“Michael!” objected the Abbot.
“No,” I heard myself whisper, plead. Talis’s grip was slowly breaking through the membranes, through the skins of numbness and pain and into the skin itself. “No, please, Talis—please.”
So abject. And I could not even hate myself for it. I was too far gone.
Elián, though—give him this, he’s never been paralyzed. He swung out from behind Xie and seized Talis’s arm and yanked him away from me. “Don’t you touch her.”
Talis just smiled. “But I didn’t touch her. I saved her. Whether I can do it again . . . If I were you, Elián, and if I loved her . . . Well. I need you to flip this little situation around for me. I need you to punch me a hole in the snow.”
“I d-don’t . . .” Elián stuttered. “I can’t— I don’t know anything about broadcast jamming.”
“But probably you have friends who do. And you might be able to get them access.” Talis laughed lightly. “If that fails, try murdering Tolliver Burr.”
I could hear Elián’s harsh breathing. But he said nothing.
“Grego,” whispered Da-Xia. “Talk to Grego. He knows broadcasting, if anyone here does.”
“Xie, I—” Elián cut himself off and turned to me. “Greta, I can’t. It’s crazy. And even if— I can’t.”
But I could only fold up, curling the whole of my body around my broken hands. “Don’t let them,” I said, to him, to all of them. “Oh, don’t let them. Please.”
Da-Xia covered her mouth with one hand, and put the other on Elián’s arm.
“Go,” said the Abbot to both of them. “I’ll take care of Greta. Go.”
A long summer evening spread across the misericord. There was birdsong in the twilight, and the sky turned lavender, with high clouds like brushstrokes, first white and then a luminous gold. Cirrus clouds, a shift of the weather. The Cumberlanders had a generator going somewhere. I could hear its growl, and the uncouth voices of the soldiers, who did not belong in this silent, careful place.
It was quiet again. Da-Xia and Elián, slipped away. Even Talis, dismissed. “Use my cell,” the Abbot had said to him. “It’s easier to defend than the rest of the Precepture, if the Cumberlanders decide to take action in the middle of the night.”
So it was the Abbot and I.
He took off my tabi and tidied my hair. He wiped the tear streaks from my face with a cool cloth. Then he scooped me up from the table and laid me in the rounded cushion by the Romanist shelves; my nest, and the place where he himself had sent me plunging into terrible dreams.
This seemed like just one more. One more dream. Except that sometimes my hands hurt, and needles were needed to keep me from sobbing.
Darkness fell, and stars opened beyond the shattered roof. The Abbot lit one of the golden lamps. He was silent, crouched at my side.
“You should sleep,” he said, finally.
Obedient—even now, obedient—I closed my eyes for a moment. Terror loomed up from my inner darkness. My eyes flew open. I breathed in through my nose and blew out as if blowing out a candle, two times, three, and four. When I could speak again, I said, “You should shelve the books.”
“Ah. That I could do.” The Abbot unbent his hexapod legs and leaned forward, his hands on the upper joints, wheezing like an old man. He paused there a moment. And then he turned to the books and lifted one delicately.
I watched him work in the lamplight, and he did not seem like a machine. He lifted the tumbled volumes as if they were flowers. He tucked them to sleep on their shelves. Where they were crumpled, or broken-spined, he piled them on his desk. He had glue and binder’s tape, a bonefolder.
He had a book press.
I looked away from the little press, its pan and levered top. Felt my heartbeat pounding in my shoulders.
The Abbot left the injured books and came back to me.
“Would that the whole world were so easy to order,” he said. “So easy to repair.”
“But it’s not.”
“No. It’s not.”
“Dreamlock,” said the Abbot, softly. “Let me help you. Dreamlock, merely to keep dreams at bay.”
“No,” I said. “Not that.”
I wanted to lift my hands, to cover my face, but even the first stir of the movement made my tender shoulders glow with pain. Talis had reseated them—his strange eyes glowing—but it was going to be days or even weeks before the tendon damage healed.
Who was I trying to fool? I didn’t have weeks.
The apple press was tomorrow.
“In four hundred years,” said the Abbot, “no army in the world, no nation and no alliance of nations, has stood for long against Talis. The UN will have its Precepture back.”
“And then you’ll kill me.” It was a cold fear all through me, but perversely I was comforted. Better the grey room than Tolliver Burr.
But the Abbot made a tock noise in his throat. “Greta Gustafsen Stuart,” he said. “What if there were another way?”
20
CLASS TWO