She welcomed the company; she was trying not to think about the wings. They weren't heavy enough to restore her balance, and they had a disturbing manner of shifting on her shoulders, demonstrating an eldritch intelligence.
She had paused to watch ants ladder up the trunk of a peach tree when Mallory hailed her. The necromancer's voice echoed off the roof of the Heaven a split second later, making Perceval smile as she turned to face them.
She knew what they had been up to, of course; it would have been hard to miss it, between the giggling and the scent of sex—and nobody had ever warned her how disturbing it would be to hear a necromancer .giggle—but that was all right, wasn't it? Rien was in clean clothes, her hair combed and braided, and Mallory was holding her elbow. They laughed every time they accidentally looked at each other.
Save me, Perceval thought, and said, "What's for breakfast?"
"There was fruit.. ." Mallory gestured to the plum tree they happened to be standing underneath.
"And pluck uninvited, in someone else's garden?"
By the necromancer's expression, Perceval thought Mallory was chewing that over for double meanings. But after a moment, Perceval was rewarded with bright laughter.
"There are stories about that, aren't there? I'll cook, then."
Perceval followed the necromancer back to the campsite. Somewhere along the way, Rien detached herself from Mallory and came to take Perceval's hand; the tension across Perceval's shoulders eased a little, despite the unweight of her wings. They went speedily, though Mallory stopped once to dig ramps and a second time to nick a bunch of mushrooms growing from the stump of a tree. The necromancer had a boot knife, a finger's length and sharp as a razor, to judge by how neatly it parted the fungus's flesh.
"You leave the base." The cluster of mushrooms disappeared into a bag, the knife back into an ankle sheath. "Then it grows again."
When they passed, Perceval wiped a ringer across the moist severed end. She could see the hair-fine corpse-white filaments that vanished into the crumbling stump. "We feed on it, and it feeds on death."
"Everything feeds on death," Mallory answered. "Especially me."
Breakfast was the fungus and ramps, a handful of spinach, and a foil vacuum pouch of silkworm larvae stir-fried in a nonstick wok. Mallory served the result in folded grape leaves; Perceval opened hers flat and, with chopsticks, began picking the pupae out.
"They're good protein," Mallory said, demonstrating. Pop, and crunch in half. Darting chopsticks picked something from the carapace and flicked it away and then the rest was gone as if it had never been. "You'll want a full belly when you go."
Doubtfully, Perceval poked one with the end of a chop-stick. Rien seemed unsqueamish; her breakfast was rapidly disappearing. "Are we going, then? Is Rien well enough?"
"After you eat," Mallory said, managing not to either look at Rien, or giggle. "I'll send Gavin along to guide you. And I'll fix you a pack."
Perceval sighed, picked up the pupae, and bit it in half. People really would eat anything.
It crunched, and tasted of tofu, though the texture inside the shell was more like the part of mango closest to the pit. She peered inside and saw a darker bit, which she—with some difficulty—picked out. The second half followed the first. Mostly she tasted the ramps, and some garlic she hadn't seen Mallory put into the oil.
"All right," she said. "It's not bad."
And it was full of protein; a quick analysis confirmed. Perceval picked up the grape leaf and continued to eat. But something, she thought, seemed strange about the light.
She glanced up at the suns, shading her eyes with a translucent wing, although they adapted fairly well to the direct light.
"Huh," she said. "That's funny."
Mallory looked up, as did Rien, and both made encouraging full-mouthed noises.
"The suns," Perceval explained. "It looks like they're throbbing. We must be having a flare."
"It happens," Mallory said.
"Yes," said Rien, before she paused to swallow. "A lot lately."
It was hard, leaving. After breakfast, Rien wandered from tree to tree, sniffing flowers for the whirls of music and speech and equations that flowed through her head when she did so. She didn't hear Mallory come up behind her until the necromancer reached over her shoulder, tugged a branch down, and said by her ear, "Partake."
"Should I?"
"It's my garden," Mallory answered. "I offered. And wherever you wind up, what you learn here may help you."
The fruit was cool, its purple skin kissed with frosty bloom. She plucked it, raised it to her mouth, but did not bite.
Still in her ear, Mallory said, "Your pack. Food and blankets and fresh clothes."
Rien turned to face the necromancer as the padded strap slid into her other hand. "You offer a lot, for someone who only just met us."
If the exclusionary us hurt, it didn't show in Mallory's expression. "I have reasons to be interested in your quest, and its outcome." A kiss, petal-soft, brushed Rien's mouth. "If the Angel of Communication wasn't dead, I'd tell you I would call."
Rien smiled, and kissed Mallory's moving lips. "I'd tell you you were welcome to. What's the fruit of this tree, then?"
Mallory looked up, leaving Rien to study nose and chin and throat in profile. "Mathematics, I think. Every fruit is different, and there is no way to tell until you put it in your mouth. You know, you're very well educated, for someone who was raised a Mean."
That put Rien's back up. "Head saw to it."
"An unusual person." With a wrist-led gesture, the necromancer indicated a white peach tree that stood in a clear spot, not far. "That is my special tree."
Rien looked at the plum in her hand, and then the heavy pale fruits, bloomed rose-pink, that bowed the branches of the other. "What grows on that one?"
"Memories," Mallory said. "Souls."
Leaving Rien standing, pack in one hand and plum in the other, the necromancer crossed to the peach tree. They weren't huge peaches, just the size to sit in Rien's palm. Mallory walked among them, touching the ones that hung down—then, with a scramble, was among the branches and climbing.
"Come here, Rien."
She stood under the tree and dropped the pack at her feet. Above her, on a swaying branch, Mallory balanced like a wire-dancer, holding out a fruit the color of wine-soaked ivory. Rien put out her hand, and the fruit fell into it.
If the coat of the apricot had been velour, this was cut velvet, as soft and pale as Mallory's skin. Rien raised it to her mouth and sniffed. Nectar, tart-sweet-perfumy, and the green, green sap scent of the broken stem. Where the plum was cool to the touch—she still weighed it in her other hand—this was warm, though Rien could not say if it was from the suns or from Mallory's hand.
"Eat," said the magician in the tree, and Rien lifted the fruit to her lips and bit in.
It wasn't like an apple, or any crisp fruit, where you might sink your teeth in and lever a piece away from the orb. She bit through, faint resistance of the skin and then concupiscent flesh. Juice slicked her cheeks and chin, coursed down her forearm, dripped from her elbow. The flavor was—intense. Honeyed, but not cloying, complex and buoyant.
She hadn't words.
And then she had plenty of words, but none of them were her own.
He was Chief Engineer Conrad Ng, and he had passed through scared and into resigned. His symbiont was failing; there was a limit to the radiation damage that it could repair, and that limit had been reached around the time his flesh began sloughing from his bones. But he was concentrating, as he died. Concentrating hard, on what he knew, on everything recorded in the soft rotting tissue of his brain.
Because while he was dying, a portion of his colony might live. And with it, a portion of his knowledge.
Rien gagged. But Mallory's hand cupped over her own, and Mallory's voice urged, "Eat," and Rien bit into the fruit again.
This time, her own salt flavored it.
Knowledge that would be
needed. The ship was damaged beyond repairing. The strike had taken out the main reactor and ruptured the backup; it was in sealing what was left of the core that Ng had also sealed his fate.
They were limping. They were—
"Eat," Mallory said, and Rien choked down the last bite.
There was a binary star, close, but unstable. They might reach it in time to rig solar panels. It might have a habitable world, something that could be mined in a hurry, before the next solar event.
And if it didn't, the Jacob's Ladder could survive in orbit indefinitely. They could park it close enough for light, far enough—hopefully—to be out of danger of the binary system's occasional violent flares.
Until they could repair it. Or until its stressed, jury-rigged systems failed catastrophically.
Already, there were riots among the passengers. There was a rift among the crew. Com thought they should press on, risk it all on a farther, more stable star. Some of them thought they should try to turn back. Personally, Ng thought that should be a shooting offense.
Com couldn't do a damned thing without Engineering.
Chief Engineer Ng was selfishly glad that he was going to be gone before things got any worse.
Rien came back to herself in a snap. The peach pit was clenched in her hand; Mallory gently uncoiled her fingers, knelt down—while Rien stood shaking, wishing she could lick the stickiness off her fingers and not daring—and nudged the moss aside to plant the pit beneath.
"He's dead," Rien said, when she had gathered herself. Her voice startled her. It sounded so strong, and so calm.
Mallory glanced up, sunlight catching on the edges of that mess of dark brown hair in a tawny halo, and answered with pursed lips and a shaken head: "I'm a necromancer, sweet. What did you think that meant?"
12 the opposite of dying
Love does not help to understand
The logic of the bursting shell.
—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
In comparison to what had come before their interlude in the Heaven, the next stage of their journey was almost pleasant. Which said more for the hardships of plunging directly from captivity to space and from space into a running gun battle than for any luxury of the current situation, because when Mallory had offered them a guide and a map, nothing had been mentioned of the first kilometer-and-a-half of the journey being a crawl through abandoned access tunnels.
Perceval sheathed herself in her parasite wings— deployed, they were bulky and awkward in the confined space—and pulled herself onward doggedly on her elbows behind Rien and the basilisk. Rien had it better: she was shorter, and could scoot forward on her hands and knees, although trying to avoid crushing Gavin's tail looked like a challenge.
The shafts had not been designed for long-distance travel, and frankly, had only been meant to be entered by human agents in catastrophic emergencies. In the moving time, the ancestors of evolved nanotools like Gavin would have performed the bulk of the maintenance.
Now, the tunnel was a dark, irregular tube, its sides laced with bruising protrusions under the colonies of pale parasitical bromeliads that grew from the pressed and extruded walls. It was impossible to move without breaking the waxy leaves of the plants. They popped and snapped under Perceval's hands and feet, releasing a clear, slightly gelatinous fluid with the green smell of aloe. Small things scuttled or hopped away, startled by the noise of their passage, or the blue radiance shed by Gavin and by Pinion, which allowed the travelers to see.
"Isn't it odd," Rien said, when they had been alternately climbing and crawling for a while, "that things have evolved to take advantage of every niche in the world? It didn't happen like that back on Earth, did it?"
Perceval bit her lip when she would have hushed Rien. Of course, Rien was not an Engineer. Earth was nothing to her but a name, something she might have been taught about in ecology. She didn't know how close to the heresy of the Go-backs she trod. "They were helped," Perceval said. "Camael and the bioengineers gave some colonies a special program, when they still could. Before Metatron died. It force-mutates. Not humans, of course—"
"Funny you should mention Metatron." Rien spoke between small grunts of effort as she levered herself over a humped obstacle. It was impossible, under a layer of ridged tree-ears, to tell what the shape might once have been. But now, it was covered with rather more edges than it had once been. "Mallory did, too."
"Your brain is optimized for pattern-sensing," Gavin commented. "And chatter."
Whether the basilisk meant her to or not, Perceval laughed. And after a moment, Rien—unsulky—laughed as well. Perceval reached forward and patted her sister's ankle in praise, surprised when Rien pulled it forward quickly. Perhaps her feet were ticklish.
"What were you in the before?" Rien asked—obviously of Gavin, not Perceval, who had not been born then. "A welder?"
"Laser-cutting torch," Gavin replied, fluttering his wings as he hop-flapped to the top of the next obstacle. "Ah. There's the halfway point, fair maidens."
Perceval groaned. "Gavin, I don't mean to complain. But why are we going this way?"
"Because I was instructed by the necromancer to lead you astray, exhaust you, and then gnaw your bones," he answered, hopping down the other side of the bulge he'd been perched on. "Unfortunately, I only have a beak, which makes it hard to gnaw, so I'm trying to scrape you to death, and in the meantime wasting power so you can see where you're going. Why do you think we're going this way?"
"Direct route," Rien said, promptly.
"And cannibals," Gavin said. "Socially irresponsible, but there you have it. This is the best way around their levels, and as far as I know there's oxygen and gravity the whole way."
"I could do with a little less gravity," Rien said.
Perceval laughed again, feeling better. At least she wasn't the only one whining.
This time, Rien tried to kick her.
By the time Gavin popped open a hatch with a clever twist of his beak and led them blinking out of the stuffy, musty access tube, both Perceval and Rien had come to the conclusion that it was better to save their breath. They clambered into a small compartment gratefully, and Perceval spent the next several minutes attempting to un-kink her spine. Gritting her teeth, she unfolded Pinion and allowed it a slow stretch, which did more for her abused shoulder muscles than all the twisting she'd done before.
There was no justice.
"Where to now?" Rien asked, while Perceval checked her display for the next twist in the map Mallory had uploaded.
"Twenty-minute lunch break. Praise Zakkiel, Angel of Electricity," Gavin said, and plugged himself into the wall.
Rien wasn't certain if she was grateful or disappointed that Mallory had not packed them any of the orchard fruit. She still had the plum, however, tucked inside the vest Mallory had given her, and she slid her fingers into the concealed pocket and touched its body-warmed surface. After the peach, she wasn't sure she'd taste it before it rotted, whatever Mallory said about only that one tree growing the dead.
The plum comforted her; she imagined she could smell it on her skin, like Mallory. She pulled her hand from her pocket and accepted the bread, soy cheese, and onion jam Perceval offered.
While they ate, and Gavin recharged, Rien studied the maps in her head. It seemed like where they were going wasn't far—some kilometers, if they could take the gangways instead of crawling through warrens. "We could be there tonight," she said.
Perceval looked at her in surprise, and spoke through a mouthful of bread. "How do you know?"
"Look at the map," Rien said. "I think there used to be a side corridor ..."
"There's nothing on the map," Perceval said, and then turned completely around, not just her head. "How would you know where a side corridor used to be, Rien?"
But Rien had pressed one hand to the side of her head, feeling the hair escape between her fingers. "Ng knew," she said. Then Perceval was staring at her, and for all she could tell Gavin might have been, too, except h
e never opened his eyes.
She set the bread carefully on the decking beside her and buried her face between her knees. She covered her mouth with her hands, but couldn't stop hyperventilating, and couldn't even begin to express why.
Perceval put a hand on her shoulder. "Rien, what's wrong?"
He just wanted to die, Rien wanted to say. He just wanted to die and now he's in me, and Mallory won't let him die. That could happen to anyone.
Anyone? Or just anyone Exalt? Maybe it was the symbiont that did it.
She chewed on a mouthful of snot, stuffed the side of her fist into her mouth, and folded tighter. Stop it, ordered her lingering rational urges. She wasn't going to let anyone make her cry. Not Mallory, and not some dead Engineer. She bit her hand and forced control. "Orphans dream of being secret princesses," she said.
Perceval must not have heard her, because she made one of those indistinct encouraging noises that people make, and massaged Rien's shoulders. After a moment, Rien managed to lift her head and repeat herself: "Orphans. Dream of being secret princesses."
Perceval's thumbs made firm circles in Rien's muscles. "And so?" she said. "You are."
A peculiar emotion swept over Rien. She was furious— not specifically with Perceval, but Perceval got caught in the edge of it. But Rien did not want Perceval to stop touching her.
It seemed unfair to ask to be held while you yelled at someone, so Rien swallowed it down. And said instead, "Oh, yeah, a princess with a belly full of bugs and a sister out of nowhere and a dead man in her head." She sniffled and hugged her knees, not crying. Gavin seemed not to have moved at all since the drama started; he might have been a statue of a basilisk. Rien didn't look at him.
She said, "I never had these problems before I met you."
That made Perceval laugh, and hand her the discarded snack.
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