The second day was the day Talis killed Wilma Armenteros.
I do not wish to dwell on it. These are the bare facts. He used the apple press, and the torso.
Tolliver Burr was made to film it. I do not imagine he minded.
A fact, also: the Precepture is a small place. With the windows thrown open to the beautiful September day, there was no escaping the sounds.
Da-Xia took me by the hand, and we ran from our cell. Together we found Elián. He was huddled and shivering in the kitchen, with his back to one of the stoves. We grabbed up a glowstick and went running through the four-hundred-fifty-step tunnel up to the stone pile, and then past it, over the ridge top and onto the wide golden prairie. There we found the crater, where Elián’s road had once been blocked by a beam from the sky. The blasted interior was still a bare saucer of earth, here and there cracked open by fireweed, which had already produced its filament bundles of seed—plants like veins of ash. Elián tumbled over the edge, cowered against the crater rim, and wept.
I held him in my arms until the distant screaming stopped—and then he struggled free and dashed into the center of the crater and fell again to his knees. This time Xie went to him and sat holding his hand. I twisted the fireweed between my fingers—my so-nearly-crushed fingers—and the wiry stems gave off a strong smell, wild, as bitter as yarrow. The seeds lifted on the wind.
Wilma Armenteros.
Talis had promised to make a legend of her, and I had no doubt that he would succeed.
But Spartacus had become legend too, and not quite in the way that the Romans had intended.
We stayed in the crater even after the screams had stopped. The wind blew the grass in waves, bright as straw on their crests, dark in the troughs, restless as the sea. It made a low and constant sound. There were coneflowers in bloom, and monarchs in the milkweed. My nose got sunburned. I think we sat there a long time.
It was Talis himself who fetched us in the end, or fetched me, turning up blood-smudged and grinning. He was holding Tolliver Burr by a wire round his neck. “Hey, Greta,” he said. “Thought you might want to get in on this bit.”
I looked at the pair of them, jolted by the uncanny picture, the dissonance—the wolf-lean, leathery man being held by a slip of a girl with a boyish haircut and dirt smeared across her nose.
Except she wasn’t a girl.
And it wasn’t dirt.
“No,” I said.
“Ah, come on,” Talis coaxed. “He’s nearly wetting himself. It’ll be fun.” He let Burr go, and the man staggered free and bolted by pure instinct: three steps, four, five.
Talis pointed at him without breaking his gaze with me. “Don’t run,” he said. “I swear you’ll regret it if you run.” Burr stumbled and stopped, falling to his knees. Talis closed the distance between them like a king on a stage. He bent down and spoke low and sweet. “Run, and I’ll start with your feet. Work my way up.”
“Lord Talis,” Burr gasped. “Please.”
“Don’t ‘Lord’ me,” snapped Talis. “It’s way too late for that.”
Panting, Burr closed his eyes.
“These are my children.” Talis grabbed Burr by the chin and made him look at us. The man’s eyes came open, his face crushed with the pressure of the grip and distorted with fear. “They are sacrosanct. How dare you??”
Da-Xia stood up. “Talis.” Her voice rang out like a temple bell.
“Now, you, I’d take a ‘Lord’ from,” said Talis. Then he looked at her, his eyebrows coming up, grin blossoming. “Oooo, look. She’s going to rebuke me. How cute is that?”
“You made tools of us.” Da-Xia was barefoot in the prickly grass, and the bread-smelling wind was blowing straggles of hair into her face, but she looked more like a god than he did. Far more. “Have you never considered: The thing of a tool is that anyone might use it.”
Talis didn’t answer, but his face quieted, and slowly the grin came off it.
I looked at Burr; I looked at the blood on Talis’s hands.
“I’ve been here already.” I was thinking of the moment on the shock ship: the blood between my toes, the gun at the end of my arm. “I could have killed him. I let him go.” That point vierge moment. The moment in which I had reclaimed myself, though terrified. Redeemed my soul from fear.
I looked at Talis and said, “I want to let him go.”
Talis blinked at me, and dropped Burr’s chin. “What, seriously?”
I didn’t answer. I had been serious enough, and I knew he could see it.
Talis took a step back. A long silence. “Fine,” he said.
“What?” said Tolliver Burr.
“Fine,” said Talis. “Go.”
Burr gaped at him.
“Saskatoon,” said Talis, pointing out over the trackless prairie with one finger, “is that way. Go.”