before she could undo the straps.
“He should not have hurt you that way, but a rough instrument was what was needed. He will not be coming back with us.” Anderson looked down at her belly. “You will be healed, made whole, and of the whole. I will heal you, my daughter.”
Margaret yanked her arm free. “Let me go.”
“Hush, I have given you some autonomy, but you are mine now, and we are part of the whole. As you should have always been. I’ve missed you, my love. But now I can care for you.”
The ship shuddered, she felt it lift, and narrow windows grew out of slits in the wall, letting in light. She watched Tearwin Meet’s wall slide past, as the ship traced its path back out of the webwork that protected the city.
The space within it was primitive, nothing like her Melody Amiss or the Roslyn Dawn. In this sort of ship nothing but basic comforts were required. This ship fought and flew, as little more than a disposable barb of the Roil; not even as valuable as a limb, something to be spat out in anger, or with the cruellest of cunning. Steam swirled around her, such a contrast to the frozen world beyond the iron ship.
“Be still now,” her mother said. “Or you will hurt yourself.”
Margaret clenched her jaw. “No, I-”
Anderson tightened her belts, she could barely move. The open windows completely revealed the ship in greater detail. All around the edge of the craft sat Roilings, facing inward, and every one of them looked at her with the eyes of her mother.
“Where is Father?” Margaret asked.
She felt the answer first as a wave of bitterness and grief that crashed against her — so hard that she raised her hands to her face. “Your father is gone. When he destroyed Tate, when he used the I-bombs, he tore away his chance at life, at union, he tore himself from the both of us.”
“If only he'd managed to kill you, too,” Margaret said.
“He did,” Arabella said. “My body was destroyed, but I didn't need my body any more. The Roil doesn't require bodies, only thought, such warm and wonderful thought. It took a while to master it, but I have, my darling. And you will too.”
They reached the top of the wall, and there the Roslyn Dawn waited. Two bursts of flame. The iron ship shuddered a moment later, the ship creaking and groaning. The metal bulged inwards, but did not give, no matter how much Margaret wished it to.
The iron ship was quick to return fire.
Accurate and powerful fire, for the Dawn 's engine nacelles blew, as did a large section of the fore skull. Her flagella thrashed at the air, and the Aerokin tipped and fell into Tearwin Meet.
The iron ship’s engines fired, and they were already putting distance between them and the walls of the city. Margaret turned and watched the last flash of the Dawn ’s limbs as she tumbled into the metropolis with its razor- sharp wires, and was lost to sight. The iron ship raced south towards the Roil, towards the purest thought of her mother.
CHAPTER 50
History is a mess of argument. As though it's never quite what it should be. The pieces of a jigsaw cut crude and without thought of the future.
It's the historian's job to make them fit with eloquence and arrogance, and if that doesn't work, a sledgehammer will suffice.
TEARWIN MEET DISTANCE FROM ROIL VARIABLE
The Engine of the World held David’s hand.
It said, “Time and time again the Roil has been beaten back. But this time something different happened. This time the Roil grew so quickly — it was just forty years ago that the Roil conquered this world and was frozen from it. Normally centuries pass before I do what I must.
“And every time, I am activated by someone like you, driven by one of the Old Men, cast from their prison in desperation, just as unknowing as the rest of you. Last time it was Milton and a man called Stagwell Matheson.” The Engine smiled. “A humble shop clerk, would you believe. This time you came to me with Cadell.”
“And if I say no now?” asked David.
“You will walk back through that door, and die. But you will die knowing that the Roil can have its world, that humanity will be scoured from it, or fused wholly with it.”
“And if I walk into the cage?”
“You will be given this choice again. And you will know this world as you have never known it before.”
“And will I die?”
The Engine shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“I don't want to die,” David said. “I don't want anyone to die.”
“Death is a given,” the Engine said. “But realise this. The Roil has already washed over Drift — the last Mother fallen from the sky.” David felt himself fall with that news too. Mother Graine was gone. It said, “Hardacre burns in the south, and a great army crashes against the Underground — that secret place that was never a secret place: a wave of claw, tooth, flame and shadow. And that stronghold will not long remain so.
“To do nothing is to kill all that remains of your world. Are you prepared to let that happen?”
David stood there, looked at the door, then the cage. Thought of the Underground and the people that still fought, and he realised that he wasn't. That he had come all this way for Margaret, for Cadell, for Buchan and Whig. He had killed Old Men. All of it feeling he had no choice, and now, now… he realised that he did have a choice, and that it was the same as theirs.
Without another word, David stepped into the cage.
The cage was dark: it smelt of the dark. Icy and smothering at once. David half imagined he could see stars, points of light that danced and circled.
“I don’t want to do this,” he said, but he knew that for a lie. From the moment he had fallen from his window ledge, choosing to run instead of lie still and die, he had wanted this. No, that wasn’t true, he’d wanted this even before that. When his mother had died, when his father had frozen him out, without ever meaning to. Carnival had offered solace, but this, this was true relief.
Here he could stop a world. Reset it, and make it what it should be. What a monstrous wonderful thing that was. He had a choice, and he had made it. He had no choice at all.
“I’m ready,” he said. The cage closed around him like a fist. A thousand tiny spear points drove into his flesh. Pain, a terrible jabbing pain, and then they began to move.
He shrieked and pushed his hands against the bars and hissed at their stinging energies. The world dropped on him from a great height and at a great speed.
His heart stopped, but the cage tightened further, energies fired and set it beating again.
Blood ran from his eyes and the cage fed the bloody teardrops back into his body. And he screamed — once his heart started beating again — and he could not hear his scream, though his throat threatened to tear itself apart.
The machine gripped him and he stretched, became something that was not him — that the borders of his being could not even begin to contain. Distant engines engaged, machineries more powerful than anything of which he could imagine. But he knew at once that his kind had imagined them, had engineered them.
All this catastrophic force.
And, suddenly, he wanted it to stop.
The machine stung him, ground him down, and ripped his being to shreds until all he could feel was the vast cold of the universe.
