The Scorpion Rules (26 page)

It didn't. It was empty, except for that table. That table, with its terrible crown. But the Abbot had been a hostage child. He'd gone to the grey room. “Tell me,” I said. “Tell me how you got out.”

“The grey room . . .” The Abbot's voice trailed away, as if in reverence. He gathered himself. “It is beams—I know you've wondered. The grey room uses high-intensity electromagnetic beams. They take the human mind as an EMP burst might take a machine. One goes out in a flash. It is meant to be painless.”

“Is it?”

His pause was one beat too long. “There have been no complaints.”

It seemed reassuring for an instant. Then the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

“My point,” said the Abbot, “is that the speed is controllable. The mind can be unspooled more slowly, and the process recorded. Then reversed.” He shrugged. “The details are beyond me: I am a machine but not a machinist. What matters is the memory is copied, and that much of the man that is the sum of the memory.”

“Which is how much?”

He took my damaged hand with his damaged hand. “This much,” he said. “Enough.”

I could not feel my skin; he had no skin. But I held on fiercely.

“I need a successor, Greta,” he said. “The EMP damaged me, but even before that—I approach the end of this incarnation and have no wish for another. Yet, I would not abandon you, but stay with you, train you. You would keep your body at first, and then become as I am. You could be a scholar; a great mind. A servant of peace and an enduring fact in the world.”

I did not answer.

“You know your history. You know that the transition is—”

I knew. Most of the AIs died. But it was a chance. A chance I hadn't had, an hour before.

“Ask me anything,” the Abbot said. “I will not lie to you.”

What came out of my mouth surprised me. “Do you dream?”

“In my body I used to dream. In this form I have no dreams I do not wish to have.”

I looked at our joined hands. I could feel the pressure of his hand on mine, but not the texture. “The . . . process. Does it hurt?”

The Abbot paused, his mouth icon narrowing. “Profoundly,” he said at last. “But for me there is no torment in the memory of the pain. It is merely a thing that happened. Do this, Greta, and survive it, and no one will ever hurt you again.”

In this way, the Abbot saved me: he turned my mind back on. The apple press had left me suspended between horror and numbness, unable to think, far from myself. Say this for the prospect of becoming a machine: it was at least something to think about.

I had never cared much for my body. It was clumsy and freckly and somewhat lugubrious about the nose. It followed my brain about like a wolfhound on a lead. I did not think I would miss it.

And really, I had to lose only . . . but then I remembered the taste of Da-Xia's lips—honey and anise, her hand slipping under my shirt. Elián lifting the hair from the nape of my neck. My body warmed and softened to those memories—the taste, the tug, the goose bump brush.

I had a lot to lose.

“Elián and Xie,” I said, and the reality of what I'd asked them—begged them—to do came crashing in. “Oh, God. Elián and Xie.”

The Abbot's eye icons blinked, a pantomime of confusion.

“I sent them to kill someone.”

“It was Talis who—”

“No.” Suddenly the memory cushion's softness felt insidious—an abuser's murmur, a jellyfish kiss. I flailed away from it. “No. They didn't go for Talis. They went for me. I sent them—they'll be killed.”

I still had the Abbot's hand in mine. I tried to use it to pull myself to my feet, and my shoulder lit with pain. Tears sprang into my eyes. “Da-Xia and Elián. And Grego. And—” I couldn't get up. But I couldn't let this happen.

“Shhhh,” said the Abbot. “Here.” He shifted and wrapped his hands around my ribs, lifting me. I wobbled on my feet, in his arms. “Greta. Your friends are trying to help Talis pierce the broadcast jamming and take control of the situation. If they cannot do that, tonight, then you will be tortured again. Tomorrow. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.” All around us little cubes of gold glass from the broken roof shone in the lamplight. The Cumberland ship had come down like a city falling on us. The press had come down one
tick tock
at a time. I swallowed, and I said, “I know. But I want no one to die for me, Abbot. No one.”

And these were my friends.

The Abbot leaned his head forward until the edge of his facescreen rested feather-light against my forehead. “Would that I could kiss you, Child,” he whispered.

Then he straightened up and took a step back, leaving me to stand on my own two feet. “Your Royal Highness,” he said. “How can I help?”

In the end the Abbot did three things for me. He advised me that the Cumberlanders' broadcast jammer was almost certainly on the Cumberlanders' ship. He bound my still-weak shoulders into two slings, so that I could walk around. And he cleared the way for me to reach the tunnels under the kitchen.

The darkness down there was thick.

Hard as it is to find one's way in darkness, it is harder with one's hands bound up. I crept around the shelves of jars, around the barrels of precious flour and even more precious salt, deeper in. Once I smacked my head on a shelf of canned vegetables. But eventually I found my way to the one place in the Precepture that I had heard of but never been: the long tunnel that struck out toward the ridge, near the induction spire. And the Cumberland ship.

“Long and straight, Greta,” the Abbot had said. “Perhaps . . . four hundred fifty steps.”

Four hundred fifty steps. I counted them, and tried to stop myself from thinking of the apple press, how it had come down step by step by step by step.

Spiderwebs broke across my face and I could not wipe the stickiness away. But I went on. Lit by the glowstick the Abbot had tucked into my belt tie, empty doors gaped here and there on either side. Some of them had bars.

It was like nothing so much as a catacomb.

No, that was a lie. It was like nothing so much as a dungeon.

“Make no turns,” the Abbot had said. “Count your steps, and make no turns.”

Four hundred fifty steps, through a dungeon. The Abbot had known where he was sending me, and what I would see.

Was this where Elián had been kept? This place with no sky?

“I have tried to make this place a school and a garden, one vision of a paradise,” the Abbot had said as he bound up my hands. “I know it is not a paradise. I know you are all frightened. I know I have hurt you all, tortured you all,
conditioned
you all. I know, above all, that I am charged with keeping order.” He had paused as if to take a breath, though he could not breathe. “I know that I have failed.”

And then he had gone to make sure the hallway and the kitchen were clear.

Two hundred steps. Two hundred fifty.

For years there had been a dungeon under my feet. A dungeon.

Three hundred. Four hundred. And then—finally, finally—something brushed against me like the scent of night-blooming flowers.

Da-Xia's voice, and, faint and stifled, Elián's laughter.

If anyone could laugh in a dungeon, it would be Elián Palnik.

My heart and stomach seemed to switch places. I went staggering toward the voices, trying not to call out names. I could see starlight now—the stair at the tunnel opening. Who knew how close the patrols might be.

I could see them above me now, Elián and Da-Xia and a third behind them; I wasn't sure who. Elián said something, and Xie twisted away with a soft laugh, her hand rising to cover her mouth.

For a moment I just stood as if someone had hit me. Struck, that was the word. I was struck. Struck by Elián's drawling voice, the well-known tilt of Xie's head, the just-so lift of her hand. Struck by my own loneliness. Why had I kept myself so apart from them, for so long? I only wanted to be with them. I only wanted someone to hold me.

I must have made some noise, because they turned. There was a flurry of movement, which was strangely blurred, and the three of them came running toward me. It was Elián, Grego, and Xie.

“Elián,” I said. “There's a
dungeon
.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I noticed, actually.”

“You can't do this,” I said.

Elián frowned and took my elbow. Pain flared up and down, into my shoulders and hand.

“Don't touch her arms,” said Da-Xia softly. She pressed her fingertips against my cheekbone. “Greta.” Behind her stood Gregori, his eyes faintly luminous.

“You can't do this,” I said to her. “Don't do this.”

She dropped her fingertips. My face felt aglow with her touch, and suddenly I was terrified. “Don't do this”? It meant,
I'd rather be tortured
.

My friends—

They were wearing military chameleon cloth. Black and grey and brown wrapped them and muddled their edges. “Where did you get chamo?” I said. “What are you doing?”

In my own voice I heard only flatness and fear, but Xie answered neatly, “Grego thinks the broadcast jammer is on the ship.”

The Abbot had thought that too, but . . . the image of Tolliver Burr at his camera flashed into me like a nerve firing. Burr at his camera, and Talis leaning in beside him, glasses sliding down his nose, peering into a— “Monitor,” I croaked. “I mean, they had a monitor. By the apple press.”

“A remote terminal, yes,” said Gregori. “But the actual jammer must broadcast with some strength, no? Perhaps a kilowatt, maybe more. For this it needs a power source. It must be the ship.”

“We thought about reprogramming it, but—” began Xie.

“This is too complicated,” said Gregori. “I thought, we'll unplug it.”

“Behold our assembled genius,” said Elián, with a roll in his voice that was almost another laugh. “Our backup plan is to smash it with a rock.”

“You can't,” I said. “The ship—there will be guards. It's a military shock ship.”

They all looked at one another. Their chamo had adapted as we stood in the dungeons with only my little glowstick for light, and their bodies were almost invisible. They looked like hands and heads, like machines with no bodies.

“You'll be killed,” I said.

Xie shook her head, but Elián answered: “We know.”

“There is a plan,” said Grego.

“There's a plan, but it's risky,” said Elián. “We know it's dangerous, Greta. We're doing it anyway.”

“I want—” I said. “I don't—” I was aware that I wasn't making much sense. I wanted contradictory things: I wanted to save my friends, and I wanted them to save me. I could not have both.

“Shhhh,” said Xie. “Come into the air.” She reached for my hand, but of course she couldn't take it. She froze helplessly. It was Elián who put his hand between my shoulders and guided me up the staircase and into the starlit night.

Outside, the baked-bread smell of the prairie at night wrapped me. I took a breath and tried to orient myself. We were on top of the ridge, between Charlie's pen and the induction spire, hidden in the shadow of the rock pile—all those stones that generations of hostages had cleared from the upper gardens. We crouched together, huddling in the prickling Saskatoon bushes.

Below us the Precepture hall sat, huge and dark and foursquare, like one of the facts of the world. On the lawn between the hall and the upper terraces, the Cumberlanders had set up white tents. Lit from within, they glowed softly. I could see figures there, walking, sitting.

Nearby, the small darkness of the toolshed.

And the apple press.

“If we disable the jammer,” I said, “Talis will— He will—”

He would destroy a city.

I had been so frightened of the apple press that I had almost forgotten what else was at stake. A city. A city, and Elián's life.

“Once the jammer's down, I'll go straight to my—to Armenteros,” said Elián. “Tell her what I've— Tell her it's down. She won't—” He was struggling. “She won't take on Talis, not to his face. She'll let the Precepture go.”

“Cumberland loses the war,” said Gregori. “Everything, click, is over.” He dusted his hands together.

Over. My heart leapt after the word. But only for a moment.

Over, but not undone. War had still been declared. Even if Talis spared Pittsburgh, surely he would kill the Cumberland leaders—and their hostage. I looked at Elián and saw that he knew it.

He read my look. “I can't have a city on my head. And I can't just watch them—” He made a mute, angry gesture, toward my hands. In the starlight they peeped from their slings, swollen and purpling. I knew Elián wanted to touch me, but was afraid to hurt me. Was simply afraid. “She's my grandmother— They're my people, but I can't just watch them torture someone. I can't.”