It was all so silent. Perceval heard her own blood hum in her ears, a kind of ringing she thought was just the firing of unused nerves. She reached out before her, both arms and her curved flyer's toes on their long legs, and now the hull was rushing at them like a spinning saw blade, each protrusion or projection another chance at death.
She didn't have time to reprogram the go-pack on the fly, but reversing the thrust was easy enough. All she had to do was use the attitude jets to turn herself, to put her back to the rim of the world, and face away. Rien was looking over her shoulder, Rien with her eyes so wide and weeping tears that crazed with ice and froze to her lashes and had to be shaken away.
Perceval hoped she understood.
They were slowing, though; that, Perceval could feel in her inner ear, in her bones, in her teeth. Now? No. Now?
And then Rien gave the harness straps a yank, and ! Perceval felt something skip past her toes, bang her foot hard and spin her, but as she whirled like a throwing star, a flat spin with limbs extended, she saw some kind of antennae or mast as it glided past.
It was Rien who grabbed it, and held onto the harness with the other hand, and then with a skull-rattling jerk they were moving, and Perceval got a knee hooked around the thing, and they turned with the ship until it seemed that they moved not at all. Instead the universe wheeled around them, while they hung on the edge of the world, motionless and sublime.
Perceval might have hugged Rien and kissed her, but she felt the ice crystals growing in her own skin, her colony losing its battle. Hand over hand, she pulled them down the mast, and hand over hand, along the grab bars set in the hull. Ahead was an air lock, round, outlined in green paint and the dark sockets of long-dead lights.
It was locked, but Perceval was Exalt. The world opened its doors to her.
And then they were inside, in the heat, in the moisture, and the air was freezing to their skin, cracking off in great flakes when they moved, the sting of thawing flesh too much to be borne. Perceval's knees folded and so did she, knees everywhere and forehead on the heels of her hands, slumped forward automatically as if she still had wings.
Rien coughed up blood. Bright, frothy, oxygenated. Lung blood, and still more red than blue; she must have tried to hold her breath. It didn't matter; they were inside now. Whatever she had sustained, her colony would heal.
Except she was staring at Perceval, not her own blood on the floor. Her voice cracked and raggedy, she rasped, 'Perceval. Your wings.'
And by some luck, before Perceval called Rien any of those perfectly appropriate names that sprang to mind, she glanced past her and saw them reflected in the inside air-lock hatch. Spread out behind her, no hollow bone and soft membrane but seemingly wrought of shadow and mist and silk. Pearl and charcoal and silver, raddled this way and that like a colt's thin legs. A pair, indeed, of ghostly wings.
7 the beat of parasite wings
The air-lock decking was cold under Rien's feet, her own blood seaweedy, meaty-sharp in her mouth, overlaid with an unfamiliar bitterness. Even after speaking to Perceval, she spat and spat. The blood made a streaked puddle by her feet.
She started when Perceval touched her shoulder. 'Don't spit it out,' she said, the gauzy wings stirring behind her. 'Swallow it. You're spitting out your symbiont.'
With an effort, Rien did as Perceval instructed. Her throat was raw; it felt like swallowing scrubbers. When she could make herself stand straight, she looked at Perceval and spared herself speech by lifting her right hand, wrist bent, and making a spinning motion.
Perceval seemed to understand. She turned in place.
Rien noticed that the tips of the half-material wings lifted slightly to miss the puddle of slime on the decking. She, too, picked her way around it, cautious about stepping too close. Although, she considered, anything in the air lock was within range, if they lashed out.
The go-pack had vanished. Perceval's pale freckled back was naked from the base of her stubbled skull to the cleft of narrow buttocks. And the wings—translucent, whispery—grew from where her wounds had been. 'What do you see?' Perceval asked. When she craned her head over her shoulder, the tendons stood out along her throat all the way up to her ear.
'Are we in Engine?'
'No,' Perceval said. 'I don't know exactly where we are. The world was spinning. But not in Rule, that's something. What do you see?'
'It's the chains,' Rien said. 'The nanocolony. It's turned into wings.'
'And?'
'And fused with you,' she finished, reluctantly. And spoke the next words on a rush, wishing she dared to touch Perceval just then. 'Come on, we need to get out of this air lock and figure out where we are.'
'And how to get to Father,' Perceval said. She turned, decisively, and the wings missed thumping Rien as deftly as if they had been real. With one hand, the Engineer struck the air-lock release. Into the other, she produced the control for the nanotech colony, and was already fussing with it as the air lock cycled.
It had, Rien noticed and did not say, no visible effect.
She walked through the lock behind Perceval, distracted by the distinct, minute sensations of her lungs and skin repairing themselves, or being repaired by her new symbiont. Rien had split her scalp when she was a child, as children do, and the sensation reminded her of the tug of stitches in anaesthetized skin, on a micro level. The lock closed behind her, and they stood in the warm air of the corridor.
Perceval reached up over her shoulder and ran her fingertips from the base to the joint, as far as her arm would reach. She grasped the bone—what would have been the bone, in a living wing—between thumb and forefinger, wrist bent tortuously. She pulled, muscles flexing in her forearm, wiry biceps taut, her breast lifting as her pectorals tensed.
The wing did not budge. Perceval only succeeded in pulling her own shoulder forward. 'Ow,' she said.
Here in the corridor Rien could see it better. And see how the light did indeed fall through it, as if it were a three-dimensional rendering made real. She let her hand drop by her thigh, defeated. 'I think it's engineered out of nanoscaffolds. And it's bonded to my stumps.'
'Can you feel it?'
At first, Rien thought Perceval would not answer. The question, on second thought, was quite rude. She winced an apology. But Perceval didn't seem to find it presumptuous. 'Yes,' she said. Her lips looked thin. A muscle twitched along her jaw, a rhythmic tic. 'It doesn't hurt anymore.'
Rien thought about raw bone, naked to air, chafed by bandages. Bile rose up her throat.
'I hate this.'
All Rien could do was put her hand on her sister's arm. 'We need to find out where we are.'
'It's warm,' Perceval said. 'So it's populated. There are a lot of parts of the world that I know nothing about,
