Elián stood like a little child and let me do up the ties at his wrists. And still he didn’t move. So I reached inside the wrap of his samue to do the interior tie. My hands slipped over his ribs. His skin was hot and dry. The spider-proctors skittered over my fingers. But in a moment I had him dressed.
Elián let his head tip forward, until his cheekbone pressed against my temple. “I really do love your hair,” he said.
Was he gone? Had his mind broken? Had I lost him before I had ever learned to see him? But even as I wondered, he lifted his hand and pressed it hard against my ear, turning his nose into my braids and crushing my head between his face and his hand. “It’s too much,” he whispered, into the hair he loved. “It’s too much, Greta. They’re going to kill me.”
“I won’t let them,” I said. And I did not know what I had become, but I knew I meant it.
11
THE GREY ROOM
Thus my heart began to turn against the only truth I’d ever known.
I felt it turn. I felt Elián’s heartbeat pounding against mine as I held him. It was like holding a bird: he was so breakable, all tremble and pulse. I held him for as long as I dared—knowing the Panopticon was watching, knowing that eventually the proctors would come—and then I pulled my body away from his. I led him under the pumpkins and put a bit of netting in his hand.
He looked at it. He looked at me, his eyes bewildered.
Then he took a big, gulpy-shuddery breath and started to work.
He took some time to recover himself—for several hours his movements had a strange deliberate quality, as if he’d been struck blind. I wished he could rest, but it was impossible, and he knew it was impossible, and so he worked. We tied up the pumpkins. We harvested the first of the acorn squashes and the last of the muskmelons. We pulled up early leeks. We watered in yesterday’s garlic. Through the whole afternoon nothing unusual happened, except that Elián kept his mouth shut and his proctors did not hurt him.
In the heat of the afternoon, we went inside—and there the Abbot stood waiting.
The transept was shadowy after the September blaze, an open, empty space, all stone, like a grand hall with no grandeur. In it the Abbot looked rather small, and rather out of place, a machine among all those hand-cut, human stones.
Elián saw the old AI and stopped short, his hand reaching for me. But Xie reached not for support but to support: she put her hand on the small of my back. Xie understood the Precepture better than Elián ever would, and she knew it was not Elián the Abbot was waiting for. It was me. When I had stood, the others had stood too. I had power. And I’d just promised to use it.
I looked at the Abbot, and my larger, wilder soul had the strangest thought. He is afraid, I thought. He is afraid of me.
I could feel the others draw closer: Thandi and Atta, Grego and Han, Elián gripping my hand, and Da-Xia at my back. They pulled closer like an honor guard—or like soldiers behind a king.
The Abbot was afraid of me. And he was right to be.
A proctor came up and tugged at the knee of my samue, its little claw hooked in the rough cloth. I held up a hand that said Wait, said Peace, said The queen commands you. The others kept their place as I followed the proctor without a word.
The Abbot and the proctor led me to the miseri. It was a different room by day—brighter, harsher. It seemed to offer less shelter. The Abbot opened his hand—fingers ticking faint as beetles on glass—toward the classics section. One of the column bookcases . . . something had happened to it. Books spilled at its base, jumbled over themselves, some facedown and broken-spined.
There were no other Children in the heart room at that time of day. A few proctors were scuttling. A big one—surely it was Elián’s scorpion proctor, with its distinctive heavy build and eye-gleam joints—was sorting through the fallen books. I told myself that its strength was needed, because some of the books were big.
“Greta, dear, sit down,” said the Abbot.
I sank down. The memory cushion shaped itself to me and held me. The big proctor tapped nearer. Its iris snapped in and out as it looked me over.
The Abbot settled beside me. The bent stalk of his body made him look like a man with a stoop. “Dear child,” he said. “Are you frightened?”
“Good Father,” I answered. “Are you?”
He tipped his head a little. I think it was meant to convey surprise. “No. Merely . . . melancholy.”
Surely he was not about to say he was disappointed in me. I might laugh in his face.
He looked at me and read at least some of that. “Ah, Greta,” he said. “Greta, you know I am not supposed to have favorites. What you may not know is that you have embodied the ideals of this humble school as well as anyone else in three generations. You are the favorite I do not have, and so, I permit myself a personal question: Are you frightened?”
He sounded so sincere. It was leaching the wildness out of me. “Frightened?”
“I gather you are upset at how Mr. Palnik has been treated.”