The Scorpion Rules (36 page)

And she touched my face, the way she had when I'd bolted from the threat of torture, in that moment just before I'd kissed her. “I know,” she said. She took the scissors from me.

The cutting of my hair took a long time. The scissors were small. My hair was heavy. Xie's hands were careful, working their way close to my scalp, lifting a lock at a time. Odd that hair is called “locks.” This was an unlocking: one piece at a time, I was growing opener and looser, my breath coming deeper, warmer. Xie walked around me slowly in her work, her clothing brushing mine, her waist by my shoulder, her breasts by my ear. My skin came alive to hers, the way a drum skin shivers to the beat of another drum. Neither of us spoke.

It was full light, dappling down through the folded cranes, by the time Da-Xia stepped back from me. She looked me over. Her voice came roughened: we'd been silent all morning. “There. There you are.”

I lifted my hands to touch the lightness, the unfamiliar texture of the shorn ends, which were prickly, but soft, too, as if she'd turned me into velvet. “I look like a boy,” I said, wondering—feeling that transformed.

Da-Xia made a husky, amazed noise. “You do not.”

With my new vision I could see by heat how her blood moved—to her throat, her lips, her breasts. It was arousal. She did not hide it—she never had—but she did not speak of it either. And for how many years had I read Greek, and missed this? “Xie . . . ,” I said. I wished I knew how to shut off the implanted sensors. I wanted to see her through my own eyes. I wanted to see her. All of her.

“Li Da-Xia,” I said, and stood up. And I kissed her.

In the midst of life we are in death.
It struck me, thinking later, that this was a reversible statement: in the midst of death we are in life. If I was going to put my life down—as Wilma had—then I wanted to mourn it. I wanted to regret it, and fiercely. Maybe the grey room would kill me, and maybe not, but one way or another it would transform me, and this life would be done. I wanted to be alive before that happened. I wanted to be alive before I died, and I wanted death to terrify me, not slip in like a long-expected guest.

I kissed Xie: we kissed. We wept and we kissed. Then we did more than kiss. As for the rest of that morning—I will not say more. I will keep it silently, in that holy place in my heart.

We slept then. My last day, and we slept through it, tumbled and tangled together on Xie's narrow cot, her goddess hands folded over my belly, her breath stirring the hairs at the nape of my neck.

But how could we not have slept? I was so far beyond exhausted that I seemed to be entering already into a different world. And what had we left to say to each other, or to do? We had had our years. That I had missed them wrenched my heart, but they could not be called back now. Not even Talis could do that.

I think it was hunger that woke me—certainly I woke hungry. My newly logical body tallied the time since it had eaten and recommended starches and protein. But instead of going to find them, I lay still. Xie's breath moved against my spine. I let myself rest in the warmth of the space between us, that opened and closed.

All my life I'd lived under the threat of death—mine, my friends'. I'd been a pawn in a scheme about the greater good, and I had kept myself asleep in order to survive. I was awake now. And I had found . . . love, all around me. Love where I had never expected it to be. Xie.

Xie, and not only Xie. Elián. Atta. Grego and Han. Love. It was everywhere. And now I was going to give it up. For the greater good. It was one thing to give it up unknowingly, as I had done for years. It was quite another to hold love in one's hand, and then let it go.

My breath snagged. Xie's voice came sleepily into my ear. “Greta.”

I rolled to face her. With one fingertip she traced my cheekbones, my long wolfhound nose. The fine hairs of my skin rose to meet her. Her tiny braids—undone and everywhere—licked like paintbrushes across my throat. The wind had picked up, and was blowing the yellow apple leaves like coins against the glass of the ceiling. I could hear them, fainter than the rain. “I was born under cherry blossoms,” she said. “I'll be eighteen in the spring.”

“And go home.” Li Da-Xia was going to live.

“To the mountains,” she said, as if it were a correction. I knew the feeling: the open sky of the prairies—surely that would always be home, no matter where I had been born, or what land I was supposed to have ruled.

“I should write a note. Remind my mother to take me out of the succession.” As I said it, I realized it was not necessary. Someone would see to it. The PanPols would never consent to be ruled by an AI.

Xie made a catlike hum of affirmation, following the jump of my thought effortlessly. “My father wrote. The monks have found me a suitor. I understand his lineage is impeccable.”

“I wish . . . ,” I whispered, before I could stop myself. I wished for impossible things. It was never going to have been a fairy tale for us. There are no fairy tales about two princesses. “It's six months until cherry blossoms. I wish we could have it.”

In answer Xie kissed me softly. “I have had eyes.”

My marriage will be dynastic, but in the meantime, I have eyes.
I wished—

“Do you suppose the machines love each other?” I said. “The AIs?”

Her body was aglow in my arms. What would it be like, not to have a body?

“Hold on to yourself,” she said. “Please, Greta. Hold on to yourself. Hold fiercely.”

And she wrapped her hand behind my head—my prickling hair—and moved her hungry mouth to mine.

We were still tangled in each other when the door slid open.

I grabbed up a sheet.

It was Talis, of course, his hands in his pockets and his duster stirring like a heartbeat. I flushed, thinking he would grin, taunt. My newly opened soul was too tender for that. I knew I could not defend myself.

But to my surprise he didn't smile at all. His pale eyes moved over every inch of us, but it did not look like lechery. It looked like sorrow. “We're ready,” he said.

I
stood up.

I was wearing only a bedsheet, and I was blushing, but I was taller than Talis, and was not ashamed. “No,” I said.

Talis froze. His face was hard at first, his ancient eyes like bits of lit glass. Then it opened into something bigger—was it anger? Fear? Wonder?

“No,” I said again. “We do this my way. I want dinner.”

“Oh,” said Talis. “Okay.”

So, dinner.

My last meal was zucchini. I leaned against the end of the table and I laughed. Then I wept.

Thandi moved over along the bench to make room for me and Xie. Han and Atta knotted closely around. Elián was not there.

And the zucchini, I almost hate to admit, was good: sautéed with browned butter and basil. There were corn and peppers cooked up with onions and herbs and a lot of garlic. There was flatbread that was scorchingly hot on my fingers. There was butter for the bread, too. Generous butter, thick slices of chèvre piled on brilliant tomatoes, salt in a jar. Some of these things were things we were careful with, things that we rationed. Not today. This was our abundance.

I ate, and when I pushed my plate away, I felt fingers on my shoulders. I turned. It was a little boy, five or six, black, slight, with brilliant beads in his hair. I did not know him. “Greta,” he said, and touched my face shyly. And then he ducked away. Fingers brushed my ears on the other side, and I turned again, and again a Child touched my face and said my name softly: “Greta.”

One by one they came to me, not all of them, but many, the Children of Peace. They touched my newly sensitive hair, my shoulders, my freckles one by one. They called me by name. Da-Xia had to put her hand between my shoulder blades to hold me steady. There were a few gifts. An origami koi fish, no larger than the end of my thumb. “For immortality.” A carved wooden comb for what had once been my hair. “S-sorry,” said that boy, stammering. A little girl, just the right age to have the care of bees, brought me a dripping honeycomb. It was so fresh that it was warm. “For now,” she said. “Eat it now.”

So I did. And by the time I had finished the sticky sweetness, the room had fallen quiet. Han spoke into it: “Are you going to die?”

Oh, Han. Always, always, always the wrong thing.

“I don't know,” I said.

I did not know what to say to the others. Atta, who sat soaking everything in, like a stone in the sun. Thandi with her anger and her damage. And Xie. But surely I had said what I needed to say to Xie. I reached across the table and took Atta's hard, strong hands. “Talk to her.”

“I'm done with silence,” he answered. But his voice caught—not with disuse but with sudden tears.

“You and Grego and Elián,” said Thandi. “We'll be shorthanded.”

“I know.” I looked at her—proud, strong, unbruised, unmarked. Once, she had been a terrified and tortured child. I had missed my chance to help her through that. I had missed it by years.

“You remember Talis's first rule of war?” she asked. The impulse to speak quietly to condemned people did not seem present in her. Her strong voice filled the room. Everyone was looking at her, at us. I nodded, but she answered for me anyway. “It's ‘make it personal.' ”

“I know,” I said again.

“So,” she said. “If you get a chance, do something for me?”

“Of course,” I said. Everyone hung on the solemn edge of the moment, listening.

“Kick Talis in the nuts.”

The room burst into laughter. But Thandi was not laughing. She nodded to me, queen to queen.

Then she smiled. And I smiled.

I scraped the bench backward. I stood. I wobbled. I squared my feet. “I'm ready.” Or I thought I had been. My voice snagged. “Xie, would—would you come with me?”

“Always,” she said. As I had known she would.

We went out. And outside the refectory door was Elián.

“Oh,” he said, “your hair.” He folded his hand and ran his knuckles across the cut velvet of my scalp.

I shivered at the softness of his touch. “Elián . . .”

He wrapped me in his arms. I could still smell the pyre on him as I turned my nose toward those untamable curls. He pulled back and kissed my cheek, and then, his voice rough as if with smoke, he said, “It's the Abbot, Greta. . . . Could you come?”

In a pool of lamplight in the misericord of the Fourth Precepture, there is a memory cushion that lies like a nest in the grove of columnar bookshelves housing classical philosophy. In it the Abbot was sprawled as a man might sprawl, with his arms limp, and the soles of his footpads off the ground. The forward bend in his mainstem meant that his head was a foot off the surface of the cushion. Someone had piled books under it, into something halfway between a buttress and a pillow. The Abbot had not been built to lie down.

And yet he lay there.

I had been lying in just that place when he had taken this damage to save me, rushing to unhook me from the dreamlock magnets while the Cumberland ship roared down. He could have shielded himself, but he'd saved me instead. I had been lying there, and he had been torturing me.