The Face in the Box

The box had air holes, which was strange because the thing inside it was not alive.

Soren carried it with both hands through the biology building, past the table where someone had arranged feathers by size, past the tank of pond water with tiny green worlds turning in it, past his mother in the engineering tent outside, who was trying to make a swarm of palm-sized robots agree about a door.

"Storage room B," Dr. Aranda had said, already looking at her phone. "Please do not open it. Please do not drop it. And if the crows start yelling, go back inside. I have six minutes before my talk and no extra graduate students."

Soren had asked, "Why would they yell at a box?"

Dr. Aranda had looked up then. She had rain in her hair and a pencil behind one ear. "Not the box," she said. "The face. Storage room B. Thank you."

Then she was gone.

The thing in the box looked like a person only if you were not a person. Heavy rubber forehead. Wide nose. Pale cheeks. A mask, face-up under the clear lid, with a paper tag tied through one eyehole.

Soren turned the box sideways to read the tag.

Dangerous face. Banding study. First used May, two thousand twelve.

He stood still in the hallway.

Outside, the festival quad shone after rain. Children ran between tents. A woman in silver boots was handing out stickers shaped like Saturn. Nobody else seemed to be carrying a face from two thousand twelve.

Soren shifted the box against his ribs and pushed the door open with his shoulder.

The first crow shouted before the door had swung shut.

It was not a song. It was a cracked black alarm, thrown from the top of the nearest maple. Another crow answered from the library roof. Then another. In three breaths, the air above Soren had filled with black wings and sharp calls.

People looked up.

Soren stepped backward into the building.

The yelling stopped almost at once.

Through the glass door, a crow hopped along the wet railing. Its head jerked left, right, left. One black eye fixed on the box.

"Nest," Soren said softly.

He wrote the word on the corner of a program, then crossed it out before the ink dried. It was October. No nests.

He set the box on the floor and took off his blue rain jacket. He pushed the door open and stepped outside without the box.

The crow on the railing watched him.

No alarm.

Soren waved one arm.

The crow scratched its neck.

He went back in, put on the jacket, and tried again.

No alarm.

He carried the empty cardboard lid from a recycling bin outside.

No alarm.

He came back for the box and held it low, pressed against his stomach, mask facing inward.

No alarm.

He turned the clear lid outward.

The crow exploded.

Not with wings. With sound. It leaned forward until its tail lifted and hammered the air with calls. Two more crows lifted from the library roof. People on the quad ducked as if the noise had weight.

Soren pulled the box in.

Quiet returned in ragged pieces.

"Face," he said.

The word was too small for what had happened.

Storage room B was across the quad in the old brick building. The direct path went under the maples. Soren could wait for Dr. Aranda, but she had six minutes, and adults with six minutes became weather. They moved around you, not with you.

He looked at the box. The mask stared at the ceiling with a rubber expression that had made enemies before Soren was born.

He took the cloth bag from the festival table beside the door. It was printed with a cheerful sunflower and the words Soil Is Alive. He slid the box inside, pulled the drawstring tight, and stepped outside.

No crow called.

Soren crossed the first stretch of wet pavement. His shoes made small squeaks. The bag bumped his knee. The crow on the railing followed him by hopping, silent now.

Halfway across the quad, a smaller crow landed on a trash can ahead of him.

It looked almost like the others, but not quite. Its eye was not the hard dark bead of the railing crow. It was gray-blue, cloudy as rainwater. At the corner of its beak, a pink line showed when it opened its mouth.

Young, Soren thought, and stopped walking.

The young crow gave one uncertain caw.

From the maple, the older crow answered with the sharp alarm call.

The young one straightened. It looked at the cloth bag. It looked at Soren's face. It looked back at the bag.

Then it made the alarm call too.

Not as well. The sound broke in the middle.

Soren's fingers tightened around the drawstring.

The mask was from two thousand twelve. The young crow could not have been there when someone wearing that face had trapped and banded birds. It had not seen the first wrong thing. It had been handed the wrong thing afterward, from beak to beak, call to call, attention to attention.

The quad changed without moving.

It was still tents, puddles, robots, Saturn stickers, wet leaves stuck to shoes. It was also a city above the city, full of old reports and family warnings, where a face could travel farther than feet and last longer than rubber.

The young crow hopped once on the trash can lid. Its gray-blue eye stayed on the bag.

Soren lowered his head, not bowing, just making his own face less important, and walked the rest of the way without turning the mask outward.

At the old brick building, the storage room door was locked.

Of course it was.

Soren stared at the keypad. A paper sign beside it said, For presenters, see front desk.

The front desk was inside. The crows were outside. The bag was in his hand.

He could hear Dr. Aranda's voice somewhere across the quad, amplified by a microphone. "Crows are not simply reacting to all humans," she was saying. "They can distinguish individual human faces. In some studies, they continued to scold a threatening mask years after the original event."

Soren looked back.

The crowd at the biology tent was facing Dr. Aranda. Above them, on the library roof, three crows faced Soren.

One of them was the young one.

Soren set the bag down with the sunflower side up. He crouched beside it and untied the drawstring just enough to reach the box. He did not show the mask. He turned the box inside the bag so the rubber face pointed toward the cloth bottom.

Then he lifted the clear plastic box out, face hidden against the sunflower cloth, and tucked the bag over the top like a blanket.

No alarm.

He carried it through the building's front door, past the empty desk, and found Storage room B from the inside. The door opened with a push bar. No keypad this way.

The room smelled like dust, paper, and old raincoats. Shelves held skull casts, jars of seeds, a cracked model of a flower taller than Soren. Against one wall stood a glass display case labeled Urban Crows and Human Faces.

There was an empty stand inside it.

Soren slid the case open. He placed the mask box on the stand with the face turned outward, behind glass. The rubber forehead leaned toward the room. The tag dangled below one eyehole.

At the window, claws clicked on the sill.

Soren turned.

The young crow stood outside the glass, blue-gray eye bright against the black feathers. It dipped its head. The older crow landed beside it, heavy and silent.

Soren did not move.

The young crow opened its beak and gave the broken alarm call to the face behind the glass.