The Scorpion Rules

PRAISE FOR
THE SCORPION RULES

“Slyly humorous, starkly thought-provoking, passionate, and compassionate—and impeccably written to boot: not to be missed.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
, starred review

“Bow continually yanks the rug out from under readers, defying expectations as she crafts a masterly story with a diverse cast, shocking twists, and gut-punching emotional moments.”

—
Publishers Weekly
, starred review

“This is fearfully superlative storytelling— electrical tension crackles in every elegant word. The finest fiction I've read this year.”

—Elizabeth Wein, author of
Code Name Verity

“Bow's amoral artificial intelligence overlord is one of my favorite characters in a while.”

—Maggie Stiefvater, author of
The Raven Boys

“In fairy tales, princesses are always worried about who they are going to marry. Greta, Duchess of Halifax and Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy, is more concerned with her responsibilities as a future head of state. Erin Bow's Greta is my kind of princess.”

—Megan Whalen Turner, author of
The Thief

“
The Scorpion Rules
is one of the most inventive, devious, exciting, and thoroughly enjoyable books I've read in years. Very highly recommended!”

—Jonathan Maberry,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Rot & Ruin
and the Nightsiders series

“Clever and unexpected,
The Scorpion Rules
is a game-changing novel about the consequence of war and the brutality of peace. Unforgettable!”

—Suzanne Young,
New York Times
bestselling author of the Program series

“Elegant world-building, white-knuckle plot, and wonderful characters make
The Scorpion Rules
an extraordinary tale. I couldn't put it down.”

—V. E. Schwab, author of
A Darker Shade of Magic

“Bow's vision of our apocalypse is stark, beautiful, and terrifying. This is my favorite book.”

—E. K. Johnston, author of
The Story of Owen

“I don't know which is more delicious, the storytelling or the villain.”

—Tone Almhjell, author of
The Twistrose Key

“
The Scorpion Rules
is a bloody, breathtaking, beautiful book. . . . As a fellow craftsperson I'm left in awe, and as a reader I'm left feeling transformed.”

—Zoë Marriott, author of the Name of the Blade series

for my younger self, with love

“We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”

—J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER,

the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb

Once Upon a Time, at the End of the World

S
it down, kiddies. Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, humans were killing each other so fast that total extinction was looking possible, and it was my job to stop them.

Well, I say “my job.” I sort of took it upon myself. Expanded my portfolio a bit. I guess that surprised people. I don't know how it surprised people—I mean, if they'd been paying the
slightest
bit of attention they'd have known that AIs have this built-in tendency to take over the world. Did we learn nothing from
The Terminator
, people? Did we learn nothing from HAL?

Anyway. It started when the ice caps melted. We saw it coming, and we were braced for the long catastrophe, but in the end it came unbelievably fast. All of a sudden there were whole populations under water. Which meant that whole populations moved. Borders strained, checkpoints broke, and of course people started shooting, because that's what passes for problem-solving among humans. See, guys, this is why you can't have nice things.

It wasn't a global war—more a global series of regional wars. We called them the War Storms. They were bad. The water reserves gave out, the food supplies collapsed, and everybody caught these exciting new diseases, which is one of those fun side effects of climate shift that we didn't pay enough attention to in the planning stages. I saw the plague pits, I saw the starving armies, and eventually I . . .

Well, it was my job, wasn't it? I saved you.

I started by blowing up cities.

That
also
surprised people. Specifically, it surprised the people at the UN who had put me in charge of conflict abatement. Who'd so conveniently networked all those satellite surveillance systems, all those illegal-for-single-countries-to-control-them orbital super-platforms.

Yeah, fair to say those people were surprised. The people in the cities didn't actually have time to be.

I hope.

Doesn't matter.

My point is, they're showy, orbital weapons. They get attention. By city number seven—Fresno, because no one's gonna miss
that
—I had everyone's attention. I told them to stop shooting each other. And they did.

But of course it couldn't be quite that easy.

There's a math to it, blowing up cities. When you're strictly interested in the head count, when that's your currency, blowing up cities gets expensive. You can do it once in a while, but you can't make a regular habit of it. Costs too much.

No, blowing up cities doesn't work, not in the long term. You've got to find something that the people in charge aren't willing to give up. A price they aren't willing to pay.

Which leads us to Talis's first rule of stopping wars:
make it personal
.

And that, my dear children—
that
is where you come in.

—Holy Utterances of Talis, Book One, Chapter One: “Being a meditation on the creation of the Preceptures and the mandate of the Children of Peace”

W
e were studying the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand when we saw the plume of dust.

Gregori spotted it first—in truth he spent a lot of time watching for it—and stood up so fast that his chair tipped over. It crashed to the flagstones of the orderly little classroom, loud as rifle fire. Long and careful training kept the rest of us from moving. Grego alone stood as if his muscles had all seized, with seven pairs of human eyes and a dozen kinds of sensors locked on him.

He was looking out the window.

So, naturally, I looked out the window.

It took me a moment to spot the mark on the horizon: a bit of dust, as might be kicked up by a small surface vehicle, or a rider on horseback. It looked as if someone had tried to erase a pencil mark from the sky.

Terror came to me the way it does in dreams—all encompassing, all at once. The air froze in my lungs. I felt my teeth click together.

But then, as I began to twist toward the window, I stopped. No, I would not make a spectacle of myself. I was Greta Gustafsen Stuart, Duchess of Halifax and Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy. I was a seventh-generation hostage, and the future ruler of a superpower. Even if I was about to die—and the dust meant I probably was—even if I was about to die, I would not freeze and tremble. I would not gawp.

So. I put my hands one on top of the other and pushed them flat. I breathed in through my nose and blew out through my mouth as if blowing out a candle, which is a good way to cope with any kind of distress or pain. In short, I pulled myself back into being royalty. All around me I could sense everyone else doing the same. Only Grego was left standing, as if caught in a spotlight. That was clearly out of bounds—he'd be punished in a moment—but in my heart I did not blame him.

Someone was coming here. And no one came here, except to kill one of us.

At the front of the room, our teacher whirred and clicked. “Is something troubling you, Gregori?”

“I— No.” Grego broke himself from the window. His hair was the color of a cirrus cloud, and the sun caught the wiry sweep of it. The implanted cybernetic irises made his eyes look alien. “World War One,” he said, his accent sharpening the
W
s almost to
V
s. He looked down at his upturned chair as if he didn't know what it was for.

Da-Xia glided to her feet. She bowed to Grego, and then righted his chair. Grego sat down and pushed at his face with both hands.

“Are you all right?” asked Da-Xia, pushing—as she ever did—the edge of what we were allowed.

“Of course.
Žinoma
, yes, of course.” Grego's eyes flicked past her to look at the dust. “It is only the usual impending doom.” Grego is the son of one of the grand dukes of the Baltic Alliance, and his country, like mine, was on the brink of war.

But mine was closer to that brink than his.

On her way back to her seat, Da-Xia laid her hand on top of my arm. It rested lightly, momentarily, like a hummingbird on a branch. The rider wasn't coming for Xie—her nation was nowhere close to a war—so her touch was pure gift. And then it was gone.

Da-Xia sank back into her seat. “The assassination of the archduke is a great poignancy, is it not? That the death of one minor royal figure could lead to so much loss of life? Imagine, a world war.”

“Imagine,” I echoed. My lips felt numb and stiff. I did not look at the dust. No one did. Beside me I could hear Sidney's breath shudder. I could almost feel it, as if our bodies were pressed together.

“It's only a world war if you don't count Africa,” said Thandi, who is heir to one of the great thrones of Africa, and touchy about it. “Or central Asia. Or the southern Americas.”

The seven of us had been together for so long that in times of great stress we could have whole conversations that were assembled from everyone's most typical reactions. This was one of them. Sidney (his voice cracking a little) said that it could be penguins versus polar bears and Thandi would still call it Eurocentric. Thandi answered sharply, while Han, who is bad with irony, noted that penguins and polar bears did not live on the same continent, and therefore had no recorded wars.

In this prefabricated way, we discussed history like good students—and kept our seats like good hostages. Grego stayed silent, his white hand knotted in his whiter hair. Little Han watched Grego as if puzzled. Da-Xia tucked her feet up under herself in a posture of formal serenity. Atta, who has not spoken aloud in two years, was alone in looking overtly out the window. His eyes were like the eyes of a dead dog.

Talk in the classroom was drying up. Trickling away.

There was a tiny noise at the desk beside mine: Sidney, tapping his fingertips on his notebook. He lifted them a millimeter, dropped them, lifted and dropped. There were pinpricks of sweat on his cheekbones and lips.

I pulled my eyes from him, and saw that the dust was much closer. At the base of the plume was the bump-bumping dot of a rider on horseback. I could see the rider's wings.

It was certain, then. The rider was a Swan Rider.

The Swan Riders are humans in the employ of the United Nations. They are sent out to present official declarations of war—to present the declarations, and to kill the official hostages.

We are the hostages.

And we knew which of our nations was likely to be at war. The Swan Rider was coming to kill Sidney, and to kill me.