Perceval's shoulders—and the parasite wings—drooped in relief.
And then he pulled her from herself like a fist from a puppet.
When Rien came back to consciousness, she floated in cool weightlessness. There was no pain, except a pinch atop her foot and another in the crook of her arm. She breathed deeply, startled, and felt her jaw restrained by a mask. When her eyes opened, the index of refraction between her cornea and the substance she floated in left her blinking against a pale blue blur. When she convulsed, straps dug hard into her biceps, holding her arms immobile so she could not tear out the tubes.
She was in a burn tank, she realized, and relaxed against the restraints.
She remembered the run, her feet searing in her boots. We made it, she thought, and closed her eyes again. There was nothing else she could do, adrift in the healing gel, and it was pleasant not to be racing downward in agony, running against gnawing time.
In fifteen minutes, she was bored enough to scream. And no closer to finding Perceval.
She groped along the restraints and wrapped her fingers around soft poly, then—cautiously—pulled. Rhythmically. Three tugs, and then rest. Three more, and then rest.
Within forty-five seconds, by her symbiont's clock, a smooth surface pressed against the soles of her feet.
A platform raised her slowly from the gel to floor level. The tank was accessed through a hatchway, which the lift almost sealed when it reached its final position. Gel that had not yet slid aside spilled about her feet, and someone splashed through it to wipe her face. As her eyes cleared, she saw the remaining gel on her skin shining with the cobalt signature of a biocompatible symbiont.
Gentle hands unclasped her mask, cleared her nostrils and mouth, removed the intravenous hookups at her elbow and foot. The attendant was masked and goggled and did not speak, even when she unbuckled the restraints and wiped the gel from Rien's skin.
Rien stood easily, on her own. Her symbiont told her she had been unconscious in the tank for less than seven hours, but she felt light, lissome. The worm of worry gnawing at her bowels was all the more piercing, by contrast.
"Pardon," she said, when the tech stepped back. "Can you tell me where Tristen is ... ?"
There was no answer. The attendant gave her a woven gown, and she shrugged it on, grateful for the warmth covering damp skin.
"Excuse me?" she said, again, her voice harsh in her throat.
The tech pushed up her goggles and regarded Rien incuriously. Her eyes were flat, expressionless, and Rien had the sudden ridiculous desire to apologize.
The tech was a resurrectee. Rien might as well have been talking to the oxygen mask. She took a deep breath to contain her frustration, accepted the comb the resurrectee handed her, and suffered herself to be led while she combed the gel from her curls.
Before they had gone very far, she heard footsteps behind. Unshod; she turned over her shoulder to see who followed, and felt as if she should have been more surprised to recognize Samael, his blond hair lank upon his shoulders.
Rien let her hands and the comb fall to her side. "Help me get my sister back."
"It is why I am here," Samael said. "Have you thought on my proposal?"
"You're asking the wrong sister," Rien said. And then she frowned. "Why do you need her, anyway? Wouldn't any Conn do?"
"No," the angel said. He folded knotty hands before his belt. "The current claims on the captaincy are Perceval's, through Caitlin, and Ariane's, through having consumed her father's symbiont. Tristen remains in contention only if Perceval repudiates the role, as Caitlin has; you can't be Captain and Chief Engineer both."
"Or if Perceval dies," Rien said. She chewed on doubt for a moment, spiky and cloying. What if Tristen were in league with Dust, after all? What if he had betrayed them?
In the future, she resolved, perhaps she should not be so quick to trust.
"But Perceval is not dead," Samael said. "The ship knows. It will accept no others, as is its program. No claim can be complete until the other is resolved. Caitlin is older than her brother. As long as Perceval is in the running, Tristen is out of it."
"Until one of them kills the other. If Ariane kills Perceval—"
He shrugged. "Then she must kill Tristen as well, unless he abdicates. Once he and Perceval are gone, then she has the only claim. And if one of them eats her .. ." The shrug became a smile. "Then that consolidates the claims, too."
"So why do the angels care?" She stood on warm decking in nothing but a woven paper bathrobe, the hand that did not clutch the comb knotted in the fabric. Her soles made soft sucking noises on the metal when her weight shifted. "I don't understand."
"Of course you do," said Samael. "I taught you. I gave you Hero Ng. I gave you Gavin. You are my Galatea."
If her mouth had not been so dry from the face mask, Rien might have spat. She stuffed the comb into her pocket, wondering what good she thought free hands would do her. On her left, the resurrectee stood unmoving.
"You don't own me," Rien said.
"I forged you," said Samael. He reached toward her, tenderly, and she leaned back. He let fall his hand. "Tell me why the angels need Perceval, Rien."
"I don't—"
"Don't lie to me."
She paused, and folded her arms, and scowled. "You're at war among yourselves."
"And have been since the end of the moving times," he admitted. "When Israfel fragmented to survive. A great deal was lost—"
"And the world will only answer to its rightful Captain. But how does that help you, if there's not enough processing power—oh. The symbionts."
"We've had time to build more processing capacity," he said. "Yes. The colonies themselves comprise enough computronium to hold us, if we were reunited, and there were again a central authority."
"So whichever of you is allied to the Captain gains the upper hand."
While she talked, and kept Samael talking, Hero Ng whispered in her ear, He's lying.
"It is a matter," Samael said, delicately, "of survival. Or consumption. I wish to survive. I do not care to be consumed. And if you help me, I will win your sister back from Dust."
What do you mean, lying?
Hero Ng answered, The symbionts cannot hold them all. Not and hold the memories of the crew.
They'd consume us?
Not you, said Hero Ng. Us. The memories of the dead. Imagine, Rien, if I were the sort of man who thought he had more right to live than do you.
Rien could imagine it all too well. She said, to Samael, "How can you hope to win back Perceval, if you cannot defeat Dust?"
"I have given you the means already," he said. "Consider it earnest money, if you will."
"The means?"
"The plum," he said. "From the library tree. It is a rare fruit, containing a piece of code that will interrupt his control of her symbiont. I had meant it for you, to keep you free, my Rien."
She might have stepped back again at his casual possession, but Rien was nothing if not stubborn. "Then what do I need you for?"
"To bring her the fruit," he said. "And if she has not yet submitted willingly, there is a chance that it could deliver Perceval from Dust's thrall."
"But if he is the Angel of Libraries, shouldn't he know—"
"Yes," Samael answered. "But all things come to an end. And I am the Angel of Death." And then he smiled sidelong through his hair and said, "But it was I who came to see you awaken. I do not see your father or your mother here."
And why should he? They had abandoned her to Alasdair, without a backward glance, and Alasdair had done everything possible to hide her history from her.
Not that being raised Mean seemed like being cheated, exactly, now that she'd met a few Exalt.
She realized that Samael was still looking at her, waiting for her to respond. To defend Benedick, and Arianrhod— whom she had barely met—or to condemn them?
Rien smoothed her hands along her thighs, and let it go. She had never had anyone's protection
in her life. She didn't need it now, and especially she did not need Samael's.
And then he said, "You know they only want to use you. The way they used Perceval."
And his tone—hopeful, light, disingenuous—was the clue that triggered Rien to angry speculation. She came up to him with quick small steps, the decking stinging her bare, moisture-softened feet. "And are you the angel who poisoned us?"
"Poisoned you?"
"Poisoned Perceval," she said. "With an influenza virus. And then arranged for her to be captured by Ariane."
This smile made his lined face shine. "If I had," he said, "why in the world would you think I'd admit it so easily?"
They interpermeated.
Perceval had just time to realize that Dust was enfolding her, drawing her out of her body and into the shadow-light fretwork of the parasite wings, and then she was as free of her body as any devil coughed loose in an exorcism. She imagined her consciousness floating up her own throat, exhaled on a cloud of sunlit particles, swirling into the presence of the angel.
And then they were together. Meshed, reinforcing and canceling in an interference pattern, bars of brilliance and darkness. Perceval was clear of thought, simultaneously purged of the chemical cocktail with which Pinion had tried seducing her and lifted from the framework of her own flesh. She diffused into him, wondering how long it had taken Pinion to duplicate the patterns of her thought and personality, and how she would know if they had been subtly—or not so subtly—changed.
"Come with me," Dust said, and now he was a gossamer presence, a breath of air upon a neck she didn't have. He guided her, and she went with him, feeling small in the shadow of his wings. They reached out, a lightspeed flicker, closer than flying feathertip to feathertip.
And found themselves in Rule.
Or what remained of it.
"Your doing," Dust said, and Perceval might have quailed, had she not been a perfect and unemotional machine.
He showed her death; he showed her the toll of war; he showed her what it was to be an angel, and adrift.
They moved like ghosts among the dead, distributed consciousnesses floating in a fall of dust. Perceval understood that it was dangerous to be so far attenuated, that there were angels that hunted angels, but Dust had left this portion of his substance in place for a long time, and he felt his was as safe as leaving one's stronghold could ever be.
"I ward your body," he said, and if she reached back far enough she could feel it, a mortal tether floating among the lattices of the world.
She did not have his knack of distributing consciousness over the entire network. She could switch back and forth between images, conscious of a lightspeed lag measured in fractions of fractions, and even overlay one perspective with the other, but the effortlessness with which Dust managed his gestalt focus was beyond her.
She could, however, feel the dark patches, the vast swaths of the Jacob's Ladder that were outside of Dust's control, or simply dead, gangrenous flesh still grafted to the moribund world as it rotted in pieces.
"Still only human," he told her. "This is what it means to be my captain, beloved."
She explored the limits of this new capability, wondering if there was a tool here that could be used as a weapon against him, trying to hide the thought. She might have been successful; in any case, if he saw it, he did not respond.
Instead, Dust brought Perceval through Rule, and showed her the bodies of the Mean. They were netted and roped outside the air locks, frozen far more crudely than the ones in the holde. Like fish in nets, she thought. There must be dozens of dead. Hundreds.
It should have chilled her, if she were in her own flesh, but she was beyond chill. She could count them, exactly, if she wished. She could brush her fringes over each of the dead and know that person, and bear witness to their illness and agony.
Cowardly, she turned away, and went within the halls of Rule, accompanied by Dust.
Here, a few still walked. Some Mean, still wasted and shuffling with exhaustion in their slow unaugmented recovery from the illness Perceval had brought them. Some Exalt, with the flat eyes of the resurrected. And some Exalt, who must have lived.
Among them, Ariane, who stood in a luxuriously appointed chamber, two gray-faced servants by her side, arraying her for battle.
Perceval braced for a flush of rage and terror, but felt no such thing. Chemical, all chemical. And if it did rise, back in the belly of her cold body, it barely brushed her here.
"Take me," Dust said, "and I will help you defeat Ariane. Be my captain, and help me stand against the angel who is her ally."
"And what angel is that?" It was a strange sensation, to float at her Enemy's shoulder unnoticed. Witchcraft.
"Astafil, the Angel of Blades."
"While we are here beside her," Perceval asked, "why not just block her throat, kill her now?"
"Asrafil," Dust repeated. "We move subtly, now, and go unnoticed. The world swarms, and not even an angel can inspect every nanobot that crawls within its sphere. But if we moved against her, he would know."
Perceval watched as Ariane drew her unblade and cut passes in the air with it. If she followed her thread back to her own body, she could imagine fear at the sight. "Who is she going to war with? Surely not Engine. Not with her forces so depleted."
"No," Dust whispered in her ear. Perceval slid back into her body with a sense of impact, awash in sick meat and chemical deception. Her fingers curled in distaste. "She's coming here, Perceval. To devour you, and conquer me."
24 Vessel
We are like searchers in a house
of darkness,
A house of dust; we creep with
little lanterns,
Throwing our tremulous arcs of light
at random.
— CONRAD AIKEN, The House of Dust
Samael waited while the resurrectee brought Rien clothing, in which she dressed as quickly as she could, even to the paper shoes. Then the resurrectee took her wrist again and led her to a door. From the silence of the medical bay, Rien emerged into soft-spoken chaos.
She had known Engine was a city, but a glimpse of its vast spaces while being borne in on a stretcher was profoundly different from stepping out the hatchway, flanked by a resurrectee on one side and the Angel of Death on the other, and being confronted by the sweep of unfettered space. Her earlier head-spinning glimpses could not prepare her for this.
The holde might have rivaled a small city on Earth, she thought, though neither she nor Ng had personal experience to compare. Still, she felt she stood at the bottom of a bowl—but she would have felt that no matter where she stood. The space was a bubble, and the gravity must be directional, because she could see the structures rising from the walls as if from solid deck, all of them shining in pearlescent pastels, each tapered and prickling toward the center, so the whole bore a resemblance to a pin cushion turned inside-out.
And the streets, and the space between the walls, were filled with traffic. For the first time, the existence of Perceval's wings made logical sense to Rien; she watched Engineer after Engineer flit from one side of the void to the other, and thought how long it would take to walk around.
There were spanning cables as well, and cars moving along them, but why walk (or drive) if you could fly?
She would have expected noise, echoes filling the cavernous space, but the structures must have been designed to absorb sound. If anything, the street was hushed, voices falling off within a few steps, footsteps inaudible. It made the bustle eerie, like watching vids with the sound turned down to a whisper.
The resurrectee tugged her wrist gently, and Rien realized she was stuck in the doorway. Stepping away from the shelter of the wall made her knees tremble, but she was too shamed by her fear to show it. Especially in front of Samael.
She walked into the traffic and after a few steps it grew easier. The way was crowded, but in that crowding lay anonymity, and in that anonymity, Rien found security. She walked among the weirdly
modified: angels and devils and someone who looked rather like a pagoda. There were persons who were chromed to quicksilver mirrors, or whose skins reflected the iridescent colors of the city. There were persons with eight limbs, scurrying along walls, and there were tiger-striped persons with wings and lush pelts.
When she had been Mean, Rien could vanish into any crowd.
She relished being able to do it again.
She was still relieved to come to the end of the walk. They stepped through a sliding door into a cool, dim room, and Rien bit back a sigh. She stepped to one side, not wanting to stay silhouetted against the light while Samael followed, amused by her own paranoia but not amused enough to stop herself. Once she was within, her augmented eyes adjusted.
The first person she saw was Benedick, Gavin on his shoulder, and she could have sagged against the wall in relief. Instead, she made herself step forward, freeing her wrist from the resurrectee's grasp, and went to her father.
He touched her shoulder lightly. She leaned into it, just enough to let him know she appreciated the gesture, not enough to admit she needed it.
"Where's Tristen?" she asked.
. "Still in the tank," he said, with a wince that made Rien feel guilty for letting Samael make her doubt her uncle. "He was worst off. I'm here to feed you and lead you to our improvisational council of war."
"Perceval," Rien said.
He nodded. "I will make her a priority. Come and meet your mother, Rien." He looked over her shoulder at Samael. "Nothing is decided."
Samael said, "May I accompany you?"
Benedick had a steady gaze, when he wanted it. "Could I stop you?"
Samael's shrug was oddly self-effacing, for an angel.
Gavin hopped onto Rien's shoulder. He didn't say anything, so neither did she. But she leaned her cheek against his wing, and he huddled into the curve of her neck, warm and feathery, smelling of sunlight and dust.
Benedick turned away, and Rien followed. The resurrectee was left behind, as unregarded as an old shoe, and Rien gave her a regretful glance.
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