With Talis’s hand between my shoulder blades—steadying, friendly, but shiveringly possessive—we went outside.
It was twilight, perhaps three quarters of an hour before dawn. It’s a strange word, “twilight.” It makes me think of endings, of things done or left undone, of things over, of evening. But there are two twilights in every day, and one of them does not foretell darkness, but dawn. In this twilight, something new was opening up before me.
The sandbag soldiers must have sent their messages, because the Cumberlanders were bustling about with lanterns, streaking the greyness like fireflies. Or, like fireflies except that they were terrified. Talis ignored them. He guided me around the edge of the Precepture hall. The apple press drew my eye, hulking and black. I shied like a horse—then tried to hide it in a question: “Where are we going?”
“Up to the ship. I want to borrow you a sonic-knitter.”
Even the word “ship” smelled of blood. Flickering images in darkness. I stopped. “Talis, I don’t want them to touch me.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” He gave me a little push that sent me staggering. He caught me again almost at once, as if it had been a move in a dance—but his hand grabbing me by the shoulder was a shattering pain. I gasped.
“See?” he said. “It hurts, and it can be fixed, so stop whining.”
I widened my stance, balancing myself against his touch. “I don’t,” I said crisply, “want them to touch me.”
“Oh, fine,” he sulked. “They won’t touch you. I’ll do it.”
“Do you know how?”
“I have a four-digit IQ, Greta. A sonic-knitter is a long way from the most complicated thing I’ve bent to my steely will, okay?”
“But have you ever used one?”
“Sure.” His smile flashed in the half-light, flaring open like the white on a blue jay’s wing. I could not tell if he was lying.
But I decided I did not much care.
Talis walked me up the hill, and into the Cumberlanders’ ship. The guards at the door were pushed away from him as if by magnets. The sound of our feet on the deck plating, the smell of the air recycler, the rhythm of the pinpoint lights . . . the muscles in my neck bunched up, and my shoulders grew hot with pain. But I said nothing of it. Grego: he had been so afraid, and so quiet about it. It had been its own kind of strength.
Talis guided me to the medical bay, pushed me onto a tilt table, and started rummaging through locker drawers with such energy that I thought he might start tossing discarded things over his shoulders. But I hypothesized that even Talis’s theatricality had limits, for nothing went flying. I lay on the tilt table, squinting against the pinpoint light. I thought about Grego, and about the grey room. I thought about pain, and about what it would be like to have a mind one could switch off.
“Ta-da!” Talis spun around, holding something up. “Sonic knitter!”
Alternate hypothesis: tossing things theatrically had simply not occurred to him.
“Ready?” He didn’t give me a chance to consent, but pushed the round head of the device against my shoulder.
Everything I had heard about sonic knitters was true. It vibrated my teeth, it heated my skin, it produced a kind of synesthetic overload, like biting on tinfoil. But all these things were brief. I was left not with pain but with a sort of hollow space where pain used to be.
When he’d done the tendons in both shoulders and the bones in both hands, Talis lifted the knitter away, and I flopped back limply against the padded table, gasping.
The AI grinned at me: “Was it good for you too?”
I continued to hold out the hope that if I did not respond to such taunts, Talis would stop making them. It seemed a somewhat faint hope, but one takes what one can find. Tentatively, I lifted an arm. My shoulder joint rolled through the motion as if it had too much lubrication, and my hand, conversely, was too stiff. But everything moved, and nothing hurt. So I pulled the two slings off over my head, first the left, then the right. I let the fabric drop to the diamond-patterned floor. The buckles went clink. I was so tired. I leaned back into the table.
Talis let the mania slide out of his smile and lifted a hand to trace the line of my braid, just above one ear. “We’ll probably have to cut it.”
I was dumbstruck. A queen does not cut her hair.
“For when we bolt you down,” he said, still with that fond look. “You want the beams to make a nice, accurate neuromap. Can’t do that if you wiggle.”
“So you . . . restrain?”
“Bolt. Literally bolt, right into the skull. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt.” A panicked bird in his eyes again. “That part doesn’t. Anyway, can’t get a hole through all that hair. Lu-Lien had hair like that, back in the day, as long as a river. She, now—she wiggled, and after the upload she just—” He fluttered his hands. “She melted like an ice-cream cone, that fast. Came to pieces. Seriously, I’m thinking haircut.”
I swallowed. Maybe I nodded.