Chapter 345 Ranks

The first thing they built was a barn.

Not a base. Not a ship. A barn. On the plain north of the town, past the last of the new roads, where the grass went on to the edge of the sky. Because two hundred cows had come off the Pool onto the red glass and stood there in a long brown line, looking at Avalon, and refusing to move.

And the horse.

"They want a roof," said the farmer who'd brought them. A big slow woman from the farm domes on the ridge called Hettie Crale, with hands like spades and a voice like a gate. She'd walked down the Pool's ramp behind the last cow with a calf under each arm and looked at the sky, which was blue, and the plain, which was green, and the town, which had a forge and a train and more people round it than she'd ever seen in one place, and not one single barn. "They've never been out. Not once. Not one of them. Born under the dome, every one." She put the calves down. "They want a roof. And so do I, for a bit, if I'm honest."

So the first thing nine hundred and forty thousand people from Earth built on Avalon was a barn.

It took them a day.

I didn't build it. I didn't need to. That was the thing.

I'd built everything. For three years. Every house in the town and every rail on every line and every pipe Bram Okonedo drew on the backs of his maps. Every machine Halloway asked for. Every engine. I'd stood on the plain with Odell and Mira Lisk and folded iron out of the ground and asked it to be a train, and it had been one.

I came down to the plain north of the town on the first morning after Earth to start on the barn.

And it was already up.

The frame. Timber. From the forest past the river, cut and carried and stood up in the night by a crew of forty from the old east block who'd been joiners and roofers and carpenters under the dome, building the same rooms over and over for people who'd never seen a tree. They'd seen trees now. They'd walked into the forest past the river at dawn with saws from the Long Legs' hold and stood there for a long time looking up, and then started cutting, very carefully, asking the Kethri queens which ones.

A man with a pencil behind his ear came down off the roof beam when he saw me.

"You're Dask," he said.

"Yes."

He looked at the barn. At the frame against the blue sky. At me.

"We heard you could do this with your hands," he said. "Just ask the wood and it goes up." A pause. "Is that right?"

"Yes."

He thought about this.

"Well," he said. "Don't." He put the pencil back behind his ear. "We've been waiting forty years to build something that wasn't a box. You'll get your turn."

I went home.

I sat on the porch steps with my coffee and watched the plain. And over the next few days, the barn went up. And then another. And then a dairy, and a smithy that wasn't Father's, and a long low shed for the seed trays, and fences, real fences, out of timber, going out across the green toward the edge of the sky.

I didn't touch any of it.

Mother came out and sat down beside me on the third morning.

"You look lost," she said.

"I don't know what to do with my hands."

Mother looked at them. All ten fingers lit.

"Your father said that," she said. "The first week after the war. He sat on the step at the forge for three days and didn't light it." She was quiet. "Then he got up and built you a cot."

Okafor sent for me on the fifth day.

Not to the map room. To the long hall. The one where the long table sat. Except the long table wasn't sitting. The hall was nearly empty. Kwame wasn't at the head. Voss wasn't at the clerk's desk. The seats for the broods were empty.

Okafor was standing at the far end, by the open doors, where the heavy queen usually put her head through. With her slate. And beside her, a woman I didn't know.

Small. Neat. Grey-haired. In a coat with too many pockets, every one of them full. With a pair of spectacles pushed up on her head and another pair on her nose.

"Dask," said Okafor. "This is Doctor Yusra Bell."

The woman held out her hand. I shook it. She had a very firm grip and ink on every finger.

"Materials," she said. "Forty years. Level Fifty-eight, New Halcyon. The dome glass. The pump housings. The suits." She looked at me over both pairs of spectacles. "I've read everything Halloway wrote about you. Twice." A pause. "I'd like to know how you fold iron. I'd like to know very much."

"I don't know how," I said. "I just ask."

"Yes," said Doctor Bell. "That's what Halloway wrote." She took the top pair of spectacles off her head and put them in a pocket. "That's going to be extremely annoying."

There were more of them.

Okafor had a list. Of course she did. On the back of the slate. Past Selwyn. Past Now. Past A keeper said no. Past Everyone. Past Not still.

Nine hundred and forty thousand people from Earth, and Selwyn had gone through every one with her. Every record that had come off the archive floors in the Scarecrow's hold. Every name.

"Four thousand, one hundred and six engineers," said Okafor. Reading. "Structural, mechanical, electrical, fluid. Twelve hundred physicists. Nine hundred chemists. Six hundred and forty from the Program floors who can read silver on a scanner." She turned the slate. "Eleven thousand builders. Two thousand machinists. The whole of the pump crew from New Halcyon. The whole of the fabrication halls from Level Fifty-eight." She looked up. "Every person who kept the domes alive for eighty years, Dask. Every one. They're here."

I didn't say anything.

"For three years," said Okafor, "everything on Avalon that was made of metal, you made." She put the slate down. "That stops."

"Not because you're not good at it," said Okafor. "Because there's one of you."

She walked to the open doors. Looked out. At the plain, and the new barns going up on it. At the red glass, with the Ground on it and the heavy queen beside her, and against the heavy queen's side a small grey queen like ash, and against her, a keeper, curled, with a red scarf.

"The houses spoke through the Overseer," said Okafor. "They said fault. They said return, or be corrected." She was quiet for a moment. "We didn't return anything. We took everything. Earth's empty. And we took a queen out of the middle of their black and gave her back to her son."

She turned round.

"The Overseer says they have a word," she said. "For what we are now. It's not fault." A pause. "It woke up last night and told Mother. It says there's only one other thing the houses have ever called a world. One other word, in all of their records. For the ones that didn't stop being faults when they were corrected."

"What is it?"

Okafor looked at me.

"Front," she said.

Nobody said anything.

Doctor Bell took the second pair of spectacles off her nose and polished them on her coat for a long time.

"Then we'd better have one," said Okafor. "A front. A real one."

She picked the slate back up.

"I've been a sergeant for thirty years," she said. "I ran cadets. I ran the dome drills. I ran a war on Avalon with a slate and a map and four children who could do things nobody had ever seen." She looked at me. "That was a fault. Faults run on slates." A pause. "A front doesn't."

She laid it out that night.

In the map room. To all of us. Luna and Sera and Risa and me. The General. Holt. Liam and Anja. Toby. Genny and Garnet, because Okafor said there was no point pretending they wouldn't be listening at the door anyway. Selwyn. Ruan, on the big screen from the Meridian. Doctor Bell, with all her pockets.

Garnet's sheet was on the great table. Four hundred and nineteen circles. And beside it, a new one. Avalon. Every road. Every town. Every rail. Carver, far north past the ninth lake. Ashby, on the salt in the west. Stillwater. The east locks people, out past the Hesk ranges. Halden's eleven thousand, who'd come off the ash and gone south, to the warm country, because they said they'd had enough of cold. The new farms on the plain. Every place anyone lived.

Okafor put her finger on Carver.

"How long," she said, "for the Scarecrow to get from here to there?"

"Two hours," I said. "If I push her."

"And if correctors drop out of the sky over Carver at dawn?" Okafor didn't look up. "The way they dropped over the east block?" A pause. "How many people in Carver?"

"Two hundred and ten thousand," said Selwyn.

"How long does the black take to cover a town of two hundred thousand?"

Nobody answered.

"Two hours is too long," said Okafor.

"Interceptors," said Doctor Bell.

Everyone looked at her.

She was very calm. She'd taken out a notebook from one of her pockets, small and black and full, and was turning the pages.

"Small craft," she said. "Fast. Not ships. Not something you carry people in. Something you get there in. Two people. Three. One to fly, and whoever you need when you arrive." She found the page she wanted. "We had plans. On Earth. For atmospheric work outside the domes. Never built. No point, under a brown sky, with nowhere to go." She turned the notebook round. "Hull, engine, frame. I can build the hull. Halvard Ostrand can build the frame; he did the pump housings for New Halcyon for thirty years. The engine—"

She stopped. And looked at me.

"The engine's the problem," she said. "We don't have fuel. We don't have anything that burns hot enough. Not on Avalon." A pause. "Halloway says your iron ships don't use engines. She says they hum."

"The heavy queen sang into the iron," I said. "For three days. And it learned how to be a ship."

"Can she do it small?"

I didn't know.

"Ask her," said Okafor. "Ask her what she'd like."

The heavy queen said no.

Not unkindly. She said it through Dot, through the wood of the Ground's ramp, on the red glass, the next morning, with the small grey queen against her side and the keeper against her.

She says she is too heavy, said Dot. She says what she sings into iron is weight. Holding. Carrying. A pause. She says a thing that must get there fast does not want to be heavy.

"Then who?"

The heavy queen turned her head. Slowly. Up. Toward the wind over the plain.

Toward the Kethri queens.

The Kethri queens said yes.

Before anyone asked them. They came down out of the wind onto the plain north of the town where Doctor Bell and Halvard Ostrand had laid out the first hull, a long narrow shape of new steel on trestles, with Earth's plans on a board beside it, and they looked at it for a long time with their great heads on one side.

Then the elder of the two put her head down and sang into it.

Not a hum. Not weight. Wind. The moment before a storm breaks, when everything goes still and the air leans one way.

The hull lifted off the trestles.

Doctor Bell sat down very suddenly on the grass.

"It's not a ship," said Doctor Bell. On the grass. Looking up at the narrow steel shape, hanging in the air over the trestles, leaning very slightly north, like something that wanted to go. "It's not an engine. It's not anything I've got a word for." She took off both pairs of spectacles. "It's wind. In steel. It knows which way it wants to go."

"Can it go fast?"

The Kethri queen sang one more note into it.

It went.

North. Over the plain. So fast it was a line, and then a dot, and then nothing, and a moment later a sound like the sky tearing came back across the grass and flattened it in a long silver wave.

It came back four minutes later.

From Carver.

Risa flew it.

I want to write that down properly. Because she'd never flown anything that wasn't herself. Because she said, when Okafor asked who, me, before anyone else could open their mouth, and Okafor looked at her for a long time and said why, and Risa said, because it's lightning that knows where it's going, and I'm lightning that knows where it's going, and somebody had better teach it manners.

She took it up on the second day. With Liam behind her, because Liam could see where the air would be.

They went to Carver and back in seven minutes.

They went to Ashby, on the salt in the west, and back in eleven.

They went to Halden's people in the warm country in the south, and the farmers there, who'd never seen anything faster than the train, came out of their houses and stood in the fields with their mouths open as it went over them like a thrown knife.

When she came down, she climbed out of the cockpit with her hair standing straight up and her face white and her eyes very bright.

"We'll need forty," she said. To Okafor. "At least. One for every town further than ten minutes. Two for Carver." She took her gloves off. "And pilots. Lots. And they'll need to learn to talk to the Kethri. The steel listens to them, not me. I just argue with it."

"Who'll teach the pilots?"

Risa looked at her.

"Who do you think?" she said.

That was the first rank.

Okafor gave it to her that night. In the map room. Without ceremony. She wrote it on the slate, Calder, R. — Wing, and looked up, and said, "You're in charge of the interceptors. All of them. Every pilot. Every hull. You answer to me."

"What's the rank?"

Okafor thought about it.

"Wing Commander," she said. "It's what they called it. On Earth. Before the domes." A pause. "There's nobody left alive who knows what it means. So it means what you make it."

Risa looked at the slate for a long time.

"Wing Commander Calder," she said. To nobody.

Small Sigmund, asleep against her shoulder, made very small thunder.

The Meridian came down from her track on the twelfth day.

Not all the way. To the low track, where Ruan could see the whole of Avalon from the main ring at once. Where the spine-queen, laid along the middle of the station like a pale root, could feel every thread that came down into Avalon's sky. Every rope. Every crossing.

Every Hand.

"Command," said Ruan. On the big screen in the map room, with the main ring behind her lit for the first time since I'd known her. All of it. Every station. Six hundred and four crew at their posts. "That's what she's for. That's what she should have been all along."

Doctor Bell and Halvard Ostrand went up on the Long Legs with three hundred engineers from Level Fifty-eight. They refitted her. In a month. Every system. New sensors, from the Program floors' scanners, turned outward, so they could read silver not in a body on a table but in the sky over a whole world. A relay that could talk to every interceptor and every ship and every town at once. A map room of her own, at the heart of the main ring, round the spine-queen.

And the spine-queen, who'd chosen to stay aboard when we'd freed her, lay in the middle of it all and listened.

To everything.

"She hears the threads," said Ruan. A month later. On the screen. "Every one that comes into Avalon's sky. She can hear something coming down one before it gets here." A pause. "Six minutes. Sometimes eight. Enough time to put an interceptor in the air."

Okafor wrote it on the slate.

Ruan, M. — Orbital Command.

Ilka Marrow went up with them.

She asked. She came to the map room on the third day after Earth, still in the grey shift coat from Level Forty, and stood in the door the way the Overseer stood, as if she wasn't sure she was allowed past the frame.

"I ran the relay," she said. "On the north dome. Eleven years. Nights, mostly." She looked at the big screen. At Ruan. "I'm good at it. I'm good at listening to nothing for a long time and noticing when it isn't nothing any more." A pause. "I don't know how to do anything else. I don't know how to build a barn."

Ruan looked at her from the screen for a long time.

"Come up," she said.

Ilka went up on the Long Legs the next morning. She sits at the relay in the new map room at the heart of the main ring now, with the spine-queen laid along the floor behind her like a pale root, on the night shift, every night. She says she can see the whole of Avalon from up there. The towns. The lights. The rails going out like spokes.

She says the sky's blue from the top too.

Genny opened the first of Sera's sacks on the tenth day.

At the kitchen table. With the brood book. With Tally beside her, because Tally had a queen in eleven pieces once, and knew.

There were forty sacks. Every one full of small grey boxes. Every box with a piece of a queen in it. Broken. Given to the Council as tokens, for thirty years. Nobody had ever counted.

Genny counted.

Eleven thousand, two hundred and six pieces.

She sat at the kitchen table and looked at the number for a long time.

"I can't," she said. Very quietly. "Not on my own. Not even with Tally. It took us weeks for eleven."

"Then don't do it on your own," said Mother. From the stove.

So Genny didn't. She took the sacks down to the long ward. And Neve came, with her lit hands. And the six hundred and forty from the Program floors who could read silver on a scanner. And the children from the halls, who'd sung slivers quiet at Halden. And every night after supper, in the long ward with the lamps low, they opened the boxes one at a time and listened, and wrote down which note each piece hummed, and put the ones that hummed the same note together in the same tray.

By the fortieth day there were three hundred and twelve trays.

Three hundred and twelve queens. In pieces. Waiting to be sung back.

Genny says it'll take years.

She says that's all right. She says they've waited longer.

The bases came next.

Four. One at each edge. North, at Carver, past the ninth lake, where the cold country started. West, at Ashby, on the salt. South, in the warm country, where Halden's people had gone. East, out past the Hesk ranges, on the plain the old queen had made when she broke a mountain.

Not forts. Okafor said she'd seen enough of walls. Fields, with hangars on them for the interceptors. Barracks. A ward, every one, with someone from Halloway's classes. A store of everything a town would need if it had to hold for a day.

And a queen.

Every base. A queen who'd chosen to be there. The Drenn queen went north, to Carver, with half her brood, because she said the cold country was like the edge of her forest in winter. The coral queen went west, to the salt. The forest queen went south, to the warm country, where she said things would grow fast. The red queen went east, to the old queen's valley, because she said she liked a sky with nothing in it.

"They're not ours," said Okafor. When the long table asked. "They're not soldiers. Nobody gives a queen a rank." She looked down the table at the seat for every brood. "They're allies. They chose. Every one. They can unchoose."

The long table voted. Every brood. Every town.

It passed.

Then the ranks.

Okafor didn't want them.

She said so. In the map room. Late. To me. With the slate on the table in front of her, half covered in names, and her coffee gone cold.

"Thirty years," she said. "Sergeant. That's all I ever was. That's all I ever wanted to be. You know where you are with a sergeant." She rubbed her eyes. "And now there's going to be a hundred thousand people in uniforms on four bases and a station in orbit and forty interceptors, and somebody's got to be at the top of it, and the General says he did his time and won't take it, and Holt says he'll stand beside whoever does and not one inch in front."

"So take it."

"I'm a sergeant, Dask."

"You told me," I said. "The night before the singing. You said you lied, and you were a sergeant." I put my hand on the slate. "You've been running a war for three years from a slate with four children on it. You've been running it right."

Okafor looked at me for a long time.

"Marshal," she said at last. Very quietly. "That's what they called it. Before the domes. The one at the top. Who answers to the people, not the other way round." A pause. "I'll answer to the long table. Every week. And the day they say stop, I stop."

She wrote it on the slate.

Okafor, M. — Marshal.

She looked at it.

"I hate it," she said.

The rest came quickly after that.

The General was the first to stand up at the long table and say Marshal Okafor. In his greatcoat. With the frost at its edges. He said it very clearly, and saluted, the way he'd have saluted thirty years ago. And sat down.

Then Holt.

Then everyone.

Luna was Chief of Staff. Okafor said she'd been it since the dome; she was just writing it down.

The General took the four bases. Not command. Inspector, he said. He'd go round them every month and tell them what they'd got wrong, which was the only thing he'd ever been good at and the only thing he'd ever wanted to do in a war. Holt took the training. Every recruit. Every drill.

Sera took the forges. All of them. Every foundry, every smithy, every hull for every interceptor that Doctor Bell designed and Halvard Ostrand framed. She said if the steel was going to carry Risa's pilots into the sky at the speed of lightning, it was going to be steel she'd put her own hands on.

Liam was Risa's second. He said it was because he could see where the air would be. Risa said it was because she needed someone she could shout at who'd shout back.

Anja took the ground. Everyone who stood in front of things. She said she'd been doing it on her own for three years, and it was about time somebody stood beside her.

Toby took the medics. With Halloway. And Neve. Every base. Every interceptor that went up would have someone aboard who could hear a heart.

Genny and Garnet didn't get ranks. Okafor said they were fifteen. Garnet said she was going to be the one drawing the maps every single one of them would use, so she'd like to know who exactly was going to stop her. Okafor said nobody. Garnet said good. Okafor wrote Dask, G. — Maps at the bottom of the slate, very small, and didn't say anything else about it.

Hana asked not to have one.

She said so at the kitchen table, with the twins. Very calmly. She said she'd held a wall of water for fourteen hours and she'd do it again, any time, for anyone. But she said there needed to be someone in the house who wasn't anything but Hana. Someone the children could come home to who didn't have a rank.

Okafor didn't argue.

And me.

Okafor left it till last. At the bottom of the slate. A space. Empty.

"What do I write?" she said.

I didn't know.

"You're not a soldier," said Okafor. "You never were. You've never once in your life done anything because somebody told you to." She tapped the space. "You can feel every grain of a world. You can be in six places at once. You can take an archive apart and put it back together in the hold of a ship." A pause. "Nobody's going to command that. I'm not going to try."

"Then don't write anything."

"I have to write something," said Okafor. "Or the recruits will ask. And Holt will make something up. And it'll be worse."

I thought about it.

And then I thought about Dot. The first time. Before any of this. In Scarecrow, in the first days, when I didn't know what I was and nobody had told me. A voice in the dark that called me one thing. Always. From the very first day. Before anyone else knew my name.

"Operator," I said.

Okafor looked at me.

"That's what Dot calls me," I said. "She always has. I never asked why." A pause. "I think it means the one who does the work. Not the one who gives orders. Not the one who takes them." I looked at the slate. "Just the one who does it."

Okafor didn't say anything for a long time.

Then she wrote it.

Dask, L. — Operator.

Dory found out on the porch.

She found out the way she found everything out. By asking everyone, one at a time, what they were now. Oldest to youngest. And writing it down in the notebook Garnet had given her, in her big careful letters.

Grandma: Grandma. Mother had looked at her and said there was no higher rank on Avalon and never would be, and Dory had written it down and underlined it.

Mama Luna: Chief of Staff.

Mama Risa: Wing Commander. Dory asked what a wing was. Risa took her up on a storm over the town and showed her.

Mama Sera: Forges.

Hana: Hana. Dory looked at her for a long time and then wrote it down and underlined it too.

Papa: Operator.

She looked at the list for a long time.

"What am I?" she said.

Okafor was on the porch. She'd come up the hill at dusk the way she did now, every evening, to hear me say it, because she said a Marshal had to be somewhere every evening and she'd rather it was here than anywhere.

She looked at Dory for a long time.

"What would you like to be?" she said.

Dory considered this. Very seriously. With her chin on her notebook.

"Somebody who holds things," she said. "When they're coming apart." A pause. "Like Papa's fingers. And Neve's hands. And the house when I was born."

Okafor nodded slowly.

Then she took the slate out from under her arm. And turned it over. To the very back. Past everything. And wrote, at the bottom, very small:

Dask, D. — Holding.

She showed it to Dory.

Dory looked at it for a long time.

"That's not a rank," she said.

"It is now," said Okafor.

The first alarm came on the fortieth day.

At the hour before dawn. From the Meridian. From Ruan, on every band at once.

"Thread coming down. North-east. Over the Hesk ranges. Six minutes." A pause. "The red queen's base. The old queen's valley. Something's coming down on the east base."

I was on Father's roof. I always was, at that hour. I felt it before Ruan finished speaking. A thread. Coming down. Out of the dark past the middle, through Avalon's sky, toward the east. Fast. Cold.

Not a Hand. Not the voice.

Correctors.

A hundred and forty of them.

Risa was in the air in ninety seconds.

I felt her go. From the field north of the town. Her interceptor first, with Liam behind her. Then three more. Pilots she'd been teaching for a month, who could argue with the Kethri wind in steel nearly as well as she could. Four lines of silver across the dark sky. East. Over the Hesk ranges.

Four minutes.

They got there in time.

I want to write that first. Before anything else. Because we hadn't. Not once. Not on the fire world. Not on the reed world. Not at the twelfth. Not at the north dome.

This time we did.

The correctors came down out of the dark onto the old queen's valley, where the east base was. In a long dark line. And landed on the grass. And started walking.

And Risa came over the Hesk ranges in an interceptor made of steel and wind with three more behind her, and the red queen on the base below lifted her long curved neck and sang, and every interceptor fired.

Lightning. Out of the steel. Not out of Risa. Out of the interceptors themselves. Because Sera had put her hands on every hull, and the Kethri queens had sung wind into every frame, and Risa had sat in every cockpit for a month arguing with the steel until it understood what lightning was for.

The black took it. All of it. All at once.

And for one breath, the black under the correctors' feet was so full of lightning it couldn't take anything else.

And Anja's people came out of the barracks. And Holt's recruits. A hundred and twenty of them, who'd drilled for a month on the plain north of the town. With the Drenn among them, on loan from the north, blades out. And the base medics behind, with Toby.

They didn't have to walk into anything.

The red queen's young had sung grey out of the rock on their world, under the white sun, a long time ago. And now they sang it up out of the rock under the correctors' feet. Up. Around them. Fast. A wall. Grey and hard and singing.

And the correctors walked into it.

And couldn't walk through it. Because it wasn't anything the black could take. It was only stone that had decided to be in the way.

It took eleven minutes.

I got there in nine. Scattered. Over the valley. And there wasn't much left for me to do.

A hundred and forty correctors.

Nobody of ours.

Two recruits went cold to the elbow. Neve's people held their arms open on the way home on the interceptor. Toby said the queens could sing them back by the end of the week.

Nobody else.

Okafor was standing on the porch when I came home at dawn.

With her slate. With her coffee. In her coat, buttoned right for once.

She didn't say anything. She looked at me for a long time.

Then she said, "On time."

"On time."

She nodded. Very slowly.

Then she turned the slate over. To the back. Past everything. And wrote, under Dask, D. — Holding, very small:

First one on time.

I said it that night.

On the porch. In order. Marshal last, because she asked.

Okafor listened to all of it with her eyes shut.

Then she opened them.

"I lied," she said. "I'm not a sergeant any more." A pause. "I'll miss it."

Days 2780–2820. Ranks.

Nine hundred and forty thousand from Earth built a barn first, because two hundred cows wanted a roof, and the carpenters told me to keep my hands off. Okafor: there's one of you; that stops. Doctor Yusra Bell, materials, forty years on Level Fifty-eight. The Overseer says the houses have a word for us now: front. The Kethri queens sang wind into a steel hull and it went to Carver in four minutes. Risa is Wing Commander; Ruan has Orbital Command on the refitted Meridian*, where the spine-queen hears threads coming eight minutes out; four bases with a queen who chose each one; Luna Chief of Staff; Sera the forges; Anja the ground; Toby the medics; the General inspects. Okafor is Marshal and hates it. I'm Operator, because Dot always called me that. Dory is Holding. On the fortieth day, correctors over the east base. We were on time.*