Perceval breathed in so deeply it made her chest ache like a distended balloon, and held it.
Softer, and not in any voice Perceval recognized, Nova said, "I cannot be her with you. I cannot be Dust.
You would not like me any better as Samael or Asrafil or Inkling. I am only the angel they have wrought me, Captain, though I am as yet a thing mosaic-made from chips. But all those shards serve you, and you alone." The angel paused, as if groping after words. As if settling an argument that Perceval could not overhear. "And serve you I must."
Nova's warm-looking wing encompassed her, covered her shoulders, and proved not warm at all but nearly weightless. The voices inside Perceval yammered responses, pushing, arguing with each other and herself. Silence them, she told herself, but it was an order easier issued than obeyed.
"As I must serve the world," Perceval said. She wanted nothing more than to shrug away the angel's embrace, but somehow restrained herself. "We are bound to it."
"We are but familiar demons," the angel agreed. "Forgive me."
Perceval closed her eyes. "Sweetheart," she said, "I'm trying. And it's not your fault that I hate you."
Asrafil enfolded Arianrhod in the borders of his colony, and they fell into the bosom of the Enemy again. Charity, its shortened blade more suited to her height now, lay across her back in the fittings Asrafil had constructed for it. It felt strange there--unpresent, empty, neutral, still, and waiting to be filled.
Hungry, if she allowed herself to anthropomorphize so far. She kept wanting to touch it to reassure herself it was really there, or really gone.
"We are still followed," Asrafil said softly, inside her as if reluctant to disturb her train of thought.
"From Engineering?" Arianrhod asked. "Our path should lead them down through the lift to the Broken Holdes."
"It is as you arranged," he agreed. "Benedick is determined, and he has found an ally. Young Chelsea Conn is with him on the hunt."
Arianrhod grimaced, feeling her frozen cheeks crack in the cold. Chelsea should have died usefully in the plague, and having survived that, it seemed a shame to kill her now.
But pity had no place in the world Arianrhod had been raised to. "If they're in the shaft," she said, "I left them an enemy there."
Below the halfway point, Benedick and Chelsea rested again, this time on a shelf fungus broad as a dining table. They slept in shifts, and--having tested the environment and found it within the tolerances of their colonies--opened their helms and breathed the spore-sweet air while they dined on a variety of nutritious fungi and eyeless shaft-dwelling insects. When they resumed descending, Benedick took point.
He was still in the lead when light began to glimmer through the caps beneath his feet. He notified Chelsea and slowed his descent. Transition zones were often most dangerous--the haunt of predators lying in wait for something that had blundered out of its usual range, something that might be confused, disoriented, or ill.
Nothing attacked him when he lowered himself into the gap that permitted access to the next stratum, but only the armor's filters saved him from bedazzlement when he found himself encircled by a beaded curtain of falling water refracting brightness. The mushroom forest, it seemed, could not retain every drop lost by the long-cracked irrigation system.
Benedick shook his head and spun himself on the cable for a 360-degree view, watching rainbows, their polarized light intensified by his filters, skip across his armor.
"I'm down," he said to Chelsea, and with minimal exertion swung himself up to the lip of the shaft. The swifts darted about, screaming and buzzing his head and hands, but even if they had dared come close enough to strike, their talons would have proved ineffectual. He clipped in to a convenient knobby growth of woody fungus and settled himself. "Ready to belay."
He had time to observe the shaft below while waiting for her. The mimosa wood at its lip grew particularly verdant, and like the one above was shrieking with parrotlets. The shaft was lushly forested from this point to the south as far as he could see. He could make out the glow of lights through an extravagance of leaves.
Chelsea was with him in less than ten minutes, and he was amused to note that she duplicated his admiring spin. "Hang on," she said and, with a series of contractions and extensions of her body, swung pendulum-fashion toward the nearest cable. She stretched, spun, and plunged a hand through encrusting swifts' nests to catch on and cling tight.
Benedick watched her knife flash in the other hand, and the grace with which she intercepted the falling material. When she released the cable, she had a meshed bundle of the cleanest nests and a few dozen tiny eggs, to add to the chunks of tested-safe mushroom that made up their foraged rations.
"Break for dinner?" Chelsea said, when she swung close to him again.
Once she was safely latched in, Benedick unclipped himself. "All you think of is food."
"Bird's nest soup," she tempted, and lowered him before he asked. He had to swing a little to make contact with the rim of the shaft. But once his feet struck the deck the mimosas drew back to make a protected glade, and he brought Chelsea down to it with no trouble.
The easiest method for cooking the soup involved painstaking deployment of the microwave projectors in their toolkit. The toolkit curled around the collapsible bowl, and Benedick and Chelsea cupped their shielded gauntlets around it, careful lest stray radiation should cook their eyeballs, their internal organs, or any passing birds. Soon they were sharing a steaming, pleasantly mucilaginous bowl of bird's nest soup studded with chunks of mushroom and soft-poached swift eggs.
"This is awfully idyllic for a high-speed chase," Chelsea said as Benedick wiped out the dinner dishes. He was worried about the toolkit's charge, though he could replenish it from his armor if need be.
The toolkit itself was almost underfoot, seeming determined to maintain a wide berth from the mimosa. Benedick couldn't say he blamed it. He clucked, and the toolkit got a running start, leaped to his extended hand, and scampered up his arm.
"There's little to be gained by catching her if we're too exhausted to do anything about it," Benedick said mildly. He folded the bowl away and tucked it into his pack.
"That also sounds like something Father would have said."
Benedick set his cable, ignoring the irrational twinge of irritation. He was not his father, and Chelsea was not Tristen. "One time or another, I'm certain he did. Do you wish to lead the first descent?"
From the examining glance Chelsea cast across Benedick's face as she fixed their lines together, she knew perfectly well that he was holding back. She might even know what; he was always surprised by the gaps and bridges in the younger siblings' knowledge of family history.
No blame on them for that. It wasn't as if he or Tristen had gone out of their way to make themselves available to teach. The fact that their father had disallowed such knowledge only increased their onus to have passed it along. Maybe their reasons were different--Benedick, as far as he knew, had far more to be ashamed of than Tristen, and he would have been happy to let his many failings remain private history--but the truth was, both of them were complicit in Alasdair Conn's conspiracy of lies.
So in the light of everything else, perhaps it was an insignificant failure. Nonetheless, it remained one that griped at Benedick, as further evidence of his own moral cowardice--something he thought he'd already established to everyone's satisfaction.