The Scorpion Rules (28 page)

Elián and Burr were scuffling. The gun spun out across the floor and struck against my hip. I looked at it. I bent my elbow and pulled my right hand free of the sling. The weight of my arm pulled at my shoulder. The pain opened my mouth like a gag, but I made no noise. My hand was numb. My ears were ringing. I fumbled for the gun.

“Gregori?” Da-Xia's voice cracked. “Grego?”

I looked at them. The cheesecloth around Grego's throat wicked the blood up and was red as a bandanna, and more blood was black and shining around the raised grey pattern of the traction plating. It smelled like coins held too long in the hand.

And then—I could see it happen. Grego died.

His eyes changed into paintings of eyes. Into blank icons.

“Oh,” said Xie. “Oh no.”

I closed my fingers around the gun, and rose to my feet like the Lady of the Lake.

With the gun in my hand, I counted the people breathing—five. Me, Da-Xia, Elián, Burr, and the recording of me, which sounded like something being sawed in half. Not Grego. The sounds of the scuffle had mostly stopped. I squared my feet on the deckplate and felt the blood seep between my toes. It was warm.

Burr's white shirt swam up from the darkness. Elián had overcome him. He held one of Burr's arms twisted round his back. With his other hand Elián pressed the knife against the side of Burr's neck. Blankly I noticed that it was the wrong way around, the dull edge against skin. Elián clearly knew as little of knife fights as I knew of guns.

But then, really: when it comes to guns, what is there to know?

Elián and Burr shuffled forward. I pointed the gun at them, though my hands couldn't feel it. My shoulder had become a ball of some hard-rubber substance I supposed was pain.

“Greta,” gasped Burr.

“Tolliver,” I answered.

On the deckplate I heard hoofbeats, the crash of Talis's horse. And then someone began to scream.

“Shut that off! God!” Elián wrapped his arm around Burr's neck and twisted both their faces aside.

But the tablet was across Grego's body from Da-Xia, and Elián was busy, and I did not care.

“What do you want, Greta?” Burr's voice was rough because of the pressure on his Adam's apple, but he seemed calm.

I had frankly no idea what I wanted. The recording on the floor was screaming intolerably. Then it stopped.

“Which one's the broadcast jammer?” Elián panted. He sounded strained, much more so than the man he was choking.

Tolliver Burr jabbed the thumb of his free hand toward a certain machine. “That one. I'll shut it off for you. I've got no loyalties to Cumberland. There's no need for drama.”

“Drama!” said Da-Xia. “You just shot Grego!”

The recording had looped around to its beginning. “That's lovely, dear,” said Burr's voice. “That's perfect.”

“Worth a shot,” said Burr. “I thought you might be angry enough to kill me. But you're not, are you, Greta? You really are a pacifist.”

“I'm not,” said Elián, and pushed the dull edge of his knife harder.

Da-Xia stood up. “If you think so, Mr. Burr, then you do not understand the Children of Peace.”

The recording said: “We can all hear you, Greta; you're a star.”

“Give me the gun, Greta,” said Xie.

But I didn't move. My whole arm, held stiffly out and ending in a gun, was alien to me.

The recording caught a murmur. “Oh, Greta, you are perfect.”

“You are,” Burr echoed himself, smiling fondly. “You were raised to just
take it
.”

I closed my eyes.

A shout, a struggle—I opened my eyes and Tolliver Burr was lunging toward me like a rabid dog.

I lifted the gun and my hand twitched around it, and I—I—

I did not shoot him. The moment opened and seemed to stretch, and in that endless moment I did not shoot Tolliver Burr.

Elián caught Burr and growled, “I'll cut your damn throat.”

Just take it
indeed. “You do not understand me, Mr. Burr.” My voice rang out, as if I were speaking inside a bell. “You do not know the first thing about me. And I do hope that terrifies you.” I moved the gun some ten degrees and fired into the darkness. Burr yelped and jerked—but I had been aiming at the machine he had said was the broadcast jammer. The bullet struck metal with a spark and a smash, and the jammer's lights winked off one by one.

My father told me something once. A quiet night on one of his boats, drifting on the glassy sea. He told me about
le point vierge
, the untouched place—the cupped and open space in the center of the human soul, where only God can enter. In that dark little room, with the blood between my toes, in that endless moment, I fell into the untouched place. I became Greta again, and whole. I was not afraid.

I handed Xie the gun.

She took it, and she shot every machine in the room. After all, there was no way to know if the torturer had been telling us the truth.

The sound was shattering. Ringing filled my ears. I worked my elbows back into their slings. Pain faded. I couldn't hear, I didn't hurt, and I was not afraid.

And in that strange state, I knew something. I saw something. I saw a way out. A way to save Elián, and Pittsburgh, and my soul—if not my life. A way out.

It was dazzling.

When every machine in the room was smoking, Da-Xia turned the gun on the smartplex tablet at my feet. It shattered. Each fragment kept playing a different piece of the recording of Tolliver Burr torturing me. But they were small pieces. I felt I could handle them.

I had seen a way out.

As if watching a vid on mute, I noted that Burr was still struggling. Elián gave his pinned arm a jerk, and suddenly the torturer went limp in his grip. His mouth widened with pain. Something must have broken, torn, dislocated. I cannot say I was sorry.

Elián had stopped trying to restrain Burr and was trying, now, to hold him up.

“What do we do with—” Elián couldn't seem to decide whether to ask about Burr or Grego's body first. But it didn't matter, because at that moment a squad of soldiers burst into the room.

The soldiers had guns drawn but, fortunately, not blazing. I do not know what had alerted them—if the ampoules of goat pheromones had been discovered, if the soundproofing of the ship had failed in the face of all that gunfire, if the destruction of the broadcast jammer had set off an alarm. It did not seem to matter. Here they were, five soldiers, at the ready. Buckle was at the back of them. She looked more tired than ready.

Seeing them, Da-Xia dropped her weapon at once, and raised her blood-gloved hands. Elián hesitated, grunted, and let Burr drop. The communications specialist flopped to the floor like a hooked fish. I still wasn't sorry.

But I didn't want him to touch Grego. I stepped between them. The eyes of the guns followed me.

Elián pitched his plea over the heads of the squad. “I'm Elián Palnik—the general's grandson.”

“Yes,” sighed Buckle. “I know who you are.” Her tone suggested that she regretted knowing. If she hadn't, she simply could have had him shot. Or at least locked up. After all, we had a dungeon.

“I need to see her,” demanded Elián.

“Not me,” I said. I was still thinking of that
point vierge
moment, the door I'd seen that might get everyone out of this alive. “I want to see Talis.”

“What?” said Elián. “Why?”

Da-Xia turned to me. I saw the quick calculation in her eyes, her guesses, but she said nothing.

“Greta—” said Elián, and he would have said more, except that Buckle cut him off.

“Outside,” she snapped to her squad, and then put her hand to her ear. “Clancy? Wake the general.”

One of the Cumberlanders started to heave up Grego's body.

“Don't touch him!” Elián was ferocious and snapping. “I'll take him, I'll carry him.”

They let him.

Down the square metal corridor, Elián carried Grego in his arms, as he had carried me. He went like a prince at the head of a procession. Xie and I followed him. The soldiers followed us. I assumed there were guns at our backs, but I couldn't be bothered to look. I was looking at Grego. The tuft of white hair tucked against Elián's shoulder. One hand swinging loose.

The whole ship smelled like gunpowder and blood.

And then, suddenly, the night opened up and we were on the gangplank, and then in the grass, with the wild sweet wind blowing around us.

Out there to meet us were more soldiers, and with them Han, Thandi, and Atta.

Atta was leaning on Thandi, his eyes dimmed, blood trickling down behind one ear. Thandi was stormcloud and silence. And Han—sweet, innocent Han, magnificent bastard that he was—was the one particularly guarded, the one clapped in irons.

Nevertheless it was Han who burst from the group and ran toward us. Han who—as he ever did—said what we were all thinking, but did not dare speak. “Oh no,” he said. “Oh no, no, no.”

He raised his hands to touch Grego's face. His handcuffs rattled. “Oh,” he said. “No.”

“I'm sorry,” Elián said to him. “I'm sorry. I know you loved him.”

The soldiers around them seemed to shrink back, leaving the three of them—Elián, Han, and Grego—cupped in a small space all their own. “He was so brave, Han,” said Elián. “He was so good. He was so scared, and he was so brave.”

“He went in first,” said Xie.

Slowly, reverently, Elián laid Grego's body in the rustling grass. Han knelt beside him—it—and then, one by one, the rest of us knelt.

The chamo cloth—and perhaps this was what chamo was for—hid a great deal of the blood. It looked merely like a dark stain, seeping down over his shoulder, front and back, like an officer's half cape. Only in his snow-white hair was it vivid, and even that was fading. His skin was pale as a lamp shade, and he was unlit.

“Grego,” said Xie. And one by one the rest of us said it too.

His eyes were open, just a little. He had long, long white eyelashes.

Moonlight fell across us. The Cumberlanders drew back, leaving just the seven of us—the six of us, now. The Children of Peace, alone, as we always were.

Atta was swaying on his knees. Xie wrapped an arm around his waist.

“You all right?” murmured Elián.

Atta nodded, but his head was hanging.

“Concussion, I think,” said Thandi, her voice very low. “He blacked out for a second. Threw up.”

“We need to wash him clean,” said Han. He was leaning forward, almost covering Grego's body, in a world of his own.

“We do,” said Xie. “We do.” She herself was wearing blood like a pair of gloves.

But Han just repeated himself: “We need to wash him clean.”

“What happened here?” said a new voice.

We looked up, and there, standing in the sere grass, was Wilma Armenteros. In her bathrobe.

“Grego's dead,” said Elián. “Your torturer shot him. He's dead.”

“Mr. Burr,” said Armenteros.