The Scorpion Rules (15 page)

I had my back to Xie. The silence between us was like an electric charge.

“They assigned Elián a cell,” said Da-Xia. “They put him with Atta.”

Elián had not had the best evening. I'd watched him over the green beans. His eyes had been feverishly bright, and he had twitched like a cat that—well, like a cat that had been tortured. But he had done a Precepture-worthy job of pretending nothing was wrong.

“Good news,” I said.

“I'm glad you think so,” said Xie. “My guess is the Abbot is trying to keep you happy.”

There was nothing safe to say to that, but I still felt myself beginning to smile. It was a powerful feeling.

Now, if I could only use that power to lift grass stains . . . “Honestly,” I muttered. “Who makes work clothes white?”

“The same person who puts executioners in angel's wings.”

Talis, with his Swan Riders, and his endless taste for ritual.

“Also,” said Xie, getting up, “they're based on the work clothes of Zen monks.”

I didn't feel particularly monkish.

Xie glanced skyward. It was the last of twilight, nearly full dark. Beyond the glass roof, the stars were prickling on, one by one.

A bell rang, the seventh bell, to command us to sleep.

“Will you sleep?” Xie asked.

“The Abbot said I should come to him, if I didn't.”

Da-Xia smiled for the Panopticon, but her eyes were black. They said,
Don't
.

They use dreamlock. They use drugs.

“It's fine,” I said. “I'm not tired.”

“Will you be all right?” If she left, she meant. If she went to play coyotes. She'd stepped close enough to the door to trigger its silent slide. Xie had kissed me, but Xie kissed everyone. She stood there on the edge of leaving, her alb like a sail in the moonlight, the rest of her a dark sea.

For three years she'd been slipping out. I had never wanted to know with whom. I had been quite deliberate about not asking. And yet suddenly—

“Who do you meet, out there?” I asked.

Xie was shadowed by the lintel—hidden there from the Panopticon, with the hallway dark behind her. I couldn't see her face well, but I did see the glimmer of her smile. “Will you come with me?”

I thought she was dodging the question. “Really, Xie. Who?”

“Whoever I can get my hands on, really.” The smile fluttered away. “Mostly Atta. It's always been Atta.”

Atta the silent. Like a star that didn't have the mass to begin fusion, Atta was a weight and a pull in the system, a dark star to Xie's moon. I was startled, and said the first thing that came to me: “Does he talk to you?”

“Not much.” Her face was in the thickest dark now, invisible. “Not since we lost the baby. Two years ago.”

She stood in the doorway, in the shadow, in the silence. I think she was waiting for me to say something. What could I possibly say? Many of us Children are dynastic rulers, and it is in no one's interest to see the Preceptures produce bastard princes, so: “There are drugs—we take drugs.”

“There are ways around drugs.”

“But—”

“But they found out. Obviously. Atta thought they would send me home, but—but that is not what they did.”

“Xie . . . ,” I whispered. Two years ago she'd been fifteen.
Fifteen.
“My God, Xie . . .”

She'd been silent that fall, dulled like an eclipsed moon. I had thought her ill, or worried over her schoolwork, or over some threat of war she knew of and I did not. I'd scoured the dispatches for that phantom war. I'd helped her with her philosophy papers. Her Greek. To read Greek, and miss this. I felt as if I'd had my eyes closed for years.

“I don't love him,” said Xie. She might have been talking to the moon: her voice was soft and distant. “I think I did, back then, but . . . It's just shared sorrow, between us, now.”

“But at least it's shared.”

She looked back up at me. “At least it's shared.”

I took three steps, and came into the doorway with her. A small space. The hem of her alb swung over my bare feet. I could smell the harsh soap on her hands, and smell something softer, too, like musk and clover. I could sense the movement of her breath. “Take me with you,” I said. “Let's go outside.”

You cannot control a man if you take everything from him. You must leave him something to lose.

Therefore, the Precepture had its loose places, and this was one of them—playing coyotes, slipping outside at night. It only made sense, I'd long told myself. Better coyotes than armed rebellion; better sex than pitchforks. It was only logical then, that getting outside was easy. This was the Precepture's way of letting off steam, and one doesn't want one's pressure valve blocked.

And yet, the ease with which we left the Precepture hall unnerved me. It was too simple. Xie led me through the refectory, its tables long slabs of gleam. We wove through the complex shadows of the kitchens, and went down a flight of stairs. The cellars were utterly dark and smelled of another season: cold earth, dampness, potatoes. I stumbled into something and then jumped at a fleshy touch—but it was only Xie, reaching back to take my hand.

Up some steps then, spiderwebs and dust. Something creaked, and an indigo panel of sky appeared over me. Xie stood in it, framed and shining. She shouldered the door of the root cellar all the way open, and we climbed up into the night.

And that was all there was to it.

Xie stood in the open air and stretched. “There are tunnels,” she said. “Out to the toolshed, over to the dairy, even all the way up to the launch spire and Charlie's pen.”

“Tunnels, heh?” Elián Palnik drawled out of the darkness. “I want a map.”

Xie laughed. “Of course you do.”

“Elián.” I was—exasperated? How was I meant to save him, if he took such risks? “A single night in the cells was too many for you?”

“And five thousand was too many for you?” he snapped back at me—but then he switched tones with a sigh. “I just wanted to see the sky.”

Where on Earth had he been? Before he had been assigned a cell, where had he been, that he couldn't see the sky?

“The tunnels don't matter,” said Atta. Elián and I both spun to look at him—Atta. Atta the silent. His voice was as thick as dust and honey. “It is an illusion. They can read our minds. They watch us everywhere.”

“Atta,” whispered Xie, and touched him wonderingly, as if he were gold.

I don't love him,
she'd said. And maybe not. But I knew her—she would give him what she could. She would take care of him, if she could. It wouldn't have to be out of love.

Was that why she had kissed me?

I stared at them until Elián took my elbow and drew me away. “Let's let them have their illusion of privacy, huh?” He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder as he strolled away. “So that's a thing?”

“That is . . .” I swallowed, bewildered. “That is a thing.”

He laughed low. “Listen to you. You sound almost human.”

We were walking aimlessly, down the terraces, through the gardens. They were different by night, black and silver, like ancient photographs.

“I could give you lessons on contractions, if'n you want.” Elián exaggerated his accent, as he did when he was nervous. “And then we could do slang.”

“I speak as I speak, Elián.”

“That you do,” he said very softly. Every step we took sent grasshoppers flying up around us. In the distance, I could hear coyotes—real coyotes, not children playing at them. It sounded like half-grown pups, trying out the yips and growls and laughs in their nearly human voices. It reminded me oddly of a cocktail party as heard from around the bend of a quiet hallway: a Halifax sound.

Elián sighed and stretched his arms up, looking suddenly very tall. “Do you think they'll let us go all the way down to the river?”

“I doubt it.” The proctor Xie had destroyed “accidentally.” I had no doubt it had been replaced or repaired. That it was ready.

In front of us the terraces dropped away. At the bottom the river looped through its floodplain, gleaming like glass. Behind us, though neither of us turned to look, was the bulk of the Precepture hall, and the loom of the Panopticon mast, twisting and dark like a cricket's exoskeleton.

An illusion,
Atta had said.
They can read our minds.
But they couldn't. Could they?

The Abbot could come close, but much good would that power do him. I did not myself know what I was thinking.

“I don't care if it is a fake,” Elián said, as if responding to my thoughts and not to the last thing Atta had said. “Don't care a bit. An hour or so without those spiders—I'll take it.”

“They've left you?”

“When I took off my shirt. They just dropped off. Like full-up ticks.”

“So of course you went straight out to find another limit to push.”

“Well, of
course
,” he laughed. “They pushed me 'til I cracked and I've cracked right up. I'm dreaming about strolling hand in hand with Princess Greta.”

“We're not hand in hand.”

He took my hand. “In a moonlit garden.”

“The moon's not up yet.”

He stopped and turned to me. “And I'm not dreaming.”

“You need to take this seriously, Elián. The Cumberland Alliance—”

“I know.” He took my other hand, rubbing his thumbs over the ridges of my knuckles. “We're going to war. And that means they're going to kill us. I know.”

“Then why do you make them treat you—”

His thumbs stopped moving. “
Make
them?” he echoed. “God, Greta.” He let go of my hands. We stood facing each other a moment, in the dark garden. Then Elián took two hard steps away from me and sat down on a big stone that braced the terrace. “So,” he said, his voice suddenly cool. “What about you? Ready to die?”

“It might yet not come to that. The Pan Polar Confederacy is a superpower.” And the Cumberland Alliance, though I hated to say it to Elián, was a barely cohesive lump of leftovers, whose predecessor state had just lost a war with
Mississippi
, of all places. I settled for: “To take us on . . . Cumberland would be badly outclassed. They may not attack.”

The Abbot didn't believe that. My mother didn't believe that. I didn't believe that. But I tried to hang on to it, for a moment.

Elián didn't let me. “We might be
outclassed
,” he said, loading the word so heavily that it overflowed, dripping sarcasm. “But we won't be outsmarted. Maybe we can't win if we put our troops in pretty little lines to get shot at—so we won't do it that way.”

“You can't just alter the laws of war.”

“You don't know my grandmother,” said Elián. “She could alter the laws of
physics
, if she gave them this particular look she's got.”

“But Talis—”

“But nothing. We're going to war, Greta. I knew it when I got here, and I still know it. You and me, Princess, we're going to die.”

He was certain as a stone.

Quietly—supple-spined, because I
was
a princess—I sat down on the terrace beside him.

“Do you know when? Did Armenteros tell you when?”

He paused. “Guess she could have, huh? Never thought of that.” I'd just broken his heart a little. I could see the crack. “No, they didn't tell me. What about you?”

“I—I suppose my mother thinks it kinder, if I don't know when it's coming.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Kinder.”

His accent was thick enough that it could have been “kind of.” Kind of kinder. And was it? I didn't know. Maybe it was.

“I've been reading,” I said.

“Course you have. You studied up.” Elián laughed, faint as starlight. “What do you reckon, then? How long?”

“Weeks,” I said. “The diplomats have reached their endgame. No more than weeks.”

“Days?” he said.

“Maybe days.”

He closed his eyes. “And all I can come up with is ways of getting the goats into the library.”

I choked on a laugh and it came out my nose—the approved royal fashion, of course.

“I love you,” Elián said.

“What?”
All this talk of our death, and yet it was that that made me squawk.

“I love you laughing. I just—” He reached out toward me. I tensed. He stopped, his hands midair. “It's just— You look so different. With your hair down.”

In my haste to follow Xie, I'd simply left my hair in its ponytail. It hung past my waist.

“Different?” I was not sure if that was good or bad. It was utterly ridiculous that, in the face of death, I wanted to know which.

But I wanted to know which.

Elián nodded. “Real different. . . . Can I . . . ?” He reached around behind me, and I felt his fingers fumble at the nape of my neck. My whole skin shivered in the warm night. He was close to me, and I could smell the soap on him—the same as the soap on Xie's hands—and I imagined how those hands would taste. Lye, like an electric shock to the tongue. Elián worked the knot open, and then lifted my hair from my spine and spread it over my shoulders like a cape. Hair has no nerve endings, and yet every brush of my hair across my throat made me glitter and jolt.