The Swan Riders (29 page)

Michael reseated Elián's shoulder and we hauled him up onto the bed. Francis Xavier hunted through his absurdly small first-aid cabinet and found absurdly useless things: nail clippers, headache tabs. The Swan Riders, home, are a far cry from Swan Riders, deployed.

“Gimme,” said Elián, and swallowed three tablets, dry. He flopped onto Rachel's pillow. I perched on the edge of the bed beside him. “Everlasting God, Greta. For a second, I thought—”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “But—think of what would have happened if I'd accused the Swan Riders to their faces.”

“A bloodbath, I reckon,” said Elián. “One way or the other. And you know what, I don't even care. AIs, Swan Riders. You guys go ahead and kill each other.”

In infrared I could see the swelling all around the glenohumeral joint; it was hot with blood flow and tender pain. I knew exactly how that felt, and not because I had looked it up. I put my hand softly on his wrist, covering the place where his Swan Rider tattoo was meant to go. “This plan where I protect you isn't working out so well,” I said.

“It is, actually,” said Two.

Elián grunted, “Yeah, for you.”

“For you, too,” said Two. “Even if you don't know names, you know faces. And I have people who could pull your brain apart and give those faces to me. The only reason that's not my first move is that I'm hoping to know Greta for centuries. I don't want that between us.”

“That's beautiful.” Elián pulled his uninjured arm up and draped his elbow over his eyes. “Where are you registered? I'll get you something. Gravy boat? Asparagus dish?”

“Don't get too comfortable,” Two warned him. “We're going out there, and we're telling them it was trommellers who attacked the other version of me. You'll be a hero—enduring who knows what torture without implicating your coconspirators.”

“It should keep them from taking immediate action,” said Michael. “And then we can sort out how it connects, who's involved.”

“Keep the purge to an absolute minimum,” said Two, sounding chipper upon mentioning purges. “Up you get, Elián, let's go.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” said Elián. “I'm not your pawn, and I need a nap.”

“You're better than my pawn,” said Two. “You're my Rider. And the other Riders—they don't know you. I won't need to imitate you.”

Beside me the side of the yurt gusted inward, with a
whump
of fabric like a slap to the eardrum.

“Imitate,” said Elián, uncovering his eyes. He hadn't gotten there yet, but I had. Two was proposing that, in order to unravel the conspiracy among the Swan Riders, he possess Elián.

It would kill him.

Not right away—not unless something went wrong, and since we didn't know what was going on, we probably shouldn't count on everything going right—but it would kill him nonetheless. It would scar his brain.

“No,” I said.

“You say he's a Swan Rider,” said Two. “They do this. So he does this.”

“He has to be a Swan Rider, Greta,” said Michael, softly, warningly, “or you can't protect him.”

He was absolutely right about that. Without my protection, Two would tear Elián apart.

He might do it anyway.

“Francis can help us,” said Two.

“Why Francis?” I trusted Francis Xavier, but I would be amazed if Two did.

“Because I know where his levers are,” said Two, smiling fondly at the big Swan Rider. “There's this sweet little girl. Name of Rachel.”

“Two,” said Michael, laying a hand on his counterpart's arm.

The AI yanked himself free. “Don't call me that.”

“Talis,” said Michael. “Don't do this. She's an AI; she's a new AI. And she loves him. I know you know how rare that is.” He glanced at me as if reluctant to add to that, but then added to that. “How fragile. Talis.”

I no longer felt fragile. But I could fake fragile if there was power in it. “Please,” I said. “Don't use the people I love.”

Two made a pouty face. “But that's pretty much my wheelhouse. Oh, and, heads up—” He reached for my hand. There was information in his fingertips: a pulse code that opened up his scenarios, his strategies.

I looked at them. And my knees went out from under me.

I found myself sitting in one of the two mismatched chairs, across from Francis Xavier, who was silently pulling on his boots.
Sacrifice.

I didn't need catching, but both Michael and Elián had dived to catch me. Elián reached me first, but it was Michael who narrowed his eyes and hopped to the conclusion as sure-winged as a raven. “Halifax,” he said.

It was swelling in my eyes. Halifax. The Pan Polar capital. My home.

“Sunday next,” said Two.

“Two,” said Michael. “You can't. She.” And there he paused. Literally paused, as if someone had hit a button. He was frozen, and silent, and still.

Francis Xavier looked up and then lunged out of his chair.

Two tilted his head. “And did I mention? Your symptoms are going to be radically accelerated.”

Michael fell into Francis Xavier's arms as if he'd just been cut down from the gallows. His hands flew to his head.

“You can blame the short off the affinity bridge,” said Two. “The whole web must have pulsed, created a big batch of new lesions. That little dagger did a lot of damage.”

“That—” Elián was staring at Michael, at the way his fingers burrowed into his hair as if they wanted to burrow into his skull. When Elián's gaze flashed to me, I could read it plain as a book: guilt. “That wasn't part of the plan.”

Francis Xavier looked up at him with utter contempt. And Two piled on: “With respect, Mr. Palnik, I see no evidence that they told you the plan. Now. Come willingly, or I'll kill you where you stand.”

“You're a little fuzzy on
willingly
 . . . ,” said Elián. But he drew himself up, as if standing for the firing squad.

“Two,” I tried one last time.

“Francis Xavier,” Two said. “You're with me.”

Francis Xavier closed his eyes as if in prayer. Then he got to his feet, with Talis in his arms. He laid the body in their bed and then stepped away, coming like a wolfhound to Two's side. Michael was still twisting as if to escape his own skin—fighting himself with a noose-around-the-throat urgency. I had to leap in and put my whole weight on his shoulders just to keep him from falling to the floor. And while I was trapped by that task, Two was taking my friends. I looked at them as if I could stop them with my eyes alone.

“It's okay, Greta,” said Elián.

“Elián—” Did he not understand that what he was seeing here could easily become his own future? There was nothing good for him inside that mountain.

“Stay, Greta,” said Francis Xavier. “Please.”

I stayed.

The seizure was bad. It rattled on for minutes—for three minutes and forty-seven seconds, I knew, because my datastore began a count once I wondered how long it would last. I leaned over Michael, weighing down his shoulders, watching the scrolling seconds in the air between us.

Under my hands he shuddered and shuddered. A feral noise growled out of him. His focus swam around the room. And there was nothing I could do.

As Two had done on the ship, I let my sensors bloom outward; I wrapped up the suffering body and held it in light.

Infinite knowledge had once seemed to me a source of infinite power. With my sensors, I could see the new scars that Two had diagnosed. I could also see Rachel: the growth plates that showed a hungry childhood, an old fracture in her leg, the fibrous scar across her lung from her Swan Rider surgery—the surgery Elián might be having right now.

Knowledge did not seem like power anymore. It seemed like sadness.

Halifax. Two had made the threat privately three days ago; would make it public three days hence. The Pan Polars had ten days to stand their troops down, get their rioters in order, and surrender a hostage.

There was a private vid of Queen Agnes Little receiving the threat while sitting at my mother's dressing table, putting powder on her freckles. Her color drained as she listened; she was wordless as she cut the connection. But in public she lifted her chin and called for global rebellion.

Under my hands, and now, the seizure lifted.

Michael went limp.

I raised my hands away, and their light glimmered and died.

I could hear the heat pump humming, the voices in the tents around us, and the distant lap of thick red water.

“How did you break your leg?” I asked.

“I fell off a horse,” Rachel answered. “When I first came here.” She laughed. “A Swan Rider who couldn't . . .”

“ . . . ride,” said Michael, dialing into focus. “Oh.”

“Michael?” I said, to be sure of him.

“It was Francis Xavier who picked me—her—up. We were practicing in the meadow island. It was spring, and wet—boggy, really. Nature's safety mat. We were just covered in mud . . .”

He stopped talking and lay there simply breathing in and out, putting beads of breath on a string of pain. I watched.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

I did not even know what name to call him.

With some struggle he pushed himself up on his elbows. I grabbed the second pillow and tucked it behind him. He lay propped, peering at the room as if not sure how he'd come to be there.

“Could you,” he said, finally, faintly. “My glasses?”

I knew by now that they lived in a padded inner pocket in his duster. I retrieved them and handed them over, and he slipped them on with delicate hands. And then he lay looking around as if taking photographs. The indigo quilt at his fingertips. The two red-glazed mugs hanging on hooks. The old mirror with its dappled shine.

“Welcome home,” I said softly. Because I was fairly sure this was Rachel.

“Thank you.” The murmuring voice was throaty. Those haunted eyes looked at me with an expression nothing in my datastore could match—a mix of innocence and bitter irony: the smoke in the caramel, the salt on the chocolate. Not Rachel. But not Michael either.

Whoever she was, she bumped up her glasses and pushed the back of her wrists into the hollows of her eyes. A child's gesture, sleepy, sulky. She gave her head a little shake and made a visible effort to tune in. “Where's . . . where's Francis?”

As if all heartbreak had been given one name.

And yet the voice was still not purely Rachel's.

“Your counterpart,” I began.

“Two.”

“Yes. He—”

“I remember.” He started to sit up, suddenly urgent. “Greta—”

“I need to get there,” I said. “Where would they go—did they go into the mountain?”

Michael pressed his lips together. “Talis will probably take Elián to the upload portal in seventeen C. There's nothing special about it, but we all have our habits.” A little shrug, a wary look. “There are a handful of Riders who might also know that. If they talk to each other. If they put it together.”

And they were, it seemed, doing exactly that. A conspiracy of Swan Riders against AIs. Of Pan Polars against Talis. In both those struggles I was a pawn, a piece to fight over, and—we would see about that. I had no intention of playing the pawn. But for the moment, there was no one I could trust.

“Go alone.” Michael always could read my mind. “Francis is just there in case I need muscle, but Elián—”

“Will you be all right?” I could see the warp and shimmer at the edge of his aura. Another episode was building.

Clustered. Welcome to stage five.

Michael's eyes were hooded. What I could see, he could feel, and if Talis had one terror, it was being left alone. But he answered in a voice that trembled hardly at all. “I'm fine.”

“You'd be safer on the floor.”

There was a pause as short as a gulp.

“Right,” he said. “Help me?”

So I helped him sit, then slide onto his feet, and from his feet to the tatami mat on the floor. I could feel his dizziness in uneven bursts of weight on my arm.

I knelt over his body. The woven grass of the tatami released a smell of sweet hay and sunshine, of lost summers, though the eddy of air around the bottom of the tent was damp and cool. In that smell, in that eddy, I curled Michael up on his side—recovery position, for the thing that had not yet happened. I knew he wouldn't stay there, but it seemed like the only thing to do.

“Seventeen C,” he said, touching my fingertips with his fingertips as if to give me the data. There was no data in them, but the words were enough to make a map bloom in my head. I had to look through the map to see him. Dizziness lingered in the set of his mouth and whirled Rachel and Michael together in his eyes. “I—” he said. “You—”

And here his voice shifted, stumbled a little as if the heart behind it had lurched. “You should be there,” said Rachel. “Be there when Talis lets him go.”