The Scorpion Rules (13 page)

Desperate, I went to our cell, and there I found her, lying in bed, limp as if fevered.

“Xie!” The name came out of me as if I'd been struck in the stomach. I could have folded up, knotted myself around relief and terror both. But she looked at me blankly and said nothing. Her little braids were spread out on the UN-blue pillow, limp and dark. I sat down on my own cot. The cell was so small that I could reach for her hand, cot to cot. She didn't reach back, though. She wasn't looking at me. All our codes and connections had fallen away. I felt adrift.

“Xie?” I whispered.

Nothing.

The glass roof over us seemed to dial in, like a microscope head, coming closer. The origami cranes twitched in a draft I couldn't feel. The room was bright and hot and still. And my best friend lay as if dead.

The silence was too long, and too much. I leaned forward and put my hand over hers. She still didn't stir, but she spoke—spoke as if to the ceiling. “Did you get the garlic in?”

“We did,” I said. “Grego needed a bit of a rest, but he helped with the last tray.” Da-Xia would be—normally would be—worried about Grego, whom she had last seen collapsed on the floor. I thought she would be relieved, but she did not even blink. “We missed you and Thandi.” I was fishing for my own reassurances. “And Elián, of course.”

Da-Xia said nothing.

“Xie,” I said, and heard my voice crack.

And then, finally, she spoke. Her voice was flat and plain. “A generation ago the Mountain Glacial States closed their southern reservoir gates and let what was left of Bangladesh vanish into a cholera storm. Two million people died. They didn't have enough water to keep their hands clean, and they
died
.”

Her voice was like a mask with no face under it. “We did that,” she said. “My father did that. He was nineteen years old.”

I felt my chin come up and my throat tighten. It was a gesture of pride, but a feeling of fear.

“Cumberland is thirsty,” she said. She was looking right at the Panopticon, and she was speaking far too plainly. “It's so cruel, thirst.”

“Xie, stop.” I slid forward and knelt beside her cot. The flagstones bruised my knees. “You have to stop.”

“Sometimes I run away,” she said.

“What?”

“Sometimes—I walk out the door and look at the brightest part of the sky until I can't see anything anymore. I get tired of seeing. So I run away.”

She was speaking as if directly to the Panopticon.

“The sex is the same thing,” she said. “Playing coyotes. I'm staring at the sun.”

Suddenly Xie was speaking faster, her voice wobbling. “You think . . . I don't understand you, Greta. I don't know why you can't see it. Elián—he's not being taught. He's not being disciplined. He's being tortured.”

“Da-Xia, stop.” Desperate, I leaned forward, as if to cover her with my body, to come between her and the Panopticon, to give her that shelter. Though it would not be enough. There could be bugs anywhere. In the cracks of the stone. In our clothing. Our skin. “Come back, Xie.”

“He's being tortured, Greta. Right in front of our eyes.”

“I know that. I do know.”

Though I hadn't. Not until I'd said it aloud.

“He's not even the first,” she said. Close up, I could see she was weeping. “Do you know what they did to Thandi when she came here? They used dreamlock, they used drugs. And I can't stop seeing—”

Her hand was locked on mine. I lifted my other hand and wiped her tears away.

Da-Xia had eyes. She saw things.

But when I saw Thandi the next morning, she was the same as she'd ever been.

They used dreamlock,
Xie had said yesterday. Of course, just because she had said it yesterday did not mean it had happened yesterday. It had been years ago. Still, I wondered how I had missed it. Was I truly so blind? I had been only ten when Thandi had been hostaged, but still: I could read Greek, at ten. Read Greek, and miss this? And now. Was there a little gel, maybe, in the hair around her temple?

But I stared at Thandi, and I swore she was unchanged.

And, finally, Elián.

Elián missed—was held through—lecture and lunch. It wasn't until after the fifth bell that he came out. The six of us were working just then under the pumpkin trellises, tying nets around the pumpkins so that they would not pull the vines down with their weight. I happened to glance around, and spotted Elián coming down the slope toward us.

I shot a look at Da-Xia, but she had her face raised to the sky. I turned back to Elián.
See him,
I said.
Look.
So I stopped working, and I watched him come.

There was something vulnerable about the way he walked, as if he were remembering how to do it, calling up each piece of the movement from the software. When he came under the trellis, he stopped. He stood there swaying.

I looked at him. He stared at me. “I like your hair,” he said. His samue was undone, falling away from his breastbone, flapping loose at his wrists.

“You should tie your shirt,” said Han. “There are ticks.”

Elián didn't seem to hear.

I could see the soft inside of his forearms; the faintest of branching marks, ghosts of bruises where electricity had followed the nerves under his skin. This was more than what had happened to me, to all of us. This was more; this was different. And I had missed it. “Elián,” I said. “Tie your shirt.”

Elián nodded and fumbled with the tie at his wrist. Well, it is in truth hard to do—the trick is to use your teeth—but he failed and then simply stood there with the little strip of cloth in his hand. His top drooped open. I could see the indentations where the ribs joined his sternum, like thumbprints in clay. He'd lost weight.

Torture will do that,
said a voice inside me. It was so—alien. The way I was just standing there. The voice in my head that did not seem my own. I felt as if I had been possessed. My known self was cold and small and still. Something larger and more wild had pushed it aside.

“Let me help you,” the larger me said.

Elián stood like a little child and let me do up the ties at his wrists. And still he didn't move. So I reached inside the wrap of his samue to do the interior tie. My hands slipped over his ribs. His skin was hot and dry. The spider-proctors skittered over my fingers. But in a moment I had him dressed.

Elián let his head tip forward, until his cheekbone pressed against my temple. “I really do love your hair,” he said.

Was he gone? Had his mind broken? Had I lost him before I had ever learned to see him? But even as I wondered, he lifted his hand and pressed it hard against my ear, turning his nose into my braids and crushing my head between his face and his hand. “It's too much,” he whispered, into the hair he loved. “It's too much, Greta. They're going to kill me.”

“I won't let them,” I said. And I did not know what I had become, but I knew I meant it.

T
hus my heart began to turn against the only truth I'd ever known.

I felt it turn. I felt Elián's heartbeat pounding against mine as I held him. It was like holding a bird: he was so breakable, all tremble and pulse. I held him for as long as I dared—knowing the Panopticon was watching, knowing that eventually the proctors would come—and then I pulled my body away from his. I led him under the pumpkins and put a bit of netting in his hand.

He looked at it. He looked at me, his eyes bewildered.

Then he took a big, gulpy-shuddery breath and started to work.

He took some time to recover himself—for several hours his movements had a strange deliberate quality, as if he'd been struck blind. I wished he could rest, but it was impossible, and he knew it was impossible, and so he worked. We tied up the pumpkins. We harvested the first of the acorn squashes and the last of the muskmelons. We pulled up early leeks. We watered in yesterday's garlic. Through the whole afternoon nothing unusual happened, except that Elián kept his mouth shut and his proctors did not hurt him.

In the heat of the afternoon, we went inside—and there the Abbot stood waiting.

The transept was shadowy after the September blaze, an open, empty space, all stone, like a grand hall with no grandeur. In it the Abbot looked rather small, and rather out of place, a machine among all those hand-cut, human stones.

Elián saw the old AI and stopped short, his hand reaching for me. But Xie reached not for support but to support: she put her hand on the small of my back. Xie understood the Precepture better than Elián ever would, and she knew it was not Elián the Abbot was waiting for. It was me. When I had stood, the others had stood too. I had power. And I'd just promised to use it.

I looked at the Abbot, and my larger, wilder soul had the strangest thought.
He is afraid,
I thought.
He is afraid of me.

I could feel the others draw closer: Thandi and Atta, Grego and Han, Elián gripping my hand, and Da-Xia at my back. They pulled closer like an honor guard—or like soldiers behind a king.

The Abbot was afraid of me. And he was right to be.

A proctor came up and tugged at the knee of my samue, its little claw hooked in the rough cloth. I held up a hand that said
Wait
, said
Peace
, said
The queen commands you
. The others kept their place as I followed the proctor without a word.

The Abbot and the proctor led me to the miseri. It was a different room by day—brighter, harsher. It seemed to offer less shelter. The Abbot opened his hand—fingers ticking faint as beetles on glass—toward the classics section. One of the column bookcases . . . something had happened to it. Books spilled at its base, jumbled over themselves, some facedown and broken-spined.

There were no other Children in the heart room at that time of day. A few proctors were scuttling. A big one—surely it was Elián's scorpion proctor, with its distinctive heavy build and eye-gleam joints—was sorting through the fallen books. I told myself that its strength was needed, because some of the books were big.

“Greta, dear, sit down,” said the Abbot.

I sank down. The memory cushion shaped itself to me and held me. The big proctor tapped nearer. Its iris snapped in and out as it looked me over.

The Abbot settled beside me. The bent stalk of his body made him look like a man with a stoop. “Dear child,” he said. “Are you frightened?”

“Good Father,” I answered. “Are you?”

He tipped his head a little. I think it was meant to convey surprise. “No. Merely . . . melancholy.”

Surely he was not about to say he was disappointed in me. I might laugh in his face.

He looked at me and read at least some of that. “Ah, Greta,” he said. “Greta, you know I am not supposed to have favorites. What you may not know is that you have embodied the ideals of this humble school as well as anyone else in three generations. You are the favorite I do not have, and so, I permit myself a personal question: Are you frightened?”

He sounded so sincere. It was leaching the wildness out of me. “Frightened?”

“I gather you are upset at how Mr. Palnik has been treated.”

Sweat prickled on my back. “Somewhat, Father.”

“Hmmmm,” he said. Strong yellow light came through the tinted ceiling, showing the dappled oxides and tiny dents of his aluminum casing. Old. He looked old. He sighed, steepling his fingers. Unlike the proctors, his joints were no longer perfect; they made creaks and ticks. I wondered if they pained him. “I've pushed Elián, I admit. Perhaps I have even pushed him harder than I should. But, Greta, you have to understand. We have so little time.”

So little time.

Last Christmas the queen my mother had commanded my portrait to be painted. We had fought over the matter. I wanted to be painted in the white clothes of the Precepture, as is proper: the Children of Peace, around the world, are so depicted. The portraits of the sacrificed Pan Polar hostages are hung in the portrait gallery in the Halifax palace. They glow against the dark panelling. When I was small, I thought they were angels.