Rien glanced back at Tristen and Benedick. The men's legs were longer. And Gavin had wings. "Ready?" she called, as Tristen half hopped, half slid to the top of the path.
It might have been stupid, but Rien needed to make the gesture. She turned her back on her father and started running.
At first she could call it easy. The way sloped down, alongside the steaming river. A ripple of blue-silver light flowed along it, against the current, and Rien was fit and frustrated. If Benedick called after her, she did not hear him.
She followed the light. Briefly, it crossed her mind that she could have learned from immediate experience and waited. Might as well try to bridle the wind; she was fed up, as Head would have remarked, and too full of fed up to sit down for any more of it.
She ran. And footsteps followed on hard behind her.
"I suppose you know where you're going?" Tristen said, running in step a yard behind. He must have passed Benedick.
"You sound like somebody's dad."
"You never know. Someday you might find out I am."
Rien laughed, and felt a traitor for laughing. She could hold on to her anger and determination—they charged every stride—but her misery was no match for the rhythm of her feet. Instead, a black determination rose in her, as if she could feel the wrath coiling her arteries.
She could welcome that.
Tristen did not speak again, but rather let her run.
Her shoes thumped on the path unevenly, for the way was not smooth. She was obliged to leap and scramble, following the deadly water through many levels of the ship. Something was funny with the gravity; she ran down, but beside her the river was flowing up. She imagined if she leapt into it, before it cooked her flesh shredding from bone, she would feel herself carried down, down, back to the beginning.
However uneven, her steps were a rhythm for meditation. On her left side rose torn metal, stained and savage, weeping rust. Under her feet the smashed bulkheads had been smoothed by many feet, doing as hers did now.
She twisted through a narrow pass, spiked plates of buckled decking, and slithered from the overhang down to a broad landing below. Rust stained her clothing, tattooed abraded skin. She'd be as hot as Inkling when they came to Engine. Maybe they would give her a gold-lined coffin, cast in lead. They might pour colorless diamonds and topazes through her fingers, so her radiant touch could stain them green and blue, the colors of the abandoned homeworld.
The colors seething in this fatal river.
She stepped aside, dropped her hands on her knees, and gasped. Benedick landed lightly beside her, folding into a crouch from which he rose on what seemed the same efficient motion. There was a good watery light by which to see the chamber—blue undulations rippled up the walls as if reflected from the river, but in this case the river was the source.
Her lungs burned, though her muscles still felt strong. Bile and bitterness painted the back of her throat; her stomach heaved. The skin on the back of her hands was rising in lenticulate bubbles. The air was thin, and growing thinner; she could not fill herself on it no matter how much she sucked in and heaved Out. "How long before we're blinded?" she asked her father, wondering if she could sense the first milky cataract already growing.
"The dose is no more than four sieverts," Benedick said. "Your symbiont will protect you."
"For now," Rien said.
"When it doesn't," Benedick answered, "I shall."
Gavin swung wide over the water, the crawling light reflecting on the underside of his wings until he shone like a blue jewel. Tristen slithered down beside them, and as he straightened, wheezed, "Run on."
But Rien was retching. Hands still on her knees, caustic ropes of mucus and bile slipping between her teeth. The blisters on her palms broke. Her hands slipped on their own outer layer of skin, well lubricated with dripping lymph.
When Tristen took her elbow, she felt the wetness of his flesh weeping, too. "Run on," he said. "For Perceval."
Rien spat one more mouthful of vomit and made herself rise. "Gavin," she called out. "Lead us!"
His only answer was to sideslip, turning, and glide toward shore. Then over the bulwark at the edge of their brief landing, and on.
They followed him down on blistering feet. Tristen was the next to suffer the nausea, turning his head to vomit as he ran. Running downhill jarred feet, ankles, hips, knees. The gravity varied from level to level, sometimes from step to step. They staggered. Rien's skin sloughed where the margins of her clothing rubbed it.
She vomited, and vomited again. Her hair fell loose in her hands when she wiped it from her forehead. The decking creaked and settled beneath her feet, rusted metal flaking, ragged edges crumbling when they passed too close.
After another hour, Benedick went to one knee. He fended her back with an outstretched hand when she would have gone to him, vomited and vomited until the froth that dripped from his lip was cobalt with blood.
He stood, doubled, fists clenched in his belly. Standing, he vomited again. Rien would have sworn there was nothing left to bring up, but he found something.
Spatters of his own blue blood.
Rien wobbled, dizzy. She retched in sympathy, her abdominal muscles contracting as if around a swung fist. She held her hand out to her father, again, and this time he took it and let her pull him on.
In the fourth hour, she thought, if you had told the Rien of a fortnight past that she would do what she was doing for the love of an inviolate princess, she would have laughed in your face. In the fifth hour, while her joints ached and the swelling in her hands made it impossible for her to tip a water bottle between them, never mind fumbling off the top, she thought, this is what Perceval has given me. In the sixth hour, she thought only of pain, of nausea, of keeping Gavin and Benedick in sight before and Tristen in earshot behind.
In the seventh hour, she did not think. She followed on in suffering and purgation, a raw red weeping thing that only ran until it stumbled, and then ran on again.
And on Gavin led them, on and down through hell.
23 in your name
I must lie down where all the
ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop
of the heart.
By the time they came down—or up—the river to Engine, Rien had been leading Tristen hand in hand for an hour. He swayed and had to be guided, and his pale skin tore away, or bruised azure and cerulean wherever she touched him. Gavin rode on his opposite shoulder. Rien wasn't sure the weight was helping her uncle, but Tristen did not complain.
And he was, after all, a man grown. He could make his own decisions. Even, she thought wryly, if a little child led him by the hand.
In truth, of course, it wasn't his fault. He was weak from his long imprisonment, and she thought it was only through some unholy force of will that he stayed erect at all. And his pale eyes had failed him; he was blinded by corneal burns.
The water grew hotter. The steam grew denser. And out of it spoke the voice of Inkling. "You will come to a crosspath," he said. "Go left there. It is too hot for you, if you continue."
Upriver, to the comet-burst reactor core itself.
Rien counted clicks on her colony's radiation detector, and decided herself pleased not to be finding out exactly how hot it was in person. "Thank you, Inkling," she said, formally.
The beast bowed, although not over her hand. Just as well. "You are very welcome, Rien Conn," he said, and vanished into the water like a memory.