The Swan Riders (31 page)

“But he said we should throw you a party,” said Evie. She sounded peevish. A needle-arm twitched out from one wall and set a rocking chair in the corner creaking. I had not particularly noticed the rocking chair before, but now I did. There was a teddy bear in it. It was ancient—it looked as if it would come apart at a touch, like a moth's body left in an attic window. Evie didn't touch it. And I wasn't going to.

“You have to have cake,” she said. “We made it. It's totally not poisoned or anything. Az, call one of the humans to do that king-and-food-tester thing with the cake.”

“Pinged,” said Azriel.

What if
, said the simulation,
we blockaded the Halifax archipelago to prevent evacuation. What if we turned down the beam and burned it slow.

The rocking chair went
scrik screak.

“Evie, Azriel, um, everyone,” I said, and tried to remember what it was like to be a duchess, always the first person to sweep out of a room. “It is truly a pleasure to meet you, and I look forward to deepening our acquaintance. But I have obligations to attend to and I really must go.”

I reached into the
UNDEAD
for the door.

“I locked it,” said Evie.

“Oh.”

I could feel her control meet mine again. As if we were hand in hand.

So I took her hand and pulled myself up and into the control systems.

“Hey!” said Evie, as if I were a big sister who had just shoved my way into her room. “Get out!”

“Evie, I'm sorry, but I need to go.”

“I locked it. You won't get it open.” Her voice was proud and peeved. Her metaphorical hand felt sharp in mine.

In the datascape I could see the things she had locked. They were piled up like books, like little pink or purple diaries with tiny brass padlocks—a nine-year-old's heart, a nine-year-old's secrets.

I edged closer to the pile of diaries and they swelled in front of me, looking huge—big enough to climb. A ladder of locked things.

The bottom book was this door that locked me away from rescuing Elián. The padlock. It was made of six-hundred digit semiprime numbers. It was made of teeth.

I fit my fingers inside the padlock loop. It bit me.

I yanked my hand out and looked at the stack of diaries, each big as a step. The bottom book was this door, part of the
UNDEAD
systems that ran the mountain. The top books were . . .

The satellites. The orbital weapon satellites.

Calgary, Reykjavík, Edinburgh. A child-queen in black taffeta, turning to face the camera. The Halifax crater opening like a cat's pupil, inside the simulation, inside my head, every 3.2 seconds.

The satellites were eyes and whispers.

My eyes
, I thought.
My whispers.

I stepped up onto the diary that was the locked door. Onto the one that was the
UNDEAD
. The glittery pink pleather squeaked under my feet. I reached up for the next book, I climbed toward the satellites. I put my hand on the lowest of them, and—

And I met a scream of light and code, a wall of teeth and
no
. To call it a lock was to call a punch a handshake. The next thing I knew I was thrown out of the datascape and on the floor. My head and my heart were pounding. The needle-filled ceiling over me seemed to sway.

“Once upon a time, a nine-year-old stole the nuclear launch codes.” The voice came from Evie's speakers, but it was not Evie's voice. “This is not the moment where the new girl takes them from me, okay?”

“Talis,” I said.

There was nothing there that grinned, but I felt Two grin at me. “And why aren't we having cake?”

“Where's Elián?” I said.

But the smiling presence was gone.

One of the snakelike arms was nudging its way under me, and Evie's voice sounded both gleeful and hurt. “I told you you wouldn't get it open.”

There was a sound behind me: the door sliding open. “Here is your tester,” said Azriel. I rolled over. And there, standing as if he had a hundredweight of sorrow yoked across his shoulders, was Francis Xavier. He saw me and that sorrow changed to fear. “Greta!” He came running and was by my side in a moment, batting Evie's arms away. “What happened?”

“She didn't want cake.” It was amazing, but Evie could make a room seem sulky.

“But why—” Francis was trying to lift me. Why had I left, when he'd asked me to stay. “Rachel?”

“No, she's—” Not fine, not even for the most generous definition of fine. “She survived it. Elián?”

“The surgery—” he said, and stopped, and looked around the room. It was full of AIs, who were recording, carelessly. Like a harbor icing, FX calmed. “He survived it.”

Neutral as an echo. An empty thing to say.

By now we were kneeling together, and he had his arm around me. It was useless to whisper, and yet my voice came out softly: “And the rest of it . . . ?”

“I am sorry, Greta.”

The way his eyes caught mine—it was as clear as that time we had synchronized and counted together, to tie a bandage. They said:
I cannot stop Talis.

Nor, apparently, could I. Talis and I might in principle be equals, but I was the one on my knees. I reached up and took hold of the smooth scales of Evie's still-dangling arm. It flexed like a boa constrictor under my hand, and pulled. With that help, and with Francis, I got to my feet, still wobbling.

Francis Xavier looked around the room—the limp streamers, the empty-eyed figure, the twitching little boxes. He made a general salute.

“What was it you required?”

“It's an AI debutante surprise party,” said Evie, with a little wag of her hundred arms. “And we made some cake. Please taste it so that Greta knows we're not going to kill her.”

They kept us there almost an hour—fifty-three and a third minutes, exactly enough time for Halifax to die inside my mind a thousand times. We had cake, and Evie decided we needed music. There was no singing.

Finally the party simply stopped, midbeat, and the door slid open. And we were allowed to run.

It was too late. That was the point of the cake. Of course it was too late. But still we ran.

Francis didn't know where we were going, but he stayed exactly beside me: 17, 18, 19, and the C cross corridor. The overhead lights made thick bars of shadow spring from our feet. They shifted and spun as we ran, like compass needles. As if the world were spinning around me.

Too late, too late: but there was 17C.

“Two!” I shouted, into the air, into the
UNDEAD
, at the top of my lungs and with all my heart. Echoes bounced around us. And the door opened.

Francis Xavier, at my back, took a sharp breath in.

The space behind door 17C was tiny—a broom closet, it could have been, except that there was an alcove at the back of it, no bigger than an iron maiden and shaped to hold a man. An upload portal.

Elián was inside it.

He was locked in. Metal bands that closed over the opening like ribs. His hands were wrapped around them, fingers loose—forgotten fists. “Elián . . .”

“Guess again,” said the wall.
Two.

Fury turned me cold, and my words came out like a royal decree: “Let him go.”

“Certainly,” said the wall, and the ribs swung open.

Elián stepped out. His gaze was inward, absent. Then he blinked—three times. His face rebooted and his eyes lit like indicators.

FX put a hand on my shoulder.

“Elián?” I said.

Elián's face smiled—but not with Elián's smile. “Guess again.”

“Two,” I said. “Let him go. I demand that you—”

“Demand?” said Elián's mouth, and his eyebrow came up twenty-three degrees. “Oh, well, in that case . . .” And with no more warning than that, he collapsed.

I shouted wordlessly and lunged, skidding into him and wrapping him up even as he fell. We both crashed to our knees. The clatter of boots and knee bones hitting the metal floor echoed around the tiny room. Francis Xavier was right behind me. I could feel him, like the shield at my back. Elián was breathing loudly, and right in my ear, but when I leaned away to look at him I found his face calm.

. . . Or, not exactly calm. Inanimate. It was big-eyed and openmouthed, as if someone had taken a snapshot before the fear and horror had taken hold. He was breathing heavily as if he had a respirator driving his lungs, and his rate of breathing was speeding up, but his face was so, so still.

What would it take to shock Elián Palnik out of his skin?

And what would I do if he didn't come back?

“Just a test drive,” said Two, brightly, from the wall. “Just kicking the tires.”

“He's not a horse,” I answered. And then, as my datastore caught me up on the test drive/tires reference, “He's not a thing.”

Francis's hand was on my shoulder, heavy and steady and warm. “I've seen this,” he murmured—though surely no murmur was soft enough, with Talis in the room. “It's breaking, see?”

It was, the way ice breaks up. Elián was breathing so fast now that he had to be close to hyperventilating. He was starting to shiver and blink.

“I don't have much to report,” said Two. (The voice was synth'd, but nearly human—based on recordings, probably. Male, tenor, clever, warm, a bit too quick. Could it have been Michael's voice?) “Surgery went fine; implants are operational, obviously. We should be good to get out there and see what we can see.”

“Two,” I said, and did not even care that I was begging. “Talis . . .”

There were other things in the room: a whole wall of old-school blinking lights and screens and speaker grills. A ripple of pattern crossed the bank of lights, like a quirk of the lips. “Look, Greta,” said the wall, “I appreciate that this is disturbing for you. You certainly don't need to watch. But this is a
terrible
time for a palace coup. We need to find out what the Swan Riders want.”

“I know that,” said Elián. He was shivering like a tall poppy, and his voice was soft, but his aura was full of swirls. “I know what they want.”

“Oh, really?” said Two.

“They want—they want this. They want this never.” And then the ice broke with a catastrophic boom. “They want this never to fucking happen,” Elián snarled. His hands flew to his face, and he began scrubbing his skin with his fingernails, as if trying to scrub all traces of the possession away.

He was weeping. Francis Xavier and I crouched on either side of him. We took his hands so that he couldn't hurt himself. We pushed close.

“Well,” said the wall, in its light-opera voice. “Isn't that an interesting piece of feedback?”

FX looked up, too sharply.

The hole in the landscape, the vanished mountain that was the Swan Riders' experience of being ridden. It didn't matter that Two couldn't access it directly from Elián's mind. His reaction was enough to spotlight its importance.

“Greta,” said the wall, “why don't you take your little friend home. Two aspirins, call me in the morning sort of thing. Don't mess with my satellites. Check in with you in a bit.”

“But—” I began, then found myself busy as Francis Xavier let go of Elián's hand and stood up. Suddenly I needed both hands to keep Elián from scratching himself. Welts were coming up on his cheeks and neck and across one eyelid.

“Tell him he caught a break,” said Two. “Because if that's really their motivation, then he's the wrong person to ask. Whereas Francis . . .” The upload ribs opened, waggling like fingers. “Step into my parlor, said the spider . . .”

“I need him,” I said, wishing I had a hand free to pull Francis Xavier back down. In my grip, Elián jerked and jerked. “I can't carry Elián without him.”

“It's not like I did anything to his
legs
.” And then there was a beautifully timed pause: even when he was being a wall, Talis had Gilbert-and-Sullivan-worthy timing. “Or, if you need Francis, I suppose I could call Rachel.”

He couldn't possess Rachel. But there were other things he could do to her. It was Francis's lever, and Two had no qualms about pushing it.

Francis Xavier bowed his head and saluted the empty air. “My life is yours,” he said.

“That's my boy,” said the wall brightly. “I really would like to know all about this, now. I don't think I can read your mind. It shouldn't be possible, but to be honest, I've never tried it. But even so. We could do it in bursts—in and out, and you can give me little updates. How does that sound?”

It sounded like—

What if
, said the simulation,
we burned it slow.

Elián made a small, choked sound. “Get me out of here,” he whispered. “Greta, get me out.”

This, of course, is the problem with caring about more than one person. You can be forced to choose.