The Scorpion Rules (33 page)

I had just made a note about ruling the world.

Talis—he'd been human, once. Ambrose, our Abbot, who had the charge of this terrible place—he'd been a hostage child. What had happened to them? What was going to happen to me?

I watched the ship shrink to a pinpoint, and inside I shook.

“Let's go down to the river,” said Da-Xia.

Elián looked startled. “Will they let us?”

“They'll let me,” I said, sure of it. I relished the surety—and I was frightened by the relish. It was early for power to change me, and it would not be only power. I wondered exactly how it was that a boy named Michael had become a monster.

We gathered the others and went down through the alfalfa—which was coming back up nicely; we should get one more cutting out of it, to feed the goats through the winter—to the sandy shingle of the looping river.

The water was cold and clear, flashing with minnows.

Da-Xia and Atta went wading in the shallow water, each with an arm wrapped around Han, who moved between them like a sleepwalker. Thandi and Elián competed at skipping stones.

I sat on the horizontal branch of a cottonwood tree that overhung the water, and watched myself in the bright surface, my reflection distorted and continually washing away.

It was a good day. It was beautiful.

In due course Elián lost his skipping stone contest—because no one beats Thandi at anything—and came and stood before me. The current eddied around his shins, lapping the bottom of his rolled-up camouflage. He put his hands on my knees and cocked his head to look up at me. “That night in the garden,” he said, and then stopped. He squeezed my knees and looked bewildered. “I kissed you,” he said. “I woulda sworn—I could have sworn you were kissing me too.”

A twist and flush started at my belly button and crept both up and down. “I was. I did.”

“But—” He let go of one of my knees and ran his hand up the back of his head, against the grain of his once-again floppy hair. (Talis did that too.) “You don't love me.”

“Oh, Elián.” It was not that simple. Not nearly. “I—I'm sixteen years old. And I've been asleep my whole life.” I tilted forward on the branch—so far that I would have fallen if he hadn't reached up to brace me. But he did brace me, and I had known that he would. I trusted him, and—I loved him?

I looked past him to where Atta and Xie had their arms around Han, their hands joined at the small of his back. Then I leaned forward, and kissed Elián on the mouth. It was soft and slow, neither of us pushing the other, both taking warmth and comfort, if not the more that he wanted. “You woke me up, Elián Palnik.”

“Like Sleeping Beauty,” he said, with a rough, sad smile. “My princess.”

It was not really what I had meant—it was his scream that had awakened me, not his kiss—but I let him have the interpretation. Why not? And the kiss
had
helped. “You woke me up,” I said again.

“And you saved me,” he answered.

I kissed him again, and he pulled me even farther forward, until he'd pulled me from the branch and I was in his arms, held in his arms as if he were a prince in a storybook—held in his arms as I had been the night on the shock ship, when I'd been damaged and terrified. But now I felt only . . . held. Treasured. Safe. Still.

So naturally, Elián Palnik—forever bad with stillness—chose that moment to dunk me into the river.

T
he second day was the day Talis killed Wilma Armenteros.

I do not wish to dwell on it. These are the bare facts. He used the apple press, and the torso.

Tolliver Burr was made to film it. I do not imagine he minded.

A fact, also: the Precepture is a small place. With the windows thrown open to the beautiful September day, there was no escaping the sounds.

Da-Xia took me by the hand, and we ran from our cell. Together we found Elián. He was huddled and shivering in the kitchen, with his back to one of the stoves. We grabbed up a glowstick and went running through the four-hundred-fifty-step tunnel up to the stone pile, and then past it, over the ridge top and onto the wide golden prairie. There we found the crater, where Elián's road had once been blocked by a beam from the sky. The blasted interior was still a bare saucer of earth, here and there cracked open by fireweed, which had already produced its filament bundles of seed—plants like veins of ash. Elián tumbled over the edge, cowered against the crater rim, and wept.

I held him in my arms until the distant screaming stopped—and then he struggled free and dashed into the center of the crater and fell again to his knees. This time Xie went to him and sat holding his hand. I twisted the fireweed between my fingers—my so-nearly-crushed fingers—and the wiry stems gave off a strong smell, wild, as bitter as yarrow. The seeds lifted on the wind.

Wilma Armenteros.

Talis had promised to make a legend of her, and I had no doubt that he would succeed.

But Spartacus had become legend too, and not quite in the way that the Romans had intended.

We stayed in the crater even after the screams had stopped. The wind blew the grass in waves, bright as straw on their crests, dark in the troughs, restless as the sea. It made a low and constant sound. There were coneflowers in bloom, and monarchs in the milkweed. My nose got sunburned. I think we sat there a long time.

It was Talis himself who fetched us in the end, or fetched me, turning up blood-smudged and grinning. He was holding Tolliver Burr by a wire round his neck. “Hey, Greta,” he said. “Thought you might want to get in on this bit.”

I looked at the pair of them, jolted by the uncanny picture, the dissonance—the wolf-lean, leathery man being held by a slip of a girl with a boyish haircut and dirt smeared across her nose.

Except she wasn't a girl.

And it wasn't dirt.

“No,” I said.

“Ah, come on,” Talis coaxed. “He's nearly wetting himself. It'll be fun.” He let Burr go, and the man staggered free and bolted by pure instinct: three steps, four, five.

Talis pointed at him without breaking his gaze with me. “Don't run,” he said. “I swear you'll regret it if you run.” Burr stumbled and stopped, falling to his knees. Talis closed the distance between them like a king on a stage. He bent down and spoke low and sweet. “Run, and I'll start with your feet. Work my way up.”

“Lord Talis,” Burr gasped. “Please.”

“Don't ‘Lord' me,” snapped Talis. “It's way too late for that.”

Panting, Burr closed his eyes.

“These are my
children
.” Talis grabbed Burr by the chin and made him look at us. The man's eyes came open, his face crushed with the pressure of the grip and distorted with fear. “They are
sacrosanct
.
How dare you? 
”

Da-Xia stood up. “Talis.” Her voice rang out like a temple bell.

“Now, you, I'd take a ‘Lord' from,” said Talis. Then he looked at her, his eyebrows coming up, grin blossoming. “Oooo, look. She's going to rebuke me. How cute is that?”

“You made tools of us.” Da-Xia was barefoot in the prickly grass, and the bread-smelling wind was blowing straggles of hair into her face, but she looked more like a god than he did. Far more. “Have you never considered: The thing of a tool is that anyone might use it.”

Talis didn't answer, but his face quieted, and slowly the grin came off it.

I looked at Burr; I looked at the blood on Talis's hands.

“I've been here already.” I was thinking of the moment on the shock ship: the blood between my toes, the gun at the end of my arm. “I could have killed him. I let him go.” That
point vierge
moment. The moment in which I had reclaimed myself, though terrified. Redeemed my soul from fear.

I looked at Talis and said, “I want to let him go.”

Talis blinked at me, and dropped Burr's chin. “What, seriously?”

I didn't answer. I had been serious enough, and I knew he could see it.

Talis took a step back. A long silence. “Fine,” he said.

“What?” said Tolliver Burr.

“Fine,” said Talis. “Go.”

Burr gaped at him.

“Saskatoon,” said Talis, pointing out over the trackless prairie with one finger, “is that way.
Go.
”

Burr got up, looking gormless. One could almost see the questions circling his head like stars. Talis said nothing. We all looked at Burr. And we all said nothing. Burr stared from face-to-face—and then he broke into a shambling run, skirting the crater, making for the open plain.

“Well, that's boring.” Talis flipped a hand toward Burr's shrinking form. “He might even live.”

“No,” said Elián, who had set out on that path himself once. “Probably not.”

Talis scratched behind his ear like a hound, watching Burr move out of sight. “Right, well. Two things. One: Greta, your mother wants to talk to you. Two: Does anyone know how to sterilize a scalpel?”

In a slight variation of my don't-encourage-him policy, I didn't ask about the scalpel. I was not sure I wanted to know. I had, after all, taken a master class in anticipation from a torturer, and I had learned that ignorance really can be a kindness.

Talis sulked when no one rose to his bait, but he didn't press. He hooked me under the arm, and took me back to the Precepture, to the miseri.

He'd dug out from somewhere—the Cumberland equipage?—a tablet of smartplex the size of a piece of paper folded in two. I sat down at the map table with it. The tablet was a Halifax thing, and it did not belong in the Precepture, but it sat as comfortably as a book in my hands, and was better by far than the jolt of seeing my mother's face overtake the familiar screen of one of my teachers.

Still, I had to take a breath, and two, and three, before I tapped it on. Talis hovered.

“Mother,” I said.

The screen came to life. I got my mother's privy secretary, a hasty bow, and then my mother herself, sinking into her chair with a scroop of satin. The heavy loops of her wig were caught up in a jeweled net, but her glasses were wire-rimmed and plain, ordinary things. By this I knew she was not meeting me with ceremony, but with love. “Greta . . .” She looked over my shoulder. “Thank you, Lord Talis.”

“Oh, hey. You bet.”

“And now, if you would leave us? ‘Shoo,' is that how one puts it?”

How I loved my mother.

Talis raised both eyebrows, but then made a sweeping bow. “As you wish.” Then: “Greta?” He closed a hand over my shoulder in parting, his fingers finding the tender places where he had healed me. “Surgery's next. Meet you in your room.”

And before I had a moment to say he was by no means welcome in my room, he was gone.

“Surgery?” My mother's voice almost cracked. I could see her do exactly as I would once have done: swallow the question to allow me my own space and dignity.

“Don't,” I said. “You're already so far away . . .”

She looked so close that I might touch her, reach for her as if for a book. I put my fingers on the smartplex. But I also knew how it would look to her. She was sitting at the dressing table where she took private calls. I would be in place of her mirrored reflection, caught in the glass, reaching out.

“You're so far away,” I said again.

“I wish I were not,” she said. “I wish I had not always been.” She put her fingers against mine. I felt nothing. Pearls and sapphires glowed in the net that held her hair. “The broadcast, Greta. The—apple press . . .”

Well, there was a word I would never be able to hear again. I felt as if there were still screams ringing around in the hollows of my ears.

“Don't faint.” My mother was leaning close, her breath almost fogging the mirror between us. “Should I call you help? Father Abbot!”

But he wasn't there. It was only me, and she, and the distance.