Chapter 350 The Mom Squad

I've tried to write down what it was like going up the thread. Genny's made me try four times. For the brood book.

This is the fifth.

It was cold.

That was the first thing. Not the cold of the ice world, or the cold the black left in my arm on the fire world. The cold between. The dark that the ropes go through, that the ships go through, that I'd been through a hundred times inside a hull with a queen singing round me and never once felt.

I felt it now.

Every grain of me. Spread out. Thin as breath. Going up a thread that had never been meant to carry anything but a voice. And the dark between pressing in on every grain, from every side, the way water presses in on you at the bottom of the canyon lake.

Sera's heat held.

I felt it. In every grain. The heat she'd put into me on the porch with her arms round me, all of it, slowly, until she wasn't burning any more and I was. It went up the thread with me. Every grain of me had a little of it. Enough. Just enough.

For the way, she'd said. It's cold. Between.

She was right.

The second thing was that I wasn't alone.

I'd thought I would be. Spread out along a thread in the dark between worlds. I'd thought it would be like being the only thing in the world.

It wasn't.

Behind me, very faint, very far, down the thread, the long ward. The door. Dory, holding it open, with her hand flat on the boards. Efua behind her with the air held still. Kwame, feeling where every grain of me was. Wren, counting. Genny, asking the trays. Tally, listening.

And ahead of me, further than I'd ever reached, nine small quiet places. Snow. Bell. Red. Wind. Moss. Grass. And three more.

Holding the other end.

I went up the thread between them like someone walking down a long dark corridor toward a door with a light under it, with someone behind him holding a lamp.

The third thing was the teaching.

I heard it long before I reached the middle.

The voice was being taught. Tally had said. Every hour. Faster since the far queen called. I'd felt it from Father's roof, the black going in, over and over.

I hadn't known what it sounded like up close.

It was the one note. The one I'd heard a thousand times, dig, hold, keep. Except it wasn't dig any more. It wasn't anything. It was the note with nothing in it. The note taught to be empty. Over and over. Louder and louder. Coming from somewhere past the middle and going into the voice like water into a pipe.

And the voice, at the end of the ninth line, was so full of it that the whole thread shook.

I came to the middle.

I'm not going to be able to describe it properly. I've tried four times.

It wasn't a place. Not a world. Not a ship. Not anything with a floor. It was where every thread came together. All nine lines. All the threads off them, thousands, tens of thousands, every thread that had ever gone down to a tower on any world. All of them coming in from every direction in the dark and meeting at one point.

And at the point, the voice.

It was enormous.

Not big. Enormous. The way the heavy queen is enormous, or the old queen's mountain. A great tangled shape of grey, grown together out of pieces, thousands and thousands of pieces, all of them small, none of them anything on its own. Every thread on every line came into it. Every tower on every world was a finger at the end of it.

It was very old.

And it was screaming.

Not out loud. Not the long torn note from the fire world. Inside. Every piece of it, every grain, with the black going in, over and over, and nowhere to go.

And in the middle of all that grey and all that screaming, nine small lights.

You came, said the voice.

Not through Tally. Not through the thread. Right there. All round me. Every grain of me that had come up the thread, and the voice was all round every one.

You came up the thread. Like the singing. Like the boy who folded the Hand. The wrong way.

"Yes," I said. I didn't have a mouth. I said it anyway.

Nobody has ever come here. Not in all the time I have been here. Nothing has ever come up a thread to me. A pause. Only down.

It is loud, said the voice. I am sorry. I cannot make it stop.

"I know."

They are teaching me faster. Since you came. They felt you. On the ninth line. A pause. They are afraid of you. More than of the singing. More than of the queens who hold.

"Why?"

The voice was quiet for a moment. The screaming wasn't.

Because you come up threads, it said. Nothing comes up threads. Threads go down. From the houses, to me. From me, to the towers. From the towers, to the young. Down. Always down. A pause. If something comes up, then there is an up. And if there is an up, then the houses are not at the top of anything.

I asked it what it knew.

There wasn't time for anything else. I could feel it already. Very far behind me, down the thread, Wren counting. Every grain of me that had gone up. And the number she'd been counting since I left was still the number I'd started with.

For now.

"The hollow world," I said. "The far queen. The rooms. Where are they?"

The voice showed me.

I can't write it down. There aren't words. It was a direction. Past the middle. Not along any of the nine lines. A thread that wasn't a thread. Very thick. Very old. Going out from the far side of the middle into the dark, the way the root of the old queen's mountain goes down into the plain.

At the end of it, very far, a world.

Hollow.

And in it, so many queens that even feeling them through the voice, through thousands of pieces of the voice, I couldn't begin to count them.

All of them holding.

They break one every day, said the voice. I hear it. Every day. I hear one go quiet. A pause. Some of the pieces of me came from there. A long time ago. I hear them go quiet too.

"How far?"

Further than the ninth line is long.

"And the houses?"

The voice didn't answer at once.

Past it, it said. Past the hollow world. Further. A pause. I have never seen them. I have only ever heard them. Coming down the thick thread. Into me. Another pause. But I know how many.

I waited.

Fewer than you think, said the voice.

That was when Wren's number changed.

I felt it before I felt anything else. Very far behind me. Down the thread. In the long ward. Wren, in the corner, with her eyes shut. Counting every grain of me.

And one grain short.

Then two.

Then eleven.

Something was reaching up the thread behind me.

Not toward the middle. Toward me. Toward the grains of me spread out along the ninth line between the long ward and the voice. Cold. Certain. The grip I'd felt once in the Overseer, on the red glass, when the houses picked it up like a tool left in the rain.

Picking me up.

A grain at a time.

They have found the way you came, said the voice. Very fast. They are coming down the thick thread. Through me. Past me. Into the ninth line. A pause. To where you are spread.

Forty grains short. Wren's voice, very far off, through the door, through Dory: Lucas.

Go, said the voice.

"I can't. They're on the thread. Between me and home."

The voice was silent for a moment. Then:

Then come into me.

I don't know how to describe that either.

The voice opened. Not all of it. The nine small places. The quiet ones. Snow. Bell. Red. Wind. Moss. Grass. And three more. It opened them, the way a queen opens her coils, and every grain of me that was still mine went into them.

Into the snow, falling, on a world of high cold places.

Into warm water, with lights in it.

Into grass. Long. Grey-green. Going to the edge of the sky. Moving in the wind.

And the grip that was reaching up the ninth line for me reached the place where I'd been.

And found the voice.

And went past.

It didn't know I was there. The houses didn't. They'd never once looked into the nine quiet places, because they didn't know there were any. They'd built the voice out of pieces so that no piece would be anyone. They'd never thought to check whether any of the pieces had remembered.

I lay in the grass inside the voice and felt the houses' grip go past me down the ninth line toward Avalon.

Toward the long ward.

Toward the door Dory was holding open.

Mother told me the rest. After.

They came at the second hour after midnight.

Down the ninth line. Fast. Down the thread I'd gone up, the one Dory was holding open from the long ward floor, through the door, straight into Avalon's sky.

The spine-queen heard them at four minutes. Ilka put it on every band.

"Thread coming down," she said. "Not out of the dark. Out of the ninth line. Straight down the door. Into town." A pause. "Into the long ward."

Correctors.

Not a ring. Not seven hundred. Forty. Dropping out of the dark directly over the town, over the long ward, the way they'd dropped over the east block on Earth. Fast. Aimed.

At Dory.

Risa was gone before Ilka finished. Out of the long ward door as lightning. Luna after her on a path of ice. Sera burning. Up. Into the dark over the town, toward the forty coming down.

Luna told me about it after. In pieces. The way she told everything that she hadn't liked.

It was dark. That was the worst of it. Forty of them dropping out of a black sky over a sleeping town, and every one of them black, and nothing to see them by but the lights of the town below and Risa.

Risa lit them.

Not to break them. To see them. She went up into the dark as lightning and stopped, hanging, and threw a bolt sideways across the sky, not at anything, just across, so that for one white instant every corrector coming down was lit from the side like a dark shape in a window.

Luna counted them in that instant. Forty.

Then dark again.

Luna laid ice. Not a path. A floor. A great flat sheet of it in the air over the long ward, thick and white and clear, so that anything coming down onto the long ward came down onto ice first. The correctors landed on it. The black came off their feet into it. And Luna let it go to frost, all at once, and the whole sheet blew away like snow off a roof, and the correctors on it fell.

Into Sera.

She was under the ice. Waiting. Burning. Light as hot air. And every corrector that fell through the frost fell past her, and she put out her palm, and a line of star went through it, and it came apart before it reached the ground.

Risa lit the sky again. Luna laid another floor. Sera waited under it.

Over and over.

They got thirty-two.

Eight came through. The eight that came down furthest from the long ward, at the edge of the town, by the road, where Luna's floor didn't reach.

They landed in the street outside the long ward.

On the road. Outside the double doors where our queen had her great head on the floor. Eight correctors. Tall and wide and faceless. With the black coming off their feet onto the stones. Walking.

Toward the doors.

Inside, Dory was on the floor in the middle of the nine trays with her hand flat on the boards and her eyes shut. Holding. With Efua behind her holding the air still. With Kwame watching the thread. With Wren counting, very fast, very white. With Genny asking. With Tally listening.

If Dory let go, the door shut. And every grain of me still spread on the ninth line, and every grain hidden in the voice, would have no way home.

She didn't let go.

Small Sigmund was standing at the door.

Guarding it. The way he'd said he would. Very straight. With a spark running round his ear. He'd been standing there for two hours, since I let go, and nobody had told him there was nothing to guard it from.

There was something now.

He saw them come up the road. Eight. Faceless. Walking. With the black coming off them.

He didn't move.

He was a child. Okafor's rule. No children fight. He stood in the door of the long ward with his small fists clenched and his lattice going white round his eyes and a very small storm gathering over his head, and he didn't move one inch.

And then Mother stood up.

She'd been in Father's chair by the door. She'd been in it for two hours, with her hands in her lap, watching Dory.

She stood up. And put her hand on small Sigmund's shoulder. And moved him, very gently, behind her.

"Thank you," she said. "That'll do. Go and stand by your sister."

He went.

Mother stepped out into the road.

And Ingrid Friese stood up beside her.

And Maura Calder.

I should explain about the three of them. Because by then the whole of Avalon knew, and I didn't, because I was in the grass inside the voice at the end of the ninth line.

They'd been at the long ward since dusk. All three. Ingrid because her grandchildren were there, and she'd spent too long not being where her grandchildren were. Maura because Sera had gone up the thread with me in a way, her heat in every grain, and Maura said if her daughter's heat was out there in the cold between she'd rather be somewhere she could feel it come back. And Mother because Mother was always there.

They'd sat together. By the door. In three chairs. With the teapot.

Ingrid and Mother had been sitting together most nights since Earth. On the porch. Talking about the war. About the northern front. About the Kesh ford. About Trevor and Konrad and the men who'd called Ingrid the Hush behind her back.

Maura had started sitting with them in the second month.

She'd come up the hill one night with a pie, because she said she'd heard there were two old women on the Dask porch every night telling war stories and she'd been at the Varran pass with the field kitchens, and she'd like to know if they remembered the night the snow came in so hard the soup froze in the pot and Trevor Dask came down the line with his hands on the frozen ground, changing it, tent by tent, into something that held the warm.

They remembered.

After that it was three chairs.

They walked out into the road together.

Three women. Not young. Mother in her dark coat with Father's ring. Ingrid in the green scarf Mother had found her, the same colour as the one she'd worn at the Kesh ford. Maura with her sleeves rolled up the way she rolled them up to knead bread.

Eight correctors walking toward them.

And behind them, through the double doors, Dory on the floor of the long ward with her hand flat on the boards and her face very white. Holding.

Mother held the road.

Not the correctors. The road. Every stone. Every grain of the ground under it, between the correctors and the doors. She held it the way she'd held the rock in the Ossari's galleries, so the black couldn't take its shape. The black came off the correctors' feet and onto the road and the road didn't go black.

It stayed road.

The correctors kept walking. On ground that wouldn't take the black. Toward three women who didn't move.

Maura went hot.

Not like Sera. Maura's silver was simpler than Sera's. Mine wasn't much, she'd always said. She couldn't burn. She couldn't fly. She couldn't hold a star in her hand.

She could make things warm.

That was all. That was all it had ever been. In the field kitchens at the Varran pass. In the Calders' kitchen with Liam setting fire to the curtains. She could make soup warm in a pot. She could make a cold child warm in her arms. She could make a frozen line of men warm enough to keep their hands on their rifles for one more night.

She put both hands out.

And the air between the three of them and the correctors went warm.

Not hot. Warm. Like a kitchen. Like bread. Like the inside of a house at the end of a long day.

The correctors walked into it.

And the black, coming off their feet, which took fire and light and silver and everything that had anything in it, reached for the warm.

And kept reaching.

Because Maura didn't stop. She stood in the road with her sleeves rolled up and her hands out and kept the air warm, and kept it warm, and kept it warm, the way she'd kept a whole line of men warm through the night the soup froze. The black took the warmth. And she put more in. And it took that. And she put more in. Not a lot. Never a lot. Just enough. Over and over.

And the correctors slowed.

Because everything the black took, it had to take. And the black, coming off eight correctors, was being asked to take a kitchen's worth of warmth every second, from a woman who'd never once in her life run out.

"Now," said Mother. Very calmly. "Ingrid."

Ingrid Friese put out one thin hand.

Flat.

And everything went quiet.

I've heard about it since. From everyone. Okafor, who came running down the hill in her Marshal's coat buttoned wrong and stopped at the top of the road. Holt, behind her. Liam and Anja. Toby. Everyone who was in the long ward and looked out through the double doors.

They all say the same thing.

Everything went quiet.

Not just the correctors. The road. The air. The night. The town. Every sound, all at once, gone. The way the air goes before lightning. The way it went at the Kesh ford, when three hundred handlers came up out of the river and the men on the bank said here comes the Hush.

Ingrid called the charge out of eight correctors.

All of it. Every spark. Everything that made them go. Into her one thin hand.

They stopped. In the warm air. On the road that wouldn't go black. Mid-step.

And she gave it back.

Okafor says it lit the whole town.

Every window. Every street. The bowl of the long table on the side of the hill. The red glass by the landing field, and the Ground, and the heavy queen beside her, lifting her great head. A white flash from one thin hand that went through eight correctors at once and out the other side and up into the sky.

Where Risa, coming down out of the dark over the town as lightning with the last of the thirty-two behind her, saw it.

And stopped. In the air. Mid-bolt.

And knew whose it was.

There was nothing left of them on the road.

Mother let go of it. Maura let the air go cool. Ingrid looked at her hand. Turning it over.

Then the three of them turned round. And went back to their chairs. By the door. And sat down.

Maura picked up the teapot.

"Still warm," she said. Pleased.

Ash said it first.

She'd been at the window of the long ward. With Trevor. Watching the whole thing with her hinge face. And when the three of them came back in and sat down and Maura poured the tea, Ash turned round to Trevor and said, very clearly, in the voice she used for explaining things to the dog:

"That's the Mom Squad."

Trevor considered this.

"Yes," he said.

Small Sigmund, by Dory, with his spark running round his ear, said, "Mom Squad," very loudly, to make sure it was official.

And it was.

Risa found her mother on the long ward steps at the first light.

She'd come down out of the sky after the thirty-two with her hair on end and her hands still smoking and gone straight past everyone, past Okafor at the top of the road, past Luna on her ice, past the doors. To the steps. Where Ingrid had gone out to sit, with the green scarf round her shoulders, because she said the long ward was too warm with Maura in it.

Risa stood at the bottom of the steps for a long time.

"I saw it," she said. "From up there. The flash."

"I know," said Ingrid. "I saw you stop."

"I stopped because I knew it was you." Risa's voice was very level. The voice that meant storms. "I've never seen you do anything. Not once. Not before. And I knew it was you from a mile up, in the dark, mid-bolt." She swallowed. "How did I know?"

Ingrid looked at her for a long time.

"Because it's the same," she said. "Yours and mine. The same storm." She held out her hand. Palm up. And a very small spark ran across it. Blue. "I felt you on the first day. Coming out of the sky at the door of the ward. Before you'd even touched the ground. I'd been in that room so long I'd forgotten what my own lightning felt like." A pause. "And then I felt yours. And I remembered."

Risa came up the steps.

She sat down beside her mother. And held out her own hand. Palm up. Beside Ingrid's.

And a spark ran across it. Blue. The same blue.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

Then Risa said, "Teach me the quiet."

Ingrid looked at her.

"The part before," said Risa. "The Hush. When everything goes still. I can throw it. I can break a hill. I can carry a horse." She looked at her hand. "I can't make everything stop first."

"No," said Ingrid. "That takes a long time to learn." She closed Risa's hand in hers. "I'll teach you. Every morning. On the plain." A pause. "We'll start with small things. Candles."

"I don't need candles."

"Everyone needs candles," said Ingrid. "That's where the quiet is."

I came home at dawn.

The grip went back up the ninth line at the first hour before dawn. Up the thread. Through the voice. Past the nine quiet places, where I was lying in the grass. Back up the thick thread to wherever the houses were.

Empty.

It hadn't found me. It hadn't found the door. It had come down into Avalon's sky with forty correctors, and thirty-two of them had met Risa and Luna and Sera in the dark, and eight of them had met three women in a road.

They are gone, said the voice. Go now. While they are deciding what happened.

"Come with me."

The voice didn't answer for a long time.

I am the middle, it said. I am where every thread comes together. If I leave, every thread comes loose. A pause. Every tower. Every world. Every young lying in a ring. Another pause. Not yet.

"Then when?"

When someone has gone down the thick thread, said the voice. To the hollow world. And past it. A pause. When the houses are not there to teach me any more.

I lay in the grass inside the voice for a moment longer. Long. Grey-green. Going to the edge of the sky. Moving in the wind.

"I'll tell them," I said. "At home. What you showed me."

Tell the woman with the ring, said the voice. The one who asked who I came out of. A pause. Tell her I have nine.

Wren's numbers were right.

All of them. Every grain. She counted me down the thread, through the door, onto the floor of the long ward, beside Dory, and when the last grain came through she opened her eyes and said, "That's all of you," and put her face in her hands and didn't take it out for a long time.

Dory let go.

She'd been holding for seven hours. Seven. She'd never held anything for more than one. She opened her eyes and looked at me, whole, on the floor beside her, and didn't say anything. She just fell over. Sideways. Onto Ash, who'd been keeping her warm, and who caught her.

Neve was there before anyone. With her lit fingers on Dory's wrist.

"She's all right," said Neve. "She's asleep. She's very asleep." She looked up at me. Her face was wet. "She held for seven hours, Lucas. Halloway said an hour was too much."

Luna's ring was still frozen.

On my finger. I hadn't felt it the whole way. I felt it now. Burning with cold.

I took it off and held it out to her.

She didn't take it.

"Keep it," she said. Very steadily. "For next time."

I told Okafor what the voice told me.

In the map room. At noon. With everyone. The thick thread past the middle. The hollow world at the end of it. The queens, too many to count, every one holding. One quiet every day.

And past the hollow world, the houses.

"Fewer than you think," I said. "That's all it would say."

Okafor looked at the back of Garnet's sheet. At the dots. Thousands of them.

"How many fewer?"

"I don't know."

She didn't say anything for a long time.

Then she turned round. And looked at the three women sitting by the window of the map room, in three chairs, with a teapot, where they'd been sitting since the long ward because nobody had dared ask them to move.

"I've had a request," said Okafor. "This morning. In writing. Signed by all three."

Mother didn't look up from her tea.

"They'd like to be a task force," said Okafor. "The three of them. Together. No one else." She looked at the paper in her hand. "It says, and I quote: We were the northern front. We'd like to be it again. We'd like to go wherever the young are being taken and take them back. We will not be split up. We have been split up long enough."

She put the paper down.

"There's a postscript," she said. "In different handwriting. I think it's Ash's."

"Read it," said Mother.

Okafor read it.

"Please call them the Mom Squad. Everyone does."

The long table voted that evening.

It passed. Every brood. Every town. The Ossari, in the rock. The Vel, in colour across the western sky. The Thren, very slowly, in light. Kwame, on Hana's knee, at the head of the bowl, pointed.

Okafor wrote it on the slate that night. Under everything. Under Dask, D. — Holding. Under First one on time.

Task Force Nine. Dask, D. — Holding. Friese, I. — Lightning. Calder, M. — Warm.

And under that, because the long table had voted on the name as well, very small:

The Mom Squad.

Konrad came up the hill that evening.

It was his night. Once a week, Sigmund had said. He brought the bread. He'd been learning. It was still not very good. Maura said it was getting less bad, which from Maura was nearly praise.

He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps the way he always did. And looked at the three women at the end of the porch in three chairs, under one blanket, with the teapot.

He'd heard. Everyone had heard.

"Task Force Nine," he said.

"Yes," said Ingrid.

Konrad stood there with his loaf for a long time. Narrow and grey and perfectly composed, in his dark coat. With nothing in his hands but bread.

"At the Kesh ford," he said. "When you walked out in front of them. I wrote the report." A pause. "I wrote that you stood behind me."

"I know," said Ingrid. "I read it."

"I've wanted to write it again for thirty years," said Konrad. "Correctly." He held out the loaf. "I can't. There's nobody left to send it to." He looked at the bread. "So I made this instead. It's not very good."

Ingrid looked at the bread. And at him.

"Put it on the table, Konrad," she said. "Dot's got the knife."

He came up the steps.

He'd never come all the way up before. Not once. Not since the evening he asked to see his granddaughter. He came up the steps and put the bread on the table between the three chairs and stood there.

Maura cut it. Mother buttered it. Ingrid ate a piece.

"It's less bad," she said.

Konrad didn't say anything. But he sat down. On the top step. With his back to the post. Where Sigmund usually sat.

Sigmund, coming up the path from the hospital with Jessa, saw him there. And stopped. And looked at him for a long time.

Then he came up the steps and sat down beside him.

I said it that night. On the porch.

In order. Oldest first. Which meant the three of them. In three chairs. At the end of the porch. Under one blanket. With the teapot.

Mother. Ingrid. Maura.

Ingrid listened to the whole of it with her eyes shut. Then she opened them and looked at me for a long time.

"Trevor never once said that," she said. "Not out loud. Not to anyone. Not in the whole of the war." She looked at Mother. "Did he, Dot?"

"Only to the children," said Mother. "Every night. Standing between their beds. When they were asleep."

Ingrid nodded slowly.

"Then his boy learned it awake," she said. "Good."

Maura poured the tea.

Days 3302–3304. The Mom Squad.

It was cold between, and Sera's heat held. At the middle every thread meets in the voice, enormous, made of pieces, screaming with the teaching, nine lights inside. It showed me a thick thread past the middle to the hollow world, and past that the houses: fewer than you think. Then Wren counted me short; the houses were reaching up the thread for me. The voice hid me in its quiet places, in the grass, and the grip went past toward the door. Forty correctors came down into town at Dory. Risa, Luna and Sera got thirty-two. Eight reached the long ward road, where small Sigmund was guarding the door. Mother held the road, Maura kept the air warm until the black was too full to walk, and Ingrid called every spark out of them and lit the town. Ash named them. Dory held seven hours. I came home whole. They asked to be Task Force Nine. The long table voted: the Mom Squad.