The Scorpion Rules (40 page)

“She is,” said Xie, who knew me. “Go.”

Elián bolted.

“I'm here, Greta,” breathed Xie. “I'm here. I see you.”

The light fell across her, her skin, the bright darkness of her hair—

The organics offered a memory as clear as anything from the datastore, and more brightly lit: Da-Xia stepping back to regard the haircut she'd just given me, her voice roughened with loss and desire.
There. There you are.
The datastore replied with the same memory. It echoed; looped; reinforced, it rose. Oh, I could see her, feel that moment: the shudder of anticipation and realization; fear and longing—the cord inside me pulled tight.

“Greta?” said Xie. “Is it you? Can you come back?”

She was turning me inside out.

“Stop,” I begged her. “Stop, stop, stop.”

Currents in the brain— I was overloading. Inside, outside, again and again. How can one person be two things? How can two things be one person? I was turned inside out so many times that I had no outside—no protection, no defense. It was surely as deadly as losing one's skin.

I closed my eyes and held them closed, and held on. Colors—color. I began counting breaths. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Partial list of real numbers/positive integers. My knees gave way, and I sank down against the wall. Six. Seven. God. I remembered that the
Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius were important, so I read them all in four hundred milliseconds. Eight. Nine.

A crash of noise—someone coming in at a run. I ignored it, kept my eyes closed. I was standing on thin air, and it would hold me, so long as I didn't look down.

Hold on, Greta. Hold fiercely.

Ten. In front of me: Talis. Even with my eyes closed I was sure of it. I could smell the horse-scent that clung to his clothes; I could feel the current of his active sensors, sweeping into me. “Get her on the cot,” he said. “She's going into seizure.”

Someone—Elián—scooped me up. The pillow again. The smell.

“Greta.” I could feel Talis's hands on mine, his thumbs rubbing over my knuckles.

“What's happening?” said Elián.

Talis didn't answer him. I wished he'd stop the movement of his fingers.

“What's happening?” said Elián again.

“She's skinning,” Talis whispered. “Oh, I didn't think she would—”

My hands had been broken. Talis's hands moved over them, relentless, restless—
Reducing stimuli will always help.
Why didn't he know that? He ought to know that.

“Talis,” I said. “Why don't you know that?”

Elián's voice cracked. “Well, help her!”

There was nothing to be done for me. Talis would know that. I knew that. I could feel our sensors meshing on the backs of my hands, like to like.

Da-Xia had still not spoken, but it was no good. I could sense her heat as if she were a sun; I could smell her, in the pillow and right in front of me, in memory and in real time—

“Greta,” Talis said. “Greta, listen to me. The two memories are the same, yes?” he said. “It's only the thinker that's different—but what does that matter, if the thoughts are the same?”

“What does it matter!” I heard emotion in my voice: the organic mind had pushed the limbic system way up; the heart was beating fast, fast, fast. “It's only the whole construction of self, Talis!” The AIs of the First Wave—the overload. “They died, Michael! They all died!”

“What's the trigger?” he asked. “What did you remember? The last clear thing.”

“Xie.” I gasped at the sharp pierce of her name. “Xie, cutting my hair.”

“Well, then,” he said. “Look at her.”

“Don't look down!”
I shouted at him.

“Nah. You can fly—I know you can. Look at her.”

And I heard the small voice again, no one's voice. Saying,
Greta
.

I opened my eyes. For a second the world was wild, flashing color. No different inside than out. No flying. Then I saw. Elián had taken a step back—Elián, always most frightened when he did not understand—but Da-Xia was standing there, holding firm.

The colors were gone. I saw her only. Her hand on the tangled blue quilt, inches from mine. Tears running down her face.

Rain on the mountains,
said the organics, and the datastore listed the other times I'd seen her cry. She was a strong person who cried easily; my lover, weeping in our bed.
Rain on the mountains.
“Greta,” she said.

There was a space inside me, cupped and still. It was small as cupped hands; it was large as the sky. It was untouched and it was touch itself. It was empty and it was full. I held love there, like a treasure. I held my own name.

“Greta?” said Xie.

I moved my broken hand two inches to the left. Opened it. Da-Xia laid her palm in mine, infinitely careful. I closed my fingers, one by one.

It hurt, yes. But it was me. I took a deep breath and let the pain of my broken bones and the feel of Xie's fingers be everything I was. In that way, and slowly, I became something. I held on to that something. I held on fiercely.

“Li Da-Xia,” I said. I was not like the dying Abbot: I had only one voice.

She squeezed my broken hand in answer, and put her other hand against my face. “Greta. There you are.”

And thus.

Thus, I did not die. I, Greta: I put aside my title and everything I had ever known. I put aside the self I had once had, and perhaps even my soul. But I did not die. I went into the grey room and I did not die.

Thus, love saved me.

The crisis point—I knew there would be others, but that first and critical crisis—passed away under Talis's cool voice, Da-Xia's brave hands.

All my life I had waited for the grey room. Very deliberately, I had never thought about the graves, with the wild morning glories growing over them. Very deliberately, I had never thought about what came after.

This, for me, is what came after. On the evening of the third day after I died, that day on which I found a door into the stillness of my own heart—on that evening I went up to the ridgetop to watch the plume of dust.

Talis went with me, of course.

And all my friends.

Atta, who touched my hair and wished me blessings. Thandi, who touched my broken hand and wished me strength. And Han, who said without irony, “I hope you live.”

Da-Xia whispered something to them, and they hung back, letting the rest of us pass the rock pile, pass the ridgetop, and walk into the waving grasses.

Autumn was beginning on the tall-grass prairie, color coming into the stems and seeds of things. In the river bottom the noise of the cottonwood leaves was sharper, stranger. The monarchs swept through the coneflowers, getting ready for the journey from which they would never return. The spiral paths they traced were overlaid with mathematical patterns that were something close to music. Da-Xia took my hand, and Elián hesitated, and then took the other.

“So you're gonna ride off into the sunset?” he said.

“We'll need to go more south than west,” I said. “But you could go west, if you wanted.”

“I meant a kinda metaphorical sunset.”

“I expect to make a hash of it,” I said. “The datastore can't teach me how to use a horse.”

This time I knew it was a joke. I knew it would make Elián laugh, and it did. Something else to cup inside the still place of my heart. Elián's laughter.

If you knew what to look for—and we did—you could see the crater from where we stood. You could see the graves.

“You're one of them now,” said Elián. “An AI?”

Xie sighed. “Really, Elián? You're going to frame that as a question?”

“I only meant—they rule the world.”

They did. I looked at Elián looking at the crater. At the graves.

Xie followed our gaze. “And they might rule it differently.”

“So they might,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” said Talis. “We'll see about that.”

“Live first,” said Xie, softly. “Hang on to yourself. Live.” Her hand tightened on mine.
Every callus and curve.

To hold love in one's hands, and then let it go—that was the cruelest thing anyone had ever done to me, and I had done it to myself. I held Elián's hand. I held Xie's. I could see the three Riders now, at the base of the plume, their silhouettes bump-bumping in the golden light. It was a very long moment, watching the Riders, a very still one: so still that a bird might have nested on the surface of the sea. Halcyon.

When the Riders were close, when their hoofbeats sounded like drums under the vast sky, Elián's hand tightened and Xie turned to me. “Greta,” she said. And nothing more.

I wanted to never let them go, but in a moment I would have to.

Elián's strength was at my back, and Xie's face was before me. Tears were making her eyes shine darkly. I looked at her, and looked at her, and looked at her, as the men with wings crashed in around us.

“I love you,” I said.

And then I let go.

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council.

MARGARET K. McELDERRY BOOKS

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Text copyright © 2015 by Erin Bow

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