His monitor turned against the book-pillow. His facescreen was pixelated, his eyes only intermittently showing as coins of grey.
“Greta?” I could hear the synthetic parts of his voice—this tone and that tone—blurring slightly out of sync. My new sensors could see the currents moving through him, falling from capacitive plane to capacitive plane like water down steps of ice. Cascade, came the word. A cascade failure. It was washing him away.
“Good Father.” I took his hand. “I’m here.”
Da-Xia came and took his other hand. “Cannot Talis repair you?”
His head twitched against the books, the sound of a page being turned. “He could, I—” A spark, then, jumping down that slope like a coyote hunting. “Greta, please, I wanted—”
“Father Abbot.” I squeezed his hand. How much of a man? This much. “Father. Ambrose.”
His voice was entirely synthetic now, like a pipe organ given speech. “Tell him not.”
“Not what?”
“Repair.”
“Ambrose,” I said, again.
“No repair.” His face swung to me, blind, weaving from side to side like a snake’s head finding by smell. My velvet hair prickled with instinctual fear. Then his eye icons resolved, and for one second he was my Abbot again. “Forgive,” he said.
And nothing more.
Da-Xia’s eyes met my eyes over his body—wide, shocked.
Elián—and I realized it had been Elián who had piled the book-pillow, who had kept this vigil—Elián touched the side of the Abbot’s main casing where Tolliver Burr had once forced his wires. “God knows I hated you,” he said, and swallowed. “God knows I had cause.” His hand shifted, soft, against the frozen monitor, as if to brush closed the eyes. “God knows what you used to be,” he said. “God knows.”
Xie steepled her hands around her nose, covering her mouth. Tears sprang up in her eyes. “What will we do?”
I thought, I have just seen my death.
But I said, “Something new.”
We left the Abbot’s body lying in the golden light. What else could we have done? Talis had given me three days, and it had been three days. We went hand in hand. Da-Xia and Elián, walking me. The grey room wasn’t far away. Its ordinary, ever-closed door.
That door was open. Talis was inside, sitting on the high narrow table, swinging his feet. He hopped down when he saw us, and rubbed his hands dry against the faded spots on the thighs of his jeans. “Where’s old Ambrose? Thought he’d want to see you off.”
“He did,” Elián said, smooth as a cat. Who knew if such a death were reversible, but even if it were, surely time would make it less so. Let the Abbot have that time.
The Abbot. The grey room. He had done this, once. He had lived. But later he had wanted to die.
Under the lintel, Talis opened his hand through the doorway with a very Talisy grin. “Your table awaits.”
I froze and swallowed.
Talis let the grin drop away. “Ready?” he asked softly.
Without prompting, without a word, Elián and Da-Xia folded themselves around me, hugging me, covering me like wings. For a moment we three paused there, our arms gripping each other tightly, our breath mingling, our foreheads resting together. “So, right,” Elián whispered. “Xie, you take the snap; Greta, you go long . . .”
I knew he was joking, but I had to stop him: I couldn’t bear it. “Elián,” I whispered.
Da-Xia was weeping without a sound, her tears dripping down onto the flagstones. Rain on the mountains. “Hold on,” she said. “Hold on, Greta. Please hold on.”
I could not even tell her that I would. I did not know if I could. I could not speak at all. I straightened up.
“Ready?” said Talis, again.
“Willing,” I said, which is a different thing.
And I walked alone into the grey room.
29
COLOR
The door whispered closed.
That room. Its soft walls, its carefully filtered light. It was—I could feel it, now, in my new sensors—it was washed in radiation, hidden collimators on the walls humming like bees. “My friends—” I began.
“It would kill them to stay here. It would kill me, for that matter— Twice. Scramble me and kill Rachel. I’m afraid you’ll have to go solo.”
“I know,” I said. Then: “Okay.”
Talis patted the surface of the high table. “Hop up.”
The aluminum surface was even with my ribcage. “That would be undignified.” I truly did not want to spend my last human moments struggling to hoist myself to death.
“Oh, right! Forgot!” He hooked his foot around something stored underneath the table. It slid out—a milking stool. It could have been centuries old. Its use had polished it like gold-grey glass.
A milking stool.
It struck me as horrible, suddenly, that someone had thought of this way to boost us to the right height for our deaths. The gamma rays crawled over my skin. I put my foot on the milking stool, my hands on the table, and I boosted myself up. “What do you do with the little ones?” I asked. “The babies?”
Talis shrugged, preoccupied. “The Riders lift them. Does it matter?”