sat down beside me under the cherries by the seventh lake, small hard green fruit, the first ever under a sun that isn't a lamp. You can lift a mountain, open a Hand, fly faster than anything, and you can't stay on a horse. Good. There should be something.

Every few days: riding when I could stay on, swimming in the third lake among glowing Ulu young, the Singing Garden at dusk. She thought she'd die on the cistern floor with the water going out of her, then in a medical-wing bed never saying the right word, then carrying letters on the lower floors nobody looked at. I never thought there'd be this. Horses, lakes, pillars that sing. You. I took her hand. The pillars rang.

She moved in by the end of summer the way things happen now, slowly: supper, then late on the porch, then a real rain, then she just did. The house drawn on a wet wall was too small long ago. Garnet with the old dog: make it bigger, you can in an afternoon. No, all four at once. Pell: too perfect; nobody can live in it. We'll build it ourselves; you do the floor; nobody minds a warm floor. Gareth said the doorways were too narrow and was right; Liam and Rory carried beams and argued; Keir checked every joint twice; Thorne brought bread at noon, said nothing, stayed to hold a plank. Hana's room on the side with a crooked window toward the lake and the barn; she likes it crooked; it's hers. A children's room with five beds, because plan ahead. The shared room bigger; Sera took a wall out with fire and put it back and the wall just wasn't there. All autumn. The crookedest house in Scarecrow; Agnes said nearly as ugly as hers, a compliment.

That winter at the table, lamp low, Luna's notebook: five beds; how many each, for the plan. Sera: four, at least; Calders come in lots; Liam setting fire to the curtains, Pip when she was old enough to change her, Maura shouting; a house so full you can't hear yourself think. Risa: three, Dory and two; one brother and a father who signed things and never looked up; none of them ever the only one at the table, and someone for Dory to check besides the world. Hana: six in two rooms on Harbor Block 44, mother, father, grandmother and three of us, happy mostly; as many as the house will hold. It holds five beds. Then we'll build another room. Luna: two, drafted four times; but if every one is brother or sister to every other, with four mothers, two of mine in a house of a great many isn't enough; three. She crossed out two. Me: I thought of Father with three of us and Mother holding three bowls so steady I didn't know what I was watching. As many as you all want. That's not an answer. It's the only one I've got. L: as many as we all want. That's going to need a very big house.

Spring, at night: Juno banging on our door woke Trevor, who frosted the children's room, Ash changed the frost to glass, Dory checked everyone: Juno's frightened. Okafor, Holt, the General, Pell. Through the seed, the first queen, Dory, Juno, faint as a voice down a long pipe: I've been removed. The Senate met in closed session without me; the Overseer's replacement sat in my chair. Charged: conspiring against the human race, aiding a hostile power, opening the locks every night for two years. They know about the animals, the orchards, the vault; somebody went down and counted the empty floors. Her rooms at the Senate Residence; soldiers at the door, Friese's old aides. A public trial in nine days in the Senate Annex. They've already decided. They're going to execute me.

Tell Mara I'm not afraid; I still have the post scissors; I heard Harriet's name and have said it aloud every night since in the office to nobody. And Major: Pell's people still here, who didn't believe or were too frightened, waiting for the next time. There won't be one after this; they'll seal the locks, watch the sky, look closely now. Tell them.

Pell stood up from the corner and unfolded her hands. Juno, can you reach my people through the seed? I can try. Try. Down the thread through Dory asleep on Mother's lap, the first queen, eleven light-years, into a sliver on a chain round the neck of a woman under arrest in the Senate Residence who'd have to remember it and get it out: This is Harriet Pell. To everyone who's listened to me, carried a letter in their head, been waiting. The ships will come once more. This is the last time. If you want to come, be ready.