Dust

23 in your name

By the time they came down—or up—the river to Engine, Rien had been leading Tristen hand in hand for an hour. He swayed and had to be guided, and his pale skin tore away, or bruised azure and cerulean wherever she touched him. Gavin rode on his opposite shoulder. Rien wasn't sure the weight was helping her uncle, but Tristen did not complain.

And he was, after all, a man grown. He could make his own decisions. Even, she thought wryly, if a little child led him by the hand.

In truth, of course, it wasn't his fault. He was weak from his long imprisonment, and she thought it was only through some unholy force of will that he stayed erect at all. And his pale eyes had failed him; he was blinded by corneal burns.

The water grew hotter. The steam grew denser. And out of it spoke the voice of Inkling. "You will come to a crosspath," he said. "Go left there. It is too hot for you, if you continue."

Upriver, to the comet-burst reactor core itself.

Rien counted clicks on her colony's radiation detector, and decided herself pleased not to be finding out exactly how hot it was in person. "Thank you, Inkling," she said, formally.

The beast bowed, although not over her hand. Just as well. "You are very welcome, Rien Conn," he said, and vanished into the water like a memory.

They crept from a vent in the wall and found themselves on a path. A proper path, if narrow; soft grass leading to a blue-painted wall and around the corner. Nothing like the hideous scramble that had brought them this far. "Faster," Rien said.

Benedick choked. "By four days." His jaw moved as if he were considering spitting out a tooth.

Someone came toward them. Several someones. Rien could not see clearly enough to make them out, beyond shapes rounding that corner. They bore a stretcher between each pair. She thought how nice it would be to lie down on one of those and sleep.

The next she knew, someone was lifting her from the grass with brutal hands. She might have fallen, but must they be so brutal?. Every touch was like fire. No, her skin was on fire. Melting away at their touch.

She heard Benedick talking, heard him explain. Another voice answered, a woman's, stern but comforting because of it. There was music, chimes and flutes and drums. Someone accompanied them. She lay on the stretcher, her eyes closed, and it was very peaceful. A crier sang out: Honor them, for it is in your name that they have done what they have done, over and over again.

A shadow fell over her, and she made a soft noise in the anticipation of more pain, but something cool dripped onto her lips and she swallowed, and swallowed again, a thin trickle wetting her mouth and soothing the unbearable nausea. She opened her eyes. Somehow, they had come within a mighty city, pearl-colored structures projecting from the walls of the cavernous open space as it arched up and around them. If Rien lifted her head, she could see another stretcher behind her.

In addition to the bearers at either end, two women walked beside Rien's litter. One was willowy, her silver hair—silver with age, not white like Tristen's—falling in waves. She must be a relative of Perceval's, because she had the same pert nose and broad square cheeks, though softened by time. Her face was more fine of detail than Perceval's, though, so instead of looking square and a bit unfinished, it took Rien's breath away.

The other was of less than medium height, her auburn hair clipped close, so it only curled once from the scalp.

Her gray was only a scattering, her face more pug-nosed and not so square. She had freckles and she wore a sword, or more likely an unblade, bumping on her left hip.

"Rien," Rien said when the flow of water stopped, trying to lift her hand to introduce herself.

"Shh," said the white-haired woman. "We know who you are, sweetheart."

Rien reached anyway, got her hand up and onto the woman's arm. But the other one reached down and took her wrist, feather-soft, in a gloved hand. "I think she is asking our names, Arianrhod."

Arianrhod.

Arianrhod Kallikos?

No light shone behind her; no halo graced her head, except in the way the sunlight smoothed down the strands so she seemed all dipped in quicksilver. Arianrhod smiled and wet a cloth for her lips, again.

"Mother?" Rien would have asked, but when she tried to lever herself up on her elbows, she slid from her own head like sand through fingers, and fell back into the stretcher undone.

When they left the dead, Dust took Perceval to see the suns. She preceded him silently down echoing corridors, Pinion floating about her with feathertips arched like a child's fingers to trail upon the wall. Even with Dust behind, she strode in confidence, because Pinion would permit no wrong turnings. Even in her confidence, she knotted her fists in hate, because if she chose a direction that Dust disapproved, Pinion also would not permit it.

An air lock whisked open. She stepped inside. The avatar followed. With a soft hiss, air was pumped from the compartment, and then the external lock slid wide.

Perceval did not know what she expected, but the bright flicker of the parasite wings about her, lifting her into space, was not it. There was nothing for them to beat against, but still they beat, and she rose free of the world and the world's gravity, emerging from the air lock like a butterfly from a chrysalis, all wreathed in shimmering bronze.

The cold seemed less. She was only a little uncomfortable, and she thought the parasite wings were protecting her as much as they enslaved. Although she felt pressure and currents against them, she didn't understand how they could fly in vacuum until a voice spoke in her ear.

Or, the memory of a voice spoke in her mind, more precisely: as there was no air to bear up wings, there was no air to carry sound. But her colony could make her think she heard him, just as it could make her feel that she loved him.

Dust said, "Pinion is as adaptable as you, beloved. He can fly the solar winds. Light pressure and electromagnetism and matter are all the same to him. Fear not, for he will ward you."

He had come behind her, and hovered now at her flank, a bowering shadow. She tilted her head forward and looked down into the suns.

She had seen them from space before. But she had never stepped outside for the sole and express purpose of turning to them, like a sunflower, and watching the old consume the new.

The waystars were comprised of a smaller and more massive white dwarf primary and its larger but lesser partner, upon whose photosphere it fed. Soon the equilibrium of their dance would fail, and the white dwarf would die with such violence that it would take its entire stellar neighborhood with it.

Perceval thought of the world behind and around her, the untold thousands of lives. The innocents dead and frozen in its holdes. The dead resurrected at work in the chambers of her father's house.

"What do you want from me?" she asked, thinking that if Dust could speak to her silently, he could hear her when she spoke in return.

"Only what I have begged," he said. "Be my captain, Perceval Conn. Bring us out of peril; set us under way again."

"Why me?"

He snorted softly in her ear. "You would prefer Ariane?"

Which of course was not an answer. "Bargain with me." She did not take her eyes off the waystars, though she thought maybe she didn't need her eyes. Pinion could see all around, it seemed. And if she could feel what Pinion felt, she could see what Pinion saw.

Dust nodded. Perceval savaged her cheek with her teeth, for the pain, to not feel comforted by his approval.

"What is it you wish, beloved?"

"I want the parasite wings gone. I want you to stop manipulating my biochemistry. I want autonomy."

"And then you will be my captain?"

"And then I will consider it. When you permit me to think clearly."

His hand on her shoulder. They stood on nothingness, framed in the gargantuan lattice of the world, their wings cowls of shadow catching rills of light from the waystars, as when sun falls through the dusty air.

"No," he said.

"Then we have nothing to discuss."

"Have we not? I give you more freedom than you know."

The parasite wings would not allow her to drift. But she floated, and looked upon the suns with her own eyes, and did not turn to her captor.

"It is not a gift of freedom," she said, and if she had been speaking aloud it would have been through clenched teeth, "not to seize everything that it is in your power to seize."

He was silent at her back. His hand fell away. After a little time, while Perceval wondered that her lungs did not yet ache nor her head spin from lack of oxygen, he seemed to collect within himself, and thus to draw away.

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."