The Swan Riders

The Swan Riders by Erin Bow Page B

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Authors: Erin Bow
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arm.
    â€œAre you angry?” said Francis Xavier.
    â€œWhat?” I said.
    Francis Xavier lifted his dark eyes and said: “You should be.”
    Just then the refuge door opened, and in came Talis, trailing night chill and wildness. “Oh, good, you’re up.” He spoke to me without a glance at the other two. “Feeling better?”
    â€œFeeling—” What was I feeling? “What happened?”
    â€œWe made soup,” said Talis. “Did anyone give Greta some soup?”
    Francis Xavier had bent his head back to his work on the bridle, and he stayed bent. Sri tucked her carving away and got up to ladle soup. She slid a bowlful over the table toward me. Talis swatted Francis Xavier on the shoulder and the Swan Rider stood up so that the AI could claim his seat.
    Talis sat. Francis Xavier crossed silently to the bed. He tugged on one side. The bed separated into two narrower beds—not much more than benches, though topped with feather ticks. The legs scraped and screeched across the stone floor as Francis Xavier pushed one bed into the empty alcove.
    â€œTry the soup,” said Talis.
    I tried the soup. It was potato leek. Warmth spread through me—heat and carbohydrates mimicking emotional comfort. “What happened before the soup?”
    â€œWe were talking about the political situation,” said Talis. “Calgary, former city of. And all that.”
    Calgary. Yes. I remembered the charged and roiling sky spreading out behind Talis on my first day away from the Precepture. The ruined city hiding behind the horizon. I remembered that. But I had lost something, too. “The why of it,” I said.
    â€œPretty simple. The PanPols refused to give up a hostage. I—by which I mean the master version of me, not me me—used Calgary as a pressure point.”
    â€œDid it work?”
    Talis raked his hand through his hair, raising it into wild spikes. “I’m sure it will. ”
    â€œSo, no?” said Sri.
    â€œThe government is dragging their feet. And the public is . . . I don’t think we’re looking at a popular uprising. But just shy.”
    â€œWe’re riding through a popular uprising?” That seemed alarming to me.
    â€œHardly. This is Saskatchewan—who’s going to rise up, the gophers? We’re riding through sand. And the Pan Polar Confederacy is huge. There are seven duchies on three continents. It’s not like I’m going to run out of pressure points.”
    No, but—
    We should stop , I thought.
    Or maybe: Help me.

INTERLUDE:
ON TAKING OVER THE WORLD
    I n the end, Michael Talis reflected, it was easy. Taking over the world.
    The satellites were in his head all the time now. At first communicating with them had been clunky and wobbly, like using a pole to get something down from a high shelf. But they had slowly . . . come into focus? Something like that. Seven years after Evie had first given him the codes, seeing the world from the orbiting spy satellites was as easy and as natural as using his eyes.
    Reaching down the weapons platforms was like putting one finger down on top of an ant. When he did it for the first time, he could almost feel the tiny crunch. Sensory feedback in the finger he didn’t have. From the exoskeleton that Manila didn’t have.
    Actually—he looked again—Manila didn’t have much anymore. He’d wiped it out. Entirely. Gone.
    He tilted back his artificial head and looked at the ceiling of the room that was Evie. The needle-arms waved back at him cheerfully. “Rebroadcast the demands again. Tell them there’s more where that came from. Tell them total global cease-fire.”
    â€œAlready done,” said Azriel. Despite his somewhat appalling nom de guerre (Azriel, angel of death), Talis rather liked Az. He had a cute New Zealand accent and a way of getting things done before you even asked for them. On this

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