Chapter 394 Room

Orrin didn't believe us.

I'd thought they would. I'd thought, on the way up the thread, scattered, the long way, with Ysolt's voice in my head through the silver telling me what she'd say: a world with no children will open its doors to anyone who says they have them.

She was wrong. So was I.

I came back together in a square.

A small one. Grey stone. In a town of grey stone on the side of a hill, with a wide brown river below it and fields going down to the water. A market square, with stalls. Empty. Nothing on them.

There were people in it.

Not many. A few hundred. Sitting on the steps of the buildings round the edge. On the edge of the dry fountain in the middle. On the ground. Grown men and women in plain brown clothes, sitting very still, not talking, the way people sit at a funeral when the funeral's been going on for a month and nobody knows how to end it.

They looked up when I came out of the air.

And every one of them stood up and ran.

Not toward me.

Away.

Into the buildings. Into the side streets. Doors slamming all round the square. Shutters coming down. In less than a minute the square was empty except for me and a very old man on the edge of the fountain who hadn't been able to get up fast enough and was sitting there with his hands over his head.

I didn't move.

"It's all right," I said. Through the silver. Through Dot, the long way back down the thread, who gave it to him in Orrin. "I'm not them."

The old man didn't take his hands down.

"That's what they said," he said. Very quietly. Into his knees. "The last time."

So I sat down.

On the cobbles. In the middle of the empty square. With my hands in my lap where he could see them. And waited.

It took a long time.

Ysolt came through the arch two hours later.

Kyria had cut it at the edge of the square, by the dry fountain, with twelve cutters and the old man watching from between his fingers. Dory sang it. And it opened. Onto the red glass.

And Ysolt walked through. Tall and pale and old, in her grey coat with the ash of Imber still on the hem.

She didn't speak to the old man. She didn't speak to the shutters. She went to the middle of the square and stood there, and put her hand up, and said, in her own language, very loud, so it went off the stone walls:

"I am Ysolt. I speak for the council of Imber. My world is glass."

Then she waited.

Nobody came out.

"Three hundred thousand of my people are glass," said Ysolt. "Two million seven hundred thousand are not. Because they came." She pointed at me. On the cobbles. "Because he came. And stood where you are standing. And held a door open with his hand for eight hours while the sky burned."

Nothing.

"I know," said Ysolt. Very quietly now. "I know you do not believe me. I would not. They came to Orrin and took every child you had in one night. And now someone comes out of the air and says: we have them." She looked round at the shutters. "You think it is them. Come back. To see if there is anything left to take."

A shutter moved. A very little.

"I cannot make you believe me," said Ysolt. "So I have brought someone who can."

She turned round to the arch.

Mother came through.

Holding a boy's hand.

He was small. Thin. In thin Orrin clothes that Maura had washed and Nan Vey had ironed. With grey round his eyes, still, a little, from twenty days in a pen under a tower singing a song that wasn't his.

The boy from the first ring on Merrow. The one Mother knelt in front of. The one who took her hand first.

He stood in the arch and looked round at the empty square. At the dry fountain. At the stalls. At the shutters.

And then he looked at one shutter. Above a shop on the far side of the square. With a blue door.

And said something. Very small. In Orrin.

Dot didn't need to translate it. Nobody did.

The blue door opened.

I don't know her name. I never asked. It wasn't mine to ask.

She came out of the blue door and stopped on the step and looked at him across the square for a long time. A woman in brown, with her hair tied back, and her hands at her sides.

Then she came across the square.

Not running. She couldn't. She walked. Very fast. And then she was on her knees on the cobbles in front of him, with her arms round him, and she was making a sound I've heard before. On the red glass, the morning I brought Mother home. On the ring, when the grandmothers found the shirts. In the long ward, when Tally found the eleventh piece.

And every shutter in the square opened.

They came through for eleven hours.

Not the way Imber came. Imber had walked nine days to the capital. Imber was waiting on a hill with bags.

Orrin was everywhere. Every town on every hill along every river. One million six hundred thousand people in twenty days of quiet, in houses with small beds in them that nobody slept in.

So Kyria cut more arches.

Not one. Twelve. In the twelve biggest towns on Orrin, one after another, with her cutters going from one to the next on the Open Hand. And Dory held them. All twelve. From the courtyard on Avalon. With her hand flat on the stone and her silver net bright up both arms and round the back of her neck, and her eyes shut. And Corin beside her, with his hand flat beside hers. And Thessaly beside him, giving him what he asked for.

Twelve doors. Held open by three of my children. From a world away.

And at every one, someone from Merrow.

That was Mother's idea. A child of Orrin, at every arch. Brought back through, holding a grown-up's hand, to stand in the door and look round for a face. Because Orrin wouldn't believe a woman in a grey coat, or a man sitting on the cobbles with his hands in his lap.

But they believed their children.

The Hands didn't come.

I waited for them all day. Everyone did. Risa was up the whole eleven hours, high, in short hops from cloud to cloud, watching. Okafor stood at the arch in the first square with her hands half up. Ilka listened from the Meridian and said nothing every hour, on the hour, through the silver. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

They didn't come.

"They're writing it down," said Crane. That night. On the red glass. With his spanner. "Merrow. They don't know how." He didn't look up. "They lost thirty Hands in an afternoon and we walked away with everything. They haven't got a line for it." He almost smiled. "I've seen a ministry with no line for something. It takes weeks."

At the end, in the first square, by the dry fountain, there were some who wouldn't come.

Not many. The old man on the edge of the fountain. And others like him. Old. Very old, some of them. Who'd been born on Orrin, and their parents, and theirs. Who had no children left to come for, or whose children were already through.

"I will not go into a door," said the old man. To Ysolt. Very politely. "I have never been through a door that did not take something." He put his hand on the edge of the fountain. "I am staying with this."

"They will burn it," said Ysolt.

"Yes," said the old man. "I know."

Ysolt looked at him for a long time.

She didn't argue. She knelt down in front of him, in her grey coat, on the cobbles, and took his hand, and said something to him in Imber that Dot didn't give me. And he said something back in Orrin.

Then she stood up and came through the arch, and didn't look back.

ORRIN. 1,600,000.

Through: 1,583,210.

Stayed: the rest. By their own choice.

Konrad wrote it under the line. Under 398,941. Home. In the same neat hand.

Then he wrote, very small, beside the second number: Not all.

And beside that, smaller: But asked.

The Hands came to Orrin four days later.

Ilka heard them. Twelve. And the fire.

I didn't feel it. I wasn't there. Nobody was, except the old man on the edge of the fountain and the eleven thousand who'd stayed with him.

I've thought about them every day since.

Okafor wrote it on the wall. Under ORRIN. 400,000. LATE. and Not again.

ORRIN. 11,000. ASKED. STAYED.

She didn't write anything under it.

That was when Avalon ran out of room.

I'd known it was coming. Everyone had. Kwame Osei had been saying there's always a bit more since Imber, and digging another shaft every week, and every week it filled.

But a hollow is for when the sky goes dark. It isn't for living in.

And now there were two million seven hundred thousand from Imber, and four hundred thousand children of Orrin, and one million six hundred thousand of their parents. On the red glass. On the north field, round the wheel. In tents on the plain east of the seventh lake, all the way down the long slow folds to the river. In every spare room of every crooked house in the town under the garden wall, where the grandmothers had opened every door.

More than four million people. In a month.

On a world that had been built, to start with, for twenty thousand.

Voss called the meeting.

Not Okafor. Okafor said it wasn't hers. She said she ran a war, and this wasn't a war, and she'd made that mistake with the domes once already and wasn't going to make it twice.

"Who does it belong to?" I said.

Okafor looked at Voss.

"The one who used to run a whole world," she said.

Voss didn't want it.

She said so. In the kitchen. To Mother. With her pen on the table, square to the edge.

"I ran Earth," she said. "Into the ground. Under glass. For twenty years. I signed things." She looked at the pen. "Halden happened on my watch. My brother died in a dome I was meant to be keeping." She didn't pick it up. "I'm not the right person to build anything."

Mother poured her tea.

"You're the only person on Avalon," said Mother, "who's ever had to find beds for four million people at once. And knows exactly what it looks like when you get it wrong." She put the cup down in front of her. "That's not the wrong person, love. That's the only one."

Voss looked at the tea for a long time.

Then she picked up the pen.

So the meeting was in the long ward.

Because it's the biggest room in Scarecrow that isn't a hold, and Halloway said if four million people were going to be planned for she'd like to be in the room where it happened. Voss at the head of the long table they'd carried in. And round it, everyone Voss asked for.

Wren. With her slate, and her hand on her middle, because she's carrying again and further along than anyone expected, and still counting in her sleep.

Miss Pell. With her stick and her spectacles.

Halloway. Kwame Osei, with his hat. Bram Okonedo from the forty-first floor waterworks. Keir, with his drawings. Edda, with her green book. Holt, for the Hathri. Ysolt, for Imber. A woman from Orrin called Tamsa, who'd come through the arch from the blue door's town and who'd been, Ysolt said, the nearest thing Orrin had to a council when the Hands came, because she ran the grain stores and everyone owed her something.

Me. At the end. Because Voss said I should be there, and Miss Pell said I should be there and keep my hands in my lap.

"How many?" said Voss.

Wren didn't look at her slate. She didn't need to.

"Four million, six hundred and ninety thousand, two hundred and twelve," she said. "New. Since Imber. As of this morning." She put her hand on her middle. "Plus everyone who was already here. Plus the ones Halloway's delivered this week." A pause. "Plus mine, eventually."

Voss wrote the number down.

Then she looked at it for a long time.

"I've seen this number before," she said. Very quietly. "On Earth. Under glass. When the domes closed." She put the pen down. "We put them in the levels. Floor after floor. Two rooms each. Six to a room, some of them. And we told ourselves it was temporary." She looked round the table. "It was not temporary."

Nobody said anything.

"I'm not doing that again," said Voss.

"Then don't," said Miss Pell.

Everyone looked at her.

"Don't put them anywhere," said Miss Pell. "Don't build them a city." She looked at me over her spectacles. "Especially you. Don't build them anything. Not yet."

"They're in tents," I said.

"Yes," said Miss Pell. "And they'll be in tents a little longer. And that's all right. Because they're alive in tents." She folded her hands on her stick. "If you build a city for four million people in a week, Lucas Dask, it'll be the most beautiful city anyone has ever seen. And every one of them will walk into a house that a stranger made perfect, on a world that isn't theirs, and sit down on a perfect chair, and feel like a guest." She looked at Voss. "For a hundred years."

"So what do we do?" said Wren.

Miss Pell looked at her.

"Schools," she said.

Wren put down her slate.

"Schools," said Miss Pell again. "First. Before houses. Before roads. Before anything." She looked round the table. "Four hundred thousand children from Orrin who've been in a pen. Six hundred thousand from Imber who've watched their world go glass. Two thousand from the white rooms who still don't know what a bicycle is." She put her stick down flat across the table. "Every one of them sitting in a tent all day with nothing to do but remember."

"They don't speak the same language," said Holt.

"Nor did the children from the white rooms," said Miss Pell. "Nor did Rain. Nor did Tally." She looked at me. "Your daughter talks to every brood on Avalon and half of them haven't got mouths."

"What do we teach them?"

Miss Pell thought about it.

"Each other," she said.

That was how the schools started.

Not with buildings. With Miss Pell.

She went out onto the plain the next morning. East of the seventh lake. Where the tents went down the long slow folds toward the river. With her stick and her spectacles and a bag over her shoulder.

And sat down on the grass.

That was all. She sat down on the grass at the edge of the first row of tents and took a book out of her bag. A child's book. From Earth. With pictures. One of the ones that came on the last crossing with the archive floors.

And started reading it. Out loud. In English. To nobody.

By noon she had nine children.

They didn't understand a word. They sat on the grass in front of her and looked at the pictures. A boy from Imber. Three girls from Orrin. Two from the white rooms. And a Hathri young, very small, low and grey and broad, who'd come over from Holt's people's tents to see what the noise was.

Miss Pell turned the page.

And pointed at a picture. A dog.

"Dog," she said.

The Hathri young made a sound. Low. Like a stone settling.

Miss Pell looked at it over her spectacles. "Is that your word for dog?"

The Hathri young made the sound again.

Miss Pell said it back. Very badly.

The three girls from Orrin started laughing.

Then one of them said something. In Orrin. Pointing at the dog.

And Miss Pell said that one back too. Also very badly.

By the end of the week she had four hundred.

By the end of the month there were nine thousand schools on the plain.

None of them had walls. Most of them didn't have roofs, either. They were a grandmother on a step, or a grandfather on a blanket, or a girl from Imber who'd been a teacher before the glass sitting under a Kethri tree with forty children round her. They were Rain, from the window at the top, teaching the children of Orrin the word for window in Moon's word and her own and the hello all at once. They were Tally on the floor of the long ward, teaching anyone who came how to listen. They were Taveth with his pot, which isn't a school, but every child who came to get soup learned the Hyrrani word for bad very quickly.

They were the children themselves.

That was what Miss Pell had meant. Each other. A girl from Orrin who could count to a hundred in Orrin sat down with a boy from Imber who could count to a hundred in Imber, and by the end of the afternoon they could both count to a hundred in both, and in English, and in the sound the Hathri young made for each number, which was the same sound getting lower.

Wren counted them.

All of them. Every school. Every teacher. Every child. She walked the plain with her slate and her hand on her middle, from the first row of tents to the river and back, every day, and wrote down where they were and how many and what they were learning.

And at the end of every day she came back to the long ward and sat down across from Voss, and gave her the numbers.

"Why?" said Voss. On the fourth day. "Miss Pell doesn't need them counted. They're not going anywhere."

"Because they're going to need somewhere to go," said Wren. "When it rains."

She put the slate on the table.

"Look where they are," she said.

Voss looked.

The schools weren't scattered. Not really. Wren had drawn them as dots, and the dots weren't random. They'd clustered. Under trees. By water. Where the land was flat. Where the grandmothers had been. Where the Hathri tents met the Orrin ones. Where someone good at stories had sat down first.

"That's where they want to be," said Wren. "Not where we'd have put them. Where they went." She put her finger on the biggest cluster. By the river, at the bottom of the long folds, under a stand of Kethri trees. "That's where the first school's going to be. A real one. With a roof. Because that's where nine hundred children walk to every morning without anyone telling them."

Voss looked at the slate for a long time.

"And the houses?" she said.

"Round the schools," said Wren. "Where else would you put them?"

So that was how the city started.

Not with me. With the schools. With Wren's dots.

Voss took the slate to Keir.

And Keir took his chalk and went out onto the plain and walked from dot to dot for three days, with Kwame Osei beside him on his stick and Bram Okonedo behind them, arguing. And drew lines between the dots. Not straight. Never straight. The way people walk. The way the children walked to Miss Pell every morning, round the tents and over the folds and down to the water.

"Roads," said Keir. "There. Where the grass is already worn."

"Water," said Bram. "There. Where it'll want to run. And drains. Deeper. Never touching."

"And hollows," said Kwame Osei. "Under every one. In four minutes from every door." He tapped the ground with his stick. "There's always a bit more."

And then they came to me.

Voss. Keir. Kwame. Bram. Wren. And Miss Pell, behind them, leaning on her stick.

"Now," said Voss.

I asked what she wanted.

"The big ones," said Kwame Osei. Before Voss could answer. "The way you did the lake. The things nobody else can make." He held up a finger. "The tunnels for the water, from the river and the lakes. Under the whole of the plain." Another finger. "The roads. Not the little ones. The long ones. Out to the edges, so it can grow." Another. "The hollows. Deep. Under the hard sheets, where the warm is." He put his hand down. "And then stop."

"And the houses?"

"Not one," said Miss Pell. From the back. "Not one house, Lucas Dask. Not one door. Not one window." She looked at me over her spectacles. "Make them the ground. Let them make the rest."

So I made the ground.

I did it in one night. Not because I had to. Because I wanted it ready for the morning.

I went out onto the plain east of the seventh lake after dark, with Hana beside me to breathe and Luna beside her to hold the paths and Sera to keep me warm, and Risa overhead in short hops from cloud to cloud, watching. Andraste stayed on the porch with her hand on her middle. She said the one at the wall wanted to listen to this one from far off.

And I put my hand on the ground.

And felt it. All of it. The whole of the plain, from the lake to the river and past it, out to the edges where the Kethri trees go up into the hills. Every fold. Every place the grass was worn. Every one of Wren's dots, warm, with children asleep near it.

And under it, the red stone, and the grey-black rock, and the hard old sheets laid down like the pages of a book.

I made the water first.

From the river. From the seventh lake, and the sixth, and the fifth. Tunnels through the grey-black rock, wide as a street, in long slow curves that followed Keir's chalk lines exactly, so that every road would have water under it. I made them the way Kwame taught me to, years ago, at the top of the canyon. Make the big ones. Show the pipe man. Let him make the rest. And at every place where a school was, every one of Wren's dots, I brought the water up. Just to the edge of the ground. And stopped.

For Bram, in the morning. With his four hundred.

Then the drains. Deeper. Never touching.

Then the roads. Not the little ones. The long ones. Out from the first school by the river, along Keir's lines, out to the edges in every direction like the spokes of a wheel that wasn't round. Not stone. Not glass. The red-grey of the rock, just under the grass, so firm a cart wouldn't sink and so plain nobody would notice until they did.

Then the hollows.

Under everything. Under every dot. Down through the grey-black, down through the hard sheets, to where it's warm. And not finished. Just started. A shaft at every school, and a hollow at the bottom of it the size of the long barn, and a note scratched on the wall at the bottom of every one in Kwame Osei's own words, which he'd asked me to put there: Dig more.

Then I stopped.

It was nearly dawn. I was very tired. I sat down on the grass at the edge of the first row of tents, where Miss Pell had sat with her book. And Sera sat down beside me and put her arm round me and was very warm, and Luna put her cold hand on my neck, and Hana breathed for me without saying anything.

And Risa came down out of the sky like a leaf.

And we watched the sun come up over the plain.

They came out of the tents at first light.

Four million people. A little at a time. The way people come out of tents in the morning. And saw the plain.

It didn't look like anything. That was the point. It looked like a plain. With grass. And long worn paths through the grass where they'd walked. And here and there, where the paths met, at every school, a ring of red-grey stone set into the ground, very plain, with water bubbling up in the middle of it, clean and cold. And beside every one, the top of a shaft going down. With a ladder.

And nothing else.

No houses. No walls. No doors.

A woman from Orrin walked to the nearest ring of stone.

She looked at the water for a long time. Then she knelt down and put her hand in it.

Then she looked round. At the plain. At the worn paths. At the school under the Kethri tree, where a girl from Imber was already sitting with her back against the trunk, waiting for the children.

And she said something. In Orrin. To the man beside her.

Tamsa, from the grain stores, was near enough to hear. She told Voss afterward. Voss told me.

The woman had said: We could put the house there. Facing the water. So the children can see the school from the window.

And the man had said: We'd need stone.

And the woman had said: There's a river. There's always stone by a river.

By the end of the first week there were eleven hundred houses on the plain.

Crooked. Every one of them. Grey stone from the river, the way they build on Orrin, with steep roofs against a wind that doesn't blow here. Pale timber from the Kethri trees, the way they build on Imber, with long low walls and a single great window facing the sea, though there isn't a sea. And Hathri houses, half underground, round, with the doors facing the warm. And some that weren't any of those, because someone from Orrin had married someone from Imber in a tent on the second night, and they'd built something that was both.

Not one of them was perfect.

Miss Pell walked through all of them with her stick. Every one. And at the end of the week she came back to the porch and sat down.

"Good," she said.

From her, that's the highest praise there is.

Voss did one thing herself.

She didn't tell anyone. I found out because Wren counted it, and asked me, and I didn't know either.

On the long road out from the first school, where it runs straight for a while along the river before it bends, there was a shed. Wooden. Small. Pale Kethri timber, badly cut, with a door that didn't shut properly and a window with no glass in it yet. Somebody had built it on the fourth night, alone, in the dark.

On the eighth morning there was a sign over the door. Painted by hand. Not very well.

TEODOR'S.

I went down the road that evening.

Voss was inside. In her plain coat, with her sleeves rolled up, sitting on an upturned crate with a bicycle frame across her knees. One of mine. One of the ones I made for the amusement park, with the release Enna taught us on every one. She'd taken the front wheel off and had the spokes in a tin beside her and was putting them back, very slowly, one at a time, with her tongue between her teeth.

There were more frames along the wall. Eleven. And wheels. And a pile of children's shoes by the door, because the children had taken them off to come in, the way you do in an Orrin house.

There were children everywhere.

On the floor. On the crates. On the windowsill with no glass. Orrin and Imber and two from the white rooms and a Hathri young, very small, watching the spokes go in with great seriousness.

Voss didn't look up when I came in.

"He never taught me this part," she said. "Teodor. He taught me to ride. He never taught me to mend them." She put another spoke in. "I've been reading the archive. There's a manual. From before the domes." She tightened it. "I'm very bad at it."

"You could ask me."

"No," said Voss. "I couldn't."

She put the last spoke in. And spun the wheel. It wobbled.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she held it out to the oldest of the children. A girl from Orrin, maybe ten. Thin, with grey still round her eyes a little, from Merrow.

"It wobbles," said Voss. In very bad Orrin. Tamsa had been teaching her. "You fix."

The girl took the wheel. And looked at it. And looked at the spokes. And at the tin. And at Voss.

Then she sat down on the floor and started taking the spokes out again, one at a time, and putting them back differently.

Voss watched her.

"Good," she said.

I went back up the road in the dark.

Behind me, in the window with no glass, there was a lamp. And the sound of a wheel spinning. And somebody laughing, in Orrin. And Voss's voice, very low, saying something I couldn't hear.

The next morning there were three bicycles outside TEODOR'S that hadn't been there before. And three children riding them up and down the long road by the river, very badly, wobbling, while other children ran behind them holding the seats.

And letting go.

Voss gave it a name.

Not on her own. She asked. At the long table in the long ward, with Wren's slate in front of her and the number on it, which was bigger now, because Halloway had delivered nineteen more babies on the plain that week.

"What's it called?" she said. To everyone. To Ysolt and Tamsa and Holt and the girl from Imber who'd been a teacher before the glass. "Not Scarecrow. That's ours. The town under the garden wall, that's the grandmothers'." She looked at the slate. "This is yours. What do you want to call it?"

They argued about it for three days.

In the end, it was the children who decided. The ones in Miss Pell's first school, under the Kethri trees, by the river. Who'd made a word between them in the first week, out of Orrin and Imber and English and the sound the Hathri young made, for the place where they all went every morning without anyone telling them to.

Nobody could spell it.

Wren wrote it down the way it sounded. Thera.

In Orrin, it's close to the word for the place by the water. In Imber, close to the word for together. In English, it's nothing. In Hathri, it's the sound a stone makes when it's settled and isn't going to move again.

Voss wrote it at the top of the slate. Under the number.

Then she put the pen down. Square to the edge.

And for the first time since I'd known her, she didn't straighten it.

Days 4402–4440. Room.

Orrin didn't believe us; they ran. Ysolt spoke to the shutters; Mother brought the boy from the first ring, and the blue door opened. Twelve arches, held by Dory and Corin and Thessaly; a child of Orrin at every one. 1,583,210. Some stayed by their own choice; four days later, the fire. Konrad: not all, but asked. More than four million new in a month. Voss didn't want it; Mother: you're the only one. Miss Pell: schools first. Each other. Nine thousand schools with no walls. Wren counted the dots, and the dots were where people wanted to be. Keir drew roads where the grass was worn. I made the ground in one night, water and roads and hollows, and stopped. They built the houses themselves, crooked. Voss built a shed on the long road and painted TEODOR'S over the door; a girl from Merrow fixed her wobble. The children named it Thera.