The world guide
Seven trees,
sixty-one platforms,
thirty-nine kids.
Everything a reader needs and nothing that spoils anything. Where they live, what a day is, the three Laws, the bell they run on, how to say the names out loud, and what every word in the books means.
The map, in words
The Apron
Half an acre of packed earth under the trees, the silted-over roof of a sunken car park and the only ground in the Grove that does not flood. Swept every morning, because Odji says a swept yard means you can read the tracks.
The Bell Platform
Ninety feet up Bell. The bell, and the Three Laws painted on the rail in white house paint. Announcements, Namings and arguments happen here, and there is a milk crate for Pia to stand on.
The Long Table
Forty feet of restaurant table bolted end to end under a tarp. Every meal, all school and every vote. A green enamel mug sits at the head at every meal and nobody drinks from it.
The Drum
Four thousand gallons of drinking water in a dairy tank at a hundred and twenty feet, filled off two miles of spliced pipe. It drips into a tin pan on purpose, one drop every four seconds. If the dripping stops, somebody is already climbing.
The Ear
Forty-one salvaged speakers on a rack leaning out over the water, with one kid on watch day and night. Whoever watches, pedals: the power comes off a bicycle.
The Green
Nine terraces of soil in bathtubs, gutters and truck beds on the south face. Everything grows in a container that used to be something else. Tarn’s tomatoes are in a filing cabinet.
The Lift
Aunt Bess, an eight-ton Triceratops, walks a treadwheel: four hundred pounds to seventy feet in ninety seconds. She stops walking at the two-bell meal call no matter what is in the basket.
The Warren
Where everyone ten and over sleeps — staggered cubbies with a curtain and a hook. Every cubby has a foxfire jar, so a dark cubby means that kid is out.
The Nest
Where the twelve youngest sleep, low on purpose and in the middle of the Grove on purpose. Two people are awake in it every night, all night, all year, and it is the one job nobody has ever had to be talked into.
The Crow
The lookout, a hundred and eighty feet up a tree no bridge reaches. Twelve miles on a clear day. You climb the ratlines, so you cannot rush the lookout.
A day, grey light to lights out
The day is run
by a brake drum.
There are no clocks anybody trusts and no grown-ups to keep them. There is a bell, and everybody can hear it, and that turns out to be enough.
| Grey light | One long bell. Ratlines down. The gutterwings begin arguing and do not stop for an hour. |
| First half hour | Jars: the foxfire lanterns are fed and the dark ones reported. Tibbs, who is ten, runs it and takes it very seriously. |
| Early | Water up, Chute down, Apron swept, latches checked. Twenty minutes, everybody, Odji included. |
| Two bells | Breakfast. Fish, greens, flatbread off the Smoke, and whatever the Green had too much of. |
| Morning | School, two hours. Everyone teaches one thing and learns two. |
| Midday | Work blocks. Riggers in the shop, Green on the terraces, Far past the Gate, Riders in the Ring. |
| Two bells | Dinner, the big meal, everyone at the table at once. The loudest hour of the day. |
| Six bells | Sundown. The Gate closes. Anybody still out gets the Toll. |
| The Hour | The last hour of light belongs to nobody. Lamps lit, a four-string guitar, a keyboard wired to the Ear’s bicycle so that if you want music somebody pedals, and the youngest allowed up on the Long Table itself, which is otherwise a hanging offence. |
| Three soft bells | Late. Lights down to jars. |
Painted on the bell rail, ninety feet up
Three sentences,
in white house paint.
Every one of the ten books quotes one of them flat and then turns on it.
Law One
No rig points at a person.
“Point it down.”
Law Two
No dino carries a fight it did not choose.
“Not her fight.”
Law Three
Nobody goes Quiet alone.
“Not alone.”
The bell code
Anybody may ring it.
No permission, no age, no exception. It is not one of the Laws; it is the closest thing the Roost has to a fourth.
A fire truck’s brake drum at ninety feet, struck with a brass hammer on a jump-rope lanyard, and it carries four miles downriver — which is exactly as far as the other settlement, and both sides know it.
A few signals are held back here because they belong to volumes you have not read.
| Signal | Means |
|---|---|
| One long | Wake up. Ratlines down |
| Two | Food. Come to the Long Table |
| Three, slow | Long Table sitting. Bring your spoon |
| Three, fast | Somebody is hurt. Clear the Lift and the Long Cross |
| Four, fast, rolling | Fire. Everything else in the world stops |
| Five | Strangers at the Gate. Not necessarily bad. Come and look |
| Five fast, then one long | The Tally |
| Six | Sundown. Gate closing. Last call for the Far |
| Two, pause, two, repeating | A Drift. Everyone off the ground and up; hands flat on wood; start counting |
| The Toll | Somebody is out there in the dark. The bell is a rope. Walk to it |
| The Scatter | Get off the ground. Something big is inside the paddocks |
| Three, soft | Late. Lights down to jars |
| Nine | Everybody stop. For nine minutes. It has never been rung. |
How to say it
Said one way,
forever.
Written down before the books were, so that a name is the same in Book One and in Book Ten. Capitals are the stressed syllable. Useful out loud at bedtime and in a classroom.
| Who | Say |
|---|---|
| Lars Vantén | LARZ van-TEN |
| Nell Okonjo | NEL oh-KON-joh |
| Odji Faal | OH-jee FAHL — Faal rhymes with doll |
| Kit Ossory | KIT OSS-uh-ree, three syllables |
| Pia Marchetti | PEE-uh mar-KET-ee, hard K |
| Tarn Beaufort | TARN BOH-fort, never BYOO-fort |
| Wren Adeyemi | REN ah-day-YEH-mee |
| Marisol ‘Mars’ Quintero | MAH-ree-sol · MARZ · keen-TEH-roh |
| Corva Quist | KOR-vuh KWIST |
| Animal | Say |
|---|---|
| Deinonychus | die-NON-ik-us |
| Ankylosaurus | an-KY-loh-SOR-us |
| Triceratops | try-SERRA-tops |
| Utahraptor | YOO-tah-rap-tor |
| Compsognathus | komp-SOG-nay-thus |
| Parasaurolophus | pa-ra-SORE-oh-LOAF-us |
| Microraptor | MY-kro-rap-tor |
| Gallimimus | gal-ih-MY-mus |
| Deinocheirus | DYE-no-KY-rus |
| Maiasaura | my-ah-SAW-ra |
Every word in the books
The glossary.
| The Nine Minutes | The Tuesday morning the sky went pale and everyone older than sixteen vanished. Not dead. Gone, with the cars still idling. |
| The Quiet | What happened then, and what is still happening: on the morning of your sixteenth birthday, you go too. It is a normal verb at the Roost and is never said as a euphemism. |
| The Overgrowing | The old world coming back up through the new one. Horsetail to the second floor, warm wet air, and the animals of a hundred million years ago simply there. |
| A Match | The bond between a kid and an animal that said yes. The animal chose too, and can un-choose. |
| A rig | Harness gear an animal wears and helps operate. Nets, sap, water, mud, sound, rope, smoke, flares. Never bullets, blades or fire. |
| The Cast-Off | The release every rig carries, so the animal can shed the whole thing itself in about a second. It is the first thing a Matched animal is taught. |
| A Drift | A patch of stopped time standing in the landscape, forty feet deep, lit gold from no direction. It does not climb. |
| The Roost | Thirty-nine kids in seven enormous araucarias over a drowned river city. Sixty-one platforms. |
| The Tally | A hundred and twelve kids in a flooded ballpark four miles downriver, who collar their animals and keep an account of what everyone owes. |
| The Ledger | Odji’s three books, strapped together. Every trade, every debt, every birthday. It records the question, the count and the date, and never who voted which way. |
| The Ear | The rack of salvaged speakers the Roost listens on. In three years the machines have carried one word at a time, never two. |
| Going Quiet alone | The thing Law Three exists to prevent. |
What this page gets asked
Seven questions,
and one of them has no clean answer.
Answered off the tables above rather than around them — including the one where the honest reply is that the table on this page is deliberately two rows short, and why.
How many bell signals are there?
Fifteen in the books. Thirteen are on this page. The two that are missing are the two halves of the Sixteenth ritual, and neither is rung until the last chapter of Book Nine — printing them here would put the ending of the season on a reference page, so they stay in the books. If you have counted the rows and made it thirteen, you counted correctly.
What is the Quiet?
On the morning of your sixteenth birthday you vanish, the way every adult on Earth vanished in the nine minutes three years earlier. It is not a euphemism for dying and the children never use it as one; it is a normal verb at the Roost, with a date attached to every person who has one.
Why do the children not simply tame the dinosaurs?
Because the series is built so they cannot. An animal is Matched, not tamed: it chose, and it can un-choose. Every rig carries a Cast-Off so the animal can shed the whole thing itself in about a second, and that is the first thing a Matched animal is taught — before anything it is useful for.
How old are the children?
Nine to fifteen. Nobody at the Roost is sixteen, and nobody ever will be.
Is the dinosaur science real?
The nonfiction page at the back of every volume is, and each one names the paper or the catalogued specimen a claim comes from and who found it. The same page also says plainly which parts of the story were invented. All ten are free to read on this site.
What order do the books go in?
Publication order, and there is no other order. Each volume closes its own problem, so none of them ends on a cliff — but the village keeps a written count of everything it owns, and what one book spends the next one is short of.
Can I print this page for a classroom?
Yes. Every free page on this site is meant to be copied, printed and read out loud, and the plain-text version of this one is at the-roost.md if that is easier to work from.
The books
Ten paperbacks in one box, with the ten ebooks free. Ships free in the US.