The Swan Riders (26 page)

“When what star—” began Elián, and then, just as I figured out what was going to happen, it happened. Michael's head snapped back into the cushion, the muscles in his neck hyperextending, his eyes wrenched wide open. He didn't scream, but he must have bitten something inside his mouth because suddenly there was blood on his lips and—

“What the hell!” shouted Elián.

Francis Xavier was twisting around as far as he could, inside his harness, trying to get the leverage to push Michael back against his seat so he couldn't damage himself. I strained forward against my harness, but the only thing I could reach was his knee.

The shuttle swerved. We were thrown sideways, and then, stomach-droppingly, upward. Michael was beyond noticing. His leg, under my hand, was rigid with opposing tremors. Only their opposition was keeping him from shaking himself apart. His fingernails were denting bloody crescents in the back of Francis Xavier's hand. FX was twisted clear around, his stump wedged across Michael's torso. But really, neither of us could reach him properly. We kept our hands on him, but neither of us was doing him any good.

But then, it was Rider's Palsy. There was nothing we could do.

M
y cry for help didn't get us help (“Flying a spaceship right now!” Two had chirruped back when I'd screamed his name), and Michael's seizure was over by the time his counterpart came down the ladder with a slide and a hop.

Still, the AI took one look and knew—he came to his other self's side with impressive speed. Crouched. Slipped two fingers under the corner of the jaw, checking the pulse (and probably a dozen other things).

Michael opened his eyes. They were so altered that they were almost a different color. He looked lost, young, and completely human.

“The palsy,” said Two. “Your first episode?”

Under the strong, strange fingers Michael's throat worked a minute—I guessed he was too dry-mouthed to swallow, too stunned to speak. He nodded, mute.

“Bad?”

A dazed laugh. “Not good.”

“This is what Sri has,” said Elián. He too looked dazed.

“This is what we all have,” answered Francis Xavier. “It's Rider's Palsy.”

“It looks . . .” Elián tucked his head and fussed with the buckle on his harness. “It looks tough.”

Michael slid him a look. “Don't you dare comfort me, Elián Palnik.”

Elián made a huffing snort, and a denial that I think might have been a lie: “Like I would.”

Two arched both eyebrows at that little byplay. I tried to think of a way to remind the boys that they were supposed to be allies. Michael stabbed the release button on his harness savagely, but his knees buckled when he tried to get up.

Two closed his hands around Michael's—Rachel's—slim, muscled biceps and lifted his counterpart to his feet. His active sensors were on high, wrapping both of them like Guadalupe's cloak. Odd to think that only Francis and I could see it—it was so comforting, so lovely. Michael found his balance, but Two held on one more moment, and they seemed in perfect communion, wrapped in light.

Then Michael opened his eyes and glared at the room generally, a bit of Talis back in his eyes. He flicked his hands to shoo off the help. Two released him.

“So, yeah,” he said. “Rider's Palsy: pretty much as advertised. Good to know. I feel I've really grown as a person, experiencing it. Let's fix me now.”

And Two—AIs characteristically lack microexpression, but Talis Mark Two—

The look on his face was pure and heartbreaking hopelessness.

It occurred to me that that cloak of light was probably also a detailed and expert scan. If it was, Two didn't share the results. Michael's “fix me” hung in the air. The cloak swirled away like candle smoke.

“The horses—” said Elián.

As if on cue one of the horses—my money was on Spartacus—started kicking something, and the ship rang like a gong.

“Welcome home,” said Two. “Do you need help with the ladder?”

“I'll help him,” said Francis Xavier. Neutrally.

Two tipped his head a fraction in permission. He still had that look of filing things away for future ammunition. Possibly that was his default.

Anyway.

There is not much one person can do to help another with a ladder. Michael climbed down it almost exactly as if using his right arm weren't a flaring agony. Then he pushed through the horses and down the gangplank. At the foot of it he tumbled to a crouch in the dirt and shook.

“Unstrap the horses, please,” murmured Two, which kept Francis Xavier from dashing to the rescue. Elián and I lingered in the hatchway as the half-strange AI sauntered down the gangplank and stood over the shivering figure. “Good?”

Only Michael's back was visible, but I could imagine the scrunch of his face. “Peachy.”

I could feel the loop of Two's electronic attention hooking into the ship's communications. Filing our arrival. Summoning help. “Stretcher?”

Stiffly, as if he were made of metal parts, Michael sat up. “I am
not
going into the Red Mountains on a stretcher.”

“All right then,” said Two, and helped him to his feet.

I felt Elián at my elbow. Without speaking we went down the gangplank side by side. And stepped into another world.

The Red Mountains. All my life I'd known of them. Everyone did: they were our Olympus, our Sinai. Gods lived there—the AIs and their Swan Riders—but no one else came. It was not a mortal place.

And yet here we were, all too mortal: wounded, exhausted, endangered, betrayed. My body was both limp and stiff, like a cheesecloth wrung out and dried on a line. I was so tired that my eyes felt as if they were bulging. I pressed on them, but the strange scene around us did not waver. The ship sat like a pin at the middle of a small, perfectly circular island. It was dawn quiet, dawn calm, fresh without a breath of wind, nearly silent, except for the lapping of waves. The sea. It was all around us, and it was . . .

“It's red,” said Elián.

It was.

A few hundred years ago, the landmass of the Missouri River plateau, undermined by the draining of the aquifer and the fracking of deep hydrocarbons, and triggered by a hiccup at the Yellowstone supervolcano, had abruptly dropped a few hundred feet. Reclamation had been attempted, but it had gone wrong, and the result was: this.

A shallow inland sea, stark mountains rising from strange waters. No one wanted it, so the AIs took it. But even they could not save it. A few hundred years might be enough to remake the human world, but it was far too short to make a healthy ecosystem. The new sea—it was called the Sundance—was a mess. The water was dark as wine. It lapped with an animal sound and smelled sticky and sweet. The denuded mountains that rose from it bloomed with red lichen. They glowed as the rising sun reached them.

Everything was quiet, and everything was the color of blood.

The launchpad on which we were standing was one of a series of small man-made islands—round as plates—some distance from the hollowed mountain of the AIs and the floating city of the Swan Riders. (No one flew to the city itself, my datastore knew: the aerial defenses were fearsome and permanently on.) A spiderweb of causeways swept across the sluggish water. There were cottonwoods growing here and there, winter bare and filled with hundreds and hundreds of ravens.

Two held up a hand and whistled low and sweet. A raven swooped down, spread its wings, landed on his wrist. The bird tipped its head at the AI, who tipped his head mirrorwise, then conjured a bit of cheese. The raven took it in its gleaming beak.

“Oh,” said Elián. “That isn't creepy at
all.
”

“They're both top predator and top scavenger around here,” said Two. “Absolute keystones for our messed-up pocket ecosystem. And beyond that they're interesting. Smart. Adaptable. I like them.”

“You would,” said Elián.

“Are you sure you're on my side, little Rider?” Two snapped his wrist into the air and the bird took off, a bafflement of wings.

“Absolutely,” said Elián. “Ready and willing. What should we do first, surgery or tattoos?”

“Oh, surgery,” said Two, with a smile you could bounce lasers off. “It's way less reversible.” He swept the rest of us with his eyes, seeming to measure the distances and angles between us, to guess and gauge our tangled loyalties—and then looked beyond us to the road at our backs.

I turned. Down the causeway came men on horseback, women with wings. Swan Riders. Perhaps two dozen of them—enough to count as an overwhelming force. I could hear the hoofbeats, see the flash off the wing struts. The ravens flew up as they passed, a whirling storm of black.

It was uncanny. It was terrifying. And there was nothing to do but stand and meet it. Two was holding Michael on his feet. Elián stepped closer to me than was probably advisable for any cover story. Francis Xavier, with halter lines in his hand, slipped behind us as if to guard our backs. NORAD stamped and Gordon sidled. Spartacus trumpeted and reared.

And then the horses were on us, pintos and bays and buckskins and roans, a crash of noise, a chop of light through legs and wings. The riders dismounted, boots hitting gravel all around us.

“Greta,” said Two softly. With a deep recognition, as if he'd been saying it for years.

I looked at him, and I'm sure my eyes were wide.

“Greta Gustafsen Stuart,” he said. “I read up, you see.” In the ship, he would have had time to scan my whole file—every recorded and monitored moment of my entire hostage childhood. His gaze flicked to my hands, and I worked not to curl them against the apple press I could see in his eyes. “Greta,” he said, raising his voice. “May I present your Swan Riders.”

And as if I were the rock at the middle of a ripple, in rings all around me, and one by one, the Riders knelt. I could hear the horses breathing, I could hear the wind against stiff white wings; I could hear the lap lap lap of the sea. But the Riders, with their heads bowed, did not make a sound.

“I take it back about the birds,” said Elián. “This here is our new bar in creepy.”

“Oh, shut up, Elián,” murmured Michael.

Two shrugged. “It's been more than a century since we got a new AI. It's worth a little ceremony.” He flicked his fingers as if to dissolve a spell, and the Riders got up. Still silently. They were way creepier that way.

“Welcome home, Greta,” said Two. “And please excuse me if I don't see you settled in. I would like to get Rachel here to the doctor.”

“I'm fine,” objected Michael, without much hope.

“Don't be silly,” said Two. “There's no reason you shouldn't have the best care.” He singled out two riders with a cock of his wrist. “Take her to the hospital,” he said. “I'll be right along.”

He took a horse from one of the reassigned Riders and swung into the saddle. “Home again, home again,” he singsonged.

Jiggety-jig.

Two and his designated Swan Riders took Michael away then. We couldn't stop them. We didn't even know how to try.

We stood in the middle of a ring of armed strangers, who in principle owed me life-and-death loyalty and absolute obedience. Was there a proper greeting for that? It did not seem as if it ought to be “hi.”

“Francis Xavier,” said one of them—a tall man with midtone skin and very dark eyes. “How was the ride?”

Ah.
There
was the ritual greeting.

Francis tipped his head a little. “The ride was hard,” he said. His voice cracked. “The ride was—” And then suddenly big, solid, silent, understated Francis Xavier was folding up and sobbing.

The dark-eyed man caught him, arms wrapping around him, brotherly. “Hey now,” he said. “Hey.”

“I'm sorry,” said Francis, gulping. “Alejandro. I'm sorry. I ought not—”

“It's okay,” said his friend: Alejandro? “Let's—let's put these horses away. Heh? Let's get you home.”