Free The Swan Riders by Erin Bow Page A

in her saddle and ran her hand over the long stiff feathers. I could not see her face, just then, but there was something about her hand: the wrinkling at the wrist, the very smallest tremor: such human hands. Something in the moment seemed elegiac, as if I were seeing Sri for the last time. She spent only a second like that, and when she twisted back she grinned wickedly. “I’d rather have my crossbow.”
    She liked to wear it on her back. The wings would slow the draw.
    Talis, too, was looking at Sri’s hand, lost in feathers. But slowly he nodded. “Keep it loose, then. Shoot first and ask questions when they’re bleeding.”
    â€œLeg wounds it is,” Sri said, and squeezed her knees round Roberta. The horse took off at a lope and quickly broke into a gallop. The wind gusted and then fell quiet. Distantly, barely, I heard the hum and rumble of the trommels—the house-sized rotating drums that aided in the mining of the city ruins. Then the wind picked up again, and the sound was gone.

    We waited.
    The place we had stopped featured a scrub-choked little cut, with a trickling creek at the bottom of it. Francis Xavier built a hot little fire from the scrub of buffalo berry and creosote bushes. I took the horses down to the water.
    An hour went by. Talis sat on a stone at the root of the ruined transmission tower. He was toying with the fire striker, making sparks jump between his fingers.
    Time passed with the queasy, twisting slowness that it took on in waiting rooms, in places where there might be something wrong but one had nothing to do.
    The click of the piezoelectric striker in Talis’s hands reminded me of beads hitting a floor. My heart felt strange, as if it was skipping beats. As if I had expected a bridge but had stepped out into the air.
    â€œWhat did you take?” I asked Talis. “Back at the refuge. What did you take?”
    â€œIf you could cope with knowing that,” said Talis, “then I wouldn’t have had to take it, would I?”
    â€œIt was the political situation in the Pan Polar Confederacy,” I said. “I didn’t lose the data. But if I didn’t lose the data, what did you take?”
    Talis turned up his palm and let a spark fall into the center of it. We both watched as it burned him, a little round hole.

    A second hour passed with no sign of Sri. She could not have had to ride that far. The trommellers were in earshot, or nearly. Sometimes we could hear the rumble of the trommels, at work in the distant ruins. Sometimes not. Gusts of sound came and went.
    Francis Xavier was brushing Heigh Ho Uranium. My datastore told me his brush was a dandy brush, fed me information about how to groom a horse, but said nothing about the smooth upward flick at the end of the stroke, or how it raised small billows of dust from Yuri’s coat to kindle golden as pollen in the bright midday light.
    I watched him, and considered.
    Talis considered Saskatoon Francis Xavier’s territory. And it was FX and Rachel who had carried out the execution.
    â€œThe refuge,” I said. “Number—what was it?”
    â€œSeven ninety-two.”
    â€œIt’s Francis Xavier’s station, and Rachel’s.”
    â€œYeah. When I heard—when your Precepture went dark . . .” He seemed unwilling to say more, which seemed odd to me. Obviously I remembered the day the Cumberlanders had taken over the Precepture where I was being held. They’d tried to use me against my mother, broadcast an elaborate though ultimately minimally damaging torture sequence, which now played in my head in crisp color, as if I were watching a vid.
    Why be so shy of mentioning it? I felt nothing.
    But Talis rushed past the topic. “Trickle download through the refuge terminal. Which, tip for the future, is like turning your brain into toothpaste and squeezing it through a clogged tube; try to avoid it. Anyway. Trickle download, quick