The Swan Riders (23 page)

“Greta . . .”

“Don't,” I said. “Don't.”

AIs did not remember; they relived. Elián, sagging into me under the pumpkins, hurt and frightened, wrapping me up, his cheekbone on my temple:
I really do love your hair
. And my whole heart had turned in that moment. Turned against the Precepture, against Talis, against the only truth I'd ever known.

It turned now.

It turned
on.

And it hurt. My hands hurt. My heart. My
head.

Crushed against Elián, I heard myself whimper.

Talis—Talis was the only person I'd ever met who could smile while he burned. And this is what he felt: the missile impact of the memory, the plunge of the crash, the heat around his mind that was like the heat around a satellite reentering the atmosphere. A self cloaked in shock waves, and blazing.

That was me, now. I was burning.

I stood there, burning.

And slowly, slowly, I smiled.

I was burning, but I was not dying.

Elián. He loved my hair
now.
My hair was different. I was different. This was different. We were here, we were now.

Elián lifted his hands and framed my face, then swept his fingers over the place at my hairline where I still had faint circular scars. They were from the bolts that had held me in place, through the pain and terror and change of the grey room. Through the moment I'd died. Elián touched them gently, and for a moment I would have sworn that his fingertips were as electric as mine. He stroked my hair back from the scars, looked at me for a moment, and then pulled me close. My face was pushed into his shoulder. Near my heart I could feel his heart pounding, at a rate that must be near 90 percent of its safe intensity, as if he were running hard.

“Thank you,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“I am,” I said. “I really am. . . .”

I was aflame but the fire did not consume. I was shock wave and signal. I was blazing.

And Elián couldn't see any of it.

He could feel me find my feet, though, and after a moment he stepped far enough away to hold me by the shoulders, to look me in the eye.

“Hey, Princess,” he said.

“Hello, farm boy. It's good to see you.”

This was Talis's unteachable trick. This was survival. This was
AI.

I thought of Elián's “experiment”—to teach an AI to be human again . . .
Explain to Elián the flaw in his brilliant plan,
Talis had said. And standing there, I spotted it.

“What you're proposing . . .” I pressed my hand against my own ribs, in the place where Talis had been stabbed. “It wouldn't work. I'm not like Rachel. My brain is more damaged. Much more damaged. I would die.”

It didn't take an AI's expertise to read Elián. His face was like the sky, its weather plain. He looked bewildered, then angry. “I'm such a tool,” he said. “Dammit. I'm gonna hang a big sign around my neck that says
use me
.”

And I'm sure you'll have takers
, said the ghost of Li Da-Xia, deep in my heart.

It was golden, having her back.

“Who told you it would work?” I asked. “Was it Sri?”

He didn't answer. Talis whimpered in his sleep. I heard the catch of his breathing.

“Elián,” I said. “Why do they want him alive?”

“I can't—” He took a deep breath. “Greta. Do you trust me?”

“Not with long-term planning.”

“What? Hey!”

“I am not a pawn. Not Talis's, not yours, not Sri's. It's not about trust. It's about making my own choices.”

“Yeah.” Elián raked his hand up the short hairs on the back of his neck. “I get that.”

Someone had been using him. And it wasn't even
new
—someone had been using him since the moment his grandmother had pinned on her general's stars. Someone had lied to him about ways to save me, lied to him to get him here. Someone had put him in Talis's crosshairs.

And really, the most extraordinary thing about him was that he could stand in those crosshairs with steady feet and open eyes.

It was warm and dim in the refuge. Our coats hung like shadows on the wall. Francis Xavier's arm sat on the table, buckles gleaming like little candles. I could smell the garlic melting into the soup as it cooled. I could smell the human world. “If I can do this, Elián . . .” I tapped my datastore with my fingertips. “If I can do this, properly . . .”

“You can change the world.” He put a hand out and put it opposite my hand, mine over my datastore, his over my heart. I could feel it beat where he was pressing.

“Tell me something,” I said.

Elián stiffened, as if he were carrying something heavy. The conspiracy; the rebellion. He thought I was asking him to betray it. He looked staggered, as if the weight were crushing.

But what he said was: “Anything.”

“Not that,” I said. “Tell me something about you.”

“Me?”

“From before all this. Before the Precepture. Tell me something.”

He looked bewildered. “Uh. I'm an only child.”

“I knew that.”

“Okay. Um. I had a pet raccoon once. I named her Daniel Boone, because I'm bad at sexing racoons. Or maybe I'm bad at naming. I'm a good cook but I put garlic in everything. Did you know that? Before . . . I liked cooking.”

“You liked bowling,” I said, remembering.

That surprised a soft laugh from him. “Yeah: I'm a demon with fifteen-pound balls.” He paused. “That kinda came out wrong.”

And I laughed. It had been so long since I'd laughed.

Francis Xavier turned over onto his back.

I dropped my voice and stepped close to Elián. He wrapped his arms around me and tucked his chin. “I've missed you,” I said. I pushed a kiss against his forehead. His temple. I brushed my fingers over the bruise on his throat. “I've really missed you. But Elián. You need to run away.”

“Not happening.”

“Think about it. You took a knife to Talis. And we have communications here. When the Swan Riders hear what you did, when the AIs hear . . . Do you understand? Do you know what they will do to you, if you don't run away?”

“About that,” said Elián. “I should tell you . . . I called them already.”

I wrenched away from him. “You what?”

“I called the Red Mountains. I mean, I put it on a delay. But I think it's gone out.”

“Why?”

“They—Sri gave me the frequency and stuff.”

“Because she doesn't want Talis to die.”

She really, truly didn't. There was something so sinister about that, a rush of chill in the heart. And suddenly I was thinking about how long a skilled torturer could keep someone alive. I was thinking about what would happen to Elián.

I spun around, pushing my hand into the squishy part of the controls, throwing my machine self deep into the comms system, commanding it not to send.

It was too late. The message had been queued yesterday, but it had gone out seventeen minutes ago. Like a missile spiraling in from orbit. Like a bomb dropped from a plane. There was no calling it back.

“What did you tell them?”

With a glitter of my fingers I grabbed the transcript. He hadn't told them much. A bare report of a Swan Rider team in trouble—possibly lost, at least one serious injury. A request for backup, for transport. They'd pinged back: asked for more details, demanded codes, tried four times, hadn't raised us, gotten irritated, and sent a rather cross notice that help was on the way.

On the way. Right now.

“Elián, why didn't you run?” I said desperately. “You put it on a delay. Why didn't you run?”

“Well,” he said. “I was gonna. But I kept hoping you might show up.”

“Run
now
,” I demanded. Ridiculously. In this snow—the tracks, the slowness, the ease of surveillance on this open prairie. There was not nearly enough time. I found myself literally turning, casting about for a solution. My fingers pulled free from the communications gel with a pop.

Elián at the Precepture. He'd fought even though they'd hurt him. Even though he couldn't win. They'd hurt him and it had not been only a little. He'd said no and they'd taken everything from him, slowly stripped his defiance until he was— Oh, Elián.

“Hey,” said Elián, taking my arm, pulling me in, helping me be still. “Hey, remember when you saved me?” He put a hand on my face. I could
feel
his fear, in his heart rate, in the conductivity of his skin. But he stood in the crosshairs, his eyes deep and steady. “What's happening to you, Greta—I'm not gonna pretend to understand it. But I do know you shouldn't have to do it alone.”

“With no one who loves me.”

“Yeah,” he said, all bravery and all heartbreak in a single word. “Yeah. That.”

I let myself stand there, for one moment, with my sensors reading his skin, with our two hearts beating equally fast. Somewhere between 90 and 95 percent of safe intensity. Two human hearts. Signaling. Blazing.

I let myself stand there one moment, and then it was time to be AI again, and in charge.

“Talis,” I said. “Wake up.”

I stepped over Francis Xavier and shook Talis, hard, by the uninjured shoulder.

He groaned and batted at me.

“Wake up,” I said. “Come on, I need you.”

He blinked. The bruise on his cheekbone was ripening and spilling upward to begin a black eye. He rubbed at the other eye and bleared at me. His face was lopsided as Gordon's, and he looked pale, young, battered. Human.

“Talis?” A question, because I wasn't sure.

“Is it really morning?” he groaned. “I blame the turning of the earth. And also, since you're handy, you.”

“It's five a.m., actually, but you've got to wake up,” I said.

“
Five?
No. No, I do not get up at five unless something is literally on fire. And like, a big something. Or my hair.” He closed his eyes. “I've had a long day. Go away.”

Not promising, but the glittery temper was at least unambiguously not Rachel's. It was Talis's.

No—it was Michael's.

The Michael thing
, I thought. Not an insult. Not an intimacy—or not merely. I called him that because I needed to remember that there was a human inside the machine. If there was anything left of the creature who had been Talis, it was surely the human part. And so I shook his shoulder again, sharply.

“Michael, I need you. There's a ship coming. Elián called the Red Mountains.”

“Really?” Talis—Michael—opened his eyes, dragged himself up on his elbow and peered at Elián. He was fully dressed but bedraggled as a cat in a bath, and similarly disgruntled. “That's a bit shortsighted, even for you, isn't it?”

Elián crossed his arms, his whole body shutting. “I've got my reasons.”

“Yeah, and I've got people who can drag them out of you.” Michael reached for my hand and I eased him up so that he could sit on the edge of the feather tick. He looked as if he were rising from his deathbed, which was not really a stretch. “You said they're incoming now, G?”

My brain was full of scramble schedules, rocket telemetry. “Absolutely.”

“So you woke me for the bit with the knives.”

“Michael, you're not hearing me. Elián Palnik is under my protection. I want your help to save him.”

“Well, that's a twist.” Michael nudged Francis with a toe. “Wake up, big guy, we've got company coming.”

Francis Xavier woke with a huge gasp. His head came up from the floor and then banged back down into it as he saw only the three of us and nothing on fire. He rolled onto his back as if too exhausted to change his view of boots and bare ankles. “Hey, Francis,” said Michael. “You'll never guess. Elián here called in a shuttle.”

“What?” said Francis Xavier. “Why?”

“Yeah, not to mention
how
? They'd never deploy without a Rider's security codes.” He flipped a look at Elián. “Sri's orders, I'm thinking?”

“I'm not telling you anything,” said Elián.

“Oh, not me. But there are people in the Red Mountains who can pull your mind apart engram by engram. And I bet they'll let me watch.”

“Talis!” My voice—only a human voice would break like that. I swallowed and tried again. “Michael. Please.”

Silence.

“I'll start breakfast,” Francis Xavier murmured, and staggered upright. It was hard to blame FX for wanting out of the middle of this, but it was somewhat strange to be deep in a life-and-death negotiation while someone mixed an oat porridge in the background.

“You really mean it,” said Michael. “He's got my lung tissue under his fingernails and you really want me to help save him.”

“I do.”

“What changed? I've only been asleep for—” There was a skip in his voice where he tried to reach for the current time and failed. “I. Where are my glasses? Help me up. Let me look at you.”