The Swan Riders (24 page)

I handed Michael his glasses (they were on a little ledge beside the bed) and carefully hoisted him to his feet. He wobbled and clung to my arms. We were that close together. I tried, with my whole mind, to read the delicate chain of emotion that looped across his face as he examined mine. Surprised. Evaluating. Hopeful. His eyes went from me to Elián and back again. His look softened. “My ears and whiskers, Greta,” he said, almost reverently. “You're blushing.”

“I am not.”

But I was. Shock wave and signal. Blushing and blazing.

“Give me a reason, then.” His tone was coaxing. “Give me one good reason.”

“Because I ask it,” I said. “Because . . . you love me.”

It was not quite what he was looking for, I could tell that much, but it must have been enough. He pulled free of me.

“Hmmm. Well.” I could actually see him start to think: the electrical patterns shifting rapidly in his brain, that narrow-eyed sparkling look I'd thought might be lost forever. “I get that he's kind of adorable, but you can't protect him just with your say-so.”

And he was right. There were rules about who an AI could and couldn't protect: razor-sharp, unbending rules. After all, we were meant to be the unsentimental, impartial protectors of the whole world. The system would crumble if we played favorites.

I wanted to change the world, and thought I probably could—but I probably couldn't start here.

“Oh, I know!” Michael turned to Elián: “Pledge fealty to her.”

“What?” Elián looked bewildered.

“Try to keep up, Elián. Honestly. Greta, define ‘fealty' for our visiting scholar here.”

That was the kind of classroom request to which I would always respond. “Fealty is the duty owed by a vassal to a lord. A duke to a king, for example.” I couldn't imagine Elián swearing fealty to, well, anything. Certain methods of barbecue, perhaps. I tried to soften it. “The root is the Latin
fidelis
, ‘loyalty.' It's cognate with ‘fidelity.' And ‘faith.'”

“And it just might save your life,” said Michael. “Pledge. Now.”

“I—” said Elián.

There was a little clicking noise: Francis Xavier knocking the spoon against the soup pot. It was the FX equivalent of leaping to one's feet. “Elián,” he said.

I would not have been much more surprised if FX had started yelling. But Elián did not know FX, and when Michael made a “shush” gesture, FX shushed.

I could feel the incoming rocket, now, its ground radar beating down on us. I could feel my heart pounding in my throat.

“I pledge—” said Elián.

I wasn't sure if he'd forgotten the word “fealty,” or if even in the moment he found it a little much. He offered me both his hands, and I took them.

“Greta Stuart,” he said. “I'm yours.”

“Close enough,” said Michael, clapping his hands together like a rifle shot. “By the power vested in me by, well, me, as ruler of the world et cetera et cetera, I hereby pronounce you AI and Swan Rider. You may now kiss the bride.”

“Swan Rider?” said Elián.

“Oh, Elián Palnik,” said Michael, lighting a smile like a long fuse, “here's where your life gets
interesting
.”

And just at that moment, someone kicked in the door.

That poor door. Francis Xavier had kicked it in just yesterday, and we'd had to jam the snapped-off handle of a wooden spoon into the top hinge to keep it shut against the snow. Now the spoon bit was shattered and the middle hinge was hanging by one screw and the whole door was swaying like a wounded man. It let in a rectangle of dark and brilliant cold.

Framed against the snow was a single figure: a man with a crossbow in his hands. He slid in, keeping his back to the wall, his weapon up.

Everyone was standing, everyone was braced, but only Francis was armed. By which I mean he was holding the porridge spoon as if it were a javelin.

The stranger took us in, his eyes brightly fearless, his weapon just loose enough to be steady. He was young to look so deadly, and so at ease with deadliness, but then, I could see the wing tattoo wrapping his wrist. People with that mark were often unusual, and always young. “Hello, Swan Rider team in trouble,” he said. “Gallant Rescue, at your service.”

Beside me, Michael took in a breath with a hitch at the end of it.

The stranger had caramel skin of indeterminate geography (Persian? Pashtun?) liberally spattered with freckles, a beakish nose that had been broken at least once. His eyes were a startling green. Nothing about him was familiar, except that everything was.

“Gotta say,” the Rider said, his weapon casually sweeping us, “I think you set a new record for vagueness of report. Bit irritating, to be called in without so much as a please and here's-my-pulse-code. But, congratulations, you got my attention. So, having got it”—and here he smiled: a weaponized smile—“what are you going to do with it?”

The geometry of that expression—eyebrow up twenty-three degrees, mouth part of a Fibonacci curl: purely I knew it.

“Talis,” I said.

“Yup,” he said, snapping the end of the word like an electric spark. “Give the new girl a gold star.” Then suddenly, his attention zeroed in on me. “Wait, you're not a Rider, you're . . .” Active EM sensors sleeted through me, rudely prodding at the damage in my brain. There was only one way to endure that kind of damage and walk around afterward. “You're AI,” he said softly. He sounded almost awed. His crossbow drifted out of line. “A new AI.”

I put my hand on Elián's arm.

“Greta Gustafsen Stuart,” said Michael. “May I present my better half?”

The new AI looked at his other self with widening eyes. “Oh, no, seriously?” Abruptly deciding there was no threat, he put his crossbow down on the table with a clang and a sulk. “You know I hate it when there are two of us. The pronouns make my teeth hurt.”

Michael shrugged. “I think we'll cope.”

Talis Mark Two was glaring. “Well, if you'd put fingertip codes into the distress call like everyone is
supposed to
, I'd—” And then something happened to his face: a draining, like life out of the eyes. The half-amused irritation sluiced away, revealing . . . was it shock? Disgust? “You can't, can you?”

Michael said nothing.

The new AI came across the room as if in fury and slammed his other self up against the wall. “You
can't
.” He kept Michael pinned there with one hand and spread the fingers of his other hand as if they were medical equipment. He fanned them over the datastore a moment, scanning, then swept them sideways. He reached the place where Sri had once pushed her finger—and he too pushed. With three fingers. Hard.

Michael's whole body curled inward and Rachel flickered into his eyes. A little sound broke out of them.

“Don't hurt her!” said Francis Xavier.

Talis Mark Two flipped FX a look that said both
interesting
and
deal with you later.
He returned his attention to his counterpart. “You're broken,” he said.

“It's
injured
, you ass.”

“Nah, but that implies you might heal. Hate to break it, but—” He flicked his fingertips against the slick forcescar. They made a little tick.

Michael swallowed. Was there no way back for him, then? I was not sure that was true.

Meanwhile Talis Mark Two—just Two, my datastore decided, efficiently—had mastered whatever had brought him across the room like a hawk striking. He stepped back and said more softly: “What happened?”

Elián's skin charged under my hand.

Who could lie to an AI? There was an actual verse of scripture that warned us not to. But Michael did it without blinking. True, his body was tense, which was characteristic of deception, but he was both injured and emotionally stirred, and either could account for that tension. Michael wore that ambiguity like a mask. He did not even glance our way. “Well, obviously it's an intricate, epic tale of love and betrayal,” he said. “But the short version is: Sri stabbed me.”

“Sri.” Two ran his tongue over his teeth.

“Yeah,” said Michael, soft and hair-raising, “I call dibs.”

“Huh.” Two scrunched his nose, startlingly familiar. He sat down on the shelf. He was close to us now and Elián's pulse was racing under my fingers. “Well. That was a whacking great blind spot, wasn't it?”

“What was?” I ventured.

“My Riders,” he said. “A Swan Rider, betraying me.”

It hadn't exactly been
him,
but I took the point.

“Loyalty is more or less their defining characteristic, you know, like . . . well, like dogs.” Another sharp smile. “No offense.”

No one volunteered to claim any.

Two looked up at me, thoughtful. “Supposing you lived with a pack of hounds,” he said. “And one day one of them . . .” He trailed off, seeming disturbed by the image. I could see where he might be. The Swan Riders outnumbered the AIs a hundred to one. They had intimate knowledge, intimate access.

“Francis Xavier!” Two's voice was sudden and sharp. “Perhaps you could introduce me to my new friends.”

Francis Xavier—who'd been working, without much success, to close the door—turned around. He paused before answering. The pause did not look suspicious, because Francis Xavier would stop to consider his response if you asked him for directions to the nearest bathroom. “What do you know?” he said.

Two popped the air out of his cheeks. “Not much. The Cumberlanders took my Precepture, this one here went off to reclaim it, blew up Indianapolis for some reason, no huge loss there, then declared the matter resolved and sent for Riders. Gotta say, it wasn't much of a report.”

“Yeah,” said Michael. “Because life is all about paperwork. Don't scold me, you big ninny.”

The AI shrugged off the point, though it was a fair one: being the same person (wasn't he?), he would presumably have done the same thing. “You asked for extra horses: I assumed we either had new recruits or someone in need of some . . . special treatment.”

“Did that on-site.”

“Mmmm-hmmm: Wilma Armenteros. Saw the vid. Very . . .” Two rolled the word round his mouth: “. . . neat.”

I had seen the apple press, after. “Neat” was not an adjective I would have chosen.

“Anyhow,” said Michael. He'd slipped between Two and Francis Xavier, and I didn't think Two had even noticed. “This is Elián Palnik, her grandson. He helped us, on-site—got the phone lines to the satellites unjammed.”

“Interesting.” The AI's gaze slid to Elián. His eyes were verdigris—the green of shipwrecked copper. Strange and deep. “This was voluntary?”

Elián stood in the crosshairs, his heartbeat almost a vibration. “Hell, no,” he said.

“. . . No?” said Two.

The bones of Elián's wrist rotated under my hand, and then he was holding on to my wrist as I was holding on to his, in the manner of ancient warriors. “I did it,” he began, and then his voice cracked. “I did it to save Greta. They—my grandmother and her people . . . they hurt her. They were going to hurt her again. I did it for Greta. I'd never do it for you.”

“Indeed.” Two looked the pair of us over. If he'd been in Rachel's body, he would have fiddled with his glasses, peering over the top of the frames. “Call me paranoid, but I think I'm sensing some hostility here.”

“Damn straight,” said Elián.

One of these days, that rough-and-ready integrity of Elián's was going to get him killed.

Maybe even today.

Two clicked his tongue and tilted his head back at his other self. “And how is it this one's not dead?”

Michael tipped his head too, and for a moment the two of them were in perfect mirror image. “I'd be lying if I said I was never tempted.”

“I mean,” said Two, “these are the hostage children of two nations who declared war. There's supposed to be a big electromagnetic period at the end of that sentence. Grey room, quick death, quiet burial, end of story.”