The Scorpion Rules (17 page)

It is— It was— Am I awake?

I was in the toolshed. My hands were locked around one of the crank wheels of the cider press. Xie and Elián were talking as if I weren't there. I was angry with Elián. I was afraid. I could not remember why. I was a ghost—compelled to feel, but no longer remembering the roots of the feeling.

“. . . and you've been sneaking out for years,” Elián was saying. “So why . . .”

The wheel went
click, click, clock
as I pushed at it. Every notch was a little bit harder to move.

“. . . control her, control the Precepture,” came the fragment of Xie's answer. I wasn't really listening to her. I was thinking of how each notch of the press pushed the apples further. The raw juice dripped from the spile. Wasps swarmed at the pulp that came up around the edges of the press. “You're just a loose cannon, Elián. It's Greta we follow.”

The wasps were drunk; the pulp oozed up.
Click, click, click.

And yet, the business of making cider did not turn into a torture sequence, and no one grew antlers, and slowly I decided it was real.

Of course, I decided this a moment too late, after we'd gone outside to feed the wrung-out apple pulp to some of the goat kids. A tawny little kid named Dipshit butted me in the back of the leg, knocked me down, and climbed on top of me. She stood on my back and stuck her head into the apple bucket.

It is important to note, at this point, that I did not swear. It is one of those things, like cutting one's hair, that queens do not do. “Dipshit!” I shouted.
“Get the expletive off me!”
I reared up; the goat scrambled, making welts with her dainty little hooves as she slid off. My samue was streaked with greenish goat manure—they'd been eating too much food-fight melon—and one of my braids was swinging free. There was something smeared across my face that I refused even to consider.

“Hello, Greta,” said Xie. “Welcome back.” She reached over the fence and pulled me a hank of grass.

Elián's face was paint-tight with the work of not smiling. “Shut up,” I warned him, wiping at my face with the clean grass.

His rigid muscles twitched in answer.

“I'm quite serious, Elián. I was just dreamlocked for you.”

Though, in fairness, it had not exactly been for him.

At the mention of dreamlock, Elián got his face under control. Then it cracked again. “Dipshit,” he mimicked, “get the
expletive
—”

“It is her name,” I said, coiling up the braid and pushing the pins into it. “The names of this particular batch of kids are Flopsy, Mopsy, Topsy, and Dipshit, and I assure you, that was not my idea.”

“You don't say,” said Elián, with the world's most contagious smile.

It was strange. We were from opposing nations that were at the brink of war. We were days away from dying for that war. And yet I would have done almost anything for Elián.

Except perhaps more dreamlock. Which was, of course, exactly what I feared I would be called on to do, when the moon rose. And so it proved.

I have never begged anyone for anything. I did not beg.

A queen does not beg.

Dreamlock: I stand in front of my portrait. My beautiful dress, my iced-over eyes. Huge behind me arch the white wings of a swan.

A Swan Rider. I've been painted with a Swan Rider looming behind me.

I tense.

The portrait tenses.

It's not a painting, it's a mirror. And the Swan Rider is behind me.

I whirl. But it's Xie.

It is Li Da-Xia, arrayed for her throne, her headdress looped and weighted with turquoise and yellow jade, with red coral and silver and carved white bones. This is her royal. This is her when I never see her again. She is a goddess-queen in red and gold silk, and she looks past me, at something over my shoulder. “No,” she says to whatever is back there. “No. You cannot have her.”

The wings. It's the Swan Rider. I can still feel the shadow of her wings.

I whirl around, but there's only the mirror. There is no Rider.

It's me, I am wearing them. The wings are on my back.

I am the Rider.

I wake—

“. . . up! Greta, wake up!” I have never heard the Abbot so urgent. Is it possible he is afraid? Some kind of drug or current, something artificial, surges through me. It peels open my eyes the way an IV stent opens a vein. I can see but I cannot choose what to look at. Straight up: the glass roof of the miseri is rippled amber, the color of apple juice. The Abbot leans over me. His face is discomposed, his eye icons sideways like a goat's eyes, his mouth just an oblong. “Greta,” he says—he does not make his mouth icon move. “Greta, they are coming. There are shielded places we can go, but you must wake up.”

But I cannot even move my eyes. If it is time for me to go to the grey room, I will go to it like a sleepwalker.

Which is what they have wanted all along.

From the corner of my eye, I see the ceramic phalanges and braided metal tendons of the Abbot's hand. He is touching my face, my temple, where the dreamlock magnets are affixed.

Something in my brain goes
click, click, click
—and I see things, as if my eyes had been turned to slide projectors.

Xie in her crown.

A body in my dress.

Elián's face, smiling up under his antlers.

My ears are full of the static noise of my silk dress whirling over stone.

There is blood in my mouth.

“Greta!” The Abbot tugs at me. He glances over his shoulder, at the ceiling—a human gesture, and odd, for surely he must have visual feeds. But he turns, and I find I, too, can turn. I look up—

And something is coming down.

Through the sky at dawn, something big is coming. It slams toward us like a fist swinging in, like the sky itself falling, something round and black and thundering down. There is an enormous sonic boom. The ceiling shatters. The Abbot falls. His mainstem strikes across my legs. His hand splays against the floor with a
clack
. Squares of golden glass patter onto us. The underside of the ship takes up the whole sky.

And then—

Then lightning strikes me. It goes into my brain. I scream and I hear the Abbot scream and—

The world goes black.

T
here, it is disconnected.”

The voice was familiar, but I was adrift. I could not place it. I opened my eyes and saw only a window—a hatchway or a round window, edged with blades. It was a circle, and then the blades swung inward and made it a smaller circle, and then larger again. The twitching looked organic. The blades seemed to flutter like a pulse. Half machine, half—

“Father?” I said. The Abbot. The Abbot had been—

I heard the Abbot's voice, as if in a memory: “Children, I'm afraid there is bad news. . . .”

“Come back, Greta.” That voice was Xie's.

“Greta?” Elián. “Please, God— Grego, is she okay?”

“I'm not— A moment.” It was the unplaced voice again—Grego. It was Grego. “Ah, yes. See? Yes, they are coming free.” There was a twinkle in the corner of my eye. A dark shadow lifted past me as the dreamlock magnet-net came loose. And then the bladed window took its true size. It was tiny. It was right in front of me, but it was tiny, a laser aperture—an aperture.

Grego's eyes.

Grego pulled away from me, white eyelashes blinking over the dark shutters that pulsed where his irises should have been.

“
Sveika
, Greta,” he murmured. “It is good that you are back.”

“What?” My tongue felt thick and rough. “Xie?”

“Greta,” she whispered. She wrapped an arm around me and helped me sit up. The room pounded and spun.

Right in front of me was the Abbot. His facescreen was blank—literally blank, with no icons at all. When he spoke, his voice, mouthless, seemed to come from everywhere. “Children, I'm afraid there is bad news.”

“Stop
saying
that!” Elián wailed, and kicked the old AI right in the mainstem, just above where the hexapod legs joined. The Abbot staggered, blind, putting out a hand.

“Children, I'm afraid—” he said again.

Elián was not wearing what he should have been, not his whites. Patches the colors of stone and dust and books shifted across him and seemed to blur his edges.

Focus, Greta.
I blinked hard. Elián—he was wearing chameleon cloth, chamo, a fabric with active pattern disruption. It is what soldiers wear. Elián looks like a soldier. The Abbot looks dead. His face is blank as paper. “There is bad news,” he intoned, like a looped recording. “A war has been declared.” Dead, but speaking, and Grego had eyes made of blades.

Could I at least have faith in Xie? She was right—her shape, her smell, the strength of her arm around me. I closed my eyes and clutched at her. “Xie? Is this real?”

“You're waking up,” she said. “Come back, Greta. It's—”

Something cut her off, a voice that growled out of the shadows, a woman's voice. I could not make out words.

Grego answered the voice. “She was partly hooked to the dreamlock magnets when the EMP hit. There would have been feedback, so there may be . . . damage.”

I saw Elián shake his head to deny it, moving so fast that ghost images trailed him like antlers. The chamo cloth seemed to erase his body.
Damage.
I closed my eyes, trying to cope with the pulsing color, pulsing pain.

“Princess Greta,” said the unknown woman's voice. “Your Highness?”

The sharp edges of my title cut the inside of my throat like nutshells. I could feel Da-Xia's arm around my back, the warmth of her side against my side. She took a sharp breath in.

“Look at me, please, Your Highness.” Despite the “please” and the honorific, it was a command. The kind of command a doctor might give. Had they brought a doctor? I thought I might need a doctor.

I opened my eyes. Yes, there was Xie holding me, there was Elián in fatigues, there was Grego with an engineer's multipencil twinkling in his hands. A bookcase had toppled, spilling books like guts. The school's proctors were there too, piled in a heap of legs and joints.

Xie shifted and pushed, and I sat up fully. A figure, a bulky shadowy thing, took a step toward me. I squinted. It seemed to be human, something human, though my mind was full of animals. A shamble like a bear, but a controlled precision like a warhorse. A hawk nose in a soft face. Grey hair cut short, coarse as a mane. “Crown Princess Greta Gustafsen Stuart,” the bear-woman said. “On behalf of the Cumberland Alliance, I offer the Pan Polar Confederacy a formal declaration of war. Will you accept it?”

“Of course,” I said, politely.

Then I threw up on the legendary shoes of Wilma Armenteros.

General Wilma Armenteros, secretary of strategic decisions for the Cumberland Alliance, legendary scion of a legendary line, and disgruntled grandmother of the Precepture's most troubled hostage, looked down at her shoes and blinked.

Then she looked up. Her eyes, like the Abbot's, were pixel-grey.

“Major Buckle,” she said crisply to someone standing behind me. “Why don't you take these young people outside? I'm sure the fresh air will do Her Highness good.”

I turned in time to see the woman behind me salute. “Yes, sir.”

“And Major—send someone to find me some socks.”

Xie and Grego hoisted me by the armpits. I stood shaking. Cubes of gold glass fell from my clothes and hair as if I were some fairy-tale thing, shedding radiance. Elián hesitated. He seemed unsure which category he fell in, the sock-finders or the fresh-air-getters. He looked to Armenteros. I'm not sure what he saw there, but it did not seem to clarify matters for him. For a moment he was as frozen as if the spiders were still on him. But when we moved, he followed us.

“Children.” The Abbot's voice trailed us. “I'm afraid there is bad news.”