Dust

grip on Rien. As they came down the far side of the arch, she leaned close and said in Rien's ear, 'I'm glad you saved me.'

Sometimes people said an obvious thing, and what they meant by it wasn't obvious at all. 'I'm glad, too.'

And then Perceval grabbed her by the arm with both hands and flung her away.

The gravity in the corridor was slight, but definite. Rien half slid, half catapulted into Benedick, who was already turning to catch her. She landed in his arms and he did not fall backward. If he staggered a step, Tristen caught him.

'Stay back.' Perceval stood some meters up the arch of the tube, her hands knotted in fists by her thighs, Pinion flaring, bladed, from her shoulders. Between them, Gavin beat wings slowly, hovering in the light gravity like a moth. 'Please.' 'Perceval—'

'Stay back!' Her head dropped, the tendons of her neck ridging as if she strained at some impossible burden. 'It's the wings.'

Rien might have charged forward, but Benedick's hand was on her shoulder. He pulled her back, clutching, dragging her toward the lock at the bottom of the arch. She fought him, after a moment of shock, trying to reach Perceval.

It never happened.

Pinion flexed. The parasite wings convulsed, Perceval's clenched fists opened as she reached spastically forward, caught at the heart of a brazen, shadowy blur.

An instant later, Gavin's spread wings and tail and talons telescoped, slamming into the sides of the inspection tube. A spiderwork of fine threads grew between them like crystals racing through a supersaturated solution. The tube beyond him shattered. Whatever Perceval might have shouted was lost in the rush of escaping air.

Benedick curled around Rien as they were blown off their feet. He folded her tight, shielded her with his body, and as they tumbled toward the webwork with Gavin spread-eagled at its heart, Rien saw Perceval fall into the embrace of the Enemy, wings dividing and flailing, the fragments all around her full of refracted sun like shattered crystal.

21 oh child, he said, all sorrow

Eager for color, for beauty,

soon discontented

With a world of dust and stones and

flesh too ailing.

— CONRAD AIKEN, The House of Dust

When Pinion brought Perceval into Dust's embrace, she was cold. Frost rimed her lashes, crystallizing from the moist air of his holde like pale mascara. He enfolded her, agitating the air around her, creating friction and with it, gentle warmth. He had oxygenated the atmosphere, increased the light levels, made it ready for a human woman.

Pinion warmed her blood; the link was complete now, and she was as fused to the prosthesis as she had ever been to her engineered wings.

When she was warm, but still semiconscious, Dust stepped into his avatar—taking special care with his dress—and with Pinion's help hoisted her to her feet. The parasite wings walked her to the bed that awaited her and laid her gently down, folding her tight in their shadows. Protection and restraint.

She looked very stark there, all in black. Straps crossed her shoulders, but the pack had been tattered by Pinion's struggles, and Dust asked the wings politely to remove its remnants now. They did so, spitting the rag onto the floor, and while his avatar still stood over Perceval, Dust carried it to be recycled.

His anchore, he realized, was hardly suitable for a mortal guest. Without so much as a gesture, he rearranged himself into chair, table, couch. He brought clean water and fruit and protein.

And then he settled himself to wait.

In minutes, she stirred. Pinion and her own symbiont colony, indivisible now, were scrubbing her blood, oxygenating her tissues, repairing cell walls burst by freezing and the damage done by her own boiling bodily fluids. She would be over the injuries before she had a chance to feel them.

Dust would see to it that she never knew pain again. Never knew doubt, or hunger. And he would try to see to it that she never knew grief, though that was harder to guarantee.

There was no hair on her forehead to brush away, but he reached out anyway, a cool cloth in his hand, and bathed her brow. 'Wake, my beloved.'

Her eyes came open like unshuttered windows. Dust was an imaginative sort; all of the literature the builders had thought worthy, or entertaining, was in his program. He fancied, for a moment, that he could see the suns behind her eyes.

Of course, it was only poetry.

And whatever he thought he saw died when she cringed away from him. 'Fear not,' he said. 'You will come to no harm. Perceval Conn, you are precious to me.'

She awakened warm, and comforted, embraced as if in her mother's arms. But something felt wrong—the voice, the hand on her forehead. When she opened her eyes, she did not recognize her surroundings, or the man who stood over her. It all smelled different, cold.

Uninhabited.

The man was dark, clear-eyed, beautifully dressed and unhandsome, not tall. He murmured endearments and stroked her face again.

She trusted him immediately, and knew that she had no logical reason to do so. 'Rien?'

'She is safe,' he said. 'As are the princes. My brother's servitor protected them.'

'Your brother—'

'Samael,' he said. 'The basilisk is his creature.'

'Space,' Perceval said. She flinched back. Her emotions said trust, and it was hard to think through them. Pheromones, perhaps, or an endorphin cocktail fed her by the parasite wings. She should have hacked them off in the snow, if she had to use the dulled edge of Tristen's broken unblade to do so. 'You're Dust.'

'Jacob Dust,' he said. 'Shipmind, shipsoul. Synthetic sapience. Distributed man. At your service, beloved.'

'I am not—' Something squeezed in her chest when she would have said, not your beloved. It hurt. She gasped.

Was this what Rien felt, when Perceval would not kiss her?

It was just a chemical cocktail. Dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin. Just the drugs of the brain, an evolutionary response to encourage self-interested individuals to risk everything to propagate. Her symbiont could shut it down—should be shutting it down. Something had affected her program.

Pinion. Of course.

She firmed her jaw. 'I am not your beloved. I do not love you.'

She would have edged back, but Pinion lived up to its name. It was like struggling in a cotton wool binding; she might contrive to bang her head upon the pillow or kick her heels, but otherwise she was constrained.

Dust bent down and kissed her forehead. His lips were cool, perfectly resilient. Inhumanly perfect, where Rien's had been warm and rough and damp.