But the armor held her in the lift, and the lift hurtled through the world, bars of light and shadow ripping past on every side. Rien looked away from Samael, toward the shipwreck stars, and pretended to herself that she could see into the swirl of dying matter and know what would come next.
The inferno was beautiful.
"Let me remake you in my image," Samael said. He spoke into the void, his lips moving, untroubled by the Enemy. She heard him, even over the clamor of the hurtling lift, as a clear calm voice in her ear.
And she was grateful to the armor, because if it had been the strength of her own hands holding her to the lift, she would have tumbled free in shock. She half turned, clinging to her post, and gaped. "What exactly do you propose?"
"A way to make you stronger than Dust," he said. "A way to make you an angel."
She looked around—at Tristen in his stark white armor. He had turned away and seemed oblivious. She wondered if Samael had somehow affected her perceptions, if he was appearing to her eyes only. "Another ally you can consume?"
"You never know," he said. "Maybe you'll defeat me also." He shrugged. "But you know what they say about age and treachery versus youth and skill."
"No," she said.
He leaned forward. "What's to stop me doing it anyway?"
"You need consent." Not a guess. Hero Ng gave her that; it had been built into Israfel from the first, hard-coded, irreducible. Whatever the angels did, they first needed the consent of the subject. Or of the Captain, if what was to be done was to be done to more than one human.
"If you let me," he said, "you could see what I see." He gestured around, to the waystars and the world. "All the buzz of machine life, the consciousnesses that swirl all over the skin of the world, glistening in wavelengths to which you are deaf. Look off to starboard."
He pointed, and Rien's eye followed. Just in time to see a vast section of the Jacob's Ladder shear away from the body of the ship like a sawn branch bending free of the tree. She could see as it spun clear that no atmosphere was escaping, and no lights shone within. Even as she watched, it began to break apart into smaller chunks, the chunks moving. They would be torn down to reinforce the living sections of the ship, to try to make it robust enough to withstand the wavefront, or spun out into the monofilaments that would—if grace or luck was with them—help catch the exploding star's magnetosphere, producing acceleration.
Well, that wasn't quite right, was it? The blast wave was going to produce acceleration no matter what. The question before them was whether it was going to be acceleration in very small pieces... or the sort of useful acceleration that could bootstrap the world into flight once more.
Bits shook loose—from the lift, from the world under its scuttling graspers. Rien tried not to look, tried not to imagine those tumbling bits were anything but loose bolts and rust.
"That's not a reason for me to sacrifice myself for you."
Samael's face rearranged itself around the sharp edge of his smile. "What about sacrificing yourself for the world? It will take whatever resources we can field to defeat them."
"Them." A simple pronoun. It should not have knocked Rien so far down a cold well of fear that the angel's voice seemed to echo after her.
"Yes," Samael said. "Ariane and her allied angel are coming to the party, too. If our timing is right, we'll arrive after the other claimants to the throne have softened each other up, and we'll be able to pick up their leavings. Won't that be grand?"
When Rien glared at him, stricken, he only shrugged. "I'm an angel, sweetheart. I'm five hundred years old. I don't want to die."
"Even if it's God's will?" she snapped.
"If it's God's will," he said, "we'll find out the hard way, won't we?"
Rien tongued on her mike as she turned away from him, and quickly passed along to Tristen what Samael had told her. There was silence at first, and Rien saw the broad movements of helm and armor as her uncle shook his head.
"You didn't hear him," Rien said in disgust. "Of course you don't believe me—"
"Actually—" Tristen stepped in. Literally, hauling himself forward hand over hand up the superstructure of the lift, his armor glimmering white as starshine except where it caught ruddy highlights off the secondary waystar. "I believe you," he said. "But this is as fast as we can go."
She opened her mouth to accuse him. The words piled up. Denial. Anger.
He was an adult, an Exalt. A prince of the world. The oldest living son of Alasdair Conn.
If he couldn't do something—
—there was nothing that could be done.
28 the kiss of angels
World to world, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of adaptation.
Perceval turned her face and permitted the angel to kiss her. She closed her eyes, breathing between parted lips, and waited to see what happened.
At first, there was nothing. The small, chaste kiss. The pressure of Dust leaning in, and withdrawing. And then she felt her breath come clean, and the next one, pure and untrammeled, filling a chest no longer restricted by longing. She breathed deep, held it, let it flow.
She owned herself again. For a long, clean second, she exulted, and if her wings had been hers, too, she would have stretched out into them.
And then Dust touched her shoulder, and called her "Captain."
And she realized she would never be herself again.
She was braced for an invasion. To be torn out of herself, smashed, raped, impaled. But that wasn't it at all. Instead, the first thing she noticed was a creeping dissolution. As if the fringes of her consciousness were sliding apart, growing friable and then melting into particles. Into powder.
Into dust.
Perceval crumbled. Scattered. Disassociated. Dispersed. She felt herself slipping away, the core, the center, the ego worn into a shadow even starlight could shine through. As if she were all fingers and no eyes, all edge and no center. She felt the world all through her, or her all through the world, and the ship and its denizens were no different. She felt it lacking, felt where it was weary with metal fatigue, battle fatigue, the incessant scrape of entropy.
Dust was there with her. She felt him, in all his diffusion, all his cold angelic will, as she spun along the webs and nodules and struts and lattices of the world.
She felt where the ship might hold, when the waystar primary went supernova. She felt where no repairs could be enough, where it would inevitably fail. She felt the borders of other angels, and the spaces where she could not tread.
She felt Ariane approaching, on the one side. And on the other, Rien and Tristen, come to bring her home. Too late, too late, and she mourned not her loss—for she had not lost them—but the grief they would suffer on behalf of her.
Like oil dropped onto a puddle, Perceval spread thin. And lost herself in the world.
There was only so far the lift could take them. Eventually, they came to the outer hull of the bridge itself, protected at the core of the world. When the lift finally rattled to a halt, vibrating and straining so Rien could feel the unheard whine of metal fatigue through her boots, she could not at first seem to unlock her gauntlets from the strut. But Tristen, armor glistening, paused beside her and carefully uncurled each finger, with a delicacy she could imagine had taken decades to perfect.
He held one of her wrists. They floated face-to-face for a moment, and when Rien peered through his faceplate she saw him wink, quite broadly, his waxy face contorting.