cause vibrations that would startle Dorcas’s prey, and the conversation they were about to have would be difficult enough without irritating her.
She glanced sideways, acknowledging his arrival, but her head stayed bent under the broad-brimmed hat. She slipped forward another step, hesitantly, her toes probing the mud before she shifted her weight. Her hands swayed loosely, almost seeming forgotten.
Until they lashed out suddenly, darting and twisting at the wrist, lifting simultaneously from the water. She was a slender person, thin-armed, her shoulder blades bony through the back of her worn shirt, but she hooked the fish out of the paddy with tendons flexing in her narrow wrists and tossed its silvery, thrashing body to Tristen.
Reflexively, he caught it. It flopped against his fingers, muscular and slimy-rough. It was the colors of tarnish and quicksilver, broad-sided and narrow-backed, with bright eyes that stared accusingly at Tristen as it gasped and fought for life.
He felt a pang of sympathy for it as he crouched to strike its head upon a rock. Once, twice, with a full swing of his arm. After the second blow its spasming muscles relaxed. Brutal, but kinder than letting it suffocate in air.
Dorcas came back up the levee to him, walking duck-footed on slippery grass and rolling oatmeal-colored sleeves down over browned, fair skin.
“Lunch,” she said, relieving him of the fish.
He pushed his hair behind his shoulder. “I’ve eaten.” Even if Perceval hadn’t been able to force herself, Tristen was old enough to have learned when to treat food as fuel and get it inside him any way he could.
When he’d first come here, it had been the midpoint of a perilous journey. Now, it was a half hour’s pleasant walk and a lift ride from the Bridge. How a few years changed things—but the time hadn’t changed Dorcas, or her Heaven.
He followed her down the sides of the steep valley between rice paddies and straw-bale plantings of salad vegetables. Other field-workers scarcely glanced up, although a sleek black-and-butter-colored snake head lifted through the water’s surface, tongue flicking as Tristen and Dorcas passed.
She led him a few hundred meters to a communal kitchen, where she stepped up to an unattended station and leaned her hat against the side. Without ceremony, she expertly cleaned the tilapia. The knife she used was a singlepurpose object, ground thin by many sharpenings, the ceramic blade stained from use. The handle was bound in grubby green marker tape. Tristen thought the blade itself was salvage, some other object repurposed and reshaped, and not originally intended for cutting at all.
But it worked well enough. She let the blade glide down either side of the spine. “You didn’t come here on a whim.”
“I didn’t,” he said. He did not bother glancing over his shoulder. He could feel the pressure of other cooks at each shoulder, although, other than a glance of acknowledgment to Dorcas, they had not looked up from their tasks. Tristen was not and would never be popular with the Go-Backs—for reasons he could not argue—though Dorcas herself was willing now and again to sacrifice a few moments of her time for him.
Tristen turned on the grill and, with a glance at Dorcas, pulled a heavy flat-bottomed pan over the heating element. “Can we speak in private?”
“I won’t conceal what you tell me from my people, so they may as well hear it from you directly. That way, you can be sure I haven’t misrepresented you.” One more pass of the knife, and the tilapia lay headless and open like an ancient paper book on the cutting board.
Tristen put oil in the pan and watched it shimmer while Dorcas cleaned her tools and racked them. She waved vaguely at an onion, so he borrowed the wiped knife and diced it, then scooped translucent crescents into the pan. An aroma of cooking organosulfates converting to sugars—alluring enough to have woken the dead—tickled the inside of his nose.
When Dorcas turned back, she said, “Thank you.”
She scraped the onions to the edge of the pan. Salted and herbed, the fish went into the oil with a satisfying hiss. Tristen stepped aside, giving her room to work. It was easier to speak to the back of her head and the fine hay-colored locks curling around her hairline—revealed because the body of her hair was upswept into a ponytail. A UV flush colored her wrists where they stretched from the protection of her sleeves.
He watched her for a moment, then he folded his arms and said, “Grail is inhabited.”
He had waited until her hands were away from both the knife and the hot pan, and it turned out well, for she jolted as if he had run a current through the floor. From the muffled exclamation of pain off to the left, perhaps he could have timed the revelation better from the point of view of the bystanders.
“Aliens,” she said, after a moment.
“Humans,” he replied. “People who use a Roman alphabet and Arabic numerals. People from Earth.”
Dorcas had been an Engineer once—Exalted in the first Moving Times, during the Breaking of the world. Not too long after Tristen. She had become a Go-Back—one of the colonists and crew members advocating a return to Earth Tristen had so successfully opposed in his youth. He might be personally responsible for her death.
For she had died. She had died in her old body then, and later her machine memories had been reincarnated in the body of Tristen’s Exalt daughter Sparrow, who had died in the mind because Tristen had not had the courage to follow her out of Rule, but whose form had been taken by the Engineers and given as a shell to one of their own lost ones.
The person who stood before him wasn’t Sparrow. She was who Sparrow had become, because Tristen had failed her as a father.
On their first meeting, she had reminded Tristen of his crimes, and were Tristen not Exalt, he would still bear the scars of that meeting. In return, Tristen had placed in her hand his daughter’s haunted sword, though she had not held it long. Given such an inauspicious beginning, he doubted they would ever be friends, but his respect for her was unrivaled.
“What an irony, to finally come to the world we meant to infest, and to discover that we’ve already infested it.” The fish sizzled as she flipped it. “You think they hopped right over us?”
Tristen paused, waiting for his moment. “Well, I guess we were delayed for rather a long time.”
She held it in for a while before the laughter broke free and she snorted—one of those times where it was plain to him that she was not Sparrow and in some ways barely resembled her. The appearance of a face had a lot to do with how one wore it, and Sparrow had grown up in the House of Conn, trained from a young age to comport herself as a lady.
Dorcas was something else—a high-handed Engineer turned priest. Tristen, who had not known her in her old life, imagined she’d been a woman who played as hard as she worked. And even today, she worked hard.
She squeezed lemon over the fish, leaving Tristen to wonder where the trees were. This enclave of Go-Backs also exported mango, chocolate, and vanilla—a tropical extravagance of edibles. They were efficient agriculturalists who had maintained better mechanical control of their holdes and domaines than most of the isolated communities on the
She handed him a plate and gestured to a communal pot of brown rice, steaming slightly around the loose- fitting lid. Tristen ladled out a portion, pressing a depression into the center to hold the fish juices. Dorcas accepted the now-laden plate he handed back without a word.
The silence held while she slid fish onto the plate, turned off the stove, wiped out the pan, and hung it for the next cook’s use. She pulled a whittled wooden fork from a cup and led him back out into the filtered and supplemented light of the fast-approaching sun.
Tristen grabbed two bent-metal cups on the way out and dipped them into a water jug by the pavilion door. He dropped onto the grass next to Dorcas as she seated herself and handed her one of the two when her hand was free.
They sipped. The water was faintly dusty-tasting, but sweet, and Tristen’s symbiont told him it was tolerably clean. He wondered if the Go-Backs filtered it through folded cloth after they pulled it out of the fish ponds, or if they had something more elaborate set up.
After three bites of onions, fish, and rice, she said, “You might have kept that from us.”
“We might have.”
“But for how long?”
He smiled. Another blessing of the circumstances of their reacquaintance—and all the parallel history that lay
