She would have edged back, but Pinion lived up to its name. It was like struggling in a cotton wool binding; she might contrive to bang her head upon the pillow or kick her heels, but otherwise she was constrained.
Dust bent down and kissed her forehead. His lips were cool, perfectly resilient. Inhumanly perfect, where Rien's had been warm and rough and damp.
The chaste small kiss sent a flush of warmth through her.
She spat in his face.
The spittle vanished as it struck him, and he drew back and smiled. "Beloved," he said. "Claim me, and I will do your will. I am yours by right, through the line of your foremothers and forefathers. Only let me own you. Perceval. My darling."
She gritted her teeth and did not speak. "Let me up," she said. "Your monster is hurting me."
"You can't escape," he said.
"I'm sure your precautions are exemplary. May I pee?"
Rien could never have explained how they made it to the air lock. Once the decompression was over—it took hardly any time at all—they managed to scramble to the handholds along the walls of the shattered tunnel. Gavin collapsed into himself when they were secure and clutched Rien's pack, hunkering against her shoulders.
Following Benedick through the eerie silence, followed by Tristen, she clambered along the rungs, moving as fast as possible without drifting into Benedick's trailing feet. Gravity had failed when the tube broke, and Rien thought the induction fields that delicately manipulated the electromagnetic field to shield the world from the waystars' radiation had likely failed as well.
In case having been spaced were not encouragement enough to hurry.
At the end of the tube, Benedick keyed the air lock. Despite her colony, Rien's head already swam with oxygen starvation. She waited for the lock to jam, the power to fail. She had grown too aware of how fragile the world was, how many ways there were to damage it. And in all honesty, she half expected sabotage.
When the air lock opened smoothly, without releasing a puff of vapor, she had to grit her teeth to restrain the urge to shout. Benedick hauled her after him; she turned and grabbed Tristen's wrist to perform the same service for him. And then they were within, the door sealing, the silence of emptiness replaced by the welcome hiss of atmosphere. Rien's ears popped painfully, as they must have done when she decompressed; it was a miracle her eardrums weren't shattered.
But then, the Exalt were full of miracles.
She shook herself. She was getting entirely too accustomed to this Exalt thing, and—
—and shouldn't she? Wasn't it what she was, now? Should she walk around terrified of her own blood all the time?
The alternative wasn't only being like Ariane. There was Tristen and Benedick and Mallory. And Perceval.
Rien curled her nails into her palms. "How are we going to get her back?"
Gavin hopped from her pack to her shoulder. She reached up, plucked him off, and hugged him in both arms. Like a child clinging to a cuddler, but if that was what it took, she'd do it. He let her, too, serpent's tail dangling and his long neck looped over the back of hers. Watching Benedick and Tristen trade glances made her j feel even more like a child, and that was not okay. "Whatever you two are not saying—"
"We need to go on to Engine," Benedick said, and Rien gaped.
"How can you say that?"
At least Tristen had the decency to show reluctance. Or feign it, though Rien hoped that was only her own bitter suspicion. He cleared his throat and rubbed his cleanshaven cheek with the back of his hand. "It's what Perceval would say, were she with us," he said. "The world is at stake, not only her. And we have no way of knowing where she was taken."
"And in Engine is her mother," Benedict said. And where another man might have elaborated, he left the implications for Rien to figure out herself, if she could.
Caitlin Conn was a Chief Engineer. And Rien had no idea what her capabilities were. A week since, and she would have said the Exalt could do anything.
She looked at her hands.
"Space with you both," she said, and strode out past Benedick as soon as the air lock irised open, trying very hard not to stomp in a manner of which Head would not have approved. And if Dust had Perceval, and Head was dead...
Benedick and Tristen were what she had in the world. Even if they were conspiring to parent her.
It was only a corridor beyond, a low-volume accessway carpeted in overgrown grass. The trimmers had not been by. Rien's legs swished through it; it grabbed at her knees. Strands tugged and broke against her trousers at each stride.
"Well, hurry up," she called over her shoulder. "You can make me keep walking. But I'm going to walk as far as I can."
"Rien," Tristen called, "you shouldn't go blithely where you can't see your feet."
And on the heel of his words, Benedick shouted, "Stop! Holdfast!"
Rien stopped. It was a voice of command, and it shocked her into immobile obedience, one foot lifted in the air. She teetered, caught herself without dropping the basilisk, and put her shoe down in the print she'd raised it from.
"Gavin, do you see anything?"
"Yes," he said. His head tickled below her ear. She felt his beak moving, and then all of him as he wriggled and slithered around the back of her neck until he was crouched on her shoulder again. "Listen to Benedick. Fear not. But be very still, Rien."
Perceval ate and drank what was provided. She could have starved herself to make a point, but that would have been foolish. Anything Dust cared to introduce into her system, he would not have needed to lace into her dinner. Her every unruly emotion was proof of that.
At least he had the decency not to watch her dining— well, not in his avatar, though his amorphous person might have been all around her—and to provide fresh clothes and a place to bathe. A shower; hot fresh water. Running water. If it wasn't clean, her symbiont could handle most things.
Even an engineered influenza. She hadn't told Rien, because it would have been cruel to make her worry about things that were not her fault and which she could not control, but Perceval was still concerned about that.
If Ariane suffered and died in an ague, it served her right. But Perceval couldn't crave vengeance on all of Rule—well, she could, but she chose not to—and Perceval knew something she hadn't told Rien. The Engine and Rule strains of symbiont were different. It was possible that an illness Perceval could survive (and Rien, colonized by Perceval's symbiont, as well) would be devastating to someone who bore the blood of Rule.
Perceval was as helpless to affect that as was Rien. But it did not stop her fretting. Even the endorphin cocktail she swam in was insufficient distraction, and she kept telling herself, silently repeating, that she needed to worry as well about that.
But, "Is this clean?" she asked, to have something to say.
"Clean enough to drink," he said. "Fear not; the gray water is recycled. I recall gardens, which I shall show you when you are refreshed."
He gave her privacy again, or as much privacy as she could have with his creature welded to her back. The stall was large enough for both Perceval and Pinion, however, and she made a festival of the shower.
Drying herself in warm air and fluffy towels, she thought, perhaps he isn't so bad. And then she thought also, that is how the hostage identification process starts, dear Perceval.
When she was dressed, she called to him. "Dust?"
Following a crystal chime, his voice came from everywhere and none. "Pinion will lead you."
Words that should have destroyed any warmth she might be feeling, but she was drugged. It helped to think of it that way: drugged on her own chemicals. If she could externalize, make the emotion other, she would not believe it.