The Swan Riders (33 page)

“Tell me what it's like. What it's like to be—”

“No,” said Elián, his voice muffled.

“I think it's important.”

Under my hands the back buckled as if Elián were going to throw up. He didn't. But he didn't answer me, either.

I didn't push him. The truth was, I could read Two's intent as clearly as if he'd filed a plan. As clearly as if I had planned it myself. I had Azriel's critical-decision-point model running loops inside my head, blowing up Halifax every 3.2 seconds. I understood being AI just a little too well.

But just because you have power doesn't mean you have to abuse it.

Elián stirred a little and a pebble went tumbling down the steps, tick, tock, drop—the sound of a bead falling onto glass. A shudder went over my skin. Around us boulders and scree, red with lichen bloom, were scattered with the little statues of horses.

“The Swan Riders make these.” I said it by way of distraction. I reached to pick up one of the statues, to show Elián—and stopped.

I had grown up as a Precepture child, and my roommate had been a fairly major god: I knew the feel of ritual or religion, even when I did not know the religion itself. It seemed deeply taboo to touch the horseman figures, and so the Precepture child still inside me knew what the AI I had become did not.

Awe hit me like a shock wave. “The Swan Riders make these,” I breathed. In the sunlight, Elián was pulling himself together, and I was pulling together the world. “They make them from the horns and trees of old saddles. They work on them from the moment they are first possessed. The Japanese would have called them
haniwa
. The Egyptians,
ushatbi
. They are funerary offerings.”

“They're what?” said Elián.

“They're grave markers.”

The Swan Riders made these because they were going to die. And they left them here, at our feet. At
Talis's
feet.

“Okay, great,” said Elián. “A-plus job comforting me, Greta.” He sounded like himself, but he was shaking still, and I could actually see the pounding lights of his fear and headache. It was disturbingly intimate, like looking at someone's rape kit. He staggered to his feet. “Let's go.”

“Where?”

“Away from the grave markers? Down there. I want a word with Talis—Michael, I mean.”

I was afraid that word might be “stab,” but I too wanted a word with Michael.

He would know, better than I did, what the Swan Riders wanted. Whether I could lead them. Whether they would turn against Talis and help me rescue Francis Xavier. Whether I could stop this war.

Whether I could remake the world.

“Michael!” The name burst out of me as we tumbled through the low door of the yurt.

Then I stopped. Michael was on the floor, on his stomach, with his head turned away, one hand outstretched, and so limp that for just an instant I thought he was dead.

But he wasn't. He stirred and rolled over.

“So?” he said, flat on his back but attempting an insouciant smile. “How did it go?”

The urgency caught up with me again: “Can the Swan Riders be turned?”

He blinked at me, bleary. “Into what?”

“Turned,” I said, “against—”

“Hey, remember.” Elián cut me off. “Humans do this thing called soft-pedaling?”

“You never soft-pedaled a thing in your life.”

“Watch me start,” he said, and knelt to help Michael up off the floor. Rachel and Francis Xavier had a table with a wobbly leg and two mismatched chairs. Elián sat Michael down in one of them.

Michael slumped into the curving back. “We're going to chat, are we?” His voice was both fierce and weak. “Should I start? Hey, El, nice ink. Is it new?”

Elián covered his swollen wrist tattoo with his other hand. “Do you know what being possessed does to them?”

“I didn't,” said Michael, and then flickered for a moment. “I do.”

Michael hadn't known, but Rachel did. Rachel knew very well what being ridden was like.

“You said it was like dreaming,” I told her.

“Don't—” said Michael. “Don't push me, Greta. My balance isn't so good.”

“Rachel said it was like dreaming,” I amended, and Elián broke in.

“Says the gal who's been dreamlocked. They use dreams to torture people, Greta.”

“They don't have to . . .” That was Rachel, called by her name and rising up in Talis's precarious teeter-totter mind. “If you're willing, if you don't fight, I—”

“At this point,” said Michael, “Rachel would like to give you a little speech entitled ‘Lie Back and Think of England.'”

“Says
England,
” snarked Elián.

“Yeah,” said Michael. “I'm realizing.” He sighed and leaned forward, folding his arms on the tabletop and resting his head on them, fatigue and pain and sorrow in every line of him. It made my heart twist. It made Elián turn away.

The mugs and the teapot were hanging on hooks on the wall. The tea was in a round wooden box on a shelf above. Elián set them all in the middle of the table, in a precise little line. The precision was unlike him. It was the kind of precision that could put a knife into the second intercostal space, half an inch from the aorta. He swung the kettle on the induction plating with a clang, and claimed the other chair. Michael had lifted his head to watch, and for a moment the pair of them just looked at each other as if finding targeting solutions.

The kettle boiled, and I set it between them, on a trivet of woven straw.

After a moment Michael reached out and took the lid off the teapot. It rattled as he set it down—his hands were shaking that much—and when he reached for the canister of tea he nearly knocked it over. Elián steadied it. They stopped.

They were not hand in hand, but it was close: both leaning forward over the table, both with a hand against the round wooden box.

“Three scoops for a full pot,” said Michael.

And Elián didn't nod. But he did measure the tea leaves into the pot, one scoop at a time. Poured the steaming water. Michael replaced the teapot lid.

“Do you want to know why I brought you here?” said Elián. “Why I called in the evac?”

Michael, who never passed up the chance to hear the master plan, drew his little loop in the air. “I assumed it was because your coconspirators exploited your feelings for Greta and thereby got you to take the mind-bogglingly stupid part of the risk.”

“Sure,” said Elián. “That. But why from the refuge? Why not just from the church?”

“Oh, for God's sake, don't lead me through it,” snapped Michael. “You're not Socrates and I have a headache.”

“It was because you were supposed to be learning something. And you couldn't do that while you were stuck, you know, in the first stage of grief.”

“Anger,” I said, because I couldn't help it. There was never a space wanting a fact that I didn't want to fill.

“With AIs it's actually fury and vengeance.” Michael pinched the skin between his eyebrows. I could see his aura trembling.

“Yeah.” Elián shrugged. “Anyway.”

“And what exactly was the sucking chest wound supposed to teach me, Elián? Spit it out. I'm out of patience.”

What he was out of was time. I slipped behind him and dropped a hand onto each shoulder, getting ready. I saw the tilt of his dark head as he looked at my hand. Felt his muscles tighten with fear.

“How to be human,” said Elián, who was also looking at my hands.

“How to care about people,” I said.

“Hey, I care about people. Just, you know.” He waved a hand. “Statistically.”

“That's not—” Good enough, I wanted to say, but just there the palsy overwhelmed him. He went off into a horrible, rattling seizure, and it took both Elián and me to get him on the floor and hold him there.

I thought about what Talis had taken from me—what I had fought to get back. What had entered me like a shock wave and turned me into a beacon. How to care about people. It was the difference between me and Azriel with his pinwheel eyes; between me and Evie with her shallow, shocking glee. It was the difference between Two and Michael.

I thought this, and I held Michael's hand, even though I thought he might break my fingers with his pain and panicked strength.

There was nothing to do but hang on.

But hanging on was not nothing.

And when he fell limp, he kept my hand in his. Just breathed for a little while. And then lifted my fingers to his lips. “Greta Stuart,” he said. “You may yet be the best of us.”

Only Michael would say that and mean us, the AIs. But only Rachel would speak that softly.

“We need to be better,” I said, and meant the same we, the same us.

Two would not have agreed. But Michael answered at a whisper: “Yes. I know.”

Then he shivered—almighty whole-body shiver. “We're out of time for soft-pedaling,” he said. “Help me up.”

Elián crouched to help. It was a wrestle, to get that small, limp body in the chair again. These attacks—they were clustered more thickly than I would have thought. Two had warned that the disease would be accelerated, but I hadn't dreamt it would be by this much. Michael had very little time.

And FX. Halifax. None of us had very much time.

“Can the Swan Riders be turned,” Michael said, “into what.”

“Can they be turned against Talis?”

He looked up sharply. He'd chipped a tooth during the seizure and there was blood on his mouth from where the newly sharp edge had caught his lip. He was pale and it was vampire-vivid, inhuman, strange—his whole face was whirled and new, neither human nor AI, neither Rachel nor Michael. Balanced as if on the edge of a knife.

“You're the only person I know who's ever taken over the world,” I said. “Will you help me?”

“Halifax,” he guessed.

“Peace through terror.” I didn't know how to phrase this. “They locked me out of the weapons systems.”

“Evie's little padlocks.” Michael scrubbed his face with one hand. “Yeah, you won't be opening those anytime soon.”

“That leaves the Swan Riders. Michael, they make these little . . . carvings.”

Over his shoulder was Rachel's carving, homey and portentous, on the rickety table by the bed. I looked at it, and when I looked back, the person looking at me was changing.

“I—we do,” she said. “We carve the riding.”

“Rachel,” said Elián. “Tell her. Tell her what the Swan Riders want.”

She leaned forward, small but magnetic. I had seen her only at the bottom of Talis's pain, and so it was easy to think of her as a hurt person, as a victim. But she wasn't. She was a Swan Rider, and whatever else the Swan Riders were, they were all falling stars. Rachel was blazing. “Being ridden,” she said. “It's—it's like nothing human, but it's a little like dreaming. You fall asleep, but things keep happening . . .”

“You're aware of it?” I asked her. “You remember it?”

Her face flickered, half Michael, but she shrugged by cupping her hands, a very un-Talis gesture. She seemed unable to elaborate. “It's like dreaming.”

“Yeah,” said Elián. “The kind of dreaming where the monster is reaching for you and you can't even scream.”

“Sometimes.”

For some reason I was thinking of Queen Agnes Little, flushing and touching her weskit as she turned to the camera, freckles and fierceness and half an engineering degree. An alternate of me. “Do you want it to stop?” I asked.

“Yes.” The word seemed to have burst from her before she could catch it. Her cupped hands clenched into fists. “No. It's not that. We
volunteer.
”

True believers. And yet . . . “You must have worked hard, though, to keep your secrets. Because there's nothing in the datastore about what it's like to be ridden. There's nothing at all.”

“There isn't?” That was Michael, shocked, frozen. The strategic thinker of the age he might be, but this was his whacking great blindspot, and I had just thrust a poleaxe into it. “Truly?” he said.

“Truly.”

“And that's what they want,” said Elián.

For an instant Michael's gaze had taken that characteristic inward turn, reaching for the data, and of course failing. Now he had a stunned look, as if the floor had vanished under him. “They want to keep the secret?” he said, uncertain.

“No,” said Elián. “They want to scream it in your face.”

“No,” I said. “They want . . .” I was so close to working it out. It sat at the edge of my understanding like a word on the tip of the tongue. “The AIs leave ghosts of themselves in the Swan Riders. But the Swan Riders can't touch the AIs. You ride someone and you're unchanged.”

“Unless you happen to bump into a zealous sheep farmer with a dagger,” said Michael.