The Scorpion Rules (37 page)

I knelt. “Abbot.”

His monitor turned against the book-pillow. His facescreen was pixelated, his eyes only intermittently showing as coins of grey.

“Greta?” I could hear the synthetic parts of his voice—this tone and that tone—blurring slightly out of sync. My new sensors could see the currents moving through him, falling from capacitive plane to capacitive plane like water down steps of ice.
Cascade,
came the word. A cascade failure. It was washing him away.

“Good Father.” I took his hand. “I'm here.”

Da-Xia came and took his other hand. “Cannot Talis repair you?”

His head twitched against the books, the sound of a page being turned. “He could, I—” A spark, then, jumping down that slope like a coyote hunting. “Greta, please, I wanted—”

“Father Abbot.” I squeezed his hand.
How much of a man? This much.
“Father.
Ambrose.
”

His voice was entirely synthetic now, like a pipe organ given speech. “Tell him not.”

“Not what?”

“Repair.”

“Ambrose,” I said, again.

“No repair.” His face swung to me, blind, weaving from side to side like a snake's head finding by smell. My velvet hair prickled with instinctual fear. Then his eye icons resolved, and for one second he was my Abbot again. “Forgive,” he said.

And nothing more.

Da-Xia's eyes met my eyes over his body—wide, shocked.

Elián—and I realized it had been Elián who had piled the book-pillow, who had kept this vigil—Elián touched the side of the Abbot's main casing where Tolliver Burr had once forced his wires. “God knows I hated you,” he said, and swallowed. “God knows I had cause.” His hand shifted, soft, against the frozen monitor, as if to brush closed the eyes. “God knows what you used to be,” he said. “God knows.”

Xie steepled her hands around her nose, covering her mouth. Tears sprang up in her eyes. “What will we do?”

I thought,
I have just seen my death.

But I said, “Something new.”

We left the Abbot's body lying in the golden light. What else could we have done? Talis had given me three days, and it had been three days. We went hand in hand. Da-Xia and Elián, walking me. The grey room wasn't far away. Its ordinary, ever-closed door.

That door was open. Talis was inside, sitting on the high narrow table, swinging his feet. He hopped down when he saw us, and rubbed his hands dry against the faded spots on the thighs of his jeans. “Where's old Ambrose? Thought he'd want to see you off.”

“He did,” Elián said, smooth as a cat. Who knew if such a death were reversible, but even if it were, surely time would make it less so. Let the Abbot have that time.

The Abbot. The grey room. He had done this, once. He had lived. But later he had wanted to die.

Under the lintel, Talis opened his hand through the doorway with a very Talisy grin. “Your table awaits.”

I froze and swallowed.

Talis let the grin drop away. “Ready?” he asked softly.

Without prompting, without a word, Elián and Da-Xia folded themselves around me, hugging me, covering me like wings. For a moment we three paused there, our arms gripping each other tightly, our breath mingling, our foreheads resting together. “So, right,” Elián whispered. “Xie, you take the snap; Greta, you go long . . .”

I knew he was joking, but I had to stop him: I couldn't bear it. “Elián,” I whispered.

Da-Xia was weeping without a sound, her tears dripping down onto the flagstones. Rain on the mountains. “Hold on,” she said. “Hold on, Greta. Please hold on.”

I could not even tell her that I would. I did not know if I could. I could not speak at all. I straightened up.

“Ready?” said Talis, again.

“Willing,” I said, which is a different thing.

And I walked alone into the grey room.

T
he door whispered closed.

That room. Its soft walls, its carefully filtered light. It was—I could feel it, now, in my new sensors—it was washed in radiation, hidden collimators on the walls humming like bees. “My friends—” I began.

“It would kill them to stay here. It would kill me, for that matter— Twice. Scramble me and kill Rachel. I'm afraid you'll have to go solo.”

“I know,” I said. Then: “Okay.”

Talis patted the surface of the high table. “Hop up.”

The aluminum surface was even with my ribcage. “That would be undignified.” I truly did not want to spend my last human moments struggling to hoist myself to death.

“Oh, right! Forgot!” He hooked his foot around something stored underneath the table. It slid out—a milking stool. It could have been centuries old. Its use had polished it like gold-grey glass.

A milking stool.

It struck me as horrible, suddenly, that someone had thought of this way to boost us to the right height for our deaths. The gamma rays crawled over my skin. I put my foot on the milking stool, my hands on the table, and I boosted myself up. “What do you do with the little ones?” I asked. “The babies?”

Talis shrugged, preoccupied. “The Riders lift them. Does it matter?”

“It does,” I said. “It should.”

“Lie down,” he said.

“Talis—” I said, and then could not think of a thing to say.

“Put your head,” he said, putting one finger on the tabletop, where the intersecting radiation beams (though still quiescent) made a bright spot that only the two of us would have been able to see. “Just here.”

I put my head just there.

The bright spot was brighter than I'd anticipated. I squinted, but it wasn't that kind of bright. I could see the sparkles of ionization where high-energy particles were entering the soft gel of my eyes. “This will blind me,” I said.

“Hmmmm?” Talis was standing at my ear, a flicker and loom on the periphery, bigger than he should have been, nightmarish. I could see his busy hands, the invisible light dancing over his weaver's fingers, the blackwork tattoo at his wrist. “Oh, yes. Cataracts. That body won't last long enough to develop them. Don't worry.”

Don't worry.

Something as hard as a scythe swung into my vision then, and I flinched—and then strained my eyes upward to look. The cage for the head. It was a half circle of metal that swung into slots beside my ears. It was pierced with threaded bolts.

Bolt. Literally bolt,
Talis had said.

I was ready to.

I heard metal brush metal, very close.

Elián,
I thought.
Pittsburgh. Louisville.

And then, reminding myself:
I choose. I hope. Something new.

Talis leaned over me; I saw his face upside down, bisected by the metal arch of the halo. He put a hand over each of my ears and moved me minutely, this way, then that, then simply holding me steady, centered in the beams.

“Talis,” I said, and was ashamed that I was starting to cry with fear, ashamed that I could think of nothing to say.

“Greta.” He swiped tears off my cheekbones with the pads of his thumbs. “Let me tell you something that I learned in my youth, from a sage called the Road Runner. You can walk off a cliff and the air will hold you. Only, don't look down.”

I tried to take that in. I would have nodded, except that I was afraid of ruining the alignment. Lu-Lien, who'd wiggled.
Melted like an ice-cream cone.
I held very, very still.

Talis's eyes were intense and sure. “It's too late for doubt. Understand?”

I choose. Not death. Something new.
“Yes,” I said. My chest was so tight.

Talis began to set the bolts.

I could hear them, ticking and creaking, as minutely as crickets.
Tick, tock, drop.
He set one against the prominence of bone behind my left ear. Another against the right side. I could still have sat up; I could still—

He set one against the center of my forehead. I could see the flat bottom of the bolt starting to come down.
I laid her faceup in that press and let her watch.

The blunt ends of the bolts were firm and cold, like coins on the eyes. There were four more to set.

Talis set them.

And then tightened them.

Bruising. And then burrowing. No pain, but a wrongness that no amount of anesthetic could ever deaden. They were
in
me.

Don't panic, Greta. Don't panic.

The radiation like ants crawling over my face. Into my eyes and ears. I reached up and touched the halo. Talis laid his fingers over mine. I could feel our sensors meeting, meshing, like to like. “Don't look down,” he said.

I swallowed. Lowered my hands slowly to my sides. One wrist brushed leather.

“You don't have to . . .” I meant the straps.

Talis's smile flickered. “You'll need them,” he said, and buckled them tight.

He leaned in, hesitated as if shy, and then put a cool kiss on the end of my nose. “Greta Stuart: see you on the other side.”

And he left the room.

I was alone. My aloneness echoed around me. I took a deep breath, and counted it: one.

Two.

My implanted datastore sensed what I was doing and started scrolling milliseconds.

Three. Four. A tightness in my chest: pure fear.

Blessed and glorified, honored and extolled, adored and acclaimed—oh help me—

I choose this. Power in the choosing. I claim it. I claim it.

Five. Six.

Seven breaths and 25,172 milliseconds later, the beams switched on.

Is there any point in describing my death from induced currents in the brain? There were magnets; they induced currents; I died.

Does it hurt?
I had asked the Abbot.

The word he'd chosen: “profoundly.”

It hurt profoundly.

There is a threshold before which sensation is not painful. There is another, which few people know, past which pain becomes something besides sensation. There are no words for it, though some people call it light, the white light induced by the overload of the dying brain. Perhaps I should call it color, the thing that quarks are said to have. Quarks bind themselves into twos and threes so that their color adds up to white. Take one out of its pairing and hold it apart from the others, and the strain, the
wrongness
, will be so great that space itself will rip apart.

And create something new.

Dear God.

The magnetic fields reached inside me and pulled each color and held it alone in the universe:

The golden skin of Da-Xia's back, arching with joy.

The orange sparks of the funeral pyre rising against the ink-dark sky.

The fireweed, silver and white.

Grego's blood drying burgundy.

Ivory: the weathered ceramic of the Abbot's fingers.

Gray: the crushing stone of the apple press.

Black: the camera's eye.

Faster and faster they came: orange pumpkins, blue orbital weapons, Charlie's tawny coat, rose-red taffeta, the joyful multicolor of Christmas tree lights.

No,
I said, looking into the camera,
of course I'm not afraid
.

Red: my mother's hair, ablaze with diamonds.

Blue: Talis's eyes.

Da-Xia blushing. Elián, his black hair tumbling over his face. His hands were bound.

My hands were bound. If they had not been bound, I would have ripped out my eyes.

A lightning strike. A feeling of charge building up, pulling and pulling and pulling. It was going to hit me. I was going to become lightning. I was going to die.

For one moment all the colors turned into white, a tunnel, a welcome. I looked over whatever it was that passed for my shoulder and saw the body on the table below me, convulsing against its straps.

It's a big one,
the child Da-Xia shouted, singing to the lightning.
Are you afraid?