Grail

behind it—was that Dorcas felt no need for polite fictions with him, if she ever felt them with anyone. “I’d prefer to think of us as being on the same team when it comes to the survival of the world and all the people in it. Since we got under way again, there’s been no need for enmity or disagreement between your people and the Conn. We’re going somewhere and, historically speaking, the Edenites”—he chose the polite term—“were all for that. Your faction’s argument against harboring at the waystars was never about returning to Earth; it was always predicated on finding a safe landing zone. And at the time, Earth was the only one we knew how to get to.”

She had to know where he was going, but she wasn’t going to give him an inch that he didn’t earn. “But?”

“Things change,” he said softly. “Time passes. We know that better than most.”

Because we are older than most. The expression she shot him around a forkful of fish was wry and appreciative, or he could spin it that way. But she still didn’t let him off the hook—or whatever the parallel metaphor was for those who preferred to tickle their dinners from the water. For the fish, it was nevertheless as tragic a seduction as any encounter with pole and reel.

“What I’m suggesting,” he offered, “is that people forget the reasoning behind a dogma, and eventually come to treat the dogma itself as holy writ.”

“You mean like that book in the case outside the Bridge?”

Tristen nodded. All these centuries later, all the revelations of how his ancestors had betrayed and been betrayed in the name of God, and the idea of blasphemy, still sent a frisson up his neck. Even for an Exalt, the conditioning ran deep.

But she’d mentioned the book first. If she was guilty, would she have done that?

No, he thought. She was too savvy to play those kinds of games with an Exalt. And there was no increase in her pulse or respiration when she spoke.

But she had just given him the opening he had been waiting for.

Watching her face carefully, he lowered his voice and shielded the shape of the words with the dingy cup. “The book that isn’t in the case outside the Bridge anymore, you mean?”

Dorcas also had a lot of experience hiding her emotions. The uptick in her heart rate could have meant anything—but the fact that it happened reassured him that he had not missed a similar one previously.

She met his eyes briefly, then glanced down again. “Your Captain finally jettisoned the damned thing?”

“Three hours ago, an incursion group broke in and stole it,” he answered. “My sister Caitlin’s mind died in the attack.”

Her chin lifted abruptly. Her chest swelled on a sharply taken breath. Adrenaline response. “I am sorry for your loss.”

Not sincere, exactly, but not whatever the opposite was, either. He turned it aside with a lift of his hand. “There’s a radical element among your people that will not support any course of action except reversing course— no matter how Pyrrhic that would appear to be at this juncture.”

“Radical, are they?” Whoever she was now, Dorcas still had Sparrow’s appetite. He had startled her once; she would not show it now, and the meal balanced in her lap was vanishing rapidly, though tilapia were not small fish.

“When their political convictions can move them to unprovoked violence, I find it difficult to think of another term.”

“Like the ones who Exalted an entire colony ship full of life-forms?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. “We didn’t expect anything Mean to survive Acceleration.”

“You thought you knew what the world needed. Perhaps some of us would rather have died than be transformed. Perhaps—did you ever think?—perhaps it’s better to die than exploit others.”

“We made a judgment call,” he said. “I suppose you’re right, and that does make me a dangerous radical. So what does that make the extreme element among your people? The ones who consider themselves contaminated? Zealots? Fanatics?”

Dorcas set her plate aside and rubbed her hands on the grass as if wiping off a trace of oil or fish juice. “That’s because, at your heart, you’re still a reactionary.”

Tristen didn’t agree with her, but he also didn’t want to argue. And what was it to him what this woman thought? She wasn’t Sparrow, and nothing he could do would make her so. All he’d do was break his own heart seeking the lost girl in the present-day woman.

Children always grew up strangers, he thought, imagining what a disappointment he had been to his own father. In this case, the strangeness was literal as well as metaphorical.

“Some of your people view Earth as sacred,” he persisted.

“Sacred as circles,” she agreed, “and not just my people, Tristen.”

“Do you know who killed my sister?”

The cut direct. There was the held breath, the chilling of the extremities, the pupil blown wide to catch any scrap of information. Fight or flight.

Just a moment’s worth before she snorted like an alligator and tossed her head. “Would you have me ferret out whosoever it might be and remand them to you for questioning?”

Nobody was sitting nearby now, but Exalt ears could overhear distant conversations. This once, his knowledge of that fact did not affect Tristen’s choice of words. “I leave that up to your conscience. But I would prefer it if you handled any disciplinary issues among the Edenites internally.”

“So you can’t be blamed?”

“Because it reinforces your authority.” He folded his hands. “The murder of my sister cannot be considered to be a matter strictly among the Edenites.”

“Murder, or act of war?”

“Either way,” he said, “I will prosecute it.”

Their gazes were locked, and had been. Tristen made the choice to look down first. He needed Dorcas’s cooperation, offered rather than coerced.

The whisk of skin on skin was her rubbing the palms of her hands together—a worried habit, or anticipation? Her scent was too well controlled to offer him a clue to her motivation, and her heart rate had settled now.

“You’re afraid of sabotage.”

He nodded without meeting her eyes.

“You’re afraid of dying,” she said, “because you have lost your faith. You’ve gotten old, Tristen Tiger, and you cling to life even though it scares you, because you don’t think there’s anything else afterward.”

If she’d been striking for his heart, she’d missed. His apostasy was too ancient and too well-founded for her schoolroom sally to discomfit him. And he thought she revealed more about herself than him in the attempt.

He wanted to reach across the space between them and take her wrist, but restrained himself. “I lost my faith because we can only create the God we can imagine, and we are pathetically small creatures. I lost my faith because I find the prospect of nothingness more heartening than the idea of a God no larger, no greater of spirit, no more numinous than my father.”

He’d been doing fine, maintaining the tone of gentle sarcasm, until he got to the word father. Then his voice cracked, and he found her staring at him with a quizzical expression.

The silence stretched.

“What?”

Dorcas nee Sparrow smiled. “The Tiger’s heart,” she said. “I think I saw it.”

   What had been a toolkit was a monster now, and not blinded to that metamorphosis. Dust the small and scurrying, Dust the broken-backed—but rats were everywhere in the walls of the world. There has never been a ship without rats.

Dust scuttled among them, of them and not of them, consuming them when it was convenient, ignoring them when it was not. From their corpses he learned the new plan of the world that had been his body, the smell of the ones who inhabited it. He stayed slight, insubstantial. He masked himself in their scent and DNA. He felt Nova all around him as he moved, the corona of her essence and awareness silver-sharp.

But he was just one small thing among other small things—a fluffy cybernetic creature, colony-riddled, moving ring-tailed and spot-backed among millions of its kind. He could get lost, even from an Angel’s