The Scorpion Rules (6 page)

“Sure. I've seen them all. That interview last Christmas? At the tree-lighting ball? You're royalty, Greta. A celebrity. Like—like Guinevere.”

Da-Xia actually laughed aloud.
“Guinevere!”

Elián shrugged, as well as one can when holding a potato riddle and shivering with recent shocks. “I think it's mostly the hair.”

“My hair is fairly trivial, surely.”

“Weeeellll,” said Elián, drawing it out to about four syllables. “The hair and the stick up your royal . . . bearing.”

There was just enough spin on “bearing” to let even the most oblivious among us (all right, me) know that the word was a last-moment substitution. The comment was rude, and un-royal, and made Thandi laugh. Thandi, of all people. I felt as if Elián were melting us, one by one. But of course none of my friends had my reasons to stay frozen. Their nations were not squared off with his nation. They had not seen him tied up and screaming.

As we faced each other over the riddle, Elián kept trying to catch my eye. There was something magnetic about him, something that made it hard to look away. He was not a prince—they didn't have princes, the Americans, so he was just some general's kid, some politician's kid—but . . . Spartacus, he'd called himself. Spartacus had been a slave who'd become a hero. A general who'd become a martyr. Elián was joking and laughing, but his eyes were desperate. He looked like someone who'd been told he was going to die.

I gave the riddle a last hard shake, and then tipped the potatoes into the basket in Atta's arms. Dust bloomed. I dragged the cuff of my samue across my forehead and squinted the sweat out of my stinging eyes. The day was hot. I could practically feel my freckles drawing together to form city-states.

Elián swung the empty riddle in one hand and looked from Atta to Grego. “If she's Guinevere, that makes you two Lancelot and Arthur. Which one's which?”

Atta said absolutely nothing. He looked down on Elián with eyes you could fall into, like wells.

“Atta's quiet,” murmured Xie. She slid herself between them. She is just a slip of a thing, but it is amazing how much protection her body can give. “Don't tease.”

“First,” said Grego, “you are overlooking Han, which, frankly, is too common a thing. Second, I am certainly Arthur. Only slightly more Lithuanian, and interested in engineering.”

“Speciality?” said Elián. “Please say ‘munitions.' ”

At Elián's feet the big proctor clicked—a sound like a bone breaking. The thing was standing close to us, and still. Dust moved across the nanolubricants on its ball-and-socket joints; they gleamed like oily eyes.

“Don't,” warned Thandi. She was watching the proctor, but she sounded more angry than frightened.

“It's cybernetics, isn't it, Grego?” said Han, oblivious, as always.

“Mostly.” Grego had gone cautious and still. “Cybernetics and mechatronics more generally.”

“That's a shame,” said Elián, his face slowly opening up into a huge grin. “I was hoping you could help me blow this place to kingdom come.”

The proctor brought him down.

The shock caught Elián in the knee and the groin. He didn't even get out a scream. His eyes rolled up and he tipped backward. Atta dropped the bushel and lunged to catch him, but I was closer. Elián fell into my arms, and I fell. Potatoes tumbled around us. For a moment his eyes were white moons behind his tangled lashes, but he came around quickly. He was sobbing, gulping air—

No. He was laughing.

On the ground, desperately hurting, should-be- humiliated, and
laughing
. He shook his head as if to rattle whatever was loose in there—his dignity, his sense of self-preservation, perhaps some small rocks. . . .

“Are you all right?” Xie knelt beside us.

“Awww, peachy,” he gasped. “This is way more fun with company.”

Fun?

Surrounding us, my cohort stood astonished. For a moment there was no sound but the wind, making sage-green and sere ruffles in the prairie grass.

And in that moment—that farseeing, dry moment—I was absolutely sure. I was going to die. My mother herself had brushed my hair because the Great Lakes were under threat, because my nation was going to go to war.

It didn't matter that Cumberland would be the aggressor, that the PanPols would be defending their own.
Play nice, kids,
said the Utterances.
Work it out. I won't be picking sides.

No, Talis would make no judgements about who was in the right. He would not choose sides. I could practically hear him, that unknowable, alien thing, saying:
I love you all the same.
He would send Swan Riders, and they would take us both to the grey room.

I was going to die. I was going to die with this boy who was laughing in my arms. I jerked away, dumping him into the dirt, and scrambled to my feet. Elián rolled over and lay flat on the ground beside the potato trench. The proctor stood over him. For just a moment its red eye beam tipped up at me, and it quivered, as if it were going to say my name.

M
other,
I wrote.

That day—that day with Elián and his scorpion shadow—we'd worked as long as the light had lasted, late in that northern August. We had staggered in exhausted and eaten cold food that had tasted of dust.

Now I was sitting in the twilight, alone at the tiny table in my cell. Xie had gone to fetch a pitcher of washing water, and so I sat with the grime of the day still on me, a pen hesitating above white paper.

The
Mother
looked back at me. It was in my heart to write,
Do not let my death surprise me.

My heart did not quite manage to move my pen. My free hand had smudged the paper, holding it down. I needed some of my mother's map weights, those elegant velvet sacks of sand that held down the corners of papers. They were embroidered with the family motto,
Semper Eadem
. “Always the same.”

Halifax was so far away.

It is not that I have not been there. Like all the Children of Peace, I go regularly to visit my parents. I have an apartment in the palace. I have a vast bed and a desk, and gowns, and beautiful books. But even so, Halifax does not seem like my home. A refitted monastery and a few acres of permaculture garden, somewhere in Saskatchewan—Precepture Four—that is home. As part of Canada it is technically part of my kingdom, but out here I am the princess of grasshoppers and red tails, duchess of chickens and goats.

Halifax is so different, so alien. Citadel Hill seems to loom. The sea is restless. The sky is too small. In Halifax I am interviewed and bowed to; I go to fetes and balls. In Halifax, my father takes me sailing, out among the little islands of the Nova Scotia archipelago, above the ruins of the sunken cities. In the evenings I go out with him to the campanile to ring the twilight bells, the ones that call the little ships home. In Halifax, my mother pours me cup after cup of tea. In her library she spreads out maps and we speak of history. In Halifax I have to wear shoes indoors, and corsets that press red lines into my skin. In Halifax I am duchess and crown princess. When I come here the prairie sky opens up over me. I fold the crown princess away like linens into lavender, and I am Greta again.

It is hard for the person I am here to write to that strange and distant place called “home.” My mother—what could I say to her?
Mother, the Cumberland hostage—I think he knows something.

The last time I was in Halifax, my mother did not mention a war. But she did not invite me to privy council either, as she usually does. And on the last day of my visit she herself brushed the thousand strokes through my hair. She wasn't crying, but she was. . . .

In my cell, two thousand miles from my mother, the blank paper looked up at me. Surely she would warn me. Surely, she would not let me be surprised.

Mother, Sidney was surprised and it was terrible.

Sidney and I had known that a Swan Rider was, almost surely, coming for us. And yet in the end, Sidney had been surprised. He had stood frozen. He had spoken of his father.

Mother, there is a boy here and he seems so afraid.

Elián. I could imagine us walking to the grey room together, walking to both our deaths. I could imagine him wanting to hold my hand. Or—no, he probably wouldn't walk. He'd probably fight and have to be dragged, and then all my practiced dignity would be for nothing. There would be a scene.

My mother would not approve if I died with a scene.

The little cell was still hot. The floors were warm. The walls were warm. Even the moonlight spilling through the ceiling seemed warm. Summers were short, there in what used to be Saskatchewan. But that didn't mean they weren't hot.

All day long, sweat had gathered at the nape of my neck and run in a little trickle down my spine. My spine itched, my neck itched—even my hair itched.

In Halifax I have two maids to fuss over my hair, and they amuse themselves (if not me) by doing elaborate things with it. Here I merely put it in two thick braids, which I coil around my head, out of the way. Like Guinevere, evidently. Well. She was a busy woman. Probably she wanted her hair out of the way, too.

I pulled the pins out of my hair, and the two braids tumbled free and fell, swinging, down my back.

Our door slid open. Xie. The pitcher swung empty in her hand. “There's no water,” she said.

For a moment, just a moment, my mind filled with the dry waving grass of the prairie in drought. A Rider moving through that grass would make such a dust plume. . . .

“No water,” I said.

We both knew what it meant. There
was
water—our well was not dry—but we were being denied access to it. We were being punished.

It was not a surprise. At the Precepture each cohort regulates itself, but if someone in the cohort acts egregiously, publicly, noticeably poorly—well, then, we all pay. It is little things, mostly. Reduced diets. Sealed doors. Hours spent in total darkness. It gives us incentive to keep each other in line.

We had certainly not managed to keep Elián in line.

“Tonight of all nights,” I complained. “It's hot.”

“I imagine our new friend is more uncomfortable even than that.” Da-Xia tugged at one of my braids. “Guinevere.”

“Yes, well, Americans. They do have an obsession with royalty.” I nudged my letter to one side and Xie set the pitcher down on the table (which was also our washstand) with a depressingly empty clang. “I wish they would just get some of their own.”

“But where will they find a bloodline that's blessed and anointed by the gods?”

With that, my roommate, the god, peeled off her samue and flopped down across her cot.

The prevalence of hereditary monarchies in the modern world was a quirk of history, a side effect of requiring national decision-makers to have children and putting those children under lethal threat. Even the most robust democracies of the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries had never been far away from being dynasties. All it had taken was Talis's thumb on the scale.

I didn't actually mean for the hostage thing to create a whole bunch of hereditary monarchies
, saith the Utterances.
But, you know, whatever. Murdering princesses. I guess I can work with that.

Xie would be eighteen in the spring. Her country was utterly at peace. Here, in front of me, was one princess who was going to live. She folded her hands behind her head, watching the sky turn from lavender to silvered indigo, lying bare below the glass ceiling as if the light alone could wash her.

Da-Xia and I have been together for so long that there cannot be much modesty left between us, yet still I turned my eyes away, back to the paper. A letter had failed to write itself. Overhead, wind was picking up: a storm with no rain, just birds being pushed too far, too fast.

“Writing home?” Xie asked behind me. I heard the rustle of her pulling on her alb.

“Trying to.”

Early in the history of the Preceptures, hostage Children had been allowed real-time video uplink with their parents and friends, access to a full spectrum of media. It hadn't worked out well. (
Yeah,
said the Utterances.
In my considered opinion, riots are bad for morale.
) Now we got our news from printed dispatches. And we wrote letters.

I looked at the smudged paper. “I can hardly tell her—ask her—” It was hard to code this.
Tell me, Mother, if I'm going to die.
“It turns out I have no idea what to say.”

“Most holy and beloved father,” said Xie, addressing an imaginary letter to her own father. “The weather is hot and dry. Today we harvested the early potatoes. A goat escaped and ate all the stone plums, and now we will have a bitter winter.”

“There are still peaches,” I said.

“Fortunately, there are still peaches,” Xie dictated, tracing the round characters of her own alphabet in the air, little dances of her hand. “And soon there will be apples. And all things will be well.”

We were speaking as much to the Panopticon as to each other. “All things will be well,” murmured Xie.

We both knew that wasn't likely.

I leaned forward and pinched up the smudged and heavy paper. “Make a bird for me?”

“Of course.” Da-Xia's quick fingers made the word “Mother” vanish into a fold. She made another fold, another, another, until the paper was a delicate crane.

“Make a wish,” said Xie.

Cranes traditionally represent a wish for peace. I closed my eyes and wished. Uselessly. Hard.

I
t was already hot when the
prime
bell woke us the next day. I had somehow failed to become less grimy in my sleep. Our Precepture practices appropriate use of technology—meaning, among other things, that we use nothing we can get by without. Normally that seems only wise, but on that day I thought an air conditioner or two probably wouldn't ruin the world.