corner like a key wedging into a lock. “Seal me up in here,” she said.
Nova jerked back.—
Perceval sighed. “Seal me up. I have someone I need to talk to, and I can’t risk her at large in the world.”
“You shall,” Perceval said, “although I expect it’s too damaged to be of much use. And you shall withdraw yourself as well. You could provide her with a conduit for escape. I fear we must treat the Princess Ariane, when she is aware and unfettered, as a viral presence. I am confident that, offered the slightest chance, she will replicate, spread, and infect anything she can. She may be only a shadow of what she was, but what she was was a treacherousness that surpassed knowledge.”
Nova tilted her head, the brown locks breaking across her face in a manner she must have studied recordings for, because Perceval’s hair certainly never did anything so engaging.—
“A mere shadow,” Perceval scoffed. “Don’t forget, I once defeated the real thing. I don’t expect a lot of trouble from a mindprint. Most especially a mindprint I’ve already beaten, and beaten the body it came in, too.”
Nova folded her imaginary arms
“Still,” Perceval answered. “I will be fine, and you may not monitor me.”
That surprised Perceval into a chuckle. “I think if I’m replaced by Ariane Conn,” she said, “or even the ghost of her, it won’t take you too long to notice. Random hideous murders of people just standing around in corridor intersections minding their own business would fairly quickly give her away. If it doesn’t, you’ll probably catch her after the next erratic cleansing of strangers and hirees who got in her way, or who knew too much.”
The Angel snorted silently, which told Perceval she was winning. But Nova would not be made to back down so easily.
“Nova.”
Perceval had never yet seen an Angel make that particular expression—childlike, rueful, reprimanded. She wondered from which of Nova’s component parts it had come, and then wished she hadn’t. These days, she usually managed to see Nova as Nova, rather than the sum of her parts. But there were always the inevitable lapses.
Each time they happened, Perceval considered editing out the emotional/mnemonic function that reminded her of lost loves. And each time, she put the decision off for another day. The pain faded naturally with the years, but she was loathe to lose it all. It might prickle, but it prickled because it was the relic of something dear.
She met Nova’s level look with one of her own. The Angel was the first to glance down.
Perceval forced a smile. “I’ll knock to be let out.”
No passes, no incantations, no prestidigitator’s gesturing. Just the veil of titanium drawn transparent across the gap, then thickening, opaquing, and the Angel’s face vanishing behind it. Her interior voice went silent at the same time, and Perceval was left with the bottomless, unsettling emptiness of being alone in her own head for the first time in a half century.
It was cold in the library, and there was no oxygen. It didn’t matter; she was the Captain of the
She was Perceval. She was strong. She could do this thing.
She placed the palm of one hand against the cold, cold wall of ice, hard as stone and unmelting before the mere warm heat of any mortal flesh. She grounded herself in that reality and went within.
There were shapes in her head—enemies and strangers. There were people in her program she never would have invited there. The program informed the meat, and the meat informed the person who identified as Perceval, and the person who called herself Perceval controlled the program. An endless loop, an oceanic cycle.
One of those people was the pallid remnant of Ariane Conn—a thing Perceval did not touch willingly or often. Now, though, she girded her loins, rolled up her sleeves, and waded into the fray. For Rien, for Caitlin, for Oliver— for everything Ariane had broken, and everything she had destroyed.
It was not easy.
It was rather like catching an oil slick, to begin with. Ariane might be in her head—might clamor for attention, attempt to force her twisted wisdom on Perceval, might be only a reflection and a memory of the madwoman who had been Ariane Conn in truth—but that did not mean she cared to let Perceval lay hands on her, even metaphorically. Her surface was greasy and insubstantial, and below that the personality of the dead Commodore was thick and sludgy, putrid, repellent. It was probably Perceval’s loathing for Ariane that was corrupting the program (she was reasonably certain that Ariane the narcissist had never seen herself as revolting), but acknowledging the source of the revulsion did not serve to make it any less real.
Still Perceval held the dead woman’s memory close, hugged it to her breast, and delved.
The record of a life ill-spent assaulted her. A great deal of what Ariane treasured was simply hellish to Perceval. The memory of her own maiming was in there, Ariane severing Perceval’s great wings with her weightless unblade. The memory of Tristen’s betrayal and incarceration was there as well. Perceval was tempted to tread lightly around the borders of that last. She knew Tristen would not care to be reminded of his decades in durance vile, nor would he care for her to share the details of his internment. But she was the Captain, and she was Caitlin’s daughter, and it was her responsibility to seek the truth under all the layers of sadism that Ariane could load up on it.
She gritted her teeth—literally as well as metaphorically—and plunged into the stinking depths.
Something that was not there, however, was the information she sought. Seamless, all of it, machine memory meshing up perfectly with the edges of fallible chemical memory, or as much of that latter as was recorded in Ariane’s ghost. Perceval waded through treasured, attention-polished images of her own gaunt flyer’s body, cobalt blood laddering down her protruding ribs and vertebrae as if it descended a staircase, dripping with viscous regularity from the thick, ragged stubs of her wings before it groped together like blind fingers and formed seeking tendrils, trying to seal the unhealing wounds. She walked tiptoe between Ariane’s gloating recollections of the netted dead in Rule, epidemic victims bundled and frozen in the bosom of the Enemy for when their bodies might be needed for raw materials or allowed to heal into the mute and servile resurrected. She watched Ariane kill Alasdair and consume his memories and experience with his colony.
She learned what snapped an unblade, as Ariane’s Mercy met Tristen’s black Charity, and both swords threw black sparks and shatterings along the walls of the world. She saw the battle, and she saw that Tristen was clearly the superior swordsman. But it availed him not when Ariane—that treacherous knight—sent her attendant Angel Asrafil into the matrix of Tristen’s sword, possessing the unblade, weakening its structure, and creating a plane of cleavage through the blade so that it broke across the forte. As Tristen reeled back, Ariane struck with the dagger in her left hand and ended the fight—for a time.
She learned, too, that Ariane had blinded Tristen before she locked him away, though she had used only her main gauche to do it and not her unblade, and so after some time the wound had repaired itself. A cruelty at the time—what good were eyes in eternal darkness?—but an unexpected and unintended mercy in the end, when Perceval, Gavin, and Rien had resurrected Tristen from the tomb.
Perceval learned all these things—things she had already known or suspected. She learned them in too much detail, and too well. At first, Ariane twisted against her, tried to hide, but she was proud of her crimes, fulfilled in her evils. She—her remnant—had been alone with them a long time.
There was a part of Ariane that delighted in showing off for Perceval all the wickedness she’d done. It was a new wickedness, and Perceval’s horror and disgust were most satisfying. Ariane gave her more, unable to resist. It
