I wake—
“. . . up! Greta, wake up!” I have never heard the Abbot so urgent. Is it possible he is afraid? Some kind of drug or current, something artificial, surges through me. It peels open my eyes the way an IV stent opens a vein. I can see but I cannot choose what to look at. Straight up: the glass roof of the miseri is rippled amber, the color of apple juice. The Abbot leans over me. His face is discomposed, his eye icons sideways like a goat’s eyes, his mouth just an oblong. “Greta,” he says—he does not make his mouth icon move. “Greta, they are coming. There are shielded places we can go, but you must wake up.”
But I cannot even move my eyes. If it is time for me to go to the grey room, I will go to it like a sleepwalker.
Which is what they have wanted all along.
From the corner of my eye, I see the ceramic phalanges and braided metal tendons of the Abbot’s hand. He is touching my face, my temple, where the dreamlock magnets are affixed.
Something in my brain goes click, click, click—and I see things, as if my eyes had been turned to slide projectors.
Xie in her crown.
A body in my dress.
Elián’s face, smiling up under his antlers.
My ears are full of the static noise of my silk dress whirling over stone.
There is blood in my mouth.
“Greta!” The Abbot tugs at me. He glances over his shoulder, at the ceiling—a human gesture, and odd, for surely he must have visual feeds. But he turns, and I find I, too, can turn. I look up— And something is coming down.
Through the sky at dawn, something big is coming. It slams toward us like a fist swinging in, like the sky itself falling, something round and black and thundering down. There is an enormous sonic boom. The ceiling shatters. The Abbot falls. His mainstem strikes across my legs. His hand splays against the floor with a clack. Squares of golden glass patter onto us. The underside of the ship takes up the whole sky.
And then—
Then lightning strikes me. It goes into my brain. I scream and I hear the Abbot scream and— The world goes black.
14
ELIáN CHOOSES
There, it is disconnected.”
The voice was familiar, but I was adrift. I could not place it. I opened my eyes and saw only a window—a hatchway or a round window, edged with blades. It was a circle, and then the blades swung inward and made it a smaller circle, and then larger again. The twitching looked organic. The blades seemed to flutter like a pulse. Half machine, half—
“Father?” I said. The Abbot. The Abbot had been—
I heard the Abbot’s voice, as if in a memory: “Children, I’m afraid there is bad news. . . .”
“Come back, Greta.” That voice was Xie’s.
“Greta?” Elián. “Please, God— Grego, is she okay?”
“I’m not— A moment.” It was the unplaced voice again—Grego. It was Grego. “Ah, yes. See? Yes, they are coming free.” There was a twinkle in the corner of my eye. A dark shadow lifted past me as the dreamlock magnet-net came loose. And then the bladed window took its true size. It was tiny. It was right in front of me, but it was tiny, a laser aperture—an aperture.
Grego’s eyes.
Grego pulled away from me, white eyelashes blinking over the dark shutters that pulsed where his irises should have been.
“Sveika, Greta,” he murmured. “It is good that you are back.”
“What?” My tongue felt thick and rough. “Xie?”
“Greta,” she whispered. She wrapped an arm around me and helped me sit up. The room pounded and spun.
Right in front of me was the Abbot. His facescreen was blank—literally blank, with no icons at all. When he spoke, his voice, mouthless, seemed to come from everywhere. “Children, I’m afraid there is bad news.”
“Stop saying that!” Elián wailed, and kicked the old AI right in the mainstem, just above where the hexapod legs joined. The Abbot staggered, blind, putting out a hand.
“Children, I’m afraid—” he said again.
Elián was not wearing what he should have been, not his whites. Patches the colors of stone and dust and books shifted across him and seemed to blur his edges.
Focus, Greta. I blinked hard. Elián—he was wearing chameleon cloth, chamo, a fabric with active pattern disruption. It is what soldiers wear. Elián looks like a soldier. The Abbot looks dead. His face is blank as paper. “There is bad news,” he intoned, like a looped recording. “A war has been declared.” Dead, but speaking, and Grego had eyes made of blades.
Could I at least have faith in Xie? She was right—her shape, her smell, the strength of her arm around me. I closed my eyes and clutched at her. “Xie? Is this real?”
“You’re waking up,” she said. “Come back, Greta. It’s—”
Something cut her off, a voice that growled out of the shadows, a woman’s voice. I could not make out words.