there was an old-fashioned hardwired com link, useful—like a speaking tube—in emergencies.
It was Samael who answered. “We are under attack. Another Angel or djinn has infiltrated Nova and is attempting to rewrite and exploit her. In defense of the rest of us, she has shut down all contact-related functions.”
“Oh, suck it,” Jordan said, ripe with disgust. “It’s like the game with the worms and the mallets.”
Benedick, rising from his chair, could not prevent a flicker of smile. “Whack-an-Angel?”
“Yeah.” She turned in circles, scanning the edges of the room. “What do we do now?”
“I would suggest suiting up. Meanwhile, I shall forge a perimeter.”
Samael had always been prone to dramatic gestures. He spread his arms and seemed to stretch, the spaces between his colorful flakes and gleanings expanding like the skin between the scales of a swallowing snake. Scraps of husk and petal that made him visible shivered from their invisible supports. Each pattered or drifted floorward according to their nature, leaving not even an outline in the air.
His voice now resonated all around them, as if the very air spoke from their own lungs and ears and the space between them. “Your armor will be awkward, but it will be airtight. And the suits have their own colony defenses, independent of Nova.”
Benedick, colony-naked, paused for a moment to consider. If his colony, his machine memories, failed with the absence of the integrated and distributed Angel, did that mean those parts of him were only a subroutine in her virtual universe? Had she really assimilated so much?
What was identity in the machine?
While he thought, he also moved. Jordan, for all her awkwardness when unsupported by her symbiont, reached the armor locker first. She heaved the grate open, struggling, and Benedick’s heart sank. They’d have to seal into the armor the old-fashioned way, by stepping inside its opened shell. And they’d packed their suits side by side, which meant dragging them out of the locker one by one.
“Sealing the room,” Samael said. No visible change followed the words. Benedick would have to take his word for it.
Benedick drew a deep breath while he assessed. First things first. “Chief Engineer,” he said crisply, “I recommend we pull your armor out first, as—given you are a flyer—it will take you the longest to suit up under these conditions.”
Jordan frowned at him, but nodded. “And I’ll be stronger in the armor. All right. Come on.”
She started forward into the cupboard, Benedick hot on her heels.
* * *
Since she touched her dead self’s blade at Tristen’s insistence, Dorcas had been unable to ignore the whispering. She knew what she heard—the voice of Mirth, the voice of Sparrow. The echo through her bones of two things so allied they might as well be one.
She had heard it, and she had turned it away. Because she was not Sparrow; she was no Conn whelp, no woman who believed the world could be bettered by bullet and blade.
She heard it now, swelling in her. She might have turned it aside again, but this time was different than the others.
This time she stood before the worst Conn whelp of all, the words of an ancient spell crawling through her, transubstantiating her into a whirling tower of light and shadows, so Dorcas reached out a shaking hand and let Sparrow move it.
Her fingers pierced the luminescence. She had expected to feel something, some pressure, some resistance, but it was like reaching into a ray of sun. The heat was palpable, but not material.
Light broke in shafts through her fingers, blinding her with its moving dazzle. Her colony should have reacted to protect her eyes, but she realized at that moment that she felt nothing from that connection at all. Her irises contracted on their own, with merely biological alacrity.
Her merely human strength might have failed her had the revelation not surprised her so that she tripped against the table, her outstretched hand plunging into the swarm of words siphoned off the pages of the Book and into Ariane.
They caught her, too, in a spider-snare, a web of words, and noosed her wrist, and drew her in and in and in.
She half lay, half stretched across the table, and with the hand that was not sinking into the Book’s storm of words, she lunged for the hilt of the unblade that rested by Ariane’s hip.
Danilaw knew his body must be convulsing, his back arching, the pale froth bubbling between his lips. But it was an intellectual knowledge, divorced from any sense of fear or urgency, because he felt no fear, no shame, no concern for the friends he knew knelt around him, bruising their knees, trying to protect his body from its own wildly firing electrical system.
He was somewhere else, somewhere warm and buoyant, and the ocean moved around him, swishing between his muscular limbs. The dodecapus bore him along, a serene passenger in a serene passage, and Danilaw felt himself sliding into release, into the embrace of a warm and just and loving universe. Sliding into acceptance, into universal light, into universal love.
He was numinous; the dodecapus was numinous; the whole damn sea and everything in it was numinous, too.
He felt the creature’s awareness, its concentration, the strength of its mental processes. He felt its intelligence and the curiosity with which it surveyed its environment. He felt the bind of the scars on its lower side, and remembered in bright concrete images and sensation how it had been injured, and what it had learned from that injury:
He felt his own words, pushing to get out, to get into his new friend, and he felt the blankness with which this smooth, intricate intelligence greeted them. Sounds, concepts, ideograms. They were nothing to it. There was the being and the sharing, and the things he knew, viscerally, because the dodecapus knew them.
The scarred old thing sculled along the muddy bottom of Crater Lake, puffs of mud rising behind it with each squash-blossom contraction of its webbed tentacles. Now, through its eyes, Danilaw saw a bubble of light, the shadows moving against it.
The dodecapus plastered itself against the glass and, with one giant jelly eye, it looked within.
Danilaw saw the man on the floor, the figures surrounding and supporting him, and another pair withdrawn to one side with their heads bent together. He saw it all through a haze of atmospheric distortion and sense of wonder, the brightness of awe that filled him up like a pressure bubble until joy buzzed from every pore.
An immanence filled him—a thing that went beyond words and math and music and into some other space—a gestural, nonverbal, sharp-edged reality of light and hope and companionship. You could never be alone again. There was something divine inside you, and all you had to do was give it a home.
He would never be alone again.
The warmth of the dodecapus’s approval washed through him until he felt himself falling and it was gone.
Samael bought them the time to armor themselves. By the time Benedick was sealing his helm and gloves, a fox fire of Cherenkov radiation crawled the walls and ceiling in moth-eaten loops and frontiers like the outlines of magnetic storms seen from space. It was the visible result of the battle lines drawn between Samael and Ariane’s colonies, as were the bright flashes that more and more regularly sparked in every corner of Benedick’s vision.
The battling colonies threw off charged particles; the flashes were caused by them passing through the vitreous humor of his eye. All around the room, furniture and other things were disassembling themselves, raw material for Samael to throw into the fray. Benedick suspected that he, Jordan, and Mallory might be more useful to the Angel as raw materials than as self-willed firepower, in the long run, but it wasn’t an option he was ready to put on the table.
Yet.
