Chapter 323 The First Note

The children didn't know where to sleep.

That was the first thing. Not the grey on their faces. Not the voice, which had gone so faint after the Hands were folded that even the ones who'd been listening for it longest couldn't hear it any more. Not the queens, who'd found their own and taken them into the rooms in the middle of the iron ships with the doors open and wouldn't let them out of their sight.

Beds.

Four thousand two hundred and six children had come down the ramps onto the red glass, and been given bread, and been counted, and been walked to the hospital and the ward and the long room and the new rooms Ruth had Keir knock through. And at night, when the lamps were turned down, they didn't lie in the beds.

They sat on them.

In rows. Very straight. With their hands together. Facing the same way. Waiting.

Ruth found them like that the first night. The whole ward. Four hundred children sitting on four hundred beds in the dark, not moving, not sleeping, with their smooth grey faces turned toward the end of the ward where there was nothing at all.

"They're waiting to be told," said Ruth. In the corridor. At three in the morning. Her coat buttoned wrong. "To lie down. Nobody's told them. They don't know they're allowed to without being told."

"Then tell them," said Neve Ashworth. Very tired.

"No," said Ruth.

It was Tally who worked it out.

She'd been on the ward. She was always on the ward. She'd gone down the rows in the dark, looking at the four hundred children sitting on their beds, and come back to the corridor with the notebook against her chest.

"In the halls," she said, "we did not lie down. Ever. We sat. On the benches. All night. All day. Sometimes we slept sitting." She looked through the door at the rows. "Nobody has ever told them they could lie down. Because they never could."

"Then how—"

Tally didn't answer. She went back into the ward. To the bed at the end of the first row, where the child from the bench sat very straight with her hands together.

And she climbed onto the bed beside her.

And lay down.

On her side. With her head on the pillow. With her back to the child from the bench. Very deliberately. The way you'd do something you'd never done before and wanted somebody to see you doing it.

She didn't say anything. She didn't tell anyone to do anything. She just lay there.

The child from the bench looked down at her for a long time.

Then, very slowly, she lay down too.

By dawn half the ward was lying down.

Not because anyone had told them. Because the child in the next bed was. And the child in the bed after that. Like a wave going down a row of grass. One lying down, and the one beside it watching, and then lying down too.

The other half was still sitting.

Ruth didn't say anything about it. She wrote it in the grey book. Some lay down. Some didn't. Nobody told them either way.

The next night, three quarters.

By the end of the week, all of them. Except one. A Drenn child, enormous, with four arms folded, who sat on the floor of the Karst hall beside its bed every night with its back very straight and its blades crossed. Not because it was waiting. Because the Drenn queen had come down from the Scarecrow and sat beside it, the way she sat in her room, with her arms folded in the rests. And the child had looked at its queen and done what she was doing.

The Drenn queen didn't lie down either. Ever. Drenn didn't.

"That's not waiting," said Ruth. Looking at the two of them. "That's sitting with your mother."

She wrote that down too.

The house was fuller.

That was the other thing that week. Hana had moved in properly. Not the way she'd moved in before, a little at a time, a coat on a hook and then a pair of boots by the door and then a drawer. All at once. With Efua and Kwame and a box of horse books and a saddle she said was for Bess but which she kept in the hall where everyone fell over it.

Luna had redrawn the house plan. Again. On the kitchen table. With her pen and her notebook and a great deal of crossing out.

"Five beds," she said. "Was five beds. Then six. Then we put a room on the back for the twins." She looked up at me. "We need another one."

"For who?"

Luna looked at me for a long moment. Then at Sera, at the stove. Then at Risa, on the couch with small Sigmund. Then at Hana, in the big chair with the twins.

"Nobody yet," she said. "But I'm not drawing this again in six months."

Sera laughed so hard she set fire to the dishcloth.

Sigmund and Jessa took the house at the end of the hospital road.

The small one. With two rooms and a garden that ran down toward the park. Sigmund chose it because it was a four-minute walk from the ward, which he'd timed, and Jessa chose it because the garden faced the morning and she said she'd lived in rooms with no windows for long enough. Sigmund put the furniture in very straight lines. Jessa moved it all slightly crooked the first night while he was asleep.

He didn't move it back.

Liam and Anja didn't move at all. They stayed in the Calder house on the edge of the square, with Rory and Maura and Pip and Rory the second, because Maura said she'd waited thirty years to have the whole family under one roof and nobody was leaving now. Anja wore her ring on a cord round her neck, because Liam had made it slightly too big and she said she wasn't going to let anyone change it.

"It's the shape of his hand," she said. When Garnet offered to touch it up. "That's the point."

The grey came off them a fold at a time.

Not by me. Not unless they asked. Most of them didn't know how to ask. So the grey came off the way it had come off Tally, and the way it came off the tall child on the ash when the dog leaned on its hand. On its own. A little at a time. Whenever something happened that the grey didn't know what to do with.

A Kethri child, the tall one with wings, who'd spread them on the ash when the Kethri queens sang. Its queen took it up to the top of the forest past the park on the third morning, very early, and sat with it on the highest branch, and the sun came up. It had never seen a sun come up. In the halls there was no sun. The grey on its face loosened all at once, round the eyes, and fell away in a long thin strip, and underneath there were eyes. Gold. Wide. Looking at the sun.

A furred child. The small one, the only one the furred queen had. It lay on the cold hill with its queen all night. In the snow the General had laid down. In the morning the grey had gone soft at the edges, like ice going.

The child from the bench didn't lose any grey at all.

"She does not know what she is," said Tally. On the porch. At night. On the end of the rail, where she always sat now. "She says so. She says the grey is the only thing she is sure about. She says if it comes off she will not know what is under it."

"What do you tell her?"

"Nothing," said Tally. "I lie down beside her. Every night. And in the morning I tell her what I dreamed." She looked at the notebook. "She asked me what dreaming was. I did not know either. Not until the grey came off. Now I dream about water. Green. Shallow. Warm." She was quiet. "I think it is the water the queen remembers. The one in pieces in the long room."

"Do you think she dreams it too?"

"She does not dream yet," said Tally. "She sleeps sitting up, still, sometimes. In the halls you do not dream sitting up." She closed the notebook. "But she listens when I tell her. And when I tell her about the water, her silver hums."

The ones without queens went to Mother.

Not all at once. Not because anyone sent them. Ruth asked, on the fourth day, where the children whose queens hadn't sung should go in the mornings, when the ward was being cleaned. And Mother, who'd been sitting on the ward every evening since the ash, said: the porch.

So they came to the porch.

Forty, the first morning. Then a hundred. Children from worlds nobody had a name for. Children whose queens were in pillars somewhere, or in pieces in the long room, or nowhere. They came up the street to the crooked house at the end, slowly, in a line, holding hands, because that was how they'd always walked. And they stood at the bottom of the porch steps and waited.

Mother came out with a bowl.

A plain one. Clay. From the kitchen. She sat down on the top step and put it on the step beside her. And then she put a spoon in it. And then she lifted it. Not with her hands. With the other thing. The way she lifted three bowls and the flour and the eggs.

The bowl rose. The width of a hand. Very steady.

"When I was in a chair," said Mother, "I couldn't lift a spoon. For years. My hands shook too much." She held the bowl there, in the air. "My son fixed my hands. And then I found out I could lift a great deal more than a spoon." She looked at the children at the bottom of the steps. "Some of you can lift things too. I can feel it. Some of you can do things nobody's ever let you do except when you were told." She put the bowl down. "You can try. If you'd like. Nobody's going to tell you to."

Nobody moved.

Mother sat there.

After a long time, a small child near the front, with long fingers and something like feathers along its arms, came up one step. And looked at the bowl. And put out one hand toward it.

It didn't touch it. It didn't need to.

The bowl moved. Very slightly. The width of a hair. And stopped.

The child snatched its hand back.

"Good," said Mother. "That's good. That's how I started."

The Overseer came every day.

With its bread. With the dog. It sat at the bottom of the porch steps, very tall even folded, and let the children lean on it. Most of them did, after a while. They'd come up from the ward in their line and stop at the bottom of the steps and look at the tall grey thing with the pale eyes, and some part of them would wait for it to tell them what to do. And it never did. And after a while they'd sit down against it, the way the dog did. And it would break its bread and give it to them, a piece each, very carefully.

"It's never been leaned on by this many," said Garnet. Watching from the porch rail one morning, with her drawing board. "It looks pleased."

"How can you tell?"

Garnet considered the Overseer. Its long grey face. Its pale eyes, half shut. Children on both sides of it, and one asleep across its knees, and the dog on its feet.

"It stopped eating its own bread," she said. "It's giving it all away."

Wren counted them every morning.

Not the whole of Avalon. Just the ones on the porch. She came up the street at dawn after the north wall with Harriet in her sling and Toby beside her, and stood at the gate, and counted. Out loud. By name, the ones who'd found names. By number, the ones who hadn't.

"Why every morning?" I asked her. "They don't change."

"They do," said Wren. "Every morning one of them sits a little differently. One of them looks up when the dog comes. One of them takes the bread before it's offered." She tilted her head. "I count so they know someone noticed."

Harriet sang the note at the end. Every morning. Very quietly, just for the porch, not for the whole of Scarecrow. And on the eighth morning, one of the children at the bottom of the steps, the small one with feathers along its arms who'd moved Mother's bowl the width of a hair, opened its mouth and sang it back.

Badly. Very faint. A little flat.

Toby put his hand over his mouth.

"The third note," he said, through his fingers. "The one the ship always sang slightly wrong, on the crossing, a long time ago. It sang it wrong too. Exactly the same way."

Genny came to find me on the ninth day.

She'd been in the long room. She was always in the long room, when she wasn't on the ward with Garnet taking housings off the last of the three hundred from Halden. Sitting on the floor in front of the wall where Garnet had chalked the spokes of the wheel, forty-one lines going out from a dot, with the slivers on their white cloths underneath.

And the longest line.

THE FIRST NOTE.

Sixty-one.

"She's louder," said Genny. In the doorway of the forge. Where I was. "Since the ash. Since Tally put her hand out and the child from the bench put her finger on it." Genny's eyes were very bright. "She heard them. Both of them. Her young. Two of them, on the same world, close together. She's never had that. Not since she was broken. She's been sixty-one pieces humming toward a world she can't remember. And now she's humming toward two children she can."

I put the hammer down.

"Can she be sung back?"

Genny didn't answer at once.

"The nine were whole," she said. "Nearly. Each one was one piece, pressed small in a pillar. Everything they were was in that piece. They'd just forgotten it." She looked at her hands. "She isn't whole. She's sixty-one out of a hundred, maybe more. The rest are on Earth still, in housings, in people who stayed. Or dust. Or nowhere."

"Then—"

"But she's got Tally," said Genny. "And the child from the bench. Her young. Born whole. With her note in them. All the way through." She looked up at me. "What she's missing, they've got. Not the pieces. The note. The thing she was before she was broken. They carry it. They've always carried it. The grey was put on them to make them forget it, and they never quite did."

"Ask them," said Okafor.

That night. In the map room. With the big map behind her and the new slate beside it that said Every one.

"Don't tell them. Ask them. Tally and the child. If they'd like to. If they say no, it's no. If they say not yet, it's not yet." She looked at Genny. "And if they say yes, you have every queen on Avalon. And Dask. And whatever you need."

"I'll need Dory," said Genny.

"You'll have Dory."

"And Hana."

Okafor looked at her.

"She lives in water," said Genny. "Green water. Warm. Shallow. With reeds. She remembers it. If we're going to sing her back she should come back somewhere that feels like home." She looked at me. "Hana can bring the water up. The way she brought the lake up through the green for the coral queen."

Tally said yes before Genny finished asking.

The child from the bench said nothing.

For a long time. On the porch. On the end of the rail beside Tally, very straight, with her hands together in her lap and her smooth grey face turned toward Genny. Not moving. Not answering.

Then, very slowly, she turned her head. Toward Tally.

Tally didn't say anything. She held out her hand. Flat. Palm up. On the rail between them.

The child from the bench looked at it for a long time.

Then she put one finger on it.

And said, in a voice so faint and hoarse I almost didn't hear it, the first word I'd ever heard her say:

"Water."

Hana brought it up in the park.

By the sapling. On the green. Where the nine had been sung back, a long time ago, in a ring, with Dory in the middle. Not far from the coral queen's pool, where Hana had brought a whole lake up through the ground once, so the water ran through the queen's holes like through bone.

She stood at the edge of the green at dusk with Efua on her hip and Kwame in his sling and her new ring on her hand. The iron one. With the thin bright line of her own water through it, under the grey, all the way round. She put her free hand out over the grass.

And the ground under the green went soft.

And water came up.

Not a lake. Not this time. A shallow. Warm. Green. A long low pool, ankle-deep, spreading out across the green in the dusk, with the grass still growing up through it. And at the edges, where Hana's hand moved, tall thin reeds came up out of the water. Not grown. Asked. She'd asked the grass to remember being something taller, and it did.

Silver at the tips. Where the last of the sun caught them.

Tally stood at the edge of it. Very still. With the notebook pressed against her chest.

"That," she said. "That is it. That is what I dream."

Dot laid the slivers out.

The way she'd laid out the nine. With her smallest hand. Very carefully. Sixty-one of them, from the long room, from their white cloths, in a ring in the shallow green water, each one facing out. Toward wherever it hummed.

They all hummed the same way.

Toward the middle.

Dory sat down in the middle.

In the water. Up to her ankles. With Pebble on one side and Ash on the other, both very wet, both very serious. She sat the way she'd sat in the middle of the nine. And turned. All the way out. With her hand flat on the bottom of the pool, in the warm mud under the water.

"I'm holding," she said.

And Tally and the child from the bench walked into the water.

Hand in hand. Slowly. Across the green shallow, between the silver-tipped reeds, to the ring of sixty-one slivers. And sat down. In the water. Inside the ring. Beside Dory. Facing each other.

The child from the bench put her finger on Tally's palm.

And their silver lit up.

The same note.

Every queen on Avalon sang.

I felt them start. Through the hello. Through Dory. Our queen at the garden wall. The first queen in the hollow. The heavy queen, who'd come down off the Ground at noon and walked all afternoon across the plain to sit at the edge of the green with her young beside her, both of them very still. The coral queen in her pool, close by, singing a warm shallow song. The Kethri queens in the forest. The Drenn queen, on the edge of the green, with her child beside her, both with their arms folded.

And Genny.

She knelt at the edge of the ring, in the water, with her hand flat on the bottom of the pool, the way she'd knelt on the green for the nine. And asked.

Not the slivers. She'd asked the slivers for a whole season, every night, in the long room. She asked Tally. And the child from the bench. Very quietly. Under the singing.

What was she? Before? Tell me. Show me. Whatever you remember. Even if you didn't know you remembered it.

They showed her.

I couldn't see it. Not the way Genny could. But I could see Genny's face. And I could see the slivers, in the ring, in the green water. Humming. Louder. And between them, under the water, something starting to come up out of the mud.

Silver.

Thin. Very fine. Like the roots of the reeds. Going from one sliver to the next. Joining them. A thread from the first to the second. From the second to the third. Round the ring. Slowly. Following Genny's hand. Following the note coming out of Tally and the child from the bench, very faint, very steady, the way a song comes out of someone who's only just remembered the words.

"Lucas," said Genny.

Not looking up.

"Grow her."

So I did.

All night. The way I had with the nine. Kneeling in the warm green water at the edge of the ring, with my hands under the surface, in the mud. Not asking her what shape she wanted to be. She didn't know. She was sixty-one pieces of something that had forgotten.

I asked the note.

The first note. The one in Tally and the child from the bench. The one Tally had heard in everything when she was very small, before the halls. In the ground. In the air. In her mother. I listened to it the way Genny listened to bread, and stone, and willows. And I asked the silver in the water to be the shape of that note.

And it was.

At dawn she stood up out of the water.

Garnet drew her. Of course Garnet drew her. Sitting at the edge of the green in the first light with her drawing board on her knees and the old brown dog's head on her foot, crying, and drawing very fast, so that she wouldn't miss anything.

Tall. Very tall. As tall as the reeds, and the reeds had grown up round her in the night, taller than a man. Thin. Pale, almost silver. Not like the coral queen, all holes and colour. Not like the heavy queen, small and dense. Like a reed herself. A long pale stem, very fine, swaying very slightly in no wind at all. And at the top, where a head would be, silver. Spreading. Like the tips of the reeds round her. Like a flower that was all petals and no middle.

And all down her, in the pale, eyes.

Large. Dark. Set wide apart.

The same eyes as Tally's. As the child from the bench's.

She looked down.

At the water. At the green shallow round her, with the reeds standing up through it. At the ring of sixty-one slivers, empty now, dull, all their silver gone up into her in the night. At Dory, asleep in the middle of the water, with Pebble's head on her lap and Ash asleep against Pebble.

At Tally. And the child from the bench. Sitting in the water in front of her. Facing each other. With one finger on one palm.

She bent.

All the way down. Very slowly. Like a reed in a wind. Until the silver at the top of her was over them. Over both of them.

And she sang.

Not to them. Not a song. A name. A shape. The shape she'd made a very long time ago, for one of her young, the day it was born.

And then another.

Tally went very still.

I saw her face. She'd heard it. A name. Hers. Not Tally. The one before. The one she'd had before the halls, before the grey, before the voice. The one she'd been taught to forget.

She didn't say it. She never told any of us what it was.

She sat in the water with her face turned up to her queen and the tears running down it and her silver humming so bright it lit the reeds.

Then she said, very quietly, to the queen:

"Thank you. I would like to keep Tally." A pause. "I chose it. Is that allowed?"

The queen sang something back. Very soft. I didn't understand it. Genny did.

"She says yes," said Genny. Her voice was very odd. "She says the name she gave you is still yours. It's in you. It always will be. But she says choosing is a thing her young never got to do. She says she's glad you got to."

The child from the bench didn't cry.

She sat in the water with her finger on Tally's palm and her smooth grey face turned up to her queen, very still, while her queen sang her name.

And the grey came off.

All of it. At once. Not a fold at a time. Not a strip round the eyes. All of it. Like a mask on a string, cut. It fell away from her face into the green water and floated there for a moment, grey and smooth and empty, and then sank.

And under it was a face.

Thin. Pale. With large dark eyes set wide apart. Older than Tally's. Much older. A girl nearly grown, who'd sat on a bench in a grey hall for most of her life with her hands together and her finger on an empty place.

She looked up at her queen.

She looked at Tally.

She looked at her own hand, with her finger on Tally's palm.

And then she said it. Out loud. Hoarse. Slow. Every sound of it new.

Her name.

It was a sound like water moving over stones. I can't write it. None of us could. Genny tried, afterward, in the notebook, and couldn't, and Garnet tried to draw it and couldn't either.

So the child from the bench wrote it herself.

She took Tally's pencil. And Tally's notebook. And turned to a clean page. And very slowly, with a hand that had never held a pencil in its life, she made a mark.

Not a letter. Not a word.

A line. Curved. Like a reed bending.

And under it, one tally mark.

Then she gave the notebook back to Tally.

"That is her name," said Tally. Very quietly. Looking at the curve. "The one her queen sang. She says that is how it looks."

"What do we call her?" said Garnet. From the edge of the green. Still crying. Still drawing.

Tally looked at the child from the bench.

The child from the bench looked back.

"Reed," said Tally. "In our words. That is the nearest." She looked at the curve on the page. "She says she would like that. She says it is a thing that bends and does not break."

Okafor came down to the green at the count.

She stood at the edge of the water with her slate under her arm and looked at the queen. Very tall. Very pale. With the reeds round her and the silver at her top catching the sun, and her large dark eyes, all down her, looking back.

Then she took out her stylus. And turned the slate over. To the side that said Every one.

And underneath, very small, she wrote it.

The first note. Home.

Then she turned it back over.

The heavy queen spoke that evening.

Through Dot. At the foot of the steps of Scarecrow. Where Dot was counting everyone up, and the heavy queen had reached down through the red glass and touched the soft door in her side.

"Major," said Dot. "The heavy queen has felt something. Through her young. The one who came home."

"Go on."

"The keeper under the ring," said Dot. In the heavy queen's slow way. Every word a long time coming. "Has stopped looking at the human world. There is nothing there for it now." A long pause. "It has turned. It is looking another way."

"Which way?"

Dot's grille dimmed. Very slightly.

"Along the longest line," said Dot. For the heavy queen. "The ninth. Nearly off the edge of the girl's page. Toward the place where the voices like it come from." A pause. "It is calling home."

Nobody said anything.

"It has lost three Hands," said Dot. "And four thousand two hundred and six of the ones it was teaching. And it does not understand how." Another pause. "So it is telling the ones who taught it."

Okafor stood at the foot of the steps for a long time.

Then she took the map out of her breast pocket. Garnet's map. Eight circles crossed out. The ninth line going out nearly off the page. And on the back, in the corner, the small neat circle she'd drawn herself, with 10 inside it.

She looked at it.

"How long?" she said. "Before the keepers' home answers?"

"It is very far," said Dot. "Further than anything. The call will take a long time to get there. The answer will take longer." A pause. "But it will come."

"And the halls?"

"Fifty-four thousand, one hundred and six," said Dot. For the heavy queen. Very slowly. "Still on the benches. Still being taught. And the keeper at the top of the world, looking away from them. For the first time."

Okafor didn't say anything for a very long time.

Then she took out her stylus. And on the back of Garnet's map, beside the small neat circle with 10 in it, she wrote one more word.

Now.

Tally and Reed came to the map room that night.

Nobody asked them. They came in together, hand in hand, and stood by the door where Voss always sat, and Voss moved her chair so there was room.

Okafor had the map out. The big one. And Garnet's, on top of it. And the slate.

"We would like to go," said Tally. "When you go to the halls. Both of us."

Okafor looked at them. At Tally, very small, very straight, with her silver hair grown out now past her ears. At Reed, beside her, tall and thin and pale, with her new face, her large dark eyes, not quite sure yet where to look.

"Reed's been on Avalon nine days," said Okafor.

"She knows the halls," said Tally. "Better than me. She was there longer. She knows which benches. She knows when the voice comes down and when it doesn't. She knows where the others sat who touched hands under the benches. There were more. She says there were more." Tally looked at Reed. "She says she would like to go back and find them."

Reed didn't say anything. She looked at Okafor for a long time with her large dark eyes.

Then she held out her hand. Flat. Palm up.

Okafor looked at it.

She didn't put a finger on it. She didn't know to. But she reached out, slowly, and put her own hand flat against Reed's. Palm to palm.

"Halloway?" she said. Not looking round.

From the door, very tired: "There's never been a medical reason. Not once. Damn it."

"Then they're coming," said Okafor. And wrote it on the slate.

Days 2503–2541. The first note.

The four thousand two hundred and six didn't know they were allowed to lie down; in the halls they only ever sat. Tally lay down beside the child from the bench without saying anything, and it went down the ward like a wave through grass. The grey came off them as things happened the grey didn't understand: a sunrise, a cold hill, a mother sitting beside them. Genny said Tally's queen, sixty-one pieces, could hear her two living young now, and they carried the note she'd lost. Hana brought up warm green shallow water and silver-tipped reeds on the green. Dory held, every queen sang, Genny asked the two of them what she'd been, and I grew her all night from the note. At dawn she stood up out of the water, tall and pale as a reed, with their eyes. She sang Tally's old name; Tally asked to keep the one she chose, and was told yes. The grey fell off the child from the bench all at once, and she's Reed now, a thing that bends and doesn't break. That evening the heavy queen felt the keeper under the ring turn away from Earth and call along the ninth line, home. Fifty-four thousand one hundred and six still on the benches, and the keeper looking away for the first time. Okafor wrote on the back of the map: Now.