The Swan Riders (9 page)

I could not talk to them. But I also could not get them out of my head.

We rode the rail line straight to Saskatoon—or what was left of Saskatoon. It took us three days to get there, and by the time we did, my datastore had started to lecture me on “rabbit starvation”: a phenomenon in which people who lived exclusively on lean meat became vaguely uneasy and uselessly hungry, and then died.

I was vaguely uneasy. I was uselessly hungry. I was not certain, though, what I was hungry
for.

The things I'd left behind.

Any trace of the human.

But there wasn't much human left in Saskatoon.

At the north edge of the city, we zigzagged down the old railway embankment and into what had once been called a suburb. The pattern of houses was faintly visible, their foundations dimpling the grass like unmarked graves. In the distance, the heaps of what had been skyscrapers were like a line of low hills. The most human thing still visible at this distance was the landfill.

It doesn't take much to break a city. Simply leaving it alone will suffice.

The grass on what had once been a suburban street was belly high on the horses, bone-blonde. It broke under Gordon's feet with a faint smell of dust and seed. Ahead of me Talis and Sri had stopped beside some kind of ruin. It took me a moment to identify it: an electrical transmission tower, one of a long line of them that would once have carried power to the lost people of Saskatchewan. It was crumpled, bent over, fringed in its hollow places with trailing grasses. It looked like a giant dancer folding her body toward the ground.

In the shadow of this thing, Talis and Sri sat still on their horses, their backs to me, their heads bent to each other in conference. A wind—a fall wind, the kind that looks for something to rattle—lifted the tattered bits of the appliquéd wings on the back of Talis's long coat, stirred the real feathers of the Swan Rider wings that covered Sri's saddlebags.

A melancholy image: sepia-tinted, all dusty-black and leather-brown and dried-grass gold. A postapocalyptic tableau of ruin and riders. Sri was making some kind of proposal. Her arm swept toward the humps of the former downtown. Talis shrugged with one hand—a flip of wrist, a cock of thumb. Two lost people in a lost place.

I tightened my knees a fraction. Gordon ambled up to Sri and Talis, and Francis Xavier and his Heigh Ho Uranium followed. I realized—belatedly, since he'd been doing it for a hundred miles—that Francis Xavier was, in fact, guarding my back.

“Sri thinks we should do some trading here,” Talis told me.

“Fodder for the horses,” Sri said. “We've exhausted the oat cache, and that's going to slow us down. And we could eat something besides rabbit.”

Talis looked to the sky. “They used to make wasabi paste in little tubes. I swear to God one of these days I'm going to reindustrialize Japan.”

Everyone ignored him. Even among the Swan Riders, for whom he was a god, ignoring Talis was a vital skill.

“The PanPols in general are restive,” he said, with a glance at me. It was the kind of sidelong glance a parent gives you when they are talking about you but don't want you to notice. “But Saskatoon specifically . . . This is your post, Francis. What do you think? Likely to be hostile?”

“Historically, not.” Francis Xavier was watching the horizon in slow sweeps, guarding us from any incoming threats. “But if you are sending a trade party, do not send me.”

Talis scrunched his nose at the back of Francis Xavier's head.

“And don't go yourself,” said Sri. She looked pointedly at Talis.

“Me?” said the AI. “What did I do?”

“You ordered the death of one of their matriarchs, remember?” said Sri. “It wasn't that long ago.”

“Oh,” said Talis. “That.”

That. When Elián Palnik had attempted to escape our Precepture, Talis had suspected the trommellers of Saskatoon of helping him. They probably hadn't, and he probably knew it. But he had still demanded an execution, just to make a point.

“But they wouldn't recognize Talis.”

“Not Talis,” said Sri. “Rachel and Francis Xavier.”

I made my eyebrows draw together, though it felt—human facial expressions sometimes felt artificial to me, like communicating by semaphore.
I am puzzled
, I flashed at Sri.

She shrugged and mimicked my face. “Who do you think carried out that execution, my little AI? That's a job for Swan Riders.”

“Well, then,” said Talis. “That should keep them in line for a bit, then, don't you think?”

That met with a windswept silence.

“. . . Or not.” Talis shrugged. “Okay. So, on a scale of zero to Get the Hell Out of Dodge, what are we at?”

“Two point six,” said Sri.

“You know, normally I'd roll the dice on that, but—”

“But Greta's worth a city.”

“Two or three cities.” We were all sitting on horseback, facing inward, a four-pointed star. “Greta is a political flashpoint for half the continent, which is clearly already a powder keg. I'm not exposing her to these people.”

“Don't I get a vote?” I asked. “Or possibly a small aside on this demonstration of the limits of peace through terror?”

“Yeah,” said Talis. “How about, survive the road trip and then we'll talk about ruling the world.”

“If we're voting, I still vote oats,” said Sri.

He shook his head. “It's a big empty and a small city. We can go round.”

“Talis,” said Sri. “You can risk me without risking Greta. The oats would speed us. And I'm not sure we have a lot of time.”

And that made Talis look at me.

It was one of those moments when he didn't look human. His eyes were calculating machines, and light glinted strangely off the screens in his retinas, as if he were a cat.

“Fine.” He snapped back round to look at Sri. “Fine, go. It will have to be just you. Feel them out. Do it cautiously.
Don't
be long.” It was a
don't
with firepower behind it. “And put on your wings.”

The Swan Riders wore such conspicuous wings for a reason, and it boiled down to protection. It was generally known that anyone who burned a hair on a Swan Rider's head was likely to be publicly set afire. Sri's wings would protect her. Or rather, they would protect her if the people she encountered didn't have it in for the Swan Riders. Which was, of course, exactly what we suspected.

Sri twisted away in her saddle and ran her hand over the long stiff feathers. I could not see her face, just then, but there was something about her hand: the wrinkling at the wrist, the very smallest tremor: such human hands. Something in the moment seemed elegiac, as if I were seeing Sri for the last time. She spent only a second like that, and when she twisted back she grinned wickedly. “I'd rather have my crossbow.”

She liked to wear it on her back. The wings would slow the draw.

Talis, too, was looking at Sri's hand, lost in feathers. But slowly he nodded. “Keep it loose, then. Shoot first and ask questions when they're bleeding.”

“Leg wounds it is,” Sri said, and squeezed her knees round Roberta. The horse took off at a lope and quickly broke into a gallop. The wind gusted and then fell quiet. Distantly, barely, I heard the hum and rumble of the trommels—the house-sized rotating drums that aided in the mining of the city ruins. Then the wind picked up again, and the sound was gone.

We waited.

The place we had stopped featured a scrub-choked little cut, with a trickling creek at the bottom of it. Francis Xavier built a hot little fire from the scrub of buffalo berry and creosote bushes. I took the horses down to the water.

An hour went by. Talis sat on a stone at the root of the ruined transmission tower. He was toying with the fire striker, making sparks jump between his fingers.

Time passed with the queasy, twisting slowness that it took on in waiting rooms, in places where there might be something wrong but one had nothing to do.

The click of the piezoelectric striker in Talis's hands reminded me of beads hitting a floor. My heart felt strange, as if it was skipping beats. As if I had expected a bridge but had stepped out into the air.

“What did you take?” I asked Talis. “Back at the refuge. What did you take?”

“If you could cope with knowing that,” said Talis, “then I wouldn't have had to take it, would I?”

“It was the political situation in the Pan Polar Confederacy,” I said. “I didn't lose the data. But if I didn't lose the data, what did you take?”

Talis turned up his palm and let a spark fall into the center of it. We both watched as it burned him, a little round hole.

A second hour passed with no sign of Sri. She could not have had to ride that far. The trommellers were in earshot, or nearly. Sometimes we could hear the rumble of the trommels, at work in the distant ruins. Sometimes not. Gusts of sound came and went.

Francis Xavier was brushing Heigh Ho Uranium. My datastore told me his brush was a dandy brush, fed me information about how to groom a horse, but said nothing about the smooth upward flick at the end of the stroke, or how it raised small billows of dust from Yuri's coat to kindle golden as pollen in the bright midday light.

I watched him, and considered.

Talis considered Saskatoon Francis Xavier's territory. And it was FX and Rachel who had carried out the execution.

“The refuge,” I said. “Number—what was it?”

“Seven ninety-two.”

“It's Francis Xavier's station, and Rachel's.”

“Yeah. When I heard—when your Precepture went dark . . .” He seemed unwilling to say more, which seemed odd to me. Obviously I remembered the day the Cumberlanders had taken over the Precepture where I was being held. They'd tried to use me against my mother, broadcast an elaborate though ultimately minimally damaging torture sequence, which now played in my head in crisp color, as if I were watching a vid.

Why be so shy of mentioning it? I felt nothing.

But Talis rushed past the topic. “Trickle download through the refuge terminal. Which, tip for the future, is like turning your brain into toothpaste and squeezing it through a clogged tube; try to avoid it. Anyway. Trickle download, quick possession. I chose the Rider with the fastest horse.”

“So, Rachel and Francis Xavier,” I began.

“Think so,” said Talis. “I mean, not like they sent me a save-the-date card, but I'm definitely getting that vibe.”

“Is it allowed, that the Swan Riders . . .”

“Fraternize?” Talis grinned. “Oh, sure. The only thing more disruptive than romantic entanglements among the Swan Riders would be
secret
romantic entanglements among the Swan Riders. And one way or another they'd be pairing up, you know. They're so young.”

And—I was startled to realize—they
were
young. They were all young.

Sri was hard to peg. She might be in her twenties. But Francis Xavier and Rachel were younger—my age—though Rachel, of course, was currently being Talis, and therefore acted like a centuries-old half-insane demigod.