“I was wrong.”
I said it that simply. As if saying it didn’t make my heart twist. As if learning it hadn’t kicked the scaffold away from the entire structure of my life, leaving me tottering. “I was wrong. My whole life, I— My friends have died here, Elián. The boy before you—you didn’t know him, but he was my friend, could have been my friend. And he died. I wanted that to mean something. I wanted it to be okay.”
“It does mean something,” murmured Xie.
“But it’s not okay,” I said. “It’s never been okay.”
“No,” she said. “It’s never been okay.”
Elián was still looking at me as if I’d turned into a chicken. “So, what, you’re just going to join forces with that . . . thing?” Elián snapped his strand of bark into matchsticks, and threw them in the direction Talis had gone.
“I’m going to save us,” I said. “All my life I’ve been trying, and I never have. Now I finally get to. I’m going to save us.” I stopped, took a deep breath. “But I’m frightened.”
It hurts more than you can imagine, Talis had said. Talis, who knew exactly what I could imagine. Who had seen them break my hands.
The Cumberlanders kept packing, but no one moved the apple press. Or its cameras.
Xie wrapped her arm around me. I leaned into her and closed my eyes.
The morning stretched and warmed. The shock ship seemed to be nearly loaded.
One thing was loading—a coffin. Of course they had come with coffins. Into it, they put Grego’s body, to be repatriated back to the Baltic Alliance. He would be the first dead hostage in four hundred years to get a decent funeral. To the Cumberlanders it was the first step in what would probably be a long, prickly process of negotiating reparations. To us it was our friend, who was dead, and who was leaving. We looked at them carrying the plain box up the gangplank, and we held each other’s hands.
Someone—a young female Cumberlander—turned up with Talis’s horse, which (despite having been ridden brutally, who knew how far) was not in fact dead. The soldier was leading the horse with a . . . leading thing (horses are not my strong point), and the horse was apparently looking for sugar cubes in the soldier’s ears. Both of them were smiling.
Elián was pacing, restless, unable—without the benefits of a Precepture education—to stay still, to contain his own physicality. He looked at the horse, and then back at Da-Xia and me, who were still sitting side by side. One of the younger hostages had brought us a UN-blue blanket and some food—hot flat bread and salty goat cheese.
“We should—” Elián said wildly. “We should hide you on board—stow you away.”
I looked at the ship, remembering Grego’s enthusiasm for it, his talk of deceleration forces and gravity harnesses; remembering the close spaces and the blood coagulating on the deck plates.
“I don’t think that’s practical, Elián,” said Xie.
It wasn’t.
“Or the horse. We could steal the horse.”
“I don’t know how to use a horse,” I said. “Do you know how to use a horse?”
Xie tipped her chin up and pointed with her thumb toward the sky. The Panopticon might have been gone, but Talis’s net of satellites certainly was not. Elián followed her gaze, his face falling.
“We’d probably end by eating it,” I said.
The horse looked over at me, reproachful and, I would swear, alarmed.
Elián was alarmed too—nearly panicking. I thought it was not really about me. The cameras stood waiting by the apple press. We were increasingly sure what they were for: the death of Wilma Armenteros.
Elián stopped pacing to look at the cameras, but couldn’t keep looking at them. He whirled away. “She— Grandma, she promised my mother, she said. She promised my mother she wouldn’t come home without me. And I—”
Elián had betrayed his grandmother—his whole nation, but his grandmother, specifically. To save me, he’d chosen to sabotage the snowstorm that had been keeping Talis at bay. And now that Talis was no longer at bay, he would tear out Wilma’s throat.
“I can’t go home,” he whispered.
His exile was already struck into the treaty. His broken heart would seal it.
Down the slope, Talis was explaining that part of the deal to Armenteros. The general glanced toward us, and there was joy shining out of her whole body.
“She’s just heard that you’re going to live.” Da-Xia’s voice was soft, steady, sure. “Look at her, Elián, so that you will remember. She does not for a second regret what she’s doing, because it means you are going to live.”