The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow Page A

the refectory and then out of the Precepture hall altogether. The sun was setting and the full moon was coming up in the east, over the river.
    We were almost out of time.
    Elián was going to try to escape. I was sure of it. And I was sure they’d catch him. Sure they’d hurt him, and not only him.
    â€œIt’s strange in there tonight,” said Xie. “It’s strange to see people bow to you.”
    â€œThe little one was so sweet. But the adults—they look at me as if I’m a sacrificial virgin.”
    â€œWell, now that you mention it . . .”
    Xie caught my eye and suddenly we were both laughing, for a moment forgetting all about the Panopticon, about Elián, about the thirst of Cumberland and the coming war—about everything. These dark thoughts came back only slowly, and even then they seemed lighter.
    Xie walked along the top of the stone wall between the lawn and the lower terraces—walked in the air with her hands outspread, a mountain child, a mountain god. It was a warm evening, ruffled with breezes, beaded with lightning bugs. At the end of the wall she reached down for my help, and I reached up to help her. She swung down on my hand. Her fingers wrapped around mine, and hand in hand we picked our way along the edge of the lawn. “You know,” she said, “if you are concerned, we could probably find a way to deal with the ‘virgin’ part.”
    I blinked at her.
    â€œI’m sure there would be volunteers.” Her voice was warm, but there was something freezing up in her face. I could usually tell what she was thinking, but not now. “Elián—inside, you were watching him.”
    And she knew why. I’d felt her attention swing around me on hormone day, when I’d tried to warn Elián: Saskatchewan will kill you. The Precepture cannot be escaped.
    I could think of nothing to say to her now, nothing that was safe. “I was, I guess. I was watching him.” Help me, Xie. What should we do?
    â€œElián, Elián,” mused Xie. “He’s compelling, I’ll give him that. And you have no idea what to do with a compelling boy, do you?”
    â€œYes I do,” I protested.
    â€œYou do?”
    â€œI don’t know why people assume classicists are prudes,” I said. “The Roman lyricists, in particular, can be quite bawdy.”
    Xie made a little noise in her throat, like a dove. “As it happens, I wasn’t thinking of your reading material.”
    We came to the end of the wall. Xie sat down on the round back of a stone and hugged her knees to her chest. I sat beside her, and glanced at the Panopticon. Its lifted sphere was still lit pink by the sun, though on the ground, shadows were gathering. Let it think we were talking about boys. We were—but also, we weren’t.
    Xie brushed the hair out of her face. “Do you remember Denjiro?”
    I did; of course I did. Denjiro had been in one of the older cohorts when Xie and I were smaller. His country had been slipping toward war, as mine was now, and he had . . . He’d used a pitchfork to do it. There had been a lot of blood.
    â€œWe’re all running,” said Xie. “Sometimes we fall.”
    â€œIf Elián—” But there was no safe way to say it. If he ran away . . .
    Denjiro. The popular theory, vis-à-vis the pitchfork, was that he’d planted it tines-up in the watermelon beds, climbed onto a terrace wall like the one we were on now, and then—
    We were all running. Denjiro had fallen.
    If Elián ran away . . . I could not say that aloud, but I could trust Xie to follow the jump of my thought. “If he does, it will be terrible.”
    Terrible for him. Terrible for all of us.
    For a moment Xie just sat there, watching the moon, the breeze off the river making strands of her hair dance above the mass of it, like the plume of snow off a mountain.