Not what I meant. That shadowy structure under his shirt—it was his shirt, and yet under it were the slightly crooked ridges of the binding wrap, and Rachel’s breasts. “The Riders—you use them, operate them?”
“Yeah, and you can too, someday—but it’s better to operate your own body at first. Less disorienting. I mean, marginally. Take what you can get on that point, trust me. You can transfer later when your body wears out. Which it will, fast, by the way—something about the induced voltages, and microscarring. Dunno; there weren’t huge numbers of volunteers, after what happened to us in that first batch, and then Antarctica melted and all that, so the research kind of hit a dead end. Anyway, my point is you won’t get more than a year or two out of it.”
“But—” I had many objections. I picked one. “What about Rachel?”
“She volunteered,” he said. “My Riders serve a higher purpose.”
“But she’s—” Was he killing her, just by making her breathe? Was that what he was saying? “This voltage scarring—”
“Higher purpose,” he chirruped. “I’m the good guy, remember?”
I looked down. The little stains on the cuffs of his shirt were more brown than red. His fingernails were scrubbed and tidy. He had his little box in his hands, and was fiddling with it.
“I—I don’t—” I stuttered. A clean sacrifice was one thing. Becoming an abstraction, like the Abbot. This was different. It was so biological, such a mishmash, a horror. “Talis, I don’t want—” The box in his hands opened.
“Oh, don’t be squeamish,” he said, and he injected something into my arm. It was cool, like chilled oil. It spread fast. My legs went liquid, my vision swam.
Talis caught me, smiling softly as he gathered me in his arms. “There,” he said. “I’ve got you. Don’t be afraid.”
I woke surrounded by blue, my head pounding. Blue: UN blue, more silver than the sky. A sheet beneath me, another over me, more tented round. I was stretched out on something as hard as an autopsy slab, but the sheets meant some care had been taken with sterility, which— Well. I should have been comforted, I suppose. Talis had just told me I was keeping my body for a year or two, and I suppose postoperative septicemia would have put a dent in that. But it was hard to be relieved. What had happened to me? I had not been uploaded, but I felt already changed. Irrevocably changed.
I was alone. The surface I was lying on was marble—the pastry counter in our kitchen. The sterile sheets had been hung from the pot racks. The symbolism was bad: I’d always been hopeless in the kitchen.
I reached up and touched my chest beneath my right collarbone. A numb tenderness met my fingers—that third skin again. I traced the rectangle of the implant, the new sensors in my fingerpads shunting information into my mind. There was a line of forcescar above the implant, slick as plastic. Faint electromagnetic radiation bloomed upward through my skin. That was strange, and then I realized I could feel it—even stranger. I blinked, wild color flaring around me, ultraviolets, infrareds. I could feel the route the blood vessels took in my head.
Strange beyond strange beyond strange.
But not painful. I sat up slowly, and the room did not spin, though I was aware of the whisper of Coriolis force from the rotation of the world.
“Well, this is interesting.” Talis’s chiming voice came through the curtains. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been murdered.”
I staggered through the draping, and found Talis backed against the butchery counter. Elián was holding a knife point to the hollow of the AI’s throat.
It was not—it was not what it looked like. Elián was tall and muscled, a farm lad who evoked the adjective “strapping,” and he was holding a butchering knife. Talis was unarmed, unprepossessing, and cornered.
But Elián was just a boy. And Talis was . . . Talis. I had an urge to reach behind me for the gamma scalpel, and it was not Talis I thought I might need to defend.
“Her blood’s all over,” Elián snarled. “It’s all over you!”
Talis was wearing hostage white as surgical scrubs, and there was indeed blood on them—my blood. But I consented, I thought. Sort of.
“Give me some credit.” The AI was leaning backward onto the counter, partly away from the knife, and partly just lounging. “I washed.”
Elián pushed with the knife. The point dimpled Talis’s skin, making a ring of white pressure.
“But you mean metaphorical blood, and fair enough.” Talis’s brightness was glinting up the blade. “You’re right. I laid her face up in that press and let her watch it drop. I did it slow. I filmed her face. And it will be centuries before anyone touches a hostage Child again.”
They had not been talking about me at all.
“How can you—” Elián was shaking. “You’re a monster.”
“Yes,” said Talis. “Are you?” He straightened up. Elián had to step back so that Talis’s own movement wouldn’t drive the knifepoint in.