The Scorpion Rules (29 page)

My head jerked up, but Burr wasn't there. The Cumberlanders must have taken him away while we'd been taken up with Grego.

“Buckle, where is Mr. Burr?”

“No.” Da-Xia stood up. “No, don't look for someone to blame. Look at this. Look at him. Look at what you have done.”

And Armenteros—give her this. She looked. At the wind stirring the white hair, tangling it in the grass. At the intensely innocent eyelashes. At the raw meat of the throat.

“His name is Gregori Kalvelis,” Da-Xia said. “Grego.”

“Grego,” said Armenteros. A grandmotherly rumble of a word. She looked away and became a general again. “Who was he? Whose hostage?” She was asking me, of all people.

“He was the son of the Grand Duke of the Baltic Alliance,” I answered.

“Cumberland has no quarrel with the Baltics. His death was—”

“A murder,” said Xie. “He was murdered by Tolliver Burr, who is employed by you and deployed under your colors in an active theater of war. That makes his actions your responsibility.” It was practically chapter and verse, and quite right.

Buckle said: “The boy was dressed as a soldier.”

Da-Xia rounded on her, her Blue Tara composure cracking, her hands and knees bloody. “He was an innocent.” Her voice cracked too, and broke into a whisper. “He told jokes and he was scared and he didn't even like to take eggs from chickens.” She lifted her chin, a goddess again, and turned to Armenteros. “Whatever titles we hold, General, we are not soldiers. And we are not rulers. We are
innocents
. I think you have forgotten that.”

Armenteros wrinkled her eyes, a weary look. “You'd be wrong there.” She looked up from Grego's body, moon-pale and being lapped by the wild grass. “Children of Peace. I confine you to your cells. I haven't the manpower to guard you while you have the run of this place, and you are more trouble than I counted on. I will see to food and so on.”

Buckle said, “What about your grandson, sir?”

Armenteros looked at Elián. She didn't sigh. “Him too.”

“But—” said Elián. “I mean, I have to tell you what I—”

“I know what you did,” said Armenteros. “And I know that, thanks to what you did, we have about two hours before Talis blows up a city. I'm dealing with that right now. The business between us, we can sort out later.”

“No,” said Elián. “You can't. You have to back off. You have to get out of here.”

“No,” I said. “What you have to do is let me talk to Talis.”

Elián shook his head violently. Thandi just stopped herself before she grabbed me by the sling. Her hand closed on empty air. “What are you doing, Greta?”

I tried to ignore them—and Xie, whose eyes were locked on me, glimmering with understanding. “General,” I said. “You need to take me to talk to Talis.”

Armenteros studied me. The broad planes of her face pulled in, as if she were chewing on the insides of her cheeks. She asked what Elián had asked, but with her there was no dodging. She had a mind like a grizzly bear: she had reach, and it was unwise to run. She said, “Why?”

“Because he'll never let you leave. And that's what you want, isn't it? You came here gambling that Talis wouldn't strike while you held his hostages hostage. And that my mother would—”

I did not mean to pause there, but I did. Of course she loved me.
Of course.
“That my mother would act to save me. You were wrong on both counts. You lost. So now the best you can hope for is to get away. You don't even need the water anymore. Your population has fallen by—” I stopped. I had no idea of the population of what had once been Indianapolis.

“Three hundred and seventy thousand,” Armenteros growled.

“And your water needs,” I said, “correspondingly.”

Armenteros grunted and stuffed her fists into the pockets of her robe. It was white. She looked like a hostage herself, which I suppose she was. “Why Talis? Why meet with Talis?”

“I have something he wants. I'm the only one here who does.”

She didn't ask what it was. Instead her eyes went to my hands, curled and swollen. “Your Highness—I don't see why you'd take Cumberland's part.”

“It's ‘Your
Royal
Highness,' ” I said. “And it's because if you can get out, General, then you can take Elián with you.”

“What?” said Elián, who someone (Buckle, probably) had slapped into handcuffs. “Greta—”

I kept my focus on the general. “They'll kill him if he stays. They'll send him to the grey room.”

“Talis will never allow it, General,” said Buckle. “The boy—he's the
hostage
.”

“Greta, what are you doing?” said Elián.

Armenteros herself didn't speak at once. I watched her stand there in her rumpled bathrobe, with Grego's body at her feet, her powerful mind sniffing slowly through the possibilities. At great length she turned to Elián. “I promised your mother, you know. Told her I wouldn't come back without you.”

Elián's face fell open. He looked stunned as if struck by an arrow.

“So,” said Wilma Armenteros, turning back to me. “You're actually not the only one with something Talis wants, Your Highness. If you can't talk him round, tell him that I offer my personal surrender. Not my men—just me. He can do what he wants. That might tempt him.”

“General,”
objected Buckle, and Elián said, “No!”

I remembered how Talis had snarled over the idea of hurting Armenteros, the thin surface of his humanity cracking.
I'll make a story of her. A myth.

Dear God.

It was fully dark, but there were birds singing. It would be dawn in two hours, with smoke over Pittsburgh. There was nothing else to do, and no one else to do it. Elián was chained up, again. Xie was covered in blood. The Abbot was dying. And Grego was dead. It had to be me.

“All right,” I said. “I'll tell him.”

The Cumberlanders took me into the miseri, then through the narrow door behind the Abbot's desk. The hallway there was lined with compartments, like the cubbies of a catacomb, and in each of them one of our teachers was stored, hands folded, head tucked tight in sleep. There should have been power-points pulsing in the walls behind them, recharging them—but there were not. There was only one light, a handheld lantern set on top of a pile of sandbags. There were soldiers there, halfway down the empty, echoing hall. They had set up a checkpoint, complete with some minor fortifications and a gun in a fixed position, pointing down the hall, to the simple closed door of the Abbot's cell.

Talis was behind that door.

I did not think all the sandbags in the world would do the Cumberlanders any good. But it's odd, what makes soldiers feel better.

We came into the pool of light. “General says to take her to see
him
,” the woman guarding me said to the checkpoint soldiers. She cocked her head at the Abbot's door, in case anyone was in doubt about who or what earned that heavy pronoun.
Talis.

“I wish to go alone,” I added.

The boy at the sandbags—I recognized him, with a jolt, as the lad who'd turned so green at the thought of me being tortured—looked at me with widened eyes, and it was a moment before he scared up any bravado. “Better you than me, Princess,” he said.

He reminded me of Grego. I hoped Talis wouldn't kill him.

The soldier in charge of the checkpoints frowned at the other two—then nodded.

They let me pass.

I left the guard and the lamplight behind; my armless, swaying shadow went ahead of me. I paused before the door and let its eye sweep me: once, twice. What intelligence controlled that eye now? The door opened.

Inside was only darkness.

“Talis?” I called softly, as if into a lion's den.

For a moment there was silence, then a rustle, a glint of eyes. Then someone standing before me—the Swan Rider girl in a sepia-dirty white shirt, faded jeans. I could still smell the horse on her. But the moment the thing spoke, the Rider was gone. She had become Talis again, a godling in the doorway, with hair all mussed. “Greta Gustafsen Stuart,” he said, with a long slow smile. “Do come in.”

I shivered. But I went in. The door slid closed behind me.

The Abbot's cell was utterly empty. Two hundred years old, and his cell was empty. Four walls. No windows. A blank, hard ceiling that was like a weight over me.

Someone—Talis himself, I supposed—had dragged in a memory cushion. His duster lay on the floor beside it, kicked off like a . . . blanket? Did such a creature sleep?

The AI leaned backward against the wall and tucked up one foot like a heron. “What brings you here, Greta? And at such a strange hour.”

The foot resting against the stone wall was bare. A woman's foot, slender and high-arched, the nails neatly trimmed. I stared at it.

“Talis,” I said. “I want you to kill me.”

T
alis blinked.

I had made the strategic mind of the epoch blink.

“I'm certainly
willing
to kill you,” he said. “But you do understand, I have no particular expertise in hands-on murder.” He flashed a dazzling smile and spread said hands—they were elegantly long-fingered, striped with rein-callus, and not his at all. “Could get messy.”

“No—I mean—”

Talis clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Just a tick.” He stooped and rifled through the pockets of the discarded coat. I hoped he wasn't looking for a weapon. I hadn't yet had the chance to explain my request for death, and I would have hated to disappoint him by asking for a delay. But he stood up flourishing his glasses. “Rachel's farsighted,” he explained, unfolding them and settling them on his nose. “And a bit night-blind—she never said. Doesn't know, maybe. Not everybody knows their own weaknesses. One just assumes one's normal.”

“Were you asleep?” I surprised myself by genuinely wanting to know.

“On and off,” he said absently. “Rachel dreams . . .” He leaned past me, triggering the door, and stuck his head into the hallway. That provoked a wave of raised weapons, the click of safeties echoing down the stone corridor. “Are those sandbags? Ha!” He popped back into the room. The door closed. “Sandbags!” he told me. “I love that. What exactly do you think they think I'm going to do?”

“Uh—” I said, unable for a moment to keep up with him. He moved fast, and I was so tired that my bones were hollow.

“So,” Talis said. “Death.” He plopped down onto the edge of the cushion and patted the space beside him. “Sit down before you fall over, Greta. And explain to me your brilliant plan.”

I sat, awkwardly. It is difficult to sink to sitting without one's arms. Talis reached up and put one of his capable, stolen hands flat between my shoulder blades, steadying me on the way down.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I—” he began, and something flashed across his narrow face, some piece of ordinary humanity that was so strange in him that it took my breath. “I'm sorry about your hands.” I stared into his eyes. The littlest doubt fluttered there. “Rachel dreamt . . .”

He let it fall into silence. I let the silence hold.

“Rachel dreamt—” His eyebrows pulled together. And then in a different tone, cheerful and metal-bright. “Rachel had inductive webbing implanted in her brain, you see, so I could inhabit her. All my Riders have it. Also a datastore, here”—he slapped his ribs as if striking a drum—“because otherwise I wouldn't fit. And they dream! Rachel, she has all these lovely squishy chemical
body
things that pull at my thoughts. Lets me think differently. Stretch out a little. It's one of the tricks for a long life, stretching.” He yawned until his jaw cracked, and he stretched his neck, pulling an ear toward one shoulder. Head sideways, he grinned at me. “And that wraps up today's edition of
Michael Talis's Top Tips for Becoming a Successful AI.
Now, what were you saying?”

He'd guessed.

Of course he had.

“The grey room, the upload.” I was fumbling after the words. “It requires my consent?”

“The grey room doesn't. Obviously it's nice to have, and the Abbot—he's done a brilliant job here, getting you kids to sign off. But the upload . . .” He paused, nudging my bare toes with his bare toes. “Yes—consent at a minimum. It's not just any mind that can hold together through the spooling. An unwilling one doesn't have a hope.”

“What . . . ,” I said, rather faintly, and did not know how to finish it.

“You have to be smart. Disciplined. Ambitious doesn't hurt. Stubborn as a mule with a toothache. Reasonable tolerance for pain.” He made a pop with the air in his mouth. “All in all, Greta, I'd say you have a fair chance. But we can't do anything until— Oh!” Something strange happened to his face, as if his eyes had swung inside him, and then out, faster than one could see. “You shut off the snowstorm! That's brilliant! Did you kill Burr?”