Dust

the plum was cool to the touch—she still weighed it in her other hand—this was warm, though Rien could not say if it was from the suns or from Mallory's hand.

'Eat,' said the magician in the tree, and Rien lifted the fruit to her lips and bit in.

It wasn't like an apple, or any crisp fruit, where you might sink your teeth in and lever a piece away from the orb. She bit through, faint resistance of the skin and then concupiscent flesh. Juice slicked her cheeks and chin, coursed down her forearm, dripped from her elbow. The flavor was—intense. Honeyed, but not cloying, complex and buoyant.

She hadn't words.

And then she had plenty of words, but none of them were her own.

He was Chief Engineer Conrad Ng, and he had passed through scared and into resigned. His symbiont was failing; there was a limit to the radiation damage that it could repair, and that limit had been reached around the time his flesh began sloughing from his bones. But he was concentrating, as he died. Concentrating hard, on what he knew, on everything recorded in the soft rotting tissue of his brain.

Because while he was dying, a portion of his colony might live. And with it, a portion of his knowledge.

Rien gagged. But Mallory's hand cupped over her own, and Mallory's voice urged, 'Eat,' and Rien bit into the fruit again.

This time, her own salt flavored it.

Knowledge that would be needed. The ship was damaged beyond repairing. The strike had taken out the main reactor and ruptured the backup; it was in sealing what was left of the core that Ng had also sealed his fate.

They were limping. They were—

'Eat,' Mallory said, and Rien choked down the last bite.

There was a binary star, close, but unstable. They might reach it in time to rig solar panels. It might have a habitable world, something that could be mined in a hurry, before the next solar event.

And if it didn't, the Jacob's Ladder could survive in orbit indefinitely. They could park it close enough for light, far enough—hopefully— to be out of danger of the binary system's occasional violent flares.

Until they could repair it. Or until its stressed, jury-rigged systems failed catastrophically.

Already, there were riots among the passengers. There was a rift among the crew. Com thought they should press on, risk it all on a farther, more stable star. Some of them thought they should try to turn back. Personally, Ng thought that should be a shooting offense.

Com couldn't do a damned thing without Engineering.

Chief Engineer Ng was selfishly glad that he was going to be gone before things got any worse.

Rien came back to herself in a snap. The peach pit was clenched in her hand; Mallory gently uncoiled her fingers, knelt down—while Rien stood shaking, wishing she could lick the stickiness off her fingers and not daring— and nudged the moss aside to plant the pit beneath.

'He's dead,' Rien said, when she had gathered herself. Her voice startled her. It sounded so strong, and so calm.

Mallory glanced up, sunlight catching on the edges of that mess of dark brown hair in a tawny halo, and answered with pursed lips and a shaken head: 'I'm a necromancer, sweet. What did you think that meant?'

12 the opposite of dying

Love does not help to understand

The logic of the bursting shell.

—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

In comparison to what had come before their interlude in the Heaven, the next stage of their journey was almost pleasant. Which said more for the hardships of plunging directly from captivity to space and from space into a running gun battle than for any luxury of the current situation, because when Mallory had offered them a guide and a map, nothing had been mentioned of the first kilometer-and-a-half of the journey being a crawl through abandoned access tunnels.

Perceval sheathed herself in her parasite wings— deployed, they were bulky and awkward in the confined space—and pulled herself onward doggedly on her elbows behind Rien and the basilisk. Rien had it better: she was shorter, and could scoot forward on her hands and knees, although trying to avoid crushing Gavin's tail looked like a challenge.

The shafts had not been designed for long-distance travel, and frankly, had only been meant to be entered by human agents in catastrophic emergencies. In the moving time, the ancestors of evolved nanotools like Gavin would have performed the bulk of the maintenance.

Now, the tunnel was a dark, irregular tube, its sides laced with bruising protrusions under the colonies of pale parasitical bromeliads that grew from the pressed and extruded walls. It was impossible to move without breaking the waxy leaves of the plants. They popped and snapped under Perceval's hands and feet, releasing a clear, slightly gelatinous fluid with the green smell of aloe. Small things scuttled or hopped away, startled by the noise of their passage, or the blue radiance shed by Gavin and by Pinion, which allowed the travelers to see.

'Isn't it odd,' Rien said, when they had been alternately climbing and crawling for a while, 'that things have evolved to take advantage of every niche in the world? It didn't happen like that back on Earth, did it?'

Perceval bit her lip when she would have hushed Rien. Of course, Rien was not an Engineer. Earth was nothing to her but a name, something she might have been taught about in ecology. She didn't know how close to the heresy of the Go-backs she trod. 'They were helped,' Perceval said. 'Camael and the bioengineers gave some colonies a special program, when they still could. Before Metatron died. It force-mutates. Not humans, of course —'

'Funny you should mention Metatron.' Rien spoke between small grunts of effort as she levered herself over a humped obstacle. It was impossible, under a layer of ridged tree-ears, to tell what the shape might once have been. But now, it was covered with rather more edges than it had once been. 'Mallory did, too.'

'Your brain is optimized for pattern-sensing,' Gavin commented. 'And chatter.'

Whether the basilisk meant her to or not, Perceval laughed. And after a moment, Rien—unsulky—laughed as well. Perceval reached forward and patted her sister's ankle in praise, surprised when Rien pulled it forward quickly. Perhaps her feet were ticklish.

'What were you in the before?' Rien asked—obviously of Gavin, not Perceval, who had not been born then. 'A welder?'

'Laser-cutting torch,' Gavin replied, fluttering his wings as he hop-flapped to the top of the next obstacle. 'Ah. There's the halfway point, fair maidens.'

Perceval groaned. 'Gavin, I don't mean to complain. But why are we going this way?'

'Because I was instructed by the necromancer to lead you astray, exhaust you, and then gnaw your bones,' he answered, hopping down the other side of the bulge he'd been perched on. 'Unfortunately, I only have a beak,