Chelsea.
“This is for my sister, bitch,” he whispered. And when he kissed Ariane-Dust on the eyelids, he pulled her and what was left of Dust, root and stock, out of Chelsea’s body. Through the eyeholes.
And then he fed the guts to Nova, satisfied and smiling.
* * *
“Shit,” Perceval said, out loud, even though Danilaw and Amanda would hear her. “Patch me through to her, would you?”
Nova’s doubt eddied about her, but though she could not avoid Perceval knowing, the Angel chose not to speak it.
“Tristen is there,” Nova said, leaving unexpressed the implications. If he could bring himself to do it, he could end the threat once and for all.
“Patch me through,” Perceval said again. “That is an order.”
Nova argued no more. A moment later, and Perceval felt Nova’s awareness of the room in which Tristen had fought. He now crouched over Chelsea’s still form, as if guarding it from Dorcas. Dorcas sat against the tent wall, arms folded as if casually, but Perceval could see the decompiler she wore like couture. And if her eyes were closed, it was because she was dreaming Perceval’s family out of existence.
“Avatar,” Perceval said, and Nova put her image before the Go-Back leader.
Dorcas opened her eyes. She looked infinitely weary, the furrows of her forehead so dark they could have been drawn in the same ink she wore like a dress.
“Go ahead,” she said. “I think I can finish this before you stop me.”
“A compromise,” Perceval said. “Don’t kill the world, Dorcas. Just wait a moment and hear me out. I know you don’t crave all that blood for its own sake. Only to protect Grail—Fortune—right? To keep us from corrupting it. That’s your goal?”
Dorcas let her head fall back. “Talk fast, Captain.”
“We don’t have to stay here,” Perceval said.
“So it’s better to rip off the resources for repair and suffer through another thousand years creeping through the belly of the Enemy until we find another world to poison?”
“No,” Perceval said. “It’s better to convert every life-form on the ship into something that can survive on nothing but clean, sunlight energy. Everything. Every soul—woman and worm, man and mallow. Turn us into Angels, Dorcas, and let us live.”
“You’d have me make the same sick choice you made when we were broken. You’d have me force a transformation on all of them?”
Perceval took a breath, pulled all her hope and passion together, and tried to put them in her voice. Dorcas was not a killer, never had been. She’d let Tristen earn his life when another would have killed him.
All Perceval could hope was that she did not really want to ruin the world.
She said, “It is better to evolve than die.”
Dorcas turned to face her fully, mouth hanging open. “How like a Conn.”
“How like a reactionary,” Perceval answered softly, “to destroy what you can amend.”
Dorcas paused. “You have me there,” she whispered. She lifted her arms as if her hands were unbelievably heavy, and flung them wide.
Danilaw heard the scraping as Cynric dragged herself across the floor, and went to help her to her knees. But as he crouched beside her, she looked past him, an expression on her ancient face as full of wonderment and awe as any child witnessing a sunrise.
And there was Amanda, her mouth hanging open, her skin gilded by some source of light that should not exist, and if it did, should not glow that sunlight golden.
Almost reluctantly, Danilaw turned.
Perceval stood like a goddess in an aura of bright light, and golden prismed jewels hung weightless all around her. They caught the light, reflected and refracted it, passed it from lens to lens to make a webwork around her, all of bright and brighter. Swarms of them hovered in a geometric pattern, caging her in lasers.
Danilaw raised a hand to shield himself from the brilliance. His other found Amanda’s.
“What’s that?”
“The library,” Cynric said. “It’s come down to her. Jordan sent it down to her.”
“I don’t understand,” said Amanda.
“Everything we know,” said Cynric. “Our Chief Engineer saved it all for you.”
“For them,” Perceval said, her voice passing strange, a thing made of echoes. “And for me.” In the center of her veil of diamonds, she turned to them. Her hands by her sides, she smiled at Cynric directly. “Have you told them yet that you’re staying?”
“Staying?” Danilaw should not have startled from the Sorceress as if from a darthfish, but there she was, huge as life and even more peculiar.
“I’d like to liaise with your aliens,” she said. “I think I’d be good at it. I accept the terms of surgery and so forth, of course.” She waved a queenly hand. “I don’t think you’ll get much argument that my personality could use amending.”
On every side of Perceval, chiming gently, the library crystals drifted to the floor.
27
the feeble starlight itself
For I remember, as the wind sets low,
How all that peril ended quietly
In a green place where heavy sunflowers blow.
Tristen turned in space, aligning himself to the tug of gravity, and let the Enemy fill with empty space the empty spaces in the net of himself. The Enemy that wasn’t such an enemy any longer.
Dorcas was there beside him, a drifting presence, jeweled in the reflected light of two worlds. She brushed his fringe. He gave her the warmth of his full attention.
“Tristen Tiger,” she said.
“Retired,” he told her, though he didn’t believe it. “What is there to fight against anymore?”
“He’s not a villain,” Dorcas said. “He’s a hero who happens to be on the other side of the war.”
“You were fighting for a passionate belief,” he said.
She made a mood of affirmation. “I can be magnanimous in victory.”
Perhaps she could. Perhaps he’d test it.
“You remember a little of Sparrow now, don’t you?”
“I am not Sparrow, sir.”
“No,” he said. “I know that. But you felt her in the blade, and it was her personality that etched the neural pathways yours lives in. Lived in. When you lived in anything.”
She modeled a mood for him. It seemed like a reluctant but tolerant one.
“Who killed my daughter, then?”
He had a sense she regarded him. He had a sense she brushed her fringe on his again.
She said what he’d known she would say. “Talk to Benedick, Sir Tristen. Speak to your brother, if you would truly know.”
He paused halfway through leaving. “Thank you.”
Now they were
Not that she had ever, exactly, been merely an Angel. With the assistance of Rien and the complicity of Mallory, she had wrought herself from the pieces of Dust and Pinion and Asrafil, and all the angels they had eaten.
