Her hand jerked, dropping the stone back into her lap.
"That's insane," said Eric. "That's absolutely insane."
Aria let her head drop backward until she was staring up at the ceiling. It was only then Eric realized she was breathing like she'd just run a marathon.
Without even thinking, he jumped to his feet and laid his hands on her shoulders, reaching out with his power gift to loosen her chest and speed her recovery. The whole time he was far too aware of the tingling warmth of her skin and the depths of her eyes as she looked up at him.
Nor did he miss the fact that he had forgotten to flinch from touching her.
Eric drew his hands away, now winded himself, and poured some cold tea from the pitcher on the table.
"How do you know it's insane?" Aria sat up straighten
Eric swigged the tea and made a face at its rancid taste. "Because it is. I've never heard of anything like it even being attempted."
"I didn't tell you all of it." The amused tone crept back into her voice.
"What more is there?"
"That if it worked, it would only work once." She leaned forward. "And that the ship would most certainly be unusable afterward."
Eric stared into the cup. "Now it sounds a little less insane."
"It is the only way your"—she waved toward the comm board—"ghost box knows that could work." Her eyes narrowed. "This despised one is waiting for my Lord Teacher to inform her he refuses to do this."
"You'll wait the dark seasons through." Eric dropped the cup onto the table. The puddle he had spilled yesterday had dried, leaving an uneven amber stain on the tabletop. "I only ask that Aria Born of the Black Wall does not ask me why I am doing this." He spread his fingers out so that he could see the backs of his hands. "Because, and the Nameless hear my words, I do not know."
"It's all right." She took his naked hand in her scarred one. "It's enough that Eric Born is doing this."
He looked up at her deep eyes. "I hope so, Aria Stone. I truly hope so."
He felt her work-roughened palm against the soft skin on the back of his hand. He watched her breathing with a deep, sudden fascination and felt the warm pulse of his erection begin. She must have realized what was happening in him, but she didn't release his hand.
He kissed her. Her mouth stiffened, startled, then puckered, as she thought to pull away, then softened to answer his gesture, his entreaty.
This is insane too, part of him said. He didn't care. She was pressing her body against him so he could feel every centimeter of her, as full of desire as he was, as lost, as scared, as crazy as he was.
For now, there was nothing else in the universe.
13—Section One, Division One, the Home Ground, Hour 11:13:25, Planet Time
"It is you who has set this work to my hands. I will not fail. It is you who has set my eyes to these sights. I will not look away. I am a child of the Lineage and through me the Lineage shall be brought home."
—Fragment from The First Grace, the Rhudolant Vitae private history Archives.
"Need personnel for a thorough survey of the vaults before we begin sealing the walls…" Even though it came through her translator disk, Historian Maseair's voice was barely audible under the noise around Avir.
Contractor Avir plucked two more greasy oil lamps out of their alcoves in the curving walls of the "Temple." "Record authorization and time stamp," she said through gritted teeth as she carried the filthy objects over to the flash disposal unit, sidestepping the Beholden who carried the programmer for the drones cleaning the ceiling.
"Anything else?" She dropped the lamps into the disposal's open mouth and, as the hatch closed, felt an irrational satisfaction in knowing they had been reduced to ashes faster than she could blink.
The initial plan had been sound; the engineers would string fiber-optic threads over the stone and plaster supports already in place and cover them all with optical matter to make a usable workspace. Eventually the supports could be replaced with more durable steels and polymers.
But now, spiderlike drones crawled across the ceilings, scraping off years of soot and tempera paints that were supposed to represent a night sky. A Beholden was injecting concrete filler into the oil lamp alcoves that studded every square foot of wall space. The tiled floor would have to be sealed and primed against water leakage before a silicate coating could be laid to make it smooth. Then optics had to be laid into the thresholds to allow for the installation of proper doors that might actually be able to shut out the sound and stench drifting in from outside, where the artifacts waited.
There had been a tiny group of telekinetics inside the Temple when her team had arrived, but they had vanished. The search teams of artifacts that Ivale had organized claimed to have found no trace of them, but then, some of the city residents had barricaded a full square kilometer's worth of the streets and it was possible the telekinetics were hiding with them.
She hoped one day she'd forget what the artifacts looked like when she had stepped out of the transport. Their eyes had been wide and their faces were all contorted with fear. Many had been on their knees or their bellies in the mud, babbling so fast in what was left of the language of the Ancestors that the translator disks couldn't even make any sense out of it.
She could hear them now through the flimsy walls of this place. They sang or shouted, or moved about without purpose or plan. Lost, all of them lost.
Waiting for her to restore them to use, and she could barely coordinate the restoration of one building. Avir rested her hand on the edge of the flash disposal. The shrieking wind that wormed its way through every niche in the walls carried with it the endless gabble of voices, snatches of devotional songs, the distant shouts of the ones who were confused enough to try to fight the Reclamation. Ivale said he had organized some of the artifacts into a kind of security force, but it seemed to have more holes than the Temple walls did.
"Engineer Faive of the First Cause, Contractor," said a new voice in her ear. "I am going to need to contract at least three more Beholden to incorporate structural standards in Section eighteen…"
The "High House," the artifacts called it, for no reason Avir could discern. It had no less than eight conduits to the underground complexes in it. She had placed a priority on having the standing walls upgraded to shelter the teams assigned to study them.
The Beholden sealing fiber-optic cables into a trench carved in the main entranceway scrambled backward to let Bio-tech Nal and two of his own Beholden enter. Behind them waddled an eight-legged drone stacked with an assortment of nameless crates.
"Record authorization and time stamp." She drew aside so the drone could pass. "Next?"
Her translator disk beeped. "Incoming message on comm line 23A," said the default voice.
She stood in front of the portable terminal, not wanting to have to perch on the hard stool in front of it. The translator disks alone could not handle transmissions from the dead side. She touched the screen. Kelat appeared, standing with a poise and propriety she envied. Behind him curved the shadowy walls of one of the underground chambers. A team of Engineering Beholden clustered around a bulge in the wall, watching monitors intently and occasionally punctuating their dialogue with a ringer stabbed toward some reading or the other. Kelat, apparently oblivious to the impropriety behind him, made a small, respectful obeisance to her.