Chapter 317 Pieces

Hana wouldn't name them until I was home.

She told Dory to tell me. Through the hello, in the dark between the pages, with three hundred quiet soldiers in the hold behind me. Hana says she's not naming them till you're here. She says she named them already in her head and she wants to see your face when she says it. A pause. She says you'll make a face.

So I came down the Scarecrow's ramp onto the red glass in the afternoon, behind the last of Halden and the three hundred, and didn't wait for anything. I went straight across the plain and up the street to the crooked house at the end of it.

She was in the big chair by the window. The one I'd made too perfect and then let Garnet make crooked by sitting in it every day for a year. With a baby in each arm.

She looked up.

"Good afternoon," she said. Very carefully. Every word right.

"Good afternoon."

"You took a long time."

"There was a fire."

"Dory told me." Hana looked down. At the one on the left, who was awake, and frowning, and making a small determined noise. "This is the loud one. She came first. She's been shouting for two days. Edda says she has excellent lungs." She looked at the one on the right, asleep, with his mouth a little open. "This one waited. He came eleven minutes after. He's been asleep ever since. Edda says he's very sensible."

Eleven minutes. Like Genny and Garnet.

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

"Sit down," said Hana. "I'm going to tell you their names. And you're going to make a face."

I sat down.

"Her," said Hana. Lifting the loud one, very slightly. "Efua. After my grandmother. Who lived in our two rooms on Harbor Block Forty-four with my mother and my father and three of us, and slept in the kitchen on a mat for eleven years so we could have the bed, and never once said she minded." She looked at the baby. "She used to shout at the pigeons on the balcony. Every morning. They never came back. Efua's going to shout at things and they're never going to come back."

Efua shouted.

"Him," said Hana. Lifting the sleeping one. "Kwame. After Papa." She looked at me. "Because Papa turned a river his whole life under the dome so it went where everyone needed it. And nobody ever thanked him. And on the coral world he turned the sea." Her voice went very quiet. "And he held me. After the cistern. When I couldn't find my words. He sat by the bed and held my hand every day and didn't say anything because he knew I couldn't say anything back."

Kwame slept.

"Efua and Kwame," said Hana. "Osei. And Dask." She looked at me. Very steadily. "There. You made a face."

"I didn't."

"You did. It's the one you make when you're not going to cry and you're going to." She held out the loud one. "Take her. She's been shouting for you for two days. She knows."

Efua stopped shouting when I took her.

She looked up at me. With Hana's dark eyes. And round them, the rings. Not a lattice, like Dory's. Not branches, like Ash's. Rings. Clear, very fine, very many, one inside another, like the rings in water when you drop a stone in it. Going out and out.

And deep inside, water. Hana's water. Turning, very slowly, the way a river turns. And under it, wound through it, mine.

She looked at me for a long time.

Then she reached up. One small fist. And opened it.

And every cup on the kitchen table, through the door, very gently, filled with water.

From nowhere. From the air. Clear and cold, right to the brim, and not a drop over.

Hana laughed.

"She's been doing that since yesterday," she said. "Every time someone she likes picks her up. Edda's run out of cups."

Dory came in from the park with Pebble a step behind and Ash a step behind Pebble, the way she came in every evening, and went straight to Hana's chair.

She didn't say hello. She put one hand flat on Efua and one hand flat on Kwame, and shut her eyes, and stood there for a long time with the lattice bright round her eyes.

"They're still talking," she said at last. "To each other. All the time." She opened her eyes and looked at me. "I still can't tell what they're saying."

"Nobody can," said Mother. From the kitchen doorway. "I told you."

Dory considered this.

"I'm going to," she said. Very firmly. "One day." She took her hands away. "That's seven. With Pebble." She looked at Ash. "Eight with Pebble, if you count Sigmund twice, because he's loud."

"You can't count him twice," said Ash. Very seriously. She was looking at Efua, deciding whether Efua deserved an explanation.

"I can count anyone I like," said Dory. "Tally says."

Kwame woke up at dusk.

He didn't cry. He opened his eyes and looked round very calmly, the way Wren looks round a room before she's counted it, and found Hana, and then found me, and looked at me for a long time.

His rings were the same as his sister's. Water, going out. But something else in them. Something I'd seen before. In Hana, on the coral world, on top of the wall, holding a thousand ropes of seawater so she could lift a whole sea over and set it down gently.

He was holding.

Not anything. Not yet. But the shape of it was in him. Ropes. Very fine. Waiting.

"He doesn't do anything," said Hana. "Edda says that's fine. Edda says some of them don't, at first." She looked at him. "But he watches. He watches everything. Dory says he's counting."

"Counting what?"

"She doesn't know." Hana smiled. "She says he's going to tell her when he's older."

Genny didn't come to see them that night.

Mother noticed. Mother always noticed. She came out onto the porch where I was sitting in Father's chair, with Kwame asleep on my chest, and sat down in the other one, and said, "Your sister's in the hospital."

"Which one?"

"Genny. She went straight there from the ramp. She hasn't come home." Mother folded her hands. "Garnet's with her. Garnet came home for supper and went back with two plates."

"Is she all right?"

"She's working," said Mother. In the voice she used for Genny, which was different from the voice she used for anyone else. Proud, and a little frightened, both at once. "She said to tell you she's found something. She said you'll want to come in the morning. She said don't come tonight, you have a son on your chest."

I went in the morning.

Ruth's ward was full again. The three hundred from Halden had gone in last night, all of them, into the long dim ward and the corridor and the Karst hall and two new rooms Ruth had made Keir knock through from the store behind. Every bed. Every chair beside every bed with someone in it. More people had come in the night. I didn't know where from. They'd just heard, and come, and sat down.

And the slivers were quiet.

That was the first thing I noticed. Walking down the ward. The housings were still on. All of them. Round every neck, down every back, grown in, the way they'd been. But the slivers inside them weren't pushing. Not one. Three hundred of them, and they were all just—still.

Like something that had let its breath out.

The soldiers in the beds were lying very quietly. Some asleep. Some awake, looking at the ceiling. Not waiting to be told. Just lying there. Some of them talking, very quietly, to whoever was in the chair.

At the bed at the end of the first row, the young woman from the gate at Halden, with ice still very faintly on her fingertips, was holding a cup of tea someone had given her. And making small flakes of ice in it, one at a time. And watching them melt.

Genny was in the long room.

On the floor. In the middle. With her back against the table and her notebook on her knees and her eyes red. Garnet asleep beside her, curled up, with her head on Genny's leg and the old brown dog's head on hers. Two empty plates on the floor.

And all round them, on the floor of the long room, in rows, slivers.

Not in housings. Out of them. Ruth had taken them out of every housing the twins had done since we came home. The thirty from the suit bay, and the forty from Carver's pumps, and Jory's, the one Genny had kept under her bed. Laid out on the floor of the long room on squares of clean white cloth, the way Ruth laid out instruments. Very small. Pale. Each one about the size of a fingernail.

Seventy-one of them.

And they weren't quiet.

They were humming.

"They started last night," said Genny. Without looking up. "When the three hundred went quiet at Halden. When all the queens sang." She looked at the rows of slivers. "They heard it. All of them. Even here. Even the ones that were already out. And they stopped humming into nothing and started humming—" She stopped. "Somewhere."

"Like the nine," I said.

The nine. In Dot's side. In the soft cup she'd grown while I wasn't looking. Kept since the tender, humming only into each other, until they heard the Kethri sing through the hello and remembered there was something besides the one note. And started pointing. Home. Each somewhere different. And Garnet had drawn nine lines from a dot like the spokes of a wheel, and that was the map. Nine worlds. Nine queens.

"Like the nine," said Genny. "But not nine." She looked up at me. Her eyes were very tired. "They're not all different. That's the thing. The nine were nine queens, a piece each. These aren't. These are—" She picked up her notebook. She'd drawn on it. Lines from a dot. Like Garnet's. But not nine. "Some of them are the same."

I looked at the drawing.

Lines. Going out from the middle. Not seventy-one. Far fewer. Some of the lines had one sliver on them. Some had two. Some had four or five. And one of them, a long one, going out further than any of the others, nearly off the edge of the page, had eleven.

"The Sorn broke the queens up," said Genny. Very quietly. "For the tithe tokens. They took queens and they broke them into pieces and gave the pieces to the Council. A piece here. A piece there. Over thirty years." She put her finger on the long line. "And the Council put the pieces in the housings. All mixed up. Any piece in any housing. They didn't know. They didn't care." She swallowed. "So a queen got broken into a hundred pieces and sent to Earth and put into a hundred people's backs to make them do what they're told."

I didn't say anything.

"But they're still the same queen," said Genny. "All the pieces. They know each other. Last night when the queens sang, they heard each other. Across the long room. Across the ward. The ones from the same queen started humming the same note." She touched the long line. "These eleven. They're one queen. Eleven pieces of her. From Jory, and from the Carver pumps, and from the thirty in the ward. All the same."

"Can she be sung back?"

"I don't know," said Genny. "The nine were whole, nearly. Each one was a whole piece, pressed small in a pillar. These are broken. Eleven pieces of something that was a hundred." She looked at the eleven slivers in their row on their white cloths, humming. "I don't know how many you'd need. Maybe all of them. Maybe more than half. Maybe enough that she remembers who she was."

Ruth came in.

She'd been on the ward all night. Her coat was buttoned wrong again. She looked at the rows of slivers on the floor of her long room, and at Genny, and at Garnet asleep, and at me.

"Seventy-one," she said. "Every housing we've taken off. Every one had one." She looked at the rows. "And there are three hundred more in my ward still in their housings, quiet now. And Odell says there are thousands on Earth. In the outer domes. On the Program floors before we emptied them. On the Council's soldiers." She was quiet. "Every one a piece of a queen."

"Every one someone's back," said Genny.

"Yes," said Ruth.

She sat down on the edge of the table. Slowly. The way she'd sat down on the floor of the corridor after the Kethri wing.

"The housings come off," she said. "That's our job. Two a day, three now they're quiet, maybe four, the twins say it's easier when the slivers aren't pushing, the roots let go." She looked at the slivers. "And every one we take off gives us one of these. And every one of these is a piece of someone who was a queen." She looked at Genny. "What do we do with them?"

Genny didn't answer for a long time.

"We keep them," she said. "All of them. On cloths. In the long room. Where they can hear each other." She looked at the drawing in her notebook. "And every time we get another piece, we put it on the right line. And when a line's long enough—" She stopped.

"Then we'll see," said Ruth.

"Then we'll see," said Genny.

Tally came in at noon.

She'd been on the ward all morning, with the three hundred. Going down the rows with the notebook. Not asking anyone to do anything. Just sitting. One chair, then the next. Making a mark beside each name in the HALDEN page as they told it to her. Most of them knew their names now. Most of them had found them at the bottom of a pocket, the way Jory had, once the slivers stopped pushing.

She came into the long room and stopped in the doorway.

She looked at the rows of slivers on the floor. Seventy-one. On their white cloths. Humming.

Her face went very strange.

She didn't say anything.

She walked into the room. Slowly. Between the rows. The way she'd walked into the fitting room behind the suit bay. Past the short lines, the slivers with only one or two on them. Past the lines with four and five. To the end. To the long line. The one going out nearly off the edge of Genny's page.

The eleven.

She stopped.

She knelt down. On the floor of the long room. Beside the row of eleven slivers on their white cloths. She didn't touch them. She just knelt there with the notebook in her lap and her hands flat on her knees and looked at them.

They were humming.

All eleven. The same note. Very faint. Very far. Like a voice down a very long pipe.

"I know that," said Tally.

Very quietly. To nobody. To the slivers.

Genny went very still.

"I know that note," said Tally. "I heard it. When I was very small. Before the halls. Before the grey." She put one hand on her chest. On her own silver. Whole. Born whole. Under where the grey had been. "It was the first thing I ever heard. It was in everything. In the ground. In the air. In my mother." She stopped. Her flat careful voice wavered. "I did not know I remembered it. They taught us to forget. I thought I had."

Nobody said anything.

Tally reached out. One finger. And very, very lightly, touched the nearest of the eleven slivers.

The humming changed.

All eleven of them. At once. Not louder. Just—more. As if they'd been humming to nobody, and now somebody was there. As if they'd been calling, very faint, down a very long pipe, and somebody at the other end had picked it up.

And Tally's silver hummed back.

I heard it. Genny heard it. Garnet woke up on Genny's leg and lifted her head and the old brown dog lifted its head and looked at Tally with its ears forward.

The same note.

"She is my queen," said Tally.

Very simply. The way Dory says things that are true.

"She was. Before." She looked at the eleven pieces. "They broke her. And sent her to the human world in pieces. And put her in people's backs." She looked at Genny. "In Jory's back. She was in Jory's back. In the housing. Pushing him. And I counted him, and I did not know."

Genny's eyes had filled up. She didn't wipe them.

"Eleven," said Tally. "Out of how many?"

"I don't know," said Genny. Very quietly. "A hundred, maybe. Maybe more. They broke her into a lot of pieces."

Tally looked at the eleven for a long time.

Then she opened the notebook. Turned past US, past THEM, past EARTH and HOME and CARVER and HALDEN. To a clean page.

She wrote at the top, in Genny's square letters, very carefully. Not a name. She didn't know her queen's name. Nobody had ever told her, if she'd ever had one. She wrote what she'd heard.

THE FIRST NOTE.

And under it, eleven marks.

"I will count her," said Tally. "Every piece. Every time someone's housing comes off and there is a piece of her in it, I will make a mark." She looked up at me. "And when there are enough—"

"Then we'll see," said Genny.

"Then we will see," said Tally.

Jory came that evening.

Tally had told him. She'd gone down the ward after the long room and found his chair, by his mother's bed, where his mother was asleep with her hand on the window Bram had put in. And she'd sat down on the floor beside him and opened the notebook to THE FIRST NOTE and shown him the eleven marks, and told him. All of it. That the sliver from his housing, the one Genny had kept under her bed, was one of the eleven.

He came to the long room with her. He stood in the doorway for a long time, the way he'd stood at the bottom of the ramp, looking up at the sky.

Then he came in. Between the rows. To the end. To the long line.

"Which one?" he said.

Genny pointed. The third one. On its white cloth. Humming with the others.

Jory knelt down beside it. Very slowly. His knees still didn't quite remember how to bend unless he thought about it.

He looked at the sliver for a long time.

"It was in my back," he said. "For all that time. Telling me." He put his hand up, without thinking, to the red line round his neck. Almost gone now. "I hated it. I didn't know I hated it, because I didn't know anything. But I did."

Nobody said anything.

"And it was her," said Jory. He looked at Tally. "Your queen. It was a piece of her. And she didn't want to either. Genny said. She didn't know how to stop."

"Yes," said Tally.

Jory was quiet for a long time.

Then he reached out. One finger. The way Tally had taught him in the fitting room, when he moved his hand without being told and put it on the mark beside hers. And very, very lightly, he touched the sliver that had been in his back.

It hummed.

Not at him. It didn't know him. It only knew one note. But it hummed, and the ten beside it hummed with it, and Tally's silver hummed back, very faint, across the long room.

"I'm sorry," said Jory. To the sliver. Very quietly. "I didn't know you were somebody."

He took his finger away.

Then he looked at Tally.

"When you find the rest of her," he said. "When there's enough. Will you tell me?"

"You will be there," said Tally. "I will count you in."

Jory nodded slowly.

"Then I'd like to come," he said. "On the crossings. All of them. To the domes." He looked down at the eleven. "There are people out there with pieces of her in their backs, and they don't know she's somebody either. I'd like to be the one who tells them. After. When it's off." He looked at his hands. "I'd like to tell them it wasn't her fault. The way the old man from Halden told the soldier."

Ruth, in the doorway, closed her eyes.

"Is there a medical reason he can't?" said Genny. Very quietly. Without looking round.

"No," said Ruth. "Damn it. No."

Voss came to the ward that afternoon.

She didn't come for the slivers. She didn't know about the slivers yet. She came because Halden had come. Because eleven thousand people from Halden had walked off the Ground the day before with filters round their necks, and been given bread, and sent north past the ninth lake with Carver.

And she'd heard. Through the seed. Through Juno. Through everything.

She found the old man with the filter mask. The one who'd told the soldier it wasn't his fault. He was sitting in a chair beside a bed in the Karst hall, beside the big soldier he'd spoken to in the ash. Neither of them was saying anything. They were just sitting.

Voss stopped in front of them.

The old man looked up at her. He knew her face. Everyone did.

"Chancellor," he said.

"Not any more," said Voss. "Renata."

He didn't say anything.

"My brother lived in Halden," said Voss. "Teodor Voss. On the east side. By the old school. His wife was carrying their first." Her voice was perfectly steady. "I was forty-two. I was the junior member of the Council that night. I watched it on the screen. Four minutes."

The old man looked at her for a long time.

"I knew Teodor," he said at last. "Everyone knew Teodor. He fixed bicycles. He had a shop by the school. He used to fix the children's for nothing." He was quiet. "He was in the door of the shop when it went. I saw him. I was across the street."

Voss didn't move.

"He wasn't afraid," said the old man. "If that's what you came to ask. He was looking up. Like he wanted to see what it was." He looked at the soldier in the bed beside him. "Like this one did, at the end. When the singing came."

Voss stood there in the Karst hall, with the Karst young humming very low along the walls, for a long time.

Then she sat down. On the floor. Beside the old man's chair. In her plain coat.

"Tell me," she said. "About the shop. About the bicycles. Please."

Selwyn didn't send anything after Halden.

Odell watched every midnight. Ruan watched every midnight. Nothing came on the Council band at all. Not a word about three hundred soldiers who'd gone out on a transport in the night and never come back.

"He doesn't know what happened," said Odell. On the screen in the map room, from his bench in the long room, where he'd moved his things to be near the slivers. "Nobody came back to tell him. The transport's still sitting on the ash outside Halden, empty. He sent three hundred people with fire in their hands and they just—stopped." Odell almost smiled. "He's frightened. He's more frightened than he was. He doesn't understand it. And frightened men who don't understand something go very quiet for a while. And then they do something stupid."

"How long?" said Okafor.

"I don't know," said Odell. "But I'd keep crossing, Major. Fast."

Okafor looked at the slate. Six crossings done. Twenty-four left.

"Fast," she said.

That night I sat on the porch with Kwame asleep on my chest again, and Efua asleep on Hana's, and Hana in the other chair. Small Sigmund was inside, with Risa, crackling faintly. Trevor was asleep in his cot under frost. Ash was asleep in Sera's bed because Ash had decided she slept there now. Dory was asleep with Pebble at her feet.

And on the end of the porch rail, where she'd sat down without asking, Tally. With the notebook on her knees. Open to THE FIRST NOTE. Eleven marks.

"How many children do you have now?" she asked me. She'd been counting. She always was.

"Six," I said. "Dory. Ash. Trevor. Sigmund. Efua. Kwame."

"Six," said Tally. She made six marks. On a new page. In the back of the notebook. She wrote at the top, very small: HIS. "And all of them know who their mother is."

"Yes."

"And who their father is."

"Yes."

Tally looked at the six marks for a long time.

"I did not know who my mother was," she said. "I do not remember her. Only the note. The first note. In everything." She turned back to THE FIRST NOTE. To the eleven marks. "But now I know where the note is. It is on the floor of the long room. In eleven pieces. Waiting."

"We'll find the rest," I said.

"I know," said Tally. She closed the notebook. "Twenty-four crossings. Thousands of housings. I will be at every one." She looked out at the plain, at the fourteen ships lying on the red glass in the dark. "Every time a housing comes off, I will listen. And if it is her, I will make a mark."

Kwame stirred on my chest. He opened his eyes. He looked at Tally on the end of the porch rail, very calmly, the way he looked at everything. As if he was counting.

Tally looked back at him.

Then she put one finger out. Very lightly. Toward him. Not touching.

And Kwame, eleven days old, who didn't do anything, who Edda said was very sensible, reached out one small hand and took it.

Days 2221–2236. Pieces.

Hana named them when I was home, so she could see my face: Efua, the loud one, after her grandmother who slept on the kitchen mat for eleven years and shouted the pigeons away; Kwame, eleven minutes later, for her father who turned rivers and held her hand after the cistern. Efua fills every cup with water when someone she likes holds her. Kwame watches everything. At Halden the slivers heard the queens and went quiet; on the long room floor, seventy-one taken from housings now hum toward home, and some hum the same note. Eleven are one queen, broken up for the tithe and put in people's backs. Tally knelt and touched one and her own silver hummed back. She is my queen. A new page: THE FIRST NOTE, eleven marks; she'll be at every crossing listening for the rest. Voss sat on the floor of the Karst hall and asked the old man from Halden about her brother's bicycle shop. Selwyn has gone quiet. That night Kwame, eleven days old, took Tally's finger.