She was in a burn tank, she realized, and relaxed against the restraints.
She remembered the run, her feet searing in her boots. We made it, she thought, and closed her eyes again. There was nothing else she could do, adrift in the healing gel, and it was pleasant not to be racing downward in agony, running against gnawing time.
In fifteen minutes, she was bored enough to scream. And no closer to finding Perceval.
She groped along the restraints and wrapped her fingers around soft poly, then—cautiously—pulled. Rhythmically. Three tugs, and then rest. Three more, and then rest.
Within forty-five seconds, by her symbiont's clock, a smooth surface pressed against the soles of her feet.
A platform raised her slowly from the gel to floor level. The tank was accessed through a hatchway, which the lift almost sealed when it reached its final position. Gel that had not yet slid aside spilled about her feet, and someone splashed through it to wipe her face. As her eyes cleared, she saw the remaining gel on her skin shining with the cobalt signature of a biocompatible symbiont.
Gentle hands unclasped her mask, cleared her nostrils and mouth, removed the intravenous hookups at her elbow and foot. The attendant was masked and goggled and did not speak, even when she unbuckled the restraints and wiped the gel from Rien's skin.
Rien stood easily, on her own. Her symbiont told her she had been unconscious in the tank for less than seven hours, but she felt light, lissome. The worm of worry gnawing at her bowels was all the more piercing, by contrast.
"Pardon," she said, when the tech stepped back. "Can you tell me where Tristen is ... ?"
There was no answer. The attendant gave her a woven gown, and she shrugged it on, grateful for the warmth covering damp skin.
"Excuse me?" she said, again, her voice harsh in her throat.
The tech pushed up her goggles and regarded Rien incuriously. Her eyes were flat, expressionless, and Rien had the sudden ridiculous desire to apologize.
The tech was a resurrectee. Rien might as well have been talking to the oxygen mask. She took a deep breath to contain her frustration, accepted the comb the resurrectee handed her, and suffered herself to be led while she combed the gel from her curls.
Before they had gone very far, she heard footsteps behind. Unshod; she turned over her shoulder to see who followed, and felt as if she should have been more surprised to recognize Samael, his blond hair lank upon his shoulders.
Rien let her hands and the comb fall to her side. "Help me get my sister back."
"It is why I am here," Samael said. "Have you thought on my proposal?"
"You're asking the wrong sister," Rien said. And then she frowned. "Why do you need her, anyway? Wouldn't any Conn do?"
"No," the angel said. He folded knotty hands before his belt. "The current claims on the captaincy are Perceval's, through Caitlin, and Ariane's, through having consumed her father's symbiont. Tristen remains in contention only if Perceval repudiates the role, as Caitlin has; you can't be Captain and Chief Engineer both."
"Or if Perceval dies," Rien said. She chewed on doubt for a moment, spiky and cloying. What if Tristen were in league with Dust, after all? What if he had betrayed them?
In the future, she resolved, perhaps she should not be so quick to trust.
"But Perceval is not dead," Samael said. "The ship knows. It will accept no others, as is its program. No claim can be complete until the other is resolved. Caitlin is older than her brother. As long as Perceval is in the running, Tristen is out of it."
"Until one of them kills the other. If Ariane kills Perceval—"
He shrugged. "Then she must kill Tristen as well, unless he abdicates. Once he and Perceval are gone, then she has the only claim. And if one of them eats her .. ." The shrug became a smile. "Then that consolidates the claims, too."
"So why do the angels care?" She stood on warm decking in nothing but a woven paper bathrobe, the hand that did not clutch the comb knotted in the fabric. Her soles made soft sucking noises on the metal when her weight shifted. "I don't understand."
"Of course you do," said Samael. "I taught you. I gave you Hero Ng. I gave you Gavin. You are my Galatea."
If her mouth had not been so dry from the face mask, Rien might have spat. She stuffed the comb into her pocket, wondering what good she thought free hands would do her. On her left, the resurrectee stood unmoving.
"You don't own me," Rien said.
"I forged you," said Samael. He reached toward her, tenderly, and she leaned back. He let fall his hand. "Tell me why the angels need Perceval, Rien."
"I don't—"
"Don't lie to me."
She paused, and folded her arms, and scowled. "You're at war among yourselves."
"And have been since the end of the moving times," he admitted. "When Israfel fragmented to survive. A great deal was lost—"
"And the world will only answer to its rightful Captain. But how does that help you, if there's not enough processing power—oh. The symbionts."
"We've had time to build more processing capacity," he said. "Yes. The colonies themselves comprise enough computronium to hold us, if we were reunited, and there were again a central authority."
"So whichever of you is allied to the Captain gains the upper hand."
While she talked, and kept Samael talking, Hero Ng whispered in her ear, He's lying.
"It is a matter," Samael said, delicately, "of survival. Or consumption. I wish to survive. I do not care to be consumed. And if you help me, I will win your sister back from Dust."
What do you mean, lying?
Hero Ng answered, The symbionts cannot hold them all. Not and hold the memories of the crew.
They'd consume us?
Not you, said Hero Ng. Us. The memories of the dead. Imagine, Rien, if I were the sort of man who thought he had more right to live than do you.
Rien could imagine it all too well. She said, to Samael, "How can you hope to win back Perceval, if you cannot defeat Dust?"
"I have given you the means already," he said. "Consider it earnest money, if you will."
"The means?"
"The plum," he said. "From the library tree. It is a rare fruit, containing a piece of code that will interrupt his control of her symbiont. I had meant it for you, to keep you free, my Rien."
She might have stepped back again at his casual possession, but Rien was nothing if not stubborn. "Then what do I need you for?"
"To bring her the fruit," he said. "And if she has not yet submitted willingly, there is a chance that it could deliver Perceval from Dust's thrall."
"But if he is the Angel of Libraries, shouldn't he know—"
"Yes," Samael answered. "But all things come to an end. And I am the Angel of Death." And then he smiled sidelong through his hair and said, "But it was I who came to see you awaken. I do not see your father or your mother here."
And why should he? They had abandoned her to Alasdair, without a backward glance, and Alasdair had done everything possible to hide her history from her.
Not that being raised Mean seemed like being cheated, exactly, now that she'd met a few Exalt.
She realized that Samael was still looking at her, waiting for her to respond. To defend Benedick, and Arianrhod— whom she had barely met—or to condemn them?
Rien smoothed her hands along her thighs, and let it go. She had never had anyone's protection in her life. She didn't need it now, and especially she did not need Samael's.