The Swan Riders (27 page)

He caught my eye over Francis Xavier's shoulder—and immediately looked away. He had black slashing eyebrows, straight and pointed. And he made me uneasy. They all made me uneasy. The way they held their bodies tense as drawn crossbows. The way they looked at me with a worship that was hiding fear/disgust.

It was the way Sri had looked at me, once.
New Rider?
she'd asked. Talis had answered:
New AI
, and for a second she'd been horrified.

There was unease all around. Even look-death-in-the-eye Elián seemed unable to look at half of the Swan Riders. And Francis was crumpled as a piece of paper—the kind of crumpled that would never be smooth again.

The Swan Riders escorted us into the nameless city of the Red Mountains. We rode past islands of winter gardens, islands of willow-scrub grazing dotted with horses and single tents, an island housing biological laboratories fitted with airlocks, a long and low-slung school, a hospital that made Francis Xavier pause and look, his eyes empty. Finally we reached the foot of the largest mountain. It sank stone roots into red water, and in its boggy skirts were raised wooden pathways and bright white yurts on small neat platforms.

“Home,” said Alejandro.

We got down from the horses. The sun was properly up now. Earliest morning. I was aware of every shifting pebble under my boots, of the fatigue like slush in my bones. Elián wrapped an arm around me, and I realized I was swaying. I wondered how Francis Xavier could even stand.

“My lady,” said one of the Swan Riders. I turned to look at her. She was blonde, square jawed, at a guess one of the Low Country survivors: Flemish, Dutch? There were not many of them, but they were clannish, and thus had maintained a characteristic look. “Renata,” she said, touching her chest—and then turning that into the Rider's salute.

“You don't need to,” I said. But I had had that argument with Sri already. Renata's face tightened into a here-and-gone smile that was almost a grimace of pain. Under that respectful blankness she was hiding something—terror, I thought.

She gestured at the mountain face, and I saw that a little way up it was a door—a door into the hill, like the Riders' refuges, but a big one. Flights of rough stone stairs, trimmed with makeshift rails and prayer flags, threaded up toward it. Four-foot-thick blast doors framed it on either side. The hollow mountain. The AIs. “If you want . . . ,” Renata said.

But Francis Xavier spoke from behind me. “Greta?” he said, his voice throaty and low. “Would you like to come home with me?”

“Yes,” I said. “Please.”

And no one thought to stop Elián, so he went too. We tried to stride down the boardwalk, but Francis Xavier was staggering, tripping over nothing at all. Elián reached to steady him but FX jerked his arm away. How long could I possibly keep Elián safe? I had seen the way the Swan Riders watched him, merely because he was a stranger. They watched him as if braced for betrayal, as if ready to attack.

Betrayal. Sri's crossbow. Two's hand oh-so-casually claiming Michael's arm, under the thin guise of holding him up.
There's no reason why you shouldn't have the best care.

What was happening to Michael?

Why would I want you screaming?
Two had said. Surely they wouldn't hurt him. Surely if they tried to remove the datastore there would be anesthetics, antiseptics, proper wound care. I'd gotten right up from my own implant surgery, recovering in moments. Un-planting, as Two had called it, was bound to be a bit more complex; there would be adhesions, old scarring, the problem of a gaping wound cavity. Even so, these were experts. Surely Michael would be all right.

But Francis, leading us down the mazy wooden walkways, looked so tired, so lost. Even Elián kept his mouth shut about it, though the best thing for him would be for Michael to die on the table.

I could not wish for that. I just couldn't.

Francis Xavier turned aside and pulled open the door on one of the yurts. It was a small door, only shoulder height, made of wood and painted bright yellow and orange. FX braced his hand on the lintel and ducked through. We followed.

Home with me
, Francis had said. And here we were. There was a drawing pinned to the lattice wall—white pelicans on a dark blue lake. There was a table, one leg shimmed up with a wedge of folded paper. Mugs on hooks. A single bed, the indigo quilt on it embroidered with gold stars. Francis Xavier knocked a hollow fist on the heat pump as he passed and it puffed to life. This was not a station. It was a home.

It was Francis Xavier and Rachel's home.

The refuge near the Precepture had been theirs too, but also as fungible as a coin—a thing they could pick up or put down, a thing that did not hold a history. The yurt was different. FX hung his kit bag on a point of lattice and put the bag that had been Talis's on the table.

Elián was hesitating in the doorway.

“You can come in,” said Francis Xavier. He was rooting through Talis's bag. “You can stay here. I will not hold you down and cut you open, even though you did that to Rachel, and even though I love her. I will not do it because Talis did not do it, and because Greta would not wish it.”

“That's nice of you,” said Elián warily. I took FX at his word, but I supposed it was hard for Elián to do the same. He still had a bruise from Francis's pincer on his Adam's apple.

FX drew from the bag what he'd apparently been looking for: a half-finished carving, no bigger than two fists, of horse and rider. He set it on the rickety bamboo table at the bedside.

“I will not hurt you,” he said—apparently to the statue. “But you are a Swan Rider now. You must learn what that means.”

“What does it mean?” said Elián.

“Sacrifice,” said Francis Xavier. Then he took off his boots and lay down on one half of the bed.

Elián and I stood together and watched him.

They were so young, the Swan Riders. But these two, Francis Xavier and Rachel, had built a life together. And they'd been ready to die. Together. I looked at the sketch of the pelicans, on the lake that was
somewhere warmer.
At the boots leaning together, with their little loop sewn to the back, so that they could be pulled on one-handed. I looked at the prosthesis, lumpy in its silk stuff sack, hanging on the hook on the wall.

Home. A place where you could come apart.

“Sit down,” said Elián. “No, actually. Lie down.”

“Where?”

“Just, I don't know. On the floor.”

The heat pump was in the middle of the room, and the floor around it was tatami matting: thick and intricately woven grass.

Elián stretched out on the tatami, propped his head up on one arm, waggled his eyebrows at me.

“Don't,” I said.

“I wouldn't.” He wiped his face with his hand. “I only mean—you're going to fall over.”

And I was, at that. So tired that weird colors were smashing into the edges of things. I took off my boots and lay down on the matting, gingerly. Elián stretched out an arm for me to use as a pillow. The heat pump puffed at us like a friendly dragon. The tatami gave under my hip.

“People bowing to you, huh?” said Elián. “That must take some getting used to.”

“For me, bowing is the thing that's least strange.”

“Yeah, I guess it would be. . . . I'm sorry, I'm no good at this. I'm better with problems you can hit.”

But in fact, he was good at this, or good enough. He was warm, and he was strong. His shape suggested a shape for me, and my body slumped into it like heated glass.

And I thought: they hadn't been bowing. They'd been on their knees. Bowing was what you did to a queen. Kneeling was different. You knelt to worship. Or to beg. The Swan Riders. They'd been . . . begging?

I could feel Elián's breath on my neck, my ear.

“I don't know how,” I said. “I took you under my protection but I don't know how that works. I don't know how to protect you.”

“Talis didn't kill me on sight, though,” said Elián. “So that's something.”

Neither of us suggested he should run. He wouldn't leave me, even if there were somewhere to go.

“Calgary . . .” The name of the dead city came out of my mouth as a whisper. “Did you see it?”

“Yeah,” said Elián, equally shaken. “I was—” He'd been lost; thirsty; dying out on the open prairie. He shifted, retrieving his pillow arm and propping himself up on that elbow. “Yeah, I saw.”

I pushed close to him, my head in the hollow of his armpit, pressing my cheek to where his datastore would be. “I want to protect you. And . . .”

“Calgary,” he said. “Indianapolis. All those cities.”

I could feel his ribs moving, and the electrical currents of his body. He reached down and pinched the short, silky hairs at the base of my neck, rolling them between his fingers.

“I wouldn't be human again,” I said. “Even if you could change me, I wouldn't choose it. All those cities.”

I was lying on the floor in a yurt, with no terminal handy, no interface gel—but all the data in the world was here in the Red Mountains. It was called the
UNDEAD
, the UN Defensive/Emergency Actions Database. (
Have you ever noticed,
noted the Utterances,
that acronyms bring out the worst in people
.) It made the very ground beneath us boggy with information. As Two had reached into the ship, I reached into the seeping edge of the
UNDEAD
. I let the data drip and dribble through. And open me.

It was different than looking down with my satellite eyes: different than my self made far, and the world made tiny. The globe of the world grew inside me.

I closed my eyes so that it would fit more easily. My eyelids felt weighted, heavy.

All those cities.

Calgary.

I could still feel Elián's warmth and strength melting into one side of me.

Calgary.

Toppled trees that ringed it for a hundred miles in all directions. The city itself was a crater, the bedrock open as a wound. From orbit, it looked as if a jewel had fallen out of a starburst setting.

I swallowed that jewel, and the Pan Polar rebellion entered me. I knew about a beloved princess, tortured publicly. A temporary hostage, stolen and made AI. I heard my mother's speech, her abdication. I saw the new king: young, bold, stricken . . . A look on his face as if his crown were molten.

I glimpsed the night footage of him spiriting his tiny son away.

Calgary, and Talis's blunt demand: son or cities.

The king's suicide.

Another coronation: a night procession, a queen in black. Her name was Agnes Little, my second cousin. Very young, yanked out of a boarding school where she'd been studying engineering. Too young. She had no children.

In Halifax, Queen Agnes Little dismissed a Swan Rider delegation with a royal shrug.

In Iceland, a mob found a Swan Rider refuge and set it blazing.

At the one-week mark, Talis blew up Reykjavík.

Popular rebellion. Swan Rider teams attacked wherever they showed their faces. My nation fracturing. Siberia, the part of the Pan Polar Confederacy whose allegiance to Halifax had long been the weakest, declared its independence and surrendered a hostage. The PanPols refused to accept the seccession. They landed troops on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

At the two-week mark, Talis blew up Edinburgh.

Queen Agnes Little lifted her chin and called for global rebellion.

Almost in my ear, Elián was snoring.

Queen Agnes Little—a childless queen.

There could be no greater symbolic rejection of Talis's order than a queen with no children. Even if she was hardly more than a child herself.

She had not been raised to a crown, and she had a bob of black hair, the cruelly fair skin of a Scot, green eyes, a mask of freckles. The AIs had captured a detailed thermal image of her. In it, I could see her fear. Her chin was just like mine.

I tipped my head back, my chin lifting. The AIs had a critical-moment decision model. Deep in the
UNDEAD
, it was churning scenarios at top speed. I could feel the intensity of the data processing, my skin prickling.

The world spun inside me. A few countries filed statements of support for the Pan Polar Confederacy: small places, mostly, thirsty have-nots with little to lose. But there was one bulletin filed from the clean white peaks of the Himalayas, from the great state that controlled the glaciers and the high plateaus that held the headwaters of so many rivers: the Brahmaputra and the Salween, the Mekong and Yellow and Yangtze. One bulletin filed from the power at the heart of Asia. The Mountain Glacial States.

It was triple-sealed and two words long.

It said:
Hold fiercely.

Xie.

Li Da-Xia, the daughter of heaven, the pure soul of the snow, the heir to the great throne of the mountains.
Hold on to yourself,
she had said to me in the moment before I left her.
Hold fiercely.