Now she knew that was exactly what Scylla had been—a monster created by a monster to unquestioningly carry out his monstrous acts. Not more than human, but less.
There was no way for her to know if the urge to serve, to be of use, that she found inside herself was something innate, or more of Fist’s programming. In the end she decided that it did not matter. That was what she saw those she most admired doing, and to become a good person she must emulate good people.
Service gave her some renewed sense of purpose and a way in which to atone for her sins. The silver skin and sinew of what she had been made her better able to help repair some of the endless damage her former Master had wrought. It gave her a way to repay the Kindred for their forgiveness. A forgiveness she sometimes doubted she would ever deserve.
The payments were made by long hours spent doing the work of machines that had fallen into disrepair because Fist had decreed that all tools were to be locked away, being potential weapons and temptations to sabotage. Her exo allowed her to perform tasks which would have taken cranes or winches or twenty strong people. She became the engine powering the truckles that hauled the ores and ices to the processors. She became a human grabmaw, tearing away at Ananke’s stony breast with her ceramyl-taloned hands, working as if it were her own sins she was rooting out of herself chip by chip.
She turned a corner, entering the wider main tunnel. Elias Acterelli trotted toward her, his short legs carrying him along at his usual breakneck pace. He had a bundle of blankets under one arm, a carry sack over the opposite shoulder, and three children hot on his heels. No doubt he was on his way to the crude hospital ward that had been set up in a former dining hall.
He slowed down and grinned at her. “Hi, Angel,” he called cheerfully, brave or foolish enough to even pat her on the shoulder in passing. She smiled back, keeping her mouth closed.
Few others would do such a thing, perhaps fearing that touching her exo would somehow summon up Scylla like some terrible genie from inside her. The reaction of the children was more typical. They gave the silver-skinned ex-angel cautious smiles and as wide a berth as the tunnel allowed.
It was not that she did not want to be free of the armor in which she had been an unwitting prisoner. She hated it now. The gleaming biometal had gone from a source of pride to a mark of shame, tarnished by the blood of innocents and creaking with the memory of mindless cruelty.
At last she reached her destination, passing through the massive steel door that had once barred the way to the chapel and the chambers off it, including what had once been Fist’s inner sanctum. Now it remained open wide, welcoming any and all back into the place which had been the center of the Kindreds’ faith.
The chapel was one of the few rooms they had managed to complete before Fist’s advent, the work of their finest artisans. Angel entered, sparing not a single glance at the radiant solar clockwork overhead or the intricately-set mosaic floor.
It was the altar table at the far end that had her whole attention. The webbed restraints that had once been bolted to it were gone now. She had torn them off herself. But bloodstains still darkened the scarred top of the white-stone slab, left there as a testament to those who had bled upon it.
A shudder passed through her. As always, the sight of the altar brought back memories of the “penances” she had meted out, and confessions she had extracted on it as Fist’s punishing angel.
Although still in a hurry, she took the time to stop and kneel, her heart tightening in her chest.
In days since Fist’s fall the altar had been quietly turned into a shrine to those who had been lost, lovingly created and tended by those who survived and remembered. A single precious real beeswax taper burned in a tall holder, its soft, lambent glow giving the objects spread across the bloodstained white stone the golden aura of cherished memories.
Indeed, that was what they were.
Dozens of flat and solido pictures of those who had died during Fist’s reign of terror had been placed there. The faces were of every age and sex and color, each of them frozen in a moment from an innocent past. Scattered among them were other momentos. Locks of hair tied in bits of wire or ribbon. Wedding rings and inscribed bracelets. Lockets opened to show a face or faces that had been carried near the heart. Medals. A briar pipe with a well-chewed stem. A china bird with a broken wing. A pair of wire-framed eyeglasses, one lens cracked down the middle. An antique leather-bound Bible and a broken compad diary.
Dried flowers, their faded petals as fragile as the life that had once been in them.
The list went on, but of all the things that had been so loving placed there, she was always the most deeply touched by the saddest testimonials of all. These were toys that had outlived the children they had belonged to. There was an air of hopeless abandonment about them. The dolls and stuffed animals looked mournful, bereft, their staring eyes searching forlornly for the lost one who had loved them.
Angel blinked back a tear in her one green human eye. The blank-glass lens that replaced the other looked on with dry indifference.
There was little of her own childhood she could remember, no more than uncertain whispers. It had been torn from her mind and discarded as useless. Gone with her childhood were all but the most fleeting memories of her mother. The moment she remembered most clearly was the one she most wanted to forget, that moment when as Scylla she had killed her mother. She could recall only shards of that act, but they were vivid and sharp enough to cut her to the quick each time they surfaced.
Once she understood the purpose of the shrine, she had tried to find something of her mother’s to put up there. After two days of fruitless searching she had given up, forced to admit that not a trace of Anya remained.
So she had made a vow that one day she would lay the silver skin of her exo down among the other offerings to the past. Until that time she would remember her mother and all the other dead by serving the living as best she could.
Angel raised her arms, holding her hands toward the altar, candlelight glinting off the polished metal. A mental flick of the wrist sent the ceramyl talons sliding from their sheaths. Try as she might, she could not entirely suppress the traitorous Scylla-thrill it set off.
“This is what I was,” she said in a husky whisper, addressing the dead gathered about her in the quiet chapel. “I still bear the mark of what I was, and it grows heavy on me…”
She bowed her head, leaving the rest unspoken. There were some things she could not say aloud, and the deepest, most secret reason for wanting to shed the angel skin was one of them. Her mother and all the other dead knew what was in her heart, she was somehow sure of that. All she could do was hope they could forgive her for her selfish secret desires.
“I will never hurt one of yours again,” she promised, retracting her claws. She gazed up at the altar, and speaking as if laying down Law to herself and whatever of Scylla remained inside, added, “I will never hurt anyone ever again.”
She stood up, comforted by the renewal of her promises to them and to herself. Even so, she knew that in the end promises weighed no more than the breath on which they were spoken. That was one of the few truths she had learned from her old Master. Only actions had real weight; only the keeping of a promise had value or meaning.
Promises. They were holding her together and tearing her apart.
She had made a promise to prove that she was no longer a monster before she allowed herself to shed the skin of the one she had been. That promise had turned into an iron collar around her neck. Yet she could not bring herself to break it, not even now, when it looked like it might cost her release and acceptance and everything else she dared want for herself.