The Scorpion Rules (18 page)

“And fetch me Burr,” I heard Armenteros say as the door closed. “I need this thing to talk.”

It was beautiful outside, one of those first days when summer rounds the corner and can see fall. It was not cold or even cool, but the air held the promise that the suffocating heat would not return. It was a day like a newly sharpened pencil, full of possibilities. There was, for instance, a whacking great spaceship parked at the top of the hill.

There were also, for some reason I could not quite grasp, a lot of soldiers about, standing like a line of scarecrows along the top of the uppermost terrace. In the flat space between the soldiers and the Precepture hall, the Children of Peace were huddled, still and watchful, like egrets.

Gregori and Da-Xia took me the other way, around to the back of the Precepture, up past the toolshed and the trellis crops, toward the line of whirligig wind generators and the induction spire. We did not go up there, though. The ship was there, and more soldiers, who did not look very civilized.

Soldiers. . . . We were at war. Now, right now, we were at war. The Rider would come. She would say my name, and Elián's, and—

I wobbled, my headache rising. Elián dashed toward the toolshed and upended an empty water trough to make a seat. Grego and Xie sat me down.

Damaged—the gardens were damaged. The goats were loose, and the pumpkin trellis was splayed flat against the ground. The rows of corn were flattened as if by a monstrous hand.

“They've knocked down the pumpkins,” I said.

“Greta . . .” Xie looked at me, sidelong. “Greta, the Precepture's been taken. Captured.”

“Oh,” I said. “Do you think we'll be able to save the corn?”

“Let's take her to her cell,” said Elián. “Maybe she can sleep it off.”

“No.” Horror froze me. “No sleep.”

“All right.” Elián touched my hair. “No sleep.”

He was brave and he thought I was strong. I leaned into his hand, into his leg. Something hard caught the soft part of my cheek: there was a pistol on his hip. “Elián . . . You're armed.”

“My grandmother— We're at war.”

Elián's grandmother—Wilma Armenteros. I had accepted a formal declaration of war. I had no authority to do any such thing. “I should be sure Armenteros knows I'm not a plenipotentiary.”

“Oh, sure,” said Elián. “'Cause I'll bet she's worried about that.”

“And look at the corn,” I said. “This is worse than the food fight.”

“They sent a shock ship,” Grego explained. “It doesn't decelerate until it's nearly on top of you. The troops have to ride sideways to survive the g-forces. They have compression gear, special harnesses. It is the sonic boom that did this damage to the crops.”

“Yes, great, thank you, Gregori,” said Elián.

And Xie said, “Greta, the corn doesn't matter.”

“How can you say that?” Suddenly I found myself weeping. “How can you say that?” We needed the corn; we needed all this food. “Don't you want to live? I want to live.”

I was so surprised to hear myself say it that I woke up.

I woke up with tears on my cheeks. It had been real—it held together, as much as I could piece it. The Cumberlanders had sent a shock ship and knocked out the Precepture's defenses and communications with an electromagnetic pulse, an EMP. The Abbot had had some bare warning of it, and had used that warning to pull me out of dreamlock.

There are shielded places we can go,
the Abbot had said. He could have saved himself—and he did need to save himself. AIs had died in EMP attacks. It was part of what EMPs had been designed to do, once upon a time, in a less appropriate-tech age—take out enemy artificial intelligences. (
Oh yeah,
said the Utterances,
I'm totally banning those
.)

But the Abbot had not tried to save himself. He'd tried to save me.

And he had succeeded. Probably. More or less. It was Grego who had finished disconnecting the net of dreamlock magnets—his interest in blinking lights paying off at last—but it was the Abbot's sacrifice that had saved me. My head was throbbing, and my vision was too sharp, rainbow-edged, but that hard word that Grego had used—“damage”—I didn't think there was any.

But before I could say so, Elián, always too agitated, stood up. “We should get her to a neuromapper,” he said. “A doctor. Somebody.”

Da-Xia looked at him as a goddess looks at a mortal who has just given her a spoiled orange. “Elián, I don't think any of us are going anywhere. And particularly not Greta.”

I turned to her. “Why's that?”

Xie looked at me and knew at once that I was awake again. She glanced by habit toward the Panopticon.

It was gone.

The Panopticon—gone. It must have been knocked down by the sonic boom. It lay across the clumped prairie grass in chunks and shards.

Nothing was watching us. Nothing. I felt—cut adrift.

I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes and tried to sort out our situation logically. “Cumberland has attacked the Precepture directly, in advance of a declaration of war.”

Even with my eyes covered I could hear Da-Xia's scholarly nod. “So far as I know.”

“Greta?” said Elián, delicately. “Are you all right?”

I ignored him and blinked the spots away. “Help me work it out, Xie. To attack the Precepture— It is audacious and illegal. But it may make strategic sense. The Cumberlanders cannot win against the Pan Polar Confederacy under the rules of war. But wage a different kind of war, take hostages against the PanPols, take hostages to prevent the UN's action—that has some hope.”

Grego bit his lip. He has of course little pigmentation in his lips, and I could see the blood rising to the pressure of his teeth. “This has been tried,” he said, his accent thickening. “When the Kush states struck against Precepture Seven.”

We all knew what had happened there. Not for nothing is Talis called the Butcher of Kandahar.

“You don't think that Talis will . . .” Elián's voice was suddenly thin. He was thinking of—Nashville, perhaps? Cleveland? Indianapolis itself?

There was no reason to think it would be only one.

“Talis holds that the Precepture system stops wars,” said Da-Xia. “He will do whatever he must to save our Precepture. The entire Cumberland is expendable, next to that.”

City goes boom,
said the Utterances, commenting on the destruction of the last people to attack a Precepture.
It's really not meant to be subtle.

It was not subtle, but Elián was struggling, truly struggling, to keep up. I had just spent three days having my thoughts professionally scrambled, but I was doing better than he was. He looked small inside his fatigues, like a child playing dress-up.

“The next question,” I told him, “is, why hasn't Talis struck already?”

“And the answer,” said Da-Xia, “is that the Cumberlanders have us. The hostages,” she said, “are now hostages.”

Elián scrubbed at his face. For a long time he was silent, stunned. Then he said: “Y'all really took that Socratic method shit to heart.”

“The benefits,” I intoned, “of a Precepture education.”

“Yes,” deadpanned Grego. “We were raised on Latin and Greek instead of love.”

Before Xie could crack up—I could see her starting to—and before Elián could reply, there was a shout.

“Hey!” One of the soldiers came across the grass toward us. His gun sat easily in his hands, as if it were a hoe, and he a gardener. “Isn't that Princess what's-her-name?” He was looking at Elián.

“Greta,” supplied Elián.

“Well, get her out in the open, okay? The shed blocks too many sight lines. Armenteros wants a close monitor on her.”

Grego stepped between me and the soldier, raising his hand like a schoolboy. “Maybe you do not notice,” he said, “but she's hurt.”

“Just a little too much sun,” I told the soldier. I did not need to advertise to the Cumberlanders how much it would take to break me. Let them think it would be easy, and maybe they would go easy. I got up, and let myself tremble, playing the delicate flower. “I'm all right, Gregori.”

“Take her round with the others,” the soldier ordered Elián, who still hadn't caught on. In uniform, armed, he had been mistaken for our guard.

The others. My friends. What had they done with my friends?

“We're going,” I said, and I led the way, with our bewildered “guard” trailing us.

Xie caught Elián by the elbow, which damaged his credibility, but seemed necessary: he did not look remotely like our military escort. She looked sidelong at him. “You're really not the most focused laser in the array, are you?”

“Hey!” Elián retorted, with laser-like brilliance. Then: “Just because I don't have
the
benefits of a Precepture education
 . . .” He exaggerated my precision into mockery.

Da-Xia shook her head. “Elián, listen to me, try to understand. We've been taken
hostage
. The Cumberlanders will use us against the UN. And they'll use Greta against the PanPols. It will beyond a doubt get ugly.”

Ugly.
Yes. Yes, it would.

Elián was trotting along with us now, so Xie dropped his arm. “You have,” she said, “about thirty seconds to pick a side.”

Around the flank of the Precepture hall we found Atta, Han, and Thandi sitting side by side in the grass, their backs to the soldiers in what had to be a deliberate choice, a tiny gesture of defiance. They had not been singled out or taken away. My friends.

They stood as they spotted us, and in a moment we were face-to-face, the three of them and the four of us. It felt as if we were not so much reuniting as squaring off. Why?

“Elián,” said Thandi acidly. “Nice look.”

Oh, right. That.

“Nice gun, too,” said Thandi. “Really, it's good to know there'll be a friendly face on the firing squad.”

“Thandi, don't,” murmured Xie.

From all around, the sun glinted off the weapons trained on us. On me.

Elián was floundering. “I'm sorry, guys,” he said. “I really am.”

Thandi sneered. “I'm sure Greta will remember that when Armenteros starts digging in her claws.”

I stiffened my face as if that could shut my ears. I didn't want to hear about claws. Not yet.

Elián was looking from one half of the unbalanced circle to the other. “Look, I know Grandma's not exactly cuddles and puppies. But I'm still gonna side with the people who
haven't
had my soft bits hooked up to electrodes all summer, okay?”

Something ugly—memory?—crawled across Thandi's face.

Elián looked stricken.

“It's all right,” I told him softly.

He answered with a snarl like a wounded lion. “Dammit, Greta, it's not
all right
.”

He pushed both fists into his face and stood like that, not looking at me, not looking at any of us. My hands twitched at my side. I ached to reach out for him. He thought I was strong, and I needed to be strong. I needed him.