Flesh and Silver

2. Administration of Tests

The temporary cubby he’d been assigned was in the half-g section of the hospital wheel. The combination of reduced gravity and enough whiskey under his belt to stop most men’s clocks had him moving with the slow, exaggerated caution of someone attempting to walk on the ceiling.

His mind precessing like a gyroscope, he considered the day’s events. As layovers went this had been about average. Forgettable. In the morning he’d be back on the circuit. In a month the only thing he’d be able to remember about today was the excellent Mauna Loa whiskey.

Next stop… where? Ganymede? It didn’t matter. Thanks to the splendid efficiency of MedArm he didn’t have to know. He would be picked up and deposited there like a chess piece.

Queen to King’s bishop 3. The Red Queen, of course. Running like hell but getting absolutely nowhere.

The image made him laugh. But it was a joyless, unpleasant bark that caused a young couple waiting for the elevator farther along the corridor to turn and stare.

He gave them a less than reassuring grin. “Actually,” he called cheerfully, “I’m more a pawn than a queen.” He blew them a kiss. “Really.”

They retreated toward the stairwell, glancing nervously back over their shoulders and whispering. The expressions on their faces suggested that they thought he might be an escapee from the wing with the padded walls.

Marchey’s attention had already strayed from them and back to the task of keeping his feet under him. Whispers were nothing new; they were the sound of the blur, signifying nothing. A behind his back shout of Freak! or Quack! could still penetrate his awareness, but that was about all.

The door to his cubby suddenly materialized before him. He peered at the number closely, even though it had been easy enough to find because it was the last door in a dead-end corridor. That was a nice touch. Whoever said hospital administrators didn’t have a sense of humor?

B/164/G. Home sweet home.

He rummaged through his pouch, pulling out the door key with a gray-gloved hand, watching that hand ’face it with the lock as if it were some unconnected piece of arcane machinery operating on its own.

The lock chirped acceptance and the door slid open. He shuffled in, slapping the plate to close it behind him. One nightcap—well, maybe two—and a check to see how his patient was doing. By pad, of course. There was no sense in taking a chance on killing the poor bastard by looking in on him after saving his life in the first place, That would kind of defeat the whole point of having come here, wouldn’t it?

Now if he could just remember the man’s name…

Had they even told it to him? Probably not.

It wasn’t until he turned toward the bed that he finally realized he was not alone in the room.

Scylla sat rigidly on the bed, waiting for her quarry to react to her presence.

No matter what he did, she was ready. If he tried to run, she would bring him down before he could get even halfway to the door. If he came at her, he would quickly learn what a deadly mistake it was to dare attack an angel.

But he only stood there, swaying slightly, staring at her so blankly that for a moment she wondered if he saw her at all.

His face was broad and rough-hewn, a craggy landscape of shadowed crevasses and eroded cliffs. Only a thinning gray-black fringe of hair clung to the back of his head. His lips were twisted into an odd half grimace that was habitual, judging by the deep grooves bracketing his mouth. He was of medium height, barrel-chested and blocky. She decided he was probably quite strong, even though his broad shoulders were slumped as if from years of grinding toil.

It was his gray eyes that bothered Scylla. They were flat and incurious. She saw nothing of herself reflected in them.

He appeared to be willing to stand there, unspeaking, unmoving, and unmoved, forever. Scylla was not used to people failing to react to her. She did not like it one bit.

“You are Dr. Georgory Marchey,” she said sharply. “You will do exactly as I say. I want you to sit down. Will you obey me, or must I demonstrate what will happen if you defy me?”

Marchey shrugged indifferently, but complied. He dropped heavily into the cubicle’s sole chair. “That’s an UNSRA-issue Armark Full Combat Exo you’re wearing,” he said blandly. “Aside from its armaments, it makes you at least fifteen times faster and thirty times stronger than me.”

“You have correctly judged my superiority over you,” Scylla said tightly, “But do not spout nonsense. I am an angel.”

Her prey gave her a mordant smile. “My mistake. I always expected my drinking to make me see pink elephants.” He leaned over to retrieve a bottle from the table beside him. “Speaking of drinking, would you care to join me in a nightcap?”

His refusing to take her seriously could not be tolerated. Scylla moved, a living lightning bolt as she came up off the bed, streaked across the room and snatched the bottle from his hand faster than the eye could follow.

Then slowly, deliberately, she crushed it to splinters in one silver-coated hand. The small cubby filled with the sharp tang of spilled alcohol. The shards tinkled to the floor.

“No?” Marchey said mildly, staring up into her face. It had been tattooed into a nightmarish red-and-black demon’s mask, a face designed to instill fear in the beholder. “Or are you just not particularly fond of gin?”

“What is the matter with you?” Scylla demanded, frustration turning her voice into a caustic hiss. “Are you stupid? Suicidal? What are you?”

Marchey stared unblinkingly back at her, his face empty of fear, empty of anything she could name.

“Thirsty,” he said.

This was not going at all the way Scylla expected.

Her world was a simple one, the rules unvarying and unbreakable, and her place in it clearly understood by one and all. People feared her because she was an angel. Angels are made to be feared; they are instruments forged in Heaven to make man comply with the Laws of God, and mete out punishment when those Laws are broken. Only one person in her life and world did not cringe in her presence, and that was Brother Fist. As she was His angel, it was only fitting that it was she who feared Him.

But this man she had been sent to fetch was no Chosen of God. He was an infidel, and she an angel. How could he look upon her and not be daunted?

Scylla knew exactly how she looked, and was proud of it. Her body was no unclean mass of soft, sagging, sweating flesh; she was polished, strutted, indestructible silver nearly head to toe. For her, nakedness was no shame. She was not cursed with a woman’s offensive parts to hide. Her groin was smooth, featureless, and unimpregnable. Her breasts were modest silver mounds without nipples to mark her as a suckling beast.

Her face was human-shaped and made of flesh, but it bore red-and-black God-marks etched into her very pores. Instead of hair, her skull was covered with gleaming silver. Her one green eye was human enough, for angels stand halfway between God and man. Her other, angel eye was an unblinking, ever-vigilant steel-framed glass lens. Brother Fist could look out through that eye, seeing His world through her when he wished, and it gave her sight in the darkness so that none could use it to escape the bringer of God’s Justice.

She shone like a sword of holy light, and yet this man Marchey was not blinded. He did not even blink.

She watched him pick up another bottle from the table. He drank from it, then offered it to her. “Come on, have a drink,” he said. “It’ll help you relax.”

She took it, but not to drink. As he started to withdraw his hand she clamped her other hand around his wrist. Her ceramyl talons hissed from their sheaths in the backs of her fingers and locked with a menacing snick, razor-sharp points dimpling the soft gray fabric of the glove he wore. Staring him straight in the eye, she squeezed. Not hard enough to crush, but more than enough to crack his infuriating indifference.

Much to her surprise his wrist was unyielding. The look of apathetic patience on his face never faltered.

Scylla frowned, red-scaled nostrils flaring. She squeezed harder. Hard enough to make him scream as bones of his wrist ground together. She was under strict orders to deliver him in one piece, but one way or another she was going to put him on his knees where he belonged, to look into his eyes and see the fear that belonged there.

Scylla knew her own strength. Her hands could crush granite to sand, twist and tear steel like putty. Yet his wrist was unyielding. His face showed nothing. Less than nothing.

She squeezed harder yet, her black-tattooed lips drawing back from teeth which had been filed to points and capped with a thin layer of bonded ceramyl. Their knife-sharp tips were bright bloodred.

Marchey cocked his head for a better look at her mouth. Against all reason, he smiled. “Nice touch,” he said. “Bet it hurts like a bastard if you bite your tongue.”

Scylla hissed in rising anger and baffled frustration. She dug her talons into his upper wrist and pulled. The cloth shredded like tissue under the ceramyl blades.

But instead of being rewarded with an agonized screech as his wrist was flayed to the bone, there was a shrill skreeeeeeee that vibrated up her arm and set her teeth on edge. Still he stared back at her, looking… amused.

Although it felt like a minor defeat, she dropped her gaze. Scraps of gray cloth dangled from her talons. His hand and wrist were silver—a silver exactly like her own angel skin. Her ceramyl blades were sharp and hard enough to slash through plate steel like cardboard, but they had not put so much as a scratch on the gleaming surface of his wrist and arm.

Her forehead furrowed, baffled by this impossibility.

When she looked up at his face again he was grinning at her.

“Surprise,” he said, daring to laugh at her. At her!

“Surprise yourself,” she snarled.

Then she shot him point-blank in the chest.

Marchey came to, shook his head groggily.

That proved to be a serious mistake. His brain felt like it had been sucked out his eye sockets, macerated, and squeezed back into his skull through the hole bored in the middle of his forehead. He moaned as it sloshed turgidly with every move he made.

Behind him someone laughed, a harsh sound that drove a blunt harpoon in one ear and out the other. A female someone? His memory coughed up a hazy picture of a one-eyed silver chimera.

Incapable of making any sense of that, he squinted at his surroundings. He recognized the high-backed chair under him, feeling a little better when he realized that he was in the familiar confines of the courier ship that had been his only real home for the past few years.

The main board was about three meters away. He managed to focus one bleary eye on the flight-status stack.

He was in transit.

That was strange. He didn’t remember—

“We are on our way to Ananke.”

That woman’s voice again. Maybe he wasn’t imagining it. He flirted with vertigo getting his chair swivelled around to find its source.

The silver-armored amazon with the hideously tattooed face hadn’t been a hallucination after all. She was sitting at his galley table. Drinking coffee, from the smell.

“Good for us,” he mumbled, fishing in his pouch for an analgesic. His fingers found only the bottom. It had been emptied.

She held up the purple foilpak he’d been searching for. “Are you looking for these?”

“Desperately.” He heaved himself to his feet, grimacing as the contents of his head ebbed and surged, and stood there a moment to regain the hang of standing before trying to walk. He felt his chest with his gloveless hand. It felt bruised and tender, like he had been hit in the sternum with a sledgehammer.

“I… remember you shooting me. Disruptor?” That plus all the booze he’d drank would explain the monster hangover.

“God’s Wrath.” Marchey watched the woman’s face harden. It was not a pretty sight. “You will feel it again if you give me the slightest trouble.” She held up one silver arm. A bracer—a detachable weapons package interfaced with the exo’s systems and her own nervous system—was wrapped around it. There was another one around her other arm. This meant she was almost as heavily armed as a small platoon. He got the message.

“Perish the thought.” He tottered toward her. “Can I have one of those, please,” he asked, reaching for the pak. “Or is torture part of this package tour?”

She stared at him a long moment. “I am no torturer.” She flipped it at him. “To rely on such things is weakness.”

Somehow he managed to catch it. He popped out a derm and pasted it over his carotid artery. He closed his eyes, waiting for the high-powered analgesics to work their sweet magic.

Hangovers were business as usual, but the aftereffects of being shot with a disruptor made him feel as though every neuron were nearing nuclear fission. After a few moments he slumped and sighed as a soothing tide washed through him. He opened his eyes, moved his head experimentally. The brain-slop was gone. Once more he was nearly capable of what passed for rational thought.

Well, that could be remedied easily enough.

He managed a wan smile. “Thanks. I hope you didn’t have to break any Kidnappers’ Union rules to do that. I just can’t rise and shine the way you do.”

Although the tattoos made dragonesque fury its natural expression, Marchey found that he could still tell real anger when it appeared on her face. It showed in the curl of her black-webbed lips, the flare of her scaled nostrils, in the cold flash of that one green eye.

“Do not take me lightly, little man,” she warned, her voice brimming with unmistakable menace. “I will make you regret it.”

It was no mental feat to deduce that being feared was of cardinal importance to her. It explained the face, the teeth, the combat exo, the attitude. He supposed he should be more careful about what he said to her. But when he got right down to it, he just didn’t give a damn. Screw her if she couldn’t take a joke.

Still, he could be polite. After all, how often did he have company?

He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “I don’t doubt that you could tear off my head, squeeze it flat, and eat it like a brain sandwich. I don’t plan on trying to overpower you. I’m a surgeon, not a fighter. Besides, I interned in a UNSRA military hospital for a while, and helped install a couple shock troopers in exos like yours. I know how they work and what they can do.”

His kidnapper glared at him. “You spout nonsense again. I told you before, I am an angel. Do not forget it.”

Marchey shrugged. “Whatever you say.” He slid into the seat across from her, ordered a cup of coffee. There was a bottle of brandy in the condiment well next to the dispenser. A liberal dollop went into his cup, then he offered it to her. “Want some breakfast?”

She shook her head, looking displeased by his offer. Probably a teetotaler

“Suit yourself.” He put the bottle down within easy reach.

“Do you spend all of your time drunk?” she demanded.

“Define all.” He took a cautious sip of his laced coffee. “Define time. Define drunk.” Another sip, peering at her over the rim of his cup. “It’s a semantic minefield. You could lose a foot just thinking about it.”

Not even a hint of a smile. If she had a sense of humor, it was better armored than her body.

“Are you really a doctor?” She made the word doctor sound like it described something strange and hideous, perhaps even evil and perverse. Are you really a lycanthropic necrophile?

He hunched his shoulders in a stillborn shrug. “Depends on whom you listen to, I guess.”

That wasn’t a subject he particularly wanted to get into this early or this sober.

“What kind of kidnapper are you, my angel?” he asked to change the subject. “What do you expect to get for me? And are you going to tell me your name, or should I just call you Madame Shanghai?”

“Only one question has any meaning. My name is Scylla.”

Marchey’s ears pricked up at her name. “Ah, were you once a fair maiden, now changed into a monster?”

Scylla’s frown deepened. “What do you mean by that?”

“Greek mythology.” No reaction. Apparently not a devotee of classical literature. Not many were.

“Homer’s Odyssey,” he explained. “Scylla was a fair young maiden who was changed into a monster. Twelve legs like tentacles. Six heads, each with a triple row of fangs, and a taste for sailors. Let’s see… ‘God or man, no one could look upon her in joy.’ That was poor Scylla after the sorceress Circe was done with her. Circe saw her as a rival for the love of a merman named, um, Glaucus. Turning her into a monster made her a lot less lovable.”

Scylla said nothing. There was no way for Marchey to tell what—if anything—she was thinking. His spiked coffee had cooled. He took a long swallow, then asked, “Did someone give you that name?”

“Brother Fist,” she said, an instant later looking confused. All expression drained from her face, and she sat there staring sightlessly past him like a robot which had encountered circumstances outside the scope of its programming.

His curiosity mildly piqued, and the brandy beginning to bring back the familiar comfortable buzz, Marchey settled back to see what happened next.

“Brother Fist.”

His name was the center of all Scylla was and did. She had uttered it a million times or more. But the moment she spoke it in answer to the infidel’s question—a question no one had ever asked her before— a sudden wrenching duality swept over her, her solid sense of self inexplicably straining in two directions and leaving her lost in the middle.

She had always been Scylla.

Brother Fist named me.

She was an angel.

{—a blurred glimpse of a face. Small. White. In a… mirror?}

She served Brother Fist.

{—another face. Bigger. Beautiful.} (I love you, Angel. Love you.)

Brother Fist spoke God’s Will.

(Remember, Angel. I love you. Love you.)

His voice was God’s voice, His words God’s words.

(ANGEL IS DEAD. DEAD. YOUR NAME IS SCYLLA. SCYLLA. YOU ARE AN ANGEL. ANGEL. YOU WILL LOVE ME. LOVE ME. YOU WILL OBEY ME. OBEY ME. WHAT ARE YOU?)

An angel! she screamed silently, trying to drown the bewildering cacophany of voices inside her head. She was and had always been the angel Scylla! All else was deception!

Life is an endless battle against the lies and deceptions cast by the forces of darkness to lure the weak in faith and spirit from the One True Path.

Brother Fist had warned her of that a thousand times. Unholy evil was everywhere, made in the very flesh and marrow of every man and woman. Even an angel was human enough to be prey to it.

Doubt assailed her. Was she too weak for the task Brother Fist had given her?

He had ordered her away from her place at His side. Commanded her to leave the safe Eden of Ananke and venture into the Profane World to bring this infidel Marchey back to Him. The impious temptation to argue with His edict had been terrible. It went against her every instinct to leave Him vulnerable and unprotected.

Still, He was Brother Fist, and she was His angel.

His will was always to be done. Disobedience was blackest blasphemy.

So she had meekly obeyed, command deciding the conflict.

Deciding, but not resolving. She had left her home and risked her life and soul to capture Marchey, but that conflict was a smoldering ember of doubt buried deep in one chamber of her heart.

An ember that made her wonder what possible use this drunken infidel could be to him. Which led her to wonder—

—could Brother Fist have been… wrong?

That thought triggered a convulsive burst of pain and nausea, cramping her insides like some fatal poison. Her body stiffened, every muscle twisting into a quivering knot. The cup she held in her silver hands shattered as they clenched into fists.

The spasm subsided, and in its wake a voice howled a litany at the back of her head. A man’s voice. The irrefutable voice of her conscience. She heaved herself to her feet in dumb obedience.

She had shown weakness of faith. She had doubted. Not just herself, but God’s perfect servant Himself. She had sinned most greviously.

And so she must atone.

Marchey watched Scylla go rigid as a steel beam, her one green eye rolling back in her head until only the white showed, crushing the heavy ceramic cup she held like so much eggshell. At first he thought she might be suffering a grand mal seizure.

After a moment she seemed to shake it off, taking a deep breath and lurching to her feet. The blank lens that replaced one eye slid blindly past him. Her other eye, the one of the unusual bottle green that reminded him of another woman, another time, another life, was fixed and dilated.

She plodded to the center of the deck space like an automaton, folded to her knees. There was a metallic double click. The bulky silver bracers on the back of her forearms released themselves to dangle loose. She removed them, laying them aside within easy reach.

Out of the utility pouch she wore at one silver-sheathed hip came a palm-sized matte black box. She pressed a catch. Two coiled wires sprang from a concealed compartment. At the end of each wire glinted a long steel needle.

She turned her hands over. Marchey saw that removing her bracers had bared a small patch of exposed flesh at the back of each hand, the pale skin framed in silver. Her ink-etched face a stiff, frozen wasteland, she drove a needle deep into the back of first one hand and then the other. Only the knotting of her jaw muscles betrayed her pain.

Now wired to the box, she placed it before her knees. The heel of each hand went atop it. After a long moment she leaned forward, putting her weight on her arms and hands. The box began to emit a low, sinister hum.

Scylla’s arms stiffened. Her back, her whole body clenched cable-taut as electricity surged from one electrode to the other, using her body as the conductor. She threw her head back, her jaw clamped tight on what had to be a scream.

She inflicted that agony on herself for a slow ten count, then let up. After muttering a low, monotonous prayer, she leaned on the box again.

Marchey shuddered and looked away.

Obviously she was punishing herself. A term for what she was doing floated up out of some obscure corner of his memory: self-flagellation. Usually it was a matter of the penitent scourging him or herself until he or she bled. Her exo made whipping pointless, even if she were to use a length of chain on herself.

Why was she doing it? He stared into his cup as if expecting to find the answer there, then shrugged and drained it. He refilled his cup, this time with straight brandy.

A strangled moan from Scylla drew his attention. She was panting for breath. Sweat beaded her tattooed forehead. Her whole body trembled as if palsied, nerves misfiring and muscles twitching from the overload. The set of her jaw said she was preparing to scourge herself again.

If he hadn’t know it before, this was irrefutable proof that he was in the hands of a madwoman. One who believed herself to be an angel of the sort favored by Revelations. No guests for years, and then this is what he got.

I should stop her, whispered a voice in his head.

He didn’t move. There was no point even to trying. As long as she was in that exo, she could be anyone and do anything she damn well pleased. This he knew from firsthand experience.

Back when he’d interned in that UNSRA Military Hospital he’d watched a shock trooper installed in an exo like hers take on a fully armed Ogre tank, his bracers deactivated to even the odds. It had taken the trooper all of twenty-one seconds to single-handedly reduce the battle machine to smoking scrap.

Marchey knew he ought to be scared shitless.

But he really didn’t feel much of anything.

He took a meditative swig of brandy, wondering if he’d reached the point where he was past caring if he lived or died.

Interesting question. He didn’t think so. When he got right down to it, his present situation wasn’t all that different from his normal routine. His destination might have been changed from the one originally set for him, but he wasn’t being wrenched off in some radical new direction. Someone else had been in control of his movements for several years now. Someone else chose where he would exercise his special skills, and on whom.

This was undoubtedly more of the same. Sure, this time an armored female maniac was in charge, but for all he knew his itinerary up until this time had been decided with darts, dice, or pigeon entrails.

When his work was done he would be shown the door, shoved back into the old game, still the ceaselessly moving pawn in an endless chess match where the Black Queen ruled the vast and far-flung board. Her name was Death, and the stalemates he forced on her had become meaningless events, forgotten by day’s end. Fleeting and inconsequential as fireflies in the void or fingerprints on glass.

He played on, but by Survivors’ Rules: apathy was sanity; caring would be the kiss of death.

Marchey’s right hand strayed up to the silver metal pin he wore over his heart. The metal still shone, even if its gleaming promise had become obscured. He found himself remembering when he had agreed to give up what little autonomy he still possessed.

He was back where it had all begun. Square one.

A meter-long reproduction of Marchey’s pin hung on the wood-texed wall behind Dr. Salvaz Bophanza’s desk, the initials of the Bergmann Medical Institute under it in gold-edged black. A close look would have revealed a patina of dust on the upper curves and strokes.

The chunky, middle-aged black man behind the desk gave Marchey a rueful smile. “I’d offer you a drink, old buddy, but I had to give it up.” He patted his stomach. “Kept eating holes in the tank.”

Marchey made a face as he sat down. “That’s a bitch, Sal.”

Bophanza shrugged. “It’s not so bad. I only miss it when I’m thirsty.” His smile faded. “You probably wonder why I recalled you.”

“I was hoping it was so we could catch Happy Hour on your expense account,” Marchey answered in an attempt to lighten the mood.

Sal rolled his eyes. “I wish. No, you’re back here because things aren’t working out very well the way they stand.”

Marchey sketched an ironic bow. “Still a master of understatement, Mister Director Sir.”

He’d arrived at the Institute to find it all but deserted, a bare handful of the staff still remaining. The corridors were silent and empty, the air of abandonment palpable. A mood of bleak pessimism had descended, but he’d hoped seeing his old friend would make him feel better. One look at Sal had been enough to kick the slats out of that.

Sal Bophanza appeared to have aged a decade in the four years since Marchey had last seen him in person. His glowing ebony skin had lost its sheen, and he seemed to have shrunk and slumped inside it. What had once been a wild black dreadlocked mane was now a thinning salt-and-pepper fuzz. His body had broadened and thickened, but his face had thinned, and it wore the resolute, resigned countenance of the captain of a sinking ship. As director of the Bergmann Medical Institute, that was uncomfortably close to his job description.

Sal’s smile was fleeting. “I try. The fact is we’re dead in the water here. When we first started having problems and the word came down our first crop was to be our last, at least for a while, I was angry. Now I’m glad. Jesus could heal, and got crucified for his trouble. Nobody’s nailed any of you guys up yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they got around to it eventually.”

Sal came out from behind his desk and began to pace. Marchey remained sprawled in his chair, waiting patiently. He knew Sal was working his way up to something. Probably more bad news.

“It really pisses me off,” Sal went on, his voice dripping disgust. “The system will use you when they don’t have any other options, but treat you like fucking pariahs before and after. The word has gotten around. Becoming a Bergmann Surgeon is the kiss of death. Even if the program weren’t on hold, it wouldn’t matter. We haven’t had an inquiry or application in over two years.”

“That’s probably for the best.” See, he could do understatement, too. Now to something he’d been dreading. “I heard that Sara-Lyn Neff, Josiah Two-trees, and Grace Nakamura all killed themselves. Is it true?” Three out of thirty-five. Not a positive trend.

Sal’s face fell, the anger leaking out of him. “It is. So did Ivan Kolinski.”

Four. Marchey shook his head sadly. “They were all damned good doctors.” Ivan had been an incorrigible practical joker. Once he had “borrowed” one of Josiah’s prosthetics while he was operating and replaced it with one made of foil-wrapped chocolate. The look on Josiah’s face…

It was easier to imagine him playing dead than being dead. Those four—all thirty-five of them—had been so full of life. Bursting with energy and idealism. So committed to the Healer’s Oath and to medicine that they had risked all in hopes of breaking ground to a new frontier. Well, they had, and become outsiders in the process.

“The best,” Sal agreed in a somber tone. “Ivan’s death was the worst of all. It was—” He closed his eyes a moment. “It was partially our fault. We brought him back here after he gave himself a near-fatal drug overdose on Cassandra Station. We had to make him stop practicing. He’d just gotten too erratic to be trusted.”

Bophanza stared down at his hands as if Ivan’s blood was on them. “He put himself in trance, put his prosthetics aside, and stopped his own heart. He left a note. It said that the way he had to practice now was killing him by inches, but without it he was nothing, and had nothing left to live for.”

He looked up at Marchey, his eyes moist and haunted. “He said he knew why we made him stop, and didn’t blame us. He… thanked us…”

“You didn’t have any choice,” Marchey offered, knowing nothing he said would ease Sal’s pain.

His old friend nodded mutely, then said, “It’s killing you all. I know that.”

Marchey made himself sit up straight. “Yeah, and knowing that is eating you alive. But I doubt that you called me back here so we could compare our beds of nails. I’m here. What happens now?”

Sal looked relieved to drop the subject of Ivan’s death. He parked his buttocks on one corner of his desk, taking on a brisk, businesslike air. “You go back out. But MedArm came up with an idea that might just make the best of a bad situation. You are each being assigned a high-speed UNSRA courier ship of your very own. No more depending on the schedules of the regular carriers to get from place to place. The ships are fully automated. We will handle logistics and itinerary from this end. See, MedArm agrees that your skills are far too valuable to be wasted. What you can do is still in demand—”

“Even if we’re not.” Marchey turned the idea over in his mind. “We can cover a larger area this way. Having our own ships will give us at least the illusion of having a place we belong, right?” He watched his old friend nod, and kept on doing his best to look at the idea in a positive light.

“Maybe it will even help our reputation. We’re constantly on the move to serve the greater good, not because we’re about as popular as tapeworms. Highspeed house calls in a back-assward ambulance.” He shrugged. “Why not? It can’t make things any worse.” Sal leaned closer, his face intent. “It’s still not going to be easy. But the couriers are big enough for two…” He raised one eyebrow and let the implication dangle like a baited hook.

Marchey snorted. “Then I’ll have lots of elbow room.” His voice dropped lower, and he looked Sal straight in the eye. “So we’re admitting that we’ve turned ourselves into nothing more than pieces of specialized medical equipment to be passed around on a rotating basis.”

“No, dammit, that’s not true!” Bophanza snapped. “You’re a healer, Gory! A goddamned good one! You and the other Bergmann Surgeons were some of the brightest, most dedicated doctors—”

“Were is the operative word, Sal.” Marchey spoke softly, but with steel-clad certainty. “I used to be a doctor. I remember what it was like. Doctors don’t give their patients nightmares. The mere sight of them doesn’t risk scaring the patient to death. Doctors treat people. I haven’t met one of my patients in years. They’re not people, they’re conditions. Diseases. Traumas. Unconscious and broken meat machinery.” He thumped his chest. “I know what I’ve become. Just a meat mechanic. That’s all.”

“No,” Sal insisted stubbornly, “That’s not true.”

“Bullshit!” Marchey roared, slapping his hands onto the arms of his chair hard enough to crack the veneered plastic. He realized that he was getting angry. But not at Sal, who had trouble enough of his own without being put in the position of an emotional punching bag.

“Sorry,” he said, getting up and going to lay a silver hand on Sal’s shoulder. “I’m not mad at you. Just at the way things turned out.”

“You have a right to be,” Sal answered wearily. “We all do.” In one way Sal had taken the hardest road of them all. Marchey smiled and squeezed his old friend’s shoulder.

“I remember when you flunked the final tests,” he went on. “They wouldn’t let you give up your hands. I remember how disappointed you were. How hurt.” He shook his head. “There was already a lot of heat on the program, a lot of controversy about what we were trying to do. People thought we were crazy, and maybe we were. I know how easy it would’ve been for you to have repudiated us and what we were doing to make yourself feel better about missing the final cut.”

He wondered if he could have showed half the guts and class Sal had displayed. “But you didn’t. You kept on believing in what we were trying to do. You took an even harder choice than we did, staying on to help us realize a dream that was denied you.”

“You don’t know how close I came to quitting,” Sal admitted softly.

“But you didn’t, and now you run the place. Your dream soured, but you kept on serving it anyway. It hasn’t gotten any sweeter or easier since then, but you’re still here. Still trying to make it work.”

He gazed up at the dusty emblem on the wall, recalling the hope it had symbolized, the pride he had felt every time he saw it. “Come to find out, we weren’t the lucky ones either. We gained an incredible skill, but lost everything else in the bargain. But we’re still keeping on the best we can because it’s all we have left. We can still be useful, and who knows, maybe someday…”

Marchey let his hand fall from Sal’s shoulder, watching him mull over his own maybe-somedays. “I’ll accept things the way they are. The way it seems they have to be. It’s that or give up completely. Maybe this bit with ships will work, though I have my doubts. I’ll try it because I have nothing to lose. But there’s one thing I want you to do for me, old friend. For all us poor bastards who will be bouncing around out there all by ourselves.”

Bophanza met Marchey’s gaze squarely. “Name it.”

“Remember the dream for us, Sal. I doubt we’ll be able to much longer. Keep looking for a way to make it come true after all.”

Bophanza nodded solemnly, then came off his desk and wrapped his arms around Marchey, pulling him close and holding him tightly. That was his answer.

Marchey stiffened and almost pulled away. But after a moment he relaxed and returned his old friend’s embrace, feeling his strength and conviction, and allowing himself to remember how it felt to have someone care.

Marchey’s hand fell.

That had been the beginning of his endless shuttle from task to task. No home other than this ship, and no end to his journey in sight.

He had been a prisoner in this ship long before Scylla took it and him over. She was just someone else who wanted to use the tool he had become.

She was still praying, but it looked like she had at least quit hurting herself. Absorbed as she appeared to be, he didn’t doubt that she would abandon her devotions were he to approach her or the ship’s controls.

Not that he planned to bother. There was no point to it.

He was being moved to another square. But every part of the board was the same; all the long years gone by had shown him that. The game never changed. It couldn’t be won. All he was doing now was playing it out to its foregone end. So why should he care about the who and where and why?

What was the difference between indifference and defeat?

Indifference was an empty cup. Defeat was no cup at all.

He looked down. His cup was empty, the spirits all gone.

So he refilled it.

And smiled to himself.

See how easy it is to take control of your life?

“What is that?”

Marchey looked up, startled. “What?”

Scylla slid onto the galley seat across from him, eyeing his plate distastefully. “That stuff you are eating.”

He laid aside the real bound book—M. A. Zeke’s excellent novelization of Homer’s works—he’d been reading while eating supper. The whole day had been pretty much spent reading and drinking. His captor had skulked around so quietly that after a while he forgot she was even there.

Chiding himself for being a bad host, he decided he should pay at least minimal attention to his guest.

“That’s steak,” he answered, pointing with his fork. “Not real steak, but a tolerable substitute. That’s a baked potato. The yellow stuff atop it is cheese sauce, the green flakes are chives. I think the chives and the potato are real, but I doubt the cheese has ever seen any more of the inside of a cow than the steak. The green beans are real, as are the mushrooms.”

Scylla absorbed all this with a furrowed brow. “None of that can be real food,” she announced. “I do not see how you can eat such things.”

“Substitutes aren’t that bad if they’re real good.” He chuckled at his turn of phrase. “Want to try some?”

Her nose wrinkled in disgust. “No. I am an angel. I would not eat human food, even if that were what was on your plate.”

Marchey took a sip of wine. “How would you describe human food, then?” This ought to be interesting.

“It is a thick green liquid that comes in big blue drums. Each person is allowed two bowlsful each day.”

What was that line Sal had always used when he came up against someone utterly convinced of something that made no sense? Oh yeah: Where you from, son? Nairobi, ma’am. Isn’t everyone?

“Two bowls of green glop a day. Everybody eats like this, you say?” What she’d described sounded like survival-grade Basicalgae; spoilage stabilized, nutritionally and dietary-fiber complete, and tasting just about like what you’d expect from enriched pasteurized pond scum.

“Of course.”

“I mean everybody everywhere?”

“What else would they eat?”

“Well, stuff like I’m eating, for instance.”

Scylla’s tattooed lips pinched tight. “That is not food.”

He chuckled again. “QED. Ten points for the lady in the silver skivvies.” He speared a forkful of steak, began to chew. “What do you eat, then?” he asked around his mouthful. “Angel food cake?”

That green eye narrowed dangerously. “Do you make sport of me?”

Marchey realized that poking fun at her was about as safe as prodding a pile of gunpowder with a lit match. “Never,” he said with what he hoped was a straight face.

“Very well,” she said stiffly. “I eat manna.”

What else? “Well, I guess you’re in the right place.”

She stared at him. “Explain.”

“Manna falls from heaven, right? Which from Earth is space. Should be regular hailstorms of the stuff out here.”

A terse shake of her head. “The things you say make no sense.”

“So it seems. My tongue must need a tune-up.” He drank some more wine, just in case the problem was excessive dryness.

“Manna comes in a crate.” She reached into her pouch and pulled out a foil-wrapped wafer. “This is a loaf.”

“Ah, ratbars.”

Scylla cocked her head, light gleaming off the polished silver covering everything but her face. “Rat… bars?”

“Short for ration bars, no rodents involved. Your exo is able to handle all your wastes as long as they are kept to a minimum. Fluids—sweat, urine, and the rest aren’t really a problem. They’re recycled, any excess vented off as water vapor. Solids are harder to manage. The ratbars are nutritionally complete, but extremely low residue. If they’re all you eat, then you probably don’t need to excrete more than what, once a month?”

Scylla scowled at him. “I am an angel,” she said at last. “I do not make filth as humans do,” she added prissily.

“Of course not. You’ve got a nanotic colony in your bowels to scavenge what your digestive system misses. But every thirty days or so this cloche”—he pointed at a bulge on her right hip with his fork—“opens. Inside is a lozenge-shaped chunk of grayish matter that you throw away.”

Scylla only stared at him intently, her webbed lips pressed tightly together, her green eye almost as cold as the lens that replaced the other.

“Well, am I right?” he prompted.

She shoved herself to her feet, snatching up the ratbar. “I cannot talk to you,” she said tightly, then stalked off in a huff.

“Apparently not,” he said mildly, watching her go to the farthest side of the compartment and sit with her back to him.

He topped off his wine, picked up his book, and went back to reading and eating. He ignored her, and she him, for the rest of the evening and most of the next day.

The closer they came to Ananke the more keyed-up and fretful Scylla became, the more impatient that this awful task be over and behind her. At long last the end was nearly in sight. Only twenty more hours to be endured.

Scylla sat alone in the galley, feeling like she had been condemned to Purgatory. Her charge was in an unresponsive stupor. He had been so for the past two days, silent and stinking of alcohol.

Yet she dared not relax her vigilance. Steadfastness was one of the defining qualities of an angel. Two days cooped up with the sodden, unresponsive lump in her charge, staying ready for action that never came, left her frustrated and edgy.

The trip out from Ananke in a battered old hopper had taken ten days, but this far swifter return seemed much longer. An eternity. All because of him.

At first she had come to the conclusion that this man Marchey was dead inside. People whose spirits had broken were common on Ananke; not everyone had the faith or inner strength to tread the hard steep road to perfection. His cryptic, sometimes sarcastic comments were nothing more than echoes of what he might have once been, like ghost data from a wiped program. She had dismissed him as nothing but an empty shell. Any response to being struck was merely an echo.

But in the evening of the second day her opinion had been forcibly revised.

He had been stretched out on a lounger, reading, listening to music, and as usual, drinking steadily. Where anyone else would have been watching her fearfully, not for even a fleeting moment forgetting that they were in the presense of an angel, he seemed utterly indifferent to her. That was wrong, contrary to all she knew. It rankled, but if he did not challenge her control over him, there was little she could do about it.

Boredom had set her to pacing the confines of the ship’s single deck. Back on Ananke there was always something to be done. Serving Brother Fist. Guarding the flock. Overseeing the workers. Hunting out blasphemy. Here she was cut off from all use and diversion.

Her restless gaze had crossed an overhead storage compartment she didn’t remember having searched when she swept the ship for weapons. So she unlatched the door to check it out.

Inside, carefully held in place by uniholds, was a bisque-fired clay sculpture. She released it from the clamps and took it down for a better look.

Brother Fist had objects like this. Pretty things, some of them imbued with a strange indefinable something that she could sense, but not quite understand.

This object was beautifully made, and it radiated a raw emotional power that caught her unawares. The harsh lines of her face softened as she stared at the thing in her hands in growing wonder.

It depicted two people who had begun making a single thing together. But the man stood off to one side, staring sadly up at what they had begun and never would finish. He cradled a child in arms that ended just below the elbow. His missing arms lay at his feet. He held the child and stumps of his arms up toward the work in an attitude she knew well, one of supplication.

The woman was tall and thin. She huddled on the ground near him among her abandoned tools. Her face was filled with such shame and loss and frustration that Scylla felt uneasy looking at it. That face was turned away from both the man and the thing they had begun making together.

What they had been making were two people embracing. Although it was rough-hewn and incomplete, Scylla could see that the man’s face was Marchey’s. It was the woman on the ground he held.

She frowned, disquiet rising with the unfamiliar emotions aroused by the thing in her hands. Something about it drew her, and yet that same thing repelled. It set off an uneasy subterranean yearning she could not begin to define. She had to wonder what her prisoner was doing in it, and why it was hidden. She called his name, turning to ask him.

When he saw her and what she held, his face had gone a terrible bloodless white. He made a strangled, tormented sound that was somewhere between a sob and a snarl, and launched himself at her with his silver fingers hooked into claws.

His drunkenness betrayed him. He stumbled as his feet hit the decking, and he went crashing to his knees.

Scylla had already braced herself to fend him off, angel reactions slowing time to a crawl as she waited for him to get up and come at her. Anticipation perked through her, hot and invigorating. At last a chance to assume her rightful place as she put him in his!

For nothing. He remained where he had fallen, hunching in on himself in heaped misery. He began to weep, begging her not to hurt the thing in her hands. He kept repeating a name: Ella.

Brother Fist’s angel knew that she had finally found a weapon to use against him, a crack in his seamless apathy. That was good.

Yet for some reason whose rhyme still escaped her, she had carefully returned the thing to its niche, putting its unnerving presence safely out of sight.

Then she had told him that it was safely back where it belonged, and promised that she wouldn’t hurt it.

Promised.

How could she have done such a thing? What was happening to her?

There was no escaping those questions. They plagued her waking hours and haunted her dreams when she curled up in a corner and set her proximity alarms to waken her if he came within three meters. He never did—at least not in body. Her sleep was fitful and restless, filled with dreams in which he intruded at will.

Never had she known such inner turmoil. Her sense of self and purpose no longer filled her the way it once had, her certainty complete and unscathable as her silver skin. The more she fought it the worse it became. Like an air leak, it had begun as a mere pinhole when Brother Fist sent her away to fetch this man, and had become a widening rent upon finding him. Only it was her insides escaping, not air.

Him, she thought grimly, watching him take yet another drink and mumble something to himself. He wasn’t afraid of her, even though all she had to do was look at the people of Ananke to put them on their knees. He didn’t care that she had taken his life in her hands. Where she was taking him and for what purpose meant nothing to him. Outwardly he acted as if he was totally beaten and in her control.

Yet she knew he was not. But for that one incident, she had not reached him. He no longer disputed her angelic state, but she had the unsettling feeling that he was only humoring her.

Every time she talked to him she came away feeling even more frustrated and confused. When she spoke of things she knew as truth, he would give her a tolerant, forbearing smile such as an adult would give a misinformed child. Somehow that smile made her feel small and weak and stupid—she who was made by

God to stand above lowly creatures such as he. When she said other things he gave her a different smile, one that left her feeling absurdly pleased.

Worse yet, he seemed to know things about her no mortal should. Like their talk of food that first night. Only her master knew—He had been the one who instructed her—that once a month she had to unburden herself of the physical manifestation of her own spiritual imperfection. It came in the form he had described, from the place he had indicated. How could he have known such a thing?

There were times she thought that maybe he was a devil who had been specifically shaped and sent to taunt and tempt her. His every aspect baffled her. He was an infidel, yet had the hands of an angel. He wallowed in weakness, but there was strength in him that made him nearly impossible to bend to her will.

Only a devil could have such knowledge or insidious power. Somehow his very presence made her think forbidden thoughts, made her doubt herself and all she knew as true. It was as if his blank indifference turned him into some sort of mirror that reflected back hidden faces of her self while distorting the familiar all out of recognition.

Where had the silver armor of her certainty gone?

For all the times she had asked herself that, she still had no answer. Her only certainty was that her only salvation lay in returning to her rightful place at Brother Fist’s side. He would make things right again, just like he had when—

Scylla frowned as the echo of another almost-memory whispered through her mind, a taunting, impossible remembrance of a time before she was an angel, when—

Her silver-clad fingers dug into the galley’s tabletop, the hard plastic furrowing and tearing like putty. Her black-webbed mouth tightened into a thin, hard line.

Deceptions. On every side, even on the inside.

As much as the man Marchey troubled her, it was being away from the Eden of Ananke, away from Brother Fist’s love that had exposed her to all this doubt and deception and confusion in the first place. He should never have—

Scylla’s one human eye squeezed shut and she shivered, aghast at how easily and often such blasphemy came into her mind. How had she fallen into such a morass of forbidden thoughts and wickedness? How had her soul become so tainted?

She must atone. That knowledge—that commandment—tolled in her mind in a voice as great as God’s. It was deafening. Irrefutable as the need to breathe.

Yet something inside her clenched as tight as her silver fists in denial.

No. There would be no atoning this time. If she was failing a test of faith, so be it. The blame was not hers alone.

Refusing the commandment to atone brought intense physical pain, an agony to match that delivered by her prayer-box. Enduring it was a kind of penitence of its own. That realization allowed her to endure the torment of refusing the commandment crackling through her nerves.

The doubting angel rode out the searing pain, until it passed, and the subtler torment that filled the hours after, counting each moment until she returned to Ananke as an eternity.

Five days after Marchey had found an angel in his room, he arrived at Ananke. It was one of the smaller outer Jovian moons, an irregular stony lump just over 20km in diameter. The screen over the main board showed its unattractive face as they approached. He hardly gave it a second disinterested look. Most of his attention was on the unpleasant descent into the grim barrens of sobriety.

Apparently Ananke was not a very friendly place. As they approached it a recorded message came in over the comm, warning them that under no circumstances would they be allowed to land. All incoming and outgoing cargo was to be left on their orbital doorstep.

Scylla had given an override command that let them land after all. She told him that his was the first outsider ship to do so in over seven years. Somehow he didn’t feel particularly honored.

They passed through an open-shuttered blister on Ananke’s pockmarked surface and into its interior. The shutters had closed after them like the jaws of a huge trap, leaving them in a narrow stone gullet. Since the moon had been given some spin, in was up. His stomach insisted on another opinion.

When they came to rest a battered, often-patched locktube blindly sought the ship’s lock like an eyeless lamprey. It finally found its mark and locked on. His own airlock began cycling, flashed orange, and aborted. He had to acknowledge a warning about poor air quality before it would finish the cycle. The pressure read as barely acceptable; any lower and he and Scylla would have needed to take antiaeroembolants to avoid the bends.

The airlock door hissed open at last. He wrinkled his nose and shrank back as a staggering wave of foul-smelling, overused air rolled over him. Scylla prodded him impatiently from behind.

Marchey had become increasingly phobic about leaving his ship over the last two years. To make matters worse, the D-Tox tab he’d taken earlier to purge the alcohol from his system had left him feeling wrung out and wincingly sober, his senses shriekingly acute and his nerves like bare, overheated wires.

He stood there at the threshold, all but gagging on the fetid air and on the verge of hyperventilating. Every instinct told him to close the lock back up and get the hell out of there.

Scylla had other ideas. This time she gave him a shove. “Start walking, or I will drag you.”

He hunched his shoulders. Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to step through the lock and begin pulling himself through the creaking tube, silver hands clamped tight on the guideline. Ananke’s innate gravity was negligible. Most small moons and asteroids were spun up to create a semblance of gravity. Here it appeared that the process had been begun and then abandoned. It felt like there was not much more than a tenth g, which was far too close to free fall for his comfort.

His ship used a combination of acceleration and spin to maintain at least a half g at all times. Most hospitals had low- or null-g sections, but surgical procedures were always performed in at least a half g. Null-g sex might be delightful, but surgery was a nightmare in it. Blood, rather than pooling, tended to cover everything like a thick coat of paint.

The tube ended at an airlock large enough to handle cargo. Both inner and outer doors were open. Scylla herded him through them, out onto a wide, shallow ramp leading down into a man-made cavern used as a receiving bay.

There were eight or nine people in the cold, dimly lit bay, shadowy figures laboring to unload an orbital container. Slowly at first, then in a stumbling rush, they abandoned their work and started toward him. Something about the way they moved reminded him of the street beggars he’d seen on Earth in a city named Calcutta back when he was twenty.

He watched them draw nearer. His eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the gloom enough to let him see them clearly when Scylla came out behind him.

The people below cried out as one and flung themselves to their knees on the rocky floor. He turned to see her gazing out over them, nodding in satisfaction. There was something like a smile on her webbed lips.

“Yes, Brother Fist’s angel has returned,” she called out, her voice echoing hollowly off the stone walls. “Stand and welcome her back into your love.”

Scylla took his arm. One by one the people below struggled to their feet and formed a double row at the foot of the ramp. Most had their heads bowed and their hands clasped loosely before them.

Those that could.

They started down. Marchey’s eyes had adjusted to the dim lighting by then, and what he saw chilled him to the bone. Each and every member of the unhappy honor guard had the gaunt, haunted look of a concentration-camp victim. The best dressed among them wore little more than rags, even though the temperature in the bay had to be in the single digits.

Every one of them was in one way or another maimed and crippled.

They came abreast of the first in line, a gaunt black man with downcast eyes. He was missing one leg and leaned on a homemade plastic crutch. The hand on the crutch-brace was a blunt misshappen knot. His other arm ended at the wrist. The face of the woman next to him was a mass of purplish scar tissue wrapped around one brown, fearful eye. Similar scarring covered her neck and disappeared down the front of her torn and greasy coverall. Marchey did not need to see the few strands of hair left on her pale, blistered skull or the tremors that racked her thin frame to recognize the signs of severe radiation exposure.

Marchey ached to reach out and wipe the pain away, to see if her face could still be found under the horror that had been done to it. But Scylla towed him relentlessly down the line past a man whose arms had been broken and not properly straightened before they set, which had left him looking like he had an extra set of elbows. Across from him was a coughing woman with black blood on her lips and and a body warped by arthritis.

It seemed he had been brought here for good reason. It appeared he had his work cut out for him.

Still, to make her and these others stand here like this! “All right, Scylla,” he said curtly, “I’ve seen enough. Unless you have a very good medical facility—which looks pretty damned unlikely—I can treat these patients better in the small clinic on my ship.”

The angel stared at him as if he had begun speaking in tongues. “You are here at Brother Fist’s command.”

“Then I’m supposed to treat him first?” Marchey told himself that this Brother Fist character had better be in goddamned rough shape if he was putting himself in line before these poor bastards.

She scowled. “Brother Fist is God’s Chosen One. Through Him we know that secular medicine is a cheat and a deception, a blasphemous affront to God’s Will. He needs nothing you can offer.” She glanced indifferently around at the cringing wretches on either side of them. “These ones will be healed if their faith is strong and their obedience perfect enough.”

She had led him along this rue of misery to draw even with a black-haired boy of perhaps twelve. Both his hands were crudely bandaged with dirty rags. One of his eyes was gone, the socket black-crusted and badly infected. The boy’s face was flushed with fever and beaded with sweat in spite of the cold. The whole area around his eye was an angry red, and so swollen that the tight and shiny skin looked ready to burst. Under it was a glistening tear track of pus. The sickly-sweet smell of gangrene filled the air. His other eye, dulled by pain and filled with mute appeal, sought Marchey’s face.

The boy tried to smile.

Marchey tried to smile back, but could not. For a moment it was as if every cell in his body had stopped motion and function. Then he shivered, feeling fury ignite in a place where there had only been cold ash for a very long time.

He shucked free of Scylla’s arm and glared at her. “Listen,” he spat through clenched teeth, his voice dripping anger and contempt. “This boy’s eye is badly infected. Necrotic. He is going to fucking die unless he gets proper care. This Brother Fist character is full of shit if he says—”

He never saw it coming. Silver lightning struck him, blasting him off his feet. He pinweeled sideways, narrowly missing the boy and slamming back first into one of the orbital containers. He hung there as if glued to its cold steel side with the wind knocked out of him, dazed and desperately gasping for breath.

Ananke’s feeble gravity never had a chance to claim him.

Scylla swept down on him like a chrome harpy. She grabbed him by the front of his tunic, her ceramyl claws raking across his chest like a fistful of knives. She peeled him off and jerked him close. Wrath turned her tattooed face into that of a Chinese dragon. Her breath steamed like smoke in the frigid air.

“Never dare speak of Brother Fist like that again,” she hissed, black-webbed lips peeling back from her serried teeth. “My punishment will not kill you.” Her one human eye narrowed to a glittering slit. The blank lens that replaced the other gleamed with machine-cold menace. “Because death would be a mercy, and there will be none for you.”

She slammed him onto his feet. Marchey staggered, but somehow managed to keep from falling. Blood from his slashed chest already stained the pristine white of his mangled tunic. He was at last able to breathe again and sucked the foul air in greedily. It tasted almost sweet.

He was hurt and scared, but his outrage still outweighed his fear. He stood up straight, gathering the shreds of his dignity about him, and stared Scylla straight in her eye.

“Your objection is noted,” he panted, “but mine still remains.”

Scylla’s mouth twisted, her lips drawing back from her mouthful of knives. She raised her hand, talons all the way out now, her next blow a killing blow. Somehow Marchey managed to stand his ground on legs that had turned to jelly under him.

But before she could strike again, a voice rang through the cavernous bay.

“Scylla! Bring the infidel to me now.” The voice was a clotted, rasping whisper amplified to the volume of thunder. It raised the hackles on the back of Marchey’s neck and sent cold crawling down his spine.

The crippled people fell to their knees. Scylla went rigid as a statue, her armored, blade-tipped hand and arm cocked over Marchey like a scythe. Anger and something Marchey could not name warred across the nightmare landscape of her face. For five endless, awful seconds he was certain that she was going to disobey and he to die.

But in the end she shuddered, let out a strangled, inarticulate sound, and let her arm fall. She bowed her head.

“I hear and obey, Brother Fist.” Her voice was low and meek. Fearful.

“Of course you do. Come to me now. I wait.”

Her head came up. She eyed Marchey coldly, pointing to the door at the far end of the bay. “Move.”

Marchey decided not to press his luck, silently obeying her order. He stumbled into clumsy motion on rubbery legs.

He kept his head high, doing his best to hide the sense of dread that made him feel as if his insides had been filled with chilled formalin.

That awful voice still rang in his head. That its owner could cow Scylla so easily did not bode well.

Nor did this place. If what he’d seen of Ananke so far was any indication of what was to come, then he’d just been brought into the first circle of hell.

There was no way for him to guess what horrors might wait in the inner circles. Humanity—and wasn’t that an ironic descriptive?—had long ago proved that when it came to the practices of cruelty and oppression, especially in the name of religion, its inventiveness was nearly infinite.

Caught between Scylla and Charybdis. That was the original rock and a hard place. There was no mistaking the danger Scylla represented. And as for the Charybdis of this Fist person and Ananke—

The door at the back of the bay opened, revealing a gloomy tunnel ahead.

—He’d know more than he wanted to sooner than he wanted.

The door closed behind him. Scylla gave him a push.

Once thing was for certain. He was no longer trapped on the old, endless treadmill where he had plodded for so long.

Once he would have said that any change would have been an improvement. Now he was getting an inkling of just how wrong he would have been.

—Scylla’s metal-shod feet made a sound like the relentless ticking of a bomb against the mesh-covered stone floor of the tunnel. Her face was as set and grim, a bulwark against the furious hellbroth of conflicts and pressures boiling inside her.

Thinking about how close she had come to killing the infidel Marchey made her head pound and her insides roil uneasily. It was not that killing bothered her. After all, God’s terrible swift sword was edged so that it might draw blood. All life was His to give or cut short.

But Brother Fist had laid on her the task of delivering her prisoner unharmed. She had come within one furious heartbeat of failing Him.

Of disobeying Him. The sin of disobedience was cardinal and unforgivable. That he had provoked her with blackest blasphemy would mean less than nothing in this case. She was an angel, and her obedience was expected to be more perfect than that of intrinsically corrupt human flesh.

She stared at her captive’s broad back, watching him shuffle cautiously along the uneven floor in the oversized magnetic slippers she had made him put on. For all the time she had spent with him, she had to admit that she could come nowhere near being able to predict his actions or reactions.

She was sure he had known full well how close he was to death back in the bay, yet he had only reacted with a quiet defiance that seemed to have been half courage and half his usual unbreakable indifference. Still his anger over the state of sinners who meant less than nothing to him had been real enough, if completely inexplicable.

There was anger in him after all, perhaps even in measure to equal her own. This was good to know. Yet as with so many things about him, the how and why of it remained a baffling mystery.

Brother Fist had not revealed why He wanted this man brought to Him. She had not dared ask; it was not her place to question His purposes and plans. Now that he was here, she had to ackowledge the possibility that her master might wish to speak to him alone.

That prospect troubled her deeply. Marchey was not cowed. He could not be trusted. He might even be a devil sent to hurt her master.

Brother Fist had not seemed quite Himself of late. He said that the Hand of God was heavy on His shoulders. Was it possible that He might overestimate His ability to control this strange, unpredictable man?

She certainly had.

Just thinking that her master might be wrong about anything made the pain and nausea she already felt spike so high that her head swam, and she very nearly lost her balance. Such thoughts were unworthy. Forbidden. Blasphemous.

But she had become used to suffering such pain on the trip back here. She accepted it, endured it.

The silver chain she clung to was the knowledge that she was Brother Fist’s angel, His servant, and— most of all—His guardian. His holy person was to be protected at any cost. Pain was a small price to pay when her life and soul were already pledged to that sacred duty.

Scylla knew where the hidden pickups covering this section of tunnel were mounted. As they moved into a blind spot she reached into the pouch at her hip and pulled out one of her Ears. It was a thin, transparent chip the size of a fingernail, perfect for being hidden in the homes and workplaces of those suspected of laziness, ill faith, or blasphemy.

She scraped her finger across its back to activate the adhesive, carefully keeping her Angel eye averted in case Brother Fist was watching through it. By the time they came in range of the next pickup the Ear was stuck tight to her prisoner’s belt.

Scylla permitted herself a small, secret smile. There was some risk that Brother Fist would frown upon what she had done, were He to find out about it, but it was worthwhile.

Now she could do her duty, guarding her charge no matter what happened.

Marchey hurt. More every minute.

The slashes across his chest were lines of fire. His back felt like one massive bruise. He could feel his lips ballooning, and his jaw felt half-unhinged. He moved it experimentally. At least it wasn’t broken.

He’d been lucky back in the landing bay and knew it. Scylla had only backhanded him—and pulled her blow at that. That exo gave her enough strength to have literally knocked his block off.

Some angel! It would have been funny if it wasn’t so tragic.

He was beginning to see her in a new fight shed by the abject obedience that had saved his life. Could it be that she was just another pawn in whatever reprehensible game was being played here? He was beginning to think so. Someone—this Brother Fist character, most likely—had turned her into a killing machine with that exo, and somehow brainwashed her into believing she was an angel. That would explain her truncated personality, her flat, knee-jerk responses.

He wished he’d spent the time coming here trying to learn something about the woman hidden—or trapped—inside that demon-faced, silver-metal monster. But he hadn’t bothered, had he? Such matters had exactly nothing to do with him, right?

Sure. Besides, why think when you could drink? He shook his head sadly. He might as well admit that she wasn’t the only one operating under flatworm-simple programming.

All right, he told himself sternly, stop using your head for a proctoscope for a change. Pay close attention to everything in this cut-rate Eden. Your life might—and probably does—depend on being on your toes for a change.

Not that what he’d seen so far was easy to ignore. The only way to describe the place was unrelentingly grim. The cramped tunnels were cold and poorly lit, the floor grid patched and curling, the unsealed walls and ceiling rough-hewn and in some places crumbling. The flat floor meant that the tunnel’s builders had planned to give the moon more spin, making up and down more than a hazy theoretical concept.

The air was only minimally breathable. Not only did it stink of sweat and poorly recycled waste, it seemed saturated to the weeping point with a suffocating miasma of fear, misery, and despair, like the air in a dungeon. Unscavenged water vapor had condensed on the walls, making them and everything else damp and clammy. Every other surface was covered with mildew.

Other than those poor bastards in the bay, Marchey had seen only a few of the inhabitants of this horrible place. Those he and his escort had encountered reacted by either cringing back against the walls as they passed with their heads bowed and eyes averted, or scuttling back out of sight like frightened mice.

If this was an Eden, then it was of the sort created by such infamous Utopians as Jim Jones, Pol Pot, and Gerald Van Hyaams. He didn’t need to see the mines to know what sort of conditions these people worked in; he’d already observed evidence of enough injuries to close down any normal operation.

It was obvious that human life was as cheap as dirt here. The people he had seen so far were clearly bereft of such basic human rights as comfort, freedom, or dignity. This was not a place where people laughed, or even smiled.

Nor did it appear to be some nest of religious zealots. It was not fanaticism he saw on people’s faces, it was fear and exhaustion. Service to God might have been the name of the game here, but the rules were from an old, old practice that went by the name of slavery.

It had been a long time since Marchey had felt anything like real anger or fear. Since he had really felt much of anything at all.

Much to his surprise, he found that the machinery for such emotions was still intact, the rusty gears grinding faster and faster. He felt like some piece of equipment that was coming back on-line after years of being on standby.

They turned into a wider tunnel. Scylla stalked beside him now, tight-lipped and impatient. It was all he could do to keep up with her.

He watched her out of the corner of one eye, finally giving the reason she had brought him here some serious thought. Did she know the reason, or was she just unquestioningly following orders? The latter seemed the most likely.

He plotted it out in his mind. She had been sent for him, specifically. She’d known his name and where to find him. How? He had no idea. Why?

Only one answer made any sense. He was a Bergmann Surgeon. Not only competent at all conventional medical procedures, but also able to treat conditions no regular physician could. The inescapable conclusion was that Fist had ordered him kidnapped and brought here because of who he was and what he could do.

According to Scylla, this Fist preached that medicine was a cheat and a deception. She acted as if she believed him, even though she was the one bringing a doctor to him.

Marchey knew he shouldn’t be surprised. Fanaticism and blindness to reality always went hand in hand; they were ultimately different faces of the same spurious coin. He was tempted to point out the contradiction to her, but felt fairly safe in predicting that her reaction would be vehement denial at best. More likely it would be violent.

That made him wonder if this Brother Fist had taken into account the chance that she might find out he was lying to her. He seemed to have her on a short leash, but still…

Watching her surreptitiously, so superhumanly fast and strong in that indestructible silver exo, he knew that he wouldn’t want to be in her master’s shoes if her illusions were shattered.

Scylla punched in the code that unlocked the massive steel door that barred the way to her Master’s chambers, a code known to her and Brother Fist alone. Hope and fear and doubt and confusion fought for supremacy inside her, making it hard to concentrate.

It would be good to be back at her Master’s side. Back where she belonged. It felt like she had been gone for an eternity.

She knew that she had somehow been changed by being away from Ananke for the first time in her life. Just how, she could not quite say, and deep in her heart she had prayed that simply coming home again would make everthing right again.

But it only made things worse. The Eden of Ananke seemed a different place than the one she had left. Smaller. Dirtier. Oppressive and almost… ugly.

She shook her head to clear it. Deceptions. The fault lay in her eyes, not what they beheld.

Even an angel’s heaven-made flesh was weak. The doubts that continued to assail her were proof of that. What should have been a joyous homecoming had come under a pall of apprehension as she realized that she would have to go before her Master with an unclean heart.

She could not help but be afraid He would see the black stains on her soul the moment He laid eyes on her, for did He not always say that He could read her every thought? His disappointment would be deep and justified. Ever quick to anger, the way she had failed His trust might provoke Him to rage.

Even if somehow He did not see her failings at first glance, she knew she would have to confess them. To withhold would only compound her transgressions.

No matter which way her sins were revealed, she would have to be punished to atone for them. She had meted out many such punishments, and knew just how high the price of redemption might be set. Many put the sinner back in God’s hands so that He might fling them down to Hell, where they belonged.

Scylla was an angel. Still, she was close enough to human to want to run and hide from what she faced.

But her silver fingertips danced swiftly across the keypad, entering the code sequence that would open the door as if they knew that the only answer was, as always, perfect obedience.

God punishes us because He loves us. To hide from His punishment is to hide from His love. She repeated that truth over and over, but for the first time in her life she found no solace in it.

The final number was pressed. A low tone signalled acceptance. Motors hummed. The door yawned open to admit the fallen angel and her charge into the anteroom of God’s chosen one.

Soon His justice and His love would shine on them both.

“Sweet Jesus in a bank vault.” Marchey muttered as he watched the two-meter-wide, half-meter-thick armored door swing ponderously outward. It looked like a tacnuke would make about as big a dent in it as an exploding cigar.

This Brother Fist had a really deep and unshakable faith in the love of his flock, didn’t he?

Scylla gave him a look. He stepped cautiously inside, unable to guess what he might find waiting for him. The door rumbled shut behind them, closing with a massive and absolute finality. Lockbolts the size of his arm pistoned into place, sealing them in.

He sniffed the air. It was sweet and clean, the oxygen content at or slightly above normal, heady as wine after the overused fung of the tunnels.

Separate life support. Brother Fist was a cautious man. A man of the people, too.

His angelic escort took his arm and led him through an arched vestibule and into a wide rotunda under a high-vaulted ceiling. This hemispherical chamber was as beautifully wrought as the tunnels were crude. Graceful carved pillars outset from the facet-cut walls bracketed the broad mosaic floor. At the far end, a white-stone altar table and real wood pulpit on a raised dais confirmed that it was a chapel.

His gaze was drawn upward toward the source of the golden light flooding the chamber. It came from a glowing one-meter sphere at the center of the ceiling dome. The globe was a representation of the Sun. Around it smaller spheres, the planets and moons, each exquisitely rendered in translucent tinted glass, wheeled in their endless dance and painted their colors on the walls.

Scylla gave him no more than a few seconds to appreciate the loving artistry that had gone into it or the chapel. Or to try to understand the melancholy air that permeated the place, a feeling of disuse. Of misuse.

She pulled at his arm in obvious impatience. “This way.” She towed him toward a wide door between two pillars at the far right. A last glance over his shoulder gave him a closer, better look at the altar.

Cold crawled into the marrow of his bones when he saw the thick webbed straps which had been bolted to the sides of the altar table. Its top was scratched and chipped. Dark brown stains were caught in the cuts and gouges…

Scylla hauled him around to face her. “You are going to see Brother Fist now,” she warned in a low, hard voice. Her face was an unreadable mask. “If you are disrespectful, I will punish you.” Her silver fingers dug into the meat of his upper arm. “If you make the slightest hostile move toward him, I will strangle you with your own guts.”

Marchey shivered, knowing that she meant every word. But he was damned if he was going to give her the satisfaction of showing his fear. He forced a smile, even though it made his mashed lips sting and begin bleeding again. “So you’re in charge of protocol, too?”

She snatched him off the floor by his arm and shook him until his teeth rattled. “Understand me, little man!” she hissed. “Even if you are alone with him, I will know what you say and do. I am an angel! Do not forget that for a single moment. If I come after you, there will be no escaping my wrath, and no mercy once I have you in my hands.”

She shook him again, nearly wrenching his arm out of its socket, then pulled him close. So close that he could see every red-and-black line tattooed on her face, could count her red-tipped, razor-sharp teeth. Her voice dropped to a knife-edged whisper.

“If you misbehave I will send you to Hell. Slowly, infidel. Skinless and screaming to die. Do you understand me?”

“I… do,” Marchey mumbled, desperately trying to contain the cyclone of dread whirling through him. The image of that bloodstained altar burned in his mind, lending a terrible credence to her threats.

Maybe she saw through the tissue-thin remains of his self-control and knew that she had him cowed. She nodded. “Very well.”

He staggered drunkenly when she slammed him onto his feet, and would have fallen but for the iron grip she had on his arm.

A commbox had been cemented to the wall next to the door. Scylla pushed the callbar. A low, absurdly cheerful tone sounded, then from the box issued the soft, rasping voice he’d heard in the landing bay. Once again the sound of it made him shiver.

“Scylla.”

She meekly bowed her head. “Here, Master.”

“You may enter.” There was the muted clunk of lockbolts withdrawing. The door swung toward them. Marchey saw that it had been backplated with a layer of steel-wrapped, reinforced stonecrete.

Just as when he’d opened his ship’s airlock, the first thing to hit him was the smell. It came gushing out in a turgid, gut-twisting wave, so thick it seemed almost liquid. It was a smell he knew, one that could slice through the strongest hospital disinfectant like a scalpel through a rose petal.

It was the sickly-sweet, septic stench of something long diseased and dying.

Scylla froze on the threshold, nerves shrieking a warning and fight response jittering through her.

Her eye narrowed. Nostrils tattooed with scales and barbs flared as she sniffed the air. What was that smell?

But she already knew the answer to the question: Brother Fist. It was a smell she knew as well as her own face in the mirror, a sweet perfume He had begun to exude just a year before: His own attar of holiness. Her first days away from His side she had missed it.

Then why did it seem like such a loathsome stench now? Was this yet another effect of her eroding angelic state?

She forced herself to stifle her unworthy revulsion and put one foot in front of the other. This twisting of her senses was a final deception, cast against her to keep her from her rightful place at Brother Fist’s side. One word, one touch, and all would be right again.

She stepped through the doorway, and at last she was returned to His holy presence.

Yet seeing her Master did not bring the comfort she so desperately craved. It only made things worse. The time apart, some inner failure, something was making her see Him differently from the way she should.

He was dressed in His black cassock and seated in His usual place, the big thronelike chair near the wall of screens that let Him look into every corner of the Eden He had created. That was as it should be. Yet instead of stern and strong and righteous, He looked old and weak and—

—sick.

She tried to smother this blasphemy even as it was being born. It was just that the Hand of God was heavy on His shoulders. It was a failure in her perceptions, a betrayal by her untrustworthy senses. The other was impossible. Unthinkable.

Ashamed that she had been prey to such a profane thought in His presence, she bowed her head, praying that when she looked up again the scales would be gone from her eyes.

“Brother Fist,” she intoned with abject humility, speaking His name like a talisman that would give her strength and lend truth to her senses. “I have returned.”

“My angel,” he replied in a thick, phlegmy rasp. “You have done well.”

Scylla hunched her shoulders. That praise heaped on the burden of her manifest unworthiness was a weight greater than even the shining metal armor that proved she was an angel could bear. Heart stuttering with fear, she steeled herself to confess.

She was never given the chance. Brother Fist spoke first. What he said and how he said it instantly banished all thoughts of confession from her troubled mind.

“Leave us now, Scylla.” His tone was brusque, impatient, as if she were an annoyance, not His angel and right hand.

Her head snapped up in surprise. She stared at Him in wounded incomprehension, unable to believe that He would dismiss her so offhandedly. She had been away for over fifteen days, braving the Profane World and putting her very soul in peril for him, yet He did not seem to care. His eyes were fixed on the infidel Marchey, and had she been forced to describe the look on His face, she would have said it was one of greedy expectation.

“But—but this man is dangerous, Master!” she protested lamely. Suddenly a sickening apprehension crawled through her. I have fallen so low that I am no longer worthy of His love. He sees. He knows. I have become less than dust in His gaze.

Brother Fist’s eyes had begun turning a yellowish color some three years before. Another sign that the Hand of God was on Him, he said; it was the reflection of the golden streets of Heaven. Those sallow eyes blazed with petulant fury now. A fury directed at her. It rooted her to the spot, unable to speak or move.

“I said leave us!” His skull-like face hardened, and he beat on the arm of his chair with a bony, blue-veined fist. “Get out, you stupid bitch! Out!”

Scylla turned and fled, cringing under the lash of His displeasure, and knowing He would strike her dead with a thought if she did not remove herself from His sight. She stiff-armed the door out of her way, choking back the bewildered cry of pain and appeal lodged in her throat.

Her cubby was on the opposite side of the chapel so that she would be close at hand to her Master, and it was there she sought refuge.

Her metal-shod feet clattered across the mosaic floor as she crossed it in a stumbling run. Once inside her room she flung herself down on the raised foam pallet that served as her bed, burying her face in the forgiving softness. Her breath came in hitching gasps, but she did not cry.

Angels do not cry.

Ever.

To do so would be an abomination. To do so would be the final damning iniquity.

Biting back some hot wet force boiling inside her and threatening to burst free, she made herself sit up. She held out one trembling hand. Her right hand.

At a mental command her right buckler released itself. She shucked the weapon off and laid it aside. Gleaming silver metal still covered her palm and fingers like a second skin, but with the buckler gone the needle-scarred area on the back of her hand was exposed. Like her weakness. Like her manifest unworthiness.

She partially extruded the talons on her left hand, the gleaming white ceramyl blades as sharp as the line between sin and obedience, between damnation and grace.

Sharp enough to slice into the tattooed flesh at the back of her hand like corruption had insinuated itself into her soul. Blood welled up around each blade, the price Brother Fist said God demanded when He was failed.

Her one green eye slid shut to hold in the strange wetness gathering there. The blood was born in pain, and that was good. Pain was the ladder one climbed to return to grace, and she bore it gladly. Each throb was a rung that lifted her higher.

The pain was cleansing. It washed away the hurt and confusion, leaving only her essential suffering self, naked to God’s judgmental scrutiny.

I am an angel.

She gritted her teeth, digging her talons deeper to root out every corrupt tendril of doubt and resentment.

I was brought down to serve Brother Fist To carry out His will and protect Him.

Blood pooled around her talons, a shimmering ruby set in a silver brooch.

I am His to be used as He will I am my duty. Without it I am nothing. I must serve with no expectation of reward in this life, and any punishment I earn should be received gladly, for it is just that I suffer for my failings.

Her whole body trembled as she balanced on the knife point of pain. Sweat glazed her forehead. She held her breath, afraid that it might carry a scream if she released it.

There is nothing of me or mine more important than my duty to my Master. If He asks me to lay down my life, I should rejoice that I can pay the price He asks of me.

She closed her eye, the better to see Truth as she recited her catechism.

If I allow Him to be hurt either by action or inaction, God Himself will condemn me to eternal damnation for failing my duty to protect His Servant.

Scylla’s green eye opened. She saw her path clearly.

She was Brother Fist’s angel. His protector. The man she had brought to him was unpredictable, maybe even dangerous. Her Master was alone with him, unaware of the threat the infidel posed and undefended from him.

He had ordered her away from His side, away from where she could watch over Him. That (hurt!) was His right. He had not ordered her to listen in and act as hidden guardian, but then again He had not ordered her not to, and how else could God’s Will be done?

Her talons retracted, the china white ceramyl smeared with the red of her own blood. She stood up, flexing her wounded hand. It felt aflame, but functioned perfectly. Her angel body could block the pain, but she kept it from doing so. Pain kept the doubt and deception at bay. Pain was truth. Pain was clarity of thought and action. Pain was grace.

It felt good to be back on the True Path once more, the angel once again in her rightful place at Brother Fist’s side.

The door closed behind Scylla. Brother Fist touched a stud on the control pad on his chair arm, locking it after her. Bolts thudded back into place, sealing it tight. Marchey flinched at the sound.

“Come, sit down, my dear Dr. Marchey,” Fist called, beckoning him closer. He smiled. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” Fist spoke softly, a clotted, wheezing, tubercular rattle to his voice. His tone was arch, ironic.

Marchey looked around, choosing the seat farthest from the wasted figure in the oversized chair. He lowered himself into it reluctantly, gaze averted from his host.

Once he was sitting down he surreptitiously took in his surroundings. The cubby was quite large, the space broken up by foamstone dividers. Fist sat at its center, on one side of him an elaborate, slightly archaic comp, on the other screens displaying views from all over Ananke. The cubby’s walls were lined with bookshelves packed full of antique bound books and permem cubes. A few choice art objects were scattered about the room, some grotesque, some quite beautiful.

But for the surveillance screens, it could have passed for a professor’s study, modest and comfortable. Two other things spoiled the effect. One was the nauseating reek that permeated the air, making it smell like a carrion eater’s lair.

Then there was the room’s owner and occupant.

Marchey had to psych himself up to taking a long hard look at the man who’d had him kidnapped. He raised his eyes hesitantly, pulse pounding with trepidation.

Brother Fist looked like his nearest relative was Sister Death. He was a skeleton draped with loose saffron skin, raised from the grave and infused with some sort of awful unlife. His black cassock hung on him like a shroud. His cheeks were gaunt and sunken, his mouth a thin-lipped, liverish slash, his teeth white and sharp. His eyes were jaundiced, feverishly bright, and were fixed on Marchey with a greedy, crazed intensity.

But it was not his physical appearance alone that sent flight-response adrenaline pumping through Marchey’s system, turning his heart into a clenched fist and making his skin prickle with cold sweat.

The primitive human animal in him scented a rabid sickness that the civilized physician in him would try to identify with meaningless labels like psychopath, egopathy or sociopath. Words created to describe monsters but falling far short of capturing their dark essence, just as a word like bomb cannot convey a millionth of the horror of one going off on a crowded sidewalk.

Such creatures can be nearly impossible to identify because of their ability to hide themselves, like fatally venomous chameleons. Clever lurking things, discovered only when someone accidentally stumbles across a cellar floored with human bones or a storage locker stacked full of severed heads. He seemed like an okay guy, the neighbors say afterward. Pretty much kept to himself.

But when guile and pretense are discarded, there is no mistaking that it is a thing only nominally human, born of woman but reared in hell and suckled on poison. It is revealed as a cold-blooded and savage thing of unspeakable drives and an absolute disdain for any life other than its own.

Brother Fist laughed, a hacking, mirthless sound that sent a shudder of revulsion up Marchey’s spine. “Do I frighten you, Doctor?” he asked, carious yellow eyes bright and cunning.

Marchey bit down on his first reply. Shitless.

“Aren’t you, um, trying to?” he asked in as close to a normal voice as he could muster.

Brother Fist’s smile made Marchey think of the gleeful, grinning rictus sardonicus worn by skeletal, scythe-wielding Plague in medieval art.

“Perhaps a little. I so wanted us to get off on the right foot. I may be unwell, but I am undiminished. I have power. Over this place, and now over you.” He gestured as if to take in all of Ananke. “This place is mine, created in my image. I have made it into a crucible, my dear doctor. I am at its center. I am its center. I am its maker and master, flame and furnace. Tell me, do you know what a crucible is?”

“Yes,” Marchey said, the words seeming to come out of his mouth on their own. “It’s a vessel for smelting ore.”

A nod. “Excellent. The crucible is a means of reducing excess and impurity, creating something useful. I am the smelter. I am the furnace. In my crucible all that does not serve my purposes is burned away. Individuality is cauterized. Autonomy is immolated. Love is cremated. Trust is boiled away. Hope chars to the blackest ash…”

Marchey watched those awful yellow eyes glaze as the old man intoned his lunatic litany in a rustling hypnotic monotone. Everything but the old man’s eyes and voice seemed to fade away.

“The smelter’s art lies in heating the crucible to the proper degree. Razing the human psyche until only fear and faith remain. Until they are fused into one. Fear and faith guarantee perfect, unquestioning service. From the crucible emerges a material fit to be beaten into a tool.”

Brother Fist’s gaze turned outward again, fixed on Marchey. He felt it bite into him, sharp and paralyzing as a viper’s fang. That black knife-slash mouth twisted into a sinister smile. “You’ve had a chance to sightsee, Doctor. What do you think of my crucible?”

Marchey licked his swollen lips, tasting blood. The man’s virulent madness seemed to infect the very air he breathed like some deadly biowar virotoxin, suffocating him, shriveling his wits and will. He squirmed in his chair uneasily, but could not find the strength to look away.

Unaware of what he was doing, he slowly reached up to touch the silver metal pin on his chest as if to find some reminder of his own identity. The emblem was still there, dangling on a bloodstained scrap of his slashed tunic. Metal touched metal with a faint click.

It was almost as if a circuit closed inside him. The sense of who and what he was flowed through him again. With it came the memory of a one-eyed child this man had condemned to die out of a cynical contempt for human life. Out of cold, raw cruelty.

“I think it sucks,” he heard himself say. He blinked and sat up straighter, returning anger making him clamp his hands on the arms of his chair. “I think someone should jam some of what you’ve been dishing out right back down your fucking throat.”

Brother Fist lolled back, eyes hooded and smirking. “Perhaps you are correct,” he agreed softly.

“Damn right I am.”

“You sound so certain. Are you volunteering to be the hand of justice, Doctor?”

Marchey stared at him, imagining his silver hands on Fist’s scrawny wattled neck. They tightened on the arms of his chair, strong enough to snap Fist’s spine like a twig.

“Think of all the pain and suffering that would be averted.”

He already was. Killing Fist would be like curing a disease.

“Come on, Doctor,” he wheedled, lifting his chin and stroking his neck in invitation. “Do what is right. Take the matter in hand. Expunge the suffering. Balance the scales.”

Marchey stared at his tormentor, but remained where he was. Cold sweat crawled down his sides.

Fist smiled with hateful pleasure. “I thought not. You won’t raise a hand against me. Your righteous indignation is a joke. I find it quite hilarious, but do you?”

Marchey looked away, feeling ill. Fist continued to taunt him, making him feel sicker with every word.

“You can’t forget yourself. You are sworn to preserve life, not take it. To heal rather than hurt. You’ve pledged your life to an oath. One that has mocked you for years. That mocks you now, even as I do.”

—I pledge my life to the practice of healing—

Marchey said nothing. Fist had summoned up the words he held as the one holy thing in his life. The Healer’s Oath. Based on the Hippocratic Oath, but further reaching; an ethical ideal he had upheld through thick and thin, and which had held him up as well. His vocation had become an empty shell. That Oath was the glue that held the fragile, cracked pieces together.

“I’m sick, my dear doctor,” Brother Fist continued, smirking as he tightened the screws. “Probably dying. That is why I had you brought to me. Now that I have you here, you will do everything in your power to cure me.”

“I won’t.” Marchey forced the words out, but they were no more than a hollow whisper.

Brother Fist’s mocking laughter made him feel like there were maggots slithering through his insides.

“Oh but you will!” he wheezed. “You have no choice. Keeping your ridiculous Healer’s Oath is the single fingertip that keeps you from falling into the abyss. It is the one tattered shred of self-respect you have left.”

He paused to catch his breath. “I have studied your kind. I know more about you than you do yourselves. Fail your Oath, and your entire existence becomes meaningless. You will have given up everything you hold sacred for nothing.”

Marchey could only shake his head from side to side like a punch-drunk fighter, trying to get away from the blows hammering into him and backing him into a corner.

—holding every life sacred—

But there was no escape. This terrible old man knew his situation too well, knew precisely which buttons to push.

“You cannot refuse to help me.”

—refusing none who seek my help—

“Welcome to my crucible, Dr. Marchey.” Brother Fist spread his thin hands. “You think I have turned up the heat beyond bearing, but I have really only just begun. After all, how hot can it be if your scruples are not yet burned away?” He gazed at Marchey with baleful pleasure, closing his hands as if he gripped Marchey’s life and fate in them. “Yet.”

His hands fell to his lap. “Do your duty. Begin examining me.”

—because my duty is to save lives, not judge them—

Marchey stood up, feeling sick and doomed, bile on his tongue and lungs clogged with choking despair.

“Scylla said you don’t believe in medicine,” he protested in a pathetic attempt to escape the nightmare swallowing him up.

His tormentor’s laughter hacked through his hopes for a way out like an antique bone saw, leaving them in raw, bleeding pieces.

“Please don’t demean yourself by pretending to such naïveté,” Fist said, his voice filled with the cloying sweetness of rotten meat. “I simply don’t believe in letting the sheep have it. It pleases me to hear their futile prayers. I so love watching them abasing themselves because their faith isn’t perfect enough to make them whole again. That is one of the brightest, sweetest-smelling blossoms in my little garden of pain.”

Garden of pain, Marchey thought with numb horror. And I’m supposed to give the gardener the renewed health he needs to continue tending his bitter crops…

Scylla hunched like a cast-silver gargoyle at the end of her pallet. Head down. Shoulders sharpened with tension. Teeth bared. Her one green eye glazed and sightless.

Brother Fist had—

Her talons were out, and she shredded the foam pad without even knowing it, hands rhythmically clenching and unclenching.

He had—

His own voice, the damning words coming from his own tongue, his contemptuous laughter as he turned her service to himself and to God into acts of willful cruelty. Turned Revealed Truth into proof that he had—

—lied to her.

This was no weakness. No deception sent to test her faith.

Brother Fist was sick.

He had sent her for Marchey because he needed a doctor.

Because…

God would not heal him.

The orderly walls of her world were shuddering and cracking, their concrete foundations turned to a quicksand of lies. In the chaos strange things that felt almost like memories surfaced like raw earth thrust up through split and buckling pavement. Faces. Feelings. Sensations. People and things she had no names for, but which seemed to know her as a sister.

Her mind reeled blindly, buffeted in a hundred directions, seeking solid ground, seeking escape, and all she knew for sure was that if she heard any more she would—

She lifted her arm, reaching out to turn the Ear off. To stop this before she went mad. Her silver hand hung there in front of the stud that would bring silence and safety and sanity.

Hung there. As if reaching for a lifeline.

Hung there. Between truth and silence.

Hung there, wavering—

—trembling—

—then fell.

Almost as if that were some sort of signal to thaw time and start the world moving again, Marchey’s voice came to her, breaking the silence.

Marchey had reviewed his options. It hadn’t taken long. They had been few, and equally grim.

His only choice was in mode of self-destruction.

Brother Fist had drawn him into a maze where the walls were built from his own moral strictures, and every turning led to darkness and defeat.

He couldn’t break his Oath without breaking himself. Brother Fist had seen that with the cynical clarity of a worldview uncolored by honor, ethics, or scruples. He could not bring himself to kill this pestilence masquerading as a person. He could not even let him die if it was in his power to heal him. Those might in one sense be the “right” things to do, but not for him.

He had long ago sworn to accept the precept that every life was sacred, had value. His entire life had been dedicated to that principle; it was the ability to save lives that might have been otherwise lost that had kept him from renouncing Bergmann Surgery and trading his silver arms for flesh. Even now he could not bring himself to abandon that vow.

Besides, even if he could bring himself to refuse, no doubt Scylla could force him to reconsider.

He would hold to his Oath, even though healing this monster would be such a rape of his skills that it would probably have the same destructive effect as breaking the Healer’s Oath. It would despoil the one thing of value and meaning left in his life.

There was no escaping the crucible unscathed.

All he could do was hope that maybe afterward he could find some opportunity to make amends for what he had done. Maybe he would get a chance to treat some of Fist’s subjects and begin redeeming himself. Maybe if he let himself be used and broken, he would be cast away and get a chance to escape on his ship and find help.

He took a deep breath. “Let’s take a look at you,” he said heavily. The heartsick resignation in his voice was no ploy. He climbed reluctantly to his feet and started toward his new patient.

Willing himself to walk deeper into the crucible.

Brother Fist produced a gun from a hidden pouch in the arm of his chair, pointed it at Marchey’s chest.

Marchey froze midstep, eyes on the weapon. He knew just enough about arms to recognize the big, blued-steel handweapon as an old-style Fukura “Spring Flower” pistol. The folded alloy projectile it fired would make a fingerprint-sized hole going into a human body. It would exit the other side like a whirling dinner plate heaped with gore.

Brother Fist hacked gleefully. “Think of this as Malpractice Insurance.” He gestured curtly with the gun. “Come on, get to it.”

Marchey obeyed, tearing his gaze away from the weapon. “You don’t have much faith in your fellow-man for a priest,” he said, trying for sarcasm but his voice coming out flat-line.

“Please, Doctor. I’m no priest, and you know it.” He cocked his head. “But you’re an intelligent man. Surely you must wonder what I am, and how I got here. I wasn’t always Brother Fist, you know.”

“No?” Marchey said tonelessly. “Give me your arm.”

The old man offered his free hand, a bundle of twigs covered with wrinkled yellow parchment. Marchey took it, the cool dry skin like paper under his fingers. A silent command started the devices inside his prosthetics recording pulse, blood pressure, NFD, GSR, and a dozen other tests. Data whispered through his mind, the first bare threads in the warp of diagnosis.

Brother Fist settled back as if totally at ease, but kept his weapon centered on Marchey’s solar plexus. “I came here not quite a decade ago. Back then about a fifth of the people on Ananke were wildcatters. The rest were members of a religious commune calling themselves the Immanuel Kindred. It looked like a perfect place to drop out of sight, further my studies, and entertain myself by practicing my specialty.”

Marchey pressed a yellowed nail, let up. No color change. “What specialty is that? Slavery?”

A sardonic chuckle. “Nothing so crude. It is an art most often referred to as phagewar.”

“Never heard of it.” He began scanning Fist’s extremities, the wasted limbs under the black cassock thin sticks vined with blue-black veins.

“What a pity. It is a lovely combination of the most effective elements of psychological and guerilla warfare, covert action, intelligence-guided subversion, terrorism, sabotage, propaganda, disinformation, and brainwashing. It is war fought without an army and prosecuted from within. Many of its stratagems are modeled on that splendidly successful, highly adaptable, and wholly admirable creature, the virus. I was— and remain—one of the top theorists and practitioners of this art. Remember the Martian Rebellion against UNSRA? I was the architect of its defeat. After that I went freelance. Undergound, really. You would find my real name turning up quite often in certain sub rosa literatures.”

“A real Renaissance man,” Marchey mumbled.

“Renaissance is rebirth, my dear doctor. You are more right than you know.” He chuckled at some private joke.

“Anyway,” Fist continued, “that life grew tiresome after a while. The governments and MuNats I worked for were reaping what I sowed, and even what you would call the worst of them had these archaic compunctions that prevented me from implementing my sharpest-cut plans. Then there was the growing temptation to bite the fat soft hands that fed me only scraps. So I decided to seek an out-of-the-way place to contemplate my arts and exercise them as I saw fit. A laboratory, if you will, complete with human rats.”

Marchey had gone on to scanning and palpating Fist’s sunken chest. The combination of the old man’s sick pride in his work and what he was finding put a grim frown on his face. “Here,” he said heavily, “on Ananke.”

Fist nodded. “Just so. The Immanuel Kindred showed me the light, so to speak. They believed that man was made in God’s image, and so remaking space in man’s image served God. Isn’t that a lovely sentiment? They were friendly, open-minded, tolerant, trusting, pacifistic, and, most importantly, industrious. They worked twice as hard as the wilders, believing they served a higher goal.”

He sighed, tipping his free hand. “So many systems fail for lack of initiative. Their childish religion offered me possibilities far beyond what I could get from simply co-opting the politics of this place.”

“So you took over the Immanuel Kindred,” Marchey said to prove that he was still listening. This was nothing that he wanted to hear, but the more he knew, the better his chances. Moreover, the vague outline of an idea had occurred to him while he was examining Fist. A possible way out.

Fist showed him a sharkish smile. “I ate them alive, hallelujah and amen! Then I began turning them into something useful while bringing the wilders into the fold. On their knees, of course.”

“You did this all by yourself?”

“I was a wolf among sheep. Oh, I had a mercy to do the cruder bits of wet work. A Shock-trooper who’d killed an officer, deserted, and gone renegade.”

Marchey looked up, confused. “Scylla?” There were female Shock-troopers, but she seemed too young.

The old despot’s bubbling laughter made Marchey shiver as if ice water had been dribbled down his back. “My angel? Isn’t she a lovely thing? But no, she came later. The mercy was an expendable who finally met his defining fate. Although you could say that the best part of him lives on to this day.”

“Scylla’s exo.” Marchey stepped back. The woman inside that dead man’s battle armor didn’t even know it was machinery. As he had guessed before, she was just one more of this creature’s countless victims.

“Exactly. Why have you stopped examining me?”

Time to bite the bullet.

“I’ve learned all I can externally. Now I have to go inside.” He already had a pretty good idea of what he would find. If he was right, he might just have a chance after all. Besides, before he could work as a Bergmann Surgeon Fist had to be—

—unconscious.

Those rheumy eyes brightened with interest. “Ah, now you perform the uncanny procedure which has made your kind outcasts among your small-minded fraternity. I can hardly wait to see you in action.”

Marchey sighed. “Then we have a problem. You have to be unconscious for me to work.” He’d wondered what was going to happen at this hurdle; it was hard to imagine Fist giving up control for even a moment. But he must have known he’d have to.

“Oh yes, the sacred rituals of Bergmann Surgery.” That skeletal face took on a crafty look. “Tell me, does the name Dr. Keri Izzak ring a bell?”

“Yes.” Reluctantly.

“Who is she?” Fist prompted sweetly.

“She—she’s a Bergmann Surgeon, like me,” Marchey answered unhappily, feeling new tentacles of cold trepidation curl through him. Fist’s knowing Keri’s name couldn’t mean anything good.

“Not anymore. The lovely Dr. Izzak no longer practices your branch of medicine.” He chuckled. “Or breathing, for that matter. About a year ago I had her kidnapped and taken to a quiet place on Earth. There she was subjected to some tests of my own devising. It was a tawdry business, and cost me a considerable sum. But I think it was money well spent. And she allowed me to prove a theory of mine.”

The cold was all through him now. Keri dead?

He found his voice. “Theory?” he croaked. Keri dead to prove a theory?

Brother Fist wagged a bony finger at him in admonition. “You mustn’t forget that I am a scholar. A scientist. I started getting sick about three years ago. So I began learning everything I could about you people and your specialty—as you well know, it’s the most advanced form of medical technique presently available. Would you care to guess what I found?”

Marchey shook his head, both unwilling and unable to guess.

“A blind spot in the data. Something so simple that it has been overlooked all these years. It looked promising enough to be worth spending some of the credit my flock has so generously provided me on having a Bergmann Surgeon kidnapped and taken someplace quiet so I could put my conclusions to the test.”

Fist paused a moment to make sure Marchey was getting all this. The shocked, sick look on his face said that he was.

“Dr. Izzak had the honor of being the subject of the tests. Unfortunately, she soon understood what I was trying to prove. Such a bright woman. I had to dispose of her—and the hirelings who tested her, of course—to protect what I had learned.”

“You disposed of her,” Marchey repeated tonelessly, unable to accept the offhanded way Fist had said it. Like her life had no more value than the wrapper around a stick of gum.

Fist shrugged. “I suppose it was wasteful, but I dared not try to bring here all the way out here. Too risky.” He gazed at Marchey, a malicious sparkle in his eyes. “Don’t look so crestfallen, Doctor. Rest assured that Dr. Izzak is still doing her part to hold up the traditions of medicine. As I understand it, she’s part of the concrete footers under a new hospital complex in Djakarta.”

Marchey absorbed this final hideous detail in silence, feeling utterly lost, weak, and doomed, as if buried up to his nose in concrete himself.

Fist cocked his head and adopted a pedantic tone. “Tell me, Doctor, what happens after one of your patients wakes up?”

“They remember,” Marchey answered, his voice drained of all emotion. “They have nightmares. Any patient who sees me afterward becomes acutely hysterical. In the beginning we had several patients nearly die of fright. One actually did, though we managed to revive him.”

Brother Fist clucked his tongue. “Not the basis for a very good doctor-patient relationship, is it? Such a shame that you’re not equipped to properly savor terror. Think how different your life would have been if you were! But I digress. Your patients must be unconscious while you work. Why?”

“In many cases they are that way to begin with, and most surgery is easier to perform on a nonresponsive patient. For the others we soon learned that what we do, and how we look and act in our working trance is so frightening that it’s easier that way.”

“So I’ve seen. One of my assistants had to be kept from shooting the late Dr. Izzak. A devout Catholic, he thought she was possessed by Satan. This extreme deep trance state you work in. Is it absolutely necessary?”

Marchey frowned. “Absolutely? I’m not sure.”

“Hazard a guess.”

“Well, the trance guarantees total concentration. When you first start out you need it to maintain your limb image.” A shrug. “I guess that technically I might be able to get by in a lighter trance now, but going deep helps shut out the reactions of the other medical people, and keeps me from getting too attached to the patient. But I don’t see—”

“Of course you don’t,” Fist replied archly. “No one did until I came along.” He looked enormously pleased with himself. “It’s really quite a wonderful thing, the way your life has been made so needlessly miserable. The irony is even more delicious because you’ll never get to use what I’ve learned on anyone but me,”

There was no way for Marchey to miss the implied message that he would never leave Ananke alive. But at that moment that didn’t matter. Fist was telling him that there was a way around the Nightmare Effect. All he could think was: What did we miss? What did we overlook?

“That’s it, think,” Fist whispered. “It’s in the air before you. Seize it.”

Marchey didn’t need him to push. His mind was working furiously, going over the hints he’d just been given, trying to put them together into the answer that had eluded them for so long.

“You—you’re saying that if the patient is conscious…”

An encouraging nod. “And?”

“And…” He racked his brain, his thoughts going in circles until they tripped over the obvious. The blood drained from his face. It was too obvious— wasn’t it?

He said it out loud, trying it on for size. “And I do my work in the lightest possible trance…”

Brother Fist nodded approvingly, as if he were a student who had given the correct answer to a difficult question. “Bravo, Doctor! You knew all along that your tightly focused concentration creates psychic scarring on a mind made especially impressionable by unconsciousness. What you failed to deduce was that the problem could be remedied by two simple changes in modus operandi.”

Marchey sagged inside. It couldn’t be that simple.

It just couldn’t! That was as simple and obvious as antiseptic procedure, as manual CPR, as the Heimlich maneuver—

—the oldest of which had been in use for just over two hundred years. The others were even newer than that; relatively recent innovations in the long history of medicine. It made perfect sense, and its very simplicity was what had made it so elusive.

He felt his pulse quicken. If this was true—

Everything would change.

No, not everything. The fear and mistrust and despite of other medical professionals would probably remain. He would still be regarded as a lunatic who had willingly mutilated himself to become some sort of bizarre faith healer. That opinion was too deeply entrenched to be changed quickly, if at all.

But he would no longer be forced to work on a blurry succession of faceless, senseless, unplugged meat machines who would remember him after only in their nightmares. He would be able to look patients in the eye before and after his work was done. He would be able to see them smile, see tangible proof that the price he’d paid had been worth it after all.

And that would make all the difference in the world.

“You must be eager to begin, Doctor.” Brother Fist purred, wrenching Marchey back to the here and now. “You want to know if this will work or not, don’t you?” It was not a question.

Marchey’s silver hands closed into fists. He nodded. Yes, I have to know.

A moment later he understood just how steep and high the walls of the crucible were built. The creature that called itself Brother Fist had known all along that he would treat him, if not for sake of his Oath or for fear of Scylla, then to see if his deepest desire was truly within his grasp.

Now that it was, and the moment of wonder had passed, he realized that Fist had turned the gift into garbage—if you could call something purchased with the life of a friend a gift—even as he gave it. There was no way for Marchey to use this to heal him and ever feel clean again.

Fist would methodically strip him of everything he loved and believed. He would probably keep him alive to be his personal physician, and to torment by forbidding him to treat those of his subjects who needed and deserved his services. That would be entirely in character.

He found himself pitying the people of Ananke more than ever. In less than an hour Fist had turned him into a helpless puppet, so entangling him in his webs that there seemed to be no way he could ever get free again. They had endured nearly a decade of his merciless machinations.

The old monster was more than a mere madman, more than another tinpot tyrant. He was like some awful destroyer from myth. A Shiva, destroyer of worlds. A gorgon, whose gaze was death. A brilliant, malignant Midas whose very touch spread corruption and ruin. A Circe who warped innocent beauty into monstrosity, just as she had when she turned Scylla—

Scylla. The fair maiden turned into a monster.

Marchey’s mood had been plummeting like a sparrow sideswiped by a supersonic fighter, the ground rushing up at it while tumbling helplessly end over end. But the thought of Scylla put air of possibility under its wings.

What and who had she been before Brother Fist laid his foul hands on her? Could some fragment of that lost soul still remain behind her horrific mask? Was there any way to reach her?

It was only the flimsiest straw of possibility, but there was nothing else within his grasp.

He remembered what she told him. Even if you are alone with him, I will know what you say and do. Was she listening? Hearing all this?

“Yes, I’m ready,” he said slowly. “But old habits die hard. I want you to talk to me while I work.”

“And what shall we talk about?” A death’s-head grin. “Would you like to hear how Dr. Izzak died?”

“Not that,” he answered curtly. The mention of Keri’s death brought back the feelings of hopelessness and defeat he was struggling to rise above. He tried to make his voice flat, uninterested. “Tell me about Scylla.”

Brother Fist settled back in his throne, hands in his lap still wrapped around the gun. He nodded, looking pleased. “Now there’s a wonderful, heartwarming story. A veritable fairy tale! In some ways she’s my most interesting creation.”

Scylla’s attention narrowed at the mention of her name, her blood pounding in her ears.

The talk about trances and the rest meant little to her. She had only half listened, her mind still reeling from the new version of her Master’s advent on Ananke. One day-for-night different than the one she knew.

Could it… possibly be true?

If her Master, the font of all truth could lie about who and what he was, then how could she know truth when she heard it? Furthermore, if his being God’s Chosen One was a lie—

—was she a lie?

Living a lie?

A living lie?

She shook her head. “No,” she whispered, trying to push it all away with that one single word.

She knew that Brother Fist had been sent by God to lead them into the grace of perfect faith and righteousness. Knew it like she knew her own name and face.

She was His angel. God had made her to serve Him.

She sought her reflection in one of the screens. There was proof of this truth. Her very form was gilded with Heaven’s power to make her a living instrument of obedience. Her might was an angel’s might. She had been brought down for the express purpose of protecting God’s Chosen One, and to chastise the faithless and punish the sinful. She knew this the way she knew she needed air to breathe; it was obvious and undeniable.

But—

Why did the story her Master told Marchey have this deeply resonating ring of truth? Why had it set loose what seemed to be remembrances of things she had never seen, of faces, of feelings, of frozen moments from a life she had never lived?

Why did her mind keep coming back to the hazy haunting sense image of a voice that might have been her own screaming, of a woman’s face filled with despair as she was dragged away by something so bright that it hurt the eyes. A blank spot, then that face again, crying, pleading, begging her not to—

—not to…

The fragmented memory ended there, like a high, crumbling cliff edge poised over an abyss of deepest darkest horror.

Brother Fist began to tell a story. Her story. The story of her genesis. And the angel Scylla hung on his every word, seeking and dreading revelation.

“I had this place fairly well in the palm of my hand, but knew I would continue to need an enforcer. Unfortunately my pet mercy already had too much power for his own good or mine. Worse yet, he was beginning to get ideas. So I—”

The old man paused to give watching Marchey his full attention. He had waited a long time for this moment. Hopefully not too long.

Marchey ignored him. He stood before a high table, sleeves pushed back to his biceps, his gleaming prosthetics crossed before his chest. He began to breathe deeply, eyes closed, effortlessly sliding into that old familiar pranayama. His hands fluttered like silver doves in rhythm with his breathing. The grim expression darkening his face faded as he centered himself.

But instead of letting himself sink into that subterranean state in which he usually worked, he kept himself at what felt like a usable higher level. The rim of the deep cold well.

His eyes opened. There was a nagging urge to sink deeper, down to where habit told him he should go. He ignored it. Bending at the waist, he rested his arms on the table, palms up, hands still and sleeping. Reclosing his eyes, he took a deep breath and let go.

Breathing a sigh of what might have been pleasure, he straightened up and stepped back. His prosthetics remained on the table, inert and lifeless. The silver plates capping his stumps just below the elbows gleamed like mirrors.

He felt relaxed, oddly detached. In deep trance he’d always felt like the beam of a surgical laser, a straight hot true line of will so potent and tightly focused that neither emotion nor personality could fit into its narrow bandwidth.

This was like being in that state between sleep and wakefulness. For the moment, he was at peace. He turned toward his patient-to-be, a bemused expression on his face.

“Talk, old man.” Speaking in trance was a new thing. His voice came out as a raspy whisper. He held his invisible hands up as if after scrubbing for surgery, feeling faint air currents slide through his fingers like silk. That indescribable sensation of being able glittered clear and bright as a diamond inside him.

Brother Fist blinked up at him uncertainly, then recovered his composure by tightening his grip on his weapon. He kept it trained on Marchey’s belly as he drew near, a single slight tremor the only betrayal of his apprehension.

“Where was I?” he muttered. “Oh yes, I needed someone I could trust implicitly. One of the last holdouts was a Kindred named Anya. She had a daughter named Angel. I took Angel hostage. The girl had a birthmark on her back. When I sent it to Anya all rolled up and wrapped with a pretty pink ribbon she caved in.” He snickered. “Of course my telling her that she would next receive the girl’s fingers and toes strung together like pearls may have had some influence on her decision.

“Anyway, Angel’s name made me think. I had set myself up as the Chosen of God, sent to rule and save them. I needed an enforcer I could trust. What would make a more fitting flunky than a Guardian Angel?”

Marchey leaned over Brother Fist and reached, the silver plates of his truncated arms stopping a handspan from the old man’s sunken chest.

Fist licked his lips, his yellow eyes focused on Marchey’s face. He knew that Marchey was reaching inside him, immaterial hands slipping through the heavy fabric of his cassock, through skin and muscle and bone as if they were not there. He knew all about Bergmann Surgery, about how those abandoned silver arms were nothing, even though they had come to symbolize his misunderstood specialty; it was their being put aside that had meaning. They were but a symbol of the flesh and bone each Bergmann Surgeon had sacrificed. He knew how a surgeon’s hands are everything, and how Marchey and his compatriots’ voluntarily having their own amputated had been the first deep cut of their severance from the rest of the medical community. He knew other things as well, things unknown and unsuspected by even the head of the Bergmann Institute.

Brother Fist smiled to himself. He was well aware of how vulnerable he was at that moment. Marchey could be holding his beating heart in his hands, with only the Oath he had mocked keeping him from turning to dead meat in his chest. The risk was small, but delicious, and the irony pure delight.

He felt no pain. The only sensation was a faint soothing warmth drifting gently through his insides. He returned to the telling of Scylla’s genesis, to add another pleasure to this moment.

“So I turned Anya’s daughter Angel into my angel. I tore her mind down and rebuilt it to my specifications. There was a doctor here. I made him imp the eye that lets me see what she sees, file and bond her teeth so she could bite a steel bar—to say nothing of an arm or leg—in half, then install her in my mercy’s exo. He didn’t need it anymore.” He chuckled darkly. “Someone gassed him like a cockroach while he was sleeping.

Marchey changed position, his hypersensitive ur-fingers tracing the convoluted skeinings of his patient’s nervous and circulatory systems upward. Toward the head. Toward the brain. A tight-lipped, disapproving frown shadowed his face.

Form V or mimetic cancer had turned the old man’s thoracic area into a metastatic jungle of blackflowering malignancies. Lungs. Liver. Spleen. Stomach. Kidneys. The list went on and on.

“I turned her into the perfect enforcer and bodyguard. She doesn’t believe she is an angel, she knows it. Her certainty is absolute and unshakable. Every glance in the mirror confirms that certainty. I was the one who tattooed her face, by the way. A most enjoyable art form, in that it is the canvas and not the artist that suffers. Her loyalty is absolute. She will disbelieve her own senses before she doubts me or my orders.”

He had to pause for breath. For the last few months he had not been able to get quite enough air.

“As for the name Scylla, that was a private joke only I was properly equipped to appreciate. When she was ready, I tested her. The first two tasks I gave her were simple. First I had her kill the doctor who made her what she was. Slowly, and with a certain bloody flair. Then I had her kill her own mother.”

Marchey shook his head, displeased. One of Form V’s mimetic variations was vascular. It insinuated itself into the structure of the patient’s veins and capillaries, replacing healthy cells and mimicking their function. To destroy or excise it would cause vascular collapse.

That was what it had done inside Brother Fist’s cranium. The old monster’s brain was as rotten and tumorous as the abominations it housed. Remove the cancer and he would begin hemorrhaging in literally hundreds of thousands of places.

As Marchey explored the damage, some mental subsystem heard the story of how an innocent girl had been warped into a monster and felt sorrow. Another felt relief that there was almost no chance he would be able to perform a self-damning healing. But for the most part he was in the position of a fireman who has arrived on the scene only to find the house he is supposed to save already completely engulfed in flame.

Brother Fist could not resist fondling the grim bones of his works. “You should have seen it. The expression of shock and horror on her mother’s face was one of the most exquisite things I have ever seen. She recognized her child. She wept. She pled. She cried Angel’s name, but it meant nothing to my creation. Scylla flayed—”

The rest of that grisly description was blotted out by a wall-shuddering reverberating boom, deafening as the thunderclap riding a lightning strike, deep and foreboding as the first trump of the Apocalypse. Books and art objects jittered from their shelves, crashing to the floor.

It came again, this time bringing a stony rain and the tormented shriek of rending steel.

Brother Fist stared past Marchey, his face turning an ashy gray when he saw Scylla standing in the ragged hole where once there had been an armored door.

She was an apparition to strike fear. Dust swirled around her like smoke. Her demonic face was twisted into a terrifying mask of hatred. Her angel eye was aimed at her Master with the deadly intent of a gun-sight while her other eye burned with an angel’s wrath and glistened with an angel’s unshed tears.

“—no—” Fist protested, his voice coming out as no more than a cracked whistle. He tried to aim the Fukura at her, but Marchey was in the way. He pawed at the larger man desperately, but Marchey remained oblivious, all his attention was focused on the impossible task at hand.

“Fist.” Scylla’s voice was cold, empty. The sound of a soul scoured by vacuum. She stepped across the bent steel and stone rubble that had once been a heavily reinforced door, pieces crunching under her metal feet. “You. Devil.”

Scylla stalked toward her maker, her steps measured and balletic, the gleaming silver metal of her exo flowing liquidly with her every motion. She seemed to glow with gathered power and purpose; a radiant, sword-sharp instrument of vengeance cast in argent and set into unstoppable motion. She was beautiful, the way a panther closing in for the kill is beautiful— form, function, and a terrible grace welded into one deadly purpose.

Brother Fist was in no position to appreciate the breathtaking perfection of his creation as she came toward him. His panic-stricken squirming finally let him get the gun pointed at her. He wasted no breath in warning, instead grimly taking aim at her face and pulling the trigger. The weapon roared and bucked in his hand, wrenching itself out of his feeble grasp.

Scylla’s amped reflexes let her swat the folded steel missile screaming toward her forehead aside like a lazy fly. One glassy eye in the wall of screens shattered explosively and went blind. She bared her sharkish teeth in something too bloodcurdling to be a smile.

“I don’t know if I am really an angel anymore,” she said as she came up behind the oblivious Marchey, her voice flat and hopeless. She shoved him aside, bowling him off his feet. Then she reached for her creator.

“—but I am going to send you to Hell anyway.” Her curved talons hissed from their sheaths and locked into place with a menacing snick. Each one ten centimeters of diamond-hard, microtome-sharp neoceramic, the ones on her left hand still crusted with her own blood.

“One piece at a time.”

She reached toward him to begin.

Brother Fist cringed back in his chair. But it wasn’t deep enough to let him escape his angel’s deadly caress.

Marchey found himself facedown on the floor with only a hazy idea how he had gotten there. He got himself onto his knees and turned around in time to see Scylla wrap her taloned silver fingers around Brother Fist’s throat.

“No! Don’t!” he shouted, lurching to his feet. He launched himself at her and wrapped his arms around her to restrain her.

They sank through her body as if they weren’t there. He stared down at his stumps in dumb surprise.

Brother Fist writhed and kicked his feet, the liverish slash of his mouth stretched wide in a soundless howl. His bony fingers clawed in futile desperation at the vise clamped around his throat. Wet, livid red spattered his black cassock as the talons sank like hooks into his wattled neck.

With her head cocked to one side, Scylla stared down at his face as if seeing him clearly for the first time and trying to figure out what he might be. The anger was gone from her face. All that remained was a lifeless, moon-cold landscape.

“Don’t do it Scyl—Angel,” Marchey crooned soothingly as he centered himself and brought to bear the invisible hands which made him what he was. He sank them into her back and moved them gently inside her, playing her nervous system like a harp as he cautiously, delicately, probed first this bundle of nerves, then that one.

“I have to.” Her voice was perfectly flat, emotionless as the metal that sheathed her tightening hands. Her shoulders sagged, but her grip did not loosen. Fist’s face was turning bluish gray, his eyes bulging in terminal disbelief. His hands scrabbled like dying crabs, fingers slashed and bloody from clawing at Scylla’s talons.

“You don’t,” Marchey said softly, insistently. “He’s beaten now. Let him go. Look at him. He’s old. Sick. He’s dying. Form V cancer, that’s what he has, and its so advanced that even I can’t do anything to save him. Let that kill him. Don’t let him make a killer out of you.”

Scylla’s one eyelid was growing heavy as Marchey gently stole her consciousness. It sagged at half-mast, like a pale flag of reluctant surrender.

“But I already am a killer,” she whispered, as if confiding a shameful secret. Her voice had become like a child’s, high and breathy, each word coming out more slurred than the last. “I killed my muh—muh—mother! I did! An’ others…”

Tears finally spilled from her one green eye. Human tears, salted with the stinging realization of guilt and loss.

“Scylla did that, Angel,” Marchey whispered soothingly. “You are Angel. You loved your mother. You would never hurt her.”

“Not… me?”

“Not you, Angel. Sleep now, Angel. Let Scylla go. Let this sick old man go. I’ll take care of him for you.”

“I—”

“Please, Angel.”

“I—”

“Please, honey. Please. Do it for me.”

“For… you…” she whispered, slowly relaxing her grip. Brother Fist fell back, gasping and wheezing as he tried to suck air through his bruised and bleeding throat.

Scylla’s arms dropped to her side. She sighed heavily. “I… so… tired…”

“I know, Angel, I know. You can let it all go now. Sleep. I’ll watch over you. Sleep.”

For Marchey the human body was an open book, and he knew every page, every line. He thought he could safely try to manipulate her voluntary muscles now that all the fight had gone out of her. But it was a slow, subtle business. If he’d tried before, she would have resisted, and probably killed him for trying.

He changed the position of his spectral hands, making that bundle of muscles contract, those slacken, gently guiding her down to the floor. Her eye was shut now, her face smoothing as sleep overtook her. He followed her down, still crooning her name, still telling her to sleep, still promising he’d watch over her.

At last Angel was stretched out on the floor, all but asleep, the vengeful angel Scylla quiescent.

Marchey knelt there beside her, gazing down and trying to see the Angel face hidden behind the face of the angel. He bit his lip. Maybe if I just…

He reached out hesitantly, then slowly swept an invisible hand across her face.

The demonic mask vanished under his touch line by line, revealing the pale, smooth face of a rather pretty woman in her mid-twenties. Her expression softened, as if she somehow knew what he had done. Like a light kindled after a long night, a shy half smile appeared, curving her lips.

Marchey sat back on his haunches, sudden tears in his eyes, utterly undone. She was so beautiful that it was almost frightening.

He reached toward her again, drawn to touch that sweet face one more time.

He never got the chance. He heard a rustling sound and a muffled grunt behind him.

Fist! He’d forgotten about F—

Realization came too late. Brother Fist crashed onto him from above, landing on his back and nearly knocking him down.

Marchey threw his head back and screamed as Fist drove the knife clutched in one bony hand deep into his back. He twisted desperately, white-hot pain ripping outward along every nerve as the knife was wrenched out of his flesh.

Operating on blind instinct alone he reared back, bucking his attacker off before he could strike again.

He spun around, slamming his knee down on the knife arm, hearing a satisfying crunch as Fist’s brittle bones broke under it. The old man hissed in pain, the knife tumbling from his fingers.

A guttural curse at his lips, Marchey thrust one immaterial hand into Fist’s scrawny neck and squeezed. Those hate-filled yellow eyes bulged as if about to explode from their sockets. His seamed mouth stretched wide in soundless, breathless agony.

Marchey felt his lips peeling back from his teeth in a feral grin. His pulse hammered in his ears. Adrenaline surged through him in a fierce red tide, washing away his reason and leaving only the urge to expunge the life from the vile creature writhing under him. To avenge Keri Izzak and Angel and her mother and every one of the countless faceless innocents who had suffered at his hands, to—

His spectral fingers closed around the old man’s spinal cord and he braced himself to rip it right out of his body.

He took a deep breath, gathering himself to—

—to become a killer, now that he could be a healer again.

He let out a furious, frustrated growl. Changing his grip, he expertly and ungently snuffed out Brother Fist’s consciousness.

But not his life.

Marchey sagged back, panting for breath and shuddering from the effort it took to get his emotions back under control, sickened by how close he had come to committing murder.

After a minute he heaved himself to his feet, gasping as the pain from the gash in his back came rushing back almost hard enough to knock him down again. Biting back a moan, he closed his eyes and recentered himself, then reached awkwardly behind him and closed the wound. He didn’t wipe all the pain away; the residual ache would be a reminder to be more careful.

Now what? he asked himself, looking around dully.

He found himself drawn back to gaze down at the sleeping form of Scylla.

No, he reminded himself, Angel

She looked so peaceful. Almost, well, angelic.

But sooner or later she would waken. What then?

She would need help, probably more help than anyone else in this terrible place if she was going to overcome the things which had been done to her. The fairly straightforward task of releasing her from the prison of that exo would only be the beginning of a long, slow, painful process. She had been a thing for years, and it might take just as many years to make her whole again. He would have to make Brother Fist tell him exactly what had been done to her to improve his chances of reversing the damage.

Which brought him to the fallen tyrant. The old monster was neutralized for the moment but would have to be watched closely for his own safety and everyone else’s. There had to be some way to keep him from being killed by those who had ample reason to want him dead, providing a chance to pry his secrets from him before he died.

Thinking about it now, Marchey realized that he might owe Fist something for proving his Oath’s precept that even the meanest human life had value. Abomination that Fist was, he had found a way for the lives of the surviving Bergmanns to have meaning once more.

Maybe so, but he hoped that this unwitting good work tormented the miserable son of a bitch to his dying day.

He had to get word back to Sal Bophanza, let him know that at least part of the dream could be salvaged. Let the others know that the Nightmare Effect was no more.

There were so many things to do. All Ananke was in need of his services. First to mind were a handless man, a scarred and trembling woman, and a one-eyed boy under the shadow of death. After that, who knew how many others.

As daunting as that task appeared, he knew that the wounds of the flesh would be simply and quickly repaired compared to the wounds of the spirit. Those would take him the longest to heal.

Him.

It finally dawned on him that he was assuming that these tasks were his to perform.

His blood went cold, chilled by an icy wave of doubt.

Had it been too long since he’d been anything other than a meat mechanic? Had he lost his touch? Had the years of drinking and apathy and disconnection damned him to be what the last years had made of him, now and forever?

He reached up, invisible fingers tracing the shape of the silver pin hanging from his slashed tunic. First it had been his pride and his hope, then his curse and his shame, and in the end the marker for a dead dream.

And now?

Could it be that this was his chance to begin putting his life back together in a new way? Had he met his own personal knight in shining armor in the form of a silver angel named Scylla, her entering his life as irrevocably changing it as his entering Merry’s had done?

Such thoughts made him uneasy. He knew where he was and what he had to do. That was enough for now.

A world of suffering waited to be eased now that the old order had come apart.

He went and put on his arms, the better to begin picking up the pieces.