Dust

Caitlin smiled. 'So might you.'

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

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

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

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

'Well,' Rien said, 'I came.'

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

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

'Because of Samael.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'He won't die,' Rien said.

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

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

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

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

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

No blame.

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

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

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

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

Although this time the armor kept her warm.

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

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

The rest is on you.

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

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

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

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

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

The inferno was beautiful.

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

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

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

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

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

'No,' she said.

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

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

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

He pointed, and Rien's eye followed. Just in time to see a vast section of the Jacob's Ladder shear away from the body of the ship like a sawn branch bending free of the tree. She could see as it spun clear that no atmosphere was escaping, and no lights shone within. Even as she watched, it began to break