The Swan Riders (21 page)

I didn't have to say it, because Francis Xavier intoned it, the verse from the Utterances: “
Shuttles can be shot down
.”

“Don't quote me at me,” Talis snapped. “So what if they do shoot? I have stage three scarring, I've lost three quarters of my mind, people I love keep trying to kill me, and I'm going to catch a
cold
. I fail to see how much worse this could get.”

“Greta could be killed,” said Francis Xavier. He didn't sound as if he cared particularly.

Talis sighed a long, careful sigh. “Right. When you ask if things could possibly get worse, the answer is always yes. Greta, make a note.”

I made a note.

“We could call in an airstrike instead, I guess,” said Talis. “Anybody got something they want to blow up?”

“Saskatoon,” I said.

They both looked at me.

“What?”

I had only been quoting Talis, who had been in the middle of proposing the destruction of Saskatoon when the EMP shot had felled us all.

“Greta . . . ,” murmured Talis. It sounded like the start of a question, but he let it drift away. When he said my name again it was faint, an impression of his voice, fading like a handprint from memory foam. “Greta Gustafsen Stuart . . . what happened to you?”

Odd that he didn't remember: “You did,” I told him.

What followed was a rather challenging few days.

The snow fell, and fell, and fell. It was four inches deep before we could get going, and it only deepened. It was so deep that Francis Xavier had to walk in front of the horses, to lead them, to break the trail.

I doubled Talis, both of us riding Gordon, who was big and steady. The horse seemed to be doing his best to set his feet smoothly. But still, Talis was struggling. When Francis Xavier lifted him onto the horse, for instance, his sympathetic nervous system lit up like roads on a smartmap. Sometimes when I looked at him I was sure I saw someone else in his eyes, someone young and hurting. The way he curled up against Francis Xavier's chest made me wonder if it was Rachel. But it could have been that anyone that purely helpless would have bent toward that strength.

The snow thickened until it narrowed the world. It deepened until even the horses were stumbling. Every time they did Talis seemed jolted to speech, single syllables breaking against his teeth. His consciousness flickered; his mastery of the brain he had borrowed seemed to cut in and out.

Francis Xavier was struggling too. To stomp a path through knee-deep snow for a mile is a feat. To do it for more than a mile is an act of desperate, teeth-gritting endurance. Francis Xavier gritted his teeth and endured.

FX was staggering with exhaustion and Talis was pale as buttermilk by the time the short day gave out. We had not made the refuge, of course. The evening niceties were short. We ate. Francis Xavier threw up from exhaustion. I checked on Talis, found the stab wound tearing open, and dumped in as much forcescar powder as I dared. Then I wrapped his chest tightly in bands of crinkle silk. It was crude—stupidly crude. But it was the best I could do.

That done, we huddled together under all three crinkle sheets. We lay with Francis Xavier on one side breathing deep as a lion and radiating heat, me on the other side shivering, and Talis in the middle spiking a fever out of sheer neurological overload. The horses gathered around us in the snowy darkness. We slept badly.

The next day we did it again.

And then the next.

I spent the fourth day watching us from above, through the sweeping eyes of the spy satellites: a figure wrapped in blue in the white world, leading three horses. On the lead horse, a rider, her cloak billowing, with a body in her arms. I could see the trail we left, and the snow closing over it. I could see us from far, far above, just dark silhouettes, then specks against the roll and dip of the prairie.

I could see the whole face of the continent turning beneath the sweep of the blizzard. The earth turned under me. I could see the humped ruin of downtown Saskatoon, the scar of the rail line, the terraced fields of the Precepture, softening in the snow. And farther, further. Past the remaining Great Lakes, past the marsh of lost Erie, I could see the little faceted thing that was Halifax, the city where I had once been born, and then the restless blank of the ocean.

My country. One of the first things Talis had taken from me. I drifted over it. I let it go.

So many of the AIs died. They clung to their humanity until it twisted inside them like a blade, until the skinning broke their minds, and their bodies ended up seizing in the grass.

But others walked away. They walked out of their humanness. They vanished into worlds inside the Matrix Boxes, worlds made of pure data. They rose.

I was floating. I was weightless, the way falling people are weightless. I looked down on the storm, on the city and the ocean. It was dark over the Atlantic; getting dark in Halifax. The streets glittered like a net of pearls. And at the Precepture, figures in white were taking evening rest under the glass roof of the great hall. Two by two in their little boxes. One of them alone. Li Da-Xia, lying awake on her bed.

Small.

Still.

Like a specimen in a jar.

I heard my own voice say, “Xie?”

“Greta?” It was Francis Xavier. “I think we're home.”

I looked back into the world in front of my human eyes. And saw the door in the hill.

Francis Xavier reached up and pulled Talis out of my arms, letting him slide sideways into a gentle embrace. I swung to the ground. Snow overtopped my riding boots and made a ring of cold around my shins. It was drifted and blank, unbroken.

This was such a likely spot for an ambush, but if anyone was here, they'd been here so long that their tracks had filled in. At least half a day. Far more likely that no one was here at all.

And yet . . .

I stood in the perfect quiet of the prairie, with my eyes that could see the whole spinning world. Snow was falling onto my shoulders. Cosmic muons were raining around me, sparking through my fingertip sensors a few times a second. As they should be. I stretched my hands out in front of me and charted the way the muons eddied and bent. A weak electromagnetic field was drifting out of the hill.

“There's EM in there,” I said.

“The power's on,” translated Francis Xavier.

We looked at each other. We looked at Talis, half conscious in FX's strong arms. “We can't go farther,” said FX.

“We can. But he can't. So.”

Francis Xavier looked at me.

I looked at the silent door.

Then I nodded.

After four days in the snow, we needed refuge. There was nowhere else to get it. The best we could do was go in with as much hope—and as much sudden violence—as we could muster.

“Quietly, then,” said Francis. “Back the horses off.” I backed the horses off. Francis Xavier trailed me, walking backward, cat-footed. Gently he put Talis on his feet. The AI wobbled. In truth, though, he alone among us was a little better: healed in part by what little medical care I'd been able to give him, in part simply by the passage of time. Still, I reached to steady him.

“What's happening?” he muttered, leaning into me.

“We've made the refuge. But someone's here, we think.”

“Oh.” Talis let go of me. He was bent forward, curled around himself, and it didn't look as if he could even lift his head. But that didn't mean he wasn't thinking hard. “Greta,” he said, looking at the snow burying his boots. “You should go. You and Francis, both. Mount up and go.”

But just then, with Talis in the middle of what might have been his first gesture of self-sacrifice in 526 years, Francis Xavier gave a huge shout and kicked in the refuge door.

A buttery glow spilled out into the lavender cold of the evening. I could smell garlic, leeks. In the cozy interior, someone was standing with his back to the door, working at the metal table. The intruder was tall, of a medium skin tone, with dark and curly hair. A young male, based on the stance. Dressed like a trommeller, crazy-quilted clothes in bright colors, billowing but cinched tight at the waist and wrists. We had caught him making soup. He spun around, spoon in hand, as the door crashed into the wall.

Even with all the clues, I was still surprised to see his face.

“Hey,” said Elián Palnik. “Took you long enough.”

Francis Xavier surged through the door like a wolf lunging. He slammed Elián up against the wall, and in an eye-blink had him pinned there, hand against wrist, hips against hips, pincer grabbing on to Adam's apple.

It looked very much as if Elián was about to get his windpipe crushed. And yet he was looking at me—and at Talis. “Wow,” he gulped, his voice made raspy by the pressure on his throat. “You look like shit. I mean, when I showed up at your Precepture they stuck electric spiders in places I don't like to mention in front of the ladies, and after months of that I
still
looked better than you.”

“I'm crushed that you don't find me attractive,” said Talis. “Francis, kill him.”

And Francis looked to me. His stance said he was ready to pop Elián's head off like a champagne cork, but his eyes were all questions.

They were good questions. Calgary. Saskatoon. Elián. Sri. Were they connected? We'd been ambushed and Talis had been stabbed and right here was the boy with the knife. They were very good questions.

“Ease up,” I said. “Let him breathe.” Slowly Francis Xavier backed off. Elián sagged and coughed.

“Awww,” said Talis. “I want to kill him.”

“Well, we're not going to.” I took Talis's elbow and wrapped the other arm around his waist. We limped forward until he could clutch the doorframe to steady himself.

Francis Xavier, meanwhile, was frisking Elián—rather roughly—and confiscating both the dagger on his belt and the wooden spoon in his hand. Elián took it with his trademark grin. “Missed the memo where they don't listen to you anymore, Michael?”

“Oh, give up on the ‘Michael' thing,” said Talis, who was pressing a hand to his breastbone, trying not to wheeze. “First: it's not an insult. Second: do I look like a Michael? Third: Greta, why can't we kill him?”

“I'm—” What was I? Something very small was stirring, as if I'd swallowed a corn snake. I felt wiggly. “I'm curious.”

“Well, of
course
you are,” said Talis. “I, on the other hand, am cold.”

“I don't have the shelter secured,” said Francis.

“You're thinking, what—infrared pulse bombs? He's a sheep farmer. It's a hole made of dirt.” Talis made a little frowny face and let go of the doorframe. He came across the room in two steps and grabbed a chair. He sat astride it, backward, folding his hands over the chair back and leaning his chin on them. Theater, pure theater—disguising the fact that leaning was the only way he could have stayed in a chair without help. He regarded Elián with a good humor. ”Okay, Greta. Satisfy your curiosity. Let me know when you're getting to the part that has knives.”