Part 4 (1/2)

Tristen felt the contraction of panic at the base of his spine and let the fear wash through him for a moment. Open s.p.a.ce, he told himself. It's nothing to fear. There is nothing out there that can hurt you.

Unlike in here, where there were rogue colonies and s.h.i.+fting wreckage.

The danger lay in crevices, tight s.p.a.ces where one could become trapped. If you stayed in a trap long enough, it could come to seem like a shelter.

Ariane had locked him away in a terrible hole, and he had stayed there until Rien, Perceval, and Gavin had rescued him. Even by Conn standards, he had been in his trap a very long time.

But his nervous system didn't understand that. It only knew what it had become acclimated to: the warm dark, the safety of wedging one's self into a den. His responses recognized the yawning emptiness of the Enemy as something to fear.

Funny to think that the world, and he, and everything else in it, were rus.h.i.+ng through the void on the brink of a shock wave, moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. And all of that meant nothing. It was relative velocity that mattered. Once Tristen left the hull, he would be sailing along with it-but it would continue to turn without him.

In Tristen's youth, Com and Engineer alike had considered it something of a point of pride to reach the far side at the appointed place without the use of att.i.tude jets.

”There?” Tristen asked, marking a likely air lock on his display.

The angel agreed. ”It will not be too challenging a trajectory.”

Tristen, careful of his armor as he slipped between shredded lips of metal, chuckled. ”Easy for you to say.”

He drew his legs clear of the rift and balanced for a moment against the skin of the world. All that nothing wheeled before him, sickly under a veil of irradiated gas. His stomach clenched; bile stung his nose. It was the most basic, the most primitive of instincts. Don't fall.

Pus.h.i.+ng against it was like pus.h.i.+ng against a wall. He'd never been afraid of the deeps before-properly wary, sure, but this was different.

How broken am I? he wondered, sparing a wrathful moment of bitterness for Ariane Conn, who had made it so. He closed his eyes and adjusted his chemistry, flooding his neural receptors with soothing molecules-a trick he hated, but if he couldn't find his native courage, he'd have to borrow some.

With a mighty kick, Tristen leapt into the cold.

5.

pinioned in terrible darkness

Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible round about. His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal.

One is so near to another, that no air can come between them.

-Job 41: 14a16, King James Bible

At first, the trail was plain. Bened.i.c.k went armored, careful, skirting the edge of a vast causeway that connected Engine to the world at large. This was not how he, Tristen, and Rien had entered the Heaven at the end of the world. They had come to Engine running flat-out, along the bank of a poisoned river inhabited by-possessed of-Caitlin's helpful familiar demon, a djinn named Inkling. But the river was dead now, Inkling consumed like all his brethren into the new angel of the world.

Bened.i.c.k found he missed Inkling, even if the river had nearly killed his daughter, his brother, and himself. It wasn't a reactor-coolant leak's fault that it was poisonous, any more than a snake was to blame for being a snake-or the Enemy for being the Enemy. One did not have to blame or fear a thing to treat it with respect.

He tried to remember that he could feel the same about the angel. It was not the angel's fault that Rien had died to make it real. And now-with the angel's intervention, with the controlled release of radiation-isolating microbes-the poisoned river could be made clean, even this water reclaimed.

It would be good to reclaim something.

But this was not the time to be concerned about such things. Now, he had the arch of metal sky overhead. Some of the s.h.i.+elding panels were closed against the cold of the Enemy beyond, some jammed open so the chilly green light of the s.h.i.+pwreck nebula shone through, a few of the brightest stars visible beyond. He had the turf underfoot, thickly planted in dandelions and clover, still healing from the trauma of acceleration, the stems of gra.s.s here and there bent by a careless foot. He had the chill, thin air, not properly circulated, and so potentially still holding a scent.

He had the spotted-and-striped, inquisitive toolkit, its fluffy tail jerking like a carelessly cracked whip as it sniffed delicately between blades of gra.s.s, bending them aside with fragile-seeming hands, tremulous fingers cast from high-impact ceramic for strength. Carbon monofilament tendons moved beneath the little animal's skin.

Bened.i.c.k kept half his attention on his sensors and all his armor's weapons online. Occasionally, the toolkit turned to him and made a soft prrt, as if to a.s.sure itself that he was following close and paying heed.

This was not its primary function, but its sensitive olfactory, tactile, and visual receptors-optimized for locating tiny malfunctions in elaborate machinery-were adequate to the task. It was needed; whosoever had taken Arianrhod had left little trace of their pa.s.sage. Bened.i.c.k knew Arianrhod's knightly skills-the equal of his own-and if she were moving under her own power the trail indicated no diminishment.

So whoever had released her was her equal, and either armored or using some other countermeasure, because the toolkit could not trace that individual's scent. Bened.i.c.k trailed on-watchful, speculating. The farther he traveled, the worse the environmental damage became. When they came to a point where there was no egress from the causeway, he lifted the toolkit off the ravaged turf and let it snuggle against his neck. Here he broke into a distance-eating jog that was as fast as he could move while remaining observant to tripbeams and traps. Eventually, the causeway separated into five great branch tunnels joined like the fingers of a hand.

Bened.i.c.k knew from experience that once one traveled a step or two into any given path, relative gravity was established. Each causeway then curved to follow a divergent path: one overhead, one branching each left and right, one leading toward his feet, and one that would continue directly forward. But he paused before entering the lobby where they connected, cautious. All the Conns in the world were not dead, and Arianrhod's history of alliances with his family was ... complex and multigenerational. And his family were nothing if not dangerous.

Bened.i.c.k pinched his lower lip, considering. The broad lobby before him was designed neither for defense nor stealth, but rather for ceremony. Once-stately palms, shattered now, strained at their root-cables. The soil they'd helped stabilize lay in clods and heaps, torn vegetation raising the scent of rot. But though the fronds of the palms curled and crisped at the tips, a haze of green so pale it was almost silver already covered the harrowed mounds, hair-fine blades of gra.s.s seeking the light.

There had been waterfalls here once, pools beneath the palms, a branch of the River that ran clean and fresh to welcome visitors to Engine. Bened.i.c.k suspected the outflow was pooling now, undercutting the soil, unless the hull had been ruptured somewhere beneath the dirt and precious water was sublimating into s.p.a.ce. Or unless the angel had already managed to allocate resources to begin repairs. Sealing the hull would be its first priority.

He scanned the s.p.a.ce, checking for heartbeat and machinery noises as well as body heat. There were insects, birds-such as a flock of gray-cheeked parrotlets, their green wings flurrying as they darted from broken tree to broken tree. Strident cries evoked a memory of ancient speech; some of the tiny birds were long-Exalted, and so old their mimicked language was the language of the Builders.

For a moment, Bened.i.c.k paused and listened, glad they had survived. With gentle hands he unwound the toolkit from its roosting place about his throat, stroked its pointed face, then crouched to set it down. It left the cage of his hands tentatively, exactly as if it felt trepidation. He supposed it was possible that it did.

It paused at the threshold, ears p.r.i.c.ked and tail jerking, and sniffed in several directions before it chanced the open s.p.a.ce beyond.

Bened.i.c.k covered its progress, but no threat materialized. Instead, the toolkit minced out into the devastated lobby, whiskers twitching on either side of its creamy freckled muzzle. About twenty meters in, it paused in the shelter of a destroyed tree and whuffled around the base of the stump, casting for the scent it had trailed this far.

Still crouched by the threshold, Bened.i.c.k was not surprised that it found nothing. No footprints bruised tender shoots or depressed moist earth. It was possible that Arianrhod had pa.s.sed this way with a flier or in machinery. Whichever, it was irrelevant. Bened.i.c.k had lost the trail.

One hand extended, he clucked to the toolkit, but something else had attracted its attention. It sat up, counterbalanced by the fluffy tail, while Bened.i.c.k clucked again. He snapped his fingers, a sharp bright sound in the armor, and said, urgently, ”Toolkit.”

It hopped forward, s.h.i.+elding itself in broken palm fronds, where its irregular stripes and spots camouflaged it. The toolkit, despite having melded with the pattern of light and shadows to the point of vanis.h.i.+ng, gave an urgent squeak. A flicker of motion showed as it glanced over its shoulder, oil-s.h.i.+ny eyes gleaming. When it looked back, Bened.i.c.k followed the line of its gaze and deduced that whatever held its attention so intently must be advancing along the corridor that would lead perspective-up. The one that, if followed, would lead eventually-and through many adventures-to Rule.

With his left hand, Bened.i.c.k sealed his helm.

He had not long to wait. An armored female figure hove into view down the curve of the tunnel-feet and legs and hips, waist and arms, chest and face. Bened.i.c.k knew her from her stride before she stood half revealed, and lowered the weapon he'd trained on her shadow. He unsealed his helm again to reveal his face-a sign that he did not mean to provoke combat-but he did not depower.

Instead, he strode forward across the lobby to meet his sister, calling her name.

Chelsea Conn paused at the bottom of the serpentine curve of the pa.s.sageway, one hand resting on the hilt of a blade at her hip. Not an unblade-there had never been many of those, and as far as Bened.i.c.k knew they had all been unfas.h.i.+oned when the angel was made-but an impressive weapon nonetheless, potent and storied enough to bear the virtue-name Humility. She studied him a moment, as was her wont, her narrow face unreadable.

He had always fancied that, at such moments, she was deciding what she would feel. When, after slightly longer than a second, a broad smile broke across her face, it did nothing to disabuse him of the conceit.

”Brother!” she cried boldly, tossing her braids back out of her armor, and strode forward with a springing step.