Dust

enough to do it on his own. And neither he, nor Dust, nor Asrafil could be trusted.

Rien agreed with him. And she meant to show him that she, too, could be ruthless with herself if it were needful.

'I love you, too,' Perceval said. Rien opened her eyes, to look on Perceval's face for one last time, as a human being. 'Dust. He made me want him. But it's you I love.'

'But not want. You don't want me.'

Perceval shrugged, her wings rising and falling. 'Oh, sex. So take a lover. Don't be ridiculous. Who wants to marry a martyr?'

'Marry?'

'Marry me,' Perceval said. 'Rien.'

Oh, too good to be true. Too much to hope for. For a cold instant, she let herself hold it close. She thought about Jordan, the wings, the golden fur ... Mallory, who might be Samael's creature or might not, but who had given her Gavin and also, Hero Ng.

She felt the angel working within her. —Give her the plum,—Samael said. — Feed her the virus. Free your love from Dust's chains.—

It was in a pouch at Rien's belt. She slipped her hand inside, and pulled it out. A little thing, bruised, sticky juice dripping over her thumb. Like the blood sticky under her boots.

'I'll marry you,' she said. She crushed the plum in her hand and dropped the pit onto the floor. 'If you'll kiss me one more time.'

The gesture with the fruit, the tone of her voice— whatever it was, something she said alerted Perceval. Rien could tell by the arch of her eyebrow and the tilt of her head. Suspicious. Intrigued.

And concerned.

Princesses and angels and kings, Rien thought. They're all monsters. Even if you need them. Even if they give you wings.

But she'd learned something from Perceval, and from Tristen, and from Conrad Ng. In addition to princesses and monsters and kings, there are knights and heroes also.

And it all came down to dying in the end, and what you chose to do your dying for.

She couldn't have done it on her own. But Tristen stood outside the door. And she had Hero Ng.

The irony, of course, was that Samael had given him to her. And Samael could not defeat Dust. And neither angel was the sort to whom she wanted to trust her life, nor the life of the world.

There was only one possible solution.

She licked the pulp of the plum from her fingers, took firm hold of Samael—with Hero Ng's solid assistance— and tilted her head back to accept Perceval's kiss.

At first, Perceval did not know what she was feeling. It wasn't the kiss, and it wasn't the gut-churning memory of Dust's wanted/unwanted kisses either. Rather, it was a spasm, an uncontrolled flood of everything not into but through her. If joining with Dust, if becoming his Captain, had taken her out of herself, then this scoured her insides out.

Rien was there, inside her, all her quick wits—so smart, so full of thinking—and all her hurts and braveries. And her love, her longing, her stubborn determination: they made Perceval's breath hurt, her eyes sting. And with Rien was Samael, and someone else—Hero Ng, calm and dedicated.

She felt the unpicking, as they tangled inside her, as they unwound Pinion from her soul and stripped it away. She felt them strike Dust, strike against the places where she and he were integrated, and expected them to break against his claim on her like water splashed aside by a hand. But they were all there: Samael and his greed and his green devotion; Hero Ng who mourned the rest he longed for and would never know; Rien, brushing Perceval in passing, shining with love and rich in selfish disappointment. And doing this thing anyway, taking Perceval as she was. And they pushed through her, ran like a river, shoved barriers aside, flooded her with their conjoined strength and scoured clean channels in her mind.

And Dust was beset, still locked in silent combat with Asrafil, constrained to protect those within his bridge, limited by human frailties not his own.

Perceval might have been frightened if Rien had not been with them. Rien, who with Hero Ng's help, used Samael's own virus—and Samael's own knowledge of how to fight angels—to unpick Samael and rework him, make him into something else, and then bootstrapped Samael up through Pinion and through Perceval. Rien, whose guiding touch she could feel as Samael slammed into Dust from a direction the angel never expected: from the inside.

Rien, who used their combined strength and resources not to consume Dust, nor even to reach through him and consume Asrafil. But to revise him. Revise them both, in fact. Infect them. Complexify them, as Pinion scattered into pieces on the deck, shadow-bright crumbling into powder, sifting through the air like sand, converting back to the nanoparticles of its colony, its guiding principle stripped out and subsumed.

1 should not have wanted to change you. You have the right to draw lines. It's not the heroes we need to fix.

It's the monsters.

The gestalt wasn't trying to eat Dust. It meant to taint him. With duty, and affection, and the bitter, soft creak of snow, compressed under struggling wings. To support him, reinforce him, bring Asrafil under his sway.

To taint him, with Pinion, with Samael, with Rien.

Rien, who whispered in Perceval's head—

—You were my knight in shining armor.—

—and who, lost in the angel she'd birthed, fell to ashes in Perceval's hands.

His Captain was a long time crying.

But that was right and fair. Right and fair that she should weep for the dead. Right and fair that she should weep as well, for those not truly alive, who had sacrificed their consciousness to the wholeness of the world.

Right and fair that she should weep for the death of her wife, and for her wings.

And while she wept, the angel was busy. There were ways to be smoothed. Latticeworks to reinforce. The whole world, like a crystal, tuned so that it might resonate at a stroke but not shatter. He reached out through the world, and—in his strength—he found the angels, greater and lesser, and opened himself to them. And they came, mostly willing, for now he was without rival, and even the strongest of the lesser rank could see that it was better to come willing, a voice in the choir, than be consumed and silenced. Even the smallest wills came unto him—Rien's newborn armor, who would never now be named. The un-blades, Innocence and Mercy, and what remained of Charity as well, though its program was decompiled and much had been lost.

There was one exception. When he reached Engine, he found a creature who had never been a fragment of Israfel. A small animal, a small tool. A white falcon with a serpent's tail and lasers for eyes.

It was what remained of an Exalt woman, the rebel Cynric Conn, and in her memory the angel left it discrete.

As for Engine, the angel was busy. He spoke to the Chief Engineer, and to her imparted the news for good and ill. That some had been lost, although there was enough left in him that had been Rien to speak to her softly, and with consolation. And to Benedick Conn as well, on whose stone face the news fell like rain.

For Arianrhod, he had no words, even as she was brought into custody at last, and led to her acceleration tank to await whatever would befall.

There were more important matters at hand.

The angel bade Tristen Conn enter, to care for his Captain. He set about cleaning the bridge, recycling the cobwebs and insect and arachnid husks. There must be repairs, and not just to the interior. His patch job of the rent Ariane—and he, in that part of him that had once been Asrafil—had torn in the hull was crude, but it was strong.

Still, the first thing he made clean was his Captain's chair, so her uncle could place her in it. Tristen lifted her carefully and held her to his armored chest for a long time before he set her down again, though she curled into herself and would not be comforted.