malfunctioning. She opened her eyes, expecting energy-saving darkness, and reached out left-handed to grope for the timer switch.
Her fingertips brushed the cool nanomesh of Perceval's parasite wing, and she jerked it back with a gasp, sucking her fingertips as if she'd burned them. 'Perceval?'
Yes. Once she was awake, even half awake, she was unlikely to forget again where she was. Her pulse hammered in her throat, a panicky adrenaline reaction, but as soon as she identified it her new internal senses—her colony, her symbiont—adjusted the level of worry to something more sensible and appropriate.
'Oh, space,' she said, and pushed at Perceval's arms. She had to get out. It wasn't her. There was an alien holding her, but worse, there was an alien in her, and it was making decisions for her.
Which, predictably, scared her even more.
Perceval's skin felt wrong. Fragile, papery. Hot. Rien thought if she pulled at it, it would slip and tear like the friable skin over a blister. Perceval moaned. Her breath smelled cloying.
She was sick, and Rien didn't know what to do. She struggled free. Perceval's parasite wings held her in place in the corridor, but Rien kicked too hard and went tumbling. She smacked one wall, smearing fluorescent fungus across the plating, her left arm first numbed from wrist to shoulder and then searingly alive. Tears stung, swelled in the corners of watering eyes, broke from acceleration and spread. But she got her right arm and her legs out, spread them wide—though it was counterintuitive—and slowed her rate of spin.
Rien was half competent in microgravity. But this was different. She was better, faster, seeing trajectories and velocities with her inner eye as if they were projected on a screen. And something was building in her awareness: a model or structure, a schematic of surrounding corridors that stretched beyond what she could immediately perceive. Echoes, she thought. Like a bat.
She bounced off another wall, redirected to the far end of the corridor, and managed to hit with bent knees and take the edge off her velocity. And then she was coming back up the hall at Perceval, but slower now and in a more controlled fashion.
And Perceval was braced.
Rien struck Perceval's pinions with both palms. The left arm buckled, but that didn't matter; it had helped absorb some of the energy. The pinions were not hard, not like hitting the decking, and Rien managed to catch hold of an edge and hold on. 'Space and ashes,' Rien said.
Perceval hung in midcorridor, suspended between extended pinions, her body curled into a fetal huddle and folded inside another pair of wings as if in a translucent clamshell. They looked like smoke, but when Rien braced herself against the extended wing and reached out to touch her sister, the surface was smooth and quite cool.
Even through the cocooning colony, Rien could see Perceval's face shining with sweat, though, and the inflamed red streaks like spiderwebs surrounding the attachment points of her pinions. She tugged, but she had nothing to leverage against except Perceval's other wings—of which there were currently in total six, the four spanning the corridor and the two within which she slept—and it was useless.
'Oh, please,' Rien said. 'I have to get her someplace with water and food.'
The pinion shifted, relaxing under Rien's hand. Abruptly, she realized how cold she was, the sweat of too- warm sleeping chilling on her skin, the ends of damp hair freezing. Perceval's pinions might have trapped the warmth when Rien was inside them, but they were themselves as cold as the corridor's frigid air. And Rien was wearing nothing but the sweeping knit trousers, cardigan, and strap-shoulder top.
'Please,' she said again, fearful she had imagined the response. 'Perceval, you have the map. I need you. Open your damned pinions.'
When the shell cracked open, the warm air within escaped in a scroll of mist and flaking frost. Perceval floated limp as the third pair of pinions silently merged into the mass of the parasite wings. Rien stretched out from where she clung and touched Perceval's cheek.
Hot and moist, and Rien's fingers smelled of sickness when she pulled them back.
'Perceval.' Her own pleading voice might have belonged to another. 'That's good, sweetheart. Now open your eyes.'
It was what Head might have said. What Head
Slowly, the pinions relaxed further, and with unhurried motions unlike last night's frantic scuttling, began to bear Perceval and Rien forward. The feathertips—well, what would have been the feathertips, if the pinions had real feathers—bent against the corridor bulkheads, and they glided along as if borne by a giant, mechanical, four-legged spider.
Rien released her grip on the leading edge of the wing and instead caught Perceval's shoulder, floating beside her, huddled close to share warmth. It was easy in the microgravity.
The parasite wings paced along the corridor for some fifteen minutes, during which Rien's dark-adapted eyes saw nothing but Perceval and deck plates and the teal and lime bioluminescence of various kinds of fungus. And a school of ship-fish, a half-dozen of the oxygen-breathing scavengers floating midair, glass-transparent except for eyes and guts and teeth and streaks of blue and vermilion neon. They hung momentarily in a cloud, and then were gone in a flicker of winfings.
Rien, light-headed from cold and poor oxygen saturation, wondered if they had come through whatever j crevice the atmosphere and spores had entered through. She would not like to be the sparrow hawk whose dinner depended on catching one.
Eventually, the pinions paused before a hatchway like a dozen others they had passed. The burning pain in Rien's left arm had dulled to the sharp occasional twinges of a bone bruise, but without releasing Perceval's shoulders, Rien was able to grab and shake her face. 'Here?'
Perceval's eyes were crusted yellow along the lashes. She shivered, and Rien's clothes were wet with Perceval's musty sweat. Whatever the infection, her symbiont was having a fight.
'Open it,' she said, her voice cracked and sticky. 'We might be safe in here.'
Rien tried the palm panel, but the hatch—like the previous ones—was dead. Instead, she undogged it manually, made sure Perceval's pinions would hold her in place, and—with one hand holding her sister's—pulled the hatch open.
At least she knew it wasn't the Enemy on the other side. Overpressure pushed the door into her hand. Her ears popped painfully, and Rien made a small sharp noise.
The atmosphere that rushed out to surround them was warm and moist, scented pleasantly of chlorophyll and richly composted loam. Birds sang; the interior of the hatch cover trailed vines heavy with unripe slipskin grapes, and a drone of insects broke what Rien now realized was the humming, mechanical unsilence of the cold corridor. There was gravity beyond the door, and she swung forward half deftly to get her feet into it and feel the strength.
The ship-fish had not come from here.
Rien swung again, using Perceval's pinions like monkey bars. She generated enough momentum to carry her over the threshold and landed barefoot on mossy soil that squished water over her toes.
She pulled her injured arm against her chest, hugging it for comfort, and stepped forward. 'Perceval,' she said. 'You found it.'
There was no sound behind her. She turned; Perceval still floated amid the charcoal sketch of her parasite wings. Her eyes were only glassy slits behind her lashes.
'Pinion,' Rien said, feeling foolish, 'please follow.'
They moved forward, smooth and graceful, with the speed and assurance of a giant spider. The trailing wing brushed the vine-hung hatch closed again, and Rien heard the thump of bolts as it sealed.
Then she also heard a flurry of wings, not Perceval's, but smaller and soft-feathered. Something white as star-shine and bigger than a rooster descended before her, fluttering hard.
The wings were so pale the blood tinted the light shining through them blue, the span a little more than the length of one of Rien's legs. The animal had fishhook talons like a hawk, a long neck leading to a cockatoo-crested head with a heavy, curved, lacquer-black beak. But the eyes were tight-shut, eyelids like the crumpled crepe of an old man's throat, and the tail that coiled around the branch it landed on lashed, scaled and patterned silver-on- blue-white.
