I did not know what to say. I tried: “Mother.”
“Are you all right? Have they hurt you? Have they hurt any of you?”
“I—” How could I explain? The fact that I’d been in dreamlock when the EMP had hit was not the Cumberlanders’ fault. That I’d been in dreamlock at all was too complex a matter to treat here. “None of the Children I’ve seen are hurt. They’ve hurt the Abbot—” I looked at his hand, and back to where his face should have been. I could see only my mother.
“Greta . . .” She seemed to be pleading with me. For what?
“And, pan right,” said Tolliver. He tapped something on his box. It must have overridden my mother’s virtual presence, because the Abbot pivoted mechanically, to focus on the general.
“There’s your proof of life, Your Majesty,” said Armenteros. “Are you satisfied?”
“I take it you have retrieved your own hostage,” Queen Anne said, her voice crisp enough to stamp on coins. “Your grandson, I believe.”
Armenteros glanced into the darkness, and then looked back and shrugged. “A side benefit, Your Majesty, and not relevant to this discussion.”
The Abbot’s head—my mother’s head—swung; she turned back to face me. She had zoomed. Her face filled the facescreen, and was shown only chin to forehead. Her eyes were where eye icons would have been. They searched me. I felt I should say something, but I really did not know what. Her gaze held me trembling.
“Greta, talk to me. Say something only you know. Something they couldn’t fake.”
My scalp prickled, but I didn’t stop to think. I just answered: “I’m not Joan of Arc,” I said. “I know because I’m frightened.”
“Greta.” I hardly even heard my name. I could only see it, on the shape of my mother’s lips. She lifted the Abbot’s hand and touched me: I felt the light coolness of the ceramic fingertips on my cheek. For a moment I let myself lean into that well-known touch, and then I looked at my mother and nodded. My mother nodded back, queen to queen, and turned to face the general.
“All right, Armenteros.” The harshness of my mother’s voice made the Abbot’s voder buzz. “Let’s hear your demands.”
I sat in the hard wooden chair at the map table—the table where I’d plotted the progress of the wars that had taken us, one by one. Bihn, taken so young. Vitor, solid and sad. Sidney, his hand falling from mine. The map table where I had studied the coming war, the war that was going to kill Elián. And me.
Off to my left, Armenteros was giving her demands—or rather, her demand. She had only one, and it was precisely what I had thought it would be—drinking water rights to Lake Ontario. I had even correctly predicted the amount, seven thousand acre-feet per annum.
Such mastery was usually a comfort to me. I could hear the Abbot’s voice saying just that. I wonder if ignorance is really the kindest thing. And I could see the high table in the grey room, where the light was so even that no shadows fell. Would it be injection? Beams? A bullet to the head? What reason was there to care? There had not been a reason before. Why should there be one now? The Cumberlanders must surely be planning something less . . . private.
Queen Anne said, “That is beyond the carrying capacity of the lake.”
“Just under, my hydrologists say.”
Even filtered through the Abbot, the tilt of my mother’s head was pure me—pure her. “That analysis was done in a wet decade. The usual pattern is 6,200 acre-feet—ten percent less.”
Armenteros shook her head slowly. “Seven thousand is the minimum required to sustain our population.”
“Then your population will need to change,” said Queen Anne. “The lake can’t.”
“You suggest I let two hundred thousand people die of thirst?”
I was certain of my mother’s raised eyebrow, though I could see only the back of the Abbot’s head, the crack in his casing where the fibers had been jammed in. “I suggest you relocate them. But that is your decision: purely an internal matter.”
“Your Majesty,” said Armenteros. “I will not be coy.” She drew a husky breath. I knew what was next. It was time to make explicit the implied threat. Time to mention torture.
Coy, she’d said.
Suddenly I was furious. I reached across the table and took hold of the bundle of fibers between the Abbot’s head and Tolliver Burr’s box. I yanked.
The wires tore free. The Abbot grunted and staggered, swinging round and catching himself against the table. On his screen, my mother’s face froze and distorted.
“General Armenteros,” I said, “it would astonish me if you were coy.”