We turned on them, pitching fruit and stones at them as if playing at pins. Someone even bowled over the big scorpion proctor with a butternut squash.
But the fun had gone out of things. A few shocks, distributed at random; the knowledge that we were watched; the fact that we had been raised better (or if not better, at least differently)—these overcame us. The Children of Peace could not easily be silly, and our silliness fell apart.
The evening found us bruised and quiet, spread out in groups or pairs on the spattered grass, eating our former ammunition—chunks of watermelon and muskmelon warmed by the bronze sun. Even this was unlike us—unstructured, unrationed eating, outdoors. But we could not waste so much food. We scattered up and down the garden terraces; we lay in the goat-cropped grass and were happy.
For my part I claimed one of the best places in the Precepture—leaning up against the wall of the toolshed, hidden from the Panopticon’s view. The grass there was less scorched. It was a sweeter, fresher place, a little oasis with a scent of wild clover. I was sitting cross-legged by myself when Elián came and flopped down beside me. He helped himself to one of the broken melons I’d gathered, and reclined on one elbow to eat it, like a Roman emperor. “Thanks,” he said.
“There’s plenty—though one might ask.”
“Nah, I mean for letting that happen.” He grinned up from his cantaloupe. “It’s been a while since I had that much fun.” Indeed he looked like a different person. His eyes were not guarded but gold-brown; his body was not hunched but held ready.
“I think a food fight falls under the heading of ‘unavoidable low-intensity conflict,’?” I said, then annotated: “That’s an allusion. From the Utterances. ‘There’s a certain level of unavoidable low-intensity conflict about which I simply can’t be bothered.’?”
“?‘But don’t bloody push it,’?” said Elián, startling me by quoting the rest of the verse. My surprise must have shown, because Elián looked at me sourly. “I’m not actually an idiot, you know. If I got stuck on a desert island, my one book would definitely be Why I Stuck You on This Desert Island, Signed, Your Insane Robot Overlord. Of course I read Talis’s damn book.”
Our eyes caught each other’s then, braced, fearful—but the proctors didn’t shock him. They might technically have been intelligent, but they weren’t sentient: they weren’t people. They were bad with sarcasm.
I let out my breath. “I don’t think it’s Talis’s book, exactly. He’s merely quotable.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, taking a big bite of melon. “For sure ‘quotable’ is the word that springs to mind.”
I tried again: “I only meant, you don’t have to thank me. The food fight—you started it.”
“The goat started it,” he said. “But you, Greta—you could have stopped it.”
“I don’t know about that. It seemed to have quite a bit of momentum.”
“Seriously?” Elián wiped the melon juice off his chin with the back of his hand. “You study power and you don’t know who’s got it around here? Let me clue you in, Princess. It’s you.”
And there was the electric shock. After getting away with the crack about Talis, Elián must have lowered his guard, because the pain surprised him. He jerked, his elbow slipped, and he fell backward. I dropped my watermelon and grabbed him in time to keep him from braining himself on a stone. I had no leverage to hold him, though. I laid him out on his back. “Elián?”
He didn’t answer me. He let his head roll farther back, pointing his chin at the sky, baring his throat, letting his eyes drift closed, black lashes tangled. If the fetal position had an opposite, here it was. He was defenseless, utterly. I could see the pulse in the soft places of his throat.
It made something wring, twist like a damp cloth deep inside me.
All my life I had been so careful, so protected, so braced, and here he was, open and . . . and . . .
I could not think what the “and” was. For once, it was not “foolish.”
“Well, fiddle,” he said. “Couldn’t they have let that last?”
Another twist inside me, because I agreed. I agreed with him.
“Was it you, who bowled down the big proctor?” I said. “I—I hope it was you.”
Elián didn’t answer. Perhaps he did not understand how much it meant for me to say that, to side with disorder. He picked up a piece of melon and lifted it in both hands, studying its peaks and watersheds. “All this fuss over me.” He rolled his head farther back and gave me an upside-down smile. “I swear, back home I was nobody.”
“Come now. Wilma Armenteros’s grandson, a nobody? The woman is a legend in sensible shoes.”
“Yeah, but my mom kept me way clear of all that. I stuck pretty close to nobody.”
“And you were no trouble to anyone, I’m sure.” I scooted around so he wouldn’t have to hurt his neck to talk to me.