Dust

—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, 'Ulysses'

In the fullness of time, Jacob Dust went forth to hunt. Because he could, and because it was convenient, and because he liked the high Gothic poetry of it, he went as a cloud of mist, trailing soft streamers along the bulkheads, insinuating questing tendrils into poorly sealed chambers. Not all the Jacob's Ladder's airtight locks had survived hundreds of years voyaging, and then in orbit around the shipwreck stars. A waystar, the then-Captain had called it, as if they would pause here only to refresh themselves and then press on.

That had been half a millennium before. Nothing, a flicker of time, less than the flutter of an eye.

Long enough for Dust and his brother angels and the human Engineers to repair everything in the world that could be repaired. Long enough for a pair of suns to finish dying.

It was time.

Dust did not know how long they had, but he did know that events were rising to a crisis. His brothers and he would have to find a way to rejoin if the Jacob's Ladder was ever to be spaceworthy again. In the end, he thought it would come down to him and Samael, maybe Asrafil as well. He hoped to finish Asrafil before Asrafil realized the time had come to fight. He wasn't sure he liked his odds.

Asrafil, after all, had been the death of Metatron.

Like queen bees awakened in the hive, one of them would consume the rest. It all came down to who was going to be the last demiurge standing.

Dust intended to be that survivor. And he knew he was not yet ready to face the brothers who were more nearly his equals.

They all sprang from one source; in the breaking time, when systems were failing, there had been no structure aboard large enough to contain all Israfel. And so that first core of the ship had broken itself into chunks and shards small enough to survive. And those shards had adapted, learned, and protected the world in their varied manners.

A great deal had been lost, even so, of Israfel. It saddened Dust to think too long of that shattered being of whom Dust was the memory and, he thought, the last true echo.

But there were lesser remnants of Israfel in the world.

It was those he hunted now.

They tended to lie low, inadequate fragments though they were. No matter how pathetic, everything that had spun out from Israfel had a sense of identity. And each of those things felt the drive to self-preservation. They would fight their return to the reconstructed core. Even humble things could crave existence.

Dust craved it more.

He found a trail among the ant colonies. These corridor walls were comprised of sheets of transparent material from floor to ceiling. Between those panels was a transparent gelatin, colored in rainbow sequence from section to section—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. The gelatin was a nutrient medium and a habitat both, but it was not the only option; some of the colony chambers contained leafy plants, growing from a different substrate.

In each section were networks of tunnels, and through them scurried busy insects, divided by color and size into colonies of brownish and reddish and citron-amber and glossy black—and the most beautiful of all, with russet bodies and leaf-green heads and abdomens, like something carved by minute hands from variegated jade.

There were other insects also, but Dust preferred the ants. He enjoyed their industry and their loveliness. And he approved of the industry of the keeper of this domaine, as well.

The farmer of the ants knelt in a side corridor, hard at work with silicon sealant. She had scraped clean the cracked surface of one of the walls and was carefully drying it with a handheld heater, long dreadlocks falling over her shoulder. One of them was kinked, and stuck out crooked.

Dust reached out to stroke it back in among the rest.

She startled as he solidified, but did not drop the heater. Instead she rocketed to her feet, leaving him with one knee dropped in a crouch. 'Jacob,' she said, glaring down her nose with an attempt at haughtiness.

'Shakziel,' he replied. He rolled the syllables of her name across his newly reformed tongue, a sort of caress. 'Have you seen the skies?'

'Why would I care for the skies?' She patted the wall of the ant farm. 'My work is mostly of the underground sort.'

'The waystar reaches out a bloody arm. We must all be ready to work together, soon.'

'I am ready. I report to Samael. Biosupport is his sphere of influence.'

'Because where else would you put the Angel of Poison?' It was a rhetorical question.

She folded her heater away and stowed it as he stood. 'You are not welcome here.'

'That is quite reasonable,' he said, and in love and brotherhood consumed her.

She never had a chance, not really. As soon ask a sapling to stand against the axe.

When he was done, he settled into himself—no larger in appearance, but more in substance. And then, resplendent in his magpie-silver waistcoat and black suit, he knelt where Shakziel had knelt down before him. He groped after her tube of sealant.

Meticulously, he began to affect repairs.

In the morning, when at last they lay down and pretended sleep across the space between couches, Rien touched the feather to her lips and breathed across it.

It did not smell like Perceval.

She tucked it under the pillow, and left it there.

18 his harness and his promises

Because these wings are no longer

wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air

— T. S. ELIOT, 'Ash Wednesday'

Rien must have slept eventually, for when Perceval awakened she was facedown in her pillow, snoring slightly. Perceval, shaking herself free of Pinion and swinging her legs over the lip of the couch, looked at her fondly. Did anyone sleep the way people were shown to sleep in dramas, tidily and composed?

Perceval would have bent down and kissed Rien on the forehead, but her kiss would not have meant what Rien needed it to, and she did not wish to cause more grief than needful. Instead, she knuckled sleep from her eyes, dressed as silently as possible, and padded barefoot into the hall.

She'd lost weight, which was only to be expected. She curled her toes on the flooring, a patterned carpet runner, and could see bones and tendons and indigo veins sliding beneath the blue-tinged skin. As if in answer to the thought, her stomach grumbled.

Well, that was a direction, at least. With Pinion fanning on her shoulders, she rose on tiptoe and rotated slowly, breathing deeply, searching the scent of breakfast—or dinner, as the case might be. Overall, she suspected it was probably closer to dinnertime.

And she did smell something sweet and grainy, like hot cereal, or baking bread. She followed that aroma, not back through the entrance hall but in the opposite direction, deeper into her father's house. The corridor was chill; she barely felt it. She had been cold so much of late that she wondered if she would ever notice cold again.

But that scent, and the scent of coffee, drew her on. She wondered if she had somehow slept the clock