# The Roost - the Dinoroost world guide

Thirty-nine children live in seven enormous araucaria trees over a drowned river city.

## The three Laws

1. No rig points at a person.  Spoken: “Point it down.”
2. No dino carries a fight it did not choose.  Spoken: “Not her fight.”
3. Nobody goes Quiet alone.  Spoken: “Not alone.”

## The bell code

| 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. |

## The places

**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

| Time | What |
|---|---|
| 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. |

## How to say the names

| 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 |
| 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 |

## 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.