Chapter 336 Ask It Why

I came home on time.

Not early. Not late. The Scarecrow came down on the landing field at dusk with the orange of the fire world still on her hull, very faint, like a blush that wouldn't fade, and I walked up the hill to the house with Sera beside me, her arms still warm at the elbows, and Luna was on the porch.

Standing. Not sitting. With her arms folded and Trevor asleep across two chairs behind her and Kwame asleep on Hana's shoulder in the doorway.

She watched me come up the path the whole way.

I stopped at the bottom of the steps.

"On time," said Luna.

"On time."

"Say it, then," said Luna. "On the porch. That was the order."

So I said it. To her first. Then to Hana in the doorway, and Kwame on her shoulder, and Efua, who wasn't asleep at all, who was sitting on the floor of the hall in the dark with her eyes open, listening. Then to Sera, beside me, who'd heard it already that afternoon, on a burning world, under her breath, while she took the heat out of a collar. She didn't say she'd heard it. She listened again anyway.

Then Luna unfolded her arms.

And said it back.

Not in the long-table voice. Not in the voice for broods who'd been talking an hour. In the voice she'd used once or twice, a long time ago, when we were both very young and very frightened.

It was a short thing. She'd never been one for long things.

"There," she said, when she'd finished. Very briskly. "In that order. Now come and eat something. Mother's kept it warm since six and she's pretending she hasn't."

Garnet told Okafor at breakfast.

She did it the way she'd said she would. She came into the map room with her drawing board and the dog and put the drawing of the glass world down on the great table on top of Okafor's sheet, and stood back.

Okafor looked at it for a long time.

At the rings in pencil, going out from the middle of the glass world. Off the edge of the page.

"Where does this go?" she said.

"Here," said Garnet.

Okafor looked up.

"Toward us," said Garnet. "The note. After the queen let her breath out." She put her finger on the edge of the page. "It went out. And something heard it. A long way past the glass world. Further than the ring goes." A pause. "It's pointing now. Home. Like the others."

"Four hundred and thirteen," said Okafor.

"Yes."

Okafor didn't say anything for a while. She looked at the sheet under the drawing. Four hundred and twelve circles, four of them crossed through.

"Wren," she said.

Wren was in the corner. She was always in the corner now in the mornings, with her back to the wall and her eyes half shut, counting. She'd been counting since before the dome and she said she couldn't stop now, any more than you could stop a clock by asking it nicely.

"Four hundred and thirteen," said Wren. Without opening her eyes. "And the stone one's started too. And the sea." She opened her eyes. "Every queen that comes out sings. Every one that sings, something further off hears." She looked at Okafor. "It isn't four hundred and twelve, Maris. It's never going to be a number you can write down and leave."

Okafor looked at the sheet.

"Then I'll stop writing it down and leaving it," she said. She took the pencil. "Garnet. Can you draw me a new one every morning?"

Garnet considered this.

"Yes," she said. "But you'll have to stop crossing them out. It ruins the lines."

"What should I do instead?"

Garnet thought about it for a long time. The dog sat down on her feet.

"Colour them in," she said.

So the circles got coloured in.

That was the morning it started. Not four teams going out and four coming home. Teams going out every morning and coming home every night, and the next morning every one of them taking someone new.

Genny took Neve back to the stone world, and two of the bench children from the porch who'd sat in the hall at the ward and watched, and a young man from the east locks called Corwin who'd been a stonecutter on Earth and said rock had always seemed to him like it was trying to tell you something. Genny stood him in front of a grey wall on the stone world and told him to ask it which way it had closed.

He stood there for an hour.

"Nothing," he said.

"You're telling it," said Genny. "Not asking. Ask it like you don't know."

"I don't know."

"Then ask it like that."

He stood there for another hour. Then the grey opened. A crack. The width of a hand. And Corwin sat down on the stone floor very suddenly with his face in his hands and Genny sat down beside him and said it twice, the way she said everything, "There. There."

Garnet took Reed back to the glass world, and Tally, and two of the light-benders, and taught them to listen once. The light-benders couldn't. They could see where the light went inside the glass, though, and showed her. Garnet drew it. It was the same shape as the note.

Mother took the General back to the sea. And four of the deep crew from the Pool, and a girl from Halden called Wynn who said she'd never been able to do anything at all until the singing, and then one morning had woken up and the water in the basin by her bed had been holding still in the shape of her hand.

Mother looked at Wynn's hand in the basin for a long time.

"Come with me," she said.

Wynn came home from the sea that night soaked to the waist and shaking and grinning, and told everyone at the ward that she had held a wave. Not a big one, she said. A small one. Still. For as long as it took Mother to say good. Then she went to sleep on a bench in the hall with her boots on, and Halloway put a blanket over her and didn't wake her.

Halloway taught it too.

Not the asking. She couldn't ask anything; she said so, briskly, on the first morning, standing at the front of her classroom on the ward with a stick of chalk. She was a doctor. She could tell you what was happening to a body and in what order, and that was all, and it was a great deal.

So she taught what happened after.

To a young man whose grey had been asked open and who woke up shaking. To a queen's young who'd been in a collar so long its neck had grown round the shape of it. To a handler from the sea, frozen and then held and then let go, who'd never in its life been anything but told, and now lay on a cot in the long ward with its eyes open and did nothing at all, for days, because nobody was telling it to.

"Shock," said Halloway. Writing it on the board. "It's the same word. Whatever the shape." She turned round. "Toby."

"Slow heart," said Toby. From the front row, where he always sat. "Then fast. Then slow. For about three days."

"Sigmund."

"Cold hands," said Sigmund. Beside him. With his notebook open and his pen very straight. "Even the fire ones. Their edges go dark."

"Genny."

Genny looked up from her own notebook. The brood book, the thick one, with half the pages already full in her small upright writing and Ruth's and Edda's.

"They want to be told what to do," said Genny. "And you mustn't. Not at first." She paused. "You sit with them. Until they ask you something." A pause. "Then you answer. Once."

Halloway looked at her for a long time.

"Yes," she said, and wrote it on the board. Under shock. In capitals.

At the back of the room, Neve Ashworth copied it down. So did two of the bench children. So did Jessa, who had started coming on her afternoons off and sitting beside Sigmund, and who Sigmund had started, without saying anything about it, leaving a chair for.

Liam explained the burn on his wrist on the fourth evening.

At the forge. With Sera. He came in at dusk and sat on the upturned bucket where Ash usually sat, and Sera, without looking round, took the heat out of the horseshoe in her tongs and said, "Well?"

"Hana put the air inside the fire," said Liam. "On the stone world. Where I told her it would go. Before it got there." He held up his wrist. The burn was healing silver at the edges, the way all of ours did now. "It went there."

"And?"

"And the fire went out," said Liam. "Not from the outside. From the inside. It just stopped." He looked at his wrist. "And then I thought, if you can put it in, you can put it in faster. So I told her where it'd go next. Before the fire knew."

"And?"

"And the fire went somewhere else," said Liam. "Very fast. Onto me."

Sera put the horseshoe down.

"Did she take it back off you?"

"Before it got to the bone," said Liam. "She took the air out from round my arm. All of it. For about a second." He shook his head. "I couldn't breathe with my arm, Sera. I didn't know you could breathe with your arm."

"You can't," said Sera.

"You can now," said Liam. "Apparently. When it stops." He put his wrist in his lap. "Anja says I'm not allowed to tell anyone it was my idea."

"It wasn't your idea," said Sera. "It was your mistake."

"That's what I'll tell people," said Liam. "When they ask." He looked at me. In the doorway. "Don't tell Anja."

"Anja knows," I said. "She told me this morning."

Liam put his face in his hands.

I said it every night.

On the porch. To whoever was there. Some nights that was everyone, and it took a long time, because Dory had decided she wanted to hear it in order, oldest to youngest, and corrected me if I got it wrong. Some nights it was just Mother in Father's chair, and the dog. Once, on the fifth night, it was only Efua, because everyone else had gone to bed early and she'd stayed up on the bottom step with her chin in her hands waiting for me to come in from the roof.

She didn't say anything when I'd finished.

She was very small. Smaller than Kwame. Louder than him. She'd never smelled of rain or made a sound like Toby's counter-note. She filled cups. Every cup in the room, in her sleep, with her hand in the nearest one. And she shouted. She shouted at everything. With Hana's eyes and her silver ring round them and something else behind them nobody had worked out yet.

She just watched me now.

Then she put out one hand. Very small. Flat.

Not to my chest. To the air. Between us.

And the air between us, for a moment, went very still. Not hot. Not cold. Still. As if every piece of it had stopped moving to listen.

Then she took her hand back and crawled up the steps and into the house without looking round.

I sat on the bottom step for a long time.

Hana found me there, later. In her nightgown. With a shawl round her shoulders. She sat down beside me.

"She did the air thing," I said.

"I know," said Hana. "She's been doing it for a week. To me. When I sing to them." She pulled the shawl tighter. "I think she's holding it still so she can hear better."

"Hear what?"

Hana looked out at the dark. At the lights of the town going down the hill, and the long roads, and the train's lamp very far off on the plain, coming home.

"Everything," she said. "Like you. She loves you. Wants to be like you, you are her super hero."

On the sixth night something came down the thread.

I was on Father's roof.

Listening. The way I did. To everything at once. Avalon, and the broods, and the queens, and the new notes going up every evening from the worlds the teams had come home from, more every night, so that the sound of it all was getting so big that some nights I had to sit with my hands over my ears even though my ears had nothing to do with it.

And under it all, at the end of the ninth line, the middle. Listening.

Leaning.

It had leaned toward the fire world for six nights. I'd felt it every night. A weight. Not pushing. Leaning, the way you lean toward a door. Toward the keeper, kneeling beside its mother on the black crust, glowing.

And on the sixth night, it moved.

Down the thread.

Not a push. I'd have known a push. I'd felt a hundred of them, down a hundred threads, be still and hold and take them, flat and heavy and certain, like a hand on the back of your neck.

This wasn't that.

This was slow. And thin. And very careful. Like someone coming down a staircase in the dark who has never been down it before and doesn't know how many steps there are.

Down the ninth line. Through the dark. Toward the fire world.

Toward the keeper.

I was off the roof before I'd finished hearing it.

Down the ladder. Across the yard. Mother was in Father's chair on the porch, and she looked at my face and stood up without a word and went inside, and I heard her on the stairs, knocking on doors.

Luna was in the map room before me. She always was. I didn't know how. She was standing at the great table with her coat on over her nightgown and her hair down, and she looked at me when I came in, and said, "Fire."

"Fire."

"Pushing?"

"No," I said. "Coming down. Slowly." I stopped. "Like it doesn't know the way."

Okafor came in. Then Wren, with her eyes already half shut. Then Toby, and Sera, and Tally from the porch with her blanket round her shoulders, very pale.

"I heard it," said Tally. "Coming down." She held the blanket tight. "It's the voice. The middle. It's never come down before. It only ever sent things." She looked at me. "It's coming itself."

"Not to us," said Wren. With her eyes shut. "To the fire world. Only the fire world." A long pause. "It's slow. It's taking a long time." She tilted her head. "It's stopping at every tower on the way and listening. Like it's checking." Another pause. "Lucas. The keepers. On the ninth line. Every tower it stops at—" She opened her eyes. "They're looking up."

"Who's at the fire world?" said Okafor.

"The keeper," I said. "Its mother. Six hundred young."

"Nobody of ours."

"No."

Okafor looked at me for a long time.

"How long until it gets there?"

Wren shut her eyes again.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Midday. If it keeps stopping."

We argued about it till two in the morning.

Sera wanted to go with everyone. The General, and Mother, and every team, and stand round the keeper on the black crust in a ring like the young had stood round the tower, so that whatever came down the thread would see us before it saw the keeper.

"It's not coming to fight," said Tally.

"You don't know that."

"I do," said Tally. "It's never come itself. Not once. Not when the red world sang, or the halls, or the ring. It sent hands. It sent pushes. It sent keepers." Her voice was very small. "It's coming itself now. Because it doesn't know what to send."

"Then why the fire world?" said Sera. "Why not here?"

Nobody answered.

Then Toby, from the corner. With his hands in his pockets. Very quietly.

"Because of the heartbeat," he said.

Everyone looked at him.

"The keeper's," said Toby. "And its mother's. The same. I heard them. Under the black, when the keeper knelt down." He took his hands out of his pockets. "They're the same heartbeat. And then the keeper heard it. And said mother." He looked at me. "That went up the thread. Lucas. It must have. Everything does. The singing. The asking. The answer." He swallowed. "The middle heard a keeper say mother. And it's been leaning that way for six days."

Nobody said anything for a long time.

"It's going to ask what that means," said Tally.

In the end it was the long table that decided.

At dawn. In the great hall. With Kwame on Hana's knee at the head, who couldn't say your turn yet but pointed, which everyone had agreed counted. With Voss at the clerk's desk, with his pen. With a seat for every brood, and the heavy queen at the open end of the hall with her great head through the doors, and the Overseer beside her, with the dog.

Luna put it to them. The thread. The fire world. The voice, coming down.

And the broods talked. For a long time. In the way broods talked, each in their own way, through Dot and through Juno and through the seed and through each other. Voss wrote all of it down.

And at the end, the Overseer stood up.

Very tall. Even for it. Its long grey face very still.

I would like to go, it said.

The hall went quiet.

I was made at the middle, it said. I was taught by the voice. It knows my shape. A pause. If it comes down the thread and finds a keeper it lost, and does not know what that is, then it may want something it made to tell it. It looked down at the dog at its feet. And something it made is sitting on the ground with a dog.

The heavy queen made a sound. Low. Through the floor.

She says, said Dot, beside her, that her son should not go. He is the top of the world. But she says— A pause. Dot's face changed. She says the Overseer is right. And she says take the girl.

Everyone looked at Tally.

Tally was sitting at the foot of the long table. In her blanket. She'd come straight from the map room and hadn't gone to bed at all.

"Me?"

You answered, said Dot. It knows your voice.

Kwame, on Hana's knee, at the head of the long table, pointed at Tally.

That was the vote.

The rule was no children fight.

Okafor had made it, before the red world. Nobody who wasn't grown went anywhere there might be fighting, not ever, not for any reason, not even if they asked.

Tally knew the rule. She'd voted for it.

"It's not fighting," she said. On the landing field. At midmorning. With the Scarecrow warming behind her. "It's answering. Again. That's all." She looked up at me. "And if it is fighting, you'll put me behind you. Like the first time. On the bench."

"I wasn't there the first time."

"I know," said Tally. "But somebody was. Somebody always is now." She pulled her blanket round her. "That's what changed."

We took the Scarecrow. The Drenn queen singing the rope.

The Overseer, folded into the hold, very tall even folded, with the dog asleep against its legs. Tally. Sera, because it was fire and because she wouldn't be left. Toby, for the hearts. Juno and the seed. Mother, who came up the ramp at the last minute in her dark coat with Father's ring and said nothing at all and sat down beside Tally and put her arm round her.

And me.

Nobody else. Okafor wanted it small. Small enough that whatever came down the thread could see every one of us at once.

The fire world hadn't changed.

Orange from horizon to horizon. Rivers of molten rock running across the black crust. Mountains of fire standing up.

But in the middle, where the tower had been, it had.

The queen was still there. Fire, standing up out of the ground. But lower. Wider. Settled, the way the heavy queen had settled beside the Ground. And round her, the young, six hundred of them, in a great glowing ring, not pressed to the ground now. Lying in the heat with their heads up. Some of them playing. You could see it from the window. Coals that walked, chasing each other round their mother in long bright loops.

And the keeper.

Kneeling where we'd left it. At her side. Its long grey hands flat on the black crust.

Glowing.

All of it now. Not just the face. Its arms, its long grey back, its folded legs. Orange at the edges. Faint. The way the forge coals glow at the end of the night.

It looked up when we came down.

You came back, it said.

"Something's coming down the thread," I said.

I know, said the keeper. I have been listening. It looked up. At the sky. At nothing. At the place where the thread went up, very far, toward the end of the ninth line. It is very close now. It is very slow. A pause. I have never heard it be slow.

We waited.

On the black crust. Sera with the heat in her arms so the rest of us could stand there. Toby with his head on one side. Mother with her arm round Tally. The Overseer, unfolded now, very tall, standing beside the keeper with the dog lying between their feet.

Two grey things. One glowing. One not.

The keeper looked at the Overseer for a long time.

You are from the middle, it said.

Yes.

You are not a keeper.

No, said the Overseer. I was more than a keeper. I taught them. Under the ring. On the benches. A pause. I taught you, I think. A long time ago.

The keeper didn't say anything.

I am sorry, said the Overseer.

The keeper looked at it for a very long time. Then it looked down at the dog. Lying between their feet. Asleep.

What is that?

A dog, said the Overseer. It belongs to no one. It came. It stays. A pause. It taught me more than I taught anyone.

Midday.

Toby heard it first. His head came up very sharply and his hands came out of his pockets.

"Lucas," he said. "There's no heartbeat."

I looked at him.

"Coming down," said Toby. Very white. "There's no heart. Everything has a heart. The keepers. The Overseer. The Hands, even, the ones we sang. Slow, but there." He swallowed. "This hasn't got one. It's just—" He stopped. "It's just listening. All the way down."

And then it was there.

Not standing on the crust. Not a shape. Nothing you could see. The sky over the fire world didn't change. The rivers didn't stop. The young didn't stop playing.

But the air did.

All of it. Over the whole of the place where the tower had been. Every piece of it, very suddenly, stopped moving. To listen.

The way Efua held it still. On the bottom step. With her small hand flat.

Keeper.

It wasn't loud. It was the voice. The one we'd heard down every thread, hold, take them, who is singing. But it was very thin. Very far. Like something speaking through a long pipe from a long way off.

The keeper didn't stand up.

It stayed kneeling. At its mother's side. With its hands flat on the black crust.

Yes, it said.

You stopped.

Yes.

A long silence. The still air over the fire world didn't move.

Why?

The keeper looked at me.

I didn't say anything. It wasn't my turn. I looked at the keeper and I didn't move.

The keeper looked back up. At nothing.

Someone came down the thread the wrong way, it said. And asked what I wanted.

Keepers do not want.

I did not know I could, said the keeper. Until I was asked.

Another silence. Longer.

You said a word. Six days ago. It came up the thread. The thin voice. Very careful. I do not know the word.

The keeper didn't answer at once.

It looked at its mother. Fire. Standing up out of the ground beside it. Bent very slightly toward it, the way she'd been bent when we left, the brightest part of her close to its face.

Mother, said the keeper.

Yes. That word.

The keeper was quiet for a long time.

She is what I came out of, it said at last. A long time ago. Before the benches. Before you taught me. A pause. She was under the tower. You kept her burning so the tower could grow. I kept her burning for you. I did not know. It looked down at its hands. Glowing. Her heart beats the same as mine.

Why does that matter?

The keeper looked at me again.

And then at Tally.

Tally was standing with Mother's arm round her. In her blanket. With her face very white.

She stepped forward.

Out from under Mother's arm. Onto the black crust. With Sera's heat round her so she didn't burn. To the keeper's side.

And put her hand out. Flat. Into the still air.

"Because it's the first thing," said Tally. "Before anything. Before the benches. Before you." Her voice was shaking. "Everyone came out of someone. And when you find them again, you know. Even if you didn't remember. Even if somebody taught you not to." She swallowed. "I found mine. Under a ring. She was in eleven pieces. Lucas put her back. And I knew her."

The still air over the fire world didn't move.

Who did you come out of?

It was Mother who asked it.

Not Tally. Not me. Mother. Standing on the black crust in her dark coat with Father's ring, with her hands at her sides, looking up at nothing. At the still air. At the voice that had been at the end of the ninth line for longer than anyone remembered.

She said it very simply. The way she'd asked me, the first night, in the kitchen, when I came home from the dome with silver on my hands. What happened? Not hard. Not soft. Just wanting to know.

"Who did you come out of?"

The silence went on for a very long time.

The young played round their mother. The rivers ran. The keeper knelt with its hands on the ground and its mother's light on its face. The dog woke up, and yawned, and went back to sleep against the Overseer's legs.

And the voice, at the end of its long thin pipe, said:

I do not know.

A pause.

I do not have one.

Nobody moved.

Then, very slowly, the still air over the fire world began to move again. Not all at once. A little. At the edges. The way a held breath comes out.

And the voice went back up the thread.

Slowly. As slowly as it had come. Stopping at every tower on the ninth line, Wren told us after. Every one. All the way back to the middle.

Listening at each one.

As if it was looking for something.

The keeper stayed.

It said it would. Its mother bent over it and it put its glowing hands back flat on the crust and said, before we went, If it comes again, I will tell it more. About her. I have six days of knowing her now. I will know more next time.

The Overseer stayed a long time at the bottom of the ramp. Looking up. At the sky. At nothing.

Then it came up the ramp. And folded itself into the hold. And put one long grey hand on the dog.

It was always alone, it said. Very quietly. To nobody. At the middle. I never thought about it. I thought it was the middle. That was all. A pause. I did not know it could not know.

Mother sat beside me on the way home. In the forward cabin. With the orange fading off the windows.

She didn't say anything for a long time.

"I shouldn't have asked it," she said at last.

"Why?"

"Because I don't know what to do with the answer." She looked at her hands. At Father's ring. "Your father used to say there's nothing worse than a question you can't take back." A pause. "He was wrong about a lot. He was right about that."

"It needed asking."

"I know," said Mother. "That's the trouble."

She put her hand on mine. On the arm of the seat.

"Say it tonight," she said. "To everyone. And then say it again, quietly, after." She looked out of the window. At the dark between worlds. "I keep thinking about something that's never had anyone say it. Not once."

Garnet was waiting in the map room when we came in.

With a new sheet. The one for the next morning. She'd stayed up to finish it, Okafor said, and wouldn't go to bed until we got back, and Okafor hadn't had the heart to make her.

She didn't ask what happened. She looked at Tally's face, and Mother's, and mine, and then she turned the drawing board round.

Four hundred and nineteen circles. Some of them coloured in. Spread across the sheet like stars.

And in the middle, at the end of the ninth line, where the middle was, nothing.

Not a circle. Not a mark. A space. The size of a circle. With the lines all running into it from every edge of the page, nine of them, and stopping.

"I didn't know what to draw," said Garnet. "For it. Every queen gets a circle. Every circle's someone who came out of someone." She looked at the space. "I didn't know what it came out of. So I left it."

Mother came round the table. Very slowly. And looked at the sheet.

"It doesn't know either," she said.

Garnet looked up at her.

"It said so," said Mother. "Today. It said it doesn't have one."

Garnet didn't say anything for a long time. The dog came and sat on her feet.

Then she picked up her pencil. And held it over the space in the middle of the sheet, where the nine lines stopped.

And didn't draw anything.

"Not yet," she said. "I'll leave room."

She put the pencil down beside the sheet. Very straight. Exactly where Okafor always put hers.

I said it that night.

On the porch. Oldest to youngest. Dory checking. Mother in Father's chair, Luna and Sera and Risa and Hana, the twins, Liam and Anja with Rory asleep between them, Toby, Wren, Tally on the rail in her blanket, the dog. Efua on the bottom step with her chin in her hands.

And then, afterward, when everyone had gone in, I went up on Father's roof.

And listened. To everything. Avalon, and the broods, and the queens, and the new notes going up every night. And under it all, at the end of the ninth line, the middle.

Not leaning now.

Very small. Very far. Moving from tower to tower, slowly, listening at each one.

I didn't push anything down the thread. I didn't sing. I didn't ask.

I just said it. Quietly. Up into the dark.

I don't know if it heard. I don't think it could. Nobody can hear my silver. They only know what I say.

But I said it anyway.

Days 2734–2740. Ask It Why.

Luna said it back on the porch, in that order. Okafor colours the circles in now; Garnet draws a new sheet every morning, and every team that comes home takes someone new the next day. Liam learned you can breathe with your arm, briefly; Anja knew before I did. Efua holds the air still to hear better. I’m her hero, one of the things I am most proud of. On the sixth night the middle came down the thread itself, slowly, with no heartbeat, to the fire world, to ask the keeper why it stopped and what mother meant. Tally told it. Mother asked who it came out of. It said it doesn't know. It doesn't have one. Then it went back up, stopping at every tower, looking for something. I said it up into the dark.