The Swan Riders (14 page)

Something human. A pain in the crook of my elbow. A quickening of my heart, thudding under the corner of my jaw.

“No questions, Talis?” Sri was still trying to catch the AI's whole attention. “Come on: I know you've got questions.” She smiled at him. “Ask me why I'm doing this.”

“Oh, sure.” Talis was clicking his fingers through the pebbles on top of the ruined wall. “I never pass up a chance to hear the master plan. Why are you doing this, Sri?” He waved a magnanimous hand at her. “Monologue away.”

Sri, though, hesitated: she too knew the clock was ticking. “On second thought, maybe you can just work it out as we go along.”

Talis gave a bony shrug. “Up to you.”

“You can start with me,” said the leaning-forward man, the I-knew-something-about-him man, stepping up from the back of the crowd. “'Cause I'm guessing you might know why I'm pissed off.”

He pushed his goggles up and yanked his mask down.

It was Elián Palnik.

Talis actually got to his feet when he saw Elián. Sri arched both eyebrows, and Elián himself gave a dried-up version of his loose, easy smile: both seemed pleased by what they took as Talis's startle. But only I guessed why he had stood.

It was because I had.

I had stood up without meaning to, with as little thought as one had when one's heart came into one's throat.

Elián. This. This was what I was trying not to remember. Hannah had screamed and begged, and there had been a bolt from the sky. A crater. Elián had tried to escape and none of us had stopped him. So they'd punished all of us. They'd punished all of us until I had stood up and made them stop. They had pushed Elián until he had crumpled into my arms. Until I caught him and promised to save his life.

The memory roared into me.

And a lightning bolt blasted it out.

Talis. He'd put his hand on my elbow, and it was blazing with electricity.

This was not like Sri's fingers bruising into the pressure point—it was a hundred times stronger. And it needed to be. Talis knew that this moment could kill me. And he was trying, silently, to save my life.

“Hello, Princess,” said Elián.

My breath caught and I wobbled.

Elián Palnik. The boy whose crazy quest to fight the Precepture had awakened me to the idea that the Precepture needed fighting. The boy who'd been my Spartacus: the slave turned hero. The boy I'd died to save.

Elián. He'd dunked me in the river; he'd carried me, damaged, through dark corridors; he'd put his fingers beside my fingers in a crushing press; he'd kissed me desperately in a moonlit garden, declaring that we were both about to die. He had—

Another lightning bolt.

“Stop.” Talis's fingers twitched around my elbow, his teeth clicking together. “Greta, stop.” It was almost a moan.

I looked sideways at him. His face was a mask, but there was pain under it. I thought for a moment it was the EM headache, but then remembered that he was overloading his own fingertips. Those sensors were exquisitely sensitive, and a touch that bothered me at the elbow must have felt to him like a hand dipped in fire. But despite being disheveled and hurting, he held his body lightly as a pair of reins. His eyes were narrowed and diamond-bright: he was thinking at speeds most people couldn't dream of.

I was not confident it would help. No amount of quick-footedness or quick thinking was going to change the basic math of the situation. There were fourteen of them. There were three of us. They were armed. We were not.

Talis's electricity looped through me as if I were a circuit and my heart beat faster yet.

What was happening here? A carefully organized, highly risky plot to bring us to this place, this moment. To this moment, and then—what? Whatever was to happen, it would clearly happen against our will.

Or, at least, against Talis's.

Was I to be rescued? Elián always had seen me as a damsel in distress.

The trommellers. Mahrip, saying,
Do you need help?

Mahrip, saying,
We're your people
. My people, coming back to me, and Elián in front of me—I felt blown open. I felt as if my ribs were too small for my lungs. As if the two bones of my forearms might open like an eye. I squeezed my hands around them, trying to hold myself together.

“Don't I get a hello?” said Elián to me. His voice was soft, injured.

“Hello, Elián,” I said. My voice surprised me: it was hollow as a cicada shell. I sounded terrible: brainwashed, kidnapped.

Had I been? I was shaking all over. Elián, who had woken me up, and shown me love, and then Xie—

“Greta?” Elián leaned in, as he always had, to save me.

“Leave her,” said Talis.

Elián's gaze went to where Talis's hand rested on my arm. His eyes narrowed, and for a moment I thought he could see the electrical pain arcing between us. But of course, that wasn't what he was seeing at all. He was seeing the touch: the girl he'd loved; the monster who'd murdered his grandmother. Arm in arm.

My hands tightened, pushing the bones of my forearms closer together.

“I mean it,” said Talis. “I don't know what you want, Elián Palnik, and I doubt you do either, because frankly thinking these things through doesn't seem to be your strong point. But this”—and here he tipped his head toward Sri—”this isn't about Greta.” He flipped his gaze back to Elián. “And you'll kill her if you push it, so leave her.”

“It's been five minutes, Sri,” said someone in the front row.

Sri glanced skyward before she could stop herself. Talis looked too, smiling a long cold smile. The weapons platform.

Sri gathered herself and returned his smile. Her crossbow hung in one hand as if she'd forgotten it, but I'd seen her hit a jackrabbit in the twilight without stilling herself to aim. “Well then, Michael,” she said. “Let's dance.”

“Don't call me that,” he said, mild as butter.

“Greta does.”

“Greta's different.”

“My little AI,” she said fondly. And then, to the crowd: “Someone hold her.”

The nothing-but-goats woman was coming up behind me, but before she could grab on, Talis turned to me. He put his hand on my face. Under each fingertip, my skin sparkled.

I found myself leaning away. “Michael, don't,” I said.

“I have to,” he said.

My people. Elián, and Xie. The who of me. The why of me.
No.

I moved back and he moved forward, neat as a dance, his fingers steady on my face.

“It's too much,” I said.

And Talis spoke almost on top of me. “It's too much for you. I have to. While I can.”

I stepped back into the arms of the people who were (for all I knew) there to kill me. The goatherd woman closed her fingers on my shoulders. My head whipped around and I saw those hands microscopically: the skin tone, the shapes of the nails, the calluses of reins between the fingers. I could see the warp of my face reflected in the woman's goggles. I was fixating, malfunctioning. If Talis had to take more—if he had to take it here . . .

I was trapped and he was trapped and they were going to kill him. Surely they were. Surely he must know that.

Anyone else in the world—literally anyone else—would have told me not to be afraid. Talis said: “Don't be human.”

“What?” My voice cracked.

“Don't be human,” he said. “Be this.” And
pushed.

His hand didn't move, but his sensors sharpened and deepened and an instant later a pulse flashed through the inductive webbing in my brain. It was more than he'd ever pushed before, and for just a heartbeat I remembered that I didn't want this—he didn't want this—there was something to lose. Then the webbing inside me turned into ribbons of light. My thoughts and the apparatus of my thinking transformed into fireflies. I closed my eyes and wondered if I was literally aglow. I felt Talis lift his hand away. “Be human later,” he said. “When I can help.”

“How can you help her be human?” Sri's voice. And she did not sound as I had ever heard her sound. She sounded—but what? My thinking was glorious: my feelings (such as they had been) were gone. “What do you know about—” she said, and her voice cracked. Broken, that was it. She sounded broken.

I opened my eyes.

Sri mastered herself and beckoned. “Come here, then. Let me show you something about being human.”

The goatherd woman behind me grabbed my shoulders and pulled me back. No one touched Talis. He cocked his head and walked out toward Sri and her conspirators. They fell back. Somehow he had made the space around him his: it was as if he'd stepped onto a stage. It would take a brave person to step onto it with him.

“Tal—” Francis Xavier choked. His voice was blocked and gaspy from the arm round his throat, his eyes were barely open. “Rachel . . .”

Was it a warning? A question:
What about Rachel?

“Easy, FX,” Talis murmured. “I've got this.”

“You think?” said Elián. And he drew a knife from a sheath on his belt.

Talis raised his eyebrows and fished his glasses from somewhere inside his coat, settling them fussily on his nose. It looked theatrical, but he genuinely was farsighted: he might simply have wanted a better look at the weapon. His eyes flashed at Elián over the top of the frames. “They've picked you for this, hmmm? Whatever ‘this' is.”

“Actually, I volunteered.” I tagged Elián's trademark drawl as a try for bravado. It fell somewhat flat. In infrared I could see the trembling tightness of the small muscles around his mouth and nose. His circulatory patterns indicated his body was preparing for fight-or-flight. His eyes kept flickering sideways at me.

It was not my first time seeing Elián with a knife. He'd threatened Tolliver Burr, the man who'd tortured me, with a much-battered vegetable knife. That had not worked out well, but never one to learn from his mistakes, Elián had also cornered Talis himself with a heavy blade more used to jointing goats than menacing our robot overlords. That had not worked out well, either, largely because Talis could outmenace anyone in the room.

This time, though, this knife . . . this knife was different. The blade was four inches long, sharp on both edges and pointed: optimized to stab. This knife was a dagger, plain and simple. What was Elián Palnik doing with a dagger?

“I thought we had established, Mr. Palnik,” said Talis, “that you are not a murderer.”

“I'm not.”

“Because I'm not a person? I promise you, Elián—you won't know it from the blood.”

Sri stepped forward then, the crossbow casual in her hands. “Take off your coat,” she said.

Talis was of course wearing a Swan Rider's duster of oiled leather, dust-smudged down one side from his fall. I had come to appreciate oiled leather: I knew it would brush clean easily, the moment we had a moment. Talis liked the coat too, and he made no move to take it off. He tipped his chin up at Sri—not defiance, but a kind of curiosity. He looked like a raven: something small, dark, and handsome, with the potential to go for the eyes.

Silence stretched.

“She said take it off,” said a woman in the crowd. Talis snapped round and locked on to her like a weapons system. She flinched—but he released her, cocking his head: “Sorry.” A glint of smile. “Just waiting to see what the threat's going to be.”

“There are enough of us to hold you down and have you stripped, if you'd rather,” said Sri. “But there's no guarantee you wouldn't get hurt. We wouldn't want that.”

“We wouldn't?” chimed Talis.

“Not to no purpose.”

“That's interesting.” He considered a moment, then took off his coat, tossing it to one side as if throwing down a gauntlet.

And then Elián—with a wide-eyed look at me—did what I had said it would take a brave man to do. He stepped onto Talis's stage.

He was still holding the knife.