Ashes of Candesce: Book Five of Virga

that's--'

'--What he would have done long before, had I not de-indexed myself,' Keir said calmly. They were staring at him as if he were mad. He swiveled to look out the window pensively. The sky trembled with distant bursts of light. 'It was when the oaks visited that time last year,' he went on quietly. 'They're very secretive, and their support of our research was secret. But they were worried. Somehow, the enemy had found out about us.'

He turned back to Maerta. 'That was the real reason the oak came to see us. It knew A.N. had put a spy in our midst, but it didn't know who it was. All it knew was that it wasn't me. So it found an opportunity to speak to me alone, and it warned me that we'd been compromised.'

Maerta had laid both hands palm-down on the table, and was staring at him intently. 'A week before you de- indexed, you told me you'd made a breakthrough. We thought--well, we didn't know what to think. You suddenly panicked, said you'd gone too far, learned something nobody was supposed to know. It was ridiculous, but all the more frightening because you seemed sincere.'

Keir nodded, half-smiling. 'I was part of a preindustrial-style drama society, oh, many decades ago. I'm glad my acting is still believable.'

'But wiping your own mind ... neotenizing yourself. Neither of those were an act.'

He shook his head, saying, 'They couldn't be. I didn't know who the traitor was, either. Whoever they were, the oak warned me they had tapped scry. I couldn't tell anyone what I'd found--not in the necessary detail--except through scry. He or she would learn it all; and if I kept it to myself, it was only a matter of time before the spy moved against me.'

Maerta took a deep breath and said to the others, 'And that was when he came to me and told me he was going to de-index himself.' Glyphs of surprise exploded through scry; she shrugged. 'He said it would be temporary, but he wouldn't tell me why he was doing it.'

'But--' Thoun, one of the founders of the Renaissance, shook his head. 'You could have come to us. To any of us--'

'Come to you? Come to you?' His voice was rising. 'You were completely ignorant of the situation, all of you!' He stood up. 'You thought we were safe here, or, oh, even worse! You never really believed in the danger. You never thought they would come after us. You never looked over your shoulders. And I was too distracted, I was so close for so long I couldn't raise my head out of the problem ... It's just a good thing the oaks were watching out for us.'

'But Gallard...' Maerta glanced around the table. 'What happened that night in Virga?'

Keir closed his eyes, and heard the others gasp--for they were there now, seeing the tree and the shadowed pathways through the eyes of the dragonfly he'd carried with him into Virga. The perspective swooped and dove, and Keir smiled as he seemed to spiral with it, dizzyingly, above the treetops. The gardens of the palace at Aurora emerged, and again he felt the others react. Emoticons flooded scry as all of Renaissance saw the wonders of a Virgan city for the first time.

But something had moved below. The dragonfly plummeted, returning to Keir, who stood with a hand held half-out at the base of a machine-augmented oak.

Someone was running up behind him, revealed and hidden in flashes of shadow and city light. It was Gallard, and he had a sword in his hand.

He raised it, his face twisted into a grimace, and Keir saw himself react. Every time he'd reviewed this recording, he'd felt a sympathetic prickle between his shoulder blades and half-consciously hunched, and he did so this time, too. The Keir in the dragonfly's video dove to one side, and Gallard's strike missed.

He rolled to his feet and for a second Keir saw himself smile. The others wouldn't understand that, but he remembered: for just an instant, he'd reveled in having the reflexes and power of a young body. Despite his shock at the attack, he'd felt powerful.

The dragonfly lowered to head-height. Gallard hadn't noticed it. He advanced on Keir with his blade raised.

'You're not surprised,' Gallard accused; his words appeared as subtitles in the recording, thanks to the dragonfly's lip-reading program.

Keir had laughed, half from adrenaline, half from contempt. 'I'm only surprised at how badly you handled all of this. How long have you been working for them?'

'There's no 'them,'' said his former teacher. 'There never was. This collective fantasy that somehow you could band together and defeat the final evolutionary stage of life is ridiculous. The Renaissance is pathetic.'

Keir was backing away. 'Then why pay attention to us at all? If we weren't a threat--'

Gallard lunged and Keir twisted away. 'Because you're a rallying point for every lunatic species that wants to advance its own cause. Don't you know why the arena exists? It's here as a place where we can all learn to get along. Artificial Reality is the glue that keeps us together. The species that rise to the top should be at the top, and the ones at the bottom should be at the bottom. They shouldn't try to game the system to their own advantage. They shouldn't conspire ... They shouldn't cheat--' He lunged again and this time his blade ripped through Keir's sleeve.

Keir jumped backward again, but this time he'd tripped. He fell. Before he could rise Gallard was kneeling on him, one knee across his chest. Gallard raised his sword.

Keir had made a last desperate plea, but not to Gallard's humanity. Whenever he watched this he thought, Why didn't I appeal to our friendship? To all we'd been through together? But something in Gallard's eyes had warned him that they were beyond that. So, he'd flinched back, hitting his head on the ground, and said, 'Is Candesce a cheat?'

Gallard hesitated, and in that moment something black had snaked out of the air to wrap itself around his chest. Gallard tried to shout in surprise but it turned into a whuff! sound as all the air was driven out of his body. It wasn't visible from the dragonfly's perspective, but Keir saw the astonishment in his eyes as the silver-threaded tree branch plucked him into the air. It rose in a smooth motion and suddenly Gallard was flying, limbs flailing, into the city-starred sky.

The dragonfly moved, swerving around to hover next to Keir's head as he sat up. Something crashed through branches elsewhere in the grove, but all Keir had noticed at the time were the two gigantic, glowing green eyes that had appeared, winking, in front of him.