Except she was staring at Perceval, not her own blood on the floor. Her voice cracked and raggedy, she rasped, "Perceval. Your wings."
And by some luck, before Perceval called Rien any of those perfectly appropriate names that sprang to mind, she glanced past her and saw them reflected in the inside air-lock hatch. Spread out behind her, no hollow bone and soft membrane but seemingly wrought of shadow and mist and silk. Pearl and charcoal and silver, raddled this way and that like a colt's thin legs. A pair, indeed, of ghostly wings.
7 the beat of parasite wings
When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world's delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night.
The air-lock decking was cold under Rien's feet, her own blood seaweedy, meaty-sharp in her mouth, overlaid with an unfamiliar bitterness. Even after speaking to Perceval, she spat and spat. The blood made a streaked puddle by her feet.
She started when Perceval touched her shoulder. "Don't spit it out," she said, the gauzy wings stirring behind her. "Swallow it. You're spitting out your symbiont."
With an effort, Rien did as Perceval instructed. Her throat was raw; it felt like swallowing scrubbers. When she could make herself stand straight, she looked at Perceval and spared herself speech by lifting her right hand, wrist bent, and making a spinning motion.
Perceval seemed to understand. She turned in place.
Rien noticed that the tips of the half-material wings lifted slightly to miss the puddle of slime on the decking. She, too, picked her way around it, cautious about stepping too close. Although, she considered, anything in the air lock was within range, if they lashed out.
The go-pack had vanished. Perceval's pale freckled back was naked from the base of her stubbled skull to the cleft of narrow buttocks. And the wings—translucent, whispery—grew from where her wounds had been. "What do you see?" Perceval asked. When she craned her head over her shoulder, the tendons stood out along her throat all the way up to her ear.
"Are we in Engine?"
"No," Perceval said. "I don't know exactly where we are. The world was spinning. But not in Rule, that's something. What do you see?"
"It's the chains," Rien said. "The nanocolony. It's turned into wings."
"And?"
"And fused with you," she finished, reluctantly. And spoke the next words on a rush, wishing she dared to touch Perceval just then. "Come on, we need to get out of this air lock and figure out where we are."
"And how to get to Father," Perceval said. She turned, decisively, and the wings missed thumping Rien as deftly as if they had been real. With one hand, the Engineer struck the air-lock release. Into the other, she produced the control for the nanotech colony, and was already fussing with it as the air lock cycled.
It had, Rien noticed and did not say, no visible effect.
She walked through the lock behind Perceval, distracted by the distinct, minute sensations of her lungs and skin repairing themselves, or being repaired by her new symbiont. Rien had split her scalp when she was a child, as children do, and the sensation reminded her of the tug of stitches in anaesthetized skin, on a micro level. The lock closed behind her, and they stood in the warm air of the corridor.
Perceval reached up over her shoulder and ran her fingertips from the base to the joint, as far as her arm would reach. She grasped the bone—what would have been the bone, in a living wing—between thumb and forefinger, wrist bent tortuously. She pulled, muscles flexing in her forearm, wiry biceps taut, her breast lifting as her pectorals tensed.
The wing did not budge. Perceval only succeeded in pulling her own shoulder forward. "Ow," she said.
Here in the corridor Rien could see it better. And see how the light did indeed fall through it, as if it were a three-dimensional rendering made real. She let her hand drop by her thigh, defeated. "I think it's engineered out of nanoscaffolds. And it's bonded to my stumps."
"Can you feel it?"
At first, Rien thought Perceval would not answer. The question, on second thought, was quite rude. She winced an apology. But Perceval didn't seem to find it presumptuous. "Yes," she said. Her lips looked thin. A muscle twitched along her jaw, a rhythmic tic. "It doesn't hurt anymore."
Rien thought about raw bone, naked to air, chafed by bandages. Bile rose up her throat.
"I hate this."
All Rien could do was put her hand on her sister's arm. "We need to find out where we are."
"It's warm," Perceval said. "So it's populated. There are a lot of parts of the world that I know nothing about, though. Have you memorized any of the world plans?"
"I've never been out of Rule," Rien said. Even that was overstating the case. She'd never been out of the Commodore's household, not even as far as the algae tanks.
"Well, no matter." Perceval craned her head back. She still held the key box in her hand, clenched like any other useless talisman. Were even Engineers superstitious? And then convulsively, she turned and slammed it against the wall. It shattered, and she let the pieces fall. And then turned away, head jerking as if startled.
Rien opened her mouth, still tasting blood and that machine-oil funk. But a frown of concentration drew down the corners of Perceval's mouth, and she held up one impatient uplifted hand. Whatever Rien had been about to say, she hushed herself.
And so heard the pad of running feet.
Perceval heard them, too. But she could not afford the time or the break in concentration to look. They were unarmed, alone, barely dressed.
The pull of skin across her cheeks told her she was pursing her lips as she concentrated, a habit her mother always teased about. It helped distract her from the weightlessness of her shadowy new wings, which generated a deep and repellent terror.
No one had a schematic of all the world. Not since the moving times, as far as Perceval knew. Not since the engines and the world brain failed, leaving them with partial maps and hard copy. But she knew her history, the stories of the world ships sent out like groping fingers across the Enemy's empty sea, better charted but no less gallant than any unevolved raftsman braving the Pacific. It was a kind of superb blindness, the human push for exploration, for growth.
Or maybe it wasn't. After all, any virus could do the same. Her symbiont, engineered and unintelligent, was even now colonizing the unknown shores of Rien's body.
Still, Perceval was human. She could be forgiven an ethnocentric value judgment. And she was a human with a carefully bred and force-evolved body and a highly engineered prosthesiotomy. She had seen maps. Thus, she could recollect them. And—it was just possible—figure out where they were, at least in the broadest of terms.
Images flickered, turned, shuffled across her inner eye. Sharp and precise, machine-learned: unlike her father, she was not a bred eidetic. But she had a trick he didn't, and she layered and turned and compared. She had her natural spatial sense, heightened for a flyer, and she had the sound of the echoes along the corridor, closer, rounding the corner now. It all built an image, a geography. A map.
She knew where they were.
And then, when she would have expected a hail or a challenge, came the flat hiss of air guns.
Perceval's reflexes were accelerated to the edge of diminishing returns. In a stress situation, thinking chips made her limbs' decisions for her; it could take too long for electricity to flow along nerves. She could assess and act faster than any unengineered creature could dream of, if it could not be precisely described as thinking.