“In my body I used to dream. In this form I have no dreams I do not wish to have.”
I looked at our joined hands. I could feel the pressure of his hand on mine, but not the texture. “The . . . process. Does it hurt?”
The Abbot paused, his mouth icon narrowing. “Profoundly,” he said at last. “But for me there is no torment in the memory of the pain. It is merely a thing that happened. Do this, Greta, and survive it, and no one will ever hurt you again.”
In this way, the Abbot saved me: he turned my mind back on. The apple press had left me suspended between horror and numbness, unable to think, far from myself. Say this for the prospect of becoming a machine: it was at least something to think about.
I had never cared much for my body. It was clumsy and freckly and somewhat lugubrious about the nose. It followed my brain about like a wolfhound on a lead. I did not think I would miss it.
And really, I had to lose only . . . but then I remembered the taste of Da-Xia’s lips—honey and anise, her hand slipping under my shirt. Elián lifting the hair from the nape of my neck. My body warmed and softened to those memories—the taste, the tug, the goose bump brush.
I had a lot to lose.
“Elián and Xie,” I said, and the reality of what I’d asked them—begged them—to do came crashing in. “Oh, God. Elián and Xie.”
The Abbot’s eye icons blinked, a pantomime of confusion.
“I sent them to kill someone.”
“It was Talis who—”
“No.” Suddenly the memory cushion’s softness felt insidious—an abuser’s murmur, a jellyfish kiss. I flailed away from it. “No. They didn’t go for Talis. They went for me. I sent them—they’ll be killed.”
I still had the Abbot’s hand in mine. I tried to use it to pull myself to my feet, and my shoulder lit with pain. Tears sprang into my eyes. “Da-Xia and Elián. And Grego. And—” I couldn’t get up. But I couldn’t let this happen.
“Shhhh,” said the Abbot. “Here.” He shifted and wrapped his hands around my ribs, lifting me. I wobbled on my feet, in his arms. “Greta. Your friends are trying to help Talis pierce the broadcast jamming and take control of the situation. If they cannot do that, tonight, then you will be tortured again. Tomorrow. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.” All around us little cubes of gold glass from the broken roof shone in the lamplight. The Cumberland ship had come down like a city falling on us. The press had come down one tick tock at a time. I swallowed, and I said, “I know. But I want no one to die for me, Abbot. No one.”
And these were my friends.
The Abbot leaned his head forward until the edge of his facescreen rested feather-light against my forehead. “Would that I could kiss you, Child,” he whispered.
Then he straightened up and took a step back, leaving me to stand on my own two feet. “Your Royal Highness,” he said. “How can I help?”
In the end the Abbot did three things for me. He advised me that the Cumberlanders’ broadcast jammer was almost certainly on the Cumberlanders’ ship. He bound my still-weak shoulders into two slings, so that I could walk around. And he cleared the way for me to reach the tunnels under the kitchen.
The darkness down there was thick.
Hard as it is to find one’s way in darkness, it is harder with one’s hands bound up. I crept around the shelves of jars, around the barrels of precious flour and even more precious salt, deeper in. Once I smacked my head on a shelf of canned vegetables. But eventually I found my way to the one place in the Precepture that I had heard of but never been: the long tunnel that struck out toward the ridge, near the induction spire. And the Cumberland ship.
“Long and straight, Greta,” the Abbot had said. “Perhaps . . . four hundred fifty steps.”
Four hundred fifty steps. I counted them, and tried to stop myself from thinking of the apple press, how it had come down step by step by step by step.
Spiderwebs broke across my face and I could not wipe the stickiness away. But I went on. Lit by the glowstick the Abbot had tucked into my belt tie, empty doors gaped here and there on either side. Some of them had bars.
It was like nothing so much as a catacomb.
No, that was a lie. It was like nothing so much as a dungeon.
“Make no turns,” the Abbot had said. “Count your steps, and make no turns.”
Four hundred fifty steps, through a dungeon. The Abbot had known where he was sending me, and what I would see.
Was this where Elián had been kept? This place with no sky?
“I have tried to make this place a school and a garden, one vision of a paradise,” the Abbot had said as he bound up my hands. “I know it is not a paradise. I know you are all frightened. I know I have hurt you all, tortured you all, conditioned you all. I know, above all, that I am charged with keeping order.” He had paused as if to take a breath, though he could not breathe. “I know that I have failed.”
And then he had gone to make sure the hallway and the kitchen were clear.