Elián stared. I did too, realizing something that it was probably best not to say aloud: Elián’s survival was to be a secret. If Talis was telling Armenteros, then he was sure—very sure—that she would not be passing the word around. She did not have long. And so he was telling her out of . . . could it be kindness?
“Ooo, I know!” Talis’s chiming voice drifted over the grass. “He can go to Moose Jaw and help mine the dump. That would be fun for him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Armenteros.
“Fine.” The AI splayed his fingers. “I don’t care. I’ll get him a horse. He can go anywhere. But tell him he’s got to vanish, Wilma, or he will regret it.”
“Understood.”
“No, I’m not going,” said Elián, to us. “They’re not sending me anywhere.” He reached for my hand. “I’ll see it through—see Grandma through, and you, Greta. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
He set off down the slope like Spartacus himself: the slave made hero. When he reached Armenteros she grabbed him like a rearing bear and pulled his lanky body into her soft, fierce one. It wasn’t three minutes before they were fighting again, though. Only this time—just for once—I thought Elián would probably win.
The ship left. The bulk of it looked ridiculous, lifting from the ground, as if a man had taken flight by flapping his hands. But lift it did. It slung itself up the induction spire, gathering speed. It cleared the top and then fired rockets—chemical ones, a blast of heat and stink. The convention limiting rockets to compressed air was apparently a nicety the military felt it could ignore, environmental damage be damned. I made a note to discuss that with Talis later. The policy might need to be changed.
Oh.
I had just made a note about ruling the world.
Talis—he’d been human, once. Ambrose, our Abbot, who had the charge of this terrible place—he’d been a hostage child. What had happened to them? What was going to happen to me?
I watched the ship shrink to a pinpoint, and inside I shook.
“Let’s go down to the river,” said Da-Xia.
Elián looked startled. “Will they let us?”
“They’ll let me,” I said, sure of it. I relished the surety—and I was frightened by the relish. It was early for power to change me, and it would not be only power. I wondered exactly how it was that a boy named Michael had become a monster.
We gathered the others and went down through the alfalfa—which was coming back up nicely; we should get one more cutting out of it, to feed the goats through the winter—to the sandy shingle of the looping river.
The water was cold and clear, flashing with minnows.
Da-Xia and Atta went wading in the shallow water, each with an arm wrapped around Han, who moved between them like a sleepwalker. Thandi and Elián competed at skipping stones.
I sat on the horizontal branch of a cottonwood tree that overhung the water, and watched myself in the bright surface, my reflection distorted and continually washing away.
It was a good day. It was beautiful.
In due course Elián lost his skipping stone contest—because no one beats Thandi at anything—and came and stood before me. The current eddied around his shins, lapping the bottom of his rolled-up camouflage. He put his hands on my knees and cocked his head to look up at me. “That night in the garden,” he said, and then stopped. He squeezed my knees and looked bewildered. “I kissed you,” he said. “I woulda sworn—I could have sworn you were kissing me too.”
A twist and flush started at my belly button and crept both up and down. “I was. I did.”
“But—” He let go of one of my knees and ran his hand up the back of his head, against the grain of his once-again floppy hair. (Talis did that too.) “You don’t love me.”
“Oh, Elián.” It was not that simple. Not nearly. “I—I’m sixteen years old. And I’ve been asleep my whole life.” I tilted forward on the branch—so far that I would have fallen if he hadn’t reached up to brace me. But he did brace me, and I had known that he would. I trusted him, and—I loved him?
I looked past him to where Atta and Xie had their arms around Han, their hands joined at the small of his back. Then I leaned forward, and kissed Elián on the mouth. It was soft and slow, neither of us pushing the other, both taking warmth and comfort, if not the more that he wanted. “You woke me up, Elián Palnik.”
“Like Sleeping Beauty,” he said, with a rough, sad smile. “My princess.”
It was not really what I had meant—it was his scream that had awakened me, not his kiss—but I let him have the interpretation. Why not? And the kiss had helped. “You woke me up,” I said again.
“And you saved me,” he answered.
I kissed him again, and he pulled me even farther forward, until he’d pulled me from the branch and I was in his arms, held in his arms as if he were a prince in a storybook—held in his arms as I had been the night on the shock ship, when I’d been damaged and terrified. But now I felt only . . . held. Treasured. Safe. Still.
So naturally, Elián Palnik—forever bad with stillness—chose that moment to dunk me into the river.
26
TWO