Chapter 363 Pairs

Garnet sent the rest of it back that night.

Through Dot. Through the coral queen. Through the rope. Eleven drawings, one after another, into the wood of the map room table, and Dot put them on the wall in order so we could see. And under each one, in Garnet's neat hand, what happened.

I'm going to write it the way she drew it.

One.

Konrad, at the stone table. With his coat folded on top of his cane. With his sleeves rolled up.

Looking at the pen.

He didn't pick it up. He looked at it for a long time. Then he asked Dot to ask the oldest one what it was made of.

Two.

The oldest of the fifty. Tall and pale, grey-green, with eyes like water with the sun on it. Looking at Konrad as if nobody had ever asked her anything before.

She said it was grown. She said the first signer, a very long time ago, was given it by the ones who came down the thread. She said it was given with the paper. She said it had always been there.

She didn't know what it was made of. Nobody had ever asked.

Three.

Dane. Coming down the ramp. Past Brock. To the table.

Dane asked if he could touch it. The oldest one said yes. He put one finger on it. Then he took his finger away very fast and looked at Konrad.

He said: it's warm.

He said: it hums.

Four.

Konrad. With his hand flat on the stone beside the pen. Not touching it. Beside it.

He told them about the tokens. The ones the Council had on Earth. Small grey pieces, given with the paper, held by whoever signed. He told them what Genny found when she opened Sera's sacks. Eleven thousand two hundred and six pieces, in boxes, humming. He told them every piece was a piece of a queen.

Dot said it twice. Because they didn't understand it the first time.

Five.

The ring of fifty. All of them. Looking at the pen on the table.

And then, all of them at once, looking up. At the tower. Grown up out of the stone platform behind them, grey, very tall, with the sea round it.

Nobody had ever been to the top. Nobody had ever asked what was in it.

The oldest one asked Konrad if their queen was in the tower.

Konrad said he didn't know. He said nobody on Avalon would know unless someone went and looked.

He said: I'd like to take this back to her. If she's there. It isn't yours to sign with. It's hers.

Six.

The tower stairs.

Very steep. Very narrow. Grown into the inside of the tower, going round and round, up into the dark. No rail.

And Konrad. On the first step. With the pen in one hand. With his other hand flat against the wall. White to the lips.

He's afraid of stairs. Ingrid said. Ladders, anyway. I think stairs too.

He went up anyway.

Brock went behind him. Iron at the edges. In case he fell.

Seven.

The top of the tower.

A small round room. Grey. With a window open to the sky over the shallow sea. And in the middle of the floor, curled very small, a queen.

Not in pieces. Not in a pillar. Not taught to be black. Just very small, and very tired, and very still, the way the forest queen had been under the black. Pale green and gold, like sunlight through shallow water. With something missing from her side. A long thin piece. The shape of a pen.

Konrad knelt down. He's not good at kneeling. He did it anyway.

He put the pen down on the floor beside her. Where the piece was missing.

He said: I'm sorry. I signed with something like this for thirty years. I never once asked what it was.

Eight.

The queen. With her head lifted. Very slowly. Looking at the pen on the floor beside her.

And the pen. Going soft. The way the grey goes soft when Garnet asks it. Going back. Into the place in her side where it had been taken from, a very long time ago, and given to the first signer with a paper.

It didn't take long. It knew where it went.

Nine.

The fifty. On the tower stairs. All of them. Going round and round, up into the dark. Following Konrad. Very slowly.

At the top, in the doorway of the small round room, the oldest one. Looking at the queen.

She knelt down too.

She said a word. Dot didn't know it. The queen did.

The queen said it back.

Ten.

Dane. At the bottom of the tower. On the stone. Talking to a young man from the council. Grey-green, with long hands, younger than the others. The one who'd stood at the back of the ring.

Dot says he's the one who receives. The deliveries. From the thread. Every tithe year, the silver and the tokens come down, and he signs for them, and he's glad.

Dane told him about the base. The carrier. The cargo sheets in the protective sleeve. Fourteen.

He told him: I was glad too.

The young man didn't say anything for a long time. Then he asked Dane what you do. After. When you stop being glad.

Dane said: you carry glass. You say the numbers out loud. You stand in front of someone else who's glad and tell them.

Eleven.

The stone table. Empty.

No pen.

And the fifty, standing round it in a ring. Not waiting now. Talking. All of them. At once. In a language nobody on the Steady understood, and Dot said she couldn't translate because they were all talking at once and none of them were telling anyone anything.

They're asking each other, Dot said.

Under it, small: The oldest one came down the tower last. She came to the ramp. She said to Konrad: we will not sign. Not this year. Not with nothing. She said: when they come down the thread for the tithe, they will find no pen and no signer and no children.

She said: and then they will come for us.

She said: will you come too?

Konrad said he didn't decide that. He said Okafor did. He said he'd ask.

She said: you asked our queen. That is more than anyone has ever done.

The Steady came home on the fourth day.

With everyone on it who'd gone. And one more thing. In Garnet's drawing board, folded, a twelfth drawing she hadn't sent through Dot.

She showed it to me on the red glass.

Konrad. On the tower stairs. Going down. With his hand flat against the wall and his face very white. And behind him, Brock. Iron at the edges. Very close.

And in Brock's other hand, Marian Haddon's seeds.

He planted them, said Garnet. At the top. In the window. There was a crack in the stone with sea-silt in it. A pause. He said his mother would want to know.

Genny came home from the Harness two days after.

From a world of grass where something had come down on a town of eleven thousand at the hour before dawn, and the Harness had been there in eight minutes because Ruan heard the thread, and Halloway's people had put eleven hundred arms back together with Maura's warm and Neve's lit hands and Genny asking, over and over, which way they'd gone cold. Nobody of ours lost. Four of theirs. Genny wrote their names in volume twelve with Father's pen.

She came down the ramp very tired.

Brock was at the bottom.

He'd been there since dawn. Mother said. Since the Harness came out of the rope over the red glass and the sorting queen said the brood-word for everyone home. He'd come down from the third-wave houses with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders very square and stood at the bottom of the ramp and waited.

Genny stopped halfway down.

"You're home," she said.

"Two days ago."

"I know. Garnet wrote. Through Dot." She came down the rest of the ramp. "You planted your mother's seeds in a window at the top of a tower."

"Konrad was frightened of the stairs," said Brock. "I was behind him. I had to do something with my hands."

Genny looked at him for a long time.

"You stood in front," she said. "Iron. On a platform in the sea. And then you let it go. So they'd see you chose to." She shifted volume twelve under her arm. "Garnet drew it."

"I know," said Brock. "She showed me." He took his hands out of his pockets. "You put eleven hundred arms back together."

"Halloway did. And Maura. And Neve. I asked."

"Asking's the hard part," said Brock. "Nobody asked me anything for a year and a half. Then you did." A pause. "In the hollow. Under the city. With soup."

Genny didn't say anything.

"Can I carry that?" said Brock. And held out his hand. For volume twelve.

Genny looked at the book. At his hand.

Nobody carried the brood book. Not ever. Not Halloway. Not Ruth. Not Mother. Genny carried it everywhere herself and slept with it under her pillow and wrote in it every night.

She gave it to him.

They walked up the long road together.

Not touching. Brock with the brood book under his arm and his other hand in his pocket. Genny beside him with her hands free for the first time in two years.

"You'll drop it," she said.

"I won't."

"You'll get it wet."

"It's not raining."

"Risa's on the porch," said Genny. "It's always about to rain."

Brock considered this.

He took his hand out of his pocket. And put it flat on the cover of the book. And very faintly, at the edges, his fingers went iron.

"There," he said. "Now nothing'll get it wet."

Genny looked at his iron fingers on the cover of volume twelve.

And laughed.

Twice. Once for each thing.

After that he was there.

Not every day. Not on purpose. He was just there. At the long ward in the evenings when Genny sat with Bell's tray, sitting on the floor across from her with his back to the wall, not saying anything, while she wrote. At the bakery in the mornings when Maura sent Genny for bread, standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, and walking her back up the hill with the basket. On the jetty at the seventh lake on Sigmund's nights, when the General took Trevor and Brock and Genny came to watch and wrote the fish down in volume twelve, every one, caught without freezing anything.

He read to the trays. That was the thing. Genny said nobody had ever thought of it. Konrad read to the children on the grass and Brock heard him and came to the long ward and sat down by the four hundred trays one night with a book from the archive floors and read out loud. To the broken queens. Badly. Stopping at the long words.

The trays hummed.

Genny wrote that down too.

Brock reads to them. They like it. They don't understand a word. Neither does he, half the time.

"Is he—" said Mother. At the kitchen table. Very carefully. With her cup.

"No," said Genny. Without looking up from the brood book.

"I didn't finish."

"You were going to ask if he's courting me." Genny turned a page. "He isn't. He's my friend." She wrote something. "I've never had one. Not one who wasn't family or a cadet or Toby." She looked up. "He sat with me for three hours on the long ward last night and didn't say anything and then said Bell's humming louder and he was right." She went back to the page. "That's a friend."

Mother looked at her for a long time.

"Yes, love," she said. "It is."

Then the Vey twins.

They were pilots. In Risa's wing. Interceptors. Two of the first forty she'd taught to argue with the Kethri wind in steel. Callum and Rowan Vey. From New Halcyon. Level Thirty-three, which Garnet said afterward was a very ordinary level, nothing on it but laundries and a school and a lot of people who'd never been anywhere.

They'd come across on the ninth crossing, at seventeen. They'd joined the first intake for Holt's drills the week the bases were announced. They'd flown every morning since.

They were nineteen now. Tall. Dark-haired. Identical except that Callum had a scar through his left eyebrow from a pipe on Level Thirty-three and Rowan didn't, and Rowan laughed first at everything and Callum laughed last.

Risa said they were the best pair in the wing.

She also said they were insufferable about me.

"About you?" said Luna.

On the porch. In the evening. Risa had come home from the field with her hair on end and her flight gloves still on and sat down on the step and put her head in her hands.

"About him," said Risa. "Every morning. On the field. Before we go up." She looked at me through her fingers. "Wing Commander, is it true he folded a Hand from the inside? Wing Commander, is it true he went up the thread scattered? Wing Commander, is it true he came through the window of the Senate Annex with Mrs. Dask and Sergeant Okafor while four million people watched?"

"That isn't how it happened," I said. "I came through on my own."

"I know," said Risa. "I told them. They didn't listen." She took her gloves off. "They were twelve. They watched it on the screen in the laundry on Level Thirty-three. A boy coming through the high window of the Senate Annex like water, with the glass closing behind him. They wrote COPY SCARECROW on the laundry wall in soap. They got in trouble for it." She looked at me. "They told me that on the first day. Before they told me their names."

Luna put her cold hand over her mouth.

"It's not funny," said Risa.

"It is," said Luna. "It's very funny."

Garnet met them first.

Not on purpose. She went down to the interceptor field on the north plain on the sixth day after the shallow seas, because Okafor had asked her to draw the hangars for the new base plans, and she was sitting on an upturned crate at the edge of the field with her drawing board and the old brown dog when two of the interceptors came down out of the sky, one after the other, very fast, in a perfect pair, and landed so close together that the dog stood up.

Two young men climbed out.

Identical. Tall. Dark-haired. In flight jackets. Laughing. One first, then the other.

They saw her.

And stopped laughing.

"You're Garnet Dask," said the one with the scar.

Garnet looked up from her drawing board.

"Yes," she said.

"The Garnet Dask," said the one without the scar. "The maps. Wing Commander Calder's—" He stopped. "Lucas Dask's sister."

"Risa's my sister-in-law," said Garnet. "And Lucas is my brother. And Risa's his commanding officer on the field and he isn't allowed to forget it." She considered. "Yes."

The two of them looked at each other.

Then at her.

"We wrote his name on a laundry wall," said the one with the scar. "In soap."

"When we were twelve," said the other one. "Level Thirty-three."

"We got in a lot of trouble," said the first.

"It was worth it," said the second.

Garnet looked at them for a long time.

Then she turned her drawing board round. And showed them what she'd been drawing. Not the hangars. Them. The two interceptors coming down out of the sky in a perfect pair. Two young men climbing out. Laughing. One first, then the other.

"You land very close together," she said.

"We always have," said the one with the scar. "Since we were born."

"Eleven minutes apart," said the other.

Garnet put the drawing board down.

"Which one of you was first?" she said.

The one without the scar grinned. "Me. Rowan. Callum's been trying to catch up for nineteen years."

"I let him go first," said Callum. "Somebody had to clear the way."

Garnet told Genny that night.

At the kitchen table. With the dog. With Genny writing in volume twelve and Brock on the floor of the long ward a mile away reading to the trays.

"Eleven minutes," said Garnet. "Exactly. The same as us."

Genny put down Father's pen.

"Which one was first?"

"Rowan. He says Callum's been trying to catch up for nineteen years. Callum says he let him go first to clear the way." Garnet looked at her sister. "Callum's the one with the scar. He laughs last."

Genny looked at her for a long time. Twice.

"You drew them," she said.

"I draw everything."

"You drew them three times," said Genny. "I can see the sheet. It's under your elbow."

Garnet moved her elbow.

"They idolize Lucas," she said. "It's ridiculous. They wrote his name on a laundry wall in soap."

"I know," said Genny. "Risa's been complaining for a month."

"They asked if it was true he folded a Hand from the inside." Garnet picked up her pencil. Put it down again. "I said yes. And then I told them about the time he tried to burn the toast on purpose the way Father did, every morning, and set fire to Mother's apron instead, and Mother made him wear it for a week anyway." She looked at the table. "Rowan laughed so hard he had to sit down on the wing."

"And Callum?"

"Callum laughed last," said Garnet. "And then asked if I'd draw the apron."

They met Genny at the bakery.

On the eighth day. Rowan and Callum came down from the field for bread, because the whole of Risa's wing came down for Maura's bread now, every morning, and Maura gave it to them warm and told them they were too thin. And Genny was there, at the counter, because Maura had sent her for the morning loaves for the long ward. With volume twelve under her arm. With Brock in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.

Rowan saw her first.

"You're Genny Dask," he said.

"Genevieve," said Genny.

"Genevieve Dask," said Rowan. "The brood book. Eleven volumes."

"Twelve," said Genny.

"Twelve," said Callum. Behind his brother. Last. "Garnet said you found nine queens inside the voice. And a rain queen. In a tray."

Genny looked at him.

"Garnet talks too much," she said.

"She said you'd say that," said Callum.

Brock, in the doorway, didn't say anything.

Genny told me after that he looked at the Vey twins for a long time, the way he'd looked at the river before he went into it. Then he looked at her. Then he went back to looking out of the door.

When the twins had gone, with their bread, Genny went to the door.

"You didn't say anything," she said.

"No," said Brock.

"They're Garnet's," said Genny. "Not mine. Garnet drew them three times."

"I know," said Brock. "I saw." He took his hands out of his pockets. "The one with the scar looked at you the way I look at the river."

Genny didn't say anything for a long time.

"Is that bad?" she said.

Brock thought about it.

"No," he said. "The river's the best thing that ever happened to me." He took the bread basket out of her hands. "I'll carry this. You'll want your hands free."

"For what?"

"For when he comes back," said Brock. "And asks you about the rain queen."

Callum came back the next day.

And asked Genny about the rain queen.

She took him to the long ward.

Brock told me about it. Not Genny. Genny said it was nobody's business, and then told Garnet, who drew it, so it was everybody's business by supper.

It was evening. The long ward was quiet the way it is in the evenings, with the lamps low and the four hundred trays humming along the walls, very faint, the way a house hums when everyone in it is asleep. Halloway had gone home. Ruth was at the far end with the sorting queen's young. And Brock was on the floor across from Bell's tray, with his back to the wall and a book from the archive floors open on his knees.

Genny came in with a pilot.

Brock looked up. Looked at Callum. Looked back down at the book.

"Keep going," said Genny. "Don't stop on his account."

So Brock kept going. Out loud. Badly. It was a book about the sea, Brock said after. Earth's sea, before. With pictures of fish nobody alive had ever seen. He stopped at the long words and sounded them out and Bell's tray hummed every time he got one right.

Callum stood in the doorway for a long time.

"He reads to them," he said.

"Every night," said Genny. "Nobody told him to."

Then she knelt down by the rain queen's tray. The small grey one at the end of the third row, that had come out of the voice with the others and wouldn't hum for anyone for a month. And she put her hand flat beside it. Not on it. Beside it.

"You don't touch," she said. "Not at first. You put your hand down near them and you wait. And then you listen."

Callum knelt down beside her. Very carefully. Like a boy who'd grown up on a level of laundries and had never once been allowed near anything that mattered.

He put his hand down. Beside hers.

"I can't hear anything," he said. After a minute.

"No," said Genny. "Nobody can. Not the first time." She didn't move her hand. "Wait."

They waited. Brock read about a fish called a herring. The trays hummed along the walls.

"There," said Callum. Very quietly. "Was that—"

"That was Bell," said Genny. "Two trays down. Because Brock said herring right." She almost smiled. "The rain queen's quieter. Keep waiting."

He kept waiting. An hour. Brock finished the chapter about herring and started one about whales. Callum knelt on the floor of the long ward with his hand flat on the stone beside a tray of broken grey, and didn't move, and didn't say anything, and didn't hear the rain queen.

He came back the next night. And the one after.

On the fourth night he heard her.

Genny wrote it down in volume twelve. Rain queen, hummed once, for C. Vey. Fourth try. He cried a bit. I'm not supposed to write that. I've written it.

Rowan didn't want to listen to trays.

Rowan wanted to fly.

So on the tenth day, when Okafor's hangar drawings were done and Garnet had nothing to draw on the north plain but grass, Rowan asked Risa if he could take her up.

"In an interceptor," said Risa. On the porch. Flatly.

"In the second seat," said Rowan. "She draws maps. From the ground. She's never seen the ground from where the maps are." He looked at Garnet. "From above. The way the map sees it."

Risa looked at Garnet.

Garnet looked at her hands.

"I'd like to," she said. "I'd like to see it the way it's drawn."

Risa looked at me.

"Don't look at me," I said. "She's eighteen. She's on Okafor's slate."

"She's your sister."

"She's your sister-in-law," I said. "And you're the Wing Commander."

Risa put her head in her hands again.

They went up at dawn. Rowan and Garnet, in the second seat, with her drawing board strapped to her knees and the dog barking on the edge of the field. And Callum beside them in the other interceptor, very close, the way they always flew. And Risa above all of them, not in steel at all, a long blue line of lightning that kept exactly over Garnet's canopy the whole hour and never once moved off it.

And Ingrid.

Nobody had asked Ingrid. Ingrid had heard about it at the bakery, from Maura, who'd heard it from Pip. And Ingrid had come out onto the field at dawn in a flight jacket borrowed off Holt's quartermaster, two sizes too big, and said, "I'll go too," and gone. Up. As lightning. Beside her daughter.

Rowan said after it was like flying in a thunderstorm that loved you.

Garnet drew Avalon from above.

The plain. The seventh lake. The wheat. The long road. The bakery with smoke coming out of it. The town under the garden wall with all its windows. The porch, very small, with Mother on it, and a cup.

And two lines of light. A long blue one and a short bright one. Over everything. Like a pair.

"Who's the short one?" said Rowan. Looking at the drawing on the field afterward.

"My mother," said Risa. Who'd come down beside them and gone back into a person with her hair on end. "Ingrid."

"The Hush," said Rowan. Very quietly.

Ingrid came down beside them, and turned back into a small grey woman in a flight coat, and looked at Rowan Vey.

"Nobody's called me that since the Kesh," she said.

"Konrad Friese told us," said Callum. "On the grass. When he read to the children. He said the Hush was the bravest person he ever met and he took her name off everything."

Ingrid looked at him for a long time.

"He said that?"

"Every Tuesday," said Callum.

Ingrid didn't say anything.

Then she reached up and took Garnet's drawing out of her hands, very carefully, and looked at the two lines of light over everything. And gave it back.

"Draw him one of these," she said. "Konrad. He'll never ask. He's afraid of heights."

"He went up the tower stairs," said Garnet. "On the shallow seas."

"I know," said Ingrid. "That's why he gets a drawing."

It went from there.

I'm not going to write all of it down. Genny would never forgive me. Garnet would draw it, which would be worse.

But I'll write that after that, Rowan and Callum Vey were at the bakery every morning, and on the porch most evenings, and at the long ward on the nights Genny sat with Bell. That Rowan learned to sit on an upturned crate at the edge of the interceptor field beside Garnet and her drawing board, with the old brown dog between them, and not say anything for an hour while she drew, which Risa said was the first time in his life he'd been quiet for more than a minute.

That Callum asked Genny to teach him how to listen to the trays. And she did. And he was bad at it. And kept coming back.

That Garnet drew the four of them on the porch one evening. Two pairs of twins. Eleven minutes apart, both pairs. Laughing. Rowan first, then Garnet, then Genny, then Callum last.

And Brock at the end of the porch rail. With volume twelve on his knees, keeping it dry.

The Vey twins had a grandmother.

Nan Vey. Eighty-one. From Level Thirty-three. She'd come across on the ninth crossing with them, with one bag and a laundry iron she refused to leave behind, and she'd been living in the third-wave houses ever since, on her own, ironing other people's shirts because nobody had told her she didn't have to anymore.

Maura found her.

Of course Maura found her. Maura finds everyone. Rowan said something at the bakery counter one morning about their Nan ironing his flight jacket so stiff it stood up by itself, and Maura put down the loaves and said, "Where is she?" And Rowan told her. And Maura took off her apron and walked to the third-wave houses with a basket.

She came back with Nan Vey.

"She's on the rota," Maura said. To Mother. At the kitchen door. With Nan Vey behind her, small and square and suspicious, holding her iron. "Thursdays. The town under the garden wall. She's going to teach the children to iron."

"Do they need to iron?" said Mother.

"Nobody needs to iron," said Nan Vey. "That's not the point of ironing."

Mother looked at her for a long time.

Then she stepped back from the door.

"Come in," she said. "I'll put the kettle on. You can tell me what the point is."

The point of ironing, Nan Vey said, at our kitchen table, over three cups, was that you could make one thing in the world flat and right. One shirt. In a laundry on Level Thirty-three where nothing else was. Where the pipes leaked and the lights went off every third night and the boys came home with scars through their eyebrows. You could make one shirt right. And then another.

"Their mother was a laundress," she said. "And her mother. And me." She turned her cup. "Their mother died when they were six. A fever on Thirty-three. No medics came down that far. Not then." She looked out of the window at the porch. Where Rowan and Callum were on the rail, with my sisters. "I raised them. In the laundry. Between the irons."

Mother didn't say anything.

"They wrote his name on the wall in soap," said Nan Vey. "I made them scrub it off. I've been sorry ever since." She looked at Mother. "I'd never seen them want anything before. Not like that. They wanted to be like him." She drank her tea. "So did I, a bit. A boy through a window. Who wasn't afraid of the Senate."

"He was afraid," said Mother. "He's always afraid. He goes anyway."

"Yes," said Nan Vey. "I've noticed that's the trick of it."

After that there were three grandmothers in our kitchen on Thursdays, and then four, and then the General came in from the jetty and Konrad from the grass and it was more grandparents than chairs.

Nan Vey taught Pip to iron. Pip said it was the most useless thing she'd ever learned and did it every Thursday anyway, at the long table in the town under the garden wall, with forty children who'd been sung white in seven-three-K learning to make one thing flat and right.

Rain ironed a shirt for Okafor.

Okafor wore it to the long table.

Nan Vey ironed Konrad's coat. Konrad said nobody had ironed his coat since Ingrid. Ingrid said she'd never once ironed his coat in her life. Konrad said he knew; he'd been trying to be gallant. Nan Vey said it was a very badly kept coat for a man who used to sign for a planet. Konrad agreed with her.

And Garnet drew the four grandmothers at our kitchen table. Mother and Maura and Ingrid and Nan Vey. With their cups. Laughing. Nan Vey with her iron in her lap.

She gave the drawing to Rowan.

Rowan gave it to his grandmother.

Nan Vey looked at it for a long time. And then folded it very carefully, and ironed the fold flat, and put it in her one bag.

"Well," she said. "That's one thing right."

I didn't know what to do about the idolizing.

They never stopped. Not really. They got better at hiding it, because Garnet told them if they asked me one more time whether it was true I folded a Hand from the inside she'd draw them both in Mother's burning apron. But they'd stop talking when I came onto the porch. And stand up. Both of them. At once. Like cadets.

"Sit down," I said. The first time.

They sat down.

"You don't have to stand up," I said.

"We know," said Rowan.

"We can't help it," said Callum. Last.

Mother, in the kitchen doorway, laughed so hard she had to hold on to the frame.

"They're good boys," she said. After. When they'd gone back down the hill to the field. "Level Thirty-three. Laundries and a school." She sat down in the chair beside me. Not Father's. The other one. "They saw you come through a window when they were twelve and decided that was what a person could be." She looked at me. "That's not nothing, Lucas. You should let them have it."

"I'm not what they think."

"No," said Mother. "Nobody is." She poured the tea. "But they'll find that out themselves. On the porch. Watching you set fire to the toast." She smiled. "And then they'll think something better."

Okafor sent the shallow seas answer to the long table the next week.

Will you come too?

The long table voted.

Yes.

I said it that night.

On the porch. In order. Which took even longer now, because Rowan and Callum Vey were on the rail, and Brock was at the end with the brood book, and none of them were family, exactly, and all of them were there.

I said it to all of them anyway.

When I got to the Vey twins they both stood up. At once.

"Sit down," said Garnet and Genny. Also at once.

They sat down.

I said it to them.

Rowan laughed first. Then Callum, last.

And Brock, at the end of the rail, with his iron fingers on the cover of volume twelve, said, very quietly, to nobody in particular:

"Copy, Scarecrow."

Days 3665–3700. Pairs.

Garnet's eleven drawings: Konrad didn't pick up the pen; Dane touched it and it was warm and hummed; a piece of their queen, given with the paper. Konrad went up the tower stairs, afraid, with Brock behind him, and knelt and gave it back, and it went home into her side. The fifty followed him up. Dane told the one who receives: I was glad too. The council won't sign: will you come too? The long table said yes. Brock planted his mother's seeds in the tower window. Genny came home and gave Brock the brood book to carry, which nobody ever has; he made his fingers iron to keep it dry, and reads to the trays, badly. Mother asked; Genny: he's my friend. Then the Vey twins, Rowan and Callum, pilots, eleven minutes apart, who wrote COPY SCARECROW in soap on a Level Thirty-three laundry wall. Garnet drew them three times. Callum asked Genny about the rain queen and heard her on the fourth night. Rowan took Garnet up to see the map from above; Risa and Ingrid flew over her as lightning. Maura found Nan Vey, who irons, and put her on the Thursday rota. They stand up when I come onto the porch.