Dust

27 black mercy

Rien's clothing had been recycled, but her personal belongings had been scrubbed and stored. She was required to sign for them, which she did, and retina and thumbprinted, too. The contents of her pack were there, including the plum.

She left everything else behind. Caitlin, who was more or less her size, had dressed her in sturdier clothes, and she didn't need a blanket here. She did check the somewhat battered fruit for excessive radiation, and was reassured. Both her symbiont and Ng agreed that any residue was within tolerance.

She slipped it into a pocket, threw away the rest, and within ten minutes has completed the forms to release her temporary locker back to the common pool.

Then, accoutered, she went to find Tristen and her father. And, incidentally, Caitlin Conn.

The same guide strips that had led her to the left luggage would bring her to the air-lock gateways. She walked through the bustling streets and the covered corridors, inevitably smaller and less flamboyant than whatever Engineer walked near. She thought she could vanish here, and the idea was attractive.

She missed being a Mean among Means. Even if it had been a lie, even then.

She thought the others would have a pack for her, gear, whatever was necessary for the long trip back to Rule. She didn't fancy another run through Inkling's chamber. She didn't think they could; there was no way to survive it without medical care waiting on the far end.

Gavin could not yet have returned from his errand, and Rien was both sad and grateful. She missed his weight on her shoulder, his malicious wit. But she could not trust him, and even though Samael himself would be with them, it was a cold comfort that Gavin was elsewhere.

Better the hand than the cat's-paw, perhaps?

No, of course not. Rien knew why.

She liked Gavin.

She would have hated to place herself on constant guard against him. She wanted to preserve the illusion of friendship.

And in the end, she was Samael's creature also, wasn't she? She, and all of Engine. And she had been a servant of monsters before. And worse monsters than Samael, who was after all only the Angel of Death.

"Well," she told herself, "if you live, you'll both be beholden to the same beast, and you'll have time to trade genial insults then." If Gavin wanted anything to do with her.

She could live with being a servant again. She told herself, firmly: you can live with being a servant again.

She would simply have to.

She was glad, though, to have had the illusion of freedom. Princesses had adventures. Princesses were taken as prizes of war. Princesses had to battle monsters if they were going to survive, and the monsters inevitably won. If not the monster you fought against, the monster you served.

Or the monster you became.

Except, she thought, the only lasting place in the world for princesses was deeply in denial, and the only important question in the end was, was it better to become the monster, or to become the servant of the beast? She thought of Gavin. She thought of Samael and Dust, and of the parasite wings. She thought she knew which monster she preferred.

Rien dodged other pedestrians and tried to calm herself with the comforting knowledge of Benedick and Caitlin's faith in her. They'd both been perfectly insouciant about allowing her to make her way to the lockers unguided.

The trust was flattering. It wasn't, as a nasty undermining conviction kept insisting, that they didn't care if they got her back. And Caitlin did not see her only as a placeholder for Perceval.

Still, when she rejoined them and Tristen at the gateway to the air locks as arranged, it took an effort of will not to coil her fists in the tails of her borrowed blouse. They were already armed and armored, standing three abreast. A brave sight, if ever she had seen one.

They had no pack.

They had a suit of power armor. Four suits, in fact, but three of those were in use already. Tristen wore shining white, Benedick the predictable black piped in golden-brown, and Caitlin, vermilion and gold. The armor that stood empty was teal and emerald, but where a device might have been blazoned on the chest was only an empty plate.

With them waited Samael, his colorless hair hanging in strings beside his face. He winked when he saw Rien. The others, helms open, watched her approach. Tristen and Benedick were bald and stubbled as Rien, Caitlin no bigger.

It was the angel who extended a hand to her, an arrogant gesture, a crook of his fingers.

She paused before him, and he placed a helmet in her hands.

Samael said, "The time is nigh. Put your armor on."

"How are we going to reach Rule in time?"

Maybe they should just stay here, and help to hold the world together. Hero Ng could be useful here, and so by extension could Rien. And whatever the monsters got up to, somebody still needed to do the work of the world.

Rien looked to Tristen. He gestured, with his eyes, to Caitlin, and she smiled. "We are Engineers," she said. "The lift to the bridge has been kept in working order, against this day of need. It will take us to the bridge in under an hour, barring disasters."

Rien considered it a major personal achievement that she didn't hurl the helmet at her new foster mother. Instead, she turned to her and said, "I've never worn power armor before."

Caitlin nodded. "I'll help you into it."

All three of them did, actually, deftly enough that they rarely seemed to be getting in one another's way. And once it had folded around her, Tristen adjusted the seals and Caitlin checked the latches, while Benedick, meticulous and silent, fixed the calibration of the pressure switches that would move the armor effortlessly with Rien's every gesture.

When she was garbed, her helm seated but not sealed, they stepped back and surveyed their work.

"Not bad," Caitlin said. "We'll make a knight of you yet."

Rien smiled. She swung her arms; they moved as lightly as if in microgravity. And because she had to know, she asked, "Did Arianrhod's arrest go well?"

"Fine."

Maybe it was the directness of Caitlin's gaze, or Hero Ng's experience, but Rien knew immediately that her foster mother was lying. She stopped, one hand raised to her helmet seal, and turned to Benedick. "She got away."

"She has a faction," Caitlin said, before Benedick could answer. "It's under con—"

"Don't lie to me," Rien said. "Don't treat me like a child, Father."

"Yes," he said. "She got away. No, I do not think she can elude us long."

She didn't think he was lying. Not exactly. But his worried glance at Caitlin told her that neither was he artless. "Chief Engineer," Rien said, "do you need to stay?"

Caitlin spread her hands. "I'm not the only Engineer," she said. "And Perceval is my daughter."

In the distance, Rien heard an alarm ringing. And then another. She thought of the resurrected in their come, of Oliver led through the streets on a leash.

Arianrhod had more than a few partisans, she understood.

She fixed Samael on a stare. And then Benedick. Inside the armor, her hands were cold. "What if you stayed, Father? You and Cat and Tristen. And Samael and I went for Perceval?"

He opened his mouth. She held up a gauntlet. "Can the two of us handle Dust?"

"I can handle Dust," Samael said. "If we were stealthy and few in number, it might even improve our chances of reaching her alive."

"Right," Rien said. "Then it's settled. The Engineers and tacticians are needed here."

"Without me, you don't have transportation," Caitlin said.

Rien laughed. "Without me, you don't know where to go. Cat"—she shrugged, ceramic plates clicking—"I know you want to."

Caitlin, bold as ever, let the mask of her helm glide open and the faceplate underneath slide back. "It's going to be a war out there," she said.

"I know," Rien said. "It's going to be a war in here as well, isn't it?"

Before any of them could answer, Rien heard the whir of wings. She twisted, automatically, casting one arm up to protect her face. The armor moved fluidly, faster than she would have on her own, so that she at first tried to resist it and it bruised her. "Ow," she said, as Gavin settled on her forearm.

"Oh, please. I could burn through that, but not pinch." He hopped up her arm to her shoulder, balancing on the slick pauldron with care. "Mallory would like to speak before you go."

Rien pressed her lips together, not caring if he saw the grimace. If she had somehow summoned the basilisk with her earlier relief at his absence, she wouldn't be surprised.

"In a minute," she said, and looked sidelong at Benedick. He reached out, as if to prevent her from stepping forward, and she sidled away.

"I've taken care of myself all my life," she said, averting her eyes. "Your deciding to be my father now doesn't change that. And if we don't come back the only thing it matters to is which angel winds up on top. If you fail here..."

... the world ends.

Benedick's lips pressed thin under his faceplate. And then he nodded and stepped back. "Tristen," he said.

Tristen, who had been silent, and who had not yet sealed his helm, licked his lips. He laid one hand on Rien's shoulder, and Rien saw Benedick's hurt that she let it happen. "Never fear," Tristen said. "Rien, one of us is coming."

"Fine," she said, choosing—again—not to wonder if she could trust him. And then she turned back to Benedick and said, "When we come back, I expect you'll be able to tell me what happened to my mother."

"When you come back, I expect I will," he said.

Then Caitlin stepped in, not blocking her path but reaching into it. Her sheathed unblade was in her hand, and Rien stared at it. "This is Mercy," she said. "Take it."

"You might need it," Rien said.

Caitlin smiled. "So might you."

Rien swallowed and waited for Caitlin to look down. And when she did not, Rien reached out slowly and closed her hand on the black hilt of the unsword.

"Thank you," she said. She locked it to the catch on her armor, and turned inside her helm to look Gavin in the eye. "Where's Mallory?"

Samael stepped forward. Rien raised a hand and pointed at the center of the angel's chest. "You're not invited," she said.

Mallory waited on a bench in a corner of a quiet courtyard, knees drawn up and chin resting on interlaced hands. The necromancer stood as Rien approached, reaching out to embrace her despite the armor. Rien suffered it, but stepped back quickly. Gavin, caught in the middle of hopping between their shoulders, fanned his wings in surprise, but managed to complete the jump.

"Well," Rien said, "I came."

"You're angry," Mallory said. "Will you just open your helmet, please?"

Rien did, a touch at the controls telescoping faceplate and mask aside. She took a deep breath, and tried to keep her face impassive, but the corner of her mouth kept twitching. "Why should I be angry?"

"Because of Samael."

"Oh, why should I be angry about that?" The sarcasm dripping from Rien's voice was just right, she thought, but also there was pain, and she hadn't meant to give Mallory that much. "He told me what was in the plum. I still have it. I'm grateful."

Mallory's smile slid into an expression Rien could only call enigmatic. "Angels don't always tell the whole truth."

"No, really?" Rien's throat hurt. Why does everything have to be so complicated? "What could he possibly have been withholding?"

Whatever was behind Mallory's appraisal, the necromancer winced. And then reached across the space between them and touched Rien's armored wrist, though Rien could not feel it. "What did he tell you?"

"That it was a program. A virus. That it could scrub Dust's agents out of Perceval. And replace them with Samael's, right? I mean, he didn't say that, but I guessed—"

"No," Mallory said. "It's more than that. It's an angel seed. It's Samael's backup. Like the peach you ate was Hero Ng's. So if Dust consumes him—"

"He won't die," Rien said.

"A fragment won't," Mallory answered. "Just a splinter. Nothing like the whole. But it's the fragment that knows all about how to fight Dust."

Rien stopped dead, brow aching between her eyes as she thought about that. "He expects to lose. He expects to die."

"Oh, sweetheart," said Mallory. "We all do."

Again, Rien was grateful for Hero Ng, even as she pitied him. His quiet resolve steadied her, gave her a point of balance. Especially when she remembered how unwillingly he had been returned to guide her, and take up his burdens again.

I would have left you in peace, she told him. But he only shrugged and carried on.

No blame.

Fortunately, Ng warned her about the lift before she got in.

Lift was perhaps a generous term. The thing was a cage on graspers, open to the breathless grasp of the Enemy, and it ran along the outside of the world, huddled close and moving with tooth-chipping speed. It rattled and clacked and shuddered as if it were about to fly apart into a thousand pieces. There were no seats and no safety lines, other than the ones that came component to their armor, and Rien clung to the nearest vertical reinforcement with all the strength of her power suit.

She was afraid to move, anyway, lest the damned thing break her arms. At least the armor had vibration dampers, which probably kept the lift's ferocious vibration from chipping the bones in her hands.

After the first quarter-hour of the journey, when she had passed through initial terror and into a sort of numbed rattling, she began to appreciate the humor. She hadn't been nearly as terrified when Perceval tossed her out an air lock as she was now, hurtling along the lattice of the world, embracing this clattering steed.

Although this time the armor kept her warm.

She began to giggle, quietly, into her helmet, realizing only too late that her suit mike was live and Tristen could hear her hysterics. She snapped off the mike in a hurry. When she looked over her shoulder, embarrassed, she was even more mortified to see him swinging toward her from handhold to handhold.

Rien turned her eyes front and gritted her teeth. In a moment, her uncle was beside her, shoulder to shoulder, leaning his helmet against Rien's to speak in private. "When we get there," he shouted into the teeth of the noise, "let the armor carry you. If you fight, it can hurt you, and you don't know how to move with it yet. I'll get you to Perceval."

The rest is on you.

Rien nodded, wondering if Tristen could see her head moving inside the helmet's shell. She wondered also if Caitlin had programmed the suit to keep her out of trouble, if it would run away if the fighting got too dangerous. She was ashamed to feel relief at the idea, and more relief that it would not be her cowardice if it happened.

"Thank you," she said, and tilted her helmet away.

Against her faceplate, she saw Tristen's reflection, and the moment of hesitation before he backed away. But back away he did, and Rien breathed a sigh of relief heavy enough to briefly fog the crystal by her mouth. But as soon as Tristen withdrew, Samael, shirtless in the void, drifted in his place.

"Take a number; we'll be with you as soon as we can," Rien muttered. This time, she remembered to check her mike light. Red. Talking made her feel like her teeth were going to shatter.

But the armor held her in the lift, and the lift hurtled through the world, bars of light and shadow ripping past on every side. Rien looked away from Samael, toward the shipwreck stars, and pretended to herself that she could see into the swirl of dying matter and know what would come next.

The inferno was beautiful.

"Let me remake you in my image," Samael said. He spoke into the void, his lips moving, untroubled by the Enemy. She heard him, even over the clamor of the hurtling lift, as a clear calm voice in her ear.

And she was grateful to the armor, because if it had been the strength of her own hands holding her to the lift, she would have tumbled free in shock. She half turned, clinging to her post, and gaped. "What exactly do you propose?"

"A way to make you stronger than Dust," he said. "A way to make you an angel."

She looked around—at Tristen in his stark white armor. He had turned away and seemed oblivious. She wondered if Samael had somehow affected her perceptions, if he was appearing to her eyes only. "Another ally you can consume?"

"You never know," he said. "Maybe you'll defeat me also." He shrugged. "But you know what they say about age and treachery versus youth and skill."

"No," she said.

He leaned forward. "What's to stop me doing it anyway?"

"You need consent." Not a guess. Hero Ng gave her that; it had been built into Israfel from the first, hard-coded, irreducible. Whatever the angels did, they first needed the consent of the subject. Or of the Captain, if what was to be done was to be done to more than one human.

"If you let me," he said, "you could see what I see." He gestured around, to the waystars and the world. "All the buzz of machine life, the consciousnesses that swirl all over the skin of the world, glistening in wavelengths to which you are deaf. Look off to starboard."

He pointed, and Rien's eye followed. Just in time to see a vast section of the Jacob's Ladder shear away from the body of the ship like a sawn branch bending free of the tree. She could see as it spun clear that no atmosphere was escaping, and no lights shone within. Even as she watched, it began to break apart into smaller chunks, the chunks moving. They would be torn down to reinforce the living sections of the ship, to try to make it robust enough to withstand the wavefront, or spun out into the monofilaments that would—if grace or luck was with them—help catch the exploding star's magnetosphere, producing acceleration.

Well, that wasn't quite right, was it? The blast wave was going to produce acceleration no matter what. The question before them was whether it was going to be acceleration in very small pieces... or the sort of useful acceleration that could bootstrap the world into flight once more.

Bits shook loose—from the lift, from the world under its scuttling graspers. Rien tried not to look, tried not to imagine those tumbling bits were anything but loose bolts and rust.

"That's not a reason for me to sacrifice myself for you."

Samael's face rearranged itself around the sharp edge of his smile. "What about sacrificing yourself for the world? It will take whatever resources we can field to defeat them."

"Them." A simple pronoun. It should not have knocked Rien so far down a cold well of fear that the angel's voice seemed to echo after her.

"Yes," Samael said. "Ariane and her allied angel are coming to the party, too. If our timing is right, we'll arrive after the other claimants to the throne have softened each other up, and we'll be able to pick up their leavings. Won't that be grand?"

When Rien glared at him, stricken, he only shrugged. "I'm an angel, sweetheart. I'm five hundred years old. I don't want to die."

"Even if it's God's will?" she snapped.

"If it's God's will," he said, "we'll find out the hard way, won't we?"

Rien tongued on her mike as she turned away from him, and quickly passed along to Tristen what Samael had told her. There was silence at first, and Rien saw the broad movements of helm and armor as her uncle shook his head.

"You didn't hear him," Rien said in disgust. "Of course you don't believe me—"

"Actually—" Tristen stepped in. Literally, hauling himself forward hand over hand up the superstructure of the lift, his armor glimmering white as starshine except where it caught ruddy highlights off the secondary waystar. "I believe you," he said. "But this is as fast as we can go."

She opened her mouth to accuse him. The words piled up. Denial. Anger.

He was an adult, an Exalt. A prince of the world. The oldest living son of Alasdair Conn.

If he couldn't do something—

—there was nothing that could be done.