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"Bitch!" Maya shrieked. "The devil’s always on your side."

I couldn’t answer. The pain from my shoulder was driving me fast toward blackout. Festina called, "Let it go, Dr. Cuttack. There’s no reason to keep fighting. What do you want? To tell the world how wicked Faye is? I can arrange that; I’m an admiral."

Thanks a bunch, I thought.

"Just open the door so we can go back," Festina told Maya. "You’re obviously a gifted archaeologist; you’ve got full control over the nanites in this bunker. Just tell the nanites to open the door."

"Yes," Maya said softly. "I could speak to the nanites…"

I didn’t like the tone of her voice.

Next moment, she shouted something in a language I didn’t recognize — the ancient Greenstrider tongue, I guess, calling a command to the control center.

Under my body, the solid granite bridge began to turn gooey.

"Oh shit," Festina said. "Oh shit."

The bridge was made of nanites too. Of course: the bunker’s last line of defense. If the place was under all-out attack, with enemy troops crossing the bridge in such numbers you couldn’t shoot everyone… then you just told the bridge to dissolve itself. Send everyone plummeting to hell.

The bridge surface had turned as soft as mud. The edges were beginning to drip into the chasm. Far to the opposite end, Maya laughed; the stone was melting under her feet too, but she didn’t care. "Got you!" she crowed. "This time I got you, bitch."

Festina grabbed my arm and pointed behind us. "Look!" The door sealing off the end of the bridge was starting to liquefy too. Crazy witless Maya must have ordered all nanites in the area to dissolve… including the ones blocking our retreat. Festina scrambled to her feet, dragging me up with her. "Let’s go, Faye! Come on, come on, come on."

My head was reeling, my shoulder throbbing, but I stumbled as best I could toward the exit. The bridge was as soft as mud in a rainshower. Each footstep sank a bit deeper. "You’ll never make it!" Maya screamed, nearly choking with laughter.

"Come on," Festina kept saying, "come on." Pulling me hard. I forced myself to keep moving, knowing I was slowing her down. If she just left me and ran, she’d get away clean — but I knew she’d never do it. Festina would rather die than abandon me… which meant I had to keep plodding ahead.

My foot suddenly splashed down, straight through the bridge. Like stepping into quicksand — another second and I’d sink clean out the other side. With the full force of my strength, I wrenched my arm from Festina’s grip and shoved her toward the open corridor. It might be the extra push she needed to get to safety… but no, she was sinking too, sinking through the bridge, liquid nano sludge, and we were both going down.

Something shot out of the corridor in front of us, something shouting in Oolom. Tic. He swooped over our heads… and I yelled at Festina, "Grab him!"

"You too!"

I’d never hold on to him with my shoulder out of commission. And Tic couldn’t support both our weights. With a sweep of my good arm, I pushed myself down faster through the goo of the bridge: out the bottom, falling free.

Looking up, I saw Festina falling too… but she’d caught Tic at the waist and he was slowing her descent like a hang glider.

"Faye!" she shouted. Angry to tears.

Survivor guilt, I thought. Welcome to Demoth, sister.

Then the world exploded into colors. Green and gold and purple and blue.

PROPOSALS

The shore of Lake Vascho.

I lay on the beach under the quiet blackness of a northern night — clouds still riding fast on the warm spring wind, but not so thick as in Sallysweet River. Stars shone through the cloud gaps, thousands of stars… and I thought of nights once upon a time, sleeping clear and girlish with the whole universe open above me.

The Peacock hovered gently over the water. He’d brought me here. Of course my father wouldn’t let me fall into a bottomless pit.

"Jai," I said. Thank you. Achy and woozy, I stayed flopped out on the sand. Nothing but stars overhead… till the Peacock fluttered up Dads-anxious, only a hand-breadth from my nose.

"I’m all right," I told him. "Well… if you can read my mind, you know I hurt like blazes. 8.5 on the getting-your-arm-torn-off scale. But it’s still minor. I think. How are you?"

Do no. Good.

"Where’s Xe?"

Tic.

"Did you say tico?" I asked.

Tic. Oov Tic.

With Tic.

"Short honeymoon," I said. "First time you two get together in three thousand years, and a day later, she’s off Riding mortals again."

Ve hadadda shunt. It’s what we do.

"You Rode my father, didn’t you?"

Gaha efliredd po. Copodd.

I didn’t Ride your father. I fused.

"Tell me about it."

Bit by bit, in his shy Oolom, the Peacock let his story trickle out.

It started long before the plague — the birth of a baby named Zillif. Or even before that: the very clock-tick of conception. The Peacock slipped into the zygote and Rode through embryo, foetus, infant, child, woman… till mushor changed the woman to a proctor.

The Ride was never fusion; but there was still a tiny mingling. A leakage of energies, Peacock to baby girl… and maybe the other way too, for all I know. Zillif grew up in the Peacock’s glow — as if there were some special element in the air she breathed, giving the woman her own faint shine.

I’d felt it myself. I adored her for it.

To the Peacock, Zillif was just another Ride; when he hitchhiked on someone cradle-to-crypt, it was common for his hosts to rise above the crowd. He liked that specialness. Maybe he even encouraged it to make the Ride more interesting, found ways to spill teeny bits of his brightness into his host’s life. But it was a teasy game, far from full fusion. He’d sworn he would never fuse again… not after the things he’d done while bonded to a Greenstrider, spurred half-mad by his fusion-mate’s lust to kill enemies.

(Oh yes, I’d been right about that. When the Peacock fused with the Greenstrider, the two-in-one creature seethed with all the black murder from the original strider’s heart. Xe’s germ factory may have scored the higher body count, but Peacock/strider fought hard to keep up.)

So. The Peacock Rode passively through Zillif’s life. He took no action, not even when the Pteromic microbe began slacking out Ooloms all over the world. The Peacock held himself back, because the last time he’d got involved, it led to disaster.

Or that was his excuse. Even superintelligent pocket universes lie to themselves, when doing the right thing seems like too much work.

Zillif herself became infected eventually. The Peacock watched, and thought now and then maybe something ought to be done. But not by him; he was out of it. He’d lived through the deaths of lesser creatures many times before: not just his hosts but the people they loved. Griefs and pains and rage at the dying of the light.

So what? So what if the Ooloms died? It wasn’t as if they were an important species. And if they didn’t get killed by this disease, they’d drop from something else. As an immortal, the Peacock prided himself on his sense of perspective.

Zillif resisted the paralysis better than most — part of the Peacock’s reflected shine, that tiny boost from his energies. But in time she succumbed; in time she landed on my roof and got carried to the Circus, where she dazzled a lovestruck girl a few days, then slipped off speechless. "Aaaaah gaah gaaaaaaah hah kaaaaaaaa."