Sweat prickled on my back. “Somewhat, Father.”
“Hmmmm,” he said. Strong yellow light came through the tinted ceiling, showing the dappled oxides and tiny dents of his aluminum casing. Old. He looked old. He sighed, steepling his fingers. Unlike the proctors, his joints were no longer perfect; they made creaks and ticks. I wondered if they pained him. “I’ve pushed Elián, I admit. Perhaps I have even pushed him harder than I should. But, Greta, you have to understand. We have so little time.”
So little time.
Last Christmas the queen my mother had commanded my portrait to be painted. We had fought over the matter. I wanted to be painted in the white clothes of the Precepture, as is proper: the Children of Peace, around the world, are so depicted. The portraits of the sacrificed Pan Polar hostages are hung in the portrait gallery in the Halifax palace. They glow against the dark panelling. When I was small, I thought they were angels.
I do not know what made my mother object to the tradition of being painted in white, but object she did, and fiercely, her accent getting away from her until she was rolling Rs like a fisherman and spitting like a whale. She brought me the royal tartans and a crown to wear. When I objected on the grounds that I was not of age and it was utterly inappropriate for me to dress as a ruling monarch, she brought me the gown I’d worn at the Yule Ball.
That gown. It was taffeta, printed in flowers. Not pastel, dainty blooms but huge sweeps of goldenrod and blue morning glory, ivy that was almost black, roses the red that roses really are. I had worn it to the ball; I had had too much punch; I had flushed and danced; I had been interviewed and told the world, and Elián, that I was not afraid.
Ah, that gown: it turned my head, more than I care to admit. And when my mother had said something sharp and strange—“Blister it, Greta, I want just one picture of you not dressed as Joan of Bloody Arc!”—I had yielded.
But the portrait, when it was finished . . . There were things I liked about it. A lifetime of farm labor had given me muscles and tendons in my collarbones and shoulders; the painter framed them in taffeta and made them look as elegant as one of Cicero’s arguments. I liked that. I liked how the set of my mouth looked determined. I even liked my hair, my troublesome Guinevere hair. But these were things I saw later. What I saw first was my eyes.
Cool and empty and blue, very blue. They were cataracted with their blueness. Filmed over as if with ice, or death. I looked hollow.
When my mother saw the portrait, she wept. She held on to me, our skirts swirling together. “Greta,” she whispered. “My Greta, my Greta, my strong sweet girl—”
“Mother . . .” Her fingernails bit into my back, and I could hardly hear what she was whispering above the sudden pounding of my heart. It was: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
The Abbot’s voice jerked me back into the miseri. “I’ve seen you at the map table,” he said.
The map table, where I had studied the watersheds of the Great Lakes basin. Where I’d read the news dispatches until my hands had bled, watching the Cumberland Alliance and the Pan Polar Confederacy creep closer to war. Elián’s nation and mine. The demand for drinking water access to Lake Ontario, which the Cumberlanders could not live without and which the PanPols would never cede.
The Abbot’s eyes widened. They were only ovals, but they looked wise and sad. “I know you know what’s coming, Greta.”
“A war.”
“I only want Elián to do well,” said the Abbot. “You know it will be better for everyone if he can do well. And after all, you will have to go with him. Better if he doesn’t make a fuss.”
“Is it soon?” I said.
The Abbot shrugged, though shoulderless, by turning up a hand and opening the fingers. “I know no more than you, Greta, of the facts on the ground. I only have longer and perhaps more bitter experience of the way such things play out.” He tipped his facescreen just a fraction. Patted one of my knees. “My dear child,” he said. “You are going to die.”
My eyes lifted—I felt as if my gaze were being pulled—toward the bulge in the wall behind him.
The grey room was on the other side of that curve.
The grey room was the central fact of our lives, and yet we knew nothing about it. From the curve, we deduce that it is oval. We deduce that it is small. But we don’t know.
We don’t even know why it is called “grey.”
“Mastery of information has always been your strength and your comfort, I know,” the Abbot said. “I wonder if ignorance is, in your particular case, the kindest thing.”
I said nothing.
“Greta. Would you like to see the grey room?”