“That’s my girl.”
I opened my eyes. We were at the door of the misericord (late Latin “misericors,” meaning “compassionate”; noun, “a room in a monastery where the rules are relaxed,” or “a small dagger for delivering a death blow to a wounded opponent”). Xie was standing there, folded against Elián. He had an arm wrapped around her. They were looking at us. And they were shielding the doorway.
Talis’s eyes went wide. He strode over and shouldered past them. In the doorway he stopped.
The datastore, which had been mulling through the names of the AIs who had died, provided me with the human names of two who had lived.
Michael Telos.
And Ambrose Devalera.
Talis looked in at the supine wreck of the Abbot and said, “Oh.”
I could see Talis’s limbic response—his heart rate picking up, his skin conductivity rising. I wondered why he was allowing that, and I was not sure what it signified. “I wish someone had reminded me,” he said, and he sounded purely petulant, as if he were discussing an overdue library book.
“He asked us not to,” said Elián.
“Oh, and naturally you obeyed him,” snapped the AI. “Just for the change.”
“What will we do?” Da-Xia was ever practical. The Abbot had run the Precepture. Now he was dead. He had meant the running of the Precepture to be my job, but I was not ready to take it on. And in any case it sounded dull.
“Hmmm.” Talis’s limbic response was subsiding. “Well. I’ve got Swan Riders incoming, to take Greta and me to the Red Mountains. I can put one of them in charge.”
I looked over at the Abbot. He lay like a discarded toy. He’d been such a finely made machine: it was sad to see such a finely made thing broken. The heat blush on Talis, his psychogalvanic response—could it be that? Could it be grief?
“Someone . . .” Xie hesitated. “Human?”
“Oh, you know,” said Talis, tugging at an ear. “Roughly.”
Da-Xia and Elián both looked at me.
“Greta,” said Talis. “You should get some sleep.”
I glanced upward, to the fading sky, and inward, for the clock. “Is it late?”
“It’s been a big day,” drawled Elián. My datastore compared that drawl to previous examples and tagged it as defensive hurt/anger, though I was not sure why he was hurt/angry. His friend (Greta) had been in pain and danger, but everything was fine, now.
“It’s not particularly late,” said Talis. “Nevertheless.”
“All right.” I turned to go to my cell.
“Go with her,” said Talis, softly.
No one answered him.
“One of you,” he said. “I don’t care which. Keep her isolated, but one of you go with her. Call me if she screams.”
I remembered that Greta had wondered if Talis could sleep, and later if Talis needed sleep. In the days that came after my death, I learned: a body needs sleep. Greta’s, just then, needed vast stretches of sleep, to settle the uproar the grey room had made in the organic brain. A body’s mechanism for that settling was, of course, dreams.
So it—she—I. I dreamt. Intense, disordered dreams. Near to dawn on that first night I dreamt a disjointed version of the business with the apple press, and woke up gasping, my hand (I had forgotten to have it knit) pierced with pain. “Xie—” I heard my rough voice rise, uncommanded. “Xie!”
She came scrambling to me. “Greta!”
“I dreamt—”
For a moment our eyes locked, and something happened that went beyond registration or recognition. Da-Xia drew air and leaned backward. The moment seemed to vibrate between us. Then she let the air out again as both breath and name: “Greta? Greta, come back to me . . .”
“Why would I come back to you?”
I was puzzled, because I hadn’t gone anywhere.
At my words, Da-Xia’s face shattered into a configuration Greta had never seen before. She ran from the room.
From then on Elián sat with me.
They wouldn’t let me out of my cell, but that didn’t trouble me. I was tired. I slept; I ate. Elián sat with me, or more often worked at pacing a groove into the floor.
We were waiting for the Swan Riders that Talis had mentioned. When they came, we—Talis and I—would go with them to the Red Mountains, the flooded bit of the Rockies that was home to master copies of the surviving AIs.
“Why do I need to go with you?” I asked Talis when he came to visit. “I hardly know you. I don’t even like you.”
Elián snorted, and Talis ignored him. “Ah, come on, I’m profoundly compelling. Everybody says so.”
“Also, I’ve never been on a horse.”
“Okay, that bit could be a problem.” Talis shrugged his most profoundly compelling shrug. “We’ll work it out. But you need to go, Greta. Think of it as . . . finding yourself.”
“I’m right here.”
Which made both Elián and Talis stare at me.
So. We waited.
There were three Riders coming. One would take over the Precepture. The other two would escort Talis and me.