arm.
âAre you angry?â said Francis Xavier.
âWhat?â I said.
Francis Xavier lifted his dark eyes and said: âYou should be.â
Just then the refuge door opened, and in came Talis, trailing night chill and wildness. âOh, good, youâre up.â He spoke to me without a glance at the other two. âFeeling better?â
âFeelingââ What was I feeling? âWhat happened?â
âWe made soup,â said Talis. âDid anyone give Greta some soup?â
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 bedsânot 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.
âTry the soup,â said Talis.
I tried the soup. It was potato leek. Warmth spread through meâheat and carbohydrates mimicking emotional comfort. âWhat happened before the soup?â
âWe were talking about the political situation,â said Talis. âCalgary, former city of. And all that.â
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. âThe why of it,â I said.
âPretty simple. The PanPols refused to give up a hostage. Iâby which I mean the master version of me, not me meâused Calgary as a pressure point.â
âDid it work?â
Talis raked his hand through his hair, raising it into wild spikes. âIâm sure it will. â
âSo, no?â said Sri.
âThe government is dragging their feet. And the public is . . . I donât think weâre looking at a popular uprising. But just shy.â
âWeâre riding through a popular uprising?â That seemed alarming to me.
âHardly. This is Saskatchewanâwhoâs going to rise up, the gophers? Weâre riding through sand. And the Pan Polar Confederacy is huge. There are seven duchies on three continents. Itâs not like Iâm going to run out of pressure points.â
No, butâ
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 didnât have. From the exoskeleton that Manila didnât have.
Actuallyâhe looked againâManila didnât have much anymore. Heâd 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. âRebroadcast the demands again. Tell them thereâs more where that came from. Tell them total global cease-fire.â
âAlready done,â 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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