The toolkit, despite having melded with the pattern of light and shadows to the point of vanishing, gave an urgent squeak. A flicker of motion showed as it glanced over its shoulder, oil-shiny eyes gleaming. When it looked back, Benedick followed the line of its gaze and deduced that whatever held its attention so intently must be advancing along the corridor that would lead perspective-up. The one that, if followed, would lead eventually--and through many adventures--to Rule.
With his left hand, Benedick sealed his helm.
He had not long to wait. An armored female figure hove into view down the curve of the tunnel--feet and legs and hips, waist and arms, chest and face. Benedick knew her from her stride before she stood half revealed, and lowered the weapon he'd trained on her shadow. He unsealed his helm again to reveal his face--a sign that he did not mean to provoke combat--but he did not depower.
Instead, he strode forward across the lobby to meet his sister, calling her name.
Chelsea Conn paused at the bottom of the serpentine curve of the passageway, one hand resting on the hilt of a blade at her hip. Not an unblade--there had never been many of those, and as far as Benedick knew they had all been unfashioned when the angel was made--but an impressive weapon nonetheless, potent and storied enough to bear the virtue-name Humility. She studied him a moment, as was her wont, her narrow face unreadable.
He had always fancied that, at such moments, she was deciding what she would feel. When, after slightly longer than a second, a broad smile broke across her face, it did nothing to disabuse him of the conceit.
'Brother!' she cried boldly, tossing her braids back out of her armor, and strode forward with a springing step.
They embraced with a great clatter of reinforced ceramic, armor rattling on armor, fists pounding backplates, making a show of their glad warrior cries. At least from Benedick's perspective, it was not dissembling.
Chelsea wore a gray and violet color-shift, so bands of lavender and plum shimmered across the surface of her armor like light reflecting off opals. She made him wonder a great deal, did Chelsea Conn. She was closed up like a bud, giving no hint of the leaves or petals within. Among all the things he wondered--what she wanted, what she feared--the one currently most on his mind was if she'd chosen those colors with intention, to tweak their father's sensibilities.
Although it was entirely possible she'd never known that Caithness had worn them as well. Alasdair Conn had gone to great lengths to expunge his eldest daughters from the family record, so Benedick would not be surprised if Chelsea had never heard the name.
He could ask her. Perhaps now that their father was dead, he would find the time.
He set her back at arm's length--he was considerably taller--and said, 'You came from Rule.'
She nodded. This time, he did not think the thumbprint shadow that darkened the space between her brows was calculated, but it was too fleeting to be sure of what it meant. She drew a breath and said, 'It's gone.'
He considered his answers and settled upon, 'I know. What did you see?' He held up a hand before she could answer, and amended the question. 'Would you know the Engineer Arianrhod Kallikos on sight?'
'Unless she's changed her face.' Chelsea lifted a shoulder and let it drop.
'Did you see her between Rule and here?'
'Brother mine, I saw a great
He let her see him frown. 'And Rule?'
'Empty.' She shook her head. 'It's all empty. Father's domaine is there. The house, untouched. Intact. But everyone is ...' She gulped air and pushed a braid angrily aside again. 'Well, I looked. And there were chambers I couldn't enter. Someone might have survived, but if they did, I did not find them. I couldn't think of anything to do other than come to Engine and present myself.'
'Ariane and Arianrhod,' he said with brutal flatness, 'killed everyone in Rule. And Ariane consumed them.'
She moved against his hand to break his grip, sidestepping left. He allowed her to go. She walked away, the precision of her step leaving perfect bootprints behind. In profile, a tilted, incongruous nose almost vanished into her face. She said, 'So you are looking for Arianrhod. And where is Ariane?'
'My daughters have avenged the family.'
He'd meant to say it with pride, as if to convince himself of what he felt. What came out was toneless, shriveled--a flat declaration of uncompromising truth.
It turned Chelsea's head to look back at him. Her mouth worked. 'Your daughters.'
'Perceval,' he said. 'And Rien. Perceval is Captain now. It's how we survived the nova.'
'I knew something must have occurred,' she said. 'Captain. In truth?'
He could not speak. He nodded, willing his face still.
And as he had known she would, Chelsea asked, 'And Rien? Surely not the same Rien who served in Rule--'
'The same.'
'Oh, Benedick. She was not there when--'
'No.' Whose voice was that? Surely not his own, ironed flat and colorless. 'She translated. She brought the angels together, and saved the world.' He managed a sidelong glance. She stared at him still and the color had gone from her cheeks. 'Tristen was witness.'
She was a Conn. She didn't ask a question when the answer was implied. Instead, she said, 'And Ariane?'
'She and Perceval dueled. And Perceval consumed her.'
He didn't imagine the upward curl of her lip, the faint smile she chose to hang on an otherwise impassive mask. 'Well. Good for Perceval.'
'Captain,' the angel said. 'Will you not speak with me?'
Perceval firmed her jaw. She felt skin stretch, the pull of muscle against bone, the way her teeth pressed each other. Every motion of her body seemed new and sharp, as if she moved against the dull edge of a knife.
It was not fair to hate the angel.
But hate him she did. Everything he represented, everything he had done to her, and everything he had become. Hated him so her palms slicked and her tongue dried, and she had to resort to her colony's neurochemical controls to keep her hands from shaking with adrenaline.
The past would not stay steady in her mind. That was new. Her colony should remember for her, as perfectly detailed as always. But now her memories seemed a fugue, as if objective reality had somehow slipped askew. There were people inside her, and they pressed at her, demanding. As if they had some right to her mind, her time.
Or as if she were remembering events as perceived through more than one set of synapses. Events, in some cases, that predated her birth by hundreds of years. Events that had occurred a world away from her experience. Events for which she had been present--but now she saw them as if through other eyes. She remembered the neutral heft and temperature of an unblade inertialess in her hand, the salt-metal splash of blood. The memory was not her own, nor was the rush of satisfaction it carried with it. The nausea, though, and the recollected shock of agony that set her wing-stubs stretching against her scars--that was her own, and she held on to it like salvation.
'That's you.'
The angel was just there, in Perceval's peripheral vision, a dark shape in dark clothing, silver hair stark against the darkened bridge beyond. He seemed taller, slimmer than before, with eyes as black as the Enemy. He reached out long, curved fingers and rested them not on Perceval's shoulder, but on the bulkhead nearby. She bit her lip and did not move away.
The angel said, 'It is I.' Apologetically, as though he would make it not be so, were that in his power. 'Some of it. Some is Ariane, and Alasdair. And the Conns before them: Gerald, Felix, Sarah, Emmanuel.'
