Grail

He ducked to get through the door before it finished opening, and he didn’t quite straighten up when he stepped inside. “Hey,” he said. “How is my favorite niece holding up?”

The light touch was the right touch, in this case. Perceval straightened.

“Freaked out,” she admitted. She stepped toward Tristen, meeting him halfway across the garden of the Bridge deck while Nova allowed herself to fade back into the landscape. Literally faded into the landscape, vanishing by inches like the Cheshire cat. Making her withdrawal ostentatious would accomplish the opposite of her desire, which was to allow Perceval and Tristen the freedom for a tolerably private and comfortable conversation. But she could soften her edges, shift herself out, and blur into the background, until they did not notice she had left them more or less alone.

   Perceval might still be his favorite niece—his only niece, in the aftermath of Arianrhod and Ariane’s destruction of much of the Conn family—but Tristen had come to accept that she was a woman of maturity and authority, and not the grown girl who had saved his life some decades ago. But unless he was careful, he still saw that skinny, gamine Knight in all her freshly maimed vulnerability. It was the protective urge—the one he would have exercised toward the daughter of his body if that daughter were still, in her own person, living.

But Perceval didn’t need a protector. She didn’t need a surrogate parent, especially now. No matter how paternal Tristen was tempted to feel toward her, what she needed was a First Mate: a collaborator, a dogsbody, and—occasionally—a friend.

He frowned at her now, studying her face—the sharp jaw and small nose, the high forehead over deep-set eyes, the architecture of pride and knowledge and competence that the sharp lines of grief could not diminish. She drew her chin back, straightening so he could imagine the stubs of her wings working under her tunic. “What are you looking at?”

“The best Captain on the ship,” he answered. “Who needs lunch. And probably yesterday’s dinner, too. Have you eaten?”

She started to shake him off with a hand gesture, but stopped herself. He wondered if it was honesty or concern over revealing too much fragility. After a moment, she licked her lips and glanced away.

“The Captain is the ship,” he reminded her, although she was already rueful. “Take care of yourself or you can’t take care of us.”

Nova would have been pressing her to eat. As evidence, a bench beside Perceval’s chair already had covered dishes set on it, but the Angel didn’t command the same moral authority with Perceval that Tristen could. Tristen rolled his eyes at his Captain and got down to the business of sorting through them. He served out portions of beans and black rice, stewed greens, and coffee with honey and almond milk. Once she accepted the plate and the cup, he made a plate for himself as well, and sat down on the grass beside her chair.

Perceval glanced at it distractedly, wrinkled her nose, and decided upon the grass as well. “You’re worried about something other than tracking down the thieves”—she should have said murderers, but Tristen was just as glad she didn’t—“and talking to whoever might already be living on Grail.”

Tristen bought time with a mouthful of beans and rice, washed down with a full cup of coffee. Perceval poked at her plate, teasing grains of rice apart with the tines of her fork. He should have taken her to task for it, but instead he poured more coffee from the insulated carafe and nursed it.

“Things have been quiet lately,” he said. “Politically.”

It was an oversimplification. “Quiet” in the sense that there had been no uprisings, no mutinies, no revolutions for going on a decade now … until this latest outrage, which might have been little more than an adolescent prank if it had not cost Caitlin Conn her life.

What could be important enough about an ancient Earth book—a paper book, at that, full of Builder religious nonsense?—to lose two people over it? Go-Backs might care about the contents, but they cared more about ecological impact.

There might not have been wars, but there had certainly been politicking, and the situation inside the walls of the world was anything but idyllic. In any case where limited resources existed, people would differ on how best they might be allotted. But the differences had not all been violent. Not after the first fifteen or twenty years, during which time Tristen—Tristen Tiger, he thought bitterly—had resumed a role he’d just as soon have left behind. And not after resources had been allotted to repatriating the wounded world’s many Balkanized cultures.

Still, resentments … persisted. And Tristen shouldered them because the Captain could not—not and still lead effectively.

“I need to break the news to Dorcas,” he said. “Either she’s involved, and perhaps I can learn something from her reaction—or she’s not, and she might be stirred to do a little investigating of her own.”

Lightly, Perceval laid her fingers on his wrist. “You are very brave.”

He shrugged and set his cup aside to free a hand for his fork. It seemed like a cowardly action to scoop sticky coconut-sweet black rice into his mouth rather than to argue, but he didn’t feel brave.

Perceval waited until he swallowed. “I need you to do more than break the news. I need you and Mallory to find my mother’s killers.”

Tristen bit his lip, rolling it between his teeth before he released it and took a breath. There was too much chance that he already knew what he would find—though as an investigator he would need to set those preconceptions aside. He wanted to shake his head, refuse, resign his commission and walk back out the Bridge hatchway as he had come in—back down the corridor, which Nova had already fixed as if it had never been torn open.

But he’d done harder things with a knot of anxiety and sorrow in his gut. Harder things, and worse ones.

“All right,” he said.

6 cometh a monster

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

—WILLIAM BLAKE, “The Tyger”

Tristen found the woman who was not his daughter more or less where he had left her when last they spoke, some months before. Which was to say, barefoot and ankle-deep in muddy water, her hands dangling below the shallow pond’s still surface as she stalked something hidden beneath her own reflection. Oblong splashes of mud, some wet and dark, some dried to peanut-butter color and flaking, adhered to the skin and the fine hairs of her calves.

She half crouched amid the rice plants, her deep gold trousers rolled up to her thighs so that the hems stayed dry, her elbows dangling between her knees as she moved softly, crabwise, each step barely rippling the water.

Other things did ripple, however, and only some of them were fish. Tristen imagined he should feel more uneasiness than he did at such proximity to the cybernetic guardians of the rice paddies, invisible though they were beneath black water. Maybe the fear of death and discomfort had been cooked out of him like moisture, leaving him desiccated and leathery against the bone.

What scared him now was danger to the world, to its inhabitants, to Perceval and Nova and everyone else embraced within its fragile walls. Including this woman, for all that her every witnessed breath sent an ice-fine needle of complicated emotion through his lungs and heart. Including this woman, though he knew Perceval half suspected Dorcas had directed the raid that killed Caitlin.

Dorcas was the leader of the Edenites, rudely termed the Go-Backs—religious and ecological conservatives who had long been opposed to the plans of the Builders. Given what time had revealed about the Builders’ many treacheries, Tristen was becoming inclined to—limited—sympathy.

You are old, he told himself, and knew it for the simple truth.

Tristen paused on the edge of the rice field, well back from the shallow water’s edge. His footsteps could