“Father Abbot,” said Xie tentatively. The proctor lashed out at her, making her cry out and lean backward, breathless. No kind, brave words would be sparing anyone this time.
The proctor minced forward, pushing itself into the skirts of Hannah’s traveling coat. One of its multi-jointed arms lifted the coat aside, then insinuated itself around her ankle, wrapping it like a cuff. The girl stood, frozen and shaking. From where we sat at her feet, we could see the urine stain spreading down one leg. “Now, Hannah, do try to think,” said the Abbot. The grip of the proctor was growing tighter. Tighter. “There aren’t so many of you that you don’t know. What else is missing? Water skins? Packs? A map?”
“We didn’t help him!” screamed Hannah.
“I—” began the Abbot, and then stopped, as if something had tapped him on the shoulder. There was, in fact, nothing in sight. “Stand up, Children,” he said. “There’s something Talis wants you to see.”
Xie’s wide eyes reflected mine.
Don’t let him be dead. I could feel my stomach climbing up my throat.
Don’t make us watch you kill him.
“Come now,” said the Abbot. “You’ll miss it.”
And what else could we do? We got up.
At the Abbot’s direction, we stood in a line, as if for a firing squad. We faced the open prairie, south and west.
Nothing happened, and nothing. And then—the sound of nightmares. A flash and crash bigger than lightning. A sizzle as if the air itself were on fire. Orbital weapons fire.
I had never heard it in life. None of us had. But of course we knew it, from a thousand vids. It was iconic. It was history. It was here.
Thandi jerked backward, crashing into me, and Gregori actually hit the ground, putting his hands over his head. A second strike came: light, then a split second later the crack-boom. The light was the eerie Cherenkov blue radiated by the accelerated particles. It flashed, brief and blinding, and when our eyes cleared, we could see the column of cloud rising, arrow-straight, all the way to the edge of space.
First a light and then a cloud—a pillar of cloud by day.
The next thing we knew, the gantry spiders from the induction spire could be seen swarming downward, striking out for the impact point.
Elián. Of course it was Elián. We all knew it. Knew it even before they brought him back over the ridge, dressed like a trommeller and walking tall in Hannah’s shoes.
“There we are,” said the Abbot. “Thank you, Hannah. Let your parents know we’ll be in touch.” The proctor stepped backward, and the trommeller child bolted.
The Abbot watched her go out of sight, and then turned to us, one degree at a time, like a ratchet. He smiled. “Well, then, my children. Isn’t this an interesting glimpse of history? Shall we go have a look?”
None of us wanted to have a look. None of us dared say so. Our little execution-neat line had bunched up—the great noise of the orbital weapon had us all clutching at each other. Han was helping Grego off the ground.
“Come then,” said the Abbot, and lifted a hand. Proctors seemed to melt out of the walls and swarm all around us. “It should be instructive.”
So we went—six children in white, following an old, creaking robot who was finding the path with a stick. It probably looked idyllic from a distance. If you couldn’t see the machines that swarmed in the deep grass around us, scaring up the grasshoppers on all sides.
We followed the way the trommellers had come, a faint road through the waist-high prairie. The grasses were sere and stiff with end-of-summer heat, and the buffalo berry and sagebrush branches were thorn-sharp. They scratched our wrists, the backs of our hands. The rough ground pressed through the thin soles of our tabi.
A hundred meters, two hundred—as far from the Precepture as any of us had ever been. Three hundred meters, and then the track ended.
In front of us a crater opened, a shallow bowl of bare earth, a thousand feet wide. Heat still rose from it: it smelled like a kiln.
Spilled down into it, as if dropped from the edge, were three apples.
We stood at the crater edge. Thandi was closest to me, and she was shivering—waves of trembling were coming off her skin, like the ripples in the air above the impact site.
What Elián had done, so publicly—our cohort would be punished for it. When? Where? How? This crater, so strange, so hot, so full of possibilities. It could be instructive.
And it was different. Different from anything we were used to. Different from anything we had practiced. Different from anything we knew we could endure. Thandi was not alone in shivering with terror.
But the Abbot did nothing.
The Abbot. My teacher and protector, as dear to me as—as— I could think of no comparison. He would never hurt me. Had never hurt me.
Though presumably he had ordered me hurt.
He had spoken to Hannah as if he were fond of her.
And he had spoken to Talis, in the silence of his elaborate mind.
Said the Utterances, These Children are mine.