Chapter 308 The Broods

Wren counted everyone the morning after the map room.

Not because Okafor asked. Okafor asked for something else. She stood at the foot of the Scarecrow's ramp at first light with Keir and Aster and a slate full of what the ship would need for a crossing longer than any she'd made, and said, "How long?"

"Four months," said Keir. "To do it properly. Water for the whole crossing. Air. Food. A hold the Drenn queen can stand up straight in if she wants to. A way to see from far off without being seen." He looked at the long dark ship with its fins folded against its sides. "She was built to stand over a dome. Not to go further than anyone's been and come back."

"Four months," said Okafor.

She didn't argue. She wrote 4 on her slate. Then she turned and looked back across the plain at the city.

And stood there for a long time.

"Marsh," she said.

Wren was on the north wall already. She always was, at dawn. But she heard. Wren heard everything.

"Ma'am."

"How many of us are there?"

Wren didn't know.

Nobody did. That was the thing. That was the thing Okafor had worked out, standing at the foot of a ramp at dawn, and it frightened her more than the ring and the two suns had.

Luna had the arrivals list. Luna had always had the arrivals list. Every crossing, every name, every family, written down as they came off the ramps. But the last crossing hadn't come off ramps. It had walked through three doors in the dome glass, tens of thousands of people at once, on foot, with their dogs and their starters and their grandfathers' flutes. Nobody had written them down. There hadn't been time.

And before that, the orchards. And the animals. And Pell's people, two years of them, a few at a time through the east locks every night, landing on Avalon in the dark and going wherever there was room.

"I've got names for about half," said Luna, at the kitchen table, that night. She had the list in front of her. All of it. It went across the whole table and onto the floor. "Maybe less. People moved. People were born. People came through the glass and walked straight into the city and built themselves a house and nobody asked who they were." She put her pen down. "I don't know how many people live on Avalon, Lucas. I don't know how many beds we need. I don't know how much water."

"Wren knows," said Risa. From the other end of the table, with Dory asleep across her lap. "Or she could."

So Wren counted.

Harriet sang the note at dawn the way she did every morning, Toby's counter-note, high and clear, out across the whole of Scarecrow. And it went out further than it ever had, because Wren asked her to sing it louder, and Harriet was small and loved being asked to do anything louder. It went over the city. Over the park and the wheel and the schools and the caves. Out across the farms on the plain, and the orchards, and the long low barn by the seventh lake. And it came back. Off every wall. Off every roof. Off every face.

And Wren stood on the north wall with her eyes shut and her head tilted and counted.

It took her all morning.

Toby stood beside her the whole time with his hand on her back. He said afterward he'd never seen her so still. He said her lips were moving the whole time, very fast, and her face was the face she had when she was counting the forty, and he'd been frightened she wouldn't stop.

She stopped a little after noon.

She opened her eyes.

She sat down very suddenly on the wall, the way Hana had sat down on the green, and put her head between her knees, and Toby crouched beside her, and Harriet, who'd been singing for five hours, fell asleep in her sling mid-note.

"Well?" said Okafor. Very quietly. From the foot of the wall.

Wren took a long breath.

"Two hundred and eleven thousand," she said. "Four hundred and six." A pause. "People. Just people. Humans. I didn't count the others." She looked up at Okafor. "I don't know how to count the others yet. The note comes back off them differently. Some of them it goes straight through."

Okafor didn't say anything for a long time.

"The dome was four million," she said at last. "And it had six hundred years of pipes."

The city had been built for twenty thousand.

That's what it came down to. When I'd sat down with Pell and Holt and drawn it out on the red glass, the first time, the time Pell had looked at my houses and told me they were too perfect, there'd been about twenty thousand people on Avalon. I'd made the water for twenty thousand. The drains. The streets. The schools and the hospital and the grain stores. All of it for twenty thousand, with room to grow to thirty.

There were two hundred and eleven thousand.

And it still worked. Mostly. Because people are clever. Because the third crossing had brought plumbers and electricians and the woman who'd run the waterworks on the forty-first floor, and they'd seen what wasn't there and quietly made it. Pipes off my pipes. Drains off my drains. A house on top of a Karst cave because nobody knew there was a cave there, and the floor sang at night.

And because, Ruth said, standing in the map room with her coat buttoned wrong, it had been summer.

"Summer's easy," she said. "Everyone's outside. Water's plentiful. The drains run. Nobody's sick." She looked at the map. At the city, sprawled out now in every direction from the square, much further than the lines I'd drawn. "Winter's when a city finds out what it's made of. Everyone inside. Close together. Water freezing in the pipes nobody buried deep enough. Drains backing up. One sick child in a house with twelve people in it." She put her finger on the edge of the map, on the new streets nobody had drawn. "I've seen it. The year the lower floors flooded. We lost four hundred people to something we'd cured a hundred years before, because the water and the drains got into each other."

Nobody said anything.

"I'll need a hospital twice that size," said Ruth. "At least. And I'll need water that never touches a drain. Not once. Not anywhere. Not even for a yard."

So that was the season.

Not the war. Not the ring and the two suns. Not the rows of small shapes with their hands together. Those were waiting, and everyone knew they were waiting, and the Scarecrow sat on the plain with Keir's people crawling all over her and her fins folded and the Drenn queen in her room, and every morning Okafor looked at her and then looked at the city.

"Four months," she said, to me, once. "Keir needs four months. Good. I'll use them." She looked at the sprawl of crooked roofs. "I'm not sending you out further than the ninth line and leaving two hundred thousand people behind in a city built for twenty. Halloway's right. It has to stand without you. All of it."

We started with water.

Kwame and me. Kwame Osei, Hana's father, who'd turned a river on Earth, under the dome, the whole of his life, so that it went where the dome needed it, and who'd come to Avalon and found that rivers here listened to him even better. He stood with me at the top of the canyon on the first morning with Luna's map between us and looked at where the seventh lake was. And where the city was. And where the city was going to be.

"You can't do it all," he said. "Not again. You did it last time. Every pipe. Every tap. Every drain." He shook his head. "Then the man who knows pipes from the forty-first floor comes and he can't fix them, because he doesn't know how you made them."

"Pell said that about the houses."

"Pell's right about most things," said Kwame. "Annoyingly." He looked at the lake. "Make the big ones. The ones under the ground. The ones nobody can make but you. Then show the pipe man where they are. And let him make the rest."

So I made the big ones.

Three of them. From the seventh lake, where the water was cleanest, under the plain, through the grey-black rock that doesn't mind holding things, to three great cisterns cut deep under the north, east, and west of the city. Each one bigger than the hollow. Kwame brought the water down them. Slowly. The way a river moves. He stood at the head of each one, the morning it opened, with his hands out, and the lake came to him like a dog that knows its name.

Then the pipe man came.

He was called Bram Okonedo, and he'd kept the forty-first floor waterworks running for thirty-one years with nothing but spare parts and swearing. He went down into the first cistern with a lamp and stayed there for a whole day. When he came up, he had a list.

It was a long list.

"You put the outflow on the wrong side," he said. "For a cistern this size. It'll silt. Not this year. In ten." He looked at the next item. "And there's no way to shut one off and keep the others running, if you need to clean it. Or if something gets in." He looked at me over the top of the list. "Can you move an outflow?"

"Yes."

"Then move it," said Bram Okonedo. "And then don't touch anything else. I'll do the rest."

He did the rest.

He and four hundred people from the third crossing who'd worked water in the dome, and two hundred more who hadn't but wanted to learn, and Keir's people when they could be spared from the Scarecrow, and Kwame, walking the lines every evening with his hands out, feeling where the water was going and where it wasn't.

They laid pipe through the whole city. Not the way I'd have done it. Not perfect. Some of it was crooked. Some of it went round things instead of through them, because somebody's grandmother's apple tree was there and nobody wanted to move it. Bram said that was fine. Bram said water didn't mind going round an apple tree, it was people who minded going without one.

And under all of it, deeper, separate, never touching the water, never once, not even for a yard, the drains.

Ruth checked every crossing point. Every single one. On her knees, in the mud, with a lamp, in her coat. Bram followed her round with his list, and they argued the whole way, and at the end of the season they'd checked eleven thousand crossing points and Ruth stood up at the last one and said "Good," and Bram said "About time," and they shook hands, and went and had tea at Meg's.

But that was only the humans.

That was the thing that took the longest to understand. It was Voss who said it, in the end. Not me. Not Okafor. Voss, in the map room, with her book.

"You keep saying the city," she said. "Two hundred thousand people. Water. Drains. Houses." She opened her book. "I've had forty-one complaints this season that weren't from people."

Holt looked up.

"Not from humans," said Voss. "From the others. Through Juno, mostly. Some through the children, who hear them better than anyone." She turned a page. "The Karst queen says the new pipes on the north edge are too loud. Her young can hear the water through the rock. All night. They can't sleep. The moth young in the dark grove say the new lamps on the park road are too bright and they can't come out at all any more. Three Kethri have flown into the new waterworks tower since it went up because it's the same colour as the sky at dawn. The salt young are frightened of the new cistern on the west side because it's under their terrace and they can feel the water coming closer." She looked up. "The Hesk would like to know why there are now roads across their sunning ground. They're not angry. They'd just like to know. They said nobody asked."

Nobody said anything.

"Nobody did ask," said Voss. "I didn't ask either. I ran four million people for twenty years and I never once asked anyone who wasn't human what they needed." She closed the book. "We're not building a city for two hundred thousand people. We're building it for two hundred thousand people and every brood on Avalon. And we've been doing it as if the broods were weather."

So Okafor called a council.

Not the map room. The map room was too small, Holt said, and he'd always hated the door. Okafor called it on the green, under the silver tree, at noon. And she didn't invite people. She invited everyone. One from every brood.

The Teeming came first, of course. Our queen didn't leave her garden wall. But she sent Pebble, and Pebble sat on the grass at the foot of the tree with his short legs folded under him, very solemn. Sesh, for the Kethri, with her wings folded, and one of the young ones who'd broken a wing on the school. The Drenn queen herself, because she'd been told she could leave the Scarecrow any time she liked and wanted to see if it was true. A Karst, long and low and many-legged, with its fine hairs all turned toward the tree. One of the Hesk, enormous, lying in the sun on the edge of the green with its jaw on the grass. A moth young from the dark grove, wrapped in a blanket Garnet had made it so it could come out in the day. The heavy queen didn't come; she couldn't, she'd have gone through the green. She sent one of her young, small and dense and slow, who took most of the morning to cross the square.

And the people. Holt. Voss. Kwame and Bram. Keir and Aster. Luna, with the map. Ruth. Edda. Meg's daughter, from the bakery, because Holt said somebody who wasn't in charge of anything ought to be there.

And me.

I was there because Juno couldn't do it alone. Not every brood at once. Juno could hear one queen at a time, two if she was fresh, under the words. But I could hear all of them. Through the hello. Through Dory, who sat on my knee the whole afternoon with Pebble beside her, checking everybody. I sat in the middle of the green with my eyes shut and every queen on Avalon in my head, and said what they said, one after another, so the people could hear.

That was all I did. I didn't build anything that day. I just listened, and said it out loud.

It took until dark.

Here's some of what they said.

The Karst queen didn't want the pipes moved. She wanted them wrapped. Something soft round them where they went through her rock, so the water didn't ring. Bram said he could do that. Bram said he'd been wrapping pipes his whole life so the people on the floor below couldn't hear the people on the floor above flushing.

The moth young didn't want the lamps taken away. They understood the people needed light. They wanted the lamps shaded on one side. The grove side. And turned off on the park road at the deep part of the night, when the young came out to feed. Keir said he'd put a hood on every lamp on that road by the end of the week, and a switch.

Sesh wanted the waterworks tower painted. Not the colour of the sky. Any colour that wasn't the sky. Garnet stood up before anyone could answer and said she'd do it. Orange. With stripes. Nobody argued.

The Hesk wanted the roads moved off the sunning ground. Not far. Just to the edge. They didn't mind people. They liked people. People were warm and they moved slowly in the morning, like Hesk. But the sunning ground was where the young lay in the first light and grew, and you didn't put a road through a nursery.

"No," said Holt. "No, you don't."

And the salt young wanted the west cistern moved.

Everyone looked at me.

"I can," I said.

"How long?"

"A day." I looked at Bram. "If you'll tell me where the outflow should go."

Bram looked at me for a long moment. Then he took out his list and turned it over and drew on the back. A cistern, and an outflow, on the right side.

"There," he said. "And then don't touch anything else."

And the Drenn queen asked one question.

She'd been very quiet all afternoon. Standing on the edge of the green on her four arms, her blades folded, looking at all of it. The broods. The people. The tree. The children in the school beyond, where her young stood round the edge facing out.

Near dusk, she spoke. Through me.

Where do my young go when they are hurt?

Nobody answered at once.

On our world, said the Drenn queen, there was nowhere. A Drenn that was hurt was eaten. By the world, or by another Drenn. That was the only medicine. Her great head turned toward the hospital, across the square, with its long corridor and its lamps just coming on. I have seen your humans go into that place hurt and come out walking. I would like to know if my young are allowed.

Ruth stood up.

She'd been sitting on the grass beside Edda all afternoon with her notebook on her knee, writing down every word I said. She stood up now. A small woman in a coat buttoned wrong, in front of a Drenn queen whose blades were each as long as Ruth was tall.

"Yes," said Ruth. "Your young are allowed. Every one. Every brood. Anybody who's hurt." She paused. "But I have to tell you the truth, ma'am. I don't know how to help them. I don't know what's inside a Drenn. I don't know what's inside any of you. I've splinted one Kethri wing and lost a great deal of sleep over it."

The Drenn queen looked down at her.

Then how will you help them?

"I'll ask," said Ruth Halloway. "If you'll tell me."

She asked every queen on Avalon.

One at a time. Over the rest of that season. Every afternoon, after her rounds, Ruth would walk up the canyon to the garden wall with Edda and Genny and a stack of paper, and Juno, or me if Juno was tired, and sit in front of a queen, and ask.

It went slowly. It had to. The queens didn't think about bodies the way Ruth did. They didn't have words for bone or blood or infection. They had words for my young, and for whole, and for broken, and for a great many things that didn't have a word in any human tongue at all.

So Ruth asked differently.

"What does your young look like when it's well?" she'd ask. And then: "And when it's not?"

And the queen would show. Through the hello. Through Juno or me. And I'd say it out loud. And Genny would write it down. And Edda would listen with her mouth in its line and ask the question Ruth hadn't thought of, the one a midwife asks, the practical one. And what do you do, when that happens?

That was the question that mattered most. Because the queens had been doing medicine for a very long time. Longer than humans had been standing up. They just didn't call it that.

Our queen sang to her young when they were hurt.

I'd known that. I'd seen it on the plain, after the first fights, every Teeming that was hurt being sung to by its queen. I'd never asked what the singing did.

Ruth asked.

It tells the body what shape it was, said the queen. So it can be that shape again.

Ruth sat very still.

"That's what you do," she said to me, afterward, walking back down the canyon in the dusk. "Isn't it? You ask a body what shape it wants to be. You learned it from her."

"I learned it from Father," I said. "From the forge. Asking the steel."

"Same thing," said Ruth. "Different steel."

The Kethri bones were hollow. Like birds. Light. They broke easily and mended fast, if they were held straight, and badly, if they weren't. Splint the wing open, Sesh said. Not closed. A wing splinted closed forgets how to open.

The Drenn blades came away at the joint when they were hurt, like a tooth. New ones grew. But the place where they came away was the only soft part of a Drenn, and if anything got into it, it went bad very fast. The Drenn queen had lost young to that on her world. Thousands. Ruth wrote it down with her lips pressed together. Then she turned to Genny.

"Something for the joint," she said. "Something clean. That keeps things out."

Genny was already writing.

The Karst felt everything through their fine hairs. Pain, too. Touch a hurt Karst anywhere and it felt it everywhere. The Karst queen said the young needed to be held, when they were hurt, but not touched. Held by sound. A low note, all round them, so they knew where they were without anyone's hands on them.

Ruth looked at me.

"Toby," I said.

"Toby," said Ruth.

The salt young dissolved in water. Edda had nearly washed one, once, the first week they came, when it scraped itself on the terrace. The salt queen had stopped her through the hello, so loud that every queen on Avalon had flinched. Never water. Ruth put that on the first page, underlined three times.

The moth young couldn't bear light. Any light. Even a lamp. If one was hurt, it had to be treated in the dark. Ruth asked how she was supposed to see what she was doing. The moth queen said: you do not see. You listen. They will tell you where.

The furred young overheated. Every summer. Since they'd come. Ruth had already noticed; she'd had three in the hospital in the hottest week of the year, flat and panting, with their tongues out. The furred queen said on their world there had been snow half the year, and they didn't know what to do with a summer. Ruth asked Luna if she could make a cold room for them. Luna said she could do better. She made one whole hill. With her father. The General stood at the top of it in his coat and laid frost down it slow and even, all one night, the way he'd laid ice under the Kethri forest.

The heavy young were so dense nothing Ruth had could cut them. Not a knife. Not a needle. If one was ever hurt inside, she'd need me. Or someone like me. She wrote that down too. Then underlined it. Then wrote, underneath, find someone like him. Before he goes.

The books were Genny's idea.

Ruth had been writing everything on loose sheets. Hundreds of them. In the records room, at night, filed under the brood, with Edda's notes clipped to hers. It was very orderly. It was Ruth.

Genny looked at the sheets one evening, at the end of a long afternoon at the garden wall, and said, "Nobody can carry that."

Ruth looked up.

"If a Kethri falls out of a tree on the far side of the plain," said Genny, "and there's a nurse there, and she's never seen a Kethri, she can't carry the records room. She needs something small. That she can put in her bag. That tells her what to do, in order, from the first page." She picked up one of the sheets. The salt young. Never water. "One book. For each brood. Same size. Same order inside. So if you've read one, you can find your way round all of them with your eyes shut."

Ruth looked at her for a long time.

"Like the drawers," she said.

"Like the drawers," said Genny.

So they wrote books.

All three of them. In the long room, at night, after the classes, with the lamps turned low. Ruth wrote what was inside. Edda wrote what to do. Genny wrote what the queens had said, in their words, as near as she could get them. And the medicines. Every one she'd made from the ark's plants, and every one she'd found that worked on a brood and every one she'd found that didn't. She was very careful about the ones that didn't. She put them in red.

Garnet drew them.

Every brood. Inside and out. She sat with Ruth in front of the ring, with a Karst young lying in it, very still, held by Toby's low note so it didn't feel the ring going round, and drew what was on the wall. Then she sat with the Karst queen in the cave and drew what the queen showed her through the hello. Then she put the two drawings side by side and drew a third one, from both, that was better than either.

"How do you know it's right?" Ruth asked her, once.

"I don't," said Garnet. "I ask Genny. Genny asks the queen. If the queen says yes, that one, it's right." She shaded a leg. "It's like Dot. You can't draw Dot from the outside. You have to know what she's for."

The first book was finished at the end of the season.

The Teeming. Because they were first. Because there were more of them on Avalon than any other brood, and because our queen had been the first to answer. A small, plain book. Blue cover. Garnet's drawing of Pebble on the front, very solemn, with his short legs folded under him. And inside, in order, on every page, in the same place every time:

What they are. What they look like well. What they look like hurt. What to do first. What not to do. What the queen says.

And at the end, a page that was the same in every book they ever made, afterward. In Ruth's small upright writing.

What we don't know yet.

It was the longest page.

Ruth said that was good. Ruth said a book that didn't have that page was lying.

They had eleven more started by the time the Scarecrow was nearly ready. Kethri. Drenn. Karst. Salt. Moth. Furred. Hesk. Coral. The marsh young. The floating young from the gas moon, who'd been the hardest of all, because Ruth couldn't put them in the ring without them floating out of it. The heavy young.

And one more, that nobody had asked for. That Genny started on her own, at the end of the kitchen table, at night, in her own notebook. The patient. Her brood. Whatever it was. With nothing on most of the pages yet, and the last page very long.

That was the season.

The water and the drains and the hooded lamps and the orange waterworks tower with its stripes. The roads moved off the sunning ground. The pipes wrapped under the north edge, so the Karst young slept. The cold hill for the furred young. The salt cistern moved, in a day, with the outflow on the right side.

And the hospital twice the size. Ruth's corridor running all the way out to the park now, with wings off it for every brood, and every wing laid out the same, and every drawer in the same place. A dark wing for the moths, with no lamps at all. A dry wing for the salt young, where no water ran. A wing with high ceilings and perches, for the Kethri. And a long low hall at the end, with soft walls, where Toby went every afternoon to sit with the Karst young who were hurt and hold them in a note.

And then, in the middle of all of it, Hana.

It was the end of a long day. Bram had found a crossing point where the water and the drains had come within a hand's width of each other, and Ruth had gone very quiet, the way she did, and we'd spent the afternoon in a trench in the rain moving one of them. I came home wet to the knees.

Hana was at the kitchen table.

She was sitting very straight. With her hands flat on the wood. Risa was beside her, holding one of them. Luna on her other side. Sera standing behind her with both hands on her shoulders. All of them looking at me.

I stopped in the doorway.

"Sit down," said Luna.

I sat down.

Hana looked at me. She'd gone pink. Then red. Then something past red that I'd never seen anyone go.

"Ruth put me in the ring," she said. "This afternoon. While you were in the trench."

"Are you hurt?"

"No." Hana took a breath. Then she said it, very carefully. Every word right. The way she said good morning, every morning, still. "I'm going to have a baby."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't.

"Two," said Hana.

"Two," I said.

"Two," said Risa. She was trying very hard not to laugh. She wasn't managing. "Two babies, Lucas. Ruth said she looked three times. Edda looked twice. Toby came in from the Karst hall and listened and went white and said there's two notes and had to sit down."

"Twins," said Sera. Behind Hana. Her hands still on her shoulders. Very hot. "Like the girls. Ruth says they're both whole. Both silver. Both—" She stopped. Her face did something. "Both yours. Both hers."

Hana was looking at me. Waiting. The way she'd waited in the barn, with the brush in her hand, brushing the same patch of Bess over and over.

"You said," she said. Very quietly. "At the table. When Luna asked how many. You said as many as you all want." She swallowed. "I said as many as the house will hold."

"It holds five beds," said Luna. "I counted."

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

Hana's face broke.

Not the way I'd thought it would. She didn't cry. She laughed. Very loudly. The way she'd laughed the first time she lifted Bess's hairy foot and Bess let her. And put her face in her hands. And Risa put her arms round her from one side and Luna from the other and Sera bent down over the top of all of them, and I sat there wet to the knees in the kitchen with mud on my boots and the four of them all holding each other at the table, and I couldn't say anything at all.

Mother came in from the children's room with Trevor on her hip. She looked at all of us. At Hana, laughing into her hands.

"Twins?" she said.

"How did you know?" said Risa.

"I had twins," said Mother. "That's the face." She put Trevor down. He immediately froze the floor. "Well. I hope you're ready, Hana. They talk to each other in the dark and they never tell you what they said."

Risa told me about hers three days later.

Or rather, Dory did.

Dory had been very quiet since Hana's news. Dory was not often quiet. She'd gone round the park every morning on foot, the way she always did, with Pebble a step behind and Ash a step behind Pebble, checking everybody. But she'd been checking her mother more than anyone. Walking past Risa in the kitchen and stopping and looking. With the frost-lattice round her eyes very bright.

On the third morning, at breakfast, she stopped beside Risa's chair. And put her hand flat on Risa's stomach. The way Mother put her hand flat on things. The way Dory had stood with her hand flat on the quiet-room door for an hour, the night Ash was born.

"Mama," she said. "There's somebody in there."

Risa went completely still.

"I've been checking," said Dory. Very seriously. "Since Hana. Because Hana has two and I wanted to see what two looked like. And I looked at you, and you had one." She considered. "It's very small. It's the same as me. Storm. And Papa's." She looked up at Risa. "Did you know?"

Risa opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

There was a sound like distant thunder, very faint, from somewhere above the house. Out of a perfectly clear sky.

"No," said Risa. "No, I—" She looked at me across the table. Her hair was starting to lift. Very slightly. "I didn't know."

"I knew first," said Dory. With enormous satisfaction. "Before Grandma. Before Ruth. Before anybody." She took her hand away. "I'm going to have a brother or a sister. And Hana's having two. That's three." She counted on her fingers. "Four with Trevor. Five with Ash. Six with me." She frowned. "Seven with Pebble."

"Pebble's not—" Luna started.

"Pebble is," said Dory. Very firmly. And went back to her porridge.

Ruth confirmed it that afternoon. One minute in the ring. Something smaller than a fingernail, with a silver thread curled round it, and the faintest crackle on the wall that might have been lightning.

"Faster than Dory," said Ruth. Looking at it. "Edda?"

Edda had the green book open on its shelf. She'd taken it down. She hardly ever took it down any more.

"Dory was quick," said Edda. "This'll be quicker." She turned a page. Things I'm no longer surprised by. "Every one's quicker than the one before. Every child with two finished parents." She shook her head slowly. "I'll need to make room on the page."

"Three," said Ruth. Writing it down in the new records. "In one house. All due about the same time." She looked at me over the top of the sheet. "When does the Scarecrow leave?"

"Keir says a few more weeks."

"And you'll be gone how long?"

"I don't know."

Ruth looked at me for a long moment. Then she wrote something else on the sheet. I read it upside down. I'd learned to, in quarantine, through the glass.

Father away. Find someone like him. Before he goes.

She'd underlined it twice.

That night, on the porch, the whole house was asleep but me.

Five beds. Dory and Ash in theirs, with Pebble at the foot. Trevor in his cot under his crust of frost. Mother in her room down the hall. Luna and Sera together, the way they slept most nights now, with the cold and the warm meeting halfway. Risa. And Hana, who'd fallen asleep in the middle of telling me what she'd name them if they were both girls, and then if they were both boys, and then if they were one of each, and had got all the way to the third set of names before she stopped talking.

I sat in Father's chair and looked at the city.

All of it. Spread out under the two moons. Further than I could see. Two hundred and eleven thousand people and every brood, asleep. The hooded lamps on the park road dark, so the moths could feed. The orange tower with its stripes. The cold hill, white under the moons, with the furred young sleeping on top of it. The salt terrace glittering. Somewhere under the north edge, the Karst young asleep, because the pipes were wrapped.

And the hospital, lit, on the square, with its long corridor and its wings. With its books. With Toby asleep in a chair in the Karst hall because he'd stayed to hold one last young in a note and nodded off. With Ruth in the records room, I knew, still up, buttoning her coat wrong.

And out on the plain, the Scarecrow. Dark. Fins folded. Waiting.

Ruth's line was going round in my head. Find someone like him. Before he goes.

I didn't know who that was.

I thought about the heavy young, who no knife could cut. About the patient, with the grey coming off her a fold at a time. About the rows of small shapes with smooth faces in Garnet's drawing, sitting straight, with their hands together, waiting for someone to tell them they could ask.

About Genny, at the end of the kitchen table, asking a willow what it wanted to be. And taking away everything that wasn't that.

I just do it slower. So I can write it down.

I thought I might know who it was after all.

Days 1949–2010. The broods.

Okafor at the Scarecrow's ramp at dawn: how long? Keir: four months to do it properly, water, air, food, a hold the Drenn queen can stand up in, a way to see without being seen; she was built to stand over a dome. She wrote 4 and looked at the city a long time. Marsh, how many of us are there? Nobody knew. Luna's list had names for half, maybe less; the last crossing walked through three doors and nobody wrote them down. Harriet sang louder because Wren asked and Harriet loves being asked to do anything louder; it went out over everything and came back off every face. Wren on the wall all morning, lips moving fast; she stopped after noon and sat down hard. Two hundred and eleven thousand four hundred and six. Just humans; I don't know how to count the others yet; some of them it goes straight through. Okafor: the dome was four million and it had six hundred years of pipes.

The city was built for twenty thousand. It still worked, mostly, because the third crossing brought plumbers and the woman who ran waterworks on the forty-first floor, pipes off my pipes. Ruth: summer's easy; winter's when a city finds out what it's made of; the year the lower floors flooded we lost four hundred to something cured a hundred years before because the water and the drains got into each other. Water that never touches a drain, not even for a yard. Okafor: I'm not sending you further than the ninth line and leaving two hundred thousand in a city built for twenty. It has to stand without you.

Kwame at the top of the canyon: you can't do it all again; make the big ones nobody else can; show the pipe man; let him make the rest. Three tunnels from the seventh lake through the grey-black rock to three cisterns bigger than the hollow; the lake came to Kwame like a dog that knows its name. Bram Okonedo, thirty-one years on the forty-first floor with spare parts and swearing: the outflow's on the wrong side, it'll silt in ten years; no way to shut one off; move it and don't touch anything else. Four hundred who'd worked water and two hundred who wanted to learn. Crooked pipes round somebody's grandmother's apple tree; water doesn't mind going round an apple tree. Drains deeper, never touching. Ruth and Bram on their knees at eleven thousand crossing points arguing the whole way: good; about time; tea at Meg's.

Voss: forty-one complaints this season not from people. Karst young hear the new pipes all night. Moth young can't come out under the park road lamps. Three Kethri flew into the waterworks tower, sky-coloured at dawn. The salt young feel the west cistern under their terrace. The Hesk would like to know why there are roads across their sunning ground; nobody asked. I ran four million twenty years and never once asked anyone who wasn't human. Two hundred thousand people and every brood on Avalon, and we've been building as if the broods were weather.

Okafor's council on the green under the silver tree, one from every brood: Pebble for our queen; Sesh and a young with a mended wing; the Drenn queen to see if she really can leave; a Karst; a Hesk with its jaw on the grass; a moth young in Garnet's blanket; one of the heavy young who took all morning to cross the square. Holt, Voss, Kwame, Bram, Keir, Aster, Luna, Ruth, Edda, and Meg's daughter because somebody not in charge of anything should be there. I sat in the middle with Dory on my knee and every queen in my head and said what they said, one after another, till dark. Wrap the pipes; Bram's wrapped them his whole life so the floor below can't hear the floor above. Hood the lamps on the grove side and switch them off at the deep of night. Paint the tower: Garnet, orange, with stripes. Roads to the edge of the sunning ground; you don't put a road through a nursery; no, you don't. The salt cistern moved in a day, the outflow where Bram drew it.

The Drenn queen near dusk: where do my young go when they are hurt? On our world a hurt Drenn was eaten by the world or another Drenn; that was the only medicine; are they allowed in that place? Ruth stood, small in a coat buttoned wrong, before blades each as long as she was tall: yes, every one, every brood; but I don't know what's inside any of you; I've splinted one wing and lost sleep over it. Then how? I'll ask, if you'll tell me.

Every afternoon at the garden wall with Edda, Genny, Juno or me, a stack of paper. What does your young look like well? And not? Edda's midwife question: and what do you do when that happens? The queens have done medicine longer than humans have stood up; they just didn't call it that. Our queen sings to tell the body what shape it was so it can be that shape again; you learned it from her; from Father, the forge; same thing, different steel. Kethri bones hollow; splint the wing open, a wing splinted closed forgets how to open. Drenn blades come away like teeth and the joint goes bad fast; something clean for the joint; Genny already writing. Karst feel everything through their hairs; hold them with sound, not hands: Toby. Salt: never water, underlined three times. Moths: treat in the dark; you do not see, you listen. The furred overheat; Luna and the General laid frost down a whole hill all night. The heavy young: nothing cuts them; she'd need me or someone like me. Find someone like him. Before he goes.

Genny: nobody can carry the records room. One book for each brood, same size, same order, so if you've read one you can find your way round all with your eyes shut. Like the drawers. Ruth inside, Edda what to do, Genny the queens' words and the medicines, the ones that didn't work in red. Garnet drew the ring, then the queen's showing, then a third from both: you can't draw Dot from the outside; you have to know what she's for. The first finished at the season's end, the Teeming, blue cover, Pebble on the front: what they are; well; hurt; what first; what not; what the queen says; and last, in every book, What we don't know yet. The longest page. A book without it is lying. Eleven more begun, the floaters hardest because they float out of the ring. And one Genny started on her own at night: the patient's brood, nearly empty, the last page very long.

The hospital twice the size, a wing per brood, every wing the same, every drawer in the same place: a dark wing, a dry wing, high ceilings and perches, and a long low soft-walled hall where Toby holds the hurt Karst young in a note.

Home wet to the knees from a trench where the water and the drains came within a hand. Hana at the table, hands flat, the other three round her. Ruth put me in the ring. I'm going to have a baby. Two. Toby heard two notes and sat down. Both whole, both silver, both yours, both hers. You said as many as you all want. I said as many as the house will hold. It holds five beds. Then we'll build another room. She laughed, loud, like Bess letting her lift a foot, and they all held each other. Mother with Trevor, who froze the floor: I had twins; that's the face; they talk in the dark and never tell you what they said.

Three days on, Dory at breakfast, hand flat on Risa: Mama, there's somebody in there. I've been checking since Hana. Small; storm, like me, and Papa's. Thunder out of a clear sky; Risa's hair lifting; I didn't know. I knew first, before Grandma, before Ruth, before anybody. A brother or sister, and Hana's two, that's three; four with Trevor, five with Ash, six with me, seven with Pebble. Pebble is. One minute in the ring and a crackle on the wall. Edda took the green book down: every one quicker than the one before; I'll need room on the page. Ruth: three in one house all due about the same time; when does the Scarecrow leave; how long? I don't know. Upside down: Father away. Find someone like him. Before he goes. Underlined twice.

The porch, the house asleep, Hana mid-names. The city under two moons: lamps dark on the park road, the orange tower, the cold hill white with the furred young on top, the salt terrace glittering, the Karst asleep under wrapped pipes; the hospital lit, Toby asleep in a chair in the Karst hall, Ruth in the records room. The Scarecrow dark on the plain. Someone like him. Genny at the end of the table asking a willow what it wanted to be. I just do it slower, so I can write it down. I think I know who it is.