Chapter 31 First Call

The calls were on Sunday nights.

There was a room for them at the end of the long corridor behind the mess hall. Eight booths along one wall, each with a stool and a screen and a door that didn't quite close. A corporal sat at a desk by the entrance with a list and a timer. Ten minutes each. Family name order.

Which meant the Calders went early, and the Dasks went after the Calders, and the Frieses went after us, and Sigmund spent the whole wait standing behind me in the line, not saying anything, very loudly.

I didn't turn round.

Liam went in first. He left his door open a crack, the way everybody did, because they didn't quite close. I heard it start before he'd even sat down. A woman's voice, very loud, asking if he was eating. A man's voice, louder, saying of course he was eating, look at him, he's eating right now, he's always eating. A little girl shrieking his name. A dog. Somebody dropping a pan. Somebody else blaming somebody else for the pan.

Liam didn't get a word in for the first three minutes. When he did, it was to tell them about the eggs in the mess hall, and Brock's sleeve, and the forty-five laps, and he told it so well that a man's laugh came out of the booth and rolled down the whole line of waiting cadets like a wave.

Bree, in front of me, rolled her eyes. But she was smiling.

Seraphina went in after him. Her door shut most of the way. I didn't hear anything from it at all, except once, near the end, a woman's voice saying something soft, and Seraphina answering, I know, Mama. I know.

She came out with her chin up and her face perfectly still, and went straight past the line without looking at anyone.

"Dask," said the corporal.

The screen came on, and it was full of Garnet's nose.

"He's there!" she shouted, from about an inch away. "He's there, he's there, I can see his ear—"

"Back up," said Genny's voice. "You're too close. He can only see your nose."

"He likes my nose."

"Back up."

Garnet backed up.

She was in the big room with the glass walls. I could see the city behind her, all its lights coming on, and the gold of the dome above. She was wearing a white apron that came down past her knees, and there was flour on her face. A lot of flour. On her cheek and her forehead and in her hair, which somebody had brushed and tied back with a blue ribbon.

"I made bread," she said.

"I can see."

"With Mr. Dunmore. Every day. He's teaching me." She leaned in again, confidentially, until the screen was mostly eye. "He says I'm not allowed to make it rise with my hands. He says it's cheating. He says the yeast has to do it by itself or it's not bread, it's a magic trick, and nobody wants to eat a magic trick." She thought about this. "I do it a little bit when he isn't looking."

"Does he notice?"

"He says, 'Garnet,'" said Garnet, in a deep slow voice, "'that dough has risen in four minutes,' and I say, 'It's a very good yeast, Mr. Dunmore,' and he says, 'It is not that good a yeast.'"

I laughed. I hadn't laughed since the field. It came out of me before I could stop it, and the corporal looked up from his desk.

Garnet was delighted. She told me about the bakery, and about Meg Thorne, who had given her a paper bag with a loaf in it every morning since I left, warm, and who let her stand behind the counter for ten minutes and say good morning to the customers. She told me about the bath, which she'd now had eleven times, and about the rubber duck Maddy had brought to the penthouse, which she'd named Sergeant. She told me she'd been working on the gray scarf. She held it up. It was longer. It was not very much straighter.

"Nearly done," she said.

"It looks nearly done."

"You're lying," said Garnet happily. "It's all right. I like it when you lie about the scarf."

Then she was pushed sideways out of the frame, and Genny was there.

Genny didn't have flour on her. Genny had ink on her fingers, and a look on her face like a storm that was still deciding which town to hit.

"How's school?" I said.

"I have a tutor," said Genny.

"I heard."

"He's an idiot."

"I heard that too."

"He told me," said Genny, "that the war ended because of the bombs. He said the bombs drove them off. He said it's in the book, page forty." She held up a book. I could see her fingers whitening on the cover. "I told him it's not true. I told him the bombs didn't work. I told him Father was there. And he said I was nine years old and I should learn the material before I argued with it."

"What did you say?"

"I said the material was wrong at any age."

Somewhere off the screen, a calm voice said, "That is, I'm afraid, a direct quotation."

Miss Pell leaned into the corner of the frame. She was wearing her gray dress and her spectacles, and she looked exactly the way she'd looked in the doorway at the orphan hall twenty-five years ago, if Mother's description had been right. Neat. Patient. Faintly amused by something nobody else had noticed yet.

"Good evening, Mr. Dask," she said. "I'm only here to report that both girls ate their vegetables."

"Both of them?"

"Both of them," said Miss Pell. "Garnet ate hers with great enthusiasm and a running commentary. Genevieve ate hers in a manner I can only describe as hostile." She paused. "The tutor's name is Mr. Ashby. I'm handling it."

"How?"

"Slowly," said Miss Pell, "and with a great deal of paperwork," and leaned out of the frame again.

Genny watched her go. Then she looked back at me, and her face changed. The storm went out of it. Something else came in. Something smaller and harder and much more careful.

"Mother wants to talk to you," she said. "I'll get her."

She didn't move.

"Genny."

"Her marker went up," said Genny.

The booth was very quiet.

Out in the corridor I could hear the corporal's pen scratching. Somebody in the booth beside me, laughing at something. Sigmund, behind the door that didn't quite close, shifting his weight.

"What marker?" I said. But I knew.

"The rejection one. The one Dr. Halloway watches. It came down every day for two weeks, and then it stopped coming down. Last Tuesday. And on Thursday it went up." Genny's voice was very steady. Too steady. "Not much. Four points. Dr. Halloway says it's normal. She says it goes up and down."

"Then it's normal."

"She said it the way you say the scarf's nearly done," said Genny.

I didn't have anything to say to that.

"Genevieve," said Mother's voice, from somewhere behind her. Tired. Fond. Not angry. "You promised."

"I promised not to tell him," said Genny, without turning round. "I didn't promise not to answer if he asked. He asked. It's number seven. Real numbers." She looked straight at me through the screen. "You asked."

"I asked," I said.

Genny nodded once, as if something had been settled. Then she got up and went away, and I heard the soft whir of a wheelchair coming across a wooden floor, and Mother came into the frame.

She was thinner.

That was the first thing. It had been nine days. She'd been thinner than she should have been nine days ago, and she was thinner now. Not much. The way the first frost comes; not much, and then everything's different. There was a soft gray shawl round her shoulders that I didn't recognize. Maddy, probably. Her hair was brushed. Somebody had done it carefully. Garnet, probably. Ends first.

She smiled at me. It was a real smile.

"Hello, Lucas," she said.

"Hello."

"You look tired."

"I'm fine."

"You've got your father's way of saying that," said Mother. "He used to say it with a hole in his side."

She asked about the compound. I told her. Not all of it. Not the eggs, or the lamp, or the word in the dark. I told her about Liam, who talked like a river that didn't know where the sea was, and she smiled. I told her about the steel ball, and the splash, and she was quiet for a while.

Then I told her about Sergeant Okafor.

I told her about the photograph on the wall, and the river crossing, and the jaw.

Mother didn't say anything for a long time. She sat in the wheelchair with the lights of the city behind her and her hands folded in her lap, and she looked at something that wasn't the screen.

"He told me about the jaw," she said finally. "Once. Years ago. In the kitchen, in the middle of the night, when he couldn't sleep." She smiled a little. "He never told me her name. He just said there was a girl in the unit who'd lived, and he'd made her something, and he'd never been so frightened in his life. Not in the whole war. Not even on the ship."

"Frightened of what?"

"Of getting it wrong," said Mother. "He said steel was easy. You could see all of steel at once. But a face—" She stopped. Her hand moved in her lap, a small slow movement. "He said a face was a whole world. And he only knew the front of it."

I thought about the old medical books in Father's study. Eleven of them, with his handwriting in the margins. The thickest one, with Dot — find out first on the inside cover.

He hadn't found out. He'd run out of time.

"Mother."

"Yes."

"The marker."

She sighed. Not unhappily. The way you sigh at weather.

"Genny's been reading my charts again," she said.

"She told me it went up."

"It goes up," said Mother. "It goes down. Ruth says—" She turned her head. "Ruth. Come and tell him. He won't believe it from me. He's never believed anything from me in his life."

Dr. Halloway came into the frame and stood behind the wheelchair with one hand on its back.

She was in her ordinary clothes, not the white coat. I'd forgotten it was Sunday for her, too. Sunday was the dose. Every week, in the big room with the glass walls, with Mother's sleeve rolled up and the little silver case open on the table.

"Lucas," she said.

"Is it normal?"

"It happens," said Dr. Halloway. "In the first months, especially. The body adjusts to the stabilizer. Sometimes it pushes back a little." She paused. "I've seen it happen before. In other people. It usually settles."

"Usually."

"Usually," she said. She didn't soften it. She never did. I'd started to like that about her more than almost anything. "I'm watching it every day. If it doesn't settle, I'll change the dose. I have room to change it." A pause. "Not a great deal of room. But some."

I looked at Mother. She was looking at me with that face again. The memorizing face.

"It slows it down," I said. "The stabilizer. You said it slows it down. It doesn't stop it."

"No."

"What would stop it?"

Dr. Halloway was quiet for a moment.

"You'd have to end the rejection," she said. "And the rejection is the body fighting the material. So you'd have to change one of them. The body, or the material. Make one of them stop seeing the other as something foreign." She looked at me steadily through the screen. "In every cell, Lucas. In the lungs, and the heart, and the blood, and the bone. Without killing either one while you did it. Billions of cells. Each one alive. Each one different from the one next to it."

"My father made a jaw."

"Your father made a jaw out of steel," said Dr. Halloway. "And then he put it into a living face, and he got that part right, which nobody on earth could have done but him. I've seen the scans of that jaw. They're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in a medical file." She paused. "But steel doesn't fight back. Steel isn't alive. And it took him six hours to do one jaw, slowly, with Okafor awake the whole time and the best field surgeon in the unit telling him where the nerves were."

The booth was very quiet.

"Nobody understands a human body that well," said Dr. Halloway. "Not all the way down. Not well enough to change it without breaking it. I don't. Nobody does."

"No," I said. "Not yet."

She looked at me for a long moment through the screen.

Mother was looking at me too.

"Lucas," said Mother quietly.

"One minute," said the corporal behind me.

Garnet's face crashed back into the frame, half on top of Mother's shoulder, flour and ribbon and all.

"Fish!" she shouted. "Did you look for fish?"

"We haven't gone yet," I said. "We're still under the dome."

"Practice looking for fish," said Garnet.

The screen went dark.

I didn't go back to the barracks.

I went the other way, down the long corridor with the lamps on their chains, to the far end of the cave where the instructors' offices were. Her lamp was on. I could see the light under her door.

I knocked.

"It's after nine, forty-one," said Sergeant Okafor's voice, through the door.

"Yes, Sergeant."

A pause.

"Come in."

She was at her desk, writing on a slate, with a mug of something next to her that had gone cold a long time ago. She didn't look up. The photograph was on the wall behind her. Field Unit Seven. The tall young man with black eyes and his hand on a girl's shoulder.

"I want to learn medicine," I said.

She stopped writing.

"Biology," I said. "Chemistry of the body. How cells work. How the body knows what belongs to it and what doesn't. Everything." I made myself stand still. "Whatever books there are. Whatever the compound has. I'll do it at night. I won't miss anything on the field."

She looked up.

"You're here to learn tactics," she said. "Squads. Formations. How not to get your friends killed on another planet."

"Yes, Sergeant."

"They'll put you on a ship inside a year. I've got that long to turn forty-one children into something that comes back alive. You think I've got time to hand you a library card?"

"My mother's marker went up," I said.

Sergeant Okafor didn't say anything.

"Four points," I said. "Dr. Halloway says it usually settles." I could feel my hands at my sides. I made them stay there. "My father sat on the ground for six hours to understand a jaw. He said he'd have to understand it slow enough that he didn't get it wrong. You told me that." I swallowed. "I've got a year. Maybe five. I don't know how long it takes to understand a whole person. I want to start tonight."

She looked at me for a long time.

Not at my eyes. At my face. All of it.

Then she pushed her chair back and got up, and went to the shelf on the wall beside the photograph. The one with the few old books on it, their spines cracked white. She ran a finger along them. Stopped at the thickest. Took it down.

She held it for a moment before she gave it to me. Just held it. Looking at the cover.

"He left it at the aid station," she said. "After. When they moved the unit up the river. I was in no state to give it back. Then the war ended. Then they put him outside." She held it out. "I kept meaning to find a way. I never did."

I took it.

It was heavy. Old. The cover was gray canvas, stained dark at one corner with something I didn't want to think about. The title was stamped on the spine in faded gold. Surgical Anatomy of the Head and Neck. Field Edition.

I opened it.

The margins were full.

Small, square, careful handwriting. Notes on notes. Arrows to other pages. Diagrams of bone, drawn over the printed ones in pencil, the lines gone over again and again until they were nearly black. And on every page, the same word, in the same hand, written beside the nerves: here. here. here. Don't guess.

Father's handwriting. The same as in the notebooks. The same as on the inside cover of the thickest book in his study, at home, in the field.

I couldn't say anything.

"There's a reading room past the armory," said Sergeant Okafor. She'd sat back down. She was looking at her slate again, not at me. "Officers only. I'm an officer. I'm putting your name on the door." She wrote something. "Lights out is twenty-two hundred. You get one hour after that. One. Not two. If I find you asleep on the field because you were reading about livers, I'll take the key and put it somewhere you can't look at."

"Yes, Sergeant."

"And forty-one."

"Yes, Sergeant."

She didn't look up.

"It took him six hours," she said. "And he knew what he was doing. He'd known what he was doing for years by then. He'd just never done it to a person." A pause. "Don't you dare start with her. You hear me? You start with nothing. You start with a leaf. You understand a leaf. Then you'll know how much you don't understand about the rest."

"Yes, Sergeant."

"Get out."

The reading room past the armory was small and cold and smelled of dust and old paper.

It had four tables, and a lamp on each, and shelves on every wall. More books than the penthouse library. More than I'd known the compound had. Military history, mostly, and tactics, and maps of places that didn't exist anymore. But near the back, in a corner where the lamp didn't quite reach, there were three full shelves of science, left over from whoever had used this cave before the program. Chemistry. Physics. And biology. Cell biology. Biochemistry. Immunology, which I had to sound out. Genetics. A thick blue book called The Human Body, as if there were only one and somebody had finally written it all down.

I stood in front of the shelves for a long time.

Then I took down the first three, and sat at the table under the lamp, and opened Father's book beside them, and started.

It was very hard.

Not the words. I'd read Father's eleven medical books twice, at the kitchen table, at night. I knew a lot of the words. I knew the names of things.

That was the problem. I knew the names of things. I'd always known the names of things. Iron. Carbon. Hydrogen. I could see them, all the way down. I knew how they fit together, and how they came apart, and how to put them back the other way.

But a cell wasn't iron. A cell was a whole city, the book said, with walls, and gates, and messengers running in and out, and factories, and a library at the center with all its plans in it, and every part of it talking to every other part, all the time, in a language made of shapes. And there were more cells in one person than there were stars you could see from the field on the clearest night of the year. Billions. More than billions. Each one alive. Each one different from the one next to it.

And somewhere in Mother, in every one of those cities, there was something that didn't belong. Something built from the wreck of a ship. And every single city was fighting it. Every one. Every day for twenty-four years. And losing.

I read until my eyes hurt.

Then I kept reading. The pressure was back behind them, very faint. Not pain. Just a weight. I wrote it down in notebook fifteen without looking up from the page, the way you'd note the weather.

Day 7. Pressure. Reading.

At eleven, a soldier I didn't know came to the door of the reading room, and looked at me, and looked at the list on the door, and said, "Okafor says time."

I closed the books.

Before I put them back, I sat for a minute with notebook fifteen open on the table under the lamp.

The list was still at the top of the first page, in my handwriting, from the night before we came to the dome. Bread. Fish (on the moon). Mother. Bread had a line through it. Garnet had made sure of that.

I turned to a clean page.

At the top, I wrote: To learn. And under it, slowly, the way Father wrote everything:

1. Cells. What they are. All the way down.

2. How a body knows what's itself.

3. Xenotissue. What it is. What it wants.

4. What's in the stabilizer.

5. Everything Father knew.

6. A leaf first.

I looked at it for a long time. Then I added one more line at the bottom. Small.

7. Slowly.

I closed the notebook. I put the three books back on their shelf, in the corner where the lamp didn't reach. I didn't put Father's back. I carried it under my arm all the way down the long corridor to the barracks, past the dark doors and the lamps on their chains, and put it on the shelf over my bed, beside Mother's photograph and the yellow socks.

Then I lay down in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought about a city with walls, and gates, and messengers, and a library at its center, fighting something it didn't understand.

I knew how that felt.

At the far end of the row, Toby started humming. He still had the second part wrong.

I fell asleep before he got to the end.