Chapter 309 G. Dask

I took Ruth's note to Ruth.

Not the sheet. I didn't have the sheet. Just what was on it, upside down, underlined twice. I went to the records room the next morning, early, before her rounds, and she was there already, of course, at the desk under the lamp with her coat on and a cup of tea she'd forgotten about gone cold at her elbow.

"Someone like me," I said.

She looked up.

"You read that," she said. Not a question.

"You taught me to. Through the glass."

"I taught you to read a brain upside down," said Ruth. "Not my notes." But she didn't sound cross. She put her pen down. "Well?"

"It's not one person," I said.

She didn't understand at first. I didn't explain it well. I'm not good at explaining things that I've only just understood myself. I tried three times. In the end I sat down on the other side of her desk and told it the way it had happened, the way I'd worked it out on the porch.

"When I fix something," I said, "I do two things. I don't notice I'm doing two things, because I do them at the same time. But I do. First I ask. I look inside and I ask what shape it's supposed to be. What it wants. What it was before it broke." I held up one hand. "Then I change it. I touch it, and I make it that shape." I held up the other. "Two things. Ask. Then touch."

Ruth was very still.

"Genny asks," I said. "She's always asked. She asks stone. She asks grey. She asked a willow what it wanted to be and it told her. She's never changed anything in her life, she asks it to be something else. She says she doesn't want to just change things." I put my hands down. "And Garnet touches things up. Since she was small. Her drawings coming up her arms. The light-benders. The collars. The collars, on the furred world, one after another. She's the only person on Avalon besides me who can make a thing be a different shape."

"And she doesn't ask," said Ruth slowly.

"She doesn't need to. She's never needed to. She draws it from the outside first, so she knows what goes in the middle." I looked at Ruth. "But she can't see inside a body. Not like I can. Not like Genny can, when she puts her hand flat and listens."

Ruth didn't say anything for a long time.

"Two of them," she said at last. "Together."

"Together they're me," I said. "Slower. But me."

"They're children," said Ruth.

I knew she'd say it. I'd said it myself, on the porch, at two in the morning, to nobody.

"They're fourteen," I said.

"They're children, Lucas. I don't let fourteen-year-olds hold the clamp." She took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes. "And you're asking me to let two of them reach inside a patient and change things nobody else can see."

"I'm not asking you to let them," I said. "I'm asking you to teach them. The way you taught me. Through the glass. Read slowly. You'll get it wrong the first time." I leaned forward. "And then, when you think they're ready, and only when you think they're ready, you let them. Not before. Not because I said so. Because you did."

Ruth put her glasses back on.

She looked at me for a long time. The way she'd looked at me in the doorway, a long time ago, with her hand flat on my chest.

"And if I never think they're ready?"

"Then they're not," I said. "And I'll come home faster."

She went to talk to Mother first.

I hadn't expected that. I should have. Ruth had known Mother longer than I'd been alive. She'd known the girls since the day they were born. She'd sat beside Mother's bed through the years when nobody knew if Mother would get up again. She walked up the street to our crooked house that afternoon and knocked on the door and asked if she could have a cup of tea, and Mother made her one, and they sat in the kitchen with the door shut for an hour.

I don't know what they said. I've never asked.

When Ruth came out she went straight to the end of the kitchen table, where Genny was doing chemistry, and Garnet was drawing, and the old brown dog was asleep under Garnet's chair with its chin on her foot.

"Your mother says I can ask you," said Ruth. "So I'm asking. Would you like to learn to do what your brother does? Inside people. Together. Slowly." She looked from one to the other. "It will take a very long time. You'll get it wrong. You'll have to do everything I say exactly. And you won't be allowed to touch a patient until I say so, even if your brother says so. Even if your mother says so." A pause. "Even if somebody's dying in front of you."

Genny put down her spoon.

Garnet put down her pencil.

They looked at each other. The thing went between them that I'd seen go between them since they were born, that nobody else ever caught but Mother.

"Yes," said Genny.

"Yes," said Garnet. And then, because she was Garnet: "Can the dog come?"

Ruth started them on bread.

Not bodies. Bread. She went to Meg's daughter's bakery on the ring street of the new city and bought six loaves, and broke them in half in the long room, and then broke them again, and then laid the pieces on the table in front of the twins.

"Put it back," she said.

Garnet looked at the bread.

"Like it was?"

"Like it was," said Ruth. "Exactly. So I can't tell."

Garnet reached out. Her silver came up her arms, small and wobbly, the way it always did when she drew. She touched the two halves. And they went back together. Quickly. Easily. A whole loaf.

Ruth picked it up. Turned it over. Pressed the place where the break had been with her thumb.

"No," she said.

"What?" said Garnet. "It's—"

"It's whole," said Ruth. "It's not the same. There's no crust in the middle. There was crust here." She tapped the seam. "And here the crumb's too tight. You squeezed it back together. You made it a loaf. You didn't make it this loaf." She put it down. "Genny."

Genny put her hand flat on the next broken piece. Shut her eyes. For a long time.

"It wants to be soft here," she said. "And there was a bubble. Here. A big one. That the crust went round." She opened her eyes and looked at her sister. "And it doesn't want to be tight at all. It's a rye. Meg's rye wants to be heavy, but loose. Like it's breathing."

Garnet looked at her.

Then she put her hand on the bread again. Slower. With Genny's hand flat beside hers, on the other half.

"There," said Genny. Very quietly. "No. Smaller. There."

It took them nearly ten minutes.

Ruth picked it up. Turned it over. Pressed it. Broke it open again, the other way, so she could see inside.

There was a big bubble. With crust round it. Exactly where it had been.

She looked at the bread for a long time.

"Better," said Ruth. "Five more."

It was bread for a week. Then wood. Then a cracked stone Genny brought up from the bottom of the canyon, the old grey-black rock, which Genny said was very old and very stubborn and didn't like being asked anything, which was why Ruth wanted them to practise on it.

Then bone. A sheep's, from the flock. Cracked down its length. Ruth held it up to the light and made them put it back so that she couldn't find the crack under the microscope I'd made her, and they did it eleven times before she couldn't.

Then a living thing.

A Kethri young, with a bad wing. Not broken. Healed wrong. It had flown into the waterworks tower in the first week before Garnet painted it, and Edda had splinted it with the two spoons and her shirt, and it had healed bent, very slightly, so the young could fly but always in a long slow curve to the left. Its mother had brought it. Sesh had asked. The mother had said yes.

Ruth stood beside the bed with her arms folded. Edda on the other side with the green book open. Toby, holding the young in a low note so it didn't feel anything. And me, at the back. With my hands in my pockets.

"You're not touching it," said Ruth to me. Without turning round.

"I know."

"Even if they get it wrong."

"I know."

Ruth looked at the twins. Genny on one side of the bed with her hand flat on the young's wing, very lightly, and her eyes shut. Garnet on the other, with her silver coming up her arms.

"Go on, then," said Ruth.

They got it wrong the first time.

Of course they did. Ruth had said they would.

Genny asked. Genny found it: the place where the bone had knitted a little crooked, and the small muscle beside it that had grown a little short, trying to pull the wing straight. Genny said here and and here, the small one, it's tired. Garnet touched the bone. And it straightened.

But she didn't touch the muscle.

She hadn't heard the second thing. She'd been concentrating so hard on the bone that she hadn't heard Genny say and here. And the young opened its wing, straight now, and the short muscle pulled, and it cried out, very high, in the voice the Kethri young have that sounds like a bird and a child at once.

Garnet snatched her hand back. Her face went white.

Toby's note went lower. Steadier. Holding the young still.

I didn't move. It was the hardest thing I'd done since the forge. Harder than sitting back on my heels under the apple trees. My hands were in my pockets and they were shaking and I could see exactly what was wrong, exactly, the small tired muscle, and I could have fixed it in less than a second.

I didn't move.

"Garnet," said Ruth. Very calmly. "What did your sister say?"

Garnet's lip was shaking.

"I don't know. I didn't—I was doing the bone, I didn't—"

"Then ask her," said Ruth.

Garnet looked across the bed.

Genny's eyes were open. She was looking back. The thing went between them.

"The small one," said Genny. Quietly. "By the bone. It's been trying to hold the wing straight for a long time. It's tired. It needs to be longer. Just a little." She put her hand back on the wing. "I'll tell you when. Watch me, not the wing."

Garnet put her hand back on the wing too.

She didn't look at the wing. She looked at her sister's face. The way you watch the spark and not the hand.

"There," said Genny. "Slowly. A bit more. A bit—there."

Garnet's silver went down her arm and into the young's wing like ink going into water.

The Kethri young opened its wing.

All the way. Straight. Grey to the tips.

It didn't cry out.

It looked at its wing for a long time. Then it looked at Garnet. Then it put its head down against her arm, the way the young do with their queens, and stayed there.

Garnet cried in the corridor afterward.

Not much. Not loudly. Just sat down on the floor outside the long room with her back against the wall, the way I'd sat by the fern in the corridor a long time ago with Halloway's gauze held to my nose, and put her face against her knees.

Genny sat down beside her.

"I hurt it," said Garnet. Into her knees.

"I know," said Genny.

"I didn't listen. You said it and I didn't listen."

"I know." Genny was quiet for a while. "You'll listen next time."

"What if I don't?"

"Then I'll say it twice." Genny bumped her shoulder against her sister's. "That's what I'm for. Lucas does both at once, because he's only one. We're two. So we have to do it out loud." She considered. "It's like the collars. You touch, I ask. We did the whole furred world like that. You never got it wrong once."

"That was collars," said Garnet. "Collars don't cry."

"No," said Genny. "Collars don't."

They sat there for a while.

Ruth came out of the long room. She looked at the two of them on the floor. She didn't say anything. She went to the records room and came back with a sheet and a pen and sat down on the floor of the corridor beside them. All three of them, in a row, with their backs against the wall. Ruth in her coat buttoned wrong.

"I'd like to tell you about my first patient," said Ruth. "When I was nineteen. I took a splinter out of a man's hand and I forgot to wash the needle. He got an infection. He lost the hand." She looked at the sheet on her knee. "I wrote it down. Every word. What I did, and what I forgot. And I read it every year on the day it happened. Every year. For forty years."

The twins looked at her.

"Write it down," said Ruth. She held out the sheet. "What you did. And what you forgot. Both of you. And then sign it. And then go home and have supper. And come back tomorrow."

They signed it.

I saw it, afterward. Filed in the records, in the Kethri book, under the young's name, in the same place on the page where everything always went.

The bone. Then the muscle, which we should have done together. It hurt because one of us didn't listen and one of us didn't say it twice. Next time we will both say it out loud.

And at the bottom, two signatures. In two hands. One very square. One wobbly, with a small drawing of a wing beside it.

G. Dask.

G. Dask.

Ruth had looked at it for a long time, when they gave it to her.

"I'll need you to put your full names on the next one," she said. "Or I'll never know which of you did what."

"No you won't," said Genny.

"That's the point," said Garnet.

The heavy young fell into a trench three weeks later.

It was one of Bram's. On the west side, where they were laying the last of the pipe from the new cistern under the salt terrace. A deep one, cut through the red glass down into the old rock. The heavy young had been crossing the plain toward the salt terrace, very slowly, the way they did everything, the way stones would walk if stones walked. And it hadn't seen the trench. Or it had and thought it was a hole in the ground and holes in the ground didn't matter, because on its world nothing fell, everything just sat where it was very heavily.

It fell.

On Avalon, things fall.

Bram's people got it out. It took eleven of them and a winch Keir had built for the cistern stones. They laid it on the edge of the trench, and it lay there, very still, small and dense and grey, and it didn't move. It didn't make any sound at all.

They sent a runner to the hospital. And another to the house. And another to the Scarecrow, where I was, with Keir, looking at the water tanks.

I flew.

I was there before anyone. Before Ruth. Before the twins, who were at the long room, and coming. I came down on the red glass beside the trench and looked.

Inside.

It was cracked. All the way down the middle. Not a bone; the heavy young didn't have bones, not the way we do. They were dense all the way through, like stone, like something that had been squeezed small by a whole world for a very long time. And it had cracked. Like a stone cracks when it's dropped. A long fine line from the top of it, where its head would be, down into the middle, where something very slow and very heavy was beating, once every long while, like a drum in a cave.

And round the crack, inside, things that shouldn't be leaking were leaking.

I could fix it. Of course I could. I could ask it what shape it was and make it that shape, and I'd be done before Ruth got out of the hospital door.

I knelt down.

And I didn't touch it.

The twins came across the plain at a run. Not flying. Ruth had said no flying near the trenches, too many people, and they'd listened. Garnet first, with the old brown dog bounding beside her, and Genny behind with her notebook still in her hand. And behind them, much slower, out of breath, Ruth. Her coat buttoned wrong.

Garnet stopped dead at the edge of the trench and looked at the heavy young and went white.

"It's cracked," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"You can—" She looked at me. "Lucas, you can—"

"Yes," I said. "I can."

I didn't move.

Ruth came up behind them. She stood at the edge of the trench with her hands on her knees, getting her breath. She looked at the heavy young. She looked at me, kneeling beside it with my hands in my lap.

She looked at the twins.

She didn't say anything for a long moment. Then she straightened up.

"Nothing I have can cut it," she said. "Nothing. Not a knife. Not a needle. I wrote that in the book. I wrote: find someone like him." She looked at Garnet. Then at Genny. "In three weeks you've put a loaf back so I can't find the break. You've put a stone back. And a bone, eleven times. And one wing. Once wrong. Then right." She paused. "That's not enough. It's not nearly enough. I'd want a year. I'd want two."

Nobody said anything.

"But your brother is getting on a ship in a few weeks," said Ruth Halloway, "and going somewhere none of us can see. And there's a child here that only he can help. Or you." She stepped back. "So I'm going to stand right here. And your brother is going to sit right there, with his hands in his lap. And if I say stop, you stop. Instantly. And he does it." She looked at me. "That's the only time. Not because he's faster. Because I said."

I nodded.

"Go on, then," said Ruth.

Genny knelt down first. On one side. And put her hand flat on the heavy young. On its grey, dense, cold skin.

She shut her eyes.

She was there for a long time. Longer than the wing. Longer than any of the bread. So long that Garnet, kneeling on the other side with her silver already coming up her arms, started to shake.

"Genny—"

"Wait," said Genny. Not opening her eyes. "It's slow. Everything in it's slow. It talks very slowly. I have to wait for it to finish." Another long silence. "It's frightened. It doesn't know what falling is. It's never fallen. It thinks the world broke."

"Tell it the world didn't break," I said. Very quietly. "Tell it it fell. And that falling's a thing that happens here. And it's all right."

Genny was quiet. Her lips moved. Not words. The thing she does with queens. Singing, almost.

The slow drum in the middle of the heavy young beat once. Then, after a long time, again. A little faster.

"It says it's sorry," said Genny. Her voice was very odd. "It says it's sorry for breaking. It thought it was too heavy to break." She opened her eyes. "It's going to tell me what shape it was. It's going to take a while. Garnet, watch me. Not it. Me."

Garnet looked at her sister's face.

"Ready," she said.

It took nearly an hour.

I knelt beside the trench with my hands in my lap the whole time, and the sun moved across the plain, and Bram's people stood back in a ring and didn't say a word, and the old brown dog lay down with its chin on Garnet's foot.

Genny said everything out loud. Every time. Twice.

"The top. Where the crack starts. There's a—it was rough there. Before. It's always been rough. Don't make it smooth. Garnet. Don't make it smooth."

"Rough. Not smooth."

"Now down. A little. It's leaking here. It's—it's the slow thing. The thing that's like blood but isn't. It goes round once every very long time. Close this first. Before the crack. This first. Garnet, this first."

"This first."

Garnet's silver went in. Small and wobbly. Very slow. Following her sister's face, not the patient.

"Smaller," said Genny. "Smaller. It's so small. Everything's so close together in it. It's like the heavy queen's world. Everything's squeezed. Smaller than that. There."

Ruth stood at the edge of the trench with her arms folded and her face completely still. She didn't say stop. Not once. I watched her. Her lips were moving, very slightly. I think she was counting.

At the end of the hour, the crack was gone.

Not smooth. Rough, at the top, the way it had always been. And inside, the slow thing that wasn't blood was going round again, once every long while, where it was supposed to go. And the drum in the middle was beating, slowly, steadily, the way stones would beat if stones had hearts.

The heavy young moved.

Very slowly. The way it did everything. It took a long time to turn its head. Toward Genny. Then toward Garnet. Then, a long time later, toward the trench it had fallen into.

Genny put her hand on it again.

"It says," she said, and stopped, and laughed, a little, shakily. "It says it'll go round next time."

Garnet sat down in the red dust very suddenly and put her face in the old brown dog's neck.

Genny sat down next to her.

Ruth came down the edge of the trench. She knelt beside the heavy young. She put her hand on it. She couldn't see inside it. Nobody could but me, and Genny, in her slow way. But she put her hand on it anyway, flat, the way you'd put your hand on a patient to tell them you were there.

Then she looked at me.

"Well?" she said.

I looked inside. All of it. Every crack, every leak, every slow round thing.

It was right. Not perfect. There was a place in the middle where Garnet's silver had gone in a little wobbly, and left something a little rough that hadn't been rough before. Like the one tooth on Keir's gear that was too wide. If it ever slipped, you'd know which one it was.

"It's right," I said.

"Not perfect?"

"No," I said. "Better than perfect. It's theirs."

Ruth looked at me for a long moment. Then she stood up and brushed the red dust off her knees and did up her coat. Wrong.

"I'll write it down," she said. "And then I'll write in the book. Heavy young. Nothing cuts them." She looked at the twins in the dust with the dog. "Ask G. Dask."

The patient asked for a name that week.

She'd been asking for a lot of things. Not many. More than before. Genny's notebook, the one Genny had given her, was nearly full now, and fewer things in it were crossed out. To have hair. That wasn't crossed out any more. Voss had underlined it, the morning she cut it.

I wasn't there for that. Nobody was, except Wren. Wren told me.

"She sat her on a chair in the room at the end of the arrivals hall," said Wren. "In the morning. Before the complaints. With the door shut, the only time I've ever seen her shut it. She'd brought the post scissors. The same ones. I don't know how she got them out of the dome. She must have had them in her coat the whole time, in the Senate." Wren looked out at the north wall. "And she cut her hair. It's very short. There wasn't much to cut. And she sang."

"What did she sing?"

"The same thing she sang to me," said Wren. "When I was small. Every month. I'd forgotten the words. I remembered them as soon as I heard it." She was quiet for a moment. "The patient didn't say anything the whole time. And at the end she put her hand up and touched it. The hair. And said I did not want it cut. And my aunt said good. And then they both sat there for a long time."

She picked her own name.

Wren had been teaching her to count. Not the way Wren counted, with the note coming back off everyone. The way you count when you're small. On paper. With tally marks. Four lines down and one across, in fives, so you can see how many at a glance.

The patient filled pages of them. Hundreds. Everything. Every person who came into the long room. Every Kethri that flew past the window. Every time the old brown dog leaned on her.

"What's this called?" she asked Wren, one evening, holding up a page.

"A tally," said Wren.

The patient looked at it for a long time.

"Tally," she said. Trying the shape. Then she looked up. "Is that a thing a person can be called?"

Wren didn't answer at once.

"Yes," she said. "If they'd like to be."

"I would like to be," said the patient. "Please." And then, after a moment, very carefully, the way she'd learned to ask. "Will you call me it? So I can hear what it sounds like?"

"Tally," said Wren.

Tally put her hand up and touched her short silver hair.

"Again," she said.

Okafor let her come.

I didn't think she would. Ruth didn't want her to. Ruth stood in the map room with her arms folded and said she'd had the grey off her eleven days, and she'd been asking questions for less than a season, and she weighed less than Dory, and nobody knew what her body needed, and she wasn't going to send a patient into the dark past the ninth line on the word of a notebook.

Okafor listened to all of it. She didn't interrupt once.

Then she said, "Tally."

Tally was by the door. Beside Voss. Where she always sat, now, when there was anything in the map room. She'd been listening.

"Yes, Major."

"Do you want to come?"

Tally took the notebook out of her coat. Genny's notebook. And opened it. To the page with one line on it that wasn't crossed out, that had been underlined twice. She held it up.

To count them.

Okafor looked at it for a long time.

"Halloway," she said. "Is there a medical reason she can't?"

Ruth's mouth went into a line. Like Edda's.

"No," she said at last. "Not one I can prove."

"Then she's coming," said Okafor. She wrote it on her slate. "Marsh. She's yours."

"Yes, ma'am," said Wren.

Toby didn't say anything about Wren going. Not one word. Not in the map room. Not at dinner. Not walking home in the dark with Harriet asleep in her sling.

He went to the hollow the night before we left.

I know because I went too. Not to watch him. To see the north shelf one more time. The boxes. The first handler. The four wardens. The forty-one. The keeper. The small polite one's box, empty now, because she wasn't in it, she was in a bed in the long room with the old brown dog leaning on her side.

Toby was sitting on the floor of the hollow. In the middle. With his fiddle across his knees. And a stone in his hand.

One of his stones. The ones from the old days, the ones he'd thrown his note into, the night we got Jessa back, when he took his hand off the bow and the stones held the note on their own.

He was singing into it.

Very quietly. Not the counter-note. Harriet's. The one she sang at dawn that went out over all of Scarecrow and came back off every face so that Wren could hear them. He sang it into the stone, over and over. And the stone took it. You could hear it, after a while. The stone humming it back. Very faint.

He looked up when I came in.

"It'll hold," he said. "Once it's in. It held the night we got Jessa. It'll hold for a long time." He looked down at the stone. "She counts by it. Every morning. She hasn't missed a morning since Harriet was born. If she's out there, past the ninth line, she won't have it." He turned the stone over in his hand. "So she'll have this."

"She'll like it," I said.

"She'll count by it," said Toby. "That's better." He stood up. "Don't tell her I cried."

"You didn't."

"I'm going to," said Toby. "In about a minute. When I give it to her." He put the fiddle under his arm. "Don't tell her."

We left at dawn. After the count.

Everyone came to the plain. Not because anyone told them to. They just came. The way everyone came to everything now. The whole of Scarecrow and the new city and the broods. The Teeming along the rim. The Kethri on the wind above, in ranks, one above another. The Drenn round the school, facing out, because that's where they stood, and they weren't going to stop standing there just because their queen was leaving.

The Scarecrow lay on the red glass with her fins folded and her ramp down and SCARECROW on her side in Garnet's gold. Four months. Keir had done it in four months, almost to the day. He stood at the foot of the ramp with grease to his elbows and didn't say anything and kept wiping his hands on a rag that made them worse.

Safi Arden at the top of the ramp, to fly her. Aster beside her, with her lamps very low. Marlo, and two of his light-benders. Juno, with the seed on its chain round her neck. Wren, with a stone in her coat pocket humming very faintly. Tally beside her, with Genny's notebook and a pencil, very small, very straight, with her short silver hair.

And the Drenn queen, in her room. Arms folded in the rests. Door open.

Dory came to the foot of the ramp with Pebble.

She'd been very good all morning. She'd checked everybody. She'd checked Risa three times and Hana twice and the babies inside them, all three, Papa, they're all there, and Trevor, who'd frozen his own blanket in protest at being up so early, and Ash, who'd turned the frost to glass.

She stood in front of me at the foot of the ramp with her hand on Pebble's back.

"Come back," she said.

"Yes," I said.

Not I will. Yes. The way Risa had said it to her, on the glass, before the Kethri world. Dory had taught all of us the difference.

Dory nodded. Very seriously.

"I'll hold everything," she said. "While you're gone. Like on the Kethri world."

"I know you will."

"And I'll check the babies. Every day. And I'll tell you through Juno." She frowned. "If they come before you're back, I'll tell them about you."

"What will you tell them?"

Dory thought about it.

"That you're the one who stands in the field," she said. "And you went to count some children. And you'll be back." She looked at me. "That's true, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said.

"Good," said Dory. "Then I'll tell them that." And she went back to Risa, with Pebble a step behind.

Risa held my face in both hands. Her hair was lifting. Very slightly. There was a small cloud over us, very white, very high, in a perfectly clear sky.

"Count them," she said. "And come back before this one does. Or I'll name it something you hate."

"What?"

"I haven't decided," said Risa. "Something long. With a hyphen."

Hana didn't say anything. She just held on. For a long time. Then she let go and stepped back and said "Be safe, we love you." I said it back.

Sera kissed me so hard the iron in the ramp went warm under our feet.

Luna kissed me and then handed me a sheet. A list. Everything in the Scarecrow's hold, in order, with the weights. And at the bottom, very small: Grams left over: 14.

I looked at her.

"Halloway's notes," said Luna. "In quarantine. You told me once. Three hundred and seventy-four grams and fourteen left." She folded my hand round the list. "I left you fourteen. For whatever you find out there that you want to bring home."

Mother didn't say anything.

She stood at the foot of the ramp in her dark coat with Father's ring on her hand and her grey streak bright in the dawn and the two girls beside her. One on each side. The way they'd stood with her at the lift doors, a long time ago, the morning I left for the launch.

Genny had her notebook against her chest. Garnet had the old brown dog's lead.

"Ruth says we're not ready," said Genny. "For anything bad."

"I know."

"She says the heavy young was luck."

"It wasn't luck," I said. "It was you."

Genny looked at me for a long moment.

"I know," she said. "I didn't want to say it in front of Ruth." She held out her hand. And I shook it. The way she'd shaken my hand at the lift doors, the morning I left her, a long time ago, when she was very small and wouldn't cry.

Garnet didn't shake my hand. Garnet threw both arms round my waist and held on so hard the dog barked.

Then they stepped back. One on each side of Mother.

Mother lifted her hand. Not at me. At the ramp. Very slightly. The way she'd lifted three bowls and the flour and the eggs. I felt the Scarecrow go a hair lighter under my feet.

"Go and count them," she said.

Dot was at the top of the ramp.

She'd come up while I wasn't looking. She did that. Very large, very quiet, all her hands folded, her grille dim. She stood at the top of the ramp in the door of the ship and looked down at me.

"This unit will not be coming," said Dot.

"I know."

"The Major has asked this unit to count everyone up the steps of Scarecrow every evening. Every evening the operator is away." Her grille brightened very slightly. "This unit has counted the operator up the steps of Scarecrow every evening since the hut. This unit will count one fewer. For some time."

"I'm sorry, Dot."

"This unit is not sorry," said Dot. "This unit will count one fewer every evening until the evening this unit counts one more." She unfolded one hand. Just one. And put it on my shoulder. Very lightly. The way she'd taken the scarf off the hook in the forge, a long time ago, and wrapped it round me. "Operator."

"Dot."

"This unit would like it to be soon."

I went up the ramp.

Safi took us up at sunrise. Slowly. Straight up over the plain, the way the Steady went, the way the Open Hand went, with the whole of Avalon looking up. I stood at the forward window beside the Drenn queen's open door and looked down.

At the plain, red glass going gold. At the city, crooked roofs to the edge of sight. The orange tower with its stripes. The cold hill. The salt terrace. The hospital on the square, with its long corridor out to the park, and somewhere in it a room full of books with blue covers and grey covers and green, and one at the end that was very nearly empty.

At the scarecrow field. The posts with the names. Father's house at the end of the street. The scarecrow with its arms out, and the blue scarf at its neck, faded nearly white.

Everyone was still there. Looking up. Getting smaller.

Wren was beside me. With the stone in her hand, out of her pocket. She was holding it against her ear. Her eyes were shut.

"Can you hear it?" I said.

"Yes," said Wren. "It's her. It's Harriet." She opened her eyes. They were very wet. "He cried. He told me not to tell you."

"He told me not to tell you."

Wren laughed. Very shakily.

Then she put the stone back in her pocket and tilted her head and started counting. Everyone on the plain. Everyone on the ship. Out loud, very quietly, under her breath, the way she always did.

Tally sat on the floor beside her with Genny's notebook open on her knee. Listening. And every time Wren said a number, Tally made a mark. Four lines down. One across.

At the top of the sky, where the red went blue and the blue went black, Safi looked back over her shoulder at me.

"Ready?"

Down the length of the ship, in her room, the Drenn queen opened her eyes.

I looked at Aster.

"Who carries it?" said Aster.

"She does," I said.

"And can she leave?"

"Any time she likes."

Aster's lamps went soft.

"Then go," she said.

The Drenn queen sang one low word.

And the Scarecrow turned the page.

Days 2011–2068. G. Dask.

To Ruth, early, in the records room with cold tea: someone like me. You read that. You taught me to, through the glass. It's not one person. When I fix something I do two things at once without noticing: I ask what shape it wants to be, then I touch it and make it that shape. Genny asks; she asks stone and grey and a willow; she's never changed anything and doesn't want to. Garnet touches things up, always has; the only one on Avalon besides me and Genny who can make a thing a different shape; she draws it from the outside so she knows what goes in the middle. Together they're me. Slower. They're children. Fourteen. I don't let fourteen-year-olds hold the clamp. Teach them, the way you taught me; let them when you think they're ready, not before, not because I said. And if I never do? Then they're not, and I'll come home faster.

Ruth had an hour of tea with Mother, door shut; I've never asked. Then the end of the table: would you like to learn to do what your brother does, inside people, together, slowly; you'll get it wrong; nobody touches a patient till I say, not your brother, not your mother, not if someone's dying. Genny put down her spoon, Garnet her pencil; the thing between them. Yes. Yes. Can the dog come?

Bread first. Garnet put Meg's rye back in a second: no; it's whole, not the same; no crust in the middle; you made it a loaf, not this loaf. Genny's hand flat: it wants to be soft here; there was a big bubble the crust went round; rye wants to be heavy but loose, like it's breathing. Ten minutes, Genny's hand beside hers: no, smaller, there. The bubble, crust round it, where it had been. Better. Five more. Then wood; then grey-black rock, which doesn't like being asked; then a sheep's bone eleven times till she couldn't find the crack under my lens.

A Kethri young that hit the tower before Garnet painted it, healed bent so it flew in a slow curve to the left; its mother said yes. Toby holding it in a note; me at the back, hands in my pockets: you're not touching it, even if they get it wrong. Genny: here; and here, the small one, it's tired. Garnet only heard the bone. The wing opened and the short muscle pulled and it cried out like a bird and a child at once. I could see exactly what was wrong and didn't move; harder than the apple trees. What did your sister say? Then ask her. Watch me, not the wing. Like watching the spark not the hand. Straight, grey to the tips, its head against her arm.

Garnet on the corridor floor: I hurt it; I didn't listen. You'll listen next time. What if I don't? Then I'll say it twice; that's what I'm for; Lucas does both at once because he's one; we're two, so we do it out loud; the whole furred world you never got a collar wrong. Collars don't cry. Ruth sat down on the floor with them, three in a row: at nineteen I forgot to wash a needle and a man lost his hand; I read it every year for forty years. Write what you did and what you forgot; sign it; supper; come back tomorrow. Both of us will say it out loud. G. Dask. G. Dask. Full names next time or I'll never know who did what. No you won't. That's the point.

Three weeks on the heavy young walked into Bram's trench on the west side, because on its world nothing falls; eleven of Bram's people and Keir's winch got it out; no sound. Cracked from the top down into the middle where something slow beats like a drum in a cave, and things leaking that shouldn't. I got there first and knelt and didn't touch it. Garnet white: you can. Yes. I can. Ruth, out of breath: nothing I have cuts it; I wrote find someone like him; three weeks isn't enough, I'd want a year, two; but your brother's getting on a ship; I'll stand here; he sits there with his hands in his lap; if I say stop you stop and he does it; not because he's faster; because I said.

Genny's hand flat a long time: it's slow, it talks slowly; it's frightened; it's never fallen; it thinks the world broke. Tell it it fell, that falling happens here, that it's all right. The drum beat a little faster. It says it's sorry for breaking; it thought it was too heavy to break. Garnet, watch me. Nearly an hour; the sun across the plain, Bram's people silent in a ring, the dog's chin on Garnet's foot; everything out loud, twice. Rough at the top, don't make it smooth. The slow thing that's like blood, close this first. Smaller; everything's squeezed like the heavy world; there. Ruth never said stop; her lips moving, counting. The crack gone, rough where it always was. It says it'll go round next time.

Right, not perfect: one place in the middle a little wobbly where Garnet's silver went in, like the wide tooth on Keir's gear. Better than perfect; it's theirs. In the book: Heavy young. Nothing cuts them. Ask G. Dask.

Voss cut the patient's hair with the post scissors, door shut the only time, and sang the song she sang to Wren, whose words Wren remembered as soon as she heard it. At the end: I did not want it cut. Good. Wren taught her tally marks, four down one across; she filled pages, every Kethri past the window, every time the dog leaned. What's this called? A tally. Is that a thing a person can be called? If they'd like to be. I would like to be. Please. Will you call me it so I can hear it? Tally. Again.

Ruth in the map room: eleven days off the grey, asking less than a season, lighter than Dory, nobody knows what her body needs. Okafor listened to all of it. Tally, do you want to come? Genny's notebook open to the one line underlined twice: To count them. Halloway, a medical reason she can't? Not one I can prove. Then she's coming. Marsh, she's yours.

Toby said nothing about Wren going. The night before, alone in the middle of the hollow by the north shelf, Tally's box empty now, singing Harriet's dawn note into one of his old stones, the kind that held the note the night we got Jessa, till the stone hummed it back. She counts by it every morning; out there she won't have it, so she'll have this. Don't tell her I cried. You didn't. I'm going to, in about a minute.

Dawn after the count, everyone on the plain without being told: the Teeming on the rim, Kethri in ranks on the wind, the Drenn round the school facing out because that's where they stand. Four months almost to the day; Keir wiping grease on a rag that made it worse. Safi to fly, Aster, Marlo and two light-benders, Juno with the seed, Wren with a humming stone, Tally with the notebook, the Drenn queen in her room, door open.

Dory with Pebble: come back. Yes. Not I will. I'll hold everything; I'll check the babies, all three, every day and tell you through Juno; if they come first I'll tell them you're the one who stands in the field and went to count some children and will be back; that's true? Yes. Risa, hair lifting, a cloud in a clear sky: come back before this one does or I'll name it something you hate, something long with a hyphen. Hana held on, then we love you. Sera, the ramp warm. Luna's hold list with the weights and at the bottom: grams left over, 14, for whatever you find out there you want to bring home.

Mother with a girl on each side as at the lift doors. Genny: Ruth says the heavy young was luck. It was you. I know; I didn't want to say it in front of Ruth. She shook my hand as at the lift doors. Garnet held on so hard the dog barked. Mother lifted her hand at the ramp and the Scarecrow went a hair lighter. Go and count them.

Dot at the top of the ramp, hands folded, grille dim: this unit will not be coming; the Major asked it to count everyone up the steps every evening; it has counted the operator up since the hut; it will count one fewer every evening until the evening it counts one more. One hand on my shoulder, the way it took the scarf off the hook in the forge. Operator. Dot. This unit would like it to be soon.

Up at sunrise over everything getting smaller: the orange tower, the cold hill, the salt terrace, the hospital with its books, one at the end nearly empty; the field, Father's house, the scarecrow with its arms out and the scarf faded nearly white. Wren with the stone at her ear: it's her; he cried; he told me not to tell you; he told me not to tell you. She counted everyone on the plain under her breath, and Tally on the floor made a mark for every number, four down, one across. At the top of the sky Safi: ready? Who carries it? She does. And can she leave? Any time she likes. Then go. The Drenn queen sang one low word, and the Scarecrow turned the page.