“That is . . .” I swallowed, bewildered. “That is a thing.”
He laughed low. “Listen to you. You sound almost human.”
We were walking aimlessly, down the terraces, through the gardens. They were different by night, black and silver, like ancient photographs.
“I could give you lessons on contractions, if’n you want.” Elián exaggerated his accent, as he did when he was nervous. “And then we could do slang.”
“I speak as I speak, Elián.”
“That you do,” he said very softly. Every step we took sent grasshoppers flying up around us. In the distance, I could hear coyotes—real coyotes, not children playing at them. It sounded like half-grown pups, trying out the yips and growls and laughs in their nearly human voices. It reminded me oddly of a cocktail party as heard from around the bend of a quiet hallway: a Halifax sound.
Elián sighed and stretched his arms up, looking suddenly very tall. “Do you think they’ll let us go all the way down to the river?”
“I doubt it.” The proctor Xie had destroyed “accidentally.” I had no doubt it had been replaced or repaired. That it was ready.
In front of us the terraces dropped away. At the bottom the river looped through its floodplain, gleaming like glass. Behind us, though neither of us turned to look, was the bulk of the Precepture hall, and the loom of the Panopticon mast, twisting and dark like a cricket’s exoskeleton.
An illusion, Atta had said. They can read our minds. But they couldn’t. Could they?
The Abbot could come close, but much good would that power do him. I did not myself know what I was thinking.
“I don’t care if it is a fake,” Elián said, as if responding to my thoughts and not to the last thing Atta had said. “Don’t care a bit. An hour or so without those spiders—I’ll take it.”
“They’ve left you?”
“When I took off my shirt. They just dropped off. Like full-up ticks.”
“So of course you went straight out to find another limit to push.”
“Well, of course,” he laughed. “They pushed me ’til I cracked and I’ve cracked right up. I’m dreaming about strolling hand in hand with Princess Greta.”
“We’re not hand in hand.”
He took my hand. “In a moonlit garden.”
“The moon’s not up yet.”
He stopped and turned to me. “And I’m not dreaming.”
“You need to take this seriously, Elián. The Cumberland Alliance—”
“I know.” He took my other hand, rubbing his thumbs over the ridges of my knuckles. “We’re going to war. And that means they’re going to kill us. I know.”
“Then why do you make them treat you—”
His thumbs stopped moving. “Make them?” he echoed. “God, Greta.” He let go of my hands. We stood facing each other a moment, in the dark garden. Then Elián took two hard steps away from me and sat down on a big stone that braced the terrace. “So,” he said, his voice suddenly cool. “What about you? Ready to die?”
“It might yet not come to that. The Pan Polar Confederacy is a superpower.” And the Cumberland Alliance, though I hated to say it to Elián, was a barely cohesive lump of leftovers, whose predecessor state had just lost a war with Mississippi, of all places. I settled for: “To take us on . . . Cumberland would be badly outclassed. They may not attack.”
The Abbot didn’t believe that. My mother didn’t believe that. I didn’t believe that. But I tried to hang on to it, for a moment.
Elián didn’t let me. “We might be outclassed,” he said, loading the word so heavily that it overflowed, dripping sarcasm. “But we won’t be outsmarted. Maybe we can’t win if we put our troops in pretty little lines to get shot at—so we won’t do it that way.”
“You can’t just alter the laws of war.”
“You don’t know my grandmother,” said Elián. “She could alter the laws of physics, if she gave them this particular look she’s got.”
“But Talis—”
“But nothing. We’re going to war, Greta. I knew it when I got here, and I still know it. You and me, Princess, we’re going to die.”
He was certain as a stone.
Quietly—supple-spined, because I was a princess—I sat down on the terrace beside him.
“Do you know when? Did Armenteros tell you when?”
He paused. “Guess she could have, huh? Never thought of that.” I’d just broken his heart a little. I could see the crack. “No, they didn’t tell me. What about you?”
“I—I suppose my mother thinks it kinder, if I don’t know when it’s coming.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Kinder.”
His accent was thick enough that it could have been “kind of.” Kind of kinder. And was it? I didn’t know. Maybe it was.
“I’ve been reading,” I said.
“Course you have. You studied up.” Elián laughed, faint as starlight. “What do you reckon, then? How long?”
“Weeks,” I said. “The diplomats have reached their endgame. No more than weeks.”
“Days?” he said.
“Maybe days.”