She wished she'd been able to protect him, dissuade him from coming to Coronade. If he were still at the Refuge, then there'd be hope. On her lone visits to other worlds, she'd sometimes thought of him as a low, flickering candle-flame in a huge night, a glow of promise on the edge of the galaxy. Now the flame was sputtering out.
It wasn't so long since she'd been a carefree, self-absorbed young woman on Maes Far. That Selene Ada often felt like a different person, now. Growing up, the presence of Concordance had always been there in the back of her mind, a constant background note of discord, rarely intruding upon her conscious thoughts. She was a very different person now. Her whole world had been destroyed – quite literally – and everything had changed. She'd set out to fight Concordance, attempt to rid the galaxy of its malign influence, and now here she was, rapidly running out of oxygen upon a spinning lump of rock a long way from any place she knew. She'd joined Ondo upon his trail through the stars, but it had led only to death: to the dead star whose nebulous ghost filled her sky and, soon, to the death of her and Ondo too.
The Warden entity at the Depository had seemed to think that she was some kind of saviour. You will return with the dawn? it had asked. At last there is light, the glow of the dawn before the sun rises. It was clear it had been badly misguided in its prophecies. She wasn't going to save anything. Not even herself.
They could perhaps have retraced their steps through the archways and the metaspace tunnels to return to the ruins of Coronade, but they'd agreed in Ondo's last few minutes of consciousness not to do so, not to place themselves in the hands of Concordance. This lonely death was better than any drawn-out end their pursuers might choose to give them. Better that their secrets died with them rather than having them ripped from their minds by the Augurs of Omn. The Refuge with its recovered scraps of history were safely hidden. Perhaps some unknown traveller would find it one day, and bring the memories back to life.
Conscious thought slipped away from Selene for a moment, and there was only the blazing cloud of ionized gas and plasma from the destroyed star to fill her eyes. Strange how something so violently destructive could create something so beautiful. The fragment of rock, crowned by its archway, spun rapidly, tumbling through space from the blast of the sun's explosion. As a result, its tumbling day was short, but there was no separation of light and darkness. A blur of fulgent light surrounded her. The colours were dazzling; she felt them filling her universe, pulling her in, promising to draw her to themselves. The thought was comforting. It would be so easy to let go, let the light absorb her. Let Concordance win.
No. She fought back, forcing herself to kick for the surface, out of the depths and back to awareness. Her biomechanical side reacted to her conscious instruction, pushing more adrenaline through her blood vessels, giving her another burst of life.
The irony was that her artificial tissues could easily have been made to survive a zero-oxygen environment – except that she'd insisted on having them fully integrated with what remained of her biology during her reconstruction. Ondo had given her the choice early on; her flesh could be an adjunct, sustained and maintained as long as it was viable, then discarded, placenta-like, pupa-like. He'd offered her that immortality, but she'd recoiled in horror. If all of the cells and tissues of her original body were gone, then who was she? In what sense was she still Selene Ada?
It was one of the last things he'd said to her, before his eyes closed: “I should have insisted.”
“I wouldn't have let you.”
He'd actually smiled. “I should have done it anyway, and not told you until now.”
“Did you?”
“Regrettably, no. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for all of this. I should have made you lead a normal life, safe on a planet somewhere.”
“And I told you, that life would never have worked for me. Not after Maes Far.”
Her two halves were inextricably intertwined, just as she'd demanded, and that meant she was doomed. The blast wave from the stellar extinction event had stripped away its planets' atmospheric envelopes, turning viable biosphere into bare rock, and the only breathable air she and Ondo had was that which they'd brought with them. She'd consumed less of her suit's oxygen than Ondo had, but in the end, it wasn't going to make any difference.
Still she fought. She would go back to Coronade, face down Concordance. Once, early on in her reconstruction, she might have given in, but not now. Conceding defeat let them win. Time to stop following the trails left by others and force a new one of her own. Since she'd started flying in the Radiant Dragon, Ondo had often accused her of taking crazy risks, and to herself she admitted that he was probably right: her fury and desire for revenge did make her take unnecessary chances. Sometimes it felt like her own survival didn't matter much anymore. Why should she get to
