At the end of the hall, her door stood as welcome and open as always. The singing was from the Crow, whose voice seemed stronger than usual. Mission saw that he wasn’t the first to arrive, that his wire had gone out. Frankie and Allie were there, both in the green and white of farm security. They were arranging desks while Mrs. Crowe sang. The sheets had been thrown off the stacks of desks kept in storage along one wall. Those desks now filled the classroom the way Mission remembered from his youth. It was as though the Crow was expecting them to be filled at any time.
Allie noticed him first. She rushed over, her coveralls bunched up around her boots, the straps knotted to make them shorter. They must’ve been Frankie’s coveralls. As she threw herself into his arms, he wondered what the two of them had risked to meet him there.
“Mission, my boy.” Mrs. Crowe stopped her singing, smiled, and waved him over. After a moment, Allie reluctantly loosened her grip.
Mission shook Frankie’s hand and thanked him for coming. It took a moment to realize something was different, that his hair had been cut short as well. They both rubbed their scalps and laughed. Humor came easy in humorless times.
“What is this I hear about my Rodny?” the Crow asked him. Her chair twitched back and forth, her hand working the controls, her Thursday dress tucked under her narrow bones. Mission drew a deep breath, smoke lingering in his lungs, and he began to tell them all he had seen on the stairwell, about the bombs and the fires and what he had heard of Mechanical, the Security forces with their barking rifles like the dogs of Supply—but the Crow dispelled his frenzied chatter with a wave of her frail arms.
“Not the fighting,” she said. “The fighting I’ve seen. I could paint a picture of the fighting and hang it from my walls. What of Rodny? What of our boy? Has he got them?” She made a small fist and held it aloft.
“No,” Mission said. “He needs our help.”
The Crow laughed, which took him aback. He tried to explain. “I gave him your note, and he passed me one in return. It begged for help. They have him locked up behind these great steel doors—”
“Not locked up,” the Crow said.
“—like he’d done something wrong—”
“Something right,” she said, correcting him.
Mission fell silent. He could see knowledge shining behind her old eyes, a sunrise on the day after a cleaning.
“Rodny is in no danger,” she said.
Allie squeezed Mission’s arm. “She’s been trying to tell us,” she whispered. “Everything’s going to be okay. Come, help with the desks.”
“But the note,” Mission said, wishing he hadn’t turned it to confetti.
“The note you gave him was to give him strength. To let him know it was time to begin.” There was a wildness in the Crow’s eyes, excitement and joy becoming something more combustible than either.
“No,” Mission said. “Rodny was afraid. I know my friend, and he was afraid of something.”
The Crow’s face hardened. She relaxed her fist and smoothed the front of her faded dress. “If that be the case,” she said, her voice trembling. “Then I judged him most wrongly.”
•33•
The dim-time approached while they arranged desks and the Crow resumed her singing. Allie told him a curfew had been announced, and so Mission lost hope that the others would show up that night. They pulled out mats from the cubbies to rest, plan, and give the others until daybreak. There was much Mission wanted to ask the Crow, but she seemed distracted, her thoughts elsewhere, a joyousness that made her giddy.
Frankie felt certain he could get them through security and deeper into IT if only he could reach his father. Mission told them how well he’d been able to move about with the whites on. Maybe he could reach Frankie’s dad in a pinch. Allie produced fresh fruits harvested from her plot and passed them around. The Crow drank one of her dark green concoctions. Mission grew restless.
He wandered out to the landing, torn between waiting for the others and his anxiety to get going. For all he knew, Rodny was being marched up to his death already. Cleanings tended to settle people down, to come after bouts of unrest, but this was unlike any of the spates of violence he had seen before. This was the burning his father spoke of, the embers of distrust and crumbling trade that jumped up all at once. He had seen this coming, but it had approached with the swiftness of a knife plummeting from the Up Top.
Out on the landing, he heard the sounds of a mob echoing from far below. Holding the landing rail, he could feel the hum of many marching boots. He returned to the others and said nothing of it. There was no reason to suspect those boots were marching for them.