The Swan Riders (19 page)

He turned around. There was another buckle on the strap across the back. I tightened it, and Francis Xavier spread his shoulders, which closed the pincer with a tiny snick. “Tighter,” he said. “I'll need the grip.” In infrared, he was aglow like a candle in darkness, the heat pouring out of him. He bowed his shoulders out, opening his pincer hand again and giving him the look of picking up something heavy. While I tugged at the strapping, he spoke out of that heaviness. “The place I'm from is warmer.”

I let go of the strap and he turned to face me. He raised his hand and traced the loops of his head scarf—or rather, the space around his face where the loops would be: the actual scarf (lately used as a compression bandage) was in a blood-soaked coil by the wall. “You asked once. Do you remember?”

Two days out of Saskatoon, seeing him wrapped up and shivering, I'd asked him where he was from. He'd said: “Somewhere warmer.” And Sri had told me she had no history.

“I remember.” There was only the shoulder saddle to adjust now. I set to it.

“What else do you remember? What did Talis take?”

“Everything,” I said without thinking, and then corrected it. “Nothing. I've lost no data, Francis.”

I was close enough to tuck myself under his chin. Close enough to see the bruising on his throat where he'd been choked.

“You never used to call me that.” He stepped away and bent to pick up his clothes. “He's changed you. He's changed you too much.”

“You mean Michael.”

“I mean Talis.”

“I'm not sure he's still Talis.”

“There's no one else he could be,” snapped Francis.

I blinked.

Francis Xavier turned his back and pulled his thermals over his head. Then he shrugged on his shirt and vest. There was violence in his motions, and decision. Something was happening. But what?

I walked around him so that I could monitor his face. I had missed so much of what was happening in Francis Xavier's head, and I was determined not to miss more. His gaze was tipped downward, and he was struggling with his buttons. I'd never seen him struggle with anything, but one-handed buttoning is quite a trick.

I stepped close to help him. There was a flustered moment, a tangle of fingers, and then he took a big gulping breath and let his hand drop.

The violence had fallen into calm. And the decision—whatever it had been—was apparently made.

“The place I'm from is warmer,” he said. “I guess I can say that.”

I watched him intently. All humans have microexpressions—bursts of unfiltered facial expression, lasting only a few hundredths of a second—that reveal their true feelings, no matter how carefully schooled and still they kept their conscious faces. It is evolutionary, involuntary. In the last few hours my datastore had made me an expert in microexpressions. FX could not hide from me.

But he didn't seem to be trying to hide. “Warmer,” he said, “and small. We fished, mostly, in a lake.” His eyes were not quite focused, his mouth not quite closed. He looked . . . soft. Sorrow, was this? “There were mosquitoes, of course. And when I was twelve—” He stopped midsentence. The microexpression betrayed him: his lower eyelids tensed, his eyebrows drawing together. Fear. It vanished in less than a blink. “It was Var5, dengue variant five. We called it breakbone fever.”

A tropical or subtropical inland fishing community, a Var5 outbreak, call it five to seven years ago—I could pinpoint him with that. But Francis Xavier intercepted my line of thought. “It doesn't matter where. It happens: I have seen it happen since. It has happened many times.”

“Yes.” The massive climate shift a few hundred years back had given rise to several new variants of old plagues, as moving human populations met moving virus reservoirs. Dengue, hanta, West Nile, bubonic plague. There was a reason global population was down to a mere half billion.

“Many died.” His breath stirred my hair. “Not everyone. But many. My mother. My sisters. What I remember—”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He was rigid with the effort of not trembling, but trembling because he was so rigid. An act of will but a strange one. It was like watching someone put nails into himself one by one.

“What I remember,” he said, “is waking up in the clinic. The cot was draped with mosquito netting, like gauze, white gauze. There was a shadow on the gauze—a woman with wings.”

There were altered levels of consciousness associated with the recovery phase in dengue fever. He would have been vulnerable to whatever images his struggling mind produced. They would have impressed him deeply. “An angel.”

“Yes,” he said—and then his deep voice broke. “An angel, but a living angel: a Swan Rider. They'd come. Talis sent them; the UN sent them. To save us. The AIs—they'd made an antiviral. From the moment the Riders came, no one else died.”

Growing up as one of the Precepture's blood hostages, as one of the Children of Peace, had conditioned me to think of the Swan Riders as the angels of death. After all, they came to kill us. But they did this, too. They were the hands and agents of the UN, of Talis and the other AIs. Earthquakes, disease, famines: over and over, they went into the worst places. Over and over, they saved the world.

The Swan Riders had saved Francis Xavier. They'd given him his life, so he'd given them his. It seemed . . . straightforward. Logical, even. Did they all have such stories, I wondered? And asked: “What about Rachel?”

“What about her?” He stepped away from me, buttoned up, armed—remade. “Do you know why I bothered with this?” He raised his pincer.

“No.” I'd been wondering. He'd been brilliantly capable without it.

“Because you can't use a crossbow with one hand.” He picked his up, and in three quarters of a second had it raised, cocked, and aimed—at Talis.

“Francis!”

His finger was on the trigger.

“We need to get out of here, Greta. We have enemies and our enemies know where we are. We cannot defend this position. It's too exposed.”

I shook my head. “Talis cannot be moved.”

“I know,” said Francis Xavier. “We need to kill him.”

“What?”

“I need to protect you, Greta. And I cannot do it here. It seems to me this whole country is at war.”

He wasn't wrong. Calgary. The Saskatoon incident. The ambush. What was safer than the middle of nowhere, Talis had once asked—but right now I was wanting a fortress.

“We need to cut our losses,” said Francis Xavier, his aim fixed on the loss in question. “We need to run. And we need to do it now.”

He fired.

I shouted.

And the bow jammed. One of the arms snapped and the string sprang free and the bolt came flying out at an angle and
thwunk
ed deep into the ground, not two feet from Talis's head.

Francis Xavier gaped at it. “Stand down!” I barked, and slapped the weapon aside. “Stand down. This is my decision.”

The crossbow stock was clamped into Francis Xavier's pincer hand. It fell to his side; the damaged bow bounced off his knee. The Swan Rider took a shuddering deep breath. Bowed his head. Closed his eyes. And saluted me as if he expected me to put him to death.

Which was tempting.

But—I was worth more than two or three cities. Was I not worth more, then, than a damaged copy of Talis himself? “Tell me—I want your frank evaluation. How much danger are we in?”

“I don't know,” he said.

“Is Sri coming back?”

“I don't know.” There was anger in it that time. “She didn't tell me. She didn't tell me anything.”

“I believe in your innocence.”

He looked up at me, the microexpression a twist of pure disgust. He didn't bother to wipe it away. “If you believe that, then you have no idea what it means to be a Swan Rider.”

I did, in fact, have some idea. I had been one of the Children of Peace. The Swan Riders had killed my friends. One by one. Year after year. But at the moment, that was not the point: “I mean, you're not part of the Pan Polar rebellion. Not part of Sri's conspiracy.”

“No.”

“It makes no sense that Sri and her people would come back. She didn't want to kill him; she wanted to change him, so that he'd die like the Riders do.” I hadn't figured that out right away, but Talis had.
That's the bloody point, isn't it?
“She reminded me about the chest tube. She wants him alive.”

“And the rest of them?” said Francis Xavier. “The boy with the knife. The one you knew.”

“Elián.” Sensation flashed like electricity. Elián. I had known him. (I
knew
him.) I wrapped my arms around my body.

“What does he want?”

“I don't know.”

And I didn't. Elián: it didn't make sense that he would want to wound Talis, merely. To give him a Rider's death, that was Sri's agenda: it corresponded to her grievance. But Elián's grievance was different, simpler: Talis had crushed his grandmother to death in an apple press. To repay that with a single surgical thrust . . . it did not seem in scale.

“What if he comes back?” said Francis Xavier. “What if he brings a dozen friends.”

“Elián loves me,” I said.

“And you think, therefore, that he would not hurt you?” said Francis Xavier. He looked down at the ruined bow, bouncing against his knee. “Think again.”

I thought again. I looked at Talis: drugged and limp, deeply asleep. His breathing was even now, though his heart rate was high as his body fought to compensate for lowered blood volume. His temperature was lower than it should be, but not critically so. It looked, generally, as if he would live if we took a little care.

Which was what the conspirators wanted.

Or
part
of what they wanted.

It was possible that my life was on the line here. But Talis's was not. He was a copy. A damaged, dying copy. There was nothing on the line for him but the manner of that death.

A tiny sound reached me: a hiccup of breath. I turned back, and Francis Xavier was crying.

“What's wrong?”

“I never meant to be a murderer,” he said. “And I am sorry about B
hn.”

“Who?” For a moment, I genuinely did not know. Then I recalled B
hn, Greta's fellow hostage, the one Francis Xavier had hauled out of our classroom to her death. Dragged her while she screamed and fought. While her fingernails broke off in the wood of the doorframe. The access to what was left of B
hn—pure data—was so slow as to be almost a malfunction. I frowned. Talis had . . . I flashed on his eyes crinkling with concentration, his fingers tight around mine, his sensors reaching deep. An ultrasound cascade: he'd called it exorcism.

He'd done it three times. He'd taken everything.

He'd taken nothing.

I'd lost none of the data.

Talis was alive, which was what Sri wanted. His life pinned us in place. Made us vulnerable, to whatever came next. It was like seeing the flare: We needed to cut sideways. We needed to move fast.