Chill

'Cecelia, as in Alasdair's second wife?'

Gavin fanned pale wings for balance. 'It didn't end well.'

Mallory pushed against the concealed door. It had been repaired many times and no longer operated automatically. But expert counterweighting ensured that, despite its mass, it swung open lightly to Mallory's exertion.

The chamber within was small, a sanctum with a single 'chair'--of sorts--sculpted of the living earth of the deck. The seat had humped arms, a high back that sloped like a pyramid, and a surface upholstered in deep, springy grass. One soft light shone down on it from above, filtered as if through leaves. A mirror hung before it, the surface lightly rippling in response to every vibration and change of air pressure as they moved into the room. It all could have been the throne room of some nature deity.

This was not the complex of labs and cloning tanks that haunted Gavin's borrowed memories. He craned over his shoulder, wishing Head were still close enough to ask, but sie was long gone. Instead, Gavin hopped to the back of the chair and turned to face Mallory, slightly surprised when the necromancer did not sit. Instead, much circling ensued, Mallory circumnavigating the tiny chamber and trailing fingers along the walls. 'Is this isolated as well?'

'If the door were shut,' Gavin answered. 'Is it safe to seal ourselves in?'

'Is anything?' Mallory crossed to the chamber door and tugged it until the latch clicked. Arms crossed, leaning against the now-seamless panel, Mallory said, 'You can come out now. We won't hurt you.'

No answer but silence.

The necromancer sighed, stretched arms wide like a dramatized conjuror, and arched fingers back until Gavin heard the joints crack. 'Come out, come out, wherever you are.'

'There could be dozens of angel fragments lurking in shielded corners of the world,' Gavin said. 'They may not have any awareness to speak of. They may have had everything consumed but their purpose, or some scrap of identity, or--'

'The ghosts of angels,' Mallory said. 'Their revenants.'

'Junk DNA,' Gavin said. 'Fragments of reassorted viruses.' Gavin felt the earth of the throne separate beneath scoring talons. The colony within it moved to heal the damage at once, grass growing cleanly over the cuts. 'What a stroke of good fortune we thought to bring along a necromancer,' he said. Then he settled back smugly, neck drawn in a tight S-curve, and added, 'He's in the throne.'

'Well then. It remains to lure him out.' Mallory moved forward and stroked the grassy arm of the chair.

'The fragmentary angel? The same fragmentary angel, do you suppose?'

'A fragmentary angel. Once we get him out, we can ask if it's the same one who is haunting the kitchen.' Mallory crouched before the throne and dug the fingers of both hands into the earth with a grimace. 'Come out, come out, wherever you are--'

When the necromancer drew back cupped, separated hands, something shimmered between them. A swirl of nanotech, a tiny fragment of a colony. Maybe--just maybe--the scrap of an angel. Tautly, as if breath control were necessary to keep from blowing the fragile thing away, Mallory said, 'Gavin? He would get lost in me.'

Gavin shook out his wings in discontent, tail coiling against the backslope of the throne. Mallory was asking him to take in the broken colony, shelter it among his own symbiont, give it strength and a place to grow until they could recompile and reboot it. 'You think you know who that is.'

'I think if it fought off a plague, then it's likely Samael. I think we need to get him safely away, and retrieve the rest of what's left of him, before Tristen sits in this chair.'

'You hope it's Samael.'

'Who else would think to use a kitchen in Rule and the shielded biosystem core as his refuge of last resort?'

Gavin hopped closer, down to the edge of the seat, but did not reach out to sweep the colony to his breast. 'What if it's Asrafil?'

Mallory held up the hands, the angel cradled between them. 'Then, sweetheart, you eat him.'

In the courtyard of Rule, Tristen Conn had to stop and lean against an olive tree. He could make a pretense that it was the ache of mending bones that led him to prop himself against a trunk just as cracked, but the truth was that being here hurt worse than any of the damage from the acceleration tank.

Some of what hurt was the quiet, the way the uncollected olives indented the healing earth beneath his soles. And some of what hurt was the Homecoming, after so much lost and so many years gone by. Neither one seemed likely to respond to anything so simple as medication and meditation, the symbiotic and mental discipline that had seen him through years in the dark. He felt his colony race to normalize his neurochemical load, support the limbic system and blood sugar levels, maintain blood pressure and heart rate. It was an electrochemical mask of serenity, a cloak over the fury and grief he would have chosen otherwise to feel.

He crouched, long, aching legs folding awkwardly, and raked his hands through ragged grass. Tangled strands encircled his finger joints, stretching and parting when he tugged. The grass remained perfectly manicured--the ghostly machine gardeners setting things right even when there were no overseers to direct them.

Rule's maintenance colony--which should be possessed by Nova now, and inexplicably wasn't--tickled the edges of Tristen's own. He found the resilient ovals of two ripe, silver-black olives in the grass, rolled them between his fingers, and picked them up.

If he put them in his mouth in this state, just as they were off the tree, the alkalinity would pucker his mucous membranes and burn his tongue. Inedible unless processed--well, no: edible, perhaps, if you were Exalt, but Tristen was not that desperate now--and still the staff of life. Someone, sometime, had figured out how to render this tiny, loathsome fruit into delicious and essential oil and flesh. The olive, far from being vile, was transformed by technology and ingenuity into a resource so indispensable as to be regarded as sacred by every ancient culture that had encountered it.

He leaned against the trunk of the olive tree once more and dented the flesh of its fruit with his nail. When he was young, he and Aefre had dared each other to chew unprocessed olives from these selfsame trees, to hold them in their mouths as long as they could stand the bitterness. The first time she'd kissed him had not been beneath this tree--it had been in the hallway near the kitchens, and afterward she'd claimed a lock of his hair as her prize. But this was where they had married, under their father's gaze, and this was where the procession that had carried her body down into the graveyard of the holdes had departed Rule. And it was here, on this very spot, that Benedick had executed Cynric, and her blood had soaked the grass under his feet.

A ghost of her colony might still inhabit the colony in the earth here, in the flesh of the fruit in his hand.

In a moment, Tristen would collect his thoughts, collect himself, and walk forward into Rule. He would pass down the hall, and the portraits of his brothers and his sisters, living and dead, including the three that his father had ordered turned and nailed to the wall. And he would come face-to-face with what he feared most--the black- draped one of Aefre, leaning on a scabbarded sword almost as tall as she, her hair falling across her forehead in springy coils like yellow ribbon stripped against a blade.

He wasn't sure yet how he would look at her, when he passed. He would deal with that in a moment. Just as soon as his legs stopped aching quite so much.

He was still leaning against the olive tree--gathering himself, surely that was all--when Head came to greet him. As with so many things, he could have predicted exactly how it played out. Sie was still Head--virtually unchanged from the images stored in his symbiotic memory, except for having grown slightly stouter and slightly more lined, and Tristen thought the apron was new. That was to be expected, though. A Mean who was so valued by hir masters as Head was--and always had been--could expect a life as indeterminate as an Exalt's. And Head had never quite been a Mean like others, being as perfect for hir job as Cynric had made hir--back when Cynric made so many things.

Head still bustled as Head always had. Short steps bobbed hir briskly over the pavement and then the lawn. Sie plowed up to him like a cargo tug, stopped abruptly enough that hir toes furrowed the earth underneath, and-- fists on hips--glared up at him until Tristen expected hir to reach right up, stand on tiptoe, and twist his earlobe between chastising fingers.

'Hello, Head,' he said, holding out his right hand.

There was a long pause. Then sie muttered 'Space you!' and threw hirself into his arms.

It might have been ridiculous--Tristen was half a meter taller--but the tears that wet the breastplate of his