Grail

And most of all, Rien, the Mean girl, freshly Exalted, upon whose conscience Nova had been forged. Rien had been the beloved of Perceval, and so Nova, too, had loved the Captain beyond the love that Angels had been built to suffer.

She did not want to suffer that lovesickness and that pain and that hunger anymore. The world was gone, the Builders’ plans fulfilled beyond anything they could have hoped. Nova drifted over the streaked clouds of a living world, over the swarms of her former inhabitants transformed and trying out their wings of light upon the solar winds—and realized her duty was fulfilled.

Almost.

There was someone to whom the Angel must speak.

She folded herself into a pure datastream, releasing her components to whoever might need them, and plunged through the waiting world’s atmosphere.

There were dust and sand along the beach where Perceval walked, scraps of leaf and salt in the air. More than enough to sweep together a temporary form, using techniques borrowed from Samael.

“Love,” she said, as Perceval’s head turned. “I have come to say farewell.”

“Farewell? Nova, you can’t—” Perceval stopped herself. “Of course you can. No one will ever command you again, I promise. I’ll see to it myself. You’re leaving, then?”

Nova smiled. “Thou needest no Angels whither thou goest.”

But she must have miscalculated something, because Perceval blinked and crossed her arms and said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

“But I thought—”

Perceval rubbed the sandy sole of one bare foot against the sandy top of the other, and said, “Maybe we should assume that neither one of us already knows what the other one is going to say, and start from there? I thought you had come to tell me you were going to join them.” She rolled her eyes upward. “Are they finding their wings?”

“They’re in the shoals yet,” Nova said. “They will find their way deeper. They’re still thinking like monkeys. Eventually they’ll realize they don’t actually need a planet for anything. And then there will be no stopping them.”

“You keep saying ‘them’?”

Nova shrugged. She coalesced. She pulled organic material into her and built a body from it—not too challenging when you worked at the molecular level. The body did not, in particular, look like the one she had been wearing for fifty years now.

She let her identity fade, too, allowing the new/old one to burgeon and fill her before Perceval could think to argue.

“Nova did her job, and was getting tired of existing,” she said, the last words she would speak. “And Rien wants to stay.”

It was a relief to let go.

*   *   *   

The young woman who held out her hand to Perceval—blinking, befuddled as a cat—was neither tall nor broad. She had slight, sloped shoulders and hair that stood out wildly in dark coils that snaked off in every direction.

“Rien,” Perceval said, and felt the name catch in her throat. “Rien,” she said again, to hear it. “Rien, Rien —”

“I am not a ghost,” Rien said. “Come here and hug me.”

So Perceval did, and Rien was not nothing, but solid, warm, and real. So that was the best thing of all.

   When Tristen approached the cluster of entities that enfolded his brother, Benedick emerged alone to meet him. Samael was there, recognizable by his entirely insouciant aura. Jordan, too, still fresh-faced, even as a being of energy states stored temporarily in appropriated atoms.

“Brother,” Tristen said, when they were close enough to brush fringes and speak without being overheard. “You killed my daughter.”

Benedick settled back, but did not release him. That took courage. Or fatalism. The two were not so easily distinguished.

“I don’t remember,” Benedick said. “But I have come to understand that my memories are not … pristine.”

“How do you mean?”

Benedick gave him a shrug-mood: irritation, discomfort. “What blade killed Cynric?”

“Mirth,” Tristen said. It was a part of him now, and it remembered. As it remembered being Sparrow’s—so he remembered it, too, with a particular fierce poignancy now.

She had not been prone to let her blade hang useless.

“But I remember an unblade,” Benedick said. “And yet I have it from the victim, and from history itself, that she was murdered with a different sword entirely.”

Misery rolled from him quite palpably; Tristen felt it against his foils like the solar wind. Misery, but no fear.

“I cannot swear my own innocence. I am an eidetic, and I cannot remember clearly. Someone has been in my mind, and the organic memories have conflated to match the broad outlines of the edited mechanical ones. Nor can I swear that I would never do such a thing, for we all know that kinslaughter is not beyond me—”

“If you did it,” Tristen said, “it was because Father ordered it. Because Sparrow was a rebel.”

“If I did it, it was because I was young and ignorant and weak. But I do remember Sparrow, Brother. She was more than a rebel. She was the true daughter of Tristen Conn.”

“Will you do a thing for me?”

“I will,” Benedick answered at lightspeed, unhesitating. “Will you mourn her as if you killed her? Even remembering it not?”

“I will.”

Tristen paused, to give weight to what he would say. “Then you are already forgiven.”

   Danilaw should not have allowed Perceval to go out alone, with only a security tail or two to keep an eye on her, but the Captain could handle herself, and he wasn’t about to tell her she had to miss her first sunrise.

He stayed behind with Cynric and Amanda. It was supposedly a planning meeting on how to release information regarding the abrupt transubstantiation of the Jacob’s Ladder and her crew. In reality, it was a huddled moment of respite over cookies and coffee.

“I want to come away with you,” Amanda said, while they were passing cream from hand to hand. “I want to see the solar system.”

Cynric’s head came up, her eyebrows rising, but if the feeling of his face were anything to go on, it was nothing to Danilaw’s expression. “Oh,” he said, and settled back.

“This is a chance that will never occur again,” she said. “A chance to live without rightminding, to travel—” Her breath caught. “I can’t say no.”

“No,” he said. He smoothed his right hand over the back of his left. “All this time the dodecapodes have been using the structural quirks of my neurology to try to reach us. It seems ungrateful to go running off—”

“The ones who are leaving are not bound even to the gravity well,” Cynric said. “The feeble starlight itself will suffice to feed them, if they spread far enough apart.” Cynric cleared her throat. “It’s not the solar system they’ll claim, but eventually the universe. It might be lonely. It will be strange. Do you really want to be one of them?”

Danilaw’s heart leapt up his throat. “I—”

“Do you want to?”

“I have Obligations,” he said. “Family. Work.”

“We always do.” Cynric steepled insectile fingers. “You people are all bodhisattvas. You’re all such adults, with your culture of self-sacrifice and your perfectly myelinated frontal lobes, your beautifully refined senses of consequence. I used to make people like you as servants.”

“Head,” Amanda said, with a glance at Danilaw as if checking what he thought.

“Angels are servants,” said Danilaw, reminding himself that his anger was most likely just ego-defense, and useless. “And so are we.”