“Weeeeell,” he drawled, drawing it out and rolling open a sly smile to match. “Maybe a spot of trouble. Here and there.”
“Here and there,” I said, trying for prim, and missing it. I sat looking down at him.
He rested the melon on his belly and examined me. His eyes were guarded again, and I knew—just knew—that he was about to do something deeply inadvisable. “What about you? You ever . . . run off? Get into trouble?”
“Rarely.” I hit prim that time. I hit it squarely.
“Would you?”
“Would I what?”
His eyes were serious. Even frightened. But his voice came out sweet as peaches. “Run off with me.”
“Elián, away from this place I am a duchess. Any outing we planned would involve protocol officers.”
He laughed—a fake laugh?—and glanced sideways.
He was checking the sight lines.
I knew those lines far better than he did. I knew that the Panopticon was hidden behind the wall of the shed. It could not see our faces. I did not need to turn and look to be sure, and yet, out of pure nerves, I turned and did just that. Because I suddenly knew what Elián was up to. He wasn’t flirting with me at all. Or maybe he was, but also, this talk of running away . . .
He had learned to speak in Precepture code. He was speaking in it now. And he was proposing an escape.
The Panopticon couldn’t see him, couldn’t read his lips. The little spiders in his clothes could hear him, but they couldn’t peel away his layers of meaning.
“We’ve got that one date coming up, though,” he said. “With a . . . protocol officer.”
With a Swan Rider. With sick tightness I remembered her: a gentle white woman with a chickadee cap of dark hair. She would walk into our classroom. She would say both our names. . . .
“When?” I said—because this was what I’d wondered from the first instant I’d seen him. Did he know he was going to die, or only guess it? Did he know when?
The word had torn out of me with too much raw power. I saw a proctor in the squash bed swivel round and scan us. I smiled politely for it, for Elián, as if flattered. My cheeks trembled in the smile. “We do,” I said. “We have a date.”
“It’s coming up fast, you know.”
“Is it?”
Did he know?
My hands were sticky with watermelon juice. I rubbed them against the rough linen of my work pants.
Elián reached up and took one of my wrists, stopping the motion, looking me up and down. I’m sure he was trying for as a man looks at a woman, but it came off rather more as an engineer looks at a bridge pylon. How much fear would it take for Elián’s flirt to go wrong like that? A lot, I thought.
Terrified. He’s terrified.
“So, what d’ya think?” he said. “Up for . . . a spot of trouble?”
Escape. Will you come with me?
I took a breath and said: “No.”
He looked blankly shocked, even betrayed.
But surely he must realize—the Preceptures were inescapable. We were isolated, outgunned, overwhelmed. Surely he must realize what happened to people who challenged Talis.
“No,” I said. “Elián, we can’t. You can’t.”
“No?” he said, in a voice more stones than peaches. “Just watch me.”
Instead of answering I tightened my hand around his. He squeezed back. And then—awkwardly, because of our joined hands—I lowered myself to lie down in the clover next to him.
We lay there as evening folded in around us.
We did not speak.
8
ROYAL VISIT
It is perhaps a strange thing that the children of kings and presidents should concern themselves with the sex lives of a herd of milch goats, but come the end of August, it was time to do just that.
If one had to sum up the Precepture in two words, they might be “hands on.” (One might also consider “academic rigor,” or perhaps “ritual murder.”) The whole world is more hands-on than once it was. On the whole, we humans have learned the hard way that we must become a permanent culture, a zero-carbon culture, and live on the earth without damaging it. (About time, people, said the Utterances. I can’t save the world by myself, you know.) Even so, things do vary by class. My royal cousins—those little countesses and wee marquesses in their royal pleats and tartans—probably can’t put up their own pickles.
If one of them comes here as a regent’s hostage, they will be in for a rude shock.